In Our Time - The Carolingian Renaissance

Episode Date: March 30, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne and the Carolingian Renaissance. In 800 AD on Christmas Day in Rome, Pope Leo III proclaimed Charlemagne Emperor. According to the Frankish historian Einhard, Charlemagne would never have set foot in St Peter's that day if he had known that the Pope intended to crown him. But Charlemagne accepted his coronation with magnanimity. Regarded as the first of the Holy Roman Emperors, Charlemagne became a touchstone for legitimacy until the institution was brought to an end by Napoleon in 1806. A Frankish King who held more territory in Western Europe than any man since the Roman Emperor, Charlemagne's lands extended from the Atlantic to Vienna and from Northern Germany to Rome. His reign marked a period of enormous cultural and literary achievement. But at its foundation lay conquest, conversion at the point of a sword and a form of Christianity that was obsessed with sin, discipline and correction. How did Charlemagne become the most powerful man in Western Europe and how did he finance his conquests? Why was he able to draw Europe's most impressive scholars to his court? How successful was he in his quest to reform his church and educate the clergy? And can the Carolingian period really be called a Renaissance? With Matthew Innes, Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London; Julia Smith, Edwards Professor of Medieval History at Glasgow University; Mary Garrison, Lecturer in History at the University of York

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 800 AD on Christmas Day in Rome, Pope Leo III proclaimed Charlemagne Emperor. According to the Frankish historian Einhard,

Charlemagne would never have set foot in St. Peter's that day if he'd known that the Pope intended to crown him. But Charlemagne accepted his coronation with magnanimity. Nimerty. Regarded as the first of the Holy Roman Empire, Charlemagne became a touchstone for legitimacy until the institution was brought to an end by Napoleon in 1806. A Frankish king who held more territory in Western Europe than any man since the Roman Empire,

Charlemagne's lands extended from the Atlantic to Vienna and from northern Germany to Rome. His reign marked a period of enormous cultural and literary achievement. But at his foundation lay conquered, lay conquest, plunder, conversion at the point of a sword, and a form of Christianity that was obsessed with sin, discipline and correction. How did Charlemagne become the most powerful man in Western Europe, and how did he finance his conquest? Why was he able to draw Europe's most impressive scholars to his court? How successful was he in his quest to reform his church and educate the clergy? And can the Carolingian period really be called a Renaissance?

With me to discuss the Carolingian Renaissance are Julia Smith, Edwards Professor of Medieval History at Glasgow University, Matthew Innes, Professor of History at Birkbeck University of London, and Mary Garrison, lecturer in history at the University of York. Matthew Innes, just tell us who Charlemagne was and how did he become king of what we now know as France. Charlemagne's actually the second king of his dynasty, and I think the crucial fact for us to understand is that until 751, the Franks have been ruled by the Merovingians.

The Merovingians have been the traditional kings of the Franks in Western Germany, modern France, the low country. since the middle of the 5th century, so 300 years. When Charlemagne's born, his father is actually mayor of the palace for the Mer of Injans. He's not born into a royal dynasty. The kind of Caralindjan takeover in 751 involves people approval in a quite shadowy process. It involves the Pope coming up to Frank here in 754, and an anointing not only Charlemagne's father, Pippin,

but also Charlemagne himself and his brother as a new royal race, new royal dynasty for the Franks. But I think the crucial fact for us to understand is there's this issue of a legitimacy deficit. These people aren't the traditionally established rulers of the Franks. They tremendously have to prove themselves and establish their right to rule. And when Shaliman comes to the throne in 768, I think this long shadow is still cast over him. And I think that's crucial for understanding that the top tremendous energy in terms of political expansion and ideological legitimation that you see going on in his reign.

Throwing over a dynasty of the Merivings had been there for 300 years. Was that tough? Was that easy? Was Charlemagne's father a brutal warrior person as well as being a mayor? The actual reins of power seem to have been slipping over for at least two generations.

Even the most revisionist of historians would say since the end of the 7th century power has been slipping towards the mayors. Charlemagne's grandfather, Charles Martel, is basically a warlord who is establishes power on the war trail, and I think military leadership is slipping to the mares and away from the Merivindian kings do have much more ritual and ceremonial functions. But we know that Pippin is educated by the monks at San Deney in Paris,

the major cultural centre of this time, and we know that he's interested in patronising scholarship. So it isn't just a case of might. I think Chalimain's ancestors have been actually ruling the roost and pulling the reins for a long time before, but there's a kind of reluctance to, there's a reluctance and a feeling of risk that overframed established legitimacy could sort of open a whole can of worms because if one powerful family can do this, what's to stop your neighbours or your cousins doing it? And that's what Charlemagne has to deal with, really.

But from very early age, from age of five, I understand, he led a deputation and rode 100 miles to meet, or whatever. We told him about this boy being brought up as a king, so the idea of kingship was very important to him, and the idea of religion was massively important to him. So can you briefly tell us what his idea of Christian kingship was? I mean, I think this is one implication of this legitimacy deficit. Ideas of Christian kingship have been around for a long time

since at least Constantine's conversion and Roman emperors becoming Christians. People have tried to work out how to use the Bible as a template for ruling this earth and to kind of view rulership in the light of Christian thought. but the overthrow of the Merovingians the Carolingians needing to legitimate themselves so they really go with a renewed emphasis on the ideology of Christian kingship

the basic idea that all power on this earth descends from God and those who hold it are responsible for God for their conduct this becomes both a way for them to legitimate themselves but also a programme for rule a programme to justify conquest Can I ask Julius Smith to take that on place? Yes I think the point is that

there isn't any alternative to Christian King really that wherever you look by the 760s, 770s, 780s, the sources and images of how to do kingship are either the Christian Roman Empire or the Bible. And the Bible is a hugely powerful handbook and gallery of kings, good and bad. Are we talking about the Old Testament really? We're talking primarily about the Old Testament, yes. It's a gallery of images of rulership. And primarily King David, possibly. Primarily but not exclusively.

not exclusively by any means. And so what you find is a sort of historical flattening that the Bible is of immediate relevance. It's not something that's rooted in a distant other past. The knowledge of the Christian Roman emperors of the 4th and 5th century, the great names Constantine, Theodosius, and so forth like that. They have an immediacy because of this historical foreshortening, which makes them appropriate.

It makes late Roman legislation, whether it's Christian framework, something that can be invoked and used. The text of the Bible is very, very central to everything that Charlemagne is trying to do in terms of an educative programme. His own sense that as ruler, he is responsible for the salvation of the people whom God has given to him to rule. He's got a relationship which stretches two ways. He's responsible to God, but he's also responsible to his subjects and for his subjects towards God. And the Bible is really the linchpin.

And by unpacking the Bible, and you can get almost any meaning out of the Bible, old and New Testament, of course, that you want. And there's a lot of debate about how to get that meaning out. You can build a Christian kingship, which uses Old Testament imagery, which has got absolutely gorgeous visual images of kingship in action in illuminative bibles. And in palaces and in buildings. You can stage. religious ceremonial, which has two centres, the altar of the church you're in,

but the king who is at the forefront of the congregation who's worshipping. And you can create a balancing, therefore, between the king and Christianity. How far do you think, just to take up briefly, Matthew Innes's idea, that this was a, they were trying to legitimize themselves and Christianity and the example of the great emperor Constantine, the first Christian Roman Empire, Emperor, sorry, and David and others in the Old Testament. That helped that process. And how far do you think we have this man who was intoxicated and saturated in Christianity?

I think Matthew's point about it's a way of overcoming a legitimacy deficit is hugely important. I don't think I would go to far as to say he's intoxicated by it. I think it's a very shrewd manipulation that it goes hand in hand, paripasu, with the military might of conquest. You can't have the one without the other. ideology without the physical practicalities of power isn't going to get you very far, particularly not in an early medieval society,

where the only face-to-face contact a king has with his subjects is there's relatively few people who are around him in the palace. I mean, this isn't an age of mass media, so you've got to work very, very, very hard to get the point across. He goes to Rome and becomes emperor. We're told by his biographer that he was taken by surprise at this. You've suggested he was more manipulative than I think. he was, but you know more than I do, so I accept that.

Do you think he goes to Roman, he walks in the church one morning and he's crowned emperor and he didn't know about it? I think it's totally and completely implausible. It's a standard modesty topos that, of course, when you're offered power, you gracefully decline and then you gracefully accept. We've got a whole range of other sources other than Einhardz, and what's quite clear is that there is a huge amount of disagreement. There's a whole prehistory to what went on on Christmas Day 800 in Rome,

involving relations between Charlemagne and Leo. In 799, Leo had been attacked. There was an attempt to depose him. He was mutilated. Some of the sources tell us that his tongue and his eyes were ripped out. Some of them tell us that they tried to rip out his tongue and his eyes. Some of them tell us that they ripped out his tongue and his eyes. And a miracle took place and he recovered.

But anyway, he fled to Charlemagne for help. In the summer of 799, Leo III crossed the Alps to Paderborn. something happened in Germany, in Paderborn. The Frankish sources and the papal sources give us a clear sense that they were spinning against each other. It's quite clear that something very important happened, but that they're not in agreement on it. Charlemagne goes to Rome, essentially to get Leo back on the papal throne in Rome.

And you do not have a congregation shouting in unison, hail to the emperor, if it's impromptu. Can I ask, turn to Mary Garrison now. Let's go back. We've got to 800 because it's just an exciting day, Christmas Day 800, but go back about to 25 years. And Charlemagne had in the possession of most of the areas that now comprise, let's say, modern France and the Frankish Rhineland. And then he expanded the empire further. Can you tell us about his abilities and his methods as a military ruler? So Charlemagne's success depended on tireless, ferocious campaigning, and it wasn't just tireless and ferocious.

He had to be victorious every year. In a sense, his campaigning is the dark side to this need for legitimacy in the Bible that Matthew and Julia have talked about. Charlemagne was ruling in some ways very much the way King's 100 and 200 years earlier had ruled through his ability to plunder every year and reward his followers with gold treasure. If there was no treasure, then there were slaves. In the middle of the 780s, when things weren't going so well, the nobles grew restive because there was no plunder. When we list his conquest, so Lombardy, Saxony, Bavaria, a bit of the Breton march, some of the Pyrenees,

eventually the Avars. We can say, you know, Charlemagne really had a tough time. He was campaigning for 30 years against the Saxons, but actually the fact that he could engage in expansionist punitive warfare outside his borders so that his own nobles weren't engaging in civil war is a crucial ingredient of his success. We might say with a king like this who needs treasure

rather than land to reward followers, as long as the snowball keeps rolling, it gets larger. When it stops rolling, it starts to melt. At the end of his reign, when he starts to seem to be much more interested in imperial representation, that's also the time the expansion has ended. So in a certain sense, treasure is the basis of the security. Can I go about, what were his methods?

Was he a particular legal general? Did he have more men than the others? Was he technologically more advanced than the Saxons, whom he ground into the ground? It's very hard to know about this. He was certainly, he had more iron weapons than others. So when Charlemagne's forces surrounded King Desiderius, in Pavia, Desiderius shouted, alas, the iron when he saw the spears, the Saxons would certainly have had inferior weapons. And later on, there were measures to to prevent the export of good metal weapons. But I think most of all it seems to be incredible physical energy and then also this ability to retain the loyalty of his men.

So in one year, Charlemagne marched from Lombardi up to Saxony, to keep on having nobles willing to leave their own territories and follow you year after year required massive resources. We can't compare him with a modern dictator or autocratic ruler because Charlemagne simply didn't have that machiner of coercion. He needed personal loyalty. Did he actually lead his man into battle? Almost all his campaigns in the first part of his reign were led by him.

Later on, his son's led campaign. So the great defeat of the Avars in the 790s was led by Erica Freuli and his son. But it does seem as if this personal relationship between Charlemagne's leader and the nobles who would gather every year in the Marchfield, it's one of the unquantifiable, unascertainable, crucial ingredients. So you're talking about a man who exists by plunder, so the living off the lands he conquers, and also the slave trade figures,

and then the wealth of the avars, the mysterious avas, suddenly turn out to be extraordinarily wealthy and set him up for a life of more expansion. Is that crudely the basis of his economic strength? This is absolutely the basis. This is essentially gold and silver treasure are the sine qua non of all of Charlemagne's military success but also of the incredible flowering

of the church and the production of manuscripts. I'm coming to that. I just want all the money at the moment. Why did the Avaas have so much money? Can anybody tell me? Can I'm fascinated? Is that why we get Avaricious from? I wouldn't know to Avaricious.

Probably not. I think the issue of the Avaas is interesting. There are step nomad people similar to the Huns who settled in the same area that the Huns settled before, and the Magia settle afterwards in the Carpathians. So it's sort of right at the far western end of the Eurasian step. They've been there for 200 years.

By the end of the 8th century when they're conquered, their kind of salad days are over. But in those 200 years of systemised plundering and tribute taking right across eastern central Europe and into Eurasia, they have amassed a huge amount of wealth in some kind of perhaps ceremonial enclosure at their central point. And when they get taken out very quickly in three years by the Franks, You have these wonderful poetic descriptions of the baggage train coming back.

But they're not the only, I mean, all of these enemies that get conquered have treasuries. When Charlemagne goes into Saxony, the first thing he does in 772 is he proclaims it a holy war by destroying the erminsul, which is some kind of pagan Saxon shrine. And the treasure from there is redistributed. Julia, can we turn now to religion? Because there's so much you say about Charmé. We've got to go to religion now. We've got to get to scholarship, so that's our job.

Charlemagne, we've talked about his Christianity. What sort of Christianity could it be described as? How would you describe his Christianity? What did he do for him and what did he do for it? I think there's one word which sums up a lot of what's going on, and that's the word correction, which is actually quite an optimistic notion. It's an idea that there is something that's better that's attainable. But it works at several different levels,

and many of the religious thinkers of Charlemagne's time are quite clear that you have to calibrate for the individual, the sort of appropriate religious response. And so the Christianity that's appropriate for the peasant is very different from that which is appropriate at the elite level. It's very much about encompassing all aspects of everyday life with clerical ritual, childbirth, marriage, sex, warfare, sitting in a law court giving judgment,

finding a Christian dimension, maybe an ethical dimension, it may be a ritual dimension. It's also about fostering a very, very basic common understanding so that this huge and sprawling empire is held together by a commonality, if not of belief, then at least of ritual and of practice. Harry Garrison, do we have much evidence for how he managed to implement what Julius Smith has described as a very intensive, all-encompassing and deeply penetrating political view of Christianity?

Do we have any evidence of how far that went, and what part did the monastery's play in this? So there's an enormous amount of evidence for the sort of attempt to implement these new policies on the ground as it were through the recopying of Charlemagne's capitularies, which combined sort of secular legal and religious provisions copied in many, many copies all across Europe for many of them. The monasteries are, we might almost think of them as the sort of batteries providing the electricity for this endeavor. So in the first instance, of course, there's prayer, not just prayer, but increasingly elaborate liturgical forms to pray for the king's victory. An Italian abbot who wouldn't pray for the king's victory and said something rude was almost excluded from his abyssey. The monasteries stored the books and libraries. And then there are some uses of the monasteries for Charlemagne's reform that aren't typical of other medieval kingdoms.

So there's the fact that Frankish monasteries owed Charlemagne military levies. And then there's the fact that monasteries had to have schools. And although the rule of Benedict provided for time for study and required some minimal Latin literate competence, there was no notion in the rule of Benedict or in the other monastic rules available then that the monastery would provide a school for the education

of people outside the monastery. But Charlemagne required that. It was useful, wasn't it? Because you've got boys. was always boys at the age of five or six from very wealthy families who went in and therefore they were trained the sons of let's say aristocrats

for the sake of just using a word and the aristocrats nearly always then followed up with money and so you could look at it again and you could say it was deeply Christian maybe also very effective of binding the empire together this multi-ethnic empire

yes and I think that's very important is that there is this commonality, that's Christianity, there is increasing attempts to define it in theological terms and to counteract some of the variant theological interpretations that the Carolingians come into contact with as their empire expands geographically and in particular as the area of the Pyrenees and the Spanish March was conquered, they came into contact with traditional Spanish forms of Christianity, which weren't 100% the same as what they were familiar with, and it caused immense problems, and these were debated in Charlemagne's presence,

in Charlemagne's presence and powerful attempts to argue against and to replace traditional local interpretations of Christian teaching with the authorised Carolingian view. I think we missed a stitch. I'm Mr. Stitch. I'm going to go back to Mara Garrison, about the military, which we can bring it in with the, Christian as well. We're missing out what we would call, well, brutality, savagery, the fact that the wars were wars

of attrition, and when Christianity heretics are dealt with quite brutally, if you ate meat in Lent as I understand it, you were executed and so on. Can you just give us, tell us a bit of that. We're talking about as if this were implemented entirely through Christian ideas. This was implemented by force,

isn't it? This is the dark side of religious force and coercion, which actually ends up becoming a source of serious debate in later decades when Alkewen objected to it. So the conversion of the Saxons entailed harsh punitive laws as you said, death for eating meat and lent, death for burning a church,

death for practicing the old rights of cremation, founding churches for the Saxons, not sort of as missionary gifts to bring the grace of God, but with the rules of plunder and booty. So the Saxons were forced to pay a tithe and pay taxes that would create their church,

in fact be located in a Frankish military enclosure in many cases. So they were sort of brought by the point of the sword. Literally at one point there was a massacre of 4,500 Saxon nobles who'd resisted Charlemagne's authority to Christianity with rules that for them emphasized external compliance with the new faith within the empire. Charlemagne was actually very interested in the inner disposition and not just external compliance, but this is the very harsh, dark side of Charlemagne's program. And what's interesting is that Charlemagne's goals changed in the debate at his court was lively enough

so we can see that this actually aroused debate and in later decades, more moderate measures would be followed. Can I come to Matthew for a moment and just let's, I'm still trying to get hold of you. You've got, this is commonly until quite recently, being called the Dark Ages. And I know that's disputed. We can perhaps come to that when we can talk about the scholarship at the time. But you have these great tracts of Europe.

Is it, here, Charlemagne, and taking on the course that laid down by his father, illuminating all this through Christianity, are these little settlements, as Mary hinted, little military settlements, little fortresses that is planting all over the place? How did he get to change most people, is what I'm trying to get at? Can you give us some view of that, Matthew? I think one of the crucial things, which we can see both from documentary, legal sources, and from the increasing amount of data we can get from settlement. We have a lot of data.

We have, I mean, if you look at the Rhine Valley, we have over 5,000 conveyancing deeds from this period, that's a lot of very boring data, but it is raw data that historians love. I mean, settlement archaeology has really taken off since the 60s, and we know a lot about what a village looks like in this period. Now, what that evidence shows us is the sort of thickening of a web of churches on the ground. If you look at your typical rural settlement that's been excavated in the,

this period, what we see is a kind of slow focusing of the settlement. It's more nucleated. It's more stable in its sighting. And nine times out of ten, the focal point for these more stable settlements will be a church and the associated churchyard cemetery. You have the community of the Christian dead being brought to the heart of the community of the living and defining the identity of that community. And the church really, and we can see this with legislation, the church trying to establish a monopoly over the relationships between the living and the dead through control of death ritual,

through control of baptism as well, which is at the other end of life. As I understood it, more than about 270 churches were built in, so it was a kingship in stone, Julia. Yes. I want to come in here on this point that what's going on in Saxony showed us very much the dark side

of Christianisation at Soul Point, and indeed it does. But Saxony is only one of the areas that make up this hugely heterogeneous empire. The Rhineland is another where there are Christian origins which go back to the late Roman 5th century. But there are parts of this empire where Christianity has been there since the first and second century. And the point I simply want to make is that we shouldn't generalise from Saxony to the entirety of this empire. What happened in Saxony, massacres, ethnic cleansing, to put it bluntly in modern parlance, the use of hostages who were taken for re-education.

It's short, sharp, it's horrific. but it's only one region of this hugely heterogeneous empire. And what happens elsewhere is quite different. Sorry, after you, Matthew. I mean, I think sort of following on from that and from your question, Melvin, I think one of the things that's going on is there are more churches there. These churches have priests, and the crucial job for the Carolingian regime is to turn these priests into the kind of hinge figures

who can transmit royal will down to peasants at the locality. We have an awful lot of legislative sources for this, both from kings. We also have bishops issue in legislation, and tell him priests what they should do what they shouldn't do. The way you're describing it, it seems to me, might seem to this as more political than Christian. I'm quite interested in this balance in his mind here because we get views of him being a little boy jumped into a grave

to venerate the bones of a saint and so on and all that. So are we still thinking of it as an instrument of state more than as his expression of Christianity. Mary first and then you. Maybe one way to answer this question would be to look and see where there are changes in Charlemagne's policy and a big change would come after some huge setbacks in 777 and 778. And you might say that before then Charlemagne was a nominally Christian king who was a very, very good warrior. The setbacks might have indicated to him that he'd lost God's favor.

And so there's a crucial and rather sudden change after. that that Charlemagne brings scholars to the court, he issues a new capitulary that shows a kind of seriousness about the ruler's duty to ensure the salvation of his subjects that wasn't evident in earlier documents. Matthew, you'll be able to... I think following on from what Mary says, I think there's just a fundamental difference in this political universe of Christian kingship in actually distinguishing between the church and the state in our terms.

The big piece of legislation that comes out of the changes that Mary has described is the general admonition of 7-8-9, probably written by... Alquin. And the programme in this is to establish peace, unity and concord among the Christian people. That's the job of the Christian King. Some of it's done by priests, some of it's done by royal officials. But the boundaries between the two are actually

very, very blurred. And the building instead, the cathedrals as well as the church of the Julia. I think that follows on exactly from what Matt has just said that the dichotomy between religion and politics is a modern one which we shouldn't juxtapose back onto this period. And when you got, for example, the royal

palace at Archen, with the imperial chapel at its center. It's a stage for the enactment of rituals of kingship, but at its heart is a religious building. And you can't separate the secular and the religious ceremonial in a place like that, nor in his ideas of what it is to be either king or emperor, can you separate them? Good. To sort of take up Julius' point, even to continue this idea that there's not a separation between religious and political within the realm of religion where Charlemagne was very interested in standard practice in the liturgy and cruelt.

correct chanting. He's also extremely concerned with correct inner disposition. So the admonitio that Matthew mentioned actually has a provision saying how bad malice and dissension is. And here he's not speaking of civil war, but the sort of feuds and nastiness among his bishop. So this is truly a concern to sort of like transform the hearts and souls of his subjects as well as their outward obedience. To stray outside, Charlemagne, for one moment after his death, this movement continued.

into law and discipline. And we have the theologian Gottschalk. Is that how he pronounced it? Gottschalk. Yeah. And what was his contribution? In a way, I think Gottschalk's an interesting figure because he shows, once you've sort of re-established the sort of tools to ask fundamental questions about the Christian faith

and about learning and its place in society, you can open all kinds of cans of worms. Gottshark has a very long and turbulent career right through the middle of the 9th century. He's actually one of these child oblate. He's a second generation Saxon. He's a boy going into a monastery. He's a second generation Saxon. His name actually means offering to God. He's given to the monks at Fuller to be educated there. He gets in all kinds of scrapes, but basically he's an intellectual superstar who starts looking at some of the fundamental issues about predestination and free will. If God's omniscient, how can individual human beings exercise agency that allows them to be saved

through good works. This is something that no one in the West has really fought systematically about since Augustine. It's something that's actually very difficult to say anything about without starting a new heresy anyway. And unsurprisingly, Gottschalk very quickly gets accused of being a heretic. He's accused of preaching double predestination where God's predestined some people to heaven and some for hell. And the major bishops of his time are absolutely terrified because, as they say, if everyone's predestined to heaven or hell, why will they do penance, give arms or do good works? and there is a long campaign to try and got Schall Kup,

which actually interestingly doesn't really work. So we've looked at the way Shalman built up his empire and the religious element. And I think that it was a very good corrective of Julius to say that it's looking back on separating at that time. They were interlocked. There were two sides of the same coin. In fact, he had coins struck, didn't he, with himself on one side

and trice on the other. So there. Now let's talk about the scholarship, which when people think of the word Renaissance, which will come to in a moment in the Kareling, they think climate scholarship court. Talk about what evidence we have for it, first, Mary Garrison. I understand there are a remarkable number of texts survive for this period. Can you give us an idea how many and why I use the word remarkable?

So to give an idea in quantitative terms of the significance of the Renaissance, they're sort of two contrast to observe. The first is that between about 0 AD and 800, we have 2,000 fragments of Latin manuscripts. In contrast, between 800 and 900, there are 7,000 surviving manuscripts. And when you consider that making a manuscript then was perhaps a cost comparable to a laptop computer, this is phenomenal. A second way of seizing this renaissance and quantitative terms would be to look at the survival of classical texts

and the copying of classical texts. Those 2,000 manuscripts before 800 are overwhelmingly manuscripts of the Bible, and the fathers of the church. If we look at the copying of classical manuscripts, more classical manuscripts. Over 250 were copied between 800 and 900 than were copied in any other following century until the 15th century, the real Renaissance.

So that gives us some idea of the quantity. Julius Smith, can you tell us how the intensification of cultural activity are preceded under Charlemagne? He has this court. He decided, do we know why he wanted so much to bring in the scholars? Was it part of his Christian?

It's a traditional ruler prestige thing at one level, but at another level what's going on is that the court is actually like an entrepreneur. Scholars, books, saints' relics, treasures are being sucked in and recycled and redistributed. The court isn't a static centre and the link between what's happening in the Central East of Sholomain's reign

and the legacy in succeeding generations is this redistribution. Scholars go to the court, spend some time there, return to monasteries here, there and everywhere. It's pump-priming what's happening in many, many other places. Books are being copied at the court. People are writing to the court, taking books out elsewhere. And I think it's very, very important that we don't have this static notion of the court.

It's embedded in regional cultures through the monasteries, through the bishoprics, through the elite secular leaders, the aristocrats who are coming annually, twice annually to the court, returning to the provinces. That this is ideas, books, peoples are in circulation. Through education, it is hoped the standard of the local clergy will improve. If you improve the standard of the local clergy, then there is a chance that the local communities may be better taught and that their Christianity may improve.

But that's the point at which it becomes very, very hard to measure and to quantify any level of success. Certainly by the later 9th century, by the 850s, 860s, 870s, one can begin to see something about what some local priests are doing in their locality. But for the reign of Charlemagne,

we can't really say how much of the high ideal turns into nitty-gritty practice out there in the boondocks of his empire. I understand, Matian, that Charlemagne couldn't read or write, but he insisted on being read to Meal, St. Augustine was on. So we're talking about somebody

whose own passions, as far as we can make out from, we know about him, entered into his policy, again, as with, if we can call Christianity a passion, as he did with that. Sure. I mean, I think the point about reading and writing is interesting, because I think there's one problem which is our modern ideas of literacy don't work for this period. Learning to read is not the, is different to, is a separate process to learning to write in this period. And actually learning to write is a very specialized scribal skill. It's the kind of craft thing. Reading when people read, it's normally reading aloud to a group.

So one doesn't necessarily have to read oneself unless one's a monk and it is reading for internal reflection. But the reading of the city of God at Mealtimes at Charlemagne's court is something that comes out of monastic culture, monastic mealtime readings. And this is, again, Julia's notion of the court as a centre of education that's almost like a monastery, except it's not full of monks, it's full of nobles. And we actually have one text which says, you know, monasteries are schools for the laws,

a schools for religious discipline, but the court is a school for secular discipline. Can I come to Alquin now, a Northumbrian who came from York, one of the great Anglo-Saxon scholars in the Northumbrian tradition, who came, well, Iona Lindisfarne down into York and south, and then across into the Frankish Empire, Alquin, became known as the teacher of Europe. Now, can you tell us, Mary Garrison,

can you tell us something of Alquin and why he was so trusted by and embraced by Sharlow? So Alcuin came from the school, of York, which had an outstanding library in the broadest curriculum of any place at the time. And at York, we have the names of his students, whereas Beade in Wehrmath and Jaro could not inaugurate a continuous tradition of students after him. Alcuin somehow inspired personal devotion from his students and had a friendship with Charlemagne that still can be detected through the letters. Alcuin was remembered as a man most learned in every field, the man

who Charlemagne always wanted by his side and who Charlemagne alone permitted to disagree with him. His intellectual contributions are enormous. I would say, you can't quite say without Alcuin, no Charlemagne, but without Alcuin, we wouldn't have the 10th century foundations of cathedral schools. Alcuin reintroduced the study of logic, and he reintroduced Pristian's long grammar book, a thousand printed pages. This is the metal language, a language to talk about language, the language to talk about thought.

It's these innovations that make the theological controversies of the 9th century possible. He also reintroduced the consolation of philosophy by Boethius, produced an addition of the Bible with corrections and emendations that still cited in the apparatus

to the Latin Vulgate. He was also remembered as the man who taught every member of the next generation of scholars. So he combined massive encyclopedic learning. I think he had the energy that Charlemagne put into campaigning, Alcuin put into writing treatise after treatise

on the basic liberal arts and then teaching students. One more character, before we can generalise this discussion a little more, Matthew and his thoughts is Charlemagne's excuse me, biographer Einhardt, the man who said he received the crown modestly. So how much do you take from Einhardt? He wrote a very long biography

and he was at the court of Charlemagne for a long time. Charlemagne, one of the things that people might not know. He ruled for an end by those standards, an extraordinary long time. over 40 years. I mean, it's 7, 6, 8, 28, 40 years. I mean, Einhardt's an interesting figure because he gets to this issue about how these religious ideas

received by the laity. He's a member of a sort of landed gentry family who's educated in a monastery, although not a monk. Talent spotted and goes to the court where he spends his whole career as a sort of career courtier putting the emperors, both on the Charlemagne and Salaman Sun Lue de Paz, putting the emperors willing to action. I mean, we have this wonderful biography of

Garlimein, highly classicising. He says that he's following Cicero. We can see that he's actually following Soutonius' lives of the Roman emperors even closer than he's following Cicero. Highly classicising, highly disingenuous. It's a very clever text we have. Letters from people at the time who read it, he says, this is really something. But it's kind of almost written in code because it's sort of, if you're clever enough, you realize there are all these Roman references and it's drawing clever literary comparisons. And this reflects what Mary is saying, you know, that there's a basic level of education you need to understand this text and to decode what he's saying when he's drawing comparisons with Roman emperors. I mean, interestingly for Einhardt, you know, this looks like a very humanistic, classicizing text. Interestingly, we know a lot about Einhardt's other activities. He steals the relics of Roman saints of Roman martyrs from Roman, founds churches for them,

and we have a whole set of, you know, what to us look in comparison like quite barbarous miracle stories. This is the other side of the coin. There's the sort of classicising image building with the religious foundation. We also have his business letters which are great because it's sort of, you can't get decent servants these days. Pork's too expensive. I think the one thing I'd say about his life of Charlemagne is that it's the ultimate in image making

and it was so successful that it's the image which has stood the test of time from his own day right to our own present day. And it's taken a lot of hard intellectual effort on the part of modern scholars to begin to crack it open and suggest that the subject. something else going on. So it was an astonishingly successful piece of ideology, propaganda, spin that hoodwinked centuries and centuries and centuries and scholars. Can you give us a couple of examples, Julia, what has been cracked to show us what's going on? I think a whole range of things. His family relationships is one. Einhard's description of his family relationship as an abidst

description of Charlemagne's family relationships is one. Another is this very, very obvious point about what happened or didn't happen in Rome on Christmas Day 800. a sense that it's driven by an altruistic Christian piety rather than by something that's rather more hard-edged, a sense that it's a renaissance in which Ciceronian Latin is at its heart. And Mary may disagree with me, but I don't think that most other people, other than Einhard and one or two others,

would have said that the intellectual endeavours were essentially Ciceronianizing renaissance. I think it was much more else that was going on that was more important for other people. people. In the final mini lab, can I come to the word Renaissance, which has been not banded about, but used two or three times across this table? Do you think it could be called Renaissance? Renaissance has very, very powerful connotations with what happened about five, six hundred years later, the Renaissance. Why do you want to use? Why is the word Renaissance useful here? Mary, yes.

In the first place, Charlemagne's courtiers and poets used that word themselves, interestingly, only in texts addressed to Charlemagne, so they truly believed it was a Renaissance in a sense They're the inventors of a renaissance. But it's also curious and surprising that the word renaissance was used about the Carolingians before Burkart, before Michelet, by a Frenchman in 1839. So there's certainly a sense

that they're participating in a renaissance, a renaissance of scholarship, a renaissance of creating an empire that had lands that had been previously not properly subdued. Do you agree with this word of renaissance as applied here? I think we need to shed it

quadrigenter implications. And we need to put the classicizing trends within a very much broader context of an emphasis on Christian learning for which, to use one of Alquin's metaphors, classical learning are the pillars which hold up the temple of Christian wisdom, that classical learning for almost all these people

is a tool towards a higher religious end. And I think simply to call it a Renaissance and focus on the classical side of it is to ignore the wider contextualization. And Matthew, in our end or our beginnings, we started with you, so here you go. I mean, in a way, I'd see the key to what's going on is this notion of Christian correction and renewal and the use of Christianity in the context of state formation, I think. But once the kind of developments that Mary is talking about are going on,

once you start getting scholarly patronage and these new intellectual tools being used, it opens a whole kind of worms so that, you know, people who are able and interested like Einhardt or Gottschalk can start to ask questions that, haven't really been asked for three or four hundred years. So to that extent, there's a renaissance, but I don't think that's Charlemagne's intention. Well, thank you very much. I'm really enjoying that.

Thank you very much, Matthew Innes, Mary Garrison and Julia Smith. Next week, we'll be talking about Gertr, not only a great writer, but also a theatre director, and art critic, a natural scientist, and a privy counsellor. Thank you for listening.

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