Map 10 The Atlantic world
After 785, Charles controlled the former European core of the Western Roman empire – northern Italy, parts of northern Spain, and all of Gaul – and had absorbed its German and North Sea periphery. He showed what a warrior king could do when backed by unprecedented resources. In 792, he turned against the Avars of western Hungary. In order to ensure supplies for future campaigns, he planned to join the Main to the Danube by digging a canal three kilometers long between the river Regnitz and the Altmühl. He was defeated by the geology of the region. The preparatory diggings for the Fossa Carolina, “Charles’ Ditch,” the Karlsgrab, can still be seen near Eichstätt. They were so impressive that, in 1800, Napoleon’s engineers considered resuming the project. In 20 weeks Charles had been able to spend two and a half million man hours, the labor of 8,000 men. Charles was not a warrior-chieftain in a fragile, epic mode. He trod with the heavy tread of a dominus, of a lord of Roman determination, capable of deploying resources on an almost Roman scale.1
The defeat of the Avars was widely publicized by the supporters of Charlemagne as the destruction of the last great pagan state in Europe. Wagon-loads of plunder made their way back to the Ardennes.
The site of the Khan’s palace is now so deserted that no evidence remains that anyone has ever lived there. All the Avar nobility died in the war, all their glory departed. All their wealth and their treasure assembled over so many years were dispersed. The memory of man cannot remember any war of the Franks by which they were so enriched and their material possessions so increased.2
Now it was time for Charles to think even bigger than before. In 794, work began on a palatium, a palace complex appropriate for an emperor, at a former Roman thermal spa on the edge of the Ardennes, Aachen – Aix-la-Chapelle, “the Waters of the [Imperial] Chapel.” Unlike the huge palaces of Constantinople and the Islamic world, from which the ruler dominated large cities, Aachen was set in the countryside. It was a compact affair. The living quarters of the palace were no larger than the residence of a Byzantine provincial governor of the age of Justinian. Aachen did not need to be large. It was sufficient for it to be a satisfying microcosm. It had all the components necessary for an imperial center: an audience hall, porticoes that led to a large courtyard at the entrance to a round, domed chapel. Only the chapel has survived. It echoed the palace church of San Vitale at Ravenna. A great mosaic of Christ, flanked by the four creatures of the Apocalypse – Christ, that is, as Judge and Ruler of the world who would come at the end of time – filled the dome. Charles sat on his throne on a high gallery, halfway between Christ, his Lord and the model of his own kingship, and the “Christian people” gathered below him. In the eyes of contemporary admirers, he had been raised up by God “to rule and protect the Christian people at this last dangerous period of history.”3
On Christmas Day, A.D. 800, Charles was in St. Peter’s at Rome, having come south to investigate a conspiracy against the pope, Leo III. Bareheaded and without insignia, as was normal for a royal pilgrim, he prayed at the shrine of Saint Peter. When he arose, Leo – apparently unexpectedly – placed a crown on his head; the Roman congregation acclaimed him as an “Augustus,” and Leo “adored” him – that is, the pope threw himself at Charles’ feet, as he would have done to his former lord, the East Roman emperor. It was a one-sided attempt, on the part of the pope, to have a say in recognizing, on his own terms, the formidable “imperial” power that had developed, far from his control, at Aachen.4
Charles returned north after the ceremony. It was from Aachen that he intended to steer his “Roman empire.” For the last years of his life, from 807 to 814, he resided for large periods each year at Aachen, making it a fixed capital – a marked departure from the mobile kingship of earlier times. It was there that he was observed by Einhard, who wrote the classic Life of Charlemagne sometime between 824 and 836. A tiny little man from the petty nobility of the Maingau, too small to be a warrior and far too clever to languish as a cloistered monk in distant Fulda, Einhard was educated at Fulda but remained a layman. He supervised the near-perfect copies of Roman bronze-work that can still be seen in Aachen. He knew just how to surprise his contemporaries by carefully chosen references to the ancient world. A jewelled cross that he dedicated to the monastery of Saint Servatius in neighboring Maastricht was set by him on a perfect miniature of a Roman triumphal arch, on which (as a good “Roman” Christian) he placed figures of Christ and the Apostles. His portrait of Charles is equally, unexpectedly Roman. He modelled it on Suetonius’ Life of Augustus, a rare text, to which this ingenious little man had gained access.5
Einhard’s Charles was not a sainted king, as Bede had portrayed king Oswald. He portrayed Charles as a man of flesh and blood, a Frank among Franks, just as Suetonius, his model, had gone out of his way to make Augustus, the first emperor, appear, for all his universal power, to be still a Roman among Romans. The realism of Einhard’s portrait of Charles was deliberate. By it, Einhard emphasized the links that bound Charles to his principal supporters and to the beneficiaries of his success, the aristocrats who led the victorious “people of the Franks.”
His nose was slightly longer than normal … His neck was short and rather thick, and his stomach a trifle too heavy … He spoke distinctly, but his voice was thin for a man of his bulk … He spent much of his time on horseback and out hunting … for it is difficult to find another race on earth who could equal the Franks in this activity. He took delight in steam baths and thermal springs … [and] would invite not only his sons, but his nobles and friends as well … so that sometimes a hundred men or more would be in the water together.
When the great man finally fell ill, the scholars at his court liked to believe that he had spent his last days “correcting books.” Einhard knew his Charles better. He wrote that Charles went out, for one last time, to hunt. When he died, on January 28, 814, it was Einhard who recorded the simple epitaph: “Charles the Great, the Christian Emperor, who greatly expanded the kingdom of the Franks.”6
The consolidation of the “greatly expanded kingdom of the Franks” required a continuous effort at “monarchy-making” such as had not been seen in western Europe since the reformed empire of Diocletian and Constantine. Loyalty could never be taken for granted. In Italy, for instance, Charles’ conquest of the Lombard kingdom had broken the Lombard aristocracy. Two hundred of them were taken north as hostages. Frankish noblemen now had the upper hand all the way from the Alps to as far south as Benevento, which remained an independent, Lombard duchy. The monastery of San Vincenzo at Volturno, some 20 miles northeast of Monte Cassino, stood at the tense frontier between Benevento and the “kingdom of the Franks.” In 785, the monks of San Vincenzo began to say regular prayers for Charles as their king. No sooner had they reached the Psalm, O God, in Thy name make me safe, than abbot Potho, a member of the old Lombard nobility, got up and refused to sing. “If it were not for my monastery,” he said, “I would kick the man like a dog.7
Charles and those around him were faced by much resentment and by widespread noncooperation, not only in conquered territories but from Frankish families who still resented the rise to power of the Carolingian dynasty. The best that Charles could do, in this situation, was to communicate that, in a shaken world, the new imperial order found at Aachen represented the only effective guarantee of social and religious stability; and that those who joined in would be allowed to thrive at the expense of those who did not.
Charles controlled a spoils system that ramified throughout much of Europe. He manipulated with great skill a reserve of inducements which no ruler had possessed since Roman times. For those who could be persuaded to be loyal, Charles, in his middle age, seemed a reassuringly old-world figure. Lack of loyalty to one’s lord, at any level of society, was known to shock him. Associations of equals that seemed to undermine the loyalty of inferiors to their lords – such as local sworn leagues and even the raucous toasting-feasts of Frisian farmers – were savagely punished. They were a “blasphemy” against God and the proper order of society.8
Charles summed up in his own style of life a hierarchical social order which insisted on close bonds of loyalty between dependents and their lords. The ceremonial life which developed around Charles at Aachen and in his other palaces did not cut him off from his fideles, his loyal dependents. He knew how to combine hierarchy and prompt obedience with studiously relaxed good cheer. The royal court was an image of a lordly, stable society, which any powerful person might hope to re-create, around himself, in his own region, provided that he retained Charles’ favor.9
It was in this distinctive, very Frankish manner, that ties of loyalty, fostered around Charles at Aachen, reached out, in tentacular fashion, through a “managerial aristocracy” composed of powerful laymen, bishops, and great abbots. Through such persons and their many dependents, Charles was careful to make his will felt in every region of the “greatly extended kingdom of the Franks.”
For modern persons, the Carolingian empire – as the empire of Charles and his successors has come to be called by historians (though it was never called this by contemporaries) – is a political and cultural system which is notoriously difficult to hold in focus. It seems, at times, to be improbably grandiose and, at times, to be pathetically weak. This is because we approach it with criteria other than those of its own time.
Most of these criteria come from our modern expectations of what a successful empire should be like. But the self-image projected by Charles and his supporters has made it even more difficult than usual to see his empire in perspective. The Carolingians had no mean opinion of themselves. They rose to power by claiming that they had brought the Franks out of a “dark age.” They asserted that the kingdom of their Merovingian predecessors had been characterized by aimless barbarism and by a sad decline in learning. As we saw in chapters 6 and 11, there is no truth in this myth. The Carolingians built on solid foundations, already set in place in Merovingian times, in the Frankish heartlands of northern Gaul.
The effect of the Carolingian myth, however, has been to encourage scholars to judge Charles and those around him according to unrealistically exalted expectations. The Frankish empire claimed to rival the “Roman” empire. As a result, we tend to judge the achievement of Charlemagne’s empire by comparing it with the centralized Roman state which had once ruled all of Europe from Scotland to Africa. Not surprisingly, we find it wanting. The scholars around Charlemagne claimed to have “renewed” Latin learning when it had reached a nadir of “rusticity.” We take this claim at face value, and so speak of a “Carolingian Renaissance.” We are then disappointed to learn that, in comparison with the Humanists of the Italian Renaissance, the scholars around Charlemagne and his successors paid scant attention to what we, nowadays, consider to be the essence of “classical” Greece and Rome. The great scholars of the Carolingian period thought of themselves first and foremost as Christians. They made it abundantly clear that they had little interest in the “classical” world in its own right. That had been a pagan world which had been replaced by Christianity. Altogether, we are left with mixed feelings. The Carolingians do not measure up to our own expectations of what they should have been. We tend to dismiss them. Either they were noble dreamers, who planned to restore all that was best in the ancient world despite the limitations of the “Dark Age” society in which they lived. Or they were pretentious barbarians, who should have known better in the first place than to attempt to imitate the past glories of Rome.
It is, therefore, important to look at what were the “horizons of the possible” for Charles and his contemporaries. They had their own view of where they fitted in to the overall history of Europe. It is revealing that, for the very first time, they spoke of the “barbarian invasions” as if they were a distinct period of history. They believed that this period had come to an end in their own, more fortunate times. Carolingian writers, indeed, were the first to propagate the myth of the “barbarian invasions.” They regarded these as an ugly interlude, a dark age placed between the “fall” of the Roman empire (which was caused by such invasions) and the coming of better things, in the form of the Christian kingdom of the Franks.
Although the whole of Europe was once denuded with fire and sword by Goths and Huns, now, by God’s mercy, Europe is as bright with churches as is the sky with stars.10
These are the words of Alcuin, an Anglo-Saxon, written in 793. Alcuin had been summoned from distant Northumbria to the court of Charles. After a period of turmoil, Alcuin implied, Charles’ empire enjoyed unprecedented prosperity and success because God was pleased with it. It had won the favor of God through having renewed the correct practice of Christianity. This was the “ancient, Roman” world that had been brought back by Charles. It was not the pagan Rome of classical times. Rather, it was the Christian empire of Constantine and Theodosius (with its massive codes of law in favor of the Church) and the Latin, Christian culture that had produced Jerome, Augustine, and preachers of the caliber of Caesarius of Arles.
For Alcuin and his colleagues, the Christian Church, and not the Roman empire, was the most majestic institution ever to have appeared in Europe. The Church reached back without a break for over half a millennium, linking the Frankish kingdom directly to the “ancient” Christian world. The Church embraced all the peoples within Charles’ Frankish empire and the neighboring kingdoms of the British Isles. While the past of pagan Rome seemed immeasurably distant to Carolingian clergymen, the same could not be said of the past of the “ancient” Christian Church. It seemed within easy reach. The correct order of the “ancient” Christian Church was alive in the present, as the almost unconscious touchstone of all that was right and proper – much as the American Constitution is more to Americans than a document written by gentlemen of the ancien régime a few centuries ago; it remains, also, the touchstone of all arguments on legality in the present-day United States. Christian texts dating from the age of Augustine and even earlier had accumulated in libraries all over western Europe. These texts were not read as evidence of a long-past period, but as reminders of the timeless presence of God and of his “Law” in all periods. They were still relevant to the present. In that sense, the Early Christian past seemed little removed from the Carolingian present.
Hence our modern word, “Renaissance,” fails to describe what the Carolingians intended to do. It was not their aim to conjure up the world of “classical” Rome as if from the grave. Their Christian culture did not need to be “reborn” for the simple reason that they did not think that it had died. It just needed to be reasserted. Their chosen term, therefore, was correctio – “correcting, shaping up, getting things in order again.” It was a down-to-earth term, suited to the aims of an energetic managerial aristocracy. Their ambition was to make sure that a respected Christian past got on the move again in modern times, much as a large and solid vintage car that had lingered for some time in its garage might soon, with a little effort, be got ready for the road.
But if they failed, then God might again turn his face from them. We should not underestimate the anxiety that was the permanent shadow of the Carolingian program of correctio. In this, Charlemagne and his court were very like their near-contemporaries, the Iconoclast emperors of Byzantium. Both believed sincerely that it was possible for the Christian people to err and to incur the wrath of God. Both believed that the imperial power existed so as to correct such errors. But, if the emperors failed in their duty, then God’s wrath would be made plain in the decline of the kingdom and in renewed barbarian invasion.
Alcuin wrote as he did because he had received the news of a Viking raid on Britain. It was a warning that the “barbarian invasions” might begin again. The unprecedented, almost indecent prosperity of the Franks had to be paid for by a strenuous effort to “correct,” to “shape up” the Christian religion of their new empire. Alcuin ended his remarks with a passage from Isaiah: Let us return unto the Lord God (Isaiah 55:7). Thus a rare combination of fear of God’s displeasure and confidence that the Christianity of their times could be “corrected” from on top drove the movement that has been confidently misnamed, by modern scholars, “the Carolingian Renaissance.”
The movement of “correction” from on top lasted longer than the reigns of Charles and of his son, Louis the Pious (814–840). It mobilized an unprecedented range of persons (lay persons as well as the better-documented monks and bishops). It touched, in very different ways, widely different areas of Europe. The extent of its impact varied greatly from place to place. Indeed, what is truly significant about the Carolingian movement of “correction” was that, although it was vociferously fostered by outstanding figures, it was not masterminded by those figures alone. It drew on a remarkable convergence of aims, which betrayed a hardening of the will to rule, and to rule “correctly,” on the part of an entire diffuse governing class. But, provided that we do not allow them to distort our picture of the movement as a whole, a few examples of well-known personalities can serve as test cases.
Let us begin with Charlemagne himself. As emperor, it was Charles’ business to uphold the “corrected” Christian order and to make it work. He did this through energetic bursts of consultation with the leading figures of each region. Each group was given its own “law,” was urged to live by it, and faced the heavy consequences of imperial disfavor should they fail to do so.
In this year [A.D. 802] the lord Caesar Charles stayed quietly at the palace at Aachen: for there was no campaign that year … In October, he convoked a universal synod [at Aachen] and there had read out to the bishops, priests, and deacons all the canons [the laws of the Church] … and he ordered these to be fully expounded before them all. In the same assembly likewise gathered together all the abbots and monks … and they formed an assembly of their own; and the Rule of the holy father Benedict was read out and learned men expounded it before the abbots and monks … And while this synod was being held, the emperor also assembled the dukes, the counts, and the rest of the Christian people … and all had the laws of his people read out, each man’s law was expounded to each, emended … and the emended law was written down … And [the Annals added, with justifiable pride at the ceremonial recognition of one emperor by another] an elephant [the gift of none other than the Calif Harun al-Rashid of Baghdad] arrived in Francia that year.11
Charles was at his most “imperial” on such occasions. This was because he was seen to be acting in a manner that revived, in Christian times, the action of the godly king Josiah, when he had promulgated the rediscovered Law to the people of Israel. Charles was well aware of this precedent. He used it in the prologue of the most extensive statement that he ever issued of the program of “correction” – the Admonitio Generalis, the “General Warning” of 789.
And the king went up into the house of the Lord … and the priests and the prophets, and all the people, both small and great: and he read in their ears all the words of the book. (2 Chronicles 34:30)12
In secular matters, local laws prevailed, each in its own region. The written laws of individual “peoples” were regularly supplemented by oral custom, created by oral forms of pleading and decision-making. Provided that the Franks retained the upper hand, Charlemagne actively encouraged the use of local laws.13 But this made the “Christian Law” all the more important. In matters of religion the “Christian Law” was the true, universal law of Charles’ empire. It was what every baptized Christian had in common with every other subject of Charles’ Christian empire.
The “Christian Law” was not intended to supersede local laws. But it did sum up the consensus on which Carolingian society as a whole rested. For the correct observance of Christianity gained the favor of God for the empire. This was a written law. It was contained in texts – in the first instance, in the Bible (the Old and the New Testaments), then in written liturgies, in the rulings (the canons) of the Councils of the Church for the last 500 years, and in the works of the Latin Fathers of the Church.
The insistence that the “Christian Law” should be applied correctly in all regions of the empire pushed to the fore a largely new group of persons. Charlemagne’s reforms created an empire-wide “nobility of the pen,” drawn from monasteries and from the clergy. This nobility of the pen was recruited largely from the Frankish aristocracy and from those who depended on the aristocracy, as distant relatives and as clients. Thus the learned class of the empire was not unlike its lay relatives. They stood at the top of Frankish society. They were rare birds and they knew it.
When we speak of this group of monks and clergymen, we should be careful not to speak of them as if they alone represented the “Church” and “the clergy.” There were many forms of clergymen. The average monk and clergyman was no great master of Latin. He lived in a different world from the highly literate group who ruled the Church. But, like their relatives, the Frankish warrior elite, the upper clergy did not form a class which was cut off from all others. Warrior aristocrats depended on their ability to raise loyal troops through maintaining the enthusiasm of large bodies of men very different from themselves. In the same way, the great bishops and abbots of Charles’ empire knew that they also had to use all the skills of command and persuasion which they possessed to bring the “Christian Law” down to every level of their own clergy and to the Christian people.14
In controlling the Church, Charles controlled a structure of power which was unusual in its extensive reach and in its ability to penetrate downwards so as to touch many layers of local society. Carolingian Europe was crisscrossed by a network of great cathedral churches and monasteries. The empire of Charles and his successor, Louis the Pious, had 180 episcopal sees and 700 great monasteries (in some 300 of which the emperor had a direct interest). In Germany, in particular, great monasteries such as Fulda, Reichenau, and St. Gall have been appositely likened to Roman legionary camps, settled on the new limes. But they were more than that. They inherited a long northern tradition, that had already been operative in Ireland, Britain, and Neustria, by which a monastery, as a locus of the holy, might become the nodal point of the society of an entire region. Carolingian abbots owned estates which made them the landlords of tens of thousands of peasants. They were responsible for mobilizing the local gentry for war. The monasteries received, in return for prayers, thousands of small gifts, often from humble persons.
Since the time of Willibrord and Boniface, indeed, a “social earthquake” had changed the face of Germany. Between half and a third of the land in most villages passed, by donation, into the hands of churches and monasteries. The Church had become an overwhelming presence in every locality. As a result of this new situation, the correctio of the Church, in Germany at least, was not imposed from above by a distant circle of idealists. It was a response on the ground level, by local churches, to a new situation of unparalleled power. The Church had to be made orderly and majestic if it was to live up to the expectations of populations for whom the Church had become, for the first time, an ever-present, dominant neighbor.15
We should not forget the importance of the highly local nature of the Carolingian churches. The existence of a widespread clerical elite, associated with bishoprics and monasteries scattered all over western Europe, made the Carolingian empire significantly different from the equally reform-minded Byzantine empire of the same time. Byzantium remained a highly centralized empire. The provinces continued to live in the shadow of Constantinople. There were few local centers of cultural life. Culture tended to drain upward to the capital, to gather around the court and the offices of the patriarchate. This was not the case in Charlemagne’s empire. Despite the ceremonial importance of Aachen in the last decade of Charlemagne’s life, the Carolingian empire never developed a single, all-absorbing center. Instead, the court acted as a “distribution center” both for books and for personnel. Skilled and enthusiastic educators and administrators were drawn to the court and then were sent out to distant bishoprics and monasteries.
Although the court was important as a cultural center in the empire of Charlemagne and his successors, it did not impose a uniformity of culture from on top. Rather, as in the days of the competing cities of the Roman empire, the Carolingian ideal of a “correct” Christianity spread all over western Europe (as Roman city life had done, half a millennium previously) through constant competition between rival local centers, each anxious to outbid the others according to an agreed but flexible standard of excellence. Hence the Carolingian reforms were capable of considerable variation, in different regions and in the hands of different persons.
The first need for such a trans-regional elite (in the age of Charlemagne as under the Roman empire) was for a common code of communication which enabled them to recognize and to feel close to their peers all over Europe. Hence the importance of a particularly well-known figure in the gallery of scholars gathered around Charlemagne – Alcuin of York (735–804). Alcuin was an Anglo-Saxon from Northumbria. He had been lured to Charles’ court in 782. He presented himself as standing for the high “Roman” traditions of Bede. He was very much a career scholar. Not a nobleman himself, he shared his compatriot Boniface’s dislike for local churches ruled by stylish and unlettered aristocrats. To belong to a great monastery brought its own nobility, and subjected the monk to its own forms of noblesse oblige.
Look at the treasures of your library, the beauty of your churches … Think how happy the man is who goes from these fine buildings to the joys of the Kingdom of Heaven … Think of what love of learning Bede had as a boy and how honored he is among men … Sit with your teacher, open your books, study the text …
Look at your fellow-student [he urged a recalcitrant disciple] who has always kept close to God and now holds an eminent bishopric, loved, praised and sought after by all.16
Yet Alcuin was not only an Organization Man. He remained an outsider in the tight world of a court dominated by well-born Frankish clergymen and laymen. To this world he brought, from his Anglo-Saxon monastic background, the inestimable gift, for any newly formed elite, of the ability to communicate to his colleagues the sense of belonging to a charmed circle. He did this through intense teacher–student relationships. He fostered a cult of friendship of which his intense penitential piety was the reverse – for the sadness of humankind consisted precisely in having turned away so often from the friendship of Christ.17
Alcuin also brought to the court an originally Irish habit, which consisted of bestowing flamboyant nicknames on his friends. Charles, predictably, was “David.” This playful streak was a welcome sign. It showed that intellectuals lived, once again, in a world so secure that they could joke with each other and be drawn to each other by elective affinities. But, characteristically for Alcuin, it also carried a didactic message. To be members of the circle of Alcuin, nicknames and all, was to become living avatars of the golden age of ancient Christianity.18
Alcuin came to a Francia that had begun to develop the sine qua non for a collaborative venture of literati – a new, uniform script. What later became known as “Caroline minuscule” was a smaller script, more regular and altogether more legible than its predecessors. Italian Humanists of the fifteenth century, when they discovered Carolingian manuscripts, were so struck by the elegance and solidity of “Caroline minuscule” that they were convinced that they were reading manuscripts written by Romans of the classical period!
In fact, “Caroline minuscule” was the end product of one of those silent continuities that are usually ignored in historical narratives of the early Middle Ages. It was the end product of centuries of experiment by unassuming “technicians of the written word” who had maintained the routines of writing legal documents at the local level and in the courts of barbarian kings, as we saw in chapter 10. Generations of barely noticed pen-pushers had continued at work, in a manner which linked the last centuries of the Roman empire, without a break, to the age of Charlemagne. Now this no-nonsense style of writing emerged as the sine qua non for the extensive copying and the public exposition of the “Christian Law.”19
The “Christian Law” had to speak for itself, to readers of varied levels of competence. But it also had to speak aloud to others. Texts, at this time, were not meant only for solitary readers. They were meant to be read aloud. The Bible, the books of the liturgy, the sermons of the Fathers (especially the homilies of Caesarius of Arles) had to be read out clearly and in an authoritative manner to a wide audience, gathered in large monasteries or in churches. This emphasis on instant intelligibility marked a significant difference between the aims of Carolingian intellectuals and their Roman predecessors. It was not expected that ancient books should speak for themselves. Roman literary manuscripts had lacked punctuation. Words were not separated. Entire sentences and paragraphs merged into each other.
This was not the sort of book that Alcuin intended to produce. He lived in a world that had come to want texts that were “user-friendly.” These texts were written out in such a way as to guide the voice of the reader. Capital letters marked the beginning of new trains of thought or of narrative sequences. Punctuation warned the reader instantly when a sentence ended and how the sentence itself fell into separate parts. Even the cadence of the voice between doubt and certainty could be indicated: the question mark is a direct legacy from the age of Charlemagne. When Charles made him abbot of the monastery of Saint Martin at Tours in 797, Alcuin placed the following inscription over the door of the monastery’s writing-hall, the scriptorium:
May those who copy the pronouncements of the holy law and the hallowed sayings of the fathers sit here. Here let them take care not to insert vain words … May they punctuate the proper meaning by colons and commas [by which Alcuin meant the pacing of the voice according to units marked by punctuation] … so that the reader reads nothing false or suddenly falls silent [because faced by an unfamiliar text] when reading aloud to the brethren at Church.20
The development of “Caroline minuscule,” and the new standards of legibility that went with it, mark a significant breach with the past. Books in Europe were no longer what they had been in the ancient world: they became considerably more like books as we know them. More important at the time, they gradually became the same all over Europe. The diffusion of the “Caroline minuscule” brought to an end the colorful diversity of local scripts that had developed in the sixth and seventh centuries.21
Alcuin played an important role in this development. But he stood at the center of a wider convergence of aims. The development of musical notation, which appears for the first time in Europe in Frankish monasteries, reflected a similar desire. Faced with the importation of unfamiliar but prestigeful “Roman” Mass-books, the monks had to establish a standard way of indicating how these should be chanted. Whether through the aid of correctly written texts or through musical notation, contemporaries were determined that the churches and monasteries of Charlemagne’s kingdom should be filled with well-organized, authoritative Latin words.22
We can see this also at the furthest end of the Carolingian empire, at the monastery of San Vincenzo in Volturno. After abbot Potho’s protest, the Carolingians competed with the Lombard dukes of Benevento to kill the monastery with kindness. Standing between the empire and Lombard southern Italy, the monastery was to be a showcase of “correct” religion. The magnificence of its buildings took archaeologists by surprise when they excavated them in the 1980s. The surfaces of the buildings were covered with writing of all kinds – exquisitely carved stone epitaphs, names on tiles, messages painted on frescoed walls. In a large assembly hall, the Prophets of the Old Testament were shown, standing in formidable order, each with an open book which bore a citation from the prophet’s message. The magnificent scripts derived from Benevento rather than from the Frankish north. But they conveyed the same message as did the scriptoria presided over by Alcuin. Words of command and admonition, uttered by holy persons and caught for all ages in the Holy Scriptures, were what Carolingians thought of when they upheld the “Christian Law.” For the “Christian Law” was no abstract code. Nor was it a mere collection of texts meant for private reading. It was a sound. It was a rolling “thunder” of authoritative voices, demanding obedience and demanding it in Latin.23
This clear Latin, however, was unintelligible to the vast majority of the population of Charlemagne’s empire. This should come as no surprise. In Roman times, also, the overwhelming majority of the population would have been illiterate. In Roman times quite as much as in the days of Alcuin and his leisured friends, those who had mastered a correct, classical Latin based on texts were instantly marked out as a privileged group. There was nothing new in that. But Charles’ empire was different in that it was divided between populations for whom some form of Latin had remained their spoken “mother tongue,” and regions where no one had ever spoken Latin at any time or had not done so for centuries. As an Anglo-Saxon, Alcuin himself had come from such a region. For centuries, in Ireland and Britain (as now in Frisia and Germany), Latin had been a language learned from books. It was a perfect language because it was a perfectly dead language. It was spoken with a fixed pronunciation (which stressed each syllable and altered the sound of many diphthongs) which even learned Continental persons from former Latin-speaking areas would have found hard to follow.
When persons such as Alcuin came to areas of “Roman” speech on the Continent, the Latin he encountered struck him as “barbarous.” But this was not because it was written by “barbarians.” The exact opposite was the case. This was Latin written by persons who thought of themselves as, in some way, still “Romans.” They thought that they were writing Latin when, in fact, they were already writing proto-French. They had not noticed the hiatus between their own, sub-Latin “Roman” language and the “correct” Latin which was to be found in ancient texts.
By creating an elite based upon shared high standards of Latin, based on common texts written in a common script, the Carolingian program of “correction” laid bare for the first time a hitherto largely unobserved barrier: the extent to which Latin, as a learned language, had come to diverge from the sub-Latin languages of southern Europe – what contemporaries called “the vulgar Roman tongue,” and what we now call the “Romance” languages: French, Italian, and Spanish. A sudden sense of strangeness fell across a linguistic situation which more easygoing generations had simply taken for granted. What Alcuin and those around him had gained, by creating a Latin culture of remarkable homogeneity and “horizontal” reach, they stood to lose, by cutting off the channels of “vertical” communication, which had made “good enough” Latin still intelligible to persons who spoke Latin-based dialects. “Correct” Latin, if spoken in the manner that scholars such as Alcuin advocated, could not be understood in the “Roman” areas of Merovingian Gaul, Italy, and Spain.24
We should not, however, over-dramatize the dilemma that this presented. Highly stratified societies do not necessarily expect their elites to be instantly intelligible to their inferiors. Inferiors can be assumed to “get the message” somehow. It was more important that the elites should understand each other. They still did so in the empire of Charlemagne. It is only with hindsight that the linguistic boundaries of Europe seem to have become fixed at this time. In fact, the Frankish elites were probably bilingual. Aristocrats switched easily from Germanic Frankish to a “vulgar Roman” proto-French. Constantly on the move from one part of the empire to another (with large retinues which would, in any case, have included Latin scribes and interpreters), they crossed without difficulty linguistic frontiers that would become clear only in later ages.
Nor had a chasm yet developed between Latin as the exclusive language of the clergy and an “unlettered” laity which was locked, by default, into local vernaculars. Once again, the real division was between the powerful and the rank and file. “Active” literacy implied the ability to read and write in Latin. This had always been the preserve of the privileged few. As in Roman times, “passive” rather than “active” literacy was the more widespread form of literacy. Many persons in Carolingian Europe could read familiar Latin texts and could decipher the contents of important documents. The average clergyman fitted into this category. He was no Alcuin, and no one expected him to be. By contrast, many lay potentes of the Frankish kingdom had maintained the late Roman equivalence of power with the possession of high culture. Just because they were lay persons, this did not mean that they were illiterate barbarians. Despite their studiously maintained self-image as a warrior upper class, defined on all occasions by the wearing of great swords, Frankish gentlemen could be as serious on matters of religion and high thought as any clergyman.
Einhard, the biographer of Charlemagne, is a remarkable example of this class of persons. In the midst of his activities as a Frankish aristocrat, he found time to write abundantly. He wrote a vivid account of how he had brought the relics of Saints Peter and Marcellinus all the way from Rome in order to set up (in the best Frankish manner) a “correct,” authentically “Roman” cult site – a Rome away from Rome – on his estate at Seligenstadt. His letters to learned clergymen allow us to glimpse the extent of his grief at the death of his beloved wife, Emma.25
The lady Dhuoda is another example of the literate aristocrat. In 841–3, during the reign of Charles the Bald, Dhuoda wrote instructions to her young son at court. It is a fascinating Latin text. Dhuoda addressed issues of daily religious practice and propounded a code of behavior suited to a Christian gentleman. Dhuoda did not write copybook platitudes. She used Latin to express her own ideas. Much of what she wrote was based upon her own personal experience and on the memories of her family. For Dhuoda, God was still “to be found in books,” and these books were Latin books.26
The problem which faced Charlemagne and his advisers was not that an unbridgeable “communication gap” had opened up, as the speakers of vernacular drifted away from the “high” Latin of the Church. It was the other way round. Those who upheld “correct” Latin felt themselves to be on the defensive. “Rustic” Latin pressed in all around them. The results of such insouciance could be serious. The message of the “Christian Law” might be blurred by the slipshod Latin of those who copied texts and repeated them aloud to the Christian people, “for often, while people want to pray to God in the proper fashion, they yet pray incorrectly because of uncorrected books.”27
The attempt of Charlemagne to maintain “correct” Latin throughout his kingdom can strike modern persons as fussy and misplaced. Yet Latin was to the Carolingian clergy what icons were to the Byzantines. Serious issues were at stake behind an apparently trivial issue of religious practice. For the new elite, “correct” Latin stood for an entire view of a world restored to order. Its erosion, through rusticitas, through slipshodness, hinted at dangers that went beyond issues of language. It opened up a truly daunting vista. Throughout Charlemagne’s empire, entire populations had, for centuries, been loyal to a largely oral version of Christianity. Christianity was their traditional religion, and Christianity for them was, in effect, the practice of their region. They often derived their instruction from local priests and from monasteries with few books to their name. The highlights of their Christian life consisted in the excitement of pilgrimages to great shrines, where, in “Roman” areas, the hearers would still be bathed in a Latin liturgy and in sermons read out in a “high tongue,” in a Latin that was all the more intimate and uplifting for being a familiar but awesome rendering of their own more blurred and “rustic” speech. (Orthodox Greeks and Russians still have the same experience with the “high” language of their liturgies, as do Arabic-speakers with the “divine,” classical Arabic of the Qur’ân.) These forms of easygoing, “vernacular” Christianity were by no means confined only to the lower classes. Entire regions, from the aristocracy and the upper clergy downwards, were committed to what we might call “dialects” of Christianity that were as distinctive and as “rustic,” by the standards of the new elite, as was their Latin.
Those around Charlemagne, by contrast, were very much the heirs of Boniface. Like Boniface, they were sincerely concerned to save souls. It was their duty, Charles reminded them, “to lead the people of God to the pastures of eternal life.”28 But like Boniface, also, they were far from certain that the people would reach those pastures if they were not warned often that much of what they thought was Christianity was not Christian at all – that the Latin formulae that their priests used might be invalid (as Boniface had thought of the priests of Bavaria with their execrable Latin) and, in general, that their religious practices were ill-informed, “illiterate,” and superstitious. “Correct” Latin texts were to be the basis of a more wide-reaching reform of piety.
Hence the importance of the major shake-up of the Frankish Church which Charles expected to carry out in 789 through sending his representatives to all regions. We have the agenda for this shake-up in the form of the Admonitio Generalis, the “General Warning,” addressed to the clergy and laity of his kingdom. The General Warning was meant to be read as the foundation document of a new style of “corrected” Christianity. It appeared in the same year of Charles’ reign as the year of the reign of king Josiah in which the king (like Charlemagne!) had rediscovered and read aloud to the people the correct, original text of God’s Law to Moses. Like Josiah, Charles strove “by visitation, correction and admonition to recall the kingdom which God had given him to the worship of God.”29
What is significant is the extent to which the General Warning reveals a vigorous, “vernacular” Christianity which, just because it was largely oral, expressed a Christian piety which experts such as Alcuin found difficult to control. Far from being untouched by Christianity, much of Carolingian Europe was characterized by intense religious curiosity and by luxuriant forms of Christian practice. The experts considered these to be in need of constant pruning. It is characteristic that, once again, the General Warning condemned the notorious Letter from Heaven, which was said to have been written by Jesus and placed by him on the altar of Saint Peter at Rome. As we saw in the last chapter, Aldebert had appealed to such a document. Now, only 40 years after Boniface’s condemnation of Aldebert, the Letter from Heaven was still making its rounds in Francia:
that most evil and most false letter which some … last year declared to have fallen from the sky [is] not to be believed or read but [is] to be burned lest the people be cast into error by such writings. Only … the words of holy authors are to be read and expounded.30
In Charlemagne’s empire, as previously, there was one communication gap which truly worried the upper clergy. This was not that the “vulgar” might not hear the Christian message. It was that they might hear it from the wrong people. As in the days of Gregory of Tours, the greatest danger did not lie in an unabsorbed paganism. The danger was a Christianity of non-literate and half-literate believers who were convinced of their own essential orthodoxy. When, for instance, in 847, a prophetess called Thiota appeared in Mainz, she was instantly brought before the bishops:
For she said that she knew a definite date for the ending of the world, and other things known only to God, as if they had been divinely revealed to her. As a result, many of the common people … came to her with gifts and commended themselves to her prayers. Still worse, men in holy orders, ignoring the teaching of the Church, followed her … After she had been carefully questioned about her claims, she admitted that a certain priest had coached her in them … For this she was publicly flogged by the judgment of the synod.31
The case of Thiota reveals an extensive category of persons, from literate clergymen to an unlettered woman, who looked to guidance from Christian visionaries and not from the exponents of “correct” Latin texts.
It was to save souls and to meet the challenge posed by unauthorized preachers of a vernacular Christianity that a council of bishops in Tours in 813 declared for the first time ever that homilies – the selected sermons of former preachers such as Caesarius of Arles – were to be read out in Latin, but that they should also be translated, by the preacher in rusticam Romanam linguam aut Thiotiscam: “into the language of rustic Romans or into German (Deutsch).”32
The decision taken at Tours has been described as “the birth certificate of French.”33 This is to see it with hindsight. At the time, the decision fits well into a movement of control from on top, which was combined with an ever-greater insistence that the commands of the authorities be fully understood by those who received them.
Throughout his reign, Charles had reached out to impose oaths of loyalty on ever-widening sections of the population. It was an aggressive policy. It rendered all those who took such oaths fully liable, in case of default, to the harsh penalties of “infidelity.” The oaths were administered in the vernacular of each region. Those who took them could never claim that they had not understood what was spoken on that occasion. Each person was henceforth engaged by his oath to serve Charlemagne “with all my will and with what understanding God has given me.” Like the oaths exacted by Charlemagne, the “Christian people” also must know in their own hearts, through having heard it in their own tongue, the “Christian Law” to which they had given their assent.34
We can see the Carolingian system of instruction and control working hardest in the newly incorporated territories of Germany. In a region such as Saxony, there was a very real need for loyalty. Here the danger did not come from charismatic leaders of a non-literate Christianity. It came directly from the pagan past. In Saxony, the gods had remained ever-present. They were alternative lords. Baptismal vows copied out in variants of Old High German included a specific list of renunciations: “and I forsake all the Devil’s works and words: Thunor, Woden and Saxnote and all the uncanny beings who are their companions.”35
One of the most remarkable examples of this drive to communicate Christianity to the newly converted Old Saxons was produced a little after the death of Charlemagne. The Heliand, The Savior, retold the story of the Gospels in Old German epic verse. In the poem, Christ was presented very much as “the Lord,” in a heavy, Carolingian style (and not in the old, looser manner of an Old Saxon chieftain). His Apostles were his war-band. At first reading, the Heliand seems to have sprung, unmistakably, straight from the woods of Germany. Yet the condensation of the Gospel narratives on which it was based was taken from a book originally written in northern Syria in the time of Bardaisan – the Gospel Harmony of Tatian. By the vagaries of the circulation of ideas within a worldwide Christendom, this product of the third-century eastern Church had ended up in central Europe. Some of the only fragments that have survived of this much-travelled and mysterious text of the Gospels are in Old Dutch.36
The Heliand was written for monks and for the local Saxon gentry who supported the monks. It was necessary that lay aristocrats should know the message communicated by Christian books in their own tongue. Christianity in Saxony still depended on a fragile alliance between the Franks and the Saxon aristocracy. In 841, this alliance broke down in a time of civil war. Local aristocrats, involved in the fighting, had to turn for support to their own peasants. It was a dangerous move. The peasants insisted on the revival of the Stellinga, the assembly of the warrior peasants associated with the pagan days of Old Saxony. It was an ugly moment. The Stellinga was suppressed with exemplary savagery. Carolingian sources described it as having been nothing less than a peasants’ revolt and an apostasy from Christianity. Whether this was true or not, the revival of the Stellinga was a warning sign. The establishment of a Christian order in large parts of Germany could not be taken for granted, It required constant vigilance.37
Saxony was a “frontier” province, where the problem of communication took on a notably aggressive tone. But the Frankish empire included many peaceful landscapes with long traditions of Christianity. They stand out as “model regions” much as do the “model regions” (given over to restrained capitalistic free enterprise) in the vast territories of the modern Chinese People’s Republic. Ghaerbald, bishop of Liège (785–809), and his successor, Walcaud (809–831), lived in one such region. Liège was close to Aachen. The documents connected with the episcopate of Ghaerbald show that he presided over a Christian landscape that had already become recognizably “medieval.” They make us realize how long we have had to wait (almost half a millennium) before features which medieval persons (and we moderns) would take for granted as central to the landscape of Christian Europe made their first appearance.
The most important of these new features was the payment of tithes. Ever since the days of Boniface and king Pippin, royal law had made the payment of tithes compulsory. All members of the population were supposed to deliver a tenth of their agrarian produce to their local church. Some form of gift-giving between the local church and the laity had always existed. We saw this in the case of Ireland, in chapter 14. But this was different. In the Carolingian empire, the imposition of tithes was only one aspect, among many others, of a reinvigorated system for extracting rent and services from the peasantry, to which we referred in the last chapter. It marked the beginning of a new dispensation: “no tax in the history of Europe can compare with tithes in length of duration, extent of application and weight of economic burden.”38
But the imposition of tithes brought the Church closer to the average Christian community than it had been before. For those who paid it needed to be persuaded in no uncertain terms that the Church was worth it. Not surprisingly, Ghaerbald of Liège urged his clergy both to keep careful lists of tithe-payers and to instruct their congregations on a regular basis. It was important that they should do both. The “Christian people” must understand their faith more fully. They had to be encouraged to embrace with the well-schooled loyalty of good subjects a faith that offered services for which they were now expected to pay on a regular basis.39
It was important that each Christian must be made fully aware of the exact nature of their baptismal vows, and so of the extent to which these vows bound them to God and his Church. Ever since the victory of Augustine over Pelagius, the baptism of babies was normal in western Christianity. Instant baptism of the child meant instant incorporation in the protection afforded against the Devil by the Christian Church. In effect, infant baptism meant that the godparents of each child vouched for their godchild. It was they who memorized and repeated the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer on the child’s behalf. The godparents would stand around the priest or bishop, each carrying a godchild on their right arm or, in the case of older children, with each child standing on the right foot of his or her godparent. It was an ideal occasion on which to remind all present of the basic tenets of the Christian faith and of the binding nature of their oath to the Christian God.40
To enforce the baptism of adults without so much as a minimal degree of indoctrination – as had happened in the case of the newly conquered Old Saxons and Avars – shocked a man such as Alcuin. Avars, he wrote, were not like those early converts described in the Acts of the Apostles, such as the centurion Cornelius. A Roman centurion, Alcuin the scholar pointed out, had received a liberal education. As a result, he would have understood the preaching of the Apostle Peter and could be instantly baptized. This was not to be expected of the Avars around Vienna, who – writes Alcuin the scholar! – were “a brutish and unreasonable race, and certainly not given to literacy.” The illiterate Avars should be allowed at least a token 40 days of Christian preparation.41
In the better-favored regions of Francia, however, Charlemagne took preparation for baptism on the part of the godparents very seriously. In 802/806, Ghaerbald received a letter from Aachen.
At Epiphany, there were many persons with us who wished [as sponsors] to lift up infants from the holy font at baptism. We commanded that each of these be carefully examined and asked if they knew and had memorized the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed. There were many who had neither of the formulae memorized. We commanded them to hold back … They were quite mortified.42
It is a revealing incident. With characteristic resourcefulness, Charles and his advisers had fastened on an informal practice, that had been widespread in the lay world, so as to use it as an instrument of religious instruction. For centuries, all over Europe and also in Byzantium, a sponsor had been asked by the family to “lift” the baptized child from the font. This had been a largely profane ritual. Families had used it to seek out alternative patrons and allies, through involving them in the baptism of their children as “co-parents.” It was an ingenious arrangement. It showed the ability of generations of post-Roman persons to impose their own “vernacular” meaning upon Christian rituals by making them serve new social needs. The Franks took the practice very seriously indeed, as a ritual device for cementing social bonds.
Charles and his clergy captured the old Frankish practice of “lifting” the child from the font by making of such sponsors, for the first time, “godparents” in the sense to which we have become accustomed. Godparents were incorporated in the baptismal liturgy. By memorizing the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed they were co-opted as the fully cognizant guarantors of the child’s oath of loyalty to God.43
It is a development that was characteristic of the Carolingian age. In the turning of sponsors into godparents, we are witnessing the ingenious exploitation, to new ends, of a situation that had already existed for centuries in Frankish lay society. In “correcting” the laity, Charlemagne and his advisers did not simply impose new demands on them. They often chose, by preference, to make use of the bridges between the lay world and the Church which the Frankish upper classes had already created for their own benefit. For centuries, the laity had asked for Christian blessing and had used Christian rituals for their own purposes. Now the Church would, as it were, “call in its favors.” Rituals which the laity had already developed in their own interest were now used to bind the laity more closely to the Church, so as to cement their loyalty as tithe-payers and to instruct them in the faith.
Altogether, with the scholar administrators of the Carolingian empire we are dealing with a singularly purposeful body of men. In their writings, many of them appear as the first technocrats of Europe. They claimed to know the Christian Law in its majestic entirety. They knew how to guide the Christian people to fulfill its goals. As landlords and bureaucrats, they kept lists of their congregations, for the purpose of extracting rents and tithes. All over Europe, they were more of a presence in the lives of those whom they intended to “admonish” and “correct” than they had been in previous centuries. Faced by Christian practices different from their own, they tended to dismiss such practices, quite bluntly, as unenlightened. One admittedly extreme example illustrates this tendency. Agobard was born in Spain and trained at Aachen. He became archbishop of Lyons in 816, where he acted, also, as imperial commissioner.
Agobard soon found that Lyons was no Liège. The former kingdom of Burgundy, in the Rhône valley, was a Mediterranean region with long traditions of its own. Agobard showed little patience with the “folk Christianity” that he encountered. For instance, he was told that certain persons in Burgundy were believed by all classes to have the power to bring down hail on the fields of their neighbors, and that they were allied to a race of persons from “Magonia,” who sailed through the clouds in boats, to take the harvests back to their distant country. This was, perhaps, an aerial version of the Irish belief in “the Land of the Other Side,” which may have survived since Celtic times in Gaul.44
Agobard was not impressed. A humane judge, he intervened to save four poor wretches who had been brought before him. They risked being stoned to death as inhabitants of Magonia who had fallen to earth. The terms in which Agobard justified his dismissal of the case deserve our attention. For in his defense of his own action, he betrayed a slight but significant shift in attitudes to the supernatural. Previously, it had been taken for granted that demons did, indeed, have control of the lower air, and that ill-intentioned persons frequently allied themselves with the demons to cause harm. Good Christians, by contrast, refused to make contact with the shadowy counter-empire, whose power in the material world was rendered all too palpable by the crash of thunder and by the hailstorms that fell like a scythe upon the vineyards. Everyone believed that holy men and women had been raised up by God so as to hold an all too real counter-empire at bay. Christian priests, monks, and holy persons challenged the demons in the name of the yet greater power of Christ. But the demons remained, nonetheless, a massive presence. They were far from being “popular illusions.”
Agobard, by contrast, drained the demonic world of much of its solidity. Agobard was an uncompromising monotheist. The “Christian Law,” as Agobard presented it in a series of citations from the Old Testament, proved that all power in the supernatural world belonged to God alone. No human being could influence the weather. Without God’s permission, not even the demons had the power to hurt mankind. Demons, of course, existed. But, for Agobard, they were a distant presence. Reports of their activities in Burgundy could be safely discounted. They were merely believed to have been active, and such belief was, in his opinion, a popular illusion. It proved what, as a court-bred scholar, he had always suspected, which was that the uneducated were no more than “half-believers.” For “stupidity [was] an essential element in misbelief.” Faced by religious practices of which he disapproved Agobard was content to declare that the Devil found it easy to delude
those over whom he thinks he has the best chance of prevailing, because they have barely any faith and lack the ballast of reason – such as girls, young boys, and persons of low intelligence.45
For Agobard, the application of the universal “Christian Law” in backward Burgundy assumed not only that Christianity was true and endowed with greater supernatural power than its rivals: in its authorized exponents, Christianity and cultural superiority could now be assumed to go hand in hand.
Agobard was an extremist. He was an unusually consequential exponent of a tendency toward a clerical detachment from all forms of vernacular religion that was latent but never dominant in the Carolingian reforms. But this streak of contempt for “popular” practices was never dominant at the time. Agobard was isolated even in his own times. We get closer to the heart of Charlemagne’s endeavor if we go back in time to the late 780s. Here we find a writer who expressed, with rare clarity, the manner in which the “corrected” Latin Christianity of the Carolingian empire had taken a path that diverged significantly from its Christian neighbors in Byzantium.
As we have already seen, at the end of chapter 16, Theodulph, the future bishop of Orléans (798–818), had been commissioned in 793 to prepare a memorandum on the cult of images, in the form of a detailed rebuttal of the Acta of the Iconophile Council of Nicaea of 787. The memorandum was read out before Charles. The manuscript still contains a precious record of the emperor’s comments. The memorandum came to be known (in modern times) as the Libri Carolini – Books for Charles. It was not well known at the time: Charles came to consider it too radical a statement to be circulated widely. Nevertheless, partly because it was a semi-secret memorandum, the Libri Carolini summed up with unusual harshness attitudes which Theodulph held in common with his colleagues.46
It was important for Theodulph to make plain the differences between himself and “the Greeks.” The clergy around Charlemagne had much in common with the Iconoclasts of Byzantium. Like the Iconoclasts, they were concerned to reassess a Christian inheritance which had been shaken in the previous century. Like the Iconoclasts also, they intended to root out abuses in worship which had crept into the Church.
In his memoir, Theodulph spells out with great care the basic religious assumptions which governed his own worldview. It was a worldview very different from that of Orthodox Byzantines. For Theodulph, God was a distant ruler, sharply separated from his creatures. God was to his creation “as a lord to his servants.” (Optime, “Excellent idea!” was Charles’ comment at that point.)47 It was his will alone that bridged the chasm between himself and human beings. He did not offer to the human race a gentle flow of visual symbols, which linked the invisible to the visible world in a seemingly unbroken continuum, as Greek thinkers such as Dionysius the Areopagite and John of Damascus liked to believe. He preferred to make himself known by his commands. Law was God’s greatest gift to mankind. When it came to the visual tokens of his will, God had used a stern economy of means. He had granted to his people a few, utterly dependable visible signs through which he had approached them and through which they could approach him. To the people of Israel he had given the Law and the Ark of the Covenant. “Shimmering with so many awe-inspiring and incomparable mysteries,” the Ark was a unique artefact. In creating it, the skilled Besaleel, “filled with the Spirit of God,” had not followed his own visual imagination but the command of God alone.48
The Ark of the Covenant was a work of art untouched by the arbitrary quality that characterized all other forms of artistic creation. Icons, by contrast, in Theodulph’s opinion, were not like the Ark of the Covenant. They partook in the frightening indeterminacy of all profane activity. Without its written label, Theodulph pointed out, an icon of the Virgin could be mistaken for the portrait of any majestic and beautiful woman – even, perhaps, for an image of Venus.49 Nothing, in itself, guaranteed the “sanctity” of such an icon; for nothing painted in it by the artist had come directly from the will of God, as had been the case when the inspired Besaleel had constructed the Ark of the Covenant.
The Ark of the Covenant was counted among the res sacratae. It was a “consecrated,” holy object, because its awesome form had been explicitly laid down by God. Such res sacratae reflected on earth the eternal will of God. In Christian times, the consecratory prayers of the Mass and the text of the Scriptures acted for the Christian people as the Ark of the Covenant had once acted for the people of Israel. They were truly holy things. They were ordained by God.50
When, as bishop of Orléans, Theodulph built his own exquisite little chapel at Saint Germigny-des-Prés, beside the Loire near Orléans, he placed a mosaic of the Ark of the Covenant in the apse above the altar. In a place reserved for “consecrated things,” only visual objects known to have been given by God to his people, by his express command, should meet the eye. As bishop of Orléans, also, Theodulph’s regulations to the clergy laid especial emphasis on the holiness of the Church and of the Eucharist. He was not over-demanding in his demands on lay persons. It was enough for a Christian to pray twice a day, in the morning and at evening, “You who have made me, have mercy on me” and “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” But they should know what were “sacred things” and what were not. The space around the altar was sacred: no woman was to enter it. The holy vessels used at the Eucharist should be worthy of it. Even the bread offered at Mass should not be “common” bread. And churches, he insisted, were holy places. They should not be used as temporary barns, in which to store the village’s supply of hay.51
Holy places could be sumptuous. Frankish ambassadors travelling to Constantinople had reported to Theodulph that they had found there many dilapidated basilicas, their roofs open to the sky and their lights untended. The ambassadors had come from a world of imposing shrines. They professed to be shocked to find that Byzantine society devoted so much energy to painting pictures and paid little attention to the fabric of holy buildings. In contrast to Byzantium, in Theodulph’s opinion, the world of Latin Christianity was right to value the shrines of the saints and the splendid cases which surrounded their relics. The unearthly brilliance of the gold and jewelled reliquaries in which the relics of the saints were encased showed that “the lords,” the saints, were “in” them. There was no doubt that this was where the saints were “present” on earth. Before such objects, the faithful should, indeed, bow with reverential awe – as Gregory of Tours had done, a full two centuries earlier. In Byzantium, by contrast, the “presence” of the saints seemed to be sought all over the place. The eyes of believers strained toward icons, many of which were not even placed in the church, but in the profane setting of private houses, even in bedrooms. In Theodulph’s opinion, it was better not to rely on icons. Rather, one should go to a great basilica (such as the shrine of Saint Martin at Tours or of Saint Peter in Rome) and kneel before the saint, who was “fully present” there, in his ancient tomb.52
The artistic traditions associated with the sacred in northern Europe tended to support Theodulph’s anti-iconic arguments. Early medieval art had turned away from the human face. Stately human figures could, of course, be seen on the walls of basilicas all over the West, from Rome to Bede’s Wearmouth and to the shrine of Saint Brigid in Kildare. But these human figures were not singled out as icons. They served, rather, as “books for the uncultivated.” They reminded the bulk of the population of biblical narratives which only the learned could read for themselves in the original text. Pictures were necessary, but they were not “holy things.”53
The highest art, in the north, had not been concerned with catching the “living” likeness of a human being, as was the case in a classical tradition of human representation which had survived unbroken in Byzantium. The art of the jeweller, and not that of the portrait painter, was the most prized. For the magical cunning of a craftsman consisted in taking raw wealth – precious stones, precious fragments of gold and silver (often unceremoniously hacked from ancient pieces, or in the form of coins extorted as tribute) – and transforming this mass of shimmering metal into condensed signs of power. Hence the skill devoted to the great brooches, to the belts, to the ornamented armor, and to similar regalia by means of which the kings and nobles of Ireland, Britain, and Francia sheathed their own persons with stunning tokens of their status.
The religious artist took this process of transformation one step further. The scribes who illuminated the Book of Kells and the other great Gospel books of the British Isles (which we saw in chapter 16) and the craftsmen who produced the great votive crowns, the crosses, and the relic-cases of Gaul and Spain were not concerned to catch a “likeness.” Their task was to take “dead” matter, associated with the profane wealth and power of great donors – precious pigments, the skins of vast herds, gold and jewels – and make them come alive, by creating from them objects whose refulgent, intricate surfaces declared that they had moved, beyond their human source, into the realm of the sacred.
Most important of all was the fact that Theodulph’s religious world was dominated by a written text. Carefully copied and passed down through the centuries, the Holy Scriptures stood out as the unique manifestation of the will of God. It was through books, and not through icons, that God had chosen to lead the human race “by the hand.” When Moses had taught the people of Israel, he had done so
not by painting but by the written word … nor was it written of him that “He took paintings,” but Moses took the Book … and read in the ears of the people the words of the Book.54
Theodulph and his colleagues placed the words of the Bible at the heart of their religious culture. A contemporary Irish poem on the ideal monastery wrote of one such great Bible, placed open in the middle of the church:
… bright candles
over the holy white scriptures.55
Careful copying and meditation on the Bible were activities tinged with an edge of mystic joy. This tradition reached back from the age of Theodulph, over four centuries, through Bede and Gregory the Great, through the Vivarium of Cassiodorus, to the leisured and literate intellectuals of the age of Augustine and Jerome.
What had changed, over the centuries, was that the Latin book had, by the time of Theodulph, become a world of its own. It stood out in majestic isolation from what was now an alien babble of vernacular tongues. To understand the Scriptures and to explain their contents to the “people beloved of Christ” became all the more urgent. It shocked Theodulph that his Christian colleagues in the East seemed unaware of the perils and the opportunities of this situation. An entire “Christian people” needed the sharp words of the Law, and the Greeks, with proud insouciance, took the “soft” option: they offered their charges the trivial medium of “little pictures.”
You, who claim to have preserved the purity of the faith by means of images, go and stand before them with your incense. We will search out the commands of our Lord by eager scrutiny, in the bound books – the codices – of God’s own Law.56
Behind the contemptuous tone adopted by Theodulph toward Byzantine piety there lay a great fear. Incorrect Christian worship might erode the boundary between the sacred and the profane. This boundary had been put in place, only recently and with considerable effort, in many newly converted areas of the Latin West. The stark contrast between a world of profane objects and a small cluster of “sacred things” was basic to Theodulph’s arguments. In Byzantium, he claimed, far too many things were treated as “holy.” Theodulph showed no sensitivity to the central argument of John of Damascus. As we saw in chapter 17, this was that God’s mercy had suffused the entire created order with a generalized sacrality. The world was filled with visible tokens which led the worshipper to the invisible God. Such arguments did not impress Theodulph. They struck him as opening the way for a dangerous blurring of the sacred and the profane. In his opinion, Byzantine Christians had blurred the distinction between mere paintings and the truly “holy” tombs of the saints. Byzantine emperors had blurred the distinction between the human and the divine. They claimed to be “colleagues” and “co-rulers” with Christ. Charlemagne claimed to be never more than “a sinner” and the “servant” of Christ. Petitions by Byzantine holy men to the Byzantine court, so Theodulph noted, had even dared to speak of the emperor’s “divine ears”! Such expressions struck him as close to paganism.57
In Theodulph’s opinion, Charles’ empire was superior to Byzantium because, in the Latin Church, the profane and the sacred had been held apart. Neither was allowed to invade the other. Each had its proper place. Because of this, each enjoyed a certain merciful freedom from the other. Condemned by Theodulph to a humble profanity, Latin artists could feel free to “do their own thing.” They did not have to strain, as did the later painters of icons in the Orthodox world, to catch the exact likenesses of holy figures and to freeze in paint an unchanging vision preserved for them, since time immemorial, by the Orthodox tradition. Latin church-painters were free to change their minds. They could fill the churches with new creations. They could even make sculptures – a practice that remained deeply disturbing to Orthodox Christians. By the end of the Middle Ages, the free flow of western art had rendered the Christian iconography of Latin churches virtually unrecognizable to Byzantine visitors.58
In an analogous manner, French, Italian, and Spanish were declared to be “profane” languages, compared with the sacred quality of Latin. This set them free to evolve, as they rapidly slipped out of the control of a Latin now deemed to be a perfect, but safely dead, language.
Altogether, the sharp separation of the sacred from the profane had opened up a neutral space. In that space, the entire pre-Christian past of northern Europe might find its niche. For the pre-Christian past could be allowed to flank the Christian present, provided that it remained resolutely profane. Memories of the pre-Christian world must not be allowed to rival, in their fascination, the high, true sacrality of the “Christian Law.” They must also be shorn of the sinister, negative sacrality associated with true pagan practice – with sacrifice and divination. But, given these conditions, the ancestral cultures of western Europe were free to contribute to the creation of vernacular literatures and of ethnic histories which could be shared by Christian clergymen and by lay persons. Such a literature gave the Christians of many areas of northern Europe access to a “deep” past that was not that of the Church. It is to this development that we must turn in our last chapter.
Map 10 The Atlantic world