Notwithstanding his many and great virtues, Charles was by, no means so pure as the poetry
and piety of the church represented him, and far from deserving canonization. He sacrificed thousands
of human beings to his towering ambition and passion for conquest. He converted the Saxons by
force of arms; he waged for thirty years a war of extermination against them; he wasted their territory
with fire and sword; he crushed out their independence; he beheaded in cold blood four thousand
five hundred prisoners in one day at Verden on the Aller (782), and when these proud and faithless
savages finally surrendered, he removed 10000 of their families from their homes on the banks of
the Elbe to different parts of Germany and Gaul to prevent a future revolt. It was indeed a war of
religion for the annihilation of heathenism, but conducted on the Mohammedan principle: submission
to the faith, or death. This is contrary to the spirit of Christianity which recognizes only the moral
means of persuasion and conviction.^246
The most serious defect in his private character was his incontinence and disregard of the
sanctity of the marriage tie. In this respect he was little better than an Oriental despot or a
Mohammedan Caliph. He married several wives and divorced them at his pleasure. He dismissed
his first wife (unknown by name) to marry a Lombard princess, and he repudiated her within a
year. After the death of his fifth wife he contented himself with three or four concubines. He is said
even to have encouraged his own daughters in dissolute habits rather than give them in marriage
to princes who might become competitors for a share in the kingdom, but he had them carefully
educated. It is not to the credit of the popes that they never rebuked him for this vice, while with
weaker and less devoted monarchs they displayed such uncompromising zeal for the sanctity of
marriage.^247
His Death and Burial.
The emperor died after a short illness, and after receiving the holy communion, Jan. 28,
814, in the 71st year of his age, and the 47th of his reign, and was buried on the same day in the
cathedral of Aix-la-Chapelle "amid the greatest lamentations of the people."^248 Very many omens,
adds Eginhard (ch. 32), had portended his approaching end, as he had recognized himself. Eclipses
both of the sun and the moon were very frequent during the last three years of his life, and a black
spot was visible on the sun for seven days. The bridge over the Rhine at Mayence, which he had
constructed in ten years, was consumed by fire; the palace at Aix-la-Chapelle frequently trembled;
the basilica was struck by lightning, the gilded ball on the roof shattered by a thunderbolt and hurled
upon the bishop’s house adjoining; and the word Princeps after Karolus inscribed on an arch was
effaced a few months before his decease. "But Charles despised, or affected to despise, all these
things as having no reference whatever to him."
The Charlemagne of Poetry.
The heroic and legendary poetry of the middle ages represents Charles as a giant of
superhuman strength and beauty, of enormous appetite, with eyes shining like the morning star,
(^246) Bossuet justified all his conquests because they were an extension of Christianity."Les conquêtes prodigieuses," he
says, "furent la dilatation du règne de Dieu, et il se moutra très chrétien dans toutes ses aeuvres."
(^247) Pope Stephen III. protested, indeed, in the most violent language against the second marriage of Charles with Desiderata,
a daughter of the king of Lombardy, but not on the ground of divorce from his first wife, which would have furnished a very
good reason, but from opposition to a union with the "perfidious, leprous, and fetid brood of the Lombards, a brood hardly
reckoned human." Charles married the princess, to the delight of his mother, but repudiated her the next year and sent her back
to her father. See Milman, Bk. IV., ch. 12 (II. 439).
(^24848)
"Maximo totius populi luctu, " says Eginhard.