Before the Gregorian Reform: The Latin Church at the Turn of the First Millennium

By John Howe

Historians typically single out the hundred-year period from about 1050 to 1150 as the pivotal moment in the history of the Latin Church, for it was then that the Gregorian Reform movement established the ecclesiastical structure that would ensure Rome’s dominance throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. In Before the Gregorian Reform John Howe challenges this familiar narrative by examining earlier, "pre-Gregorian" reform efforts within the Church. He finds that they were more extensive and widespread than previously thought and that they actually established a foundation for the subsequent Gregorian Reform movement.

The low point in the history of Christendom came in the late ninth and early tenth centuries—a period when much of Europe was overwhelmed by barbarian raids and widespread civil disorder, which left the Church in a state of disarray. As Howe shows, however, the destruction gave rise to creativity. Aristocrats and churchmen rebuilt churches and constructed new ones, competing against each other so that church building, like castle building, acquired its own momentum. Patrons strove to improve ecclesiastical furnishings, liturgy, and spirituality. Schools were constructed to staff the new churches. Moreover, Howe shows that these reform efforts paralleled broader economic, social, and cultural trends in Western Europe including the revival of long-distance trade, the rise of technology, and the emergence of feudal lordship. The result was that by the mid-eleventh century a wealthy, unified, better-organized, better-educated, more spiritually sensitive Latin Church was assuming a leading place in the broader Christian world.

Before the Gregorian Reform challenges us to rethink the history of the Church and its place in the broader narrative of European history. Compellingly written and generously illustrated, it is a book for all medievalists as well as general readers interested in the Middle Ages and Church history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781501703706

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

A PRE-GREGORIAN REFORM?

In 865, while Vikings were pillaging the monastery of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire at Fleury, its monks took refuge in Orléans and its vicinity. When they finally straggled back it was no happy homecoming. According to Fleury’s chronicler Adrevaldus (d. 878), after the monastery had been destroyed by a great raging fire, there was nothing good left, no temples suitable for divine worship, no hearths for various uses, no granaries, no provisions, absolutely nothing that was either decorative or useful; bare masonry walls shocked those gazing at them, a spectacle of horror rather than of dignity or glory.¹ The monks crowded into a small dormitory, part of which they walled off as a chapel for their treasured relics of St. Benedict,² and they remained there until the Vikings briefly drove them away again in 879.³ Fleury had lost more than monastic amenities. When the monks occupied again that holy place, they had divided minds and did not hold the property of the monastery in common, but parceled it out among themselves as they were able or as seemed good to them. Much later a local count, perhaps supported by the French king, called in St. Odo of Cluny (d. 944) to reorganize Fleury, but its monks responded by arming themselves with swords and spears, manning the walls, and holding off the reformers for several days until Odo rode in by himself on a donkey and managed to make peace. Subsequent negotiations remained tense.⁴

A century later this dysfunctional community had become one of the most distinguished monasteries in Europe. A Fleury customary composed in the early eleventh century claims that this head of the monasteries of France had three hundred monks.⁵ Its impressive properties⁶ were protected by legal privileges that included a charter from Pope Gregory V (996–99) making its abbot preeminent throughout France [primus inter abates Galliae].⁷ From its library some six hundred to eight hundred medieval manuscripts still survive today, most from the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries.⁸ A historian writing in the 1040s described the community as a torrent of the liberal arts and a gymnasium of the school of the Lord, mixed metaphors he explicates in a chapter devoted to its early eleventh-century scholars.⁹ Its church was intended to be an example to all France.¹⁰ Its customs and school influenced monks in England, Spain, northern France, the Low Countries, and Germany.¹¹

Fleury’s spectacular revival, although aided by its relics of St. Benedict, was by no means unique. The destruction the Latin West experienced turned out to have been creative destruction. Aristocrats and churchmen rebuilt the churches lost to barbarian raids and civil disorders and then built new ones, competing against each other so that church building, like castle building, acquired its own momentum.¹² Patrons strove to improve ecclesiastical furnishings, liturgy, and spirituality. Schools were built to staff the new churches. The result was that by the mid-eleventh century a wealthy, unified, better-organized, better-educated, more spiritually sensitive Latin Church was assuming a leading place in the broader Christian world.

This story has not been adequately told. One obstacle is that Church historians have focused more on the late eleventh- and early twelfth-century Gregorian Reform, offering a narrative that emphasizes the investiture controversy between popes and emperors and culminates in the papal monarchy of the High Middle Ages.¹³ Although historians recognize earlier reforms, especially the revival often somewhat simplistically associated with the monastery of Cluny, they normally separate the anticipatory movements from the main event. Augustine Fliche, who popularized the term Gregorian Reform, surveyed its earlier roots in La Réforme grégorienne but privileged the story of a movement developing in the Rhineland in the early to mid-eleventh century, brought to Rome during the pontificate of Leo IX (1049–54), and ascendant by the start of the twelfth.¹⁴ Although strong continuities between tenth- and eleventh-century reform movements and the Gregorian Reform might seem to undercut this perspective,¹⁵ Gerd Tellenbach, in a synthesis first expounded in 1936, dismissed earlier monastic reforms as otherworldly coenobitic projects quite different from mid eleventh-century papal reforms dedicated to making the world more Christian.¹⁶ His division still holds the field today, albeit with more and more qualifications. For Andrė Vauchez, for example, the Gregorian Reform is a movement toward a spirituality of action in which the popes took the lead after the mid-eleventh century; yet he recognizes that nonpapal reformers had anticipated the drive for the Christianization of the world and that the papal reform cannot be treated exclusively in political institutional terms since it reflects a spirituality that struggled against evil, within and outside the Church.¹⁷ Dominique Iogna-Prat, whose studies have greatly illuminated monastic spirituality, still starts a new era with the advent of the papal reform party in the 1040s, even while claiming that the Gregorian Reform was largely prepared by the monastic movement of the first half of the eleventh century.¹⁸ On the other hand, some English-speaking scholars, following the lead of Karl Leyser, have actually sharpened the distinction between the Gregorian Reform and earlier ecclesiastical movements by championing a Gregorian Revolution or a mid-eleventh-century formation of a persecuting society.¹⁹ True, researchers interested in millenarianism have recently been attempting to shift discussion back toward the year 1000, attributing ecclesiastical growth and development first to a hidden millennial excitement and then to the reaction to its failure, but the resulting debates, while documenting increasing eschatological interest, have not justified a focus on any single year.²⁰ Now in the twenty-first century scholars are beginning to recognize that systematic ecclesiastical reform began even earlier.²¹

The tenth- and early eleventh-century Latin Church, or more concisely the millennial Church, needs to be studied so that we can comprehend not only ecclesiastical history but also the broader history of Western civilization. The narrative linking ecclesiastical revival to the Gregorian Reform has become increasingly problematic because it no longer synchronizes with the rest of Western history. In the twentieth century, scholars such as Marc Bloch, Georges Duby, and André Vauchez had assumed that ecclesiastical revival had occurred in tandem with an economic, social, and cultural revival of the West, which they dated to the late eleventh century, part of a spectacular leap forward in all fields.²² Yet today’s scholars now situate the start of the rise of the West well before the mid-eleventh century, even well before the turn of the millennium. Many now see the mid-tenth century as the launching pad for the High Middle Ages, citing the revival of long-distance trade, the growth of cities, the birth of the village, the rise of technology, the feudal mutation or feudal revolution, and the spread of Frankish culture. Others place the new movement even earlier, back during Charlemagne’s era, and see it hitting full stride in the tenth after overcoming some post-Carolingian challenges. But whatever the exact chronology of the start of the great medieval revival, a consensus now exists that it was well under way back in the tenth century.²³

This present book attempts to reinsert the history of the Church into the story of the rise of West. It presents ecclesiastical reform as a central part of the post-Carolingian, postinvasion revival. The Church embodied and defined a rising Europe. The Gregorian Reform that centralized and developed ecclesiastical structures in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries still remains the proximate background for what has been called the Renaissance of the twelfth century and the Reformation of the twelfth century.²⁴ Yet those achievements rested on earlier ones. This book studies the Christendom that the mid-eleventh-century Latin reformers inherited. Its goal is to present the millennial Church in its appropriate context, the resurgence of the Latin West, and to understand its ecclesiastical developments as bases for later reform programs rather than as dead ends. In addition, by going beyond traditional political and institutional perspectives, this book seeks to better align Church history with the current fascination with material culture and social history.²⁵

One challenge, however, relates to the reform paradigm itself. Ecclesiastical changes in the central Middle Ages are usually discussed in terms of reform. What exactly does this mean? Is reform a modern analytical construct anachronistically applied by today’s scholars to a past context? Or is it a medieval concept animating and shaping the changes it describes? If medieval, does it designate ideological ideals or objective realities? And should discussion of reform be limited to concepts explicitly articulated by medieval people themselves or can it be expanded to include a broader implicit range of reform dynamics revealed by their actions? This last dilemma is very familiar to medieval historians who have discovered that important medieval intellectual structures often tend to go without saying, evoking little debate or definition until some malcontent or heretic begins to raise difficulties. Modern scholars, undeterred by these and other epistemological problems, still often speak indiscriminately about reform.²⁶ That they will continue to do so is suggested by the 220 special sessions and round tables that the International Medieval Congress at Leeds in 2015 devoted to its theme of Reform and Renewal.

The most systematic attempt to define and categorize concepts of reform was made by Gerhart B. Ladner, whose Idea of Reform recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary.²⁷ Appearing on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, this book identified reform as a basic Christian dynamic, one given a unique shape in Latin Christianity by Augustine, whose preoccupations with the creation of man in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26–27; 5:6; and 9:6) and with the salvation offered by Jesus Christ had led him to conclude that human beings could never return to a restored paradisial state, as many Greek fathers had envisioned; rather, because God had become man, it was now impossible to get back to the garden—reform would have to be progress toward a better state (reformatio ad melius). In retrospect Adam’s sin would turn out to have been a happy fault [felix culpa]. Augustine imagined Christian life moving forward, not backward. The city of God would be a pilgrim city, unable to be completely perfected in earthly institutions or even on earth, undergoing a never-ending process of reform as it moves toward its fulfillment of the divine plan. Reform would mean corrections based upon an authoritative past. But Ladner emphasized that reform movements in the medieval Latin Church, in contrast to later Protestant attempts at reformation guided by Scripture alone [sola scriptura], referenced multiple authorities including the Bible, the fathers and tradition, and even Constantinian, canonical, and Carolingian legislation. Although Ladner’s work launched a small school of reform studies,²⁸ inherent in his explications of reform was a tension between the dispassionate technical analysis of a former MGH scholar and the theological vision of a Jewish convert to Catholicism who had come to believe that the idea of reform…was to remain the self-perpetuating core, the inner life spring of Christian tradition through greater and lesser times.²⁹ While historians can argue, as did R. W. Collingwood, that the essence of history is the history of thought, Ladner’s conception of reform as animating thought may be close enough to the Logos to make nontheistic historians hesitate.

Here a disclaimer is in order: Ladner was my dissertation director at UCLA, and this book owes much, consciously and unconsciously, to his vision of a European ecclesiastical community haltingly and fitfully attempting to reform itself. I employ reform language, although I tend to use revival and renewal to describe the recovery of existing institutions, and restoration to describe the re-creation of institutions lacking direct continuity with their prototypes. Reform here designates attempts at reshaping existing ecclesiastical structures in order to make them better conform to ancient norms, attempts that could never fully succeed in an imperfect world and that tended to reveal in their limited successes the tensions between tradition and innovation that are inherent in any attempt at reformation for the better.

From this perspective, reform offers a dynamic narrative. Even the most conservative medieval reformers were innovative, despite themselves, because in order to establish some usable past as a benchmark, they had to resolve the conflicts in their sources and prioritize ancient norms in the light of their own knowledge and concerns. Other reformers deliberately embraced a certain measure of revolt.³⁰ The result is that it is less a question of reform than of reforms, and today’s scholars increasingly emphasize diversity and local features.³¹ Monastic reform remains a central interest, though now it is a question of many reforms, multiple reformers, and irregular initiatives that often depended upon the fates of particular patrons.³² The story line is less about organized linear progress than about minimally coordinated advances and retreats. Reformation provides a framework inclusive enough to link together the changes that millennial churchmen made in the material, institutional, and intellectual culture of the medieval Church, changes that would help shape the civilization of the Latin West.

My use of reform terminology to describe the development of the millennial Church may draw fire from scholars who question whether an allegedly chaotic Age of Iron could actually manifest reform. Ladner himself wrote that before the Hildebrandian age, reform had…been primarily individual or personal, and monastic. There was no full realization that the Church as a whole might be in need of reform.³³ In Christopher Belitto’s Renewing Christianity: A History of Church Reform from Day One to Vatican II, a book directly inspired by Ladner’s work, one reads, after a discussion of the Carolingian Renaissance, The next important chapter in the history of reform begins about 1050 with a series of reform minded popes.³⁴ This present book argues, to the contrary, that ecclesiastical structures were significantly reformed back in the tenth and early eleventh centuries. In part this conflict stems from the fact that scholars in Ladner’s tradition have usually studied ecclesiastical reforms through written documents. Reform back to the Bible? Back to the norms of the apostolic Church? Back to the canon laws of Late Antiquity and of the Carolingians? Back to ancient monastic rules? Back to customaries documenting monastic best practices? In the relatively unreflective millennial Church, however, actions were often more important than words. A dynamic of reform is manifest in material culture, ecclesiastical structures, liturgy, education, and spirituality, not just in literary discourses on reform. As will be seen below, the gritty character of this reform is evident in the earliest reappearances in the post-Carolingian world of the word reformare, where it refers to real estate, not theology, to the literal re-forming of ecclesiastical patrimonies disrupted during the invasions and civil wars of the late ninth and early tenth centuries. It was possible to re-form property and buildings, customs and costumes. Reforms in the material and customary realms, although sometimes humble, were the necessary prerequisites for the loftier theoretical developments of the Gregorian Reform. Ladner himself might have been open to this extension of his concept inasmuch as he had defined reform, without regard to media, as the free, intentional and ever perfectible, multiple, prolonged and ever repeated efforts by man to re-assert and augment values pre-existent in the spiritual-material compound of the world.³⁵

Other objections will come from a very different direction, from scholars who have concluded that traditional reform terminology now carries so much baggage that it ought to be dropped. It has been argued that monastic-reform master narratives produced in the mid-twentieth century by scholars such as Ernst Sackur and Kassius Hallinger may cause scholars to overlook the varying situations of individual ecclesiastical institutions. If the major narrative becomes reformed vs. unreformed, then debates tend to center more on abstract models such as monasticism and hierarchy and less on concrete institutional realities involving patrons operating in unique social and political situations. Traditional reform narratives emphasize charismatic leaders, overlooking the successors who often did the heavy lifting required to turn ideals into institutional realities. These and other objections were made recently in Steven Vanderputten’s Monastic Reform as Process: Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–1100, which attempts to test the historiography of monastic reform by examining seven Flemish monasteries. He concludes that reform terminology is a black hole into which all sorts of historical reality get sucked.³⁶ Yet his straw men have been attacked before: current research views institutional reform not as a single flashpoint event but as a halting and sporadic process; scholars do recognize the need to contextualize reforms in terms of different generational cohorts and goals; they know to approach with caution the alleged crisis of monasticism.³⁷ Vanderputten’s concerns relate more to specific misuses of reform paradigms than to the actual paradigms themselves, whose validity his attacks on individual scholarly malpractices cannot logically falsify.

This book is addressed not only to professional medievalists but also to general readers interested in medieval and Church history, and therefore it attempts to explain basic concepts, often, I hope, in fresh ways. The initial chapters are more narrative, the later ones more topical, but all seek to highlight changes in the Church in an age of transition. I use thick description to portray a world in which introspective analysis was rare. This story necessarily discusses ideals because the Church postulated the existence of and oriented itself toward a more perfect world. Skeptics might object that the aspirations of a few literate clerks would not have been representative of all Latin Christians, most of them illiterate, some perhaps still living in the pagan Middle Ages.³⁸ But the greater tradition—articulated by reforming churchmen, backed by powerful patrons, and embodied in a host of costly institutions and popular practices—is a legitimate subject of inquiry, perhaps more historically consequential than the medieval world’s myriad local folk and minority traditions.

Is it possible to write a unified text about a regional world? The aftermath of the collapse of Carolingian central government has been described as encellulement, the division of the Latin world into townships and castellanies like the discrete cells enclosing the enamels on a cloisonné vase. And if this was the Frankish heartland, then what about the surrounding Celts, Scandinavians, Slavs, Hungarians, and other peoples? And what about the Mediterranean world, where Latin, Greek, and Eastern Christians, incestuously connected by their corrupting sea, sometimes seem to have had more in common among themselves than with their brethren north of the Alps?³⁹ Yet certain themes help unify this diversity: reforms involved the ideals of Rome and Christendom, Carolingian civilization and its legacy, and an ecclesiastical internationalism promoted by an increasingly interrelated community of literary professionals. Reforms manifested a common tension between practice and theory that was being generated as a world based upon custom and ritual was transforming itself into a world privileging written law and true doctrine.

It is impossible to describe each piece of the elaborate mosaic that constitutes the pre-Gregorian Church. My research over the years has centered on France and Italy, though bordering regions in England and the Lorraine have always been in the background. Examples from other places are drawn more heavily from the secondary literature. It can be objected that such a perspective tends to favor Latin Europe’s core over its peripheries. Scholars who specialize in Spain, maritime Italy, the Celtic World, Eastern Europe, or Scandinavia will have no problem identifying other possible approaches, but, given the aim of this book and the types of historical sources that survive, a focus on central Francia is hard to avoid. The Latin Church was a hierarchical organization run by literate clergymen whose status in peripheral areas was based in large part on their ability to promote institutional core values. Yet although I can justify the Frankish heartland’s presence on center stage, I try not to let the actors on the frontiers fade into the scenery.

The study of the tenth- and early eleventh-century Church is easier now that the surviving historical evidence has become more accessible. Despite the tenth century’s famous obscurity, much can be discovered. Monastic chronicles and histories are not as numerous as today’s historians would wish, but idiosyncratic voices, oddly local and universal, are provided by chroniclers such as Rodulfus Glaber, Adémar of Chabannes, Flodoard and Richer of Rheims, Thietmar of Merseburg, and others. Tens of thousands of charters survive, not randomly distributed but in clusters such as those from Catalonia and from the monasteries of Cluny and Monte Cassino. Less traditional sources are now entering the public domain: early collections of canon laws that reveal legal minds at work long before Gratian, compendiums of texts produced by schoolmasters and their pupils, practical liturgical manuals, and hagiographies that are now exploited as sources for cultural history as well as for information about their heroes.⁴⁰ Architecture and art offer vital perspectives on a largely oral culture.⁴¹ Although medieval archeology is a relatively new discipline, it has much to teach.

It may be helpful to conclude this introduction by signaling some conventions this book adopts. One is to speak of the millennial Church, While the millennial Church is a simpler label than the tenth- and early eleventh-century Church, it risks evoking eschatological resonances. Nevertheless, its benefits may outweigh its deficits, especially now that millennial has become a term chronologically neutral enough to designate one group of this book’s potential readers, the millennials who are members of the 1980–2000 generational cohort. I also employ the names of contemporary national and geographical entities such as Germany or Italy or Poland, which are potentially misleading when applied to their very different medieval analogues, but I use them when they are the best communicative signs available and attach warning flags when they are particularly problematic. Personal names are presented in English whenever there is a widely accepted English form; when there is none, the Latin name is the default option. Exceptions include instances where aesthetic dissonance or long use encourage alternative forms: hence Rodulfus Glaber instead of Bald Ralph or Sainte Foy instead of St. Faith. Names of places and churches still existing today, or that did exist well into the modern period, are presented in their current vernacular form unless they have a generally accepted English name. If a medieval place has no continuity into the modern era, its name appears in Latin.

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1. Adrevaldus, Miracula Benedicti I xxxv, ed. Eugène de Certain, in Les Miracles de Saint Benoît (Paris: Mme Ve Jules Renouard, 1858), 1–83, esp. 76. For context, see Thomas Head, Hagiography and the Cult of the Saints: The Diocese of Orléans, 800–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 52–55.

2. On the relics of Benedict at Fleury, see Walter Goffart, Le Mans, St. Scholastica, and the Literary Tradition of the Translation of Benedict, Revue bénédictine 77 (1967): 107–41, esp. 108–31; Head, Hagiography and the Cult of the Saints, 135–43.

3. Adrevaldus, Miracula Benedicti I xxxv, Certain, 76.

4. John of Salerno, Vita Odonis Abbatis III viii–ix, ed. ASOSB 7:179–81, trans. Gerard Sitwell, St. Odo of Cluny: Being the Life of St. Odo of Cluny by John of Salerno and the Life of St. Gerald of Aurillac by St. Odo (London: Sheed & Ward, 1958), 79–81. John Nightingale, Oswald, Fleury, and Continental Reform, in St. Oswald of Worcester: Life and Influence, ed. Nicholas Brooks and Catherine Cubitt (London: Leicester University Press, 1996), 34–39, cautions that the most negative depictions of the Fleury community were written by its Cluniac competitors.

5. Thierry of Amorbach, Libellus de Consuetudinibus et Statutis Monasterii Floriacensis I prol., ed. Anselme Davril and Lin Donnat, Consuetudinum Saeculi X/XI/XII Monumenta Non-cluniacensia, Corp CM 7(3) (Siegburg, Ger.: Schmitt, 1984), 7–9, ed. and trans. Davril and Donnat, in L’abbaye de Fleury en l’an Mil, IRHT Sources d’histoire médiévale 32 (Paris: CNRS, 2004), 170–73.

6. Elizabeth Dachowski, First among Abbots: The Career of Abbo of Fleury (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 85–86 and 148.

7. Head, Hagiography, 236–40, 255–57; Dachowski, First among Abbots, 166–69 and 178–86. The quotation is from Gregory V’s letter to Abbot Abbo of Fleury (13 November 996), ed. Harald Zimmermann, Papsturkunden 896–1046 (Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1984–89), 2:655–57.

8. Fleury’s library is analyzed by Marco Mostert in The Political Theology of Abbo of Fleury: A Study of the Ideas about Society and Law of the Tenth-Century Monastic Reform Movement (Hilversum, Neth.: Verloren, 1987), 32–34; The Library of Fleury: A Provisional List of Manuscripts (Hilversum: Verloren, 1989); and La bibliothèque de Fleury-sur-Loire, in Religion et culture autour de l’an Mil: Royaume capétien et Lotharingie: Actes du Colloque Hugues Capet 987–1987. La France de l’an Mil, Auxerre, 26 et 27 juin 1987—Metz, 11 et 12 septembre 1987, ed. Dominique Iogna-Prat and Jean-Charles Picard (Paris: Picard, 1990), 119–23.

9. Andrew of Fleury, Vita Gauzlini I ii, ed. Robert-Henri Bautier and Monique Labory, André de Fleury Vie de Gauzlin, Abbé de Fleury, Sources d’histoire medieval publiées par l’IRHT 2 (Paris: CNRS, 1969), 32–39. On this chapter, see Dachowski, First among Abbots, 220–23.

10. The phrase from the Vita Gauzlini I xliv, Bautier and Labory, 80–91, refers specifically to the great tower constructed by Abbot Gauzlinus (1004–30). On the larger context, see Éliane Vergnolle, Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire et la sculpture du XIe siècle (Paris: Picard, 1985), 275–76, and Les débuts de l’art roman dans le royaume franc (ca. 980–ca. 1020), CCM 43 (2000): 183–84.

11. For an overview see Donnat, Recherches sur l’influence de Fleury au Xe siècle, in Études ligériennes d’histoire et d’archéologie médiévales: Mémoires et exposés présentés à la Semaine d’études médiévales de Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire du 3 au 10 juillet 1969, ed. René Louise (Auxerre: Société des fouilles archéologiques et des monuments historiques de l’Yonne, 1975), 165–74; and his Les coutumes monastiques autour de l’an Mil, in Iogna-Prat and Picard, Religion et culture autour de l’an Mil, 17–24. Regional studies of Fleury’s influence include Louis Gougaud, Les relations de l’Abbaye de Fleury-sur-Loire avec le Bretagne armoricaine et les îles britanniques (Xe et XIe siècles), Mémoires de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Bretagne 4 (1923): 2–30; Bautier and Labory, Fleury et la Catalogne au début du XIe siècle, in André de Fleury, Vie de Gauzlin, 169–85; Nightingale, Oswald, Fleury and Continental Reform, 23–45; and Mostert, Relations between Fleury and England, in England and the Continent in the Tenth Century: Studies in Honour of Wilhelm Levison (1876–1947), ed. David Rollason, Conrad Leyser, and Hannah Williams (Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 2010), 185–208.

12. John Howe, The Nobility’s Reform of the Medieval Church, AHR 93 (1988): 317–39.

13. Surveys of the literature can be found in Uta-Renate Blumenthal, The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); Maureen C. Miller, The Crisis in the Investiture Crisis Narrative, History Compass 7, no. 6 (2009): 1570–80, doi:10.1111/j.1478–0542.2009.00645.x; and Michel Sot, La réforme grégorienne: Une introduction, Revue d’histoire de l’Ėglise de France 96 (2010): 5–10.

14. Augustin Fliche, Études sur la polémique religieuse à l’époque de Grégoire VII: Les prégrégoriens (Paris: Société française d’imprimerie et de librairie, 1916), and, more influentially, in La réforme grégorienne, vol. 1, La formation des idées grégoriennes (Paris: Université Catholique, 1924), vi, viii, 6, 17, 39–148.

15. See, for example, William Ziezulewicz, The School of Chartres and Reform Influences before the Pontificate of Leo IX, CHR 77 (1991): 383–402; Howe, Gaudium et Spes: Ecclesiastical Reformers at the Start of a ‘New Age,’ in Reforming the Church before Modernity: Patterns, Problems, and Approaches, ed. Christopher M. Bellitto and Louis I. Hamilton (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 21–35; and Greta Austin, Shaping Church Law around the Year 1000: The Decretum of Burchard of Worms (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), esp. 60–67, 103–4, 123–26.

16. Gerd Tellenbach, The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century, trans. Timothy Reuter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), defended the theoretical structure he had already set up in Libertas: Kirche und Weltordnung im Zeitalter des Investiturstreites (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1936), trans. R. F. Bennett, Church, State, and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Contest (Oxford: Blackwell, 1940).

17. André Vauchez, The Spirituality of the Medieval West: From the Eighth to the Twelfth Century, trans. Colette Friedlander (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1993), 66–68.

18. Dominique Iogna-Prat, La Maison Dieu: Une histoire monumentale de l’Église au Moyen Âge (v. 800–v. 1200) (Paris: Ėditions du Seuil, 2006), esp. 360.

19. Karl Leyser, Communications and Power in Medieval Europe: The Gregorian Revolution and Beyond, ed. Timothy Reuter (London: Hambledon, 1994); Robert I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe 950–1250 (New York: Blackwell, 1987); Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

20. The historiography of the terrors of the year 1000 is surveyed in Edward Peters, Mutations, Adjustments, Terrors, Historians, and the Year 1000, in The Year 1000: Religious and Social Response to the Turning of the First Millennium, ed. Michael Frassetto (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 9–28; and Levi Roach, Emperor Otto III and the End of Time, TRHS, 6th ser., 23 (2013): 75–102, esp. 76–77. For broader millennial context, see Richard Landes, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) and the website for the Center for Millennial Studies, http://www.mille.org.

21. Timothy Reuter, preface and introduction to, NCMH, vol. 3, 900–1024, ed. Reuter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), xv–xvii and 1–24, utilizes the concept of a long tenth century to integrate much of the period covered here and treat ecclesiastical topics in a forward-looking fashion. Michel Parisse, who spent his career investigating the Lorraine and Saxony, describes a relatively seamless tenth- and eleventh-century monastic reform, most recently in Religieux et religieuses en Empire du Xe au XIIe siècle (Paris: Picard, 2011), esp. 28–31 and 85–86. A new interest in bishops, expressed by the academic society Episcopus founded in 2004, treats bishops as an element of continuity in tenth-, eleventh-, and twelfth-century Europe. This perspective is exemplified in Miller, The Formation of a Medieval Church: Ecclesiastical Change in Verona, 950–1150 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); John Ott and Anna Trumbore Jones, eds., The Bishop Reformed: Studies of Episcopal Power and Culture in the Central Middle Ages (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), esp. 4; and Francesca Tinti, Sustaining Belief: The Church of Worcester from c. 870 to c. 1100 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), esp. 225.

22. The quotation is from Vauchez, Spirituality of the Medieval West, 75. On this historiographical assumption, see Heinrich Fichtenau, Living in the Tenth Century: Mentalities and Social Orders, ed. and trans. Patrick J. Geary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), esp. 435–38; and Thomas F. X. Noble, introduction to European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century, ed. Noble and John Van Engen (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 1–16, esp. 4.

23. Howe, Re-Forging the ‘Age of Iron’: Part 1: The Tenth Century as the End of the Ancient World?, History Compass 8, no. 8 (2010): 866–87, doi:10.1111/j.1478–0542.2010.00707.x, and Re-Forging the ‘Age of Iron’: Part 2: The Tenth Century in a New Age?, History Compass 8, no. 9 (2010): 1000–1022, doi:10.1111/j.1478–0542.2010.00708.x.

24. Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927), supplemented by Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, eds., Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), a fifty-year retrospective volume; Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); R. N. Swanson, The Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999).

25. Van Engen, The Future of Medieval Church History, Church History 71 (2002): 492–522, esp. 495–97; Austin, Bishops and Religious Law, 900–1050, in Ott and Jones, Bishop Reformed, 40–57, esp. 41.

26. Julia Barrow, Ideas and Applications of Reform, in Early Medieval Christianities, c. 600–c. 1100, ed. Noble and Smith, The Cambridge History of Christianity 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 345–62.

27. Gerhart B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959). Note also Ladner, Terms and Ideas of Renewal, in Benson and Constable, Renaissance and Renewal, 1–33.

28. On the influence of The Idea of Reform, see Christopher M. Bellitto and David Zachariah Flanagin, eds., Reassessing Reform: A Historical Investigation into Church Renewal (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012); and Lester L. Field Jr., Gerhard Ladner and the Idea of Reform: A Modern Historian’s Quest for Ancient and Medieval Truth (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2015), esp. 353–416.

29. Ladner, Idea of Reform, 423.

30. Van Engen, The Twelfth Century: Reading, Reason, and Revolt in a World of Custom, in Noble and Van Engen, European Transformations, 17–44, esp. 24.

31. Howe, Church Reform and Social Change in Eleventh-Century Central Italy: Dominic of Sora and His Patrons (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), esp. 162; William North, Jay Rubenstein, and John D. Cotts, The Experience of Reform: Three Perspectives, Haskins Society Journal 10 (2001): 111–61, esp. 111–12.

32. Joachim Wollasch, Monasticism: The First Wave of Reform, in NCMH, 3:163–85, surveys recent trends.

33. Ladner, Reformatio, in Ecumenical Dialogue at Harvard: The Roman Catholic-Protestant Colloquium, ed. Samuel H. Miller and G. Ernest Wright (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1964), 172–90, esp. 172.

34. Bellitto, Renewing Christianity: A History of Church Reform from Day One to Vatican II (New York: Paulist Press, 2001), 35 and 47.

35. Ladner, Idea of Reform, 35.

36. Steven Vanderputten, Monastic Reform as Process: Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900–1100 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), esp. 186–89. Along these same lines, see Christopher A. Jones, Aelfric and the Limits of ‘Benedictine Reform,’ in A Companion to Aelfric, ed. Hugh Magennis and Mary Swan (Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2009), 67–108, esp. 70–72, 82–88.

37. Van Engen, The Crisis of Monasticism Reconsidered: Benedictine Monasticism in the Years 1050–1150, Speculum 81 (1986): 269–304; Constable, Reformation of the Twelfth Century, 4; Wollasch, Monasticism, 163–85.

38. Van Engen, The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem, AHR 91 (1986): 519–52, esp. 519–22, 538; Ludo Milis, ed., The Pagan Middle Ages, trans. Tanis Guest (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1998).

39. The phrase echoes Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), esp. 32–34, 522–23, 541, and 637–41.

40. For the sources available, see Reuter, Introduction: Reading the Tenth Century, in NCMH, 3: 1–24; Noble, The Interests of Historians in the Tenth Century, in Rollason et al., England and the Continent, 495–513.

41. Michael Camille, Art History in the Past and Future of Medieval Studies, in The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, ed. Van Engen (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 362–82, esp. 366 and 371.

CHAPTER 1

WOLVES DEVOURING THE LAMBS OF CHRIST

Then the wolves of slaughter rushed forward, they cared nothing for the water, the host of vikings, west across the Blackwater, across the shining stream they carried their shields,…The roar of battle was lifted up there, ravens circled, the bird of prey eager for carrion; there was bedlam in the land…. The onslaught of battle was terrible, warriors fell on either side, young men lay dead.

—The Battle of Maldon, lines 96–98, 106–107, 111–112

The epic Battle of Maldon, composed in eleventh-century English, relates how Ealdorman Byrhtnoth defied Viking invaders on a beach near Maldon in 991.¹ He was killed, but most of his retainers fought on, presumably until they too were slaughtered (the surviving text lacks a conclusion and perhaps some front matter). This invasion was the first in a series of attacks that ultimately resulted in the 1016 crowning of Cnut as king of England. Although the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other sources note the battle and mention some participants, the only surviving description is this single poem transmitted in a defective manuscript that was itself destroyed by fire in 1731.²

But what do we really know? Critics claim that The Battle of Maldon is not a historical document except insofar as it illustrates literary history.³ Even scholars who accept it as historical admit that the poet, lacking embedded reporters, must have invented all the heroic challenges and speeches. Some skeptics question whether Byrhtnoth and his men could even have understood their Danish foes.⁴ How would they have informed their compatriots about their final moments? Why were they assembled as a classical Germanic war band, an epic structure otherwise unattested in the unified English monarchy? And what about all the details that historians of today would want to know, such as the numbers of combatants, the subsequent fate of the raiders, and their impact on the Essex countryside?

Yet The Battle of Maldon is less problematic in some ways than are many other sources. At least it is relatively contemporary with the battle it describes, unlike some chronicles’ descriptions of events occurring centuries earlier. Because the poet used his own English language, he did not need to wrestle with the genre expectations and clichés of an alien Latin. He was probably no churchman, unlike most of the writers of the time, who were clerks with dogmatic views about what their literary communities should hear and very little sympathy for the alien other.

The difficulties that historians face when reading The Battle of Maldon are found in varying degrees in virtually all the accounts describing post-Carolingian barbarian devastation. This presents a problem for the present book because up until the middle of the twentieth century the deficiencies of the unreformed pre-Gregorian Church were usually blamed on non-Christian invaders. According to the traditional narrative, Vikings, Muslims, and Magyars smashed the empire of Charlemagne (768–814), whose incompetent successors were unable to defend it. Carolingian cultural achievements survived only as isolated ruins in a cataclysmic landscape. Out of the chaos emerged lawless military elites who preyed upon the remains of the institutional Church until the Gregorian reformers began to counter their abuses. But now this grand narrative is in trouble. If the same severe source criticism that can be applied to The Battle of Maldon can be applied to all the surviving historical sources that describe the barbarian invasions, then once the documentary witnesses have been thoroughly deconstructed and dispatched, revisionists are free to depict the invaders as minor nuisances whose contributions to crafts and commerce compensated in the long run for whatever temporary inconveniences they might have caused. Therefore, before examining how the Church was reformed in the tenth century, it is necessary to address some preliminary historical questions. What happened during the invasions? How did these events affect Christian morale? What survived to be reformed? What reconstruction was required? Like Byrthnoth and his men on the beach, we too must confront the post-Carolingian barbarians.

THE CAROLINGIAN EMPIRE

There is a new Carolingian Renaissance, not the ninth-century cultural reawakening that this label usually designates but a contemporary rebirth of interest in the Carolingian world. Charlemagne had always attracted attention, even though his attempt to create a new imperium Christianum was long viewed as a quixotic dead end. But after competing nation states nearly destroyed themselves in two world wars, Europeans began to take another look, and now they hail Charlemagne as the creator of the first Common Market, the father of Europe.⁵ Moreover, he has a new economic context thanks to scholarly attempts to test the thesis of Henri Pirenne (d. 1935) that Roman economic and cultural systems had continued on after the end of the Western Roman Empire until Islam disrupted the Mediterranean. Pirenne’s claims of cultural continuity have held up better than his economic analyses, and today scholars studying the Latin West tend to see the sixth and seventh centuries as the nadir of urban life and posit a subsequent revival.⁶ By the eighth century local power structures and aristocracies were gaining strength in many regions, and the secret of Charlemagne’s success appears to have been his ability to harness the new elites.⁷ Coin hoards and archeology now reveal a new world far from the closed Carolingian Europe that Pirenne had postulated, one deeply open to new people, new things, new ideas.⁸ Instead of the twilight of Antiquity, the age of Charlemagne now seems more like a new dawn.⁹

Insofar as a Frankish warlord could, Charlemagne re-created Christian Rome. He and his successors filled Europe with churches modeled on Constantine’s basilicas, especially on St. Peter’s.¹⁰ He built a Late Antique imperial palace complex at Aachen, which included a model of Justinian’s church of San Vitale at Ravenna (incorporating spolia from Rome and Ravenna), a swimming pool evoking a Roman bath, and decorative touches such as an imported statue of Constantine and a giant stone pine cone echoing the one found at the Lateran.¹¹ His residence was hailed as a new Lateran Palace.¹² His faux Roman coins celebrated Karolus Imperator Augustus,¹³ and his seal was an ancient Roman intaglio bearing the inscription Renovatio Romani Imperii.¹⁴ His son Louis received an imperial crown from the pope that was allegedly the actual diadem of Constantine.¹⁵ Charlemagne himself, albeit only on the rarest of occasions, could be coerced into forgoing his normal Frankish dress and donning formal Roman garments, and he was ultimately laid to rest shrouded in rich silks.¹⁶ Although his persona as a German warlord at first evoked negative comments,¹⁷ later on, looking back from more chaotic ages, people began to acclaim him as St. Charlemagne.¹⁸

Louis the Pious, Charlemagne’s sole surviving legitimate son, inherited a united empire. Because he had served as sub-king of Aquitaine since 781, he was able to bring to Aachen not only political and military experience but also his own tested ministers. He evicted his sisters, who had become increasingly powerful during the old emperor’s final years.¹⁹ He fostered monastic reform.²⁰ He sponsored efforts to Christianize the Scandinavians.²¹ But his idealism made it difficult for him to maintain Charlemagne’s careful balance between German warlord and Roman emperor, and ultimately not even his own sons would obey him, disgusted as they were by his innovations and by the machinations of their stepmother. The empire divided. In 841, two of Charlemagne’s grandsons took the famous oaths at Strasbourg, where the troops of Charles Bald swore in the lingua Romana and the troops of Louis the German in the Teudisca lingua (i.e., in their French and German vernaculars).²² The ultimate result was the Treaty of Verdun in 843, which divided the empire in a way that foreshadowed the future France and Germany and the contested territories lying between them.

This disintegration of the Frankish realm was nothing new. Frankish kings almost always disputed royal inheritances. The smooth transition from Charlemagne to Louis the Pious had occurred only because the old emperor had managed to outlive all but one primary heir. His own succession, his father’s, and his grandfather’s had been far messier, and during the preceding Merovingian dynasty the realm had frequently disintegrated into Aquitania, Burgundy, Neustria (the western kingdom of northern Francia), and Austrasia (the ancient homeland of the Franks around the lower Rhine). Yet it was always reassembled by great leaders or at least by long-lived ones. Despite the fierceness of the civil wars among Charlemagne’s grandsons and great-grandsons, anyone knowledgeable about the acrimonious history of the Franks expected that these divisions would be quickly transcended.

But this time things were different. Just as had happened to the Western Roman Empire centuries earlier, the arrival of foreign invaders tipped the balance. In the second half of the ninth and the first half of the tenth century, the Carolingian world was attacked from all sides by Vikings, Muslims, and Magyars, with a little help from the Slavs. The Franks had brought some of these troubles upon themselves. By conquering Frisians, Saxons, and Avars they had eliminated potential buffers against Scandinavians, Slavs, and Magyars; by trading with Scandinavians they had helped these dangerous neighbors develop their deadly maritime expertise; and by becoming players in Mediterranean affairs they had added the more civilized polities of Umayyad Spain and the Byzantine Empire to their roster of potential enemies. The Franks would reap what they had sown.

THE VIKINGS

The most successful invaders were Scandinavians. Medieval English writers, who could speak precisely about Danes and Northmen, called some of them Vikings, a word whose disputed etymology is usually linked to a notion of traveling, perhaps out of bays or fiords.²³ On the Continent the raiders were Danes, Northmen, heathen men, pagans, pirates, or enemies of God.²⁴ All of these terms are unsatisfactory in that the more general names obscure differences among ethnically diverse bands that could unite for mutual advantage and then turn on each other just as readily, while national labels such as Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes evoke kingdoms that had not yet coalesced and obscure the ad hoc mixed composition of many expeditions.²⁵ Also misleading is the hindsight that allows today’s historians to focus on the groups that endured and to disregard the more ephemeral ones, an advantage not shared by the people under attack.²⁶

While the Carolingian Franks were creating an empire, their Scandinavian neighbors were busy increasing their trade with France and England and quietly colonizing the Orkneys, Hebrides, and other outer British isles.²⁷ In 793, in a dramatic debut as maritime raiders, they sacked the sacred island monastery of Lindisfarne and another Northumbrian monastery, probably Jarrow.²⁸ Then they began to systematically attack all the island monasteries of the Irish Sea.²⁹ Alcuin (d. 804), the head of Charlemagne’s brain trust, an Englishman who had formerly been the schoolmaster at York, expresses his shock in seven surviving letters: Never before has such an atrocity appeared in Britain as we have now suffered at the hands of a pagan people. Such a voyage was not thought possible. The church of St. Cuthbert is now spattered with the blood of the priests of God, stripped of all its furnishings, exposed to the plundering of pagans.³⁰

FIGURE 1. Viking longship, replica of the Oseberg ship from the early ninth century. Bergen Maritime Museum, Norway. Photo credit: HIP/Art Resource, NY.

Northmen also hit the Frankish heartland. During Charlemagne’s last years, increased tension between Franks and Danes had resulted in a more elaborate Danevirke, a system of fortifications that cut Denmark off from the empire. That situation was temporarily defused by the succession disputes following King Godfred’s death in 810. Louis the Pious tried to prolong these distractions by subsidizing pretenders to the Danish crown, but this policy kept the Danes far too well informed about Francia and its problems. Stronger kings ultimately emerged in Scandinavia, a development that hurt the Franks both by facilitating mass mobilizations within the new northern kingdoms and by causing discontented groups of more independent warriors to decide to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Raids increased. Large Danish forces attacked major ports during the Carolingian civil wars of the 830s; hundreds of ships sailed up the Seine, the Loire, and the Garonne during the succession struggles of the early 840s, looting monasteries and towns all along the way. Fleets ravaged the coasts of Brittany and Aquitaine and even attacked Spain and Italy. At first the raiders sailed directly from their homelands, but soon seasonal campaigns were replaced by overwintering on riverine islands and then by more permanent Irish, English, and Continental bases.³¹

The great armies retained their mobility for a long time. When Charles the Bald (840–877) strengthened his defenses in the 870s, using tactics such as fortified bridges (which, alas, tended to concede the watersheds below them to the raiders), Vikings shifted their attention to England, where they won control over the kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia and threatened Wessex, the last holdout. King Alfred (871–99) stabilized the situation and began a systematic reconquest that would not be completed until 954 when Eric Bloodaxe was driven out of York, ending nearly a century of Viking rule there. Some Vikings avoided Alfred’s forces during the 880s and 890s by returning to the Continent to attack the Low Countries, part of the fractured Middle Kingdom of Charlemagne’s grandson, Emperor Lothar (840–55), but despite initial successes they failed to establish a permanent beachhead there.³² In Western Francia, however, the Vikings who settled at the mouth of the Seine were recognized