The Political Disorder.
In the semi-barbarous state of society during the middle ages, a strong central power was
needed in church and state to keep order. Charlemagne was in advance of his times, and his structure
rested on no solid foundation. His successors had neither his talents nor his energy, and sank almost
as low as the Merovingians in incapacity and debauchery. The popular contempt in which they
were held was expressed in such epithets as "the Bald," "the Fat," "the Stammerer," "the Simple,"
"the Lazy," "the Child." Under their misrule the foundations of law and discipline gave way. Europe
was threatened with a new flood of heathen barbarism. The Norman pirates from Denmark and
Norway infested the coasts of Germany and France, burned cities and villages, carried off captives,
followed in their light boats which they could carry on their shoulders, the course of the great rivers
into the interior; they sacked Hamburg, Cologne, Treves, Rouen, and stabled their horses in
Charlemagne’s cathedral at Aix; they invaded England, and were the terror of all Europe until they
accepted Christianity, settled down in Normandy, and infused fresh blood into the French and
English people. In the South, the Saracens, crossing from Africa, took possession of Sicily and
Southern Italy; they are described by pope John VIII. as Hagarenes, as children of fornication and
wrath, as an army of locusts, turning the land into a wilderness. From the East, the pagan Hungarians
or Magyars invaded Germany and Italy like hordes of wild beasts, but they were defeated at last
by Henry the Fowler and Otho the Great, and after their conversion to Christianity under their
saintly monarch Stephen (997–1068), they became a wall of defence against the progress of the
Turks.
Within the limits of nominal Christendom, the kings and nobles quarreled among themselves,
oppressed the people, and distributed bishoprics and abbeys among their favorites, or pocketed the
income. The metropolitans oppressed the bishops, the bishops the priests, and the priests the laity.
Bands of robbers roamed over the country and defied punishment. Might was right. Charles the
Fat was deposed by his vassals, and died in misery, begging his bread (888). His successor, Arnulf
of Carinthia, the last of the Carolingian line of emperors (though of illegitimate birth), wielded a
victorious sword over the Normans (891) and the new kingdom of Moravia (894), but fell into
trouble, died of Italian poison, and left the crown of Germany to his only legitimate son, Louis the
Child (899–911), who was ruled by Hatto, archbishop of Mayence. This prelate figures in the
popular legend of the "Mouse-Tower" (on an island in the Rhine, opposite Bingen), where a swarm
of mice picked his bones and "gnawed the flesh from every limb," because he had shut up and
starved to death a number of hungry beggars. But documentary history shows him in a more
favorable light. Louis died before attaining to manhood, and with him the German line of the
Carolingians (911). The last shadow of an emperor in Italy, Berengar, who had been crowned in
St. Peter’s, died by the dagger of an assassin (924). The empire remained vacant for nearly forty
years, until Otho, a descendant of the Saxon duke Widukind, whom Charlemagne had conquered,
raised it to a new life.
In France, the Carolingian dynasty lingered nearly a century longer, till it found an inglorious
end in a fifth Louis called the Lazy ("le Fainéant"), and Count Hugh Capet became the founder of
the Capetian dynasty, based on the principle of hereditary succession (987). He and his son Robert
received the crown of France not from the pope, but from the archbishop of Rheims.
rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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