Читать книгу The Dark Ages, 476-918 - Charles Oman - Страница 7

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The Franks in Northern Gaul—Their early conquests—State of Gaul in 481—Chlodovech conquers Northern Gaul, 486—He subdues the Alamanni, 495-6—Conversion of Chlodovech, 496—He conquers Aquitaine from the Visigoths, 507—He unites all the Frankish Kingdoms, 511.

While Odoacer was still reigning in Italy, and Theodoric the Amal had not yet left the Balkans, or the banks of the Danube, the foundations of a great kingdom were being laid upon the Scheldt and the Meuse. Early in the fifth century the confederacy of marsh-tribes on the Yssel and Lech who had taken the common name of Franks, had moved southward into the territory of the Empire, and found themselves new homes in the provinces which the Romans called Belgica and Germania Inferior. For many years the hold of the legions on this land had been growing weaker; and, long ere it became a Frankish kingdom, it had been largely sprinkled with Frankish colonists, whom the emperors had admitted as military settlers on the waste lands within their border. In the lowlands of Toxandria, which after-ages called Brabant and Guelders, there were no large cities to be protected, no great fortresses to be maintained, and, while the Romans still exerted themselves to hold Treveri and Colonia Agrippina and Moguntiacum,^[7] they allowed the plains more to the north and west to slip out of their hands. |The Franks in Lower Germany.| By the second quarter of the fifth century the Franks were firmly established on the Scheldt and Meuse and lower Rhine, where the Roman garrisons never reappeared after the usurper Constantine had carried off the northern frontier legions to aid him in his attack on Italy (406). By this time, too, Colonia Agrippina, first of the great Roman cities of the Rhineland, seems to have already fallen into the hands of the Franks. Between 430 and 450 they continued to push forward as far as the Somme and the Moselle, and when, at the time of Attila’s great invasion of Gaul, the last imperial garrisons in the Rhineland were exterminated, and the last governors driven forth by the Huns from Treveri and Moguntiacum and Mettis, it was the Franks who profited. After the Huns had rolled back again to the East, Frankish kings, not Roman officials, took possession of the ravaged land along the Moselle and Rhine, and the surviving provincials had for the future to obey a Teutonic master near home, not a governor despatched from distant Ravenna.

7.Trier, Köln, and Mainz.

The Franks were now divided into two main hordes; the Salians—who took their name from Sala, the old name of the river Yssel—dwelt from the Scheldt-mouth to the Somme, and from the Straits of Dover to the Meuse. The Ripuarians, whose name is drawn from the fact that they inhabited the bank (ripa) of the Rhine, lay along both sides of the great river from its junction with the Lippe to its junction with the Lahn, and extended as far east as the Meuse. Each of these two tribes was ruled by many kings, all of whom claimed to descend from the house of the Merovings, a line lost in obscurity, whose original head may, perhaps, have been the chief who in the third century first taught union to the various tribes who formed the Frankish confederacy.

The Franks were one of the more backward of the Teutonic races, in spite of their long contact with Roman civilisation along the Rhine. Kings and people were still heathens. They had not learnt like the Goths to wear armour or fight on horseback, but went to war half-naked, armed only with a barbed javelin, a sword, and a casting-axe or tomahawk, called the Francisca after the name of its users. Unlike Goth and Vandal they had not learnt the advantages of political union, but obeyed many petty princes instead of one great lord. All Roman writers reproach them for a perfidy which exceeded that of the other barbarians. The Saxons, we are told, were cruel, the Alamanni drunken, the Alans rapacious, the Huns unchaste, but the special sin of the Frank was treachery and perjury.

At the time of the deposition of Romulus Augustulus by Odoacer, the Salian Franks held the old Roman towns of Cambrai, Arras, Tournay, and Tongern, while the Ripuarians occupied Köln, Trier, Mainz, and Metz. |Divisions of Gaul in 481.| South of the Ripuarians lay the new Burgundian kingdom which Gundobad had founded in the valleys of the Rhone and Saône. South of the Salians was a district of Roman Gaul which had to the last acknowledged the supremacy of the ephemeral emperors of the West, and kept itself free from barbarian invaders under the patrician Ægidius. After his death in 463 his son Syagrius succeeded to his power, and ruled at Suessiones (Soissons) over the whole Seine valley, and the plain of central Gaul as far as Troyes and Orleans. After the disappearance of the last Western Emperor, Syagrius had no over-lord, but was so much his own master that the Franks called him ‘king of the Romans,’ though he himself took no title but that of patrician. South of the realm of Syagrius lay the Visigothic kingdom of Euric, a vast state extending from the Loire to Gibraltar, and from the Bay of Biscay to the Maritime Alps. Its king dwelt at Toulouse, and the Gaulish rather than the Spanish half of his dominion was considered the more important. Indeed his rule in Spain was still incomplete, as the Suevi held its north-western corner, the land which we now call Galicia and north Portugal, and the Basques maintained their independence in the western Pyrenees.

In the third quarter of the fifth century the most important of the Frankish chiefs of the Merovingian line was a prince of the Salians, named Childerich, who dwelt at Tournay, and ruled in the valley of the upper Scheldt. He died in 481, leaving his throne to his sixteen-year-old son and heir, a prince named Chlodovech or Chlodwig, who was destined to found the great Frankish kingdom, by extinguishing the other Frankish principalities, and conquering southern and central Gaul.

Such an event seemed most unlikely at the time of Chlodovech’s accession, when the dominant power in the land was that of the fierce and able king Euric the Visigoth. It was Euric who had brought the Visigothic kingdom up to its largest extent, by driving the Sueves into a corner of Spain, conquering the last Roman provinces in central Gaul, and receiving Provence from the hands of Odoacer, king of Italy. He was the first Visigothic king to publish a code of laws, and would have left a good name in history but for his assassination of his brother Theodoric, and his persecutions of the Catholics. Though not such an oppressor as the Vandals Gaiseric and Hunneric, he had made himself hated by refusing to allow the election of Catholic bishops, and by closing or handing over to his favourites, the Arians, many of the churches of the orthodox. Euric died in 485, just as Chlodovech was about to commence his conquering career in northern Gaul, a career which the Visigoth would probably have checked if a longer life had been granted him. He was succeeded by his son Alaric, a boy of only sixteen or seventeen years.

It was in the very year of Euric’s death that Chlodovech, now aged twenty-one, set out on the first of his warlike expeditions. In company with his kinsman Ragnachar, king of Cambrai, he invaded the realm of the Roman patrician Syagrius. The Gaulish troops were unable to resist the onset of the Franks, and their leader, after a short struggle, abandoned his home, and fled for safety to the court of Alaric the Visigoth. The councillors of Alaric, either wishing to gratify their Teutonic neighbours, or fearing the event of a war while their king was yet so young, threw the patrician into bonds, and sent him back to Chlodovech, who promptly put him to death. |Chlodovech conquers Syagrius, 486.| The Seine valley and the great towns of Soissons, Paris, Rouen, and Rheims now fell into the hands of the Frankish king, and, in the course of the next three years, he extended his power up to the Loire and boundary of Armorica, where the Romano-Celts of the extreme west still succeeded in holding out. Chlodovech took all the spoils for himself, none fell to his neighbours, the other kings of the Salian Franks. It was these princes who were next to feel the force of his arm. He picked quarrels with his kinsmen the kings of Cambrai and Térouanne, the one for not helping him against Syagrius, the other for claiming part of the spoil of the Roman, and slew them both, the one by treachery, the other in open battle. The remaining Merovingian princes of the Belgic plains soon shared their fate; then Chlodovech pressed eastward against the Ripuarian Franks, and conquered the Thoringi, their chief tribe, in the year 491. In a short time he had won all the Frankish kingdoms save that of his ally Sigebert the Lame, king of Köln. He remorselessly slew every prince of Meroving blood who fell into his hands, and did his best to exterminate all the rival lines. When he could find no more to kill, he is said to have made open lamentation that he was left alone in the world, and that the royal house of the Franks was threatened with extinction; he then bade any kinsman who might yet survive come to him without fear. But it was cruelty, not remorse, that moved him, for his only object was to catch and slay any Meroving who might yet survive.

His conquests in Ripuaria brought Chlodovech into touch with new neighbours, the Burgundians to the south, and the confederacy of the Alamanni to the east, along the Main and Neckar. With the first named he entered into friendly relations, and married Chrotechildis (Clotilde), niece of King Gundobad, in 492. The princess, unlike her uncle and most of her tribe, was a devout Catholic, and much was destined to follow from her alliance with the pagan Frank. |Chlodovech’s wars with the Alamanni.| With the Alamanni the relations of Chlodovech were from the first hostile; in fact, when he brought his frontier up to the middle Rhine, he was constrained to take up an already existing feud between the Ripuarians and their eastern neighbours. For several years he was engaged in a struggle with this confederacy, who held the east bank of the Rhine from Coblenz upwards, the valleys of the Main and Neckar, and all the Black Forest. At last, in 496, he got the better of them in a decisive battle—apparently near Strasburg—and forced the main body of the confederacy to do him homage and acknowledge him as over-lord. An obstinate remnant retired over the Rhine, and took refuge in Rhaetia under the protection of the great Theodoric, but all the rest became Frankish vassals. As a result of this war the Alamanni were driven southward out of the Main valley, which was seized and settled by Ripuarian settlers, and became a Frankish country under the name of East Francia, or Franconia.

A suggestive legend and an important fact are connected with these campaigns of Chlodovech against the Alamanni. The ecclesiastic writers of the next century state that, in his decisive battle with the confederates, Chlodovech was driven back and almost routed. Then, recalling the words of his wife Chrotechildis, ‘who never ceased to persuade him that he should serve the true God,’ that the Lord was the Lord of Hosts and the arbiter of battles, he cried aloud, ‘O Christ Jesu, I crave as a suppliant Thy glorious aid; and if Thou grantest me victory over these enemies I will believe in Thee, and be baptized in Thy name.’ At once the Alamanni began to give back, and the king obtained a complete triumph.

Whether this was the manner of his conversion or not, it is at any rate certain that Chlodovech, on returning from his Alamannic campaign, had himself baptized at Rheims on Christmas Day, 496. His sister and 3000 of his warriors followed him to the font. Every reader of history knows the famous tale how Archbishop Remigius hailed the king with the words, ‘Bow thy neck Sigambrian, adore that which thou hast burnt, and burn that which thou hast adored.’ First among the converted Teutonic kings Chlodovech was received into the Catholic Church, and did not become an Arian like his neighbours. In this we may, no doubt, trace the influence of his orthodox queen Chrotechildis. |Conversion of Chlodovech, 496.| The consequences of his conversion to the orthodox faith were most important; he was the only Teutonic king who adopted the faith of his Roman subjects, and was therefore served by them, and more especially by their clergy, with a loyalty which no Goth, Vandal, or Burgundian prince could ever win. Not least among the causes of Chlodovech’s easy triumphs and of the permanence of his kingdom may be reckoned his adherence to Catholicism.

It cannot be said that the king’s conversion made any favourable change in his character or his conduct. He still remained the cruel, unscrupulous, treacherous tyrant that he had always been. It will be seen that his last recorded action was an elaborate incitement to parricide followed by a horrid murder. Yet he was granted a measure of success that was refused to kings of far better disposition and far stronger intellect, such as Theodoric the Ostrogoth, or Ataulf the Visigoth.

After their king’s conversion the Franks, both Salian and Ripuarian, hastened to follow him to the fold of the Church, and in a single generation the old Frankish paganism disappeared. But, as with king so with people, the change was almost entirely superficial; it is long before we trace the influence of any Christian graces on the ungodly and perfidious race of the Franks.

After subduing the Alamanni, Chlodovech’s next war was with the people of his wife’s uncle, Gundobad, the king of Burgundy. He made a secret agreement with Godegisl, Gundobad’s younger brother, to invade and divide the Burgundian realm. While the treacherous brother raised war in Helvetia, where he possessed an appanage, the king of the Franks attacked Gundobad from the front, and invaded the valley of the Saône. It appeared as if here, as well as in the lands farther north, Chlodovech would sweep all before him. The Burgundian king was beaten and driven out of Dijon, Lyons, and Valence into Avignon, the southernmost fortress of his realm, while his brother was made king by the Frank, and became his vassal. But, in the next year, Gundobad recovered all he had lost, slew Godegisl at Vienne, and drove the Franks out of Burgundy with such success that Chlodovech ere long made peace with him (501).

But the next campaign of the Frankish king was one of far greater importance and success. He was set on trying his fortune against the young king of the Visigoths, whose personal weakness and unpopularity with his Roman subjects tempted him to an invasion of Aquitaine. It would seem that Chlodovech carefully chose as a casus belli the Arian persecutions of Alaric, who, like his father Euric, was a bad master to his Catholic subjects. |Chlodovech conquers Aquitaine, 507.| A first quarrel in 504 was composed by the great Theodoric, who, as father-in-law of the Visigoth and brother-in-law of the Frank, could appeal with authority to each of the rivals. But in 507 Chlodovech declared war on the Visigoths. ‘I cannot bear,’ he said, ‘that those Arians should hold any part of Gaul. With God’s aid we will go against them, and subdue their land beneath our sway.’ Knowing the strength of the Visigothic realm, Chlodovech allied to himself for the struggle his old enemy Gundobad the Burgundian, and Sigebert of Köln, the last surviving Ripuarian king.

Advancing from Paris Chlodovech crossed the Loire, and met the Visigoths and their king on the Campus Vocladensis, the plain of Vouglé, near Poictiers. Whether from cowardice, or from distrust of his own generalship, Alaric held back from fighting, but his army forced him to give battle. He attacked the Franks, was utterly defeated, and fell with the greater part of his men. So crushed were the Visigoths by the disaster that Chlodovech was able to overrun all the provinces between the Loire and the Garonne without striking another blow. He entered Bordeaux in triumph, and there spent the winter. Next spring he marched against Toulouse, the Gothic capital, and took it, and with it the great hoard of the Visigothic kings, including many of the Roman trophies that Alaric and Ataulf had carried off from Italy a hundred years before. Meanwhile, Chlodovech’s Burgundian allies overran Provence, and captured all its cities save Arles. To add to the troubles of the Visigoths they were distracted by civil strife; one party recognised as king Amalric, the infant son of Alaric, by Theodoric’s daughter, his lawful queen; the other elected Gesalic, a bastard son of Alaric, who had fortified himself in Narbonne and Barcelona. But the Franks and Burgundians drove Gesalic over the Pyrenees, and it appeared as if there was about to be an end of all Visigothic power north of those mountains.

Meanwhile, Chlodovech returned from Toulouse to Tours, where he found awaiting him ambassadors from the Emperor Anastasius, who saluted him by their master’s command with the titles of proconsul and patrician, and presented him with a diadem and purple robe. Anastasius sought by these honours to win an ally against Theodoric the Ostrogoth, with whom he had lately quarrelled. Chlodovech accepted them with alacrity, because of the prestige they gave him in the eyes of his Roman subjects, who saw his power over them formally legalised by the grant of the Emperor.

This was the culminating scene of Chlodovech’s life; for, in the next year, fortune turned somewhat against him. The great Theodoric interfered in the Gothic War as the guardian and protector of his grandson, Amalric. His armies routed the united Franks and Burgundians near Arles, where they are said to have slain 30,000 men. They then reconquered Narbonne and all the Mediterranean coast as far as Spain. Chlodovech’s conquests were thus restricted to the land west of the Cevennes, but still comprised the greater bulk of Visigothic Gaul, with the three great cities of Poictiers, Bordeaux, and Toulouse (510). Only the Narbonensis and Provence were saved from him by Theodoric, who now chased away the usurper Gesalic, and ruled all Spain and south Gaul till his grandson Amalric came of age.

Checked on the south by the great Ostrogoth, Chlodovech turned north to round off his dominions by the acquisition of the last independent Frankish state. Sigebert of Köln was now very old, and his ambitious son Chloderich was persuaded by Chlodovech not only to dethrone, but to slay his father. When he had seized the kingdom Chlodovech affected great wrath and indignation against him, procured his death at the hands of assassins, and then annexed his kingdom. |Chlodovech king of all the Franks, 510.| All the Frankish states were now united under one hand, but Chlodovech did not long survive this last success, though, according to the strange words of his admirer, Bishop Gregory of Tours, ‘The Lord cast his enemies under his power day after day, and increased his kingdom, because he walked with a right heart before Him, and did that which was pleasing in His sight!’

In 511 this sanguinary ruffian, murderer, and traitor died, just after he had presided at Orleans over a synod of thirty-two Gaulish bishops who were anxious to repress Arianism, and gladly called in the secular arm of their orthodox lord to their aid. Chlodovech was morally far the worst of all the Teutonic founders of kingdoms: even Gaiseric the Vandal compares favourably with him. Yet his work alone was destined to stand, not so much from his own abilities, though these were considerable enough, as from the happy chance which put his successors in religious sympathy with their subjects, and preserved the young kingdom, during the following generation, from any conflict with such powerful foes as those who were destined to overthrow the monarchies of the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, and the Vandals.