IN some year about 600 B.C. a small fleet of galleys from the Asiatic Greek city of Phocæa ploughed its way boldly into the western Mediterranean, effected a landing at the harbor now known as Marseilles, coerced or cajoled the native chiefs into allowing the shipmen to make a settlement, "to found a colony" as the Greeks said, and presently the newcomers established a town with the temples, market-place, walls, magistrates, and general customs of a genuine Hellenic city. These bold settlers were far indeed from their old home by the Ægean "under the blue Ionian weather," but those were the days of Greek maritime enterprise, when its mariners were exploring all the nooks of the Mediterranean just as later the Spaniards searched out the Golden Indies. The Phœnicians, already commercial monopolists in these seas, frowned on the intruders and did their best to fight them away. This opposition was vain. The settlement became rooted, prospered, and defied its foes, although it was the most distant of all the Greek colonies. With this foundation of "Massalia" begins the history of the country later ages were to call "France." Hitherto it had been merely the home of savage tribes. Now it becomes linked to civilization.
The tribesmen with whom the Greeks of Massalia chaffered and bartered are ordinarily named "Gauls." They had probably been in the region a considerable time, having ousted some older and still more primitive folk. These Gauls were mainly Celts, members of a great race that was spreading over most of western Europe save only southern and central Italy. Their kinsfolk were penetrating into Spain and Britain, and even to-day there are many pure-blooded Celts in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. When the Greeks first met them, they were decidedly untamed savages, red-headed, heavy-fisted, and with many of the general customs, virtues, and vices of Iroquois Indians. Contact with the Greeks, however, taught them much. They improved their weapons, learned to live more or less in towns, and consolidated their petty clans into greater tribes under kings or an oligarchy of chieftains. They also developed a peculiar type of worship. We know very little about the precise religious beliefs taught by the famous "Druids," for they served their uncouth gods with strictly mysterious rites when they met under their "sacred oaks," probably to offer human sacrifices; but we do know that they constituted an arrogant priestly caste something like the Hindoo Brahmins and the Egyptian priesthoods, and that they exercised a formidable political power over their awestricken laity. As for the rest of the Gauls, they were gradually struggling upward from savagery to barbarism. Usually they dwelt in tribes each under its elected or hereditary chief, with his Druids for advisers or spiritual masters, and his body of warriors who chose or confirmed him and then fought his battles. Below the warriors was a less honorable company of the servile men and of the women who performed the inglorious works of peace, tilled the fields, pounded the grain, and reared the children, while their lords lolled on their bearskins, drank much home-brewed liquor or choicer wines from Greek traders, gambled, quarreled, hunted, and waited a summons to battle. Each clan had ordinarily its own central "town" of circular wattled huts, and if the clan were powerful it probably occupied a hilltop enclosed by rude but often formidable timber and earthworks; or perhaps entrenched itself in a hold amid the dark recesses of wood and marsh.
Before the Romans entered the land there were already signs of a higher order of things. Clans were merging into confederacies covering considerable districts. Certain chiefs and tribes were striking coins with crude legends in the Greek alphabet. Traders from Massalia or from Italy were bringing in various Southern hardwares and fabrics as well as liquors to exchange for furs, skins, and other crude natural products. Left to themselves, in other words, these "Gallic" sections of the Celts might have evolved a real civilization in a few hundred years longer – if they had been let alone.
They were not to be let alone. Already by about 122, B.C. the Romans in their resistless expansion had occupied the extreme southeast of the country along the Mediterranean, the later Provence (that is, the Roman "Province" as contrasted with the rest of Gaul); but this was not a very large district, and for two generations the great Italian conquerors contented themselves with what was little more than a series of forts to command the important and strategic highroad from Italy into Spain. Still, Roman influence crept imperceptibly northward. In nearly every clan and tribal confederacy there would be a pro-Roman party among the chiefs, which held that Roman advance was inevitable and had better be welcomed and not resisted, and an anti- Roman "patriotic" party, crying out against southern encroachments, and almost always stoutly supported in its views by the Druids. Then, in 58 B.C., Gaul was entered by the greatest secular figure in ancient history: possibly by the greatest secular figure in all history – Gaius Julius Cæsar himself.
Cæsar wished to conquer Gaul, partly because he needed the glory and wealth flowing from such a victory to increase his chances of becoming monarch of Rome on the ruins of the tottering Roman Republic, partly because the security of the ancient world genuinely demanded that Gaul should be plucked from barbarian turbulence and set in an orderly place in civilization. He had plenty of excuses for intervention. Formidable German tribes (more barbarous and warlike than the Gauls themselves) were threatening to cross the Rhine and conquer the whole land. Many Gallic chieftains and factions, growing anxious, were ready to call in the Romans. Other chieftains were promptly won over by the master-politician's ready tact and persuasiveness. Cæsar had seldom the use of more than 50,000 Italian troops at any time during his nine years of campaigning, but they were legionaries of the best Roman discipline and led by an incomparable commander. The invaders thus were able to overrun and to subjugate nearly the whole land before the Gauls, realizing slowly that the Romans had come to stay, could begin to drop their feuds and organize resistance. Then it was too late. Cæsar had grasped the points of vantage and penetrated deep into the country. The Gauls found indeed an able and inspiring chief in Vercingetorix, who rose to the level of a true national hero. He fired nearly the whole land so that it blazed up against Cæsar in desperate revolt, but his hundreds of thousands of ill-disciplined levies were no match for the legionaries' javelins and short swords. Cæsar presently drove him into the stronghold of Alesia (not far from Dijon), beat back all attempts to throw in succor and starved him into surrender. That act practically ended the story of pre-Roman Gaul. By 50 B.C. the country was completely submissive, so submissive in fact that a little later Cæsar could call off nearly all his troops to follow him over the Rubicon for his march into Italy to found the Roman Empire.
The conqueror had been ruthless in his slaughter of enemies and his confiscations of their wealth. But when the brutal work had once been done, it was followed by an era of benevolence and conciliation. First, the Gauls were taught that it was hopeless to resist Rome; then, secondly, that it was not at all disagreeable to be her subjects. Taxes were reasonable. Law and order took the place of outrageous tribal oppressions. The Druids with their human sacrifices were suppressed. Gallic nobles were flattered with Roman citizenship. If they were really prominent nobles they might presently hope to become Roman senators. The recruiting masters for the legions enrolled thousands of Gallic youth, promising them all the pay, booty, privileges, and hopes of promotion which were ordinarily offered in the imperial armies.
Since the Gauls were themselves without a well-developed civilization, they, like most barbarians under similar pressure, easily adopted the superior usages of their masters. It was easy to rename their crude gods "Jupiter" or "Mercury" or "Juno." The provincial governors took the young chieftains into their palaces at once as guests and hostages and not merely taught them Latin, but also gave them a taste for Virgil and Cicero, as well as a great delight in Roman clothes, Roman social customs, and Roman institutions. Especially did the imperial government favor the founding and building of cities. The old Græco-Roman civilization was essentially a city civilization, as contrasted with a society based upon rural settlements. The Romans therefore promoted the building of cities as a prime step to Latinization. Sometimes old Celtic communities were recast in a Roman mould. More often new "colonies" or "municipia" were created outright, and the natives induced to settle therein. Very many of the most famous cities of France are thus of a direct Roman foundation. Among these (to name a few from many) are Limoges, Tours, and Soissons. Each of these cities had its own special charter (often from the Emperor direct) authorizing its citizens to elect their own magistrates, pass local laws, and enjoy very large autonomy so long as the taxes went in promptly to the imperial "fiscus." Each city also would have its temples to the usual Roman gods, its public baths, its amphitheater for the wild-beast fights and gladiators quite in Italian fashion, its circus for the horse-races, its forum for trade and public meetings, its "curia" for the gatherings of the local senate, its theater for Latin comedies, its schools for Latin oratory – in short, all the paraphernalia of a "little Rome" wherein the citizens called themselves Julius and Fabius and Claudius, wore long togas and tried hard to forget that their grandfathers had carried their spears behind Vercingetorix. As for the general administration of the land, Gaul was for a long time divided into six rather large Roman provinces, with the proconsuls mainly occupied with checking up the tax accounts of the various cities and acting as judges on appeal in important litigation. So submissive was the whole country that the imperial government seldom found it necessary to station a single large garrison in many very wide regions. The decrees of the Cæsars could usually be enforced by mere constables, although all men knew that close to the Rhine there always lay several reliable legions, whose prime business indeed was to keep the Germanic tribes from penetrating westward into the Empire, but which could be readily ordered about to snuff out any disorder in Gaul, should insurrection threaten.
The Gallic provinces thus became one of the most prosperous, peaceful, and important parts of the Roman Empire. Thanks to their possession the Cæsars were able to establish contact with more distant lands: with Britain (which they conquered in the first century of our era) and with Germany, which they indeed failed to conquer, but which they repeatedly invaded.
The Romans even gave to the Gauls a national capital. Lugdunum (modern Lyons) became an elegant city with magnificent public buildings comparable to those by the Tiber. Here, once a year, assembled the deputies of all the Gallic cities to celebrate elaborate sacrifices in honor of the "Sacred Emperor" to whom they owed their prosperity, and also (an important political privilege) to petition the Cæsars for redress of grievances, especially against evil governors. The results of all this Romanization were manifold. The Gauls became among the most loyal and devoted subjects of the Empire. Their old Celtic tongue was largely lost, at least by the upper classes, and the old tribal laws and customs equally perished. Some of the most distinguished poets and orators of the later Latin literature were born in the land we now call France. The Rhone, the Loire, and especially the Moselle were lined with cities and splendid villas that barely differed from those in Italy. Rome had made here one of her fairest conquests. First she had conquered by the sword: then more worthily by her superior civilization.
For nearly three hundred years after the days of Julius Cæsar the Gallic lands have no important history save as a part of the great Roman Empire. After the edict of Caracalla (213 A.D.) all their free inhabitants had become Roman citizens – legally the equals of the original ruling race. As the Empire declined, thanks to gross mismanagement by the Cæsars, the degeneracy of the army and the fundamental defects of the ancient social system which rested in slavery, the Gauls of course had their share of the world's sorrow. Beginning about 250 A.D. and for the next forty-odd years this part of the Empire was exposed to devastating raids by the Germanic tribes from across the Rhine, raids which the now demoralized legionaries failed to repel. Many Gallic cities were thus desolated. The survivors protected themselves with new walls, often erected in frantic haste, as existing archæological remains often testify. The old Roman society was apparently drifting on the rocks, but by about 300 A.D. the catastrophe seemed averted when a new succession of able emperors seized the helm of state, and by drastic reforms insured temporary safety. The Roman Empire, and Gaul with it, received another hundred years' respite.
During these silent years a new force was penetrating Gaul as everywhere else in the Empire. Soon after 100 A.D. Christianity begins to show itself in these provinces. About 170 A.D. there were enough Christians in Lyons to warrant a wholesale persecution by the pagan priests and governor. Presently we hear of churches in Autun, Dijon, and Besançon. About 251 one meets traces of Christianity in Limoges, Tours, and even Paris (still a second-class city). The early annals of the Gallic Church are not very clear. Probably here, as elsewhere, the cities were Christianized long before the rural communities ceased their superstitious worship of the old gods: and the pagans were probably in a decided majority everywhere until after about 350 A.D., when a great apostle of the Western Church, St. Martin of Tours, went up and down the land converting whole districts to the new faith. Still it is certain that when Constantine the Great (306- 337) and his successors showed Christianity indulgence and then made it the official religion of the Roman Empire, the Gallic lands accepted the change fairly readily. By 400 A.D. Gaul was officially "Christian." What is more it was "Catholic" and "Orthodox" Christian: that is to say, the bulk of its people accepted the famous Nicene Creed and the forms of belief supported by the Church of Rome and the other great centers of theological leadership. The formidable un-orthodox "Arian" (Unitarian) heresy, although it had followers in the region, had gained no general footing. This was a very important fact, for it prevented Gaul from being isolated from the rest of the world's thought at the moment the Roman Empire was dissolving before the Goths and Vandals.
About 375 A.D. the Germanic tribes began to penetrate again into the decadent Empire, and the legions soon proved too feeble to turn them out. But the first barbarian attacks were mainly upon the Balkan lands, and not till about 400 A.D. were the Rhine barriers forced and the "Romans" (as the Gauls now gladly called themselves) trembled at the sight of their burning villages while the invaders drew nigh.
Rome had not been built in a day, Roman Gaul was not conquered in a day. Some parts were quickly overrun by the barbarians; some resisted stoutly; some temporarily expelled the first conquerors; some compounded with the invaders on terms that allowed German and Gallo-Roman to settle down rather comfortably together. It was of course a miserable time, when the old civilization was painfully dying, and when the newer civilization was anything but safely born. The liberal arts seemed sterile or dead, Cities were decaying, if they were not devastated outright by the invader; the magnificent Roman road system, which had covered Gaul like a network of modern railways, was degenerating; commerce and all but the most necessary industries were nigh perishing. The only reliable law was that of the strongest. Alone in the Church and especially in the monks' and nuns' cloisters seemed there any sure refuge for peace-loving men and delicate women. Nevertheless, the age of the Germanic invasions was not one of unmitigated destruction and misery. The invaders were well aware that the invaded were their superiors in everything but warfare. The barbarian chiefs were prompt to adopt not merely Roman dresses, table manners, and court ceremonial, but also to make Gallo-Roman noblemen their ministers and officials to control the great population of provincials which the Germans knew how to conquer, but afterward did not know how to govern. Much of the old Roman law survived, along with many features of the old tax system. It was an era of twilight, but not of absolute darkness.
When the Roman Empire of the West finally went under, in 476 A.D., the greater part of Gaul was already in German hands. Since 412 the formidable Visigoths had held sway in nearly all of the south with their capital at Bordeaux. Nearer the Rhine, in the east center, the Burgundians were in control. In the north (quite isolated from Italy, curiously enough) the Roman power was making its last stand, under the "Patrician" Syagrius. The Visigoths and Burgundians had gone through the forms of professing Christianity, but it was of the unorthodox Arian type – hence they were in very bad odor with the native clergy and native population, which were mostly Catholics devoted to the Nicene Creed.
Conditions therefore were anything but static, when a new power began asserting itself in the north and speedily overshadowed all Gaul. The Franks. had been a loose confederacy of Germanic tribes on the right bank of the Rhine since the third century. They had occasionally fought against the Romans; more often they had been their well-paid allies and had sent their warriors into the Cæsars' armies. For a long time they showed no great wish to invade Gaul. Then in the fifth century they gradually followed the example of their fellow Germans and began to spread into what is now the extreme north of France. It was a slow, somewhat hesitant invasion, for the Franks were sadly disunited. Salians, Ripuarians, and other tribes of their confederacy whetted their weapons to fight against one another even more than against Syagrius. They were fierce, untamed warriors in any case – not even Arians, but downright heathen: cruel in customs and very willing to settle all issues by appeal to their "franciskas" – their great battle-axes, which possibly gave them their tribal name. In 481 the chief of the Salian Franks, Hilderic, died, and passed on his stormy authority to his fifteenyear-old son Clovis. A bad man, but a mighty ruler, had thrust himself into history.
Clovis was of execrable morality even in an age of perfidy and blood. The most that can be said is that the evils of the times demanded sharp surgery if civilization was not to end in anarchy, and Clovis assuredly never declined to use the scalpel. A man of daring courage, indomitable energy, and inexhaustible resource as well as completely lacking pity or scruple, he must have won the absolute devotion of his host of hardy warriors from the day when they lifted him on their shields as their king, and thundered their deep "Aye! Aye!" while he flourished his sword and announced he would rule over them. In 486 near Soissons he defeated and completely overthrew Syagrius, the last champion of the Roman power. Northern Gaul was in his hands – at least as soon as he could conquer or assassinate all the other lesser Frankish chiefs who might try to defy his mandates.
His methods smote the imaginations as well as the fears of the bands which followed him. The King had once claimed as his booty a beautiful bowl, when a certain unruly soldier, jealous of an attempt to take apparently more than the royal share, deliberately shivered the vessel with his battle-axe, crying, "Naught shalt thou have, beyond whatever the [customary] lot may give thee!" The King dissembled. He had overstepped his technical rights: but a year later at a review of his men-at-arms he found the offending warrior standing with his weapons for inspection. "No man has arms so ill cared for as thou!" declared the King, and contemptuously flung the man's hatchet on the ground. As the other stooped to pick it up, Clovis instantly raised his own axe and buried it in the wretch's skull – "Thus didst thou," he announced, "to that bowl!" Such methods are admirably calculated to win the implicit obedience of a certain type of warriors, the more so as nearly all such robust deeds justified themselves by their complete success.
Clovis, as intimated, had been a pagan. Probably for long he had been impressed by the splendid liturgy and ceremonial of the Gallo-Roman churches as well as by the political advantages of being in religious adjustment with his new non-Germanic subjects. That he ever understood the least thing about the spiritual teachings of Christianity we cannot imagine. What did appeal to him, however, was that the "White Christ" of the priests seemed to be a very powerful god with "good magic," and quite likely, if respectfully treated, to help against the King's enemies. Clovis presently married a Burgundian princess, Clotilda, who was a Catholic Christian, although most of her family were Arians. The King did not at once embrace his wife's religion, but he listened to her arguments with deepening courtesy. At last, in 496, he found himself in mortal battle with a rival tribe, the Alemanni. The fight was going sore against Clovis. His stoutest axemen were giving way. The old Frankish pagan gods proffered no help. It was time for desperate expedients. "O Lord Jesus Christ," prayed the King, "whom Clotilda worships; if Thou wilt now grant me victory, I will believe in Thee, and be baptized with Thy name." And lo! the tide of battle turned: the Alemanni fled: Clovis marched home victorious.
The King had every reason for keeping his bargain and vow. Such a God was certainly the one for him to champion. Clovis was baptized with magnificent ceremony at Reims (doubtless in the church that preceded the later famous Gothic cathedral) by the venerable Bishop St. Remigius, who devised a great procession and religious festival when Clovis and three thousand of his mighty men all marched up to the font together. "Bow thy head meekly," commanded the bishop when the fierce young warrior approached for baptism; "adore what thou hast once burned: burn that which thou once adored!" It was a happy day for the bishop. The King of all North Gaul had been won for Christianity, and that, too, luckily enough, the highly orthodox type of Catholicism. He was thus placed on extremely friendly relations with the powerful and numerous Gallo-Roman clergy. He had all the zeal of a new convert: and in the rest of Gaul the Catholic Gallo-Romans were ready to welcome his sway, in place of that of the Arian kings of the other Germanic invaders.
Clovis the Christian soon proved himself even more of a conqueror than Clovis the Pagan. In 500 A.D. he subjugated the Burgundians. In 507 A.D. he said to his lords, "It goes much against my grain that these Arian heretics [the Visigoths] should hold any part of Gaul. Let us go forth with the help of the Lord and overthrow them and make their land our own"! – and once more the Saints blessed his lancers and his axemen. Nearly the whole of southern Gaul was conquered, barring only a strip close to the Pyrenees. At last in 511 A.D. this treacherous and bloodthirsty king died after having smitten down practically every foe – foreign or domestic – who opposed him. He had displayed one enormous virtue, however, in the eyes of the churchmen who wrote our chronicles – he had been the unrelenting champion of orthodoxy from the day of his conversion. "Therefore," it was written by the pious historian Gregory of Tours, "every day God cast down his enemies and added increase to his kingdom, because he walked before Him with upright heart, and did that which was pleasing in His eyes."
Clovis left his heirs a fairly well-compacted dominion, embracing nearly all of modern France and a considerable slice also of western Germany. Frankish law, however, made it hard to keep a kingdom together. There was no right of primogeniture. Each of Clovis's four sons claimed his share of the kingdom, and soon the process of division and subdivision brought on a whole devil's dance of civil wars between bloody and self-seeking men. There was no guiding principle in these wars of the "Merovingian" kings (so called from Merovius, an ancestor of Clovis). The subject population was the helpless victim of the devastating conflicts of rival kings and of their equally turbulent warriors. Sometimes the realm, which we can now call "Frankland," was divided into more than four unhappy contending kingdoms, divided and subdivided like so many farms between litigious heirs. Sometimes a single masterful scion of Clovis was lucky enough to eliminate all his brothers or nephews and reign for a few years alone.
Clovis's sons had inherited a really formidable royal power from their great if evil father. Under the grandsons, however, the kingly authority was obviously shrinking before that of the leudes, the Frankish upper-warriors, who were demanding offices, honors, and lands in payment for support through the incessant wars. Under the great-grandsons, although the country sometimes again was nominally united under one king, it was evident the monarchs were becoming more and more the puppets of certain great ministers, especially of that very arrogant official who called himself the "Mayor of the Palace" (Major Domus). Frankland also showed signs of splitting up into three great units along somewhat natural and therefore fairly enduring lines – Neustria (virtually most of northern France), Austrasia (east of Neustria and including the extreme east of present-day France and the west of modern Germany), and Aquitania (the bulk of France south of the Loire). Dagobert (628-38) was the last Merovingian king who exercised any real personal authority. After him the main power in Frankland lay really with the masterful Major Domus, who continually waxed as his royal "sovereign" waned.
Unfortunately for the peace of the realm there was no orderly line of succession to this position of supreme uncrowned ruler of Frankland. To become Major Domus implied conciliating the interests of whatever was the dominant faction of Frankish leudes(mighty men) supplemented as these usually were by the old landed aristocracy which claimed descent from the Gallo- Romans. The Church, with its puissant and often very "secular" bishops, had also to be propitiated. All this meant a new series of schisms, conspiracies and wars frequently very bloody and very personal. The Mayor (Major Domus) of Austrasia fought against his rival of Neustria; while Aquitaine under a semi-independent Duke (=Dux, in origin simply "leader") would defy them both. Meantime in the seventh, even as in the sixth century, civilization seemed ever more steadily on the defensive. Then at last came a turn for the better. A great official family came forward. After various vicissitudes his dynasty, later famous as the "Carolingian" (from Charlemagne, its most distinguished member), began to supply Mayors of the Palace who ruled both Neustria and Austrasia simultaneously in a kind of hereditary succession. Rivals were put down: disorderly elements quelled by a heavy hand. It was the rare good fortune of this dynasty to supply four rulers in direct sequence from father to great-grandson who were all men of first-class ability, neither tyrants nor weaklings, neither sordid politicians nor reckless idealists, men who knew how to fight and how to spare, how to regulate and how to let alone: – four men, in short, who did very much to shape the entire history of Europe.
The story of the Carolingian house involves much more than the history of France. It is the story of early mediæval Germany, and the same of Italy. It touches deeply on the history of the rise of the Papacy, and even affects the annals of Spain. To us, whose main interest is in France, it is sufficient to state certain prime facts, but to ignore most of the non-French elements in these great rulers' annals. We may outline the careers of these four princes thus.
Pepin of Heristal was the first of the family who exercised what may be called systematic and solidly founded authority. He was in power from 679 to 714. In his days public affairs were in such chaos that successful fighting was practically all that could be asked of him. Pepin discharged his full duty in this matter. Most of his rivals perished and the rest submitted. There was again something like law and order in the land. The great Mayor not merely won victories over rebels, but reorganized the Frankish army so that it became again a real fighting machine, formidable to its foreign enemies. There was soon to be need for this army.
Pepin was followed by his illegitimate son Charles Martel (714-41), who only gained power after another period of bloody confusion, but who then showed himself alike as heavy-handed and as worldly-wise as his father. His first exploits were against the various German tribes to the east of Austrasia – only half Christianized as yet and still utterly barbarous. Saxons, Bavarians, and Alemans all alike fled before him. He also made head against the malcontent Dukes of Aquitaine who, ruling over a population of almost strictly "Roman" descent, were ill-disposed to brook Northern authority.
The issue with Aquitaine had been by no means settled when its Duke Odo suddenly changed from a defiant enemy to trembling suppliant. A terrible danger was threatening not merely Aquitaine but Frankland itself and indeed all Christendom. Over a hundred years had elapsed since Mohammed the Arabian had founded his religion of Islam – of the One Allah and his prophet, with the choice of accepting the same or the sword. In the interval the fanatical Moslems had overrun Persia, Syria, Egypt, and all North Africa, sweeping the native populations away from their old faiths and accumulating belligerent converts as a rolling snowball gathers size. Early in the eighth century their hosts had crossed into Spain, snuffed out the decadent Visigothic dynasts, and rendered nearly the entire peninsula the mere emirate of the distant Kalif of Damascus. But the conquering hordes of Arabs., Moors, and Greek and Spanish renegades had no intention of stopping in Spain. Had not Allah promised the whole world to the disciples of the Koran? In 730, after some earlier reverses, the Moslem bands began pouring through the passes of the Pyrenees and into smiling Aquitania. The Moorish riders, on their wiry desert steeds, worked rapidly upward, pillaging, carrying captive, and ruthlessly burning churches and convents. Duke Odo strove to fight them off. His strength was vain. After a brave resistance the Arab Emir Abd-Rahman took Bordeaux, the richest city possibly then in old Gaul, and distributed an enormous booty among his greedy followers.
Bordeaux was not the last Christian city to suffer. The Moslem horsemen were forcing their way northward and eastward into the Loire valley and ravaging clear into Burgundy as far as Autun and Sens. Odo cried lustily to Charles for aid, and it could not be denied. If Aquitaine was conquered to-day, Frankland proper would be in flames to-morrow. The great Mayor called out his full levy of Northern axemen. In September or October, 732, Charles led his host to face the Arab Emir in one of the plains near Tours on the Loire. Probably neither Christians nor Moslems realized that here was to be fought out one of the world's decisive battles, which, according to many later opinions, was to settle whether the civilized world was to read the Bible or the Koran. One thing is certain. If Charles the Frank had been badly defeated, there was no other Christian leader in all western Europe with military power enough to curb the Islamites.
For several days the armies confronted, then Abd-Rahman flung his magnificent Moorish cavalry on the Frankish battlelines. But the Northern infantry, standing in dense array "like solid walls or icebergs," as says the old chronicler, smote back the plunging lancers with terrible loss. Presently the Christians took the offensive, and began hewing their way into the Infidels' camp. Abd-Rahman was slain. His motley host fell into confusion. Night descended before the rout was complete, but under cover of the darkness the Moslems fled in panic southward, leaving their tents crammed with spoil for the victors. A great battle had been won, and Charles was henceforth Charles "Martel" ("The Hammer").
It took several years more of hard fighting to clear the Arab- Moors out of certain strongholds they had seized in South Gaul, but the Infidels never came back for a large-scale invasion. Their spell of victory had been broken, Allah had turned against them. Why struggle against Fate! Their conqueror, of course, reaped vast glory from his victory, as well as greatly strengthening his grip upon all Frankland.
The victor at Tours was succeeded by his son Pepin "the Short" (741-68), a leader who inherited so firm an authority from his father that he could devote some of his energies to the doings of peace as well as to those of war. In 752 he felt such confidence that he disposed of the absurd Merovingian "sluggard king" Childeric, the last of the nominal dynasty, who had lived in perpetual retirement, and whose power had dwindled to the shadow of a shade. Pepin was emboldened to take the royal title himself (a step which might have been opposed by certain Frankish noblemen) by the formal consent of the Pope of Rome. The Papacy was developing its temporal power in Italy, was in considerable fear of the attacks of the intractable Lombards, and was very anxious to stand favorably with the greatest ruler beyond the Alps. King Pepin duly repaid this favor in 753 by marching with full force into Italy and forcing the King of the Lombards to promise to let the Popes alone in their government in Rome. Thus then began those intimate dealings between the rulers of Frankland, or France, and the Papacy, which led to one working alliance or agreement after another, and were only ended in the twentieth century in the absolute divorce of Church and State by the Third Republic of our day.
Pepin left a royal title, a firm understanding with the greatest spiritual power in Christendom, a powerful army, and a loyal aristocracy and people to his son Charles, soon to be enrolled in universal history as Charlemagne (Charles, or Karl the Great, Carolus Magnus). The new ruler, of course, profited largely by the successes of his predecessors, but it is undeniable that he was by far the ablest of all the highly talented four. His reign (768-814) forms one of the turning-points in French as well as in German, Italian, and ecclesiastical history.
The Frankland of Charlemagne was very different from the Frankland of Clovis. Many of the relics of the old Roman culture had been lost. The Gallo-Roman cities had often dwindled now to starving villages, or had perished outright. The once teeming commerce of the ancient Empire had been nearly obliterated. Every little region and manor lived for itself and by itself, supplying its own economic needs and cheerfully going without any but a very few imported articles. The incessant wars and ravagings had destroyed many of the arts of peace and blighted still more of those surviving. Even the Church had been too often monopolized by worldly prelates, and the convents had become the refuge for the idle as well as for the pious and quiet-minded. The Merovingian period and that of the Mayors of the Palace had thus been often a time of cultural retrogression and destruction, melancholy to record. But not all elements had been destructive. Along with all the rack and ruin certain great facts stand out, which were to mean very much in the history of the New France yet-to-be.
1. Between 500 and 800 the process of race consolidation was fairly completed. The Franks and the Gallo-Romans had been shaken down together; intermarriage and constant contact had largely destroyed the barriers between them. There was obviously a greater Germanic element in the North (and especially the Northeast) than in the South, where Aquitaine continued predominantly Gallo-Roman; but nowhere were the racial lines now very deliberately drawn. There were assuredly serfs and great lords – but many of the serfs were doubtless descended from Clovis's warriors, and many of the lords boasted Gallo- Roman ancestors. The French people was thus being created, a people Celtic in its main origins, but stamped with the language, laws, and culture of Imperial Rome, and later still given a strong infusion of Northern firmness and virility by the Teutonic invaders. We have thus what is essentially a mixed nation, both in its race and in its culture, and history proves that it is ordinarily the mixed nations which inherit the earth. Celtic brilliancy, Italian finesse, and Northern steadfastness were to meet together in France.
2. During the Merovingian period we find shaping itself the economic and political unit which is characteristic of France all through the Middle Ages and down to the very edge of recent times. This is the great lord's manor. Under later Roman conditions, when the cities were declining, and the poorer population was always tending to fall under the power of the wealthy, it became more and more normal to be either the owner or the dependent of a great estate (a fundus). In this the humbler members were simply serfs, though not absolutely slaves, and were permitted to till and occupy a little parcel of ground, but were unable to leave the estate without their master's permission and were subject to many other harsh restraints. In Frankish days these great estates had continued to multiply. There were still a few free peasants, self-respecting owners of petty farms, but they tended ever to diminish, and the government being very weak and the age very lawless, a poor man could seldom protect his rights unless he "commended himself" (that is, became the dependent) to some great landowner who could afford him decent protection. Not merely the king, his favored warriors, and the descendants of the Gallo-Roman nobility could possess these huge serf-populated estates: they were often held by the powerful and wealthy bishops and abbots of the Church, who thus (besides their spiritual cares) were in a very temporal sense the masters of some hundreds or thousands of peasants, ruling them through their overseers and bailiffs. This was not strictly feudalism, but it was a very great step towards that feudalism which was now speedily to develop through western Europe.
When Charlemagne was at the height of his power (about 800) the territories of modern France made up nearly half of his entire dominions. They were already distinguishing themselves from his other lands (Germany and Italy) by very marked characteristics. Germany was too remote in the North to be genuinely Latinized: Italy was too Southern to borrow much from Germany: The French lands, the heart of the old Frankish kingdom, had drawn strength alike from the North and from the South.