Page:Cambridge Medieval History Volume 3.pdf/11



volume before this brought us to the death of Charlemagne, with whom in many senses a new age began. He, like no one either before or after, summed up the imperishable memories of Roman rule and the new force of the new races which were soon to form states of their own. Although we are compelled to divide history into periods, in the truest sense history never begins, just as it never ends. The Frankish Kingdom, like the Carolingian Empire, is a testimony of this truth. It cannot be rightly understood without a knowledge of the Roman past, with its law, its unity, its civilisation, and its religion. But neither can it be understood without a knowledge of the new conceptions and the new elements of a new society, which the barbarian invaders of the Roman West had brought with them. It was upon the many-sided foundation of the Carolingian Empire that the new world of Europe was now to grow up. Yet even in that new world we are continually confronted with the massive relics and undying traces of the old. The statesman and warrior Charles, the great English scholar Alcuin, typify some parts of that great inheritance. But how much the Empire owed to the personal force and character of Charlemagne himself was soon to be seen under his weaker successors, even if their weakness has often been exaggerated. Such is one side of the story with which this volume begins.

We of to-day, perhaps, are too much inclined to forget the moulding force of institutions, of kingship, of law, of traditions of learning, and of ideas handed down from the past. When we see the work of Charlemagne seeming to crumble away as his strong hand fell powerless in death, we are too apt to look only at the lawlessness, the confusion, and the strife left behind. In face of such a picture it is needful to seek out the great centres of unity, which were still left, and around which the forms of politics and society were to crystallise slowly. Imperial traditions, exemplified, for instance, in the legal forms of diplomas, and finding expression as much in personal loyalty to rulers of Carolingian descent as in political institutions, gave one such centre. The Christian Church, with its civilising force, had even a local centre in Rome, to which St Boniface, the Apostle of Germany, had looked for guidance and control. Other ancient cities, too, in which Roman civilisation and