Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/440

 374 Outlines of European History Cooperation of the civil government and the Church Foundation of towns in northern Germany Charle- magne becomes king of the Lombards Foreign policy of Charle- magne suffer death who broke into a church and carried off anything by force. No one, under penalty of heavy fines, was to make vows, in the pagan fashion, at trees or springs, or partake of any heathen feasts in honor of the demons (as the Christians termed the heathen gods), or fail to present infants for baptism before they were a year old. These provisions are characteristic of the theory of the Middle Ages according to which the government and the Church went hand in hand in ordering and governing the life of the people. Disloyalty to the Church was regarded by the State as quite as serious a crime as treason against itself. While the claims of the two institutions sometimes conflicted, there was no question in the minds either of the king's officials or of the clergy that both the civil and ecclesiastical governments were absolutely neces- sary ; neither of them ever dreamed that they could get along without the other. Before the Frankish conquest the Saxons had no towns. Now, around the seat of the bishop, or about a monastery, men be- gan to collect, and towns and cities grew up. Of these the chief was Bremen, which is still one of the most important ports of Germany. Summoned by the Pope to protect him from his old enemies the Lombards, Charlemagne invaded Lombardy in 773 with a great army and took Pavia, the capital, after a long siege. The Lombard king was forced to become a monk, and his treasure was divided among the Frankish soldiers. Charlemagne then took the extremely important step, in 774, of having himself recognized by. all the Lombard dukes and counts as king of the Lombards. So far we have spoken only of the relations of Charlemagne with the Germans, for even the Lombard kingdom was estab- lished by the Germans. He had, however, other peoples to deal with, especially the Slavs on the east (who were one day to build up the kingdoms of Poland and Bohemia and the vast Russian empire) and, on the opposite boundary of his dominion, the