Texts in Context:
Twelve Centuries Ago
By Gabriel Blanchard
Although "the Dark Ages" have officially passed, Europe is not quite finished being battered within an inch of its life ...
The Beginning of Europe
Charlemagne lived on a further fourteen years after being declared the restored West Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III. (Charles’ own attitude to his crowning is a contentious question—by some accounts he was panting for the honor, while others state that he was so furious he attacked His Holiness1—and the truth may well be irrecoverable.) In 812, two years before his death, his status as Emperor of the West was even recognized by Michael I, Emperor of the East. This had been far from guaranteed; the pope’s decision had been unilateral, not to say a usurpation, motivated at least partly by the fact that the throne in Byzantium at the time was occupied by a woman (the formidable Empress Irene of Athens2), regarded by many on both sides of the Adriatic as inherently unable to rule. Even now, Emperor Michael conceded only that Charlemagne was an emperor, not that his dynasty were imperial: when his son inherited the throne in 814, he would not be so recognized. But it was enough for the authorities of what would soon be called the Holy Roman Empire to cling to, and eventually revive yet again, in the tenth century.
It has been argued that this was the beginning, culturally speaking, of Europe. Hitherto, the civilization we vaguely call “Western” had been essentially centered on a sea, the Mediterranean. The papacy began as a part of the Mediterranean tradition, and still represented continuity with it; but, with the deepened division of the Empire and the conquests of the Caliphate, the focus of the papacy had perforce largely shifted from the east to the north.
There Is More Than One Way to Cut a Quiche
The beginning of Europe, it may have been; but the name “Europe,” and the mention of culture, may give a false impression of unity. David Lloyd-George’s caustic remark that “Europe is a seething cauldron of hates”3 would be nearer the mark. But, at this period in history, that overstates the case somewhat. The atmosphere is less one of hatred than of bickering, interminable bickering; and though the boldness, courtesy, and arrogance of the Carolingians did something to settle quarrels, the inheritance practices of the Carolingians did much more to set them off again. There was no law of primogeniture; legacies, up to and including the rule of kingdoms, were normally divided among all sons, more or less equitably. The Carolingian dynasty amassed a stable state with dominions constituting half of Europe simply because they had remarkable luck, from the middle of the eighth century into the ninth, in winding up with a single male heir to all their dominions.
That luck decidedly ran out under Charlemagne’s heir, Louis the Pious. The restoration of the West Roman Empire effectively died with him. Louis himself enjoyed a long, largely peaceful reign of twenty-six years; but his legitimate sons were constantly at each other’s throats even before his death, and after it, a civil war among them raged from 840 to 843, concluded by the Treaty of Verdun, a treaty which prepared the map of Europe for over a thousand years. It established the youngest brother, Charles the Bald, as King of West Francia, a realm covering most of modern France; Louis the German was made King of East Francia, made up roughly of Austria and Soviet-era West Germany; and Lothair became King of Middle Francia, made up roughly of the Low Countries, northern Italy, and the mountainous corridor of France that connects the two. (This realm was accordingly named Lotharingia, and the name has stuck right down to the present, albeit over a much-reduced area, and in a softened form: Lorraine.)
Minuscule Consequences
The Carolingian Renaissance does not seem to have outlasted Charlemagne by long in the sense of producing much new scholarship or literature, but it did establish certain ideals—for instance, that every cathedral,4 or even every village, should have a school (as many monasteries already did, especially those of the Benedictines). At these schools, boys were taught the basics of reading, arithmetic, and music (this third being vital to the Church). As noted last time, the invention of Carolingian minuscule—a neat, regular, easy-to-write and easy-to-read script—swept away many of the crabbed shorthand symbols and difficult letter shapes then used by scribes, while retaining some of the magnificent illuminations of the Hiberno-Saxon tradition. This allowed a positive explosion of copying to take place; nearly all of the literature we still possess from the ancient world, whether Judeo-Christian or classical pagan, we owe to the Frankish, Irish, Italian, and Saxon monks of this age.
And, increasingly, to monks from new places: Czechs, Poles, Serbs. Missions to the peoples of what Rome once called Barbaricum (a swath of land stretching roughly from eastern Germany to Romania and Ukraine) had begun long before, but Charlemagne had given these efforts a fresh impetus, pushing the borders of Christendom east. Incidentally, it is at this time that that idea, Christendom, really comes to the fore: the idea of an earthly society essentially defined by Christianity. Charles Williams (a friend of C. S. Lewis and commentator on Dante) wrote:
In the old days it had been individuals who had been converted … But now it was whole communities which were abruptly annexed. … The mass of the converts followed their lords into the territory of the spiritual City as into that of the temporal. Their loyalty to their chieftains no doubt contributed to that result; it was by no means a tyrannic compulsion but an almost “democratic” fidelity that governed them, nor was their reception pf the Faith always subservient … This is not to say they were insincere. But the crowds of husbandmen, sailors, and warriors could hardly be taught the philosophy of the Faith before baptism, nor could the majority, in all probability, be convinced … of their need for the Redeemer, or of the presence of the Redeemer. A certain firmness came into action on the part of the great missionaries; they tended to say, as has so often been said about other states: “Love will come afterwards.” … They saw before them cannibalism and wizardry and fate, and their honest but rash minds determined to end, by one means or another, the perils of supernatural evil. … But the method had its disadvantages. … Those conversions prepared the way for the Church of the Middle Ages, but the forcibleness of the conversions also prepared the way for the Church of all the after ages.5
Strike on the brazen targets,
And let our clarions ring;
I'll meet this Death they talk of,
As a King should meet a King.
There were, however, regions the missionaries had not yet penetrated, or not effectively. The Balts (the peoples who became the Latvians and Lithuanians) were pagan, and would so remain well into the Late Middle Ages; the Magyars, whom we now call Hungarians, were as yet little evangelized, too, and the same went for many of the Slavs, even those who had begun to migrate west or south and enter Romanized areas. There was also another nation, or loosely-knit collection of nations, who would soon (in historical terms) convert, but had not done so yet. The first sign of their importance came well before the death of Charlemagne, but we took no notice of it; we’ll come back to it shortly.
The Sea-Serpent
Borders at the time (whether of Carolingian rule or of the rule of the Carolingians’ God) were neither firm nor clear, except where they coincided with bodies of water. However, let’s take a moment to glance at the general shape of this proto-Europe and the peoples within it around the year of Charlemagne’s death, 814.
One noteworthy thing about the map above may not be immediately obvious: namely, how few of the peoples and states labeled on it are well and truly inland. If one took ship from, say, among the Swedes, one could reach not only immediate neighbors like the Balts, Jutes, or Prussians, nor only the neighbors of those neighbors, like the northern coast of the Holy Roman Empire or the island Kingdom of Northumbria. One could, with a little patience and good seamanship, easily reach Ireland, Spain, or Sicily; and when the ship-navigable rivers of Europe are taken into account—the Danube, the Dnieper, the Garonne, the Rhine, the Seine—almost the whole continent is in some sense open to the sea.
Speaking of the sea, the monastery Lindisfarne (or Holy Island), just off the northeastern coast of England, was an important center of the Hiberno-Saxon tradition, whose illuminated manuscripts were lettered in black, scarlet, and gold on fine vellum, and placed in covers made out of ivory and precious metals, decorated with gemstones and pearls and low reliefs depicting the Mother of God and the Crucified. It was, moreover, the site of an incredible accomplishment: many Celtic Christians had been reluctant to evangelize the Saxons, who had invaded their island and subjugated them, but, in the early seventh century, St. Aidan of Lindisfarne had championed reconciliation between the two ethnicities, in the wake of the Gregorian mission. His own successor, St. Cuthbert, was a Saxon, and the Holy Island became for the Kingdom of Northumbria what Canterbury was down in the Kingdom of Kent. Lindisfarne was one of the most powerful and prosperous Christian centers in Britain; at least, it was until a couple of decades before Charlemagne died.
In 793, ships from Scandinavia sailed over the North Sea. Landing on the Holy Island, the men massacred its defenseless monks; then, they stole the books, the sacred vessels—anything with precious metal or jewels. It is, by consensus, considered the first Viking raid.
1Neither of these theories seem very credible to the present writer. Aspiring to an office that has lain vacant for a few hundred years is not, in fact, an obvious or natural ambition of most statesmen; and for a deeply religious monarch living in a superstitious age to commit sacrilege by physically attacking an exalted religious authority, while not impossible, usually requires a sharper, less ambivalent stimulus than “being suddenly honored in public.”
2Indeed, to call Irene of Athens “formidable” rather undersells her. Given her patronage of the Second Council of Nicæa, many Christian historians have tried—apologies for an imminent and very tasteless pun—to see the good in her; but the present writer cannot get past the fact that, in 797, she had her son Constantine VI blinded in order to take the throne from him (blindness was a legal disqualification for emperors). The name Irene comes from the Greek εἰρήνη [eirēnē], “peace.”
3The quotation (worded slightly differently) comes from his 1924 book Where Are We Going, which lamented what he saw as the increasingly noxious ethnic rivalries of what was then called post-war, but now inter-war, Europe.
4Though sometimes used now to mean “any large, ornate church,” in the strict sense, cathedral denotes only a church which is the seat of a bishop.
5The Descent of the Dove, pp. 85-86. Williams goes on to say, more bitingly, “[The Church’s] victories, among other disadvantages, produced in her children a great tendency to be aware of evil rather than of sin, meaning by evil the wickedness done by others, by sin the wickedness done by oneself. The actuality of evil does not altogether excuse the hectic and hysterical attention paid to it … Even contrition for sin is apt to encourage a not quite charitable wish that other people should exhibit a similar contrition.”
Gabriel Blanchard is CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
If you enjoyed this piece, but aren’t already caught up on our introduction to the Middle Ages, you can pick it up from the beginning here, proceeding to the early Byzantine period, a review of the importance of Christian monasticism, and a little background on the rise of Islam.
Published on 6th January, 2025. Page image of the ruins of Cærlaverock Castle, a thirteenth-century fortress near the southwestern coast of Scotland; photo by Simon Ledingham (used under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license—source).
