Although Ireland had long evaded foreign domination, it could not escape the Vikings, who were attracted to its shores by the wealth of its great monasteries. In the two centuries that followed the first attacks, the "black and white foreigners" (as the Irish called the Norwegians and Danes) stormed through the land.
Ireland at the time was divided into many regions. Thus no united front could be held against the invaders. Nonetheless, many monastic communities survived the Northmen and rebuilt, like the community of Iona, which was relocated at Kells, an ancient stronghold in eastern Ireland. But its unfinished cross (right), with its roughly hewn center panel showing Christ Crucified, serves as a reminder of the Vikings' intrusion and of the Irish monasteries' subsequent decline. With the final Viking defeat in 1014, the golden age of the high crosses ended; thereafter Christianity in Ireland never again represented itself so exuberantly and flamboyantly.
In 1092, Pope Urban II felt obliged to chastise the Count of Flanders for unchristian acts. In his letter of reprimand, the pontiff anticipated the count's defense and neatly rebutted it. "Dost thou claim," wrote Urban with a tinge of sarcasm, "to have done hitherto only what is in conformity with the ancient custom of the land? Thou shouldst know, notwithstanding, thy Creator hath said: My name is Truth. He hath not said: My name is Custom."
BONDS OF CUSTOM
MEDIEVAL LAWGIVERS—fl man representing secular law, a woman, the Church —are depicted in a page from a Ninth Century Frankish manuscript containing several tribal legal codes. Above the figures, the hands with outstretched fingers may stand for the hands of Cod, the supreme arbiter.
The pope's attack on custom was well aimed. Custom did call the tune in medieval times, and it would continue to do so for centuries after Urban's time. Everywhere in the West, obedience to tradition and convention was an instinct, a standard for conduct, an elaborate ritual. This faithfulness to the past held a medieval community together. Yet the dictates of custom and the grim realities of life formed a vicious circle. The meager self-sufficiency of each farming settlement, the difficulty and perils of travel, the deterioration of commerce and currency—such factors tended to break up the West into many minor worlds that hemmed in their natives, closed their borders to outsiders and restricted the interchange of ideas. In each of these isolated agrarian worlds, the people clung almost desperately to every shred of their sparse inheritance of law and religion; it was all they had to add form, color and significance to their drab lives of toil. In turn, their rigid adherence to custom made change of any sort all the more difficult and perpetuated their depressing insularity.
Nevertheless, customs did change—slowly, subtly, but profoundly. Medieval society was itself the product of these and other changes. It was something essentially new—a mixture of Germanic, Roman and Christian cultural elements, all modified in the process of combination. In the second half of the Ninth Century, a variety of traditions from the three cultures would crystallize into the feudal order. But long before feudalism matured, these traditions had decisively changed the character and course of Western civilization.
Medieval government was a ramshackle affair that grew out of Germanic tribal ties of kinship and personal loyalty. By the end of the Sixth Century, this Germanic-style rule had everywhere replaced the Roman administrative system. Just as the
Early conquering Germanic kings had rewarded faithful chieftains with big grants of land, so their medieval descendants rewarded the loyalty of ambitious men by appointing them to the post of count, to act as royal agents in outlying districts, or counties. The counts were sworn to fidelity and charged with three main tasks: to raise troops for the royal army; to collect revenues due the king (a portion of which was theirs to keep for expenses or for their trouble); and, most important, to serve as the king's representative in the local courts.
Most counts took this delegation of authority as an outright gift of absolute, independent power. Experience proved with monotonous regularity that the ties of an oath of fidelity could not be stretched very far before they snapped. When a new count reached his county, he usually set about to accumulate wealth and hereditary privilege at the expense of the king and everyone else. A strong king might force his embezzling, self-willed counts to toe the line. But a strong king's rule lasted only as long as his lifetime; no barbarian king was able to set up an apparatus of central government capable of sustaining itself through the reign of a weak or inactive successor. With few brief exceptions, each kingdom was really an anomalous series of semidetached regions; political power remained the local monopoly of the counts and a land-rich warrior elite, whose rule differed greatly from place to place and from generation to generation.
Though the counts were usurpers and government was a shambles, this disorganized state of affairs was probably not considered bad by the medieval masses; to them it was just normal. Under tribal tradition, the people were burdened by even fewer civic responsibilities than was the king, and certainly the peasants had no reason to identify their best interests with the monarch. When the king's troops intervened in local affairs they
Damaged crops and property without accomplishing any measurable good. Besides, the kings did not endear themselves to their subjects by providing much in the way of public services; on the contrary, they allowed the old Roman roads to fall into disrepair, and they even made the royal soldiers outfit themselves out of their own pockets.
Since the people saw little evidence of royal interest or expenditure in their behalf and since their tribal past was unsullied by taxation, they assumed naturally—and quite correctly—that most taxes represented a flagrant attempt on the king's part to augment his private fortune. Nearly everyone paid the tolls and tariffs demanded by the count in the king's name, and it would have been foolhardy to refuse, with the count's armed henchman on the spot. But the king himself remained a remote, shadowy figure and most people probably wanted from him nothing more than his continued absence, plus his guarantee of their day in the local court presided over by the count.
To the people of medieval times, the law was a prized birthright. It was one of the few relatively stable institutions in an era of violent upheavals; it was a bond maintaining group identification in a day when national loyalty was unknown; and it offered some protection against injustice in a world ruled by naked force.
Law, however, was no simple matter, even for the counts who casually ignored it to suit their own purposes. Medieval law was fundamentally Germanic law; it prevailed everywhere in a bewildering variety of crude barbarian legal codes that both reflected and contributed to the problems of weak, decentralized government. In the preliterate Germanic past, many customary laws had been evolved by tribal groups living under nomadic or seminomadic conditions; these laws, surviving through centuries of oral transmission, had been written down as legal codes after the
Germanic peoples completed their conquests in the West. The multiplicity of codes, and the uncompromising loyalty of each people to its own law, created strange legal tangles for settled societies—tangles that were never wholly cleared away in the Early Middle Ages.
The jurisdiction of each legal code was tribal rather than territorial. For example, a man born of Anglo-Saxon parents was considered an Anglo-Saxon by definition; and as such he was entitled to be judged under Anglo-Saxon law whether he was living in Frankish Gaul or traveling in Visigothic Spain. Under this common Germanic tradition, every local court had to honor the birthright of every individual and try him under his own law. The principle was frequently put to the test, for outlanders were much in evidence despite the hazards of travel. According to a Ninth Century Frankish archbishop: "It often happened that five men were present or sitting together, and not one of them had the same law as another." In the course of a single year a local court might find it necessary to invoke each of about ten barbarian legal codes at one time or another.
Still other difficulties beset legal process. The steady decline of literacy resulted in a paucity of men who could read and write, and hence in a shortage of clerks to record proceedings for future reference. But the severest threat to effective law and stable government came from quite another quarter. It came, ironically, from the most stable and effective social unit of prefeudal times.
That unit was the kindred, a traditional Germanic grouping of families related by blood and marriage. The families of a kin group, which might total 50 to 250 relatives, usually lived in the same community and often fought bitterly among themselves. But each kindred policed the conduct of its members, shared the debts and hardships of a stricken family, and seldom failed to present a solid front to a dangerous world. This unity gave formidable strength to any kin group, whether it consisted of peasants or of royalty. Graphic evidence of the kin's grim solidarity appears in a medieval legal document that uses the old French word amis—friends—to define kinsmen. The obvious implication—that friendship seemed possible only among relatives—was borne out all too often in violent feuds between two kindreds.
The blood feud was a venerable Germanic practice that probably did more to disrupt medieval society than anything but the plague. It took very little to start a vendetta in a society of fighting men with hair-trigger tempers. If a man made a slighting remark about another man's courage, the honor of two kindreds might be at stake. Should anyone be slain in an ensuing scufile, the dead man's relatives were duty bound to take revenge on the killer or on any of his kinsmen. As a forceful reminder of this obligation, the Frisians of the North Sea coast would hang the corpse of a murdered man from the rafters of his home; his relatives could not bury the body until they had killed one of the enemy kin. Once begun, a vendetta tended to escalate and perpetuate itself. Medieval chroniclers have left behind many accounts of blood feuds that decimated rival kindreds for two or three generations; occasionally entire clusters of communities were plunged into anarchy.
How could society preserve itself against its own ancient and honorable traditions of violence? This was the central dilemma that Germanic law was improvised to resolve. Significantly, none of the legal codes was drafted in a systematic effort to cope with the problem in principle or even in a general way. Each consisted of concrete tribal precedents validated by traditional or "customary" use. It was this unpremeditated, collective origin that gave customary law not only its sanctity in the eyes of the people, but its peculiar limitations as well.
The barbarians' codes remained relatively crude until they were superseded by feudal law in the 10th Century. They never drew sharp distinctions between personal injury and civil crime, much less between right and wrong. Nevertheless, the various compilations reveal a resolute practicality and flashes of real ingenuity. More important, they reflect a strong commitment to the idea that law was the possession of the people—a possession to be defended by them and the king alike against all infringements. Also, quite inadvertently, these traditional codes provide a unique insight into medieval society and into the values of the people who were creating it.
Each legal code consisted primarily of a long list of offenses and matching cash fines. The fine, to be paid by the offender, was obviously intended to appease the injured party, thereby stopping a fight or, better yet, settling a grievance before it started a fight. Most of the offenses were of the homely, bucolic sort that might be expected to occur in a society that had become almost entirely rural. The Franks' Salic Law, for example, devoted fully 74 of its 343 articles to the theft of livestock and domestic animals. The penalty for stealing a bull was 45 gold solidi; for stealing an ox, 35 solidi; for a common farm dog, 15 solidi. These were stiff fines in terms of medieval purchasing power. In Italy, for instance, the 15 solidi exacted for dog-theft could buy an olive grove, or in Gaul it might purchase a vineyard. The payment of so heavy a fine could even cost the owner of such a property his title to it. By paying a fine, in coin or kind, the criminal terminated his responsibility—and the court's interest in the case. No disciplinary action followed, for in the eyes of the law, the offense had been purely a transgression against the individual, not a crime against society.
In cases of homicide, the law's basic attitude was much the same. An injury had been done to
The deceased and his kindred, for which a proper penalty must be imposed. The indemnity, to be sure, was a much stiffer one than that for theft; but cash usually sufficed to make amends, and the size of the fine seldom reflected differences in degree of culpability. Indeed, the legal codes showed rather less interest in the motive of a killer than they did in the social rank of his victim.
Class consciousness marked all Germanic law. Under every code, the fines for homicide varied according to the dead man's status, and they were so precisely graduated as to diagram the whole social order. At the bottom of the social ladder was the slave. Slaves were valuable properties; but the fine for killing a slave was the same as for killing a horse. Ranked above the slaves was the class of freemen, lesser churchmen and serfs, who were technically free though economically dependent. Every male in this freeman class had an official life value—called ivergeld ("man-money")—which had to be paid as a fine in case of his death by homicide. Under Burgundian law, the freeman's wergeld was a round and impressive 150 solidi. However, men of the upper class, which included noblemen and high clerics, were protected by a death-fine twice as intimidating—300 solidi.
At the top of the social ladder stood the royal kindred. In very early times, many tribes had cast a mantle of sanctity over members of royal families, and their status remained supreme in the legal codes despite the vicissitudes of medieval kingship. The slaying of an immediate member of a royal family could usually be indemnified only by the death of the killer. Men in the king's service were also specially protected. Under Frankish law, the fine for killing a royal retainer was triple the dead man's normal wergeld.
Each free woman and noble woman was also dignified by a specific wergeld. Smaller than a freeman's or a nobleman's to begin with, a female's
COURT AND GALLOWS are juxtaposed in a manuscript illumination showing the administration of medieval justice. The penalty of death—a punishment meted out for many crimes—has been imposed by a sword-bearing king flanked by a council of advisors.
Life-value was automatically reduced if she married below her station, and it was ungallantly reduced even further if she was slain after childbearing age.
This low value placed on a woman's life reflected the trivial status of all women in that age dominated by warrior males. The first fact of life for every female was that she had few rights of any kind. She could not inherit real estate if any male relative existed or buy and sell valuables on her own volition. Theoretically, the only grounds for divorce were adultery, the practice of witchcraft or the desecration of a tomb or church; but few women dared to institute divorce proceedings, while many husbands nonchalantly discarded their wives on mere whim. Married or unmarried, divorced or widowed, a "free" woman was everywhere forbidden to live according to her own free will; as Lombard law decreed, "she must remain always under the power of men, and if no one else, under the power of the king."
In spite of these built-in social inequalities, the law sought earnestly to be fair, and once a case was brought to court its workings had an awesome inviolability for people of all classes. During the course of a trial, the law proceeded inevitably—almost without human guidance, it seemed—through one or more time-honored procedures until the verdict finally made itself obvious to all and was accepted as an infallible truth—a manifestation of God's will. For this was an age of fierce, superstitious piety. All people believed that God intervened directly in human affairs, and therefore they assumed that the Lord would take a hand in each trial to make the truth known and to protect the innocent from harm. Germanic justice had placed itself hopefully under quasi-Christian auspices.
When the participants in a lawsuit filed into court, they became actors in what was in effect a religious drama. Before them, in impressive array.
Sat the members of the court: the presiding count or his personal representative; a panel of important local people who acted as advisors; and a number of clerks whose main function was to state legal precedents that pertained to the case. Essentially, the court served merely as referee; there was no judge or jury as we know them today. God was invoked, solemn oaths were administered and the play unfolded.
In most cases the burden of proof rested squarely on the defendant. Once his accuser had vowed that he was guilty, the defendant was obliged to refute the evidence against him, which often included hearsay and pure surmise. He swore his innocence and made his defense in a statement whose form and style were minutely prescribed by ancient custom. If he managed to complete the ritual in good order, it was clear to the court that he had sworn truly. His accuser, if he had deliberately perjured himself while calling upon God to witness the veracity of his charges, faced divine justice in the form of eternal damnation. If the defendant made the slightest slip, however—if he hesitated, coughed or stammered—it was considered a sure sign that God recognized his guilt, and the accused usually lost his case. These indications of guilt or innocence were interpreted by the count or members of the court or occasionally by a Church consultant.
Of course, the defendant's "true" oath might not be enough to exonerate him, for his accuser's oath had also presumably been true. In the absence of conclusive evidence, such as the testimony of an impartial and respected eyewitness, the defendant might bring in "oath-helpers" to swear to the truth of his oath. For practical purposes, however, the verdict might be decided by the oath of a nobleman, for his "swear-worth" was at least six times as great as an ordinary freeman's. But, the law took into full account the individual's char
Acter as well as his swear-worth. An especially notorious Frankish queen had to obtain the oaths of three bishops and 300 noblemen in order to "prove" her sworn word that her son, allegedly illegitimate, had indeed been sired by the king. On the other hand, the universally admired Bishop Gregory of Tours was permitted to clear himself of a slanderous charge of calumny: he had only to swear his innocence at three different altars.
If the testimony of oath-helpers failed to indicate a clear-cut verdict, the defendant could "prove" his innocence unequivocally by submitting to the awesome and infallible test of trial by ordeal. He had many such trials to choose from. All of them were hoary with tradition, and the severity of the one used was determined by the gravity of the offense. The accused could hold his hand in a fire, or walk between blazing piles of wood, or carry a red-hot iron bar, or pick up a stone from the bottom of a cauldron of boiling water. A few days after the ordeal took place, the defendant would be pronounced innocent if his injuries were healing cleanly, guilty if they were infected.
Should the accused be squeamish, he might choose a less painful but potentially more hazardous ordeal—the trial by cold water. In this test, he was bound hand and foot and heaved into a lake or stream. His innocence was established if he sank, and it was unfortunate if he drowned before the court could fish him out. But if he floated too soon, he was certainly guilty, for, as Bishop Hincmar of Rheims explained with unedifying logic, "the pure nature of water recognizes and therefore rejects as inconsistent with itself such human nature as has once been regenerated by the waters of baptism and is again infected by falsehood."
An especially common form of test was trial by battle, or judicial combat. The accuser and the accused fought under oath, and it was assumed that God would award the victory to the man who had
Sworn truly. This assumption, to be sure, was challenged by a few enlightened individuals, mostly churchmen, who declined to attribute to God any legal decision reached through violence. One archbishop, Agobard of Lyons, roundly denounced ordeals in general and judicial combat in particular, declaring, "If in this life the innocent were always the victors and the guilty were vanquished . . . Herod would not have killed John, but John, Herod."
The Church itself, however, had been highly secularized and barbarized by the Seventh Century; although churchmen were exempted from ordeal by battle, many chose that form of trial and availed themselves of the option to be represented by a champion. When judicial combat became the customary method of settling litigation over land, a bishop or an abbot often sent a swordsman into combat to defend or extend the boundaries of an ecclesiastical estate. Many land-rich monasteries kept powerful warriors on retainer to fight their frequent judicial battles. In a rare and startling case, rival groups of clerics in Visigothic Spain actually sent their champions into combat to decide which of two rituals to use in church.
Whatever trial form was used to decide a case, the verdict was bound to be clear-cut. What is
A SYMBOL OF SANCTUARY, fhis huge door knocker from England's Durham Cathedral was often used to gain asylum in the Church, a man's last refuge from the harsh sentences of medieval law.
More, it stood a good chance of satisfying both parties and preserving peace. If a trial for homicide ended in acquittal, the decision protected the defendant by absolving the deceased's kinsmen of their duty to take revenge, while a verdict of guilty pacified them financially with the dead man's wergeld. The sum of the fine (minus the king's commission, sometimes as much as one third) was divided among the kindred as specified by law. Relatives in the male line of descent (the "spear" side) usually received the larger portion, the remainder going to kin in the female line (the "distaff" side). As for the "guilty" defendant, he might reconcile himself to an adverse verdict even if he was innocent. After all, it was God's will.
But submission to fate never helped a poor man, innocent or otherwise, to pay a heavy fine. Economic ruin became commonplace. Severe fines often forced small free farmers, short of cash, to deed their lands to wealthy noblemen, thereby consigning themselves and their immediate families to the swelling ranks of half-free serfs. Serfs, having already exhausted their negotiable assets, were ordered by the courts to work off a delinquent fine or to suffer any torments that successful litigants might impose in irate impatience. To escape such eventualities, many convicted men fled the community and hid in the forests and hills beyond. Some men lived as solitary exiles and subsisted on what they could scavenge or on game when they could find it. But hunting was itself an offense, for hunting rights were strictly protected as the privilege of the nobility. Other refugees joined robber bands and preyed on travelers. Whether a renegade lived by poaching or by brigandage, he was literally an outlaw: having placed himself beyond the law, he might be cut to pieces or hanged on sight. All in all, the outlaw's life was one of grubby hardship and constant danger; its only charms were imaginary, the invention of bards who
Began spinning such subversive romances as that of Robin Hood in the 14th or 15th Century.
A man facing an unpayable fine had one escape-route short of outlawry. He could take refuge in the nearest church and claim sanctuary under a tradition that had its roots in remote pagan times. The churchmen interceded for penitent refugees and urged the authorities to temper justice with mercy. Moreover, these appeals were often heeded.
Clerical efforts in behalf of convicted men were only one of many ways in which churchmen began to moderate the more barbaric practices of early medieval society. The beginnings, to be sure, were small and slow; the Church, being a loose-knit and conservative institution, conducted nothing resembling an organized international campaign for legal reform. All the same, men of the Church were the first to act on moral principle; they asserted Church leadership in doing good works and setting precedents for civil responsibility. Bishop Felix of Nantes built levees against the flooding of the Loire River, and a bishop of Mainz dammed the Rhine. Other bishops and abbots built hospitals and orphanages as church annexes. Many churchmen—and churchmen alone—dispensed charity on a regular basis, giving to the destitute monthly allotments of money and supplying them with produce from ecclesiastical estates.
The practice of slavery began to decline partly because of clerical pressure. Here the power and the ambiguity of the Church's role were equally clear. The Church officially condoned slavery; the canon law of the Church recognized slaves as one of three basic social classes (the others being clergy and freemen), and some lordly clerics were themselves slaveowners. Nevertheless, Church doctrine held that all men were equal in the eyes of God, and slaves were accorded the right to receive the sacraments along with everyone else. In keeping with this spirit, humane churchmen commended
The manumission of slaves as an act of piety. The response was hardly overwhelming, but rich noblemen did free an occasional human chattel in the hopes of improving their chances in the hereafter. Sometimes the act of manumission was actually performed as a religious ceremony in church. In Lombard Italy, where the freeing of a slave was an involved legal procedure, the climax came when the slave was escorted to a crossroads, handed an arrow as the emblem of freedom, and then told in the presence of witnesses, "You may take whichever of these four roads you will, you have free power." No matter what road the freed slaves might choose, it would almost always lead them to a halffree serfdom—a small gain for liberty, but a gain nonetheless.
Even as Christian influences were beginning to stabilize and ameliorate society, Christian practices were themselves being changed by customs carried over from earlier times. The cause of these changes was the limited understanding of illiterate peoples. It took the Church centuries of patient labor to teach the true meaning of the Faith and bring the religious practices of its congregants into accord with Christian belief.
The problem of religious indoctrination had been a frustrating one for the Church since the first Germanic barbarians were baptized. While those superstitious warriors eagerly embraced Christianity as a superior cult, many of them also clung to their traditional pagan war-gods and nature-spirits. Zealous churchmen found that it did little good to destroy pagan shrines. The new Faith and the old one tended to coexist, and were practiced alternately or simultaneously. This informal arrangement became the key to official Church policy during the pontificate of Gregory the Great (590-604). That practical and far-sighted pope likened Christianity to a steep mountain that had to be climbed step by step, not in a single leap, and he
A CURIOUS SHRINE, conffliMir?!? a sandal of St. Andrezu, was among countless reliquaries made in medieval times to hold a saint’s remains or an object associated with him. This iewel-encrusted and ivory-paneled piece, from the Cathedral of Trier, could also be utilized as a portable altar.
Instructed his missionaries to desist from their efforts to obliterate ancient pagan customs "of a sudden." Instead, he said, they were to infuse heathen practices with Christian meaning and to adapt pagan temples to the worship of the True God. This policy slowly transferred local religious loyalties to the Church, and assured the continuing growth and vigor of Christianity.
The result was popular or "folk" religion—a lively blend of Christianized pagan survivals and barbarized Christian practices. The religious synthesis produced a number of colorful festivals. The pagan celebration of Midsummer's Night became part of the feast of St. John's Day, with the exorcism of demons remaining a prominent feature. Christ's birthday was celebrated on December 25, coinciding with the pagan festival of the winter solstice, and it became a popular folk holiday. The year's work was done; the cattle that could not be fed through the hard northern winters had been slaughtered; and families had leisure to gather for eating and drinking in such excess as they could afford. For the kings and their courts, Christmas became the convenient and propitious day for holding councils and coronations.
Folk religion centered on the veneration of the saints, a custom begun by the early Christians in Roman times. It thrived on the credulity of the people who clung to the traditions of personalized, intimate worship. Everyone, great and humble alike, believed in magic and miracles, and the fertile medieval imagination transformed belief into reality. Even Bishop Gregory of Tours, one of the best-educated men of the Sixth Century, reported that he was saved from a band of robbers by the intercession of St. Martin, the patron saint of Tours. Prayers to certain saints came to be regarded as especially efficacious for specific purposes or for people of particular occupations. Sailors and fishermen, who had once appealed to pagan sea-gods.
Addressed their prayers to St. Nicholas, who in life had been a much-traveled Eastern bishop. The martyrdom of the saints replaced the deeds of warriors as the favored subject matter for everyday yarn-spinning in kitchens and barns. And the saints proliferated mightily. Modern scholars have amassed a collection of stories telling of more than 25,000 saints.
The cult of the saints reached a peak of feverish intensity in the veneration of saintly relics. As late as the Fifth Century, this practice had been vigorously opposed by the Church. No less an authority than St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, declared: "Let us not treat the saints as gods; we do not wish to imitate those pagans who adore the dead." But popular devotion to old customs led to a radical change in Church policy. In 787 a general Church council decreed, "If any bishop from this time forward is found consecrating a temple without holy relics, he shall be deposed as a transgressor of the ecclesiastical traditions." No bishop transgressed. As a network of parish churches spread outward from each episcopal see, magnificent processions were frequently seen winding their way through the countryside, bearing holy remains to the new houses of worship. Inevitably, the supply of relics, many of them flagrant duplications, kept expanding to meet the demand. But in the Early Middle Ages, the authenticity of a relic was irrelevant to the purpose it served: piety, however naive, was its own reward in a time when so many conditions were beyond man's control. People with desperate causes made arduous pilgrimages, some covering hundreds of miles, to the shrines of great saints. At the end of each hopeful journey was a glittering reliquary containing some revered human fragment.
If any one object epitomized the era, it was the reliquary, not the Cross. Most people had not yet grasped the symbolism of Christ's sacrifice on the
Cross; the King of Heaven, like a mundane monarch, was a remote figure. But everyone understood the reliquary; it was representative rather than symbolic, tangible rather than remote. Its shape was often that of the mortal remains it contained—a finger, a foot, a head. The reliquary was worked in the familiar style of barbarian jewelry, crudely fashioned of gold or silver and lavishly studded with gems and colored glass. The total impression was one of power and wealth such as no ordinary man could achieve in this world. These richly wrought images must have confirmed the conviction of every supplicant that his prayers would be answered in life, or, more important, that his faith would be rewarded after death.
Apart from their religious significance, we today may admire reliquaries as works of art. But the essential outlook on life that they expressed remains alien and elusive. In early medieval times, it seems, all things merged or interpenetrated. Heaven and earth overlapped: angels and saints crossed freely back and forth. Government and religion were one: bishops served as secular leaders and kings appointed warriors as bishops. The medieval mind easily reconciled the greatest contradictions. Society was fragmented and turbulent, yet it enjoyed a sense of unity and order in its concept of Christendom.
Underlying these paradoxes was the prosaic fact that medieval civilization was developing in two opposite ways. One trend, toward unity and a common "customary" culture, was represented by the synthesis of diverse Christian, Roman and Germanic elements to form popular religion and medieval law. At the same time, disunity and diversity were on the rise, fostered by increasing distinctions among regions, languages and classes.
Both trends were gaining momentum as the Eighth Century wore on. But it was still uncertain which one would ultimately triumph.
THE REVIVING RHYTHM OF MEDIEVAL LIFE
For almost 400 years following the barbarian invasions, Western Europe was reduced to the level of subsistence farming. Cities had collapsed as the overworked land failed to provide enough food, and their inhabitants had fled to the countryside to try to eke out a living from the soil—a task made more difficult by the frequent wars that continued to ravage the land.
Gradually, however, profound changes began to take place; by the Ninth Century more land was being cultivated by more efficient methods, including improved plows and a system of land rotation. As food production increased, so did industry and trade, and by the 11th Century an economic revival was slowly spreading through Europe. This reawakening society is reflected in illustrations made by a British monk named Eadwin for a 12th Century book of psalms. His charming drawings include such everyday scenes as men sharpening scythes and swords, women at a loom (below), as well as warriors, farmers, blacksmiths and merchants, all busily plying their trades in a panorama of medieval life.
The constant warfare of the Early Middle Ages touched practically all Europeans, disrupting their communities and trade. During the centuries when the Germanic tribes were conquering Roman territories, armies were composed mainly of foot soldiers who fought with spears or bows and arrows (left), or used broad-bladed swords in bloody close-in contests (above right).
War and Its Weapons
In the years that followed, the nature of war changed. Kings fought one another for power and local lords battled among themselves to enlarge their land holdings; both conscripted their peasants as infantry to carry out their will. By the mid-Eighth Century, however, the decisive factor on the battlefield had become cavalry, armed with long spears and battle-axes (upper left). The use of horsemen gave fighting forces greater mobility and power, but even so they were not sufficiently well organized to stop the Viking raids of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries. Striking swiftly before defending troops could arrive, the fierce Scandinavian warriors plundered with virtual impunity, pillaging towns and sacking churches (above left), to make off with their treasures of jeweled caskets and gold plate.
For centuries agriculture had been bound by age-old methods, many of them developed for the climate and light soil of Italy and ill suited for conditions north of the Mediterranean. Beside village walls, like the one shown below, farmers were barely able to scratch the surface of their moist, heavy soil with light plows, and the seed they sowed by hand often blew away, or at best
Salvation from the Soil
Useful innovations as the nailed iron horseshoe and the horsecollar, as well as heavy, iron-shod plows like the one shown below, which dug deeply into the heavy earth, enabling farmers to prepare better seedbeds and open up new lands to larger crops. The beasts pulling the plow here were sketched, for reasons best known to the artist, with faces that look almost human.
As improved farming began to restore an adequate food supply, trade sprang up and urban life began to revive. By the year 1000, a new class of artisans and tradesmen was forming to serve the needs of a growing population. Quarriers and masons helped erect durable new buildings of stone (left); professional blacksmiths hammered out tools and horseshoes on forges (right); cutlers sharpened swords and plowshares on grindstones like the two-man contraption pictured at center below.
A Rebirth of Commerce
A farmer bringing his produce to market no longer had to rely entirely on barter for an exchange of goods, but could be paid in money; coins, scarce for centuries, were now coming back into general use. Nor were farm products the only commodities at the market; merchants sold such staples of medieval life as bagged
For the landed lords in particular, the new prosperity meant a more luxurious way of life. By the 11th Century many were beginning to enjoy the security of stone castles instead of wooden manor houses, and with time to cultivate the pleasures of wealth they increasingly pursued the traditional pastimes of the nobility.
Pleasures of Wealth
Among their favorite sports was hunting with hounds or falcons (left and below); noblemen jealously guarded their hunting preserves, prohibiting peasants from killing wild boar and other game. In the evenings the lords and their retinues often relaxed at lusty banquets, where they were entertained by musicians (right) or amused by performers like those shown at the lower right. This particular gathering was enlivened by a juggler, a horn player and a "danc-
In the second half of the Eighth Century, a famous king and a little-used term were connected in the minds of the few clerics who made up the intellectual community of the medieval West. The term was Europe. The king was Charlemagne (meaning Charles the Great), a big, bull-necked, pot-bellied man who inherited the Frankish throne in 768 and ruled with enormous gusto and iron-handed benevolence for 46 years. One contemporary chronicler, looking back on Charlemagne's long reign, alleged that it "had left all Europe in the greatest happiness." Poets praised Charles, describing him as the "chief of Europe" and the "father of Europe."
CHARLEMAGNE’S EUROPE
ABSOLUTE RULER of most of Western Europe, Charlemagne is portrayed here wearing the tunic of a Frankish noble and carrying the imperial orb and scepter. This statue, probably carved in the Ninth Century, stands in a church in Switzerland that is believed to have been founded by the emperor.
These tributes to Charlemagne were well deserved. Through his conquests he extended the borders of Western society to include great new areas of the continent. In his efforts to improve government and education he laid the foundations for a common culture that many peoples have been building on ever since. It is no wonder that Charlemagne became a father-figure to the people of medieval Europe. The vast extent of his realm and the firmness of his rule gave men of his time a vague but satisfying sense of belonging to a single great community. "Europe" was only one of the terms they applied to that community, but it was the term that would triumph in the end.
The idea of Europe had been stirring fitfully for more than a millennium before Charlemagne's time —since the Greeks had applied the name of their goddess Europa to the landmass west of the River Don. By the Fifth Century A. D., the Church Fathers had begun to Christianize the pagan term and evolve a geography that related "Europe" to Biblical references to the three sons of Noah. Ja-pheth was designated the first settler of Europe and forefather of the gentiles, while Asia was said to be the homeland of Shem's progeny, the Jews, and Africa the patrimony of Ham's descendants.
This fanciful geography gained in credence after the breakup of the monolithic Roman Empire. By 700, there had emerged a world that was in fact tripartite, but one whose organization differed from that conceived by the Church Fathers. Islam held much of Western Asia and all of North Africa and within a few years would conquer nearly all Spain. Byzantium was temporarily reduced by Muslim
Successes to a strong defensive heartland centered on Constantinople. By elimination, if not by definition, the rest of the known world was Europe.
Because the growing threat of Islam aroused Christian religious loyalties, the idea of Europe lacked the emotional appeal of another half-formed conception, that of Christendom. Consistent with Christianity's sense of worldwide mission, Christendom was viewed by scholars of the Eighth Century as a spiritual union that neither possessed nor acknowledged territorial boundaries; it existed wherever a single believer professed the Faith. And with the concept of Christendom in command of the Western imagination, the term "Europe" could serve only one purpose for which there was no compelling need—to describe the West in a specifically geographical context. Thus the idea of Europe floated aimlessly, without real political focus or cultural content, until the advent of Charlemagne.
When Charlemagne came to the throne he no doubt was aware of the speculation regarding "Europe"—but such scholarly speculation could have had only secondary interest to a monarch whose overriding concern was the effective use of power. Charlemagne brought to the kingship not only great strength and stamina but also a keen mind and an insatiable desire to learn, and he kept himself exceptionally well informed. However, he valued ideas and learning not so much for their own sake as for the purposes they might serve. Even if he considered Europe while embarking on the conquests that helped to define it, it was probably only as terrain—not as a cultural and political entity.
As a war leader, Charlemagne displayed little of the dash and tactical genius of his grandfather Charles Martel; but he possessed a relentless determination and a rare gift for concentrating his troops at the right place in the nick of time. Over a period of some three decades and on several fronts, he launched 60 major campaigns, half of
Which he supervised himself—often on two or more fronts at the same time. Driving into what is now Hungary, Charlemagne crushed the Avars, invading nomads from Asia, and, to prevent further Asiatic incursions, set up two marks, or marches— one of which formed the nucleus of medieval Austria. South of the Pyrenees, in Spain, he wrested the county of Barcelona from the Muslims and eventually made himself overlord of the small Christian principalities in the Spanish northeast. It was while Charlemagne was returning home from one of these Spanish campaigns that his rear guard was wiped out in the pass of Roncesvalles by the independent Basques—a calamity that inspired the rousing medieval epic poem, the Song of Roland.
Charlemagne invaded Italy very much against his will. He well knew that more could be lost than won in the small wars and involved intrigues chronically embroiling the peninsula's many splinter factions. In 771 the Lombards—as they had so often done in the previous two centuries—again broke treaties wholesale, seizing papal lands and threatening Rome. Charlemagne was committed to honor the Frankish alliance that his father, Pepin, had sealed with the papacy, and by 774 he had defeated the Lombards and occupied Italy almost as far south as Naples. To prevent the Lombards from causing trouble in the future, Charlemagne assumed direct rule as their king.
Charlemagne acted as decisively in his settlement with the papacy as he had with the Lombards. Wary of the steady growth of papal claims to temporal power, he refused to return to Pope Adrian most of the lands that the Lombards had seized, even though Pepin had granted them to Rome under the terms of his so-called Donation of Pepin. Charlemagne treated Adrian and his successor Leo III with great respect and kindness, but he left no doubt in their minds as to who was boss.
Throughout the years of his military operations.
Charlemagne was heavily engaged east of the Rhine River. In a series of campaigns, he ultimately consolidated most of what is now West Germany into a political whole under Frankish rule. He took over complete control of the semiautonomous duchy of Bavaria, which had shown an alarming preference for complete self-rule. The Frisians of the North Sea coast, a sea-going people who for a half-century had resisted the Franks and the Church as one enemy in two guises, finally succumbed to Charlemagne and to a type of conversion that a few high-minded clerics deplored as "baptism with the sword." The king, undismayed by such criticism, applied the policy with even greater fervor in winning his most important victory. After about 30 years of fierce, sporadic warfare, he vanquished and pacified the many small tribes of pagan Saxons in northeastern Germany. On at least one occasion, Charlemagne followed the standard medieval practice of slaughtering captives—4,500 of them; less barbarously and more imaginatively, he neutralized 10,000 intractable Saxon warriors by deporting them to Frankish lands west of the Rhine. The Saxons, backed to the wall and faced with the option of Christianity or death, generally accepted the Faith. Yet they refused to cooperate with the harsh occupation decrees of Frankish soldiers and churchmen. Charlemagne was forced to relax his stringent ordinances; thereafter the Saxons subsided, and Charlemagne's suzerainty was also recognized by many neighboring Slavic tribes living in what is now Poland.
Charlemagne's far-flung conquests doubled the size of the old Frankish kingdom and united under his personal rule a great diversity of peoples. His huge realm, together with its tributaries, very nearly coincided with what might be described as Christian Europe or Latin Christendom; by either description, its major lacks were only the Christian peoples of the British Isles and the Christian
Spaniards ruled by the Muslims. Yet Charlemagne's contemporaries appear never to have thought of describing the extent of his dominion in terms of Latin Christendom—possibly because the sacrosanct indivisibility of Christendom kept them from making a distinction between the Church of Rome and the Eastern or Greek Church of Byzantium.
Available, however, was a convenient and selfexplanatory term—empire; and Charlemagne received title to it in Rome on Christmas Day in the year 800. While the king was attending mass at St. Peter's basilica. Pope Leo III placed a crown on the monarch's head. The congregation chanted three times: "To Charles, the most pious Augustus, crowned by God, the great and peace-giving emperor, life and victory!" Then Leo prostrated himself before Charlemagne, a posture which until then had been a mark of reverence reserved for the theocratic emperor of Byzantium.
This ceremony, of brief duration and dubious legality, ranks among history's most significant events—and most intriguing puzzles. Apparently Charlemagne's contemporaries were at first confused about the significance of the coronation and the circumstances surrounding it; the blank spots and contradictions in their records leave many questions that may never be answered. Nevertheless, we have a good general idea of the tangled causes and effects of the ceremony.
The title of emperor, as Charlemagne and Pope Leo knew full well, belonged legally to the heir of the old Eastern Roman Empire, and only he could use or bestow it. Accepting that fact, Charlemagne had tried, through the 780s, to win Byzantine recognition of his status in the form of a dynastic marriage. His attempts had failed, but not nearly as badly as papal relations with Byzantium, which had been steadily worsening as the result of political and doctrinal disputes. By 795, when Leo became pope, he would have had little to lose and much to gain by usurping the imperial title and conferring it on his champion, Charlemagne. Even for Leo, however, the wish was not strong enough in 795 to justify the overt act.
But two years later, the parallel plans of king and pope were joined and precipitated by the sudden appearance of a legal loophole. In the strictly legal sense the throne of Byzantium became vacant in 797 when the Empress Irene usurped it from her son, Constantine VI. Because it was unprecedented for a mere woman to rule in her own name, many refused to recognize her as the legitimate successor. On this shaky basis, Charlemagne was probably willing to claim the title; in fact he might well have intended to crown himself without indebting himself to the pope for aid or sanction. But Leo shrewdly took the initiative. By crowning Charlemagne he not only invested the Frankish king with the fabled prestige of a Roman emperor, but at the same time he insinuated the thought that the very title of emperor was to be a gift of the papacy.
For Charlemagne, the coronation solved nothing. In 802, his legal loophole vanished when Irene was overthrown in favor of an unquestionably legal emperor. Until two years before Charlemagne's death in 814, he had to bargain doggedly before he was finally accepted as imperial "brother" by Emperor Michael of the new Byzantine dynasty.
The title of emperor made little real difference in the complexion of Charlemagne's reign. Of necessity, Charlemagne ruled in the same old Germanic way; that is, in the absence of any selfsustaining bureaucracy he governed as best he could through men bound to him by ties of personal loyalty. Indeed, Charlemagne, who was a great reformer rather than an innovator, made few additions to, or changes in, the institutions and policies he had inherited from Pepin and Charles Martel. Originality in government was not needed; improvement was, and this Charlemagne gave in fuller measure than the West had known since the great days of Rome.
To increase the efficiency of his government Charlemagne tightened his hold on his officials and used them to keep each other honest. Within each administrative district, his government had two arms, secular and ecclesiastical; the counts and bishops alike swore loyalty to the king and were empowered, as independent and virtually equal colleagues, to initiate action on his behalf. In addition, Charlemagne periodically sent out to each district a two-man inspection team that reported directly to him on the accounts and performance of the local officials.
For the posts of count, bishop and inspector, Charlemagne sought the best men available; his only real precondition for royal service was personal loyalty. For all practical purposes, a man was not penalized—or preferred—for his social class or tribal ancestry. An outstanding Bavarian warrior might be appointed to serve as count beside a Frankish bishop in Lombard Italy; a humble Spanish cleric might wind up as an archbishop in the Frankish Church. This international interchange of personnel tended to homogenize administrative practices throughout the empire.
The tendency toward uniformity in government was reinforced by Charlemagne's handling of the law. He did not presume to abridge the ancient right of any of his peoples to live under their own legal code; but he did minimize the confusing diversity of tribal laws. This he accomplished by revising some of the codes and by ruling through a series of capitularies, or decrees, which were enforced under all codes.
Charlemagne's reforms also extended into the field of economics. To discourage profiteering and speculation in commodities, he prohibited transactions made at night and fixed maximum prices for grains in bulk. He even went so far as to fix the price that bakers could charge for their bread. To facilitate trade on the local level, Charlemagne issued coins of a standard denomination and metal content; these largely replaced the diverse and debased coinage previously used in the lands comprising his empire.
During Charlemagne's reign, long-distance trade staged a modest upturn despite the disruptive effects of Muslim control of Mediterranean shipping lanes. Indeed it was because the Mediterranean was a Muslim sea that Charles gave legal protection to the Jewish merchants, who, being identified with neither Islam nor Christendom, served as invaluable middlemen between the hostile worlds. In the long run, Charles' guarantees to the Jewish traders helped to make business respectable and to foster the development of the new merchant class whose commerce was to galvanize Europe in the 11th Century. But in Charlemagne's day, long-distance trade remained a minor traffic specializing in such luxury items as Eastern spices and silks.
The economy of early medieval Europe was heavily agrarian, and it was in agriculture that it made its greatest gains in Carolingian times. The labor of man and animal began increasing in efficiency through the use of such rediscovered inventions as the water mill and the heavy plow enabling deeper cultivation. The introduction of the three-field system, which allowed each of three subdivisions of an arable tract to lay fallow in successive seasons, slowly raised the yield per acre. As the forests were pushed back, the scale of farming rose on the great estates of the Church and the nobility, and also in the clusters of small freehold-ings centered on villages.
There is no better example of the growing agrarian efficiency of the Eighth Century than Charlemagne's own estates—and by one accounting he owned 1,615 of them. Under the king's scrutiny, capable stewards managed the royal estates so well that Charlemagne's profits from them, together with his war booty and rich gifts from his supporters, permitted him to run his government without imposing a general money tax on his subjects whose dues to the throne were paid in service. Indeed the only tax in the usual sense that he required was the sacramental tithe that landowners paid to the Church in produce.
By modern Western standards Charlemagne's Europe was neither prosperous nor especially productive; yet some contemporaries had ample reason for thinking it was both. Considerable numbers of peasants benefited from the opening and organized colonization of eastern lands conquered by Charlemagne's armies. Plague and famine still killed thousands as they had always done; but Europe's population would sink no lower. With good Christian wars to be fought on the frontiers, with peace and order enforced at home, most of the landed and the literate minorities could not deny that "Europe" had taken a turn for the better, and that they owed their well-being largely to their just and powerful protector, Charlemagne.
Charlemagne himself was not deluded by the traces of affluence and solidity that dignified his realm. Secure prosperity, he had realized early in his reign, depended on the development of literate and responsible government officials. As the need for such men increased apace with his conquests, he put all of his resources and prestige behind a campaign to prepare the sons of noblemen for high administrative posts, secular and ecclesiastical. These efforts, prompted by necessity, far outreached their limited goal and gave impetus to a cultural revival whose effects long outlasted his empire. This was the so-called "Carolingian renaissance."
The problems of increasing the supply of literate men in an era marked by its paucity of education might have discouraged a less-determined king. When Charlemagne came to the throne secular edu-
CHARLEMAGNE'S EMPIRE
I Frankish territory before Charlemagne I Charlemagne's conquests, 768-814 ' I Slavic peoples tributary to Charlemagne
Miles
300
ANGLO-SAXON
ENGLAND
Cation had practically disappeared throughout the West. Even in the Church, the percentage of literate clerics and the average level of their education had declined nearly everywhere. Ireland was an exception and so was England, where Irish and Italian missionaries had successfully transplanted the seeds of learning in the early Seventh Century. Nowhere, however, had the number of literate men declined more sharply than in the Frankish kingdom. Charlemagne had to revive education in his realm before he could educate officials.
World History
