His reign affords a striking contrast to that of all his predecessors of the Merovingian dynasty,—­which reigned from the immediate destruction of the Roman Empire.  The Merovingian princes, with the exception of Clovis and a few others, were mere barbarians, although converted to a nominal Christianity.  Some of them were monsters, and others were idiots.  Clotaire burned to death his own son and wife and daughters.  Fredegunde armed her assassins with poisoned daggers.  “Thirteen sovereigns reigned over the Franks in one hundred and fourteen years, only two of whom attained to man’s estate, and not one to the full development of intellectual powers.  There was scarcely one who did not live in a state of perpetual intoxication, or who did not rival Sardanapalus in effeminacy, and Commodus in cruelty.”  As these sovereigns were good churchmen, their iniquities were glossed over by Gregory of Tours.  In his annals they may pass for saints, but history consigns them to an infamous immortality.

It is difficult to conceive a more dreary and dismal state of society than existed in France, and in fact over all Europe, when Charlemagne began to reign.  The Roman Empire was in ruins, except in the East, where the Greek emperors reigned at Constantinople.  The western provinces were ruled by independent barbaric kings.  There was no central authority, although there was an attempt of the popes to revive it,—­a spiritual rather than a temporal power; a theocracy whose foundation was secured by Leo the Great when he established the jus divinum principle,—­that he was the successor of Peter, to whom were given the keys of heaven and hell.  If there was an interesting feature in the times it was this spiritual authority exercised by the bishops of Rome:  the most useful and beneficent considering the evils which prevailed,—­the reign of brute force.  The barbaric chieftains yielded a partial homage to this spiritual power, and it was some check on their rapacity of violence.  It is mournful to think that so little of the ancient civilization remained in the eighth century.  Its eclipse was total.  The shadows of a dark and long night of superstition and ignorance spread over Europe.  Law was silenced by the sword.  Justinian’s glorious legacy was already forgotten.  The old mechanism which had kept society together in the fifth century was worn out, broken, rejected.  There was no literature, no philosophy, no poetry, no history, and no art.  Even the clergy had become ignorant, superstitious, and idle.  Forms had taken the place of faith.  No great theologians had arisen since Saint Augustine.  The piety of the age hid itself in monasteries; and these monasteries were as funereal as society itself.  Men despaired of the world, and retreated from it to sing mournful songs.  The architecture of the age expressed the sentiments of the age, and was heavy, gloomy, and monotonous.  “The barbarians ruthlessly marched over the ruins of cities and palaces,