Europe after Rome: Franks, monks and Charlemagne

On Christmas Day 800 Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor in Rome, 324 years after the last emperor in the west had been sent into retirement.

What “Middle Ages” means

The Middle Ages is the name for roughly a thousand years of European history, from the end of the western Roman empire in 476 to the decades around 1500. Nobody living then thought of themselves as being in the middle of anything. Italian scholars of the 14th and 15th centuries, Petrarch among them, felt they were reviving the learning of Greece and Rome after a long gap, and later writers called that gap the middle age. Historians usually split it into the Early Middle Ages (about 500 to 1000), the High Middle Ages (about 1000 to 1300) and the Late Middle Ages (about 1300 to 1500). The label fits Europe best. In the same centuries Constantinople, Baghdad and the great cities of China were among the largest and richest places on earth.

Kingdoms in place of provinces

When Odoacer, a general of Germanic origin, sent the young emperor Romulus Augustulus into retirement in 476, very little changed overnight. Roman towns, roads, bishops and Latin law carried on. What changed was who held power. Across the old western provinces, kings of peoples such as the Visigoths in Spain, the Ostrogoths in Italy, the Franks in Gaul and the Angles and Saxons in Britain now ruled over a much larger Roman population. Many of these kings used Roman titles and kept Roman officials. The most lasting kingdom was that of the Franks. Their king Clovis united most of Gaul and was baptised a Catholic Christian at Reims, traditionally in 496, though some historians prefer a date about ten years later. Most of his subjects were Catholic, and the choice won him the support of the bishops, who were often the most powerful men in their towns.

Monks and the written word

In a world of few towns and fewer schools, monasteries became the places where books were copied and kept. Around 529 Benedict of Nursia founded a monastery at Monte Cassino, between Rome and Naples, and wrote a short Rule for monks that set out a day divided between prayer, reading and manual work. The Rule of St Benedict spread across western Europe over the next three centuries. In 597 Pope Gregory the Great sent a monk named Augustine, with about forty companions, to the kingdom of Kent, where he founded the church at Canterbury. Irish and English monks in turn carried Christianity into Germany. Most of the Latin classics that survive today, from Virgil to Cicero, reached us because monks copied them by hand in these centuries.

Charlemagne and his empire

The descendants of Clovis were later pushed aside by their own chief officials. One of these, Charles Martel, defeated an Umayyad army from Spain between Poitiers and Tours in 732. His grandson Charles, known as Charlemagne (Charles the Great), ruled the Franks from 768 to 814 and went to war almost every year, adding Saxony, northern Italy and Bavaria to his lands. On Christmas Day 800 Pope Leo III crowned him emperor in St Peter’s in Rome. Charlemagne’s court at Aachen drew scholars such as Alcuin of York, and his scribes used a clear, rounded handwriting now called Carolingian minuscule, the ancestor of the lowercase letters on this page. After his death the empire did not hold together. In 843 the Treaty of Verdun divided it among three of his grandsons, roughly into a western kingdom that grew into France, an eastern one that grew into Germany and a middle strip between them.

Raiders and settlers from the north

From the 790s, raiders from Scandinavia, the Vikings, attacked coasts and rivers across Europe. In 793 they plundered the monastery of Lindisfarne off the coast of Northumbria, an attack that Alcuin wrote about with horror. Vikings were also traders and settlers. They founded Dublin, settled Iceland, and in 911, by tradition, their leader Rollo received the land around Rouen from the Frankish king. That grant was the beginning of Normandy, whose dukes return in unit 4.