by Simon Winder
Almost all the economy that peeped above the level of subsistence went on spiritual issues – the preparation for the far more serious business of the Afterlife. We are used to seeing major cathedrals in major modern cities: Cologne, say, or Antwerp, where the buildings’ size hold their own even as we wade through endless shopping centres and tram stations to reach them. A more striking dip into the past comes from seeing a great cathedral surviving in what has, for many reasons, become or remained a small town. Toul is a perfect example: an ancient Roman Moselle town (Tullum Leucorum) and seat of Christianity, its last great effort before falling into economic irrelevance seems to have been to create its immense cathedral, completed in the fourteenth century, but probably the sixth on the same site (originally that of a Roman temple). As only sixteen thousand people live in Toul now (and it still sits behind its seventeenth-century fortifications), the cathedral remains almost crazily out of scale with its meagre surroundings, like a crashed chunk of one of Darth Vader’s Star Destroyers. It looks as though all the other houses in Toul could fit inside. Or there is the sight as the train passes over the bridges at the awe-inspiring Holland Deep of Dordrecht, with its aptly named Great Church, a structure so huge it appears to be the result of some ancient feet-for-inches mistake in interpreting the plan. Even in earlier versions these churches were also vast – their building and then restless rebuilding would have been for centuries a town’s principal non-workaday goal. What we would view as the aim – their completion – was far less important than the process itself, with different parts under temporary roofs coming into use for different generations. To say that they were the ‘focus’ of life would be too narrow: they were the point of life and attracted much of the money that was not devoted to the lower-level business of simply staying alive and in reasonable comfort.
The missing part of this discussion, and where it began, is the role of the ruler. There were never individual, separate communes except in the very remote fringes of Europe. But the nature of the association that would result in security and success has never been resolved, either before or since – effectively, any political discussion about anything in 2017 (when I am writing this paragraph) is merely the latest instalment of something which has gone on for ever. The need for defence (walls, moats, troops) was always very expensive and awkward and as unresolvable as deciding how high a church tower needs to be to look suitably ecstatic and holy and not risk appearing a bit cheap (church towers always being essential also as defensive watch towers, and their bells regulating town-wide military instructions). Everyone understood that pouring cash into vast walls could be more damaging than spending the money on less dull improvements and on trade with neighbouring towns. But equally there was town after town which made a rational decision about cutting back on military training and not bothering to maintain the boring old defensive sluice system, only to find itself burned to the ground. Anybody interested in history is always looking at the big events – the town under siege, the battle down the road – but another way of thinking is to look at the periods of peace in any specific community. If somewhere has been completely tranquil for a couple of generations, who is going to have the courage to suggest that the money for the jolly carnival feast this year really ought to be spent on hiring a few archers just in case?
These interactions have never stopped, but they are poorly recorded. We are still at a loss as to how most of the empire really functioned. The constituent parts of the Frankish Empire were, like all its predecessors big or small, partly enforced at sword-point, but were also partly a sensible scaling-up for protection and mutual aid. In the eleventh century western Europe increasingly became a sort of back country, away from the main external threats, as the Vikings became Christian. The Magyars and the Slavs had ceased to be a problem after the Emperor Otto the Great defeated them at the Battles of Lechfeld and Recknitz in 955. Germanic settlers (which would at this point be taken to mean anyone not speaking lingua romana – so including the ‘Dutch’) moved east, creating many of the towns around which eastern German Christian culture was built, most importantly Otto’s foundation at Magdeburg, which became the central focus for a mass movement, using town models first established in the west, and where Otto is buried – a vast jump forward, some three hundred miles east from the old stamping ground at Aachen.
In parallel with Charlemagne’s wars with the Saxons and Avars and Otto’s further march east in the following century, although with very tangled and widely variegated roots, a modern geography emerged, with regions ruled by counts, margraves or dukes, and which brought its own variants on protection and exploitation. These figures generally owed their supremacy to either the King in Paris or to the peripatetic Emperor in one of his palaces and had shadowy ancestors from the time of the Viking invasions – as local commanders had to deal with the nightmarish world of sea- and river-borne irruption. In the 850s there is a Count of Artois, in the 860s a Margrave of Flanders, in the 880s a Count of Holland. There was the formidable if murky Reginar ‘Longneck’, who was possibly the Emperor Lothair I’s grandson, but in any event accumulated the roles of Duke of Lotharingia, Count of Liège, Duke of Hainaut and Count of Mons and who seems to have been present at all kinds of great if barely recorded events: awkwardly and uncheckably he could have been several people, as Reginar was then a fashionable name. His four children became respectively Duke of Lorraine, Archbishop of Mainz, Archbishop of Utrecht and Count of Hainaut – in fact his descendants (the ‘Reginarids’) cascade down through the region’s choicest properties (Leuven, Brussels, Limburg) for nearly five hundred years, before at last messing up and, with no males in sight, handing their legacy over to one of the sons of the Duke of Burgundy, just in time for him to be killed at the Battle of Agincourt, in a very different world. Another Reginarid branch went on to rule Hesse until 1918.
It is impossible to repeat too often: the lack of surviving documents does not mean that people were standing around vacantly in the mud, picking their noses and waiting for something to turn up. I have felt this ever since I wandered around the colossal, wholly-illiterate-Treveri-built fortress town discussed earlier: on a mission not to confuse the human trait of happening to write things down with a workable, indeed complex Europe. These rulers, scattered across Lotharingia, from the mouths of the Rhine down to the Swiss Alps, were in some cases secular, in others religious, in some cases pious, in others psychotic. How they managed to rule over their people and how they were ruled over by their sometimes notional and remote, and sometimes frighteningly immediate and focused kings would be the motor which ran European history until the twentieth century.
Imperial grandeur and decay
It would be special pleading on a grand scale to pretend that Christian Western Europe’s situation did not become fairly poor during the century after Charlemagne’s death. Indeed, it has been convincingly argued that the cult of Charlemagne really only got under way in the ghastly and nostalgic world of the 880s. Notker the Stammerer’s extensive if unreliable anecdotes of Charlemagne were written to cheer up the sad, hopeless, ill Emperor Charles III ‘the Fat’, looking back on a golden world of order and achievement, free both of marauders and of a seemingly limitless supply of mean, disloyal vassals. By 882, in a thoughtful piece of symbolic redecoration, a Viking army had converted Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen into stables.
The Emperor and the Pope and their fates were so entangled that their tumbling prestige dragged everyone down into the swamp, just as when they were both in the ascendant they tended to clash. Christian Western Europe was a very small place, under attack from Muslims and pagans at almost every point and with large areas we now take for granted (Spain and Portugal, much of Britain, all of Scandinavia, Saxony eastwards) non-Christian. Travelling back and forth down the Rhine to Rome was almost the only tourism option available. The bottom of the trough of humiliation was hit by Pope Formosus, whose pontificate was so riven by faction that after his death he was famously dug up, wrapped in papal
robes and tied to his throne so he could be put on trial at what became known as the ‘Cadaver Synod’. As a rotting corpse clad in gold cloth, he listened as best he could to closing statements from m’learned friend while in other news the brutal Rollo and his Viking (Normands) friends were busy devastating West Francia and carving out what became Normandy. This failure of political and religious leadership must have made life grim for most people. The only good news was that the Emperor Arnulf managed in 891 at the Battle of Leuven (the first ever mention of this crucial town) to devastate a Viking army heading south through the Netherlands – an early indicator that for some parts of Europe at least the scourge might be over.
Lotharingia continued to be projected upon by the ambitions of the rulers of West and East Francia. It was a kingdom and therefore grand and important, including at Aachen the core Charlemagne seal of approval. Charles III the Simple of West Francia became King of Lotharingia in 911, but his reign became engulfed in such a welter of fiascos that it is shaming even to sketch these in. Among the many things that go badly for him is the arrival of Henry I the Fowler, King of East Francia, who charges into Lotharingia, ending its independent status and turning it into a major dukedom. Henry is principally known to us today as the bluff, firm-but-fair rugby-coach-like ruler in Wagner’s Lohengrin (1850), who is rather comically out of his depth with the more mystical, swan-oriented elements in the opera and keen only to get on with persuading the good people of Brabant to help him kill Hungarian raiders. He sings things like ‘For German soil the German sword!’ which made generations of German nationalist inadequates sob and go bandy-legged, but which now seems odd to us given the squarely Belgian nature of the opera’s location.
By the time Henry the Fowler arrived on the scene (and his ascent to power is wholly mysterious, with no surviving record beyond a trite legend), Frankish power in West Francia had retreated to the area around the Île-de-France and in East Francia around the Middle Rhine. Henry began a long period of triumphant expansion, during which both what was now undoubtedly France and ‘the Empire’ (more poorly defined) became recognizable entities. The hold Henry and his successors had over Lotharingia was crucial as it provided their ever more important cultic link to Aachen (cleaned of Vikings and their horses) and entangled them in the resources and prestige of the three ancient religious territories of Trier, Cologne and Mainz. The Ottonian dynasty (919–1024) and the Salian dynasty (1024–1125) formalized and extended a structure of duchies, counties and margravates (border defence zones – the same word as the English ‘marcher’) that endured through various twists and turns until 1918, with their ghosts still turning up today in local, harmless forms.
The Ottonians showed a chaotic carelessness in their burial arrangements, winding up in (in order) Quedlinburg, Magdeburg, Rome, Aachen and Bamberg. Nineteenth-century nationalist historians disliked this messiness and were also enraged by Emperors’ endless visits to Italy, both as rulers of parts of northern Italy and because it was the Pope in Rome who made them Emperor. This historians’ fury fed into German nationalist paranoia about Catholicism and the unhappiness that medieval German identity was as much tied to the whim of ‘a gentleman living in Rome’ as to the swords of Germanic liege-men being beaten on their shields in a Lohengrin-like manner.
Some of these historians’ and archaeologists’ motives may now seem distasteful but it is thanks to their rooting in dirty archives and digging away in mouldering vaults that we know what we do. And many of them were as much motivated by the consistent, attractive localism (not just a Rhineland localism, say, but a Cologne localism) that continues to be Germany’s great saving grace. Without their obsessive tidying and reorganizing we would not have the superb spectacle provided by descending into the crypt of Speyer Cathedral. This amazing subterranean twenty-foot-high columned hall was built in 1041 and is substantially unchanged – an area that has not seen daylight for almost a millennium. It is the shrine of the Ottonians’ successors, the Salian dynasty, from Emperor Conrad II (son of Count Henry of Speyer and Adelaide of Alsace) to Henry V. They are all down here: although two died in Utrecht meaning that their bowels and hearts are separately buried in the cathedral there.1 The first great Habsburg, Emperor Rudolf I, is also here, his superb cenotaph statue glowering from a wall. The whole vault was picked over and fixed up just before the First World War and as a result the local museum is filled with sensational stuff: for example, the crowns the Emperors were buried with turned out – reasonably enough given their lack of future wear-and-tear – to be very cheaply made. Or Henry III’s cross and orb, or Henry V’s spurs. Gisela of Swabia, Conrad II’s Empress, was dug up and found to be a mummified blonde. What fun everyone must have had, scrabbling about among these horrors, all beautifully photographed (Philip of Swabia was simply mulch plus a skull). You almost expect on touching the tombs today to find them slightly warm – or to feel uneasy because of some residual hum of power, emanated at a frequency we can only intermittently hear.
Accidental fires, deliberate explosions, drastic changes in architectural taste have twisted and turned the extraordinary imperial buildings but they still preserve a powerful sense of purpose and political-military heft. The yawing, cavernous spaces of Mainz, Speyer or Worms cathedrals need to be experienced in all weathers and light conditions. Speyer at night in winter is hard to beat, with isolated pools of electric light and thousands of tons of cold stone somehow held in place above your head.
In a side chapel in Mainz Cathedral is the Udenheimer Crucifix – a simple, painted wooden cross from 1070, with a shockingly direct, almost naive statue of Christ staring down at its latest worshipper across staggering distances of time. The crucifix was made during the reign of Emperor Henry IV. If the ‘Cadaver Synod’ had marked a nadir for the papacy, then Henry was unlucky enough to live at a time of healthy rebound for that institution. A striking feature of the Empire was the both secular and religious nature of many of its territories. For example, back in the days of Otto the Great, Otto’s brother Bruno was simultaneously Duke of Lotharingia and Archbishop of Cologne (where he created the great cathedral which, alas, burned to the ground in 1248, resulting in the embarrassing shambles of stops-and-starts that meant it took six hundred years to replace). Emperors had become used to choosing their own top clerics and indeed relied on them both spiritually and militarily. Henry IV was an effective ruler, battling against recalcitrant Thuringians and Saxons and pagan Slavs in Mecklenburg. In Rome, Pope Gregory VII felt it was completely reasonable that the Church should actually control itself; making its own appointments, operating in parallel to the secular authorities – in other words controlling the ‘investiture’ of its staff. This was an ancient assertion and the various convulsions it provoked at different times did varying amounts of damage. Gregory’s attempts to enforce his views on investiture caused mayhem. Henry held a synod at Worms at which he persuaded ‘his’ bishops to depose the Pope – Gregory then shook out his entire bag of tricks: threats, fighting, bribes, anti-King Rudolf crowned at Mainz, anti-King Hermann, anti-King Egbert, several invasions of Italy and eventual rebellion by Henry’s own son. After Henry died at Liège while handling the latest daft twist in the saga, his body suffered the near unique oddity of being buried outside Speyer Cathedral in unconsecrated ground until his excommunication was lifted six years later and he could be moved inside.
Rather like the scenario in one of those science-fiction movies where a universe is only kept in existence through the will of some all-clever being, and shatters if he is even for a moment distracted, the Empire had a tendency to break apart if the Emperor lost concentration. But in common with France and England there were always powers which tended to collude with its rebuilding, who would for familial, mercenary or ideological reasons rally to him. The Investiture Controversy was settled under Henry’s son Henry V, who, at the Concordat of Worms in 1122, agreed to papal control over appointments but with steering from himself. It preserved the specific nature of the Empire, whe
re the many religious territories and their countless sprinkled ‘immunities’ were effectively self-governing in a peculiar mixture of the sacred and profane. This concordat was viewed as the founding shambles by nineteenth-century German historians, the point where Germany went on its own splintered path to weakness and futility while England and France became proper nation states. It embedded the major separate religious territories of Utrecht, Liège, Cologne and the rest, down to tiny but persistent scattered bits of land like those owned by the Abbeys of Stavelot or Prüm. But these German historians were blinded by much later anti-Catholic hatreds inexplicable back in the twelfth century. The vast bulks of the Imperial cathedrals on the Rhine alone show how power lay in a unique tangle between emperors, secular lords and religious lords – but with the sacred underpinning always crucial. Mainz Cathedral was one of the biggest buildings made since the Roman Empire and is still there, while the imperial palaces are all gone and would never have been as grand as the cathedral.
It is undoubtedly true, though, that the Empire that stretched from the mouths of the Rhine and Scheldt to its expanding eastern fighting frontier was structured in a pattern of smaller units – a bit like the hidden matrix structure within the glass of car windscreens – which under stress could break into pieces. Each had its own history, institutions, strengths and weaknesses. As each colonial eastern territory was bashed into shape in the eleventh and twelfth centuries it tended to stay in the same medieval family’s grip – with the Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, Wettins and Mecklenburgs going through many tribulations but grimly holding on until their disgusted subjects finally ejected them in the twentieth century. The older western lands had persistence and strength, setting up rough sets of boundaries and defining who should rule any or all of them. These different entities would either raise up or crush into the dirt any number of conquering heroes in centuries to come.