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Learning, literature and art suffered during the Germanic invasions that destroyed the western half of the Roman Empire. Literature suffered also from many Christians and ecclesiastics seeing books other than their Bible as heathen, pernicious or dangerous works of the devil. The only reading that the Church encouraged was the Bible -- in keeping with Augustine’s insistence that only the scriptures contained an authoritative account of the world and its phenomena. Under Church influence, many books were burned or not copied. The empire's great libraries were ruined. Of the works at the greatest of libraries, at Alexandria, only a small fraction survived. But works by the pagan historian Zosimus did. And so too did the encyclopedic work by Martianus Capella, The Seven Liberal Arts, which was to play a role in the reawakening that came during the Middle Ages.
The advances in medicine that had come with Hippocrates and then Galen in the second century waned. Among Christians disease was still regarded as punishment for sin, which demanded prayer and repentance. Christian hospitals remained, but vivisection was forbidden because the Church held the human body as sacred.
Roman populations in areas that were part German or that remained under the Roman nobles continued to live under what remained of Roman law, and in Italy this law forbade marriage with Germans. The bishop of Rome, remained as head of the Church in the west, still split with the bishop of Constantinople over the issue of who had authority.
In Gaul, meanwhile, Clovis left his kingdom divided among his four sons -- in keeping with Frankish custom. Rather than receive revenues from taxes, the sons of Clovis continued their tradition of plunder. They assaulted their neighbors, extending their control to Marseille and ending what had been the kingdom of Burgundy. For the Franks, fighting remained the business of good weather, and carousing was the business of bad weather. Each spring the king's warriors set out on hunts for game or raids against some distant lord or king. Then they would go to the shrines of Christian saints, such as St. Martin, and offer their thanks for their victories and newly won treasures. For generations, the kings who were descended from Clovis did little except pursue their pleasures, enrich themselves and their dependents and lead an occasional military expedition. They made little effort to maintain a Roman administrative system. Eventually they began collecting taxes, but taxes were so detested that if a king wished to rid himself of an official that he disliked he could send him out to collect taxes, never to hear from him again.
Gaul became divided into a number of petty kingdoms, with local aristocrats assuming as much control as they could. These aristocrats accumulated wealth and left little for the kings, and Gaul's kings became mere figureheads. The aristocratic landowners, like some of the kings, were crude, violent and unprincipled men, removed from the old tribal culture that had helped control individuals. They exercised authority as suited their passions, taking and discarding wives and concubines as they pleased and believing that they had the right to deflower a commoner's bride before he was allowed to consummate his marriage.
In Gaul, self-sufficient estates that had survived Roman times dominated agriculture. These estates were populated by servile workers -- ninety percent of Gaul's population -- and a few craftsmen. These people wore clothing of hides and rough cloth and lived in huts, rising at dawn and bedding down with the setting of the sun. They heated their homes with gathered wood or grass and cow's dung. And rarely did they have candles to light their home.
Continuing the custom of the pagan Romans, people looked for the supernatural everywhere. In stormy skies they saw the coming and going of armies or dead or demons. They saw wars, disease and all other ills as the work of demons. The number of shrines erected to saints increased, and people suffering from plagues or famine sought the miraculous powers of relics associated with saints -- bits of bone or whatever. For relics people broke up the bodies of early saints and martyrs. Relics were widely traded -- a new commerce that was a step in a restoration of trade. Also people gathered at religious festivals, which turned into fairs at which merchants from Britain and Scandinavia arrived with furs and wool, and traders from southern Europe arrived with wine and honey. Slowly, trade was reviving.
The distinction between Roman and German courts began to fade. So too did the Roman practice of using torture as a source of truth. Judicial proceedings were often judged by two or three commoners under a nobleman or his representative. Eyewitnesses testified, but attempts to determine a person's innocence or guilt were made through ordeals in which God was thought to assert his powers. This involved combat between two who had come to court as parties in conflict. Some who were on trial were thrown into water in the belief that floating to the surface was a sign of guilt (the purity of water rejecting the guilty) and that sinking was a sign of innocence. Attempts were made to prove innocence or guilt also by having the accused walk on hot coals or by the accused putting his hand into boiling water, the court believing that if the hand healed properly it was a sign of God's favor and therefore innocence. Punishments were often less severe than they had been during the Roman republic when ties among people were stronger and violations against others were considered more horrendous.
In Western Europe, slavery was less widespread than it had been in the Roman Empire at the height of its power. Slavery had declined with the decline in wars for empire and the decline among Romans in wealth.
Work in Europe was still being done by the sweat and muscle of animals and humans. As during Rome's glory days, there was still little interest in labor saving devises. A steam engine had been invented by a Greek named Hero of Alexandria during the rule of Augustus, but there had been no interest in saving labor. If one wanted more work done one put more hands or animals to work.
Disintegration in Western Europe contributed to the spread of eccentricities among Christians. Some engaged in self-torture as a substitute for martyrdom. Some, including a man named Benedict, rolled naked in thorny bushes. Some joined a new monastery movement that had appeared in Italy and Gaul. Monasteries attracted Christian conservatives who tended to oppose the worldliness of the Church and the luxury with which some of the clergy lived. But in some places monasticism took on a worldly character as people, including some who were wealthy, joined merely for a retreat and a place of quiet.
Monasteries for women appeared, which, in addition to spirituality offered women an escape from male domination and from the polygamy that was still being practiced by some nobles and German kings. These convents offered some women positions such as abbess or prioress and provided the possibility for intellectual development or training in the arts.
Thirteen monasteries were established by Benedict -- who had moderated his asceticism. His monasteries had three cardinal rules: poverty, chastity and obedience. Residents were to renounce their personal possessions, commit themselves to living their entire life in his community and to obey the monastery's leader: the abbot. The monastery was to be a family based on love, and the abbot was to consult all the brethren in matters of grave concern. Members were to spend their days at labor and prayer -- Benedict believing that idleness was the enemy of the soul. The Benedictine monks reclaimed drained swamps, improved soil, carved woods, worked with metal, made glass, wove cloth, brewed beverages and reproduced manuscripts by hand.
In the chaos and continuing wars that plagued Western Europe, a few monasteries were pillaged and burned. The Benedictine monastery at Monte Casino was sacked within sixty years of its founding in 529, and twice more within the next five hundred years. But, for the most part, the Christian monasteries were havens of peace and were to become a significant cultural force through the Middle Ages.
Recommended Book
The Early Middle Ages, 500-1000, edited by Robert Brentano, 1964
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