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By the sword and the cross, Charlemagne became master of Western Europe. It was falling into decay when Charlemagne became joint king of the Franks in 768. Except in the monasteries, people had all but forgotten education and the arts. Boldly Charlemagne conquered barbarians and kings alike. By restoring the roots of learning and order, he preserved many political rights and revived culture. Charlemagne's grandfather was Charles Martel, the warrior who crushed the Saracens.
Charlemagne was the elder son of Bertrade and Pepin the Short, first mayor of the palace to become king of the Franks. Although schools had almost disappeared in the 8 th century, historians believe that Bertrade gave young Charles some education and that he learned to read. His devotion to the church became the great driving force of his remarkable life. Charlemagne was tall, powerful, and tireless.
His secretary, Einhard, wrote that Charlemagne had fair hair and a face laughing and merry... his appearance was always stately, regal and dignified. He had a ready wit, but could be stern. His tastes were simple and moderate.
He delighted in hunting, riding, and swimming. He wore the Frankish dress: linen shirt and breeches, a silk-fringed tunic, hose wrapped with bands, and, in winter, a tight coat of otter or marten skins. Over all these garments he flung a blue cloak, and he always had a majestic sword about him. Charlemagne's character was contradictory.
In an age when the usual penalty for defeat was death, Charlemagne several times spared the lives of his defeated foes; yet in 782 at Verden, after a Saxon uprising, he ordered 4, 500 Saxons beheaded. He compelled the clergy and nobles to reform, but he divorced two of his four wives without any cause. He forced kings and princes to kneel at his feet, yet his mother and his two favorite wives often overruled him in his own household. Charlemagne Begins His Reign In 768, when Charlemagne was 26, he and his brother Carloman inherited the kingdom of the Franks. In 771 Carloman died, and Charlemagne became sole ruler of the kingdom.
At that time the northern half of Europe was still pagan and lawless. In the south, the Roman Catholic church was striving to assert its power against the Lombard kingdom in Italy. In Charlemagne's own realm, the Franks were falling back into barbarian ways, neglecting their education and religion. Charlemagne was determined to strengthen his realm and to bring order to Europe.
In 772 he launched a 30 -year campaign that conquered and Christianized the powerful pagan Saxons in the north. He subdued the Avars, a huge Tatar tribe on the Danube. He compelled the rebellious Bavarian dukes to submit to him. When possible he preferred to settle matters peacefully, however. For example, Charlemagne offered to pay the Lombard king Desiderius for return of lands to the pope, but, when Desiderius refused, Charlemagne seized his kingdom in 773 to 774 and restored the Papal States. The key to Charlemagne's amazing conquests was his ability to organize.
During his reign he sent out more than 50 military expeditions. He rode as commander at the head of at least half of them. He moved his armies over wide reaches of country with unbelievable speed, but every move was planned in advance. Before a campaign he told the counts, princes, and bishops throughout his realm how many men they should bring, what arms they were to carry, and even what to load in the supply wagons.
These feats of organization and the swift marches later led Napoleon to study his tactics. One of Charlemagne's minor campaigns has become the most famous. In 778 he led his army into Spain to battle the infidel Saracens. On its return, Basques ambushed the rear guard at Roncesvalles, in northern Spain, and killed Count Roland.
Roland became a great hero of medieval songs and romances. By 800 Charlemagne was the undisputed ruler of Western Europe. His vast realm covered what are now France, Switzerland, Belgium, and The Netherlands. It included half of present-day Italy and Germany, part of Austria, and the Spanish March. The broad March reached to the Ebro River. By thus establishing a central government over Western Europe, Charlemagne restored much of the unity of the old Roman Empire and paved the way for the development of modern Europe.
Crowned Emperor On Christmas Day in 800, while Charlemagne knelt in prayer in Saint Peters in Rome, Pope Leo III seized a golden crown from the altar and placed it on the bowed head of the king. The throng in the church shouted, To Charles the August, crowned by God, great and pacific emperor, long life and victory! Charlemagne is said to have been surprised by the coronation, declaring that he would not have come into the church had he known the popes plan. However, some historians say the pope would not have dared to act without Charlemagne's knowledge. The coronation was the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire.
Though Charlemagne did not use the title, he is considered the first Holy Roman emperor. Reform and Renaissance Charlemagne had deep sympathy for the peasants and believed that government should be for the benefit of the governed. When he came to the throne, various local governors, called counts, had become lax and oppressive. To reform them, he expanded the work of investigators, called miss dominica. He prescribed their duties in documents called capillaries and sent them out in teams of to churchman and a noble. They rode to all parts of the realm, inspecting government, administering justice, and reawakening all citizens to their civil and religious duties.
Twice a year Charlemagne summoned the chief men of the empire to discuss its affairs. In all problems he was the final arbiter, even in church issues, and he largely unified church and state. Charlemagne was a tireless reformer who tried to improve his peoples lot in many ways. He set up money standards to encourage commerce, tried to build a Rhine-Danube canal, and urged better farming methods. He especially worked to spread education and Christianity in every class of people.
He revived the Palace School at Aachen, his capital. He set up other schools, opening them to peasant boys as well as nobles. Charlemagne never stopped studying. He brought an English monk, Alcuin, and other scholars to his court.
He learned to read Latin and some Greek but apparently did not master writing. At meals, instead of having jesters perform, he listened to men reading from learned works. To revive church music, Charlemagne had monks sent from Rome to train his Frankish singers. To restore some appreciation of art, he brought valuable pieces from Italy.
An impressive monument to his religious devotion is the cathedral at Aachen, which he built and where he was buried. At Charlemagne's death in 814 only one of his three sons, Louis, was living. Louis weak rule brought on the rise of civil wars and revolts. After his death his three quarreling sons split the empire between them by the Partition of Verdun in 843. Charlemagne The King We know a good deal about Charlemagne because we have two biographies of him written by men who were close to him.
The more important of these is by Einhard. He describes Charlemagne as being moderately tall, around six feet tall and powerfully built with a thick neck and deep chest. He had the red hair and blue eyes of his tribe and was possessed of both strength and stamina. He was average of the Franks in his love for hunting and for feasting, but Einhard notes that his king drank in small servings, only three cups of wine with a meal. Charlemagne was an ambitious king, aggressive and ruthless, but equally notable was his perseverance, his ability to carry through on a plan. He was not a great general, but he was a dogged campaigner and was often able to wear the enemy down through sheer force.
Indeed, one of his more important attributes was his physical energy. Einhard notes that Charlemagne was able to work longer and harder than his commanders or his secretaries. He was no genius, but he had a good mind and appreciated literature, which he had read to him by others. He was a patron of scholars and brought many of them to his court. All these accomplishments created a wide net of loyalty. Charlemagne had admirers within the Church and among his nobility.
His enemies feared both him and his armies. He did not command perfect obedience among his vassals, but none defied him successfully or for long. Charlemagne had one other virtue that is needed if a king is to be called Great. He ruled the Franks from 768 to 814; creating an empire that would be the envy and model for many an ambitious monarch after him.
The Lombards had moved into Italy in the later 500 s, destroying what was left of the Gothic kingdom and establishing their own. They ruled northern Italy for the next two centuries, until Charlemagne ended their rule. Charlemagne was married to the sister of the Lombard king. He was not interested in maintaining the marriage, however, and while still a young man he repudiated her and sent her away, claiming the marriage was not valid. This made the Lombard king very angry, Desiderius, who immediately began conspiring to harm Charlemagne however he might. To this end, he plotted rebellion with some Frankish lords.
When this plot was discovered, Charlemagne had all the excuse he needed to go to war. Charlemagne invaded Italy in 773. He defeated Desiderius at the Battle of Pavia that same year, capturing the king himself, whom he sent off to a monastery for safekeeping. Charlemagne proceeded then to claim for himself the iron crown of the Lombards and with this the Lombards fade into the background. Central Italy was not his because Pepin had given it to the Pope. Southern Italy was still in Greek or Moslem hands.
But the Kingdom of Italy, as it came to be known, was ruled by a northern prince. This is why later German kings will claim to have rights and powers here. The story of Saxony was quite different from that of Lombardy. Saxony (is today northwestern Germany and parts of the Netherlands) was still ruled by the Saxons, who had remained pagan. They were a semi-nomadic people who lived in part by preying on farming communities and were a sore thorn in Charlemagne's side. So, in 772, he decided that it was in the interests of both realm and Church that he does something about the Saxons.
He gathered an army, marched into Saxony and defeated the army that was fielded against him. He pushed forward as far as the Weser River, receiving the submission of local chiefs. Then he went home again. The next year he was occupied by the business in Lombardy, and the Saxon chiefs quickly ignored their oaths to receive missionaries and to send tribute payments to the Christian king.
In 775, Charlemagne again invaded Saxony and again defeated the army that was sent against him. This time he scoured Saxony from one end to the other, to make sure there were no chieftains left undefeated. To make doubly certain of his new subjects, he forced the chiefs to convert to Christianity. Charlemagne ruled more territory than any other Frankish king did. The institution of monarchy among the Franks was not equipped to deal with this situation. The Merovingian's had signally failed to rule other peoples, or even themselves, and it was this system that Charlemagne had inherited.
Charlemagne either created new offices, or adapted old ones to new purposes, to meet the challenge. Typical of the changes he made were those that concerned the governors of his various provinces. Within the Frankish realm, he relied on his counts. A count was appointed by him to rule a particular region within France, these regions being still defined more by the peoples living there than by any specific geographic boundaries. These were areas that were settled and on whose loyalty the king could usually rely. Newly conquered territories, however, were another matter.
The ruler here had to be a warrior, whose principal duties were military. Such a territory was called a March. Thus, the territory won by Charlemagne when he invaded Spain is called the Spanish March. Most such marches were on the eastern borders, in German territories. The German word for count is graf, and the word for march is mark. Long after Charlemagne, and even long after the Middle Ages, there were lords in Germany called margraves, still reflecting the administrative inheritance from the early Middle Ages.
Above the counts were the provincial governors, whose duty it was to govern the principal divisions of the realm. These took the ancient Roman title of duke. The dukes were either members of Charlemagne's own family, or else were trusted comrades. These titles, too, long outlasted Charlemagne; examples include the Duke of Saxony, the Duke of Brittany, and the Duke of Aquitaine. Not all counts reported to a duke; some regions a duke ruled directly, with no counts under him; some regions were ruled by Charlemagne's directly and were known as royal lands. And some lands were ruled by none of these, but by the Church.
Jurisdictions overlapped; some duties and powers were military only, some were administrative, fiscal, or judicial. And sometimes a lord exercised power as he saw fit or until Charlemagne intervened. It was not efficient. It reflected the history of Carolingian conquest rather than any carefully considered plan of governing.
But, as noted above, much of it survived its creator and gave shape to the political geography of medieval Europe. Charlemagne knew that his system was inefficient. More importantly, he knew that there was a constant tendency for his dukes and counts to act independently of him, to do as they wished and for Charlemagne's own decrees to be ignored or circumvented. To counter this tendency, Charlemagne invented new court officers. These of were called miss dominica, or servants of the lord. Their purpose was to act as inspectors general, investigating the behavior of royal officials and reporting to the court.
As direct emissaries of the king, they carried all the prestige Charlemagne and the implied threat of his power. They were appointed in pairs, with one being drawn from the Church and one from the laity, so that neither one side nor the other should have its interests predominate. They were always posted to places outside their native lands so they should have no local ties or loyalties. And lest they develop such, the king shifted them about, neither leaving them long in one place nor posting them to the same place consecutively. They were to serve Charlemagne, not local interests.
The system worked quite well under Charlemagne. The miss dominica were able to keep Charlemagne informed as to what was going on in all his scattered lands and among all his vassals. More importantly, their mere presence and frequent visits served to remind an ambitious lord that there was a limit to his ambition, so long as Charlemagne and his mighty army was around. And that, of course, was the systems great weakness, and a weakness shared by all medieval monarchs. It worked only on the prestige and accomplishments of the king himself. So long as he was strong, the system was strong.
But let a weak king come along, or a child king, or no king at all, and the system could evaporate almost over night. Charlemagne was no scholar, but he had a great respect for them and he genuinely desired to revive learning at his court. He loved listening to the classics, such as Augustine's The City of God. He studied Latin and Greek, though he spoke only Frankish. But he recognized that learning in his day was in disrepair, and he deliberately gathered the leading intellectual lights of his age at his court.
Among these scholars was Alcuin. Saxon, Alcuin trained at York, in England, and founded a school at Aix-la-Chapelle. Another figure was Peter the Grammarian, from Pisa. Another was Paul the Deacon, from Italy, who wrote a history of the Lombards. There was Einhard, a Frank, the royal biographer. And Theodulf, a Visigoth from Spain, who trained at Seville.
These names are an example of the wide geographic spread of the scholars. A Spaniard, two Italians, an Englishman, and a Frank, and these are but a handful. Charlemagne's court at Aix-la- Chapelle was a beacon for men of learning, and the king funded their activities. It was from these, and others, there originated a burst of activity that would have a strong influence on medieval intellectual life. The Frankish practice of dividing the realm led to further splits, not only of land but of rights and powers.
No new Charlemagne emerged from these families to unite the lands anew, and many of the kings were outright incompetent. After Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, we get kings with names like Louis the Fat and Charles the Simple. To add to their problems, the later 800 s and early 900 s were not a time for incompetents. The hundred-year stretch from 850 to 950 was filled with the worst of the Viking invasions, to which were added Moslem raids and pirates in the south and Magyar raids from the east.
Against these pressures the Carolingians could not stand. Charlemagne's great empire collapsed steadily, fragmenting into dozens of pieces. The monasteries were plundered, the towns burned. Even the very title of emperor was lost again for a time.
When it reappeared, it was taken by a German king. By the middle of the 3 rd century the bishops of Rome assumed that their church tradition provided standard for other, quite distant churches. During the 4 th and early 5 th centuries, the popes made various claims to special authority and were rarely challenged. Pope Saint Leo I, the Great (440 - 461), consolidated papal power and successfully intervened in the affairs of other Western church districts. Subsequent popes considered themselves endowed with powers over the whole church, even over the East. Pope Saint Gregory I, the Great (590 - 604), made the papacy a major political force.
In the late 8 th and early 9 th centuries, the Frankish house of Charlemagne offered protection to the popes and gave them immense territories in central Italy, the basis for the future Papal States. In return, Pope Saint Leo III (795 - 816) crowned Charlemagne Holy Romanemperor in 800. In the 10 th century the papacy fell into the hands of the local nobility, and popes became mere liturgical figures. Pope Saint Leo IX (1049 - 1054) began papal reforms and emphasized papal authority as the key to restoring church order.
Pope Saint Gregory VII (1073 - 1085) was the strongest advocate of this program, which eventually was called Gregorian Reform. Overall, the papacy was strengthened, reaching a zenith with Pope Innocent III (1198 - 1216), who became the most important person, secular or religious, in contemporary European society. In the next century papal influence declined and was further damaged in the scandal of the Great Schism. During the Schism, three popes simultaneously claimed the status of legitimate pontiff. In the early 16 th century the popes consolidated their political authority in the Papal States and became effective territorial princes. At about the same time, however, Germantheologian Martin Luther rejected the papacy and denounced the pope as the Antichrist, sparking the Protestant Reformation.
Although various Protestant reformers differed on many issues, all agreed that the papacy was an inessential institution. The Christian Church first appeared in history as a fellowship of self-governing communities, scattered all over the empire, and spreading even beyond its borders. During the course of the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries the Catholic Church developed two distinct types of Christianity. The first was shared by all Latin-speaking Christians, who formed the Western Patriarchate of Rome. The second comprised the Syriac, Armenian and Greek-speaking world, which was divided into four Eastern Patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. The East emphasised the divergence of gifts, the West the need for uniformity and obedience.
It want always easy for the two sides to understand each other; they often viewed a new problem from totally different standpoints, and sometimes these disagreements ended in an opendissagreement between the two sects of Rome and Constantinople. But the schism invariably ended in reconciliation, for both sides acknowledged that the Church of Christ must include both Eastern and Western Christians, and that their gifts were complementary. Between the sixth and tenth centuries the Church gave barbarian society institutions, laws, and a concept of belonging through written history. A serious split between Rome and Constantinople took place in the ninth century. Its real origin lay in the great political conflict that occurred at the beginning of the century, when in the year 800, Charlemagne restored the Western Roman Empire. In the eyes of the East, the Pope had committed a serious breach of faith when he consented to crown a barbarian like Charlemagne as Emperor of the West.
This was a problem because the western Emperor had to recognize the new ruler as his brother-sovereign some thing neither party was satisfied with. Thus two rival political powers had been set up, both claiming to be the only lawful successor the Roman Empire, and it was merely a matter of time before one or other had to be destroyed. The bitter conflict between these two competitors, which ended with the fall of the Byzantine Empire inthe fifteenth century, involved the Church also, and was thus the root cause of the schism between the Christian East and West. This would leave an opportunity open for the Crusaders. For the West, the events of the Crusades began in an aura of optimism but ended with disaster and disunity for the Church.
After the death of Charlemagne, the military authority that had supported the Papacy began to decline. The Norman incursions into Italy posed a real threat to the Church, and the Papacy in 1059 acknowledged its inability to face any threat from a Norman invasion. At this time a request arrived from the Eastern Emperor for assistance against encroachments by Moslem forces into the Holy Lands. Urban II called together on the faithful to mount a crusade, appealing to the spirit of faith, to regain the Holy Lands from the sacrilegious hands of Islam while drawing attention to the political benefits of such a venture. Barraclough states that The Crusades to the Holy Lands were the most spectacular and self-conscious act of Western Christianexpansionism which represented a fusion of three characteristics of medieval man: piety, pugnacity, and greed.
In a very real sense, Innocents reign saw the zenith of the papal monarchy A narrower hierarchical church had replaced the Church as a community of the faithful, comprising clerical orders in ascending ranks jealously guarding their rights and privileges. Even the reforming Fourth Lateran Council had its program imposed upon it by Innocent, and in reality it was to the papacy that the people looked to reform the Church. Innocents pontificate presents for church historians aromatic dichotomy the institutionalised church beginning to give birth to the servant Church. Items of models of Church, Innocent Iii's- pontificate resembled a Tyranny: A Church which was structured that all power and authority came from one person; a Church which was brutal and violent through the Crusades and the Inquisition; and most convincingly a Church that stood for no opposition to its beliefs or its authority. The 12 th and 13 th centuries were a time of change not only in the ecclesiastical but also secular spheres. Canon law became a power that produced not only a highly organised, political and central papacy, but also a power that so influenced societal law, that it gave rise to a new secular order and a culture that was almost totally ecclesiastical (Congar, 1969).
During this century the uprooting of the papacy from Rome and its re-establishment in Avignon took place for a period for almost seventy years. However by the end ofthe fourteenth century the papacy was in turmoil and disarray, forced into another schism which saw three rival popes enthroned simultaneously in confusion and conflict. Religious life suffered as a consequence of the schism, for Christendom looked upon the scandal helpless and depressed, and yet impotent to remove it. With two sections of Christendom each declaring theater lost, each cursing and denouncing the other, men soberly asked who was saved (Flick, 1930).
Doubt and confusion caused many to question the legitimacy and true holiness of the church as an institution. In the West, the excesses that affected the church ultimately called for radical reform through that movement which we now identify with the Protestant Reformation. This period of moral decline was instrumental in leading to a Western Schism within Christendom, in which three Popes and anti-Popes concurrently contested control over the See of Peter. The popes refused to have negotiations to effect reform, and they failed to bring about reform themselves.
Thus the papacy emerged as something between an Italian city-state and a European power, without forgetting at the same time the claim to be the vice-regent of Christ. The pope often could not make up his own mind whether he was the successor of Peter or of Caesar. Such vacillation had much to do with the rise and success of the Reformation (Bainton, 1952). By their-fifteenth century the Church was in urgent need of drastic reform which, when effected, would have lasting impact on the religious and secular history of Europe. Bibliography Barraclough, G. The Medieval Papacy, Thames and Hudson London, 1968.
Flick, A. C. Decline of the Medieval Church, vol. I London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Turner and Co. , 1930. Congar, Y. Faith and Spiritual Life, Dayton, Longman &# 038; Todd, London. 1969.
Bainton, R. H. The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, Boston: Beacon Press, 1952.
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