The Xenophile Historian

A History of Europe

741 to 1000

	Iconoclasm: Act II
	Charlemagne
	Wessex and the Carolingian States
	The Fury of the Northmen
	Alfred the Great
	The Atlantic Saga
	Commerce in the Viking Era
	The Church Backslides and Splits
	Macedonian Revival
	The Caliphate of Cordova
	The First Reich and the Recovery of Christendom
	A New Beginning
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Constantine's first "reform" was to order the Empire's Jews and Montanists (the followers of a second-century heresy) to be baptized as Orthodox Christians. This must have looked a bit odd, because his first wife was a Khazar princess, and the Khazars were starting to convert to Judaism at this time. When Constantine felt he had converted all his subjects, he persecuted icons and their followers even more vigorously than his father did. Often the iconodules (icon-lovers) were excommunicated and exiled, and there are unverified reports that they were even mutilated. The iconoclastic decrees were extended to abolish the cult of saint-worship, by ordering the destruction of relics and condemning prayers made to the saints. To the iconoclasts, the only acceptable Christian symbols were the cross, the Bible, and the elements of the Lord's Supper. And because the icons contained large amounts of precious metal, their destruction also had the benefit of giving the treasury a much-needed boost in gold and silver. In 754 Constantine convened a general Church council at Constantinople to outlaw icons everywhere, but it wasn't considered an ecumenical council, because (1.) there was no Patriarch present (the Patriarch of Constantinople had recently died, and a replacement hadn't been chosen yet), and (2.) because the pope and the Western Church refused to support the council or endorse its rulings.

The strongest supporters of icons were the monks, who had made a living by making and selling them. Between 730 and 760 one monk, John of Damascus, wrote what later became the official defense of icons. He agreed that it was wrong to worship an icon, but pictures of Jesus, Mary, the Apostles and the angels are useful tools for teaching Christianity to new believers. Furthermore, it is okay to give icons respect and reverence, since the same would be done if the people they represented were here. For this, the Orthodox Church today venerates John as the last of the great teachers who put down in writing who a Christian is and what he should believe, the last of the so-called “Church Fathers.”

By the time Constantine's reign ended in 775, the iconoclastic controversy had been going on for nearly fifty years. All iconodules had been purged from the upper ranks of the government, military, and clergy--with one very special exception. Constantine had six sons, and the wife he chose for his eldest, Leo IV, was a stunningly beautiful woman from Athens named Irene. Apparently Constantine only cared about Irene's looks, because she proved to be cruel and ambitious as well. When Leo became the next emperor, Irene let it be known that she liked icons, and didn't care what Moslems might think of the images. Leo was an iconoclast, but not a very determined one; during his short reign (775-780) he let Irene have what she wanted, recalling those exiled for their beliefs, and even appointing an iconodule patriarch to please Irene. Soon Leo died of tuberculosis. He and Irene had a nine-year-old son, Constantine VI, and Irene immediately declared herself the boy's regent, to keep the power she had tasted.

The army didn't want Irene in charge, because the troops were thoroughly iconoclast, and they knew that the empress was on the other side. They tried to install a brother of Leo IV as the next emperor, and when the mutiny was suppressed, Irene had all five surviving sons of Constantine V tonsured and sent to a monastery; as clergymen, they would be seen as ineligible for the throne later on. Then she purged the army of her opponents, which left it too weak to do well in the next wars. The only successful campaign fought under Irene was against the Slavs in Macedonia and Greece, in 782. On the eastern front, the Arabs had invaded again, coming as close as Nicomedia before Irene agreed to pay a huge tribute for three years. In the west, the general commanding Sicily revolted, and while that rebellion was put down, the general in question defected to the Arabs. A brief war with the Franks in 788, prompted because Irene would not let her son marry a daughter of Charlemagne, allowed the Frankish king to take Istria (the peninsula of modern Slovenia) and Benevento.

Irene's finest hour came in 787, when she convened the Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicaea. She picked Nicaea as the meeting place not only because it reminded people of the original Council of Nicaea, but also because it was far enough from Constantinople to be safe from rioting civilians and mutinous soldiers. This council overturned the iconoclastic policies, and the position presented by John of Damascus became the official one. Because of this, the Orthodox Church later canonized Irene as a saint (her feast day is on August 9), which is remarkable when one considers what else she did.

By the time of the council, Irene was concerned that her regency was about to end; Constantine VI would soon come of age and demand his right to rule. To put off the day when she would have to step down, she picked a lady from a friendly, iconodule family in Armenia to be the wife of Constantine, and when Constantine tried to take the reigns of power in 790, she imprisoned him and ordered the entire army to swear an oath of loyalty, declaring that as long as she was alive, the army would not accept Constantine as ruler, and that in official proclamations, her name would always be mentioned before his. The troops in the capital did this willingly, but the Armenian theme, still iconoclast, proclaimed Constantine VI the sole ruler. More than half the army joined the Armenians, and assembled in Bithynia; realizing how little support she had, Irene let Constantine go when the troops demanded it. They put Irene under house arrest in one of her palaces, but she was not formally deposed; both her portrait and Constantine's were still stamped on coins, the difference being that Constantine 's name now appeared on the obverse side, instead of the reverse.

It didn't take long for Constantine VI to prove that he was a totally incompetent emperor. His only military campaign, against the Bulgars, resulted in him fleeing from the battlefield, after which he resorted to buying off any enemy who made trouble for the Empire. By the beginning of 792 he felt he needed Irene back, so, incredibly, he recalled her and restored her position as senior empress, taking precedence over him even on coins. For his supporters this was unacceptable, and the next plot in the army sought to get rid of both Irene and Constantine, replacing them with Nicephorus, one of Constantine's uncles in the monastery. Constantine, perhaps under pressure from his mother, responded by having Nicephorus blinded, and just to be sure no more plots involved the uncles, he had the tongues of the other four cut out. This alienated whatever support he still had from his subjects; not only had he shown himself to be incompetent and cowardly, he now showed he could be cruel as well.

The reinstatement of Irene did not restore harmony in the imperial family. At some point after this, she decided she would have to get rid of her son, before Constantine tried to depose her again. During the next five years she hatched various schemes to discredit him. As for Constantine, he resented the wife Irene had forced upon him, and in 795 he divorced his wife, sent her to a convent, and married a mistress that he had fallen in love with. The Church strongly disapproved of this divorce and remarriage, so it stopped backing Constantine afterwards. Naturally this played right into Irene's hands. Seeing how unpopular he was, Constantine tried to restore his reputation by riding out and punishing the latest Arab raiders, but Irene sent him messengers with false reports claiming that the Arabs had already withdrawn across the frontier. Thus, Constantine returned without engaging the Arabs, who were still making trouble in the eastern provinces, and his reputation as a coward was even worse.

In August 797, Irene saw her opportunity to strike. A group of her supporters tried to arrest Constantine while he was attending the races in the Hippodrome; he escaped from Constantinople, but was captured and brought back to the palace where he had been born. There Irene had him blinded, and the job was done so brutally that he died a few days later. According to the historian Theophanes, the sky was darkened for seventeen days, persuading the superstitious that even Heaven was weeping at this atrocity. For the next five years, Irene ruled alone.

Irene's second reign was not a successful one. Although she had eliminated anyone else qualified to rule, she felt no more secure than before, disliked by just about everybody. She tried to buy popularity by spending money like crazy--on Easter Monday in 799 she left the Church of the Holy Apostles in a chariot drawn by four white horses, and the noble leading each horse threw gold coins to the crowd--but most of her subjects saw it as a crass bribe at the treasury's expense. In 800 Pope Leo III decided that the throne was vacant, because it lacked a male occupant, so he crowned Charlemagne as an emperor. Byzantines saw this as a crime, if not a sin, against the sacred state. In 802 another palace revolution threw Irene out, and she was exiled to a monastery on the the island of Lesbos for the rest of her life; this time she was guarded closely to prevent any more revolutions.

Meanwhile to the north, the Bulgars helped the Franks in the destruction of the Avars, and thus were able to take all of Romania and eastern Hungary for themselves. The new emperor, Nicephorus I, was busy recovering parts of Thrace and Greece from the Slavs, but once he got finished with that, he turned his attention to Bulgaria. He knew that the Bulgars would be tougher and better organized than the Slavs, so to teach the Bulgars a lesson, he raised the best army Byzantium had seen in many years. It wasn't good enough. The Bulgars had an unusually vigorous leader, Khan Krum (803-814), and in 811 he trapped and annihilated the Byzantine force in the mountains along the Byzantine-Bulgar frontier. Nicephorus was among the dead; his skull became a decorated drinking cup on Krum's dining table.

Since Irene had first become regent, the Empire had suffered military defeats, diplomatic humiliations, and economic hardship. Thinking the icons were to blame, Emperor Leo V (813-820) brought back iconoclasm, vigorously deposing and imprisoning those Church leaders who spoke out in favor of icons. The last iconoclastic emperor, Theophilus (829-842), even decreed death or exile to anyone who spoke out against iconoclasm. This was going too far and it made the emperor too unpopular, so in 843 a new council was called in Hagia Sophia, which again undid all the rulings against icons, and condemned all iconoclasts except the former emperor Theophilus. Ever since that time the Orthodox Church has celebrated the first Sunday in Lent as the "feast of Orthodoxy," commemorating the end of the iconoclastic controversy.

Charlemagne

The pope may not have cared much for being the Byzantine emperor's puppet, but he didn't want a Lombard king for his overlord, either. For more than a decade he feared that he would become the Lombards' next target; in 739 he called on the Franks to save him from Liutprand, offering the title of patrician to Charles Martel. However, Charles wasn't interested, and the pope had to wait until Charles was succeeded by his sons Carloman and Pepin, before his pleas got a response.

At first, the two brothers followed tradition: Carloman became majordomo over the eastern half of the kingdom, while Pepin (also called Pepin the Short) took charge of the western half. In 743 they searched for a Merovingian to wear the king's crown, and chose a witless weakling named Childeric III. Then in 747, Carloman felt such a need to atone for his sins that he abdicated and became a monk. Now effectively ruling alone, Pepin showed that while he may have been less of a warrior than Charles, he was a better politician. Carloman's resignation, and Pepin's friendship with St. Boniface (they had cooperated in reforming the Frankish Church), suggested a solution to the kingship problem; if Pepin could get God's approval, it would be all right for him to replace the royal family with his own. In 750, with the encouragement of Boniface, he sent a letter to Pope Zacharias that asked a loaded question: should one man hold the title of king when another man holds the power?

This was an opportunity every pope had been waiting for since Gregory the Great. By giving Pepin the answer he wanted, Zacharias would put the most powerful man in the West in his debt, and get the help he needed to keep the Lombards away. Since Pepin had already proved himself a suitable ruler, in both his accomplishments and in his private life, the pope answered in his favor: "It is better that he who possesses power be called king than he who has none." Using this statement to justify his actions, Pepin convened a meeting of Frankish nobles and got himself "elected" king of the Franks. Childeric III was shorn of his long blond hair (which made him unfit to be a king but fit to be a priest) and placed in a monastery, where he conveniently died within a year.

Pepin spent the rest of his reign repaying the pope for the favor. He told the Lombards to lay off Rome and when they failed to do so, crossed the Alps, brought them to heel, and gave the land they had taken back to the pope. Pepin also conquered Septimania, driving the Arabs back into Spain (759), and put down a major rebellion in Aquitaine (760-768). He died two months after that revolt ended, and the kingdom he bequeathed to his sons Charles and Carloman was both strong and primitive at the same time.⁽¹⁾

Charles has gone down in history as Charlemagne, meaning "Charles the Great" in Latin. This is because he was a determined and successful soldier, a talented statesman, and a patron of learning all rolled into one. There were 54 military campaigns during his 46-year reign, often on more than one front at the same time. When the Lombards made trouble by breaking treaties and seizing Papal lands, he finished off their kingdom, annexing all of north and central Italy (774). At the same time he added Byzantine Ravenna to Pope Adrian I's estates around Rome⁽²⁾, but kept most of the lands taken by the Lombards, even those Pepin had given to the pope previously. Charlemagne treated both Adrian and his successor Leo III with great kindness, but made sure they never forgot who was the boss.

Charlemagne had his greatest military successes on the eastern front, where he pushed the frontiers of the Frankish kingdom to the Elbe and upper Danube. Most of the time he declared he was advancing the cause of Christianity, though a few high-minded clerics deplored his method of conversion, which they called "baptism with the sword." In 784-5 he conquered the Frisians; by crushing the seafarers of the North Sea, he left a vacuum that the Vikings would soon fill. In 788 he took over Bavaria, which had shown an alarming tendency toward self-rule after it submitted to Frankish rule. In 796 he ended an old threat to the West by destroying the Avars in Hungary. To guard the East he set up a series of "marks" or "marches", special military districts in what is now east Germany, Austria and Slovenia. This established supremacy of a sort over all of the Slav tribes on the eastern frontier, from the Sorbs of the Oder River to the Croats on the Adriatic.

The still-pagan Saxons of northern Germany were his toughest opponents. It took 32 years of campaigning (772-804) to vanquish and pacify them. Since they were disunited, he had to conquer one tribe at a time, and between campaigns they launched savage raids into the Rhineland and France. On one occasion, he slaughtered 4,500 captives after they surrendered; on another, after one tribe's forced conversion, he chopped down the Irminsul, the great oak tree that they had worshiped previously, and out fell the tribe's golden treasury into Charlemagne's lap! The Saxons eventually accepted Christianity, though they never were very cooperative subjects.

The only direction in which Charlemagne did not win much ground was to the south; all he got for attacking the Moslems in Spain was the county of Barcelona and the Pyrenees mts. ("the Spanish March"). It did, however, give France protection from a possible Moslem revival.⁽³⁾

By the end of the century Charlemagne had brought nearly all of western Christendom under his rule.⁽⁴⁾ The Arabs sent him gifts worthy of a valiant foe; his favorite gift was an elephant named Abu-al-Abbas. The pope, however, presented the most impressive gift of all. It came about because, as the saying goes, "familiarity breeds contempt," and medieval popes had trouble getting along with the people of Rome. In 799 Pope Leo III was attacked by a gang of his enemies; he was beaten up, and they attempted unsuccessfully to cut out his tongue and gouge out his eyes. When he recovered from that ambush, he was charged with a number of crimes, including adultery, simony⁽⁵⁾ and perjury, and formally deposed. He could only get his name cleared and his job back by standing trial, so Leo fled to Germany, where he met Charlemagne, and Charlemagne went to Rome in December of 800, to testify on his behalf. Sure enough, the king's testimony won the pope's acquittal and reinstatement. Christmas came two days after the trial, and that's when Leo sprung his surprise. While Charlemagne was attending a mass in Rome, the pope placed a crown on Charlemagne's head, proclaiming Western Europe reunited as a "Holy Roman Empire," with Charlemagne as its first emperor. The congregation shouted, "To Charles, the most pious Augustus, crowned by God, the great and peace-giving emperor, life and victory!" Then Leo prostrated himself before Charlemagne, a gesture which popes had previously practiced only before the emperors of Byzantium. Though somewhat alarmed, Charles went along with the idea.⁽⁶⁾

Charlemagne's Christmas present.

Theoretically only an emperor in Constantinople could bestow the imperial crown upon anybody else, but a legal loophole presented itself, in the form of Empress Irene. Although there was no law saying that a woman could not run the Empire, it had never been done before, so some--including the pope--felt that the throne was vacant so long as Irene had it. That gave the pope the legal justification to crown his own emperor. At the same time, the pope granted an even greater honor to himself; by crowning Charlemagne, he shrewdly made it look like the title of emperor was a gift from the Papacy. In the next chapter, we'll see what happened when popes got the idea that they could take away the title, as well as give it. Charlemagne had his own plan to reunite the East and West, by marrying Irene. According to the reports he heard, Irene was still beautiful, though in her late forties, and because of her unpopularity at home, she probably would have accepted the offer; it was the only way left for her to keep the throne in the East. The Byzantines would have none of it, though, and when they overthrew Irene, they also ended Charlemagne's chance to do things his way.

Actually the whole thing was nonsense. For one thing, it must seem absurd to the modern reader that two non-Italians--a Greek woman and a German man--could be accepted so easily as "Roman emperors." After the coronation, Charlemagne still ruled like an old German chief, uniting men through ties of personal loyalty rather than by laws. A century of three strong leaders--Charles Martel, Pepin the Short and Charlemagne--had made the Frankish kingdom look more impressive than it really was. The only thing it had resembling a legislative body was the annual meeting of the army. This was called the "Field of March" under the Merovingians, but Pepin had moved it back two months and invited clergymen to attend, so now it was the "Field of May." The only administration was the network of bishops and archbishops; the bureaucratic apparatus that should have managed the empire for Charlemagne's weak successors was totally non-existent. Consequently, the empire worked best wherever its ruler happened to be. For example, Charlemagne was so busy on the distant frontiers that he never found time to finish subduing the Celts of Brittany, right in his own backyard.⁽⁷⁾

During Charlemagne's time, long-distance trade started to increase, despite that fact that Moslem navies now controlled the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, it was because the Mediterranean was a Moslem sea that Charlemagne gave legal protection to Jewish merchants, since they could travel through both Christian and Moslem territories without being automatically viewed as agents for the other side. The yields from farming also increased, for reasons covered later in this chapter (use of the heavy plow, the water mill, and the three-field system). In fact, the empire prospered to the point that Charlemagne could live off his personal estates without imposing a general tax on his subjects; obligations to the crown were always paid with service rather than with money. By modern standards western Europe was still not very rich or productive, and plagues and famine would remain a problem for centuries to come. However, now there was peace at home, and the only wars to fight were "good Christian wars" against far-away enemies of the Church, so Europeans could believe that life was getting better at last, and that they owed a lot of it to their just and powerful king, Charlemagne.

Early on Charlemagne realized that he would need educated and responsible men to keep his government working. His efforts to find these men and to train the up-and-coming generation began a small-scale cultural flowering that we call the "Carolingian Renaissance." By this time education of any type had all but disappeared; only among the clergy of England and Ireland was there a decent literacy rate, and things like wars, barbarian raids, and neglect had caused many classical works, like portions of the writings of Livy and Virgil, to be lost forever.

In Guizot's History of Civilization in France there is a list of the names and works of twenty-three men who were either grouped around Charlemagne as his advisors, assigned by him as advisors to his sons Pepin and Louis, sent by him to all points of the empire as his commissioners, or put in charge of important negotiations in his name. Those he did not employ at a distance formed a learned and industrious society, a school of the palace. Since learned men were in such short supply, Charlemagne recruited many of them from abroad. For example, the Visigoth poet Theodulf came from Spain and served as the imaginative bishop of Orleans. A short German from the east named Eginhard was both minister of public works and the official court historian. But it was in England that Charlemagne found a scholar with the skills of organization and leadership needed to manage his cultural revival everywhere in the empire--Alcuin of York.

Alcuin started by setting up the empire's first school, right in Charlemagne's capital at Aix-la-Chapelle (modern Aachen, Germany). Here both the sons of noblemen and their mustachioed fathers gathered in seminarlike classes to learn what would become the basic medieval curriculum: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, and Latin literature. To us it would have seemed like a meager amount of learning, but Europe had been intellectually starved for so long that this must have seemed like a feast for the students. When not on a campaign or tour of the realm, Charlemagne would also participate, which generated some lively discussions. He eventually learned to read, but claimed that his hands were too callused from use of the sword to write, so all he did with a pen was sign his initials.

The enthusiasm of the school spilled over into the rest of the court. Sometimes Aachen was called a "Second Rome," and once Alcuin flattered the emperor by telling him, "If your zeal were imitated, perchance one might see arise in France a new Athens, far more glorious than the ancient--the Athens of Christ." Students gave themselves classical or Biblical names; Alcuin became "Horace," Charlemagne became "King David," and Eginhard chose for himself the name Bezalel, after the craftsman who built the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant for Moses. Times of socializing thus became an improbable spectacle where war-hardened nobles, pious clerics and notorious womanizers (the latter included Charlemagne⁽⁸⁾ himself) engaged in contests of self-improvement, testing each other with riddles, witty remarks and scraps of ancient pagan poetry.

Because the Carolingian scholars were imitators rather than innovators, we must thank them for rescuing many classical works that might otherwise have been lost. The actual work of copying the manuscripts was very tedious; a trained scribe usually took three to four months on a single manuscript, much of it spent on the elegant decorations known as "illuminating." Some monasteries kept twelve or more monks working full time just on the task of copying, and the effort meant that by the ninth century there were some priestly "libraries" boasting a collection of a few hundred volumes. What this means to us is that no Roman work that survived long enough to be copied by Charlemagne's scholars was ever lost again. It is because of these dedicated copyists that the entire writings of Julius Caesar, Tacitus, Juvenal, Martial, and many other classical authors are available to us today.

After so many years of war and toil, Charlemagne spent more time at home, finding rest in this work of peaceful civilization. He embellished the capital with a palace and a domed octagonal basilica, the latter magnificently adorned. He fetched from Italy clerics skilled in church music, which he recommended to the bishops of his empire. In the outskirts of Aix-la-Chapelle "he gave full scope," says Eginhard, "to his delight in riding and hunting. Baths of naturally tepid water gave him great pleasure. Being passionately fond of swimming, he invited not only his sons, but also his friends, the grandees of his court, and sometimes even the soldiers of his guard, to bathe with him, insomuch that there were often a hundred and more persons bathing at a time."

When age arrived, he continued his daily habits, but at the same time, was taken up with the thought of death, and prepared himself for it with stern severity. He drew up, modified, and completed his will several times over. Three years before his death he made out the distribution of his treasures, his money, his wardrobe, and all his furniture, in the presence of his friends and his officers; two thirds of it was divided into twenty-one portions, which were to be distributed among the twenty-one metropolitan churches of his empire. Those were put under seal immediately, while he kept for himself the third share to maintain his lifestyle. After his death, what was left of it would be subdivided into four portions, which would go to the metropolitan churches, his sons and daughters, the necessities of the poor, and to the servants of both sexes in the palace for their lifetime. As for the books which he had amassed, they would be sold at their proper value, with the proceeds thus raised going to help the poor.

He did not seem too sorry to leave this world. A terrible famine swept the empire in 809. He lost his second son, Pepin, whom he had made king of Italy, in 810. In 810 he marched against the Danes, who had refused to acknowledge his authority, but before he got to the frontier his trusty elephant Abu-al-Abbas died, and he called off the campaign. Another constant companion in wartime, his eldest son Charles, died in the following year. Finally he wore himself out haggling with the Byzantines; it took until 812 to make them recognize him as the Western Roman emperor, and accept the passing of this title to his last surviving son, Louis. He died in January of 814, at the age of 70 or 71; his ponderous corpse was reportedly buried sitting upright on a throne, in his chapel at Aix-la-Chapelle.⁽⁹⁾

Wessex and the Carolingian States

Egbert left the whole kingdom to his son Ethelwulf, but Ethelwulf went back to the old Germanic custom of dividing the inheritance; he gave Essex, Sussex and Kent to his son Athelstan. He did well in battles against the Welsh and the Mercians, only to be deposed in 856 by his eldest son, Ethelbald. Since Athelstan had died by this time, the kingdom was reunited under Ethelbald, but now the crown passed rapidly through a series of short-lived brothers: Ethelbald (856-860), Ethelbert (860-865), and Ethelred I (865-871). Under them the raids on England by Danish Vikings (see below) multiplied, and the kings of Wessex were unable to do much about this new menace. Things got so bad that Ethelred crowned his youngest brother, the future Alfred the Great, as co-king in 866, so that there would be no power struggle should he fall in battle. It was a prudent move; the same year saw the Danes launch a fullscale invasion of England. In 870 Ethelred and Alfred got involved defending Mercia from the Vikings, and the next year saw nine Viking-Saxon battles. Alfred won a handsome victory at Ashdown (January 8, 871), but Ethelred died in April, meaning that from now on Alfred would be on his own.

Back on the Continent, Charlemagne was succeeded by Louis I (the Pious). Louis forced the long-neglected Breton peninsula to submit to Frankish authority in 825, but the for the rest of his reign (814-840) he was on the defensive. Thus, his chief accomplishment was keeping the empire united, a job made a lot easier because he had outlived all his brothers. Louis tried to break with tradition and leave most of the empire to his eldest son, Lothar; as early as 817 Lothar had himself crowned regent of Italy by the pope, a move which made him co-emperor with Louis. Lothar's brothers each got a single province: Aquitaine for Pepin, Bavaria for Louis the German, and Alamannia (southwest Germany, later called Swabia) for Charles the Bald. As you might expect, the brothers wanted a bigger piece of the pie than this, and they revolted twice, in 830 and 833. In the second revolt the father's knights went over to the sons, and they briefly removed him from the throne, but later reinstated him to keep Lothar from getting too strong.

Another civil war broke out upon Louis I's death in 840. This time Charles the Bald and Louis the German (Pepin had died in 838) carried everything before them. At the Treaty of Verdun (843) the empire was divided three ways: Charles got France (minus Brittany, which revolted and regained its independence in 846), and Louis got Germany, while Lothar kept the Low Countries, Switzerland, Burgundy and Italy. Lothar died in 855, and his illogical central kingdom ("the bowling alley") was split between his three sons, Lothar II of Lorraine, Charles of Provence, and Louis II of Italy. Between treaties the kings fought frequently for more land and prestige, all of them jealously seeking to lord over as much as possible; meanwhile the real problems of their time went unattended. As they bickered, most of their political power and royal estates were usurped by counts and dukes who were just as greedy and irresponsible. This left Western Europe a tempting target for marauders like the Vikings.

By 870 Lothar of Lorraine and Charles of Provence were dead, so the three remaining kings divided up Lorraine and Provence between them. The result of this second partition was that the empire was split into portions roughly corresponding to the modern nations of France, Germany and Italy. This was a natural division in terms of both geography and people; the languages spoken by the inhabitants in each region can now be recognized as French, German and Italian.

Louis the German died in 876, and the East Frankish kingdom split between his sons: Bavaria for Carloman, Alamannia for Charles the Fat, and Franconia, Thuringia and Saxony for Louis III. But Charlemagne's descendants were now dying faster than they were growing up. Charles the Bald's successor, Louis the Stammerer (don't you love these nicknames?), only lasted on the throne for two years (877-879), and the two sons of Louis had reigns just as short. Carloman and Louis III didn't do any better, so the empire came together again under Charles the Fat in 884. Then in 888 Charles was forced by the Diet of Tribur to abdicate and the empire split up for good. While Arnulf of Carinthia, a son of Carloman, took charge over Germany, two barons fought for the crown of Italy, two other barons carved out little kingdoms for themselves in Burgundy and Provence, and one more, Odo of Paris, became king of France. In theory they all acknowledged Arnulf as superior, because he was the only remaining adult member of the Carolingian dynasty; in practice they were independent monarchs. Although Europeans would bandy about the title "Holy Roman Emperor" for nearly a thousand more years, what they meant was a powerless elected ruler over a confederation of German states, quite a different animal from what Charlemagne had set up and which now had ceased to exist.⁽¹¹⁾

The Fury of the Northmen

Denmark was the largest and most advanced Scandinavian country at this time. The Danes had absorbed their neighbors to the south, the Angles, and lorded over the southern part of Sweden. These lands gave Denmark a total population of nearly half a million. North of the Danes lived the Norwegians, also called the Norse. About 100,000 of them lived on the shores of the Vik, facing Denmark.⁽¹³⁾ An equal number lived in settlements scattered along the Atlantic coast as far north as Trondheim.

The third group, the Swedes, originally lived on the shores of Lake Malaren, near present-day Stockholm, with a tribe called the Getes between them and the Danes. The Getes were the parent tribe of the Goths who had colonized east Germany in the first century A.D., migrated to the Black Sea in the third century, and then played such an important part in bringing down the Western Roman Empire. At some point between 550 and 750, the descendants of those Goths who stayed behind were conquered by the Swedes. The name Gotland (Goth-land) remains in use as a name for southern Sweden but the people were absorbed. This brought Swedish numbers up to a figure near the Danish one.

As cold as Scandinavia was, it also had a special feature on its Atlantic side--the famous Norwegian fjords. These natural harbors were carved during the ice age, when glaciers came down from Norway's mountains to reach the ocean. The fjords gave Norway more harbors than the rest of Europe put together, and they provided both shelter from storms and places to hide, should an enemy fleet approach from the sea. No wonder the Norwegians have always been good sailors!

In Charlemagne's time Denmark and Sweden had their own kings, and both countries have traditions of a line of kings going back to 500 A.D., or even earlier. Of course the first kings were legendary figures, and we can't be sure if the stories about them are true. Runic writing was available (see Chapter 3, footnote #1), but it seems to have been used mainly for magic; only later was writing considered suitable for chronologies and other historical material. Also, Denmark was apparently divided into several states, because the Danes couldn't agree on who was really king; often more than one king is reported ruling at the same time, and there were three occasions in the seventh and eighth centuries when one king may have lorded over both Denmark and Sweden. The picture starts to make sense in the reign of Denmark's Gorm the Old (883-941), when the first historical records appear, and the next Danish king, Harald Bluetooth (941-991) was the first who could credibly claim that Denmark was united under his rule. It was a similar story with Sweden, where a unified kingdom first appeared under Erik VIII the Victorious (970?-994). Politically, the Norse were behind the other two; the first monarch in Norse legend, Olaf Tretelgia, claimed descent from an early Swedish king, so his family must have been younger than the other royal families (by contrast, the Danish and Swedish kings traced their ancestry to the god Odin). Harald I Fairhair (863-930) was the first king who even claimed to be ruler over all of Norway.

Charlemagne's arrival on the Danish border wasn't the first contact between the Scandinavians and civilization; in 5 A.D. a Roman fleet made it to Jutland. The Roman historian Tacitus noted that the Danes were fierce fighters, and they already traveled in rowboats that had high prows on both ends. After that the Scandinavians disappeared from the sight of civilized men; for the next 600 years or so they did not show their warlike side, but kept to themselves, except when they wanted to trade with the tribes and nations of the south.

What made the Scandinavians return with such destructive force, near the end of the eighth century? It now appears that the first reason was overpopulation; their homeland was so harsh that the figures quoted above were enough to fill up all land that was fit to live on. When the Goths moved out they left behind a thinly populated wilderness, dotted with crude villages that made a living through farming, fishing and a little trade. A series of unusually warm years just before 800 allowed these communities to grow larger than they normally would have. At the same time the climate bred bold people with an urge to go adventuring. This desire to explore was increased by two customs commonly practiced by Scandinavian chiefs: polygamy and the leaving of one's entire inheritance to the eldest son. The result was a surplus of younger sons who inherited nothing, and they went forth to find new homes for themselves. If these sons had retainers, they went as well, serving their masters as farmers at home, as sailors at sea, and as soldiers in foreign lands.

The other reason why the Scandinavians came into their own is because in the eighth century they learned how to make something no one else had: a really efficient sailing ship. For thousands of years there had been simple square-sailed ships in the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean that could sail with a tailwind. In most cases their captains sailed by day and kept the shore in sight so they could quickly find a place to drop anchor if the wind turned against them. Sailing ships of this type were not very useful in the tricky winds of the Atlantic, and the big holes that galleys had in their sides for oars meant they weren't even very seaworthy. Now the Norse added sails to their rowboats, because they figured out that if you build a mast so that a sail can rotate around it, you can tack into a crosswind and even into a headwind. By adding a sturdy keel to their ships they made them strong enough to stand up to Atlantic gales; it also gave the ships enough grip in the water to sail against the wind. And by making the hulls twice as wide as they were high, they created a structure that was less likely to run aground in the shallows; one Irishman declared that Norse ships could sail in any place with water, even on wet grass!⁽¹⁴⁾

Norse stories of easy pickings in the west took a few years to reach Denmark. It was only in the 830s that the Danes began to join in. Then life immediately became very precarious for the people living near the English Channel. As the Danes and Norse learned the way up the rivers it became dangerous for people inland, too. People in churches began to pray regularly for deliverance from "the fury of the Northmen."

Despite these fervent prayers, nothing stopped the Vikings or altered their course. About the only thing that could keep them away was bad sailing weather. In one case, an Irish monk was copying a manuscript when he heard a fierce storm brewing outside, and the sound gave him so much joy that he scribbled a note about it in the margin of the text he was working on: "There's a wicked wind tonight, wild upheaval in the sea; no fear now that the Viking hordes will terrify me."

Charlemagne was reportedly frightened of the Vikings, but they didn't give him much trouble; the only thing they did to the Empire while he was alive was raid the coast of Frisia (810). His weak successors, however, didn't get off so easily. In 834 the Vikings looted and destroyed Dorestad, the rich trading center of Frisia, thereby putting the Frisian merchants out of business. Nor did they stop there. Under reckless leaders with ominous names like Eric Bloodax and Ivar the Boneless, the Vikings ranged far and wide. Every major town in northwestern Europe--including London, Bordeaux, Paris, Rheims, Rouen, Aachen and Cologne--was sacked at least once. They raided Moslem Spain in the 820s and destroyed half of Seville, something no Christian army could do. Between 853 and 903 they put Tours to the sword six times. And in one way the Vikings were worse than the barbarians who brought down Rome. Many fifth-century barbarians were Christians, so clergymen could protect themselves and their property by warning raiders that God would get them if they messed with anything belonging to the Church; even Attila the Hun was impressed when he got to meet the pope. By contrast, the Vikings made churches and monasteries their favorite targets, because they (1) had lots of easily carried wealth in the form of gold and jewel-encrusted objects and (2) because unlike castles, they were not likely to have armed men protecting the premises. Sometimes they timed their attacks to occur on holy days, so that they would find not only treasure but also lots of food, and captives to sell as slaves.

Viking does not mean any Scandinavian but it does mean any Scandinavian raider. Their victims had difficulty telling the difference between Norse and Danes, so the word is a fitting term for both. It was a different case with the Swedes, who concentrated their attention on the lands east of the Baltic (mainly Russia), and the Norse and Danes did not intrude there. For that reason the Swedes are usually called Varangians, though from contemporary accounts it seems that they were just as much the ferocious Viking type as their Norwegian and Danish kinsmen.⁽¹⁷⁾

The Vikings worshiped a pantheon of gods as warlike as themselves, like the great chief Odin and the storm-god Thor. But one of them voiced what he really believed when he said, "I believe in my own strength." Most feared of all were a special class of religious warriors called berserkers, who worked themselves into a frenzy just before a battle started (often by chewing on a shield) until they could die laughing, oblivious to both their own wounds and their leader's commands.

The aim of every Viking was to do something worthy of a saga--a long poem that celebrated heroic deeds. Most Vikings expected life would be short (a Viking who reached the age of thirty was considered an old Viking), so they wanted to do something that would get them mentioned in a saga, where at least their names would last forever. As one saga, the Havamal, explained, "Cattle die, kindred die, every man is mortal; but the good name never dies of one who has done well. Cattle die, kindred die, every man is mortal; but I know one thing that never dies, the glory of the great deed."

An example of the stuff of which sagas were made was Bjorn Ironside's raid into the Mediterranean. This was a three-year-long running fight (859-862) in lands the Vikings were unfamiliar with: Spain, Morocco, the French Riviera and Italy. The high point of the adventure was the sacking of a city which Bjorn claimed was Rome. From other sources we know it was really Luna, a little town just north of Pisa, but one can forgive Bjorn for pitching his claims high: he had to live up to his father, the legendary Ragnar Lothbrok. Ragnar appears in so many sagas that he must have been both a great warrior and a talented liar.⁽¹⁸⁾

From the victim's point of view the worst part of the Viking age was the second half of the ninth century. Now that the raiders were done exploring around Great Britain, they stopped going home for the winter, choosing instead to camp near the rivers that they used as highways. On Ireland's east coast they set up a permanent winter base at Dublin (from the Gaelic Dubh Linn, meaning Dark Pool) in 841, thereby founding the future Irish capital. Likewise the Isle of Thanet, at the mouth of the Thames, became an advance base for raids on England. At this stage Viking forces were not very large; a typical fleet numbered a dozen boats with about 600 men altogether. But even so their victims had difficulty coping. Only a full army with cavalry could defeat the Vikings, and because it took months to get enough knights together, the Vikings always had plenty of time to get away.

Each time a Viking raid succeeded, they were encouraged to come back again--and in greater numbers. Around 886 a reported armada of 700 ships and 40,000 men sailed up the Seine and laid siege to Paris--probably the greatest fleet Western Europe had seen so far. This caused some Frankish communities to set aside a large sum in the hope that they could pay the invaders to leave without wreaking slaughter and destruction. The Viking chieftains eagerly accepted the "protection money", and some even honored the bargain. However, bribes can easily be turned into blackmail; before long the Vikings were making regular visits to collect their payoff. In England the Anglo-Saxons paid this tribute as regularly as taxes; they called it Danegeld (Dane-money) and counseled each other: "Buy off the spear aimed at your breast if you do not wish to feel its point." Not long after that, the biggest Danish saga began, with the landing of the "Great Army" on the east coast of England (866). The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the Heptarchy crumbled under this assault; Northumbria, caught in a civil war at the time, became the first target, with the Danes killing both rival kings and capturing York (867). Then they conquered East Anglia (870), and began to attack Mercia and Wessex. By 876 they had finished off Northumbria as well. Meanwhile, the Norse Jarl (Earl) of Orkney landed in Scotland and conquered half of the Highlands, thereby threatening to eliminate the Scots, Picts and Strathclyde Welsh (874).

Alfred the Great

After Easter of 878, Alfred established himself at Athelney and began assembling an army. In May he was ready, and won a decisive battle at Edington, which allowed him to move on and liberate Chippenham fourteen days later. Guthrum sued for peace, and in the agreement he reached with Alfred, accepted baptism as a Christian. This did not mean a total end to the fighting, however, because Danes from the Continent could still come across the Channel to make trouble. In response to one of these raids, Alfred crossed the Thames and took London in 886 (previously, the capital of Wessex had been at Winchester). A more thorough treaty with Guthrum was signed in the same year, which agreed to a 50-50 split of England; everything north and east of a line running from London to Chester was recognized as belonging to the Danes, while Alfred got the Anglo-Saxon territory south and west of the line. Because he was the only king who had succeeded in beating back the Danes, Alfred was now the champion of all Anglo-Saxons. The treaty only lasted for the lifetimes of Guthrum and Alfred, but it was a milestone in diplomacy; it meant that a Viking kingdom could be accepted into the belligerent European community.

When he wasn't busy with the Danes, Alfred promoted the education of his people. He had seen first-hand the general deterioration in learning and Christianity, caused by the Vikings' destruction of monasteries, and knew if the trend continued, it could make his kingdom impossible to govern. Accordingly, he imitated Charlemagne by opening a school at his court, and invited non-English scholars, like the Welsh monk Asser and the Irish-born philosopher and theologian John Scotus Erigena. Alfred learned Latin while in his late thirties, and translated into Old English such works as The Consolation of Philosophy by the Roman Boethius, Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, The History of the World by the Spanish priest Paulus Orosius, and Pastoral Care (a manual for bishops) by Pope Gregory I. He also patronized work on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, (see footnote #14), and reorganized the law code, in the process making the first laws that made no distiction between his English and the Welsh subjects.

Alfred's son and successor, Edward the Elder (899-924), began to take back the lands occupied by the Danes, now known as the Danelaw.⁽¹⁹⁾ He recovered Essex (913) and East Anglia (918), and put his sister Aethelflaed in charge of Mercia, but the next king, Athelstan (924-939), did even better; in 927 he took York. Afterwards Scotland and the five Welsh kings submitted to Athelstan's authority, and when they revolted, he defeated a combined force of Scots, Welsh and Danes in the battle of Brunnanburh (937, location unknown). This earned him recognition as the foremost ruler in the British Isles. The last part of the Danelaw fell to the men of Wessex in 954⁽²⁰⁾; by then the Irish had likewise expelled the Norse and the Danes who had terrorized them.

On the Continent, conditions also turned against the freebooters in the tenth century. In 911 the French king, Charles the Simple, gave the Viking chief Rollo (also known as Rolf) the lower Seine valley, on condition that he keep his fellow Vikings from attacking the kingdom. At that point it must have seemed that Charles had lived up to his nickname of "the Simple," since Rollo had not been a promising leader so far; just before Charles singled him out he had besieged the city of Chartres, only to run away for no apparent reason. It looks like Charles saw something in Rollo that others didn't, because the plan worked. Rollo's fief became the Duchy of Normandy, "land of the Northmen." Many Vikings settled there, gave up their roving ways, converted to Christianity, and learned the French of the natives, becoming the Normans who played such a critical role in eleventh century politics.⁽²¹⁾ Indeed, it was the settlements in the Danelaw, Normandy and Russia that brought the Viking attacks to an end. Now the landless sons of Scandinavia had finally found farms--or graves--abroad.

The Atlantic Saga

Greenland was first sighted around 900 by Gunbjørn, a Norse captain who got blown past Iceland. No one did anything with his discovery for eighty years. Then Eric the Red, an Icelander who had been banished for three years for committing murder, decided to spend his exile checking it out. In the course of his exploration (982-985) Eric found a spot where settlement was barely possible, and on his return to Iceland he painted a glowing picture of his discovery. He also thought up the name Greenland, one of the greatest advertising gimmicks in history.⁽²²⁾ Enough Icelanders believed Eric to join him when he went back to set up an "Eastern settlement" (actually it was just to the west of Greenland's southern tip). What they said when they found out that "Greenland" was mostly covered with ice is not recorded, but they stayed, and the colony survived. A second colony, called the "Western settlement," was founded a few hundred miles up the coast, ten years later.

North America was discovered the same way Greenland was--by accident. In 985 Bjarni Herjulfsson journeyed west to join his father in Greenland, but a storm caused him to overshoot the mark. He got a look at the American coast, then promptly turned back; he was in a hurry to get to Greenland before winter began. Eric the Red's son, Leif Ericson, followed up this tale in the year 1000. The first stretches of coastline he sailed on were forbidding; he named them Helluland ("Land of Stones," Baffin Island?) and Markland ("Land of Forests," possibly Labrador). But before he turned back he reached a more promising country, Vinland, the Land of Wild Grapes. This was almost certainly Newfoundland.⁽²³⁾

A year or two later Leif's younger brother Thorvald Ericson found a problem with America. It was already inhabited by an unfriendly people the Norse called Skraelings--either Indians or Eskimos (more likely the latter). Thorvald was killed by them in Markland and when three boatloads of Icelanders tried to colonize Vinland, the Skraelings made life too hot for them. In 1006 the Vikings gave up and sailed home. Although Greenlanders came back occasionally to Markland for timber, there was no further attempt at colonization.

At the peak of this adventure there were between 50,000 and 60,000 Icelanders and one tenth as many Greenlanders. The distances were too great and the resources too few to carry them the last step of the way, to the more temperate parts of America. Scandinavian sailors had opened up a big new realm to the European world, but it was a realm of grey seas, ice and emptiness. On the threshold of the New World the saga ended.

Commerce in the Viking Era

Wherever the Vikings went, they brought home exotic goods: silver and spices from Arabia, brocades from Constantinople, and leatherwork from Persia, to name a few. These attracted merchants from Germany, Frisia, France, and England; ports like Birka in Sweden and Hedeby in Denmark became bustling trade centers. Viking activity, ranging from Canada to the borders of Turkestan, from the Mediterranean to the Arctic circle, covered nearly 110 degrees of longitude. There probably never was a single Viking who saw every part of this network, but it wasn't unusual for one to have adventures over a widely scattered area; Harald Hardrada, for example, served as a mercenary, first in Russia and then in Constantinople's "Varangian Guard," before becoming king of Norway in 1047. It is sad that in an enterprise of such vitality and daring, so much of the effort was wasted in plundering. The northern heroes did not trade until they could no longer raid, preferring bloodstained, glorious loot to a steady mercantile profit.

The typical Viking protected his money and jewelry by putting it in a pot or bag and burying it somewhere on his property. Judging from the large number of these treasure hoards we have found, it appears that the Norsemen made a good profit from their activities. However, we have to guess at how much of the loot was ill-gotten. What they brought back from England as ransom payments must have far outweighed anything they earned by trade, but Arab coins (40 percent of the total dug up in Gotland) probably came from honest business, because the Middle East was too far away for raids to have much chance of success. What these coins do show us is how dangerous the Viking's life must have been, for every such hoard belonged to somebody who never came back for it.

Meanwhile the urban population of Europe was increasing; hamlets grew into villages and villages became small towns. Still, we must emphasize that most European communities were small, and the new towns did not become cities until after the period covered by this chapter. Hedeby, for instance, numbered perhaps 2,000 inhabitants, while Birka was only half that size. In fact, every community in Western Europe that had more than 15,000 people was in Moslem territory: Palermo, Toledo, Cordova and Seville.

In the areas that belonged to Christendom, the biggest success at this stage was Venice; by 1000 it probably had 8-9,000 people. Its rise came in time to compensate for the decline of Ravenna and the eclipse of Rome. Venice owed its success to its political independence, its location on an offshore island, and its shrewd acceptance of a formal Byzantine authority which was too far away to enforce, but allowed Venice to monopolize trade between Italy and Constantinople. They identified themselves as Byzantine subjects well into the ninth century, but when a Venetian fleet took out Commachio, a rival seaport, in 886, it was clearly acting without Constantinople's permission, so history texts mark Venice as an independent city-state after that. The Venetians also persuaded the Moslems to grant them trading rights in Alexandria, where, so the story goes, two of them stole the body of St. Mark in 888. In return for the loan of their fleet, the Venetians got a reduced rate on the taxes they paid to Byzantium (992).

There were many other communities where life was gradually getting better. The little towns of Italy may not have had more than a few thousand residents apiece, but most of them probably doubled their size in the course of the tenth century. Baldwin Iron-arm, the Count of Flanders, built two of Europe's first castles at Bruges and Ghent in the 860s; by 1000 they were holding regular fairs within their walls. When Alfred the Great captured London, he found a city which had been deserted since the fifth century; by 1000 it was England's most important community again, contributing as much as 12 percent of the Danegeld raised. The towns of France and Germany tell the same story; for the first time in centuries they were more than a handful of hovels crowded around decaying church buildings.

When transportation is costly and uncertain, a local source of a raw material, even a poor one, is worth working. Iron ore, for example, is common in western Europe; people did not care much that Sweden and Germany produced the best iron until transport costs came down. At the other end of the scale, England had an effective monopoly of tin, and Spain was the main producer of mercury, simply because no one else had very much at all. Similarly, most European gold came from Bohemia.

Lead, silver and copper came between the extremes listed above; most countries had workable deposits, but from the tenth century onwards Germany and to a lesser extent Scandinavia were the main producers and exporters of these metals. A lot of this went east, where the mines of antiquity were largely worked out. Only Armenia and southern Iran still had any decent amount of ore; for their other needs the countries of the Middle East had to import, Byzantium from Western Europe, the Islamic states from Western Europe and Central Asia.⁽²⁴⁾

The Church Backslides and Splits

The Papacy now expressed its most extreme claims through a document called The Donation of Constantine. Supposedly written when Emperor Constantine I moved to Constantinople, it stated that he was leaving rule over the whole West to the Vicar of Christ, namely the pope. All kings in western Europe were thus nothing more than tenants of the pope's land, and their positions had to be ratified by him. The fact that this formality had never been observed before didn't seem to bother anyone; nor did they ask why it had taken more than four hundred years to find Constantine's will. Now by threatening to withhold their blessings, the popes could determine the legitimacy of a king, and thus look more important than any monarch. Yet the darkness of ignorance was a two-edged sword; if it made possible the acceptance of an obvious forgery, it also meant that men were too illiterate and life was too chaotic for any document to have much effect.⁽²⁵⁾ For example, Papal authority over the Church had never been challenged by the Carolingians, but with the disintegration of the feeble bureaucracy that passed for a government under Charlemagne there was no way to turn Papal prestige into real power. Papal commands to the Church could not be heard above the clang of arms; Papal calls to the kings for peace were answered with the suggestion that the pope ought to mind his own business. The pope soon found that he could not even control Rome, let alone the Papal State. As confusion increased the pope became the puppet, not of a great power that could at least maintain the dignity of the Papacy, but of the Mafia families that controlled things in central Italy.

The decline of political power in Italy was the beginning of a trend toward disunity that would characterize the peninsula for most of the next millennium. It was helped by the attacks of Moslem fleets from the other side of the Mediterranean. In 827 the Aghlabids, a Moslem state based in Tunisia, landed on Sicily; they were invited there by the Byzantine admiral Euphemius, who got in trouble with Constantinople by marrying a nun! They followed this up by invading Sardinia in the same year, by sacking Rome in 846, by taking Bari, on the heel of the Italian "boot," in 847, by conquering Corsica in 850, and by capturing Malta in 870; in 878 they sacked Syracuse, and Sicily's greatest city was never important again. Bari became a short-lived emirate (847-871), and a base for future raids on Italy. Nobody else in the neighborhood could stop them, because the Byzantines only had a few towns left in Italy and on the Adriatic coast, while the Lombard principality broke into three parts, with Salerno seceding from Benevento in 849, and Capua from Salerno in 860. Eventually, the pope had to call in Louis II, the king of (northern) Italy, to take back Bari. However, the Lombards understandably didn't want to submit to a Carolingian king, so to keep their independence, they invited the Byzantines to come back (873). Emperor Basil I succeeded in strengthening the Byzantine position in the south, but inasmuch as he couldn't conquer his Lombard allies, the result was a six-part division of Italy south of Rome: The Byzantine province in the "heel" and "toe," the three Lombard states, and the ports of Naples and Gaeta, which were officially Byzantine but isolated and thus nearly independent.

The ninth and tenth centuries saw Rome's political factions appoint, depose, and sometimes even murder popes to get someone of their own choosing on the Papal throne. Because of that, several degenerate characters who normally would not have qualified for the job got it during this time. Just between 896 and 904, seven popes and one "antipope" rose and fell from power, of which six were murdered. One of them, Pope Stephen VI, took revenge on a rival, his predecessor Formosus, by having the dead pope's body dug up, propped in a chair, and put on trial; after conviction, the body was thrown in the Tiber River. A year later Stephen was overthrown, and strangled while in prison.

In the early tenth century two of the most important figures in Rome were women, Theodora and her daughter Marozia. Theodora was the matriarch of the powerful Crescentii family, and had been the mistress of Pope John X; Marozia imprisoned him in 928, and he quickly died under her care. Marozia, like her mother, preferred holy men, and the one she was mistress to, Pope Sergius III, was almost certainly the father of her illegitimate son. The next two popes were caretakers elevated by Marozia, one of whom she later had killed; then she installed her son, now seventeen years old, as Pope John XI. However, she also had a legitimate son, Alberic, with the Duke of Spoleto (also named Alberic), and when the younger Alberic could no longer tolerate his mother playing favorites with John, he deposed and locked up both of them. Nineteen years later (955), Alberic's own son (and the grandson of Marozia, mind you) became the treacherous Pope John XII. John XII acted like a tenth-century Caligula, castrating nobles who displeased him, ordaining a deacon in a stable, setting houses on fire, appearing in public wearing a sword, helmet, and breastplate, indulging in open love affairs and drinking to the health of the devil. Two hundred years after cutting itself off from Byzantium, the Papacy was a hive of chaos and debauchery, what some historians have called a "pornocracy."

It was a similar story with the local church. All over western Europe church property was either looted and destroyed by raiders like the Vikings and Moslems, or it fell into the hands of the local nobility. Noblemen treated church offices as their own, rewarding friends or servants with them, or selling them to anyone with the money (the sin of simony, see footnote #5). As one might expect, this produced a clergy that was ignorant, shirked its duties, and acted immorally.⁽²⁶⁾

With the end of Iconoclasm in 843, a formal reconciliation between Constantinople and Rome took place, but then minor doctrinal differences arose to keep East and West apart until the split became permanent. At first the issue was the relationship between Church and State, but as the power of the Papacy declined it switched to an argument over the Holy Spirit. Now that the Church had finished a centuries-long debate on the natures of God and Jesus, curiosity seems to have arisen concerning the third member of the Trinity. Did the Holy Spirit originate solely from the Father, as the East believed, or did it contain part of the essence of both Father and Son, as the pope now asserted? When the Papacy added three words, the so-called filioque ("and the son") to the part of the Nicene Creed that mentioned the Holy Spirit, Constantinople decided the western Church was a heresy beyond redemption. Although the formal split between Catholicism and Orthodoxy did not take place until 1054, for most of the two centuries preceding it the eastern and western bodies of the Church were no longer on speaking terms with each other.

The Byzantine monasteries lost many of their members and much of their wealth during the iconoclastic controversy, because they opposed the imperial decrees and thus attracted official persecution. The type of monastery started by St. Benedict in the West did better, as noted in the previous chapter, but in the ninth and early tenth centuries there was a sharp drop in Benedictine standards. As noted before, this was because the monasteries grew rich; the monks managed their land very responsibly by draining swamps, digging wells, and building mills. The downside was that laymen had less respect for monks who had fun too often, and there was a lot of this when their hard work paid off. Communal life was abandoned, monks got married and shared the income of the monastery, and sometimes their lack of discipline made them a menace to the neighborhood.

What the monks needed were new rules and regulations, and these came in 910 when William the Pious, Duke of Burgundy, founded a new monastery at Cluny; under its energetic abbot, Odo, it soon became a model for the strict observance of Benedictine rule. Unlike the older Benedictine monasteries, which were autonomous and answerable to nobody but the pope, the Cluniac monasteries were rigidly organized and controlled by the one at Cluny. It was an immediate success. Zeal for reform spread, and by the twelfth century the order of Cluny had 1184 houses. Kings and other wealthy benefactors gave generously to Cluny until it was able to build the largest church in Western Europe, surpassing even St. Peter's Basilica in Rome; the abbot of Cluny became the second most powerful man in the Catholic Church.

With the Cluniac reform the Western monastery became a more important part of the economy and society than its Eastern counterpart did. It served as an oasis of peace, learning and stability, irrigating the potentially fertile ground around it. The Cluniacs were also responsible for creating the concept of Christendom--the idea that Christians belonged to a superstate that transcended all borders decided by kings or differences in language and custom. The idea of universal brotherhood, a common feature of the early Church, returned, and many clergymen began to repeat a popular Cluniac maxim: "Away with anyone who thinks that God is merely local."

Those bishops who supported the reforms formed a "Peace of God" movement, which met in Aquitaine in 989 to condemn private warfare. Out of it came the "Truce of God," a pledge by armed men either to renounce acts of violence altogether, or to restrict them to certain days of the week (Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays); those who took the vow also agreed to leave some non-combatants alone. Since the West did not yet have any strong monarchies or police forces, the Truce of God was a considerable improvement, and was endorsed by later Church councils. Thus the Church played a major role in the upswing of prosperity that heralded the opening of the second millennium A.D..

Macedonian Revival

Under the emperor's gaze, Basil approached the horse. He grabbed the horse's bridle with a powerful hand and forced the animal to stand still; with the other hand he gripped the horse's ear and spoke softly into it. Whatever he said, it had an amazing effect; one moment later the untameable horse was a docile servant of the emperor. Michael was overjoyed, and promptly drafted Basil into the imperial palace guard.

This was the first step in a remarkable rise to power. Basil had come to Constantinople with nothing but the clothes on his back, and up to this point had gotten where he was by luck and his physical abilities. Now he got involved in the intrigue which made up Byzantine politics. Soon after Basil entered imperial service, the imperial high chamberlain was fired, and Basil took his job; then Michael gave his sister Thecla to become Basil's mistress.

Michael cared little for matters of state, and devoted most of his time to bedrooms, carousing and horseracing. Fortunately, his uncle, Bardas, was a very dedicated and incorruptible administrator, and he took care of the Empire for the emperor. His foreign accomplishments are still with us today: he sent to the Slavs St. Cyril and St. Methodius, who invented the Cyrillic alphabet used in eastern Europe today, while other missionaries sent by him converted the Bulgars. Yet the powers and privileges given by an unstable emperor can just as easily be taken away. One day in 866, while Bardas and Michael were planning to lead a naval expedition against Arab-ruled Crete, Basil convinced the emperor that Bardas was plotting to take the throne. At the next council of war, Michael and Bardas were reviewing army preparedness, when Basil and his henchmen suddenly attacked the imperial uncle and hacked him to death. Michael approved of the killing but was apparently shocked by the violence of it; he adopted Basil as his son and heir after that, aware that he had no true ally but his protegé.

During the next few months, Michael sank deeper into debauchery, and Basil got a chilling warning that even his position was not secure. After winning a horse race, the emperor threw a party, and a new acquaintance, a boatman, flattered him; Michael invited the fellow to remove Michael's royal red boots and try them on. Basil objected to this unseemly behavior, and the furious emperor turned on him and spat, "I made you emperor, and have I not the power to create another emperor if I will?" Unlike Bardas, Basil did not simply hope that things would turn out all right; the next time the emperor drunk himself into a stupor, Basil helped him to bed, like he had done so many times before, but left the bedroom door unlocked and came back with eight accomplices to finish him off.

Despite the treachery used by Basil to rise to the top, his reign (867-886) accomplished so much that now we call him "Basil the Magnificent." Remembering his peasant origins, he made the collection of taxes more fair by punishing venal officials and greedy landowners, and expressed clearly what the tax rates were so that taxpayers would know what was expected of them. He also recodified the civil law, which had not been revised since the time of Justinian. On the military front he lost the Sicilian city of Syracuse to the Moslems, but expelled a Moslem invasion of the mainland and took back south-central Italy from the Lombards. This was the Empire's first territorial gain in more than two centuries, and more would follow.

Basil's reign ended on a tragic note. His favorite son and heir, Constantine, died in 879, and he never got over that. The emperor was so grief-stricken that he had to leave the affairs of government to others, while he tried to forget in sorrows by hunting. On a hunting trip in 886, a huge stag cornered by the hunting party impaled the emperor on its antlers and carried him off; the antlers caught under Basil's belt. A servant chased after them and freed the emperor by cutting off the belt, but Basil died of internal bleeding nine days later.

After Basil I the Empire started to grow again, although slowly. Basil was followed by two very comptent successors: Leo VI (886-912, also called Leo the Wise), Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (913-959), a patron of the arts. The conversion of the Bulgars had not improved them much, and a long on-and-off war (894-927) ended in a truce when both sides realized that the Bulgars could not take Constantinople by force of arms. The Empire lost the last part of Sicily it held to the Fatimids, a new Moslem state in North Africa (965), but it recovered Melitene (about 930), Crete (960), Cilicia and Cyprus (965), Antioch (969) and east Bulgaria (971). In 976 a Byzantine army advanced all the way to the walls of Jerusalem before the Arabs and the death of the current emperor, John Tzimisces, forced it to turn back. These conquests happened not only because the health of the Empire had improved, but also because its enemies were chronically divided among themselves.

In the previous chapter we noted that Emperor Heraclius divided Asia Minor into four military districts called themes. To do this he had to swallow the feeling that it was dangerous to give both civil and military authority over a large area to a single man. Accordingly, his successors broke the themes into fourteen smaller ones when they became a threat to Constantinople. Fortunately, pressure on the Empire slacked off afterwards, so this did not bring disaster. In fact the sort of defense-in-depth strategy that the themes were used for was no longer needed. Since the themes were only strong enough to use in a defensive role, the imperial government built a new strike force to lead the way in the above conquests.

This new army was given first call on the resources of the themes. Into the strike force went many foreign mercenaries known for their fighting ability, like the Vikings and Normans, and since they had to be paid in cash the emperor began asking the themes for money instead of men. As a result, the theme regiments got smaller while the strike force expanded. After a 300-year interruption the empire had returned to the old Roman system of tax-paying provinces (for that is what the themes now were) and a paid professional army.

As the millennium came to an end, the Empire was in better shape than at any point since 600. The new army was a great success; it had to be, for both the Empire and the theme units now depended on it absolutely.

The Caliphate of Cordova

The only part of the Iberian peninsula that remained free of Islam after the initial invasion was the northern mountains; this contained the nearly inaccessible Basques and the Kingdom of Asturias, which had a tenuous claim to being the last part of the Visigoth state. In time they might have succumbed too, but strong Frankish leaders (Charles Martel, Pepin and Charlemagne) and Moslem disunity saved the day. Spain became the first province of the Islamic Caliphate to break away after the Abbasids took over in 750; the Abbasids slaughtered all but one member of the previous ruling family, the Umayyads. This survivor, Abd-al-Rahman I, escaped to Morocco, where he learned that Spain was in a state of near-anarchy. In the forty years since the Moslem conquest of Spain, twenty emirs or viceroys had been appointed by the Caliphs, and they were such cruel rulers that some part of the peninsula was always in rebellion, no Moslem leader would recognize anyone as his superior, and the various sheikhs waged vendettas against one another. Eighty high-ranking Arabs got together and decided that they must declare independence from the Caliph and unite under a leader of their own choosing, rather than wait for somebody in a far-off place like Damascus to send a governor they didn't care for. Accordingly, they invited Abd-al-Rahman to take over, so he made a triumphal crossing from Morocco, drove out the recently appointed Abbasid viceroy, and proclaimed Moorish Spain the independent emirate of al-Andalus in 756. Seven years later, he defeated an Abbasid army sent by Baghdad to remove him. In the northwest, the Christians of Asturias recovered Galicia by 771, starting the Reconquista and putting their kingdom on a firmer footing.⁽²⁷⁾ Because of the Islamic split, the Moors could not look for armies to come to their assistance from the Middle East; most of the Islamic world stood aside while they fought, won and ultimately lost their battles in Spain.

Charlemagne recovered the area around Barcelona in several campaigns (778-802), and pushed to the Ebro River in 812. After him the Franks lost control of the "Spanish March" and it evolved into two separate states: the kingdom of Aragon (809) and the county of Barcelona (830). In the northwest, the Basques coalesced into a kingdom named Navarre (822), while the kingdom of Asturias captured the area around Burgos (860-899); henceforth this would be known as the county of Castile. From 910 to 951 Galicia was independent of Asturias; in 913 Asturias moved its capital from Oviedo to Leon, and subsequently changed its name to the kingdom of Leon. Because Leon was an inland town, the move meant that Spanish Christians were no longer looking to the Atlantic for their livelihood; the ocean at this point was too risky, being full of storms, Vikings, and who knows what kind of monsters. In 970 Navarre absorbed Aragon, so by 1000 there were three small Christian states opposing Islam in Spain.

The Islamic part of Spain was itself in an unstable state, even after the Umayyads took charge, because their authority was often challenged by the Arab and Berber governors around them. In fact, the Arab ruling class was always a small minority, no more than 20% of the population; the rest were Berbers, indigenous Spaniards⁽²⁸⁾, Jews, and slaves from Africa and eastern Europe. As a result, the Ummayad emir based in Cordova (also spelled Cordoba) played a political balancing act to keep himself at the top of the heap. For example, we know of at least one case where treachery was used to put down a rebellion. In 807 Amrus Ibn Yusuf, the governor of Toledo, pulled a trick that had done elsewhere (it happened to the Ummayads back in the Middle East), by inviting hundreds of his most important enemies to a banquet at his new castle. In the castle courtyard Amrus had a long ditch dug, and stationed his executioner next to it. The guests were brought in one at a time, and each was beheaded and thrown into the ditch.

Al-Andalus enjoyed its best years in the tenth century, under three excellent leaders: Abd-al-Rahman III (912-961), his son al-Hakam II (961-976), and Muhammad ibn Abu ‘Amir (981-1002). Abd-al-Rahman took for himself the title of caliph, meaning the spiritual leader of Islam, in 929, to show everyone else in Spain who was boss, and to compete with the Sunni caliph in Baghdad and the Shiite caliphs in North Africa. For this reason we call his state the Caliphate of Cordova. Under him Cordova grew to become a major intellectual center, with seventy libraries, until it was the largest city in western Europe; estimates of its population range from a hundred thousand to half a million. Remember, this was at a time when London and Paris were scarcely more than dirty villages.

Abd-al-Rahman spent a good part of his time on building projects, one of which was the grandest palace of Dark Age Europe, a veritable Versailles named Medinat al-Zahra (City of Zahra), after a favorite concubine; he lavished a third of the royal budget on it for 25 years, until it was completed in 961. Another was La Mezquita, the great mosque of Cordova, originally founded in 785. He made it the third largest mosque in the world, its most distinctive feature being a forest of red and white arches supported by columns. 850 of the original 1,300 columns still stand today; the rest are gone because in the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church ordered a cathedral built right in the middle of the mosque. Even the pious King Charles V thought this change of architecture was too much; when he saw the results, he told the Church authorities: "You have destroyed something that was unique and replaced it with something which is commonplace."

Abd-al-Rahman also cut down on the number of wars in the north, by putting a friendly king in charge of Leon. First he allied himself with Fernán González, an uppity duke who attacked the castles in Leon that weren't his already; González also wanted to be king so bad that he called himself the king of Castile, instead of merely its duke. Then in 956 Sancho the Fat became Leon's king, but because of the problem that earned him his nickname, his nobles, especially González, didn't want him around. They threw Sancho out, crowned a cousin, and Sancho's grandmother, Queen Toto of Navarre, wrote to the caliph, asking if there was anything he could do. Abd-al-Rahman responded by sending his court physician, Hasdai ibn Shapirut, a Jew who was also blessed with diplomatic skills (a few years earlier he had represented the caliph, on a mission to meet with Germany's Otto I). Shapirut convinced the queen that she would have to bring Sancho to Cordova, and the sight of a Christian prince coming to the caliph for help scored a political victory for Islam. Then Shapirut put his medical skills to work, subjecting Sancho to a strict diet for several months, until he had shed enough pounds to look like a proper king. When Sancho was ready to go home, Abd-al-Rahman sent a Moorish army to take the throne of Leon for him (960), and he didn't get involved when Sancho put the duke of Castile in his place, in 966.

Despite these successes, Abd-al-Rahman seems to have been a melancholy fellow. Near the end of his long reign, he wrote: "And in all that time, I have numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness that have befallen my lot . . . They amount to fourteen . . . Put not therefore your hopes in the things of this world." Under his son, al-Hakam II, the Zahra palace became a city in its own right, reportedly housing or employing 38,000 people. Moslem pirates terrorized the Mediterranean and even set up a base on the Riviera. In the 970s Morocco submitted to Spain, after the Shiite family ruling it, the Idrisids, became extinct. From there, Berbers were recruited in large numbers and sent north to terrorize the Christian kingdoms.

The next caliph, Hisham II, was only a child when he succeeded al-Hakam in 976, so three regents managed the government. One of them, Muhammad ibn Abu ‘Amir, was so brilliant and ambitious that soon he was ruling in all but name; this alarmed the other two (one was his father-in-law!), and they revolted, stirring up an uprising in the army and calling in help from Leon, Castile and Navarre. Ibn Abu ‘Amir quickly crushed the rebellion, and then turned against Leon, defeating King Ramiro III and sacking the cities of Zamora and Simancas (981). These triumphs earned him the title al-Mansur bi-Allah (victorious through Allah); Western writers called him Almanzor or Almansor. In 985 al-Mansur marched north again, this time against Barcelona; the Barcelona Christians had stayed out of the previous conflict, but still he torched their city, and massacred or enslaved everyone in it. When Leon expelled some Cordovan mercenaries in 987, al-Mansur saw this as a good reason to teach the Christians another "lesson." This time he ravaged all of Leon, including the capital, stirred up a rebellion against Leon in Castile, and exacted tribute in return for peace. As a final triumph against Christianity, he invaded Galicia in 997, destroyed the church of Santiago da Compostela (but he spared the tomb of the Apostle James), bringing back the church's great bronze bells as trophies to show in the Cordova mosque. However, he was more interested in imposing Cordova's will than he was in finishing off Spanish Christianity; Christian kings paid their tribute and lived to see another day.

The First Reich and the Recovery of Christendom

Meanwhile Christianity regained its confidence, after 400 years on the defensive. This showed in the launching of vigorous missionary activity into northern and eastern Europe from both the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. The Orthodox won the first prizes; they converted the Danube Bulgars (870) and Serbs (879), while a third mission, led by St. Cyril and St. Methodius, started work among the Slavs of Bohemia (the modern Czech Republic) in the 860s.⁽²⁹⁾ The Catholics took over in the north after Cyril and Methodius left, so in the end the Bohemians joined the Western rather than the Eastern Church (890). Around 879 the Croats and the Slovenes also became Catholics, forming a permanent division between them and their Serb cousins. The missionaries from Rome and Constantinople might have done even better if they had cooperated more and competed less. Nevertheless, it was encouraging that both churches were on the move again. At last Christendom had some gains to offset its huge losses to Islam in the Mediterranean basin.

The Christian advance received a setback when the Magyars moved into the area. Driven from Russia by the Turkic Petchenegs, the Magyars, like the Huns and Avars before them, settled on the plains of Hungary (896). The Magyars had been on the Russian steppe long enough to learn horsemanship, so they began to raid their new neighbors. In 899 they mounted a really big raid against Italy; the army of the Kingdom of Italy was totally defeated by the nomads' tactics. For the next fifty years the Magyars were able to plunder the peninsula whenever they felt like it.

The arrival of the Magyars completed the misery of Western Europe. While Magyars attacked from the east and Vikings from the north and west, Moslem fleets resumed their offensive in the Mediterranean. We already mentioned how they threatened to conquer Italy in the ninth century; the early tenth century saw the Moors of Spain take Majorca and Minorca, while the Fatimids, the new rulers of North Africa, raided the coast of Italy. Together both of these groups hit Sardinia and Corsica.⁽³⁰⁾ The boldest pirates set up advance bases in 890, at Garigliano in southern Italy and at Fraxinetum on the French Riviera; from there they could penetrate far into France and Italy. The kingdoms of Christendom were now surrounded by enemies on all sides, and the continent was subjected to the worst raids since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Burgundy, for example, included Switzerland, a supposedly safe haven from raiders, but in the second quarter of the tenth century the Vikings, Moslems and Magyars all took turns looting it.

Magyar raiders hit Germany almost every year; the worst raid passed through Germany, France, Burgundy and followed Italy all the way to the heel before returning to the Danube (937). Some Magyar bands going west did not stop at France but continued into Spain. Not until the German king Otto I trapped and destroyed the main Magyar army (the battle of Lechfeld, 955) was Europe freed from their devastations.

The prestige Otto I gained by this victory made him the new champion of Christendom and helped him in his main work--the re-creation of Charlemagne's empire. In 961 he conquered the kingdom of Italy. The next year Pope John XII revived the title of Holy Roman Emperor for him. France and Burgundy were no longer part of the empire, but on the other hand Otto conquered the Slavs who had sat on Charlemagne's eastern marches. Otto's empire, like Charlemagne's, was a pipe dream, and for the same reason: it had almost no administrative structure. But it was big enough to enjoy a reputation as Europe's main state for the next three centuries.

The pope must have been surprised when he found he could not control the emperor he had crowned. After making the Roman people promise that they would not elect a pope without his or his son's consent, Otto convened a synod which tried Pope John, found him guilty of many crimes, and deposed him. In his place they chose a layman, who in the course of twelve hours was ordained and given all the other ecclesiastical promotions needed to become Pope Leo VIII. Leo then died of a stroke one year later, while committing adultery (964).

The elimination of the Saracen pirates took place in the next generation. Their base at Garigliano had already been captured in 916, through a joint action involving Pope John X, the Duke of Spoleto, and the Byzantine fleet of Gaeta. In 972 the pirates kidnaped and held Maiolus, the abbot of the great Burgundian monastery of Cluny. This was too important a person to be ignored. As soon as the monks of Cluny had raised and paid the ransom, a strong force of French knights descended on the Riviera and wiped out Fraxinetum.

As the turn of the millennium arrived, the Church got a pope who was fit for the job. This was Sylvester II (999-1003), the most learned man of his day. Born in central France under the name of Gerbert, he was first educated at the monastery of Aurillac. Then in 967, Count Borrell of Barcelona visited the monastery, and the abbot asked the count to take Gerbert back to Spain with him, so that the youth could study the latest in mathematics. When Gerbert learned all that was available in Barcelona, he crossed the frontier into Moslem territory, where he discovered the great libraries of Cordova, saw the scientific works that the Arabs had translated from China, India, Persia and ancient Greece, and learned Arabic and modern astronomy. Returning to Christendom in 969, he got the attention of both the pope and the German emperor; soon he was tutor to the future emperor Otto II, and ended up as a teacher at the cathedral school of Rheims. There he experimented with what he had learned; he constructed the world's largest abacus, built an organ with a water-powered bellows, invented the pendulum clock and the eight-note scale that most Western music is composed with, and introduced Arabic numerals, which are so much easier to use in math problems than the Roman numerals that European Christians were still using at this time.⁽³¹⁾

Many people refused to believe that anyone could know as much as Gerbert did, and as he rose in the clergy, eventually becoming archbishop of Rheims in 991, stories circulated about him being a magician, or that he had made a deal with the Devil. In 996 he lost his job as archbishop, for declaring that the French king's marriage was illegal. Gerbert fled to Germany, where Emperor Otto III welcomed him and hired him as a teacher and advisor. Otto felt that the quickest way to clean up the Papacy was to make sure that the pope wasn't an Italian (and thus someone without local family connections), so he made Gerbert archbishop of Ravenna in 998, and then one year later, made him the first French pope; he took the name of Sylvester II, because Sylvester I had led the Roman church in Constantine the Great's time. However, the people of Rome didn't care for a foreign pope, and they drove both the emperor and pope out in 1001; Sylvester died shortly after he managed to return, and the Papacy went back to its previous routine.

The late tenth century saw the armies of Christendom join the missionaries in gaining more lands and believers for God. The Slavs in eastern Germany were conquered, rather than converted, as Charlemagne had done with the Saxons earlier, and the recovery of central Spain was also a matter of conversion by sword rather than by word. And like the Western missionaries, the Catholic soldiers did better than their Orthodox counterparts. The Byzantine Empire's expansion under the Macedonian dynasty failed to convert many unbelievers; the emperor's armies either conquered already converted peoples like the Serbs, or uncovered schismatics such as the Armenian Monophysites.

Many of the nations which exist in modern Europe were now recognizable. In France the Carolingian line of kings petered out and was replaced by the first authentic French dynasty, the Capetians (987). England was now united under the dynasty that once ruled only Wessex, while the union of Scots and Picts (844), followed by the Strathclyde Welsh joining them (945), created the kingdom of Scotland. Both England and Scotland owed their unification to the need for defense against Viking attacks. These circumstances also briefly united most of Ireland, when in Brian Boru (975-1014) the Irish found their national hero; he ended the Viking menace by capturing Dublin in 999, only to fall in another battle fifteen years later.⁽³²⁾

The Vikings themselves began to look civilized in the tenth century. Many of the Danelaw's residents converted to Christianity after they settled down, so as early as 900 it was safe for English priests and monks to return to the churches that had been ravaged before. Of course conversion meant giving up their hellraising lifestyle, so many Vikings did it half-heartedly; usually they converted because Christians refused to trade with pagans or let them marry into their families. As in Anglo-Saxon England, the rulers tended to convert first, and their subjects followed later. Harald Bluetooth was the first Scandinavian king to become a Christian (965), but the next two Danish kings, Sveyn Forkbeard and Harald IV, were pagans, so Christianity would have to be re-introduced to Denmark by Canute the Great (1018-35). Missionaries also had to convert the kings of Norway more than once; Haakon I the Good (934-963) and Olaf Tryggvason (995-1000) both converted, but were followed by pagan rulers, so it wasn't until Olaf II Haraldson (1015-28) that Norway became Christian and stayed that way. Sweden converted just before the end of the millennium, under Olaf III Skötkonung (995-1022), and around 1001 the president of Iceland's Althing became a Christian, but because Icelanders loved their freedom, he let them know they could stay pagan for the time being. Most historians stop referring to Scandinavians as "Vikings" after this, saving the term for pagan Scandinavians only.

Poland got its act together in response to the Germans advancing toward it. The name of the country comes from polye, the Slavic word for field, which is appropriate because Poland is mostly flat. The Western Slavs who became the Poles claim a legendary figure named Piast as the founder of their royal family (840 A.D.?), but the first Polish ruler that we know anything about was Mieszko I (960-992). Starting from a territory on the south bank of the Vistula River ("Greater Poland"), with its capital at the town of Kruszwica, Mieszko pushed east as far as Warsaw; in the north he reached the Baltic, founded Gdansk in 980, and began the absorption of Pomerania. Equally important, he converted to Christianity in 966, after marrying a Czech princess named Dubravka, and the rest of the country followed. He defeated a German invasion of Pomerania in 983, but two years later paid homage to the German emperor, on condition that the emperor didn't try to be more than a lord in name only. Mieszko's successor, Boleslav, conquered Silesia in 999, and Cracow in 1000, so at the end of the century Poland had roughly the same lands it has today.

1000 A.D. also saw the final victory of the Catholic Church in central Europe. The Magyars, like the Poles, had held back because they did not want to be under German archbishops (which would have made them part of the Holy Roman Empire). Emperor Otto III agreed that their objection was reasonable, and Pope Sylvester II saw to it that both peoples got archbishops of their own. In 1000 the chief of the Magyars was crowned Stephen I, the first king of Hungary. In the east Russia had become Orthodox in 988, so now only really remote tribes like the Finns, Prussians and Lithuanians continued to stick up for paganism.⁽³³⁾

Few centuries in European history started as dismally as the tenth, and few ended so triumphantly. There was fear among some Christians that the world would come to an end in the year 1000; when the "Apocalypse" didn't happen, the result was a spirit of optimism that lasted for much of the eleventh century. What really ended in 1000 was the Dark Ages.

A New Beginning

It started with a shift in geography, caused by Christendom's loss of its southern Mediterranean lands to Islam, and subsequent gains that brought it to the Baltic and the Volga. The result was a general shift north. Christianity had started out as a Mediterranean religion and had become a purely European one. Despite its name, the Mediterranean was no longer viewed as the "middle of the Earth"; the Moslem conquests of Sardinia and Sicily moved Rome from the center of the Christian world to the southern fringe of it.

The northward move was into colder, wetter lands, where the sun often does not shine through overcast skies. Up to this point agriculture had mainly been practiced in hot, dry places like the Middle East, so the techniques developed to get the best yields were ones that were best suited for that sort of climate. European farmers faced quite different challenges, and took centuries to develop the skills needed to solve them. The really important thing is that during the Dark Ages they experimented and eventually succeeded. For example, early on the farmers learned they could keep the soil fertile longer by crop rotation: they divided a farm into three equal parts, and let a third of it lay fallow each year, with only grass and weeds in it, so that it could regain its strength before crops were planted in it again. It may have looked as though Christendom had the poorest corner of the world, but northern Europe had not been ravaged and misused the way older places like Greece and the Middle East had been; once properly exploited it proved to be one of the richest places.

The crucial invention was a wheeled plow heavy enough to turn and drain the soil, not just scratch a furrow for seed. We know that heavy plows were coming into use in northern Europe in late Roman times. It took the whole Dark Ages to get the design right and in general use. By the year 1000 the European farmer was on top of his job. He couldn't produce as much per acre as a Near Eastern farmer with irrigated fields but, thanks to his plow, he could do more work in a hour. He began to prosper.

This prosperity shows in the other tools that came into use. Water mills save a lot of time when it comes to grinding grain, but mills need millers to run them and millers have to be paid. Only a prosperous farming community can afford to do this. It says something about the rising level of prosperity that by the end of the Dark Ages every village in northwest Europe had its own water mill.

Another change for the better is the appearance of the horse as a farm animal. Up until now the horse was mainly a luxury for the nobility, while oxen (and sometimes people) did the plowing. Horses are more expensive because they eat more, but they are also faster, doing up to three times as much work as oxen. The farmer who could afford horses could work a bigger field, and bring in a bigger harvest. However, one more innovation was necessary, because if you hitch a horse to a typical yoke, it cannot pull the load without choking itself. It took the invention of the horsecollar, to spread the weight of a burden evenly on a horse's shoulders, before the horse could take the ox's place in front of the plow.

Mills and horses show that life for the European farmer was starting to get better. Even more important, they show that he was investing in equipment that would increase his output still more. He was not spending his profits, but plowing them back into his work. This is investment, the key to economic growth. Dark Age Europe may have been an ignorant, brutal, and chaotic place, but it also had a society that was capable of slow improvement.

History is full of surprises. The most impressive empires have often been socially stagnant while important things happened silently in out-of-the-way places; the invention of the improved sailing ship by the Norse is a fine example. Though people talk a great deal about our heritage from classical times, our present industrial society and our willingness to develop machinery have their real roots in Dark Age Europe.

1. Carloman deserves no more than a footnote, because he lived only three years after his father. Charles is memorialized as one of the founding fathers of France, so remember that his family was from Austrasia originally, meaning that he was not French or even Frankish: he was German.

2. The territory ruled directly by the pope was called the "Donation of Pepin" while Pepin was alive, then the "Patrimony of St. Peter" under Charlemagne. After Charlemagne's empire broke up it was called the Papal State.
Charlemagne also conquered the Duchy of Spoleto, leaving only Benevento to the Lombards. Its duke immediately upgraded Benevento's status by declaring it a principality, to remind everyone that he was still independent.

3. Charlemagne's rear guard was ambushed by some Basque freebooters in Roncesvalles pass, as it returned from a Spanish campaign in 778. Over the next few centuries, minstrels turned this disaster into an epic poem, The Song of Roland; the military expedition became a holy Crusade against the Paynim (pagans), and the identity of Roland's murderers switched to the Moslems.

4. The exceptions being the British Isles, the Breton peninsula, the Kingdom of Asturias in northwest Spain and the Lombard principality of Benevento in south Italy.

5. Simony refers to the practice of becoming a priest or bishop by paying for the job, whether or not you are qualified, rather than by ordaining someone with the right knowledge or character. The name come from Simon, the wizard in the New Testament (Acts 8:18-24) who thought he could buy the Apostles' miracle-working power. Here we have a rare example of a sin that has become obsolete; though common in the Middle Ages, it has all but disappeared from the modern world.

6. Afterwards Charlemagne stated that he would not have entered the church had he known what the pope was planning. Many people, both then and now, believed that he knew about the coronation anyway, since he was dressed properly for the occasion.

7. Most of Germany had been Christian for less than a century, so the lands east of the Rhine were managed by two archbishops, in Mainz and Salzburg. This made the archbishop of Mainz one of the most powerful men in the Empire.

8. We believe eight of Charlemagne's sons and daughters were legitimate. He confessed that ten illegitimate children were his own, too.
Though it was probably unintentional, Charlemagne encouraged the same behavior among his offspring, because he only allowed one of his daughters to marry. The official explanation was that he didn't want the daughters to produce an heir to his throne. Later on we'll see how it led to trouble when laws prevented monarchs from bequeathing anything meaningful to their daughters, or to the children of their daughters (e.g., Empress Maria Theresa in Chapter 11, the duchies of Schleswig-Holstein and Luxembourg in Chapter 13). Or maybe he was just too much of an overprotective father, and didn't like the suitors. However, Charlemagne didn't object when his daughters took lovers on the side, and had babies with them; we're talking about France, after all!

9. Charlemagne was seen as a giant; we have on record that his height was seven times the length of his foot, but we don't know how big his foot was. 6' 1" or 6' 3" seems like a safe guess, when one remembers that people were shorter back then; the average knight was 5' 4".

10. In his will Alfred called himself Occidentalium Saxorum rex, or King of the West Saxons; his son Edward the Elder was the first to put the title of Rex Anglorum (King of the English) on his coins.

11. After Odo of Paris a grandson of Louis the Stammerer, Charles the Simple (898-922), recovered the throne of France for the Carolingians, while Odo's descendants ran the affairs of the country. Thus for the next century we have a situation just like that under the Merovingians, where one family had the crown and another had the power. Likewise, Odo's family would eventually produce the Capetians, the next royal dynasty.

12. The Scandinavian ethnic groups lived entirely in the southern half of what we now call Scandinavia. As for northern Scandinavia, it hadn't changed much since the ice age. Its only inhabitants were a few thousand Lapps herding reindeer on the Atlantic and Arctic sides of the mountains and a few thousand Finns fishing the rivers on the Baltic side.

13. The Vik was the original name of the strait dividing Norway from Denmark, now called the Skagerrak. Any fjord could also be called a vik, so the word Viking means something like "men of the inlets."

14. The typical Norse "dragon-ship" could carry nearly 100 men, but needed only 15 to sail it. We know a lot about how they were constructed because the Vikings did not always burn their ships in funeral pyres, as is commonly believed; some splendid vessels were buried with their captains, to be uncovered by modern archaeologists.

15. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a list in outline form of the historical events that happened in England, from Julius Caesar's invasion to the Norman conquest. Originally written in Old English, Alfred the Great produced a Latin translation around 892, and until 915 all editions are similar. After that the events recorded diverge on details. The last entry, dated 1154, is in the manuscript written at Peterborough Abbey.

16. The Germanic tribes of the pre-Viking era used rowboats, each carrying about 30 men. These were all right for traveling from Frisia to England, but they weren't seaworthy enough to go out on the open sea, so their crews never discovered any new lands.

17. The high points of the Varangian saga are covered in Chapter 1 of my Russian history, so they won't be repeated here. Read Chapter 10 of my Middle Eastern history for a remarkable Viking raid on Azerbaijan.

18. Bjorn used a cruel trick to capture Luna. When the Vikings arrived they claimed that their leader was a Christian who had just died and asked permission to bury him in the local church. Once inside the church Bjorn leaped from his bier, and the men drew their concealed weapons and proceeded to loot the town, starting with the church.

19. The capital of the Danelaw was York, called Jorvik while the Danes were in charge of it. Five fortified towns (Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham, Stamford and Derby) were also important, and came to be known as the "Five Boroughs."

20. Dark Age coronations were less formal and more interesting than the ones practiced later on, as Charlemagne showed us. When Edred, the Saxon king who finished conquering the Danelaw, died heirless in 955, the Witan, the Saxon high council, decided to split the realm between two nephews: 15-year-old Edwig (also spelled Eadwig) got the crown of Wessex, and 12-year-old Edgar got the crown of Mercia. At his coronation feast, Edwig noticed a very attractive girl named Aelfgifu, and in a burst of hormones, sneaked away with her to a bedchamber. After a while, Dunstan, the most influential bishop in the country, noticed that the guest of honor was missing. A man with a fierce temper, Dunstan went looking for the young king, found him having sex with both Aelfgifu and her mother(!), and dragged him back to the banquet hall.
Of course Edwig was also mad about this, and soon exiled Dunstan. But that wasn't the end of the matter; those of you who have read other papers on this site know that trouble is on the way when two people are forced to share supreme power. Edgar wanted to rule the whole kingdom like his ancestors, not just part of it, and Dunstan had many friends, so one by one the barons switched their loyalties from Edwig to Edgar. The result was a civil war, which ended with the deposing of Edwig in 959. As for Edgar, he brought back Dunstan and made him the Archbishop of Canterbury, so he was one of the few Anglo-Saxon kings who got along well with his chief clergyman. Thus, here we have a fine example of how fornication isn't as harmless as some would have us believe!

21. A fifth-generation descendant of Rollo would become William the Conqueror.

22. Meteorologists call the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries the "Medieval Warming Period," because worldwide, the climate was milder than it is now, so Greenland was somewhat "greener." Still, you have to admit that with Iceland's name you know what to expect!

23. Vinland's identity was clinched in the early 1960s by the discovery of the remains of an ancient longhouse at L'Anse Aux Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland. Some detractors suggested it was built by Eskimos, but the presence of iron nails at the site makes this very unlikely.

24. The Varangians suddenly stopped bringing home Islamic silver in the 970s. This may have been the doing of the Petchenegs, the nomadic Turkish tribe that lived between Kiev and the Black Sea. When they killed the Russian prince Sviatoslav in an ambush (972), they effectively closed down the trade routes that went through their territory. However, we also know that the mines in the Pamir mts. ran out of silver during this time, so across much of Asia, from the Middle East to China, alternative forms of payment arose, like the use of silks as money. Thus the opening of new silver mines in places like Saxony had quite an impact on the east-west trade balance.

25. It wasn't proven to be a forgery until 1440, when Lorenzo Valla, an Italian scholar, examined it. Almost single-handedly inventing the science of textual criticism, Valla looked at the style of handwriting, the language, and anything else which might give clues to the document's age. His conclusion was that the Donation was not written in the everyday fourth-century Latin that Constantine would have used, but in eighth-century Church Latin.
Once he got done with that, Valla began thinking that the Vulgate (Latin Bible) might not be an accurate translation, and called for studying the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts to understand the Old and New Testaments properly. This angered the Church, and in this intolerant age Valla probably would have been burned at the stake if he didn't have the protection of a powerful Italian prince. Eventually, however, even the Papacy decided that it wanted somebody as intelligent as Valla on its side, so in 1455 it hired the man it once called a heretic, as secretary to the pope!

26. One bishop who bought his post, Manasses, remarked that it would be quite pleasant to be bishop of Rheims "if one were not obliged now and then to sing Mass." Most simoniacal clergymen found it a bore to take care of their congregations or help the poor; they started charging a fee for their services whenever they performed a baptism, wedding or funeral.
The rulers of this era gave their churches extraordinary privileges. An example of this treatment was the abbey of Gandersheim, a Benedictine convent in Germany. In 947 the abbey became in effect an independent state, when a royal edict granted its nuns the right to mint coins, hold court, and even raise an army.

27. In the northwest corner of Galicia was a town named Santiago da Compostela, whose cathedral contained several bones believed to be from the Apostle James. It became the most popular place for pilgrims to visit west of Rome.

28. This included not only the original Iberians but also the descendants of Celts, Carthaginians, Romans, and Visigoths. Spanish-speaking Christians living under Moslem rule were called Mozarabs, while those who converted to Islam were Muwallads.
The Moslem rulers of Spain preferred blonde girls and frequently married Christian slaves from the north. They did this so much that Abd-al-Rahman III had red hair and blue eyes; he dyed his hair black to look more like a real Arab. According to the Spanish orientalist Juan Ribera, Abd-al-Rahman's ancestry was only 0.39% Arab; the rest was Spanish.

29. St. Cyril is credited with inventing the Cyrillic alphabet now used by the Russians and Serbs, by choosing various Latin and Greek letters and adding a few of his own; now the Bible could be translated into Slavic languages. Everywhere east of the Rhine and north of the Danube literacy and Christianity worked hand in hand, so in most cases the date for when a people became civilized is one and the same as the date of their conversion.

30. After the Fatimids replaced the Aghlabids, Corsica and Sardinia technically reverted to their previous rulers: Corsica to the Kingdom of Italy, and Sardinia to Byzantium. However, the lack of a strong Christian fleet meant that both were now on their own.

31. If you don't believe the last statement, try doing basic arithmetic with only Roman numerals. How much in taxes would you owe on CDLXXIX gold pieces, for example, if you are in the XXVIII percent bracket? And don't go for your calculator; they didn't have any fancy machines for doing math in those days. Unfortunately Christendom wasn't ready for a new number system, and it took until the thirteenth century for Arabic numerals to catch on.

32. The Earl of Orkney tried to restore Viking rule in Dublin after Brian Boru's fall in 1014. Not only did the attempt fail, it also allowed Scotland to take away most of his fiefs on the Scottish mainland over the next few years.

33. At this stage the Eastern Church kept tighter control of its satellites than the pope did. When the Bulgar Khan Boris I accepted Christianity, he submitted to the Catholic Church at first, but the pope refused to grant him a Bulgarian archbishop, so he switched sides when Constantinople offered him an Orthodox patriarch. By insisting that their Church had to be Orthodox but independent, the Bulgars were able to fight Byzantium without feeling too guilty about it. This patriarchate of Ochrid was done away with when the Byzantines completed their conquest of Bulgaria in the eleventh century. The bishops of Kiev were always Greeks, sent straight from Constantinople.

© Copyright 2001 Charles Kimball