2August2008
Posted by James Lorenz under: Chapter Three: The Europeans; Volume One.
But such innovation and progress was not enough to create a true society in Europe. Charlemagne’s cultural achievements, in fact, did not become apparent until long after his death, and by that time proved to be too little too late. Though the level of literacy never again sunk as low as it had been during Merovingian times, there was still very little original writing, hardly any original ideas or thinkers. And when the Emperor died in 814, so did most of the creative spirit. For centuries afterwards, cultural developments of any kind appear to have been totally lacking in the European lands.Cities, the lifeblood of any civilization, barely existed at all in the Carolingian world. Whatever towns had endured in Roman times had long since been mostly deserted and fallen into ruins. Even the so-called cities of the empire - Charlemagne’s capital of Aachen, for example, or the cathedral city of Mainz - hardly deserved the name. They consisted of little more than one or two low, squat buildings and a few dilapidated houses, all of which was surrounded by a stockade wall. But kings and their lords had long ago deserted townlife in any case, since the utter lack of roads and transportation made it impossible to supply them with the necessities of life. Instead, they and their retinues moved like nomads from one domain to another, depleting the local supplies wherever they went.
Commerce by sea had been an active and profitable enterprise in many of the former towns along the coastlines of the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the North Sea. But once the Islamic conquests began and connections with Byzantium came to an end, the few traders left in the West seldom ventured beyond the waters around southern Italy. And the ocean seemed to hold no lure at all for Western men; surrounded by water on three sides, no one in all Europe appears to have shown the slightest interest in maritime adventures.
The disappearance of town life had a profound effect on what passed as a European economy. The produce of the farms, which in Roman times had poured into the urban markets, had lost virtually all their customers. The agricultural people - which at the time included nearly the entire population of Europe - therefore began to produce only what was needed for their own consumption. There was no purpose in making the soil yield more if the surplus could not be sold, and the peasant farmers soon spent only a bare minimum of care and effort on their fields. Agricultural knowledge and skills sank to their lowest ebb.
1August2008
Posted by James Lorenz under: Chapter Three: The Europeans; Volume One.
For more than forty-five years Charlemagne ruled over the Frankish Empire from his capital at Aachen, and within its borders, at least, the Western world enjoyed a relative peace during that time. But compared to the Byzantine and Islamic empires, Western Europe was a poor and backward region, its population small and almost entirely rural. Communications and transportation were all but non-existent in this world; most people never saw more than a few surrounding miles of the place in which they were born, and most knew little of the world outside their own. Violence, hunger, and disease all were facts of everyday life, and their combined effects kept the average person’s life expectancy to little more than thirty years. The people knew next to nothing about medicine, and less about science; superstitions and beliefs in the miraculous powers of numerous local saints were all they had to combat the ravages of nature. Most were poor in the extreme; nearly all were illiterate.
The everyday language of the people varied from region to region. In the British islands, the language of the Anglo-Saxons was spoken, and ancient Celtic in Ireland. The northern and eastern people of the Continent spoke a variety of Germanic dialects, while those in the south and west continued the ordinary Latin of Roman times, a language which very gradually developed into today’s Italian and Spanish. Not until about the mid-9th century did French and German begin to emerge as distinct and recognizable languages, and the begiings of the English language would have to wait until nearly the end of the 11th century. The official language of the Carolingian empire was Latin; it was the language of the Church, and since all writing in this society was done by the clergy, Latin was also the language of government, of science, of all intellectual matters.
Carolingian Europe did make a few cultural advances, mostly as a result of Charlemagne’s efforts. To remedy the lack of scholars, he brought together renowned teachers and learned men from all over the empire; with their help he founded schools in churches and monasteries, created libraries, wrote textbooks and manuscripts, and prepared dictionaries and encyclopedias. While the few surviving Merovingian writings are nearly impossible to decipher, Carolingians developed a new script so clear and legible that it has remained substantially unchanged down through the centuries. In an improvement over Roman script, which used only capital letters, the Carolingian scribes invented the lower case letters. Carolingians developed a coinage system in which one pound of silver was divided into 240 equal parts, out of which Carolingian coins were produced. This system worked so well that it was later adopted by the English, who still use it as the basis for their monetary system. Carolingian courts also devised the inquest, by which a panel of sworn men from the neighboring farms gave their opinions in disputes over land rights. This inquest, too, was later transplanted to England - and from there to America -where it developed into the modern-day jury system of civil and criminal law.
31July2008
Posted by James Lorenz under: Chapter Three: The Europeans; Volume One.
As the 8th century came to an end, the Carolingian kingdom covered virtually all of Western Europe - all of France, Germany, Ireland and northern Spain. In 774, Charlemagne had also crossed the Alps, defeated the Lombards, and had himself proclaimed King of the Franks and Lombards, adding northern and central Italy to his domain. Outside the Frankish kingdom now lay only the world of Islam and a few small pagan kingdoms in the British islands.
The Pope in Rome, however, had new problems to worry about - this time from the nobility of his own city. Eager to place one of their own on the throne of St. Peter, the upper classes of Rome had begun to spread rumors, charging Leo III with immoral conduct so vile and reprehensible, that in 799 the Pontiff was actually attacked and beaten by an enraged mob in the very streets of the city. The terrified Leo fled northward across the Alps to appeal for help from the Protector of Rome, and the following year, at a trial presided over by Charlemagne, Leo III was finally able to clear himself of all charges.
The deeply humiliated Pontiff, however, was not about to let matters rest there; in a carefully planned strategy he determined to regain some of his previous prestige and authority. Thus, on Christmas Day, 800, as Charlemagne rose from prayer before the tomb of St. Peter, the Pope suddenly stepped forward and placed a crown on the king’s head, while a well-rehearsed clergy and spectators applauded and cheered “Charlemagne Augustus, Emperor of the Romans!”
Charlemagne Augustus was furious. This same Pope who had just months earlier appealed to him for protection, the man whom he regarded as no more than a protege, had now shown the audacity to grant the most powerful ruler in the Western world the imperial crown. There can be little doubt that Charlemagne would eventually have assumed the role of Emperor in any case, but he would scarcely have permitted himself to be crowned Roman emperor. The Roman Empire by that time meant Byzantium, while the Carolingians proudly regarded themselves as a distinct and separate society from that of the East. And Charlemagne most certainly would never have accepted the imperial crown from any Pope, thereby placing himself and his empire into a subordinate position to Rome. Still, though he almost never used the title of Roman Emperor, it was on that Christmas Day in the year 800 that had been created the concept of a Holy Roman Empire, restoring in the hopes of the Western Christian people a return to the glory that once was Rome.
30July2008
Posted by James Lorenz under: Chapter Three: The Europeans; Volume One.
The Avars were one of the many groups of wild horsemen of Mongolian or Turkish origin, who had established themselves in the Danube Valley around the 5th century. They had meanwhile made themselves masters of an area from the later Yugoslavia into Germany, dominated the Slavic population all along the Danube, and at one time had even besieged Constantinople. By the end of the 8th century, these Avars continuously raided the borders of both the Byzantine Empire and the Frankish kingdom, until Charlemagne finally decided to put an end to this turmoil. In two expeditions in 791 and 795, his armies brutally massacred the Avars nearly to the point of extinction, and just to prevent any further aggression, he also threw a march or mark across the valley of the Danube - a defensive territory under military administration. This Eastern Mark, or Ostmark, later became the basis of both the name and territory of modern Austria.
Such marks were also established in northern Germany against the Slavic tribes. As aliens and pagans these people were considered to be beyond all humanity, not even worthy of being offered Christianity. Slavs taken prisoner were usually sold like cattle, and, in fact, the word slave in all Western languages is derived from their name. Slav in 9th- and 10th-century Europe came to have the same connotations as Negro was to have nearly a thousand years later in America.
In the south, along the Pyrenees, the Frankish kingdom came into contact not with pagan barbarians, but with the Moslems, who had created a most impressive civilization along the Mediterranean shores. But serious quarrels had already begun to break out in the once solidly united world of Islam, and during one such dispute an Arab emir appealed to Charlemagne for assistance. The ambitious King of the Franks responded by personally leading an army across the mountains into Spain, but failed to accomplish anything at all. Worse yet, in the retreat which followed, the Frankish soldiers were attacked in the mountain passes by Basque warriors, who fell over them, robbed their supply train and disappeared back into the mountains.
This entire affair was little more than a minor incident in Charlemagne reign, but during the religious and martial excitement that seized Europe a few centuries later, this episode assumed the proportions of a momentous historical event and inspired the Chanson de Roland as the national epic of the French nation. At the time, however, the failed expedition did teach Charlemagne one lesson: his policy toward Spain thereafter remained purely defensive, and he established the so-called Spanish March as a buffer zone against the Moslems. It was this very territory which in later generations served the surviving Christian lords of Spain as a base in their centuries-long struggle to recapture the Iberian peninsula.
29July2008
Posted by James Lorenz under: Chapter Three: The Europeans; Volume One.
Within a few years after these events it was becoming evident that the Western world was not about to conform to Papal ambitions and expectations. Pepin the Short died in 768 and, according to Frankish tradition, was succeeded by his two sons, Charles and Carloman. The weakness in this ancient system soon became plain as the brothers quarreled with each other so violently that they seriously disrupted the state to which Pepin had brought such unity and strength. But before more dangerous conflict could arise, Carloman died suddenly and inexplicably at the age of only 21 - “of some disease,” a contemporary chronicler wrote, vaguely enough; significantly, too, Carloman’s family immediately fled the kingdom and sought refuge in Italy. Charles, meanwhile, blithely ignoring his nephews’ birthrights, took over the entire kingdom, and with that set out to become one of history’s great figures - Carolus Magnus, Charles the Great, Charlemagne.
Charlemagne was still in his late twenties when he assumed the crown of all the Franks, and he was a semi-literate - meaning he was barely able to read or scratch his own name. It was said that he supported a large number of concubines, and he generally acted much like the near-barbarian people who were his heritage. But apparently Charles also possessed a keen native intelligence - enough, at any rate, that he managed to surrounded himself with the most educated people in his realm, and with their assistance was able to bring remarkable changes to Western society.
But no Germanic king, no matter how many admirable qualities he might have possessed, could ever have gained the allegiance of his lords unless he was also able to prove himself on the battlefield. And Charlemagne, above all else, was a warrior king with an ambitious plan of conquest. Most of his long reign, in fact, was spent in expanding and consolidating the Western Christian world.
In northern Germany, between the Rhine and the Elbe Rivers, lay the territory of the Saxons, brothers to the Germanic tribes who had invaded England together with the Angles more than two centuries earlier. While much of Western Europe had already become Christianized, however, the resolutely hostile Saxons clung stubbornly to their pagan rites and traditions. Christianity had until then always been introduced peacefully by missionaries to the various tribes, but on these Saxons it was now imposed by brutal force as Charlemagne began three decades of bitter campaigns against them. The Saxons, in turn, fought desperately and violently to preserve their way of life; again and again, Charlemagne’s forces conquered them, only to have them rise in revolt the moment his armies were withdrawn.
Their hostile resistance finally brought a relentlessly vicious punishment over the Saxons. The death penalty was enforced against anyone who continued to sacrifice to the pagan idols, and in one single day in 782, more than 4,000 unrepentant Saxons were executed under this edict. Mass deportations got rid of thousands more of the potential troublemakers, and under such merciless pressure even these hardy tribesmen could not hold out indefinitely. Black Monks appeared everywhere in the wake of the Frankish armies, and by the beginning of the 9th century, both Christianity and Frankish control was securely established in Saxony. The annexation of this territory brought nearly all of ancient Germany under the influence of the Carolingian kingdom. Beyond its borders now lay only the regions of barbarism, inhabited by the much despised Avars and, lowlier still, the Slavs.
