took from the altar a golden crown, and with his own hands placed it on the head of Lewis. By this he meant to show that he did not believe the empire to depend on the pope's will, but considered it to be given to himself and his successors by God alone.
CHAPTER V: DECAY OF CHARLES THE GREAT'S EMPIRE (AD 814-887)
were known to be wealthy. They made fortified camps, often on the islands of the great rivers, and did all the mischief they could within a large circle around them. These Northmen were bitter enemies of Christianity, and many of them had lost their homes because they or their fathers would not be converted at
Charlemagne's bidding; so that they had a special pleasure in turning their fury against churches and monasteries. Wherever they came, the monks ran off and tried to save themselves, leaving their wealth as a prey to the strangers. People were afraid to till the land, lest these enemies should destroy the fruits of their labours.
Famines became common; wolves were allowed to multiply and to prey without check; and such were the distress and fear caused by the
invaders, that a prayer for the deliverance "from the fury of the Northmen" was added to the service-books of the Frankish Church.
Another set of enemies were the Mahometan Saracens, who got possession of the great islands of the Mediterranean and laid waste its coasts. It is said that some of them sailed up the Tiber and carried off the altar which covered the body of St. Peter. One party of Saracens settled on the banks of a river about halfway between
Rome and Naples; others in the neighbourhood of Nice, /and on that 183 part of the Alps which is now called the Great St. Bernard; and they
robbed pilgrims and merchants, whom they made to pay dearly for being let off with their lives.
Europe also suffered much from the Hungarians, a very rude, heathen people, who about the year 900 poured into it from Asia. We are told that they hardly looked human, that they lived like beasts, that they ate men's flesh and drank their blood. They rode on small active horses, so that the heavy-armed cavalry of the Franks could not overtake them; and if they ran away before their enemies, they used to stop from time to time, and let fly their arrows backwards.
From the Elbe to the very south of Italy these barbarians filled Europe with bloodshed and with terror.
The Northmen at length made themselves so much feared in France, that King Charles III, who was called the Simple, gave up to them, in 911, a part of his kingdom, which from them got the name of
Normandy. There they settled down to a very different sort of life from their old habits of piracy and plunder, so that before long the Normans were ahead of all the other inhabitants of France; and from Normandy, as I need hardly say, it was that William the Conqueror and his warriors came to gain possession of England.
The princes of Charles the Great's family, by their quarrels, broke up his empire altogether; and nobody had anything like the power of an emperor until Otho I, who became king of Germany in 936, and was crowned emperor at Rome in 962.
/CHAPTER VI: STATE OF THE PAPACY (AD 891-1046) 184 All this time the papacy was in a very sad condition. Popes were set
up and put down continually, and some of them were put to death by their enemies. The body of one pope named Formosus, after it had been some years in the grave, was taken up by order of one of his successors (Stephen VI),was dressed out in the full robes of office, and placed in the papal chair; and then the dead pope was tried and condemned for some offence against the laws of the Church. It was declared that the clergy whom he had ordained were not to be reckoned as clergy; his corpse was stripped of the papal robes; the fingers which he had been accustomed to raise in blessing were cut off; and the body, after having been dragged about the city, was thrown into the Tiber (AD 896).
Otho the Great, who has been mentioned as emperor, turned out a young pope, John XII, who was charged with all sorts of bad conduct (AD 963); and that emperor's grandson, Otho III, put in two popes, one after another (AD 996, 999). The second of these popes was a very learned and clever Frenchman, named Gerbert, who as pope took the name of Sylvester II. He had studied under the Arabs in Spain (for in some kinds of learning the Arabs were then far beyond the Christians); and it was he who first taught Christians to use the Arabic figures (such as 1, 2, and 3) instead of the Roman letters or figures (such as I, II, and III). He also made a famous clock; and on account of his skill in such things people supposed him to be a sorcerer, and told strange stories about him. Thus it is said that
he made a brazen head, which answered "Yes" and "No" to questions.
Gerbert asked his head /where he should die, and supposed from the 185 answer that it was to be in the city of Jerusalem. But one day as he
was at service in one of the Roman churches which is called "Holy Cross in Jerusalem," he was taken very ill; and then he understood that that church was the Jerusalem in which he was to die. We need not believe such stories; but yet it is well to know about them, because they show what people were disposed to believe in the time when the stories were made.
The troubles of the papacy continued, and at one time there were no fewer than three popes, each of whom had one of the three chief churches of Rome, and gave himself out for the only true pope. But this state of things was such a scandal that the emperor, Henry III, was invited from Germany to put an end to it, and for this purpose he held a council at Sutri, not far from Rome, in 1046. Two of the popes were set aside, and the third, Gregory VI, who was the best of the three, was drawn to confess that he had given money to get his office, because he wished to use the power of the papacy to bring about some kind of reform. But on this he was told that he had been guilty of simony--a sin which takes its name from Simon the
sorcerer, in the Acts of the Apostles (ch viii.), and which means the buying of spiritual things with money. This had never struck Gregory before; but when told of it by the council he had no choice but to lay aside his papal robes, and the emperor put one of his own German bishops into the papacy.
CHAPTER VII: MISSIONS OF THE NINTH AND TENTH CENTURIES