Lights in the Dark Ages: Monasteries, Faith, Saints and the Reshaping of Europe

The final collapse of the Roman Empire in the West came in the 5th century under the pressure of German barbarians.

Three centuries later, on Christmas Day of the year 800, a German was crowned in Rome as Emperor of the West.

He was Charles, King of the Franks, whom history knows as Charles the Great or Charlemagne,

and whose glorious reign was for the times a paragon of stability.

But the period in between those 300 years from collapse to coronation, this period is known as the Dark Ages, partly because we don't know much about it, and partly because it was just that, dark and bloody. The economy had gone to pot.

The economy had gone to pot. The social fabric fell to pieces, as much by internal as by external disruption.

Material culture decayed, as we can see by new settlement patterns, with a lot of farms and villages on the best lands deserted for upland places, old strongholds that had been inhabited since the Stone Age, the like of which came back into use not because you could hope to make a better living there, but because of the economic crisis.

But simply because you had a better chance to stay alive. That's what the general situation looks like, or we guess it looked like.

At the political level, you remember that the Roman Empire in the West had been replaced by smaller barbarian kingdoms.

Visigoths in Spain, who were later gobbled up by the Arabs around 700, Lombards in Italy, Franks and Burgundians in Gaul, Angles and Saxons in England. These represented whatever organized political power there was in Europe.

Everything else belonged to the Roman Church. Moral authority, learning, the prestige of the Roman name, and the care of the people.

It was to the bishop that ordinary people looked for leadership in Christian society. All this time, a process of assimilation was going on.

The barbarians were converted to Christianity in the 5th and 6th centuries, and acquired a thin Roman veneer.

But as the barbarians were converted to Christianity, the Church was increasingly barbarized.

You can see this in the description that Gregory of Tours wrote, in the second half of the 6th century.

Gregory, seen here in an illuminated manuscript from the 10th century, was himself a man of aristocratic Gallic lineage, a descendant of Roman officials, a member of a dynasty of bishops. He was a man of a dynasty of bishops.

But Frankish history, at least what we know of it from Gregory, is one long tale of arson and rape, murder and perjury, sons strangling their mothers, mothers throwing their sons down a well, people getting kicked or burned to death at a friendly banquet, wives encouraging their lovers to murder their husbands, and then in due course murdering their daughters, because they were afraid that they might tempt the lover away, incest, rife and sometimes leading to murder, servants and allies betraying or poisoning their masters and their friends.

This all came to a high point, or rather low point, with the death of Queen Brunhildis, who was captured along with her three sons by her enemies, tortured for three days, and on the fourth paraded round the camp on a camel, in what state you can imagine. And then she was fastened by her hair and arm and a foot to the tails of wild horses and torn limb from limb. But the fate of one of her sons is particularly interesting because even though two of the lads were killed at once, one happened to be the godson of the captor, and so he was spared and left to finish his life in a monastery, a good indication of the strength of religious bonds, even in a brutish, superstitious world. It was on these savage barbarians that the church was increasingly dependent.

Consequently, the outward decline in the condition of culture was accompanied by a deterioration of moral standards among the clergy.

We have to remember that these standards, at least at the higher levels which are the only ones visible to us, continue to be those of the Roman world.

So we shouldn't be surprised that bishops had slaves and concubines as other gentlemen did. But we also find bishops who wear mail and sword under their vestments, presumably for ready use, and who despoil poor men of their holdings and sometimes of their wives as well.

There is a scene at the table of a Frankish king where two bishops accuse each other of licentiousness, and there are many scenes where the bishops get so drunk that they can't even recognize their guests. The world which Gregory of Tours describes is a world of violence and corruption in which rulers set the example of injustice and contempt for the law and where even the barbaric virtues like loyalty and military honor are no longer preserved.

In such a world, religion was able to maintain its power only by the terror and the awe that its supernatural prestige sometimes inspired, and by the threat of spiritual violence which it used to protect itself from the physical violence of barbarism. Fear of the wrath of God, fear of the vengeance of the saints, these were the only things that might intimidate the lawless ruffians who were so common among the new ruling classes.

This is the period when saints played their most important part. Here, for instance, is Saint Cuthbert who once revived a dying baby with a kiss.

In the Dark Ages, saints were not merely models of moral perfection whose prayers were invoked by the church. They were very pragmatic forces who played a constant part in daily life, intervening in very practical ways so that the fishermen of Naples scourged their saints when they caught no fish.

Saints were, in effect, supernatural powers and they were thought to live in the sanctuaries from which they could watch over the welfare of their land and their people. The most important saint for Gregory was Saint Martin whose shrine at Tours was considered a fountain of grace and miraculous healing to which the sick came from every part of Gaul. Saint Martin was thought to be particularly good against epilepsy and impotence.

The shrine at Tours was destroyed in 853 and it was replaced several times this one being the latest version.

The original shrine was a sanctuary where fugitive slaves, escaped criminals, people outlawed by the king could all find refuge and supernatural protection. As a result, it was chock-full of refugees.

In principle, any church was supposed to be a church to provide sanctuary but it had to be a pretty important saint who could actually frighten the great lords or the king from robbing the saint's property or from shedding blood on his premises. Those churches that were spared owed it largely to the power of their patron saint. And so the early centuries of the Middle Ages see the rise of a new Christian mythology in the West. The legends of the saints like Saint Iriex here which represented the other side of the dark picture of barbarian society that Gregory wrote about.

On one side we see a world of violence and injustice which is sinking to destruction by its own weight.

On the other side there's the world of divine power and mystery in which man is freed from the harsh necessities of daily experience where nothing is impossible because the saint can bring children back to life or provide food and drink. Where every human suffering can find a remedy because the saint can heal the sick and feed the poor and even purify the guilty. Now in this twilight world it was inevitable that the Christian saint should acquire some of the features of the witch doctor on the one hand and the demigod on the other. That his prestige should depend upon his power as a wonder worker. And that men should appeal to him very much as they used to appeal to the family gods or to the local gods of the ancients as a patron of the family gods. As a patron of the community. It was only in this world of Christian mythology that the vital fusion of the Christian faith and ethics with the barbaric tradition of the new peoples could have been achieved.

It was obviously impossible for peoples without any tradition of philosophy without any written literature to assimilate directly the subtle profound theology and metaphysics of the great doctors of the church. The barbarians could understand and accept the spirit of the new religion only when it was manifested to them obviously, visibly in the lives and the acts of men who seemed endowed with supernatural qualities.

So the conversion of Western Europe was not achieved so much by a new doctrine as by a new power that impressed them and subdued them. The Christian missionaries themselves were powerful personalities.

Brave, hardy, inspiring enthusiasm and trust. And there were women saints as well as men. Walburga, who practiced medicine among the Saxons and who is remembered on the night of May the 1st, Walpurgisnacht. And Saint Audrey, abbess of Ely, whose feast on June the 23rd was so popular that it became famous for its annual fairs.

The cheap trumperies and necklaces on sale there gave the name to Tordry. Women also played an important part in the conversion of the pagans at the political level. In 496, a Catholic princess of Burgundy, Clotilda, married Clovis, King of the Franks, and helped to convert him to Christianity. A hundred years later, Clotilda's great-granddaughter, Bertha, married and converted this man, Ethelbert, King of Kent. And their offspring carried Christianity from Kent to Northumbria.

In 987, the Hungarians were Christianized by Stephen, later Saint Stephen, who was baptized by his mother and encouraged by his wife.

This was not pillow talk, of course. It was a matter of alliances and political interests. But whatever the reasons, wives played an important role in such conversions. Then, once Christianity was accepted by the nobles, the Church's prohibition of incest began to change the political face of Europe. It meant that the network of royal marriages was going to spread from Ireland to Constantinople, from Castile to Novgorod, avoiding the disadvantages of inbreeding, but also intertwining a group of families highly selected for their abilities in government and war.

And the Church's prohibition of polygamy meant that, theoretically at least, bastards were excluded from succession to the throne. Now, it took a long time to convince the ruling classes to abide by such exclusions. Still, gradually, it would no longer be necessary to murder all your brothers to be safe.

Succession to the throne was clarified and stabilized, all of which had its uses. The main thing, however, is that the Western Church did not come to the barbarians with a civilizing mission or with any promise of political and social progress. It came with a tremendous message of divine judgment and divine salvation. Humanity was born under a curse. It was enslaved by the dark powers of cosmic evil.

It was sinking ever deeper under the burden of its own guilt. Now, this was obvious enough. And it was only by way of the cross, it was only by the grace of the crucified Redeemer, or, better still, of Christ's majesty, that men could extricate themselves from the damned mass of unregenerate humanity, could escape from the wreckage of a doomed world. The world was falling to pieces.

It was coming to an end. And so it was natural for Christians to turn their eyes to the other world, to the eternal city, rather than to an earthly one and to the Church, which offered the only avenue towards it. The argument was so convincing that while chaos continued and increased in the Western world, all the activities and the aspirations that we call cultural were concentrated in and on the Church.

The tradition of Latin culture, the patterns of Christian life, were not going to be preserved or developed in the cities which fell more and more into ruins, but in monasteries. And the monks would become not only the apostles of the West, but also the founders of medieval culture.

Men and women withdrawing from the world to find salvation as isolated hermits or in small communities were not a new phenomenon.

Christians had begun to do this in the Egyptian and Syrian desert from the third century on. But this sort of thing is easier to do in Egypt, where you can go and dig a hole in the sand or build a little hut out of reeds, out of mud, and doze through most of the day. It's easier to do it there than it is further north in Germany or France, or even just across the Mediterranean in Italy, where winter can be very cold.

So harsh climates posed a problem to the monastic life. And so did discipline, given the chaos around.

These were the problems that Benedict addressed when he set up his first monastery on Monte Cassino, south of Rome, in 520, and when he drew up rules for his community in or around 529. The Benedictines may be taken as typical of all the older monastic orders. They took a lifelong vow to observe obedience, poverty, and chastity. These were supported on four main precepts. No private property, no eating of butcher's meat, except in case of sickness, steady manual labor, and strict confinement within the monastery itself. Benedict recommended three or four hours a day to be spent reading devotional books, although he made allowance for those who couldn't read. But everybody had to spend four or five hours a day in prayer and religious services. This public prayer became increasingly important as time went on, and the average monk did less and less manual work and concentrated on praying for his fellow men. So by a curious paradox, the monk who abandoned the world to save his own soul found that one of his major tasks was the job of interceding with Heaven on behalf of his fellow men.

The rule of Saint Benedict is a model of practical and spiritual wisdom, even to recommending how monks should sleep. They shall sleep separately in separate beds. A candle shall always be burning in their cell until early in the morning. They shall sleep clothed and girt with belts or ropes, and they shall not have their knives at their sides, lest perchance in a dream they should wound the sleepers. But like a lot of great documents, the rule of Saint Benedict became in time more a statement of what should be than an indication of what actually was. Property and meat crept in, work and abstinence went out. In spite of reports and repeated reforms, monasteries became more businesslike and more worldly. This isn't surprising when you consider that in a troubled, violent, unsafe world, monasteries and convents afforded shelter and a minimum of order and comfort to a greater extent and for longer periods of time than any other residential establishment.

The shelter wasn't merely physical, of course. It was spiritual, too. Men and women crept into monasteries out of the cold, chilled to the marrow by the wickedness and wildness outside, envisaging the cloister as a refuge where they could keep warm in the faith.

They could also maintain what bits and pieces of civilization were left, copying and illustrating old manuscripts when they weren't scraping them off to make room for something else. And they could spread the Christian message by missionary work, not just by sending out fiery preachers, but by example. Monasteries were sited in rural areas and it was the monks who converted illiterate and heathen peasant populations and who also probably introduced agricultural and technological improvements that were going to change the quality of life all over Europe.

The Dark Ages must have been incredibly dismal with raids and counter raids, ambushes, robberies,

murder, looting, kidnapping, torture and drunken brawls ending in bloodshed and hands and ears and noses

cut off which was considered a more Christian treatment of criminals or enemies than putting them to death. But through all this life went on.

In burghs and monasteries and fortified manors people maintained a minimal security. Merchants traveled on the old Roman roads.

They were robbed once and twice but they went on trading. Above all, men and women went on

sowing, harvesting, driving the pigs into the forest, driving the cattle out of pasture to feed themselves and their masters as best they could.

Next time we shall see how the Dark Ages came to an end although not the darkness.....

Last time we ended on a rather bleak note. We were in the Dark Ages, that dismal period between the 6th and the 9th centuries when violence and corruption, both physical and spiritual, were endemic in Europe. But of course history is never as neat, let alone as linear as we like to think. At the grassroots level great things were also happening in the Dark Ages.

Historians disagree about the exact date but sometime between the 6th century and the 10th century a new heavy plow with wheels began to replace the old light plow that had been used for thousands of years. The new plow dug deep and turned over furrows instead of just scratching the topsoil the way Mediterranean plows did and often still do. About the same time a new method of planting came in more complex rotation systems like the triennial system that left one field fallow once every three years to recuperate its powers. That way sheep and cattle could feed in the fallow fields and then on the stubble left in the planted fields after they had been harvested. And the manure the animals dropped could improve the crop yield further.

Productive power was increasing in other ways too. This is a medieval flour mill which was made possible by the appearance of the crank sometime during the Dark Ages.

The crank, which is the most important motion transmitting device after the wheel now turned grindstones and hand mills and pulleys.

This was also when water power was harnessed by water driven mills to grind grain or cut logs

and when the use of animal power was immensely improved. The ancients had been terribly concerned by the inefficiency in their care and use of farm animals.

They had no nailed shoes which meant a lot of broken hooves and a lot of beasts limping around. And they had only a yoke harness which was alright for oxen but not very good for horses. They also didn't know how to harness one animal in front of another only a breast which meant that great weights had to be drawn by gangs of slaves. By the 9th century however the development of nailed shoes the tandem harness, horse collars meant that one team could pull three or four times the weight that a Roman team could manage.

It created a new supply of non-human power at no extra cost doing for the 10th century what a steam engine was going to do for the 19th century.

With this increase of productivity among North European peasants the economic center of the continent shifted from the shores of the Mediterranean where it had been for many centuries to the great plains between the Baltic and the North Sea and the English Channel.

and violence. Despite disorder and violence, there was more food, there were more people, there was more activity. North Europeans were also going to surpass the people to the south in power. The extra wheat and meat the northerners produced made them bigger and stronger. The extra oats they grew permitted them to breed and feed larger horses and to build up a heavy cavalry that could use another new invention, the stirrup, which let you sit firmly in the saddle and allowed you to charge with a lance without falling over. From the 8th century on, these new heavy-armed, heavy-armored horsemen were going to be the tanks of the medieval battlefield, stopping the Arabs at Poitiers in France in 733.

This increase in power was especially important because history is really about power, who gets it, who keeps it, who uses it, who loses it. You cannot have society without power, or culture, or art.

And power is about numbers of people, but also about productivity, and metals, and money. After all, there are more goods available if you have cheaper and more efficient ways of producing them. More goods make it easier to fight wars and to win them. And so you see, the military-industrial complex is nothing new. The traditional metal of war is iron. Since the time of the Assyrians, the army with a more powerful, more powerful, more powerful, more powerful, more powerful, more powerful, most iron tends to win the war. The early Middle Ages were going to see a serious increase in the production of iron and the number of foundries. Iron continued to be pretty expensive, but there was more of it in Northern Europe than around the Mediterranean.

And then in the 9th century, iron became available for uses other than weapons, spade tips, plow parts, ordinary tools, when new iron mines were opened that made the metal cheaper.

The brilliant success of one tribe, the Franks, was based on this new advantage in productivity.

For them, as for most German tribes, war was a national institution, almost their main trade.

The most important Frankish king was the king of France. The king of France was the king of France. The king was named Charles. History knows him as Charles the Great, Charlemagne, Charlemagne. And he was simply the most successful representative of this warlike enterprise.

He inherited the Frankish kingdom from his father, Pepin the Short, and proceeded to enlarge it. From the 770s to his death in 814, Charlemagne campaigned ceaselessly and successfully from Spain and Italy and Dalmatia to Germany and Bohemia.

Charlemagne was also an able statesman who provided his dominions with fairly effective administration. Based on literate clerks and on tough illiterate royal officials, military commanders with territorial responsibilities, called by titles that still survive today, he was the king of France. The duke of France was Charles the Great, Duke of France, duke of France, dukes, from the Latin dux, meaning leader or commander, counts, from the Latin comus, a trusted companion of the king, and margrave, or marquis, who was the person in charge of border provinces.

Charles was operating in a society that produced relatively little surplus. His Administrative reforms aimed at getting the land and especially the imperial estates to provide more of a surplus or at least setting up a structure that would permit him to cream off more of a surplus.

The surplus would go towards supporting the armies which he led and which could be very large indeed, as much as 20,000 horsemen and three times as many footmen.

Now if you think just how many oats you need to feed that many horses, how many wagons you need to carry the grains and other supplies, how many supplies. You need just to prepare the army for moving out. You can see the logistics of military campaigns could be pretty impressive.

But so was the ultimate purpose of all this effort.

Politically, Charlemagne's aim was to revive the Roman Empire with its stability and greatness.

And indeed on Christmas Day in the year 800, he was, as you know, crowned emperor. And he was crowned in Rome as emperor of the West.

He saw himself as charged by God to restore and maintain the social order and the values this order represented.

And he believed that this could best be done by reference to ancient Rome.

Since architecture is often an expression of politics, you can see in the palaces and abbeys Charlemagne put up, the expression of the Roman Empire.

The expression of this attempt to return to Roman sources, to revive the empire by imitating its forms,

and also to spread the civilizing Christian message associated with Rome.

The most effective means of instruction and edification was mural painting, which offered a kind of holy comic strip of biblical images for a largely illiterate public. The most effective means of instruction and edification was mural painting, which offered a kind of holy comic strip of biblical images for a largely illiterate public. The most effective means of instruction and edification was mural painting, which offered a kind of holy comic strip of biblical images for a largely illiterate public.

Now remember that the 8th and 9th centuries were also the time of the iconoclastic struggle, of the tension between Rome and Constantinople about whether religious images, icons, were good or bad.

So you can see why the Pope, Leo III, thought images were essential to carry the Christian message, and why he appealed to Charlemagne to help.

And how did he help? How also he wound up crowning Charlemagne the Emperor of the West for this and other favors.

Images were also good for publicity and prestige. They could present a legendary historical background for a family or a people, as was done in one of Charlemagne's palaces at Ingelsheim, where the Great Hall was surrounded by paintings of the history of the Franks, as the Franks would have their history looking.

At a more sophisticated level, Charlemagne patronized the production of illustrated manuscripts and books like this Bible, and he provided rich endowments to the clerks, scribes, and illuminators who produced them, and to the monasteries where these men were sheltered.

Charlemagne hoped that the monasteries would also generate administrators and educators.

Scores of new monasteries went up, and hundreds of churches were built or restored, richly decorated.

Towers and bell towers especially grew taller, nesting places for angels and archangels, who were expressly invited to alight and perch there, to protect humans against lightning and sin. Taller also because they were impressive, and visible from afar, and practical as watchtowers.

Watchtowers were going to be needed soon because a lot of the new buildings were going to fall within a generation or two.

Most of the great monastic foundations disappeared in the time of troubles that followed the death of Charlemagne.

One of these, the Abbey of Saint-Riquier, was built in the 790s near Amiens in northwest France.

It held 300 monks, a school with 100 students, 110 knights with their own chapel, and a great host of servants to serve all these people.

Charlemagne's special sympathy for scholars and clerks meant a lot to him. It meant that he was always a favorite with them, and that was reflected in the documents of the time.

But Charlemagne's reign was not based on intellectual pursuits or scholarship.

It was based on war, on violence successfully exercised, as was the entire Carolingian dynasty of Frankish kings,

which ruled for two and a half centuries from the time of Charlemagne. From the time of Charlemagne's father to the year 987.

But when Carolingian civilization could no longer meet violence with superior violence, it foundered.

Charlemagne wanted to be a Roman emperor, in fact, as well as named.

But he died in 814 like a Frankish chief, dividing his lands among several legitimate sons.

It could have been worse, since he had hundreds of bastards. Charlemagne's successors were incompetent and divided.

After 820 or so, Norsemen, Hungarians, and Saracens brought even worse horrors to Europe than had been suffered in the centuries before Charlemagne.

Saracen is simply the Byzantine word for a Muslim Arab.

Westerners borrowed it to describe the Muslim enemy that kept pushing north across the Adriatic, the Mediterranean, and the Pyrenees.

The Saracens raided into the Alps and into central France. They even sacked Rome in 845. But that was becoming a tradition.

Everyone who was anyone had to sack Rome. Although the Hungarians never managed to get that far, they did spread terror throughout the rest of Europe.

Hungarians were a Turkic people from the Eurasian steppes, and they displaced the Huns from what is now Hungary.

They ravaged to the walls of Constantinople, all over Germany and France, as far as Burgundy and the Rhône Valley, and well down into Italy.

They were the scourge of Europe until defeated and converted in the second half of the 10th century.

As a matter of fact, our word for the gigantic, hungry ogre, whom a lot of fairy-story heroes meet and defeat, derives from the word for Hungarian, hungar, or honger.

But the main threat to Western Christendom came from the fact that the Hungarians were not the only ones to be killed. They were the first of the Scandinavian pirates and invaders, the Northmen, also known as Norsemen, or Normans.

They were also called Vikings, perhaps after the narrow channel between Sweden and Denmark, the Vik. The Viking danger was not new.

It had been staved off since 800 or so by Carolingian diplomacy, busy missionary activity, and a lot of political activity. The Vikings had, of course, arms.

When the successors of Charlemagne started to fight each other, Viking attacks on their kingdoms became more serious.

In 845, a Danish king destroyed Hamburg, which was at the time the northernmost outpost of Christian civilization. In the same year, Paris was sacked.

And the King of France, Charles the Bald, paid the price for the destruction of the city. He paid a heavy ransom to the Danes to get them out again until next time.

But these disasters were only the prelude to the main Viking attack on the West, which began around 850 and continued without a stop for the next 50 years.

During these years, it wasn't any longer a question of isolated pirate raids, but of skillfully planned invasion, by highly organized forces, organized professional armies,

that didn't just want plunder, but sought conquest and settlement.

Year after year, Norwegian and Danish Vikings launched campaigns against Germany, the Netherlands, England, France.

They defeated what armies the kings could gather. They could take and sack almost any town or abbey in their way. And few places were safe from their swift attack.

But the Vikings were not alone. The Swedish Vikings also penetrated the lands east of the Baltic, along the Dnieper and the Volga rivers, in the 800s.

The name of the land we call Russia comes from the Finnish name for these Vikings, Uruotsi, or rowers.

They were going to melt into the Slav populations. But their expeditions provided an essential link between the West and the Eastern Roman Empire, between the Baltic and the Black Sea and the Caucasus.

In the West, however, Viking colonies were set up during the 900s throughout the Atlantic Islands, in England, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, with some landfalls on the North Sea. The Dutch, however, did not want to take the land.

Most important, though, was the settlement in the lower valley of the Seine, that would become a buffer state between French territories and other raiders.

This became the Duchy of Normandy, and in due course, its rulers managed something the other Vikings never had, the conquest of England in 1066. Still, for 300 years, until Christian kingdoms were established in Scandinavia in the 11th century, Viking destruction continued, because this is what the Northmen did best, sail, fight, and rob. But the robbery was often part of a larger enterprise, trade.

Like Phoenicians or Greeks, the Vikings were merchants as well as pirates. Like the Assyrians, the Vikings were merchants as well as pirates.

Like the Assyrians, their pillaging raids and wars also redistributed wealth.

Indeed, it's quite likely that their major role was to release wealth stored in Western treasuries and put it back into circulation.

They stole from the monasteries, and they used the silver to buy land to settle on, or to equip ships to trade with.

And so, the Vikings probably did a lot to reopen, in turn, their trade. They extraordinary rockered with traditional commerce in Europe And contributed to the beginning of economic revival from the doldrums that they themselves had helped create.