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The Historians' History of the World 07 [The History of the Later Roman Empire]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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[841-842 A.D.]
Trusting in all these allies Lothair now determined to attack his brother Ludwig, and gathered together an army near Worms. Charles the Bald shrewdly recognised the danger of the situation, and advanced with his forces to the Rhine to support Ludwig. Lothair was thereby constrained to alter his tactics, and to force Charles to retreat before leading his army to oppose Ludwig. He therefore marched into the interior of Gaul. Charles thereupon retreated upon Paris where he entrenched. Lothair determined nevertheless to attack him, but he failed to cross the Seine owing to the rise of the river. After a renewal of peace negotiations, which were once more fruitless, between the two brothers, Lothair marched to meet his nephew Pepin in order again to join forces with him. This he succeeded in doing farther up the Seine at Sens. Charles the Bald proceeded hastily in the meanwhile to join Ludwig the German near the Rhine, which Ludwig had already reached. The two armies effected their junction at Strasburg in February, 842. From this time the brothers firmly resolved to put an end to all hesitation and to the aimless wandering hither and thither, and to bring the matter to a head. They mutually swore an oath of loyalty and indissolubility in the presence of their armies. Ludwig then addressed the assembled warriors, recounting the wrongs they had endured at the hands of Lothair and asserting his fixed determination to conclude an honourable alliance with Charles, absolving his men from their allegiance to him should he break his oath. At that time the national separation of the French and the Germans was already very marked; for Ludwig made his speech in German, repeating it in the Romance tongue in order that Charles’ warriors also should understand it. Hereupon the two kings and their armies swore a solemn oath of mutual loyalty and support.
LOTHAIR BROUGHT TO TERMS (842 A.D.)
[842 A.D.]
The camp was then broken up in order to bring on the crisis at once. Lothair had now returned from Gaul to Aachen, whither his adversaries marched with their armies. He endeavoured to entrench on the banks of the Moselle and to oppose the passage of the enemy, but his dispositions for the defence were miserably weak. The forces of Ludwig and Charles crossed the river without the slightest difficulty, and Lothair so lost his head as to take to flight hastily, never halting until he reached Lyons.
The victorious brothers proceeded to Aachen, which was still considered as the seat of the whole empire. There they called upon the bishops to decide between them, and Lothair; which they were only too ready to do, declaring Lothair had grievously offended against both church and state, and had besides shown himself to be quite incapable of governing the empire, which should therefore pass over to Ludwig and Charles. As the might of the strongest was thus confirmed by moral authority, Lothair began to be seized at last with anxiety and seriously tried to come to an agreement with his brothers. He therefore made proposals to them with regard to the partition of the empire, which seemed reasonable and led to further negotiations. It was impossible, however, owing to Lothair’s new subterfuges, to effect a reconciliation at once; but in June, 842, the three brothers held a meeting on the island of Ansilla on the Saône, where they mutually took a solemn oath of peace, and arranged to meet again on October 1st of the same year in Metz, when the division of the empire should irrevocably be made by a tribunal of 120 arbitrators, of which each of the brothers was to select forty from his most distinguished men. This agreement is known as the Treaty of Ansilla, and it was the forerunner of the Treaty of Verdun.
A King of the Ninth Century
(From an old print)
The three brothers were all anxious to make the utmost use of the interval which must elapse before the virtual conclusion of peace, in consolidating their own power. Lothair, as revengeful and cruel as he was craven, vented his rage, on his return to Aachen, on those of his vassals who according to him were responsible for the disaster on the Moselle, by confiscating many fiefs. Charles, on the other hand, tried to ruin his nephew Pepin in Aquitania, although the latter, supposing any right of inheritance over states to have existed, would have possessed a better right than the uncle. The third brother resolved to put down the rising in Saxony which threatened to become a danger to Germany. There is, it is true, no historical evidence that the Saxon freemen and villeins had lent any actual assistance to Lothair, the instigator of the insurrection; but on the other hand, they proceeded all the more vigorously at home to reorganise their established religion and constitution. Consequently they expelled not only the Christian priests but also many nobles; more particularly those who had been aware of the hopelessness of the enterprise and who would not join the movement. It is possible that in the course of events a freer tendency had been evolved, and that the improvement of the position of the middle classes, and more especially of the villeins or peasants, was the object of their endeavours. For many centuries this numerous class, so oppressed by the Germans, had borne their misery without any attempt to escape it; and yet it was inevitable that by degrees even those of them who were without rights should awake to a consciousness of their unworthy position, and should feel a wish to improve it.
OPPRESSION OF THE SAXON FREEMEN
[842-843 A.D.]
During the reign of Louis the Pious there had already been a dangerous rising of serfs in Flanders and in the northern maritime countries, which according to the custom of lords paramount was not put down by justice—that is, by an acknowledgment of the human rights possessed by the miserable oppressed, called in law parlance beasts, and by a lenient and reasonable improvement of their lot—but by the sword.
As a prototype of Napoleon, who held the municipalities responsible for the individual actions which displeased him, Ludwig or rather his council treated the lords of the serfs in the same way in order to guard against similar uprisings in the future. The owner of the villein who took part in a conspiracy was threatened with the king’s ban (60 solidi).
These facts must be taken as a sign of the times. They show that a longing for freedom was beginning to stir in the bosom of the villein who was without civil rights, and the movement in Saxony might have taken this direction too, as already observed; but this was no struggle for the restoration of an alleged former freedom, as the newer historians would have it, but the opposite—an attempt to overthrow the tyranny of the olden times. Such a condition of things would have stood in direct opposition to the re-establishment of the old Saxon constitution, which certainly was included in the plot, because that government upheld serfdom; yet the Saxons included therein the ancestral religion, their independence from the Franks, and exemption from tithes, and therefore in that sense the struggle for freedom was compatible with the re-establishment of the ancient constitution. It was customary in the peasant rebellions in Germany to adopt a particular name, such as the bundschuh, “lace-shoe.” The Saxon freemen and villeins called their rising the stellinga. When a rebellion has for its goal the acquisition of liberty, it is only natural that a king should tremble; but whether this was really the case here or whether it was the natural dislike of all Germans for the Carlovingian dynasty, that had oppressed not only the Saxons and Frisians but also the Alamanni and the Bavarians, it is certain that Ludwig feared the spread of the Saxon rising over Swabia and Bavaria, and strained every nerve to subdue it. In order to accomplish this he made use of such cruel means that his name, like that of his grandfather Charles, deserves to be branded by history.