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in prayer, addressed warning words to his son, caused him to promise fulfilment of all commands, and finally bade Louis take a second crown that was lying upon the altar and place it himself upon his head.

The reign of Charles as Emperor was a period of quiet improvement of great acquisitions. The wars of the earlier period had come to an end, and conquest was over. His magnificent efforts to raise the conditions of social and religious life became apparent. The world power was universally recognised. Far beyond the Christian peoples of the West, Charles enjoyed unconditional respect. In East and West he was looked upon as the head of the Christian Empire, to the Slavs he was so absolutely the ruler that his name (as Kral) served as an expression for royal authority, just as formerly in the West those of Caesar and Augustus had been chosen to express supreme monarchical power.

On 28 Jan. 814, at 9 o'clock in the morning, Charles died, after an illness of a few days' duration at Aachen, where he had resided by preference during the last years of his reign. He was buried the same day in the Basilica there, and in the manner customary in the West, lying in a closed coffin. Only a later fanciful writer was able to distort this well-attested simple fact. Count Otto of Lomello, one of those who accompanied Otto III on his remarkable visit to the grave of Charles in the year 1000, related, according to the Chronicum Novaliciense, that Charles was found sitting on a throne like a living man, with his crown upon his head and his sceptre in his hands, the nails of which had grown through the gloves. Otto III, according to this account, had the robes set in order, the lost portion of the nose replaced by gold, and a tooth of the great Dead brought away. It may well be supposed that the awful moment in which the fanciful Otto wished to greet his mighty predecessor in person dazzled the senses of the Count, whose imagination and perhaps the desire for sensation have led astray much learned investigation and popular ideas.

Popular legends soon busied themselves with the person of the Emperor to whom following generations very soon gave the title of the Great. Even in the ninth century all kinds of fables were told about him and the hero became exalted into the superhuman. In the amusing little book of Notker the Stammerer, the Monk of St Gall, anecdotes and popular tales play a part. By that time, two generations after the death of the great king, these tales must have grown very much. In Northern France the legends were specially busy, and the stories of Charles and his Paladins were gathered together in poetic form in the Chansons de Geste and later in the Chanson de Roland, to travel from France to Germany and to live on in the Rolandslied, in the Willehalm, and in the Chronicle of the German Emperors of the twelfth century. Legends had long been developed on the ecclesiastical side. The Poeta Saxo, as early as the end of the ninth century, had praised the

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Emperor as the Apostle of the land of the Saxons, and the struggle with the Saracens also was praised from this point of view. It is true that Charles could not be regarded as a saint so long as his manner of life was remembered. This caused great trouble to the strict moralist. The monk Wetti for instance represented Charles as suffering terrible punishments in the other world on that account, and Walafridus Strabo, who in the time of Louis turned the Visio Wettini into verse, relates that a nun had beheld the tortures of Charles in the fires of Purgatory. But these memories faded, and later it was only the soldier of God, the champion of the faith, the builder of numerous churches, who was remembered. As early as the second half of the tenth century stories were told of a journey of Charles to Jerusalem. In the eleventh century this was generally believed and Charles was extolled as a martyr on account of his many adventures. The picture of the monarch was transformed and his character became that of a Christian ecclesiastic, even that of a monk. The purely ecclesiastical legends about Charles originated in the twelfth century. His life was thought of, not as ascetic, but as holy, and the solemn canonisation in 1165 was the final step in the process.

No authentic portrait of Charles has come down to us, for the equestrian statuette from the Treasury of the Cathedral of Metz, which is now in the Carnevalet Museum at Paris, cannot be proved to be a contemporary representation. The long moustache of the otherwise beardless rider seems rather to belong to Charles the Bald. The first Western Emperor was large in body. The examination of the skeleton in the year 1861 shewed a length of nearly 6 ft. 4 in. But we cannot form a clearer idea of his external appearance, in spite of the excellent description which we owe to Einhard. This faithful counsellor and friend wrote his Life soon after the death of the great Emperor. His picture maintains its great value even though it can be proved to borrow its general, and even its particular, features from the biographies of Suetonius. Einhard made independent observations and drew the portrait of Charles with love and intelligence. We see the old Emperor before us with his majestic form, his round head resting upon a neck somewhat too short and thick, and covered with beautiful white hair, and with his kindly face from which looked the large quick eyes. We learn that much that was not beautiful, such as his too great corpulence, was forgotten on account of the symmetry of his limbs and his harmonious proportions. We learn that in the two last years of his life, when his body had become somewhat weakened through attacks of fever, his old vigorous gait had become a little feeble, owing to the halting of one leg. We hear the Emperor speaking in a curiously high voice, which was in marked contrast with the powerful form of the speaker. We have exact information even about the habits of his daily life, we see how Charles rises in the morning and receives his

friends even while dressing, how he discharges the business of government, hears the reports of the Palsgraves, and decides difficult points of law. We learn how he dressed, how he took hot baths, how fond he was of hunting and how he practised swimming, if possible in company with many others, how he ate much and drank very moderately, how he liked to hear music or to have some book read aloud during his chief meal. We even learn how he took a long rest in the middle of the day in summer, and how the activity of his mind disturbed his rest at night.

Einhard was depicting the monarch in his later years. But the picture does not shew the features of an old man. The vigour of the great king remained unbroken. The whole personality of Charles is made unusually human and brought very near to us by Einhard and by the popular stories of the Monk of St Gall. It is a personality of magic power from which no one can escape, of noble amiability, with a sense of humour, and naturally kind. Tender chords also echoed in this great soul, a deep love for his children, especially for his daughters, and he felt the need of close confidence on the part of his family. But there is not the pure honour of the simple father. His passion is always breaking out, a strong desire, to which the moral ideas of the age could set no limits, an unusually strong inclination for the other sex. And this strong nature, so accustomed to command and to expect obedience, could set no limits to his own desires. There was a remarkable licentiousness in the private life of the Emperor and his court, a want of discipline, immorality even in the eyes of a coarse age, an inclination for freedom and at the same time for what is great. Only he who was himself above rules and ordinances, demands unconditional submission to his will. For the simplicity of his character, his affability and popularity never did harm to his majesty or made him too free. From this great nature there issued a strength which mastered everything. It was a nature full of passion and yet of calm circumspection. Charles never formed important resolutions in his angry moments. He went his way without consideration for the rights or wishes of others, or for individuals of the different peoples, but did so only when he served the purpose of his high mission. This gave his actions invincible strength.

The wideness of his interests and his real understanding for the needs of the people is unique even amongst the greatest in history. His care was given to great things and small, even to the smallest matters — alike to the political, the social, the literary, and to the artistic life of the peoples. Everywhere he made ordinances, everywhere he gave encouragement, everywhere he took a personal part. Everywhere of course as the head of the community, everywhere as a man of action, as an intelligent leader of his people. He was no theorist, no dreamer, not a man of books. Quite pathetic is his endeavour to make himself acquainted with the elements of the culture of the time. In addition to German, he was

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The Empire and the Civitas Dei

master of Latin and understood Greek. But his attempts to acquire the art of writing had as little success as his endeavour to produce new ideas in the sphere of Grammar or Chronology. He was no great scholar, no abstract thinker. And so he shewed himself in his relation to the Church and to theocratic ideas. In spite of all his interest in questions of doctrine he had no deep or independent grasp of religious problems. The teaching of the Church was for him an unassailable truth. From this he derived his high sense of mission. He placed himself at the service of theocratic ideas in order to combine them with his quest for power. This gave his policy an unexpected moral strength. A sense of the grace of God dominated his work from the very beginning. That does not mean that he acted as a simple Christian man who is anxious about the salvation of his soul, but as the Plenipotentiary of God who has to maintain earthly order in the Christian sense. Necessarily connected with the Christian theocratic idea is all that would strengthen authority in this world: on this then he seized, and this by virtue of his naturally strong character he brought to accomplishment.

Charles looked upon his Empire as a Divine State. He felt that he had been appointed by God as the earthly head of Christians. He read and loved Augustine's book de Civitate Dei. He believed that he had set up the Civitas Dei, in the second empirical sense, which Augustine placed beside the Civitas Dei as the spiritual union of all saints under the grace of God, as a great earthly organisation for the care of common earthly needs in a manner pleasing to God, and for the worthy preparation for the better life in the world to come. Augustine, it is true, had seen the empirical manifestation of the Civitas Dei in the universal Catholic Church. Charles saw no contradiction. For him the ecclesiastical body and the secular were one. He was the head. And while Augustine placed the Roman Empire as fourth in the order of worldempires and as a Civitas Terrena in opposition to the Kingdom of God, for Charles this dualism was no more his Imperium Romanum is no Civitas Terrena, it is identical with the earthly portion of the Church founded by Christ. The words of Alcuin are significant: Charles rules the kingdom of eternal peace founded by the Blood of Christ.

The Empire of Charles was intended to realise the Divine Kingdom upon earth. On the one hand this answered to the great tendencies which governed the life of the Christian peoples of the West, but on the other it contradicted them. Government of the world by the laws of Christ, uniformity of Christian organisation, universalism - these ideals the new Imperium Romanum of Charles seemed to serve. But in the Christian society there had long prevailed the idea of a Priesthood set over the laity, the idea of the hierarchical order and of the Papal Primacy - and these ideas demanded unity and universalism in the sense that the supreme head of the Society could not be a secular monarch but only the Bishop of Rome. Hence an imperial universalism could

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not finally overcome that of the Curia. Two different currents were perceptible in the Christian-theocratic tendencies towards unity after the year 800, often working together, often against each other. And here it must be observed that the tendencies towards Priestly universal rule are as little to be regarded as specially Roman, as the tendencies towards the Theocratic-christian imperial power as specially German. Rather both were the outcome of a general Western development, and both have as their representatives both the Romance and the Germanic peoples. On the one hand the universal ecclesiastical views necessarily led again and again to a Priestly universal rule, and on the other hand the increasing political needs of the rising Romance and German nations necessarily caused a desire for the independence of the State.

The significance of Charles for the history of the world lies in this, that he transferred the theocratic idea of absolute sovereignty, which had begun to work as a great historical factor in Western history, from the sphere of the Roman Curia to the Frankish State. He prepared the way for the social institutions peculiar to the Middle Ages and at the same time opened the source of unavoidable wars. Of course there were general antecedents for this in the political life of the Franks and of the other Western peoples. But yet it was here that this mighty personality was an independent force.