Justified True Belief

(●) The Frankish king who made Christendom a political fact, and whose sword left the church a question it is still answering. + There was a grown man in the eighth century who kept wax tablets in his bed, under the pillow, so that when he woke in the night he could practise forming his letters. He never really got the hang of it. His biographer, who loved him, put the failure in the book anyway: he had started too late in life, and it came to nothing. That man ruled most of western Europe. Charles the Great, king of the Franks from 768 and emperor from Christmas Day 800, is where the church and the state in the West fused into a single thing and got a name for it. Before him there were Christian kingdoms; after him there was Christendom, one people under one baptism and one ruler who believed God would hold him accountable for their souls. Nearly everything that follows in Western history, the Holy Roman Empire, the long quarrel between popes and emperors, the very idea of a Christian civilization with borders, runs back through his reign. So does the library. The oldest surviving copy of most Latin authors you can name is a book his schools ordered copied, in a script his scribes invented, which is why the lower case letters on this screen look the way they do. He is also the hardest case on the shelf. The same reign that saved the books made refusing baptism a capital offence in Saxony, and his own annals, the year by year record kept at his court by men who admired him, set the number of Saxons beheaded in a single day at four and a half thousand. The most interesting thing about that is not that later Christians condemned it. It is that his own teacher did, while he was still alive to read it. One small honesty about the dates in the title. The day is reasonably well attested: ninth-century monks at Lorsch kept his birthday on 2 April. The year is not settled and probably cannot be. Einhard says he died in 814 in his seventy-second year, which points back to 742, and the epitaph on his tomb says seventy. A set of annals from his own century puts the birth in 747, and Matthias Becher argued in 1992 that those annalists began their year at Easter, which would move it to 748. Serious reference works still print all three. So 747 here is a convention rather than a fact, and the "c." on every date is doing real work.

(●) c. 747 AD: He was born to a household that had just taken a crown it did not inherit. + His father Pepin was mayor of the palace, which sounds like a butler and meant the opposite: the mayors were the men who actually governed the Franks while the last Merovingian kings, the old royal line, sat on the throne and signed things. Everyone at court could see the arrangement for what it was. The trouble was that taking the crown off a living king is theft unless somebody whose word carries beyond the kingdom says otherwise, and so in 751 Pepin sent a question to Pope Zacharias, asking in effect whether the man who holds the power ought to hold the title. The answer he wanted came back. The last Merovingian was tonsured, which meant having the crown of his head shaved bare in the manner of a monk, a public and fairly permanent way of announcing that a man was finished with the world, and he was put in a monastery. Pepin was made king. Three years later Pope Stephen II crossed the Alps in person and anointed Pepin and his two sons with oil at the abbey of Saint-Denis. Charles was perhaps six or seven years old, and had just been made holy by a pope in front of the Frankish nobility. Of the childhood itself there is nothing. Einhard, who wrote the life within about fifteen years of his death, opens his account by saying that it would be folly to write a word about Charles’ birth and infancy, because nothing had ever been written on the subject and there was no one left alive who knew. So the man who is better documented than any other layman of the early Middle Ages has a completely blank first twenty years.

(●) 768 AD: At about twenty he inherited half a kingdom, and three years later he had all of it. + Pepin died on 24 September 768 of what his century called dropsy, the old name for the swelling that comes when fluid collects in the body and will not drain. Within a month, on 9 October, the Franks in general assembly made Charles and his younger brother Carloman kings together, on condition that they split the kingdom down the middle. Two kings, one people, and no obvious way of telling whose word won when they disagreed. Einhard, who is loyal to the point of discretion, says only that peace between the brothers was kept with the greatest difficulty, and that some men at Carloman’s court were actively trying to start a war between them. In December 771 Carloman died of illness after a little more than three years as king. His widow Gerberga did not wait to see what her brother-in-law would do. She took her small sons and her leading supporters and fled over the Alps to Desiderius, king of the Lombards, and Charles was elected king of all the Franks. There is a piece of family wreckage from these years that Einhard reports and will not explain. At his mother Bertrada’s urging, Charles married a daughter of that same Lombard king, and then sent her home within the year "for some reason unknown." It was the only quarrel he and his mother ever had. Bertrada lived on in his house in great honour, he buried her with pomp beside his father, and the young woman’s name has not even come down to us with certainty.

(●) 772 AD: He cut down the Saxons’ holy pillar and began a war that ran for thirty-three years. + The Saxons lived across an open frontier from the Franks, north and east of the Rhine, in a country with no king, no towns worth the name, and a religion of sacred groves and springs. In 772 Charles took the hill fort at Eresburg and destroyed the Irminsul, a great wooden pillar the Saxons held sacred, and carried off the gold and silver around it. His court annals record it without a flicker. What followed was the longest and ugliest war of his life. Einhard, a Frank writing for Franks, calls the Saxons a fierce people given to the worship of devils and hostile to our religion, and says no war the Franks ever fought was carried on with such persistence and bitterness. The pattern repeated for a generation: the Saxons were beaten, gave hostages, accepted baptism, and then rose again the moment the Frankish army went home, so often that Einhard says it is hard to say which came easier to them, making the promise or breaking it. From the Saxon side the same facts look different. The baptism was the surrender term, and the tithe that came with it, the tenth of a household’s crop and livestock owed to the church, was a tax on a conquered people collected by the men who had conquered them. In 782 a Frankish force was destroyed in the Süntel hills. Charles came north fast, the Saxons handed over the men held responsible, and the Royal Frankish Annals, the court’s own chronicle, record the number executed at Verden on the river Aller in a single day: four thousand five hundred. Three years later the Saxon war leader Widukind came in, was baptized at Attigny, and Charles stood as his godfather. The war still had nearly twenty years to run. It ended in 804, when he deported ten thousand Saxons with their wives and children and scattered them through Gaul and Germany, and the terms of peace were the renunciation of their old religion, the acceptance of the Christian sacraments, and union with the Franks to form one people.

(●) 774 AD: He took the Lombard crown and made himself the pope’s protector. + Pope Hadrian I asked for help against the Lombards, whose kingdom sat between Rome and the Alps and whose king was sheltering Charles’ nephews. Charles crossed the mountains and sat down in front of Pavia, the Lombard capital, until the city gave in. Then, instead of leaving a friendly Lombard on the throne and going home, he took the title king of the Lombards for himself and sent the defeated Desiderius to a monastery for life. The papal territories were restored and enlarged, and the Franks became the standing military guarantee of the bishop of Rome. That arrangement, a northern king who protects the papacy and expects a say in return, is the political engine of the next five centuries. Not everything worked. In 778 he marched into Spain, achieved little, and on the way home through the Pyrenees his rear guard was ambushed in a narrow pass and cut down to the last man. Einhard names the dead: Eggihard the steward, Anselm the count of the palace, and Roland, governor of the March of Brittany. Three centuries later that small disaster became the Song of Roland, the first masterpiece of French literature, in which the Basque raiders have turned into a Saracen army and a local defeat has become a holy war. The rest of it went his way, and mostly at somebody else’s expense. Tassilo, duke of Bavaria, was summoned, tried and put in a monastery in 788, and Bavaria was handed over to counts who answered to the king. Then came the Avars, a people of horsemen out of the eastern steppe who had spent generations taking tribute and plunder from their neighbours and keeping it in one place. In 795 a raiding column sent by Eric, duke of Friuli, broke into the Ring, the fortified camp of the Avars on the Hungarian plain, and the next summer Charles’ son Pepin went back and finished the work. The accumulated plunder of two centuries of raiding came back to Aachen in carts. By the end Einhard could say that the kingdom Charles received from his father had more than doubled. Word of him travelled: Harun al-Rashid, caliph in Baghdad, sent him gifts, and when Charles asked for an elephant, the caliph sent the only one he had.

(●) 782 AD: He hired a Northumbrian schoolmaster, and the schools that followed saved the books of the ancient world. + He met Alcuin of York at Parma in 781, on the road back from Italy, and talked him into coming north. Alcuin arrived at court the following year, and for the next fourteen years the most learned man in Europe ran a school for the king, the king’s children, and the young men being trained for bishoprics and counties. Charles put himself in the class. Peter of Pisa, an elderly deacon, taught him grammar; Alcuin taught him rhetoric, logic and above all astronomy, and Einhard says he learned to reckon and would track the movements of the heavenly bodies with a close and curious attention. He spoke Latin as easily as Frankish and could follow Greek better than he could speak it. He simply could not write, which is what the tablets under the pillow were for. What came out of that school was not private self-improvement. In 789 the Admonitio Generalis, the general admonition, went out to the whole kingdom: eighty-two chapters ordering bishops to preach, priests to know what the words of the mass mean, and schools to be kept where boys could learn to read. A letter to Abbot Baugulf of Fulda told the monasteries that study was owed to God and not optional (T2, T3). And in the scriptoria, the copying rooms, the scribes worked out a new hand: small, round, evenly spaced letters with gaps between the words and capitals to start a sentence. Caroline minuscule, it is called, and it is the direct ancestor of the alphabet you are reading now.

(●) 800 AD: On Christmas Day in Rome a pope put a crown on his head, and the West had an emperor again. + In April 799 Pope Leo III was attacked in the streets of Rome during a procession by men loyal to the family of his predecessor. Einhard says they tore out his eyes and cut out his tongue. He was seeing and speaking again soon afterwards, so whatever was actually done to him in the street that day, it did not take. The Romans who wanted him gone then tried the other method and accused him of serious crimes, and Leo fled north to Charles at Paderborn, in the middle of the Saxon country, to ask for help. Charles went to Rome, spent the winter there sorting out the accusations, and on 23 December Leo cleared himself by oath, since no one on earth had the standing to try a pope. Two days later, at mass in St Peter’s on Christmas morning, Leo set a crown on Charles’ head and the congregation acclaimed him emperor and Augustus, the title the rulers of Rome had carried since the first of them, and which no one in the West had carried for more than three hundred years. Then comes the strangest sentence in Einhard’s book. Charles, he says, so disliked the imperial titles that he declared he would not have set foot in the church that day, feast or no feast, if he had known what the pope intended. Historians have argued about that line for two centuries and have not settled it. It may be modesty written in after the fact. It may be a signal aimed at Constantinople, where there was already an emperor and where the Byzantines regarded the whole business as theft. Or it may be the plainest reading of the three, that Charles wanted the title and hated the way he got it: from a pope’s hands, in a pope’s church, in front of a Roman crowd. A thing handed to you is a gift, and a gift, by its nature, is the kind of thing that can be withheld next time. The eastern court came round eventually and recognized him in 812. The question of who had given whom what on that Christmas morning was still being fought over in the twelfth century.

(●) 814 AD: He crowned his own son, and died seven days into a fever at Aachen. + In 813, old and in poor health, he called an assembly of the leading men of the kingdom at Aachen and made his one surviving legitimate son, Louis, co-emperor. He did not send for a pope. He took the diadem, the imperial crown itself, in his own hands and set it on his son’s head, and that was his answer to the question Christmas 800 had raised, given quietly, in front of the men whose opinion mattered, and without a word of argument. Then he went hunting, as he always did in the autumn, and came back to Aachen at the start of November. In January he caught a fever and took to his bed. He prescribed himself the treatment he always used, which was to stop eating. Then pleurisy set in, an inflammation of the lining around the lungs that turns every breath into something a man has to decide to take. He kept fasting anyway. He died on 28 January 814, on the seventh day of his illness, at nine in the morning, having received communion, and was buried the same day in the church he had built, under a gilded arch with an inscription calling him the great and orthodox emperor. The will he had meant to make was begun too late and never finished. What he had done, three years before, was divide his treasure in front of witnesses. Two thirds of it went into twenty-one boxes, each labelled with the name of one of the archbishoprics of his empire, to be given away as alms by his heirs. A man who had spent forty-six years acquiring things spent one of his last working out how to give most of them away.

What He Taught

(T1) A ruler will answer to God for whether his people live as Christians. + Think of a landlord who is legally on the hook for the wiring in every flat he owns. He did not install it, he cannot be in all the buildings at once, and if a fire starts at three in the morning it is still his name on the summons. That is roughly how Charles understood his job, except that the thing he could be summoned about was the eternal state of several million people. He was not a theologian and he did not write a treatise. He wrote laws, and the laws say it plainly. In 802 he sent out a capitulary, one of the numbered royal ordinances issued at the great assemblies, requiring every man in the kingdom over the age of twelve, clergy and laity alike, to swear fidelity to him as emperor. Then he had it announced publicly that the oath meant far more than people had assumed. It did not merely mean not killing him and not letting his enemies in. It meant that each man would strive, as far as he knew how, to live in the holy service of God, because the emperor could not give every individual the necessary care and discipline himself. To make this more than a pious sentence he invented an inspectorate. The missi dominici, "those sent by the lord," rode in pairs, a bishop and a count together, through districts where neither of them held land, with authority to hear complaints against the local counts and to send anything they could not fix straight to him. The same machinery turns up in unglamorous places. At Frankfurt in 794 he fixed maximum prices for oats, barley, rye and wheat in a famine year, and ordered every holder of a royal benefice, meaning an estate the king had granted a man for as long as he served well, to see to it that no serf on that land died of hunger. Later Christian thinking about politics would pull the two swords apart again, and with good reason. The phrase is the medieval one: two blades, the church’s authority and the state’s, meant to be carried in two different hands. Here they are in one hand, and the hand is his.

(Q) "That no one shall presume to rob or do any injury fraudulently to the churches of God or widows or orphans or pilgrims; for the lord emperor himself, after God and His saints, has constituted himself their protector and defender." + Source: Charlemagne, General Capitulary of the Missi (802), chapter 5 (Munro translation). The clause sits in the middle of the list of things the new imperial oath was held to contain, between a ban on hiding or withholding the emperor’s serfs and lands and a ban on wasting a royal benefice. Widows, orphans and pilgrims are the three groups in a medieval kingdom with no kin nearby to avenge them, which is exactly why they are named.

(T2) Learning is owed to God, and a man who cannot read cannot obey well. + Letters kept arriving at court from the monasteries, telling the king that the brothers there were praying for him. He noticed something about them that most rulers would have let pass. The feeling in the letters was right and the Latin was terrible. Anyone who has read a heartfelt note riddled with mistakes knows the small embarrassment of it. Charles drew a much larger conclusion, and wrote it out in a circular letter to Abbot Baugulf of Fulda, one of the great monasteries of Germany, with instructions to copy it to every bishop and every house in the kingdom. If the writing is this poor, he reasoned, what is the reading like? These are men whose whole business is Scripture, a book that comes in a foreign language and is full of figures of speech, images and turns of phrase that a careless reader will simply misunderstand. A monk who cannot construe a Latin sentence is not a humble monk. He is a man handling something dangerous without knowing how. So the letter tells them to study, not for accomplishment, but so that they may more easily and more correctly get at the meaning of the Scriptures. It is the founding document of what historians call the Carolingian renaissance, and its argument is not that learning is noble. It is that ignorance is a way of getting God wrong.

(Q) "For although correct conduct may be better than knowledge, nevertheless knowledge precedes conduct." + Source: Charlemagne, letter to Abbot Baugulf of Fulda, known as De litteris colendis, "on the cultivation of letters," c. 780 to 800 (Munro translation). The concession in the first half is deliberate. He is not claiming that the learned monk is the better Christian. He is claiming that you cannot do what you do not understand, so the order runs one way: know first, then act.

(T3) An error in a book becomes an error in a soul, so the books have to be corrected. + Copy a recipe by hand, have someone copy your copy, and have a third person copy that, and by the fourth generation the salt has doubled and a step has gone missing. Now do it for four hundred years, with the Bible, in a language most of the copyists only half know, and you have the situation Charles inherited. Churches twenty miles apart were reading different words at mass, chanting different tunes, and working from Bibles that disagreed. His answer was a programme the scholars around him called correctio, correction. Alcuin, at Tours, went through the Latin Bible and produced a cleaned-up text of Jerome’s Vulgate, the fourth-century translation that was the Bible of the West. Paul the Deacon was commissioned to assemble a homiliary, a fixed set of readings from the fathers arranged through the church year, so that a village priest with no library still had Augustine and Gregory to read aloud. Singers were sent from Rome to teach the Roman chant. Standard copies were kept at court and sent out to be copied again. Underneath all of it is one conviction, and it is a surprisingly modern one: that textual accuracy is a spiritual matter. A scribe who nods off and drops a line is not committing a clerical error. He is handing a priest the wrong words to say to God, and the priest will say them for forty years.

(Q) "And we all know well that, although errors of speech are dangerous, far more dangerous are errors of the understanding." + Source: Charlemagne, letter to Abbot Baugulf of Fulda (De litteris colendis), c. 780 to 800 (Munro translation). The sentence comes directly after his account of the badly written letters from the monasteries. He has just admitted that bad grammar is only a symptom, and then names the disease he is actually afraid of.

(T4) A conquered people may be ordered to the baptismal font. + There is no honest way to soften this, so it stands as flatly as he set it down. Around 785, in the middle of the Saxon war, he issued the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, the ordinance for the districts of Saxony. It is a short law and most of it carries the death penalty. Death for breaking into a church and robbing or burning it. Death for killing a bishop, priest or deacon. Death for burning a supposed witch and eating her flesh. Death for burning a corpse in the pagan manner. Death for sacrificing a human being to a demon. And death for being a Saxon who hides himself away unbaptized because he would rather stay a pagan. Lesser fines follow for making vows at springs, trees and groves, and a tithe on everyone’s property and labour, noble, free and freedman alike, is imposed in the same document that imposes the faith. It is worth being precise about what this is and is not. It is not a law for converting the world; it is a law for a specific conquered province in open revolt, where Charles plainly regarded pagan rites as treason under another name, which is why the article on unbaptized Saxons sits two articles away from the one on plotting with pagans against Christians. That explains the logic. It does not make it right, and he came to think so himself, at least in part: the Saxon capitulary of 797 went back over the same ground and replaced many of the death sentences with fines. There is one more thing worth noticing, and it changes the shape of the whole complaint. The objection to this law was not invented later. It was made in his own lifetime, in his own household, by the man he had hired to teach him.

(Q) "If any one of the race of the Saxons hereafter concealed among them shall have wished to hide himself unbaptized, and shall have scorned to come to baptism and shall have wished to remain a pagan, let him be punished by death." + Source: Charlemagne, Capitulary for Saxony (Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae), c. 785, chapter 8 (Munro translation). Chapter 14 of the same law provides that a man who has committed one of these capital crimes in secret, and comes of his own accord to a priest and confesses and is willing to do penance, is to be spared on the priest’s testimony. The escape clause runs through the confessional, which tells you exactly how the law understood itself.

(Q) "While at table, he listened to reading or music. The subjects of the readings were the stories and deeds of olden time: he was fond, too, of St. Augustine’s books, and especially of the one entitled 'The City of God.'" + Source: Einhard, Life of Charlemagne 24 (Turner translation). Einhard was raised at the court from boyhood and wrote the life within about fifteen years of the emperor’s death, so this is a witness rather than a legend. Of all the books in the world, that one. Augustine wrote The City of God to explain that the earthly city and the City of God are not the same city, that Rome was never the kingdom of heaven, and that no empire, however Christian its emperor, is the thing Christians are waiting for. Charles had it read to him at dinner while he built the closest thing the West would have to a Christian empire for a thousand years. Whether he heard the warning in it is a fair question, and it is the question the rest of his afterlife turns on.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The church received him as a second David, and the West has been arguing about his crown ever since. + The scholars at his court gave each other nicknames from the Bible and from antiquity, and the name they gave the king was David. It was not flattery in the modern sense. It was a claim about what kind of thing his kingship was: an anointed ruler over a people covenanted to God, with the prophets at his elbow and the responsibility for the nation’s worship in his hands. Alcuin wrote to him in those terms for years, and the phrase that goes with it, imperium christianum, the Christian empire, is one Alcuin used of him. The political inheritance is enormous and double-edged. Every later Western coronation looks back to Christmas 800. The Holy Roman Empire, which lasted in one form or another until Francis II gave up the title in 1806 with Napoleon’s armies at the door, dated itself from him. In the year 1000 the emperor Otto III had the tomb at Aachen opened, wanting to see him. In 1165 Frederick Barbarossa, at war with the papacy, had Charles declared a saint by Paschal III, the rival claimant he had set up against the lawfully elected Alexander III, which is what an antipope is. Rome never ratified that canonization, though the cult at Aachen was quietly allowed to continue. And the question left on the table that Christmas morning was never really settled. A pope had crowned an emperor. Did that mean the pope conferred the empire, or merely acknowledged it? Charles gave his own answer in 813 by crowning Louis with his own hands and no pope in the building. Gregory VII, Innocent III, and the emperors who fought them gave other answers for the next four hundred years. The investiture controversy, which was the long fight over who put the ring and staff of office into a new bishop’s hands, a king or a churchman, and the two-swords debates, and the whole medieval quarrel between the church’s authority and the state’s, all of it begins in the room where Leo III was holding the crown.

(†) The books of the ancient world survive because his scribes copied them. + This is the least disputed thing about him and the easiest to underrate. Bernhard Bischoff spent a working lifetime cataloguing the manuscripts of the ninth century and counted roughly seven thousand books and fragments surviving from the continent in that single century, against something like five hundred from the whole of Merovingian Gaul before 750. Something had changed, and what changed was that a king ordered it. The consequence is that for most Latin authors, the oldest copy anyone has is Carolingian. Lucretius, Tacitus, much of Cicero, Caesar, Suetonius, Seneca: what we read is a Carolingian copy or a copy of one, and where the Carolingians did not copy an author, we mostly do not have him. The Christian inheritance travelled the same way, since the same scriptoria produced the corrected Vulgate, the fathers, the councils and the canon law that the medieval church would work from. There is a small delicious footnote. Six hundred years later the Italian humanists went hunting in monastery libraries for classical texts, found them in this clear round ninth-century hand, assumed it was how the Romans themselves had written, and called it littera antiqua, the ancient letter. They copied it. The printers copied them. The roman type on this screen is a Renaissance imitation of a Carolingian imitation of nothing in particular, and the schools that produced the hand grew into the cathedral schools, which grew into the universities.

(†) He treated the church’s doctrine as an emperor’s business, and both Rome and Constantinople felt it. + For sixty years the Greek church had been tearing itself apart over religious pictures. One party, the iconoclasts, literally the image-breakers, held that a painting of Christ or a saint was an idol and had them whitewashed, prised off walls and burned. The other held that honouring the picture honoured the person in it, the way a soldier’s widow kisses a photograph without confusing the paper for the man. In 787 the Greeks held a council at Nicaea that ended this first iconoclast controversy and restored the veneration of images: the bowing, the kissing, the candle set in front of an icon, all of it carefully distinguished from the worship that belongs to God alone. Then a poor Latin translation of the council’s decrees reached Francia, as the Frankish lands were called, and in that translation the Greeks appeared to be saying exactly what they had been at pains to deny, that images should be given the worship due to God. Charles had a long, learned and extremely sharp reply drawn up in his own name, the Opus Caroli regis contra synodum, the Work of King Charles against the Synod, written mostly by the Spanish-born bishop Theodulf of Orléans. Its position is a middle one: images are good for memory and ornament and must not be smashed, and they must not be adored either. The working copy survives with marks in the margin recording the king’s approval as it was read to him. At Frankfurt in 794 he presided over a council that condemned adoptionism, the Spanish teaching of Elipandus of Toledo and Felix of Urgell that Christ in his humanity was God’s Son by adoption rather than by nature, and rejected what the bad translation had led the Franks to think Nicaea had said about images. A king convened it, a king sat in it, and doctrine was settled there. The sharpest instance came at the end. A council at Aachen in 809 affirmed the filioque, the Latin phrase "and the Son" that the Western creed adds to the clause about the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father, and Charles asked Pope Leo III to make the addition universal. Leo said he agreed with the doctrine and would not alter the words of the creed, and had the creed engraved without the clause on two silver shields and set up in St Peter’s. Eastern and Western Christians still disagree about the clause itself, and the disagreement is a real one that neither side has conceded. What is not in dispute is the shape of the exchange: a lay ruler’s court pressed a change to the creed on a pope, and the pope declined.

(†) Where his own record goes wrong: he baptized at the point of the sword, and his own teacher wrote to tell him so. + It would be easy, and cheap, to convict him by the standards of a later century. There is no need. The case against the Saxon policy was made inside his own court, in his own lifetime, by men he had appointed, and he changed the law partly in response to it. - What the law said. Refusing baptism was a capital offence in Saxony under his own ordinance (T4), and the tithe fell on the newly conquered from the start. - What the sword did. Four and a half thousand Saxons beheaded at Verden in one day in 782, recorded not by his enemies but by his own court’s annals. - What Alcuin said. When the Avars were conquered in 796 and the same treatment was proposed for them, Alcuin wrote in alarm to Arno of Salzburg, who was to lead the mission, to the courtier Meginfrid, and to the king himself. Tithes, he wrote, are said to have destroyed the faith of the Saxons; be a preacher of godliness, not a collector of tithes. Had the light yoke of Christ been pressed on the Saxons half as hard as the tithe was collected from them, they might not have shrunk back from baptism at all. A new believer is an infant, he argued, fed on milk until he is strong enough for solid food. Teach them first and baptize them after, because washing a body whose mind has not been taught the faith does no good. The bishops who met on the Danube that same year ran the Avar mission on those terms, and the Saxon law was softened the year after. - What Scripture says. The commission is to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to observe everything Christ commanded (Matthew 28:19–20), and neither half of that is work an army can do for you. "So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ" (Romans 10:17), which is a description of how belief is actually produced, and threat is not on the list. When two of the disciples wanted to call fire down on a village that would not receive Jesus, he turned and rebuked them (Luke 9:54–55). And to the one man in the Gospels with the legal power to have him killed, Jesus said "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting" (John 18:36). A font a man is driven to at spear point does not make him a believer; it makes him a wet pagan with a grievance, which is roughly what the next twenty years of Saxon revolt demonstrated. - And at home. Einhard, who admired him, is visibly uncomfortable in two places: the string of concubines after his last wife died, and the grown daughters he refused to let marry anyone, kept at court because he said he could not do without their company, with rumours about them circulating that he pretended not to hear. The emperor who legislated Christian morals for a continent ran his own household by a different rule, and the man closest to him knew it. None of this cancels the schools, the corrected Bibles, the alms in twenty-one labelled boxes, or the protection of widows and orphans written into his oath. It sits beside them. He is the standing proof that a ruler can do the church enormous good and enormous harm with the same hand, and that the church is not to be trusted to notice the harm on its own; on this one, it was a schoolmaster from York who noticed.