The Age of Faith

The career of Rodrigo (Ruy) Diaz illustrates the bravery, chivalry, and chaos of Christian Spain in the eleventh century. He has come down to us rather under the title the Moors gave him of EI Cid (Arabic sayid)—noble or lord—than under his Christian sobriquet of El Campeador—the Challenger or Champion. Born at Bivar near Burgos about 1040, he grew up as a caballero or military adventurer, fighting anywhere for any paying cause; by the age of thirty he was admired throughout Castile for his daring skill in combat, and distrusted for his apparently equal readiness to fight Moors for Christians, or Christians for Moors. Sent by Alfonso VI of Castile to collect tribute due from al-Mutamid, the poet emir of Seville, he was accused, on his return, of keeping part of the tribute, and was banished from Castile (1081). He became a freebooter, organized a small army of soldiers of fortune, and sold his services to Christian or Moslem rulers indifferently. For eight years he served the emir of Saragossa, and extended the Moorish dominion at the expense of Aragon. In 1089, leading 7000 men, mostly Moslems, he captured Valencia, and exacted from it a monthly tribute of 10,000 gold dinars. In 1090 he seized the count of Barcelona, and held him for a ransom of 80,000 dinars. Finding Valencia closed to him on his return from this expedition, he besieged it for a year; when it surrendered (1094) he violated all the conditions on which it had laid down its arms, burned its chief justice alive, divided the possessions of the citizens among his followers, and would have burned the judge’s wife and daughters too had not the city and his own soldiers raised a cry of protest.¹⁵ In this and other ways the Cid behaved in the fashion of his times. He atoned for his sins by governing Valencia with ability and justice, and making it a saving rampart against the Almoravid Moors. When he died (1099) his wife Jimena held the city for three years. An admiring posterity transformed him by legend into a knight moved only by a holy zeal to restore Spain to Christ; and his bones at Burgos are revered as those of a saint.¹⁶

So divided against itself, Christian Spain achieved its slow reconquista only because Moslem Spain finally surpassed it in fragmèntation and anarchy. The fall of the Cordovan caliphate in 1036 offered an opportunity brilliantly used by Alfonso VI of Castile. With the help of al-Mutamid of Seville he captured Toledo (1085) and made it his capital. He treated the conquered Moslems with Moslem decency, and encouraged the absorption of Moorish culture into Christian Spain.

III FRANCE: 614–1060

1. The Coming of the Carolingians: 614–768

When Clotaire II became king of the Franks, the Merovingian dynasty seemed secure; never before had a monarch of that family ruled so large and united a realm. But Clotaire was indebted for his rise to the nobles of Austrasia and Burgundy; he rewarded them with increased independence and enlarged domains, and chose one of them, Pepin I the Elder, as his “Mayor of the Palace.” The major domus—“head of the house”—had been originally the superintendent of the royal household and overseer of the royal estates; his administrative functions grew as the Merovingian kings concentrated on debauchery and intrigue; step by step he took control of the courts, the army, the finances. Clotaire’s son King Dagobert (628-39) checked for a time the power of the major domus and the grandees. “He rendered justice to rich and poor alike,” says the chronicler Fredegar; “he took little sleep or food, and cared only so to act that all men should leave his presence full of joy and admiration”;¹⁷ however, Fredegar adds, “he had three queens and a host of concubines,” and was “a slave to incontinence.”¹⁸ Under his negligent successors—the rois fainéants or do-nothing kings—power passed again to the mayor of the palace. Pepin II the Younger defeated his rivals at the battle of Testry (687), expanded his title from major domus to dux et princeps Francorum, and ruled all Gaul except Aquitaine. His illegitimate son Charles Martel (the Hammer), nominally as mayor of the palace and Duke of Austrasia, ruled all Gaul under Clotaire IV (717-19). He resolutely repelled invasions of Gaul by Frisians and Saxons, and saved Europe for Christianity by turning back the Moslems at Tours. He supported Boniface and other missionaries in the conversion of Germany, but in the critical financial needs of his career he confiscated church lands, sold bishoprics to generals, quartered his troops on monasteries, beheaded a protesting monk,¹⁹ and was condemned to hell in a hundred sermons and tracts.

In 751 his son Pepin III, as major domus to Childeric III, sent an embassy to Pope Zacharias to ask would it be sinful to depose the Merovingian puppet and make himself king in fact as well as name. Zacharias, who needed Frank support against the ambitious Lombards, answered with a comforting negative. Pepin called an assembly of nobles and prelates at Soissons; he was there unanimously chosen king of the Franks (751); and the last of the do-nothing kings was tonsured and sent to a monastery. In 754 Pope Stephen II came to the abbey of St. Denis outside of Paris, and anointed Pepin rex Dei gratia, “king by the grace of God.” So ended the Merovingian dynasty (486-751), so began the Carolingian (751-987).

Pepin III “the Short” was a patient and far-seeing ruler, pious and practical, loving peace and invincible in war, and moral beyond any royal precedent in the Gaul of those centuries. All that Charlemagne accomplished was prepared by Pepin; in their two reigns of sixty-three years (751-814) Gaul was at last transformed into France. Pepin recognized the difficulty of governing without the aid of religion; he restored the property, privileges, and immunities of the Church; brought sacred relics to France, and bore them on his shoulders in impressive pageantry; rescued the papacy from the Lombard kings, and gave it a spacious temporal power in the “Donation of Pepin” (756). He was content to receive in return the title of patricius Romanus, and a papal injunction to the Franks never to choose a king except from his progeny. He died in the fullness of his power in 768, after bequeathing the realm of the Franks jointly to his sons Carloman II and the Charles who was to be Charlemagne.

2. Charlemagne: 768–814

The greatest of medieval kings was born in 742, at a place unknown. He was of German blood and speech, and shared some characteristics of his people—strength of body, courage of spirit, pride of race, and a crude simplicity many centuries apart from the urbane polish of the modern French. He had little book learning; read only a few books—but good ones; tried in his old age to learn writing, but never quite succeeded; yet he could speak old Teutonic and literary Latin, and understood Greek.²⁰

In 771 Carloman II died, and Charles at twenty-nine became sole king. Two years later he received from Pope Hadrian II an urgent appeal for aid against the Lombard Desiderius, who was invading the papal states. Charlemagne besieged and took Pavia, assumed the crown of Lombardy, confirmed the Donation of Pepin, and accepted the role of protector of the Church in all her temporal powers. Returning to his capital at Aachen, he began a series of fifty-three campaigns—nearly all led in person—designed to round out his empire by conquering and Christianizing Bavaria and Saxony, destroying the troublesome Avars, shielding Italy from the raiding Saracens, and strengthening the defenses of Francia against the expanding Moors of Spain. The Saxons on his eastern frontier were pagans; they had burned down a Christian church, and made occasional incursions into Gaul; these reasons sufficed Charlemagne for eighteen campaigns (772-804), waged with untiring ferocity on both sides. Charles gave the conquered Saxons a choice between baptism and death, and had 4500 Saxon rebels beheaded in one day;²¹ after which he proceeded to Thionville to celebrate the nativity of Christ.

At Paderborn in 777 Ibn al-Arabi, the Moslem governor of Barcelona, had asked the aid of the Christian king against the caliph of Cordova. Charles led an army across the Pyrenees, besieged and captured the Christian city of Pamplona, treated the Christian but incalculable Basques of northern Spain as enemies, and advanced even to Saragossa. But the Moslem uprisings that al-Arabi had promised as part of the strategy against the caliph failed to appear; Charlemagne saw that his unaided forces could not challenge Cordova; news came that the conquered Saxons were in wild revolt and were marching in fury upon Cologne; and with the better part of valor he led his army back, in long and narrow file, through the passes of the Pyrenees. In one such pass, at Roncesvalles in Navarre, a force of Basques pounced down upon the rear guard of the Franks, and slaughtered nearly every man in it (778); there the noble Hruodland died, who would become three centuries later the hero of France’s most famous poem, the Chanson de Roland. In 795 Charlemagne sent another army across the Pyrenees; the Spanish March—a strip of northeast Spain—became part of Francia, Barcelona capitulated, and Navarre and Asturias acknowledged the Frankish sovereignty (806). Meanwhile Charlemagne had subdued the Saxons (785), had driven back the advancing Slavs (789), had defeated and dispersed the Avars (790-805), and had, in the thirty-fourth year of his reign and the sixty-third of his age, resigned himself to peace.

In truth he had always loved administration more than war, and had taken to the field to force some unity of government and faith upon a Western Europe torn for centuries past by conflicts of tribe and creed. He had now brought under his rule all the peoples between the Vistula and the Atlantic, between the Baltic and the Pyrenees, with nearly all of Italy and much of the Balkans. How could one man competently govern so vast and varied a realm? He was strong enough in body and nerves to bear a thousand responsibilities, perils, and crises, even to his sons’ plotting to kill him. He had in him the blood or teaching of the wise and cautious Pepin III, and of the ruthless Charles Martel, and was something of a hammer himself. He extended their power, guarded it with firm military organization, propped it with religious sanction and ritual. He could vision large purposes, and could will the means as well as wish the ends. He could lead an army, persuade an assembly, humor the nobility, dominate the clergy, rule a harem.

He made military service a condition of owning more than a pittance of property, and thereby founded martial morale on the defense and extension of one’s land. Every freeman, at the call to arms, had to report in full equipment to the local count, and every noble was responsible for the military fitness of his constituents. The structure of the state rested on this organized force, supported by every available psychological factor in the sanctity of anointed majesty, the ceremonial splendor of the imperial presence, and the tradition of obedience to established rule. Around the king gathered a court of administrative nobles and clergymen—the seneschal or head of the palace, the “count palatine” or chief justice, the “palsgraves” or judges of the palace court, and a hundred scholars, servants, and clerks. The sense of public participation in the government was furthered by semiannual assemblies of armed property owners, gathered, as military or other convenience might dictate, at Worms, Valenciennes, Aachen, Geneva, Paderborn … usually in the open air. At such assemblies the king submitted to smaller groups of nobles or bishops his proposals for legislation; they considered them, and returned them to him with suggestions; he formulated the capitula, or chapters of legislation, and presented these to the multitude for their shouted approval; rarely the assembly voiced disapproval with a collective grunt or moan. Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims, has transmitted an intimate picture of Charles at one of these gatherings, “saluting the men of most note, conversing with those whom he seldom saw, showing a tender interest toward the elders, and disporting himself with the young.” At these meetings each provincial bishop and administrator was required to report to the King any significant event in his locality since the previous convocation. “The King wished to know,” says Hincmar, “whether in any part or corner of the Kingdom the people were restless, and the cause thereof.”²² Sometimes (continuing the old Roman institution of inquisitio) the representatives of the King would summon leading citizens to inquire and give under oath a “true statement” (veredictum) as to the taxable wealth, the state of public order, the existence of crimes or criminals, in the district visited. In the ninth century, in Frank lands, this verdict of a jurata, or sworn group of inquirers, was used to decide many local issues of land ownership or criminal guilt. Out of the jurata, through Norman and English developments, would come the jury system of modern times.²³

The empire was divided into counties, each governed in spiritual matters by a bishop or archbishop, and in secular affairs by a comes (companion—of the king) or count. A local assembly of landholders convened twice or thrice a year in each provincial capital to pass upon the government of the region, and serve as a provincial court of appeals. The dangerous frontier counties, or marches, had special governors—graf, margrave, or markherzog; Roland of Roncesvalles, for example, was governor of the Breton march. All local administration was subject to missi dominici—“emissaries of the master”—sent by Charlemagne to convey his wishes to local officials, to review their actions, judgments, and accounts,’ to check bribery, extortion, nepotism, and exploitation, to receive complaints and remedy wrongs, to protect “the Church, the poor, and wards and widows, and the whole people” from malfeasance or tyranny, and to report to the King the condition of the realm; the Capitulare missorum establishing these emissaries was a Magna Carta for the people, four centuries before England’s Magna Carta for the aristocracy. That this capitulary meant what it said appears from the case of the duke of Istria, who, being accused by the missi of divers injustices and extortions, was forced by the King to restore his thievings, compensate every wronged man, publicly confess his crimes, and give security against their repetition. Barring his wars, Charlemagne’s was the most just and enlightened government that Europe had known since Theodoric the Goth.

The sixty-five capitularies that remain of Charlemagne’s legislation are among the most interesting bodies of medieval law. They were not an organized system, but rather the extension and application of previous “barbarian” codes to new occasion or need. In some particulars they were less enlightened than the laws of King Liutprand of Lombardy: they kept the old wergild, ordeals, trial by combat, and punishment by mutilation;²⁴ and decreed death for relapse into paganism, or for eating meat in Lent—though here the priest was allowed to soften the penalty.²⁵ Nor were all these capitularies laws; some were answers to inquiries, some were questions addressed by Charlemagne to officials, some were moral counsels. “It is necessary,” said one article, “that every man should seek to the best of his strength and ability to serve God and walk in the way of His precepts; for the Lord Emperor cannot watch over every man in personal discipline.”²⁶ Several articles struggled to bring more order into the sexual and marital relations of the people. Not all these counsels were obeyed; but there runs through the capitularies a conscientious effort to transform barbarism into civilization.

Charlemagne legislated for agriculture, industry, finance, education, and religion as well as for government and morals. His reign fell into a period when the economy of southern France and Italy was at low ebb through the control of the Mediterranean by the Saracens. “The Christians,” said Ibn Khaldun, “could no longer float a plank upon the sea.”²⁷ The whole structure of commercial relations between Western Europe and Africa and the Levant was disturbed; only the Jews—whom Charlemagne sedulously protected for this reason—connected the now hostile halves of what under Rome had been a united economic world. Commerce survived in Slavic and Byzantine Europe, and in the Teutonic north. The English Channel and the North Sea were alive with trade; but this too would be disordered, even before Charlemagne’s death, by Norse piracy and raids. Vikings on the north and Moslems on the south almost closed the ports of France, and made her an inland and agricultural state. The mercantile middle class declined, leaving no group to compete with the rural aristocracy; French feudalism was promoted by Charlemagne’s land grants and by the triumphs of Islam.

Charlemagne struggled to protect a free peasantry against spreading serfdom, but the power of the nobles, and the force of circumstance, frustrated him. Even slavery grew for a time, as a result of the Carolingian wars against pagan tribes. The King’s own estates, periodically extended by confiscations, gifts, intestate reversions, and reclamation, were the chief source of the royal revenue. For the care of these lands he issued a Capitulare de villis astonishingly detailed, and revealing his careful scrutiny of all state income and expense. Forests, wastelands, highways, ports, and all mineral subsoil resources were the property of the state.²⁸ Every encouragement was given to such commerce as survived; the fairs were protected, weights and measures and prices were regulated, tolls were moderated, speculation in futures was checked, roads and bridges were built or repaired, a great span was thrown across the Rhine at Mainz, waterways were kept open, and a canal was planned to connect the Rhine and the Danube, and thereby the North with the Black Sea. A stable currency was maintained; but the scarcity of gold in France and the decline of trade led to the replacement of Constantine’s gold solidus with the silver pound.

The energy and solicitude of the King reached into every sphere of life. He gave to the four winds the names they bear today. He established a system of poor relief, taxed the nobles and the clergy to pay its costs, and then made mendicancy a crime.²⁹ Appalled by the illiteracy of his time, when hardly any but ecclesiastics could read, and by the lack of education among the lower clergy, he called in foreign scholars to restore the schools of France. Paul the Deacon was lured from Monte Cassino, and Alcuin from York (782), to teach the school that Charlemagne organized in the royal palace at Aachen. Alcuin (735-804) was a Saxon, born near York, and educated in the cathedral school that Bishop Egbert had founded there; in the eighth century Britain and Ireland were culturally ahead of France. When King Offa of Mercia sent Alcuin on a mission to Charlemagne, the latter begged the scholar to remain; Alcuin, glad to be out of England when the Danes were “laying it desolate, and dishonoring the monasteries with adultery,”³⁰ consented to stay. He sent to England and elsewhere for books and teachers, and soon the palace school was an active center of study, of the revision and copying of manuscripts, and of an educational reform that spread throughout the realm. Among the pupils were Charlemagne, his wife Liutgard, his sons, his daughter Gisela, his secretary Eginhard, a nun, and many more. Charlemagne was the most eager of all; he seized upon learning as he had absorbed states; he studied rhetoric, dialectic, astronomy; he made heroic efforts to write, says Eginhard, “and used to keep tablets under his pillow in order that at leisure hours he might accustom his hand to form the letters; but as he began these efforts so late in life, they met with ill success.”³¹ He studied Latin furiously, but continued to speak German at his court; he compiled a German grammar, and collected specimens of early German poetry.

When Alcuin, after eight years in the palace school, pled for a less exciting environment, Charlemagne reluctantly made him Abbot of Tours (796). There Alcuin spurred the monks to make fairer and more accurate copies of the Vulgate of Jerome, the Latin Fathers, and the Latin classics; and other monasteries imitated the example. Many of our best classical texts have come down to us from these monastic scriptoria of the ninth century; practically all extant Latin poetry except Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius, and nearly all extant Latin prose except Varro, Tacitus, and Apuleius, were preserved for us by the monks of the Carolingian age.³² Many of the Caroline manuscripts were handsomely illuminated by the patient art of the monks; to this “Palace School” of illumination belonged the “Vienna” Gospels on which the later German emperors took their coronation oath.

In 787 Charlemagne issued to all the bishops and abbots of Francia an historic Capitulare de litteris colendis, or directive on the study of letters. It reproached ecclesiastics for “uncouth language” and “unlettered tongues,” and exhorted every cathedral and monastery to establish schools where clergy and laity alike might learn to read and write. A further capitulary of 789 urged the directors of these schools to “take care to make no difference between the sons of serfs and of freemen, so that they might come and sit on the same benches to study grammar, music, and arithmetic.” A capitulary of 805 provided for medical education, and another condemned medical superstitions. That his appeals were not fruitless appears from the many cathedral or monastic schools that now sprang up in France and western Germany. Theodulf, Bishop of Orléans, organized schools in every parish of his diocese, welcomed all children to them, and forbade the priest instructors to take any fees;³³ this is the first instance in history of free and general education. Important schools, nearly all attached to monasteries, rose in the ninth century at Tours, Auxerre, Pavia, St. Gall, Fulda, Ghent, and elsewhere. To meet the demand for teachers Charlemagne imported scholars from Ireland, Britain, and Italy. Out of these schools were to come the universities of Europe.

We must not overestimate the intellectual quality of the age; this scho lastic resurrection was the awakening of children rather than the maturity of such cultures as then existed in Constantinople, Baghdad, and Cordova. It did not produce any great writers. The formal compositions of Alcuin are stiflingly dull; only his letters and occasional verses show him as no pompous pedant but a kindly soul who could reconcile happiness with piety. Many men wrote poetry in this short-lived renaissance, and the poems of Theodulf are pleasant enough in their minor way. But the only lasting composition of that Gallic age was the brief and simple biography of Charlemagne by Eginhard. It follows the plan of Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars, and even snatches passages therefrom to apply to Charlemagne; but all is forgiven to an author who modestly describes himself as “a barbarian, very little versed in the Roman tongue.”³⁴ He must have been a man of talent nevertheless, for Charlemagne made him royal steward and treasurer and intimate friend, and chose him to supervise, perhaps to design, much of the architecture of this creative reign.

Palaces were built for the Emperor at Ingelheim and Nijmegen; and at Aachen, his favorite capital, he raised the famous palace and chapel that survived a thousand dangers to crumble under the shells and bombs of the Second World War. The unknown architects modeled its plan on the church of San Vitale at Ravenna, which owed its form to Byzantine and Syrian exemplars; the result was an Oriental cathedral stranded in the West. The octagonal structure was surmounted by a circular dome; the interior was divided by a circular two-storied colonnade, and was “adorned with gold and silver and lamps, railings and doors of solid bronze, columns and crucibles brought from Rome and Ravenna,”³⁵ and a famous mosaic in the dome.

Charlemagne was profusely generous to the Church; at the same time he made himself her master, and used her doctrines and personnel as instruments of education and government. Much of his correspondence was about religion; he hurled scriptural quotations at corrupt officials or worldly clerics; and the intensity of his utterance forbids suspicion that his piety was a political pose. He sent money to distressed Christians in foreign lands, and in his negotiations with Moslem rulers he insisted on fair treatment of their Christian population.³⁶ Bishops played a leading part in his councils, assemblies, and administration; but he looked upon them, however reverently, as his agents under God; and he did not hesitate to command them, even in matters of doctrine or morals. He denounced image worship while the popes were defending it; required from every priest a written description of how baptism was administered in his parish, sent the popes directives as numerous as his gifts, suppressed insubordination in monasteries, and ordered a strict watch on convents to prevent “whoring, drunkenness, and covetousness” among the nuns.³⁷ In a capitulary of 811 he asked the clergy what they meant by professing to renounce the world, when “we see” some of them “laboring day by day, by all sorts of means, to augment their possessions; now making use, for this purpose, of menaces of eternal flames, now of promises of eternal beatitude; despoiling simple-minded people of their property in the name of God or some saint, to the infinite prejudice of their lawful heirs.” Nevertheless he allowed the clergy their own courts, decreed that a tithe or tenth of all produce of the land should be turned over to the Church, gave the clergy control of marriages and wills, and himself bequeathed two thirds of his estates to the bishoprics of his realm.³⁸ But he required the bishops now and then to make substantial “gifts” to help meet the expenses of the government.

Out of this intimate co-operation of Church and state came one of the most brilliant ideas in the history of statesmanship: the transformation of Charlemagne’s realm into a Holy Roman Empire that should have behind it all the prestige, sanctity, and stability of both Imperial and papal Rome. The popes had long resented their territorial subordination to a Byzantium that gave them no protection and no security; they saw the increasing subjection of the patriarch to the emperor at Constantinople, and feared for their own freedom. We do not know who conceived or arranged the plan of a papal coronation of Charlemagne as Roman emperor; Alcuin, Theodulf, and others close to him had discussed its possibility; perhaps the initiative lay with them, perhaps with the councilors of the popes. There were great difficulties in the way: the Greek monarch already had the title of Roman emperor, and full historic right to that title; the Church had no recognized authority to convey or transfer the title; to give it to a rival of Byzantium might precipitate a gigantic war of Christian East against Christian West, leaving a ruined Europe to a conquering Islam. It was of some help that Irene had seized the Greek throne (797); now, some said, there was no Greek emperor, and the field was open to any claimant. If the bold scheme could be carried through there would again be a Roman emperor in the West, Latin Christianity would stand strong and unified against schismatic Byzantium and threatening Saracens, and, by the awe and magic of the imperial name, barbarized Europe might reach back across centuries of darkness, and inherit and Christianize the civilization and culture of the ancient world.

On December 26, 795, Leo III was chosen Pope. The Roman populace did not like him; it accused him of various misdeeds; and on April 25, 799, it attacked him, maltreated him, and imprisoned him in a monastery. He escaped, and fled for protection to Charlemagne at Paderborn. The King received him kindly, and sent him back to Rome under armed escort, and ordered the Pope and his accusers to appear before him there in the following year. On November 24, 800, Charlemagne entered the ancient capital in state; on December I an assembly of Franks and Romans agreed to drop the charges against Leo if he would deny them on solemn oath; he did; and the way was cleared for a magnificent celebration of the Nativity. On Christmas Day, as Charlemagne, in the chlamys and sandals of a patricius Romanus, knelt before St. Peter’s altar in prayer, Leo suddenly produced a jeweled crown, and set it upon the King’s head. The congregation, perhaps instructed beforehand to act according to ancient ritual as the senatus populusque Romanus confirming a coronation, thrice cried out: “Hail to Charles the Augustus, crowned by God the great and peace-bringing Emperor of the Romans!” The royal head was anointed with holy oil, the Pope saluted Charlemagne as Emperor and Augustus, and offered him the act of homage reserved since 476 for the Eastern emperor.

If we may believe Eginhard, Charlemagne told him that had he known Leo’s intention to crown him he would not have entered the church. Perhaps he had learned of the general plan, but regretted the haste and circumstances of its execution; it may not have pleased him to receive the crown from a pope, opening the door to centuries of dispute as to the relative dignity and power of donor and recipient; and presumably he anticipated difficulties with Byzantium. He now sent frequent embassies and letters to Constantinople, seeking to heal the breach; and for a long time he made no use of his new title. In 802 he offered marriage to Irene as a means of mutually legitimizing their dubious titles;³⁹ but Irene’s fall from power shattered this elegant plan. To discourage any martial attack by Byzantium he arranged an entente with Harun al-Rashid, who sealed their understanding by sending him some elephants and the keys to the Christian holy places in Jerusalem. The Eastern emperor, in retaliation, encouraged the emir of Cordova to renounce allegiance to Baghdad. Finally, in 812, the Greek basileus recognized Charlemagne as coemperor, in return for Charlemagne’s acknowledgment of Venice and southern Italy as belonging to Byzantium.

The coronation had results for a thousand years. It strengthened the papacy and the bishops by making civil authority derive from ecclesiastical conferment; Gregory VII and Innocent III would build a mightier Church on the events of 800 in Rome. It strengthened Charlemagne against baronial and other disaffection by making him a very vicar of God; it vastly advanced the theory of the divine right of kings. It contributed to the schism of Greek from Latin Christianity; the Greek Church did not relish subordination to a Roman Church allied with an empire rival to Byzantium. The fact that Charlemagne (as the Pope desired) continued to make Aachen, not Rome, his capital, underlined the passage of political power from the Mediterranean to northern Europe, from the Latin peoples to the Teutons. Above all, the coronation established the Holy Roman Empire in fact, though not in theory. Charlemagne and his advisers conceived of his new authority as a revival of the old imperial power; only with Otto I was the distinctively new character of the regime recognized; and it became “holy” only when Frederick Barbarossa introduced the word sacrum into his title in 1155. All in all, despite its threat to the liberty of the mind and the citizen, the Holy Roman Empire was a noble conception, a dream of security and peace, order and civilization restored in a world heroically won from barbarism, violence, and ignorance.

Imperial formalities now hedged in the Emperor on occasions of state. Then he had to wear embroidered robes, a golden buckle, jeweled shoes, and a crown of gold and gems, and visitors prostrated themselves to kiss his foot or knee; so much had Charlemagne learned from Byzantium, and Byzantium from Ctesiphon. But in other days, Eginhard assures us, his dress varied little from the common garb of the Franks—linen shirt and breeches next to the skin, and over these a woolen tunic perhaps fringed with silk; hose fastened by bands covered his legs, leather shoes his feet; in winter he added a close-fitting coat of otter or marten skins; and always a sword at his side. He was six feet four inches tall, and built to scale. He had blond hair, animated eyes, a powerful nose, a mustache but no beard, a presence “always stately and dignified.”⁴⁰ He was temperate in eating and drinking, abominated drunkenness, and kept in good health despite every exposure and hardship. He often hunted, or took vigorous exercise on horseback. He was a good swimmer, and liked to bathe in the warm springs of Aachen. He rarely entertained, preferring to hear music or the reading of a book while he ate. Like every great man he valued time; he gave audiences and heard cases in the morning while dressing and putting on his shoes.

Behind his poise and majesty were passion and energy, but harnessed to his aims by a clairvoyant intelligence. His vital force was not consumed by half a hundred campaigns; he gave himself also, with never aging enthusiasm, to science, law, literature, and theology; he fretted at leaving any part of the earth, or any section of knowledge, unmastered or unexplored. In some ways he was mentally ingenuous; he scorned superstition and proscribed diviners and soothsayers, but he accepted many mythical marvels, and exaggerated the power of legislation to induce goodness or intelligence. This simplicity of soul had its fair side: there was in his thought and speech a directness and honesty seldom permitted to statesmanship.

He could be ruthless when policy required, and was especially cruel in his efforts to spread Christianity. Yet he was a man of great kindness, many charities, warm friendships, and varied loves. He wept at the death of his sons, his daughter, and Pope Hadrian. In a poem Ad Carolum regem Theo-dulf draws a pleasant picture of the Emperor at home. On his arrival from labors his children gather about him; son Charles takes off the father’s cloak, son Louis his sword; his six daughters embrace him, bring him bread, wine, apples, flowers; the bishop comes in to bless the King’s food; Alcuin is near to discuss letters with him; the diminutive Eginhard runs to and fro like an ant, bringing in enormous books.⁴¹ He was so fond of his daughters that he dissuaded them from marriage, saying that he could not bear to be without them. They consoled themselves with unlicensed amours, and bore several illegitimate children.⁴² Charlemagne accepted these accidents with good humor, since he himself, following the custom of his predecessors, had four successive wives and five mistresses or concubines. His abounding vitality made him extremely sensitive to feminine charms; and his women preferred a share in him to the monopoly of any other man. His harem bore him some eighteen children, of whom eight were legitimate.⁴³ The ecclesiastics of the court and of Rome winked leniently at the Moslem morals of so Christian a king.

He was now head of an empire far greater than the Byzantine, surpassed, in the white man’s world, only by the realm of the Abbasid caliphate. But every extended frontier of empire or knowledge opens up new problems. Western Europe had tried to protect itself from the Germans by taking them into its civilization; but now Germany had to be protected against the Norse and the Slavs. The Vikings had by 800 established a kingdom in Jutland, and were raiding the Frisian coast. Charles hastened up from Rome, built fleets and forts on shores and rivers, and stationed garrisons at danger points. In 810 the king of Jutland invaded Frisia and was repulsed; but shortly thereafter, if we may follow the chronicle of the Monk of St. Gall, Charlemagne, from his palace at Narbonne, was shocked to see Danish pirate vessels in the Gulf of Lyons.

Perhaps because he foresaw, like Diocletian, that his overreaching empire needed quick defense at many points at once, he divided it in 806 among his three sons—Pepin, Louis, and Charles. But Pepin died in 810, Charles in 811; only Louis remained, so absorbed in piety as to seem unfit to govern a rough and treacherous world. Nevertheless, in 813, at a solemn ceremony, Louis was elevated from the rank of king to that of emperor, and the old monarch uttered his nunc dimittis: “Blessed be Thou, O Lord God, Who hast granted me the grace to see with my own eyes my son seated on my throne!”⁴⁴ Four months later, wintering at Aachen, he was seized with a high fever, and developed pleurisy. He tried to cure himself by taking only liquids; but after an illness of seven days he died, in the forty-seventh year of his reign and the seventy-second year of his life (814). He was buried under the dome of the cathedral at Aachen, dressed in his imperial robes. Soon all the world called him Carolus Magnus, Karl der Grosse, Charlemagne; and in 1165, when time had washed away all memory of his mistresses, the Church which he had served so well enrolled him among the blessed.

3. The Carolingian Decline

The Carolingian renaissance was one of several heroic interludes in the Dark Ages. It might have ended the darkness three centuries before Abélard had it not been for the quarrels and incompetence of Charlemagne’s successors, the feudal anarchy of the barons, the disruptive struggle between Church and state, and the Norman, Magyar, and Saracen invasions invited by these ineptitudes. One man, one lifetime, had not availed to establish a new civilization. The short-lived revival was too narrowly clerical; the common citizen had no part in it; few of the nobles cared a fig for it, few of them even bothered to learn how to read. Charles himself must bear some blame for the collapse of his empire. He had so enriched the clergy that the power of the bishops, now that his strong hand was lifted, outweighed that of the emperor; and he had been compelled, for military and administrative reasons, to yield a dangerous degree of independence to the courts and barons in the provinces. He had left the finances of an imperially burdened government dependent upon the loyalty and integrity of these rude aristocrats, and upon the modest income of his own lands and mines. He had not been able, like the Byzantine emperors, to build up a bureaucracy of civil servants responsible only to the central power, or capable of carrying on the government through all vicissitudes of imperial personnel. Within a generation after his death the missi dominici, who had spread his authority through the counties, were disbanded or ignored, and the local lords slipped out of central control. Charlemagne’s reign was a feat of genius; it represented political advancement in an age and region of economic decline.

The cognomens given to his successors by their contemporaries tell the story: Louis the Pious, Charles the Bald, Louis the Stammerer, Charles the Fat, Charles the Simple. Louis the “Pious” * (814-40) was as tall and handsome as his father; modest, gentle, and gracious, and as incorrigibly lenient as Caesar. Brought up by priests, he took to heart the moral precepts that Charlemagne had practiced with such moderation. He had one wife, and no concubines; he expelled from the court his father’s mistresses and his sisters’ paramours, and when the sisters protested, he immured them in nunneries. He took the priests at their word, and bade the monks live up to their Benedictine rule. Wherever he found injustice or exploitation he tried to stop it, and to right what wrong had been done. The people marveled to find him always taking the side of the weak or poor.

Feeling bound by Frank custom, he divided his empire into kingdoms ruled by his sons—Pepin, Lothaire, and Louis “the German” (whom we shall call Ludwig). By his second wife, Judith, Louis had a fourth son, known to history as Charles the Bald; Louis loved him with almost grandparental infatuation, and wished to give him a share of the empire, annulling the division of 817; the three older sons objected, and began eight years of civil war against their father. The majority of the nobles and the clergy supported the rebellion; the few who seemed loyal deserted Louis in a crisis at Roth feld (near Colmar), which thereafter was known as the Lügenfeld, the Field of Lies. Louis bade his remaining supporters leave him for their own protection, and surrendered to his sons (833). They jailed and tonsured Judith, confined young Charles in a convent, and ordered their father to abdicate and do public penance. In a church at Soissons Louis, surrounded by thirty bishops, and in the presence of his son and successor Lothaire, was compelled to bare himself to the waist, prostrate himself upon a haircloth, and read aloud a confession of crime. He took the gray garb of a penitent, and for a year was imprisoned in a monastery. From this moment a united episcopate ruled France amid the disintegration of the Carolingian house.

Popular sentiment revolted against Lothaire’s treatment of Louis. Many nobles and some prelates responded to the appeals of Judith to annul the deposition; a quarrel among the sons ensued; Pepin and Ludwig released their father, restored him to his throne, and returned Judith and Charles to his arms (834). Louis took no revenge, but forgave all. When Pepin died (838) a new partition was made; Ludwig did not like it, and invaded Saxony. The old Emperor again took the field, and repelled the invasion; but he fell ill of exposure on the way back, and died near Ingelheim (840). Among his last words were a message of forgiveness to Ludwig, and an appeal to Lothaire, now Emperor, to protect Judith and Charles.

Lothaire tried to reduce Charles and Ludwig to the rank of vassals; they defeated him at Fonteney (841), and took at Strasbourg an oath of mutual loyalty famous as our oldest document in French. In 843, however, they signed with Lothaire the Treaty of Verdun, and partitioned the empire of Charlemagne into approximately the modern states of Italy, Germany, and France. Ludwig received the lands between the Rhine and the Elbe, Charles received most of France and the Spanish March. Lothaire received Italy, and the lands between the Rhine on the east and the Scheldt, Saône, and Rhone on the west; this heterogeneous terrain, stretching from Holland to Provence, took his name as Lothari regnum, Lotharingia, Lothringar, Lorraine. It had no ethnic or linguistic unity, and inevitably became the battleground between Germany and France, repeatedly changing masters in the bloody fluctuations of victory and defeat.

During these costly civil wars, weakening the government, man power, wealth, and morale of Western Europe, the expanding tribes of Scandinavia invaded France in a barbarian wave that resumed and completed the havoc and terror of the German migrations of four centuries before. While the Swedes were infiltrating Russia, and the Norwegians were getting a foothold in Ireland, and the Danes were conquering England, a mixture of Scandinavians whom we may call Norse or Northmen raided the coastal and river cities of France. After the death of Louis the Pious these raids became great expeditions, with fleets of over a hundred vessels fully manned with oarsmenwarriors. In the ninth and tenth centuries France endured forty-seven Norse attacks. In 840 the raiders sacked Rouen, beginning a century of assaults upon Normandy; in 843 they entered Nantes and slew the bishop at his altar; in 844 they sailed up the Garonne to Toulouse; in 845 they mounted the Seine to Paris, but spared the city on receiving a tribute of 7000 pounds of silver. In 846—while the Saracens were attacking Rome—the Northmen conquered Frisia, burned Dordrecht, and sacked Limoges. In 847 they besieged Bordeaux, but were repulsed; in 848 they tried again, captured it, plundered it, massacred its population, and burned it to the ground. In the following years they dealt a like fate to Beauvais, Bayeux, St.-Lô, Meaux, Évreux, Tours; we may surmise something of the terror by noting that Tours was pillaged in 853, 856, 862, 872, 886, 903, and 919.⁴⁵ Paris was pillaged in 856, again in 861, and burned in 865. At Orléans and Chartres the bishops organized armies and drove back the invaders (855); but in 856 Danish pirates sacked Orléans. In 859 a Norse fleet sailed through Gibraltar into the Mediterranean; raided towns along the Rhone as far north as Valence; crossed the Gulf of Genoa, and plundered Pisa and other Italian cities. Baffled here and there by the fortified castles of the nobles, the invaders rifled or destroyed the treasures of the unprotected churches and monasteries, often burning them and their libraries, and sometimes killing the priests and monks. In the litanies of those dark days men prayed, Libera nos a furore Normanorum—“Deliver us from the Norse fury!”⁴⁶ As if in a conspiracy with the Northmen, the Saracens took Corsica and Sardinia in 810, ravaged the French Riviera in 820, sacked Arles in 842, and held most of the French Mediterranean coast till 972.

What were the kings and barons doing in all this half century of destruction? The barons, themselves harassed, were loath to go to the aid of other regions, and responded weakly to appeals for united action. The kings were busy with their wars for territory or the Imperial throne, and sometimes encouraged the Norse to raid a rival’s shores. In 859 Archbishop Hincmar of Reims directly accused Charles the Bald of negligence in the defense of France. Charles was succeeded (877-88) by worse weaklings—Louis II the Stammerer, Louis III, Carloman, and Charles the Fat. By the accidents of time and death all the realm of Charlemagne was again united under Charles the Fat, and the dying empire had another chance to fight for its life. But in 880 the Norse captured and burned Nijmegen, and turned Courtrai and Ghent into Norman strongholds; in 881 they burned Liege, Cologne, Bonn, Prüm, and Aachen; in 882 they captured Trier, killing the archbishop who led its defense; in the same year they took Reims, forcing Hincmar to flight and death. In 883 they seized Amiens, but retired on receiving 12,000 pounds of silver from King Carloman. In 885 they took Rouen, and sailed up to Paris in 700 ships with 30,000 men. The governor of the city, Count Odo or Eudes, and its Bishop Gozlin led a valiant resistance; for thirteen months Paris stood siege, and made a dozen sorties; finally Charles the Fat, instead of coming to the rescue, paid the Northmen 700 pounds of silver, and gave them permission to go up the Seine and winter in Burgundy, which they pillaged to their hearts’ content. Charles was deposed, and died in 888. Odo was chosen king of France, and Paris, its strategic value now proved, became the seat of government.

Odo’s successor, Charles the Simple (898-923), protected the region of the Seine and the Saône, but raised no hand against Norse depredations in the rest of France. In 911 he conceded to Rolf or Rollo, a Norman chieftain, the districts of Rouen, Lisieux, and Évreux, which the Normans already held; they consented to do feudal homage for them to the king, but laughed in his face as they performed the ceremony. Rollo agreed to baptism; his people followed him to the font, and slowly subsided into agriculture and civilization. So Normandy began, as a Norse conquest in France.

The simple king had found a solution for Paris at least; now the Normans themselves would block invaders entering the Seine. But elsewhere the Norse raids continued. Chartres was pillaged in 911, Angers in 919; Aquitaine and Auvergne were plundered in 923; Artois and the Beauvais region in 924. Almost at the same time the Magyars, having ravaged southern Germany, entered Burgundy in 917, crossed and recrossed the French frontier unhindered, robbed and burned the monasteries near Reims and Sens (937), passed like consuming locusts through Aquitaine (951), burned the suburbs of Cambrai, Laon, and Reims (954), and leisurely looted Burgundy. Under these repeated blows of Norse and Hun the fabric of social order in France verged upon total collapse. Cried an ecclesiastical synod at Trosle in 909:

The cities are depopulated, the monasteries ruined and burned, the country reduced to solitude.… As the first men lived without law … so now every man does what seems good in his own eyes, despising laws human and divine…The strong oppress the weak; the world is full of violence against the poor, and of the plunder of ecclesiastical goods…. Men devour one another like the fishes in the sea.⁴⁷

The last Carolingian kings—Louis IV, Lothaire IV, Louis V—were well-meaning men, but they had not in their blood the iron needed to forge a living order out of the universal desolation. When Louis V died without issue (987), the nobles and prelates of France sought leadership in some other line than the Carolingian. They found it in the descendants of a marquess of Neustria significantly named Robert the Strong (d. 866). The Odo who had saved Paris was his son; a grandson, Hugh the Great (d. 956), had acquired by purchase or war almost all the region between Normandy, the Seine, and the Loire as his feudal realm, and had wielded more wealth and power than the kings. Now Hugh’s son, called Hugh Capet, had inherited this wealth and power, and apparently the ability that had won them. Archbishop Adalbero, guided by the subtle scholar Gerbert, proposed Hugh Capet as king of France. He was unanimously elected (987), and that Capetian dynasty began which, in direct or collateral line, would rule France until the Revolution.

4. Letters and Arts: 814–1066

Perhaps we exaggerate the damage done by the Norse and Magyar raids; to crowd them into a page for brevity’s sake darkens unduly the picture of a life in which there were doubtless intervals of security and peace. Monasteries continued to be built throughout this terrible ninth century, and were often the centers of busy industry. Rouen, despite raids and fires, grew stronger from trade with Britain; Cologne and Mainz dominated commerce on the Rhine; and in Flanders thriving centers of industry and trade developed at Ghent, Ypres, Lille, Douai, Arras, Tournai, Dinant, Cambrai, Liége, and Valenciennes.

The monastic libraries suffered tragic losses of classic treasures during the raids, and doubtless many churches were then destroyed which had opened schools on the lines of Charlemagne’s decree. Libraries survived at the monasteries or churches of Fulda, Lorsch, Reichenau, Mainz, Trier, Cologne, Liége, Laon, Reims, Corbie, Fleury, St. Denis, Tours, Bobbio, Monte Cassino, St. Gall…The Benedictine monastery at St. Gall was acclaimed for its writers as well as for its school and its books. Here Notker Balbulus—the Stammerer—(840-912) wrote excellent hymns and the Chronicle of the Monk of St. Gall; here Notker Labeo—the Thick-lipped—(950-1022) translated Boethius, Aristotle, and other classics into German; these translations, among the first productions of German prose, helped to fix the forms and syntax of the new tongue.

Even in harassed France the monastic schools were lighting up these Dark Ages. Remy of Auxerre opened a public school at Paris in 900; and in the tenth century schools were established at Auxerre, Corbie, Reims, and Liege. At Chartres, about 1006, Bishop Fulbert (960-1028) founded a school that became the most renowned in France before Abélard; there the venerabilis Socrates, as his pupils called him, organized the teaching of science, medicine, and classical literature as well as theology, Scripture, and liturgy. Fulbert was a man of noble devotion, saintly patience, and endless charity. To his school, before the end of the eleventh century, would come such scholars as John of Salisbury, William of Conches, Berengar of Tours, and Gilbert de la Porree. Meanwhile, now at Compiègne, now at Laon, the Palace School established by Charlemagne reached the height of its glory under the encouragement and protection of Charles the Bald.

To this Palace School, in 845, Charles invited divers Irish and English scholars. Among them was one of the most original and audacious minds of the Middle Ages, a man whose existence casts doubt upon the advisability of retaining the phrase “Dark Ages” even for the ninth century. His name doubly revealed his origin. Johannes Scotus Eriugena—“John the Irishman, born in Erin”; we shall call him simply Erigena. Though apparently not an ecclesiastic, he was a man of wide learning, a master of Greek, a lover of Plato and the classics, and something of a wit. A story that has all the earmarks of literary invention tells how Charles the Bald, dining with him, asked him Quid distat inter sottum et Scotum— “What distinguishes” (literally, what separates) “a fool from an Irishman?”—to which John is said to have answered, “The table.”⁴⁸ Nevertheless Charles was fond of him, attended his lectures, and probably enjoyed his heresies. John’s book on the Eucharist interpreted the sacrament as symbolical, and by implication questioned the Real Presence of Christ in the consecrated bread or wine. When Gottschalk, a German monk, preached absolute predestinarianism, and therefore denied free will in man, Archbishop Hincmar asked Erigena to write a reply. The resultant treatise De divina praedestinatione (c. 851) began with a startling exaltation of philosophy: “In earnestly investigating and attempting to discover the reason of all things, every means of attaining to a pious and perfect doctrine lies in that science and discipline which the Greeks call philosophy.” In effect the book denied predestination; the will is free in both God and man; God does not know evil, for if He knew it, He would be the cause of it. The answer was more heretical than Gottschalk’s, and was condemned by two church councils in 855 and 859. Gottschalk was confined in a monastery till his death, but the King protected Erigena.

In 824 the Byzantine Emperor Michael the Stammerer had sent to Louis the Pious the Greek manuscript of a book, The Celestial Hierarchy, believed by Christian orthodoxy to have been composed by Dionysius “the Areopagite.” Louis the Pious turned the manuscript over to the monastery of St. Denis, but nobody there could translate its Greek. Erigena, at the King’s request, now undertook the task. The translation deeply influenced Erigena, and re-established in unofficial Christian theology the Neoplatonist picture of a universe evolving or emanating out of God through different stages or degrees of diminishing perfection, and slowly returning through different degrees back into the deity.

This became the central idea of John’s own masterpiece, De divisione naturae (867). Here, amid much nonsense, and two centuries before Abélard, is a bold subjection of theology and revelation to reason, and an attempt to reconcile Christianity with Greek philosophy. John accepts the authority of the Bible; but since its sense is often obscure, it must be interpreted by reason—usually by symbolism or allegory. “Authority,” says Erigena, “sometimes proceeds from reason, but reason never from authority. For all authority that is not approved by true reason seems weak. But true reason, since it rests on its own strength, needs no reinforcement by any authority.”⁴⁹ “We should not allege the opinions of the holy Fathers … unless it be necessary thereby to strengthen arguments in the eyes of men who, unskillful in reasoning, yield rather to authority than to reason.”⁵⁰ Here is the Age of Reason moving in the womb of the Age of Faith.

John defines Nature as “the general name for all things that are and that are not”—i.e., all objects, processes, principles, causes, and thoughts. He divides Nature into four kinds of being: (1) that which creates but is not created—viz., God; (2) that which is created and creates—viz., the prime causes, principles, prototypes, Platonic Ideas, Logos, by whose operation the world of particular things is made; (3) that which is created and does not create—viz., the said world of particular things; and (4) that which neither creates nor is created—i.e., God as the final and absorbing end of all things. “God is everything that truly is, since He makes all things and is made in all things.” There was no creation in time, for this would imply a change in God. “When we hear that God made everything, we ought to understand nothing other than that God is in all things—i.e., subsists as the essence of all things.”⁵¹“God Himself is comprehended by no intellect; neither is the secret essence of anything created by Him comprehensible. We perceive only accidents, not essences”⁵²—phenomena, not noumena, as Kant would say. The sensible qualities of things are not inherent in the things themselves, but are produced by our forms of perception. “When we hear that God wishes, loves, chooses, sees, hears … we should think nothing else than that His ineffable essence and power are being expressed by meanings co-natural with us” (congenial to our nature) “lest the true and pious Christian be silenced concerning the Creator, and dare say nothing of Him for the instruction of simple souls.”⁵³ Only for a like purpose may we speak of God as masculine or feminine; “He” is neither.⁵⁴ If we take “Father” as meaning the creative substance or essence of all things, and “Son” as the divine Wisdom according to which all things are made or governed, and “Spirit” as the life or vitality of creation, we may think of God as a Trinity. Heaven and hell are not places, but conditions of soul; hell is the misery of sin, heaven is the happiness of virtue and the ecstasy of the divine vision (the perception of divinity) revealed in all things to the soul that is pure.⁵⁵ The Garden of Eden was such a state of soul, not a place on the earth.⁵⁶ All things are immortal: animals too, like men, have souls that pass back, after death, into the God or creative spirit from whom they emanated.⁵⁷ All history is a vast outward flow of creation by emanation, and an irresistible inward tide that finally draws all things back into God.

There have been worse philosophies than this, and in ages of illumination. But the Church properly suspected it as reeking with heresy. In 865 Pope Nicholas I demanded of Charles the Bald that he should either send John to Rome for trial, or dismiss him from the Palace School, “that he may no longer give poison to those who seek for bread.”⁵⁸ We do not know the outcome. William of Malmesbury⁵⁹ relates that “Johannes Scotus came to England and our monastery, as report says; was pierced with the iron pens of the boys whom he instructed,” and died from the results; probably the tale was a schoolboy’s wishful dream. Philosophers like Gerbert, Abélard, and Gilbert de la Porrée were secretly influenced by Erigena, but for the most part he was forgotten in the chaos and darkness of the age. When in the thirteenth century his book was exhumed from oblivion it was condemned by the Council of Sens (1225), and Pope Honorius III ordered that all copies should be sent to Rome and there be burned.

In these disturbed centuries French art marked time. Despite Charlemagne’s example, the French continued to build their churches on the basilican plan. About 996 William of Volpiano, an Italian monk and architect, became head of the Norman abbey of Fécamp. He brought with him many of the devices of the Lombard and Romanesque style; and apparently it was his pupils who built the great Romanesque abbey church of Jumièges (1045-67). In 1042 another Italian, Lanfranc, entered the Norman monastery at Bee, and soon made it a vibrant intellectual center. Students flocked to it in such number that new buildings had to be provided; Lanfranc designed them, perhaps with some more expert help. Not a stone remains of his structures; but the Abbaye aux Hommes at Caen (1077-81) survives as a testimony to the powerful Romanesque style developed in Normandy by Lanfranc and his fellows.

All over France and Flanders in the eleventh century new churches were built, and artists adorned them with murals, mosaics, and statuary. Charlemagne had directed that church interiors should be painted for the instruction of the faithful; the palaces at Aachen and Ingelheim were decorated with frescoes; and doubtless many churches followed these examples. The last fragments of the Aachen frescoes were destroyed in 1944; but similar murals survive in the church of St. Germain at Auxerre. These differ only in scale from the style and figures in the manuscript illumination of the time. At Tours, in the reign of Charles the Bald, a great Bible was written and painted by the monks, and presented to the King; it is now No. 1 of the Latin codices in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris. Still more beautiful is the “Lothaire” Gospel also made at this time by the monks of Tours. The monks of Reims, in the same ninth century, produced the famous “Utrecht” Psalter—108 vellum leaves containing the Psalms and the Apostles’ Creed, exuberantly illustrated with a veritable menagerie of animals and a museum of tools and occupations. In these lively pictures a lusty realism transforms the once stiff and conventional figures of miniature art.

5. The Rise of the Dukes: 987–1066

The France that Hugh Capet ruled (987-996) now stood out as a separate nation, no longer acknowledging the suzerainty of the Holy Roman Empire; the unification of western continental Europe achieved by Charlemagne was never restored, except momentarily by Napoleon and Hitler. But Hugh’s France was not our France; Aquitaine and Burgundy were virtually independent duchies, and Lorraine would for seven centuries attach itself to Germany. It was a France heterogeneous in race and speech: northeastern France was more Flemish than French, and had a large German element in its blood; Normandy was Norse; Brittany was Celtic and aloof, dominated by refugees from Britain; Provence was still in stock and speech a Roman-Gallic “province”; France near the Pyrenees was Gothic; Catalonia, technically under the French monarchy, was Goth-alonia. The Loire divided France into two regions of diverse cultures and tongues. The task of the French monarchy was to unify this diversity, and make a nation from a dozen peoples. The task would take 800 years.

To improve the chances of an orderly succession, Hugh, in the first year of his reign, had had his son Robert crowned co-king. Robert the Pious (996-1031) is accounted a “mediocre king,”⁶⁰ perhaps because he shunned the glory of war. Having some dispute over boundaries with the Emperor Henry II of Germany, he arranged a meeting with him, exchanged presents, and reached a peaceable agreement. Like Louis IX, Henry IV, and Louis XVI, Robert had a kindly feeling for the weak and the poor, and protected them as well as he could from the unscrupulous strong. He offended the Church by marrying his cousin Bertha (998), bore excommunication patiently there for and the taunts of those who thought her a witch; finally he separated from her and lived unhappily forever afterward. At his death, we are told, “There was great mourning and intolerable grief.”⁶¹ A war of succession followed between his sons; the elder, Henry I (1031-60), won, but only by the help of Robert, Duke of Normandy. When that long conflict (1031-9) ended, the monarchy was so impoverished in money and men that it could no longer prevent the dismemberment of France by powerful and independent lords.

About the year 1000, through the gradual appropriation of surrounding territory by great landowners, France was divided into seven main principalities ruled by counts or dukes: Aquitaine, Toulouse, Burgundy, Anjou, Champagne, Flanders, and Normandy. These dukes or counts were in nearly all cases the heirs of chieftains or generals to whom estates had been granted, for military or administrative services, by the Merovingian or Carolingian kings. The king had become dependent upon these magnates for mobilizing troops and protecting frontier provinces; after 888 he no longer legislated for the whole realm, or gathered taxes from it; the dukes and counts passed laws, levied taxes, waged war, judged and punished, as practically sovereign powers on their estates, and merely offered the king a formal homage and limited military service. The authority of the king in law, justice, and finance was narrowed to his own royal domain, later called the Ile de France—the region of the Saône and middle Seine from Orléans to Beauvais and from Chartres to Reims.

Of all the relatively independent duchies, Normandy grew most rapidly in authority and power. Within a century after its cession to the Northmen, it had become—perhaps through proximity to the sea and its position between England and Paris—the most enterprising and adventurous province in France. The Norse were now enthusiastic Christians, had great monasteries and abbey schools, and reproduced with a recklessness that would soon drive Norman youth to carve new kingdoms out of old states. The progeny of the Vikings made strong governors, not too finicky about their morals, nor palsied with scruples, but able to rule with a firm hand a turbulent population of Gauls, Franks, and Norse. Robert I (1028-35) was not yet duke of Normandy when in 1026 his eye was caught by Harlette, daughter of a tanner in Falaise. She became his cherished mistress according to an old Danish custom, and soon presented him with a son known to his contemporaries as William the Bastard, to us as William the Conqueror. Weighed down by his sins, Robert in 1035 left Normandy on a penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Before going he called his chief barons and prelates to him and said to them:

By my faith, I will not leave ye lordless. I have a young bastard who will grow, please God, and of whose good qualities I have great hope. Take him, I pray you, for lord. That he was not born in wedlock matters little to you; he will be none the less able in battle … or to render justice. I make him my heir, and I hold him seized, from this present, of the whole duchy of Normandy.⁶²

Robert died en route; for a time nobles ruled for his son; but soon William began to issue orders in the first person. A rebellion tried to unseat him, but he put it down with dignified ferocity. He was a man of craft and courage and farseeing plans, a god to his friends, a devil to his foes. He bore with good humor many quips about his birth, and signed himself, now and then, Gulielmus Nothus— William the Bastard; but when he besieged Alençon, and the besieged hung hides over their walls in allusion to his grandfather’s trade, he cut off the hands and feet, and gouged out the eyes, of his prisoners, and shot these members from his catapults into the town. Normandy admired his brutality and iron rule, and prospered. William moderated the exploitation of the peasantry by the nobles, and appeased these with fiefs; he dominated and presided over the clergy, and appeased them with gifts. He attended devoutly to his religious duties, and shamed his father by unprecedented marital fidelity. He fell in love with the beautiful Matilda, daughter of Baldwin, Count of Flanders; he was not disconcerted by her two children and her living but separated husband; she sent William away with insults, saying that she “would rather be a veiled nun than marry a bastard”;⁶³ he persevered, won her, and married her despite the denunciations of the clergy. He deposed Bishop Malger and Abbot Lanfranc for condemning the marriage, and burned down part of the abbey of Bee in his rage. Lanfranc persuaded Pope Nicholas II to validate the union; and William, in atonement, built at Caen the famous Norman Abbaye aux Hommes. By this marriage William allied himself with the Count of Flanders; in 1048 he had already signed an entente with the king of France. Having so guarded and garnished his flanks, he proceeded, at the age of thirty-nine, to conquer England.

CHAPTER XX

The Rise of the North

566–1066

I. ENGLAND: 577–1066

1. Alfred and the Danes: 577–1016

AFTER the battle of Deorham (577) the Anglo-Saxon-Jute conquest of England met with only minor resistance; and soon the invaders divided the country. The Jutes organized a kingdom in Kent; the Angles formed three kingdoms—Mercia, Northumberland, and East Anglia; the Saxons another three in Wessex, Essex, and Sussex—i.e., West, East, and South Saxony. These seven little kingdoms, and others smaller still, provided the “history of England” until King Egbert of Wessex, by arms or subtlety, united most of them under his rule (829).

But even before this new Angle-land was molded by the Saxon king, those Danish invasions had begun which were to rack the island from sea to sea, and threaten its nascent Christianity with a wild and letterless paganism. “In the year 787,” says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, “came three ships to the West Saxon shores … and they slew folk. These were the first ships of Danish men that sought land of Engle folk.” In 793 another Danish expedition raided Northumberland, sacked the famous monastery of Lindisfarne, and murdered its monks. In 794 the Danes entered the Wear and pillaged Wear-mouth and Jarrow, where the learned Bede had labored half a century before. In 838 the raids attacked East Anglia and Kent; in 839 a pirate fleet of 350 vessels moored in the Thames, while their crews pillaged Canterbury and London. In 867 Northumberland was conquered by a force of Danes and Swedes; thousands of “English” men were slain, monasteries were sacked, libraries were scattered or destroyed. York and its neighborhood, whose school had given Alcuin to Charlemagne, were reduced to destitution and ignorance. By 871 most of England north of the Thames was subject to the invaders. In that year a Danish army under Guthrum marched southward to attack Reading, the Wessex capital; Ethelred the king and his young brother Alfred met the Danes at Ashdown and won; but in a second engagement at Merton Ethelred was mortally wounded, and the English fled.

Alfred mounted the throne of West Saxony at the age of twenty-two (871). Asser describes him as then illiteratus, which could mean either illiterate or Latinless.¹ He was apparently epileptic, and suffered a seizure at his wedding feast; but he is pictured as a vigorous hunter, handsome and graceful, and surpassing his brothers in wisdom and martial skill. A month after his accession he led his little army against the Danes at Wilton, and was so badly defeated that to save his throne he had to buy peace from the foe; but in 878 he won a decisive victory at Ethandun (Edington). Half the Danish host crossed the Channel to raid weakened France; the rest, by the Peace of Wedmore, agreed to confine themselves to northeastern England in what came to be called the Danelaw.

Alfred, says the not quite reliable Asser, led his army into East Anglia “for the sake of plunder,” conquered the land, and—perhaps to unify England against the Danes—made himself king of East Anglia and Mercia as well as of Wessex. Then, like a lesser Charlemagne, he turned to the work of restoration and government. He reorganized the army, built a navy, established a common law for his three kingdoms, reformed the administration of justice, provided legal protection for the poor, built or rebuilt cities and towns, and erected “royal halls and chambers with stone and wood” for his growing governmental staff.² An eighth of his revenue was devoted to relief of the poor; another eighth to education. At Reading, his capital, he established a palace school, and gave abundantly to the educational and religious work of churches and monasteries. He recalled sadly how in his boyhood “the churches stood filled with treasures and books … before they had all been ravaged and burned” by the Danes; now “so clean was learning decayed among English folk that very few there were … that could understand their rituals in English, or translate aught out of Latin.”³ He sent abroad for scholars—for Bishop Asser from Wales, for Erigena from France, and for many others—to come and instruct his people and himself. He mourned that he had had so little time for reading, and he now gave himself like a monk to pious and learned studies. He still found reading difficult; but “night and day he commanded men to read to him.” Recognizing, almost before any other European, the rising importance of the vernacular tongues, he arranged to have certain basic books rendered into English; and he himself laboriously translated Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Gregory’s Pastoral Care, Orosius’ Universal History, and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England. Again like Charlemagne, he gathered the songs of his people, taught them to his children, and joined the minstrels of his court in singing them.

In 894 a fresh invasion of Danes reached Kent; the Danes of the Danelaw sent them reinforcements; and the Welsh—Celtic patriots still unconquered by the Anglo-Saxons—signed an alliance with the Danes. Alfred’s son Edward fell upon the pirate camp and destroyed it, and Alfred’s new navy dispersed the Danish fleet (899). Two years later the King died, having lived only fifty-two years, and reigned for twenty-eight. We cannot compare him with a giant like Charlemagne, for the area of his enterprise was small; but in his moral qualities—his piety, unassuming rectitude, temperance, patience, courtesy, devotion to his people, anxiety to further education—he offered to the English nation a model and stimulus that it gratefully received and soon forgot. Voltaire admired him perhaps immoderately: “I do not think that there ever was in the world a man more worthy of the regard of posterity than Alfred the Great.”⁴

Toward the end of the tenth century the Scandinavian attack on England was resumed. In 991 a force of Norwegian Vikings under Olaf Tryggvesson raided the English coast, plundered Ipswich, and defeated the English at Maldon. Unable to resist further, the English under King Ethelred (978–1013, called the Redeless—counselless—because he refused the advice of his nobles) bought off the Danes with successive gifts of 10,000, 16,000, 24,000, 36,000, and 48,000 pounds of silver, which were raised by the first general taxes levied in England—the shameful and ruinous Danegeld. Ethelred, seeking foreign aid, negotiated an alliance with Normandy, and married Emma, daughter of the Norman Duke Richard I; from that union would spring much history. Believing or pretending that the Danes of England were plotting to kill him and the nation’s Witenagemot or parliament, Ethelred secretly ordered a general massacre of the Danes everywhere in the island (1002). We do not know how thoroughly the order was carried out; probably all male Danes of arms-bearing age in England were slaughtered, and some women; among these was the sister of King Sweyn of Denmark. Swearing revenge, Sweyn invaded England in 1003, and again in 1013, this time with all his forces. Ethelred’s nobles deserted him, he fled to Normandy, and Sweyn was master and king of England. When Sweyn died (1014) Ethelred renewed the struggle; the nobles again deserted him, and made their peace with Sweyn’s son Cnut (1015). Ethelred died in besieged London; his son Edmund “Ironside” fought bravely, but was overwhelmed by Cnut at Assandun (1016). Cnut was now accepted by all England as its king, and the Danish Conquest was complete.

2. Anglo-Saxon Civilization: 1066

The Conquest was only political; Anglo-Saxon institutions, speech, and ways had in six centuries sunk such roots that to this day neither the government nor the character nor the language of the English can be understood without them. In the newsless intervals between war and war, crime and crime, there had been a reorganization of tillage and trade, a resurrection of literature, a slow formation of order and law.

History gives no ground for the delusion that Anglo-Saxon England was a paradise of free peasants living in democratic village communities. The leaders of the Anglo-Saxon hosts appropriated the land; by the seventh century a few families owned two thirds of the soil of England;⁵ by the eleventh century most towns were included in the property of a thane (noble), a bishop, or the king. During the Danish invasions many peasants exchanged ownership for protection; by 1000 the bulk of them paid rent in produce or labor to some lord.⁶ There were tun-moots or town meetings, and folk-moots or hundred-moots that served as assemblies and courts for a shire; but only landowners were allowed to attend these gatherings; and after the eighth century they declined in authority and frequency, and were largely replaced by the manorial courts of the lords. The government of England lay essentially in the national Witenagemot (“meeting of the wise”)—a relatively small assemblage of thanes, bishops, and the leading ministers of the Crown. Without the consent of this incipient Parliament no English king could be chosen or sustained, or add a rood to the personal estates from which he derived his regular revenues; without it he could not legislate or tax or judge or wage war or make peace.⁷ The only resource of the monarchy against this aristocracy lay in an informal alliance of throne and Church. The English state before and after the Norman Conquest depended upon the clergy for public education, social order, national unity, even for political administration. St. Dunstan, Abbot of Glastonbury, became chief counselor under kings Edmund (940-6) and Edred (946-55). He defended the middle and lower classes against the nobles, boldly criticized monarchs and princes, was exiled by King Edwig (955-9), was recalled by Edgar (959-75), and secured the crown for Edward the Martyr (975-8). He built St. Peter’s Church at Glastonbury, encouraged education and art, died (988) as Archbishop of Canterbury, and was revered as England’s greatest saint before Thomas à Becket.

In this centrifugal government national law developed slowly, and the old Germanic law, modified in phrase and circumstance, sufficed. Compurgation, wergild, and ordeal survived, but trial by combat was unknown. The wergild varied instructively in Anglian law: the fine or composition-money for killing a king was 30,000 thrimsas ($13,000); a bishop, 15,000; a thane or a priest, 2,000; a ceorl or free peasant, 266. By Saxon law a man paid one or two shillings for inflicting a wound an inch long, thirty shillings for slicing off an ear; it should be added, however, that a shilling could buy a sheep. By the laws of Ethelbert an adulterer was obliged to pay the husband a fine and buy him another wife.⁸ Any person who resisted a court order was declared an “out-law”; his goods were forfeited to the king, and anyone might kill him with impunity. In some cases wergild was not admitted, and severe punishments were inflicted: enslavement, flogging, castration, amputation—of hands, feet, upper lip, nose, or ear—and death by hanging, beheading, burning, stoning, drowning, or precipitation into an abyss.⁹

The economy, like the law, was primitive, and far less developed than in Roman Britain. Much work had been done in clearance and drainage, but England in the ninth century was still half forest, heath, or fen; and wild beasts—bears, boars, wolves—still lurked in the woods. The farms were tilled mostly by bondmen or slaves. Men might fall into slavery through debt or crime; wives and children could be sold into slavery by husbands or fathers in need; and all the children of a slave, even if begotten by freemen, were slaves The owner might kill his slave at will. He might make a female slave pregnant, and then sell her. The slave could not enter a suit at court. If a stranger slew him, the modest wergild went to his master. If he fled and was caught he might be flogged to death.¹⁰ The main commerce of Bristol was in slaves. Nearly all the population was rural; towns were hamlets, and cities were towns.* London, Exeter, York, Chester, Bristol, Gloucester, Oxford, Norwich, Worcester, Winchester were small, but grew rapidly after Alfred’s time. When Bishop Mellitus came to preach in London in 601 he found only “a scanty and heathen population”¹¹ in what had been a metropolis in Roman days. In the eighth century the city grew again as a strategic point commanding the Thames; under Canute it became the national capital.

Industry usually worked for a local market; weaving and embroidery, however, were more advanced, and exported their products to the Continent. Transport was difficult and dangerous; foreign commerce was slight. The use of cattle as a medium of exchange survived till the eighth century, but in that century several kings issued a silver coinage of shillings and pounds. In tenth-century England four shillings could buy a cow, six an ox.¹² Wages were commensurately low. The poor lived in wooden thatched huts on a vegetarian diet; wheat bread and meat were for the well-to-do, or a Sunday feast. The rich adorned their rude castles with figured hangings, warmed themselves with furs, made their garments gay with embroidery, and brightened their persons with gems.

Manners and morals were not as prim or refined as in some later periods of English history. We hear much about rudeness, coarseness, brutality, lying, treachery, theft, and other hardy perennials; the buccaneering Normans of 1066, including some bastards, professed to be amazed at the low moral and cultural level of their victims. The moist climate persuaded the Anglo-Saxons to heavy eating and hard drinking, and the “ale feast” was their notion—like ours—of a convention or a holiday. St. Boniface, with picturesque exaggeration, described the eighth-century English, “both Christians and pagans, as refusing to have legitimate wives, and continuing to live in lechery and adultery after the manner of neighing horses and braying asses”;¹³ and in 756 he wote to King Ethelbald:

Your contempt for lawful matrimony, were it for chastity’s sake, would be laudable; but since you wallow in luxury, and even in adultery with nuns, it is disgraceful and damnable…. We have heard that almost all the nobles of Mercia follow your example, desert their lawful wives, and live in guilty intercourse with adulteresses and nuns…. Give heed to this: if the nation of the Angles,… despising lawful matrimony, gives free indulgence to adultery, a race ignoble and scorning God must necessarily issue from such unions, and will destroy the country by their abandoned manners.¹⁴

In the earlier centuries of Anglo-Saxon rule the husband could divorce his wife at will, and remarry. The Synod of Hertford (673) denounced this custom, and gradually the influence of the Church promoted the stability of unions. Women were held in high honor, though this did not preclude their occasional enslavement. They received little book education, but found this no handicap in attracting and influencing men. Kings patiently wooed proud women, and consulted their wives on public policy.¹⁵ Alfred’s daughter Ethelfled, as regent and queen, gave Mercia for a generation effective and conscientious government. She built cities, planned military campaigns, and captured Derby, Leicester, and York from the Danes. “From the difficulties experienced in her first labor,” says William of Malmesbury, “she ever afterward refused the embraces of her husband, protesting that it was unbecoming the daughter of a king to give way to a delight which, after a time, produced such unpleasant consequences.”¹⁶ It was in this period (c. 1040) that there lived in Mercia, as wife of its ruling Earl Leofric, the lady Godgifa, who, as Godiva, played an attractive role in legend, and earned a statue in Coventry.*

Education, like everything else, suffered from the Anglo-Saxon Conquest, and slowly recovered after the conversion of the conquerors. Benedict Biscop opened a monastic school at Wearmouth about 660; Bede was one of its graduates. Archbishop Egbert established at York (735) a cathedral school and library that became the chief seat of secondary education in England. These and other schools made England in the second half of the eighth century the leader of European learning north of the Alps.

The fine devotion of the monastic educators shines out in the greatest scholar of his time, the Venerable Bede (673-735). He summed up his life with modest brevity:

Bede, the servant of Christ, a priest of the monastery of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, which is at Wearmouth and Jarrow. Who, being born in the territory of that monastery, was delivered up by my kinsfolk, when I was seven years of age, to be brought up by the most reverend abbot Benedict [Biscop]; and from that time spending all the days of my life in the same monastery, I have applied all my diligence to the study of the Scriptures; and observing the regular discipline, and keeping the daily service of singing in the church, I have taken delight always either to learn, or to teach, or to write…. In the nineteenth year of my life I was made deacon; in my thirtieth I became a priest… and from that time until the fifty-ninth year of my age I have employed myself upon Holy Scripture, and in these following works …¹⁷

—all in Latin. They included Biblical commentaries, homilies, a chronology of world history, treatises on grammar, mathematics, science, and theology, and above all, the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, or Church History of the English Nation (731). Unlike most monastic histories, this is no dry chronicle. Perhaps, towards the end, it is too heavy with miracles, and always it is innocently credulous, as befitted a mind immured from the age of seven; nevertheless it is a clear and captivating narrative, rising now and then to a simple eloquence, as in the description of the Anglo-Saxon Conquest.¹⁸ Bede had an intellectual conscience; he took great pains with chronology, and is generally accurate; he specified his sources, sought firsthand evidence, and quoted pertinent and available documents. “I would not,” he said, “that my children should read a lie”¹⁹—meaning, we hope, the 600 pupils whom he taught. He died four years after penning the above autobiography; and all the tenderness and faith of medieval piety are in its concluding lines:

And I beseech Thee, merciful Jesus, that to whom Thou hast of Thy goodness given sweetly to drink in the words of the knowledge of Thee, Thou wilt also vouchsafe, in Thy loving kindness, that he may one day come to Thee, the fountain of all wisdom, and stand forever before Thy face.

Bede notes that five languages were spoken in his England: English, British (Celtic), Irish, Pict (Scotch), and Latin. “English” was the language of the Angles, but it differed little from Saxon, and was intelligible to Franks, Norwegians, and Danes; these five peoples spoke varieties of German, and English grew out of German speech. As early as the seventh century there was a considerable Anglo-Saxon literature. We must judge it largely from fragments, for most of it perished when Christianity brought in the Latin script (replacing the runic characters of Anglo-Saxon writing), when the Danish Conquest destroyed so many libraries, and when the Norman Conquest almost swamped the English language with French words. Moreover, many of these Anglo-Saxon poems were pagan, and had been transmitted orally through generations of “gleemen” or minstrels who were a bit loose in life and speech, and whom monks and priests were forbidden to hear. It was probably an eighth-century monk, however, who wrote one of the oldest extant Anglo-Saxon fragments—a verse paraphrase of Genesis, not quite as inspired as the original. Interpolated into the poem is the translation of a German narrative of the Fall; here the verse comes to life, largely because Satan is represented as a defiant and passionate rebel; perhaps Milton found here a hint for his Lucifer. Some of the Anglo-Saxon poems are elegies; so “The Wanderer” tells of happy days gone by in the baronial hall; now the lord is dead, “all this firm-set earth becomes empty,” and “sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things”;²⁰ not even Dante improved the expression of this idea. Usually these old poems sing blithely and lustily of war; the “Lay of the Battle of Maldon” (c. 1000) sees only heroism in the English defeat; and the old warrior Byrhtwold, standing over his slain lord, “taught courage” to the overwhelmed Saxons in words presaging Malory:

Thought shall be the harder, heart the keener, mood shall be the more, as our might lessens. Here our prince lies low, they have hewn him to death! Grief and sorrow forever on the man that leaves this war-play! I am old of years, but hence I will not go; I think to lay me down by the side of my lord, by the side of the man I cherished.²¹

The longest and noblest of the Anglo-Saxon poems, Beowulf, was composed, presumably in England, in the seventh or eighth century, and is preserved in a British Museum manuscript dating back to 1000. Its 3183 lines are apparently the complete work. The verse is rhymeless but alliterative antistrophic rhythm, in a West Saxon dialect quite unintelligible to us today. The story seems childish: Beowulf, prince of the Geats (Goths?) in southern Sweden, crosses the sea to free the Danish King Hrothgar from the dragon Grendel; he overcomes Grendel, and even Grendel’s mother; sails back to Geatland, and reigns justly for fifty years. A third dragon, a firedrake, now appears, and ravages the land of the Geats; Beowulf attacks it, and is seriously wounded, his comrade Wiglaf comes to his aid, and together they kill the beast. Beowulf dies of his wound, and is burned on a funeral pyre. The tale is not so naïve as this sounds; the dragons of medieval literature represent the wild beasts that lurked in the woods about the towns of Europe; the terrified imagination of the people might be forgiven for conceiving them fantastically; and it gratefully wove legends about the men who conquered such animals, and made the hamlets safe.

Certain passages of the poem are incongruously Christian, as if some kindly monkish editor had sought to preserve a heathen masterpiece by inserting here and there a pious line. But the tone and incidents are purely pagan. It was life and love and battle on the earth that interested these “fair women and brave men,” not some strifeless* paradise beyond the grave. At the outset, when the Danish king Scyld is buried in the Viking style, in a boat pushed crewless out to sea, the author adds: “Men cannot tell for a truth who received that burden.” But it was not a gay paganism. A somber tone pervades the poem, and enters even into the feasting in Hrothgar’s hall. Through the lilt and sigh of the flowing lines we catch the plaint of the gleeman’s harp.

Then Beowulf sat down on a seat by the wall … he talked of his wound, of the hurt sore unto death; he knew well that he had ended his days…. Then men bold in battle rode about the burial mound; They were minded to utter their grief, to lament the King, to make a chant and speak of the man; they exalted his heroic life, and praised his valorous deeds with all their strength…. They said that among the kings of the world he was the mildest of men and most kindly, most gentle to his people, and most eager for praise…. Thus it is fitting that a man should extol his friendly lord … and should love him heartily, when he must needs depart from his body and pass away.²²

Beowulf is probably the oldest extant poem in the literature of Britain; but Caedmon’s (d. 680) is the oldest name. We know him only through a pretty passage in Bede. In the monastery of Whitby, says the Ecclesiastical History, ²³ was a simple brother who found it so hard to sing that whenever his turn came to chant he fled to some hiding place. One night as he lay asleep in his stable lair, it seemed to him that an angel appeared and said: “Caedmon, sing me something!” The monk protested that he could not; the angel commanded; Caedmon tried, and was startled at his success. In the morning he recalled the song, and sang it; thereafter he lisped in numbers, and turned Genesis, Exodus, and the Gospels into verse “put together,” says Bede, “with very great sweetness and pricking of the heart.” Nothing remains of them except a few lines translated into Latin by Bede. A year later Cynewulf (b. o. 750), minstrel at a Northum -brian court, tried to realize the story by versifying divers religious narratives—“Christ,” “Andreas,” “Juliana”; but these works, contemporary with Beowulf, are by comparison dead with rhetoric and artifice.

Literary prose comes later than poetry in all literatures, as intellect matures long after fancy blooms; men talk prose for centuries “without knowing it,” before they have leisure or vanity to mold it into art. Alfred is the first clear figure in the prose literature of England; his translations and prefaces were eloquent through simple sincerity; and it was he who, by dint of editing and adding, transformed the “Bishop’s Roll,” kept by the clerks of Winchester cathedral, into the most vigorous and vivid sections of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle—the first substantial work of English prose. His teacher Asser may have written most of the Life of Alfred; perhaps it is a later compilation (c. 974);²⁴ in any event it is an early instance of the readiness with which Englishmen used English instead of Latin for works of history or theology, while the Continent still blushed to write such dignities in the “vulgar” speech.

Even amid poetry and war men and women found time and spirit to give form to significance, and beauty to things of use. Alfred established a school of art at Athelney, brought to it from all quarters monks skilled in arts and crafts, and “continued, during his frequent wars,” says Asser, “to teach his workers in gold, and his artificers of all kinds.”²⁵ Dunstan, not content with being both a statesman and a saint, worked cleverly in metal and gold, was a good musician, and built a pipe organ for his cathedral at Glastonbury. Art work in wood, metal, and cloisonné enamel was carried on; gem-cutters joined with carvers to make the jeweled and sculptured crosses of Ruthwell and Bewcastle (c. 700); a famous equestrian statue of King Cadwallo (d. 677) was cast in brass near Ludgate; women made coverlets and tapestries and embroideries “of a most delicate thread”;²⁶ the monks of Winchester illuminated with radiant color a tenth-century benedictional. Winchester itself and York built stone cathedrals as early as 635; Benedict Biscop brought the Lombard style to England from the church that he built at Wearmouth in 674; and Canterbury rebuilt in 950 the cathedral that had survived from Roman times. We know from Bede that Benedict Biscop’s church was adorned with paintings made in Italy, “so that all who entered, even if ignorant of letters, whichever way they turned, should either contemplate the ever-lovely aspect of Christ and His saints … or, having the Last Judgment before their eyes, might remember to examine themselves more strictly.”²⁷ In general the seventh century saw an exuberance of construction in Britain; the Anglo-Saxon Conquest was complete, the Danish had not begun; and architects, who had heretofore built in wood, now had the resources and spirit to raise great shrines in stone. Yet it must be confessed that Benedict imported his architects, glassmakers, and goldsmiths from Gaul; Bishop Wilfrid brought sculptors and painters from Italy to decorate his seventh-century church at Hexham; and the beautifully illuminated Gospel Book of Lindisfarne (c. 730) was the work of Irish monks transplanted by the eremitical or missionary zeal to that bleak isle off the Northumberland coast. The coming of the Danes ended this brief renascence; and not until the sound establishment of Cnut’s power did English architecture resume its climb to majesty.

3. Between Conquests: 1016–11066

Cnut was more than a conqueror; he was a statesman. His early reign was tarnished with cruelty: he banished the children of Edmund Ironsides, and had Edmund’s brother murdered to forestall an Anglo-Saxon restoration. But then, noting that the widow and sons of King Ethelred were alive at Rouen, he cut many knots by offering Emma his hand in marriage (1017). She was thirty-three, he twenty-three. She consented, and at one stroke Cnut secured a wife, an alliance with Emma’s brother the Duke of Normandy, and a safe throne. From that moment his reign became a blessing for England. He brought under discipline the disorderly nobles who had broken the unity and spirit of England. He protected the island from further invasion, and gave it twelve years of peace. He accepted Christianity, built many churches, raised a shrine at Assandun to commemorate the Anglo-Saxons, as well as the Danes, who had fought there, and himself made a pilgrimage to Edmund’s tomb. He promised to follow the existing laws and institutions of England, and kept his word with two exceptions: he insisted that county government, which had been debased by autocratic nobles, should be under his own appointees; and he replaced the archbishop with a lay minister as chief counselor to the Crown. He developed an administrative staff and civil service that gave unprecedented continuity to the government. After the insecure early years of his rule, nearly all his appointees were Englishmen. He labored constantly in the tasks of state, and repeatedly visited every part of his kingdom to supervise the administration of justice and the execution of the laws. He came in as a Dane, and died as a Englishman. He was King of Denmark as well as of England, and in 1028 he became also King of Norway; but it was from Winchester that he ruled this triple realm.

The Danish Conquest continued that long process of foreign invasion and racial mixture which culminated in the Norman Conquest and finally produced the English people. Celt and Gaul, Angle and Saxon and Jute, Dane and Norman, mingled their blood, in marriage or otherwise, to transform the undistinguished and uninitiative Briton of Roman days into the vocal buccaneers of Elizabeth’s time, and the silent world conquerors of later centuries. The Danes, like the Germans and the Norse, brought into England an almost mystic love of the sea, a willingness to accept its treacherous invitation to adventure and trade in distant lands. Culturally, the Danish invasions were a blight. Architecture marked time; the art of illumination decayed from 750 to 950; and the intellectual progress so promoted by Alfred was checked, even as in Gaul Norse raids were canceling the labors of Charlemagne.

Cnut might have repaired more of the damage his people had wrought had he been granted a longer life. But men wear out rapidly in war or government. Cnut died in 1035, aged forty. Norway at once threw off the Danish yoke; Harthacnut, Cnut’s son and appointed heir, had all he could do to protect Denmark against Norwegian invasion; another son, Harald Harefoot, ruled England for five years, then died; Harthacnut ruled it for two years, and passed away (1042). Before his death he summoned from Normandy the surviving son of Ethelred and Emma, and recognized this Anglo-Saxon stepbrother as heir to the English throne.

But Edward the Confessor (1042-66) was as much of a foreigner as any Dane. Carried to Normandy by his father at the age of ten, he had passed thirty years at the Norman court, brought up by Norman nobles and priests, and trained to a guileless piety. He brought to England his French speech, customs, and friends. These friends became high officials and prelates of the state, received royal grants, built Norman castles in England, showed their scorn for English language and ways, and began the Norman Conquest a generation before the Conqueror.

Only one Englishman could compete with them in influencing the mild and malleable King. Earl Godwin, governor of Wessex, and first counselor of the realm under Cnut, Harald, and Harthacnut, was a man of both wealth and wisdom, a master of patient diplomacy, of convincing eloquence and administrative skill; the first great lay statesman in English history. His experience in the government gave him an ascendancy over the King. His daughter Edith became Edward’s wife, and might have made Godwin grandfather to a king; but Edward begot no children. When Godwin’s son Tostig married Judith, daughter of the count of Flanders, and Godwin’s nephew Sweyn became ruler of Denmark, the Earl had forged by marriages a triple alliance that made him the strongest man in northern Europe, far more powerful than his King. Edward’s Norman friends roused him to jealousy; he deposed Godwin; the Earl fled to Flanders, while his son Harold went to Ireland and raised an army against the Confessor (1051). The English nobles, resenting the Norman ascendancy, invited Godwin to return, and pledged him the support of their arms. Harold invaded England, defeated the King’s troops, ravaged and plundered the southwest coast, and joined his father in an advance up the Thames. The populace of London rose to acclaim them; the Norman officials and prelates fled; a Witenagemot of English nobles and bishops gave Godwin a triumphant reception; and Godwin resumed his confiscated property and his political power (1052). A year later, exhausted with tribulation and victory, he died.

Harold was appointed Earl of Wessex, and succeeded in some measure to his father’s power. He was now thirty-one, tall, handsome, strong, gallant, reckless; merciless in war, generous in peace. In a whirlwind of bold campaigns he conquered Wales for England, and presented the head of the Welsh chieftain Gruffydd to the pleased and horrified King (1063). In a gentler phase of his impetuous career he poured out funds to build the abbey church at Waltham (1060), and to support the college that grew out of the cathedral school. All England beamed upon the romantic youth.

The great architectural event of Edward’s reign was the beginning (1055) of Westminster Abbey. While living in Rouen he had become familiar with the Norman style; now, in commissioning the abbey that was to be the shrine and tomb of England’s genius, he bade or let it be designed in Norman Romanesque, on the same lines as the magnificent abbey church which had been started only five years before at Jumièges; here again was a Norman conquest before William. Westminster Abbey was the beginning of an architectural efflorescence that would give England the finest Romanesque buildings in Europe.

In that abbey Edward was laid to rest early in the fateful year 1066. On January 6 the assembled Witenagemot elected Harold king. He had hardly been crowned when news came that William, Duke of Normandy, claimed the throne and was preparing war. Edward, said William, had in 1051 promised to bequeath him the English crown in gratitude for thirty years of protection in Normandy. Apparently the promise had been made,²⁸ but Edward, regretting or forgetting it, had, shortly before his death, recommended Harold as his successor; in any case such a promise had no validity unless approved by the Witan. But, said William, Harold, on a visit to him at Rouen (date now unknown), had accepted knighthood from him, had become William’s “man,” owed him submission according to feudal law, and had promised to recognize and support him as heir to Edward’s throne. Harold admitted this pledge.²⁹ But again no oath of his could bind the English nation; the representatives of that nation had freely chosen him for its king; and Harold now resolved to defend that choice. William appealed to the Pope; Alexander II, counseled by Hildebrand, condemned Harold as a usurper, excommunicated him and his adherents, and declared William the lawful claimant of the English throne; he blessed William’s proposed invasion, and sent him a consecrated banner and a ring containing, within a diamond, a hair of St. Peter’s head.³⁰ Hildebrand was glad to set a precedent for the papal disposition of thrones and deposition of kings; ten years later he would apply the precedent to Henry IV of Germany; and it would come in handy in 1213 with King John. Lanfranc, Abbot of Bec, joined William in calling the people of Normandy—indeed of all countries—to a holy war against the excommunicated king.

The sins of Harold’s wild youth were now visited upon his benevolent maturity. His brother Tostig, long since exiled by the Witan, had not been recalled by Harold come to power. Tostig now allied himself with William, raised an army in the north, and persuaded King Harald Hardrada of Norway to join him by promising him the English throne. In September, 1066, as William’s armada of 1400 vessels sailed from Normandy, Tostig and Hardrada invaded Northumberland. York surrendered to them, and Hardrada was there crowned King of England. Harold rushed up with what troops he had, and defeated the northern invaders at Stamford Bridge (September 25); in that battle Tostig and Hardrada died. Harold moved south with a diminished force far too small to pit against William’s host, and every adviser bade him wait. But William was burning and harrowing southern England, and Harold felt bound to defend the soil that he once had ravaged but now loved. At Senlac, near Hastings, the two armies met (October 14), and fought for nine hours. Harold, his eye pierced by an arrow, fell blinded with blood, and was dismembered by Norman knights: one cut off his head, another a leg, another scattered Harold’s entrails over the field. When the English saw their captain fallen they fled. So great were the butchery and chaos that the monks who were later commissioned to find Harold’s body could not discover him until they led to the scene Edith Swansneck, who had been his mistress. She identified her lover’s mutilated body, and the fragments were buried in the church at Waltham that he had built. On Christmas Day, 1066, William I was crowned King of England.

II. WALES: 325–1066

Wales had been won for Rome by Frontinus and Agricol A.D. 78. When the Romans retired from Britain, Wales resumed its freedom, and suffered its own kings. In the fifth century western Wales was occupied by Irish settlers; later Wales received thousands of Britons fleeing from the Anglo-Saxon conquerors of their island. The Anglo-Saxons stopped at the Welsh barrier, and called the unsubdued people Wealhas—“foreigners.” The Irish and the Britons found in Wales a kindred Celtic stock, and soon the three groups mingled as Cymri—“fellow countrymen”; this became their national name, and Cymru their name for their land. Like most Celtic peoples-Bretons, Cornish, Irish, the Gaels of northern Scotland—they based their social order almost wholly on the family and the clan, and so jealously that they resented the state, and looked with unappeasable distrust upon any individual or people of alien blood. Their clan spirit was balanced by uncalculating hospitality, their indiscipline by bravery, their hard life and climate by music and song and loyal friendship, their poverty by an imaginative sentiment that made every girl a princess, and every second man a king.

Only next to kings stood the bards. They were the soothsayers, historians, and royal counselors, as well as the poets, of their people. Two among them left enduring names—Taliesin and Aneurin, both of the sixth century; there were hundreds more; and the tales they spun crossed the Channel to Brittany to reach polished form in France. The bards constituted a poetic clerical caste; no one was admitted to their order except after strict training in the lore of their race. The candidate for admission was called a mabinog; the material he studied was mabinogion; hence the name Mabinogion for such of their tales as have survived.³¹ In their present form they are not older than the fourteenth century, but probably they go back to this period, when Christianity had not taken Wales. They are primitively simple, paganly animistic, and weird with strange animals and marvelous events; overcast with a somber certainty of exile, defeat, and death, yet in a mood of gentleness all the world away from the lust and violence of Icelandic Eddas, Norse sagas, and the Nibelungenlied. In the loneliness of Welsh mountains there grew a romantic literature of devotion to the nation, to woman, and, later, to Mary and Jesus, that shared in begetting chivalry, and those wondrous tales of Arthur and his valorous-amorous knights sworn to “break the heathen and uphold the Christ.”

Christianity came to Wales in the sixth century, and soon thereafter opened schools in the monasteries and cathedrals. The learned Bishop Asser, who served King Alfred as secretary and biographer, came from the town and cathedral of St. David’s in Pembrokeshire. These Christian shrines and settlements bore the brunt of pirate attacks from Normandy, until King Rhodri the Great (844-78) drove them off and gave the island a vigorous dynasty. King Hywel the Good (910-50) united all Wales, and provided it with a uniform code of laws. Gruffydd ap Llywelyn (1039-63) was too successful; when he defeated Mercia, the nearest of the English counties, Harold, the future king of England, proclaimed a war of preventive defense, and conquered Wales for Britain (1063).

III. IRISH CIVILIZATION: 461–1066

At the death of St. Patrick, and until the eleventh century, Ireland was divided into seven kingdoms: three in Ulster, the others Connaught, Leinster, Munster, Meath. Normally these kingdoms fought among themselves, for lack of transport to wider spheres of strife; but from the third century onward we hear of Irish raids and settlements on west British coasts. The chroniclers call these raiders Scots—apparently a Celtic word for wanderers; throughout this period “Scot” means Irishman. War was endemic: till 590 the women, till 804 the monks and priests, were required to fight alongside more ordinary warriors.³² A code of laws essentially similar to the “barbarian” codes of the Continent was administered by brehons—highly trained lawyer-judges who, as early as the fourth century, taught law schools and wrote legal treatises in the Gaelic tongue.³³ Ireland, like Scotland, missed conquest by Rome, and therefore missed the boon of Roman law and orderly government; law never quite succeeded in replacing vengeance with judgment, or passion with discipline. Government remained basically tribal, and only at moments achieved a national unity and scope.

The unit of society and economy was the family. Several families made a sept, several septs a clan, several clans a tribe. All members of a tribe were supposedly descended from a common ancestor. In the tenth century many families prefixed Ui or O’ (grandson) to a tribal name to indicate their descent; so the O’Neills claimed descent from Niall Glundubh, King of Ireland in 916. Many others assumed their father’s name, merely prefixing Mac—i.e., son. Most of the land in the seventh century was owned in common by clans or septs;³⁴ private property was limited to household goods;³⁵ but by the tenth century individual ownership had spread. Soon there was a small aristocracy holding large estates, a numerous class of free peasants, a small class of renters, a still smaller class of slaves.³⁶ Materially and politically the Irish in the three centuries after the coming of Christianity (461-750) were more backward than the English; culturally they were probably the most advanced of all the peoples north of the Pyrenees and the Alps.

This strange imbalance had many sources: the influx of Gallic and British scholars fleeing from the Germanic invasions of the fifth century, the growth of commercial contacts with Britain and Gaul, and the exemption of Ireland, before the ninth century, from foreign attack. Monks and priests and nuns opened schools of every scope and degree; one at Clonard, established in 520, had 3000 students (if we may believe patriotic historians);³⁷ there were others at Clonmacnois (544), Clonfert (550), and Bangor (560). Several gave a twelve-year course leading to the doctorate in philosophy, and including Biblical studies, theology, the Latin and Greek classics, Gaelic grammar and literature, mathematics and astronomy, history and music, medicine and law.³⁸ Poor scholars whose parents could not support them were maintained by public funds, for most students were preparing for the priesthood, and the Irish made every sacrifice to further that vocation. These schools continued the study of Greek long after knowledge of that language had almost disappeared from the other countries of Western Europe. Alcuin studied at Clonmacnois; in Ireland John Scotus Erigena learned the Greek that made him the marvel of the court of Charles the Bald in France.

The mood and literature of the age favored legend and romance. Here and there some minds turned to science, like the astronomer Dungal, or the geometer Fergil, who taught the sphericity of the earth. About 825 the geographer Dicuil reported the discovery of Iceland by Irish monks in 795, and exemplified the midnight day of the Irish summer by noting that one could then find light enough to pick the fleas from his shirt.³⁹ Grammarians were numerous, if only because Irish prosody was the most complicated of its time. Poets abounded, and held high state in society; usually they combined the functions of teacher, lawyer, poet, and historian. Grouped in bardic schools around some leading poet, they inherited many of the powers and prerogatives of the pre-Christian Druid priests. Such bardic schools flourished without a break from the sixth to the seventeenth century, usually supported by grants of land from Church or state.⁴⁰ The tenth century had four nationally known poets: Flann MacLonain, Kenneth O’Hartigan, Eochaid O’Flainn, and that MacLiag whom King Brian Boru made archollamh, or poet laureate.

In this age the sagas of Ireland took literary form. Much of their material antedated Patrick, but had been transmitted orally; now it was put into a running mixture of rhythmic prose and ballad verse; and though it has reached us only in manuscripts later than the eleventh century, it is the poets of this period who made it literature. One cycle of sagas commemorated the mythical ancestors of the Irish people. A “Fenian” or “Ossianic” cycle recounted in stirring stanzas the adventures of the legendary hero Finn Mac-Cumhail and his descendants the Fianna or Fenians. Most of these poems were ascribed by tradition to Finn’s son Ossian, who, we are informed, lived 300 years, and died in St. Patrick’s time after giving the saint a piece of his pagan mind. An “Heroic” cycle centered around the old Irish king Cuchulain, who encounters war and love in a hundred lusty scenes. The finest saga of this series told the story of Deirdre, daughter of Felim, King Conor’s leading bard. At her birth a Druid priest prophesies that she will bring many sorrows to her land of Ulster; the people cry out “Let her be slain,” but King Conor protects her, rears her, and plans to marry her. Day by day she grows in loveliness. One morning she sees the handsome Naoise playing ball with other youths; she retrieves a misthrown ball and hands it to him, and “he pressed my hand joyously.” The incident touches off her ripe emotions, and she begs her handmaid, “O gentle nurse, if you wish me to live, take a message to him, and tell him to come and talk with me secretly tonight.” Naoise comes, and drinks in her beauty to intoxication. On the following night he and his two brothers, Ainnle and Ardan, take the willing Deirdre out of the palace and across the sea to Scotland. A Scotch king falls in love with her, and the brothers hide her in the highlands. After some time King Conor sends a message: he will forgive them if they will come back to Erin. Naoise, longing for his native soil and youthful haunts, consents, though Deirdre warns him and foretells treachery. After reaching Ireland they are attacked by Conor’s soldiers; the brothers fight bravely, but are all killed; and Deirdre, insane with grief, flings herself upon the ground, drinks the blood of her dead lover, and sings a strange dirge:

On a day that the nobles of Alba [Scotland] were feasting…

To the daughter of the lord of Duntrone

Naoise gave a secret kiss.

He sent her a frisky doe,

A deer of the forest with a faun at its foot,

And he went aside to her on a visit

While returning from the host of Inverness.

But when I heard that,

My head filled with jealousy,

I launched my little skiff upon the waves;

I did not care whether I died or lived.

They followed me, swimming,

Ainnle and Ardan, who never uttered falsehood,

And they turned me in to land again,

Two who would subdue a hundred.

Naoise pledged me his word of truth,

And he swore in presence of his weapons, three times,

That he would never cloud my countenance again

Till he should go from me to the army of the dead.

Alas! if she were to hear this night

That Naoise was under cover in the clay,

She would weep most certainly,

And I, I would weep with her sevenfold.

The oldest version of “Deirdre of the Sorrows” ends with a powerful simplicity: “There was a large rock near. She hurled her head at the stone, so that she broke her skull and was dead.”⁴¹

Poetry and music were near allied in Ireland, as elsewhere in medieval life. Girls sang as they wove or spun or milked the cow; men sang as they plowed the field or marched to war; missionaries strummed the harp to muster an audience. The favorite instruments were the harp, usually of thirty strings, plucked with the finger tips; the timpan, an eight-string violin played with plectrum or bow; and the bagpipe, slung from the shoulder and inflated by the breath. Giraldus Cambrensis (1185) judged the Irish harpers the best he had ever heard—a high tribute from music-loving Wales.

The finest product of Irish art in this period was not the famous Ardagh chalice (c. 1000)—an astonishing union of 354 pieces of bronze, silver, gold, amber, crystal, cloisonné enamel, and glass; it was the “Book of Kells”—the Four Gospels in vellum, done by Irish monks at Kells in Meath, or on the isle of lona, in the ninth century, and now the prize possession of Trinity College, Dublin. Through the slow intercommunication of monks across frontiers, Byzantine and Islamic styles of illumination entered Ireland, and for a moment reached perfection there. Here, as in Moslem miniatures, human or animal figures played an insignificant role; none was worth half an initial. The spirit of this art lay in taking a letter, or a single ornamental motive, out of a background of blue or gold, and drawing it out with fanciful humor and delight till it almost covered the page with its labyrinthine web. Nothing in Christian illuminated manuscripts surpasses the Book of Kells. Gerald of Wales, though always jealous of Ireland, called it the work of angels masquerading as men.⁴²

As this golden age of Ireland had been made possible by freedom from the Germanic invasions that threw the rest of Latin Europe back by many centuries, so it was ended by such Norse raids as in the ninth and tenth centuries annulled in France and England the progress so laboriously made by Charlemagne and Alfred. Perhaps the news had reached Norway and Denmark—both still pagan—that the Irish monasteries were rich in gold, silver, and jewelry, and that the political fragmentation of Ireland forestalled united resistance. An experimental raid came in 795, did little damage, but confirmed the rumor of this unguarded prey. In 823 greater invasions plundered Cork and Cloyne, destroyed the monasteries of Bangor and Moville, and massacred the clergy. Thereafter raids came almost every year. Sometimes brave little armies drove them back, but they returned, and sacked monasteries everywhere. Bands of Norse invaders settled near the coast, founded Dublin, Limerick, and Waterford, and levied tribute from the northern half of the island. Their King Thorgest made St. Patrick’s Armagh his pagan capital, and enthroned his heathen wife on the altar of St. Kieran’s Church at Clonmacnois.⁴³ The Irish kings fought the invaders separately, but at the same time they fought one another. Malachi, King of Meath, captured Thorgest and drowned him (845); but in 851 Olaf the White, a Norwegian prince, established the kingdom of Dublin, which remained Norse till the twelfth century. An age of learning and poetry gave way to an era of ruthless war, in which Christian as well as pagan soldiers pillaged and fired monasteries, destroyed ancient manuscripts, and scattered the art of centuries. “Neither bard nor philosopher nor musician,” says an old Irish historian, “pursued his wonted profession in the land.”⁴⁴

At last a man appeared strong enough to unite the kingdoms into an Irish nation. Brian Borumha or Boru (941-1014) was brother to King Mahon of Munster, and headed the Dalgas clan. The brothers fought a Danish army near Tipperary (968) and destroyed them, giving no quarter; then they captured Limerick, and despatched every Northman they could find. But two kinglets—Molloy of Desmond and Donovan of Hy Carbery—fearing that the marching brothers would absorb their realms, entered into a league with the immigrant Danes, kidnaped Mahon, and slew him (976). Brian, now king, again defeated the Danes, and killed Molloy. Resolved to unify all Ireland, and rejecting no means to this end, Brian allied himself with the Danes of Dublin, overthrew with their aid the king of Meath, and was acknowledged monarch of all Ireland (1013). Enjoying peace after forty years of war, he rebuilt churches and monasteries, repaired bridges and roads, founded schools and colleges, established order and repressed crime; an imaginative posterity illustrated the security of this “King’s peace” by the story—often occurring elsewhere—how a lovely lass, richly jeweled, traveled across the country alone and unharmed. Meanwhile the Norse in Ireland raised another army, and marched against the aging king. He met them at Clontarf, near Dublin, on Good Friday, April 23, 1014, and defeated them; but his son Murrogh was killed in the battle, and Brian himself was slain in his tent.

For a time the harassed country recovered the luxuries of peace. In the eleventh century art and literature revived; the Book of Leinster and the Book of Hymns almost equaled the Book of Kells in splendor of illumination; historians and scholars flourished in the monastic schools. But the Irish spirit had not yet been tamed. The nation again divided into hostile kingdoms, and spent its strength in civil war. In 1172 a handful of adventurers from Wales and England found it a simple matter to conquer—another matter to rule—the “Island of Doctors and Saints.”

IV. SCOTLAND: 325–1066

Late in the fifth century a tribe of Gaelic Scotti from the north of Ireland migrated to southwestern Scotland, and gave their name first to a part, then to all, of the picturesque peninsula north of the Tweed. Three other peoples contested the possession of this ancient “Caledonia”: the Picts, a Celtic tribe, established above the Firth of Forth; the Britons, refugees from the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain, settled between the River Derwent and the Firth of Clyde; and the Angles or English between the River Tyne and the Firth of Forth. From all these the Scottish nation was formed: English in speech, Christian in religion, as fiery as the Irish, as practical as the English, as subtle and imaginative as any Celt.

Like the Irish, the Scotch were loath to relinquish their kinship organization, to replace the clan by the state. The intensity of their class conflicts was rivaled only by their proud loyalty to their clan, and their tenacious resistance to foreign foes. Rome failed to conquer them; on the contrary, neither Hadrian’s Wall between the Solway and the Tyne (A.D. 120), nor that of Antoninus Pius, sixty miles farther north between the firths of Forth and Clyde (140), nor the campaigns of Septimius Severus (208) or Theodosius (368) availed to end the periodical invasion of Britain by the hungry Picts. In 617 the Saxons under Edwin, King of Northumbria, captured the hill stronghold of the Picts, and named it Ed(w)inburgh. In 844 Kenneth Mac-Alpin united the Picts and Scots under his crown; in 954 the tribes recaptured Edinburgh, and made it their capital; in 1018 Malcolm II conquered Lothian (the region north of the Tweed), and merged it with the realm of the Picts and Scots. Celtic supremacy seemed assured; but the Danish invasions of England drove thousands of “English” into south Scotland, and poured a strong Anglo-Saxon element into the Scottish blood.

Duncan I (1034-40) gathered all four peoples—Picts, Scots, Celtic British, and Anglo-Saxons—into one kingdom of Scotland. Duncan’s defeat by the English at Durham gave an opening to his general Macbeth, who claimed the throne because his wife Gruoch was granddaughter of Kenneth III. Macbeth murdered Duncan (1040), reigned for seventeen years, and was murdered by Duncan’s son Malcolm III. Of seventeen kings who ruled Scotland from 844 to 1057, twelve died by assassination. It was a violent age of bitter struggle for food and water, freedom and power. In those dour years Scotland had little time for the frills and graces of civilization; three centuries were to pass before Scottish literature would begin. Norse raiders captured the Orkney Islands, the Faroes, the Shetlands, and the Hebrides; and Scotland lived ever under the threat of conquest by those fearless Vikings who were spreading their power and seed over the Western world.

V. THE NORTHMEN: 800—1066

1. The Kings’ Saga

Apparently the Northmen were Teutons whose ancestors had moved up through Denmark and across the Skaggerak and Kattegat into Sweden and Norway, displacing a Celtic population that had displaced a Mongolian people akin to the Laplanders and Eskimos.⁴⁵ An early chieftain, Dan Mikillati, gave his name to Denmark—Dan’s march or province; the ancient tribe of Suiones, described by Tacitus as dominating the great peninsula, left their name in Sweden (Sverige), and in many kings called Sweyn; Norway (Norge) was simply the northern way. Skane, the name given to Sweden by the elder Pliny, became in Latin Scandia, and begot the Scandinavia that now covers three nations of kindred blood and mutually intelligible speech. In all three countries the fertility of women, or the imagination of men, outran the fertility of the soil; the young or discontent took to their boats and prowled about the coasts for food, slaves, wives, or gold; and their hunger acknowledged no laws and no frontiers. The Norwegians overflowed into Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, and Greenland; the Swedes into Russia; the Danes into England and France.

Life’s brevity forbids the enumeration of gods or kings. Gorm (860-935) gave Denmark unity; his son Harald Bluetooth (945-85) gave it Christianity; Sweyn Forkbeard (985-1014) conquered England, and made Denmark for a generation one of the great powers of Europe. King Olaf Skottkonung (994-1022) made Sweden Christian, and Uppsala his capital. In 800 Norway was a conglomeration of thirty-one principalities, separated by mountains, rivers, or fjords, and each ruled by a warrior chief. About 850 one such leader, Halfdan the Black, from his capital at Trondheim, subdued most of the others, and became Norway’s first king. His son Harald Haarfager (860-933) was challenged by rebellious chieftains; the Gyda whom he wooed refused to marry him until he should conquer all Norway; he vowed never to clip or comb his hair till it was done; he accomplished it in ten years, married Gyda and nine other women, cut his hair, and received his distinguishing name—the Fair-haired.⁴⁶ One of his many sons, Haakon the Good (935-61), ruled Norway well for twenty-seven years; “peace lasted so long,” complained a Viking warrior, “that I was afraid I might come to die of old age, within doors on a bed.”⁴⁷ Another Haakon—“the Great Earl”—governed Norway ably for thirty years (965-95); but in his old age he offended the “bonders,” or free peasants, by taking their daughters as concubines, and sending them home after a week or two. The bonders called in Olaf Tryggvesson, and made him king.

Olaf, son of Tryggve, was a great grandson of Harald of the Fair Hair. He was “a very merry frolicsome man,” said Snorri of Iceland, “gay and social, very generous, and finical in his dress … stout and strong, the handsomest of men, excelling in bodily exercises every Northman that ever was heard of.”⁴⁸He could run across the oars outside his ship while men were rowing; could juggle three sharp-pointed daggers, could cast two spears at once, and “could cut equally well with either hand.”⁴⁹ Many a quarrel he had, and many an adventure. While in the British Isles he was converted to Christianity, and became its merciless advocate. When he was made King of Norway (995) he destroyed pagan temples, built Christian churches, and continued to live in polygamy. The bonders opposed the new religion fiercely, and demanded that Olaf should make sacrifice to Thor as in the ancient ritual; he agreed, but proposed to offer Thor the most acceptable sacrifice—the leading bonders themselves; whereupon they became Christians. When one of them, Rand, persisted in paganism, Olaf had him bound, and forced a serpent down his throat by burning the serpent’s tail; the viper made its way through Rand’s stomach and side, and Rand died.⁵⁰ Olaf proposed marriage to Sigrid, Queen of Sweden; she accepted, but refused to abandon her pagan faith; Olaf struck her in the face with his glove, saying, “Why should I care to have thee, an old faded woman, a heathen jade?” “This may some day be thy death,” said Sigrid. Two years later the kings of Sweden and Denmark, and Earl Eric of Norway, made war against Olaf; he was defeated in a great naval battle near Rügen; he leaped full-armed into the sea, and never rose again (1000). Norway was divided among the victors.

Another Olaf, called the Saint, reunited Norway (1016), restored order, gave righteous judgment, and completed the conversion of the land to Christianity. “He was a good and very gentle man,” says Snorri, “of little speech, and openhanded, but greedy of money,” and slightly addicted to concubines.⁵¹ One bonder who preferred paganism had his tongue cut out, another his eyes.⁵² The bonders conspired with King Cnut of Denmark and England, who came with fifty ships and drove Olaf from Norway (1028); Olaf returned with an army and fought for his throne at Stiklestad; he was defeated, and died of his wounds (1030); on the site posterity dedicated a cathedral to him as Norway’s patron saint. His son Magnus the Good (1035-47) recaptured the kingdom, and gave it good laws and government; his grandson Harald the Stern (1047-66) ruled Norway with merciless justice until the year when William of Normandy took England.

About 860 a band of Northmen from Norway or Denmark rediscovered Iceland, and were not quite displeased to find it so similar to their own land in mists and fjords. Norwegians fretting under the new absolutism of Harald Haarfager migrated to the island in 874; and by 934 it was as thickly settled as it would ever be before the Second World War. Each of the four provinces had its thing, or assembly; in 930 an allthing, or united parliament, was established—one of the earliest institutions in the history of representative government, making Iceland then the only fully free republic in the world. But the same vigor and independence of spirit that motivated the migration and molded this parliament limited the effectiveness of the common government and laws; powerful individuals, rooted on their great estates, became the law of their lands, and soon revived in Iceland the feuds that had made Norway so difficult for her kings. In the year 1000 the allthing formally adopted Christianity; but King Olaf the Saint was scandalized to hear that the Icelanders continued to eat horseflesh and practice infanticide. Perhaps because the winter nights were long and cold, a literature of myths and sagas grew up that apparently excelled in quantity and quality the like tales told in the homelands of the Norse.

Sixteen years after the rediscovery of Iceland, a Norwegian skipper, Gunnbjörn Ulfsson, sighted Greenland. About 985 Thorwald and his son Eric the Red established a Norwegian colony there. In 986 Bjerne Herjulfsson discovered Labrador; and in the year 1000 Leif, son of Eric the Red, landed on the American continent; we do not know whether it was Labrador or Newfoundland or Cape Cod. Leif Ericsson wintered in “Vinland” (wine land), and then returned to Greenland. In 1002 his brother Thorwald, with thirty men, spent a year in Vinland. An interpolation, not later than 1395, in the “Saga of Olaf Tryggvesson,” by Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241), tells of five separate expeditions by Norsemen to continental America between 985 and 1011. In 1477 Christopher Columbus, by his own account, sailed to Iceland, and studied its traditions of the new world.⁵³

2. Viking Civilization*

Social order among the Norse, as elsewhere, was based upon family discipline, economic co-operation, and religious belief. “In him who well considers,” says a passage in Beowulf, “nothing can stifle kinship.”⁵⁴ Un wanted children were exposed to die; but once accepted, the child received a judicious compound of discipline and love. There were no family names; each son merely added his father’s name to his own: Olaf Haraldsson, Magnus Olafsson, Haakon Magnusson. Long before Christianity came to them, the Scandinavians, in naming a child, poured water over him as a symbol of admission into the family.

Education was practical: girls learned the arts of the home, including the brewing of ale; boys learned to swim, ski, work wood and metal, wrestle, row, skate, play hockey (from Danish hoek, hook), hunt, and fight with bow and arrow, sword or spear. Jumping was a favorite exercise. Some Norwegians, fully armed and armored, could jump above their own height, or swim for miles; some could run faster than the fleetest horse.⁵⁵ Many children learned to read and write; some were trained in medicine or law. Both sexes sang lustily; a few in either sex played musical instruments, usually the harp; we read in the Elder Edda how King Gunnar could play the harp with his toes, and charm snakes with its tones.

Polygamy was practiced by the rich till the thirteenth century. Marriages were arranged by the parents, often through purchase; the free woman could veto such an arrangement,⁵⁶ but if she married against the will of her parents her husband was declared an outlaw, and might legally be slain by her relatives. A man could divorce his wife at will; but unless he gave good reason he too was subject to assassination by her family. Either mate might divorce the other for dressing like the opposite sex—as when the wife wore breeches, or the man wore a shirt open at the breast. A husband might kill with impunity—i.e., without provoking a blood feud—any man whom he caught in illicit relations with his wife.⁵⁷ Women worked hard, but they remained sufficiently delectable to stir men on to kill one another for their sakes; and men dominant in public life were, as everywhere, recessive at home. In general the position of woman was higher in pagan than in later Christian Scandinavia;⁵⁸ she was the mother not of sin but of strong brave men; she had one-third—after twenty years of marriage one-half—right in all wealth acquired by her husband; she was consulted by him in his business arrangements, and mingled freely with men in her home.

Work was held in honor, and all classes shared in it. Fishing was a major industry, and hunting was a necessity rather than a sport. Picture the power of will and toil that cleared the forests of Sweden, and tamed to tillage the frozen slopes of Norway’s hills; the wheat fields of Minnesota are the offspring of American soil crossed with Norwegian character. Large estates were few; Scandinavia has excelled in the wide distribution of land among a free peasantry. An unwritten insurance softened disaster: if a farmer’s house burned down, his neighbors joined him in rebuilding it; if his cattle were destroyed by disease or an “act of God,” they contributed to his flocks a number of animals equal to half his loss. Nearly every Northman was a craftsman, especially skilled in wood. The Norse were backward in using iron, which came to them only in the eighth century; but then they made a variety of strong and handsome tools, weapons, and ornaments of bronze, silver, and gold;⁵⁹ shields, damascened swords, rings, pins, harness were often objects of beauty and pride. Norse shipwrights built boats and warships not larger, but apparently sturdier, than those of antiquity; flat-bottomed for steadiness, sharp in the bow to ram the enemy; four to six feet deep, sixty to one hundred and eighty feet long; propelled partly by a sail, mostly by oars—ten, sixteen or sixty to a side; these simple vessels carried Norse explorers, traders, pirates, and warriors down the rivers of Russia to the Caspian and Black Seas, and over the Atlantic to Iceland and Labrador.

The Vikings divided themselves into jarls or earls, bondi or peasant proprietors, and thralls or slaves; and (like the guardians in Plato’s Republic) they sternly taught their children that each man’s class was a decree of the gods, which only the faithless would dare to change.⁶⁰ Kings were chosen from royal blood, the provincial governors from the jarls. Along with this frank acceptance of monarchy and aristocracy as natural concomitants of war and agriculture, went a remarkable democracy by which the landowners acted as legislators and judges in a local hus-thing or meeting of householders, a village mot, a provincial thing or assembly, and a national allthing or parliament. It was a government of laws and not merely of men; violence was the exception, judgment the rule. Feud revenge incarnadined the sagas, but even in that Viking Age of blood and iron the wergild was replacing private vengeance, and only the sea-rovers were men with no law but victory or defeat. Harsh punishments were used to persuade to order and peace men hardened by the struggle with nature; adulterers were hanged, or trodden to death by horses; incendiaries were burned at the stake; parricides were suspended by the heels next to a live wolf similarly hung; rebels against the government were torn asunder by horses driven apart, or were dragged to death behind a wild bull;⁶¹ perhaps in these barbarities the law had not yet replaced, but only socialized, revenge. Even piracy at last gave way to law; the robbers subsided into traders, and substituted wits for force. Much of the sea law of Europe is Norse in origin, transmitted through the Hanseatic League.⁶² Under Magnus the Good (1035-47) the laws of Norway were inscribed on a parchment called from its color the “Grey Goose”; this still survives, and reveals enlightened edicts for the control of weights and measuses, the policing of markets and ports, the state succor of the sick and the poor.⁶³

Religion helped law and the family to turn the animal into a citizen. The gods of the Teutonic pantheon were not mythology to the Norse, but actual divinities feared or loved, and intimately connected with mankind by a thousand miracles and amours. In the wonder and terror of primitive souls all the forces and major embodiments of nature had become personal deities; and the more powerful of these required a sedulous propitiation that did not stop short of human sacrifice. It was a crowded Valhalla: twelve gods and twelve goddesses; divers giants (Jotuns), fates (Norns), and Valkyries—messengers and ale-bearers of the gods; and a sprinkling of witches, elves, and trolls. The gods were magnified mortals, subject to birth, hunger, sleep, sickness, passion, sorrow, death; they excelled men only in size, longevity, and power. Odin (German Woden), the father of all the gods, had lived near the Sea of Azov in Caesar’s time; there he had built Asgard, or the Garden of the Gods, for his family and his counselors. Suffering from land hunger, he conquered north Europe. He was not unchallenged nor omnipotent; Loki scolded him like a fishwife,⁶⁴ and Thor quite ignored him. He wandered over the earth seeking wisdom, and bartered an eye for a drink at wisdom’s well; then he invented letters, taught his people writing, poetry, and the arts, and gave them laws. Anticipating the end of his earthly life, he called an assembly of Swedes and Goths, wounded himself in nine places, died, and returned to Asgard to live as a god.

In Iceland Thor was greater than Odin. He was the god of thunder, war, labor, and law; the black clouds were his frowning brows, the thunder was his voice, the lightning was his hammer flung from the skies. The Norse poets, perhaps already as skeptical as Homer, had much fun with him, like the Greeks with Hephaestus or Heracles; they represented him in all sorts of predicaments and toils; nevertheless he was so loved that nearly every fifth Icelander usurped his name—Thorolf, Thorwald, Thorstein…

Great in legend, minor in worship, was Odin’s son Baldur, “dazzling in form and feature … mildest, wisest, and most eloquent” of the gods;⁶⁵ the early missionaries were tempted to identify him with Christ. He had a terrible dream of his impending death, and told the gods of it; the goddess Frigga exacted an oath from all minerals, animals, and plants that none would injure him; his glorious body thereafter repelled all hurtful objects, so that the gods amused themselves by hurling at him stones and darts, axes and swords; all weapons were turned away, and left him scatheless. But Frigga had neglected to pry an oath of innocuousness from “a little shrub called mistletoe,” as being too feeble to hurt any man; Loki, the irreverent mischief-maker among the gods, cut off a twig of it, and persuaded a blind deity to throw it at Baldur; pierced with it, Baldur expired. His wife Nep died of a broken heart, and was burned on the same pyre with Baldur and his gorgeously caparisoned horse.⁶⁶

The Valkyries—“Choosers of the Slain”—were empowered to decree the death date of each soul. Those men who died basely were thrust down into the realms of Hel, the goddess of the dead; those who died in battle were led by the Valkyries to Valhalla—“Hall of the Chosen”; there, as favorite sons of Odin, they were reincarnated in strength and beauty to spend their days in manly battle and their nights in drinking ale. But (says late Norse mythology) the time came when the Jotuns—monstrous demons of disorder and destruction—declared war upon the gods, and fought with them to mutual extinction. In this Twilight of the Gods all the universe fell to ruin: not merely sun and planets and stars, but, at the last, Valhalla itself, and all its warriors and deities; only Hope survived—that in the movement of slow time a new earth would form, a new heaven, a better justice, and a higher god than Odin or Thor. Perhaps that mighty fable symbolized the victory of Christianity, and the hardy blows that two Olafs struck for Christ. Or had the Viking poets come to doubt—and bury—their gods?

It was a marvelous mythology, second only to the Greek in fascination. The oldest form in which it has come down to us is in those strange poems to which error has given the name of Edda.* In 1643 a bishop discovered in the Royal Library of Copenhagen a manuscript containing some old Icelandic poems; by a double mistake he called them the Edda of Saemund the Wise (c. 1056-1133), an Icelandic scholar-priest. It is now generally agreed that the poems were composed in Norway, Iceland, and Greenland by unknown authors at unknown dates between the eighth and twelfth centuries, that Saemund may have collected, but did not write, them, and that Edda was not their name. But time sanctions error as well as theft, and compromises by calling the poems the Poetic or Elder Edda. Most of them are narrative ballads of the old Scandinavian or Germanic heroes or gods. Here for the first time we meet with Sigurd the Volsung and other heroes, heroines, and villains destined to take more definite form in the Volsungasaga and the Nibelungenlied. The most powerful of the Edda poems is the Voluspa, wherein the prophetess Völva describes with somber and majestic imagery the creation of the world, its coming destruction, and its ultimate regeneration. In quite different style is “The High One’s Lay,” in which Odin, after meeting all sorts of conditions and men, formulates his maxims of wisdom, not always like a god:

Much too early I came to many places, or too late; the beer was not yet ready, or was already drunk.⁶⁷ … The best drunkenness is when everyone after it regains his reason.⁶⁸ … In a maiden’s words none should place faith, nor in a woman’s; for guile has been laid in their breasts;⁶⁹ … this I experienced when I strove to seduce that discreet maiden; … nor of that damsel gained I aught.⁷⁰ … At eve the day is to be praised, a sword after it is tested, a woman after she is cremated.⁷¹… Of the words that a man speaks to another he often pays the penalty⁷² … the tongue is the bane of the head.⁷³ Even in three words quarrel not with a worse man; often the better man yields, when the worse strikes.⁷⁴… He should rise early who covets another’s property or wife.⁷⁵ … Moderately wise should a man be, not over-wise…. Let no man know his destiny beforehand; thus will his mind be most free from care…A wise man’s heart is seldom glad.⁷⁶ … One’s home is best, small though it be⁷⁷ … best is one’s hearth, and the sight of the sun.⁷⁸

Probably the poems of the Elder Edda were preserved by word of mouth until the twelfth century, when they were put into writing. In the Viking Age letters were runes, as in north Germany and Anglo-Saxon England; these twenty-four symbols (literally, “mysteries”) constituted an alphabet roughly formed on Greek and Latin cursive scripts. Literature, however, could in that age dispense with letters; minstrel skalds composed, memorized, recited, and orally transmitted their lays of the Teutonic gods, and of that “Heroic Age” (from the fourth to the sixth century) when the Germanic peoples spread their power over Europe. Sturluson and others preserved some fragments of the lays, and the names of many skalds. The most famous of these was Sigvat Thordarsson, who served St. Olaf as court poet and candid counselor. Another, Egil Skallagrimsson (900-83), was the leading figure of his time in Iceland—a mighty warrior, an individualistic baron, a passionate poet. In his old age he lost his youngest son by drowning, and was about to kill himself with grief when his daughter persuaded him to write a poem instead. His Sonartorrek (“The Loss of the Son”) is a defiant denunciation of the god, whom he blames for the death; he regrets that he cannot find Odin and fight him as he has fought other enemies. Then a softer mood comes, as he reflects that the gods have given him not only sorrow but the gift of poesy; reconciled, he resolves to live, and resumes his high seat in the councils of his country.⁷⁹

The literature of Scandinavia in this period doubtless exaggerates the violence of Viking society, as journalism and history, luring the reader with the exceptional, miss the normal flow of human life. Nevertheless the hard conditions of early Scandinavia compelled a struggle for existence in which only men of the toughest fiber could survive; and a Nietzschean ethic of unscrupulous courage rose out of ancient customs of feud and revenge and the lawless piracy of ungoverned seas. “Tell me what faith you are of,” one Viking asked of another. “I believe in my own strength,” was the reply.⁸⁰ Gold Harald wanted the throne of Norway, and proposed to get it by force. His friend Haakon advised him: “Consider with thyself what thou art man enough to undertake; for to accomplish such a purpose requires a man bold and firm, who will stick at neither good nor evil to accomplish what is intended.”⁸¹Some of these men found such pleasure in battle as almost anesthetized their wounds; some went into a battle frenzy known as berserksgangr—“the berserk’s way”; the berserkers—“bear-shirters”—were champions who rushed into combat without shirts of mail, and fought and howled like animals, bit their shields in fury, and then, the battle over, fell into a coma of exhaustion.⁸² Only the brave would enter Valhalla; and all sins would be forgiven to him who died for his group in war.

So trained in hardship and wild games, the “men of the fjords” rowed out and conquered kingdoms for themselves in Russia, Pomerania, Frisia, Normandy, England, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, Italy, and Sicily. These ventures were not invasions by masses of soldiery like the Moslem hijad or the Magyar flood; they were the reckless sallies of mere handfuls of men, who thought all weakness criminal and all strength good, who hungered for land, women, wealth, and power, and felt a divine right to share in the fruits of the earth. They began like pirates and ended like statesmen; Rollo gave a creative order to Normandy, William the Conqueror to England, Roger II to Sicily; they mingled their fresh blood of the north, like an energizing hormone, with that of peoples made torpid by rural routine. History seldom destroys that which does not deserve to die; and the burning of the tares makes for the next sowing a richer soil.

VI. GERMANY: 566–1106

1. The Organization of Power

The Norse irruptions were the final phase of those barbarian invasions that had stemmed from Germany five centuries before, and had shattered the Roman Empire into the nations of Western Europe. What had become of the Germans who had remained in Germany?

The exodus of great tribes—Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, Franks, Lombards—left Germany underpopulated for a time; the Slavic Wends moved westward from the Baltic states to fill the vacuum; and by the sixth century the Elbe was the ethnic, as it is at present the political, frontier between the Slavic and the Western world. West of the Elbe and the Saale were the surviving German tribes: Saxons in north central Germany, East Franks along the lower Rhine, Thuringians between them, Bavarians (once Marcomanni) along the middle Danube, and Swabians (once Suevi) along and between the upper Rhine and upper Danube, and along the eastern Jura and the northern Alps. There was no Germany, only German tribes. Charlemagne for a time gave them the unity of conquest, and the essentials of a common order; but the collapse of the Carolingian Empire loosened these bonds; and until Bismarck tribal consciousness and local particularism fought every centralizing influence, and weakened a people uncomfortably shut in by enemies, the Alps, and the sea.

The Treaty of Verdun (843) had in effect made Louis or Ludwig the German, grandson of Charlemagne, the first king of Germany. The Treaty of Mersen (870) gave him additional territory, and defined Germany as the land between the Rhine and the Elbe, plus part of Lorraine, and the bishoprics of Mainz, Worms, and Speyer. Louis was a statesman of the first order, but he had three sons; and on his death (876) his realm was divided among them. After a decade of chaos, during which the Northmen raided the Rhine cities, Arnulf, illegitimate offspring of Louis’ son Carloman, was elected king of “East Francia” (887), and drove back the invaders. But his successor, Louis “the Child” (899-911), proved too young and weak to hold back the Magyars, who ravaged Bavaria (900), Carinthia (901), Saxony (906), Thuringia (908), and Alemannia (909). The central government failed to protect these provinces; each had to provide its own defense; the provincial dukes organized armies by giving lands in fief to retainers who paid in military service. The forces so raised gave the dukes virtual independence of the crown, and established a feudal Germany. On the death of Louis the nobles and prelates, successfully claiming the right of choosing the king, gave the throne to Conrad I, Duke of Franconia (911-18). Conrad spent himself in strife with Duke Henry of Saxony, but had the wit to recommend Henry as his successor. Henry I, called “the Fowler” because of his love of hunting, drove back the Slavic Wends to the Oder, fortified Germany against the Magyars, defeated them in 933, and prepared, by his patient labors, for the achievements of his son.

Otto I the Great (936-73) was the Charlemagne of Germany. He was twenty-four at his accession, but was already a king in bearing and ability. Sensing the value of ceremony and symbolism, he persuaded the dukes of Lorraine, Franconia, Swabia, and Bavaria to act as his attendants in his solemn coronation at Aachen by Archbishop Hildebert. Later the dukes rebelled against his growing power, and induced his younger brother Henry to join in a plot to depose-him; Otto discovered and suppressed the conspiracy, and forgave Henry, who conspired again and was again forgiven. The subtle King gave new duchies to his friends and relatives, and gradually subordinated the dukes; later monarchs would not inherit his resolution and skill, and much of medieval Germany was consumed in conflicts between feudalism and royalty. In this contest the German prelates sided with the King, and became his administrative aides and counselors, sometimes his generals. The King appointed bishops and archbishops as he named other officials of the government; and the German Church became a national institution, only loosely attached to the papacy. Using Christianity as a unifying force, Otto fused the German tribes into a powerful state.

On the urging of his bishops, Otto attacked the Wends, and sought to convert them to Christianity by the sword. He compelled the king of Denmark and the dukes of Poland and Bohemia to accept him as their feudal suzerain. Aspiring to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, he welcomed the invitation of Adelaide, the pretty widow of King Lothaire of Italy, to rescue her from the indignities to which she had been subjected by the new King Berengar II. Otto combined politics deftly with romance: he invaded Italy, married Adelaide, and allowed Berengar to retain his kingdom only as a fief of the German crown (951). The Roman aristocracy refused to acknowledge a German as emperor and therefore as master of Italy; now began a contest that would last for three centuries. The rebellion of his son Ludolf and his son-in-law Conrad called Otto back to Germany, lest in trying to become emperor he should cease to be king. When the Magyars again invaded Germany (954), Ludolf and Conrad welcomed them, and supplied them with guides. Otto put down the rebellion, forgave Ludolf, reorganized his army, and so decisively defeated the Magyars at the Lechfeld, near Augsburg (955), that Germany won a long period of security and peace. Otto now devoted himself to internal affairs—restored order, suppressed crime, and for a time created a united Germany, the most prosperous state of its time.

Imperial opportunity returned when Pope John XII appealed for his aid against Berengar (959). Otto invaded Italy with a strong force, entered Rome peaceably, and was crowned Roman Emperor of the West by John XII in 962. The Pope, regretting this action, complained that Otto had not fulfilled a promise to restore the Ravenna exarchate to the papacy. Otto took the extreme step of marching into Rome, summoning a synod of Italian bishops, and persuading it to depose John and make a layman Pope as Leo VIII (963). The papal territory was now confined to the duchy of Rome and the Sabine region; the rest of central and northern Italy was absorbed into a Holy Roman Empire that became an appanage of the German crown. From these events German kings would conclude that Italy was part of their inheritance; and the popes would conclude that no man could become Roman emperor of the West except by papal coronation.

Otto, nearing death, forestalled disorder by having his son Otto II crowned coemperor by Pope John XIII (967); and he secured as his son’s wife The ophano, daughter of Romanus II the Byzantine Emperor (972); Charlemagne’s dream of a marital union of the two empires was transiently made real. Then, old in deeds but still only sixty years of age, Otto passed away (973), and all Germany mourned him as its greatest king. Otto II (973-83) spent himself in efforts to add southern Italy to his realm, and died prematurely in the attempt. Otto III (983-1002) was then a boy of three; his mother Theophano and his grandmother Adelaide ruled as regents for eight years. Theophano, in her eighteen years of influence, brought something of Byzantine refinement to the German court, and stimulated the Ottoman renaissance in letters and arts.

At the age of sixteen (996) Otto III began to rule in his own name. Influenced by Gerbert and other churchmen, he proposed to make Rome his capital, and unite all Christendom under a restored Roman Empire, ruled jointly by emperor and pope. The nobles and populace of Rome and Lombardy interpreted the plan as a conspiracy to establish a German-Byzantine rule over Italy; they resisted Otto, and established a “Roman Republic”; Otto suppressed it, and executed its leader Crescentius. In 999 he made Gerbert Pope; but the twenty-two years of Otto’s life, and the four years of Gerbert’s papacy, proved too brief for the implementation of his policy. Half a saint but in some measure a man, Otto fell in love with Stephania, widow of Crescentius; she consented to be his mistress and poisoner; the young king, feeling death in his veins, became a weeping penitent, and died at Viterbo at the age of twenty-two.⁸³

Henry II (1002-24), last of the Saxon line of German kings, labored to restore the power of the monarch in Italy and Germany, where the reigns of two boys had strengthened the dukes and emboldened neighboring states. Conrad II (1024-39), beginning the Franconian or Salian line of emperors, pacified Italy, and added to Germany the kingdom of Burgundy or Aries. Needing funds, he sold bishoprics for sums so large that his conscience irked him; he swore never again to take money for an ecclesiastical appointment, and “almost succeeded in keeping his oath.”⁸⁴ His son Henry III (1039-56) brought the new empire to its zenith. On the “Day of Indulgence,” at Constance in 1043, he offered pardon to all those who had injured him, and exhorted his subjects to renounce all vengeance and hatred. For a decade his preaching and example—perhaps also his power—reduced the feuds of the dukes, and co-operated with the contemporary “Truce of God” to bring a brief golden age to Central Europe. He patronized learning, founded schools, and completed the cathedrals of Speyer, Mainz, and Worms. But he was no saint pledged to eternal peace. He warred with Hungary till it recognized him as its feudal suzerain. He deposed three rival claimants to the papacy, and appointed two successive popes. In all Europe no other power equaled his. In the end he pushed his authority to an extreme that aroused opposition among both the prelates and the dukes, but he died before the storm, and bequeathed to Henry IV a hostile papacy and a troubled realm.

Henry was four when crowned king at Aachen, six at his father’s death. His mother and two archbishops served as regents till 1065; then the fifteen-year-old boy was declared of age, and found himself vested with an imperial power that must have turned any youthful head. He came naturally to believe in absolute monarchy, and sought to rule accordingly; soon he was at odds or war with one or another of the great nobles who had in his helplessness almost dismembered his realm. The Saxons resented the taxes laid upon them, and refused to restore the crown lands that he claimed; for fifteen years (1072-88) he fought an intermittent war with them; when he defeated them in 1075 he compelled their whole force, including its proudest nobles and its martial bishops, to walk disarmed and barefoot between the files of his army, and lay their act of surrender at his feet. In that same year Pope Gregory VII issued a decree against lay investiture—the appointment of bishops or abbots by laymen. Henry, standing on the precedents of a century, never doubted his right to make such appointments; he fought Gregory for ten years in diplomacy and war, and literally to the death, in one of the bitterest conflicts in medieval history. The rebellious nobles of Germany took advantage of the quarrel to strengthen their feudal power, and the humiliated Saxons renewed their revolt. Henry’s sons joined the opposition; and in 1098 the Diet of Mainz declared Henry V king. The son took the father prisoner, and compelled him to abdicate (1105); the father escaped, and was forming a new army when he died at Liége, in the fifty-seventh year of his age (1106). Pope Paschal II could not grant Christian burial to an unrepentant excommunicate; but the people of Liége, defying Pope and King, gave Henry IV a royal funeral, and buried him in their cathedral.

2. German Civilization: 566–1106

Through these five centuries the labor of men and women tilling the soil and rearing children conquered Germany for civilization. The forests were fearfully immense, harbored wild animals, impeded communication and unity; nameless heroes of the woodland felled the trees—perhaps too recklessly. In Saxony the struggle against the self-regenerating forest and the infectious marsh went on for a thousand years, and only the thirteenth century gave man the victory. Generation after generation the hardy, hearty peasants pushed back the beasts and the wilderness, tamed the land with mattock and plow, planted fruit trees, herded flocks, tended vines, and consoled their loneliness with love and prayer, flowers and music and beer. Miners dug salt, iron, copper, lead, and silver from the earth; manorial, monastic, and domestic handicraft wedded Roman to German skills; trade flowed ever more busily over the rivers and into the North and Baltic Seas. At last the great campaign was won; barbarism still lurked in the laws and the blood; but the gap had been spanned between the tribal chaos of the fifth century and the Ottonian renaissance of the tenth. From 955 to 1075 Germany was the most prosperous country in Europe, rivaled only by that northern Italy which had received law and order from German kings. Old Roman towns like Trier, Mainz, and Cologne carried on; new cities grew around the episcopal seats at Speyer, Magdeburg, and Worms. About 1050 we begin to hear of Nuremberg.

The Church was the educator, as well as the administrator, of Germany in this age. Monastic schools—really colleges—were opened at Fulda, Tegernsee, Reichenau, Gandersheim, Hildesheim, and Lorsch. Rabanus Maurus (776?–856), after studying under Alcuin at Tours, became abbot of the great monastery at Fulda in Prussia, and made its school famous throughout Europe as the mother of scholars and of twenty-two affiliated institutions. He extended the curriculum to include many sciences, and reproved the super stitions that ascribed natural events to occult powers.⁸⁵ The library at Fulda grew to be one of the largest in Europe; to it we owe Suetonius, Tacitus, and Ammianus Marcellinus. An uncertain tradition attributes to Rabanus the majestic hymn, Veni Creator Spiritus, which is sung at the consecration of popes, bishops, or kings.⁸⁶ St. Bruno, who was both the Duke of Lorraine and the Archbishop of Cologne, and became imperial chancellor under Otto the Great, opened a school in the royal palace to train an administrative class; he brought scholars and books from Byzantium and Italy, and himself taught Greek and philosophy.

The German language had as yet no literature; nearly all writing was done by clerics, and in Latin. The greatest German poet of the age was Walafrid Strabo (809-49), a Swabian monk at Reichenau. For a time he was tutor to Charles the Bald in the palace of Louis the Pious at Aachen; he found an enlightened patron in Louis’ wife, the beautiful and ambitious Judith. Returning to Reichenau as its abbot, he gave himself to religion, poetry, and gardening; and in a delightful poem De cultura hortorum—On the Care of Gardens—he described one by one the herbs and flowers that he tended so fondly.

His greatest rival in the literature of Germany in these centuries was a nun. Hroswitha was only one of many German women who in this age were distinguished for culture and refinement. Born about 935, she entered the Benedictine convent at Gandersheim. The standard of instruction must have been higher than we should have expected, for Hroswitha became familiar with the poets of pagan Rome, and learned to write Latin fluently. She composed some lives of saints in Latin hexameters, and a minor epic about Otto the Great. But the works that make her memorable are six Latin prose comedies in the manner of Terence. Her purpose, she tells us, was “to make the small talent vouchsafed her by Heaven give forth, under the hammer of devotion, a faint sound to the praise of God.”⁸⁷ She mourns the pagan indecency of Latin comedy, and proposes to offer a Christian substitute; but even her plays turn on a profane love that hardly conceals a warm undercurrent of physical desire. In the best of her brief dramas, Abraham, a Christian anchorite leaves his hermitage to care for an orphaned niece. She elopes with a seducer, is soon deserted, and becomes a prostitute. Abraham traces her, disguises himself, and enters her chamber. When she kisses him she recognizes him, and recoils in shame. In a tender and poetic colloquy he persuades her to abandon her life of sin, and return to their home. We do not know whether these dramatic sketches were ever performed. The modern drama developed not out of such echoes of Terence, but out of the ceremonies and “mysteries” of the Church, crossed with the farces of wandering mimes.

As the Church gave a home to poetry, drama, and historiography, so she provided subjects and funds for art. German monks, stirred by Byzantine and Carolingian examples, and helped by the patronage of German princesses, produced in this age a hundred illuminated manuscripts of high excellence. Bernewald, Bishop of Hildesheim from 993 to 1022, was almost a summary of the culture of his age: a painter, a calligrapher, a metalworker, a mosaicist, an administrator, a saint. He made his city an art center by assembling artists of diverse provenance and skills; with their help, but also with his own hands, he fashioned jeweled crosses, gold and silver candlesticks chased with animal and floral forms, and a chalice set with antique gems, one of which represented the three Graces in their wonted nudity.⁸⁸ The famous bronze doors which his artists made for his cathedral were the first historiated metal doors of the Middle Ages to be solidly cast instead of being composed of flat panels affixed to wood. Domestic architecture showed no signs yet of the lovely forms that would grace German cities in the Renaissance; but church architecture now graduated from wood to stone, imported from Lombardy Romanesque ideas of transept, choir, apse, and towers, and began the cathedrals of Hildesheim, Lorsch, Worms, Mainz, Trier, Speyer, and Cologne. Foreign critics complained of flat timbered ceilings and excessive external decoration in this “Rhenish Romanesque”; but these churches well expressed the solid strength of the German character, and the spirit of an age laboriously struggling up to civilization.

CHAPTER XXI

Christianity in Conflict

529–1085

I. ST. BENEDICT: C. 480–543

THE year 529, which saw the closing of the Athenian schools of philosophy, saw also the opening of Monte Cassino, the most famous monastery in Latin Christendom. Its founder, Benedict of Nursia, was born at Spoleto, apparently of the dying Roman aristocracy. Sent to Rome for an education, he was scandalized by the sexual license there, or, some say, he loved and lost.¹ At the age of fifteen he fled to a remote spot five miles from Subiaco, in the Sabine hills; made his cell in a cave at the foot of a precipice; and lived there for some years as a solitary monk. The Dialogues of Pope Gregory I tell how Benedict fought valiantly to forget the woman

the memory of whom the wicked spirit put into his mind, and by that memory so mightily inflamed with concupiscence the soul of God’s servant… that, almost overcome with pleasure, he was of a mind to forsake the wilderness. But suddenly, assisted by God’s grace, he came to himself; and seeing many thick briers and nettle bushes growing hard by, off he cast his apparel, and threw himself into the midst of them, and there wallowed so long that when he rose up all his flesh was pitifully torn; and so by the wounds of his body he cured the wounds of his soul.²

After he had lived there for some years, and his steadfastness had won him fame, he was importuned by the monks of a nearby monastery to be their abbot. He warned them that his rule would be severe; they persisted, and he went with them; after a few months of his stern regimen they put poison in his wine. He resumed his solitary life; but young devotees came to live near him and solicit his guidance; fathers brought their sons, even from Rome, to be taught by him; by 520 twelve little monasteries, each with twelve monks, had risen round his cave. When of even these monks many found his rule too strict, he removed with the most ardent of his followers to Monte Cassino, a hill 1715 feet above sea level, overlooking the ancient town of Casinum, forty miles northwest of Capua. There he demolished a pagan temple, founded (c. 529) a monastery, and formulated that Benedictine Rule which was to guide most monasteries in the West.

The monks of Italy and France had erred in imitating the solitary asceticism of the East; both the climate and the active spirit of Western Europe made such a regimen discouragingly difficult, and led to many relapses. Benedict did not criticize the anchorites, nor condemn asceticism, but he thought it wiser to make asceticism communal, not individual; there should be no show or rivalry in it; at every step it was to be under an abbot’s control, and stop short of injury to health or mind.

Hitherto, in the West, no vows had been demanded of those who entered the monastic life. Benedict felt that the aspirant should serve a novitiate, and learn by experience the austerities to be required of him; only after such a trial might he take the vows. Then, if he still wished, he was to pledge himself, in writing, to “the perpetuity of his stay, the reformation of his manners, and obedience”; and this vow, signed and witnessed, was to be laid upon the altar by the novice himself in a solemn ritual. Thereafter the monk must not leave the monastery without the abbot’s permission. The abbot was to be chosen by the monks, and was to consult them on all matters of importance; but the final decision was to rest with him, and they were to obey him in silence and humility. They were to speak only when necessary; they were not to jest or laugh loudly; they were to walk with their eyes on the ground. They were to own nothing, “neither a book, nor tablets, nor a pen—nothing at all…All things shall be held in common.”³ Conditions of previous wealth or slavery were to be ignored and forgotten. The abbot

shall make no distinction of persons in the monastery…. A freeborn man shall not be preferred to one coming from servitude, unless there be some other and reasonable cause. For whether we are bond or free, we are all one in Christ…. God is no respecter of persons.⁴

Alms and hospitality were to be given within the means of the monastery, to all who asked for it. “All guests who come shall be received as though they were Christ.”⁵

Every monk must work—in the fields or shops of the monastery, in the kitchen, about the house, copying manuscripts…. Nothing was to be eaten till noon, and in Lent not till sundown. From mid-September to Easter there was to be but one meal a day; in the summer months, two, for then the days were long. Wine was allowed, but no flesh of any four-footed beast. Work or sleep was to be frequently interrupted with communal prayer. Influenced by Eastern exemplars, Benedict divided the day into “canonical hours”—hours of prayer as established by canon or rule. The monks were to rise at two A.M., repair to the chapel, and recite or sing “nocturns”—scriptural readings, prayers, and psalms; at dawn they gathered for “matins” or “lauds”; at six for “prime”—the first hour; at nine for “tierce”—the third; at noon for “sext”—the sixth; at three for “none”—the ninth; at sunset for vespers—the evening hour; at bedtime for “compline”—the completion. Bedtime was nightfall; the monks almost dispensed with artificial light. They slept in their clothes, and seldom bathed.⁶

To these specific regulations Benedict added some, general counsels of Christian perfection:

1. In the first place, to love the Lord God with the whole heart, the whole soul, the whole strength. 2. Then one’s neighbor as oneself. 3. Then not to kill … nor commit adultery … nor steal… nor covet … nor bear false witness…. 8. To honor all men…. 11. To chasten the body… 13. To love fasting. 14. To relieve the poor. 15. To clothe the naked. 16. To visit the sick…. 30. Not to do injuries, and to bear them patiently…. 31. To love one’s enemies. … 53. Not to be fond of much talking. … 61. Not to desire to be called a saint… but to be one…. 71. After a disagreement to be reconciled before the going down of the sun. 72. And never to despair of the mercy of God.⁷

In an age of war and chaos, of doubt and wandering, the Benedictine monastery was a healing refuge. It took dispossessed or ruined peasants, students longing for some quiet retreat, men weary of the strife and tumult of the world, and said to them: “Give up your pride and freedom, and find here security and peace.” No wonder a hundred similar Benedictine monasteries rose throughout Europe, each independent of the rest, all subject only to the pope, serving as communistic isles in a raging individualistic sea. The Benedictine Rule and order proved to be among the most enduring creations of medieval man. Monte Cassino itself is a symbol of that permanence. Lombard barbarians sacked it in 589; the Lombards retired; the monks returned. The Saracens destroyed it in 884; the monks rebuilt it; earthquake ruined it in 1349; the monks restored it; French soldiery pillaged it in 1799; the shells and bombs of the Second World War leveled it to the ground in 1944. Today (1948) the monks of St. Benedict, with their own hands, are building it once more. Succisa virescit: cut down, it blooms again.

II. GREGORY THE GREAT: 540?-604

While Benedict and his monks peacefully worked and prayed at Monte Cassino, the Gothic War (536-53) passed up and down Italy like a withering flame, leaving disorder and poverty in its wake. Urban economy was in chaos. Political institutions lay in ruins; in Rome no secular authority survived except that of imperial legates weakly supported by unpaid and distant troops. In this collapse of worldly powers the survival of ecclesiastical organization appeared even to the emperors as the salvation of the state. In 554 Justinian promulgated a decree requiring that “fit and proper persons, able to administer the local government, be chosen as governors of the provinces by the bishops and chief persons of each province.”⁸ But Justinian’s corpse was hardly cold when the Lombard invasion (568) subjected northern Italy again to barbarism and Arianism, and threatened the whole structure and leadership of the Church in Italy. The crisis called forth a man, and history once more testified to the influence of genius.

Gregory was born at Rome three years before Benedict’s death. He came of an ancient senatorial family, and his youth was spent in a handsome palace on the Caelian Hill. On the death of his father he fell heir to a large fortune. He rose rapidly in the ordo honorum, or sequence of political plums; at thirty-three he was prefect—as we should say, mayor—of Rome. But he had no taste for politics. Having finished his year of office, and apparently convinced by the condition of Italy that the ever-heralded end of the world was at hand,⁹ he used the greater part of his fortune to found seven monasteries, distributed the rest in alms to the poor, laid aside all vestiges of his rank, turned his palace into the monastery of St. Andrew, and became its first monk. He subjected himself to extreme asceticism, lived for the most part on raw vegetables and fruits, and fasted so often that when Holy Saturday came, on which fasting was pre-eminently enjoined, it seemed that another day of abstinence would kill him. Yet the three years that he spent in the monastery were always recalled by him as the happiest of his life.

Out of this peace he was drawn to serve Pope Benedict I as “seventh deacon”; and in 579 he was sent by Pope Pelagius II as ambassador to the imperial court at Constantinople. Amid the wiles of diplomacy and the pomp of palaces he continued to live like a monk in habit, diet, and prayer;¹⁰ nevertheless he gained some helpful experience of the world and its chicanery. In 586 he was recalled to Rome, and became Abbot of St. Andrew’s. In 590 a terrible bubonic plague decimated the population of Rome; Pelagius himself was a victim; and at once the clergy and people of the city chose Gregory to succeed him. Gregory was loath to leave his monastery, and wrote to the Greek emperor asking him to refuse confirmation of the election; the city prefect intercepted the letter; and as Gregory was preparing flight he was seized and brought by force to St. Peter’s, and there was consecrated Pope; or so we are told by another Gregory.¹¹

He was now fifty, and already bald, with large head, dark complexion, aquiline nose, sparse and tawny beard; a man of strong feeling and gentle speech, of imperial purposes and simple sentiment. Austerities and responsibilities had ruined his health; he suffered from indigestion, slow fever, and gout. In the papal palace he lived as he had in the monastery—dressed in a monk’s coarse robe, eating the cheapest foods, sharing a common life with the monks and priests who aided him.¹² Usually absorbed in problems of religion and the state, he could unbend into words and deeds of paternal affection. A wandering minstrel appeared at the gate of the palace with organ and monkey; Gregory bade the man enter, and gave him food and drink.¹³ Instead of spending the revenues of the Church in building new edifices, he used them in charity, in gifts to religious institutions throughout Christendom, and in redeeming captives of war. To every poor family in Rome he distributed monthly a portion of corn, wine, cheese, vegetables, oil, fish, meat, clothing, and money; and every day his agents brought cooked provisions to the sick or infirm. His letters, stern to negligent ecclesiastics or to political potentates, are jewels of sympathy to persons in distress: to a peasant exploited on Church lands, to a slave girl wishing to take the veil, to a noble lady worried about her sins. In his conception the priest was literally a pastor, a shepherd caring for his flock, and the good Pope had every right to compose his Liber pastoralis curae (590), a manual of advice to bishops, which became a Christian classic. Though always ailing and prematurely old, he spent himself in ecclesiastical administration, papal politics, agricultural management, military strategy, theological treatises, mystic ecstasies, and a solicitous concern with a thousand details of human life. He chastened the pride of his office with the humility of his creed; he called himself, in the first of his extant epistles, servus servorum Dei, “servant of the servants of God”; and the greatest popes have accepted the noble phrase.

His administration of the Church was marked by economic wisdom and stern reform. He struggled to suppress simony and concubinage in the clergy. He restored discipline in the Latin monasteries, and regulated their relations with the secular clergy and the pope. He improved the canon of the Mass, and perhaps contributed to the development of “Gregorian” chant. He checked exploitation on the papal estates, advanced money to tenant farmers, and charged no interest. But he collected due revenues promptly, slyly offered rent reductions to converted Jews, and received, for the Church, legacies of land from barons frightened by his sermons on the approaching end of the world.¹⁴

Meanwhile he met the ablest rulers of his day in political duels, won often, sometimes lost, but in the end left the power and prestige of the papacy, and the “Patrimony of Peter” (i.e., the Papal States in central Italy) immensely extended and enhanced. He formally acknowledged, but in practice largely ignored, the sovereignty of the Eastern emperor. When the duke of Spoleto, at war with the Imperial exarch of Ravenna, threatened Rome, Gregory signed a peace with the duke without consulting the exarch or the emperor. When the Lombards besieged Rome Gregory shared in organizing defense.

He mourned every minute given to earthly concerns, and apologized to his congregation for his inability to preach comforting sermons amid the worldly cares that troubled his mind. In the few years of peace allowed him he turned happily to the task of spreading the Gospel through Europe. He brought the rebellious bishops of Lombardy to submission, restored orthodox Catholicism in Africa, received the conversion of Arian Spain, and won England with forty monks. While Abbot of St. Andrew’s he had seen some English captives exposed for sale in a slave market at Rome; he was struck, says the patriotic Bede, by their

white skin and comely countenance and hair of excellent beauty. And beholding them awhile he demanded, as they say, out of what region or land they had been brought. And it was answered that they came from Britain, where such was the appearance of the inhabitants. Again, he asked whether the people of that island were Christian men … and answer was made that they were paynims. Then this good man … “alas,” quoth he, “it is a piteous case that the author of darkness possesseth such bright beautied people, and that men of such gracious outward sheen do bear a mind void of inward grace.” Again, therefore, he enquired what was the name of that people. Answer was given that they were called Angles. Whereon he said, “Well are they so called, for they have an angel’s face, and it is meet that such men were inheritors with the angels in heaven.”¹⁵

The story—too pretty to be credible—goes on to say that Gregory asked and received of Pope Pelagius II permission to lead some missionaries to England; that Gregory started out, but was halted by a locust dropping upon the page of Scripture that he was reading; “locusta!” he cried; “that means loco sta”—stay in your place.¹⁶ Impressed soon afterward into the papacy, he did not forget England. In 596 he sent thither a mission under Augustine, Prior of St. Andrew’s. Arrived in Gaul, the monks were turned back by Frank stories of Saxon savagery; those “angels,” they were informed, “were wild beasts who preferred killing to eating, thirsted for human blood, and liked Christian blood best of all. Augustine returned to Rome with these reports, but Gregory reproved and encouraged him, and sent him back to accomplish peaceably in two years what Rome had transiently achieved by ninety years of war.

Gregory was not a philosopher-theologian like the great Augustine, nor a master of style like the brilliant Jerome; but his writings so deeply influenced and expressed the medieval mind that beside him Augustine and Jerome seem classical. He left behind him books of popular theology so rich in nonsense that one wonders whether the great administrator believed what he wrote, or merely wrote what he thought it well for simple and sinful souls to believe. His biography of Benedict is the most pleasing of these books—a charming idyl of reverence, with no pretense to critical sifting of legend from fact. His 800 letters are his best literary legacy; here this varied man reveals himself in a hundred phases, and gives unconsciously an intimate picture of his mind and times. His Dialogues were loved by the people because they offered as history the most amazing tales of the visions, prophecies, and miracles of Italy’s holy men. Here the reader learned of massive boulders moved by prayer, of a saint who could make himself invisible, of poisons rendered harmless by the sign of the cross, of provisions miraculously supplied and increased, of the sick made whole and the dead restored to life. The power of relics ran through these dialogues, but none more marvelous than the chains that were believed to have bound Peter and Paul; Gregory cherished these with adoration; he sent filings from them as presents to his friends; and with one such offering he wrote to a sufferer from ailing eyesight: “Let these be continually applied to your eyes, for many miracles have been wrought by this same gift.”¹⁷ The Christianity of the masses had captured the mind or pen of the great Pope.

His deeper venture into theology took the form of the Magna moralia—a six-volume commentary on the Book of Job. He takes the drama as literal history in every line; but also he seeks in every line an allegorical or symbolical significance, and ends by finding in Job the full Augustinian theology. The Bible is in every sense the word of God; it is a complete system of wisdom and beauty in itself; and no man should waste his time and debase his morals by reading the pagan classics. However, the Bible is occasionally obscure, and is often couched in popular or pictorial language; it needs careful interpretation by trained minds; and the Church, as custodian of sacred tradition, is the only proper interpreter. Individual reason is a weak and divisive instrument, not designed to deal with supersensual realities; and “when the intellect seeks to understand beyond its powers, it loses even that which it understood.”¹⁸ God is beyond our understanding; we can only say what He is not, not what He is; “almost everything that is said of God is unworthy, for the very reason that it is capable of being said.”¹⁹ Hence Gregory makes no formal attempt to prove the existence of God. But, he argues, we can adumbrate Him by considering the human soul: is it not the living force and guide of the body? “Many of our time,” says Gregory, “… have often seen souls departing from the body.”²⁰ The tragedy of man is that by original sin his nature is corrupt, and inclines him to wickedness; and this basic spiritual malformation is transmitted from parent to child through sexual procreation. Left to himself, man would heap sin upon sin, and richly deserve everlasting damnation. Hell is no mere phrase; it is a dark and bottomless subterranean abyss created from the beginning of the world; it is an inextinguishable fire, corporeal and yet able to sear soul as well as flesh; it is eternal, and yet it never destroys the damned, or lessens their sensitivity to pain. And to each moment of pain is added the terror of expected pain, the horror of witnessing the tortures of loved ones also damned, the despair of ever being released, or allowed the blessing of annihilation.²¹ In a softer mood Gregory developed Augustine’s doctrine of a purgatory in which the dead would complete their atonement for forgiven sins. And like Augustine, Gregory comforted those whom he had terrified by reminding them of the gift of God’s grace, the intercession of the saints, the fruits of Christ’s sacrifice, the mysterious saving effect of sacraments available to all Christian penitents.

Perhaps Gregory’s theology reflected his health as well as the frightening chaos of his time. “In eleven months,” he wrote in 599, “I have rarely been able to leave my bed. I am so tormented with gout and painful anxieties that… every day I look for the relief of death.” And in 600: “For nearly two years I have been confined to my couch, so afflicted with pain that even on festivals I can hardly get up for three hours to celebrate Mass. I am daily at the point of death, and daily being driven back from it.” And in 601: “It is long since I have been able to leave my couch. I look longingly for death.”²²It came in 604.

He dominated the end of the sixth century as Justinian had dominated its beginning; and his effect on religion was exceeded in this epoch only by that of Mohammed. He was not a learned man, nor a profound theologian; but because of his simplicity he influenced the people more deeply than the Augustine whose lead he followed with engaging humility. In mind he was the first completely medieval man.²³ While his hand managed a scattered empire, his thought dwelt on the corruption of human nature, the temptations of ubiquitous devils, and the approaching end of the world. He preached with power that religion of terror which was to darken men’s minds for centuries; he accepted all the miracles of popular legend, all the magical efficacy of relics, images, and formulas; he lived in a world haunted with angels, demons, wizards, and ghosts. All sense of a rational order in the universe had departed from him; it was a world in which science was impossible, and only a fearful faith remained. The next seven centuries would accept this theology; the great Scholastics would toil to give it the form of reason; it would constitute the tragic background of The Divine Comedy.

But this same man, superstitious and credulous, physically shattered with a terrified piety, was in will and action a Roman of the ancient cast, tenacious of purpose, stern of judgment, prudent and practical, in love with discipline and law. He gave a law to monasticism, as Benedict had given it a rule; he built the temporal power of the papacy, freed it from imperial domination, and administered it with such wisdom and integrity that men would look to the papacy as a rock of refuge through tempestuous centuries. His grateful successors canonized him, and an admiring posterity called him Gregory the Great.

III PAPAL POLITICS: 604–867

His early successors found it hard to live up to his height of virtue or power. For the most part they accepted domination by exarch or emperor, and were repeatedly humiliated in their efforts to resist. The Emperor Heraclius, anxious to unify his rescued realm, sought to reconcile the Monophysite East—which held that there was but one nature in Christ—with the orthodox West, which distinguished two; his manifesto, Ekthesis (638), proposed an agreement through the doctrine of monothelism—that there was but one will in Christ. Pope Honorius I agreed, adding that the question of one or two wills was “a point which I leave to grammarians as a matter of very little importance”;²⁴ but the theologians of the West denounced his compliance. When the Emperor Constans II issued a proclamation (648) favoring monothelism, Pope Martin I rejected it. Constans ordered the exarch of Ravenna to arrest him and bring him to Constantinople; refusing to yield, the Pope was banished to the Crimea, where he died (655). The Sixth Ecumenical Council, meeting at Constantinople in 680, repudiated monothelism, and condemned Pope Honorius, post mortem, as “a favorer of heretics.”²⁵ The Eastern Church, chastened by the loss of Monophysite Syria and Egypt to the Moslems, concurred in the decision, and theological peace hovered for a moment over East and West.

But the repeated humiliations of the papacy by the Eastern emperors, the weakening of Byzantium by Moslem expansion in Asia, Africa, and Spain, by Moslem control of the Mediterranean, and by the inability of Constantinople or Ravenna to protect the papal estates in Italy from Lombard assaults, drove the popes to turn from the declining Empire and seek aid from the rising Franks. Pope Stephen II (752-7), fearful that a Lombard capture of Rome would reduce the papacy to a local bishopric dominated by Lombard kings, appealed to the Emperor Constantine V; no help came thence; and the Pope, in a move fraught with political consequences, turned to the Franks. Pepin the Short came, subdued the Lombards, and enriched the papacy with the “Donation of Pepin,” giving it all central Italy (756); so was established the temporal power of the popes. This brilliant papal diplomacy culminated in the coronation of Charlemagne by Leo III (800); thereafter no man could be an accepted emperor in the West without anointment by a pope. The harassed bishopric of Gregory I had become one of the greatest powers in Europe. When Charlemagne died (814), the domination of the Church by the Frank state was reversed; step by step the clergy of France subordinated its kings; and while the empire of Charlemagne collapsed, the authority and influence of the Church increased.