The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

by Chris Wickham

  The two major dynasties of kings in Ireland both contained several separate kingdoms, in rivalry with each other: the Uí Néill, dominant in Meath and western Ulster, the more powerful of the two, and the Éoganachta, dominant in Munster. Each of these dynasties had a main ritual centre, Tara and Cashel respectively, which was not actually lived in (Tara was an ancient and abandoned hill-fort; Cashel was newer, and later had a church built on it); the paramount king of the dynasty at any given moment was king of Tara or of Cashel. The Uí Néill and the Éoganachta seem to have established their dominance in the fifth century, although exactly how is obscure; Níall Noígíallach, the ancestor of the Uí Néill, is a largely legendary figure. Before their appearance, an important centre was Emain Macha (now Navan Fort) near Armagh. This was the focus of the entirely legendary saga-cycle of Cúchulainn, hero-fighter for King Conchobar of the Ulaid, the original core tribe of Ulster, whose kings were pushed east into modern Antrim and Down by the Uí Néill; they made up four kingdoms there by the sixth century. Leinster was largely outside the dominance of the two dynasties, and so even was Connacht, the poorest province, though the Uí Néill seem to have come from there originally and claimed kinship with the major dynasties of kings there. Successful Uí Néill kings could nonetheless claim temporary hegemonies among the kingdoms of any province except Munster (the Éoganachta, by contrast, stayed in Munster until the eighth century).

  Amid the hundreds of Irish kings sparely documented in rival sets of annals, a few stand out. Diarmait mac Cerbhaill (d. 565) was arguably the king who moved the Uí Néill from legend into history (though many traditional stories attach themselves to him, too); he was ancestor of the main dynasties of the Uí Néill in Meath, and from his time onwards, at the latest, there was seldom doubt of the family’s dominance in the midlands and north of the island. Báetán mac Cairill (d. 581) of the Ulaid kingdom of Dál Fiatach attempted to establish a hegemony over the Isle of Man and Dál Riata in western Scotland as an alternative power-focus to the Uí Néill. He failed, but he shows that the fifth-century political settlement was not immutable. Seventh-century politics was more stable, with kings from the rival branches of the main dynasties succeeding each other regularly in all the provinces. We begin to find wider ambition again in the eighth. One example is Cathal mac Finguine (d. 742) of the Éoganacht Glendamnach in modern northern Cork, who began for the first time to link up with Leinster kings and attack Meath, until Áed Allán (d. 743) of the Cenél nÉogain, the northern Uí Néill of Tyrone, held him back in Munster in 737-8. Another is Donnchad Midi mac Domnaill (d. 797) of the Clann Cholmáin of the Uí Néill of Meath, who from the 770s was paramount in Leinster and keen to fight Munster kings as well. Their successors, Feidlimid mac Crimthainn (d. 841) from the Éoganacht of Cashel, easily the most aggressive Munster king before the end of the tenth century, and his Uí Néill enemies will be looked at in Chapter 20; the ninth century was more clearly a period of political aggregation, when traditional rules were disrupted by Viking attack and increasingly broken by native rulers as well. But there was a continuity from the eighth century all the same; that was when ambitious kingship first broke the old boundary between the Éoganachta and the Uí Néill. Conversely, Donnchad Midi did not obviously have a style of kingship that differed from that of his ancestor Diarmait mac Cerbhaill; the Irish were very slow indeed to consider the sort of political infrastructural change that was developing in England.

  Ireland began to convert to Christianity in the fifth century, thanks largely to the mission of the Briton Patrick, whose writings survive but whose own career (and even dating) is largely obscure; by the late sixth, when Irish written sources begin, formal paganism seems only a memory, at least among élites, and the clergy fitted easily into the learned professions after that. But Irish Christianity was different. It had an episcopal network, attached to the kingdoms, but it also had an increasingly wealthy and powerful network of monastic families, whose connections went in different directions from those of political and episcopal hierarchies. Armagh claimed episcopal primacy from the seventh century onwards, on the grounds of a largely spurious association with Patrick. This was contested by Kildare in Leinster, and largely ignored by the churches subject to the monastery of Iona in western Scotland; the latter was the chief cult site of Dál Riata, but was, interestingly, controlled by an Uí Néill dynasty from the time of its foundation by Colum Cille (Columba, d. 597) in 563. The monastery of Clonmacnois in the centre of Ireland had fewer claims to primacy, but achieved considerable wealth by obtaining land and lesser monasteries, in an area of relatively weak kingdoms (its abbots were generally drawn from aithechthúatha), and by the mid-eighth century was prosecuting its own secular politics by force of arms. The episcopal and monastic churches had firmer views on accumulating wealth in land (as opposed to cattle) than most kings and aristocrats, and by the eighth century their leaders were probably richer than all but a few kings; this was a future resource for political power (and, by the ninth century, an object of plunder by royal rivals as well). The Irish church had some sense of Ireland-wide identity, just as the legal profession had. Church councils began already in the 560s, education in Latin must have begun around then too, and in the seventh century there was a flowering of ecclesiastical literature - hagiography, penitentials, poetry, grammars - parallel to that of secular law. Irish clerics and intellectuals had some influence in Francia, from Columbanus (d. 615) to John the Scot (d. c. 877), the ninth-century West’s greatest theologian. But that identity was not, unlike eventually in England, in itself an underpinning for secular ambition; the Irish church was in its own way as fragmented as secular authority.

  The tiny northern Antrim kingdom of Dál Riata seems to have expanded into western Scotland from the late fifth century, occupying what is now Argyll and some of the Hebridean islands. Its king Áedán mac Gabráin (d. c. 609), Columba’s patron, had thirty years of military protagonism in northern Britain (he fought and lost to Æthelfrith in 603), and so did some of his successors, at least up to the 640s; after that, Dál Riata power in Scotland fragmented into two or three rival lineages with separate power-bases, a process familiar in Ireland as well. Argyll was nonetheless a solid political focus; it was in size, even though probably not in resources, already larger than any kingdom in Ireland. The colonial bet of sixth-century Dál Riata in this respect paid off. In the eighth century, starting with Onuist son of Urguist, it was subject to Pictish hegemony more often than not, and this continued into the ninth, although by then intermarriage between the two ruling families (made easier by Pictish matrilineal rules, although patrilineal succession was coming in by the ninth century even there) meant that the same king could claim inheritance in both. This was the basis for what seems to have been a double coup by Cinaed (Kenneth) mac Ailpín (d. 858), a Dál Riata prince, first around 840 when he took Dál Riata, and then around 842 in Pictland itself. Kenneth transferred his political seat to the Perthshire heartland of the southern Picts; this reflected the overall dominance of the Pictish lands, but was also, probably, rendered necessary by Viking attacks in Argyll. He seems to have ruled in effect as a Pictish king, but the kingdom of Alba or Scotia which his descendants ruled was after the end of the ninth century ever more clearly one dominated by Dál Riatan, that is, Irish aristocrats, Irish law, Irish ecclesi astical culture and eventually the Irish language. Unification was a slow and intermittent process, but Alba by 900 was nonetheless already much larger and more stable than any Irish kingdom or over-kingdom, and this must reflect the fact that its core area was by now the former Pictish provinces. Dál Riata, so small in Ireland, was thus in purely political terms the most successful Irish kingdom ever. Whatever the Pictish political infrastructure consisted of, it was the foundation for that.

  8

  Post-Roman Attitudes: Culture, Belief and Political Etiquette, 550-750

  Valerius of the Bierzo was an ascetic hermit living in the mountains of north-west Spain at the end of the seventh century; unli
ke most hermits, he was of aristocratic origin, and wrote accounts of his own life. This life was pretty miserable. Valerius was perpetually tormented by the devil, who got a local aristocrat and a bishop to try to make him a priest, thus regularizing his position (fortunately they both died), and who also turned local priests and monks (of the monastery to which he was loosely attached) against him. Valerius’ disciples were rejected by him, or dissuaded by terrible weather, or killed by brigands; one, Satur ninus, built a church near Valerius’ hermitage, and began to do miracles, but then, also tempted by the devil, he became proud and thought he would get more veneration if he had his own hermitage, so he left, but not before stealing Valerius’ books. Only after forty-two years did Valerius get royal patronage without conditions. Sour, self-righteous, ungrateful and paranoid, as well as obstinate in his chosen path, Valerius may give us the most authentic voice of the early medieval hermit. The moral awfulness of the Bierzo in his writings is most likely to be the reflection of his own mind, not of any particular local reality. The solidity of the Christian infrastructure in this relatively cut-off region, notwithstanding the brigands, is equally striking.

  One aspect of moral degradation that was apparently absent in the Bierzo was the survival of ‘pagan’ practices. This may be surprising; Bishop Martin of Braga (d. 579), based slightly further west, had preached against them at length shortly before his death, complaining of people who observed a wide variety of what he considered un-Christian rituals, lighting candles beside rocks and trees, throwing bread into fountains, not travelling on inauspicious days, chanting over herbs. Nor did this end with Martin. A late ninth-century slate text from the Asturias, slightly further north, preserves an incantation against hail, in the name of all the archangels and St Christopher, adjuring Satan not to trouble the village of the monk Auriolus and his family and neighbours; in effect, an entirely traditional magical text, although couched in Christian terms. Maybe north-west Spain was so regionally diverse that practices like these did not occur in the Bierzo; maybe Valerius was so wrapped up in himself that he did not notice them; but maybe he, like Auriolus, did not see them to be as wrong as Martin did. After all, what could be described as weather magic was practised even by saints, as when Caesarius of Arles (d. 542) held off hail with a cross made out of his staff, and when Gregory of Tours did the same by putting a candle from St Martin of Tours’s tomb in a tree. We must recognize from the start the diversity of early medieval Christianity in the West, both in beliefs and in practices. And there is another point to note: Gregory also revered Martin of Braga, however different their views about candles. We do not, even among the uncompromising (who were numerous in the early medieval church: Valerius is only an extreme version of a type), often find the ferocity of religious disagreement that was typical in Late Rome. The spiritual challenges and problem-solving sketched out in this paragraph would have been recognizable in the Roman world, but the context had changed. We need to explore how.

  The episcopal hierarchy of the late empire in most places survived into the early Middle Ages without a break. As we shall see, the monastic tradition established by John Cassian and Benedict of Nursia did as well, and took on ever greater force in northern Europe. The organizational framework of Roman Christianity, discussed earlier, was still fully in operation. One important difference, however, was that it was less united. This can be explored through looking at the authority of the popes. Nominally the senior bishop of the Latin church, the pope between 550 and 750 was little looked to by people in Francia, Spain, even northern Italy. In religious and political terms, popes themselves were orientated eastward, to the patriarchs in the Byzantine empire and (after the 630s) in the caliphate, their equals, and they sparred over eastern-generated theological issues; as institutional leaders, they were looked to above all by the Byzantine parts of Italy, and even there they had energetic rivals in the archbishops of Ravenna. The register of letters of Gregory the Great (590-604), who was also the most significant theologian to be pope in the early medieval period, has survived; the 850-plus letters in it are overwhelmingly addressed to central and southern Italy, especially Naples and Sicily, and also to Ravenna and Constantinople. Fewer than thirty are to Gaulish recipients, if we exclude Provence, where the pope had lands, and fewer than ten to Spain. Only in England did the popes have real influence, thanks to Gregory’s initiative in sending the first mission to Kent in 597 under Augustine of Canterbury. Although the Kentish mission did not convert most of the Anglo-Saxons (the Irish were the most successful missionaries in England), the Roman connection was made permanent by Theodore of Tarsus’ reorganization of the English church after 669. Most medieval archbishops of Canterbury from then on received the pallium, a linen band representing their office, from Rome, and this, too, gave the papacy considerable leverage in England. Apart from in England, however, the institutional unity of the western church remained nominal for a long time. It recognized a common identity, certainly, but its liturgies became different, and its monastic traditions were extremely various as well. The Carolingians revived the Roman link, and (more importantly) they also centralized church practices along Frankish lines, and monastic practices along Benedictine ones; all the same, a structured western church focused on Rome in any serious way did not develop until after the end of the period covered by this book. The Visigoths and Franks had plenty of church councils, but these were councils of the bishops of a kingdom, and did not look outside the borders of Spain and Francia respectively. Essentially, the political fragmentation of the western empire had fragmented the church as well.

  One consequence of all this is that the western church did not have much trouble with heresy in this period. The Arian-Catholic division lasted until 589 in Spain, as we saw in Chapter 6, and was violent while it lasted; well-informed contemporaries like Gregory of Tours and Gregory the Great rejoiced at the Catholic victory in the third council of Toledo. Gregory of Tours had a personal obsession with the evils of Arianism, indeed, which appears many times in his Histories. The signs are, however, that his contemporaries in Francia were altogether more neutral on the subject, perhaps considering Gregory’s dinner-table speeches about Arianism (at the expense of unfortunate Gothic envoys) somewhat out of place. In Spain, religious orthodoxy remained important, as the late seventh-century persecution of the Jews shows. Indeed, the Spanish bishops even persecuted Priscillianists, a very marginal sect; vegetarianism itself, a standard ascetic trait, was a little suspect in Spain because Priscillianists refused meat, and the 561 council of Braga required vegetarian clerics at least to cook their greens in meat broth, to show their orthodoxy. But new heresies did not appear even in Spain before the late eighth century, and in Francia, and later in England, religious controversy in this period was hardly ever about doctrine. Only the date of Easter caused difficulties, and then only in the Irish and Welsh churches, where in the seventh and eighth centuries it became apparent that the local rules for calculating Easter diverged from those in Rome. Where controversy lay was in the behaviour of clerics, and whether their sexual activity, mode of dress, or the gifts they may have paid for their office (the sin of simony) undermined their sacrality. There was never a time without rigorists who could wax angry on the failings of bishops and priests in these respects.

  As noted in Chapter 3, even under the empire the purity of the clergy may have mattered more in the West than in the East, and their exact beliefs about the Trinity somewhat less. But the lack of intense theological argument in this period probably also betrays a smaller critical mass of highly educated churchmen. The two centuries after 550 were not as low a point for functional literacy, even for the laity, as was once thought. Government was based on writing everywhere on the Continent until after the Carolingian period; kings and the lay aristocracy could normally read, and could sometimes compose quite elaborate Latin, as in the court of Childebert II in the 580s, or that of Sisebut in the 610s. (Writing itself, as a specific technical skill, was probably less widespread, and di
ctating to copyists was normal.) A more developed literary training was usually restricted to churchmen by now, and it was more orientated towards ecclesiastical works than had been the case two centuries earlier; Gregory of Tours cites more Sidonius and Prudentius than Sallust and Virgil. One could certainly still be well informed in this period; libraries could still be large as was that of Isidore of Seville, and could even be created from scratch, as with the substantial library in Bede’s Jarrow, apparently mostly bought by the monastery’s founder Benedict Biscop in the 650s-680s during his visits to Rome. Bede was a genuine example of an intellectual who had read widely, at least in Christian literature, as a result. All the same, he was the only one in Northumbria in his age; he had no one really to argue with. He tried; some of Bede’s writings (particularly about chronological computation) are quite rude. But this is a long way from the concentration of trained and ambitious theologians in the great eastern cities, Alexandria and Antioch, which had produced Arianism or Nestorianism. This would not reappear in the Romano-Germanic kingdoms until Charlemagne and Louis the Pious established a court ecclesiastical culture, in the three generations after the 780s (see below, Chapter 17). Only Rome would have been large enough to generate such debate in the meantime. That it did not do so may simply show that it was too culturally and spatially fragmented as well. It is also likely that career success in the Roman ecclesiastical hierarchy did not depend much on theological skill; Gregory the Great was the only exception, and there is evidence that he was unpopular.

  The political fragmentation of the western church and the absence of heresy were, as has been implied, linked: people simply did not have regular information about what was going on outside their own local and regional circuits. A letter of 613 from the Irish monastic founder Columbanus to Pope Boniface IV survives; it dates to the moment of Columbanus’ career in which he had arrived in Lombard Italy, to establish the monastery of Bobbio, after more than two decades in Francia and Alemannia. It expresses great surprise that Boniface (he hears, now he has come to Italy) adheres to the Constantinople line over the Three Chapters schism, and chides him severely for it. Yet the papal position on this had been unchanged since the 550s, and was controversial in northern Italy, at least. Any knowledge of a relatively sharp theological debate seems to have been absent over the Alps, or, at the least, Columbanus could claim it was. If there was that lack of personal contact, then unorthodox belief would not easily expand, and might not even be known about. All kinds of local versions of Christianity could develop under these circumstances, without contestation from elsewhere. It is this localized world that Peter Brown has called one of ‘micro-Christendoms’, a phrase that has had good fortune in recent years: a world of steady divergence in ritual, rule and tradition, as also in the political structures and socio-cultural practices of secular society.