Einhard's Life of Charlemagne : the Latin Text

DC 73.52 .67 1915 IMS "^L J. HALL & SON New & Second-hand Booksellers Trumpington Street, Cambridge CcnJ^jL^^ CtAytô^X^' C<yiJli>^ Digitized by the Internet Arciiive in 2011 witin funding from University of Toronto http://www.archive.org/details/einhardslifeofchOOeinli 1 NO 1^ r e B TLI D T 6 T I CO <5 Nf S fS ~ppO p/\ N T7 A D SC/^cncoA^\^^ o L L e c TAA o scnoA ofî;\>iî<^ry r-iiciiclf»eaV'pLebeTnrxi.dtrn exiûJLe-e^xrcnnfe- ciif^yrinujccn htxi fAetuytxcmeîx&n eratm - fn-re- Jnrn nofrruTn ilrrnjxjym filium xxiutn O ( r> 7 S SA CT) ,A O S C.A oo ci^ A K I A en- <:r>-NipoTeNS rem pf xremnc^df ^m fuppuccfepc or^lrn tiT crcficor; un I <7T?TH CXI rcu ur |-i It ci rh oJi eT~Ti axil cu m n cyfrrsLC^c^r' miTuD ft^rrzn-A- InxêmpLo etc pr^tfc-n caxu T \T:^noffsu4^fpu n fic^n fxiht m erra tu rprefenxân - pevdnm rtoftrum- PAGE OF A CAROLING IAN BOOK (written for Charlemagne's son Drogo) EINHARD'S LIFE OF CHARLEMAGNE THE LATIN TEXT EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTIONS AND NOTES, BY H. W. GARROD FELLOW AND TUTOR OF MERTON COLLEGE FORMERLY ASSISTANT TUTOR OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE AND R. B. MOWAT FELLOW AND ASSISTANT TUTOR OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE OXFORD * Unus quisque legens tanto citius spiritualiter intellegit quanto prius in litteratnrae magisterio plenius instructns fuerit.' Charlemagne. OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1915 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE BOMBAY HUMPHREY MILFORD M.A. PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY ^ of Mediae V PREFACE The primary object of this book is to satisfy the needs of students in this University reading for the Previous Examination in Modern History. Some of these are not finished Latin scholars ; and this will explain why the text has occasionally been annotated, or translated, where it would present little or no difficulty to students more familiar with Latin idiom or vocabulary. It is hoped, however, that the book may serve to introduce to a rather wider public a work which may fairly be called the literary masterpiece of the Middle Ages. Sections I-IV of the Introduction, together with the Text and the Notes upon the Prologues and chapters i-xi, xxi-xxvi, are the work of Mr. Garrod. Mr. Mowat is responsible for Section V of the Intro- duction, and for the Notes upon chapters xii-xx, xxvii-xxxiii. But either editor has revised the work of the other. In the preparation of the Text we owe much to the edition of Waitz (Waitz-Holder-Egger). In the Notes and Introductions we have tried to follow mediaeval rather than modern authorities. But a 2 s V PREFACE among modern books of which we have made use should be mentioned : Richter's Zeittafeln der deut- schen Geschichte im Mittelalter ; Lavisse's Histoire de France, ii. i ; Ranke's Kritik fydnkisch-dcutscher Reichsannalisten ; Waitz's Deutsche Verfassungsge- schichte iii ; the Lives of Charlemagne by Dr. Hodgkin and Mr. H. W. C. Davis ; and Hodgkin 's Italy and her Invaders, vii and viii. In Section IV of the In- troduction, and occasionally in the Notes, Traube's Einleitung in die lateinische Philologie des Mittelalter has been helpful. The Editors are much indebted to Mr. H. W. C. Davis who read this volume in proof and made valuable suggestions. They have also to thank the Committee of the New Palaeographical Society for permission to reproduce the facsimile which forms the frontispiece. The Editors have throughout elected to speak of ' Charlemagne ', and not of ' Charles the Great ' —to follow, that is, a tradition sanctioned by Milton and by Gibbon rather than a fashion certainly new and probably pedantic. They hope that they may be acquitted of any sinister design to obscure the essen- tially Teutonic character of the life and actions of Charlemagne. H. W. G. R. B. M. Oxford, February 1915. CONTENTS PAGE THE TEXT OF THE VITA KAROLI . vii INTRODUCTION xiii I. EiNHARD xiii II. The Good Faith of Einhard . xv III. Other Authorities for the Life of Charlemagne ..... xxx IV. German Culture in the Early Middle Ages ....... xxxii V. The Carolingian Empire : its Limits AND Administration . xiii TEXT I NOTES 39 Index of Places and Peoples . -79 Index of Personal Names . .81 ILLUSTRATIONS \ Page of a Carolingian Book . Frontispiece . at end The Empire of Charlemagne ^ — THE TEXT OF THE VITA KAROLI The Vita Karoli has been preserved to us in more than eighty MSS., of which no less than sixty were employed by G. H. Pertz, in his edition of 1829 (Mon. Germ. Hist., SS., ii, pp. 443 sqq.). Pertz's Apparatus Criticus is a magnificent monument of that kind of industry which, seeking no end save itself, conceives itself to have infinite rights and almost no duties. Its merciless proHxity called forth the sharp animadversion of P. Jaffe, who, in 1867, sweeping aside the whole of Pertz's sixty MSS., produced a text based upon a single authority, the excellent Paris MS., which he has the merit to have discovered (Bibl. Rer. Germ, iv, pp. 487 sqq.). In 1880 appeared the edition of Pertz-Waitz (now Pertz-Waitz- Holder-Egger, Hanover and Leipsic, 1911). Waitz employs some twenty MSS., most of them used already by Pertz, and some of them too hastily set aside by Jaffe. But his twenty MSS. end by being almost as tiresome as the sixty of Pertz. In one respect they are more so he employs for them a notation so complicated that his Apparatus is barely intelligible. Each MS. is denoted by at least two symbols, and a fair number by as many as three (e.g. A^^, B^^, &c.). The revision of Waitz by Holder-Egger adds little and takes nothing away. Waitz managed to persuade himself that the text of the Vita had become deeply depraved in the short interval between the date at which the work was composed and that at which our earliest MSS. of it were written (p. xvii, 191 1). It is true that there is a good deal of depraved spelling. It is true that we have many MSS. written by scribes who were careless, or ignorant, or both. It is also true that in one or two passages we have some reason to suspect trivial interpolations. Yet on the whole it would be hard to find a work dating from so early a period where we had so little room to doubt what the author himself wrote. And a proof of it is this : that between the ^ viii THE TEXT OF THE VITA KAROLI edition of Jaffe, based on a single MS., and that of Waitz, based on twenty, there is really no important difference. The fact is that there are at least half a dozen MSS. of the Vita, written within fifty years of Einhard's death, any one of which would, with a revised orthography, furnish an excellent working text. Waitz divides the MvSS. into three classes, which he calls ABC. The following facts supply the principle of this threefold classification : (i) The MSS. of Classes A and B lack the Preface to the Vita ; (2) The last two sentences in chap, xix are found in MSS. of the A and B Classes, but are absent from MSS. of the C Class ; (3) At chap, xviii, lines 22-3, the C Class MSS. have a whole clause not found in the texts of the other two classes (and offer for tres) quattuor ; (4) The MSS. of Class B differ from those of both the A and the C Class by a striking omission in chap. ix,fin. They want there the clause in which the death of Roland is mentioned ; (5) The B Class MSS. append to the Vita six elegiac couplets in honour of Einhard, written by one Gerwardus, Librarian to Charlemagne and to Louis the Pious. These facts undoubtedly point to the conclusion that all our MSS. are derived from three distinct copies, made some time in the early part of the ninth century. Our ideal should clearly be to restore, by a comparison of the readings of the MSS. of each class, the three lost copies that lie behind our texts. The pursuit of this ideal is the raison d'etre of Waltz's text, and affords the explanation of the extraordinary system of notation which he employs. But Waitz must be said to perish in the pursuit of an ideal which is, frankly, unattainable. The three classes * The verses are as follows : — Hos tibi versiculos ad laudem, maxime princeps, edidit aeternani memoriamque tuam Gerwardus supplex famulus, qui mente benigna egregium extoUit nomen ad astra tuuni. Iianc, prudens, gestam noris tu scribere, lector, Einhardum magni magnificum Karoli. — THE TEXT OF THE VITA KAROLI ix which he establishes—and they are real enough—have already, even in our earliest codices—become infinitely ' ' contaminated ; that is to say, the MSS. of each class have fused the tradition of their own with that of the other two classes. One or two MSS. of the A Class have the Preface, deriving it, no doubt, from some MS. of the C Class. Some MSS. of the C Class have the last sentences of chap. xix. Some MSS. of the B Class have not the verses of Gerwardus, or have only a part of them. Yet more serious is the fact that, where we are confronted with variant lections, it very rarely happens that the same reading is found in all, or even most, of the MSS.

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