Part 13
The one man with genius and creativeness adequate to restore a practical republican government was Cæsar himself, and to him republican ideals meant nothing. He was a realistic statesman, who saw the road to monarchy as the short cut to good government, and took it unhesitatingly. At no point in Cæsar’s career is there any evidence that he believed in anything but personal rule. Alike skeptical of higher appeals and with a contempt for shams, he never wavered at any stage in his well-planned pursuit of autocratic power. His fight with the Senatorial oligarchy, who alone blocked his way, was conducted with the directness of a military campaign. There was little personal feeling, for he treated men as pawns, whether they were friends or enemies. When their power to help or to oppose him was gone, they were of no significance; so, at the close of the civil war, it was easy to exercise a clemency or a patronage which meant little. There was a superficial amiability in these acts which indicated a contempt of individuals rather than spontaneous humanity. His cold, clear-cut character seemed to work out problems in a bloodless atmosphere alike free from prejudices and from prepossessions.
Cæsar’s benefactions and his enmities were alike self-centered. The whole force of a nature extraordinarily versatile and incessantly active was turned to one end, and the various stages of his political career are explained by the closing years of his life. It was his purpose to overthrow the Senatorial aristocrats. The purpose was a most worthy one, and it is difficult to see how it could have been done except by extra-legal means, for the Senatorial faction made the laws, and so held all the cards in their hands. Their motto of government was “Heads I win, tails you lose”; and the claim of legality with such a leader as Pompeius, who had no respect for the constitution, was altogether disingenuous. Cæsar was a shrewder politician than any member of the Senatorial faction, far more brilliant in conception and far quicker in action than his rival Pompeius. After clearing the field of his opponents, he showed less creative capacity than in his preparatory work.
Of course, the time was short between his murder and the close of the last campaign in the civil war, but the government he established was a kind of sham republicanism after the Sullan model, only with a different center of gravity. He seems to have planned a better system of administration, and meant that it should be worked in a way regardful of the public interests of a great empire; but the machinery was to remain the same, except that the various magistracies were either to be held by himself or filled by men of his own selection. The shadow of republicanism was to cover a monarchical rule, and in this respect the conservatism of Cæsar was epoch-making, for it continued to influence the whole genius of the Roman imperial system for centuries.
As a general Cæsar was fortunate in having at his command an army which represented the result of years of technical training acquired in the almost continuous campaigns of the Romans. He did not have to create his army; the material for his conquests was ready to hand. He added nothing new to the art of war as it was already known, but the legion under him had a commander of great versatility, who understood how to use it to the best advantage under any given conditions. This genius in providing for the maintenance of his army repeatedly gave him the advantage over the enemy in the Gallic wars, for it enabled him to defer the decisive engagement until all conditions were favorable for his own side.
Another characteristic of his strategy was his skill in using fortified camps. He was a born engineer, and the engineering feats of his campaigns are evidently recounted with great satisfaction in his “Commentaries.” It is evident that they played a decisive part in securing success both during the Gallic campaigns and in the civil war. Indeed, one of the most important contributions of the Romans to the art of warfare was superior technique in fortifications, and in protection of camps, aided by which the defensive of a numerically smaller force could be made to balance the offensive of superior numbers. The sole method of overcoming such resistance was by starving out the army placed in a fortified camp. In his campaigns Cæsar showed remarkable versatility in using the argument of hunger as well as the argument of the sword, and he was quick to turn from one to the other as occasion required.
He seems never to have burdened himself with a pedantic following of rules. Plutarch tells us he had read the accounts of Alexander’s great victories. So far as his own “Commentaries” are concerned, there is a studied vagueness, which, as has been mentioned, often leaves important points in obscurity. He is very sparing of giving personal reflections on the progress of the war he is describing. It is noteworthy, therefore, that he once blames Pompeius for repressing the enthusiasm of his troops, saying that it is the general’s business to encourage the emotional element in battle.
He is also fond of calling attention to the rôle played by fortune or chance, and so he has been often blamed for the risks he was willing to take because he trusted too much to luck, and it is said that he conducted warfare in the spirit of a gambler. Like Napoleon, he appears to have believed in his star, but the references to fortune in the “Commentaries” are probably a literary device intended to impress a popular audience who, though they had lost belief in the gods of polytheism, were ready to recognize an incalculable and mysterious element in human life.
But there was in his strategy more than a spontaneous brilliancy adequate to rescue him from the difficulties of a position he had not anticipated. In his campaigns we see evidence enough of caution and calculation. Especially in the matter of numerical superiority he was careful not to allow himself any hazards in a decisive engagement. The battle of Pharsalus is the only one in which it is certain that he won a victory with an army inferior in numbers to his opponent. In this case nothing else could have been done, for Pompeius, who was in control of the sea, would have removed his army from Greece if he had been outnumbered. There was but one way of forcing a pitched battle under these circumstances, and it was part of superior strategy to induce an enemy relying on superior numbers to confront troops superior in quality. But such chances Cæsar only took when obliged. There was little of the bravado element in his wars. The situation was outlined beforehand. The almost mathematical result bears witness to the presence of that same type of cool reflection which in the political side of his career makes the founder of the Roman Empire something of an enigma. It is hard to believe that a man can be just as unfeeling and unethical in statesmanship as when he is directing the movements of masses of troops. Cæsar’s genius stands for an abnormal development of intellectual power disciplined to serve the ambitious purposes of a man bent on enjoying personal rule, who, to a unique degree, had measured the capacity of other men and himself.
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CHARLES THE GREAT
I INTRODUCTORY
Out of the chaos in Western Europe due to the collapse of Roman provincial rule in the fifth century, there came into being various Teutonic states. They all bore the mark of the early tribal organization of the German peoples and took up the work, more or less successfully, of assimilating the orderly elements and traditions of Roman polity. In the Italian peninsula the permanence of these political creations was short-lived, except in the case of the Lombards, who maintained an enduring rule, largely because they adhered to a crude policy of isolation and set well-considered limits to their desire for expansion. In Spain, the Goths, despite the predominance of the Roman provincial element, succeeded, with the help of the Church, in attaining a fairly centralized organization for several centuries until it was swept aside by the irresistible pressure of the Moslem conquest. To the North, in France, which was first of all the seat of various Teutonic peoples, the Franks, under the astute leadership of their tribal monarchs, gradually absorbed all the territory of the old Roman province of Gallia, adding to it the land to the east which had been the home of their ancestors before they had crossed into the Roman province.
Chlodvig, the founder of the Merovingian line of kings, was not a ruler of the type of Theodoric the Ostrogoth. In contrast with the Teutonic kingdoms of Italy and Spain, the Merovingian showed a stubborn conservatism. After Chlodvig’s death there was no man of first-rate ability during the period of Merovingian rule with the dubious exception of Dagobert. These were long years of division, lawlessness, and bloodshed. The Franks kept possession of their conquests, but the royal line produced a succession of weak and helpless rulers who showed themselves incapable of casting aside the traditions of tribal rule. The demand for centralization was recognized and met by the representatives of the noble family of Heristal who, because they were landlords over wide estates, became, as mayors of the palace, _de facto_ possessors of sovereign authority. To them the Frankish chieftains throughout the land looked for leadership, and did not look in vain, for their efficient statesmanship soon arrested the disintegrating tendencies of Merovingian rule, and gave their people such an amount of cohesive strength that they became the foremost representatives of Teutonic power in Western Europe. It was the House of Heristal which saved the Franks from the fate of the Visigoths, for it was Charles the Hammer who met the Moslem host on the field of Poictiers and swept them back across the Pyrenees.
Charles’ son, Pippin, carried on the work of his father; he was strong, courageous, and cautious, a thorough type of the opportunist statesman, willing so far as he was concerned to control his people under the title of Mayor of the Palace, while the titular dignity of king was kept intact in the Merovingian family. The bloodless revolution which made Pippin a monarch _de jure_ from a ruler _de facto_, was due to outside pressure, and this pressure came from the See of Rome, which appealed to him for help as the representative and most powerful Catholic leader in Western Europe after the Emperors at Constantinople had alienated the population in Italy by the part they played in the Iconoclastic controversy.
The Popes of the eighth century, seeing the inability of the Eastern Empire to protect its Italian possessions, and unwilling to give them support against the aggressions of the Lombards, were face to face with a difficult problem. They did not wish to be absorbed in the Lombard kingdom, and were just as much afraid of seeing any restoration of power to the hands of the Emperor’s representative, the Exarch of Ravenna.
Pope Stephen played a bold stroke of genius when he crossed the Alps to ask the ruler of the Franks to save the religious capital of Western Christianity from capture at the hands of the Lombard kings. Nor was his political sagacity yet exhausted, for he persuaded the Mayor of the Palace to regularize his own position by taking the title of king under the sanction of the Holy See. This was an ambitious design, unprecedented in the earlier pages of Papal history. Even Gregory the Great had no thought of bestowing the royal crown on any Teutonic tribal chieftain. The action was evidently suggested by the plan prepared some years before, when, with the coöperation of the Pope, it was proposed to revive in Italy a native Italian emperor to lead the people of the Peninsula against the church policy of Constantinople. This scheme was from the beginning a forlorn hope, and it had turned out to be a failure. There was not sufficient military strength in Italy, apart from the Lombards, to back up a revived Emperor of the West, and it is clear that the Lombards would have made short work of any such ruler, even if there had not been among the Italians a party who looked up to the Exarch of Ravenna as the natural head of their civil government.
The negotiations with Pippin ended successfully. The Pope’s prestige was enormously increased. Instead of looking forward to becoming the captive of a Lombard king, he became himself the bestower of royal dignity on a man who had at his disposal such vast military power that the passage of his army across the Alps into Lombard territory brought about the reduction of the Lombard kingdom to a status of dependency on a Frankish ruler.
Pippin, as a loyal churchman, followed the Pope’s counsel, but he seems to have done so with distinct reservations. The traditional Frankish policy had been the complete subordination of the Church to the State. It is no wonder then that many of the Frankish nobles disapproved of Pippin’s act, which reduced their monarchy to a gift from the hands of the Pope. Pippin did all he could during the rest of his lifetime to keep clear of further Italian complications. He never crossed the Alps again, and he was very careful not to depress the Lombard power in Northern Italy and so give Stephen an excuse for demanding additional territory. As a temporal ruler the Pope’s authority had been substantially increased by the cession of lands which he had claimed from him on the basis of the so-called Donation of Constantine--a fictitious instrument which Stephen appealed to when there arose the question of the disposition of the territory once belonging to the Exarchate of Ravenna. According to the legend, Pope Sylvester, the contemporary of Constantine, when the capital of the Empire had been removed to Constantinople, had received from the Emperor extensive donations of Italian territory, both on the Peninsula and on the adjacent islands, over which he was to rule with the power of a temporal sovereign. To Pippin, this legendary Donation, because of its presumed sanction at the hands of a revered Emperor and Pope, was sacred. He was willing to be an instrument in carrying out the terms of the sacrosanct compact, but he refused to go farther than this, and for the rest of his life he maintained an attitude of reserve in according additional favors to the Holy See.
Pippin’s reign came to an end as calmly as though the line of descent had been unbroken. Even the evil traditions of the Frankish monarchy with respect to the inheritance of the crown were not cast aside. Just as Cromwell and Napoleon felt the weight of custom in their relations with the members of their families, when they were arranging to perpetuate the power of their own creation, so Pippin, the diplomat, the cautious statesman, could do, or at least did nothing to alter the bad and impracticable tribal custom of division of patrimony. This practice caused the downfall of the Merovingian line, and had started the revolution by which the fortunes of the House of Heristal had been assured. This is only one of many anomalies which followed the breaking up of the administration of the Roman Empire, and which testified to the absence of initiative on the part of the Germanic peoples when they were called upon to solve problems of government, for which they had had no preparation. Rulers who did not hesitate to show their individuality in other ways proved fearful of violating tribal customs on questions of divisions of property and family precedence.
The new line of Frankish rulers had apparently learned nothing from the vicissitudes of the elder house. At the death of Charles Martel, the division of the kingdom between his two sons would have certainly endangered the sovereignty of his family had not the difficulty been averted by the abdication of Carloman the elder. Yet Pippin, on his deathbed, had not scrupled to make the same blunder of dividing the realm between his two sons, Charles and Carloman. Almost immediately after their father’s death the heirs, apparently mutually suspicious, separated from each other, and had themselves separately proclaimed kings by the Frankish nobles, and received anointment at the hands of the bishops, Charles at Noyon, Carloman at Soissons.
The diplomacy of the dead ruler was revealed in the kind of disposal he made of his realm. It was an equal division only on paper; for the arrangement of the shares was such that the elder son was left with such manifest superior advantages as to territory that the younger brother could not venture to compete with him. As his share Charles had the part of his father’s kingdom from which the Frankish hosts derived their chief military strength, viz.: the lands from the Main to the English Channel. Besides this, he received the western portion of Aquitaine, the province whose conquest had cost Pippin a hard struggle of seven years, and which, therefore, might become a dangerous center of warlike enterprise if it were placed entirely in the hands of the younger brother. Carloman had as his share the Suabian lands on both sides of the upper Rhine, and the entire Mediterranean coast from the Maritime Alps to the frontier of Spain. In addition to this there came to him the eastern half of the territory adjacent to such towns as Clermont, Rodez, Albi, and Toulouse.
In geographical extent there was but little advantage on the part of the elder brother, but the territory of the younger from a military point of view was far inferior. Carloman in case of war would have against him, under the command of Charles, the whole military power of the Franks. There was no pretense of friendship between the two new rulers; it seems they had never been friendly. The reason of the alienation may have been because the birth of Charles preceded the formal transfer of the Frankish crown to his father. He was, therefore, the son of a Mayor of the Palace, while Carloman, though younger, was son of the King of the Franks.
The question of the duration of external harmony between the brothers was of especial importance in its effect on the situation in the Italian peninsula. Some of the Frankish nobles had by no means approved of Pippin’s policy of opposition to the Lombard kings, and had criticised his willingness to protect the integrity of the dominions of the Pope, whenever he was appealed to from Rome for aid. The efforts of the Queen Mother Bertrada were evidently intended to promote a better feeling between the Franks and the Lombards, for she personally arranged a marriage between Charles and the daughter of Desiderius, the Lombard king. The protests of the Pope were unavailing when he urged, from a decidedly interested point of view, that Charles should marry a wife from his own people; although he recalled the oaths taken, when the two Frankish rulers were children, that they would have the same friends and the same enemies as the Church.
The whole situation, political as well as personal, was suddenly changed by the death of Carloman in 771, and by domestic difficulties in Charles’ own household which led to an alienation from his mother and caused the repudiation of his Lombard wife. Immediately after his brother’s death Charles was acknowledged as sole king throughout the Frankish territories, and the alliance with the Lombard party in Italy was brought to an end. Gerberga, Carloman’s widow, and her sons betook themselves to the court of Desiderius, which now became a natural refuge for all who were discontented with the new ruler of the Franks.
II CONSOLIDATION OF RULE
In the meantime, Pope Stephen, the man who had made the Frankish alliance the cornerstone of papal diplomacy, had died. (772.) He was succeeded by Hadrian, who proclaimed his purpose to follow the rule of peacemaker in the complexities of Italian politics, and so to induce Romans, Franks, and Lombards to live in mutual harmony. Despite his pacific intentions, he was unable to tolerate the military aggression of the Lombards on the cities in the Patrimony which had been turned over to the Pope by Pippin, including Ravenna itself.
Papal protests against this invasion proved useless. Desiderius threatened to appear with his army before the walls of Rome itself, and he actually approached as close to the city as Viterbo, having in his army the young heirs of Carloman, whose claims to their father’s inheritance he wished to have legitimatized by having them anointed by the Pope. He was deterred from carrying out his plan, and the Pope met the daring of the Lombard leader with a formal warning, that the king and all his host would be placed under the ban of anathema if they entered the territory of Rome. Desiderius therefore withdrew.
To the Frankish delegates who appeared in Rome to investigate the condition of affairs between the Pope and Desiderius, Hadrian probably explained that his difficulties had been occasioned by his refusal to anoint the pretenders, Carloman’s sons, at Desiderius’ request. There would not be wanting, also, appeals to Charles to fulfil his solemn engagements to stand by the Roman See. Desiderius, in his interview with the envoys, treated them curtly; he was evidently looking forward to settling the issue with Charles by arms. There was not only the difference with the Pope, due to Lombard aggression on the papal cities, but he must have felt aggrieved because Charles had refused to live with his daughter. There was also the fact that at the court of the Lombard king, Carloman’s children had been received and were being used in the rôle of pretenders, as tools in an intrigue against the ruler of the Franks.
Desiderius had prepared for invasion from the North by fortifying the pass at Susa, the “débouchement” in northwestern Italy of the road regularly taken by the Frankish army when they invaded Italy. But while methods of military defense were being looked to, Desiderius saw the need of preparing for the coming struggle by consolidating his rule over his adherents and dependents. The important Duchy of Benevento was allied with him by the bonds of family relationship. The Duchy of Spoleto was less important, as it had lost in territory and in independence during the reign of Desiderius, but means were taken to conciliate the Church by gifts to important abbeys. Indeed, so numerous were these alienations of the royal lands to ecclesiastical foundations, that the king’s policy in annexing cities and territories in the Patrimony of the Pope had become as much an economic as a political necessity, for the owners of the alienated land could only in this way be compensated for their losses. The abbeys were of strategic importance; many of them, and these the largest, were situated on the inner lines of communication. The cities and castles were still surrounded with their Roman walls, and under the Lombard monarchy the many roads and bridges had been kept in order.