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The Carolingian Dynasty

Among the Franks in Gaul a  new dynasty of kings arose, the Carolingians, begun by Charles Martel (b. 688, d. 741). Martel's grandson became known as Charlemagne (French for Charles the Great). It was a dynasty dependent on the support of nobles, with whose help the Carolingians were able to fight wars and suppress peasant rebellions. These nobles recognized the Carolingian king as their overlord and the Carolingian king recognized the nobles as local rulers and rewarded them with land and booty for their services.

Charlemagne was a devout Christian who had four wives and children by five mistresses. He has been described as crude and as tough, and he saw himself as king by divine right. Charlemagne did what many did who won recognition as great men: he conquered a lot of territory. Charlegmagne subdued the Saxons and the Lombards. He united Europe as far east as the Elbe River, southwest across the Pyrenees Mountains toward  the Ebro River in Spain, and in Italy as far south as Rome.

Much of Charlemagne's rule involved continuous warfare, and his power with the sword gave him influence with the Church. In the year 800, Pope Leo III crowned him emperor, hailing him as "Augustus, crowned of God …emperor of the Romans." The ruler in Constantinople also claimed to be the Roman Emperor, but Charles played down his title.

Charlemagne's Europe was more rural and thinly populated than either the civilizations ruled by Constantinople or Islam -- a result of low prosperity, which Charlemagne tried to raise. He encouraged more trade by giving guarantees to Jewish merchants. And under Charlemagne's rule agriculture improved.

Literacy in Gaul had all but disappeared since the invasions by the Germans, and Charlemagne invited scholars from England and Ireland to teach. He founded a school for the nobles of his court, and he tried to learn to read.

Charlemagne standardized weights, measures, and coinage. He replaced amateurs representing their community in local courts with itinerant professional judges who had a better understanding of law. And Charlemagne reformed the clergy. To be ordained a priest one had to take an examination. Anyone, priest or commoner, committing fornication was obliged by law to do penance for ten years, three of these years living on bread and water. A cleric committing adultery and begetting a child had to do penance for seven years. If a cleric lusted after a woman and was not able to commit the act because the woman would not comply he had to do penance for half a year on bread and water and for a whole year abstain from wine and meat. Anyone caught at theft had to do penance for seven years. If anyone "by his magic" caused the death of anyone, he had to do penance for seven years. Or if anyone "took away the mind" of someone "by the invocation of demons," he had to do penance for five years. Abortion was punished by penance for three years.

These were times when a village on special holidays might dance and sing the pagan or ribald songs of the forefathers. Churchmen complained of the peasants singing "wicked songs" that were the lures of the devil. But, amid this wickedness, economic progress was taking place. People had begun taking advantage of river water to power their mills. Northern Europe was blessed with the low mountains and slow-moving rivers appropriate for such power. The three-field system had been introduced, allowing a field to lay fallow a year here and there, which increased per-acre harvests. The invention of the horse collar permitted a horse to pull a load three or four times as great as it had with a simple thong of leather around its neck. A tandem harness allowed numerous oxen to work as a team. A wheeled plow had been introduced that could knife deeply into the heavy, richer, wetter and often sticky soil of northern Europe. Rather than scratch the surface as other plows did, the new plow turned the soil over. Cross plowing was no longer needed. It took as many as eight oxen to pull such a plow, and peasants pooled their oxen and their labor. A great agriculture was beginning that would give advantage to northern Europeans and change the world.

After Charlemagne

At the end of Charlemagne's life his empire's roads were still primitive, making travel slow. There was little surplus wealth with which to make effective centralized governance. But it was the custom of dividing property among one's sons that played the biggest role in breaking down the centralized governance of Charlemagne -- a custom that still existed among the Franks. Charlemagne's son and successor, Louis the Pious, divided the empire among three of his grandsons, one receiving western Gaul to the Pyrenees, another Charlemagne's realm roughly between the Rhine and Elbe rivers, and the eldest, Lothair, receiving the title of emperor and territory between the two others, from what is now Belgium and south in Italy just beyond Rome. The division was to last into modern times, between what would be France and Germany, with fragments of Lothair's kingdom to become Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

After Charlemagne, wandering minstrels sang of him and exercised humanity's proclivity to fantasize and exaggerate. They glorified his deeds and his ability as a conqueror. They described Charlemagne as having performed superhuman feats and as having dispensed perfect justice.

While singing about Charlemagne, those in what had been Charlemagne's realm were helpless against those who would be called Vikings. In their low draft boats the Vikings could raid along a shore or up a river and quickly return to sea before help could arrive.

The Vikings were responding to economic growth in their own country accompanied by an increase in population. The Scandinavians had increased their trade with other parts of the world. They were aware of the wealth that existed elsewhere, and some were inspired to go out and grab some of it. They were aware that treasury was being stored at monasteries and churches, and these were their usual targets, conveniently located on rivers and near the coast. They raided and returned home, happy with the prestige that their loot inspired, and their success inspired an increase in raiding. They reported that land was available abroad, and with the growth in population having eliminated the availability of land at home, more Scandinavians were willing to venture to distant areas for the purpose of settling down.

The Vikings raided Paris, and they settled in Normandy. These were years of good weather and good sailing, and they ventured beyond Western Europe, and beyond England, Scotland and Ireland, as far as Iceland, Greenland and North America. The Vikings and their animals became Iceland's inhabitants, and between their use of wood and their animals wandering about, all the trees in Iceland would disappear. How far the Vikings could spread was limited by their number, and in North America, where they were greatly outnumbered, their settlements failed and they were forced to withdraw to Greenland.

The Vikings had greater success closer by. They also crossed the Baltic Sea, and in waves they passed down the Dnieper and Volga rivers.  They were intent on looting treasure in Arabia but did not make it that far. Instead they conquered Slavs and set up a kingdom at Novgorod and at Kiev.

From the Hungarian Plain fierce Magyar tribesmen terrorized Europe. They raided isolated villages and monasteries, and in 899 they routed an Italian army at Brenta in the far northeast of Italy. In the 930s they swept through Germanic lands to Paris and down through and past Rome in the 930s. They took prisoners and sold them to the slave markets of the East. Finally, armies were sent against them, and in 955 the king of Germany, Otto I,  devastated the Magyars in battle, the Magyars unable to stand up to frontal assaults from heavy cavalry. And the Magyars returned to the Hungarian Plain, where they ruled over Serbs who farmed..

Raiding from the Mediterranean Sea by Muslims had also been continuous, but in the early 700s Constantinople had held out against attempts by Muslims to conquer them, and by the 900s Constantinople's navy was acquiring supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean against a divided Islam. In the 900s, Constantinople's commerce and industry was at its height. In 965 Constantinople drove the Arabs from Cyrpus. By 975, Constantinople again ruled Syria and Palestine, and it also ruled a large part of Mesopotamia.

The raiding disrupted trade and harvesting. And with political power fragmented there was no large state to apply an effective counter force. It might take local rulers a couple of days to get men on horseback over primitive tracks to a place that was under attack. 

The response among local lords gave impetus to feudalism -- land exchanged for military service. The land was called the fief, and the fighting man was the vassal. The vassal vowed to his lord that he would love what the landlord loved, hate what the landlord hated and be bound to serve and respect the lord. "Thy friends," promised the knight to his lord "will be my friends, and thy enemies my enemies." Money was not yet the dominant means of exchange, and so few lords could merely buy a small army. The fighting men had the best means of transport on land: horses. Saddles with stirrups had arrived from Asia, these allowed someone with armor on horseback more stability and able to stand when wielding a sword or lance, while carrying a shield. And the horses had iron horseshoes, which allowed them to carry more weight across rough ground. 

The new system of defense was at times effective in chasing away marauders. But the little armies were at times used also against hostile neighbors and to settle territorial disputes. A new kind of warfare was coming into being, often involving sieges against neighboring lords holding out behind castle walls.

The vassals were called knights and were always on call for their lord if danger threatened. Otherwise they might be hunting on horseback, both as recreation and military exercise. The knights were a new form of aristocrat. In this new era of danger, common farmers -- called peasants -- joined the system by surrendering their land to a local lord for the protection offered by the lord and his knights -- similar to what had been done in the Roman Empire at the beginning of its decline. It is called the manorial system. The peasant changed from a freeholder of land to a subject of the lord, often bound to the lord for life and under his authority and supervised perhaps by a knight, working for the knight or for the lord. The lord benefited from the peasant's harvests and sometimes dictated personal matters such as to whom one could marry. Some peasants might be forced into a sort of protection racket of a local lord, much as Hammurabi had around 2,500 years before. But many peasants preferred the protection of the local lord and his knights to being at the mercy of the armed marauders then prevalent in Europe, including those belonging to neighboring lords, whose men could be as ill-behaved as the Vikings. 

In France, Viking intrusions had created divisions and the Carolingian kings had lost power to local lords. Then in the late 900s a new dynasty of French kings came into being, beginning with Hugh Capet. The Capetian kings ruled from behind the walls of Paris, only ten miles from robber barons, living in drafty, smelly and poorly sanitized castles. Castles were the defense strategy of the day, barriers against the weapons of the day: swords, knives, pikes, crossbows, spears and the Viking's battle axe. [note]

Without democracy, political power was still based on force of arms. No single independent lord elsewhere in France had the military power or will to overthrow Capet, and they were too independent-minded and fearful of one another to unite as a force against him, leaving Capet on his throne and claiming the support of God.

Western Christianity to 1054

In the year 1000, many Christians believed that God might have planned Armageddon for that year. Since the failed uprisings by the Jews, which had been associated with the apocalyptic appearance of their Messiah, Judaism's leaders had been downplaying scriptural references to God's day of judgment. But apocalyptic expectations were still very much alive among Christians, drawn at least in part from prophesy from the Book of Revelations. As the year 1000 approached, people in Christendom feared God's judgment and nervously anticipated the end of the world. But the year went by and nothing unusual occurred.

Nothing unusual meant an early death for many. Half of those born were dying before the age of one, and life expectancy in Northwestern Europe was around forty.  Most of those who survived never in their lifetime went more than ten miles from where they were born. And nothing unusual also meant wars by ego-driven young nobles on horseback -- Christian noble against Christian noble. The Church was eager to limit their fighting and created what it called the "Peace of God," prohibiting fighting on Sundays and during Church festivals.

During the disorder that followed Charlemagne, bishops and monasteries lost ties with Rome and came under the control of the lords who really could protect them -- secular rulers. And these lords began appointing their own men, or their sons, to Church positions, without regard for spirituality.

In Rome, the Pope was both spiritual leader and secular ruler of the city, and selecting a pope was a matter of competition among the city's wealthy and influential families, with spirituality only an occasional consideration. A powerful woman, Marozia became the mistress of Pope Sergius (Pope from 904 to 911). Pope John X (914 to 928) was romantically involved with Marozia's mother. Marozia succeeded in having Pope John X deposed and installed her illegitimate son, fathered by Pope Sergius, as John XI., pope from 931 to 935. And she managed to see one of her grandson's become Pope John XII

The fear of God inspired lay people to demand changes. Heinrich III (Henry III),  the German king, ruling from what is today northern German and the Holy Roman Emperor, was moved by piety to change the Church. With an army he arrived in Rome in 1046. He suppressed the political factions having influence over the papacy and started appointing a series of popes. One such pope, Leo IX (1049-54), condemned the selling of Church offices and called for an enforcement of celibacy for clerics. For those common men who were intelligent and ambitious the Church offered a step up in social status. Slaves, however, were not allowed to enter the priesthood, and normally neither could serfs.

Eastern Orthodoxy versus Roman Catholicism

In Constantinople the patriarch of Greek-speaking Christianity, Michael Cerularius, was hostile to the Latin (or Roman) wing of Christianity. He closed the Latin churches in Constantinople. He complained of various customs of Latin Christianity, especially fasting on Saturday and the use of unleavened bread for the Holy Eucharist, a complaint he distributed in the form of a treatise written by the monk Nicetas Pectoratus. The treatise described Latins as "dogs, bad workmen, schismatics, hypocrites, and liars." Cerularius's chancellor, Nicephorus, entered the Latin churches and trampled upon the Holy Eucharist because it was consecrated with unleavened bread. From Rome, in January 1054, Pope Leo IX sent representatives to Constantinople to negotiate. He died in April, and the negotiations continued until July when the Cardinal representing Rome marched into the great church of Hagia Sophia and, in the name of the late Leo IX, put on the high altar a declaration excommunicating Cerularius and those who followed him. A few days later Cerularius issued an encyclical asserting the independence of the Greek speaking Church, centered in Constantinople, from the Roman Church.

The Church ruled from Constantinople was called the Eastern Orthodox Church. It remained Trinitarian -- God existing in "the Father, Son and Holy Spirit." The Roman Catholic Church regarded the Holy Spirit as proceeding from the Father and the Son; the Eastern Orthodox Church claimed that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father through the Son.

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