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The Age of Charlemagne
560–840

Gregory the Great

The old imperial heartland of Italy, new home to the defeated Ostrogoths, now lay open to anarchy and invasion. In 568 the Lombards, originally from Scandinavia, moved with other Germanic tribes west through the Alps in search of a new home. They seized control of Milan and Pavia and by 572 were threatening Rome. Plague had cost the city a third of an already depleted population. Close to a million had become barely 30,000. They were governed by a thirty-year-old prefect named Gregory, who soon despaired of the task and left office to found a monastery in his father’s villa outside Rome. In 579 he was prevailed upon by Pope Pelagius II to go to Constantinople and plead for help against the Lombards. In this he was unsuccessful, but after his return Gregory was raised to the papacy in 590 ‘by acclamation’.

Since Rome had long been abandoned as a capital city, Gregory had untrammelled authority. He bribed the Lombards to leave it in peace and commenced an abusive argument with the eastern patriarch, John, for the latter’s giving himself the title ‘ecumenical’ (or global) in 588, implying sovereignty over the western church. Never one to mince words, Gregory called John ‘the fore-runner of Antichrist’.

Gregory’s fourteen-year papacy (590–604) led to his being known as ‘the Great’. He recast Catholic liturgy, with no reference to Constantinople. Church tradition attributes to him the beginnings of church music, introducing what became known as Gregorian chant. He demolished many of the ruins of ancient Rome as pagan distractions from pilgrim churches and shrines. The first monk to become pope, Gregory was also eager to extend Christianity through mission. Where ancient Rome had used legions to extend its command over Europe, he used abbots, priors and monks. Gregory is the first church father who emerges from this period with a distinct personality, clever, argumentative, self-confident. The historian Chris Wickham writes that, of all the personalities of the period, Gregory was one of the few ‘I could imagine meeting with any real pleasure’.

In about 595 Gregory noted two blond English slaves in a Roman market, of whom he allegedly said they were non Angli sed angeli, not Angles but angels. Britain had been Christian under the Romans, but had mostly reverted to Anglo-Saxon paganism. Gregory commanded a Roman prior, Augustine, to travel north and bring its inhabitants back to the fold. A reluctant Augustine landed in Kent in 597, where he and forty monks swiftly converted the Kentish king, Aethelbert, with the assistance of his queen, Bertha, who was a Frankish Christian princess. Augustine’s mission left Gregory delighted that ‘God has brought even the ends of the Earth to the faith’, but although that might have been the case in the south, in parts of the west and north inhabited by descendants of the ancient Celts, the so-called Ionan rite of St Columba remained in force. It was not until 664 that a synod at Whitby finally won England, if not all of Britain, to the Roman rite.

On the continent, the empire of Clovis had disintegrated on his death. Under Frankish custom, property was divided among male heirs, rather than left to an eldest son. Such partible inheritance might suit a migratory tribe, dividing the spoils of conquest between kinsmen, but it was disastrous to the cohesion of an emergent state, dependent on the security and continuity of a hierarchy of nobles, merchants and farmers. The winner from partigeniture was the church. Bishops and abbots negotiated legal sanctuary and immunity from taxes and military service. They enjoyed increasing wealth and spiritual power over the souls of men. They offered rulers a corps of trained administrators and diplomats. Above all they represented continuity with the past, sustaining a tenuous link with the tradition of classical learning. Hence by the time of Gregory’s death in 604, a new empire was emerging from the ruins of the old, that of the church of Rome. In its grandeur and discipline, and in its capacity to inspire loyalty, it was for a time that empire’s worthy successor.

Persia and Islam

At the turn of the seventh century it was Constantinople’s turn to face an existential threat. The emperor Heraclius (610–41) was under pressure from Slav, Bulgar and Avar forces to the north, and from a recuperated Persian empire to the east. The Persians advanced across Syria, seizing Jerusalem in 614 and cutting Constantinople’s grain supply. They finally reached the city’s walls, where Gibbon claims they were offered ‘a thousand silk robes, a thousand horses and a thousand virgins’, of which the city apparently had an inexhaustible supply. Heraclius eventually repulsed the Persians in a daring winter campaign, driving them deep into Mesopotamia and defeating them at the Battle of Nineveh in 627.

For the eastern empire it was a short-lived victory, as it left a weakened Persia vulnerable to a new force out of Arabia of unprecedented potency. In 632, the death in Medina of the prophet Mohammad unleashed a burst of expansionist zeal. Mounted Arab armies overran Mesopotamia, entered Syria and took Damascus in 635. Egypt fell next, and Alexandria was taken in 642. North Africa followed. As if overnight, a Christendom that had embraced the Mediterranean, Black and Caspian seas, and reached the banks of the Nile and the Tigris, did so no more. The great cities of antiquity – Antioch, Damascus, Alexandria and Carthage – passed to Islam, taking with them roughly a third of Christendom’s population. Nothing in Europe’s history so emphatically altered and fixed the concept of its eastern boundary with Asia.

Christianity was ill equipped to meet this crisis. The faith of the eastern empire was immersed in theological schism and persecution. Provinces lived in fear of heresy and excommunication as Heraclius had sought to impose Orthodox belief on his war-weary people. The Muslim advance was initially tolerant. It was not seeking mass conversion, only submission and tribute. In his study of the Silk Roads, the historian Peter Frankopan stresses the sympathy with which early Islam treated the faiths of the near east. ‘The message was inclusive and familiar, and seemed to draw the sting out of the fractious arguments that had set Christians on edge.’

As a result, the expansion of Islam out of Mesopotamia found widespread support among Jews and dissident Christians in the newly conquered territories. Pockets of Christian worship remained throughout the Middle East into modern times. Alexandria retained its status as a centre of both Hellenistic and Christian culture. Egypt’s Copts lived without being castigated as heretics. The Muslim conquests of the seventh century were, in almost all cases, never to revert to Christianity. That faith was now to enjoy only a distant, sometimes violent, relationship with the land of its birth.

Charles Martel and Pepin the Short

In France a new Frankish leader, Pepin of Herstal (687–714), began to reassemble Clovis’s domain. In 687 he gained power over northern France and went on to subdue Burgundy and Aquitaine, as well as lands along the Rhine. His son, Charles Martel (714–41), pushed north into Frisia and the Low Countries. To the south Martel reached the borders of Lombard Italy. But his greatest challenge was in the west. In 711 an Umayyad army in Africa reached the Straits of Gibraltar, finally crossing into Spain. By 719 Muslims were in command of all of Iberia except the Basque lands. They then crossed the Pyrenees, reaching as far into France as the Garonne and the Rhône. In the east, Umayyad forces were also attacking Constantinople, where in 718 they were narrowly repulsed by Leo III. They moved on into the Balkans.

This was the most serious incursion into the European land mass since the demise of Rome. Christendom faced not just a conquering army but a faith that was both united and yet tolerant of the beliefs of its conquered peoples. After a series of advances into and retreats from the south of France, in 732 an army under Abdul Rahman crossed from Spain into Gascony and the heart of Frankish territory. Martel summoned troops from across his domain and confronted Rahman at the Battle of Poitiers (or Tours). Here the Umayyad army was conclusively defeated.

The importance of the victory to the fate of medieval Europe is much debated. The threat was clearly real. Arabs had overrun Spain, were facing Italy from north Africa and had Constantinople and the Balkans in their sights. Gibbon concluded that without Martel’s achievement at Poitiers, Oxford would have been teaching the Koran. Kenneth Clark agreed that, without Martel, ‘western civilization might never have existed … we survived by the skin of our teeth’. One of the pleasures of counter-factual history is that its practitioners can endlessly disagree, some now treating Poitiers as no more than a gigantic raid. As it was, retaliatory Frankish expeditions soon recovered parts of north and west Spain, while the Umayyad empire gave way to over-extension and fragmentation. A Berber revolt of 741 was followed in 750 by the overthrow of the Umayyads in Iraq by the Abbasids. Islam became as divided and argumentative as had been Christendom. Had it won at Poitiers, it is doubtful it could have held Europe for long.

Despite these divisions, Islam proved remarkably tenacious in Spain. Cordoba declared itself an independent emirate in 756 and survived as such into the thirteenth century, while Granada did not fall to Castile until the fifteenth. Cordoba grew to up to 500,000 inhabitants. Its markets were celebrated, its religious life tolerant and its streets famed for their arcaded courts, cool fountains and nocturnal lighting. One ruler, Al-Hakam II (961–76), kept a male harem and a Christian concubine, building a library to rival Alexandria’s. He appears in few histories of Europe.

Martel died in 741. His son, Pepin the Short (751–68), sustained his father’s domain but with a significant departure. He was officially no more than a Frankish warlord, a so-called ‘mayor of the palace’ (after major domo), and he craved papal coronation. At the time, Pope Stephen II in Rome needed a different sort of help. In 751 a Lombard army had seized Ravenna and demanded exorbitant tribute from Rome. Stephen did something no pope had done before. He left Italy and travelled north to Pepin’s court outside Paris. The offer was simple. Stephen would anoint Pepin king of the Franks and ‘Patrician of the Romans’ if, in return, Pepin would intervene to prevent a Lombard attack on Rome.

The deal was honoured on both sides. Stephen crowned Pepin in Reims in 754, together with his sons Carloman and Charles (the future Charlemagne). In return, Pepin invaded Italy and forced the Lombards to surrender Ravenna to the pope. They also had to surrender a strip of territory across Italy as far as Rome. These ‘Papal States’ brought the papacy both revenue and a buffer zone against Lombard aggression. They were known as the Donation of Pepin. Since the gift was of land still claimed by the eastern empire, its disposal by Pepin was outlawed by Constantinople. This gave rise to a celebrated forgery, of the ‘Donation of Constantine’, a supposed fourth-century document indicating that Constantine had given imperial lands in Italy to the church of Rome. Either way, the donation further cemented the alliance between France and Rome.

Charlemagne

In 768 Pepin split his kingdom between his two sons, who immediately quarrelled. We know only that within three years Carloman was dead, according to rumour, of a bad nosebleed. Charles then seized from Carloman’s young sons their half of France and combined it with his own inheritance, mostly in modern Belgium and Germany. Charles the Great (768–814) was, for those times, a giant of over six feet, heavily bearded, and wearing a sheepskin tunic and cross-gartered leggings. He styled himself a Frankish king, with eighteen children by ten wives and concubines (the numbers vary).

Almost throughout his reign, Charlemagne was fighting, pushing outwards the Frankish borders set by Clovis, Martel and Pepin. He conquered pagan Saxony and Catholic Bavaria to the east and Catalonia to the south. In 774 he invaded Italy and made himself king of the Lombards. Other Germanic tribes beyond the Elbe, unconquered since the days of Rome, paid obeisance to Charlemagne, though many remained pagan. The sacred groves of Odin (or Wotan) still cast their spell, as they continued to do over Scandinavia. While France and Italy developed variants of the Latin tongue, the German Franks continued to speak Charlemagne’s native version of Dutch or Old High German.

Charlemagne sought to make his capital of Aachen a northern Rome. He modelled his palatine chapel on St Vitale in Ravenna, and begged the pope for mosaics from Ravenna to adorn it. He saw learning as part of his status as a Christian king. He could speak Latin, though he never mastered the art of writing. Pre-eminent among his scholars was an amiable English monk, Alcuin from York (735–804), where the library was reputedly the finest in northern Europe. Alcuin became head of Aachen’s palace school and the king’s spiritual adviser, presiding over what came to be known as the Carolingian renaissance.

In 800 Charlemagne travelled to Rome to defend Leo III against charges of simony and adultery concocted by his enemies. At a Christmas ceremony in 800, Leo rewarded him with a Mass in St Peter’s and the title ‘emperor’, conscious that this Frankish monarch might prove a more reliable ally than distant Constantinople. Charlemagne worried that the title would infuriate the eastern emperor, but he accepted it and boasted ‘imperator’ on his coinage.

Thus was born what became the Holy Roman Empire, a feature of Europe’s political geography until its dismantling under Napoleon in 1806. Its heartland was the German-speaking areas of central Europe – indeed its full title was ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German nation’. It had no capital, no army and no revenue, and was later ridiculed by Voltaire as ‘not holy, nor Roman, nor an empire’. Yet the title of emperor was valued by its holders for its grandeur, and by the papacy for the power implied by conferring it. Strong emperors exploited loyalty to the imperial title to raise armies, weak ones had to concede ‘autonomy’ to its subordinate rulers. The very fact of its existence impeded the unification of both Germany and Italy until well into the nineteenth century. Even today, its loose-knit confederacy is evoked by champions of a devolved and localized European union.

The Treaty of Verdun

With the eastern empire now reduced to Asia Minor and its Mediterranean outposts, Charlemagne, as secular head of western Christendom, was the first figure since the Roman emperors to bestride at least the heart of Europe. As such he became an icon of the early European Union. But as with the Merovingians so with the Carolingians: no empire was safer than the calibre of its succession. When Charlemagne died in 814 at the age of seventy-two his court went into deep mourning, and was understandably nervous. The curse of partigeniture soon settled over it. Charlemagne’s heir, Louis the Pious (814–40) divided his domain in turn among his three sons, who on his death resorted to three years of fratricidal war. This culminated in 843 in the Treaty of Verdun, in which they agreed to partition their grandfather’s empire between them. No treaty was more significant in the early history of Europe.

The partition of Verdun saw the lands west of the Loire/Rhône go to Charles the Bald. Those to the east of the Rhine went to Louis the German. Thus were created the first precursors of today’s France and Germany. Between these two lands ran territory to be ruled by Louis’s eldest son, Lothair. This comprised a series of unrelated territories south from the Rhine basin through what is now Belgium, Alsace, Lorraine, Burgundy and Savoy, into Charlemagne’s kingdom of Lombardy. Initially called Lotharingia, it included Charlemagne’s capital at Aachen, and carried with it the title of emperor. While France and Germany went their distinctive ways, and with their own languages, Lotharingia acquired neither a stable boundary nor an identity. It would fragment into kingdoms, principalities and bishoprics, some no more than a few miles wide. But its cities grew to become the richest in Europe, from Antwerp and Ghent in the north to Genoa and Milan in the south. Mastery of them and of the fertile lands round them was bitterly contested, and became the flashpoint for Europe’s most savage wars.