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 beginnings 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.
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.
No farm, no matter how large or small can ever be entirely self-sufficient – it is simply not possible to exist without some form of outside income that produces even a minimum of cash income – but in 9th-century Europe that was no longer available anywhere. Harassed by tax collectors, whom they were unable to satisfy, threatened by crime and violence against which they were unable to defend themselves, visited by plagues and famine that left them utterly helpless, many of the people simply gave up. In ever increasing numbers they took the familiar road – they now attached themselves to a neighboring lord’s domain, exchanging their independence for security; freedom in itself had little meaning in a world of utter chaos. It was during that time that the manorial system grew so widespread, and exercised such enormous influence over every phase of life, that it has left traces in all European countries to this day, remembered in place names ending in ville or court or hof.
Yet despite the implications of a slave-master relationship, the manorial system might have benefited the peasants in several ways. At a time when the state was unable to preserve law and order, the lord of the manor assured the serf protection of some sort and guaranteed him at least a share of the soil. And since the serf became a part of the lord’s property, he was necessarily concerned about his preservation. Besides, there was abundant land available, but manpower was scarce, and without someone to work the fields all that land was useless. The lord of the manor therefore tried to defend his subjects in the event of a war, and he grudgingly fed them out of his stores in times of famine – conditions that seem to have afflicted Europe every few years with an amazing regularity. On the whole, the medieval peasants were thus perhaps better off than the slaves of Roman times, and some, in fact, did very well indeed. But for most serfs, life was much like that of a beast in the field, perennially lingering on the brink of starvation.
It is impossible even to estimate Carolingian population figures since no records exist at all. But they were certainly small – smaller, perhaps, than at any point in historic times. And that population seems to have remained almost stationary for another three to four centuries. Births did little more than fill the gaps constantly made by famine, war, and catastrophes of every imaginable sort that descended upon Western Europe after the middle of the 9th century.