Decline of the West (566–1066)

Introduction

While Islam advanced and the Byzantine Empire recovered from apparently fatal blows, Europe struggled through the “Dark Ages.” The term “Dark Ages” is used loosely here for non-Byzantine Europe from the death of Boethius in 524 to the birth of Abelard in 1079. During this period Byzantine civilization continued to progress despite territorial losses, but Western Europe in the sixth century showed signs of chaos, fragmentation, and renewed barbarism. Much of classical culture survived hidden in monasteries and a few families, but the physical and psychological foundations of social order had collapsed, requiring centuries to rebuild. Love of literature, artistic sacrifice, cultural unity and continuity, and intellectual growth through the exchange of ideas among different peoples all collapsed under the shocks of war, dangers of transport, economic constriction, the rise of vernacular languages, and the eclipse of Latin in the East and Greek in the West. In the ninth and tenth centuries Muslim control of the Mediterranean and Viking, Magyar, and Saracen raids on European cities and coasts intensified the localization of life and defense and the primitivization of thought and language. Germany and Eastern Europe became a whirlpool of migrations; Scandinavia became a nest of pirates; Britain was trampled by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes; Gaul was overrun by Franks, Normans, Burgundians, and Goths; Spain was divided between Visigoths and Moors; Italy was shattered by the long struggle between Goths and the Byzantine Empire, and the land that had once ordered half the world endured five centuries of moral, economic, and political decay.

Yet during this long dark period Charlemagne, Alfred, and Otto I each brought temporary order and stimulus to France, England, and Germany. Eriugena revived philosophy, Alcuin and others restored education to its first rank, Gerbert spread Islamic science in Christendom, Leo IX and Gregory VII reformed and strengthened the Church, the Romanesque style emerged in architecture, and Europe in the eleventh century began the movement that led to the achievements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the greatest of the Middle Ages.

Italy (566–1095)

The Lombards (568–774)

Three years after Justinian’s death, Byzantine rule in northern Italy was overthrown by the Lombard invasion. According to Paul the Deacon, himself a Lombard, they were called Lombards or Longobards because of their long beards. The Lombards themselves believed their original homeland was Scandinavia, which is why their descendant Dante, the famous Italian poet, addressed them. In the first century A.D. the Lombards lived on the lower Elbe; in the sixth century they reached the Danube; Narses used them in his Italian campaigns in 552 and, after victory, sent them to Pannonia, but the Lombards never forgot the rich beauty of northern Italy. In 568, pressed by the Avars from the north and east, 130,000 of them—men, women, and children, with their baggage—crossed the Alps with difficulty and reached the pleasant and fertile plains of the Po—the region now called Lombardy after them. Narses, the man who might have blocked their advance, had been deposed and humiliated a year earlier. The Byzantine Empire was busy fighting the Avars and Persians. Italy itself, exhausted by the Gothic wars, had neither the will to fight nor the money to buy the strength and courage of others. By 573 the Lombards held Verona, Milan, Florence, and Pavia—Pavia became their capital. In 601 Padua, in 603 Cremona and Mantua, and in 640 Genoa fell to them. Their most powerful king, Liutprand (712–744), conquered Ravenna in eastern Italy, Spoleto in the center, and Benevento in the south, and dreamed of bringing all Italy under his rule. Pope Gregory III could not allow the papal territories to become a Lombard bishopric; he therefore sought help from the Venetians, who had not yet submitted, and the Venetians recovered Ravenna for the Byzantine Empire. Liutprand had to content himself with northern and central Italy and established there the best government the region had seen since the time of Theodoric the Goth. Like Theodoric, Liutprand was illiterate.

The Lombards created an advanced civilization. A council of nobles elected and advised the king, and the king usually submitted his laws to an assembly composed of all males who had reached military age. Rothari, king of the Lombards (643), published a code that was both primitive and progressive: for example, it allowed monetary compensation for murder, sought to protect the poor against the rich, mocked belief in witchcraft, and granted equal freedom of worship to Catholics, Arians, and pagans. The Germanic invaders were absorbed by intermarriage into the Italian race and adopted the Latin language. Blue eyes, blond hair, and a few Teutonic words in Italian speech are all signs of the Lombards. Once conquest gave way to law and peace, the natural trade of the Po valley resumed; by the end of the Lombard period the cities of northern Italy had all become rich and strong, ready for the arts and wars of the high Middle Ages. Literature declined. From this age and region only one important book has survived—the History of the Lombards by Paul the Deacon, written around 748, a tedious book with poor organization and lacking the slightest philosophical charm. But Lombardy left its name on architecture and finance. Until the arrival of this people, the building and architectural trades had preserved some of the skill and organization of ancient Rome; a group of them, the masters of Como, took the lead in adapting old and new styles and creating the “Lombard” architectural style, which later reached perfection and became known as Romanesque.

Within a generation after Liutprand’s death the Lombard kingdom faced the stubborn opposition of the papacy. In 751 the Lombard king Aistulf captured Ravenna and removed the Byzantine governor. Since the Duchy of Rome was legally under the Byzantine governor, Aistulf claimed that Rome itself was part of his vast realm. Pope Stephen II sought help from the Byzantine Emperor Constantine V Copronymus. The Greek emperor sent a mild letter to Aistulf. Stephen, seeing the situation, took a step with endless consequences: he appealed to Pepin the Short, king of the Franks. Pepin, intoxicated by the scent of empire, crossed the Alps with a large army, crushed Aistulf’s forces, made Lombardy a Frankish fief, and placed all central Italy under papal control. Thereafter the popes continued to recognize the Eastern Roman Emperor as their nominal overlord, but Byzantine power in northern Italy was now at an end. Desiderius, the Lombard puppet king, tried to restore Lombard independence and conquests, but Pope Hadrian I appealed to Charlemagne, the new Frankish king. Charlemagne marched on Pavia, sent Desiderius to a monastery, ended the Lombard kingdom, and made it a province of the Frankish realm (774).

The Normans in Italy (1036–1085)

Italy now endured a thousand years of fragmentation and domination by foreigners who fought among themselves, and we pass over these events. In 1036 the Normans began their assault on southern Italy, which until then had been under Byzantine rule. It was the custom among the princes of Normandy that each, upon death, divided his lands equally among his sons—as is still done in France. But in France this rule produced small families, while in medieval Normandy it produced small estates. Some restless Normans, who had no desire for quiet poverty and whose veins still pulsed with the adventurous and plundering spirit inherited from the Viking age, entered the service of rival dukes in southern Italy and fought bravely for or against Benevento, Salerno, Naples, and Capua, and as a reward for these exploits the city of Aversa was granted to them. When this news reached other young Normans that in that land one or two sword strokes could make a man a landowner, they set out from Normandy for Italy. Soon the number of Normans in Italy grew so large that they could fight for themselves, and by 1053 the bravest of them, called Guiscard (the Wise or the Cunning), had created a Norman kingdom in southern Italy. Robert Guiscard resembled the legendary heroes more than any other: taller than his soldiers; with a strong will and powerful arm; handsome face, blond hair and beard; dressed in very costly clothes; greedy for gold and equally generous; sometimes ruthless, but always fearless.

Robert, who recognized no law but power and cunning, attacked and ravaged Calabria, and in a battle that nearly cost Pope Leo X his life captured Benevento (1054), made a treaty of alliance with Nicholas II and promised him tribute and to recognize him as his overlord; in return he received the title of duke of Calabria, Apulia, and Sicily (1059). After sending his younger brother Roger to conquer Sicily, Robert himself set out to take Bari (1071) and drove the Byzantines from Apulia. The obstacle of the Adriatic Sea troubled him and he always dreamed of the opportunity to cross it, capture Constantinople, and make himself the most powerful king in Europe. For this reason, with limited resources, he prepared a fleet and defeated the Byzantine navy near the coast of Durazzo. The Byzantine Empire appealed to Venice; Venice, unwilling to be less than queen of the Adriatic, accepted the invitation, and in 1082 the Venetian warships, under skilled captains, destroyed the Norman admiral’s ships not far from the scene of his recent victory. The following year Robert, with a persistence worthy of Julius Caesar, transferred his forces to Durazzo, defeated the army of Emperor Alexius I there, and, leaving Epirus and Thessaly behind, almost reached Salonika. Then, when his ambition was on the verge of fulfillment, a urgent demand from Pope Gregory VII reached him asking Robert to come to his aid and save him from Emperor Henry IV. Robert, upon receiving the request, left his soldiers in Thessaly and hurried back to Italy; gathered an army of Normans, Italians, and Saracens, rescued the pope, drove the Germans out of Rome, suppressed the revolt the people had raised against his soldiers, and allowed his angry troops to plunder and burn the city so thoroughly that even the Vandal attack of 451 could not compare with this destruction (1084). Meanwhile his son Bohemond I returned and confessed that Alexius had crushed his army in Greece. Robert, the aged pirate, prepared a fleet for the third time, defeated the Venetian navy near the coast of Corfu (1084), captured the island of Cephalonia, one of the Ionian Islands, and there, from poison or an infected wound, died at seventy. Robert Guiscard is one of the first and greatest of the Italian condottieri, the mercenary warlords.

Venice (451–1095)

Meanwhile, while most of Italy lost importance in a whirlpool of chaos and foreign domination, a new government had arisen at the northern end of the peninsula that by destiny was destined to grow in splendor and power. During the barbarian migrations of the fifth and sixth centuries, and above all during the Lombard invasion of 568, the inhabitants of Aquileia, Padua, Belluno, Feltre, and other cities fled in fear for their lives and joined the fishing communities that lived on small islands at the mouth of the Adriatic, formed by the confluence of the Piave and Adige rivers. Some of these refugees who stayed after the crises passed and founded communities such as Heraclea, Malamocco, Grado, Lido, ... and Rivoalto (Deep River), the latter later becoming the seat of their united government as Rialto (811). Long before the time of Julius Caesar a tribe called the Veneti had settled in the northeastern parts of Italy. In the thirteenth century the name Venezia (Venice) was applied to the extraordinary city formed by the union of all the refugee settlements.

Life in Venice was initially very difficult. Obtaining drinking water was difficult and as expensive as wine. The people of the region were forced to transport the fruits of their labor—fish and salt from the sea—to the interior of Italy in exchange for grain and other necessities of life; thus the Venetians became a nation of merchants and sailors. Gradually the goods of merchants from northern and central Europe and the Near East began to flow through Venetian ports. The new federation, to protect itself against German and Lombard migrations, accepted the suzerainty of the Byzantine Emperor, but the inaccessibility of these islands due to the shallowness of their shores against land and sea attacks, the perseverance and patience of the population, and the growing wealth resulting from the expansion of their trade—all combined over a thousand continuous years to grant the small country of Venice independence.

Twelve tribunes, apparently each dedicated to one of the twelve important islands of the country, administered the government until 697. In that year, when the various communities became aware of the necessity of forming a united state, they elected their first doge or duke (leader or duke) who, for life or until a revolution led to his removal, would serve the nation. Doge Agnello Badoer (809–827) defended the city of Venice so skillfully against the Frankish invasion that his successors were regularly elected to such a position until 942. During the reign of Orseolo II (991–1008) Venice, in revenge for Dalmatian pirates’ attacks on their refuge, suddenly assaulted them, captured Dalmatia, and established its supremacy over the Adriatic Sea. In 998 it became customary among the Venetians to celebrate this naval victory and superiority over the enemy every year on the feast of the Ascension with symbolic ceremonies called the Sposalizio. The ceremony proceeded as follows: a sailing ship was adorned with gold and jewels, and the doge of Venice, standing on the deck, threw a consecrated ring into the water and loudly pronounced this phrase in Latin: “As a sign of my true and perpetual dominion, O sea, I wed thee.” The Byzantine Empire gladly accepted an independent ally like Venice and granted it such commercial privileges and facilities in Constantinople and other cities that Venetian merchants’ goods reached the farthest points of the Black Sea and even the ports of the Islamic world.

In 1033 a group of merchant nobles ended the hereditary transmission of the doges’ power and decreed that from then on the right of election would be subject to the opinion of an assembly of the city’s inhabitants, and forced the doge to govern thereafter in association with the Senate. At this time Venice was known as the “Golden City” and its people were famous for their very costly clothes, the large number of literate people, and their pride and devotion to public affairs and the preservation of civic rights. The Venetians were a people always in the fever of acquiring wealth, shrewd and cunning, brave and combative, pious and lacking moral principles. They sold Christian slaves to the Saracens and with part of the profits built shrines for the saints. The shops of the city of Rialto had skilled craftsmen who had inherited the technical secrets and subtleties from Roman Italy. In the row of canals the local goods market was very prosperous, and its peace was broken only by the intermittent shouts of the boatmen. The island harbors, with adventurous sailing ships loaded with goods from Europe and the East, offered a very picturesque sight. The cost of commercial voyages was financed by loans usually taken from capitalists at twenty percent interest. After the wealth of the maggiori (rich) increased and the poverty of the minori (poor) decreased somewhat, the gap between the two classes widened. No mercy was shown to the poor. In this arena of struggle the stronger won, and the faster arrived first. The poor lived on the ground and their household waste flowed into the streets and canals; the rich built magnificent palaces for themselves and, to please God and comfort the people, undertook the building of the most beautiful cathedral in the Latin world. The Doge’s Palace, first built in 814 and burned in 976, underwent many changes in appearance and form before becoming a beautiful mixture of Islamic decorations and Renaissance style.

In 828 some Venetian merchants stole objects that were thought to be relics of the Apostle Mark from a church in Alexandria. Venice made that Christian apostle its patron saint and plundered half the world to build a shrine for his bones. Construction of the first tomb and church of the Apostle Mark (San Marco), begun in 830, was so damaged by fire in 976 that Pietro Orseolo II undertook the building of a new and larger structure. For this work Byzantine craftsmen were summoned and that group laid the foundations of San Marco in the style of the Church of the Holy Apostles, built in Constantinople by order of Justinian—with five domes, on a cruciform plan. The work took about a century; the main part of the building, essentially in its present form, was completed in 1701, and the consecration ceremony took place in 1095. Since the relics of the Apostle Mark had been lost in the fire of 976 and there was fear that their absence would diminish the sanctity of this cathedral, it was decided that on the day of the consecration ceremony all the faithful would gather in the church and pray for the discovery of those relics. According to the legend cherished by the faithful Venetians, a column sank to the ground in answer to their prayer and the bones of that apostle of Jesus appeared from under the debris. This cathedral was damaged and restored many times. It was impossible not to make some changes or add to its decorations every ten years. The San Marco Cathedral we see today does not belong to one particular history or period, but is a thousand-year history of stone and ink. In the twelfth century its brick walls were covered with marble; various columns were imported from a dozen countries; Byzantine artists who had accepted Venetian citizenship built mosaics for the cathedral in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; four bronze horses were seized in 1204 from conquered Constantinople and installed above the main door; Gothic artists in the fourteenth century added several turrets, window tracery decorations, and a chancel screen; and in the seventeenth century Renaissance painters covered half the mosaics with wall paintings. Throughout all these centuries and changes, the strange building of this cathedral preserved its unity and character—always Byzantine and Islamic, ornate and bizarre: its exterior extremely brilliant, adorned with arches, buttresses, conical minarets, columns, portals, turrets, inlaid colored marbles, carved cornices, and magnificent onion-shaped domes; its interior a dark collection of colorful columns, painted or carved arches, dark frescoes, 465 square meters of mosaic, a floor covered with jasper, porphyry, agate, and other precious stones; and its golden altar screen made with precious metals and cloisonné wire in 976 in Constantinople, set with 2,400 pieces of jewels, and installed behind the high altar of the cathedral in 1105. In San Marco Cathedral, just like Santa Sophia, the Byzantine love of decoration reached its extreme. God had to be honored with marble and jewels, and man had to be terrified, disciplined, encouraged, and comforted by showing a hundred scenes from the Christian epic, from the story of creation to the destruction of the world. The Romanesque style, which drew from the racial characteristics of the Roman people, sought solidity and power rather than the elevation and delicacy peculiar to the Gothic style. It wanted to subject the human spirit to a calm and submissive discipline rather than to captivate it with an ecstasy that stirred the heavens.

In this period Italy produced two masterpieces of the Romanesque style. One was the medium-sized church of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan, and the other was the huge domed cathedral of Pisa. The building that St. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, had prevented the emperor from entering its porch, was rebuilt in 789 by Benedictine monks, but was again destroyed over time. This structure was converted from a columned “basilica” to a vaulted church under the direction of Archbishop Guido from 1046 to 1071. The nave and aisles, which previously had a wooden roof, were now covered with ribbed vaults whose ends rested on compound piers, and together they formed a ribbed vault of brick and stone for the building. The ribs or prominent corners created by the intersection of the brick and stone vaults in the church’s ribbed vault were strengthened with “ribs” of brick. This vault is the oldest “ribbed vault” in Europe.

The simple exterior of Sant’Ambrogio differs greatly from the complex exterior of Pisa Cathedral, but all the elements of the style are the same in both. After the decisive victory of the Pisan sailors over the Arab fleet near Palermo (1063), the city of Pisa commissioned two architects named Buscheto (probably Greek) and Rainaldo to design a building in memory of that victory and, with part of the spoils of that war dedicated to the Virgin Mary, to erect a shrine that would arouse the envy of all Italy. Almost the entire huge structure was built of marble. Above the western portals of this building (later adorned in 1606 with magnificent bronze doors) four rows of open arcades ran the entire length of the facade. Inside the building numerous columns—taken as spoils from various regions—divided the church into nave and aisles, and above the crossing of the transept and the nave itself rose an oddly shaped elliptical dome. This building was the first cathedral in the series of cathedrals built in Italy, and to this day it remains one of the most astonishing works of medieval architects.

Christian Spain (711–1095)

The history of Christian Spain in this period is the story of a long religious war or, in other words, a rebellious determination to drive out the Moors. The Moors were a rich and powerful people, owners of the most fertile lands and the best governments; while the Christians were poor and weak; their lands were difficult for agriculture, and their mountainous borders separated their territory from other regions of Europe, divided them into small realms, and encouraged fraternal feuds and exaggeration of local patriotism. In this fiery peninsula, Christian blood was shed far more by Christians than by Moors.

Due to the Muslim invasion in 711, the Goths, Suevi, Christianized Berbers, and Celtiberians were driven to the Cantabrian Mountains in northwestern Spain. The Moors pursued them. But they were defeated at Covadonga by a small army under a Goth named Pelayo, and this leader immediately proclaimed himself king of Asturias and thus founded the Spanish kingdom. The Moorish defeat at Tours gave Alfonso I (739–757) the opportunity to expand the borders of Asturias to Galicia, Lusitania, and Vizcaya. The grandson of Alfonso II (791–842) added the province of León to his realm and made the city of Oviedo his capital.

It was during the reign of this Alfonso that one of the fundamental events of Spanish history occurred. According to unverified statements, a shepherd, guided by a star, found a marble sarcophagus in the foothills containing, according to many people’s belief, the bones of the Apostle James “the brother of God.” In that place they first built a chapel. Then a magnificent cathedral named Santiago de Compostela or “St. James the Apostle of the Starry Field” was erected and became, after Jerusalem and Rome, the pilgrimage shrine and qibla of Christendom. The sacred bones found in that place were very useful in arousing the spirit of the people and collecting funds for the war against the Moors. The Apostle James became the patron saint of Spain and spread the name Santiago across three continents. Such relics make history, especially when false; in the path of vain illusions, how many men have not accepted the most honorable deaths.

East of Asturias, and directly south of the Pyrenees, lay the land of Navarre. Its inhabitants were mostly of Basque race—in other words, probably the result of a mixture between African Berbers and the Celtic tribe of Spain. Since the mountains surrounding this region provided a strong fortress against invaders, the people of Navarre successfully preserved their independence against Muslim, Frankish, and Spanish attacks. In 905 their emir named Sancho I Garcés founded the kingdom of Navarre and made the city of Pamplona his capital. Sancho (994–1035) was called the Great because he added León, Castile, and Aragon to his realm. For a while the unity of Christian Spain seemed on the verge of realization, but Sancho, upon his death, by dividing his realm among his four sons, undid what he had woven. The kingdom of Aragon began from this date. Aragon expanded in the south by pushing back the Muslims, and in the north by peacefully annexing Navarre (1076) so that by 1095 it included a vast part of the north-central regions of Spain. Catalonia—the northeastern region of Spain around Barcelona—was conquered by Charlemagne in 788 and came under the rule of French counts who turned that region into a semi-independent “Spanish March.” The language of that region, Catalan, was an interesting compromise between the Provençal dialect of France and the Castilian language. The name León in the northwest entered history with the accession of Sancho the Fat or the Gross. Sancho was so stout that when walking he had to lean on the shoulder of a servant. When the nobles deposed him he went to Cordoba, and there the famous Jewish statesman and physician Hasdai ibn Shaprut cured his obesity. Sancho, who had now become as flexible as “Don Quixote,” returned to León and again seized the throne from his enemies (959). The name Castile in the central regions of Spain is due to the numerous castles that Christian nobles built there. This land faced Muslim Spain and was constantly ready for war. In 930 the knights of Castile no longer agreed at any price to obey the orders of the king of Asturias or León, formed their own independent country, and made the city of Burgos their capital. Ferdinand I (1035–1065) united León and Galicia with Castile, forced the Muslim emirs of Toledo and Seville to pay annual tribute, and like Sancho Garcés the Elder, by dividing his realm among his three sons on his deathbed, nullified his own labors. After their father’s death, his sons, with full zeal, continued the customary tradition of fraternal wars among the Christian kings of Spain.

Christian Spain, suffering so much from poverty of agriculture and political discord, lagged far behind Muslim Spain in the south, and never matched its northern rival, the Franks, in industry and means of civilization. Even within each of the small realms of the various Christian kings, unity existed only for short periods. The nobility almost ignored the kings except in time of war; and they ruled their serfs and slaves in feudal fashion. The ecclesiastical hierarchy formed the second aristocratic class. The bishops were also owners of land, serfs, and slaves, had their own armies that they independently sent to war, usually paid no attention to the popes, and ruled Spanish Christianity as if it were a completely independent church. In 1020 the nobles and bishops gathered in León, formed national councils, and in parliamentary fashion approved laws for the realm of León. The “Council of León” granted a charter of autonomy to that city and declared León the first “commune” or autonomous city in medieval Europe. Perhaps to attract support and financial aid from other cities in the struggle against the Moors, similar charters were granted to them as well. Thus from Spanish feudalism, which still had monarchical governments, a limited urban democracy emerged.

The story of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar is the best witness to the courage, manliness, and chaos of Christian Spain in the eleventh century. He is known in history as El Cid (the same Arabic title), the Christian nickname being El Campeador, meaning champion or warrior in Spanish. Rodrigo was born around 1040 in Vivar near the city of Burgos and in his youth became an adventurous caballero or knight who drew his sword for any profitable cause. At thirty his courage and prowess had reached such a degree that he was praised throughout Castile but at the same time not trusted, for apparently he was as ready to fight the Moors in the service of Christians as to fight Christians for the Moors. Alfonso VI king of Castile sent him to the poetically inclined emir of Seville, al-Mu’tamid, to collect tribute. Upon his return, when Rodrigo was accused of keeping part of the tribute for himself, he was exiled from Castile (1081). Rodrigo gathered a group, formed a small mercenary army and, without any particular view toward Muslim or Christian emirs, offered his army to those who sought it. For eight years he served the emir of Saragossa (Zaragoza) and expanded the Moorish realm by encroaching on Aragonese lands. In 1089, at the head of an army of seven thousand, mostly Muslims, he captured Valencia and forced the city to pay a monthly tribute of ten thousand gold dinars. In 1090 he captured the count of Barcelona and demanded a ransom of eighty thousand gold dinars for his release. Upon his return from this mission, when the gates of Valencia were closed to him, he besieged that city for a year; when Valencia surrendered (1094) he violated all the conditions the city had set for laying down arms, burned the city’s chief judge alive, divided the people’s property among his followers, and if the people of the city and his own soldiers had not protested, he would have burned the judge’s wife and daughters as well. This deed and other actions of El Cid were in accordance with the customs of his age. He governed Valencia with ability and justice to atone for his sins and turned that land into a fortress for the salvation of Christians against the Muslim Almoravid sect.

When he died (1099) his wife Jimena held that city for three years. Future generations, in admiration, by fabricating legends portrayed him as a knight whose only motivation was the sacred zeal to return Spain to the Christian world, and for this reason his tomb in Burgos is venerated today like the shrine of one of the saints of the faith.

Christian Spain, which itself suffered so much from discord, was only able gradually to recover the lost lands because Muslim Spain finally surpassed Christian Spain in chaos and fragmentation. The collapse of the Cordoba Caliphate in 1036 gave Alfonso VI king of Castile the opportunity to use it brilliantly. With the help of al-Mu’tamid, emir of Seville, he captured the city of Toledo (1085) and made it his capital. He treated the defeated Muslims with the nobility characteristic of the Muslims themselves and encouraged the absorption of Islamic culture into Christian Spain.

France (614–1060)

The Rise of the Carolingian Dynasty (614–768)

When Clotaire II became king of the Franks, the Merovingian dynasty seemed firmly established. Until this time no king of this family had ever held so vast and united a realm. But Clotaire owed his elevation to the nobility of Austrasia and Burgundy, and therefore increased their independence, enlarged each one’s territory, and chose one of them, Pepin I the Elder, as his “mayor” or “steward” of the palace. The “mayor” originally referred to the steward of the royal household and manager of the royal estates. As the Merovingian kings’ debauchery and intrigue increased, so did the administrative duties of this steward. Step by step this process advanced until he supervised all the courts, the army, and the financial departments of the kingdom. Clotaire’s son, King Dagobert (629–639), for a while checked the expansion of the mayor and other magnates. Fredegar the chronicler writes of Dagobert: “In the administration of justice, the poor and the rich were equal in his eyes. He slept little, was frugal in food, and attached great importance to behaving in such a way that all people would leave his court full of joy and admiration.” But Fredegar also notes that “he had three queens and a large number of concubines, and was a slave to debauchery.” During the reign of his frivolous successors, whom they called the “idle kings,” power again fell into the hands of the mayor of the palace. Pepin II the Younger, in the battle of Tertry (687), defeated his rivals, changed his title from “mayor” to “duke and prince of the Franks,” and ruled over all Gaul except Aquitaine. His illegitimate son, Charles “Martel” (the Hammer), who nominally was mayor of the palace and duke of Austrasia, actually ruled all Gaul during the reign of Clotaire IV (717–719). He repelled the attacks of the Frisians and Saxons on Gaul with firm determination, and by defeating the Muslims at Tours, preserved Europe for Christendom. He supported Boniface and other Christian missionaries in converting the Germans to Christianity, but in the critical moments of his rule, when he urgently needed money, he confiscated church lands, sold bishoprics to army commanders, and quartered his soldiers in monasteries. He beheaded a monk who objected to this action, and consequently was condemned to hell in dozens of religious treatises and sermons.

In 751 his son, Pepin III, who was the “mayor” of Childeric III, sent an envoy to Pope Zacharias to inquire whether, since the kingship was actually in his hands, it would be a sin to end the farce of Merovingian kingship and officially proclaim himself king. Zacharias, who needed the support of the Franks against the ambitious Lombards, gave a negative answer that relieved Pepin’s mind. Pepin convened a council with the presence of the nobility and high clergy at Soissons, and there all present unanimously proclaimed him king of the Franks (751) and sent the last of the idle kings, with his head shaved, to a monastery. In 754 Pope Stephen II came to the abbey of Saint-Denis outside Paris and anointed Pepin and called him “king by the grace of God.” Thus the Merovingian dynasty (486–751) was extinguished, and the Carolingian dynasty (751–987) began.

Pepin III, called “the Short,” was a patient and far-sighted king, pious and practical, peace-loving and invincible in war, and so attached to moral principles that he had no equal among the kings of Gaul in those centuries. All of Charlemagne’s successes were due to the preparations made by Pepin. During the reign of these two men, that is, over sixty-three years (751–814), the land of Gaul finally became France. Pepin was aware of the problems of governing the kingdom without the help of religion and therefore restored to the clergy the properties, privileges, and immunities of the Church. He brought relics of the saints to France and carried them on his own shoulders with effective ceremonies. He freed the papal territories from the ambitious Lombard kings and by issuing the “Donation of Pepin” (756) granted extensive political powers to the pope. In return for these labors he was content only that the pope should give him the title of “Patricius Romanus” and issue a decree to the Frankish people that they should never choose anyone as king except from the lineage of Pepin. Pepin III died in 768 at the height of his power and on his deathbed divided the Frankish realm jointly between his two sons Carloman II and Charles (later known as Charlemagne).

Charlemagne (768–814)

The greatest king of the Middle Ages was born in 742 in an unknown place; he was of German race, spoke their language, and shared some of the characteristics of his people—including physical strength, courage, national pride, and a kind of rough simplicity—that differed greatly from the refinement and polish of a modern Frenchman. His knowledge and literacy did not exceed several books, but useful books. In his old age he tried to learn writing but never succeeded in this task. Nevertheless he was able to speak in old Teutonic and literary Latin, and he understood Greek.

In 771 Carloman II died and Charles, who was twenty-nine years old, became the sole Carolingian king. Two years later Pope Hadrian I, whose territories had been raided by the armies of King Desiderius of the Lombards, hastily sought help from Charlemagne. Charlemagne besieged and captured the city of Pavia, took the Lombard throne, confirmed the “Donation of Pepin,” and declared himself defender of the Church in all non-spiritual matters of the papal territories. Upon his return to his capital, the city of Aachen, Charlemagne began his fifty-three campaigns, in almost all of which he personally commanded; he intended by these wars to conquer and Christianize Bavaria and Saxony, repel the troublesome Avars, prevent Saracen attacks on Italy, and strengthen the Frankish defensive positions against Moorish expansion. On his eastern border were the pagan Saxons who had burned a Christian church and occasionally extended their hand toward Gaul. These reasons were sufficient for Charlemagne’s eighteen wars (772–804), which were fought with the utmost intensity between both sides. Charles gave the Saxons the choice between death and conversion to Christianity, beheaded 4,500 Saxon rebels in one day, and then set out for Thionville to participate in the Christmas celebration.

In 777 Ibn al-Arabi, the Muslim governor of Barcelona, sought help from Charlemagne in his struggle against the Caliph of Cordoba. Charles crossed the Pyrenees at the head of an army, besieged and captured the Christian city of Pamplona, treated the numerous Basques of northern Spain, who were at the same time Christians, with hostility, and even advanced toward Saragossa. But the Muslim uprising that Ibn al-Arabi had promised as part of his plan of struggle against the Caliph of Cordoba did not materialize. Charlemagne saw that with his forces alone he could not challenge Cordoba; meanwhile news arrived that the defeated Saxons had risen fiercely and were heading toward the city of Cologne. Charlemagne, who in this situation saw prudence as the essence of courage, ordered his soldiers to retreat, and his forces moved in a long and narrow column through the passes of the Pyrenees toward Gaul. It was in one of these passes, at Roncevaux in Navarre, that a group of Basque soldiers attacked the rearguard of the Frankish army and almost completely slaughtered them (778). In this battle a nobleman named Roland, who three centuries later became the famous hero of the eloquent French epic Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland), lost his life. In 795 Charlemagne sent another army across the Pyrenees; as a result of this campaign the “Spanish March” or a strip of northeastern Spain became part of Frankish soil, Barcelona surrendered, and the two lands of Navarre and Asturias recognized Frankish suzerainty (806). Meanwhile Charlemagne had crushed the Saxons (785), repelled the Slav invaders (789), and defeated and destroyed the Avars (790–805) and now, in the thirty-fourth year of his reign, when he was sixty-three years old, had submitted to peace.

In fact Charlemagne always preferred the administration of the kingdom to war and had resorted to war only to forcibly create a kind of governmental and religious unity in Western Europe, a land that for centuries had been divided by ethnic and religious differences. Now he had brought all the peoples of Europe from the Vistula to the Atlantic, and from the Baltic to the Pyrenees, plus almost all of Italy and most of the Balkans, under his command. How was it possible for one man alone to administer so vast and diverse a realm with efficiency? His physical strength and courage were such that he could endure a thousand kinds of responsibilities, dangers, and crises, even the conspiracy of his own sons who wanted to kill him. He benefited from both the teachings of Pepin III—that wise and cautious king—and the cruelty of Charles Martel; or their blood flowed in his veins and he himself was as hard and strong as a hammer. Charlemagne expanded the sphere of influence of his fathers, protected it with a solid military organization, and strengthened its foundations with religious rites and reverence. He had the power to both nurture lofty purposes with thought and provide the means to realize those ambitions. He was able to lead an army, subject an assembly to his views, satisfy the nobility, subdue the clergy, and rule a harem.

Charlemagne made the possession of land and property, from a small amount upward, conditional on military service and thus made the defense of personal lands and their expansion the psychological foundation of the military spirit. Every free man, upon mobilization, was obliged to present himself with all his equipment to the local roll-call branch; each noble was responsible for the fitness of the men in his district. The foundation of government rested on this organized force and every existing psychological factor, from the reverence for the lawful king of the country and the pomp and splendor of his court’s ceremonies to the tradition of obedience to established governmental power, helped to strengthen its foundations. The courtiers were composed of a group of clergy, administrative nobles, the steward or mayor of the palace, the “count of the palace” or chief justice, the “palatine counts” or court judges, and a hundred investigators, servants, and secretaries. Through the existence of assemblies with the presence of armed landowners, which met every six months, usually in the open air, at Worms, Valenciennes, Aachen, Geneva, Paderborn, and elsewhere, usually due to military necessities or other issues, the sense of public participation in government was strengthened. In these assemblies the king submitted his proposals on laws to smaller groups of nobles or bishops, they considered the king’s views and returned them with their own proposals. Then the king proceeded to draft the capitularies or special decrees, and when he finished this work, he presented it to the group present in the assembly so that they would loudly declare their approval. It rarely happened that the assembly expressed its disagreement with a decree with collective grumbling or muttering. Hincmar, archbishop of Reims, has described Charlemagne’s behavior in one of these sessions in private as follows: “He greeted the elite nobles, talked with those he rarely had the opportunity to see, showed affectionate interest in the elderly, and entertained himself with the young.” In these kinds of assemblies every governor and bishop of the province was obliged, from the time of the previous assembly meeting, to report to the king every important event that had occurred in his area of responsibility. Hincmar says that “the king wanted to know whether in every part or corner of his realm the people were disturbed or not, and if so, why.” Sometimes (continuing the old Roman institution, the inquisitio or inquiry) the king’s representatives in the district under their inspection summoned important subjects to investigate them, or bound them by oath to give a “verdict” on their wealth for taxation, the state of public order, and the existence of crimes and criminals. In the ninth century, in the Frankish realm, these groups of sworn inquirers or “sworn juries” were used in resolving many local disputes concerning land ownership or criminal offenses. One of these famous groups known as the jurata, which evolved among the Norman and English peoples, gradually became the jury system of modern times.

The empire was divided into several counties, each of whose spiritual affairs were under the responsibility of a bishop or archbishop, and whose non-spiritual affairs were under the administration of a comes (king’s companion) or count. In the center of each province a local assembly with the presence of landowners met two or three times a year to settle the affairs of that province and perform the work of a provincial court of appeal. Dangerous border provinces (or marches) each had their own governor who sometimes held the title of graf, margrave, or margrave duke. For example, Roland of Roncevaux was the governor of the Breton March. All local administrations were subject to or envoys of the king, whom Charlemagne usually sent to convey his wishes to local officials, inspect their work and examine their rulings and accounts; to prevent bribery, extortion, appointing relatives to positions, and abuses, and to hear complaints and do justice; to protect the “Church, the weak, minor children, widows, and all people” against oppression and tyranny; and finally to report the state of the kingdom to the king himself. The Capitulary of the Missi, or the law that defined the duties and responsibilities of these kinds of royal envoys, was like a kind of Magna Carta for the people, and this four centuries before a Magna Carta was created in England for the nobility. The best evidence that this law was actually enforced is the story of the Duke of Istria who, when Charlemagne’s envoys accused him of various acts of extortion and injustice, the king forced him to return what he had stolen to its owners, compensate everyone he had wronged, publicly confess his crimes, and guarantee that he would not commit any offense again. If we ignore Charlemagne’s wars, it can be said that his government was the fairest and most enlightened government Europe had seen since the reign of Theodoric the Goth.

Of all Charlemagne’s decrees sixty-five laws have survived, which are among the most interesting collections of medieval laws. These laws were not a coherent set of principles and rules, but the generalization and application of the previous “barbarian” law codes on the basis of new necessities and needs. These law codes were in some details not as progressive as Liutprand’s laws. For example, they preserved old customs such as payment of wergild or blood money, ordeal, duel, and mutilation. For apostasy or for persons who ate meat during Lent, they prescribed the death penalty, but the clerical class was allowed to reduce the severity of the punishment at will. But not all decrees were laws; some were answers to questions on various issues, some were questions that Charlemagne himself had asked the state governors, and some had the nature of moral advice. For example, in one of these advices he said: “Since the emperor lord is unable to supervise the discipline of every individual, it is obligatory upon all to serve God to the utmost of their power and ability and to walk in the path of divine commandments.” In the course of several months, every effort had been made to bring greater order to people’s sexual and marital relations. Obviously the people did not apply all these advices, but through all these chapters it is clear that their drafter consciously and deliberately intended to lead his society from the degree of barbarism to the destination of civilization.

Charlemagne’s view in making laws, in addition to the administration of the kingdom and strengthening moral principles, was to create a system for agriculture, industry, finance, culture, and religion. His reign coincided with an era in which, due to Saracen control of the Mediterranean, the economy of southern France and Italy followed a downward curve. It was a time when, according to Ibn Khaldun, “the Christians no longer had the power to float even a plank in the water.” The entire foundation and basis of commercial relations between Western Europe and Africa and the eastern shore of the Mediterranean had been shaken. Now only the Jews were the link between the two hostile halves of a single world that had once enjoyed economic unity under Rome, and for this reason Charlemagne protected the Jews with great effort. In Byzantine and Slavic Europe, and in the northern regions that were the Teutonic realm, trade remained in place. Trade in the English Channel and the North Sea was very prosperous, but the order of this trade market also, even before Charlemagne’s death, was disrupted by the attacks and piracy of the Norsemen. The Vikings in the north, and the Muslims in the south, almost blocked the connection of French ports to the outside and turned France into a country surrounded by land on all sides and dependent on agriculture. The middle merchant class began to decline, and no class remained to compete with the rural nobility. Due to the victories of Islam and the land grants of Charlemagne, the feudal system in France flourished.

Charlemagne tried to preserve the freedom of farmers against the expanding system of serfdom, but the power of the nobility and the pressure of the necessities of the time nullified his efforts. Even as a result of the Carolingian struggles against pagan tribes, for a while the slave trade flourished. The king’s personal estates—which expanded every now and then due to receiving gifts, confiscating others’ property, taking the lands of those who died without a will, and reclaiming lands—formed an important source of his treasury’s revenues. Charlemagne drew up a “special ordinance” for the care of these lands with astonishing details from which one can infer the precise attention he paid to all the kingdom’s revenues and expenditures. Forests, wastelands, passes, ports, and all underground mineral resources belonged to the state. All means of encouraging trade, as much as remained, were provided. Commodity markets were protected; weights, measures, and prices were fixed by law; hoarding was prevented; roads and bridges were built and repaired, a large bridge was built over the Rhine at Mainz; canals were dredged and kept ready; and efforts were made to build a canal connecting the Rhine and the Danube and, through this, joining the North Sea to the Black Sea. A stable currency was circulated, but the scarcity of gold in France and the decline of trade caused the silver pound to replace Constantine’s gold solidus coin.

The king’s strength and enthusiasm penetrated all aspects of life; the names he gave to the four main directions still remain today. He established an organization and method for helping the poor, and financed it through taxing the nobility and clergy; and after all this, he considered begging one of the crimes. Since almost no one except the clergy was able to read and write, and Charlemagne was horrified by the illiteracy of the common people and the lack of education among the lower clergy, he invited foreign scholars to revive the schools of France. He brought Paul the Deacon from Monte Cassino with promises and invited Alcuin from York (782) to teach in the school he had established in his royal palace at Aachen. Alcuin (735–804), who was a Saxon, was born near the city of York and completed his education in the school that Bishop Egbert had established in the city’s cathedral. In the eighth century Britain and Ireland were culturally ahead of France. When Offa king of Mercia sent Alcuin as envoy to Charlemagne, the Frankish king asked that scholar to stay there. At this time when the “Danes” were turning “England into ruins” and violating the sanctity of monasteries with debauchery, Alcuin, happy not to return to his homeland, accepted Charlemagne’s invitation. He sent messengers to England and other places to find books of the masters, and soon the palace school at Aachen became one of the active centers of teaching and learning, revision and copying of manuscripts, and cultural reforms that spread throughout the kingdom. Charlemagne himself, his wife Liutgard, his sons, his daughter Gisela his secretary of letters, Einhard, one of the nuns, and a group of others were among the students of this school. Charlemagne was the most eager student in acquiring knowledge and was as eager to acquire science as he was diligent in conquest. He studied grammar, dialectic, and astronomy. He made a praiseworthy effort to learn the alphabet and the secrets of writing; Einhard says that “he had placed tablets under his pillow so that during his leisure he could accustom his hand to drawing the shapes of the alphabet, but since he had begun this work late in life, his effort was unsuccessful.” Charlemagne eagerly learned Latin, but in his court he still spoke German. He composed a German grammar and samples of early German poetry.

When Alcuin, after eight years of teaching in the royal school, desired a less exciting environment, Charlemagne reluctantly appointed him abbot of the monastery of Tours (796). There Alcuin encouraged the monks to prepare more accurate and precise copies of Jerome’s Vulgate, the Latin books of the Church Fathers in early Christianity, and classical Latin books, and other monasteries followed this practice. Many of our best classical texts are the result of the labors of these copyists of the ninth-century monasteries. It can be said that all existing Latin poetic works, except the poems of Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, and almost all existing Latin prose works, except the writings of Varro, Tacitus, and Apuleius, have been preserved for us by the monks of the Carolingian age. Many manuscripts of the Charlemagne period and his successors were illuminated by patient artists who resided in the monasteries. The famous “Vivian” Gospels, which were later sworn upon by German emperors at their coronation, belong to these illuminators of the “palace school.”

In 787 Charlemagne issued a historic decree to all the bishops and abbots of the Franks called the “Capitulary on the Acquisition of Knowledge.” In this decree he rebuked the clergy for their “harsh language” and “expression lacking in learning,” and encouraged every cathedral and monastery to establish schools so that in those places members of the clergy and ordinary people alike could learn to read and write. Another ordinance or decree in 789 forced the heads of these kinds of schools to ensure that they made no distinction between the sons of free men and serfs, so that all could come to school and sit on the same benches and learn grammar, music, and mathematics. According to a law of 805, medical education was considered and another decree condemned medical superstitions. The establishment of numerous schools under the supervision of churches and monasteries in France and western Germany is a sign that Charlemagne’s requests did not go unanswered. Theodulf, bishop of Orléans, in all the districts of his ecclesiastical jurisdiction built schools, received all children with open arms into these educational institutions, and forbade priest teachers from taking any fees—this is the first case in history that we encounter public and free education. During the ninth century important schools were established in Tours, Auxerre, Pavia, St. Gall, Fulda, Ghent, and other places, almost all of them attached to monasteries. It was on the foundation of these schools that universities later emerged in Europe.

With all this, we should not exaggerate the intellectual characteristics of this period. The revival of learning was a movement specific to children, not the elderly, as existed in the same era, especially in academies such as Constantinople, Baghdad, and Cordoba. This movement produced no great writer. The official writings of Alcuin are oppressively tedious. Only from his private correspondence and scattered poems can one infer that this man was not a pompous pedant, but a kind man who could reconcile happiness with piety. In this short-lived renaissance, many composed poetry and the poems of Theodulf, bishop of Orléans, although they are not of great importance, are in their own way delicate. But the only lasting work of this brilliant Gallic age is the simple and concise biography of Charlemagne himself by his secretary of letters, Einhard. This book is written exactly in the style of Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars and the author has even taken some phrases from Suetonius’s book and applied them to Charlemagne. Nevertheless, this sin of a writer who humbly calls himself a barbarian and claims “that he has so little skill in the Roman language” is forgivable. With all this, Einhard was certainly a man of talent, for Charlemagne made him steward and treasurer and his intimate friend, and perhaps entrusted him with the supervision and design of most of the architectural works of this creative period of his reign.

Palaces were built for the emperor at Ingelheim and Nijmegen, and in Aachen itself, which was Charlemagne’s favorite capital, a famous palace and chapel were built at his direction that survived among a thousand incidents of time until it was destroyed by bullets and bombs of the Second World War. This palace, built by unknown architects modeled on the church of San Vitale in Ravenna, was similar in shape and style to Byzantine and Syrian buildings; the result was a cathedral in the Eastern style in the Western Christian world. The head of this building was an octagonal structure ending in a round dome. The interior consisted of two circular floors, each with a row of columns and “adorned with lamps of gold and silver, railings and doors of solid bronze, columns and urns brought from Rome and Ravenna,” and a very fine mosaic on the dome ceiling.

Charlemagne was extraordinarily generous toward the Church. At the same time he supervised all religious matters and made religious doctrines and the clergy a means of spreading education and a means of conducting government affairs. Much of his correspondence was about religion. In rebuking corrupt state officials or worldly clergy, verses from the Bible flowed from his tongue and pen like a torrent. The intensity of his statements prevents us from portraying his sanctity as a kind of hypocrisy for political purposes. He sent funds to help Christians suffering hardship and distress in foreign countries, and in his negotiations with Muslim rulers he always insisted that they treat Christian populations with justice. In councils, assemblies, and his administration the bishops held important positions, but although Charlemagne treated them politely, he still considered himself the vicar of God and them his agents and officials and even in matters related to religious doctrines and morals he gave them orders without hesitation. While the popes defended image-worship, Charlemagne condemned this practice. Every priest was obliged to report in writing to him how baptism was performed in his district. As much as he sent abundant gifts to the popes, he issued orders to them, suppressed rebels in monasteries, and strictly ordered that strict supervision be maintained over nunneries to prevent “prostitution, drunkenness, and greed” among the women who had left the world. In an ordinance of 811 he rebuked the clergy that the purpose of their claim to leave the world was which, especially when “we see”; some of them “day by day resort to various means to increase their wealth; sometimes they use the eternal fire of hell as a means of fear for their purpose, and sometimes they make heavenly salvation a means of their own temptation; in the name of God or one of the saints, they plunder the property of simple people and become the cause of endless loss for the legal heirs of such people.” Nevertheless, Charlemagne left the clergy free to have their own courts, decreed that one-tenth of all agricultural products be given to the churches, entrusted the supervision of marriage and wills to the clergy, and himself bequeathed two-thirds of his estates according to his will to the bishoprics of the kingdom. But sometimes he forced the bishops to present “gifts” to the royal treasury to help pay the kingdom’s expenses.

As a result of this sincere cooperation between Church and government, one of the most brilliant theories in the history of statecraft emerged, in other words Charlemagne’s realm became a Holy Roman Empire that wanted to enjoy both the dignity, reverence, and stability of the empire and the papal government of Rome. For many years the popes had been distressed by their subjection to the Byzantine Empire, which gave them no security and no protection, and saw how day by day they fell more under the subjection of the emperor in Constantinople, and for this reason they feared for their freedom. It is hidden from us who thought of forcing the pope to place the crown on Charlemagne’s head and bestow upon him the title of Emperor of Rome. Alcuin, Theodulf, and other close associates of the king had discussed the possibility of such an event. Perhaps the initiative was with them, or perhaps this idea first occurred to the pope’s advisers. There were great difficulties in the way of implementing such a plan: one was that the Greek rulers had already been called Emperor of Rome and all kinds of historical rights belonged to this title; another was that the Church had no power to grant or transfer the title; and another problem was that granting such a title to a rival of the Byzantine Empire might intensify a great war between Eastern and Western Christendom, and deliver ruined Europe to the Islamic conquerors. The accession of Irene to the Greek throne (797) helped solve this problem; for now some believed that there was no longer a Greek emperor, and the field was open to anyone who claimed such a title. If this bold plan had been implemented in time, a Roman emperor would again arise in the West, Latin Christianity could become a strong and united community to resist the disintegrating Byzantine Empire and the threatening Saracens, and barbarized Europe might, with the help of the fear and magic of the emperor’s name, leave several dark centuries behind and inherit the culture and civilization of the ancient world and give it a Christian tint.

On December 26, 795, Leo III was elected to the papacy. This pope was not popular with the Roman people, for they accused him of various misdeeds. On April 25, 799 the people revolted against him, mistreated him, and imprisoned him in a monastery. Leo III escaped from prison and took refuge with Charlemagne in Paderborn. The king received him kindly, brought him back to the city of Rome under the protection of a group of armed soldiers, and decreed that the following year the pope and those who accused him should gather there in his presence. On November 24, 800, Charlemagne entered the historic capital with his retinue. On December 1 an assembly of Franks and Romans agreed that if Leo swore to deny the misdeeds attributed to him, the charges would be dropped. Leo swore; and preparations were made for a grand celebration on Christmas. On Christmas Day, when Charlemagne, dressed in a short cloak according to the patrician Roman custom and wearing sandals, knelt before the altar of St. Peter’s Church to perform his devotions, Leo suddenly brought out a jeweled crown that had been hidden from view and placed it on the king’s head. The bystanders, who had perhaps been previously instructed to confirm the coronation according to the ancient customs of the Roman people’s council, shouted three times: “Hail to the Augustus, great emperor of the Romans, bringer of peace whom God has crowned with the royal diadem!” Charlemagne’s head was anointed with holy oil, the pope called him emperor and “Augustus” and bowed his head in submission before him, that is, he performed the same act for the Frankish king that since 476 had been reserved for the Eastern Roman Emperor.

If we believe Einhard’s account, apparently Charlemagne said that if he had known beforehand that Leo intended to crown him, he would not have entered the church. Perhaps he was generally aware of the plan, but regretted its haste and conditions. Perhaps receiving the imperial crown from the pope’s hand did not please him, for this act opened the door to centuries of debate over the relative dignity and power of the giver and the receiver; it is also unlikely that Charlemagne was not thinking of the problems he had with the Byzantine Empire. From this date he often sent letters and envoys to Constantinople and sought to remove the grudge and for a long time did not use his new title. In 802 he proposed marriage to Irene so that by this means the dubious titles of both sides might gain legal form, but Irene’s fall from power nullified this precise plan. To prevent any military attack by Byzantium, Charlemagne made an alliance with Caliph Harun al-Rashid and Harun, to confirm this alliance, sent the keys of the Christian holy places in Jerusalem with several elephants as a gift to him. The Eastern Roman Emperor, in retaliation, incited the emir of Cordoba to break his allegiance to the Baghdad Caliphate. Finally in 812 the Eastern Roman Emperor recognized Charlemagne as his partner in the title, and Charlemagne in return officially recognized Venice and southern Italy as belonging to the Byzantine Empire.

Charlemagne’s coronation had consequences that lasted a thousand years. This coronation, since it made civil powers subject to clerical approval, gave power to the papacy and the bishops. From then on Gregory VII and Innocent III could, relying on the events that occurred in Rome in 800, build a stronger clerical organization. Charlemagne’s influence against the barons and other rebellious princes also increased because he had now become the special vicar of God. Moreover, it greatly strengthened the theory that the rule of kings is a divine gift. It also helped the schism between Greek and Latin Christianity; the Greek Church no longer wanted to follow a Roman Church that was allied with the rival Byzantine Empire. Charlemagne’s desire that his capital should still be in Aachen (as the pope desired) and not in the city of Rome itself confirmed the transfer of political power from the Mediterranean region to northern Europe, and from the Latin peoples to the Teutons. Above all, Charlemagne’s coronation, although theoretically it did not establish the Holy Roman Empire, practically caused the establishment of such an empire. Charlemagne and his advisers considered the new power as the revival of the old imperial powers, and it was only in the time of Otto I that the special features of the new regime became clear and in 1155 when Frederick I called Barbarossa (Red Beard) added the word “Holy” to his titles, the title of Holy Empire was first circulated. On the whole, the Holy Roman Empire, despite the danger it posed to freedom of thought and the freedom of subjects, was a lofty theory; it was a dream of security and peace and the restoration of order and civilization in a world that had been freed from the clutches of barbarism, tyranny, and ignorance.

The special imperial ceremonies now greatly restricted Charlemagne himself in official occasions and cases. Now he was obliged to wear embroidered robes, wear jeweled shoes with golden buckles, and place a golden and jeweled crown on his head; and those who were admitted to his presence had to prostrate themselves to kiss his foot or knee. All this was a ceremony that Charlemagne learned from Byzantium, and Byzantium imitated Ctesiphon. But, according to Einhard, in the days when he had not yet assumed the title of emperor, his clothing did not differ much from the ordinary clothing of the Franks, that is, he wore breeches and a linen shirt and over it a woolen tunic with a silk border. The wristbands that were tied with straps covered his two shins, and his shoes were leather. In winter he wore a tight coat that was usually of otter or marten fur, and he always wore a sword at his side. He was taller than 1.9 meters and his build was proportional to his stature. He had blond hair, spirited eyes, a large nose, and a mustache, but no beard. He had a face that was “always regal and dignified.” In eating and drinking he followed the path of moderation, hated drunkenness; despite any hardship and cold and heat, no defect found its way to his health. Most of the time he went hunting or rode to hard physical exercises. He was a skilled swimmer and liked to bathe in the hot springs of Aachen. He rarely spread a banquet table. He liked to hear music or read a book at the table. Like every great man, he valued time. In the morning, while dressing or putting on shoes, he gave audiences or heard the petitions of applicants.

Behind his calm and majesty he had a fervor and strength that, with the help of a prudence accompanied by insight, he put to work for his purposes. He did not spend all the strength of his life in preparing for his wars, which were more than fifty; while engaged in these wars, with an inexhaustible zeal he also devoted himself to sciences, laws, literature, and theology. He was distressed that part of the world or a branch of knowledge remained unexplored or undiscovered. In some respects he had an inventive mind. He disapproved of superstitions, condemned the practice of astrologers and soothsayers, but accepted many legendary miracles and exaggerated the power of law for good or intelligence. This inner simplicity also had merits, that is, his thought and speech had a clarity and sincerity that is rarely seen among statesmen. When politics required it, Charlemagne could be a ruthless man, and especially in his efforts to spread Christianity he was hard-hearted. Nevertheless, he was a very kind man who helped the fallen, was sincere in friendship, and had many loves. He wept at the death of his sons and daughter and Pope Hadrian. Theodulf in a poem entitled “In Praise of Emperor Charles” delightfully describes the emperor’s moods at home. When he returns from the daily troubles, his children surround him. His son Charles removes his father’s robe, his other son Louis unbuckles his sword. His six daughters embrace him and bring him bread, wine, apples, and flowers. The bishop comes forward to read a prayer over the table to ask for blessing. Alcuin is present beside him to discuss literary issues with him. The small Einhard comes and goes like an ant and places large books before him. Charlemagne was so fond of his daughters that he prevented them from thinking of marriage and said he could not bear to be separated from them. His daughters consoled themselves with their secret loves and had several illegitimate children. Charlemagne accepted such events with good humor, for he himself, according to the customary tradition of his descendants, had taken four wives one after another and had five concubines or mistresses. His overflowing vital force made him very susceptible to female charms, and his wives preferred sharing him to the exclusive right of any other man. He had eighteen children from his multiple wives and concubines, only eight of whom were from legitimate marriages. The clergy of his own court and the papal center in Rome overlooked such morals of this Christian king with tolerance.

Now he stood at the head of an empire far greater than the Byzantine Empire which, in the white world, except for the realm of the Abbasid Caliphate, was superior to all. But every expansion of the empire’s borders or the world of sciences brings new problems. Western Europe had tried to protect itself from the Germans by incorporating them into European civilization. But now it was Germany’s turn to defend itself against the Norsemen and Slavs. By 800 the Vikings had established a government in Jutland and were busy encroaching on the coast of Frisia. Charles hastily set out from Rome to the north, built forts on the coasts and prepared fleets on the rivers, and stationed garrisons at sensitive points. In 810 the king of Jutland attacked Frisia and was defeated. But shortly after this event, according to the account of the chronicle written by the monk of St. Gall, Charlemagne, who was residing in his palace at Narbonne, was greatly shaken by the sight of Danish pirate ships in the Gulf of Lion.

Charlemagne, perhaps because like Diocletian he foresaw that many points of his vast empire would need defensive positions at the same time, in 806 divided all his realm among his three sons—Pepin, Louis, and Charles. But Pepin died in 810 and Charles in 811, and only Louis remained, and he was so immersed in piety that apparently he did not have the ability to rule a turbulent world. Nevertheless, in 813, with magnificent ceremonies, Louis was elevated from the rank of kingship to the rank of emperor and Charlemagne, the aged sovereign, thanked God that: “Thanks be to you, O great Lord, who granted me the grace to see with my own eyes the accession of my son to my throne!” Four months later, while Charlemagne was spending the winter in Aachen, a severe fever afflicted him and he contracted pleurisy. For his treatment he was content only with drinking liquids, but after a seven-day illness, in the forty-seventh year of his reign, at the age of seventy-two he died (814). His body was buried under the dome of Aachen Cathedral while dressed in his imperial clothes. It did not take long for the whole world to call him Carolus Magnus, Karl der Grosse, Charlemagne; and in 1165, when time had completely erased the memories of his concubines from people’s minds, the Church that he had so sincerely served numbered him among the saints.

The Decline of the Carolingian Dynasty

The Carolingian renaissance was one of the few short brilliant periods that Europe saw in the dark ages. If it had not been for the wars and incompetence of Charlemagne’s successors and the feudal chaos of the lords and the devastating struggle between Church and government, and if these futile disputes had not encouraged the invasions of the Vikings, Magyars, and Saracens, the dark ages might have ended three centuries before Abelard. One man, one lifetime, had not been able to establish a new civilization. The short-lived movement that arose was too confined to the clergy. The common peasantry had no share in it. The nobility almost paid no attention to it, and among this class those who even bothered to become literate were very few. In the disintegration of the empire Charlemagne himself must be blamed. He had made the clergy so wealthy that when his powerful hand was removed from work, the power of the bishops surpassed the power of the empire; moreover, Charlemagne had been forced for military and administrative reasons to increase the degree of independence of the provincial courts and lords to a dangerous level. He had made the governmental expenses that he was forced to bear subject to the loyalty and honesty of these arrogant nobles, and dependent on the average income of his own lands and mines. Like the Byzantine emperors he had not been able to create a coherent bureaucracy of civil servants who would be responsible only to the central government, or who could continue to manage the affairs of the state despite all the changes that occurred in the imperial court. Within one generation after Charlemagne’s death, the organization of the “king’s envoys” that had been the means of expanding his authority in all the provinces was dissolved or ignored, and the local nobles raised their heads against the central government. Charlemagne’s kingship was in fact the masterpiece of a genius; this kingship displayed political progress in an age and region whose greatest distinguishing feature was considered economic decline.

The titles that contemporaries gave to Charlemagne’s successors are the best description of the story of this period. Among them are: Louis the Pious, Charles II called the Bald, Louis the German, Charles III called the Fat, and Charles III called the Simple. Louis the Pious (814–840) had a handsome face and tall stature like his father Charlemagne; he was a humble, pure-hearted, generous man, and like Julius Caesar incorrigibly tolerant. Since he had been educated and raised under the supervision of priests, he cherished all the moral commandments that Charlemagne had applied with such moderation. He took only one wife and had no concubines. He expelled all his father’s concubines and the lovers of his sisters from the court, and when his sisters protested, he imprisoned them in nunneries. He trusted the clergy and ordered the monks to act according to the teachings of the Benedictine order. In every case where he saw injustice or exploitation, he tried to prevent it or compensate for the oppression or wrongdoing of others. The people were amazed to see that he always took the side of the weak or the poor.

Since he considered himself obliged to observe Frankish traditions, he divided his empire into several kingdoms, each administered by one of his sons. From his first wife he had three sons—Pepin I, Lothair I, and Louis II called the German (we will call him Ludwig). From his second wife Judith he had a fourth son who in history is remembered as Charles the Bald. Louis’s affection for this son was almost like the great love of a father or grandfather for a grandson; and since he wanted this son to also have a share, he canceled the divisions he had made in 817. His three older sons objected to their father’s action and waged civil war against him, which lasted eight years. The entire nobility and clergy supported this revolt. The few who apparently remained loyal to Louis left him alone in a critical battle at Rothfeld (near Colmar)—for this reason this place was later called Lügenfeld or “Valley of Lies.” Louis ordered the few supporters who were still around him to leave him to save his life, and surrendered to his sons (833). His three older sons shaved Judith’s head and imprisoned her. They imprisoned the young Charles in a monastery, and ordered their father to abdicate the imperial throne and publicly repent. Louis was forced to stand in a church in Soissons, while thirty bishops surrounded him, in front of his son and successor Lothair I, strip himself to the waist, fall to the ground on a hair shirt, and loudly read a scroll containing his confession of guilt. Then he put on a gray garment that belonged to penitents, and for a year they imprisoned him in a monastery. From this date onward, while the Carolingian dynasty was subject to division and extinction, a united group of bishops ruled France.

The way Lothair treated his father Louis aroused public feelings against him. A group of nobles and some bishops responded to Judith’s repeated demands to annul Louis’s deposition order. As a result a war broke out among the sons themselves. Pepin and Ludwig freed their father from prison and again placed him on his throne and returned Judith and Charles to his arms (834). Louis took no revenge, but forgave everyone. When Pepin died (838), the lands of the empire were again divided among the three brothers. Ludwig, who was dissatisfied with this new division, attacked Saxony. The aged emperor again went to war and repelled the attack; but upon his return, due to bad weather he fell ill and died near Ingelheim (840). His last words were a message of forgiveness to Ludwig and a request to protect Charles and Judith from Lothair who now sat on the imperial throne.

Lothair tried to make Charles and Ludwig his subjects, but the two defeated him at Fontenoy (841), and at Strasbourg swore a mutual oath of loyalty that is now preserved as the oldest existing document in the French language; nevertheless, in 843 they signed the Treaty of Verdun with Lothair, and divided Charlemagne’s empire into three parts that those three parts were almost equivalent to the new countries of Italy, Germany, and France. The lands between the Rhine and the Elbe became Ludwig’s; most of France and the Spanish March belonged to Charles; Italy and the lands between the eastern limit of the Rhine and the western limit of the rivers Scheldt, Saône, and Rhône were given to Lothair. These non-contiguous lands, which extended from the soil of the Netherlands to Provence, became Lotharingia or the realm of Lothair, Lotharingia, Lothringen, and finally Lorraine. These lands had no racial or linguistic unity and as a result became a battlefield between Germany and France; throughout history after bloody wars that led to the defeat of one and the victory of the other, sometimes this and sometimes that ruled that region.

During these expensive internal wars, which caused the weakening of government and manpower and wealth and the spirit of Western Europe, the expanding tribes of Scandinavia became such wild waves that they seemed to be the continuation and complement of the plunder and terror of the German migrants four centuries earlier. While the Swedes penetrated the realm of Russia, the Norwegians gained a foothold in Ireland, and the Danes conquered England, a mixture of Scandinavian peoples whom we call Norsemen or Northerners began to encroach on the cities of France that were located on the coasts and rivers. After the death of Louis the Pious, these attacks turned into great campaigns with fleets of more than a hundred ships whose rowers were all warriors. In the ninth and tenth centuries the Norsemen made forty-seven attacks on France. In 840 they plundered Rouen and this act began a century of continuous attacks on Normandy. In 843 they attacked Nantes and killed the bishop at his altar. In 844 they passed through the Garonne River to Toulouse, and in 845 they headed for Paris through the Seine, but, in return for a tribute equivalent to 7,000 pounds of silver, they did not harm that city. In 846—while the Saracens attacked Rome—the Norsemen conquered Frisia, burned Dordrecht, and plundered Limoges. In subsequent years they brought the same calamity upon Beauvais, Bayeux, Saint-Lô, Meaux, Évreux, and Tours. If we consider that the city of Tours was plundered in 853, 856, 862, 872, 886, 903, and 919, then perhaps we can understand the extent of the terror of the people of this region from the attacks of the Norsemen. Paris was plundered in 856 and again in 861 and burned in 865. In Orléans and Chartres the bishops prepared armies and repelled the invaders (855), but in 856 Danish pirates plundered Orléans. In 859 a fleet of Norsemen passed through Gibraltar and entered the Mediterranean and attacked the cities along the Rhône, even as far north as Valence. Then they passed through the Gulf of Genoa and plundered Pisa and other cities of Italy. Since the invaders sometimes encountered fortified castles of the nobility on their way and were unable to conquer them, instead they plundered or destroyed the treasures of unprotected monasteries and churches, often burned these buildings and their libraries, and sometimes killed priests and monks. In those dark days, the people, in their prayers accompanied by religious rites, prayed that “O God, deliver us from the wrath of the Norsemen!” The Saracens, as if engaged in a conspiracy with the Northern peoples, in 810 conquered Sardinia and Corsica, and in 820 ravaged the French Riviera, in 842 plundered Arles, and until 972 dominated most of the French Mediterranean coasts.

During this half-century of destruction, what were the kings and lords doing? The lords, who themselves had been attacked, in no way were willing to help other regions and therefore responded casually to demands for unified action. The kings were busy with wars to preserve their lands or imperial throne and sometimes the Norsemen encroached on their rival’s coasts. In 859 Hincmar archbishop of Reims openly accused Charles the Bald of neglecting the defense of French soil. Charlemagne’s successors—Louis II the German, Louis III, Carloman, and Charles the Fat—who reigned from 877 to 888 were all incompetent individuals far worse than Charles himself. By the accidents of time and death, all of Charlemagne’s realm was reunited during the reign of Charles the Fat, and that declining empire had another opportunity to fight for its continued existence. But in 880 the Norsemen captured and burned Nijmegen, and turned the two cities of Kortrijk and Ghent into strong bases for themselves; in 881 they burned Liège, Cologne, Bonn, Prüm, and Aachen; in 882 they captured the city of Trier and killed the archbishop of that city who was fighting at the head of the defenders; in the same year they captured Reims and forced Hincmar to flee and die. In 883 they captured Amiens, but in return for 12,000 pounds of silver from King Carloman they left there. In 885 they headed for Paris with an army of thirty thousand who were aboard seven hundred ships. The governor of the city, Count Odo or Eudes, along with Bishop Gozlin bravely resisted at the head of the Frankish soldiers. Paris was besieged for thirteen months and the brave men of that city made twelve attempts to repel the invaders. Finally Charles the Fat, instead of coming to the aid of Paris, sent 700 pounds of silver to the invaders and allowed them to move their fleet up the Seine River and spend the winter in Burgundy. The Norse warriors reached that place and plundered it as they wished. Charles was deposed from his position and died in 888. Count Odo was chosen as king of France, and Paris, which had now proven its strategic value, became the seat of government.

Charles the Simple (898–923), Odo’s successor, protected the Seine and Saône regions, but took no action to prevent the plundering of the Norsemen and other parts of France. In 911 he granted the regions of Rouen, Lisieux, and Évreux, which were in the hands of the Normans, to one of the chiefs of that tribe named Rolf or Rollo; the Normans agreed to recognize him as their overlord and to do feudal homage to him; but during the execution of this ceremony they laughed at him. Rollo agreed to baptism and the people also accepted Christianity and gradually became eager for agriculture and observance of the manifestations of civilization. Thus Normandy, as a conquest for the Norsemen in France, came into existence.

The simple king had at least found a solution for Paris; for from then on the Normans themselves blocked the way of invaders to the Seine River. But in other parts of France the Norse invasions continued. In 911 they plundered Chartres, in 919 Angers, in 923 Aquitaine and Auvergne were plundered; and in 924 the regions of Artois and Beauvais were raided. Almost simultaneously with these events, the Magyars, who had exposed southern Germany to their raids, in 917 reached the soil of Burgundy, passed the French border many times without any obstacle, plundered and burned the monasteries near Reims and Sens (937), passed through Aquitaine like swarms of hungry locusts (951), burned the suburbs of Cambrai, Laon, and Reims (954), and with an easy mind plundered the property of the people of Burgundy. The foundation of the social order of France was on the verge of complete collapse due to these repeated blows of the Norsemen and Huns. The bad situation of France is well evident from the lament of the high council of clergy that was held in Trosly in 909:

The cities are empty of inhabitants, the monasteries are destroyed and burned, the kingdom is empty of dwellings. ... Just as the first men lived without law ... now also everyone does what seems good in his own eyes, and despises the laws, whether divine or human. ... The strong oppress the weak; the world is full of oppression of the poor and plunder of the property of the clergy. ... Men devour one another like the fish of the sea.

The last kings of the Carolingian dynasty—Louis IV, Lothair IV, and Louis V—all were individuals of good will, but none had the power necessary to create order amid this general chaos. When Louis V died without an heir (987), the nobles and high clergy of France decided to choose the king of the country from another dynasty. Such a person was found among the descendants of a margrave of Neustria, and interestingly he was named Robert the Strong (d. 866). Count Odo who had saved Paris was the son of this Robert the Strong. The grandson of this Robert the Strong named Hugh the Great (d. 956) through buying lands or war had seized almost all the region between Normandy, the Seine, and the Loire as his feudal realm and had accumulated wealth and power far greater than the kings. At this time when the nobles and bishops were looking for a king, and the son of Hugh the Great named Hugh Capet had inherited wealth, power, and apparently the ability to acquire both from his father. Adalbero archbishop, guided by Gerbert, that shrewd investigator, introduced Hugh Capet as king of France. Hugh Capet was chosen king by unanimous vote (987) and thus the Capetian dynasty began which, through direct descendants or indirect relatives, ruled France until the outbreak of the Great Revolution.

Literature and Art (814–1066)

Perhaps we exaggerate the destructions caused by the invasions of the Norsemen and Magyars; because we want to summarize all these raids and therefore gather them in one page, naturally the picture of this part of people’s life becomes excessively dark, while this life sometimes enjoyed security and peace. During this terrible century, the ninth century, the building of monasteries continued and often these same monasteries were centers of active industries. Rouen, despite the invasions and fires, became stronger due to trade with Britain. Cologne and Mainz controlled the trade of the Rhine basin, and in Flanders rich commercial and industrial centers emerged in Ghent, Ypres, Lille, Douai, Arras, Tournai, Dinant, Cambrai, Liège, and Valenciennes.

During the invasions of the Norsemen and Magyars, the ancient treasure of the libraries of the monasteries suffered disastrous damage, and undoubtedly many of the churches that according to Charlemagne’s decree had established schools were destroyed during these events. In the monasteries or churches of Fulda, Lorsch, Reichenau, Mainz, Trier, Cologne, Liège, Laon, Reims, Corbie, Fleury, Saint-Denis, Tours, Bobbio, Monte Cassino, St. Gall and ... the libraries remained. The Benedictine monastery in St. Gall was famous for its writers as well as for its school and books. Here Notker Balbulus (the Stammerer) (840–912) composed excellent religious hymns, and wrote the chronicle of the monk of St. Gall. Here also Notker Labeo (Thick Lips), (950–1022) translated the works of Boethius, Aristotle, and other classical books into German. These translations, which are among the first prose works in German, helped to record the forms and rules of that new language.

Even in France which was subject to attack and plunder, these kinds of schools attached to monasteries, with the torch of knowledge, illuminated these dark centuries. Remigius of Auxerre opened a public school in Paris in 900; and in the tenth century schools were established in Auxerre, Corbie, Reims, and Liège. Around 1006 a school was created in Chartres under the direction of Bishop Fulbert (960–1028) whose fame as the most important educational institution in all French soil had spread before Abelard. In this school Fulbert or, as his students called him, the “venerable Socrates” founded the teaching of natural sciences, medicine, classical literature, as well as theology, the Bible, and the rites of prayer. Bishop Fulbert was a man of extreme piety, patient like the saints, and extremely benevolent. Before the end of the tenth century great scholars like John of Salisbury, William of Conches, Berengar of Tours, and Gilbert de la Porrée had studied in this school. Meanwhile the palace school that was one of Charlemagne’s institutions for a while in Compiègne and sometimes in Laon under the encouragement and support of Charles the Bald reached the peak of its glory and honor.

In 845 Charles invited various groups of Irish and English scholars to this palace school. Among this group was a scholar who must be considered one of the most innovative and fearless thinkers of the Middle Ages, a man whose existence casts doubt even on the application of the title “Dark Ages” to the tenth century. The name of this man from two sides indicates his origin and lineage: Johannes Scotus Eriugena (“John the Irishman, born in Erin”), in this book we will hereafter briefly refer to him with the English spelling of his name, Eriugena. He, although apparently not belonging to the clergy, was a man with extensive knowledge, a master of Greek, a lover of Plato and classical works, and relatively witty. A story is told of him that in some respects must be considered an invention of the literati of that age; they say that once while sitting at a table eating with Charles the Bald: the king asked him: Quid distat inter Sottum et Scotum? “What is the distinction (or literally, the interval) between a fool and an Irishman?” John replied: “The table.” Nevertheless Charles was fond of him, paid attention to his lessons, and perhaps enjoyed his innovations. John’s book on the subject of the Holy Sacrifice interpreted this rite as a symbolic ceremony and implicitly doubted that the consecrated bread becomes the body and the wine becomes the blood of Christ. When a German monk named Gottschalk in his teachings invited people to accept the doctrine of absolute predestination or absolute fate and therefore denied human free will, Archbishop Hincmar asked Eriugena to write an answer to that monk’s arguments. As a result, the Irish scholar composed a treatise entitled On the Divine Predestination (c. 851) whose beginning was a praiseworthy discussion of philosophy: “When a person seriously engages in investigation and seeks to discover the cause of all things, he will observe that every means to reach a pious and complete doctrine is hidden in that science and discipline which the Greeks called philosophy.” In fact this book denied fate and said that will is free in both God and man; and God is not aware of the existence of evil, for if he were aware, he himself would have to be its cause. This answer was far more heretical than Gottschalk’s statement, and for this reason two church councils in 855 and 859 condemned it. Gottschalk was imprisoned in a monastery until his death, but the king supported Eriugena.

In 824 the Byzantine Emperor Michael II the Stammerer had sent a Greek manuscript to Louis the Pious entitled The Celestial Hierarchy which the orthodox Christians attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite. Louis the Pious sent this manuscript to the monastery of Saint-Denis, but none of the monks of that monastery were able to translate its Greek. At this time, at the king’s request, Eriugena undertook this important task. The translation of this book greatly influenced the Irish scholar, and in unofficial theology re-established the Neoplatonic image of the universe, to the effect that this universe, in stages and degrees of descending perfection, emanates or issues from God, and slowly through various degrees returns to divinity.

This lofty translation formed the basis of the principle of Eriugena’s own masterpiece entitled On the Division of Nature (867). This book in a world full of nonsense, and two centuries before Abelard, with complete courage tried to subject theology and revelation to reason, and to establish a compromise between Christianity and Greek wisdom. John accepts that the Bible is an authentic document, but believes that since its meaning is often ambiguous, it must be interpreted with the help of reason, that is, usually through symbolism and allegory. In this regard he says: “Sometimes authority derives from reason, but reason never derives from authority. For any authority that real reason does not confirm seems weak. But since real reason relies on its own power, it needs no authority for its confirmation.” “We should not recite the opinions of the popes ... unless this act is necessary for strengthening debates, in the view of those who are not skilled in reason, and submit more to authority than to rational arguments.” These statements indicate that in this period the embryo of the age of reason began its evolutionary life in the womb of the age of faith.

Eriugena applies the word “nature” to “all things that exist and do not exist,” and his purpose is all things, processes, principles, causes, and thoughts. He divides nature into four types of being: 1) that which creates but is not created—that is, the Necessary Being; 2) that which is created and creates—from this are the first causes, principles, original models of creation, like the Platonic, Logos, by the blessing of whose effect the world of particular things has been created; 3) that which is created and does not create—and that is the world of particular things that was mentioned; and 4) that which neither creates nor is created—God who is the attractive and final reference of all things. Since God is the creator of all things and is present in all things, then whatever really exists is God. Creation has not occurred in the course of time, for accepting such a judgment implicitly indicates a change in God’s existence. “When it is said to us that God created all things, the only thing we must understand from this statement is that God is present in all things, in other words the essence of all things is God.” “Understanding the essence of God is not obtained by any cognitive faculty; in the same way, realizing the secret essence of every thing that has been created by Him is also impossible. What we understand is only appearances not essences”—or as Kant later said in his philosophy, phenomenon, not noumenon. The intelligible qualities of things are not inherent in the things themselves, but are created by the forms of our perception. “When it is said that God wills, loves, chooses, sees, hears, ... nothing should occur to our imagination except that His incomparable essence and power are expressed in words that are homogeneous with us” (that is, in accordance with nature) “so that a true and pious Christian should not remain silent about the Creator and should not lack the courage to say something about Him for the guidance of simple people.” Using a masculine or feminine title for the Creator is only permissible for a similar purpose. He is neither masculine nor feminine. If we consider the word “Father” as the creative matter or essence of all beings, “Son” as the universal intellect according to which all beings have been created or administered, and “Holy Spirit” as life or the life-creating force of creation, then we may imagine God as three persons. Heaven and hell are not particular places but states of the soul. Hell is the misery of sin, and heaven is the happiness of virtue and the attraction of the divine vision (the vision of divinity) that manifests in every being upon the pure soul. The Garden of Eden is a state of the soul, not a place located on earth. All beings are eternal: animals also like humans have spirits that after death return to God or the creative spirit from which they emanated. All history is a great flow of creation that emanates from the original source, and an irresistible inner ebb and flow that finally returns everything to God.

Of course there have been people who have come into existence, and this in the ages of enlightenment, whose philosophical thoughts have been much harder than all this. But the Church rightly considered these philosophies full of heresy and blasphemy. In 865 Pope St. Nicholas I asked Charles the Bald to send Eriugena to Rome for trial or to expel him from the palace school “so that he can no longer feed poison to those who seek bread.” We have no information about the result of this affair. William of Malmesbury relates that “John Scotus came to England and our monastery and, as has been reported, his body was pierced with iron pens by the children who studied under him” and as a result of this incident he died. Perhaps this story was the desired dream of one of the students. Philosophers like Gerbert, Abelard, and Gilbert de la Porrée were all secretly influenced by Eriugena’s theories, but this man’s opinions were often forgotten amid the chaos and darkness of the age. When in the thirteenth century his book was brought out from the corners of oblivion, the Council of Sens (1225) condemned it and Pope Honorius III ordered that all copies of it be sent to Rome and burned there.

In these turbulent centuries French art stagnated. Despite Charlemagne’s innovative example, the French continued to build their churches in the basilican style. Around 996, Guglielmo da Volpiano, an Italian monk and architect, was appointed head of the Norman monastery in Fécamp. This person brought with him a large number of Lombard and Romanesque style designs to France, and apparently it was his students who built the great Norman monastery of Jumièges in the Romanesque style (1045–1067). In 1042, another Italian named Lanfranc entered the Norman monastery in Bec and soon turned it into an active intellectual circle. The number of students who came to this monastery from all directions was so large that it became necessary to build new buildings. Lanfranc designed these buildings and perhaps in this matter he received help from some more skilled individuals. Of the buildings he built, today not a single brick remains; but the “Men’s Monastery” in Caen (1077–1081) is a witness to the enduring power of the strong Romanesque style that was created in Normandy by Lanfranc and his followers.

In the eleventh century, throughout the soil of France and Flanders, new churches were built and the artists of the age adorned them with wall paintings, mosaics, and sculpture. Charlemagne had ordered that the interiors of churches should be painted for the education of the faithful, his own palaces in Aachen and Ingelheim were adorned with frescoes, and undoubtedly the palaces of Charlemagne were imitated in the decoration of many churches. The last pieces of frescoes from the Aachen palace were destroyed in 1944; but similar wall paintings still remain on the walls of the church of Saint-Germain in Auxerre. These paintings differ only in size from the style and designs that were used in the illumination of manuscripts of that age. During the reign of Charles the Bald, the monks of the city of Tours wrote a large Bible by hand and illuminated it and presented it to the king; this book now holds the first place among the Latin illuminated manuscripts preserved in the National Library of Paris. Luther’s Bible too, which is far more beautiful than this book, was prepared in the same age by the monks of Tours, and it was during this same ninth century that the monks of Reims prepared the famous Utrecht Prayer Book. This book consists of 108 sheets of calfskin containing the Psalms and the Apostles’ Creed, with lively and spirited images of various animals and various tools and professions. In these spirited images a powerful realism changes the dry and soulless and conventional figures that were once characteristic of miniature art.

The Rise of the Dukes (987–1066)

The France over which Hugh Capet ruled (987–996) had now become a separate country that no longer recognized the suzerainty of the Holy Roman Empire; the unity of all Western Europe that had been achieved by Charlemagne, except for a short time under the rule of Napoleon and Hitler, was never restored. But Hugh Capet’s France was not the France we know today. Aquitaine and Burgundy were really two independent duchies, and Lorraine for seven centuries considered itself part of German soil. This was a France heterogeneous in race and language: the northeastern region of France had more of a Flemish character than French, and to a large extent was related to Germany; Normandy was Norse in race and language; the people of Brittany were Celts, had no mixture with others, and were under the influence of British immigrants; Provence was still considered a Gallo-Roman “province” in origin and language; the France near the Pyrenees had a Gothic character; Catalonia, although technically under the suzerainty of the French kingdom, was in fact Goth-Alonia, that is, Gothic. The Loire River divided France into two regions that were different in language and culture. The important task that the French kingdom had before it was to unite these heterogeneous nations and make one nation from a dozen different peoples. Achieving this important task took eight hundred years.

Hugh Capet, to remove any doubt and possibility of dispute in the matter of his succession, in the first year of his reign had prepared the means for the coronation of his son Robert, and had made him his partner in the administration of the kingdom. Robert II, called the Pious (996–1031) has been called “the moderate king”—perhaps because he avoided the pomp of war. For example, when he had a dispute with the German Emperor Henry (Heinrich) II, called the Saint, over the borders of the kingdom, he arranged a meeting with him, exchanged gifts with him, and reached a friendly agreement with him. Robert, like Louis IX, Henry IV, and Louis XVI, had affection for the weak and the poor and, as much as possible, protected this class against the unrestrained powerful. Robert, due to his marriage to his cousin Bertha, caused the displeasure of the Church (998) and, with complete patience, endured the excommunication of the Church and the taunts of those who considered his wife a witch. Finally he separated from her and thereafter lived with bitterness. It is said that at his death “a great mourning was held and an unbearable sorrow prevailed.” With his death, a war broke out among his sons over the succession; his eldest son Henry I (1031–1060) won, but this victory was only with the help of Robert, duke of Normandy. When that long war (1031–1039) ended, the kingship had become so destitute in terms of money and manpower that it could no longer prevent the fragmentation of France by powerful and independent nobles.

Since the great landowners had gradually seized the surrounding lands, around the year 1000 France was divided into seven important regions, each ruled by a count or duke; these seven regions were Aquitaine, Toulouse, Burgundy, Anjou, Champagne, Flanders, and Normandy. These dukes or counts were almost, in all cases, heirs of leaders or commanders whom the kings of the Carolingian or Merovingian dynasties had granted lands to in return for their military or state services. The king had relied on these great landowners to mobilize forces and protect the border provinces; after 888 the king himself no longer legislated for his entire realm or collected its taxes. The dukes and counts took upon themselves the work of legislation, taxation, conducting wars, judging, and criminal affairs and in their personal estates they almost enjoyed the powers of a sovereign; they only did nominal homage to the king and placed limited military services at his disposal. The king’s sphere of authority in legal, judicial, and financial matters was limited to his own court realm which later this region was called the Île-de-France. The Île-de-France was the region of the middle Seine from Orléans to Beauvais, and from Chartres to Reims.

Among all the relatively independent duchies, the power and strength of Normandy grew faster than all. Normandy during the hundred years after it was granted to the Norsemen, perhaps because it was close to the sea and between Paris and England, had become the bravest and most adventurous province of France. The Norsemen had now become fervent Christians, had established great monasteries and schools in the monasteries, and multiplied so recklessly that soon the young Normans were forced to leave their homeland and head for the ancient countries and create a new kingdom for themselves there. The descendants of the Vikings became powerful rulers, were not overly attached to morals, nor were their hands and feet bound by too much scruple, but they were able to rule the turbulent communities of Gauls, Franks, and Norsemen with an iron fist. Robert I (1028–1035) had not yet become duke of Normandy when in 1026 he was captivated by a maiden named Herleva, daughter of a tanner of Falaise. According to one of the old Danish customs, Herleva became his beloved concubine, and soon bore a son whom his contemporaries called William the Bastard and whom we know in history as William the Conqueror. Robert, burdened with his sins, in 1035 left the soil of Normandy to atone and set out for Jerusalem. Before his departure he gathered the important lords and bishops of his realm and said:

By my faith I will not leave you without a lord. I have a young bastard son who by the grace of God will come to fruition and I have great hope in his good qualities. I ask you to accept him as your lord. That he is not the result of marriage will not affect you much; this matter will not diminish his ability in war ... or in the administration of justice. I appoint him my successor and from this moment I entrust all the duchy of Normandy to him.

Robert died on the way. For a while the nobles governed in the name of his son; but soon William began to issue decrees in his own name. A group rose up to depose him but William suppressed the sedition with a ferocity accompanied by dignity. He was a cunning and brave man, far-sighted in his plans who in the eyes of his friends was a god and in the eyes of his enemies a devil. With good humor he endured the countless taunts that were made about his birth and sometimes, at the foot of decrees, signed his name as Guillelmus Notus (William the Bastard). But when he besieged the city of Alençon and saw that the besieged hung pieces of leather from the city walls that referred to his maternal grandfather’s profession, William cut off the hands and feet of his prisoners and gouged out their eyes and put them in his catapult and threw them inside the city. Normandy admired his ferocity and iron rule and his work flourished. William moderated the nobles’ abuse of the peasant class, and to subdue them granted them fiefs. He subdued the clergy and brought them under his command, and calmed them by giving gifts and presents. With sincere intention he performed his religious duties and with an unprecedented honesty in marriage, he blackened his father’s face. William fell in love with Matilda the beautiful daughter of Baldwin count of Flanders. He was not troubled by the fact that Matilda had two children, nor by her husband who was alive but set aside. Matilda rejected William with contempt, and sent a message that for her “to enter the veil and become a nun is better than marriage with a bastard.” But William persisted and persuaded her and, despite the clergy’s criticism, took her in marriage. He made an alliance with the count of Flanders; in 1048 he had signed a treaty of friendship with the king of France. Thus, while he had secured both his flanks, he set out to conquer England at the age of thirty-nine.