Читать книгу The Empire and the Papacy, 918-1273. Investiture Contest, Crusades & The Famous Conflicts онлайн

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The revolution of 987 was easily accomplished, because the old order was so nearly dead. It involved no striking change in form. The Capetian kings posed as the lawful successors of the Carolingians: they had the same conceptions of sovereignty, and followed the same principles of government. ⁴⁶ Yet those are not far wrong who regard the accession of Hugh as the starting-point of all later French history. It is easy to exaggerate the nature of the change. It is unsafe to make the change of dynasty a triumph of one race over another. It has been the fashion to say that, with the last of the Carolingians, disappear the last of the Teutonic conquerors of Gaul, and that their power had passed on to the Romanised Celts whom they had ruled so long. But there is no scrap of evidence to prove that the later Carolings were different in tongue, ideas, or policy from the Robertian house. There was no real national feeling in the tenth century, and, if there were, no proof that the one house was more national than the other. Nevertheless, the passing away of the line of Charles the Great does complete the process which the Treaty of Verdun had begun. The Capetian king had a limited localised power, a power that in due course could become national; and if he looked back, like the Carolings, to the traditions of imperial monarchy and order, he had no temptation to look back, as the Carolings were bound to look back, to the imperial ideas of universal dominion. He had no claim to rule beyond the limits ascribed to the West Frankish kingdom in the Treaty of Verdun. He was king of the French, the new Romance people that had grown up as the result of the amalgamation of conquering Frank and conquered Roman. He spoke the infant French tongue; his ambitions were limited to French soil; he represented the new nationality that soon began to take a foremost place amidst all the nations of Europe. But the triumph of the Capetian was not even in anticipation a simple national triumph. It was only in after ages, when France had become great, that she could look back and see in his accession the beginnings of her separate national monarchy. Personally, Hugh Capet was doubtless, like Harold of England some two generations later, an embodiment of the new national character and energy. But, less fortunate than Harold, he had time enough to live to show how powerless was a national hero, amidst an order of society in which the national ideal could have no place. He was rather the mighty feudatory, raised by his own order to a position of pre-eminence to represent the predominance of feudal ideas. The Carolings had fallen, not because of their own weakness, and still less by reason of any want of sympathy between them and the French nation. They were pushed out of power because France had become so fully feudalised that there was no room for an authority that had no solid basis of feudal support. France had become divided among a series of great fiefs. None of these fiefs fell to the ruling family, which was thus, as the result of the preponderance of the feudal principle, deprived of revenue, army, lands, and reputation. Hugh Capet inherited all that had kept the Carolingian power alive so long; but in addition to that he could supplement the theoretical claims of monarchy by right divine, by the practical arguments drawn from the possession of one of the strongest fiefs. Thus the new dynasty saved the monarchy by strengthening it with a great fief. No doubt the feudatories acted unwisely in having a king at all. But a nominal monarchy was part of the feudal system, and the barons could console themselves by believing that in becoming king of the French, Hugh still remained one of themselves. He was not surrounded with the mystic reverence due to the descendants of Charlemagne. As Harold, in becoming king of the English, did not cease to be earl of the West Saxons, so Hugh, in ascending the French throne, was still in all essentials the duke of the French. Harold and Hugh alike found but a questioning obedience in the great earls and counts, who looked upon the upstart kings as their equals. The Norman Conquest destroyed Harold before it could be early demonstrated what a long step in the direction of feudalism was made by his accession. Hugh Capet and his successors had time to bear the full brunt of the feudal shock. The most powerful of dukes proved the weakest of kings. It was only gradually that the ceremonial centre, round which the cumbrous fabric of French feudalism revolved, became the real heart of French national life. Yet, even in the feeble reigns of the first four Capetian kings, it is plain that France had begun a new existence. The history of the Carolingians is a history of decline. The history of the Capetians is a story of progress. While beyond the Rhine and Alps the continuance of the imperial theory choked the growth of German and Italian national life, the disappearance of these remnants of the past proved a blessing to Gaul. The history of modern Europe is the history of the development of nationalities. That history may be said in a sense to begin with the establishment of the first of an unbroken dynasty of national kings over what was destined to become one of the greatest of modern nations.