The kingdom of the Ostrogoths in Italy would be swept away by Justinian I, the Byzantine Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire who had never accepted the over-lordship of Germanic tribes in the Western Roman Empire. Justinian was particularly averse to the Ostrogoths hold over the heart of the old empire in Italy and the Vandals’ possession of the rich territories of North Africa. He was determined to claim these regions and found a new unified Roman Empire, centred this time on his capital of Constantinople. In AD 552, when Justinian I launched his attack on the Ostrogoth kingdom, the Franks did not come to the aid of their Arian cousins, prefering to see their main rivals in the former Western Roman Empire weakened. The Ostrogoths were defeated and subsequently forced to submit to the authority of the Byzantine Emperor in return for being allowed to remain on their lands. Justinian I then pursued the Vandals in North Africa, ending their kingdom in AD 553.(24)
Some historians argue that as a result of Justinian and his successors’ efforts to reunify the Roman Empire, Rome did not die in AD 476, rather that it lived on in the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium until it was conquered and destroyed by the Mamluk Turks in 1453. Yet the Eastern Roman Empire — Byzantium — was a very different empire in religion, language and culture. Byzantium, positioned at the edge of Europe on the border with the Middle East and the ancient civilizations of Greece, Egypt and Persia, spoke Greek, practised Orthodox Christianity and was anything but Roman. Justinian I was certainly the first Eastern emperor to turn the tide of the seemingly unstoppable advance of the Germanic tribes. However, his successes were short-lived. No Germanic tribe ever retook North Africa, but then neither could Byzantium hold it against the advance of the Muslim Moors; and a mere five years after Justinian’s victory in northern Italy the Ostrogoths were replaced by yet another Germanic tribe — the Langobards (Lombards),ix while the Franks continued to expand and consolidate their conquest of much of the former Western Roman Empire.
In AD 751, the Carolingians supplanted the Merovingian dynasty in the kingdom of the Franks, when the last of the Merovingian kings was deposed and locked in a monastery that was set alight. The first of the Carolingian kings was Pepin the Short. Pepin was the son of Charles — the Hammer — Martel, who had stopped the Umayyad Muslim invasion of Europe in its tracks at the battle of Poitiers in AD 732, pushing them back across the Pyrenees. Pepin was crowned in the Basilica of Saint Denis in Paris that same year by the Pope, who had travelled all the way from Rome specifically to reward the Franks for their ceaseless work in protecting and expanding the remit of the Roman Catholic Church. This renewed the alliance between the Franks and the Roman church that had previously been established under Clovis. In gratitude for the Pope’s support, Pepin pledged to destroy Arianism in Italy and conquer the Lombard kingdom.x Pepin was successful; he seized Italy, the heart of the old Roman Empire, the one conquest that had eluded the Merovingian kings. Hence the Lombard kingdom joined the long list of Germanic kingdoms that were subsequently occupied by the Franks. Pepin then cemented the bond with the Roman Church even further by giving them vast tracts of the conquered lands, which formed the basis of the newly created Papal States.
In AD 768, Pepin was succeeded by his son Charlemagne (Karl der Große) who continued to gift the Church with conquered lands. Consequently he was crowned Roman Emperor by the Pope in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome on Christmas day in AD 800, in reward for his efforts and his generosity. A great circular porphyry slab marks the spot at the entrance of the modern day Vatican where the coronation took place. Nearly 400 years after the Germanic tribes had crossed the Rhine, one of their number had now been crowned Emperor in Rome. The Translatio imperii, the transfer of imperial power from the Roman to the German kings, established a mythical bond between the new Germanic and the ancient Roman empires that would endure for a millennium.(25)
Charlemagne and his successors, as post-Roman emperors, would claim the same religious authority over the territories under their sway as their Roman predecessors, taking it upon themselves to appoint bishops and call religious councils. And they used the continuity of Roman law and Roman Christianity to underpin their claims to be the rightful inheritors of the traditions and authority of ancient Rome over Western Christendom.
The Anglo-Saxon world has chosen to remember Charlemagne (Karl der Große — Charles the Great) by his Francophone name, however it is worth pointing out that his native dialect was Theodisk (Old High German), which was both the language of his ancestors and the language of the Carolingian court centred on the city of Aachen.xi (He also spoke Latin and the Romanised language of Gaul which would later evolve into French). Charlemagne mandated that the German language be preserved in song and basic grammar, as it had become threatened by the increasing use of Latin.(26) Charlemagne’s grandchildren divided his empire into three parts: western, central and eastern kingdoms and continued to expand their individual realms. The western kingdom corresponded approximately with the territory of what became France. The central kingdom was based upon a band of territories that still largely separate France from Germany including Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Alsace and Switzerland. The eastern kingdom, under the leadership of the Saxon Ottonian dynasty from the tenth century onwards came to resemble modern Germany. This division of Charlemagne’s empire by his grandsons created the geopolitical fault lines that dominated European history for the next millennia and which were to have fateful consequences for the course of European history, reverberating into the modern era.
i The Vandals, like the Teutons and Cimbri, originated from the Jutland Peninsula. They set off in AD 100 to settle in the area on the lower Oder river. Made up of a mix of smaller tribes, the two most significant being the Silingen — who were said to have given Schlesien (Silesia) its name — and the Hasdingen (‘long-haired ones’) — who were to settle what later became the Siebenburgen region of Romania.(15)
ii ‘The Huns’ became a derogatory term used by the Anglo-Saxons to describe the Germans during both world wars. The Huns were described as foreign, alien, ‘other worldly’ and as savagely destructive barbarians from the east. This pejorative comes about firstly because a number of subjugated Germanic tribes fought alongside Attila (although more fought against him), in his conquest of Europe. And secondly, because of an innocuous speech made in 1901 by Kaiser Wilhelm II on the eve of the colonial powers sending forces to quell the Boxer Rebellion in China. Speaking to assembled officers of the German navy before they set sail, the Kaiser said; ‘German troops must expect or give no quarter and fight like Huns…’ and the label stuck!(17) Labelling Germans as Huns is all the more historically inaccurate as the great migrations of the Germanic tribes to the west and south were to a large extent precipitated by the Hunic invasions from the east and because without the Germanic tribes making common cause with Rome the Huns would most likely have triumphed at the battle of Châlons.
iii However the separation of the western Franks from their Germanic language was not fully complete until the late tenth or early eleventh century, by which time the Germanic Frankish dialect had all but disappeared. Estimates vary as to the extent of the number of French words derived from their original Germanic tongue, anywhere from 2–15 per cent.(19) It would take a similar duration for the Viking Normans, originally from modern day Denmark, to generate a similar level of assimilation in Britain, where from the late eleventh to the fourteenth century they remained a state within a state, speaking a bastardised French that only gradually melded with the Germanic lingua franca of the Angle and Saxon descendants. French continued to be used as the language of the ruling caste and the kings of England from 1066–1362.
iv At the outset of the early tribal migrations, however, the bulk of the Germanic tribes maintained their pre-Christian beliefs. Their main gods were Odin/Woden (the god of war), Thor (the god of thunder, winds and cloud), and Freya (the goddess of magic, love and fertility). It is interesting to note that these three gods gave us the names of three of our days of the week: Wednesday, Thur
sday and Friday. Many tribes also believed in a race of giants that were separate from the gods, with whom the gods made war, eventually culminating in their destruction in the Götterdämmerung or ‘twilight of the gods’.(20) Their warrior ethos and faith led them to believe that death was not final; consequently there was nothing more heroic than to die in battle. They believed that Woden’s virgin Valkyrie sirens would kiss the fallen heroes on the battlefield and that they would awake in Valhalla.
v The tribal name of the Alamanni holds the distinction that all Latin countries, from France to Brazil, still use a derivation of their name to describe the Germans, yet the Alamanni were one of the few Germanic tribes not to settle a kingdom of their own. The Alemansch German dialect of the Alamanni is still alive in five countries and regions in Europe today, from eastern France in the Alsace, to south western Germany in Baden Wurtemberg, and across parts of Switzerland as far as the Voralberg, the western Tyrol in Austria and Lichtenstein.
vi The successor kings of Leon and Castile who launched the Reconquista (reconquest of Spain from the Muslim Moors) from their northern enclave did not claim legitimacy over the territory from Roman times but from their descendency from the Visigoths and their rule of the territory.
vii The Burgundians originated from the island of Burgundholm (today known as Bornholm) in the Baltic and gradually drifted south. By AD 413 they are recorded as having established a kingdom on the Middle Rhine centred on the core towns of Worms, Straßburg and Speyer. They fought to expand their kingdom in Belgica and Gaul. Their tragedy came in AD 436 when they were attacked and cornered by the Huns. Over 20,000 of their soldiers were massacred, their towns pillaged, their women raped and the tribe was nearly wiped out, its remnants set to flight. This is the event recalled by the Nibelungenlied (‘Song of the Twilight’), on which Richard Wagner was to base this part of his four-part opera.
viii Ravenna’s Ostrogoth architectural legacy lives on in stone, in the form of the Arian Baptistery (c.AD 500), Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo (c.AD 500), Mausoleum of Theoderic (AD 520), Basilica of San Vitae (AD 548), Basilica of Sant’Apollinare in Classe (AD 549).(53)
ix Langobards literally translates as long beards; a tribe who originated from the Lower Elbe region in Germany.
x The Lombard conquest of northern Italy in AD 568, with the establishment of their capital at Ravenna, was to be the last advance of a Germanic tribe south of the Alps and would mark the end of the great migration of the tribes.
xi Charlemagne spent his first Christmas at Aachen in 768, and every winter from 792–814. He initially chose the location due to its abundant hot springs and because the nearby forests held a plentiful supply of deer and were ideal for hunting. Charlemagne transformed his court at Aachen into the most important religious complex north of the Alps, with the largest cathedral in which thirty-three kings would be crowned over the next 600 years. The city remained the centre of the court and he was buried there. The only time Aachen has ever been part of France was during the Napoleonic Wars when the entire left bank of the Rhine was annexed to France. Charlemagne is variously regarded as being the founding father of both France and Germany and more recently of ‘modern’ Europe as witnessed by the Karlspreis or Charlemagne Prize, an award given annually to those perceived to have done most to strengthen European integration. Famous recipients have included Jean Monnet, Konrad Adenauer, Winston Churchill and Bill Clinton.(27)
2
The Rise and Fall of the First Reich: The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation
Having founded the Holy Roman Empire in AD 800, Charlemagne bequeathed Europe a diverse legacy. Expanding Germanic settlement across Central and Eastern Europe, he conquered territories much farther east than any former Roman emperor, thereby bringing non-Germanic, Slavic tribes (both heathen and orthodox Christian) within the confines of the Holy Roman Empire. Charlemagne regarded himself as emperor and high priest in his lands. He made it his divine mission to bring Roman Christianity to all the tribes conquered by the Franks. Future emperors continued in his stead, laying claim to both temporal and spiritual power on earth. This legacy became the source of great conflict from the eleventh century onwards, when popes, bolstered by vast tracts of land and property that had been donated by a succession of emperors, sought to assert their own power.
THE LEGACY OF CHARLEMAGNE’S 1,000-YEAR REICH
Charlemagne set important precedents for future emperors in terms of the way he administered his empire. He divided his kingdom into counties that were administered by local ‘counts’. Many of these land grants became hereditary over time, creating a new feudal nobility. These counts from the outset were given power to exercise authority over local courts and to impose weregild (fines).(1) Yet Charlemagne retained oversight in the form of a professional corps of imperial envoys who oversaw the working of the courts.(2) With each passing generation, these noble counts grew in wealth, power and prestige, rivalling that of kings and eventually growing strong enough to break the hereditary principal and force the election of future emperors. Competing rivalries between the emperor and the Estates were made worse by the Frankish tradition of partial inheritance, which maintained that a kingdom be divided between all surviving sons. Charlemagne was ‘fortunate’ with his own succession as he only had one surviving son, Ludwig the Pious.
Once on the throne, Ludwigxii tried to replace partial inheritance. In AD 817, he made his eldest son, Lothar, co-ruler and sole heir. Lothar’s younger brothers Charles and Louis (also known as Ludwig the German) were to gain Aquitaine and Bavaria respectively. However, Ludwig’s attempts to secure sole inheritance did not survive the Frankish tradition of partial inheritance and the scheming of his various wives, or the plotting of the counts. Three years after the death of Ludwig the Pious, his family’s bitter infighting was finally ended in AD 843 by the Treaty of Verdun (Wirten), which some historians claim is the ‘birth certificate of modern Europe’.(3) The treaty carved Charlemagne’s empire into three parts that remain distinguishable, even today. Lothar received the middle kingdom centred on the capital at Aachen and the imperial title, along with what would become Holland, Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, Switzerland and Italy. Ludwig the German received the ‘German kingdom’, essentially the eastern empire with most of the German-speaking lands including Bavaria and Austria. Charles received the western kingdom; essentially much of what became France, where he established his residence in Paris.
The middle kingdom was the poisoned chalice. It became the focal point for a test of strength between the western and eastern kingdoms for hegemony. Whoever controlled it held the balance of power in the empire, yet neither Charlemagne’s construction nor the three-way split of the empire held. Throughout the ninth century, Charlemagne’s empire continued to fragment as a result of the internal dynastic rivalry, partial inheritance, and the self-interest of the Church and the landed nobility. New external threats, such as the invading Magyars (Hungarians) from the east, Vikings from the north and Saracens from the south also played a part in its destruction. By the end of the ninth century, the Carolingian dynasty had been voted out by the very nobility it had created, and by the early tenth century the empire was in its death throes. In AD 911, it was forced to cede territory along the Seine and the English Channel to the Viking leader Red Rollo in what became Normandy. The successors to Charles, Charlemagne’s grandson, who had inherited the western portion of his empire, were beset with so many internal conflicts and external threats that they lost interest in their imperial heritage and were, in any case, too weak to enforce their claims. The mantle of the western empire therefore passed to their stronger eastern counterparts.
The Saxon dynasty superseded the Carolingians in the eastern kingdom. The Saxon kings inherited the title of emperor and proceeded to revive the empire and cloak themselves in the traditions established by Charlemagne. The idea of a western Roman empire linking the Germanic successor kingdoms to Rome both spiritually and temporally endured, and was revived again, an
d again, by a succession of Germanic dynasties. German historians, both past and present, have continued to recognise that the seeds of nationhood were sown by Saxon kings who re-established the Holy Roman Empire in the tenth century. By the thirteenth century, this eastern empire had absorbed the middle kingdom and revived the fortunes of the Holy Roman Empire. By the mid fifteenth century, the empire became known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation ‘in recognition of the supremacy of its trans-regional German identity’.(4) Yet in reality the Holy Roman Empire remained a fragmented collection of German states. The age of centralised and unified nation states was yet to come.
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE OF THE GERMAN NATION IN AN ERA BEFORE THE NATION STATE
The German nation only existed during the early Middle Ages as one German historian noted, ‘In the shadow of the Holy Roman Empire and its powerful mythical associations, and the important political symbols — the holy lance, the crown and Charlemagne’s throne in Aachen cathedral.’(5) The Holy Roman Empire was not a German nation in any modern sense of the word, but it did create the basis for settlement, for the linguistic, geographical, cultural and — to a more limited extent — the constitutional foundations on which a later German state would be built.
Death of a Nation Page 6
