Oct. 18: Carolingians and their collapse
I. EXPANSION OF FRANKISH KINGDOM – CAROLINGIANS
In the 7th century AD, Franks ruled most of what is today France -
The Franks would have probably remained just one Germanic kingdom among many, except for the Carolingians.
The Carolingians started out as energetic aristocratic family who worked for the Frankish kings.
In 732, one of the Carolingians, Charles Martel, managed to defeat the Arabs, and prevent them from conquering France. (Battle of Tours)
Charles became famous, but he was not a king, only an important Frankish noble.
Yet after his victory, the Carolingians got noticed by one of the most important leaders of early medieval Europe – the pope in Rome.
Early medieval popes
You see, the popes also needed protection in this violent and chaotic age.
Rome was technically part of the Byzantine empire.
The Arabs were trying to conquer Italy in the south,
And in northern Italy, the Germanic Lombards had formed a kingdom (heretics)
The popes needed to find a Catholic protector, and chose the Carolingians.
20 years after Charles’ Martel had defeated the Arabs, the pope created a Carolingian king of the Franks.
The Pope anointed him (poured holy oil on his head), the way kings had been anointed in the Old Testament.
This was a revolutionary way to make king – not birth, not election, but the blessing of the pope.
It's one sign of the growing political of the Christian church in the early Middle Ages.
Now the Carolingians were kings of the Franks ordained by God’s representative, the Pope.
The new Carolingian kings began to conquer much of continental Europe – especially Charlemagne.
Charlemagne (“Charles the Great”) conquered most of Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and n. Spain.
He created the biggest European state since he fall of Rome.
(MAP)
He even conquered peoples the Romans had never been able to – the northern Germans – or Saxons – a warlike pagan people whom Charlemagne fought every year for 30 years.
These Saxons are the ancestors of modern Germans.
Then in 800 AD – Charlemagne became emperor, first time after 476 that there was an emperor in Europe.
How? The pope had him acclaimed emperor in Rome.
So popes were not only creating kings – but also a new emperor in Europe.
Scholars have debated endlessly about what Charlemagne’s coronation as emperor really meant:
It was not a restoration of the Roman empire – the institutions, army, geography were all very different.
And the Roman empire still existed in the east – the Byzantine empire
What the imperial title did do, was unite many of these different little kingdoms and peoples of western Europe into a federation of kingdoms and duchies.
For the next thousand years there would be emperors in Europe – esp. in Germany and Italy.
Sometimes these emperors didn’t rule much territory – but the title meant something.
What is called the Holy Roman Empire – based in Germany – grew out of Charlemagne’s empire..
Carolingians sparked an intellectual revival called the Carolingian
Renaissance
As seen in Einhard,Charlemagne himself couldn’t write – he tried to learn to write, even keeping a book in bed with him, but he had started too late in life.
(Note the difference here between early medieval Europe and the other people we have studied – all Roman and Byzantine emperors could write, so could the Muslim caliphs)
- Yet Charlemagne promoted scholars in his court – most of them Christian clerics.
He gave these scholars lands, and set up new monasteries, and new bishoprics for them to work in.
- Old manuscripts of Cicero, and Virgil, and other Roman authors were searched for in the monasteries, and recopied.
- There was a standardization of the spelling of written Latin:
Latin becomes language of learning for all of Europe (not just parts which had been part of Roman empire)
- but it is now a separate language from the spoken language - “vernacular” French, Italian, etc.
- Part of the reason for the success of the Carolingian intellectual renaissance was the invention of a new, easy to read script called Carolingian minuscule.
If you want to know what it looks like, just open a page of your text.
We still use the Carolingian minuscule in our lower case letters; the Romans had only used upper case letters.
The Carolingians invented our forms of punctuation – commas, semi-colons, periods; spaces between words – the Romans just wrote one long string of capital letters (WRITE)
The medium of writing changed as well as the script.
They no longer wrote on scrolls of papyrus – but in books of parchment, animal skin.
Remember papyrus was a reed grown in Egypt, used to make a sort of paper.
The Romans wrote primarily on papyrus, considering parchment – animal skin – too expensive.
Because trade had broken down between Egypt and Europe, the Europeans had to use parchment.
This processed sheep or calf skin, parchment, looks like very thick off-white paper.
It survives better than papyrus or paper – which is another reason we have so many Carolingian books.
Under Charlemagne’s empire, these intellectual reforms – the new clear minuscule print, the new types of literature and copies of classical literature – spread through continental Europe – France, Germany, Italy, N. Spain.
These peoples who had been divided into to so many little barbarian kingdoms, now began to share a common intellectual heritage..
Legacy of Carolingians:
- Formed last great empire in Europe (though Napolean and Hitler will try to repeat)
- second legacy: revival of learning, carried out in monasteries with new minuscule script.
- third legacy: the incorporation of northern and central Europe – people like the Saxons who had never been part of the Mediterranean empire; at least superficial conversion to Christianity
But the Carolingians failed to incorporate one of these peoples of northern Europe - the Scandinavians – better known as the Vikings.
The Carolingians not only failed conquer them, but ended up being invaded by them.
II. WHY DID CAROLINGIAN EMPIRE BREAK APART?
1. First reason was the practice of partible inheritance - Carolingian kings didn't leave their kingdoms just to the oldest son (primogeniture) - but to all of their sons (compare England today - why Prince Charles only, and not Andrew become king)
So the Carolingian Empire kept being divided among sons - each piece getting smaller and smaller.
2. Second reason the Carolingian Empire disintegrated, was because two ethnic groups - the Vikings and the Magyars - invaded it.
Invaders of the 9th century:
MAGYARS
The Magyars were pagan nomads from central Asia who invaded eastern Europe ninth century.
They attacked the eastern Carolingian Empire - eastern Germany, Hungary, and so on.
Modern Hungarians partially descended from them.
Their great military advantage was their ability to fight on horseback - great cavalry warriors.
VIKINGS
At about the same time, the people of Scandinavia began to raid the coastal regions of western Europe.
Beginning in the 9th century, the Scandinavians - called Vikings - began to sail up the rivers of Europe, raiding monasteries, raping women, capturing Europeans to sell as slaves overseas.
These Vikings were still pagans.
They had no complex political system – no coinage, no literature (only runes), no cities.
(and by the way, no helmets with horns like Hagar the Horrible)
What they had was an amazing skill with boats.
Peoples like the Franks fought only on land; they had no navy.
The Vikings had invented a new sort of boat called the longboat – with both oars and sails –
(about 65 feet long, carrying 40 to 60 men; Carolingians had no navy)
These longboats could travel both on the ocean (the Scandinavians made it to America), and on European rivers.
Armed Vikings would row these boats, and leap out to attack a monastery or village, before any military response could be made.
The Franks could usually defeat the Vikings if it came to a pitched battle – but it rarely came to a battle.
In the 2nd half of the 9th century, such Viking raiding parties appeared all over Europe – in the heartland of the Carolingian empire, in Anglo-Saxon England.
At first the Vikings raided, and left.
Then they began to look for places to settle permanently – some went to Iceland and Greenland on the Atlantic.
Iceland today still has a government which was set up by 10th century Vikings – one of the oldest continuous governments on earth.
Vinland was the name for Scandinavian settlements in North America.
Archaeologists had discovered their remains – mostly in eastern Canada , perhaps into New England - ; they did not last long.
In addition to these settlements in the Atlantic, the Vikings began to settle in Europe itself – esp. Britain and Ireland, but also in western France.
The Scandinavians eventually founded a new state in western Europe itself – Normandy in 911.
The Normans kept the warlike tendencies of the Vikings while adopting the French language.
Normandy is important for us – because the Normans will conquer England in the next century – 1066, leading to the creation of our language – modern English – among other things.
- Vikings in Russia began as slave traders ("slave" from "Slav"); began Kievan principality by early 10th cnetury
So to sum up the Vikings –
pagans from Scandinavia, with a new technology – the longboat – and the skill to use it.
They became raiders in 9th century of the Carolingian empire and Britain.
By the 10th century, they began to colonize places – Iceland, North America, Normandy in France.