Frankish
Homeland & Clovis'
Conquests
Like the sixth-century Anglo-Saxons, the Franks had not undergone religious conversion, so Clovis—brilliant, cunning, brutal, and deadly—kept his men’s loyalty through war and shared plunder. In 493 he married the Catholic Clothilde, a Burgundian princess. Gregory of Tours (540-594), bishop and author of the History of the Franks, writes that she pressed Clovis for three years to convert, and after some additional urging by Remi (459-530), bishop of Rheims, Clovis submitted to baptism in 496. His subsequent campaigns against the Visigoths not only brought the usual land and plunder, but took on the harsh edge of a religious crusade. Gregory has Clovis proclaim: “I take it very hard that these Arians hold part of Gaul. Let us go with God's help and conquer them and bring the land under our control.” They did both, and forcibly baptized the Goths as well. As he lay dying in his new capital of Paris, Clovis had much to be satisfied with. The Frankish people were united and a single acceptable religion held sway in most of Gaul. But Frankish custom dictated that Clovis’s kingdom be divided among his four sons, and so it was. Technically the Frankish kingship was an elected position, but in fact royal blood was revered to the point that it was hereditary in practice.
The kingdom was reunited a century later, but corruption had entered into the relationship between church and Frankish state. As in England, kings and nobles gave gifts of land—the only commodity of which there was plenty—to the Church, or specifically, to monasteries and bishops, and so these two institutions came to hold about one-third of Frankish land. The people worked the land, were tied to it for survival and by law, and peacefully went along with any change of control. The ownership of land meant rights to the produce of the land (usufruct), which supported the landlords, whether lay or religious. Though the Christian communities elected the bishops, increasingly powerful landlords, who were often still warriors, and the king exerted considerable influence on these decisions. Positions of Church leadership often went to royal cronies, nobles’ sons, or trusted administrators, rather than to men who could provide good spiritual guidance. Christianity came to be associated with the institution and not the faith. A series of weak and ineffective kings in the later seventh and early eighth centuries did not help matters.
After the nobleman and royal marshal Charles Martel (“the Hammer”; d. 741) defeated a Muslim army near Tours in 732, many looked to his family for effective leadership. In the same year, an Anglo-Saxon missionary named Boniface (676-754) was named archbishop of Fulda, and leader of the East Frankish Church. Boniface had spent nine years re-establishing Benedictine monasticism in northern Europe, bringing Columbanus’s Irish-style establishments into line and reviving many monasteries that had been plundered or destroyed in the era of war and lawlessness. Charles worked closely with Boniface, recognizing the value of having the leaders of church and state work together in creating unity and order. Like Charles and his contemporary countryman, Bede, Boniface recognized the importance of political and religious unity, and strove to tie the Catholic and secular leadership in the Frankish kingdom tightly to Rome and the pope.
Charles’s son Pepin the Short (r. 747-768) continued this policy, and, with the support of the pope, had himself elected king in 751. The deposed king was yet another feckless Merovingian non-entity, the young Childeric III (r. 743-751), so the transition was a quick one. Childeric’s long locks were shaved off and he was forced into a monastery. Conveniently, he died within the year. Pepin thus established his new Carolingian dynasty without rivals—named for his father (Carolus in Latin). Three years later Pepin rewarded the pope by leading an army into Italy and defeating the Arian Lombards, who had taken over in the wake of Justinian’s wars against the Goths a century earlier. He also formalized the Donation of Pepin, a swath of land centered on the city of Rome that the pope would rule as a monarch. The Bishop of Rome would no longer be merely a spiritual pastor, but a landlord and monarch. This earthly authority was strengthened by the “discovery” of the so-called Donation of Constantine, a document that supposedly recorded a similar grant to the Bishop of Rome by Emperor Constantine. It was a fiction, but it added legitimacy by supposedly echoing an imperial decree.
Like Clovis, Pepin divided the kingdom between his sons. Carloman (d. 771), however, died after three years, leaving Charles (r. 768-814) sole ruler. Charles’s accomplishments earned him the title Charles the Great, or in French, Charlemagne. He became one of the greatest of medieval rulers. His long reign, clear vision, and tireless energy allowed him to take the powerful kingdom of the Franks and make it even more powerful, creating a true empire in both name and substance.
Clothilde Praying to St. Martin
The Baptism of Clovis
Fresco of the Donation of Constantine in the Church of the Quattro Coronati in Rome
The Conversion of Clovis
Clovis and the Soissons Vase
Treatment of Serfs and Slaves
Trial by Ordeal
The Battle
of Tours
Pepin's Coronation
Donation of Conatantine
Charlemagne’s successes were founded on victories in some sixty major military campaigns. He defeated the Lombards and made himself their king. After two decades he subdued the Saxons in the east and had them slaughtered or forcibly baptized. This impressed the Slavic peoples further east and they agreed to pay him tribute. He crushed the Avar people, and seized their gigantic treasury, much of which he used to support the church and artists. His one failure was marching across the Pyrenees to subdue the Moors in Spain. In 778 the rear guard of his retreating army was slaughtered at Roncesvalles by Basques, an event which gave rise to one of the great epics of French literature, The Song of Roland (see Chapter 11). All told, he roughly doubled the size of the Frankish realm.
Frankish armies, like Frankish society, were led by counts. Originally they led the Germanic comitati, or warrior bands that made up tribal armies. As the Germanic folk settled in Roman territories, these leaders accommodated themselves to their new tasks: gathering their men for war, gathering revenues due to the king, and sitting in the king’s place in local law courts. Under the weak Merovingians they became territorial lords with increasingly broad powers and, after years of careful marriages, control of great tracts of land—counties—and thus wealth. Counts in strategically vital areas bore the title duke, from the Latin dux, a military commander. Counties tended to center on old Roman cities and derived their names from them: the county of Anjou centered on Angers, for example. Bishops resided in and administered their flocks from these same cities, which served as the seats of their dioceses and locations of their cathedral churches. Charlemagne’s administrators carried this system into Central Europe and northern Italy. Charlemagne was instrumental in reorganizing a confusing system of Germanic tribal laws and issuing many new ones regulating both church and state. He kept both nobles and churchmen in line by the use of missi dominici—“messengers of the lord (Charlemagne).” These pairs of men, a nobleman and a cleric, served as judges and inspected the records of churches, monasteries, and county seats for compliance with Charlemagne’s will.
There had been no Roman emperor in the west since 476, and Charlemagne came closer to meriting the title than anyone. Consequently, Pope Leo III so crowned him in Rome on Christmas Day, 800. This presented several problems, however. No pope had ever done this before; if he granted the imperial crown, could he take it back? And what about the Byzantine emperor’s claim to the entire Roman Empire? The second issue created few problems, but the first spawned many controversies in later years.
Charlemagne understood the importance of fusing the elements of Christian, Roman, and Germanic culture. Historians have named his program the Carolingian Renaissance. Important aspects of classical Roman style and expression were revived and given new contexts and meanings. While this generally meant supporting the Church as creator of culture, Charlemagne, imitating Constantine, centralized the crown’s role. He recognized the problem of linguistic diversity in his realm, and sought a solution by reinforcing the role of Latin. This meant first of all the education in Latin of the clergy as well as the monks. All priests were to be educated, and every town was to have a free “grammar school.” As king and emperor, Charlemagne needed literate administrators. Between 782 and 796 he enjoyed the services of Alcuin (735-804), a highly educated Anglo-Saxon cleric who had headed the famed cathedral school at York. The Franks had trained the children at court in a palace school since the early 700s, but Alcuin changed the emphasis from martial arts to the liberal arts. He brought with him the love of classical literature that had accompanied monastic intellectual activity in Northumbria, and the English style of writing in which each letter stands out clearly. Adapted by the Franks, this Carolingian minuscule script replaced many older ones and made learning to read, and reading itself, far easier.
This new script was used in two huge royal projects; one was to place a fine and accurate copy of the Latin Bible in every cathedral church, and the other was to copy the full range of Latin secular and religious literature. Education in Latin meant reading from classical sources, and Alcuin’s efforts paid off to the extent that locating and collecting copies of classical authors’ works became fashionable. This resulted in the preservation of most ancient Latin works that still survive. Six hundred years later, classical scholars would discover these manuscripts and convince themselves that the Frankish script was true Roman. Early printers adopted Carolingian minuscule in part because of this misunderstanding, and in part because of the clarity of the fonts it produced.
The Bibles and liturgical books that Charlemagne produced for his clergy were beautifully and richly decorated. What remains of Carolingian painting comes from them and only a few surviving frescoes. The manuscript artists clearly used late antique models in an attempt to revive classical expression and link their time with the imperial age. This could mean either adaptation or copying, as in the Godescalc Evangelistary from around 782 and the Coronation Gospels of fifteen years later. Neither work reminds us of the Lindisfarne Gospel’s evangelist with his stylized hair and robe and sparse setting, nor does either come close to the abstraction or busy-ness of the contemporary Book of Kells. The artist, Godescalc, provides a bearded Christ reminiscent of late antique portrayals, and places him on an elongated pillow atop a rather simple seat. The sense of space is distorted by the wall behind him, the placement of his name (IHS XPs = Jesus Christ), and the stylized plants in the register above. Christ’s large-eyed face stares placidly out like a Byzantine icon’s, while his spindly fingers bless and grasp elegantly if improbably. His body’s form is obscured somewhat by the patterning of the robe, but the linear folds are little more indicative of what is underneath than what the Lindisfarne artist provided his Matthew. Christ’s halo, with its Anglo-Saxon dotting and Celtic knot-work in the framing demonstrate the eclectic nature of this and much Carolingian work.
The St. John portrait in the Coronation Gospels seems a world apart. It loses much of the geometrical nature of Godescalc’s work, and imitates the sense of flow of his classical model. John sits far more naturalistically in his chair, while on his robe, shadows and lines of varying thickness clearly convey the body beneath. It possesses a sense of volume and corporeality lacking in Godescalc’s Christ. John’s face too, with its softer modeling and less iconic positioning, reflects a sounder sense of the human figure. The architectural setting is still confused, and mere wisps of plants and trees provide the meager background. The greater naturalism of the human figure, making him more approachable and familiar, is sometimes related to a revived sense of humanism that values the natural person, displayed without detachment or abstractions or a riot of surface detail that masks the humanity beneath.
About fifteen years after the Coronation Gospels, an unknown artist created the highly idiosyncratic Gospel book for Bishop Ebbo of Rheims (d. 851). His image of Matthew hearkens back to late classical models but is conceived with an energy and psychic focus that has no real predecessor. The intensity of his eyes and face, with its powerful jaw-line, is counterbalanced by his almost vibrating robe. The plethora of wrinkles, highlighted by swipes of gold, brown, and purple, create a spiritual frenzy that both discloses and hides the body beneath. Everything else in the picture is formed of quick, bold strokes of color or simple line. His linear technique was picked up a few years later by the artist who decorated the Utrecht Psalter, with its simple but elegant monochromatic drawings. Such naive illustrations were present in some classical texts, but this artist created small clusters of figures and minimalist landscape that literally depict the words of each Psalm. The clusters may or may not interrelate; their meaning is entirely bound up with the text. This economical method was not lush, but was copied by more than one artist of the period.
Charlemagne looked into the state of liturgical and monastic music in his realm and was less than pleased. Over several centuries, the public religious services and monastic office (prayers chanted by monks eight times per day) had become increasingly more complex. Each Hour of the Office consisted of set prayers, Psalms, and readings from Scripture. In Benedict’s day, the Office may have taken four hours to perform. With the development of prayers and chanting, this came closer to eight hours per day by the later Carolingian period. The style of singing for which we have the earliest direct evidence is called Gregorian Chant, named for Pope St. Gregory the Great, himself a Benedictine. The principal liturgy, called the Mass, consisted of two major sections. In the first, unchanging or “Ordinary” prayers (“Kyrie,” “Gloria”) were interspersed with prayers and readings from Scripture in preparation for the Eucharist; in the second, more preparatory prayers (including the Ordinary “Sanctus” and “Agnus Dei”) were followed by the consecration of the bread and wine by the priest and their sharing with the congregation in Communion. The Office and the Mass featured both solo and choral chanting, but the choral was monophonic—all singing the same syllable on the same note at the same time—and a cappella. Like Byzantine chant, Western chant had no set rhythm, and it used musical scales called modes, though these differed from those of the Eastern Church. At Masses, performance by the choir replaced congregational singing, which allowed for far greater diversity in composition and performance, since a choir—monastic or attached to a cathedral church—could rehearse new melodies. Scholars argue over whether this development was gradual or took place rapidly over a short period. Either way, the music was evolutionary, moving from simple to more complex treatments. Because of the difficulty in communication and travel, many regional and local chant traditions grew up in the Italian, Spanish, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Gallic (French), and Byzantine cultural areas.
As with other aspects of his culture, Charlemagne wanted to establish and preserve a uniform practice in liturgical and monastic chant. Preservation required a means of recording musical notes, or notation. Boethius had used the first fifteen letters of the Roman alphabet to denote musical tones—similar to our notes A through—but until a symbolic musical language was devised, such a system was far too clumsy for aiding performers. The oldest evidence for the practice of notation is from the late ninth century, but the placement of symbols called neumes over written words to indicate changes in pitch probably began earlier. This was a revolutionary step in the development of Western music, as it took a singer from reliance on memory and improvisation and led to a universally understood system for recording melodies.
But neumes only indicated a change of pitch and its direction; they did not indicate specific pitches. In some manuscripts, signs indicating rhythm and dynamic changes also appear. By the early eleventh century, scribes began using a long single line to indicate an absolute pitch around which neumes were placed to indicate movement from that tone. Soon two lines, representing the tones C and F, appeared, and finally the French monk Guido d’Arezzo (c. 995-post-1033) created both a four-line staff that anchored the pitch of each mark and the vocal scale do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti. Music was clearly moving away from its previous place as an abstract study rooted in Platonic and Pythagorean number mysticism and claiming its place as a practical, applied creative art.
Charlemagne's Empire
Charlemagne (center) with Popes Gelasius and Gregory the Great
Charlemagne's Coronation Crown
Alcuin (c) Presents Raban Maurus to the Archbishop of Mainz
Carolingian Minuscule
Christ from Godescalc’s Evangelistary
St. John from the Coronation Gospels
St Matthew from Ebbo’s Gospels
Utrecht Psalter: Drawing Accompanying Psalm 20
Early Neumes
Chant Notation, Laon, c. 930
Guido d'Arezzo
Life of Charlemagne
Charlemagne Summons His Army
The Life of the Missus
Sicut Cervus
The setting for this music was the churches of monks and bishops—churches crafted in Roman-style architecture, but with a Germanic twist. Traditional Germanic architecture consisted of simple timber-frame structures with wooden or thatched roofs. Even a great hall, like Beowulf’s Heorot would have been constructed of planks and trusses, with the ground floor several feet beneath the ground. While this worked for smaller churches and even monasteries, the Romans had taught northern Europe to build in stone, and on a larger scale. Towns in Gaul, Italy, and even Britain retained many of their Roman buildings, and the presence of a bishop in Gaul and Italy meant the continuing use of churches for centuries. By Charlemagne’s time, some had been renovated, others remained intact, and some torn down and reconstructed. They were usually basilica structures with three aisles and trussed wooden roofs. Like many others, Bishop Gregory’s cathedral at Tours had transept with a square tower over its crossing with the nave. A single rectangular tower projected from the center of the façade and rose above the roofline, creating a grander main entrance and a powerful vertical thrust up the front of the building.
The monastic church was physically and symbolically the center of the community. One such monastery, established around 475 just outside Paris, was dedicated to St. Denis, the Neoplatonist who inspired Maximos the Confessor and served as the first bishop of Paris. Under the Merovingians it became the burial place of kings. After his coronation, Pepin intended to continue the tradition and had the structure rebuilt in a grander, more Roman style. Charlemagne chose burial in his own capital of Aachen, but continued—even accelerated—the pace of construction.
One of the grandest monastic complexes was the monastery of St. Riquier, near Centula in Gaul. Angilbert (d. 814), known as “Homer” around Charlemagne’s court, became abbot and lavished significant resources upon it. The site included three churches, one just a simple wooden “barn chapel” dedicated to St. Benedict. The main church was an enormous basilica that was 250 feet long. Nine towers sprung from it: one over the crossing and two flanking each end of the cross-shaped building. The main entrance at the west end—the altar was always at the east end of a church—was virtually a structure unto itself, and came to be known as the westwork. The towers and main door resembled city gateways, and they served to mask the structure beyond. As at Tours, the towers created a powerful sense of verticality, moving the eye and spirit heavenward. They also served as sheltered places where grand processions gathered. This Carolingian style of multiple towers and westworks appeared over and again in northern France and Germany, and can still be seen at the German Abbey of Corvey.
St. Riquier’s third church, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, was an attempt to copy San Vitale at Ravenna. In fact, it was a courtier’s tribute to Charlemagne’s palace chapel at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), itself a replica of San Vitale. The royal chapel stands today as the only remnant of Charlemagne’s palace complex. With an atrium holding 7,000 people, it held apartments and barracks, a school, an audience hall, and a vast swimming pool fed by natural hot springs. The architect Odo of Metz based his design on the pope’s episcopal palace at St. John Lateran in Rome. He began work in 792, and Pope Leo III dedicated it in 805. Charlemagne’s advisers no doubt made the linkage to Justinian’s Ravenna and Rome itself, and convinced him that his own chapel and burial church should not be a basilica, but a centrally planned structure, like a Roman mausoleum.
Charlemagne was buried there in 814, after ruling for forty-five years. He had brought countless Germanic folk into the Christian world, assured the preservation of Latin literary culture, and strengthened the Church in its diocesan and monastic life. He established ethnic boundaries of Western Europe that still exist today, and established a Western Empire that would rival and outlive the Byzantine and exist in some form until the Defeat of the Central Powers in World War I (1918). He left a single heir, Louis the Pious, to rule as king and emperor.
The Monastery of St. Riquier
The westwork of the Abbey church of Corvey, Germany
Palace Chapel of Charlemagne
Charlemagne’s Palace