POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENTS IN
EARLY MEDIEVAL EUROPE
The political history of western Europe from 476 to 800 has comparatively little interest except for the specialist. A few of the major developments, however, deserve some attention. Following the deposition of the last of the Roman emperors in the West, a Germanic chieftain by the name of Odovacar proclaimed himself king of Italy. But in 493 Italy was conquered by the Ostrogoths under Theodoric, one of the ablest and most intelligent of barbarian leaders. Until nearly the end of his reign of thirty-three years, Theodoric gave Italy a most enlightened rule than the country had known under many of the Caesars. He fostered agriculture and commerce, repaired public buildings and roads, patronized learning, and enforced religious toleration. But in his last years he became querulous and suspicious, accusing some of his faithful subordinates of plotting with the Roman aristocracy to overthrow him. Several of them were put to death, including the philosopher Boethius. Soon after Justinian became emperor at Constantinople in 537 he determined to reconquer Italy and the provinces in the West. Not until 552 was the power of the Ostrogoths finally broken. The long war utterly ruined Italy and opened the way for the Lombard invasion in 568. The Lombards succeeded in holding most of the peninsula under the rule of semi-independent dukes until the conquest of Charlemagne in the late eight century. (See "The Lombards in Italy" in my writing of July 7, 2005.)
In the minds of most students of history Charlemagne stands out as one of the two or three most important individuals in the whole medieval period. By some of his contemporaries he was acclaimed as a new Augustus who would bring peace and prosperity to western Europe. There can be no question that he established efficient government, and that he did much to combat the centrifugal tendencies which had gathered momentum during the reigns of the later Merovingians. Not only did he abolish the office of mayor of the palace, but he eliminated the tribal dukes and bestowed all the powers of local government upon his own appointees, the counts. To prevent abuses of authority by the latter he appointed missi dominici, or royal messengers, to visit the counties and to report to the king any acts of official injustice. He authorized the missi to hold their own courts for the purpose of hearing complaints of oppression and even in extreme cases to remove local officers. He modified the old system of private administration of justice by authorizing the counts to summon accused persons to court and by vesting the magistrates with more control over judicial procedure. He revived the Roman institution of the sworn inquest, in which a number of persons were summoned by agents of the king and bound by oath to tell what they knew of any crimes committed in their locality.
The institution survived the downfall of the Carolingian state and was carried by the Normans to England, where it eventually became an important factor in the origin of the grand jury system. While much of the remainder of the political structure which Charlemagne established perished with the end of his dynasty, the precedent which he set for strong government undoubtedly influenced many of the French kings in the later Middle Ages and the German emperors as well. It should be noted however, that the glory of Charlemagne's empire rested in large part upon a foundation of slaughter. During the forty-three years of his reign from 771 to 814, he conducted no less than fifty-four wars. There were scarcely a people of western Europe against whom he did not fight, except for the English. Since most of his campaigns were successful he annexed to the Frankish domain the greater part of central Europe and northern and central Italy. But some of these conquests were made possible only by a fearful sacrifice of blood and a resort to measures of the harshest cruelty. The campaign against the Saxons met with such stubborn opposition that Charlemagne finally ordered the beheading of forty-five hundred of them. It is typical of the spirit of the times that all of this was done under the pretext of inducing the pagans to adopt Christianity.
As a matter of fact, it was Charlemagne's constant intervention in religious affairs which led to the climax of his whole career - his coronation as Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III. Leo had been in trouble for some time. Accused by being a tyrant and a rake, he so aroused the indignation of the people of Rome that in 799 they gave him a severe beating and forced him to flee from the city. Struggling over the mountains to Germany, he implored the aid of Charlemagne. The great king sent him back to Italy and was instrumental in restoring him to the papal throne. On Christmas day, 800, as Charles knelt in prayer in St. Peter's church, the grateful Pope placed a crown on his head while the assembled multitude hailed him as "Augustus, crowned of God, great and pacific Emperor of the Romans." The significance of this event is rather hard to appraise. Charles has been represented as surprised and embarrassed by the honor. But the real cause of his irritation was probably his being made to accept a crown from the Pope. There is evidence that he had already developed some ambitious scheme of his own for reviving imperial power in the West. Moreover, he regarded his own authority as in no wise limited by any higher sovereignty of the church. He legislated freely on religious matters, controlled all appointments to ecclesiastical offices, and lectured priests and bishops alike on their morals and on what they should preach. Nevertheless, the fact that the coronation was acclaimed by so many of Charlemagne's contemporaries as marking the return to a golden age bears witness to its more than trivial importance. The Carolingian empire thus established was not conceived as the beginning of a new state at all, but as a revival of the Empire of the Caesars. The grandeur of Rome was now held to be reborn. It would have been more nearly in harmony with the truth if the event had been interpreted as an expression of the cultural and political awakening of the West. Theoretically the Empire with its capital at Constantinople still included Italy and the surrounding areas of Europe. The establishment of an empire in the West was a symbol of the widening gulf between Latin Christendom and Byzantium. Finally, the fact that Charlemagne was crowned by Leo III gave the Popes of the later Middle Ages a bulwark for their claims to supremacy. They could argue that it was they who had really created the empire, acting of course as the vicegerents of God.
Most of the records of economic life in the early Middle Ages present a mournful picture of return to primitive conditions and in some cases actual misery. The decline of Italy in the second half of the fifth century was especially swift. The forces which were set in motion by the economic revolution of the preceding two hundred years had now attained their full momentum. Commerce and industry were rapidly becoming extinct, lands that were formerly productive were growing up in briars and brambles, and the population was declining so noticeably that a law was enacted forbidding any woman under forty years of age to enter a convent. While the proprietors of the great landed estates extended their control over agriculture and over many of the functions of government as well, larger and larger numbers of the masses of people became serfs. During the reign of Theodoric this process of economic decline was arrested in some measure as a result of the benefits he extended to agriculture and commerce and his reduction of taxes. But Theodoric was unable to eliminate serfdom or to reverse the concentration of landed wealth, for he felt that he needed the support of the aristocracy. After his death the forces of decay again became operative; yet if it had not been for Justinian's war of reconquest, Italy might still have preserved a degree of the prosperity she had gained under the Ostrogothic king. The long military conflict brought the country to the verge of stark barbarism. Pestilence and famine completed the havoc wrought by the contending armies. Fields were left untilled, and most of the activities in the towns were suspended. Wolves penetrated into the heart of the country and fattened on the corpses that remained unburied. So great was the danger of starvation that cannibalism appeared in some areas. Only in the larger cities were the normal functions of civilization continued to any appreciable extent.
INTELLECTUAL ATTAINMENTS OF EARLY MEDIEVAL EUROPE
Generally speaking, the mentality of early medieval Europe was not of a very high order. Superstition and credulity frequently characterized the work even of many of the outstanding writers. A fondness for compilation rather than for original achievement was also a distinguishing feature of much of the intellectual endeavor. Few men any longer had any interest in truth for its own sake; both science and philosophy were intended to contribute to the moral improvement of man and to illuminate the road to salvation. Such an attitude naturally led to mystical interpretations of knowledge and to the acceptance of fables as fact when they appeared to be freighted with symbolic significance for the sphere or morality or religion. In spite of all this, the mind of the times was not hopelessly submerged in darkness. The light of antique learning was never entirely extinguished; even some of the most pious of church fathers were ready to concede the value of classical literature. Moreover, there were some men in the period who, if not creative geniuses, at least had abilities of scholarship which would not have been rated inferior in the best days of Greece.
Nearly all of the philosophers of the early Middle Ages may be classified as either Christian or pagans, although a few seem to have been nominal adherents of the church who wrote in the spirit of pagan thought. The Christian philosophers tended to divide into two different schools: (1) those who emphasized the primacy of dogma; and (2) those who believed that the doctrines of the faith should be illuminated by the light of reason and brought into harmony with the finest products of pagan thinking. The dogmatist tradition in Christian philosophy stemmed originally from Tertullian, a priest of Carthage who lived about the beginning of the third century. For him, Christianity was a system of sacred law to be accepted entirely upon faith. God was an absolute sovereign, whose decrees no mortal had any right to question. Human knowledge was of no value for religion; indeed, now that the Christ had come, and men had the Gospels, there was no need for any further curiosity. As Tertullian would have it, the wisdom of men was mere foolishness with God, and the more a tenet of the faith contradicted reason the greater was the merit of accepting it.
While few of the Christian fathers went as far as Tertullian in
despising intellectual effort, there were several who adhered to his general principle
that the dogmas of the faith were not to be tested by reason. St. Ambrose, the great
bishop of Milan in the fourth century, was one of them, in spite of his well-trained mind
and his liberal social philosophy. His contemporary, St. Jerome, was another. But the most
influential of them all was Pope Gregory I (540-604), known in church history as Gregory
the Great. The scion of a rich senatorial family, Gregory scorned the seductions of wealth
and power in order that he might dedicate his life to the church. He turned his father's
palace into a convent and gave all of the remainder of the wealth he had inherited to the
poor. With Gregory the patristic mind sank to perhaps the lowest point it was destined to
reach. Naive and credulous as a child, he recognized no need for any further knowledge
than the limited amount he possessed. He delighted in accounts of the miraculous and in
stories of the terrifying malignance of demons. He described in graphic detail the
marvelous powers of the bones of saints and of filings from St. Peter's chair. Despite
these qualities of his mind, his influence upon the beliefs of the church was profound. He
laid great stress upon the idea of penance as essential to the remission of sins and
strengthened the notion of purgatory as a place where even the righteous must suffer for
minor offenses in order to be purified for admission to heaven. Perhaps more than anyone
else he was responsible for originating the doctrine that the priest in celebrating the
mass co-operates with God in performing a miracle which has the effect or repeating and
renewing the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.
The most eminent of the Christian philosophers who may be described as representatives of
a rationalist tradition were Clement of Alexandria and Origen. Both of them lived in the
third century and were deeply influenced by Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism, although they
adhered to neither one of those systems very closely. Far from despising all human
knowledge, they taught that the best of the Greek thinkers had really anticipated the
teachings of Jesus, and that Christianity is improved by being brought into harmony with
pagan learning. While Clement and Origen would not qualify as rationalists in the modern
sense, inasmuch as they took a great many of their beliefs on faith, they nevertheless
recognized the importance of reason as a fundamental basis of knowledge whether religious
or secular. They denied the omnipotence of God and taught that God's power is limited by
his goodness and wisdom. They rejected the fatalism of many of their opponents and
insisted that man by his own free will molds his course of action while on earth. Neither
the universe nor anything in it, they declared, was ever created in time; instead, the
process of creation in eternal, new things supplanting the old in unending succession.
Both Clement and Origen condemned the extreme asceticism of some of their more zealous
brethren; in particular they deplored the tendency of such men as Tertullian to speak of
marriage as simply a legalized form of carnality. They avowed, on the contrary, that
wedlock and the begetting of children are necessary not only for the good of society but
for the perfection of man himself. Finally, they maintained that the purpose of all future
punishment in hell cannot be eternal, for even the blackest of sinners must eventually be
redeemed. If it were not so, God would not be a God of goodness and mercy.
The most erudite and perhaps the most original of all the early Christian philosophers was St. Augustine. In so far as it is possible to classify him at all, he occupied an intermediate position between Clement and Origen, on the one hand, and Tertullian and Gregory on the other. While he certainly placed faith above reason, his mind was not absolutely closed, and he recognized the need for an intellectual understanding of what he believed. Born in 354, the son of a pagan father and a Christian mother, Augustine was torn by conflicting impulses throughout the greater part of his life. As a young man he was addicted to sensual pleasures, from which he tried vainly to escape, though he admits in his Confessions that his efforts were none too sincere. Even after his engagement to marry he still could not resist the temptation to take a new mistress. Meanwhile, when he was about eighteen years old, he was attracted to philosophy by reading Cicero's Hortensius. He passed from one system of thought to another, unable to find spiritual satisfaction in any. For a brief period he considered the possibilities of Christianity, but it impressed him as too crude and superstitious. Then for nine years he was a Manichean, but ultimately he became convinced that that faith was decadent. Next he was attracted to Neo-Platonism, and then, finally, after listening to the preaching of Ambrose, he returned to Christianity. Though already in his thirty-third year when he was baptized, Augustine advanced rapidly in ecclesiastical position. In 395 he became bishop of Hippo in northern Africa, an office which he held until his death in 430.
As a philosopher Augustine derived a great many of his theories from the Neo-Platonists. He believed in absolute and eternal truth and in instinctive knowledge which God implants in the minds of men. There are certain basic concepts of knowledge, he maintained, which are not the subjective products of human thinking, but exist in the mind of man from birth as reflections of eternal truth. These can be relied upon as immutable standards of justice and right. Skepticism is therefore unjustified. The supremely important knowledge is knowledge of God and His plan of redemption for mankind. Though most of this knowledge must be derived from the revelation contained in the Scriptures, it is nevertheless the duty of man to understand as much of it as possible in order to strengthen his belief. On the basis of this conclusion St. Augustine developed his famous conception of human history as the unfoldment of the will of God. Everything that has happened or will ever happen represents but an episode in the fulfillment of the divine plan. The whole race of human beings comprises two great divisions: those whom God has predestined to eternal salvation constitute the City of God; all others belong to the Earthly City. The end of the drama of history will come with the Day of Judgment, when the blessed few who compose the City of God will put on the garment of immortality, while the vast multitude in the earthly kingdom will be cast into the fires of hell. This, according to St. Augustine, is the whole meaning of human existence.
St. Augustine's theology was an integral part of his philosophy. Believing as he did in a deity who controls the operation of the universe down to its smallest detail, he naturally emphasized the omnipotence of God and denied the freedom of the will. He conceived of man as totally depraved by nature and therefore absolutely incapable by his won efforts of performing good deeds or of contributing anything to the salvation of his soul. Only those men can be saved whom God has elected for reasons of His own to inherit eternal life. The members of this tiny minority are made the recipients of heavenly grace which serves to keep them from sin. All others are doomed to follow the inclinations of their depraved natures and therefore receive eternal damnation. Except by the grace of God it is impossible for man to perform any good work; the so-called pagan virtues are simply "splendid vices". The influence of St. Augustine was enormous. In spite of the fact that his teachings were modified slightly by the Council of Orange in 529, and still more by the theologians of the later Middle Ages, he is revered to this day as one of the most important fathers of the Roman Catholic religion. Several of the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century also adopted some of his doctrines, especially his theories of absolute predestination, original sin, the total depravity of man's nature, and the bondage of the will.
Practically the only pagan school of philosophy in early medieval Europe was that of the Neo-Platonists. There was one other individual thinker, however, who cannot be definitely classified as either a pagan or a Christian. It is quite possible that he had been brought up in the church, but the spirit of his chief writings was entirely pagan. The name of this man was Boethius. Born about 480 of aristocratic parentage, Boethius eventually became principal adviser to Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king. Later he fell out with that monarch, was accused of treason, and thrown into prison. In 524 he was put to death. The chief philosophical work of Boethius, which he wrote while languishing in prison, is entitled The Consolation of Philosophy. Its dominant theme is the relation of man to the universe. The author considers such problems as fate, the divine government of the world, and individual suffering. After carefully weighing the various conceptions of fortune, he comes to the conclusion that true happiness in synonymous with philosophic understanding that the universe is really good and that evil is only apparent. Pointing out that men who yield to violent impulses either suffer pangs of remorse or find themselves slaves of their passions, he endeavors to show that vice never goes unpunished nor virtue rewarded. Although he apparently assumes the immortality of the soul, he refers to no definitely Christian belief as a source of consolation. His attitude is essentially that of the Stoics, colored by a trace of Neo-Platonist mysticism. Few treatises on philosophy were more popular in medieval Europe than Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. Not only was it ultimately translated into nearly every vernacular language, but numerous imitations of it were also written.
As one would naturally expect, science in this period showed little originality. The most pretentious scientific writings were largely compilations of curious lore believed to possess mystical significance. One of the earliest examples was The Marriage of Philosophy and Mercury, written by Martianus Capella, an African Neo-Platonist of the early fifth century. The work was cast in the form of an allegorical narrative in which Mercury,, the groom, presented his bride, Philosophy, with seven maid-servants, symbolizing the Seven Liberal Arts - grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Each of these subjects was discussed briefly but with far more attention to magic symbolism than to scientific accuracy. Thus the treatise on arithmetic consisted in large part of a discourse on the marvelous virtues of the first ten numbers. Despite its intellectual aridity, Capella's work became one of the most popular of medieval textbooks.
A production of a somewhat similar type was a work of unknown authorship entitled the Physiologus. Purporting to be a treatise on natural history, it was filled with quaint misinformation about the habits of animals, which was intended to exemplify certain principles of Christian doctrine. Two examples will suffice. The lioness gives birth to her cub dead; three days later the father lion roars in its face and brings it to life. Because of his great strength the unicorn cannot be captured by hunters, but he tamely submits to being taken by a pure virgin. In like manner, the Christ, mightier than any power on earth, submitted to becoming the champion of sinful man through the fact of his virgin birth.
The third of the famous compilations was the Etymologies of Isidore, bishop of Seville, who lived in the seventh century. As its title indicates, the purpose of this work was to explain the nature of things through accounting for the derivation of their names. The subjects discussed ranged from angels to agriculture and from furniture to fabulous monsters. The author's deductions regarding the origins of words frequently went badly awry, not only because of his meager information, but also as a result of his attempts to discover some hidden religious or ethical meaning. The Etymologies, however, was one of the most widely used medieval books. It was considered an indispensable addition to every monastic library. Fortunately these elaborate compilations were not the only scientific writings produced during the early Middle Ages. Some of the shorted textbooks in use were of decidedly superior quality. The most notable were the works of Boethius on arithmetic and geometry. These, while not very original, were nevertheless free from mystical nonsense. A textbook by the same author on music was considered good enough to be studied at Oxford until the eighteenth century. In the judgment of some historians the scientific writings of the Venerable Bede should be ranked high in the scale of merit, but most of these were quite elementary and were often filled with the same childish love of the fabulous that characterized the work of his contemporaries. For example, he states in one of them that snakes will die when brought into the air of Ireland. Nevertheless, Bede did make one important contribution to science: a new method of chronology by which events were dated before and after the birth of Christ instead of from the supposed year of the creation.
The history of literature in the early Middle Ages was marked, first of all, by a decline of interest in the classical writings and later by the growth of a crude originality which ultimately paved the way for the development of new literary traditions. By the fifth century the taste for good Latin literature had already begun to decay. Some of the Christian fathers who had been educated in pagan schools were inclined to apologize for their attachment to the ancient writings; others expressly denounced them; but the attitude which generally prevailed was that of St. Augustine. The great bishop of Hippo declared that men should continue to study the pagan classics, not for their aesthetic value or their human appeal, but "with a view to making the wit more keen and better suited to penetrate the mystery of the Divine Word." The Latin language also suffered from the effects of the gradual barbarization of culture. Many theologians appeared to feel that it was almost impious for a Christian to write too well. In composing his commentaries on the Scriptures, Pope Gregory I avowed that he considered it exceedingly inappropriate to "fetter the Heavenly Oracle" to the rules of grammar. As a result, medieval Latin was eventually corrupted by a hopeless confusion of changes in syntax and spelling and by the introduction of new words from colloquial usage. Toward the close of the period, however, the vernacular languages, which had been slowly evolving from a fusion of barbarian dialects, with some admixture of Latin elements, began to be employed for crude poetic expression. The consequence was a new and vigorous literary growth which attained its full momentum about the thirteenth century.
The best-known example of this literature in the vernacular is the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf. First put into written form about the eighth century, this poem incorporates ancient legends of the Germanic peoples of northwestern Europe. It is a story of fighting and seafaring and of heroic adventure against deadly dragons and the forces of nature. The background of the epic is heathen, but the author of the work introduced into it some qualities of Christian idealism. Beowulf is important, not only as one of the earliest specimens of Anglo-Saxon or Old English poetry, but also for the picture it gives of the society of the English and their ancestors in the early Middle Ages. Many of the remaining examples of the popular literature of this time were also written in Old English. They include the hymns of Caedmon and numerous elegies describing the rude virtues of early barbarian culture. But no account of the vernacular literature of this time would be complete without some mention of the achievements of the Irish. Ireland in the late sixth and early seventh centuries experienced a brilliant renaissance which made that country one of the brightest spots in the so-called Dark Ages. Without the benefit of any influence from Latin culture, Irish monks and bards wrote stories of fantastic adventure on land and sea and hundreds of poems of gorgeous color and sympathetic understanding of human nature.
Aside from the theological works the leading productions of authors who wrote in Latin during the early Middle Ages were the histories of Orosius, Gregory of Tours, and Bede. At the request of St. Augustine, a Spanish priest by the name of Orosius wrote his Seven Books Against the Pagans. Distinguished neither by accuracy nor by literary charm, this work was intended to be a history of the world showing that the calamities which had befallen ancient nations were due to their wickedness. Bishop Gregory of Tours, a contemporary of Clovis, also wrote with a view to defense of the faith. In his History of the Franks he condoned the murders of Clovis on the ground that they were committed in the service of the church. Although his work contains interesting information about the events of his time, it is marred by his accounts of the miraculous powers of sacred relics and his tendency to give a supernatural interpretation to every occurrence. By far the best of the historical writings of the early medieval period was the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England. Bede was an English monk who lived between 673 and 735. Apparently more interested in scholarship than in pious meditation, he pursued his studies so assiduously that he gained a reputation as one of the most learned men of his time. In collecting material for his history he devoted careful attention to sources. He did not hesitate to reject the statements of some of the most respectable authorities when he found them to be in error; and when the evidence was a matter of mere oral tradition, he was honest enough to say so.
Compiled by Marko Marelich
Retired Mechanical Engineer
San Francisco, California USA
August 21, 2005.