The Life of Charlemagne (Charles the Great)

In the gradual transformation of the old world of classical antiquity into the world with which the statesmen of to-day must deal, no man played a greater part than Charles the Great, King of the Franks and Emperor of Rome. The sharp lines of demarcation which we often draw between period and period, and which are useful as helps to memory, have not for the most part had any real existence in history, for in the world of men, as in the development of the material universe, it is true that uniformity rather than cataclysm is the rule: Natura non vadit per saltum. Still there are some great landmarks, such as the foundation of Constantinople, Alaric’s capture of Rome, the Hegira of Mohammed, the discovery of America, the Reformation, and the French Revolution, which have no merely artificial existence. We can see that the thoughts of the great majority of civilized men were suddenly forced into a different channel by such events, that after they had occurred, men hoped for other benefits and feared other dangers than they had looked for before these events took place. And such a changeful moment in the history of the world was undoubtedly the life of the great ruler who is generally spoken of as Charlemagne, and pre-eminently the year 800, when he was crowned as Emperor at Rome.
When Charles appeared upon the scene, the Roman Empire—at least as far as Western Europe was concerned—had been for more than three centuries slowly dying. An event, to which allusion has just been made—the capture of Rome by Alaric in 410—had dealt the great world-empire a mortal blow, and yet so tough was its constitution, so deeply was the thought engraven even on the hearts of its most barbarous enemies, “Rome is the rightful mistress of the world,” that it seemed as if that world-empire could not die. The Visigoth, the Ostrogoth, the Vandal, the Burgundian, the Lombard, coming forth from the immemorial solitude of their forests, streamed over the cities and the vineyards of the Mediterranean lands, and erected therein their rude state-systems, their barbaric sovereignties; but even in framing their uncouth national codes they were forced to use the language of Rome; in government they could not dispense with the official machinery of the Empire; in religious affairs, above all, they found themselves always face to face with men to whom the city by the Tiber was still Roma caput mundi. Hence in all these new barbarian kingdoms that arose on the ruins of the Empire there was a certain feeling of precariousness and unrest, a secret fear that the power which had come into being so strangely and so unexpectedly would in a moment vanish away, and that the Roman Augustus would assert himself once more as supreme over the nations; to borrow a phrase from the controversies of a much later date, the Visigothic and Burgundian and Lombard kings were obviously kings de facto; but there was a latent consciousness in the minds of their subjects, perhaps in their own also, that they were not kings de jure.
Had the Italian peninsula been less easily accessible by way of the Julian Alps, or had Rome been situated in as strong a position as Constantinople, it is possible that this secret belief in her rightful predominance might have won back for a Roman emperor that dominion over Europe which was in fact wielded for a time by the Roman popes. But the virtual transference of the seat of empire from the Tiber to the Bosphorus, which was the result of the foundation of the new Rome, and the frequent successful sieges of the old Rome, prevented the Roman emperor from thus reasserting himself. There were jealousies between Rome and Constantinople already before the end of the fourth century, and when under Justinian the Empire made its wonderful efforts to recover the ground which it had lost in Africa, in Italy, and in Spain, though these reconquests were effected in the name of a Roman Augustus, it was felt, and often loudly asserted, that the armies which fought under the imperial standards were Greek rather than Roman. Thus, through all the kingdoms of the west, even while the emperor enthroned at Constantinople was looked upon as in some sense the legitimate monarch of the world, the old deep-rooted hostility between East and West also made itself felt, and it was becoming every day more improbable that the western lands should ever be brought under the rule of a “Byzantine” Cæsar.