Charlemagne is remembered for being an empire-builder, but he is also remembered for his many reforms of the monetary system, the government, the military, the church, and Frankish culture. His reforms became what today is called the “Carolingian Renaissance.”
While there was no chance of the survival of the empire as it was when Charlemagne died—there was no constitution to hold it together, and the tensions within the Carolingian descendants were too great, plus in the outlying areas of the kingdom the tribal loyalties were too strong—what did remain was a common memory of a time when there was a united Western Christendom that had a common goal of expanding culture, education, quality of life, and Christian religious values.
Economic and Monetary Reforms
The peace with Byzantium in the 750s ended Byzantine rule in northern Italy, but it created a financial problem: a shortage of gold. The Franks were forced to give up Venice and Sicily, and that meant the loss of trade routes to Africa and the East. When Charlemagne came to power, he followed his father’s reforms, but extended them further in 792 to 794 by ending the monetary system based on the gold sou and replacing it with a system based on silver, which was in much more plentiful supply in Frankish lands.
This standardization unified, harmonized, and simplified the hundreds of tribal currencies that had been in place for centuries and began new opportunities for trade and commerce. The new currency was called the livre carolingienne (from the Latin libra, the modern pound), and based upon a pound of silver. This pound, which was a unit of both money and weight, was worth 20 sous—from the Latin solidus (which was primarily weight used for accounting and trade and never actually minted) or 240 deniers (from the Latin denarius, equal to the modern penny). During this period, the livre and the sou were counting units; only the silver denier was a coin of the realm.
Charlemagne instituted principles for administrative structure in several documents; the most significant in terms of the economic control of his kingdom was the Capitulare de villis of 802. It lists a series of very specific rules about how the king’s estates must be run, and it gives us a wealth of detail about the day-to-day expectations of how his subordinates must meet the king’s needs. It has rules about the estate’s agricultural, craft, financial, and industrial workings, and how each of these must be run in order to meet the needs of the royal household and the palace.
In addition to this macro-oriented reform of the economy, Charlemagne also initiated a number of microeconomic reforms, such as direct control of prices and levies on certain goods and commodities. He prohibited the lending of money for interest, and then strengthened the laws regarding lending in 814 when he made the Capitulary for the Jews, a complete banning of the Jewish practice of money-lending.
Much of the European continent took up Charlemagne’s system, because it was not his problem alone that gold was no longer heading north. In England, the Anglo-Saxon King Offa of Mercia voluntarily adopted the standard. After Charlemagne’s death, the quality of the silver used for coins began to decrease, forcing those in Europe until about the year 1100 to use the more purely minted English coin.
Laws
One cannot have an empire without a common law, the essential ingredient that binds people together and gives society its structure. The Lex Romana, for example, allowed Roman citizens the confidence in knowing that they were protected by the same laws and had the same rights wherever they lived in the Roman Empire. Charlemagne’s view of law was not that it should be uniform in his empire: that would have been too difficult, considering the differences of language, territory, and custom. He did insist on a uniform Christianity, however, and he based his legal decisions on the church’s canon laws first, and then regional law next. To clarify: Charlemagne believed in law and justice, and he made sure the laws of all the areas of his empire were collected and written down. He also documented and circulated the laws of the church. But in terms of individual areas’ laws concerning such things as inheritance, trials and punishments, and age of majority for marriage, he allowed the rule of tribal leaders and local law.
Military
One of the myths surrounding Charlemagne’s legacy is the idea that he was able to dominate Europe by his cavalry’s use of the stirrup, supposedly introduced by Charles Martel in the 730s. The stirrup, however, was not introduced until the late eighth century and was not widely adopted until the twelfth century, and so it could not have been used as a part of a “shock cavalry charge” with the lances held locked in position and the knights locked on the horse as well by means of stirrups. Charlemagne’s military success instead can be attributed to clever use of the siege technologies of the time and to brilliant logistics—he fought very few battles directly in the field, as most of his warfare was based on attacking the enemy’s forts and laying siege—and so even if he had the skill of a “shock cavalry” among his knights, he would not have had to use the technique enough for it to become famous.
Church Reforms
Charlemagne may have had problems with his dukes, counts, officials, and other political subordinates, but he was very secure in his relationship with the representatives of the church. Because he saw himself as a partner in a divine mission, the church gave him bishops, abbots, monks, and priests to do the work of conversion wherever Charlemagne conquered—but they also were educated men who acted as his trusted secretaries, intellectual support, and administrators.
Many of these men were wealthy in their own right, and one way that Charlemagne showed his favor was to give grants of ecclesiastical titles and land. The men who swore allegiance to the emperor were given certain immunities and were able to receive tithes from the subjects who lived on their lands. Charlemagne, in turn, had a high level of expectations for his ecclesiastical subjects. When he became king, he discovered that the clergy had taken advantage of their privileged position in society and, instead of evangelizing, had sat back and simply enjoyed their security. Most of the clergy were woefully undereducated, and the result was that preaching was substandard: inadequate in both quality and quantity. If he wanted to create a peaceful Christian society, then he had a long way to go—a realization that he would have as much of a problem with creating a standardized spiritual community where dogmas were understood and obeyed as with creating a Christian empire among the borderlands of Frankish territory.
Charlemagne set out his program for church reform in 789 in the Ad-monitio Generalis. In it, he standardized not only the secular life within the church—law courts, building upkeep, the church calendar, and tithing—but also spiritual matters such as how to teach the mystery of the Trinity. He believed (he had a superstitious side) that there was one right way of saying
Mass, one right way of chanting the psalms, and one perfect and faultless text of scripture, and straying from these forms would displease God (and hence would be unlucky). He asked the pope in 790, for example, for an authorized sacramental liturgy, which he then had copied and sent all over his kingdom with the express intent that it would be the one right text that every clergyman would use. He did the same with the Bible in order to get things perfect and thus not tempt the Almighty into displeasure.
His reforms had to be restated, and pushed, over and over again despite the fact that the clergy were supposedly submitting to the papal rule. Almost every year Charlemagne had orders sent out, even up to his death, and in the letters exchanged between the emperor and Alcuin it seems that Charlemagne was going to be frustrated in his life’s goal to create an orderly and universally obeyed realm of church law.
Educational Reforms
The term “Carolingian Renaissance” is most closely connected to the flowering of education, scholarship, literature, art, and architecture that the king enthusiastically encouraged. He had always enjoyed a passion for scholarship and learning, mastering languages (he spoke Latin fluently and mastered diplomatic Greek, and evidence suggests he spoke more than a little Arabic). In the 780s Charlemagne began to make his court a center of religious scholarship, controlling, in effect, the intellectual grounding of his empire, and thus boxing in what people might believe or think.
He sent away to monasteries for manuscripts that might be useful and had many copied and sent on to other schools or centers of learning throughout his empire—attempting to create a standard of education among present and future generations of clerics. They were sent holy scripture, commentaries, patristic works, and as much of the Roman and Greek classical authors as were available at the time. He did increase the libraries of monastic schools and scriptoria (centers for book-copying) in his empire: most of the surviving works that we have today of classical Latin were copied and preserved by Carolingian scholars, and the earliest manuscripts available for many ancient texts are Carolingian. If a text managed to survive to the Carolingian age, chances are that it survives today, thanks to Charlemagne.
Charlemagne brought Frankish culture into contact with the culture and learning of other countries (such as the Visigoths in Spain, the Anglo-Saxons in England, and the caliphal court in Baghdad) due to his vast conquests. In his court, he surrounded himself with men of learning from all over his empire: Alcuin, an Anglo-Saxon from York; Theodulf, a Visigoth from Septimania; the historian Paul the Deacon, a Lombard; Peter, later the bishop of Pisa, and Pau-linus of Aquileia, both Italians; and Angilbert, Angilram, Einhard, and Waldo of Reichenau, all Franks. This is only a partial list of his legion of scholars.
This blend, however, promoted the liberal arts at the court, and Charlemagne ordered that his children and grandchildren be well educated in this mix. Even he continued to study. At a time when most warlords were basically illiterate, Charlemagne learned Latin grammar from Paul the Deacon; rhetoric, logic, and astronomy from Alcuin; and arithmetic from Einhard. The king’s great failure in scholarship, as Einhard confesses, was his seeming inability to learn how to write. Part of the problem was that Charlemagne attempted to learn only in his later years—practicing the formation of letters (in his bed during his free time) on books and wax tablets that he hid under his pillow—and it calls into question his ability to read. Einhard is notoriously silent about that skill, and no contemporary source supports the idea that Charlemagne could read.
Nevertheless, Charlemagne’s success as warrior and administrator can be traced to his admiration for learning. One of the reforms named after him, however, was due not to an intellectual advance, but, ironically, an advance in handwriting. Because all manuscripts had to be hand-copied, the handwriting a monk or scribe was taught to use was very important in terms of being easy to read. The Merovingian handwriting was very difficult to follow, as single letters could be written with different shapes—a “c” could easily be mistaken for an “e,” for example—and the Insular Script was beautiful but the ligatures and abbreviations also made copying difficult and slow.
The new minuscule, called Carolingian or Caroline, was developed first in Aachen and later from the influential scriptorium at Tours, where Alcuin retired as an abbot. It combined the Roman half uncial script (and its cursive version) with features from the Insular Scripts that were being used in Irish and English monasteries. Its strength was in its uniformity—rounded shapes, clearly distinguishable letters, clear capital letters, and spaces between words—all norms that we take for granted today.
World History
