The Historians' History of the World 07 [The History of the Later Roman Empire]

INDICTION VII

PORTENTS OF CHARLEMAGNE’S DEATH

There were many portents of his approaching death, for not only others, but the king himself felt them. During the whole of his last three years there were eclipses both of the sun and of the moon, and certain spots of blackish hue were seen in the sun for the space of seven days. The portico which he had built with great labour between the church and the palace fell in a sudden and complete ruin from top to bottom on the day of the ascension of our Lord.

Also the wooden bridge across the Rhine at Mainz—which it had taken the king ten years of immense labour to construct, a work so marvellous that it seemed as if it would endure forever—chanced to catch fire, and was burned to a cinder in three days, so that not a single spar remained beyond what was protected under water. Again, when the king was in Saxony on his last campaign against Godefrid, king of the Danes, one day when the march had begun and he had left the camp before sunrise, he saw fall suddenly from heaven a blazing torch that flashed through the clear sky from right to left. While all wondered what this might portend, suddenly the king’s horse fell right upon his head and hurled his rider with such violence to the ground that the pin of his mantle was broken and his sword belt burst. His attendants rushed up and loosened his armour, and with some help he was induced to rise. The javelin which he chanced to hold in his hand at the time was thrown from his grasp a distance of twenty feet or more. Nor is this all. The palace of Aachen was visited with frequent shakings, and the ceilings of the houses in which he dwelt cracked constantly. The church in which he was afterwards buried was visited by lightning, and the golden apple with which the apex of the roof was embellished was wrenched away and hurled away over the adjoining house of the priest. In this same church, on the ring of the cornice which ran round the interior of the building between the upper and lower arches, there was an inscription in red chalk relating who was the founder of the church, the last line ending with the words Karolus Princeps. It was noticed by certain persons that in the same year as that in which he died, a few months before that event, the letters spelling Princeps were so obliterated as almost to be invisible. But the king either concealed his feelings about all these warnings from on high, or else he scorned them as in no way relating to himself.

HIS WILL AND TESTAMENT

Charles intended to make a will in which he might provide to some extent for his daughters and the children he had begotten of his concubines, but he began it late and it could not be completed. Three years, however, before his death he made division of his treasures, his money, his garments, and other chattels, in the presence of his friends and of his servants, making them witnesses that after his death the distribution made by him should take effect and be ratified by their assent. What he wished to be done with each portion he set down in an abstract of which the argument and text is as follows:

A Frankish Woman of Quality

Description and division made by the most glorious and most pious prince, Charles, emperor, augustus, in the year of the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ 811, in the forty-third year of his reign in Francia, in the thirty-seventh of his reign in Italy, in the eleventh of his use of the imperial dignity, and in the fourth indiction.

Whereas a pious and prudent consideration urged him to make and with the will of God to complete this division of the valuables and moneys found in his treasury on that day. And whereas the said Charles was most anxious and eager to provide that both the customary distribution of alms which is duly made by Christians from their possessions should be given by himself from his moneys as is right and befitting, and also that his heirs, having all sense of doubt removed as to what belongs to them, might be able to know clearly and make division among themselves in due appointment without strife or contention. Now this indenture witnesseth his will and purpose that all his goods and chattels, whether of gold or silver or precious stones or royal ornaments, such as can be found on the aforesaid day in his treasury, be divided into three portions, to be again divided, two of them into twenty-one parts, the third portion to be kept entire; the reason of this division of two-thirds of the property into twenty-one parts being because that is recognised to be the number of metropolitan cities in the realm, and of these twenty-one parts one is to be given by his heirs and friends to each metropolis as a gift of alms, the archbishop being at that time at the head of that church to take up the portion granted to his church and divide it with his suffragans in these proportions—one-third to be retained for his own church and the remaining two-thirds to be divided among suffragans. These portions of the first threefold division, twenty-one in number, that being the number of the metropolitan cities, to be separated from one another, and each to be stored distinct in its own depository with the name of the city upon it to which it shall be conveyed.