CHARLEMAGNE.

Otago Witness, Issue 4085, 28 June 1932, Page 64

CHARLEMAGNE.

(■•nt of the fume ami of <,ie drearic-t of all epochs in history there flops a man. 1 say “ diea rie.-1 " advised! v, for a more dismal scene of horror ami vice than the ITanki-h world of the eight h century it would be impossible to imagine. But at one leap, with this man Charles, we pass out <>f the reck of that hideous anti wearisome age, in which a queen was compel led by her liege lord to drink out of a cup fashioned from the skull of her dead father, into a new sanity ami a new ho[x- of order. Hi’ is called Charles the Great, this man. and for once history has not misnamed one of her characters. It is easy, with the aid of a map. to raisu Kierstand his true greatness. He inherited a great kingdom; he made it still greater. He warred victoriously against the Saxons, the Lombards, the Avars, and the Slav tribes of Germany. His Laities were swift, decisive, crushing. as behoved the handiwork of the grandson of (diaries the Hammer who saved Europe from the Moslem.

But it is not culture as a soldier or a conqueror that he is to be estimated. He was an organiser, a unifier, a bringer of light into an almost inconceivable darkness. He was great, not because he won battles, but because he spared the vanquished; not because he amassed treasure, but because he founded schools and encouraged education. He improved agriculture, built churches and monasteries, brought from the Tirol the first vines from which Rhine wine is made, and rescued from oblivion the Siegfried saga which is the basis, of the Ring of the Nibelungs.

A German writer lias called him “ a typical German peasant.” am] there is a good deal of the peasant in Charlemagne's careful husbandry of his realm, his hatred of waste rind needless disorder. and his touching respect for learning. But he had a restless, inquiring mind, and a generosity and foresight that were far above the peasant level. In some respects, too, he was entirely of his time. Occasionally the barbarian would break out in . him, as when he sentenced to death 4500 Saxons who were guilty of harbouring Wittekind. the patriot leader who for so long fought Charles with skill and audacity. In his relations with women, too, he had not achieved the respect for the marriage bond which the Church sought to enjoin. He left 18 children, of whom eight were legitimate.

When he found his wife Desiderata a dull and unsuitable consort, he lost no time in sending her home, and putting a beautiful Alemaunian woman, Hildcgardc. in her place. He had a long and varied succession of mistresses. But Hildegarde was his good angel. When she died and was followed by Fastrada, the daughter of a German count, his fortunes were less smoothly guided. Charles had one great end to which all his schemes tended. Inspired by Augustine’s book, “The City of Cod,” he dreamt of a great realm in which the whole of Christendom would be united under one temporal ruler, himself, and one spiritual sovereign, the Pope. He had, also, no doubt that the Emperor should be superior to the Pope. Here lay the seeds of a conflict which was to divide Europe for centuries and which, even to-day, appears in various forms in different places; which is to be supreme, Church or State, spiritual or secular? So long as Hadrian I was Pope, the question did not 'arise. There was a profound personal affection between the

two men. But when Leo 111 ascended the throne of Peter things were different. Charles rescued the Pope from a ring of enemies and quelled, by his mere prestige. the plotting against him.

And on Christmas Day, 800, there was a great festival in St. Peter’s. The Pope said mass, the King prayed at the shrine of the Apostles. When he rose from his knees, the Pope snatched a gold crown from the altar and placed it on Charles’s brow. At the signal the whole throng gave a shout of acc'nniation: “To Charles the Augustus, crowned of God. the great and pacific emperor, long life and victory!” But Charles, it seems, was not pleased. He saw that the astute pontiff had established a valuable precedent. For, if he was Emperor only because the Pope had crowned him. how, then, could ho have priority of the Pope? There arc signs that he was annoyed bv Leo’s well-staged coup, and Eginhard. his biographer, says that “ he declared that although the day was a high church festival, if he had known the Pope’s intention lie would not have entered the church.

Mr Charles Edward Russell, in his “Charlemagne.” finds it bard to believe that the affair was not prearranged between the Pope and Charles, ami that the new Emperor's dismay was assumed for reasons of policy. But this overlooks the fact that Charles had a very real cause to feel upset. And it is certainly the case that he impressed on his son Louis the importance of taking the crown from the altar and crowning himself! The most famous episode of Charlemagne’s reign is. of course, the famous disaster at Roncevalles in which his rearguard was destroyed while crossing the Pyrenees from Spain into France. Charles had gone to Spain to fight the Saracens, but it was not the crafty Moslem who won that dark and evil day. It was the Basques who attacked and slaughtered the Franks, not “the Paynim sons of swarthy Spain.” As for Roland, a blast of whose famous horn, the Oliphant. reached Charles and warned him of the disaster, all that we certainly know of him is contained in a few words in the chronicler—“ Hruoland, warden of the Breton March.” That is all. but it has been enough to bear an immense structure of legend, in which Hruoland has become Roland for the French. Orlando for the Italians, and Roldan for the Spaniards. That was in a later age. when Charlemagne himself had become wrapped in clouds of chivalric imaginings.

. Why he did so is easy enough to sec. A king who could bring back as spoils of one of hi.s wars models of pillars, friezes, capitals, facades, plans for buildings, instead of gold and slaves and the skulls of his foes was a sufficiently extraordinary person to capture the imagination of his time. From his capital city of Aachen. Charles ruled France and most of Germany as one empire. Himself half French, half German, he could reconcile the differences of tradition, the growing divergence of language, which were later to sjdit two peoples who were racially one. And Aachen, he was resolved, should be a centre of learning and culture. It is this wistful dream of his that makes him so likeable and so modern a figure. One day he had heard strange news in his palace. A British ship had brought two men from “ the Scottish island of Hibernia ’’ to oue of his ports. And in the streets of the town they went crying, “ If any man has desire for knowledge, let him come here and acquire it, for we have it for sale.” Charles brought them to his Court; brought, in time, other scholars, including the famous Englishman. Alcuin, who became one of his dearest friends. He set up schools and attended them himself in the winter, when the fighting season was over. And he insisted that all who wished to learn, whether they were rich or poor, should be free to study under his teachers. This was typical of the man who talked to men of every rank at the annual assemblies, and who even made serfs counts of his empire.

When he found that the poor scholars exceeded the young nobles in learning, he addressed severe words to the latter: “ By the King of Heaven, 1 care nothing for your noble birth and your handsome faces, let others prize them as they may. Know* this for certain, that unless you give earnest heed to your studies you shall never receive any favour at the hands of King Charles.” It is an odd picture this of the middleaged king, tall, with a feeble voice, white-haired, “ his belly too prominent,” whose fame extended to the Court of Tlaroun al-Raschid in distant Baghdad, pausing in the conduct of his great affairs to learn the elements of arithmetic along with the sons of the local miller.

Whether or not it is true that Charles actually sat next to the son of hi.s own cellarmau in class and that he is the author of the famous hymn, “ Veni Creator Spiritus ’’ —for the one is a legend ami the other a tradition—it is certain that Charlemagne and Alcuin and the other students set up an institution which they called the “ Academy.” There they put aside worldly though*, assumed names from the Bible (Charles, not without appropriateness, was “ David "), and discussed theology and literature. Even women were admitted to these naive symposia, which was an astonishing thing in those days. “ The history of the schools of Charles the Great,” writes one authority, “has modified the whole subsequent history of European culture.” When he died, as a result of hunting in the Ardennes woods in mid-winter, his enemies, Saxon and Saracen, mourned him. His empire fell asunder, but the wraith of it haunted Europe for a thousand years. The work he did for civilisation was not undone.—George Scott, in John o' London's Weekly.

FOUR-FEET. In “ Limits and Renewals " (Macmillan, 7s fidt Mr Rudyard Kipling shows that his pen has lost none of its charm, as witness the perfection of one of the short poems included. It is called “ Four-Feet." I have done mostly what most men do And pushed it out of my mind; But. I can't forget, if I wanted to Four-Feet trotting behind. Day after day, the whole day through — ’Wherever my road inclined— Four-Feet said. “ I'm coining with you! ” And trotted along behind. Now I must go by some other round— Which 1 shall never find— Somewhere that does not carry the sound Of Four-Feet trotting behind.