Who was Charlemagne?

It is 800 AD and we are standing in the Basilica of St. Peter's. And for any of you who have been to the Vatican and seen modern St. Peter's, you might have realized that that building was actually built significantly later. In fact, it was not begun until essentially the time of the Reformation. We are right now in old St. Peter's Basilica. An old St. Peter's Basilica was built on top of an old Christian graveyard. This part of old Rome during the Pagan Empire had housed the Circus Maximus off to the left of what is the modern-day Vatican. And in that Circus Maximus, a number of Christians had been crucified or executed. And over time, the bodies of these Christians were taken down into a low valley and they were buried. And with the coming of Constantine, this hallowed ground, this 1st and 2nd century graveyard, was laid over with dirt and a basilica was placed on top of it to honor those who had died as martyrs of the faith and as a symbol of the Christian victory over the pagan world. At this point of 800 AD, however, it might have seemed to some that the pagans of the world were again gaining the upper hand. The Lombards in and around the Italian peninsula were wreaking havoc and causing trouble for the papacy. The Romans themselves, particularly those in the city of Rome, often were quite hostile to the papacy. The local ruling families were something a bit like the mafia. They would fight and they would cajole and they wanted the papacy often to either do its own bidding or on a few occasions, they even put their own men on the throne. And so by the end of the 8th century, as the Frankish empires have come out of the Merovingians and as they have developed their martial ethos and their rule of Northern Europe, the partnership between the papacy and the Franks was beginning to deepen. On this Christmas day during the Mass, as Charlemagne was kneeling down, the story we are told is that the Pope, reaching for a crown, placed it on Charlemagne's head and declared that he was now the new Emperor of Rome. Many at the time and even down until today have been shocked by this. They see in this some sort of spiritual takeover of politics or they say that this is the first time that the church and state have become fused together. Now, of course, as we've seen, this simply is not the case. Constantine managed to do that back in the 4th century. We did not need Charlemagne or Pope Leo III to do this. Others who were contemporary of Charlemagne, however, were equally offended because as we've seen in our lectures about the Byzantine world, there already was a Roman Emperor. Out east in New Rome or Constantinople, there still existed a Roman Emperor who, at least by some accounts, was head of all the old regions that Charlemagne had owned, which means that the Emperor in Constantinople had at least some authority over Europe. Only now the Papacy has declared that there is a new Emperor and that this Emperor in particular would be one over the West alone. For centuries, the fact that the Papacy decided to coronate its own Emperor in the West became one of the serious bones of contention between the Papacy and the Byzantine world. For those in the West, however, this was a sign of God's providential love. Now the West would return to glory. Now the West would be unified. And for them, and for the rest of Western history all the way down until the modern world, the Papacy's decision to coronate Charlemagne on Christmas 800 AD marked the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire. And in this lecture, we're going to take a look at Charlemagne. What was his reign like? How did he conquer so much land in such a short period of time? And then what was Charlemagne's effect on European culture? As we'll see, Charlemagne enacted one of the most important cultural renaissances in all of European history, often today called the Carolingian Renaissance. And lastly, we'll look at how Charlemagne shaped and changed the Church as it developed from an early ancient Church into a medieval Western European Church. One of the most important things about Charlemagne's reign is how much land he conquered during his tenure. Charles Martel and Pepin before him, his father and grandfather, had conquered an enormous amount of land already. They already had under their authority the region of Aquitaine, Burgundy, and most of what we would today call France, Germany, and the Netherlands. This already was a significant piece of land. However, there were regions that Charles Martel and Pepin were unable to really put to rest and to bring under their orbit entirely. And these regions are the ones that Charlemagne manages to conquer. And so Charlemagne's military conquests were not so much the result of him taking over more land than his predecessors, but rather Charlemagne was able to conquer lands that were challenging to his predecessors and make them finally and officially part of the Frankish or the Carolingian dynasty. And these regions were the area of Lombardy, which is essentially the northern part of Italy, all the way down until the middle part of Italy around the region of Rome. Charlemagne also conquered Bavaria. And more importantly, he finally put Saxony under his boot. Saxony had been one of the more annoying neighbors to the Northeast that had always plagued the Frankish empires. In addition to these regions, Charlemagne managed to create certain regions that we would later call the Marches. And the Marches regions were regions that were on the forefront of serious battle or against serious enemies. So Charlemagne establishes the Marches down in the south of Aquitaine to keep an eye on Muslim Spain. He also keeps the Marches area out over in the east. When it was all said and done, Charlemagne had a region that from east to west spanned something between 800 and 850 miles. Significant portions of Europe, really the vast majority of arable, farmable, cultivatable land on the continent of Europe was now under the Frankish dominion. And a lot of this has to do with the prowess of Charlemagne. Now we've already seen in the last lecture how Charles Martel was a supreme warrior. How he drilled his armies, how he deployed superior tactics, particularly against the Muslim armies at the Battle of Tours. And Charlemagne is the inheritor of this military tradition. Now there is a myth about this. It's often said that one of the great reasons why Charlemagne is able to conquer is because the stirrup to the saddle is finally invented just as Charlemagne comes to the throne. And therefore the cavalry that was widely used by the Frankish armies was somehow superior. Now of course if you've ever been horseback riding, you may not have noticed the importance of the stirrup. But take the stirrup away and you're really precariously perched atop a saddle and atop a horse, particularly if it's going to ever run. However, the invention of the stirrup will not happen for some time. It's a myth that some invention of technology is the real cause as to why Charlemagne and the Frankish empires are able to conquer so much land. They did employ heavy cavalry tactics. But the vast majority of the reason why Charlemagne and the Frankish empires are able to expand so far is due to the fact that they are relentless and they are disciplined. In fact, the only major time that Charlemagne loses is when he embarks on a conquest to try to go into Spain himself. He sends an army down in the hopes of achieving some of the great prowess of Charles Martel, his grandfather. And the army goes and it is pretty soundly defeated. And that defeat of the armies that are going down into Spain is captured in a very famous poem called The Song of Roland, one of the pieces that students throughout history have always had to study as a good piece of medieval literature. Well, that poem is written as a result of Charlemagne's armies losing in their attempt to retake certain portions of Spain. And so Charlemagne ruled over the most important areas of Europe. But he wasn't just a military thug. Charlemagne also managed to establish the good rule and administration of his empire. At his palace at Aachen, which we'll talk about in more detail in just a minute, Charlemagne arranged all kinds of ambassadors and legal experts and scholars and scribes in the effort to ensure that all of his decisions, all of his rulings, were to go out into his empire so that those who were under his authority would get the verdict in clear and concise language from the central imperial government. Charlemagne imposed all kinds of regulations related to taxes, the accrual of wealth, the registration of wealth, so that they could keep track of who owned what and who was responsible for what. But this was predominantly a period of time in which reason and intellectual prowess was applied to the legal profession for the first times in a realm that was not Roman. Significant attention to detail was applied to laws, to precedents, and all of these things were codified and written down. Now, alongside these military conquests and the changes in legal and administrative practices that Charlemagne accomplished during his reign, there was also during Charlemagne's time what historians call the Carolingian Renaissance. And the Carolingian Renaissance is a period of time in which some of the most significant intellectual minds of Europe were brought together by Charlemagne into his entourage so that intellectual activity and letters and arts and manuscripts and all of these things might flourish. Now, in today's world, we're used to seeing the arts as something that's more cosmetic or something that is not vital. We send our kids to school too often, I'm afraid, for the utility of getting them to college so that they can get out of our houses and so that they can get jobs. But you have to remember that at a time in which intellectual engagement and thinking and process and the arts were not prescribed in society, for Charlemagne to take a noted interest in these things was as much to do with preservation of knowledge and Roman culture as it was with the advancement of it. And the fact that there is a Carolingian Renaissance should really undermine in your minds the fact that this period of time is called the Dark Ages. It might be the Dark Ages in terms of its relationship to, say, the Renaissance in Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries. Or it might be the Dark Ages simply by the fact that some of the manuscripts and artifacts and some of the data that we would like as historians doesn't really exist in this period of time. That literacy rates are low and that there's just simply not much to draw on from a literary standpoint. But what we see in Charlemagne's reign is that there is actually a concerted effort in an attempt to ensure that the Roman culture, the Romanitas, the ways in which the old world had engaged in the life of the mind, was going to continue. And there are all kinds of ways in which Charlemagne engaged in this Renaissance. In terms of architecture, there were significant building campaigns. During the Frankish reigns, from 768 until 855, there were at least 30 cathedrals and 417 monasteries built all around the Frankish empires. And that is not even to count the royal palaces and the palaces for the dukes and the comites that were in these regions as well. This is a period of significant building. In fact, today, if you were to go throughout Europe and you were to see all kinds of these medieval castles, not a few of them, at least in the areas of the Frankish empires, date back, at least portions of them, date all the way back to this period of time. Charlemagne also liked to draw around him the leading intellectuals of Europe. Now, prior to Charlemagne coming to the throne, perhaps the single most important intellectual climate and culture was that of Britain. The British Isles had a significant intellectual tradition amongst its monks. They were literate. They wrote a great deal. We can think, for example, of the Venerable Bede and others. But what Charlemagne decides is that from all around Europe, from Lombardy, from certain regions of Brittany, and from other regions throughout Europe, he was going to attract these scholars to his central palaces at Aachen. And the single most important scholar that he brings to Aachen is Alcuin of York. Now, York, of course, is a British region. It's up in Northumbria, the northern part of Brittany. Alcuin actually was very comfortable and quite happy up there. But he was a leading intellectual. At one point, the king of Anglo-Saxony sends Alcuin down to Rome in an effort to plead with the pope that the pope would allow there to be an archbishopric in the region of York. There was already one in the south, that of Canterbury, and the king wanted one in the north, that of York, which, by the way, still exists. The archbishopric of York is still part of the Anglican Church. And Alcuin concedes, and he travels to Rome, and there prevails upon the pope to see his way, and therefore there is an archbishopric created in York. On the way back, though, Alcuin stops off at the Aachen court and makes an appearance with Charlemagne. And Charlemagne somehow manages to convince Alcuin to come be a part of the palace at Aachen, so that the intellectual world might flourish there. Now, by far the most important thing that Alcuin and his scribes and his priests managed to cultivate at the palace at Aachen is a new form of handwriting and manuscript development that had not been seen in Europe before. A number of historians, when they begin to study the past, particularly in the Middle Ages or in antiquity, often have to take something called paleography. And I can tell you, when you're taking paleography classes, it can be borderline torturous at some point. One of the things that happens, particularly when you're looking at Old Roman cursive, or Old Roman half-uncial, some of these scripts that were being used to write out manuscripts before the early Middle Ages, sometimes they are nigh impossible to make out, unless you have a great deal of training, or unless you are simply used to the way these things work. When you're a novice, these things are back-breaking, they are annoying, they are very challenging to try to read. And as many students of paleography can tell you, as soon as you get to Carolingian script, suddenly the sky is part, the sky is blue, the sun is shining upon your manuscript, and it becomes significantly easier. And this is because of the way in which the Carolingian Renaissance affects the dissemination of knowledge. Now, we take this for granted. We're used to printing, we're used to simple, uniform fonts, maybe slightly different here and there, but by and large, all of our fonts are relatively straightforward. They have uppercase, they have lowercase, they have uniform punctuation, at least for those of us who take time to learn all the punctuations that we're supposed to use. But there was a time in the ancient world where much of this didn't exist. If you look at some of the more ancient manuscripts, often one of the things you see is that all the words kind of smushed together. And not only that, but they are all uppercase. So good luck figuring out the difference between some of these words, particularly if you're doing it in Latin, and it's not necessarily your best language. What you get when you get to the Carolingian Renaissance, though, is you get something called Carolingian Minuscule. And Carolingian Minuscule is going to have a dramatic effect on learning and education in the West. Again, handwriting matters. How the font reads matters. If you're trying to learn the language for the first time, these things matter. And one of the things that Carolingian manuscripts give us is they give us a uniformity and they give us a clarity of learning. Carolingian Minuscule, for example, has a set font pattern. It has uppercase for titles. It has a combination of upper and lowercase for subtitles. It also tends to space the words out, and it tends to use a little bit more punctuation than previous manuscripts. Now, you might think this is a bit of archaic knowledge, but actually it has affected our world as well, even down till today. What happens is, as the Carolingian world sort of fades, and as we get into the higher Middle Ages, what happens is a new form of script takes over called Gothic. And Gothic is, again, we're back into the harder times of trying to discern the letters. It's certainly, at least by my estimation, easier than cursive Roman or half-unsealed Roman. But the Gothic manuscript is sort of unwieldy and complex and kind of chunky lettering. And what happens is, as we move after the Gothic period and into the time of the Renaissance, what we will see happen is that the Renaissance will find these manuscripts that were created during Charlemagne's reign, and they will mistake them for traditional ancient Roman handwriting. And so what happens is, is the Renaissance writers will think that this is classic writing, that this Carolingian script is just the best way. This is how the Greco-Romans must have written their letters. Even though we don't have the manuscripts here, we see that this is how it was. And so, actually, Carolingian script becomes the model, becomes the basis for the Renaissance typography, which at the time of the Gutenberg Press means that the attention to detail and legibility that we see in Carolingian script suddenly explodes and it becomes the basis, frankly, at least the kernel of the idea behind much of the fonts that we use in modern vernacular printing. And that really is a symbol of what the Carolingian Renaissance wanted. They wanted education to flourish. They also knew that education, if it was going to flourish, needed to have some reform. Education was no longer for the rich and the wealthy. They wanted it to be for those who could at least achieve and had the gray matter to attempt to learn these things. There are all kinds of stories, actually, of Charlemagne, who himself was poorly educated, who was really just a warrior, of him attempting, throughout his life, to learn things like arithmetic. He even tried his hand at learning writing, and, as one account says, he gave up, very frustrated, and said, in a nutshell, that he is too old to learn how to write, despite all the practice that he has attempted at it. And so Charlemagne is a lover of learning. He funds, as we've already said, monasteries far and wide. And not just that, but Charlemagne ensures that the Latin Vulgate, the language that was still being spoken in the majority of these regions, that a copy of the Latin Vulgate be provided for every church in his realm. Now, the center of all this learning was in the city of Aachen. Aachen was the place that Charlemagne decided was going to be his new imperial palace location. And the palace of Aachen is really the epicenter of the Carolingian Renaissance. Charlemagne decided that a new imperial palace to rival even those that are in Byzantium would be erected during his lifetime. And the Aachen Palace is largely lost to us today. You can still go and see pieces of it, in particular the old Palatine Chapel. Unfortunately, though, even this has been largely renovated, and so the original is largely lost to us. Work on this palace began in 794, and we can reconstruct part of what it looked like, but the Aachen Palace was a marvel. It had on one end the Council Hall, which is built in a basilica style, which is to say it has a main entrance, and a long corridor structure, and at the far end there is a rounded piece, or a rounded curve. This was the basilica style which was first invented and worked out in Rome, and it had spread throughout Europe as a whole. And in the Council Hall, Charlemagne engaged in a number of state functions. It was here in the Council Hall where Charlemagne would entertain ambassadors, where he would issue certain legal rulings, etc. And just off this Council Hall was a very tall tower, and that tower was the treasury and the archives for the Frankish Empire. From the treasury, Charlemagne decreed a number of reforms to the currency. As gold was becoming less plentiful, Charlemagne turned to a more silver-based currency, which significantly helped with the development of currency exchange, and economics, and all these kinds of things, as Charlemagne funded all kinds of new things in his empire. It was also the repository for all of the decisions, and the artifacts, and the manuscripts that would be developed at the palace. And one of the things to note about the preservation of knowledge in the Middle Ages is that if it were not for this repository, for this tower, significant numbers of the manuscripts from the ancient world that we still have today would have been lost. Something in the neighborhood of 7,000 manuscripts survive today because of the palace school at Aachen. There are significant numbers of texts that we don't have the originals for. Texts that were written in Latin, or in some cases in Greek, but in particular the Latin text, would have been lost. But what happens is that Charlemagne pays for these manuscripts to be recovered from wherever they might be, they are brought to Aachen, and then they are copied. And it is because of this that throughout the Middle Ages, whenever people needed manuscripts, you could almost always bet that at Aachen the manuscripts would be there. And it was in the tower where many of these texts were kept. On the other side of the palace at Aachen was the grandest building of them all, and it is this building which we can still see pieces of today, and that is the Palatine Chapel. The Palatine is in the shape of an octagon, and within it on the ground floor you have three chapels. You have the Chapel of Our Savior, you have the Chapel of the Virgin Mary, and you have the Chapel of Saint Peter. The design of it, architectural historians have noted, actually mimics heavenly Jerusalem. There are all kinds of parallels. For example, in a mosaic that is now behind a reconstructed mosaic from a later period, you see Jesus seated with the 24 elders, hearkening to the heavenly Jerusalem image we see in the book of Revelation. And there are other parallels as well. And in this chapel, Charlemagne would sit on the second floor, up above, for all to see, and he would sit on a marble-paneled throne. And the image here is that Charlemagne himself, in a way, occupies an elevated, almost divine seat of power. You see in this that Charlemagne elevates himself, that he sits on this throne. The evolution and the development of what would become in the Middle Ages the exaltation of kings from human rulers up the chain of being until they become quasi-sacred. And other things in the Palace of Aachen are the stuff of legend. There was a menagerie there in which Charlemagne kept an elephant that had been a gift from someone down in the Middle East. There was also a gymnasium and barracks. There were thermal springs in Aachen, which is why the Roman armies had originally founded the city. And Charlemagne had reconstructed these baths, now without pagan statues, but instead with Christian statues. And it was said that Charlemagne liked to swim while the works of Augustine were read aloud to him. And the last thing we want to say when we look at the Carolingian Renaissance is the way in which Charlemagne reformed the church. Charlemagne was, of course, intimately tied, as was his father and grandfather, to the papacy. And Charlemagne continues the policies of enforcing and regulating the Catholic faith in his realms. And this can't be underestimated. As we've noted on a few occasions, if there's any faith that is in ascendancy in Northern Europe, it is Arianism at this point. There is Catholicism in other areas. Certain missionaries have made inroads in Northern Europe. But with the coming of Charlemagne, what you see is a Catholicizing movement in Northern Europe in which Charlemagne attempts to establish once and for all the Nicene faith for all of Europe. And so Charlemagne does a number of things to ensure the regulation of churches in his regions. It is Charlemagne who is the first to require the tithe be enforced in all of the churches. That is to say, 10% of all goods are to go to the church. Charlemagne also takes an interest in liturgy. He requires his churches to follow the liturgical pattern that had been established in Rome. He also makes efforts to ensure that the clergy are well-educated or at least sufficiently educated. At one point, he is concerned about the poor quality of sermons in his regions. And so he has drawn up a list of model sermons that he believes ought to at least be read aloud if the person who is giving the sermon is unable to come up with a sermon on his own. And so Charlemagne is the first major step towards developing a cohesive Catholic identity in Western Europe. The dominance of the papal Catholic religion in Western Europe, in Northern Europe, might have been delayed if not attenuated entirely. But with a strong figure stressing the Catholic faith and stressing papal obedience, we see Europe develop increasingly in the Middle Ages towards a unified Catholic church. In the end, Charlemagne is one of the most important figures in European history. But despite the fact that he was so successful at unifying the empire, Charlemagne's children and grandchildren, nevertheless, repeated some of the same problems that we saw in the Merovingian dynasty in our last lecture. Within two generations of Constantine's death, in fact, we see that the Frankish kingdom has descended into a civil war. Three brothers, Lothar, Louis the German, and Charles the Bald, all received divided portions of the Frankish kingdom. And for a number of reasons, they go to war with one another. And Lothar initially has the upper hand. But his other brothers, Louis and Charles, managed to defeat him. And so in 843, we have the Treaty of Verdun. And this treaty establishes the pattern of the development of European countries that actually will exist all the way down until the modern world. Lothar is given the major portions of the former Lombard regions. He is given, in other words, Northern Italy all the way down into the central Italian area. Louis the German, as the name seems to suggest, gets the eastern part of the Frankish kingdoms. Charles the Bald, on the other hand, gets the western part of the Frankish kingdoms and in Aquitaine. Now this is significant, because Lothar very quickly dies. And the states that he is in charge of end up breaking up into a number of different regions. The Italian states, in other words, all the way down to the modern world with the formation of modern Italy, remain broken up and segmented for centuries. The eastern and western portions of Francia, however, remain unified. The western portion will end up developing into modern day France, and the eastern portion, over the course of several centuries, will develop into modern Germany. More important is the question of who gets the title of Holy Roman Emperor. Now there was some consideration that Charlemagne did not believe initially that this was a hereditary title. When he first appoints his heirs, he actually does not appoint them to be Holy Roman Emperor. He appoints them to his lands, but not to that same title. At a later date, however, Charlemagne does bequeath the title of Holy Roman Emperor. In the end, it is the eastern portion of Francia, the portion that will become Germany, that comes to dominate and take over the title of Holy Roman Emperor. And that occurs with the coming of Otto. King Otto is really the first Germanic prince on the scene in the Middle Ages, and he establishes the Holy Roman Empire as his own dynasty that is going to be bequeathed to his sons on and on. And so it is the dynasty of eastern Francia, or what would become Germany, that establishes itself as the heirs to the Empire. And so therefore, the German peoples, for nearly a millennia, all the way down until very, very recently, in fact, it is the Germans who have the Holy Roman Empire as part of their identity. End