One popular misconception concerning the Middle Ages is the idea that the church squelched learning, which it associated with the pagan societies of Greece and Rome. Quite the opposite is true. With the Roman Empire gone and the barbarian tribes threatening to extinguish the candle of civilization, only the church kept it lit.
Much of that light came from Rome, of course, but Rome itself was threatened when the Lombards invaded Italy in 568. Around the same time, a group of monks traveled to the farthest reaches of the Western world—the British Isles. There, in dank, cold monasteries on the harsh coasts of the North Sea and the Atlantic, they copied down the Bible and early church writings. But they did not simply copy; the books they produced were works of art in themselves, with lavishly illuminated lettering that served to illustrate the fact that to these scholars, words were sacred.
Ireland was converted to Christianity by St. Patrick in the 400s, and in the following century, monks began arriving on the British Isles from continental Europe. The first major monastic settlement in the area was founded by the Irish missionary St. Columba (c. 521-597) at Iona, off the coast of Scotland, in 563. Monks from the Iona community in turn founded Lindis-farne off the coast of England in 634. The latter community would become famous for the Lindisfarne Gospels, and Iona became famous for the Book of Kells. Both were gorgeously illuminated manuscripts.
The communities of Iona and Lind-isfarne were destroyed by the last great wave of Germanic barbarians in the Middle Ages, the Vikings, in the 790s. Many of the monks left before the Vikings arrived; in any case, they and their brethren had managed to keep learning alive during the darkest years of the Middle Ages.
Eventually the stature of the popes would become such that they created relics of their own, making water or oil "holy" simply by praying over them. By that time, the pope was the most powerful man in Christendom (KRIS-in-dum), or the Christian world, and for that, too, later popes had Gregory to thank. Under his shrewd leadership, the papacy became firmly established as something much more than the office of Rome's bishop; gradually the pope became not just the spiritual, but the political leader of Western Europe.
Gregory reinforced the church's power by teaching that the Bible was a difficult book that required interpretation by those trained to do so: priests and other leaders of the church. A version of the Bible had been translated by St. Jerome (c. 347-c. 419), and its name, the Vul-
Clovis, a Frankish king who ruled from 481 to 511, was the greatest ruler of the Merovingian dynasty. Reproduced by permission of the Corbis Corporation.
Gate, a term referring to the language spoken by common people, implied that it was meant to be understood by the masses. The Vulgate, however, was in Latin, a language that had long since been replaced by local dialects for everyday use. Yet it remained strong as a written language, and virtually every educated person in early medieval Europe understood Latin. The problem was that hardly anyone, outside of a tiny minority within the church, was educated: for many centuries, even most kings were illiterate. Eventually people had no idea of what the Bible said, and the church actively discouraged believers from attempting to read the Scriptures.
Finally, from Augustine's writings Gregory adopted the idea of Purgatory, a place for people who were too good to go to Hell, but had not quite made it to Heaven. He took this concept and added to it, suggesting that the loved ones of a deceased person pray for his or her soul. By the 1000s, the concept of Purgatory had become firmly established.
World History
