Page:EB1911 - Volume 10.djvu/828

HISTORY] on a more and more absolute character. But though he felt the ascendant influence of Christian teaching, he was not really penetrated by its spirit; a professing Christian, and a friend to the episcopate, Clovis remained a barbarian, crafty and ruthless. The bloody tragedies which disfigured the end of his reign bear sad witness to this; they were a fit prelude to that period during the course of which, as Gregory of Tours said, “barbarism was let loose.”

The conquest of Gaul, begun by Clovis, was finished by his sons: Theuderich, Chlodomer, Childebert and Clotaire. In three successive campaigns, from 523 to 532, they annihilated the Burgundian kingdom, which had maintained its independence, and had endured for

nearly a century. Favoured by the war between Justinian, the East Roman emperor, and Theodoric’s Ostrogoths, the Frankish kings divided Provence among them as they had done in the case of Burgundy. Thus the whole of Gaul was subjected to the sons of Clovis, except Septimania in the south-east, where the Visigoths still maintained their power. The Frankish armies then overflowed into the neighbouring countries and began to pillage them. Their disorderly cohorts made an attack upon Italy, which was repulsed by the Lombards, and another on Spain with the same want of success; but beyond the Rhine they embarked upon the conquest of Germany, where Clovis had already reduced to submission the country on the banks of the Maine, later known as Franconia. In 531 the Thuringians in the centre of Germany were brought into subjection by his eldest son, King Theuderich, and about the same time the Bavarians were united to the Franks, though preserving a certain autonomy. The Merovingian monarchy thus attained the utmost limits of its territorial expansion, bounded as it was by the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Rhine; it exercised influence over the whole of Germany, which it threw open to the Christian missionaries, and its conquests formed the first beginnings of German history.

But to these wars of aggrandizement and pillage succeeded those fratricidal struggles which disgraced the whole of the sixth century and arrested the expansion of the Merovingian power. When Clotaire, the last surviving son of Clovis, died in 561, the kingdom was divided between

his four sons like some piece of private property, as in 511, and according to the German method. The capitals of these four kings—Charibert, who died in 567, Guntram, Sigebert and Chilperic—were Paris, Orleans, Reims and Soissons—all near one another and north of the Loire, where the Germanic inhabitants predominated; but their respective boundaries were so confused that disputes were inevitable. There was no trace of a political idea in these disputes; the mutual hatred of two women aggravated jealousy to the point of causing terrible civil wars from 561 to 613, and these finally created a national conflict which resulted in the dismemberment of the Frankish empire. Recognized, in fact, already as separate provinces were Austrasia, or the eastern kingdom, Neustria, or north-west Gaul and Burgundy; Aquitaine alone was as yet undifferentiated.

Sigebert had married Brunhilda, the daughter of a Visigoth king; she was beautiful and well educated, having been brought up in Spain, where Roman civilization still flourished. Chilperic had married Galswintha, one of Brunhilda’s sisters, for the sake of her wealth; but despite this

marriage he had continued his amours with a waiting-woman named Fredegond, who pushed ambition to the point of crime, and she induced him to get rid of Galswintha. In order to avenge her sister, Brunhilda incited Sigebert to begin a war which terminated in 575 with the assassination of Sigebert by Fredegond at the very moment when, thanks to the help of the Germans, he had gained the victory, and with the imprisonment of Brunhilda at Rouen. Fredegond subsequently caused the death of Merovech (Mérovée), the son of Chilperic, who had been secretly married to Brunhilda, and that of Bishop Praetextatus, who had solemnized their union. After this, Fredegond endeavoured to restore imperial finance to a state of solvency, and to set up a more regular form of government in her Neustria, which was less romanized and less wealthy than Burgundy, where Guntram was reigning, and less turbulent than the eastern kingdom, where most of the great warlike chiefs with their large landed estates were somewhat impatient of royal authority. But the accidental death of two of her children, the assassination of her husband in 584, and the advice of the Church, induced her to make overtures to her brother-in-law Guntram. A lover of peace through sheer cowardice and as depraved in his morals as Chilperic, Guntram had played a vacillating and purely self-interested part in the family tragedy. He declared himself the protector of Fredegond, but his death in 593 delivered up Burgundy and Neustria to Brunhilda’s son Childebert, king of Austrasia, in consequence of the treaty of Andelot, made in 587. An ephemeral triumph, however; for Childebert died in 596, followed a year later by Fredegond.

The whole of Gaul was now handed over to three children: Childebert’s two sons, Theudebert and Theuderich (Thierry), and the son of Fredegond, Clotaire II. The latter, having vanquished the two former at Latofao in 596, was in turn beaten by them at Dormelles in

600, and a year later a fresh fratricidal struggle broke out between the two grandsons of the aged Brunhilda. Theuderich joined with Clotaire against Theodobert, and invaded his brother’s kingdom, conquering first an army of Austrasians and then one composed of Saxons and Thuringians. Strife began again in 613 in consequence of Theuderich’s desire to join Austrasia to Neustria, but his death delivered the kingdoms into the hands of Clotaire II. This weak king leant for support upon the nobles of Burgundy and Austrasia, impatient as they were of obedience to a woman and the representative of Rome. The ecclesiastical party also abandoned Brunhilda because of her persecution of their saints, after which Clotaire, having now got the upper hand, thanks to the defection of the Austrasian nobles, of Arnulf, bishop of Metz, with his brother Pippin, and of Warnachaire, mayor of the palace, made a terrible end of Brunhilda in 613. Her long reign had not lacked intelligence and even greatness; she alone, amid all these princes, warped by self-indulgence or weakened by discord, had behaved like a statesman, and she alone understood the obligations of the government she had inherited. She wished to abolish the fatal tradition of dividing up the kingdom, which so constantly prevented any possible unity; in opposition to the nobles she used her royal authority to maintain the Roman principles of order and regular administration. Towards the Church she held a courteous but firm policy, renewing relations between the Frankish kingdom and the pope; and she so far maintained the greatness of the Empire that tradition associated her name with the Roman roads in the north of France, entitling them “les chaussées de Brunehaut.”

Like his grandfather, Clotaire II. reigned over a once more united Gaul of Franks and Gallo-Romans, and like Clovis he was not too well obeyed by the nobles; moreover, his had been a victory more for the aristocracy than for the crown, since it limited the power of the latter.

Not that the permanent constitution of the 18th of October 614 was of the nature of an anti-monarchic revolution, for the royal power still remained very great, decking itself with the pompous titles of the Empire, and continuing to be the dominant institution; but the reservations which Clotaire II. had to make in conceding the demands of the bishops and great laymen show the extent and importance of the concessions these latter were already aiming at. The bishops, the real inheritors of the imperial idea of government, had become great landowners through enormous donations made to the Church, and allied as they were to the aristocracy, whence their ranks were continually recruited, they had gradually identified themselves with the interests of their class and had adopted its customs; while thanks to long minorities and civil wars the aristocracy of the high officials had taken an equally important social position. The treaty of Andelot in 587 had already decided that the benefices or lands granted to them by the kings should be held for life. In the 7th century the Merovingian kings adopted the custom of summoning them all, and not merely the officials of their Palatium, to discuss political affairs; they began, moreover,