At the beginning of the Common Era, nothing seemed as certain to endure as the Roman Empire. Having defeated all contenders and potential adversaries, Octavian (later given the title Caesar Augustus by a pliant Senate), bestrode the Mediterranean world and western Europe in a showcase of marble monuments to his unchallenged power. To assuage the sentiments of a powerless Senate and leading citizens of Rome, Octavian designated himself as the Principate – the principal, ‘first’ of Roman citizens. The Principate continued with successor rulers until nearly the end of the second century. Some were excellent; others mediocre; still others, mentally deranged (cf. Caligula). The truly last Principate, and excellent in his rule, was Marcus Aurelius (161-180 AD). He was the last emperor to rule the Empire in its entirety, when it was also at its greatest territorial extent: from Britannia in the north to the Upper Nile River Valley in the south; from Persia in the East to Iberia (Spain) in the West. After his rule of relative peace, guided, as he was, by his meditations of Stoic precepts, the Empire turned largely to military rule, tempered by assassinations, military coups, economic decline, and the split of the Empire into an Eastern Roman Empire, based in Constantinople; and a Western Roman Empire, governed from Rome, but later moved to Milan, for reasons discussed below.
ROMAN DECLINE
By the mid-fourth century, inflationary price spirals and population decline had become the rule, as a once proud citizen army was reduced to mercenary recruitment to fight its battles and guard its borders. When the Rhine River froze over in the winter of 376 AD, Germanic, Hunnish and other land-hungry warrior bands, with families in tow, crossed the frozen “ice-bridge” to settle in Gaul and beyond, using the vast, efficient system of Roman roads to take up permanent residence. Rather than assimilating to Roman ways, the invaders created “a state within a state”, applying their oral, tribal law to adjudicate their own affairs. These interstitial communities severed communications, isolating Roman colonies into near-feudal subsistence, and effectively cut them off from Roman commerce, jurisprudence, and civil administration. As Rome had been suffering from a “birth dearth”, a declining birthrate, for many generations by this time, Rome no longer had the manpower to guard its borders. But, more importantly, Romans lost the will to preserve the Empire. Rome was sacked in 410, virtually all civil administration was moved to Milan, until the last Roman Emperor that resided in Rome was deposed in 476.
As disorder and discontinuity spread, standards of living declined. For example, Britannia (England and Wales), located at the far-flung northwestern region of the Roman Empire, had prospered under Roman rule. The Romans had introduced glass into “Britain”, and taught the art of glass-blowing to its colonial settlers and native residents of the soil. With the decline of the Roman Empire, supplies of glass had become scarce. And having learned the art of glass-blowing from the Romans, by the late sixth century, glass was no longer made in Britannia, for knowledge of the art had disappeared from the collective experience of Roman Britannia. To make matters worse, Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invaded and wreaked havoc across the island, disrupting trade networks and virtually destroying the infrastructure of communications, especially the fine network of Roman-built roads, that once had been effectively used to defeat a widespread insurgency of Celtic tribes inspired by the female warrior Boudicca. Without well-connected and orderly upkeep, commerce and artisan trades that once prospered in Britannia, went into eclipse.
INTERLUDE
This time period from the Roman collapse until the establishment of the great new schools of learning in the second millennium of the Common Era, bore the name of the Dark Ages, although, as we shall see, the era was not so “dark” as we have been led to believe. Learning and wisdom that had been collected and catalogued under the auspices of Greek academies and the Roman genius for law and civil administration, indeed, faced the very real possibility that the entirety of the collected wisdom of the classical civilization would be lost. In the race against time, thousands of monks and scholars, scattered and isolated, as they were, in small communities in the backwoods and isles of Europe, rushed to copy as much as possible before extant works finally went into the dark. Although this time period had not left historians much documentation to record history, there were still thousands of points of light that intermittently blinked in a murky reflection of what had been a great civilization, and would, over the course of several centuries, arise and emerge as a new civilization in continuity with Rome, but unlike the Rome of old, a born again Roman civilization guided by new ideals from the work of saintly exemplars: Saint Benedict developed a rule for living the communal life, which was copied and lived out in hundreds of monasteries and houses of hospitality in all parts of Europe; missions to pagan Germanic, Slavic, and Scandinavian pagan societies would result in the rise of nations that gave birth to Christendom; the rise of scriptoriums to copy old manuscripts in a race against time, to secure them against pillaging Vikings and warrior knights out to destroy what remained; and new forms of organizations such as cathedral canons of clergy, stipends of prebends to develop canon law and fund the study of the scriptures, and the rise of corporations, which would be instrumental in development of the university as an organized guild of scholars.
With new forms of organization, Europe’s secular and spiritual authorities worked together to rebuild a moral and spiritual ‘infrastructure’ to jointly undertake a re-civilization of the continent, working hand-in-glove. They had to not only rebuild and re-evangelize an old continent, but to reteach the various peoples of Europe how to make glass and arches, and to turn them into stained glass and Gothic arches. During this time, Christianity was about the only light to exist in the “Dark Ages”. As Christianity is a religion about death and resurrection, Europe’s history is one of death, followed by resurrection and a new birth. The cycle begins with a resurrection of the ‘sepulchered’ Western Roman Empire, which emerged as a new civilization (Christendom), giving birth to new art, new liturgies, new music, and new literary canons – all with a distinct texture. This rebirth, which eventually became known to us as the Carolingian Renaissance, was precipitated neither by Roman clerics, nor by the missi*, nor ministers, nor mayors of the palace**. Rather it came in the form of a most unlikely of figures. It arrives in the form of an illiterate warrior and conqueror – and loyal son of the Church – who, despite his own lack of formal education and not having the ability to read or write, Charlemagne, as he came to be known, shared with the Roman Church a love for learning and desire to improve the piety and morals of his subjects.
*Missi, (short for missi Dominici), were palace officials assigned by the Frankish King to supervise provincial administration, and report to the king irregular or substantial matters that did not fully comply with his high standards for good governance. Eventually all of his empire was divided into missatica (inspection circuits). Missi informed local communities of imperial decrees, and reported back to the King on local conditions and “problem areas” that required royal intervention.
**Mayor of the palace (major palatii) was a Frankish official, established before the Carolingian dynasty emerged in the eighth century. Under the previous rule of the Merovingian Kings, the mayor of the palace, was the most important officer to the king himself, served as the equivalent of regent or viceroy or chamberlain or estate overseer or steward. The Merovingian kings adopted the system by which great landowners of the Roman Empire had employed a major domus (major domo, mayor, or supervisor, of the household) to superintend the administration of numerous, widely scattered estates. The mayor acquired further duties and powers: he took responsibility for educating and tutoring the royal princes; wielded authority over court personnel; advised the king on the appointment of counts and dukes; and eventually took over command of the royal army.
Merovingian mayors continued to rule, even as the young princelings reached maturity and eligibly entitled to rule in their own name. Eventually, the mayors, through their powers of appointment and command of the army, displaced the Merovingian dynasty, to be replaced by the Carolingian dynasty of Charlemagne and his successors.
CHARLES THE GREAT
Considering that the man who never learned to read until past middle age, and never learned how to write, may have been the greatest ruler in the entire history of “the West” is not exaggerated hyperbole. His legacy of accomplishments beggars the imagination. The ‘look’ of western Europe that is recognizable on modern maps is largely the result of Charlemagne. As a highly-trained, disciplined, and skilled warrior, his conquests expanded his Reich from the marches*** of Bulgaria in the eastern Balkans, to the Bay of Biscayne in the West; and from the Jutland peninsula in the North to the Neapolitan Kingdom in southern Italy. The ‘grand’ nations of the West – France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy – would begin to take shape in their modern forms.
***Marches were the lands of the empire that bordered neighboring realms. Established by Charlemagne through royal decree, their purpose was to create a cordon sanitaire – a neutral buffer of territory against potential hostilities from Bulgarian and Slavonic tribes in the east, or from the kingdom of Andalusia south of the Pyrenes. It is equivalent to a spatial area that fans of the long-running television series Star Trek would be familiar with: the collocative “neutral zone”, between Federation space and the border of the Romulan Empire, to give advance warning of planned military incursions from either side.
ADMINISTRATION OF AN EMPIRE
After a generation of soldiering, Charlemagne turned his attention to consolidating his territorial gains through standardizing law and administration of his empire. His vast Reich, enlarged by vast new conquests in the East, had become the largest unified empire in Europe since the Roman Principate established by Caesar Augustus at the beginning of the Common Era. To consolidate these lands into a vast single realm the following three matters were the subjects of his attention: first, economic reform to ensure uniformity of coinage across the realm; second, reform of the church to ensure trinitarian doctrine, a uniform liturgy, and elevation of morals of state, church, and society; and third, to ensure that his administrative reforms would continue, the education of the clergy and laymen became a top priority – in funding schools, scriptoriums, and recruitment of scholars from ‘abroad’ to abide in Aachen – Charlemagne’s vast, centralized court of missi (ministers), advisors, and the central chancellery for constitutions, recorded properties (for taxing and revenues), and legal promulgations of all edicts and capitularies.
To ensure uniform standardization in the economy, the faith, and the education of his subjects, Charlemagne took control of forging a Reich of strong institutions. He structured his administration on a firm and explicit legal foundation, to ensure loyalty from the landed nobility to himself, the backing of the church, and the support of his subjects.
On the matter of law, Charlemagne assumed supreme jurisdiction in judicial matters, including the removal and prosecution of Judges taking bribes, and established sworn inquests to establish facts. He was also the “Supreme Legislator”, that is the author, or authority, of all legislation issued in his name. To ensure his justice would be administered fairly and uniformly, he established a class of scabini, professional experts on law, reportable to the local count. It proved to be an effective subsidiaric delegation of power, so that this “most Christian of kings” could discharge his Christian duty to protect both church and poor. Finally, in 802 – two years after he was crowned by Pope Leo as Holy Roman Emperor – he promulgated that all law was to be written down, and amended as needed.
Overall and most importantly, legally, Charlemagne exercised the bannum, the right to rule and command, over all of his territories. To ensure his will was made known and his directives carried out, he held annual meetings, at various locations throughout the Reich, to showcase himself as a ruler actively taking an interest in, and seeing for himself, the state of his realm. These annual meetings were, in effect, a yearly convoked assembly to gather the estates of the realm, to discuss political and ecclesiastical matters affecting the kingdom; to propose legislation therefor; and, as the Reich’s Supreme Judge, issued decisions that had the force of law.****
****According to old Germanic oral tradition, an assembly gathered to make law was call a thing. Disputes on land titles and dowries, for example, it was said, could be ‘brought before the thing.’ As old German evolved into English, the thing became known as the assembly where “things got done”. With the entry of Latin words res (“thing, affair, matter”) and publica (“public”), by way of Norman-French, into English, the thing became known as the place to discuss those things and affairs that mattered to the public. A system set up to manage and legislate the affairs of society having a public element is a res–publica, or “republic”. The word “thing” lives on, in the word husting – political electioneering campaign events, such as debates and rallies.
ECONOMIC REFORM
Despite virtually all executive, legislative, and judicial administration under his authority, Charlemagne could not build a vast extension of scriptoriums and monastic schools, without a stable, sufficiently supplied, non-inflationary specie of coinage to equip his armies, and to paying soldiers and European scholars invited to his court.
His monetary reform of coinage was to be based on silver, not gold.
He abolished the monetary system based on the gold sou. Gold was scarce, supply was unreliable, and gold was the specie of exchange between nations, for reparations, ceded territories, etc. Instead, he established a new standard, based on silver – a pound of silver – livre carolinienne (“Carolingian pound)”. [Aside. This standardized system of coinage remained in force in England until decimalized reform emerged in the late twentieth century. One livre = one pound; 240 deniers = 240 pence. The modern English pound = 100 pence.]
Charlemagne issued accounting principles of recording incomes and expenses and a standardized system for recording receipts, expenditures, and the collection of taxes.
CHURCH
What Europe needed in all its institutions – both in Church and State – was order. A fissiparous, tribalized Europe without a single creed or code of law was to invite invasion from without, and subversion from within. Disunity has a way of wending its pandemic effects through societies and across borders that lead to misunderstanding, communication breakdown, and violence. Recognizing this state of affairs, which is endemic to man as a species, Charlemagne, with the assent of the papacy, took control of both church and state. Both Charlemagne and Pope Leo strongly held the belief that a core duty of a Christian king was to protect and promote the church. Since the pope had no “divisions”, (using the parlance of Josef Stalin), the church needed a powerful king’s protection.
In taking administrative control of the church, Charlemagne strengthened the church’s power structure, (effectively strengthening the pope in his own “realm”), advancing the moral quality of the clergy, standardizing liturgical practices, clarifying tenets of the faith, and rooting out paganism – enforced by battalions of court officials with detailed instruction to church leadership in education, rituals and piety.
His authority, now extended over church and state, he could discipline clerics, control ecclesiastical property, define orthodox doctrine, and had clergy support to deepen piety and morals.
EDUCATION
His skills as a warrior, civil and church administrator, pales in importance to the interest he took in education. It was education, and the sponsoring of scholarship, that was his greatest legacy. Charlemagne took a serious interest in scholarship. He recognized, that unlike modern precepts, such as the separation of church and state, a strong, unified realm was not just about armies and coinage; nor about faith and morals, as necessary and as practical as they are; but without the ability to transmit that unity and renew itself through faith and moral instruction, societies will fall into decay.
Every traditional civilization was originally organized around a single axis. That single axis needs to be and made widely well-known is the fruit of education. With many newly acquired territories, the realm required a unified working language (Latin as liturgy and law of the realm), spoken and understood, and written in a script of letter font used by all. That script developed into Carolingian miniscule, in which all officials reporting to Charlemagne’s chancellors, counselors, and councilors had literacy in Latin as written down in Carolingian miniscule. Jurisprudence, moral regeneration, and the copying and preservation of patristic and classical texts, owes its achievement to a legible miniscule that fostered communication across the English Channel and eastwards to the Black Sea.
Charlemagne’s conquests brought to the attention of Francia’s scholars contact with Moorish Spain, Anglo-Saxon England, and Lombard Italy; and therefore, increased demand for monastic schools and scriptoria for book copying. His ambition was not the preservation of a language and culture that belonged to another time; rather it was a take a corpus of work, relatively voluminous (all had not been ‘lost’), and use it as the basis of a new Western Civilization. Charlemagne took a serious interest in scholarship, not only for its potential contribution to statecraft, but for his own personal reasons. He took efforts to persuade the most prominent scholars of his time to hold court in his palace at Aachen: Alcuin, an Anglo-Saxon from York, from whom Charlemagne humbled himself to learn astronomy, dialectic, logic, and rhetoric; from Peter of Pisa, he studied grammar; and arithmetic from his friend and counselor, Einhard.
By inviting scholars to his court in Aachen, to making the knowledge collected from the East and Moorish Spain accessible, Europe finally achieved the order and stability to contribute to a world of civilizations outside the West. His funding of education and construction of monastic schools lay the foundation for church establishment of cathedral schools in large towns and cities for canons of clergy, and for the rise of “learning communities” in these cities, that organized learning among themselves ‘collegially’ resulting in the university.
