The Carolingian Age

W hereas the Merovingian Age had begun in turmoil, but had led to the establishment of Europe's first stable dynasty in centuries, the period from 750 to 1000 started with the establishment of a new dynasty and ended in turmoil. The Carolingians' magnificent empire seemed to recall that of Rome, but their power largely centered around one man: Charlemagne. Once he was gone, the empire began disintegrating. Europe faced new terrors as well, not least of which was the last wave of Germanic barbarians: the Vikings. Other invaders came as well, and it seemed that Europe was on the verge of another dark age.

The Carolingian Age (751–987)

A turning point in the history both of Western Europe and of church-state relations occurred in 751, when Charles Martel's son Pepin III (c. 714–768) sent a message to the pope asking if it would be a sin to remove the Merovingian king from power. The pope, who needed Frankish help to defend against the Lombards, sent word that it would not, where-upon Pepin ordered that the last of the Merovingians be thrown into a monastery. Thus once again a pope blessed the establishment of a new dynasty, the Carolingians (kayr-uh-LINJ-ee-unz).

The name came from that of Pepin's son Charles, sometimes known as Carolus Magnus, meaning "Charles the Great." He is better known as Charlemagne (SHAR-luh-main; 742–814; ruled 768–814), and he was the single most important Western European leader of the Early Middle Ages. Under Charlemagne, Western Europe had something it had not seen for centuries: a vibrant, growing empire. Already the Frankish territories comprised most of what is now France and western Germany, but Charlemagne started expanding the boundaries, first by defeating the Saxons to the north in 777. He saw himself as more than a conqueror, however, and with the conquest came the forced conversion of the Saxons to Christianity.

His father Pepin had already dealt the Lombards a harsh blow in 756, after which he turned their territories in eastern Italy over to the church in an act known as the Donation of Pepin. Thenceforth these were called the Papal States, and would exist as such until the 1800s. Charlemagne completed the conquest of the Lombards, receiving their crown as his own in 774. He then turned his attention to Spain, where in 778 he tried unsuccessfully to win back Muslim-held territories for Christendom. Further campaigns resulted in Charlemagne unifying virtually all German territories, including the kingdom of Bavaria in southern Germany.

Words to Know: The Carolingian Age

Astronomy:

The scientific study of the stars and other heavenly bodies, and their movement in the sky.

Chain mail:

A lightweight, flexible armor made of interlocking metal rings.

Christendom:

The Christian world.

Communion:

The Christian ceremony of commemorating the last supper of Jesus Christ.

Epic:

A long poem that recounts the adventures of a legendary hero.

Geometry:

A type of mathematics dealing with various shapes, their properties, and their measurements.

Mace:

A club with spikes on the end, typically used for breaking armor.

Mead:

An intoxicating drink of fermented honey, popular among Vikings and other Germanic peoples of Northern Europe.

Noble:

A ruler within a kingdom who has an inherited title and lands, but who is less powerful than the king or queen; collectively, nobles are known as the nobility.

Nomadic:

Wandering.

Vatican:

The seat of the pope's power in Rome.

In 794, Charlemagne established his capital at Aachen (AH-ken;

in modern-day Germany), a city famous for its mineral baths. The year 800 marked the high point of his career, when he became the first European emperor to visit Rome in three centuries. The Byzantine rulers had cut themselves off from Rome; therefore Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Carolus Augustulus, Emperor of the Romans, on Christmas Day. This was in effect the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire, which, though it never lived up to its magnificent name, was destined to become a significant part of the Middle Ages.

The Carolingian Renaissance

While in Italy, Charlemagne visited the former imperial capital of Ravenna, including the Church of San Vitale. Built by the Byzantine invaders, the church must have inspired him, because upon his return to Aachen, he ordered his architect, Odo of Metz, to design a replica. The chapel at Aachen, as it turned out, was not an exact reproduction: it was a much firmer, less delicate building than the original—and thus it helped establish the essentials of Carolingian architecture.

A number of qualities distinguished the architecture of Carolingian times from that of the Merovingian era, when civilization was still hanging by a thread. Merovingian buildings were small and boxlike—like a hut, only bigger and more permanent. Carolingian design, by contrast, incorporated the graceful, open basilica floorplan used by Constantine (emperor of the Roman Empire; ruled 310–37). Thus the Carolingians borrowed Italian concepts for a rougher, hardier northern kingdom, and laid the groundwork for both Romanesque and Gothic architecture.

The period of Charlemagne's rule saw a rebirth in the arts and learning; hence it is sometimes called the "Carolingian Renaissance." Much of the credit goes to Alcuin (AL-kwin; c. 732–804), an Anglo-Saxon scholar who at Charlemagne's request became head of the school at Aachen. Surveying the deplorable state of education among the future Carolingian leaders, Alcuin called for a return to the study of Latin and of what the Romans had called the seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric (the art of writing and speaking), logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

Charlemagne himself could barely read and write, yet literacy thrived among the upper classes during his reign. By then parchment, a durable type of paper made from sheepskin, had come into use. Many of the Greek and Roman classics had been saved earlier by monks in the British Isles, but Carolingian monks copied so many manuscripts themselves that many took their versions for the originals. The monks had developed the Merovingian majuscule into a highly readable script called minuscule. Later, they created a more square version of this script that, because people mistook their manuscripts for Roman originals, came to be called "Roman." A slanted version of "Roman" lettering, used at the Vatican, became the basis for italic—that is, Italian—script.

The divided kingdom

Charlemagne's empire did not long outlast him. His son Louis the Pious succeeded him in 814, but Louis was no Charlemagne, and his rule was marked by quarrels. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 arranged for the division of the empire into three parts, one for each of Louis's sons.

One son received an area that came to be known as the West Frankish Empire, later to become the nation of France. A second son received what was dubbed the East Frankish Empire, which would unify under the name Germany more than a thousand years later. In between was the "Middle Kingdom," the inheritance of the other son. This comprised a strip running from what is now Holland all the way down to Italy.

Through inheritance, the "Middle Kingdom" would soon be dissolved into a patchwork of tiny principalities. The western and eastern empires, by contrast, lasted a bit longer. Descendants of Charlemagne ruled France until 887, and off and on for exactly 100 more years; however, the real power rested in the hands of various feudal lords. Much the same happened in the East Frankish Empire, where in 911 the nobility chose their own king from outside the Carolingian line of succession.

Feudalism

One of the most important legacies of the Carolingian dynasty was feudalism, an economic and political system based on land and loyalty that evolved into a fully defined way of life in the 800s. Central to this evolution were knights, heavily armed cavalry soldiers who could fight either in massed formations or one on one. As such, they represented centuries of change and development in society as a whole.

In early Merovingian times, all soldiers were more or less the same. Many were farmers who had simply left their fields to fight, and most were infantrymen, or foot soldiers. This was a pattern that went back to the ancient Greeks. Then in the late 500s, one of the most important inventions in human history made its appearance: the stirrup.

Abu al-Abbas

During Charlemagne's time, fame of the great Frankish emperor spread to Arabia, from whence the powerful caliph Harun al-Rashid sent him an unusual gift in 802: an elephant called Abu al-Abbas. The king and the beast soon became inseparable, and wherever Charlemagne went on his conquests, Abu went as well. Abu died in 810, while his master was on a campaign against the Danes in northern Europe. Abu's ivory tusks were made into chess pieces.

Actually, a form of stirrup had been used in India since before the time of Jesus Christ, and perhaps the Huns picked up the idea as they moved across Asia toward Rome. Whatever the case, the power of Attila's armies can be attributed in part to the fact that riders were equipped with hanging rings to hold their feet. This may not sound terribly important, but it made all the difference in battle. A rider without stirrups could use only the strength of his arm to deliver a blow with a sword or lance; if he struck with his full weight, he would be thrown from his horse. A soldier firmly anchored in stirrups, by contrast, could strike with his whole weight and that of his horse as well.

More than a century after Attila, stirrups—and the types of tactics they permitted—took hold among the Merovingians. Soldiers began protecting themselves with armor, typically chain mail, a lightweight, flexible covering made of interlocking metal rings. The first battle using armored cavalrymen was probably a fight between the Franks and Saxons in 626; but it was Charles Martel's victory at Tours in 732 over the Muslims (who had no stirrups) that firmly established the new technology.

How the feudal system worked

To equip a knight was costly: not only did he have his armor and his weapons (sword, lance, mace, and sometimes crossbow), but he needed more than one horse in case the first one was hurt in battle. He also needed a group of servants to assist him, along with food for his horses, his servants, and himself—not to mention years of freedom from other responsibilities in order to train for warfare. Not even a king could afford to support more than a few knights; for this, he had to depend on the nobles within his kingdom.

In early medieval times, all wealth was based on land ownership, and the king owned all the land. Below the king were feudal lords, or nobles, who were allowed to maintain estates on the king's land as long as they supplied him with a certain amount of knights to defend the kingdom. The estate was called a fief (FEEF), a word that, like feudal, is related to "fee." The nobles would in turn give knights title to small fiefs of their own, along with the authority to tax those who lived on the land.

The lowest-ranking people in feudal society were the serfs, or peasants, by far the largest group. They were the ones who worked the land, growing food—most of which they turned over to the lords—and paying taxes, which helped maintain knights. There were gradations of rank within the peasantry, with certain types of peasants who acted as foremen over other peasants, but they were all so far below the royalty and nobility that it hardly mattered. In return for their labors, they received protection from outside attack, itself a very real danger in the Middle Ages; but they also tied themselves and future generations to a life only slightly better than slavery.

In the medieval world, this arrangement did not seem unfair. People saw feudalism, if they considered it at all, as a system of mutual obligations in which everyone had a place—even the church. Lords provided their local church and monastery with protection; in return, priests and monks, who had great influence over the peasantry, supported the nobility and the king.

The Vikings (793–c. 1000)

Around the time of Charlemagne's coronation as emperor, just when it seemed that Europe was on the road to safety and unification, yet another great threat appeared from the north. They came from Scandinavia—now Sweden, Norway, and Denmark—where the land was rough and rocky, and people lived on the edge of the sea. With the population growing and the land ever more scarce, they began sweeping over Europe, killing and marauding as they went. Frightened Europeans called them Northmen, Norsemen, or—using a word from the invaders' own language—Vikings.

On January 8, 793, Viking raiders destroyed the church at Lindisfarne off the coast of England—ironically, one of the places where civilized learning had weathered the darkest years of the Middle Ages. In a further irony, Lindisfarne, Iona, and other scholarly centers now became bases for Viking raids throughout the British Isles. The marauders swept through Ireland, drawn by the gold and other wealth of its monasteries, and established colonies on the east coast. Among the latter was Dublin, which later became the Irish capital.

The Vikings were particularly savage in their attacks on Britain, so much so that the natives began uniting

against them. This happened in Scotland, and again to the south, where attacks by the Danes helped produce the first true hero of English history. At first King Alfred (849–899) ruled only a small realm called Wessex; by 886, however, he had captured the city of London, and united all English lands that were not under Danish control. The Danes were pushed into the northeast of England, which came to be known as the Danelaw; thereafter, they became landowners and eventually melted into the population.

The spread of the Vikings

In 860, Viking ships sailing westward found a relatively pleasant and fertile land far beyond England. Fearing the overpopulation that had driven them from Scandinavia, they gave it the discouraging-sounding name of Iceland. Beyond Iceland in 982, the Vikings found another land, one not nearly as hospitable. Because they were not worried about people overpopulating this area, they gave it an inviting name: Greenland.

The Medieval Mind

Western Europeans during the Early Middle Ages were inclined to believe the most outlandish ideas, particularly where religious matters were concerned. For instance, they believed Satan was everywhere; thus one monk wrote that "the whole air is but a thick mass of devils." Another chronicler told of how a wicked priest tried to take sexual advantage of a woman. He kissed her with a Communion wafer in his mouth, hoping this would win her by affection; instead, the wafer caused him to suddenly grow so tall he could not leave the church building. He buried the wafer in a corner of the church, then later dug it up—only to find that it had turned into a bloodstained figure of Jesus on the cross. People who heard this story most likely gave it the same solemn respect that a modern person would for a nightly news report.

Superstition was an everyday part of life. Immediately after a death in the house, for instance, all bowls of water would have to be covered so that the loved one's spirit would not drown. Care also had to be taken to ensure that a cat or dog did not walk across the corpse in the coffin, lest the dear departed turn into a vampire. Some superstitions have survived from medieval times—for instance, saying "bless you" when someone sneezes, since sneezing was viewed as an opportunity for a demon to enter the body.

In place of scientific knowledge, people often relied on highly uneducated ideas about cause-and-effect relations. For example, people readily accepted an idea that has since come to be known as "spontaneous generation." If one were to leave food out in a room for long enough, it would of course draw rats; but medieval people, seeing a rat where a piece of cheese had been, reasoned that the cheese had actually turned into the rat. They also believed in what was later dubbed "acquired characteristics," another simpleminded fallacy. According to this notion, if a man lost his right arm in an accident, his children would be born missing their right arms as well.

Sailing still farther west, in about 1000 Leif Eriksson landed on what the Vikings called Vinland, probably Newfoundland. There they did battle with what they called "skraelings"—almost certainly the same people Columbus later mistakenly identified as Indians. Columbus's men had guns, whereas the Vikings' weapons were no more advanced than the war clubs and arrows of the "skraelings." Therefore the Viking colonization of the New World was shortlived, and soon forgotten except in legends of Vinland.

While some Vikings went west, others went south. From their homeland in Sweden, a group called Varangians in 862 sailed along rivers from the Baltic Sea deep into Eastern Europe. Drawn by myths of a rich, golden city—perhaps Constantinople—they founded a great city of their own, Novgorod, and also established their power in Kiev. The Slavs of the area called the Varangians "Rus," and eventually Russia became the name of the region.

Then there were the Vikings who came to be known as Normans, a corruption of "Norsemen." They began moving down the west coast of Europe in the mid-800s, and for the next two centuries battled throughout the western half of the Mediterranean. In 820, another group of Normans settled in an area of northwestern France that came to be known as Normandy. They adopted the French language and culture, and in 1066 would launch one of the most significant invasions in history when they conquered England.

Decline of the Vikings

By the time the Varangians and Normans were establishing themselves,

the Vikings as a group were dying out. By about 1000, they had accepted Christianity and become relatively civilized, meaning that they no longer had the same lust for raiding. In place of the old Scandinavian tribal lands, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden emerged as kingdoms, possessing formal governments with capitals and laws.

One last hurrah for the Norsemen came in the early 1000s, when the Danes briefly conquered England. At their high point under King Canute (ruled 1016–35), they controlled England, Denmark, and Norway, but there is a legend about Canute that says something about these last Norsemen's attempts at conquest. Supposedly Canute ordered the tide not to wash in on the shoreline; of course it did anyway, thus proving that there are limits even to a king's power. As it turned out, his empire was shortlived, and the last Danes were pushed out of England by William of Normandy—himself a descendant of Vikings—in 1070.

The end of the Early Middle Ages (843–c. 1000)

The late 800s and 900s were a frightening time in Western Europe. Not only were the Vikings on the move, but the continent faced invasion by other forces from the south and east. The Muslims had already conquered Spain, and in the 800s they began menacing Italy. They drove out the Byzantines, who had held Sicily and southern Italy off and on for centuries, and even threatened Rome itself. At the same time, a group of nomads called the Magyars entered Eastern Europe from Ukraine, where they had been forced out by Central Asian nomads. This seemed like a repeat of events that had helped bring about the fall of the Roman Empire: indeed, the Magyars even took over the old stompinggrounds of Attila the Hun in Hungary, from which they launched attacks on various German states.

During this age, people who looked to the church for comfort were bound to be disappointed. The papacy had severely declined in the 800s and 900s, with murderers, thieves, and adulterers among the ranks of the popes during those years. An example was the man who became known as John XII in 955: among Pope John's many accomplishments were bribetaking and wild orgies in the papal palace. Yet this period also saw the beginnings of church reform, led by the Benedictine monks at Cluny in France in 910. The Cluniac (KLOO-nee-ak) movement stood for a new type of monasticism: instead of withdrawing from the world, the Cluniacs sought to strengthen the central authority of the pope as a way of reinvigorating the church, and thus society as a whole.

Viking Mythology

According to Viking mythology, when soldiers died in battle they would be swept up by warrior maidens called Valkyries (vahl-KEER-uhz) and taken to a kind of heaven. The latter was called Valhalla (vahl-HAHL-uh), and was essentially a more perfect version of the Vikings' own feasting halls, where they dined on legs of mutton and drank an intoxicating honey malt beverage called mead (MEED).

Norse mythology became the basis for a number of great medieval epics: the Icelandic Eddas (c. 900–1241) and Volsung Saga (1200s), as well as the German Niebelungenlied (nee-buh-LOONG-en-leed; 1200s). In the nineteenth century, German composer Richard Wagner (REE-kard VAHG-nur) wrote a majestic series of operas, The Ring, based on the Nordic myths.

One of the most memorable pieces from The Ring is called "Ride of the Valkyries."

The 900s also experienced the rise of Western Europe's first great leader since Charlemagne, Otto the Great (912–973). In 955, he defeated the Magyars, who soon became Christianized and settled permanently in Hungary. He then marched into Italy, by then under threat from a variety of local kings. Otto defeated them, and in 962, the pope crowned him emperor, reviving the title held by Charlemagne. A year later, Otto had the crooked Pope John replaced, showing that though the bishop of Rome could crown him, he still held more power. The great struggle of kings and popes, a conflict that would dominate the eleventh century, had begun.

For More Information

Books

Clark, Kenneth. Civilisation: A Personal View. New York: Harper, 1969, pp. 1–32.

Dijkstra, Henk, editor. History of the Ancient and Medieval World, Volume 9: The Middle Ages. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1996, pp. 1164–1224.

Hanawalt, Barbara A. The Middle Ages: An Illustrated History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Langley, Andrew. Medieval Life. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Severy, Merle, editor. The Age of Chivalry. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1969, pp. 43–91.

Web Sites

Daily Life—Medieval History Net Links. [On-line] Available http://historymedren.about.com/education/history/historymedren/msubmenudaily.htm (last accessed July 28, 2000).

Vikings and Scandinavian History. [Online] Available http://historymedren.about.com/education/history/historymedren/msubvik.htm (last accessed July 28, 2000).