The Cambridge Medieval History - Book XIII: Learning and Literature in the Early Middle Ages

By Louis Halphen, Paul Vinogradoff, W.R. Lethaby and Montague James

The alluring dream of Charles the Great has vanished; after his death no temporal prince was found capable of carrying on his work, and it fell to ruins. Nevertheless, the root idea which had inspired him still persisted: the idea of the unity of the Christian world, bound together and grouped round a single head, ready to give battle to the infidel, and to undertake the conversion of the barbarians. But it was the Church which now appropriated the idea, and which alone, amidst the surrounding confusion, succeeded in maintaining itself as the principle of order and the power of cohesion. To show in broad outline how and to what extent the Church succeeded in this design during the disturbed period which preceded the great Church reform of the eleventh century is the object of these few pages which will thus sum up the history.
Under the ever-present influence of scriptural ideals, Charles the Great had really come to see in himself what he was so often called, a new David, or another Solomon, at once priest and king, the master and overlord of the Bishops of his realms; in reducing those Bishops to the level of docile fellow-laborers with him in the work of government, he had believed himself to be working for the consolidation of his own power. But in this matter, as in so many others, the results of his policy had not accorded with his wishes and expectations. The Bishops, having been called upon to take part in affairs of State, were consequently quite ready to busy themselves with them even uninvited, while, on the other hand, by the investment of the Emperor with a semi-sacer­dotal character the clergy were encouraged to see in him one of themselves, and, despite his superior position, to look upon him as amenable to their jurisdiction...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Perennial Press
• Release date: Feb 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781531235086

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THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY - BOOK XIII

Learning and Literature in the Early Middle Ages

Louis Halphen, Paul Vinogradoff, Montague James, and W.R. Lethaby

PERENNIAL PRESS

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Copyright © 2016 by Louis Halphen, Paul Vinogradoff, Montague James, and W.R. Lethaby

Published by Perennial Press

Interior design by Pronoun

Distribution by Pronoun

ISBN: 9781531235086

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE CHURCH FROM CHARLEMAGNE TO SYLVESTER II, by Louis Halphen

FEUDALISM, by Paul Vinogradoff

LEARNING AND LITERATURE TILL THE DEATH OF BEDE, by Montague James

LEARNING AND LITERATURE TILL POPE SYLVESTER II, by Montague James

BYZANTINE AND ROMANESQUE ARTS, by W.R. Lethaby

THE CHURCH FROM CHARLEMAGNE TO SYLVESTER II, BY LOUIS HALPHEN

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THE PRECEDING VOLUME CAME TO an end with the picture of a vast Empire seemingly destined to absorb Europe itself. This volume, on the contrary, has offered little for our consideration save the spectacle of Europe fallen to fragments, of its kingdoms sundered from one another, and of disintegration steadily advancing. The alluring dream of Charles the Great has vanished; after his death no temporal prince was found capable of carrying on his work, and it fell to ruins.

Nevertheless, the root idea which had inspired him still persisted: the idea of the unity of the Christian world, bound together and grouped round a single head, ready to give battle to the infidel, and to undertake the conversion of the barbarians. But it was the Church which now appropriated the idea, and which alone, amidst the surrounding confusion, succeeded in maintaining itself as the principle of order and the power of cohesion. To show in broad outline how and to what extent the Church succeeded in this design during the disturbed period which preceded the great Church reform of the eleventh century is the object of these few pages which will thus sum up the history.

Under the ever-present influence of scriptural ideals, Charles the Great had really come to see in himself what he was so often called, a new David, or another Solomon, at once priest and king, the master and overlord of the Bishops of his realms; in reducing those Bishops to the level of docile fellow-laborers with him in the work of government, he had believed himself to be working for the consolidation of his own power. But in this matter, as in so many others, the results of his policy had not accorded with his wishes and expectations. The Bishops, having been called upon to take part in affairs of State, were consequently quite ready to busy themselves with them even uninvited, while, on the other hand, by the investment of the Emperor with a semi-sacerdotal character the clergy were encouraged to see in him one of themselves, and, despite his superior position, to look upon him as amenable to their jurisdiction.

This had been clearly perceived as early as the time of Louis the Pious, when, on the morrow of Lothar’s usurpation (833), the Bishops, alleging the obligation laid on them by their ‘priestly office’, had plainly asserted their right to examine and punish the conduct of a prince who had incurred guilt by ‘refusing to obey’, as the official record declares, ‘the warnings of the clergy’. For, although Louis the Pious was already looked upon as deposed at the time of the ceremony in St Medard’s at Soissons, the course which the Bishops had adopted without hesitation was in point of fact to bring him to trial for his conduct as a sovereign, imposing on him the most humiliating of penances, after which, as the record concludes, none can resume his post in the world’s army.

Louis the Pious, as already seen, did, nevertheless, return to the world’s army, and was even reinstated in the imperial dignity. Yet this decisive action taken by the Bishops in the crisis of 833 showed clearly that the parts had been inverted. Louis the Pious was the king of the priests, but no longer in the same sense as Charles the Great: he was at their mercy.

The precedent thus set was not forgotten. During the fratricidal struggle which, on the morrow of the death of Louis the Pious, broke out amongst Lothar, Louis the German, and Charles the Bald, the Bishops more than once took occasion to interfere, and to make themselves masters of the situation. In March 82, in particular, when Charles the Bald and Louis the German had encamped in the palace of Aix-la-Chapelle whence their brother had precipitately fled at their approach, the clergy, as Nithard, an eye-witness, relates, reviewing Lothar’s whole conduct, how he had stripped his father of power, how often, by his cupidity, he had driven Christian people to commit perjury, how often he had himself broken his engagements to his father and his brothers, how often he had attempted to despoil and ruin the latter since his father’s death, how many adulteries, conflagrations and acts of violence of every description his criminal ambition had inflicted on the Church, finally, considering his incapacity for government, and the complete absence of good intentions in this matter shown by him, declare that it is with good reason and by a just judgment of the Almighty that he has been reduced to take flight, first from the field of battle, and then from his own kingdom. Without a dissentient voice the Bishops proclaimed the deposition of Lothar, and after having demanded of Louis and Charles whether they were ready to govern according to the Divine Will the States abandoned by their brother, Receive them, they bade them, and rule them according to the Will of God; we require it of you in His Name, we beseech it of you, and we command it you.

In thus encroaching on the domain of politics, the Bishops were persuaded that they were only acting in the interest of the higher concerns committed to their care. They had gradually accustomed themselves to the idea that the Empire ought to be the realization upon earth of the ‘City of God’, the ideal city, planned by St Augustine. The study of St Augustine had been the mental food of Bishops, learned clerks and princes themselves, and in their complaints the clergy had always a source of inspiration in the complaints echoed four centuries earlier by St Augustine and his followers. The Empire was hastening to its ruin because religion was no longer honored, because every man was concerned only for his own interests and was careless of the higher interests of the Church, because instead of brotherliness and concord only cupidity and selfishness reigned unchecked. If the Empire were to be saved, the first thing to be done was to recall every man to Christian sentiments and to the fear of God.

Whatever work of the period we open, whether we go to the letters written at the time by the clergy, or whether we examine the considerations on which the demands made by their synods to the king are based, we shall find the same arguments upon the necessity of reverting to the Christian principles which had constituted the strength of the Empire and had been the condition of its existence. For the deacon Florus, the decadence of the Empire is merely one aspect of the decadence of the Church: at the period when the Empire flourished the clergy used to meet frequently in councils, to give holy laws to the people; today, he goes on, there is nothing but conciliabula of men greedy of lands and benefices, the general interest is not regarded, everyone is concerned about his own affairs, all things command attention except God. The conclusion of the whole matter is, he says, that all is over with the honor of the Church and that the majesty of the State is a prey to the worst of furies. The same reflections may be found in Paschasius Radbertus, biographer of the Abbot Wala; the whole of the disorder in the State arises from the disappearance of religion, the imperial power has made shipwreck at the same time as the authority of the Church. Wala’scomment, as he made his appearance amidst the partisans of Lothar on the morrow of the penance at St Medard’s, is well known: It is all perfect, save that you have left naught to God of all that was due to Him.

To restore to the Church of God and to its ministers the honor that is their due, such is the sheet-anchor which the Episcopate offers to sovereigns. Over and over again during the years that followed the death of Louis the Pious and the partition of Verdun, the Bishops press upon rulers the necessity of acting with charity, and in cases where any error has been committed, of doing penance, and, as a document of 844 expresses it, asking the forgiveness of the Lord according to the exhortation and counsel of the priests. And these exhortations bear fruit; in April 845, while a synod was sitting at Beauvais, the King of France, Charles the Bald, after swearing on the hilt of his sword in the Name of God and the saints to respect till death the privileges and laws of the Church, admits the right and even the duty of the prelates both to suspend the execution of any measure he might take which should be to the detriment of these privileges and laws, and also to address remonstrances to him, calling upon him to amend any decisions contrary to them.

Strong in this pledge, the prelates of France, a few months later (June 845) ventured to put forward, at the Synod of Meaux, a whole series of claims directed not less against their king than against the whole lay aristocracy, reproaching both alike with hindering the free exercise of religion. Their reproaches were expressed in a language of command, which on this occasion was carried to such a height that the king, with the support of the magnates, resisted.

Nevertheless, the Bishops remained masters of the situation. In the years that follow, making common cause now with the lay aristocracy, they succeed, throughout the various kingdoms which sprang from Charles the Great’s empire, in imposing their will upon the sovereigns. They are at once the leaders and the spokesmen of the turbulent vassals, ever ready to league themselves together to resist the king. In an assembly held in August 856 at Bonneuil near Paris, with unprecedented violence they accuse Charles the Bald of having broken all his engagements; they warn him in charity that they are all, priests and laymen, of one mind in resolving to see them carried out, and they summon him, in consequence, to amend without delay all provisions to the contrary, concluding this singular request with a threatening quotation from the Psalms: If a man will not turn, He will whet His sword: He bath bent His bow, and made it ready. He hath prepared for him the instruments of death.

We have already seen, how two years later this prediction was apparently realized. Louis the German, in response to the appeal of a portion of his brother Charles theBald’s subjects, invaded his dominions and succeeded in occupying a great part of them. Called upon to ratify his usurpation, a group of Bishops from the ecclesiastical provinces of Rheims and Rouen gathered together at Quierzy-sur-Oise, following the suggestions of Archbishop Hincmar, carried matters with a high hand; after having recommended him to meditate upon the duties which a prince owes to the Church, they thought fit to bring to his notice these words from the Psalms: Instead of thy fathers thou shalt have children, together with the interpretation: Instead of the Apostles, I have ordained Bishops that they may govern and instruct thee."

Kings working for the maintenance of peace under the aegis of the Church, such was thenceforward the programme of the Episcopate. And by peace is intended the peace of Christendom, the peace of the Church; to disturb it is to infringe the laws of which the Church is the guardian, and to revolt against the Church itself. Thus in a synod assembled at Metz on 28 May 859, the Bishops of the kingdoms of Western France and Lorraine do not hesitate to characterize the attempt of Louis the German to seize upon his brother’s lands as a schism in the Holy Church and in Christendom, adding that he is bound to ask absolution for it. A month later in an assembly held atSavonnières (14 June 859) Charles the Bald himself appears to give official recognition to the claims of the clergy; in making a complaint against Wenilo (Ganelon), Archbishop of Sens, who had ventured to crown his brother Louis the German king in his place, he expresses astonishment that a claim should have been set up to depose him, without the case having been submitted to the judgment of the Bishops, by whose ministry he had been consecrated king, and to whose fatherly admonitions and sentences he had been and ever was ready to submit himself.

The episcopal theory was thus expanded to its utmost limits, as it was about to be stated even more rigorously, and with the greatest boldness by the illustrious Archbishop of Rheims, Hincmar, in numerous treatises and letters or in the decrees of councils which on all hands are allowed to be his work. The theory, very simple in itself, may be brought under these few heads: The king is king because the Bishops have been pleased to consecrate him: It is rather through the spiritual unction and benediction of the Bishops than from any earthly power that you hold the royal dignity, writes Hincmar to Charles the Bald in 868. The Bishops make kings by virtue of their right to consecrate, and so are superior to them, for they consecrate kings, but cannot be consecrated by them. Kings, then, are the creatures, the delegates of the Bishops: the monarchy is a power which is preserved and maintained for the service of God and the Church; it is an instrument in the hands of the Church which is superior to it, because she directs it towards its true end. Except for this special power which the king has at his disposal and which lays upon him special duties, he is but a man like other men, his fellows and equals in the city of God. Like them he is bound to live as a faithful Christian.

The whole trend of this ecclesiastical reaction, thus traced in outline during the half century which followed the death of Charlemagne, was to form a system logically invulnerable but making the monarchy the slave of the clergy. To make head against the unbridled appetites of men the Church claimed as its own the twofold task of maintaining union and concord and of directing the monarchy in the paths of the Lord.

Left, however, to their own resources, and compelled, in addition, to resist the claims and the violent attacks of the lay aristocracy, the Bishops would have been in no position to translate their principles into action. Only a centralized Church, gathered round a single head, could enable them to give practical force to their views, and for this reason, the eyes of an important section of the Bishops were very early directed towards Rome.

The Forged Decretals.

This tendency is strikingly shown in the famous collection of the False Decretals which are still to a great extent an unsolved problem despite endless discussion. They were composed within Charles the Bald’s dominions about the year 850 by a Frankish clerk assuming the name of Isidorus Mercator, who, in order to contribute solid support to the prerogatives of the Bishops at once against the arbitrary control of the Archbishops or metropolitans and the attacks of the civil power, did not hesitate to misattribute, to interpolate and rearrange, and thus practically to forge from beginning to end a whole series of pseudo-papal decisions. This collection clearly lays down as a principle the absolute and universal supremacy of the Chair of Peter. It makes the Pope the sovereign lawgiver without whose consent no council, not even that of a whole province, may meet or pronounce valid decrees; it makes him, at the same time, the supreme judge without whose intervention no Bishop may be deposed, who in the last resort decides not only the causes of Bishops but all major causes, whose decision constitutes law even before any other ecclesiastical tribunal has been previously invoked. In this manner, while the Episcopate, freed from the civil authority, is the regulating power within the borders of every State, the Pope appears as the Supreme Head of the whole of Christendom.

Such a theory harmonized too well with the aspirations of the Popes not to find an echo at Rome. They had themselves been trying for some time on parallel lines: to take advantage of the decline of the imperial power to strengthen their own authority, and to claim over the Christian world as a whole that office of supreme guardian of peace and concord which the local Episcopate had assumed for itself inside each of the Frankish kingdoms. The weakness of Louis the Pious and the conflict of interests and of political aims which characterized his reign had been singularly favorable to this project. It has been shown in a preceding chapter how in 833, when the revolt in favor of Lothar broke out, Pope Gregory IV had allowed himself to be drawn into espousing the rebel cause. Urged on by the whole of the higher Frankish clergy who, though maintaining Lothar’sclaims on the ground of principle, were, nevertheless, well pleased to be able to shelter themselves behind the papal authority, and, supporting themselves by various texts, pressed upon him the prerogatives attaching to the Chair of Peter, Gregory spoke as sovereign lord. In a letter couched in tart and trenchant language in which the hand ofAgobard, Archbishop of Lyons, may probably be traced, he resolutely put forward rights superior to those of any other power whatever. To those Bishops and priests who, loyal to Louis the Pious, had pleaded his orders as a justification for not having hastened to present themselves when summoned by the Pope, Gregory does not hesitate to retort: "Why speak to me of the orders of the Emperor? Are not the orders of the Pope of equal weight? And