The Historians' History of the World 07

But Charles’ ambition as emperor, it is certain, was not to revive the despotism of heathen Rome over the world, to call to life again forgotten rights of the ancient emperors and thus establish absolute power for himself. His idea of the new power that came to him as emperor was rather based upon that religious and political conception of the emperorship which the western church had developed in itself. It was rather the theocracy of the old alliance than the despotism of the Roman imperial state that furnished him the maxims which he followed in the administration of the world power intrusted to him. In the circle of his friends Charles was called King David; when compared with his imperial predecessors he must be placed not beside the Julians or the Flavians, but beside Constantine or Theodosius, the founders of the Roman state church. Thus the ideal of the new imperial state is nothing less than the kingdom of God on earth, in which the emperor is appointed by God himself as his lieutenant, in order that he may, in accordance with the divine intentions, guide and govern the people.

It was in this sense that Charles conceived his position; in this sense he began his imperial government. Soon after his return from Rome he had the entire body of ecclesiastical and civil law in force in his dominions revised at Aachen and everything struck out that seemed contrary to the command of God. Then he sent out royal messengers, both ecclesiasts and laymen, in all directions to put these improved laws into force and at the same time to require from all subjects of the empire who had passed their twelfth year a new oath of allegiance, an oath which, as was expressly emphasised, imposed far higher duties towards his imperial majesty than the oath formerly given to the king. To these messengers Charles gave an almost apostolic mission; they were to warn the people zealously against any violation of the divine commands, to enjoin the Christian virtues, to remind all that they must sometime give an account of their lives before the judgment throne of Christ.

Though the Germanic kingdom had from the beginning assumed some ecclesiastical rights, it seems now, when raised to imperial power, to usurp almost the plenitude of the high-priesthood. And Charles was in fact frankly designated the “regent of the holy church”; church councils not only required his permission to meet, he supplemented their decisions, rectified their mistakes, and had everywhere the deciding vote in them. It was he, in no less degree, who reformed the entire clergy of his empire and with unrelenting sternness forced upon them the canonical life whose regulations were for the most part taken from the monastic rules of St. Benedict. The legislation of Charles encroaches everywhere upon the domain of the church, and even in the later collections of the canon law his laws appear beside the letters of the popes and the decrees of the councils. The pope, although the western church honours him as its spiritual head, sinks beside this high-priestly emperor almost to the rank of first councillor in ecclesiastical affairs, of head of the highest corporate body of the empire.

But it was as king of the Franks, as commander-in-chief and supreme judge of his people that Charles had attained imperial power; out of the military and judicial authority that he exercised over the free Franks and all peoples subject to them his whole power had arisen, and would fall to the ground if this basis upon which it rested should be weakened or withdrawn from it. If the empire of Charles was to maintain its existence it was all-important that the subject portions of the realm should at the same time be so fully incorporated in the Frankish political system that they could never again separate from it—an immeasurable, infinitely difficult task, especially as Charles could never think of forcing the despotism of decrepit Rome upon his empire nor of crushing the characteristic life of the separate races with the weight of his supreme power, of establishing one law and administration and like forms of government from one end of his empire to the other. He was withheld from this in the first place by his ideal of the Christian state, but even more by his own disposition and by the nature of the peoples he ruled over. If the political creation of Charles was to gain any sort of permanence among peoples that were either German throughout, or had at least been internally transformed by Germanic elements, it must proceed from the German spirit, which possesses no creative activity where freedom of development is not permitted to the individual. It must, moreover, cling tenaciously to tradition, and regulate, assemble, and direct the powers of the state more through personal influence than through a lifeless mechanism.