Book V: The European Middle Ages
I
The Beginnings of European Culture
1. BYZANTINE PHILOSOPHY
Great Byzantium . . . where nothing ever changes.
William Butler Yeats
I begin with an apology, for we shall pursue the history of Medieval thought in the West, and only in this context shall we occasionally refer to a Byzantine commentary or controversy that had some impact in the West. Why not an independent chapter, at least a chapter, on Byzantine philosophy?
The short answer is that there is very little Byzantine philosophy to write about. We find very few records of any sort at all, and the Byzantine histories we rely on were not in the habit, as Western histories were from the beginning, of including sources and the discussion of sources. All intellectual work in the Eastern Empire was subservient to the state, as was the Church, and, in the conviction that the chief task was to preserve what could be kept of the past, it was almost entirely of an antiquarian sort. The governmental institutions were consumed in an imitation of the past, and the Christianity of the Eastern Empire, being perfect already, needed no further discussion. There is no source for political philosophy in the whole of the Byzantine period after Justinian.
The East, in particular after the Muslim incursions, suffered much the same deurbanization as the West
did, and we find little in the way of architectural remains of Byzantine culture after the 7th century. But perhaps
the destruction was not sufficiently extensive. Rather than building new institutions from the ground up, as we
shall see was done in the West, with Church and State in creative conflict with one another, the Byzantine
Empire clung to its past, and felt compelled to place all power in the hands of its Emperor. Innovation of any
kind became suspect, for the glory of Rome could not be surpassed, it could only be preserved to the extent
that it might, and any innovation represented a simple departure from what was good. A siege mentality set
in. One could only wait for the end, however long that may be delayed, after which God would set things right
in the new world. But even in that world, as one historian has noted, development was forbidden, for the
doctrine of purgatory was rejected by the Eastern Church—no growth was to be found in this life, or expected
in the next.
2. IRELAND AND ENGLAND
Though their false hope and imagination lead fools to believe that power and wealth are the highest good, yet it is quite otherwise... by means of these worldly goods and the wealth of this life we oftener make foes than friends.
Alfred the Great of England
The recovery of the Classical intellectual tradition in the West began, not in the old centers of Italy and Gaul,
but in Ireland, and then England,
and this precisely because these lands lay at the edge of the once civilized
world. Because of that position, they were not targets for the barbarian invaders that destroyed the Roman
civilization, and, as newcomers to Roman culture, they took, as recent converts often do, an intense pride in
it. Ireland and England held the intellectual lead in Europe for more than 200 years, from the late 6th to the to
the end of the 8th century, when learning was revived on the continent under Charles Martel and Charlemagne.
This revival was partly responsible for the decline of learning in the islands in the 9th century, for missionary
efforts on the continent drained away the best men from what was always a small pool of scholars, but the
Norsemen, who finally put an end to the island’s security, must bear the chief blame.
According to legend, Ireland was converted by Patrick and Palladius. Patrick (385-461), the English
son of a decurion, was captured by pirates and sold in Ireland as a slave. He worked as a shepherd at Antrim
for six years, and then, in response to a vision, walked 200 miles to the coast, and found a ship in which he
returned home to England. After receiving religious training in Gaul, he returned to Ireland as a missionary in
432, one year after the arrival of Palladius, the Pope’s representative and Bishop.
Patrick went straight to Tara,
converted the Kings, and then concentrated on establishing a native clergy. Armagh was made his metropolitan
see. The Druids and older elements of the population opposed the new religion, but by Patrick’s death most
of Ireland was Christian. So goes the story of the Irish hagiographers in the eighth century and after. Probably
Patrick made much less headway than these later biographers, seizing on a colorful early missionary as their
national saint, liked to think. But even so, it is clear that a number of monasteries arose in Ireland the century
after his work.
Irish Christianity probably resulted from the work of British priests, of whom Patrick might
have been one, seeking refuge from the Saxons, of Gaulish priests seeking refuge from the Germanic invasions,
and possibly also of some Greek religious who brought with them both a language and texts not found
elsewhere in Europe at that time.
The Christianity thus established was entirely monastic. The diocesan organization of Roman lands was
superimposed on Roman administrative units. No such units ever existed in Ireland to which the Bishops might
attach themselves. The clergy were monks, not diocesan priests. Irish monasteries, moreover, were associated
with the clans, each providing its educational and religious services, including those elsewhere provided by the
diocesan ministry, to that clan from which it drew its monks. The clergy were married, and formally the abbot
was, like a bishop, elected by the clan he served. The abbacy tended in fact to be hereditary, or at least closely
held in the leading family, usually with the old abbot choosing his successor. The monks and their abbot lived
together on clan lands in a group of huts, some performing manual labor, some studying, some living as
recluses, for the Irish were given to asceticism. Nearby clan members owed duties and protection, and the
abbot might be a secular ruler as well, even a king. Abbeys participated in war, and even fought one another,
monks sacking monasteries and killing monks. Bishops, who would serve an entire region and several clans,
frequently lived in the monasteries, though it does not seem they owed the abbot obedience. Though his title
was largely honorary, a bishop had a higher wergeld
than the abbot. The rule of the Irish monasteries was quite
harsh, judging by the surviving rule of St. Columban at Bangor, and, perhaps oddly, followed the Mosaic laws
closely. By the 6th century the more severe monks were seeking out desert places, and many monasteries were
thus established on islands, in the Shetlands and Hebrides, and elsewhere.
The Celts had their own ancient learned class, with schools of literature, history and law. There were recognized degrees, and a first-rate scholar=s wergeld might match that of a petty king. Their poetry was end-rhymed, a technique that spread throughout Europe, and often very lyric, although rather hyperbolic and long-winded. There was native script, Ogan, in which we have some 360 inscriptions in old Celtic. The monks of the new religion naturally saw themselves as the Christian equivalent of learned men in their own, Celtic tradition. These Christian scholars had their own script, of course. The half-uncial of the 5th and 6th centuries, the earliest Latin script in Ireland and England, originated in Western Gaul, and was later reintroduced there, forming the basis of the Carolingian minuscule. The separation of words in writing was first introduced by the Anglo-Irish in the 8th century. The books that formed the basis of Irish scholarship into the Carolingian period must have come for the most part into Ireland in the 5th and 6th centuries from Gaul, before the Saxons in England cut Ireland off from the continent.
Irish Christian scholarship echoed the Celtic tradition. There was no systematic philosophy or theology, but much in the way of poetry, chronicles, and biblical commentary of the allegorical sort, and some hagiography and excerpting from the Fathers. Greek was known and taught, and Latin was learned directly from the classical authors. Since the vulgar tongue was not a form of Latin, one had to turn to written texts to learn the language. When the Irish and English spread their brand of scholarship to the continent, they introduced the practice of shaping one’s Latinity through reading in the Classics, and the gulf between learned Latin and vulgar Latin merging into Old French opened wider. No doubt, as the monk saw it, if he was to practice the new religion he needed to master a new set of heroic poems embodied in the Bible and paralleling the traditional Irish literature, and even another set beyond that, embodied in classical Latin literature, and so he had to learn the language in which these poems were written. Indeed, classical literature may have seemed more like his own heroic literature than the Bible did, and the Old Testament would certainly have been more familiar than the New. God would have been seen as a great warrior to which one swore fealty, someone who performed mighty deeds.
In zealous pursuit of austerities, and imitation of the saints, the Irish monks sought out remote places,
and proselytized their neighbors. They spread first to Scotland, then to the North of England. A Pictish king
was first converted by St. Columba, who thereby obtained the island of Iona for a monastery. Born in 520 in
Donegal, Columba was descended on both sides from kings, was in the traditional order of the learned poets.
As a youth he wandered from one monastery to another, and was involved in some wars with King Dermot.
He founded Iona in 563, and was abbot there until his death in 597. From Iona some 30 monasteries were
established in Scotland, and another 30 or so in Ireland. These establishments were regarded as colonies of Iona,
all ruled by its abbot.
More important, from Iona, Lindisfarne was established in Northumbria. Pope Gregory
had sent Paulinus to convert Edwin of Northumbria in 627, but when Edwin was killed in 633 by Welsh
Christians and Mercian Pagans, his successors refused to follow his lead. Northern England was in fact
converted from Iona when King Oswald defeated Edwin’s successors in 634, and invited St. Aidan to
Northumbria, giving him Lindisfarne as a site for a monastery. Many more Irish monasteries in Northumbria
followed.
The English Church, no doubt founded by continental missionaries, had been healthy and in the
mainstream until 410, when the legions withdrew into Gaul. The Saxons then began to settle in England, and
cut the Welsh-Irish Church off from contact with the East, so that the Irish Church continued to hold to the
old date of Easter after the new methods of computation were developed at Alexandria, and used an old rite
of baptism. The Irish monks also wore an old-fashioned tonsure, and penance was worked out in private
between the Abbot and the offender, with set penalties for various sins, as opposed to the Gaulic practice of
public penance. (This last practice, unlike the others, had a future. It was introduced into Gaul by St.
Columban
and caught on there.) At first the English church maintained contact with Gaul, calling on its
bishops, for instance, for help against the spread of Pelagianism, and so attracting missions to Britain in 429 and
447. But by the end of the 5th century the situation became quite gloomy, and as the Saxon strength grew the
church seemed cut off and in danger of destruction. Even after a decisive defeat of the Saxons around 500, the
English continued split into warring Pagan kingdoms, and the Church grew ever weaker and more isolated in
the chaos.
But Gregory the Great at Rome saw the future of the Papacy in the west, and, apprised of an opportunity there, did not hesitate to attempt the establishment of an English church. England was by now largely Pagan, but the opportunity arose with the marriage of Ethelbert of Kent, the most powerful kingdom in England at the time, to the Christian Berta, daughter of Charibert of Paris, who brought with her her own chaplain, the bishop Liudhard. In 597 Augustine was sent to convert Ethelbert of Kent, with the reluctant agreement of the Irish church (the Irish and Welsh hated the Saxons). The effort may have been the fruition of a wish long considered, for it is said that Gregory, viewing some Angle slaves for sale, asked who they were. Upon being told they were Angles, he said, “non angli sed potius angeli,” “not Angles, but rather angels,” and resolved to convert them. Whatever prompted Gregory to send his embassy, the King met it under an open sky, for fear of sorcery, for he had been told about the miracles of the Saints, but he ended by giving the embassy Canterbury (Kent-burg) as their seat. Heathen feasts were turned to the honor of the new god, and fanes were consecrated priests. The religion caught on fast, and even kings became monks.
The English, except in the North, may have been converted by Gauls and Italians, but they still
recognized the superiority of Irish Scholarship throughout the first half of the 7th century. Agilbert, for instance,
who became bishop of Paris and contributed to the conversion of England, had, like many other English, gone
to Ireland to study scripture, and observe the stricter monastic discipline. But the influence of the Irish was
waning, and to the minds of the British, their isolation from Rome had put them behind the times. Wilfrid, a
British monk of noble lineage at Lindisfarne, became leader of the movement to reform the Irish practices.
After study in Rome and Lyons, he returned to Northumbria in 658, and gained the King’s ear, as well as the
abbacy of Ripon in 661. His efforts finally resulted in the Synod of Whitby in 664, a gathering of both clergy
and laymen, where his arguments were chiefly responsible for convincing the Irish to change the date of Easter
and give up the old tonsure. This may have represented a reunion of the Irish with the Roman Church but it
was scarcely a thoroughgoing reform, for the Irish kept their married clergy and the peculiar organization of
the monasteries. Moreover, the Irish missionaries at Lindisfarne withdrew to Iona after the victory of Wilfrid’s
party. In their view Wilfrid and Rome had won the fight for Northumbria, and they no longer felt welcome
there.
In the end England was returned to the Church by the work of envoys from the continent, not by the Irish, despite their efforts in the North. Once the English Church became active, it proved more effective than the Irish in converting its neighbors. The Irish went far afield in establishing their monasteries, and were charismatic as only true ascetics can be, but though they often impressed the nobles and so were able to establish a foothold, their monasteries remained dependent on their mother houses for support and recruitment, both as a matter of policy (they were viewed as colonies to be administered from the mother house) and because the Irish discipline was too strict for many otherwise enthusiastic local Christians to tolerate. The Irish never saw the necessity for building an independent, self-regenerating, native priesthood. Hence the real conversion of the populace was generally carried out by the Anglo-Saxons, even if they arrived after the Irish.
But there were other, more political reasons, at work as well. The Roman clergy must have seen the
native kingdoms of the English as hopelessly small and disorganized affairs, certainly not the sort of government
they were accustomed to for support of the Church. The Bishops, sometimes no doubt unconsciously, and
sometimes by design, influenced the stronger powers to seek a hegemony over all the English and set up a
proper Kingdom, with proper laws, and above all, a proper system of taxation allowing public largesse to the
Church, to maintain large monasteries, cathedrals, and all the pomp appropriate to the office of Bishop. With
the arrival of the Roman Bishops and their advice to the local rulers, there arose a new system of taxation, and
the Church began to throw its support quite consistently to the most likely candidate for bringing England into
unity.
In England, meanwhile, a native scholarship fostered by Rome grew up, which came to surpass the Irish. Aldhelm (ca. 639B709), born in Wessex and a nephew of the King, studied under an Irish monk from whom he seems to have learned in both the Latin and the Celtic traditions, and then under Hadrian at Canterbury. He became a noted poet, experimenting with many meters, his work including a collection of 100 Aenigmata (Riddles) in hexameters which were much imitated in the following century. Aldhelm particularly encouraged the study of grammar with sacred scripture in view, after the pattern established by Cassian. He became abbot of Malmesbury in 675.
In 669, the new Bishop of Canterbury, the Greek Theodore of Tarsus, arrived from Rome with the
charge of imposing central control on the British church. Upon his arrival he found resistance from Wilfrid,
in York, who wanted to carry out such reforms himself, but gained control of the situation when he brought
under his influence Egfrith, the new king of Northumbria, in 671.
But Egfrith got himself into a war with
Mercia, and in 679 Ethelbert of Mercia won such a decisive victory that Northumbria went into permanent
eclipse, and Mercia came to the fore of English affairs. Theodore saw which way the wind blew and, angling
for a united England, abandoned the prospects of Kent, and allied himself with Mercia, and through this alliance
carried out the reforms he had in mind. He worked with Abbot Hadrian to form a cathedral school at
Canterbury which became the center of scholarship in Southern England. Hadrian took advantage of the
Bishop’s skills to introduce the study of Greek. Under Theodore’s successful reorganization monasteries were
established under the Benedictine rule in the North (after the Irish conversion of the area) at St. Peter’s at
Wearmouth in 674 and St. Paul’s in Jarrow in 682 by Benedict Biscop (ca. 628-690). Biscop, one time Thane
of King Oswiu of Northumbria, became a monk at Lérins in 666B667. He brought in books and art from his
repeated trips to Italy, and made Jarrow in particular a center of learning. All of this was a result of deliberate
policy at Rome. The English Church was to be made as prestigious as possible, and the Irish Church was to be
brought into obedience to the Pope if the prestige of Rome with the Irish could possibly accomplish that.
The most noted scholar in England was Bede, whose History of the English Church and People (731) and lives of the saints provide us with much of our information on the period. He was born in 672, and offered to Benedict Biscop as an oblate at seven years of age, at Wearmouth. He went to Jarrow when it was founded, and settled there, never traveling much. He mastered all the scholarly knowledge available in his time and place, though this did not yet include dialectic, logic or philosophy. He wrote an Opera Didascalica [Works of Teaching], a De rerum natura [On the Nature of Things], a work on the seasons and another on the date of Easter. In all of this he depended a good deal on Isidore of Seville, supplementing his information from what other sources he could scare up. But these are side interests. The bulk of his writing is biblical commentary, mostly on the Old Testament, but also Mark, Luke, and Acts. in which he gives more than the usual attention to the literal meaning, and credits his borrowed interpretations and allegories to the fathers from whom he got them, an unusual practice at the time. Most of this work is a matter of preserving, excerpting and systematizing material recorded in scarce manuscripts, or manuscripts borrowed from abroad, to give it wider circulation. There is little original thought here, and Bede systematically removes scientific and philosophical digressions from the works of the Fathers that he excerpts for his exegesis of Scripture. His historical work, on the other hand, is original and excellent. He wrote several chronological works on the pattern of Eusebius, and is responsible for the Western habit of dating from the birth of Christ. He traces British history back to Rome and Christianity, not its heroic pagan past. Bede, grown famous as a scholar, died in 735, just as Alcuin of York was born. Boniface wrote to Egbert of York requesting that a complete set of his works be sent to him in Gaul. Egbert, Archbishop in York after Bede, developed the cathedral school there into the leading cultural center in England. In 767 Aelbert succeeded Egbert, and Alcuin became the leading scholar at York.
3. MEROVINGIAN GAUL
It was in Gaul that the foundations of European Civilization were laid after the collapse of the Western
Roman Empire.
From 482 to 511 Clovis led the Franks across the Meuse and occupied northern Gaul,
establishing the Merovingian Empire. He converted to Orthodox Christianity in 496, to gain more readily the
allegiance of the Roman Gauls (who considerably outnumbered their conquerors), and to obtain the support
of the Church with its economic and governmental power.
He drove the Visigoths south of the Pyrenees, his
successors conquered Provence and Burgundy, and by 539 the Merovingians ruled the entire area once
governed by Rome between the Alps and the Pyrenees. But the Kingdom, treated as a personal possession to
be divided among the King’s sons, fell apart as quickly as it had come together, and by 561 the Franks were
divided into Burgundy, Neustria and Austrasia, this last Kingdom being established on the banks of the Rhine.
Moreover, the notion that the Kingdom was a personal possession meant that the King generally felt no
responsibility at all to do any good for his subjects. The Merovingians are marked by their extravagant vices and
murderous instincts towards their kin (reducing the number of one’s brothers always made one’s own share
larger), not by any project aimed at the public good. The old Roman system of taxation was kept, but,
administered more and more poorly, by 600 it produced almost no revenue at all.
The most notable writer of these barren years was certainly Gregory of Tours (538-594), author of the History of the Franks, which is our only real source for the Merovingian age. Gregory became Bishop of Tours in 573. His great history deals with events from the creation to 511 in its first two books, the history of the Franks to 573 in the next two, and the period from 573 to 591 in the remaining six, the period for which he had first hand information. His prose is unpretentious and he fills his history with interesting tales and biographical portraits, Saint’s lives and miraculous events. He is careful when recording his own time to give his sources and get the facts straight, though he has very little conception, of course, of the broader causes of events.
Venantius Fortunatus (ca. 535–ca. 600), the greatest poet of the age, is the only other literary figure of Merovingian Gaul worth noting. He was educated at Ravenna during the reign of Theodoric, and left there, he says, to make a pilgrimage to the Shrine of St. Martin after the saint cured his eyesight. After making his way to Tours he met Agnes and Radegund at Poitiers, who ran an abbey there, and became fast friends. He became a priest in 590, Bishop of Poitiers in 597. Fortunatus had a facility for pleasing occasional poems reflective of his time composed on a large variety of topics.
It was in these years, too, that the Irishman, St. Columban,
Leinster born and a monk of Bangor, a
scholar with some acquaintance with classical authors, pursued his spectacular missionary career. He wandered
to England first, and then arrived in Gaul with a few disciples in 590, the year Gregory the Great became Pope.
A striking man, he pleased King Gontran of Burgundy, grandson of Clovis, who gave him an old palace,
Luxovium (Luxeuil) for a monastery. Many noble’s sons joined the monastery, despite its strict rule. But after
Gontran died, Theuderic, his successor, asked Columban to bless his illegitimate children, for his mother,
Brunhilde, kept him supplied with mistresses, but seemed uninterested in his marrying. Columban replied that
the scepter would never be held by anyone in this brothel brood, and pointed out that Brunhilde had an interest
in keeping a legitimate successor from appearing on the scene. That made him persona non grata, for Theuderic
was not going to buck his mother, but such was Columban’s prestige that it was difficult to dislodge him from
his monastery. Finally he was removed by force and taken down the Loire. According to the story he allowed
himself to be taken when he saw the terror of the soldiers sent to do the job, and he had no doubt already
decided Theuderic was hopeless. He supposedly prayed on the way down the river to visit the shrine where St.
Martin’s was later erected, and the boat went there despite the efforts of the rowers to prevent it. He was
instructed to return to England, but instead traveled to Neustria, preaching to the heathen near Mainz and Lake
Constance. When all Austrasia came under Theuderic’s hand, he proceeded to Italy, and King Agiluf allowed
him to establish the monastery at Bobbio, where he died the following year. His career was impressive, and lent
prestige to his religion, but he moved among the nobles, not the common people. He might plant the tree, but
others were needed if it was to take root.
In the course of the 7th century, it seems, the old town culture of the Romans, with its urban churches and Roman educational institutions, finally disappeared almost entirely. The towns had ceased to be secular administrative centers some time ago, for the King and his vassals lived off their estates, employed a minimal civil service, and often disdained to live in a city. The sea-borne commerce that once supported the cities had already been disrupted by the Vandal fleets, and overland commerce had broken down with the political fragmentation of the region during the barbarian invasions. Multiple borders and multiple tariffs even over relatively short distances destroys trade quickly, especially trade in relatively inexpensive products such as agricultural produce. It seems that what commerce there was, which was increasing somewhat in the 7th century due to a deliberate Byzantine effort to build trade with the West, was interrupted by the Moslem conquests. The cities still served as ecclesiastical centers, but even this function languished in the seventh century. The Church, always independent of Rome, had now become very much a local affair, neither supporting nor supported by the King, but providing a living for younger sons and unmarried daughters of local nobility. The result seems to have been that the Church eventually moved into the country with the nobility it served, leaving the cities and even the bishoprics vacant. Certainly, its devotion to scholarship disappeared, and one sees no missionary activity arising from Gaulish abbeys.
Austrasia, under the Mayor of the Palace, who had become the de facto ruler, gradually came to dominate the Franks, until in 687, Pippin II came into control of all three kingdoms. Charles Martel succeeded Pippin in 714, and consolidated his position by confiscating Church lands in the south, in Neustria, and handing them over to his vassals in exchange for a formal commitment of annual military service. Thus Feudal institutions, quite capable of operating in a largely agrarian society without liquid capital, replaced the older salaried positions of the Empire, and the personal fealty of the Barbarians to their chieftains replaced the formal relations between government officials in the urbanized Empire.
Clearly, several salient features of the new European civilization, feudalism and the initially rural economy, were moving into place. In addition to these developments, by 600 the land was tilled by serfs, who made up perhaps 60% of the population. In 400 about 30% of the population had been slaves and another 20% Roman coloni, who, like the medieval serf, was legally tied to the land rather than a particular owner. Serfdom marked a modest improvement in the position of the agricultural laborer, for serfs had greater personal freedom, and also somewhat greater personal income. Nonetheless, serfs lived a life far poorer than that of the 20% or so of the population that staffed the Church and the secular nobility. In particular, they were illiterate, received precious little religious instruction, and would have been lucky to see a priest once a year. Pagan practices, whether Roman or Barbarian, lived a long subterranean life among them.
Again, the center of gravity of the early European civilization shifted away from the Mediterranean and
to the North, to the British Isles, France and Germany. This shift seems due for the most part to technological
innovation. The invention of the horse collar, which enables a horse to pull a plow with its full strength without
constricting its windpipe, enabled deep plowing, and improved tillage of the alluvial earth of the rain land. This,
aided by the invention of the horse shoe, combined with the three-field system of triennial crop rotation,
increased the agricultural yield of northern lands enormously, and made possible a considerable growth in
population in the northern alluvial plains, with the deep soils most suitable for the new technology. When the
agricultural revolution was complete, and the disruptions of the Norse invasions at an end, the growth of
commerce in manufactured goods, and a new urbanization, arose from the new agricultural productivity.
But
even before the political situation had stabilized enough to allow that, this northern productivity meant that
larger armies could be fielded, and the Carolingian military successes hinged on military manpower from the
North. They also hinged on the development of shock cavalry. The horse shoe and the adoption of the stirrup
in the 730's enabled the Franks to develop cavalry tactics rotating around charges directly into enemy
formations using heavy lances (with pennants attached so they would not sink too deeply into the bodies of the
enemy soldiers, and could be withdrawn to be used again). Without the stirrup, the impact simply knocks the
rider off his horse, and up to this point the most effective use of cavalry had hinged first, on its rapidity of
movement, then on archery from horseback, a tactic developed on the steppes which presented problems to
the later Romans. The new shock tactics of the European cavalry had a great deal to do with its ability to defeat
the Muslim armies in the south of France.
Special note can be taken of the growth of the medieval nunnery. Noble women who chose not to marry, or not to remarry, would often betake themselves, sometimes with a considerable fortune, to abbeys, where they would live a cultured life of prayer, modest scholarship, and good works. Every noble family had a nunnery where relatives resided as one of its favorite charities. A certain equality came to upper class women in this way, for the nuns ran their own affairs to a considerable degree, which meant not only that a certain level of scholarship was possible, and a reputation for piety on a par with that of any monk, but that lands and wealth might be managed as well. The competent and scholarly abbess served as a constant reminder throughout the Middle Ages that women were not incapable of even the most worthwhile pursuits, all except, perhaps, warfare.
4. THE FRANKS AND THE CHURCH
If it was necessary for scholarship to find refuge on the periphery during the disorders that gave birth to Europe, it was equally necessary for it to move once more to the center once the birth of the new order was accomplished and relative security was restored. The first step here was the reform of the Gaulish Church, the matrix within which scholarship must grow.
A number of missions were sent from Ireland to accomplish this aim, but St. Columban and St. Gall, founder of Gallus, were effective, as we have noted, only in making contact with the nobles. The Anglo-Saxons resorted to the easier Benedictine Rule for their monasteries, and worked hard to establish a native priesthood and a self-sustaining government within the monasteries that rendered them independent of charismatic leadership, which always failed with time, and thus were able to root the new style of monastically centered Church in Frankish soil. But their success where the Irish failed was also due to a new political situation, for the Mayors of the Palace in the Frankish Kingdoms had become the de facto rulers, the Merovingian Kings serving only ceremonial functions, and, as time went by, less and less of those. The first effect of this development was a more effective government.
The Anglo-Saxon missions to the continent began with Willibrord, from Northumbria, who attempted from 690 on to convert the Frisians in the Low Countries. He worked at first with the support of Pippin II, but drawing his authority from Rome, establishing the monastery at Esternach in Luxembourg as his base. Rome and the Frankish Church were drawn into closer association by his effort, but Pippin’s death led to the resurgence of the pagans under Kind Radbod of Frisia.
Wynfrid, who came to be known as Boniface, gained more permanent success. He worked hard to reform the Frankish Church, convert the Germans, and cement the bond between the Pope and the Frankish ruler. Born ca. 675 in Southern England, he was a monk and scholar for 40 years, beginning with his first mission to the continent in 718, the year Charles Martel reconquered Frisia, marching to the Zuider Zee, and established Willibrord as Bishop in Utrecht. However, Boniface did not want to work under Willibrord, so he moved his operations to Germany, where he worked until 739 under Charles’s protection, and quite successfully, to establish a German Church subject to Roman hegemony. His dependence on the Mayor of the Palace is clear from his own letters, where he professes that
without the protection of the prince of the Franks, I can neither rule the people of the church
nor defend the priests and clerks, monks and nuns; nor can I prevent the practice of pagan
rites and sacrilegious worship of idols without his mandate and the awe inspired by his name.
That he was working under the Pope is likewise clear. He visited Rome three times in this period, was given a papal commission and a Latin name at the first visit in 722, made a roving Bishop by Gregory II at the second, and appointed as Archbishop of the newly organized German Church at the third in 738. He founded the monastery at Fulda, which became a seat of learning, in 744, with the aid of Charles’s successor as Mayor of the Palace, Pippin III.
The Mayors of the Palace in the Frankish kingdoms recognized the usefulness of converting the peoples they conquered, and seem to have been looking more and more to Rome to help them in this effort. Pope Gregory II pressed his advantage as far as he could, strengthening the bond between Rome and the Franks, for he had received orders from the Emperor in Constantinople to adopt the Iconoclastic program, orders he could not obey, since he neither recognized the right of the Emperor to legislate on such an important theological issue, nor thought the Emperor right, since the West, ever since Gregory the Great, had consistently defended the use of images in the churches for instruction and edification. It was time for Rome to break with the Emperor. He sent an angry letter to Constantinople claiming that the West stood with him and was ready to defend him from the Imperial army in the south, but this was a bluff. In fact, when he called on Charles Martel in 739 to defend Rome from the Lombards, he was refused.
Nonetheless, in 742, the Franks moved yet a little closer to Rome. In a council called under Carlomann in Austrasia, Boniface reformed the Frankish Church, forbidding the clergy to hunt or bear arms, ordering false priests to be exposed, suppressing heathen practices, prescribing the Benedictine rule for all monasteries, and establishing monastic schools for the first time among the Franks. He met much opposition from powerful Bishops but made progress with the backing of Carlomann. In 747 Carlomann abdicated and withdrew to a monastery, exemplifying a new type, the saintly King. He became a monk at Monte Carlo, where he claimed to be a murderer atoning for his sin, but was recognized and treated as the King he was nonetheless. The Kingdom was united under his brother, Pippin III, who aided Boniface in extending his reforms to Neustria.
Pippin had reason to please Rome, for though he was now sole ruler of the Franks, he was still only Mayor of the Palace. So upon his succession, he wrote to the Pope, asking if one who did not actually rule should be King? He would have simply declared himself king if he could have, of course, but the hereditary principle had become so powerful that he could not. And it was not simply pride that drove him to seek the office, for, should a Merovingian emerge that was truly throne worthy, it was conceivable that the Mayor would be thrust aside. So Pippin sought the support of the Church and divine authorization to take the throne himself. This was the break Gregory II had been waiting for. He replied that the one who exercised the power of the King in fact should be King, of course, a reply in fact consistent with the Roman approach to such things, for the received view in the Church was that a ruler’s authority depended, among other things, on his ability to be effective. Boniface crowned Pippin III King in 750 at the Pope’s behest, in an elaborate ceremony crowded with symbolism. There was a danger here for the Pope, as well as an opportunity. A theocratic monarch might claim, as the Emperor in the East had, the right to run the Church. So Gregory conducted the coronation in such a way that Pippin clearly refrained from claiming any such authority.
Gregory of Tours, in his History of the Franks, refers to St. Sylvester in a legend that probably originated in Italy around the time of Pope Gelasius I. Pope Sylvester, the story goes, cured Constantine of leprosy, and in gratitude the Emperor not only made him the head of the Church, but also gave him his secular power and his royal crown. To show this forth in action, he acted as the Pope’s groom, leading his horse. Sylvester accepted the first gift, but restored Constantine’s crown and secular power. The legend, of course, presents the Gelasian view of the relation of the temporal to the priestly power in a figure, suggesting that the Pope has the right to bestow the temporal power on whom he will. The Roman Curia was convinced of the truth of the tale, it seems, and they produced a forged document, the Donation of Constantine, to prove it. (They no doubt thought the original document had somehow been mislaid or destroyed, and so produced a forgery, much in the way that many a monastery would produce a forgery of a charter to meet some legal challenge to its rights when unable to find the original among their records.) At the coronation of Pippin the King led the Pope’s horse for a few paces, taking on the role of the Pope’s groom, just as Constantine had done. At the great ceremony at St. Denis, Pippin was named the protector of the Roman Church, and he vowed to restore to the Romans the Exarchate of Ravenna, that grand Byzantine fortress, once capital of the Western Empire, which had very recently fallen into the hands of the Lombards. He fulfilled this promise the following year, invading Lombardy and, once he had control of Ravenna, handing it over, not to the Emperor, but to Rome. The divorce from the East was now complete. Henceforth Rome looked West, and never again recognized in any form the authority of the East in its ecclesiastical or temporal affairs.
Charles Martel had fought shy of too close a connection to Rome, and rejected Boniface’s suggestions that he reform the Frankish Church, bringing it under Rome, for however happy he may have been to have Rome convert the heathen, he wanted sole control of the Church in France so that its offices could be delivered to his vassals. In the end, despite Pippin’s coronation, Martel won, for once the Carolingian dynasty was established, its authority rested in itself, as far as its vassals were concerned, and Pippin was the last to lead the Pope’s horse, or to receive willingly the crown from an ecclesiastic. (Charlemagne was, though only through a deception, crowned Emperor by the Pope, but not King of the Franks.) To a degree, the Church ceased to be splintered into fragments loyal to local lords, but it became national, loyal to the King, not to the Pope, even if regulations and organization proceeded from Rome. Indeed, even Carlomann, dominated as he was by Boniface, had put the Church reforms out as capitularies, under his name and his authority. Only the Abbey at Fulda was directly under Rome, by the King’s sufferance. Regular synods of the Frankish Church were held, but their decrees could be set aside by the King.
Fulda and the other monasteries established by Boniface were the first important monastic schools, but by 786 Boniface’s pupils had all died, and Fideles of the King, mostly from Alcuin’s school, had moved into their places. Boniface’s students had been quite independent of the secular authority, Alcuin’s were not. Now began the long, and largely successful, struggle of the medieval King to secure the Monastic schools and the Church to educate his civil servants, while still protecting himself from the growth of an internal constituency for a foreign power, Rome.
Charlemagne consolidated a Frankish empire that had been building already for some time. In 800, when he was crowned Emperor of the West by the Pope at Rome, an honor he neither sought nor wanted, all of Christendom in the West was under his sway, except for some Byzantine territory in Italy and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom in Britain. The Bishop of Rome had good reason to crown him Emperor. Rome was at last free of interference from the East, and safe from the Lombards, but at the cost of becoming a Frankish protectorate. The arrangement seemed threatened by various events after Pippin’s death, but when Charles became sole ruler upon his brother’s death in 771, Pope Hadrian immediately sought his assistance against the Lombards. By 774 the Lombard Kingdom was no more, and the last Lombard King ended his days in the monastery at Corbie. But Charles had many fronts on which to fight, and often must have resented the troops and time periodically devoted to Italian affairs.
Pope Leo III provided Charles with an opportunity when he had to be rescued from the unruly Roman nobility, who wanted their own candidate elected in his place, and charged him with immorality. Leo fled to Charles, where, by Alcuin’s advice, the King waited a good long time, and then staged a trial of the Pope in Rome in which he was exonerated, but only after a rather humiliating procedure in court that underlined the superiority of the secular jurisdiction of the King. Leo desperately wanted to recover some of his authority, and so, catching Charles by surprise as he prayed, he crowned him Emperor in 800. The act enlisted Charles as the Pope’s protector, and it made the rejection of the Eastern Emperor’s authority entirely explicit, but it also once more asserted the Gelasian doctrine, and Charles would have none of it. He could not return the gift, but he was miffed by it, and kept it perfectly clear that his real power was as King of the Franks, an office he had deliberately avoided formalizing through any priestly coronation.
The new Emperor accepted the deed, but lay his own interpretation on the relation it established between himself and the Pope. Charles expected to receive the Pope’s blessing and the support of his prayers in all his activities, most especially his military activities. In return he would protect Rome. The Pope might have his own dominions, held, de facto, on suffrage from the Franks, but the Christian Church of which he was the leader was reduced to a state Church, required to support the secular power of France in all it did.
5. ALCUIN OF YORK
We are little men, at the end of time.
Alcuin.
. . . of all Kings, this [Charlemagne] was the most eager to seek out learned men and provide them with the means to philosophize at their ease, by which he was able to foster a new flowering of all knowledge, much of it hitherto unknown in this barbarous world.
Walafrid Strabo, in his preface to
Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne
Lend a hand, good master. Flint has fire within, which comes out only when struck; so the light of knowledge exists by nature in human minds, but a teacher is needed to knock it out. . .
Alcuin, De Grammatico
In 781 Charlemagne encountered Alcuin of York,
who was already near fifty years old, at Pavia, and
invited him to come to France and take charge of training missionaries to Saxony. Alcuin, a Briton born in 730,
had become the most important scholar at the Cathedral School of York, so he was well set up, but this was too
good an opportunity to miss, and he took up residence in the palace at Aachen. When he arrived in 782, he
found the King had changed his mind, and wanted him to run the Palace School instead of playing the
missionary, and make it a rival to the Cathedral School at York. He lived there from 782 to 796, visiting
England in 786 and 790-793. He was convinced by the King to return from England in 794 only by the offer
of St. Martin’s Monastery at Tours, a large and very wealthy establishment, where he remained, working and
writing, and pressing the monks into his legions of copyists, until his death in 804.
Much of the point was to educate the Counts to read and write and calculate, to improve administrative efficiency by imitating the old Romans. Charles wanted written laws, records of transactions and inventories of his estates, all the apparatus of a literate civil service. He had ordered Counts to keep clerks with them to read his letters and reply to them, though for the most part they didn’t, and he even ordered that local laws and traditional practices be written down and preserved so that judges could decide their cases fairly. Charles was interested in reforming the Church and the monasteries because he wanted to be a good Christian King, but also because he wanted a civil service, and that civil service would have to be provided by the clergy. But there was more than this going on. Charles ruled an Empire, a conglomeration of peoples with different tongues and customs, but a common religion. It was Christianity that made a unity of his domains. His father, Pippin, had seen that already, when ruling only Neustria and Austrasia, and launched a reform of the Church to strengthen that bond of unity. Charles felt compelled to pursue the same policy, for nothing else could hold the Empire together.
Alcuin, as counselor to the King, earned enough respect so that he could oppose some of Charles’s
settled policies, for instance, forced conversion. His opposition on this point was ineffective, it is true, but still
he did not anger the King, and he was not always ineffective.
Charles paid close attention to his advice on
Church reform, relations with the Pope, and similar matters. Much of the reform work was done in Alcuin’s
last years, at St. Martin’s. In particular, he put together a good text of the Latin Bible there (797-801), and
made sure that everyone got copies. (Theodulf also produced an excellent text, but it did not spread as widely
as Alcuin’s did.) Alcuin’s Bible remained vulgate throughout the Middle Ages.
He got a copy of the Church
Law from Hadrian, and the Canons and Decretals of Dionysius Exiguus, which were made universally binding
at the Synod of Aix la Chapelle in 802. He also asked for the sacramentary of Gregory I, and had two certified
copies made from a fair copy. He promulgated an accurate copy of Benedict’s rule to the monasteries,
and
using Gregory’s sacramentary, put together a unified liturgy worked up from Frankish and Latin tradition,
which is the ancestor of the Latin Missal. Paul the Deacon assembled a collection of sermons which was used
throughout the Middle ages. He even had Hadrian send him a compilation of grammatical rules to improve the
clergy’s Latin, and a copy of Vitruvius on architecture to improve church construction. (Some of this had been
tried before. St. Boniface had written a grammar and treatise on versification, and the School of Utrecht had
produced similar publications, but Charles did not want Merovingian works to be used, and preferred
instituting his own reforms.) In his most advanced work on these lines, Alcuin wrote for Charles On Rhetoric
and the Virtues, an epitome of rhetoric based on Cicero (especially On Invention) to equip him for the prosecution
of civil suits.
Alcuin went to a great deal of trouble to borrow books, developing an exceptionally wide range of
contacts, and had them copied to build up the libraries in France.
Most places had very few books before he
arrived, but the Rule of St. Benedict almost demands a good library, since it requires the monks to read three
or four hours a day. It is a difficult business to transport books, and often people were reluctant to loan them
not only because they did not want to be without them for a period of years, but also for fear they would be
lost or destroyed on the journey. It was expensive to copy a book, and the work of the copyist might best be
turned to one’s own needs, and so a request for a copy was not always well received, either. Moreover, in the
days before union catalogues, it was hard to find out who might have a given book. But after Alcuin’s work,
every important monastery was in possession of several hundred volumes, and Fulda, with the largest
collection, had perhaps a thousand volumes in the ninth century. This work was extremely important. Most
of the Classical texts we possess today trace back to a single Carolingian copy.
The classical authors were read
to gain the mastery of Latin necessary for scholarship in the Scriptures, available, of course, only in Latin, and
the Fathers. But they had their own charm, of course, which was sometimes seen as a danger to piety. It was
at this time that Cicero and Vergil became especially valued as models of Latinity.
Charlemagne ordered schools established at episcopal centers, and schools both for the monks and the local populace at the monasteries. (It was difficult to persuade the monasteries to educate boys not destined to become monks, and this part of Charlemagne’s arrangements, especially, was probably more often omitted than observed, particularly after the King’s death.) There were also to be parish schools, at which local priests could teach what they knew. Much of this never materialized, but things did improve. The main point was to teach people to read and write Latin, and to sing the services. Vulgar Latin had become French, and a simplified Classical Latin was taught in the schools.
To further his book collecting, Alcuin completed the general reformation of the manuscript hand and orthography, and set everyone to copying the exemplars he was able to pull in from abroad. The existing book hands in Italy and England, the ‘Capital’ and ‘Uncial,’ despite their beauty, required considerable skill and went rather slowly. The more practical scribal hand of the ecclesiastical administrator was full of ligatures and abbreviations, and quite difficult to read. What was needed was a hand easily learned and executed, so that many scribes could be trained to work quickly, but nonetheless clear and easy to read. Several different solutions to the problem were developed in England and the Irish monasteries on the continent. In the final outcome Alcuin, working at Tours, adapted a script developed at Luxeuil and then Corbie, which was generally adopted throughout th