Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (60 page)

Like the Papal States which his father had brought into being, Charlemagne's new empire of the West was destined to persist in one form or another for a thousand years as one of the cornerstone institutions of Europe. In the middle of the twelfth century, emperors began referring to it as the 'Holy' empire and later as the 'Holy Roman Empire', largely because they had come to experience problems with the successors of Leo. Although these subsequent popes had discovered that they had helped to create an institution impossible to control from Rome, the pope's participation in the empire's foundation had been a dramatic assertion of the papacy's new self-confidence in its cosmic role, and it signalled the returning vitality of the Latin West. Both these characteristics were reflected in documents which now emerged to prove that this new situation in fact reflected an ancient reality. We can call them forgeries, but our attitudes to such matters are conditioned by the humanist historical scholarship which emerged in Italy in the fifteenth century. That leads us to expect that our history must be based on carefully checked and authenticated evidence, or it simply cannot exist. For centuries before, though, people lived in societies which did not have enough documents to prove what they passionately believed to be true: the only solution was to create the missing documentation.
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In this spirit, there emerged one of the most significant forgeries in history: the so-called Donation of Constantine. The document claims to be the work of Constantine I; after reciting a story of his healing, conversion to Christianity and baptism at the hands of Pope Sylvester, it grants the Pope and all his successors not merely the honour of primacy over the universal Church but temporal power in the territories of the Western Empire, reserving to himself the empire ruled from Byzantium (see Plate 26). Its real date is problematic, but it is generally thought to predate the coronation of Charlemagne, which would have rendered the second part of the gift embarrassing, and to have been written in the late eighth century, in the atmosphere of papal tensions with the Byzantine Empire and of energetic Frankish Church reform.
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The forged Donation much fired the imagination of later popes and clerical supporters of their power, who saw it as a manifesto for a world in which Christ's Church would be able to rule all society. It is possible to see that as a noble vision.

This process of creative rewriting of the papal past reached a peak under Nicholas I (858-67), a pope who faced major confrontations and even schism with the Byzantine Church over the control of new Christian missions in central Europe (see pp. 458-60), and who looked for support from Frankish rulers in doing so. Nicholas was assiduous in gathering strong papal assertions of Rome's authority, such as those of Gelasius (see pp. 322-3), but he also became aware of a hitherto-unsuspected collection of Western Church law (canon law), gathered not in Rome but probably during the course of a local ecclesiastical dispute in the Frankish Church. This was attributed to one Isidore, a figure obscured from more exact identification by the passing of centuries, and it ingeniously combined genuinely old documents with some brand-new confections. For purposes of its own, the collection emphasized the power of the pope to overrule or reverse any decision of a local Church council. The Pope found this collection of 'False Decretals' of pseudo-Isidore highly useful: its great attraction was that it suggested that the papacy could construct Church law for itself, without references to the deliberations of bishops gathered in general councils of the Church, which had been the real source of the crucial decisions on discipline and theology made in the fourth and fifth centuries.
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So it was in the years after 800 that the two cornerstones of the medieval world, empire and papacy, consolidated claims for the future by looking to the past. What followed has been compared to a later movement of rediscovering the Classical past which took shape in the fourteenth century, and so it has been called the Carolingian Renaissance (Carolingian after Charles himself). Charlemagne's buildings proclaimed his agenda much earlier than that exceptional coinage of his last years. When he made Aachen his capital, its octangular imperial private chapel, now the central limb of a spectacular later medieval cathedral, was a copy of the octagonal church of San Vitale, built in the time of the Emperor Justinian in Ravenna three centuries before. Charlemagne went to the trouble of bringing architectural fragments from Ravenna to adorn it (see Plate 28). Throughout the lands where Charlemagne had control, he and his associates built monumental churches. They symbolized the creative refashioning of the past which was so characteristic of this era, because they imitated forms and plans of basilican churches from the early Christian past, but developed them in new ways, for instance building monumental entrance chapels and towers at the west end of the basilica, to overwhelm those approaching with ecclesiastical splendour and a sense of the beginning of a journey into a sacred interior; these were the first dramatic entrance facades in Christian architecture.
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Charles also brought to an end the long haemorrhage of written information from the Classical world which had resulted from texts dying as a single manuscript witness disintegrated. He encouraged a massive programme of copying manuscripts, his scribes developing from earlier Merovingian experiments a special script for fast writing and easy reading, 'Carolingian minuscule'. This spread throughout western Europe and was so influential that it is the direct ancestor of the typeface at which you are looking now. Virtually nothing of the Classical literature or early Christian writing that had survived in the West appears to have been lost since that burst of copying in the ninth century, and in virtually every case the earliest known copy of their texts dates from this period.
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This 'information explosion' was the basis of an attempt to remodel and instruct society on Christian lines. The Emperor's advisers drew up systems of law to regulate all society by what they saw as the commandments of God; among Charlemagne's favourite reading was Augustine's
City of God
. When he published a programme for reform of Church and laity, the
Admonitio Generalis
, he was happy to have himself compared with King Josiah of Judah, who had pleased God by finding and implementing the ancient book of the Law, and his programme also associated him with Moses, the original lawgiver.
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Drawing on the practical example of what Chrodegang had done a generation before in the diocese of Metz, Charlemagne pushed reform on the Church's life and worship practice throughout his dominions. At the royal and imperial monastery of Lorsch, where Chrodegang's brother had been the first abbot, there was even an ambitious attempt to produce a replacement for the Julian calendar, though in the end it did not have the long-term or worldwide impact achieved by Pope Gregory XIII's calendar reform eight centuries later.
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Charlemagne's agents for this heroic programme of social engineering were of course clergy, the only people who could be expected to read and write. Most prominent among them was the scholar and poet Alcuin, an Englishman from Northumbria, who came to Francia only in his middle age in the 780s, but who won Charlemagne's respect and even friendship. Alcuin proved one of the most important architects of Charlemagne's renewal programme, bringing with him the range of learning which had made England such an exceptional region of the Western Church since the days of Bede half a century before and which now returned to enrich the new empire.

Yet in one respect Alcuin was an exception to prove a significant rule amid Charlemagne's clerical agents: he only ever became a deacon, and he was in formal terms never a monk, even when he was made an abbot late in life. Otherwise, overwhelmingly the agents of reform and change in the Carolingian world were monks, and they were members of monastic communities with a particular formation, decided by the Rule which St Benedict had pioneered in Italy in the sixth century (see pp. 317-18). There had long been other monastic Rules known in the Frankish territories. Why did Benedict's prevail? One major motivation arose from a dramatic act of theft. In the central Loire valley, at the heart of France, there was a monastery called Fleury. Its much later Romanesque church still stands, a monumental tribute to the prestige of an ancient monastic tradition and the product of a hugely successful pilgrimage based on that theft, which is also commemorated in Fleury's alternative name, Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire.

Towards the end of the seventh century the monks of Fleury had mounted an expedition far into the south of Italy, to Monte Cassino, and there they clandestinely excavated the body of Benedict himself, plus the corpse of his even more shadowy sister and fellow religious, Scholastica. The consecrated raiding party bore their swag of bones back in triumph to the Loire, and there Benedictine monks still tend them in a crypt in their great church, to the continuing mortification of the Benedictines of Monte Cassino. Benedict had not put up any resistance to his abduction, so it was reasonable to suppose that he approved of it, and thus he gave his formidable blessing to the whole people of Francia. The possession of his bones in Frankish lands was a major reason why first the Franks and then other peoples who admired Frankish Christianity adopted Benedict's Rule as the standard in monastic life. Emperor Louis 'the Pious', Charlemagne's son, sealed the process during the 810s by decreeing that all monasteries in his dominions should follow the Rule. Now it was to set monastic standards throughout Latin Europe.
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Charlemagne encouraged the Benedictines to reform older monastic communities which to his eyes were chaotic and decadent. The Emperor's policies reflected the existing esteem which the elite families of Europe felt for monasteries; indeed, from the time of Pippin, the Carolingians were ruthless in annexing monastic patronage from their noblemen, in a bid to consolidate their power. Emperors and noblemen competed to endow Benedictine monasteries with estates to free the monks from financial anxiety.
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Why did they make these huge investments? Even though there is much to be cynical about in the establishment of the Carolingian Empire and its reforms, clergy brought these brutal politicians and warlords to a healthy sense of their own need for repentance and humility: the theme runs alongside and in counterpoint to the power politics of their era. Pippin directed his body to be buried face-down at the west door of the Abbey of St-Denis outside Paris. Charlemagne did then rather neutralize this gesture of abasement, transforming it into triumphant celebration by building on to the abbey church a huge example of the new fashion for 'westworks', a separate section of the church to the west of the people's nave, over his father's grave.

Nevertheless, the Emperor himself also felt the theme of humility very keenly and personally. He commissioned Alcuin to produce for him a private prayer book which committed him, despite his status as a layman, to a regular daily round of recitation of extracts from the psalms, especially those which were customarily used to express penitence, and to a detailed and specific confession of his sins. In his preface addressed to the Emperor, Alcuin reminded him of yet another monarch of the Old Testament, the author of the psalms, who was also a great sinner: David of Israel.
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It is difficult to know how far this private humility extended, and where it became a political pose. For instance, in all the magnificent and numerous manuscripts which the Emperor commissioned, there was no picture of the Emperor himself - but then, one of the barrage of reasons which the Carolingians produced for no longer regarding the Eastern emperors as Roman emperors was that the Byzantines had let pictures of themselves be offered veneration, a fatal sign of their pride.
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Equally, humility could be a useful instrument of policy: if an emperor was forced to change his mind in some radical way, he had a ready-made method of performing his political U-turn in the Church's language of penitence and forgiveness.
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From whatever motives, imperial humility persisted amid the legacy of splendour from Charlemagne's extraordinary reign. It was a potent theme because the Church was pushing the same idea throughout Frankish society and expected Charlemagne's subjects to follow his example. The ninth century was a decisive era in extending the penitential discipline brought by the Celtic monks in their missions to central Europe (see pp. 332-3). During the eighth century they and their admirers had radically changed the older Christian idea of confession as a single event in an individual's life, something like a second baptism, into an encounter with a priest to be repeated again and again. Now laity who confessed could expect to have to perform regular real penances for their regular real sins: fasting, or abstention from sex, with the penalties laid out in the Church's penitential books.
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This new regime of penitence caused a problem for Carolingian warlords. Quite apart from a healthy sense of their own sinfulness in general, they were faced with the continuing Christian insistence on the profound sinfulness of war in particular. Any notion of absolute prohibition on soldiering had long disappeared, but killing in war was still regarded as inherently sinful. Penance offered a way of dealing with this on a regular basis, but it still left noblemen in a cleft stick: they constantly had to fight to survive and gain wealth, but the price was drastic physical self-punishment. It has been pointed out that if the Norman armies who won the Battle of Hastings in 1066 had carried out the penances which the contemporary penitentials laid down as atonement for their fighting, they would have been too physically weak to go on to conquer England.
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There was a solution: monasteries could use their round of prayer to carry out these penances on behalf of the noblemen and warriors who had earned them. There was a weak concept of individuality in this society; in early medieval eyes, God would not mind who actually performed the penance demanded, as long as it was done. So the regular round of communal prayer demanded by Benedict's Rule was an excellent investment for the nobility; it saved them from the powers of Hell, which were as near and real as any invading army on their territory. Monasteries were fortresses against the Devil, the monks the garrison, armed with prayer.