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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Jones
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August 1 - August 19, 2022
Because Charlemagne was a wildly enthusiastic issuer of charters, letters, and directives to all corners of his territories and beyond (often contained in documents known to historians as “capitularies”), his palace base at Aachen also became a center for both intellectual inquiry and manuscript production.
Under Alcuin’s supervision Aachen became an elite school for rhetoric, religion, and the liberal arts,
In order to perform this epic feat of storing and organizing medieval “big data,” the scribes at Aachen developed a new style of writing, known as Carolingian miniscule. This script—exceptionally plain and well spaced, with a then unusually generous use of lower- and uppercase letters and punctuation marks—was designed to make manuscripts readable to literate people anywhere across the broad sweep of the Carolingian territories,
Just as his papal predecessors had sought out Pippin to save them from the Lombards, so Leo now implored Pippin’s son to restore him to his dignity—and his office.
It recognized the fact that since the 750s, the Carolingians had become masters not only of Francia, but also of a huge swath of central and western Europe. It acknowledged that the Franks and not the Byzantines were now the secular defenders of the
papacy. And it rewarded Charlemagne for using the spoils of his wars against unbelievers—the Muslims of al-Andalus, the Avars, and the Saxons—to sponsor his program of building churches and monasteries.
This time he would rise not as a king but as an “Emperor and Augustus.”
It restored to western and central Europe the fact of imperium, which had
gone missing on the ground several hundred years earlier, and which seemed to be wobbling even in Constantinople,
Four centuries later, during the reign of Frederick I Barbarossa, a tradition arose where those emperors formally crowned by a pope could call themselves Holy Roman emperors. And in that form, the office endured until the Napoleonic Wars at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Within three years of Louis’s accession, Bernard, king of Lombardy, the son of one of Charlemagne’s illegitimate children, known as Pippin the Hunchback, began the rot. The flashpoint was the publication of a constitutional document known as the Ordinatio imperii in 817. In it, Louis tried to clarify the hierarchy of the Carolingian empire and make provisional plans for its rule after his own death. Louis implied (although he did not state) that when the time came, Bernard ought to recognize the supreme lordship of Louis’s eldest son Lothar.
Very soon, Bernard was rumored to be plotting to break off his Italian kingdom and enjoy all the supposed fruits of full sovereignty. When these whispers reached Louis’s ears, Louis had Bernard arrested, tried, and sentenced to death.
Louis had been left an empire too big for him to hold together. Between 830 and 840 a series of three major rebellions broke out in which Louis’s sons banded together in various combinations to try to improve their portions of the imperial inheritance.
In June 833, at a meeting in Rothfield, in the Alsace, Louis was confronted by his eldest son, Lothar, who had proven himself an attentive student of Carolingian family history, and persuaded Pope Gregory IV to back him as supreme ruler. Lothar’s play for power spooked Louis’s supporters, and almost to a man they abandoned him for his eldest son: an act of collective spinelessness that earned the meeting the nickname the Field of Lies.
Like Alexander the Great before him, Charlemagne had built an empire that quickly proved itself possible only as an extension of one man’s political self. Louis died in 840, at which time three of his sons were still alive. After yet another round of civil war, they decided in 843 to abandon the European dream. The Carolingian empire was formally partitioned under the Treaty of Verdun, creating the three kingdoms of West Francia, the Middle Kingdom, and East Francia. (These approximated, respectively and very roughly, to modern France, northern Italy and Burgundy, and western Germany.)
For a brief moment toward the end of the century, Charlemagne’s hapless, idle, and unfortunately epileptic great-grandson, Charles III (Charles the Fat), staked a claim to all the lands of the Franks. But when he died in 888 the empire fell apart,
He was Napoléon Bonaparte—another irresistible warrior and accumulator, but one whose career only served to emphasize what Charlemagne’s had done: it has only been possible to unite Europe once or twice in every millennium, and even then, not for very long.
Charles the Bald now agreed to pay Ragnar seven thousand pounds of silver and gold to retire. This was an astronomically large sum, and its size alone was a miserable humiliation for the Frankish king.
Around the same time, people living around Denmark were capable of constructing clinker-built* boats:
It is telling that in the early Middle Ages neither Christianity nor Islam touched the northern world, which remained resolutely cut off from the desert monotheisms and their worship of the book and the word until the turn of the first millennium. Left to develop on its own course, Viking culture was highly idiosyncratic, infused with the unique landscape and conditions of the lands on the Arctic fringe.
And they interacted with this invisible realm in ways far removed from the liturgical, institutionalized forms followed by the Christians, Muslims, and Jews of Europe and the Middle East, ranging from leaving offerings of food to practicing ritual human sacrifice. Historians have puzzled for generations over why the Vikings suddenly, in the course of two generations, broke their relative isolation and surged out to terrorize—and colonize—the west. Political turmoil, cultural revolution, climate change, and demographic pressure have all been proposed as causes.50 Like all huge questions, it has
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At the same
time there was rising cultural pressure on young Viking men to travel and enrich themselves.
The best ways to raise funds for this were trade and piracy—or a bit of both.
Under Charlemagne the Franks became increasingly interesting to the Northmen. For one thing, Charlemagne’s campaigns against the Saxons drove the Frankish frontier north, until it was nudging up against the lands of the Vikings.
And for another, the Carolingians founded and enriched monasteries and other Christian holy sites. Large amounts of movable wealth were placed in the hands of monks: physically the weakest men in society. Moreover, many monasteries—such as the Saint-Philibert at Noirmoutier, nestled on a spit of land at the mouth of the Loire—were on the coast or beside rivers, or in locations far from secular society, where the brothers were deliberately isolated from social violence—or so they thought.
the Frankish rulers falling into a mutually
destructive civil war, and eventually into a three-way partition of the once impervious empire,
In place of the small, smash-and-grab hits on coastal targets that had characterized their forays at the end of the eighth century, by the ninth century came huge missions equipped for siege, subjugation, and settlement.
But the Great Heathen Army was a fully formed army of conquest,
By the 880s around half of England was under Scandinavian control or direct rule; the Viking advance was halted only after a long struggle led heroically on the Saxon side by Alfred, king of Wessex. A treaty agreed at some time between 878 and 890 formalized the partition of England, with the large portion of “Viking” territory, in the north and east of the country, known as the Danelaw. Within the Danelaw, a different legal system operated, Anglo-Scandinavian coinage circulated (including pieces emblazoned with Thor’s hammer), new languages came into use, and place-names changed.*
(This kingdom of Dublin was built on a flourishing slave market: enslaved people known as “thralls” taken inland on Ireland might be sold into servitude in lands as distant as Iceland, rubbing shoulders in slave markets with other unfortunate people captured across the western world, as far away as north Africa or the Baltic.)
By the middle of the tenth century, Byzantine emperors had come to envy the martial abilities of the Northmen so much that they maintained a personal bodyguard known as the Varangian guard, recruited from Viking stock.
The Vikings seemed to be eternally expanding their global networks and the frontiers of their societies. By around the year 1000 the Scandinavian west would include settlements in Iceland, Greenland, and even “Vinland”—Newfoundland in modern Canada, where an abandoned Viking settlement has been excavated at L’Anse aux Meadows
In the same year Pippin died, the Frankish emperor Charles the Bald issued the Edict of Pîtres. Amid a raft of legal pronouncements on matters such as coin production, labor laws, and the plight of refugees, the edict also ordered Frankish subjects to contribute to measures against the Vikings, including a royal bridge-building program, by which vulnerable waterways such as the Seine would have regular militarized crossings along their course, guarded with forts and theoretically able to block the Northmen’s boats.
The Carolingians had grown rich and powerful, and sponsored well-endowed abbeys, by plundering unbelievers on their borders. Now that process was ironically and very uncomfortably reversed. The hunters had become the hunted.
Odo was elected as king of Western Francia. Odo thus became the first non-Carolingian to rule over a Frankish kingdom since the lifetime of Charles Martel.
no ruler was ever again able to do as Charles the Fat had briefly done, and rule the full empire assembled by Pippin and Charlemagne. Undone by their own family rivalries, the challenges of holding together such a vast and culturally diverse collection of territories and peoples, and the depredations of the Northmen (as well as other enemies on their eastern frontiers, including the Magyar tribal groups who had started to launch massive raids into imperial territory from what is now Hungary), the Carolingians drifted, generation by generation, from preeminence to irrelevance. Behind them they
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Italy that would in time become known as the German, or Holy Roman, Empire. (Middle Francia, sometimes known as Lotharingia, was gradually squeezed out of existence.) For long stretches of the later Middle Ages, and well into the early modern period, France and the German Empire would be the dominant powers on the European continent. Their successor states, France and Germany, occupy the same status in the early twenty-first century.
the realm of the Northmen, or Nordmannia—known as Normandy.
Under them, Scandinavian settlers flooded into Normandy, and although over time they mixed, married, and integrated with the Frankish inhabitants of Normandy, the Normans retained a sense of themselves as a people apart long into the Middle Ages.
Norman dukes would rule England until 1204, and with the wealth and military resources of the English crown behind them, were able to cause enormous trouble for the French kings,
But the Vikings who colonized Normandy were distinct and different. They converted early and decisively and never looked back.
serfs—unfree peasants who were legally obliged to work the land.
Insofar as it was
ever possible for medieval monks to be fully inured from harm and left to their own devices, the brothers of Cluny would be.
But it was Cluny, located in Burgundy but with influence extending throughout France into England, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and western Germany, that would grow to become the preeminent monastery in Europe.
Like branches of a spiritual McDonald’s, Cluniac houses could be found almost everywhere west of the Rhine, and particularly along the international road routes walked by pilgrims visiting holy sites such as Santiago de Compostela, in northwestern Spain. True, Cluny’s reach did not extend to much of Germany, nor was it preeminent in the Christian parts of eastern and central Europe, let alone Byzantium, where a distinctive “eastern” form of monasticism developed. All the same, for several generations Cluny was armed with a rare degree of soft power that crossed jurisdictions and borders.* And
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Nothing better summed up the business of being a monk than Christ’s words in the parable of the rich young man, as reported in the Gospel of Matthew. “If you would be perfect,” Jesus said, “go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”5 The young man to whom Christ addressed these words was not willing to listen. He departed lamenting that it would be quite impossible for him to give up his money. (Christ responded with his famous line about camels and needles.*) But several hundred years later minds had changed. From the third
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now call asceticism emerged in the deserts of the near east, and especially in Egypt. Among the most famous of the Egyptian Christian ascetics was Saint Anthony the Great. Anthony was himself quite literally a rich young man—the son and heir of a wealthy family who at the age of twenty went to church and heard Christ’s exhortation to poverty and promptly “sold all he had, gave the proceeds to the poor and from then on lived the life of a hermit.”6 His devotion to self-denial was a legendary model for generations of monks who came after him. Anthony’s contemporary Athanasius, bishop of
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