In this Gaul then, which remained as purely Roman as before, with no perceptible admix ture of new blood and with no change in the methods of government save a gradual weak ening and coarsening of them, Clovis estab lished himself in executive power, over the municipalities of the north and east; having, that is, the right to issue writs in his name, to gather the dwindling taxes and to reserve for his part the luxuries and the honors tradi tionally incident to the position of a Roman official. For more than a century, till the ad vent in 628 of Dagobert, the great-great-grand son of Clovis, this local executive power is as vague and changeable as can be. It depends upon personal prowess in battle. Now the petty kinglet in the north stretching his nomi nal power almost to the Pyrenees; now the whole territory is divided among brothers; now there is an alliance with other Teutonic chieftains of the Burgundian or Visigoths in other parts of the now for a moment the whole is united again its one hand. Save as concerned landmarks, the lives of these kings are unimportant. The social fact under lying the whole business is the dissolution of one portion of the Roman organization and the survival of another. The portion which dissolved and. whose instruments of power be came first nominal, then merely legendary, was the central authority and the army upon which it had reposed. The portion which survived and which even increased in strength as the darkness of the time deepened was the munic ipality and above all the clerical organization based upon the municipality.
Meanwhile, like any great body that has gone through a sharp readjustment of condi tions, the western districts of the Roman Em pire by the 7th century began to organize a new and a debased but yet a stable life. The conditions were these: Britain had been for more than a hundred years quite cut off from the Roman world and the Eastern half of it nearly ruined by pirates. Africa had been over run by every sort of wastrel, escaped slaves, nomads of the desert, starving peasants and criminals, gathered round a small nucleus of wandering Teutonic barbarians called Vandals. It had been temporarily regained by the Im perial power, but was never again the orderly and civilized province which it had been for 700 years and was destined in the next century to be permanently effaced by the Arab inva sion. In Spain and in Gaul the Roman munici pality endured and little bands of Teutonic raiders had established their chieftains as nom inal heads of the executive power. Men had settled down to this conception of the world as to the obliteration of the old central author ity; they were long used to seeing upon their parchments the curious names of Germanic ori gin which had replaced those of the emperors. Letters and arts had so declined that the past had become a fixed standard of excellence, the attainment of which was despaired, when the ruins of the old Roman order began to group themselves again into something of a stable (though of a coarsened and much lowered) civilization which is generally called that of the Dark Ages. And by an historic accident this civilization was nowhere fully preserved save in Gaul.
This accident was the successful Moham medan invasion of Spain, a• catastrophe which left Gaul the only intact Christian unit, and therefore the only seed plot in which the tradi tion of civilization could hold its own and be preserved.
Britain was hardly yet rechristianized and civilization had but just begun to strike its new roots. Theodore had but just organized the Church in that island and it was still a mass of little warring districts, when Taric landed upon the shore which still retains his name under the Rock of Gibraltar, in 711. In two years the Mohammedans were at the foot of the Pyrenees, and the whole intervening plateau with its Roman municipalities, its organized hierarchy, its European traditions of 900 years, was subject to the Asiatic.
The consequences of this disaster were enormous. The western Mediterranean, the common highway by which Roman influence has welded all Western Christianity together, was henceforward Mohammedan. Its islands were open to perpetual invasion, many of them to regular occupation (the Balearics were not re covered by Christendom for over 500 years 1) ; every seaport which had escaped actual conquest was open to perpetual insult; Italy, already a mass of independent localities, now lay, as to its southern half, open to influences the most antagonistic to those of Rome; Rome itself might henceforward almost be called a fron tier town; the balance of the great provincial system was destroyed and a general observer of history who should not 'be acquainted with what was to follow might imagine that after this blow Christian civilization and all the tra ditions of Rome and the West could not but perish. As a fact, by a process with which
this paper has not to deal, the indomitable energy of the Spaniard reconquered the Iberian province and slowly reestablished the civiliza tion which we now enjoy. The debt we owe to the crusading spirit of Spain is not calculable; but for it there would not to-day be what we call Europe; its learning and its religion would have perished. As it was, for many hundred years, with Britain hardly civilized, Spain lost and Italy distracted, Gaul remained to the dose of the Dark Ages• the one intact remnant of Meanwhile there had been proceeding in Gaul itself a transformation in the nature of political authority which was destined to have wide-reaching effects. The spirit of the municipalities, organized and aided by the bishops, had restored a conception of national unity, and the Frankish kings were at the head of that unity, the nominal centres from which a political power, debased but still Roman, pro ceeded. These Icings were manifestly unequal even to the moderate task of governing the decline of civilization. The great landowners who formed by this time an intimate mixture of Roman and German families grew more and more important as communications became more difficult. Chief among these land-owning families was one which had acquired an heredi tary position of predominance in the palace. This family had originated in a Roman noble of the territory of Narbonne, nearly 300 years before, but as was the case with nearly every other great Roman territorial family of Gaul, there had been continual intermarriage with families of German-stock, and prior to the Mohammedan invasion of Spain this family is found having its principal seat in that one of its many estates which lay in the eastern of Gaul in the boundary of German-speaking ter ritory. It was therefore, in the language of the time, an Austrasian family, for the French monarchy was roughly divided into Neustrian or Western and Austrasian or Eastern, though these divisions did not correspond to anything in race or language, but were convenient categories in which to reckon the topography of the scattered estates. This family was al ready virtually ruling in the place of the king when the great head of it, Charles, led the combined Gallic forces against the Moham medan invaders who had passed the Pyrenees in 732. This horde of Asiatics, crossing various parts of the chain of mountains but •proceeding mainly by the middle road of the Imus Pyrze flans, sacked the cities of southern Gaul, were turned northward by the resistance of Tou louse, passed through Poitiers and were march ing upon Tours and the north when Charles Martel (Charles the Hammer) met them on the plateau of Dissay about half-way between the two towns. Their force was completely de stroyed and Europe was saved. The son of Charles, Pepin, was still more patently the head of the state, though for several years he refused to accept the crown; and it is under him that Gaul appears as the protector of the Papacy, an institution which French military power was to support continuously for the next 500 years. It was only at the call of the Gallic municipalities and the hierarchy, but also by the direct sanction of the Pope that Pepin in 752 accepted the crown. He died in 768, leaving, as was so constantly the barbaric custom of the time, political authority divided between his two sons Charles and Carloman; the latter died in 771, and Charles, now 29 years old, became the sole ruler of the great territory which was now the only un broken piece of the ancient empire and the only one subject to any sort of central au thority; around it upon all sides, in Britain, in the German Marches, in the southern valleys of the Pyrenees and of the Asturias, in north ern and central Italy, was a confused mass of petty lordships and beyond that again the ex ternal belt of enemies of the Christian faith and Christian civilization, the savages of Scandinavia and of central Germany, the Mohamtnedan power of the South. The great Charles, therefore, whose title in history is Charlemagne, stood upon the defensive, as it were, throughout his long and glorious life, holding 'an island of Christendom against the pressure of these external forces. His de fense was successful and that long respite per mitted Christendom to accumulate just so much strength as was sufficient in the next century to repel, though hardly to expel, the final as sault of the anti-Christian power.