Papacy & Empire
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Book Three
Feudal Europe
Chapter I
The Dissolution of the Empire
1. Internal Causes
p109 Despite the fame of Charlemagne, we must be under no illusion as to the solidity of his political achievement... nothing could exceed the fragility of the Empire. The weakness of Louis the Pious, the quarrels of his sons, and the incursions of the Normans, Slavs and Saracens, merely hastened a dissolution whose causes were internal, and so obvious that they force themselves upon our attention.
...the royal power seems that of an absolute sovereign, but of one whose absolutism is doubly limited. It is limited... by Christian morality, and it accepts this limitation. It is limited further by the necessity of avoiding anything that will displease the aristocracy, and to this limitation it submits... In short, we may say that the Carolingian constitution was based on a disagreement. The two forces [the king and the aristocracy] that seemed to be in alliance were in reality two adversaries.
p110 ...This aristocracy declared that it was the people, and to a certain extent it was right; for the people had disappeared into the aristocracy. It had absorbed the people into its domains... Charles saw the danger, and he tried to guard against it. He attempted, by reducing the burdens that military service and the judicial service imposed on freemen, to safeguard those who had preserved their liberty... His measures met with the common fate of all attempts to deter social evolution from gravitating in the direction of interests and necessities; they could not prevent the inevitable. The peasants continued to cede their lands to the magnates and attach themselves to their domains.
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p112 ...The Imperial treasury was still fed from two sources: one of them -- war booty -- intermittent and capricious; the other -- the revenue of the domains belonging to the dynasty -- permanent and regular... Charles gave it [the latter source] his careful attention... but their yield consisted of pretestations in kind, just enough to revictual the court. Properly speaking, the Carolingian Empire had no public finances, and when this has been said we can appreciate how rudimentary was its organization compared with that of the Byzantine Empire or the Empire of the Caliphs, with their taxes levied in money...
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2. The Pope and the Emperor
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p115 Louis succeeded to the throne [814] in an atmosphere of general approval. The Empire was rejoicing in the profoundest peace... it was for good reason that the second Carolingian Emperor was known to tradition as "the Pious." But his piety... was preeminently a political piety. It was blended with a conception of the secular power which regarded the maintenance and protection of the Church as its raison d'etre. Charles... had retained something of his independence as a sovereign... as king of the Franks; but with his son this independence disappeared. Louis, on his accession, abondoned the title of King of the Franks and Lombards; the only title which he bore was that of Emperor...
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I'm not going to cover the dynastic intrigues leading to the Treaty of Verdun in 843.
p119 The death of Louis II (875) furnished the Papacy with a fresh opportunity of affirming its superiority over the Empire, and of showing that the Empire was dependent on the Papacy and not on the dynasty. Louis had no children, and his nearest male relation was Carloman... whom he had appointed his heir. John VIII [Pope] (872-882) decided otherwise, summoned Charles the Bald to Rome, and crowned him.
...By himself the Pope, reduced to the possession of his little Roman State, would have been absolutely incapable of resisting the least aggression. Further, in the last resort he owed the authority which he enjoyed... to the Carolingians whom he had crowned... A paradoxical situation, which permitted the Pope to dominate the Emperor for so long as the Emperor guaranteed his liberty; which allowed the spiritual power precedence over the secular only by virtue of the support which it received from the latter! And now the political anarchy into which Europe was falling... at the close of the 9th century, suddenly deprived the Pope of this indispensable protector. Charles the Bald was the last Emperor to enjoy any real prestige, to exercise any real power. After him, under the irresistible pressure of feudality, under the blows of the Normans, the Saracens, the Slavs and the Hungarians, [why not Magyars?] under the influence of regional particularism, and of personal ambitions and intrigues and rivalries, what was left of the Carolingian order foundered, and the princes, whether they called themselves kings or emperors, were equally powerless... Now... the very liberty of the Papacy was threatened. Since the Pope had the disposal of the Imperial crown, it would be possible henceforth to obtain it by subjecting him to violence... after the death of Charles the Bald, Charles the Fat, marching upon Rome at the head of an army, had forced John VIII to crown him (881)... After the deposition of Charles the Fat and the final rupture of the Carolingian unity two Italian magnates, the Marquis of Friuli, Berenger, and the Duke of Spoleto, Gui, disputed for the ancient Lombard crown, and each had himself crowned king in Pavia. The Imperial dignity was vacant: Gui resolved to seize it. He had only to enter Rome with his soldiers...
I don't see how even Machiavelli could have done anything with this situation -- if he had been adviser to either the Carolingians or the Papacy. Have to admit I'm amused at how the Papacy outsmarted itself.
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