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He who ordains the fate of kingdoms and the march of the centuries,
the all-powerful Disposer of events, having destroyed one extraordinary
image, that of the Romans, which had, it was true, feet of iron, or even feet
of clay, then raised up, among the Franks, the golden head of a second image,
equally remarkable, in the person of the illustrious Charlemagne.
---Notker
the Stammerer, monk of Saint Gall
(844)
Introduction
We have seen how Byzantine civilization grew out of the wreckage of the Roman
Empire. Furthermore, this civilization, centered at Constantinople,
drew extensively on the Greco-Roman tradition. From Greece
came Hellenistic culture and all that culture had to offer in terms of art,
architecture, philosophy, science and literature. From Rome
came the much more practical details of law and administration. It was
Justinian (c.482-565) who best represented this assimilation of Roman law.
And, of course, added to the Greco-Roman tradition was Christianity -- the
great unifying agent of the early Middle Ages both east and west. Islamic
civilization also benefited from the Greco-Roman tradition, especially in the
areas of Greek science and philosophy. Islamic scholars placed Aristotle on a
pedestal and called him simply, "The Philosopher." While Islam did
not call itself Christian, it did have a religion which was as persuasive in
the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa
and Spain as
Christianity was in Western Europe.
Between the 6th and 9th centuries, Byzantine and Islamic civilization flourished
-- the result was a material civilization which far outshone their western
neighbors. The west had to remake itself. In the wake of the demise of the Roman
Empire, European peasants, nobles and clergyman had to literally
remake their lives. Our image of this period in western history is one of
darkness. Greece
and Rome, even during its bad
times, always appears more brilliant than the early Middle Ages even its
peak. There appears to be little or no intellectual pursuit -- no creativity,
no innovation in the arts, the learning, no science.
Perhaps the metaphor of a Dark Ages is not that far from the truth.
One reason why this may be so is that most Europeans had other things on
their mind. As the urban life of Rome
gave way to the countryside, people became more closely attached to the land.
Their very survival depended upon it. These people needed security and
protection and these seemed to be the two words which best express the common
needs of the general population of Europe. Serfdom and
feudalism promised security and protection; however, feudalism contained
the seeds of its own destruction. What began as an attempt to restore social,
political, military and economic order, ended up producing nothing less than anarchy.
Before we turn to Charlemagne the foundation of the Frankish
Kingdom, we need to spend some
time discussing a few intellectual trends of the early Middle Ages. Our
discussion may shed some light on this rather dark age. Although the majority
of Europeans were busy reconstructing their lives -- trying to find
protection and security -- there were scholars who were desperately trying to
keep learning alive. As you might expect, these were Christian scholars. I
would like to suggest that these scholars were not that original in their
thinking. On the other hand, like St. Augustine
(354-430), they did help keep classical learning alive. The two individuals I
am about to mention retained a profound respect for the intellect of Greece
and Rome. At the same time, they were devout Christians. They were trying to
create a Christian culture which combined the Greco-Roman tradition with a
faith in Christianity and support of the Church.
Boethius
"The last of the Roman philosophers, and the first of the scholastic
theologians," Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c.475-524),
was a Roman statesman and philosopher, and was descended from a prominent
senatorial family. He studied philosophy, mathematics and poetry at Plato's Academy,
and through his studies at Athens
he gained the knowledge that later enabled him to translate Greek philosophic
writings into Latin. Soon after 500, he served the court of Theodoric (455-526), king of the Goths,
who ruled Italy.
In 510, Boethius was appointed consul and
"Master of Offices." As consul, he attempted to check the
oppressive behavior of his fellow officials. In 522, and during a religious
controversy, Boethius managed to choose the wrong
side. He was arrested, condemned and sent into exile to await execution. But Boethius was a man of principal, like Socrates, and rather than given to
stronger powers, he stood firm in his opinions.
 While waiting execution, this admirable scholar wrote a
short book called, The
Consolation of Philosophy. In the Consolation, BOETHIUS
carried on a conversation with Philosophy, who appears as a woman. In other
words, he turned not to God or to Christ or his faith, but to his early
training in philosophy. He reassured himself, in the tradition of Socrates
and the Stoics, that "if then you are master of yourself,
you will be in possession of that which you will never wish to lose, in which
Fortune will never be able to take from you." This is classical humanism
defined.
The Consolation is a marvelous book and its debt is clearly
Socratic and Stoic. Imagine this scholar imprisoned, waiting for a certain
death. It was Stoicism which gave him spirit and support. Oddly enough, the
words Christ or Christianity do not appear in his book. Boethius
exerted a major influence in western intellectual life. Until the 12th
century, virtually all of what Europe knew about
Aristotle came from Boethius. He even helped to
diffuse Euclidean geometry to the Middle Ages. He wanted to unite faith and
reason -- and wanted to show that they did not conflict with one another, but
complemented one another. His influence was far and wide. As late as 1600,
Elizabeth, the Queen of England, made the Consolation required reading
at her court. She even saw through its translation into English. Dante, Boccaccio, Cervantes, and Chaucer were all familiar
students of the Consolation of Boethius.
But Boethius -- remember, we left him in prison
-- soon met a horrible fate at the hands of the Gothic officials. In 524, Theodoric confirmed his sentence and after days of cruel
torture, Boethius was the bludgeoned to death. Like
Socrates, Sir Thomas More, Bruno and Galileo, Boethius
fell victim to stronger and much crueler powers. He
was an intellectual who stood by his principles. Boethius
helped to keep classical scholarship alive. So too did Cassiodoris
(c.485-c.580), Gregory
of Tours (538-c.594) and Isidore
of Seville (c.560-636). And in his own unique way, so too did St.
Augustine.
There was something vital in this Greco-Roman tradition that had to be
preserved. And soon we shall see what the 12th and 13th centuries were to
make of all this, for in those centuries, St. Thomas
Aquinas (1225-1274) managed to blend Aristotle, a pagan philosopher, with
Christianity. Reason and faith were not opposites, but two necessary roads to
truth (i.e. the medieval synthesis).
The Venerable Bede
The other scholar I'd like to mention was the Venerable Bede (c.673-735). Bede was
born near Monkwearmouth, near Durham, in England
and educated at a Benedictine monastery under Benedict Biscop.
He was later transferred to the daughter monastery at Jarrow.
He devoted himself to Latin, Greek, and the literature of the Church Fathers.
He also studied Hebrew, medicine and astronomy. He was by all accounts, a
polymath. He wrote lives of the Saints, hymns, epigrams, works on Christian chronology,
and commentaries on the Old and New Testament.
Bede's most valuable work was the Ecclesiastical
History of the English People (Historia
Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum), to which we are indebted for almost all
our information on the ancient history of England down to the year 731. The History
begins with an account of England's
geography and early inhabitants and carries the story from Caesar's landing
in 55B.C. through the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons and spread of the
Christian faith down to his own day. It is to Bede,
furthermore, that we received the expression "A.D." or anno domini
("from the Lord's incarnation"). He used a variety of sources to
write his history including chronicles, biographies, records, public
documents, and oral and written communications from his contemporaries. He
used these sources critically, as would a modern historian, yet he still
believed in miracles and saw all history in terms of the story of man's
salvation. History, in other words, had a purpose, and that purpose was human
salvation. This is perhaps not that unusual considering that the age in which
we're speaking is often called the Age of Faith.
The Kingdom of the Franks
It was during the early Middle Ages, roughly 500-1000, that a new form of
government appeared. This government was Germanic in origin. Rome
had built her government around an emperor and his elaborate and extensive
administrative bureaucracy. The Germans had a different idea. What developed
were kingdoms -- the king had to constantly move around his land in order to
show and prove himself to his subjects. While all this was going on, the
Church became controlled by members of the educated elite. These elites
provided the bureaucrats and administrative officials necessary to maintain
religious authority. While the Church preserved Roman and Latin culture, the
Germans literally changed the Church in order to incorporate it into their
own society.
The Franks
expanded their territory to the west -- from Germany
into what is now modern France.
Although they remained tied to the traditions of their homeland, the further
west they moved into Gaul, the less Germanized they
became. In other words, their customs and institutions changed as they moved
away from their traditional lands. The Franks and other Germanic tribes were
never absorbed into the Roman world; rather, they added a Germanic impression
to that world. And, as we will see, feudalism itself grew out of this
combination of Germanic custom and Roman law.
The real impact of the Franks upon Western
Europe dates from the year 481, when the Frankish king Clovis
(465-511) assumed the throne. When he took power, Clovis
was only 15 years old. Just the same, he was an ambitious, able and decidedly
ruthless king. Between 486 and 511, Clovis
conquered a few provinces still ruled by Roman patricians. He also destroyed
the kingdoms of the Alemanni, the Burgundians and the Visogoths
in Gaul. The most significant event of his career was
his CONVERSION TO CHRISTIANITY, the impetus to which was supplied by his
wife, Clotilde. Clovis
compared himself to Constantine
-- another ruler who had experienced a conversion. His followers and loyal
subjects followed suit and embraced Roman Christianity. Such an act further
explains just how and why Europe was Christianized.
Clovis turned his wars of
aggression and conquest into holy wars. These were wars against heretics and
his people, the Franks, considered themselves to be the protectors of the
faith. So, from the time of his conversion and long after his death, the
history of the Franks was inextricably connected with a Roman Church. This is
a precedent which would be embraced by France
almost down to the present day.
When Clovis died in 511, Gaul
was the scene of numerous civil wars. The cause of these civil wars was the
Frankish law of inheritance. The law was as follows: if a man with four sons
died, his land was divided into four equal parts. Each son would be given
land for use only. No one could be said to have owned the land as private property.
In other words the law specified use and not ownership or possession. This
same law was applied to royal power. The Frankish kingdom was regarded as a
larger state which could be divided for purposes of administration. Such a
scheme was fertile ground for conflict.
An amazing or brilliant ruler is often followed by a ruler of lesser
quality. After Clovis, there was
no successor equal to his power or to his influence. By 640, the Merovingian
dynasty established by Clovis,
rapidly declined. Finances were out of control, the land was continually
divided, and political control was turned over to local administrative
officials, the Mayors of the Palace. By the end of the 7th century, the
Mayors had been established on hereditary lines. These hereditary mayors were
the ancestors of Charles the Great or Charlemagne (in Latin, Carolus Magnus). The Carolingians inherited
land that retained some of the attributes of Roman administration,
specifically laws and systems of taxation.
Charlemagne
The Frankish Mayors of the Palace represented a new aristocracy -- the class
of warriors. This class attained its wealth solely from land. Frankish
culture was not urban and as a result in the early Middle Ages we see a
general decline of urban life not to be revived into well after the 12th
century.
 It has
been said that it was during the reign of CHARLEMAGNE
(742-814) that the transition from classical to early medieval civilization
was completed. He came to the throne of the Frankish kingdom in 771 and ruled
until 814. His reign spans more than 40 years and it was during this time
that a new civilization -- a European civilization -- came into existence. If
anything characterizes Charlemagne's rule it was stability. His reign was
based on harmony which developed between three elements: the Roman past, the
Germanic way of life, and Christianity. Charlemagne devoted his entire reign
to blending these three elements into one kingdom and by doing this, he secured a foundation upon which European society
would develop.
Frankish society was entirely rural and was composed of three classes or
orders: (1) the peasants - those who work, (2) the nobility - those who
fight, and, (3) the clergy - those who pray. In general, life was brutal and
harsh for the early medieval peasant. Even in the wealthiest parts of Europe,
the story is one of poverty and hardship. Their diet was poor and many
peasants died undernourished. Most were illiterate although a few were devout
Christians. The majority could not understand Latin, the language of the
Church. The nobility were better off. Their diet, although they had more
food, was still not very nutritional. They lived in larger houses than the
peasants but their castles were often just as cold as the peasant's small
hut. Furthermore, most of nobility were illiterate and crude. They spent most
of their time fighting. Their religious beliefs were, for the most part,
similar to those of the peasants. At the upper level were the clergy. They
were the most educated and perhaps the only people to truly understand
Christianity since they were the only people who had access to the Bible. It
was the clergy who held a monopoly on knowledge, religious beliefs and
religious practice.
When Charlemagne took the throne in 771, he immediately implemented two
policies. The first policy was one of expansion. Charlemagne's goal was to
unite all Germanic people into one kingdom. The second policy was religious
in that Charlemagne wanted to convert all of the Frankish kingdom, and those
lands he conquered, to Christianity. As a result, Charlemagne's reign was
marked by almost continual warfare.
Because Charlemagne's armies were always fighting, he began to give his
warriors land so they could support and equip themselves. With this in mind,
Charlemagne was able to secure an army of warriors who were deeply devoted
and loyal to him. By the year 800, the Frankish kingdom included all of
modern France, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, almost all of Germany and large
areas of Italy and Spain. It seemed clear that Charlemagne was yet another
Constantine, perhaps even another Augustus Caesar.
Toward the end of the year 800, Pope Leo III asked
Charlemagne to come to Rome. On Christmas Day Charlemagne attended mass at
St. Peters. When he finished his prayers, Pope Leo prostrated himself before
Charlemagne and then placed a crown upon his head. Pope Leo then said
"life and victory to Charles Augustus, crowned by God, the great and
peaceful emperor of the Romans." This was an extremely important act.
Charlemagne became the first emperor in the west since the last Roman emperor
was deposed in 476. Charlemagne's biographer, Einhard
(c.770-840), has recorded that Charlemagne was not very much interested in
Pope Leo's offering. Had Charlemagne known what was to happen on that
Christmas day, he never would have attended the mass. The bottom line is this
-- Charlemagne had no intention of being absorbed into the Roman Church. From
the point of view of Pope Leo, the CORONATION OF CHARLEMAGNE signified the
Pope's claim to dispense the imperial crown. It was Leo's desire to assert
papal supremacy over a unified Christendom and he did this by coronating Charlemagne.
By gaining the imperial title, Charlemagne received no new lands. He never
intended to make Rome the center of his empire. In fact, from Christmas Day
800 to his death in 814, Charlemagne never returned to Rome. Instead,
Charlemagne returned to France as emperor and began a most effective system
of rule. He divided his kingdom into several hundred counties or
administrative units. Along the borders of the kingdom, Charlemagne appointed
military governors. To insure that this system worked effectively,
Charlemagne sent out messengers (missi
domini), one from the church and one lay
person, to check on local affairs and report directly to him. Charlemagne
also traveled freely throughout his kingdom in order to make direct contact
with his people. This was in accordance with the German tradition of maintaining
loyalty. He could also supervise his always troublesome nobility and maintain
the loyalty of his subjects. There was no fixed capital but Charlemagne spent
most of his time at Aachen.
In terms of commerce, Charlemagne standardized the minting of coins based
on the silver standard. This also actively encouraged trade, especially in
the North Sea. The Franks manufactured swords, pottery and glassware in
northern France which they exported to England, Scandinavia and the Lowlands.
He also initiated trade between the Franks and the Muslims and made
commercial pacts with the merchants of Venice who traded with both Byzantium
and Islam.
The most durable and significant of all Charlemagne's efforts was the
revival of learning in his kingdom. This was especially so among the clergy,
many of whom were barely literate. On the whole, the monks were not much
better educated. Even those monks who spent their days copying manuscripts
could barely read or understand them. The manuscripts from the 7th and 8th
centuries were confusing. They were all written in uppercase letters and
without punctuation. There were many errors made in copying and handwriting
was poor. There were, however, a few educated monks as well as the beginnings
of a few great libraries. But Charlemagne could not find one good copy of the
Bible, nor a complete text of the Benedictine Rule
. He had to send to Rome for them. Above all,
Charlemagne wanted unity in the Frankish Church, a Church wholly under his
supervision. Charlemagne, although illiterate as a youth, was devoted to new
ideas and to learning. He studied Latin, Greek, rhetoric, logic and
astronomy. He wanted to meet an educated man -- he was very lucky. He was in
northern Italy when he met the Anglo-Saxon scholar, Alcuin.
Alcuin
(c.735-804) lived in York where there was a library which contained a vast
collection of manuscripts. Charlemagne persuaded Alcuin
to come to Aachen in order to design a curriculum
for the palace school. Alcuin devised a course of
study that was intended to train the clergy and the monks. Here we find the
origins of the seven liberal arts: the trivium
comprised grammar (how to write), rhetoric (how to speak) and logic (how to
think) while the quadrivium was made up of
the mathematical arts, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music. All of this
meant a classical and literary education. Students read Homer, Virgil,
Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, Plato and Cicero.
By the 9th
century, most monasteries had writing rooms or scriptoria. It was here
that manuscripts were copied. The texts were studied with care. It was no
longer merely a matter of copying texts. It was now first necessary to
correct any mistakes which had been made over years of copying. Copying was
indeed difficult: lighting was poor, the monk's hands were cramped by cold
weather and there was no standard scholarly language. What Charlemagne did
was institute a standard writing style. Remember, previous texts were all
uppercase, without punctuation and there was no separation between words. The
letters of the new script, called the Carolingian minuscule, were written in
upper and lower case, with punctuation and words were separated. It should be
obvious that this new script was much easier to read, in fact, it is the
script we use today. Charlemagne also standardized medieval Latin. After all,
much had changed in the Latin language over the past 1000 years. New words,
phrases, and idioms had appeared over the centuries in these now had to be
incorporated into the language. So what Charlemagne did was take account of
all these changes and includes them in a new scholarly language which we know
as medieval Latin.
One of the
most important consequences of the Carolingian Renaissance was that
Charlemagne encouraged the spread of uniform religious practices as well as a
uniform culture. Charlemagne set out to construct a respublica
Christiana, a Christian republic. Despite the fact that Charlemagne
unified his empire, elevated education, standardized coins, handwriting and
even scholarly Latin, his Empire declined in strength within a generation or
two following his death in the year 814. His was a hard act to follow. His
rule was so brilliant, so superior, that those emperors who came after him
seemed inferior. We've seen this before with Alexander the Great, Augustus
Caesar, Constantine, Justinian
and Mohammed.
Although
the Frankish kingdom went into decline, the death of Charlemagne was only one
cause of the decline. We must consider the renewed invasions from barbarian
tribes. The Muslims invaded Sicily in 827 and
895, invasions which disrupted trade between the Franks and Italy. The
Vikings came from Denmark, Sweden and Norway and
invaded the Empire in the 8th and 9th centuries. The Danes attacked England, and
northern Gaul. The Swedes attacked areas in
central and eastern Europe and Norwegians attacked England, Scotland and Ireland and by the
10th century, had found their way to Greenland. The third
group of invaders was the Magyars who came from modern-day Hungary. Their
raids were so terrible that European peasants would burn their fields and
destroy their villages rather than give them over. All these invasions came
to an end by the 10th and 11th centuries for the simple reason that these
tribes were converted to Christianity. And it would be the complex
institution known as feudalism which would offer Europeans protection from
these invasions, based as it was on security, protection and mutual
obligations.
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