Pippin to Charles
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Book Two
The Carolingian Epoch
Chapter II
The Frankish Kingdom
3. The New Royalty
p76 ...His [Pippin the Short] conduct... [toward St. Bonaface and his mission beyond the Rhine] was inspired by political interest. He understood that the most effectual means of mitigating the barbarism of the Frisians, the Thuringians, the Bavarians and the Saxons, thus making them less dangerous neighbors and paving the way for future annexation, was to begin by converting them...
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p77 Mounted upon the throne by the help of the Pope, the first of the Carolingian kings was not slow to repay the debt... [Pope] Stephanua II came in person... [in 752] to claim his assistance against the Lombards... With this the die was cast; Rome broke with Constantinople...
Pippin... promised to march against the Lombards, and having conquered them, to give to the Roman Church the territory surrounding the Eternal City. Neither Pippin nor Stephanus was deterred... by the notion that they were thus disposing of a region whose legitimate possessor was the Emperor. The campaign which was fought in 754 gave the victory to the Franks. The Pope received the promised territory: the State of the Church was founded... At the same time, this question of the temporal sovereignty of the pope gave rise to serious complications and conflicts. The Papal State was small and feeble... How could the independence of the Papacy be reconciled with the urgent need of military tutelage. While waiting for a more satisfactory solution, Stephanus adopted the emergency measure of bestowing upon Pippin a title which could be interpreted in any sense, according to circumstances, but which established a permanent bond between the Frankish king and Rome: the title of patricius Romanorum, Roman patrician.
p78 ...The royal power of the Merovingians had been purely secular: but that of the Carolingians reveals a profoundly religious imprint. The ceremony of consecration, which appeared for the first time at the coronation of Pippin, made the sovereign in some sort a sacerdotal figure. The king affirmed his submission to the command of God and his desire to serve Him, not merely by including the Cross amongst his emblems, but by entitling himself, in Christian humility, "King by the grace of God." From this time forward... the ideal of the king was not to be Caesar, a potentate deriving his power and authority only from earthly sources; but to ensure that the divine precepts prevailed on earth, and to govern in accordance with Christian morality: that is, in accordance with the Church... We find... [this ideal] expressed in all the treatises of the 9th century on the sovereign power... it made religion an affair of State. Only those who belonged to the Christian society could belong to the public society, and excommunication was equivalent to outlawry. [Footnote: The ancient or Roman ideal of monarchical power was replaced by the Christian ideal until its reappearance in the 12th century.]
Chapter III
The Restoration of the Empire in the West
I. Charlemagne (768-814)
After talking about the Saxon invasion of Britain and their recent conversion to Christianity.
p81 Even as late as the middle of the 8th century the continental Saxons, by a singular chance, had never been subjected to Roman or Christian influence. While their neighbors were becoming Romanized or were converted to Christianity, they remained purely German, and during the long centuries of their isolation their primitive institutions, like their national cult, had developed and become firmly established... They held fast to their religion as the token and guarantee of their independence.
p82 Charles's Saxon campaigns of 780 and 804 may be regarded as the first of the European wars of religion. Hitherto Christianity had been peacefully diffused among the Germans. On the Saxons it was imposed by force. They were compelled to accept baptism... This new policy was the consequence of the ecclesiastical character which the monarchy had recently assumed. Holding his power from God, the king could not permit dissent in the matter of faith or worship among his subjects... Hence the violence and the massacres in the wars against the Saxons, and hence too the obstinacy with which they defended their gods, the guardians of their liberty. For the first time Christianity encountered, among pagans, a national resistance...
The annexation and conversion of Saxony brought the whole of the ancient Germany into the community of European civilization. When they were completed the eastern frontier of the Carolingian Empire extended to the Elbe and the Saale. Thence it ran to the head of the Adriatic, across the mountains of Bohemia and the Danube, including the land of the Bavarians... Beyond this was the region of barbarism: Slavs on the east, Avars in the south.
p83 And the Avars had to be fought immediately. This nation of horsemen, of Finnish origin... had established themselves in the valley of the Danube... Several expeditions were needed... These were campaigns of extermination. [Similar to Marius's campaign against the Teutones, ironically.] The Avars were massacred to the point of disappearing as a people... The operation completed, Charles, to guard against further aggression, threw a march or mark across the valley of the Danube: that is, a defensive territory under military administration. This was the Eastern March (marca orientalis), the point of departure for modern Austria, which has retained the name.
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p84 At the other side of Europe, along the Pyrenees, the kingdom was in contact not with pagan Barbarians, but with the Musulmans... Spain, where the Caliphate of Cordova had lately been established, no longer looked toward the north... The rapidity of the progress made by Islam in the sciences, arts, industry, and commerce, and all the refinements of civilized life, is almost as amazing as the rapidity of its conquests... While science progressed and art flourished, religious and political quarrels broke out... Three Arab emirs, at war with the Caliph of Cordova, had applied... [to Charles] for assistance. He came in person... was unsuccessful at the siege of Saragossa, and recrossed the Pyrenees after a somewhat inglorious campaign, the only result of which was the erection of the Spanish March between the Ebro and the Pyrenees. This afterwards served the petty Christian kingdoms which had established themselves in the mountains of Asturias as an advance-post against the Arabs in the long struggle which was to terminate, in the 15th century, in the liberation of the peninsula...
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