A Little History of the World

by E. H. Gombrich

  Now at that time hardly any of the eastern half of Germany belonged to the kingdom of the Franks. The Saxons lived there, and they were as wild and warlike as the Germanic tribes had been in Roman times. In addition, they were still heathens and would have nothing to do with Christianity. But Charlemagne saw himself as the leader of all Christians and in this he was not unlike the Muslims who thought you could force people to believe. So he fought with the Saxon chieftain, Widukind, for many years. Each time the Saxons surrendered, they would be up in arms again the next day. Charlemagne would then return and lay waste to their land. But he had only to turn his back for the Saxons to free themselves again. They would follow Charlemagne obediently into battle and then turn and attack his troops. In the end they paid a terrible price for their resistance: Charlemagne had more than four thousand of them put to death. The remaining Saxons allowed themselves to be baptised without protest, but it must have been a long time before they were able to feel any affection for the religion of loving kindness.

  Charlemagne’s power was by now very great indeed. But, as I said, he was not only good at conquering: he knew how to govern and take care of his people too. Schools were especially important to him, and he himself went on learning all his life. He spoke Latin as well as he did German, and he understood Greek. He was an eloquent and ready speaker with a firm clear voice. He was interested in all the arts and sciences of antiquity, taking lessons in rhetoric and astronomy from learned monks from Italy and England. It is said, however, that he found writing diffficult because his hand was more used to grasping a sword than tracing rows of beautifully curved letters with a delicate quill pen.

  He loved hunting and swimming. He generally dressed simply. Under a striped silk tunic, he wore a plain linen shirt and long breeches held by gaiters below the knee, and, in winter, a fur doublet over which he flung a blue cloak. A silver- or gold-hilted sword always hung at his belt. Only on special occasions did he wear gold-embroidered robes, shoes decorated with gems, a great gold clasp on his cloak and a gold crown set with precious stones. Try to imagine that towering and imposing figure in all his finery, receiving ambassadors at his favourite palace at Aachen. They came from everywhere: from his own kingdom – that is, from France, Italy and Germany – and from the lands of the Slavs and Austria as well.

  Charlemagne kept himself informed about everything that went on in his kingdom and made sure his instructions were faithfully carried out. He appointed judges and had the laws collected and written down. He nominated bishops and even fixed the price of foodstuffs. But what concerned him most was uniting all the Germans. He didn’t simply want to rule a handful of tribal duchies. His aim was to weld them all into a single, strong kingdom. Any duke who objected was deposed. And it’s worth noting that, from now on, whenever anyone referred to the language spoken by the Germanic tribes, they no longer said Frankish or Bavarian or Alemannish or Saxon. They simply said ‘thiudisk’, meaning German.

  Because Charlemagne was interested in all things German, he made people write down all the ancient songs about heroes, tales which probably came from the time of the wars of the Migrations. These songs were about Theodoric (later called Dietrich of Berne), and Attila, or Etzel, King of the Huns, and Siegfried the Dragon-Slayer who was stabbed by the treacherous Hagen. But they have almost all been lost and we only know them from versions noted down some four hundred years later.

  Charlemagne saw himself not only as king of the Germanic peoples and lord of the kingdom of the Franks, but as the defender of all Christians. And it seems that the pope in Rome, who had often enjoyed Charlemagne’s protection against the Lombards, agreed with him. On Christmas Eve, in the year 800, when Charlemagne was kneeling in prayer in the great church of St Peter’s in Rome, the pope suddenly stepped forward and placed a crown upon his head. Then the pope and all the people fell on their knees before him and proclaimed Charlemagne the new Roman emperor, chosen by God to preserve the peace of the empire. Charlemagne must have been very surprised as it appears that he had no inkling of what was in store for him. But now he wore the crown and was the first German emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, as it later was known.

  Charlemagne’s mission was to restore the might and grandeur of the old Roman empire. Only this time, instead of heathen Romans, the rulers would be Christian Germans, who would become the leaders of all Christendom. This was Charlemagne’s aim and ambition, and it would long be that of German emperors who came after him. But none came as close to achieving it as he did. Envoys from all over the world came to his court to pay him homage. The mighty emperor of the Roman Empire of the East in Constantinople was not the only one anxious to be on good terms with him. So was the great Arab prince, Caliph Harun al-Rashid, in far-off Mesopotamia. From his fabulous palace in Baghdad, near ancient Nineveh, he sent precious gifts to Charlemagne: sumptuous robes, rare spices and an elephant, and a water clock with the most amazing mechanism, unlike anything seen before in the kingdom of the Franks. For Charlemagne’s sake, Harun al-Rashid even let Christian pilgrims visit Christ’s tomb in Jerusalem, unhindered and unmolested. For Jerusalem was at that time under Arab rule.

  All this was due to the intelligence, energy and undoubted superiority of the new emperor, as rapidly became clear after his death in 814 when, sadly, it all fell apart. Soon the empire was shared out among Charlemagne’s three grandsons in the form of three separate kingdoms: Germany, France and Italy.

  In the lands that had once belonged to the Roman empire, Romance languages continued to be spoken – that is, French and Italian. The three kingdoms would never again be united. Even the German tribal duchies rebelled and won back their independence. On Charlemagne’s death, the Slavs proclaimed themselves free, and founded a powerful kingdom under their first great king, Svatopluk. The schools Charlemagne had founded disappeared, and the art of reading and writing was soon lost to all but a handful of far-flung monasteries. Intrepid Germanic tribes from the north, the Danes and the Normans, mercilessly pillaged and plundered coastal cities in their Viking ships. They were almost invincible. They founded kingdoms in the east, among the Slavs, and in the west on the coast of what is now France, where Normandy still bears their name.

  Before the century was out, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, Charlemagne’s great achievement, was no more. Not even the name remained.

  22

  A STRUGGLE TO BECOME LORD OF CHRISTENDOM

  The history of the world is, sadly, not a pretty poem. It offers little variety, and it is nearly always the unpleasant things that are repeated, over and over again. And so it was that, barely a hundred years after Charlemagne’s death, in times of chaos and misfortune, hordes of mounted warriors from the east invaded yet again, as the Avars and the Huns had before them. Not that there was anything remarkable about that. It was easier, and therefore more tempting, to take the path which led from the Asiatic steppes towards Europe than to launch raids on China. For behind the protection of Shih Huang-ti’s great wall, China had now become a powerful and well-organised state, with large and prosperous cities, where life at the imperial court and in the houses of its learned high officials had reached levels of refinement and taste undreamt-of elsewhere.

  At the same time as people in Germany were collecting ancient battle songs – only to burn them soon after on the grounds that they were too heathen – and monks in Europe were making timid efforts to turn Bible stories into German rhymes and Latin verse (that is, in about 800), China was home to some of the greatest poets the world has ever known. They wrote on silk, with elegant flourishes of brushes dipped in Indian ink, concise and brief verses which, in the simplest way, express so much that you need only read one once and it is in your head for ever.

  Because the Chinese empire was well administered and well protected, the mounted hordes continued to direct their raids towards Europe. This time it was the Magyars’ turn. With neither Pope Leo nor Charlemagne to stop them, they made short work of the lands that are now Hungary and Au
stria, and invaded Germany to loot and kill.

  This danger forced the independent tribal duchies to elect a common leader. In 919 they chose Henry, duke of Saxony, to be their king, and he eventually succeeded in driving the Magyars out of Germany and keeping them outside the frontiers. His successor, King Otto (known as Otto the Great), did not destroy them completely, as Charlemagne had the Avars, but after a ferocious battle in 955 he forced them back into Hungary, where they settled and have remained to this day.

  Otto the Great didn’t keep the land he had taken from the Magyars for himself, but bestowed it on a prince, as was then the custom. His son, Otto II, did likewise when, in 976, he bestowed part of present-day Lower Austria (the district around Wachau) on a German nobleman called Leopold, a member of the Babenberg family. Like all noblemen granted land by the king, Leopold built himself a castle and ruled over his land like a prince, for while the royal grant endured he was no longer merely a royal official but the lord of his domain.

  Most of the peasants who lived on these lands were no longer freemen, as German peasants had been in earlier times. They belonged to the land the king bestowed, or to land owned by a nobleman. Like the sheep or the goats that grazed there, like the deer, the bears and the wild boar in the forest, like the streams and the woodland, the meadows, the pastures and the fields, the people belonged to the land they tilled. They were known as serfs, or bondsmen, because they were bound to the land. Nor were they free citizens of the kingdom. They had neither the right to go where they wished nor the right to decide to till or not to till their fields.

  ‘Were they slaves, then, like in antiquity?’ Well, not exactly. For as you remember, the coming of Christianity had put an end to slavery in our lands. Serfs weren’t slaves, because they went with the land, and the land still belonged to the king even after he had bestowed it on a nobleman. A nobleman or prince was not allowed to sell or kill serfs as masters once could their slaves. But he could make them carry out his orders. The serfs had to cultivate his land and work for him, when he told them to. They had to send regular supplies of bread and meat up to the castle for him to eat, because a nobleman didn’t work in the fields. Most of his time was spent hunting, whenever he felt like it. The land the king had bestowed on him, known as his fief, was his land, and would be inherited by his son, as long as he did nothing to offend the king. In return for his fief all a prince had to do was to take his lords of the manor and his peasants with him into battle to fight for the king, if there was a war. And of course, there often was.

  At this time virtually the whole of Germany had been granted in this way to different lords. The king kept little for himself, and the same went for France and England. In France, in 987, a powerful duke called Hugh Capet became king, while in 1016 England was conquered by a Danish seafarer called Cnut, or Canute, who also ruled over Norway and part of Sweden, and he, too, granted his lands as fiefs to powerful princes.

  The power of the German kings was greatly increased by their victory over the Magyars. Otto the Great, having defeated the Hungarians, made the Slavic, Bohemian and Polish princes recognise him as their feudal overlord as well. This meant that they had to look on their own lands as being held in trust for the German king, and were obliged to bring their armies to his aid in time of war.

  Confident in his might, Otto the Great marched on Italy, where, amidst fearful confusion, savage fighting had broken out among the Lombards. Otto declared Italy a German fief too, and bestowed it on a Lombard prince. Greatly relieved that Otto had been able to use his power to bring the Lombard nobility to heel, the pope crowned him Roman emperor in 962, just like Charlemagne in 800.

  So once again, German kings became Roman emperors, and by that title the protectors of Christendom. They owned the land the peasants ploughed from Italy to the North Sea, and from the Rhine to far beyond the Elbe, where Slav peasants became serfs of German noblemen. The emperor didn’t grant these lands only to noblemen. He frequently bestowed them on priests, bishops and archbishops. And they too, being no longer mere ministers of the Church, ruled like noblemen over great estates and rode into battle at the head of their peasant armies.

  At first this suited the pope very well. He was on good terms with the German emperors who protected and defended him and were all very pious men.

  However, the situation soon changed. The pope didn’t want the emperor to decide which of his priests should become bishop of Mainz, or Trier, or Cologne, or Passau. ‘These are religious appointments,’ said the pope, ‘and I, as head of the Church, must decide them.’ But the fact remained, they weren’t just religious appointments. Take the archbishop of Cologne, for example: he was both guardian of the souls of that district and its prince and lord. Therefore the emperor maintained that it was for him to decide who was to be a prince or a lord in his land. And if you think about it for a moment, you will see that each, from his own standpoint, was right. Bestowing land on priests had created a dilemma, for the lord of all priests is the pope, but the lord of all lands is the emperor. This could only lead to trouble, and it soon did. This trouble became known as the Investiture Controversy.

  In Rome, in 1073, an exceptionally pious and zealous monk, who had already devoted his life to defending the purity and power of the Church, became pope. He was called Hildebrand, and as pope took the name of Gregory VII.

  Meanwhile in Germany a Frankish king was on the throne. His name was Henry IV. Now it is important to realise that the pope saw himself not only as head of the Church, but also as the divinely appointed ruler of all Christians on earth. At the same time, the German emperor and successor to the ancient Roman emperors and Charlemagne saw himself as protector and supreme commander of the entire Christian world. And even though Henry IV had not yet been crowned emperor, he still believed, that, as German king, it was his right. Which of the two should yield?

  When the struggle between them began, the world was in an uproar. Some were for King Henry IV, others sided with Pope Gregory VII. So many people were involved in this contest that we know of 155 arguments written for and against the king by his supporters and opponents. A number of these portray King Henry as being a wicked and hot-tempered man, while in others it is the pope who is accused of being heartless and power-hungry.

  I think we should believe neither. Once we have decided that each, from his own standpoint, was right, whether King Henry behaved badly towards his wife (as his opponents said), or pope Gregory was elected pope without following the usual formalities (as his opponents said), matters little to us. We can’t go back into the past and see exactly what did happen, and find out whether these accusations against the pope and the king had any truth in them. They probably didn’t, for when people take sides they are usually unfair. However, I’m now going to show you just how hard it is to get at the truth, after more than nine hundred years.

  We can be sure of one thing: King Henry was in a difficult situation. The nobles on whom he had bestowed lands (that is, the German princes) were against him. They didn’t want their king to become too powerful in case he started ordering them around. Pope Gregory opened hostilities by shutting King Henry out of the Church – by which I mean that he forbade any priest to give him Holy Communion. This was known as excommunication. Then the princes let it be known that they would have nothing to do with an excommunicated king, and that they were going to choose someone else to take his place. Somehow Henry had to get the pope to lift this terrible ban. His fate depended on it. If he failed, he would lose his throne. So, all alone and without his army, he set out for Italy to try to persuade the pope to lift the ban.

  It was winter, and the German princes who wanted to prevent King Henry’s reconciliation with the pope occupied all the roads and paths. So Henry, accompanied by his wife, had to make a great detour, and in the freezing winter’s cold they made their way over the Alps, probably by the same pass that Hannibal had used when he invaded Italy.

  Meanwhile the pope was on his way to Germany to negotiate with Hen
ry’s enemies. When he heard of Henry’s approach, he fled and took refuge in a fortress in northern Italy called Canossa, convinced that Henry was arriving with an army. But when Henry appeared alone, only wishing to have the excommunication lifted, he was amazed and overjoyed. Some say the king came dressed as a penitent, wearing a rough, hooded cloak, and that the pope made him wait three days in the castle courtyard, barefoot in the snow, before he took pity on him and lifted the ban. Contemporaries describe the king as whimpering and begging the pope for mercy, which the pope, in his compassion, finally granted.