Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 6.djvu/554

 and finally in 755 met the death of a martyr at the hands of the Frisians. After the Church had thus obtained a good foothold it soon reached a position of much importance in the eyes of the youthful German peoples. By grants of land the princes gave it an economic power which was greatly increased when many freemen voluntarily became dependents of these new spiritual lords; thus, besides the secular territorial aristocracy, there developed a second power, that of the ecclesiastical princes. Antagonism between these two elements was perceptible at an early date. Pepin sought to remove the difficulty by strengthening the Frankish Church and placing between the secular and spiritual lords the new Carlovingian king, who, by the assumption of the title Dei gratia, obtained a somewhat religious character.

The Augustinian conception of the Kingdom of God early influenced the Frankish State; political and religious theories unconsciously blended. The union of Church and State seemed the ideal which was to be realized. Each needed the other; the State needed the Church as the only source of real order and true education; the Church needed for its activities the protection of the secular authority. In return for the training in morals and learning that the Church gave, the State granted it large privileges, such as: the privilegium fori or freedom from the jurisdiction of the State; immunity, that is exemption from taxes and services to the State, from which gradually grew the right to receive the taxes of the tenants residing on the exempt lands and the right to administer justice to them; further, release from military service; and, finally, the granting of great fiefs that formed the basis of the later ecclesiastical sovereignties. The reverse of this picture soon became apparent; the ecclesiastics to whom had been given lands and offices in fief became dependent on secular lords. Thus the State at an early date had a share in the making of ecclesiastical laws, exercised the right of patronage, appointed to dioceses, and soon undertook, especially in the time of Charles Martel, the secularization of church lands. Consequently the question of the relation of Church and State soon claimed attention; it was the most important question in the history of the German Middle Ages. Under the first German emperor this problem seemed to find its solution.

Real German history begins with Charlemagne (768-814). The war with the Saxons was the most important one he carried on, and the result of this struggle, of fundamental importance for German history, was that the Saxons were brought into connexion with the other Germanic tribes and did not fall under Scandinavian influence. The lasting union of the Franks, Saxons, Frisians, Thuringians, Hessians, Alamanni, and Bavarians, that Charlemagne effected, formed the basis of a national combination which gradually lost sight of the fact that it was the product of compulsion. From the time of Charlemagne the above-named German tribes lived under Frankish constitution retaining their own old laws, the leges barbarorum, which Charlemagne codified. Another point of importance for German development was that Charlemagne fixed the boundary between his domain and the Slavs, including the Wends, on the farther side of the Elbe and Saale Rivers. It is true that Charlemagne did not do all this according to a deliberate plan, but mainly in the endeavour to win these related Germanic peoples over to Christianity. Charlemagne's German policy, therefore, was not a mere brute conquest, but a union which was to be strengthened by the ties of morality and culture to be created by the Christian religion. The amalgamation of the ecclesiastical with the secular elements that had begun in the reign of Pepin reached its completion under Charlemagne. The fact that Pepin obtained papal approval of his kingdom strengthened the bond between the Church and the Frankish kingdom. The consciousness of being the champion of Christianity against the Arabs, moreover, gave to the King of the Franks the religious character of the predestined protectors of the Church; thus he attained a position of great importance in the Kingdom of God. Charlemagne was filled with these ideas; like St. Augustine he hated the supremacy of the heathen empire. The type of God's Kingdom to Charlemagne and his councillors was not the Roman Empire but the Jewish theocracy. This type was kept in view when Charlemagne undertook to give reality to the Kingdom of God. The Frankish king desired like Solomon to be a great ecclesiastical and secular potentate, a royal priest. He was conscious that his conception of his position as the head of the Kingdom of God, according to the German ideas, was opposed to the essence of Roman Caesarism, and for reason he objected to being crowned emperor by the Pope on Christmas Day, 800. On this day the Germanic idea of the Kingdom of God, of which Charlemagne was the representative, bowed to the Roman idea, which regards Rome as its centre, Rome the seat of the old empire and the most sacred place of the Christian world. Charlemagne when emperor still regarded himself as the real leader of the Church. Although in 774 he confirmed the gift of his father to the Roman res publica, nevertheless he saw to it that Rome remained connected with the Frankish State; in return it had a claim to Frankish protection. He even interfered in dogmatic questions.

Charlemagne looked upon the revived Roman Empire from the ancient point of view inasmuch as he greatly desired recognition by the Eastern Empire. He regarded his possession of the empire as resulting solely from his own power, consequently he himself crowned his son Louis. Yet on the other hand he looked upon his empire only as a Christian one, whose most noble calling it was to train up the various races within its borders to the service of God and thus to unify them. The empire rapidly declined under his weak and nerveless son, Louis the Pious (814-40). The decay was hastened by the prevailing idea that this State was the personal property of the sovereign, a view that contained the germ of constant quarrels and necessitated the division of the empire when there were several sons. Louis sought to prevent the dangers of such division by the law of hereditary succession published in 817, by which the sovereign power and the imperial crown were to be passed to the oldest son. This law was probably enacted through the influence of the Church, which maintained positively this unity of the supreme power and the Crown, as being in harmony with the idea of the Kingdom of God, and as besides required by the hierarchical economy of the church organization. When Louis had a fourth son, by his second wife, Judith, he immediately set aside the law of partition of 817 for the benefit of the new heir. An odious struggle broke out between father and sons, and among the sons themselves. In 833 the emperor was captured by his sons at the battle of Luegenfeld (field of lies) near Colmar. Pope Gregory IV was at the time in the camp of the sons. The demeanour of the pope and the humiliating ecclesiastical penance that Louis was compelled to undergo at Soissons made apparent the change that had come about since Charlemagne in the theory of the relations of Church and State. Gregory's view that the Church was under the rule of the representative of Christ, and that it was a higher authority, not only spiritually but also substantially, and therefore politically, had before this found learned defenders in France. In opposition to the oldest son Lothair, Louis and Pepin, sons of Louis the Pious, restored the father to his throne (834), but new rebellions followed, when the sons once more grew dissatisfied.

In 840 the emperor died near Ingelheim. The quarrels of the sons went on after the death of the father, and in 841 Lothair was completely defeated