Book I
THE DREAM OF WORLD DOMINION
From Charlemagne to Gutenberg (800–1500)
“I have often felt a bitter pang at the thought of the German people, so estimable as individuals and so wretched in the whole.”
—GOETHE
1
CHARLEMAGNE (768–814), one of the three or four rulers of stature among the Germans, was the first who envisioned a world empire—that boundless German dream that took hold of the Germans for a thousand years and that has again seized them today. It is this dream which time and again entices the imagination and the aspirations of the Germans to the high sea of thought, only to let them subsequently rest content with a few peoples cruelly subjugated.
Charlemagne seized primarily upon immediate objectives and thus met with more than usual success. Unwittingly, indeed against his will, he laid the fragmentary basis for German unity. Yet he always considered himself a Frank rather than a German, similar to Bismarck who, one thousand years later, always remained a Prussian.
This was possible only for a great character. The state of learning was still at a low ebb in the eighth century, and little knowledge about Charlemagne has been handed down; yet a few traits have indelibly impressed themselves upon posterity.
We see the mighty King of the Franks sitting there, learning to read. And having learned to read, trying his hand at a kind of German grammar. While his court in Aix-la-Chapelle strutted in elegant Latin, he had ancient German legends collected and German history written. Saint Boniface and other great lords neither spoke nor dined with anyone who departed in the slightest from the Church canon; but Charlemagne sent letters and presents to Harun-al-Rashid, not long after the Mohammedans had invaded France. If, in the course of his far-flung enterprises, he happened to have a day of leisure, he was in the habit of saying: “Let us undertake something memorable today, lest anyone reproach us for spending the day in idleness!” Here we witness a sense of responsibility and prestige unheard-of in any German before him. Words such as these endure in the memory of men longer than any battle, for they are universal and their human tone encourages successive generations to emulate such a man.
Charlemagne was tall, of robust and sturdy stature. He looked out into the world with wide-open eyes. His mood was generally cheerful. He liked to speak and he spoke well—in a clear voice that lacked volume. Despite his imperious nature, all accounts agree in describing him as amiable. No one knows exactly how many children he had, but between the age of sixty and seventy he still sired a daughter and three sons. His daughters he loved so greatly that he forbade them to marry in order to keep them with him. At the same time he gave them complete freedom in love, ultimately acknowledging their natural children as his grandchildren. For years he mourned the death of one beloved wife, who lost a magic ring. At Aix-la-Chapelle he used to sit for hours beside the pond in which the ring had disappeared.
The world of Charlemagne’s thoughts had a tangible beginning; at least it was set into motion by a crisis. When he wrested Italy from the Langobards, and even more a few years later, in 781, when he revisited the country under less strenuous circumstances, he was profoundly struck by the contrast between his own and his people’s lack of culture, and the monuments of the thousand-year-old culture he saw before him. Unlike the barbarians of our own day, Charlemagne recognized the intellectual superiority of a people, even though it might have succumbed to the force of arms. Nothing symbolizes the eternal German longing for the South more beautifully than the fact that this first Teutonic emperor had Italian chestnut and almond trees transplanted to his gardens in the North. But at the same time Charlemagne, who at forty had covered twelve thousand miles on horseback, threw himself with the passion of youth into the second, higher task—that of learning the vanquished people’s spirit and culture.
The first thing he did was to bring half a dozen of the outstanding scholars of literature and legend from Pisa and Parma across the Alps to his own court. There he gave them princely salaries and permitted them complete intellectual freedom. A character of such stature could dare things in the social field too which at that time seemed astonishing—elevating freedmen to high office, for example. He was, on the other hand, severe with the nobility, constantly sending out emissaries—always a clergyman and a secular official together—to supervise the barons on their estates, seeing to it that they did not ruin their tenants.
Charlemagne’s victory over the Lombards and Bavarians had been an easy one, but it took him thirty years to conquer the Saxons, and even then he succeeded for a short interval only. With true German premonition this powerful people, literally cut up into many tribes, was to resist the Franks and even more so Christianity in the name of which Charlemagne sought to conquer them. Here for the first time the two Germanys met on the field of battle, for the Saxons clung to their ancient faith with such fanaticism that they forbade the Christian faith on pain of death, while the Franks were determined to force Christ upon the Saxons with the sword. If on this occasion Charlemagne had forty-five hundred Saxons butchered at one stroke, even that was done by the conqueror in the name of the saints.
Yet this precipitated him into grave conflicts. Where were freedom and equality, the Saxons asked? Both had been promised them under the new faith. Once, when the captured Saxon duke Widukind was dining with his captor,—though each at a separate table,—he saw a few beggars sitting on the steps before them.
“I thought your Christ lived in the poor,” he mocked at the more fortunate. “And now I am to bend down before Him whom you leave lying in the dust?” Charlemagne flushed, the chronicle adds.
He was almost sixty when he became the principal figure in a symbolic gesture of world-historical significance. In response to a call for aid on the part of the sorely pressed Pope, Charlemagne marched on Rome, throwing the Pope’s enemies into confusion. There was to be a Christmas celebration for the Frankish noblemen in old St. Peter’s Church—a celebration the like of which had never before been seen in times of peace or without conquest.
But suddenly, as Charlemagne rose from prayer before the altar, the Pope reached for a secreted gold crown and placed it on the Teuton’s graying locks. A group of Roman knights, evidently in on the secret, shouted: “Hail Charles, the Augustus, crowned by God, Emperor of the Romans, hail!” Whereupon the Pope prostrated himself before Charlemagne, who in the words of his biographer remained silent because he was confused and taken aback. Subsequently he is supposed to have said that he would never have set foot in the church had he known what was in store for him. His political vision seems to have anticipated immediately conflicts with Byzantium. The Pope hastened to style the act solemnly “the transfer of the Roman emperorship from the Greeks to the Franks,” calling Charlemagne “the seventy-third emperor of the Fourth World Empire.” The civitas dei had been reborn in France.
Done on Christmas Day of the year 800. . . . In his own way the mightiest ruler of his time, who all his life had wisely been a friend of the Church, and who had subjugated three peoples, had been content with the world in his old age. And now the German King, at prayer on his knees in St. Peter’s, quite possibly in sincere devotion, was surprised in an almost grotesque scene by a crown that meant nothing less than the symbol of world power. Had the Pope resorted to this great symbol in the full knowledge of what its consequences might be? For five centuries to come, all the German rulers justified their Roman ambitions with Charlemagne’s coronation. What course, one may well ask, would German history have taken, had Charlemagne at this moment of surprise pushed aside the Pope’s hand and rejected the alien imperial crown, as had Caesar in the same city and in the same rôle? Perhaps only the name would have been different. Perhaps his successors, like those of Caesar, would have cloaked their power with the name of their master and we would today be using a word like Karl