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

by Chris Wickham

  It was possible to buy into divine causation so much that people denied there was any other kind. Gregory of Tours largely thought this: kings must know that God’s will lay behind everything. As for illness, it derived from demons or God’s punishment for sin, and cures came from repentance or the power of St Martin; doctors were not an acceptable alternative to Gregory, but rivals, on a par with magic-workers. (That said, Gregory did have a doctor, Armentarius, with him when he became bishop in 573; Armentarius failed to cure him from dysentery when St Martin’s dust succeeded.) But Gregory may have been an extremist in this respect; certainly Caesarius of Arles saw doctors as good, and in themselves rivals to magic-workers. Merovingian kings all trusted doctors enough to have them by them all the time; and a Greek doctor, Paul, even became bishop of Mérida in Spain and a saint in the early sixth century; the abortion he skilfully performed on a dead foetus to save the life of the mother, a fabulously wealthy aristocrat, was said in his saint’s life to be the origin of the wealth of the episcopal see thereafter. In medicine as in public life, people were essentially eclectic. One could believe in miraculous cures but, if one was rich enough, still have doctors beside one; and one could believe - everybody believed - that God decided battles, but few generals thought this meant that they did not need trained troops as well, if they could get them. People needed both. And, mostly, people did not see this as a contradiction.

  There has been a stress on bishops in this chapter, for they are very prominent in our sources. They really were central, however, if only because the ecclesiastical hierarchy was fairly simple as yet. In the countryside, rural churches were not non-existent, but as yet relatively few. In Italy, a long-Christianized land, there were in the diocese of Lucca sixty rural baptismal churches (plebes) by the tenth century, and these had probably for the most part been founded by the sixth; this may seem a substantial number, but each was the main church for many different settlements. Only in the eighth century did other churches begin to be founded, a trend which continued (with some blips) into the twelfth: by then, Lucca had over six hundred rural parishes, a very different pattern. In Francia, too, rural churches with the right to baptize expanded in number only after 700; and in England, where large ‘minster parishes’ were the norm, this process only really began after 900. So most villages and rural settlements did not yet have their own church; the clergy of the diocese were largely concentrated in the bishop’s own entourage (and in urban churches if cities were big enough); as a result, the ritual activity of each diocese focused, far more than would be the case after the tenth century or so, on the bishop. Bishop Daniel of Winchester, an otherwise exemplary bishop, went blind before he died around 744, a circumstance that seems to have prevented him from baptizing; no one took his place, with the result that many children died unbaptized in his diocese in his last years. This was an extreme case, and it could not have happened in Italy, where there were more baptismal churches, but it does show how ritually important the person of the bishop was. He controlled all the diocesan religious rituals, including processions and festivals, that he could, and sought to control more.

  The processions organized by bishops could hold off the plague, cause rain to fall, put out fires and confound enemy armies, if we believe the saints’ lives about them. In one dramatic case from Ravenna in around 700 (according to Agnellus’ episcopal history in the 840s), Archbishop Damian organized a formal penitential procession, divided between men and women, clergy and laity, in order (miraculously) to discover the truth, after one of the urban factions secretly murdered the menfolk of a rival faction. Bishops represented their cities and dioceses politically, but they also did so spiritually. It is remarkable how often episcopal miracles concern the liberation of prisoners held by counts and other secular officials, or the saving of condemned men from death, in many cases quite regardless of their guilt. This matches the more secular ransoming of captives that bishops performed routinely, as well as episcopal pleas for tax relief for their dioceses in front of kings: they were protectors of their flocks in every sense. Bishop Fidelis of Mérida in the mid-sixth century secretly proceeded around the city’s urban and suburban churches by night, following a fiery globe, in the middle of a crowd of saints; those who saw him were sworn to secrecy, and if they spoke about it they died. Small wonder that when Bishop Masona of Mérida was exiled by Leovigild in the early 580s, and also when Bishop Desiderius of Vienne was exiled by Brunhild in 603-7, the city experienced famine, plague and storm till its pastor returned.

  Bishops thus mattered greatly. Accordingly, it is not surprising that they tended to be of aristocratic origin, something that we have seen for different countries in previous chapters. There were cases in which they were of lesser birth, and rose up the local church hierarchy because they were good administrators or personally virtuous, but this was probably by now relatively rare everywhere. Being an aristocrat meant that one could rely on a secular (and ecclesiastical) political network that would make any bishop’s life easier. Praejectus of Clermont (d. 676), who was not of high birth, does not seem to have been an astute politician, as we saw earlier, and was killed by aristocratic rivals. Conversely, his second successor Bonitus, of ‘Roman’ noble birth according to his saint’s life (he was indeed probably a descendant of the emperor Avitus and of Sidonius Apollinaris), was a high official in the court of Sigibert III, and became prefect of Marseille, before succeeding his brother Avitus II as bishop of his home town in 690 thanks to Pippin II’s patronage; subsequently he was able to act as a dealer for Pippin, persuading rebels in Lyon to return to loyalty. When he retired a little after 700 and travelled to Rome, it was natural for him to be received by the Lombard king Aripert II, for whom (of course) he did miracles. We have seen similar Frankish bishops operating in the circle of Desiderius of Cahors a generation earlier, too, and the large number of Merovingian saints’ lives makes them particularly well attested in Francia, but they had their analogues in Italy, Spain, England and Ireland as well.

  Being an aristocrat and, possibly, a former secular official also meant, however, that an aristocratic lifestyle was very familiar to such bishops. They lived well (this is stressed less in saints’ lives, but it is quite clear in, for example, Gregory of Tours’ Histories); increasingly, they took on secular roles even as bishops. They involved themselves in high politics, which sometimes killed them, as with Leudegar of Autun in 678; increasingly, they also led armies in war. In the sixth century this was still rare in Francia, but it was more common in the seventh and eighth, as with Savaric of Auxerre (d. c. 721), who invaded five neighbouring bishoprics and died on the way to attack a sixth; his successor Hainmar fought Arab raiders from Spain. The bishops of Trier and Mainz in the early eighth century are well-known examples. Milo of Trier (d. c. 757) was the son and great-nephew of former bishops of Trier, an ally of Charles Martel, and a bête noire of Boniface; he is depicted in hostile sources as living a classic lay aristocratic lifestyle. Gewilib of Mainz (d. c. 759) succeeded his father Gerold, who had fallen in battle against the Saxons; Gewilib went back in the next Saxon war and killed his father’s killer. Boniface had him deposed for this in 745, and succeeded him in his see, although Gewilib lived on, enjoying some local respect. Boniface achieved no real change of episcopal style, anyway; martial bishops remained common under the Carolingians. All this must not be seen as a ‘secularization’ of the church (although Boniface undoubtedly thought so); Milo and his father Liutwin were keen monastic patrons, and Liutwin indeed became a saint. But they were aristocrats; this is what aristocrats did. In Italy, too, Bishop Walprand of Lucca, son of Duke Walpert of the same city, another respected church leader, seems to have died in the war against Pippin III in 754.

  The other side to this coin was that aristocratic birth was regarded by many as intrinsically virtuous. Over and over again, saints’ lives stress noble birth as a positive element in the saint’s future holiness; only a very few writers (Bede, not himself an aristocrat, was one) play it down.
The rapid expansion of monasticism in Francia, England, Ireland in the seventh century and Italy in the eighth is clearly associated with this sort of intrinsic aristocratic virtue, more even than the episcopal church. Of course, aristocrats had the wealth to endow monasteries in the first place; but they chose abbots and abbesses from their own families, if indeed they did not become the head of the monastery themselves. Columba in Iona (d. 597), himself nephew and cousin of kings, was succeeded by male-line family members, with only one break, in the next century, as his seventh successor, his biographer Adomnán (d. 704), proudly relates. Major female monastic founders and abbesses, Hild of Whitby (d. 680) or Gertrude of Nivelles (d. 653) were also from the highest ranks, Hild a great-niece of King Edwin, Gertrude the daughter of Pippin I; they became saints and they, too, were succeeded by relatives.

  The foundation of a monastery in fact served two purposes. One was the honouring of God and the establishment of a group of specialist devotees to that process of honouring, which was a virtuous act and would ease one’s passage to heaven, reinforced by the prayers of the monks or nuns, still more if the founder also became a monk or nun, dedicated to ascesis in the framework of the monastic rule. The other was to act as an organizing pole for the founder’s family: most monasteries remained under de-facto family control (and, if possible, out of control of the local bishop), with abbots and abbesses choosing successors who were either direct kin or family clients; and land given by relatives to the monastery did not really leave the family unless the latter lost control of the foundation. These two purposes were by no means in contradiction; indeed, the more the monastery shone as a spiritual beacon, the more other people would give land to it as well, and the more the founding family would gain status - and the more prayers would be said for them. One had to be careful to do this right. Bede raged against false monasteries in Northumbria in a letter of 734, and Fructuosus of Braga had already said the same for northern Spain around 660: both saw cosy family foundations, with no pretence to religious commitment, as a confidence trick, aimed only at escaping lay obligations. Such monasteries must have been common, in fact, and were probably considered normal by most, indeed virtuous. But the great foundations were more spiritually committed, without, for the most part, abandoning family ties; that would not come until much later, not until after 1000 in most cases.

  Linked to these monastic foundations, but not restricted to it, came a huge increase in church land. Kings, bishops, aristocrats and indeed smaller landowners gave land to cathedrals, monasteries and local churches throughout Europe: from the sixth century in Spain, Wales and Byzantine Italy, from the early seventh, probably, in Frankish Gaul and Ireland, from the late seventh in England, from the early eighth in Lombard Italy and Germany east of the Rhine (the dates are those of our earliest references to extensive gift-giving; that for Gaul may be too late). The eighth century seems to have marked a temporary high point for such gifts; they became less frequent in these areas in the early ninth. David Herlihy has estimated, however, that by then almost a third of the land area of Francia and Italy was probably ecclesiastically owned. The motivation for these gifts was of course religious; the imagery of an exchange of gifts, a physical gift to a church in return for prayers, or burial in the church, or even heavenly life, recurs often in surviving documents, for such gifts are the initial basis for most of the documentary archives that survive from this period onwards. But they were part of family strategies, too; the prayers were often for families, and it was common in Italy, for example, for a donor with three sons to give a quarter of his property - an extra son’s portion - to the church. The gifts were also often to family foundations, or to the foundations of secular or ecclesiastical patrons whom one might need to impress.

  The appearance of landed gifts of this kind often follows on quite closely from the end of the practice, common in the sixth and early seventh century in the Romano-Germanic kingdoms, of burying valuables in the ground as part of the funerary clothing and accoutrements of dead family-members. Getting rid of property in preparedness for death, or as part of the death ritual, was a public act, with resonance for one’s social status, for both pagans and Christians. (Not that furnished burials in themselves imply paganism, as was once thought. There were plenty of standard Christian examples, including St Cuthbert himself. But they began in the pagan period, in England for example, and have the same features in both pagan and Christian regions.) It has also been argued that burying goods is a mark of élites still relatively unsure of their local status, and concerned to negotiate it by competitively disposing of property, which became less necessary once aristocracies became stable and wealthy. The argument has particular force in Anglo-Saxon England. Why one might move from the ceremony of burying movable goods to that of the handing over of land (and also movables) to the church remains unclear; but churches themselves vastly preferred the latter, of course, and as they gained in influence this must have had weight. And one result of the shift to landed gifts was that individual churches and monasteries could gain considerable wealth, putting themselves, as institutions, on the level of aristocratic families in terms of resources. This in itself added to the desire of aristocrats to control them; it also made the richest monasteries into powerful political players, as we saw for Clonmacnois in Ireland, and as would soon be the case for Fulda and St. Gallen in Germany, Nonantola, Farfa, S. Vincenzo al Volturno and Montecassino in Italy, Saint-Denis, Saint-Germain and Saint-Bertin in what is now France, to which we should add, for the tenth century, Cluny in France, and Ely and Ramsey in England. Already in the 660s the retired Queen Balthild said to her fellow nuns in her monastery at Chelles that they should play the political game, visiting and giving gifts to kings, queens and aristocrats, ‘as was the custom, so that the house of God would not lose the good reputation with which it had begun’; in the ninth century and beyond this would be the mark of a recognizable monastic politics.

  The moral king looked after his people, was successful in war, was just and generous and listened to bishops. These were international presumptions in the early Middle Ages, and they were important. In Ireland, indeed, unjust or unsuccessful kingship was explicitly believed to bring climatic disaster, and other peoples thought the same (cf. below, Chapter 17, for the Franks). War was unavoidable; even the most religious of kings had to do it, or their kingdoms were in danger. King Sigeberht of East Anglia retired to a monastery in the 630s, but was called back by his people when Penda of Mercia attacked, to give them courage; this did not work, unfortunately, and he died in battle (Bede, our source for this, tells the story fairly flatly, and he may well have thought Sigeberht’s non-military choices were wrong). Doing justice was, together with war, the basic attribute of early medieval government, and all kings were assessed by observers for their fairness in judging and accessibility to plaintiffs; actual law-making was less important before 750, except perhaps in Spain. Generosity was the necessary marker of every king, large or small, who wanted to have or build up a loyal entourage; hael, ‘generous’, was a standard epithet of successful Welsh kings, for example, and we saw in Chapter 5 the political importance of the treasury for Frankish kings; conversely, a vignette in Beowulf depicts the Danish king Heremod as mad when he not only killed members of his entourage but ‘did not give the Danes treasures in pursuit of high esteem’, and his men abandoned him. Listening to bishops is an attribute that is particularly likely to be stressed by our sources, which are nearly all ecclesiastical. Gregory of Tours praised Guntram most out of his contemporaries, perhaps for this reason above all, and Braulio of Zaragoza could in the 640s give unsought advice even to Chindasuinth, controversial and ruthless though the latter was; all the same, bishops were themselves political players, and respect for them was only sensible. Every successful Christian king in our period played church politics, indeed, and some, notably in seventh-century Spain, pursued it very assiduously.

  Our sources, even though so very clerical for the most part, nonetheless give secul
ar values a good deal of respect. The effective polygamy of Merovingian kings is only occasionally criticized in our sources; Columbanus was the only ecclesiastic who actually condemned a king for it, Theuderic II, and he was expelled from the kingdom for his pains. (The Franks may have given their kings more licence, though; Visigothic, Lombard and Anglo-Saxon kings were all at least sometimes criticized for sexual excess.) And the violence that was the inevitable consequence of war was hardly ever condemned, at least if it was done to other people. It is crucial to remember that the whole of secular society was by now militarized, throughout the West, and clerics, too, took military virtues for granted. Military obligations at least in theory extended even to the peasantry (see Chapter 9), and characterized all the aristocracy by definition; with this came training in arms and in quasi-military sports such as hunting. Kings put their palaces beside woodland regions that were easy to reach for hunting; the Frankish and Lombard kings began to see some of these regions as ‘forest’, royal reserves, in which only they could hunt. Aristocrats did not do this yet, but they were certainly as enthusiastic about the sport as kings were; Charlemagne at the turn of the eighth century had to upbraid his counts for cutting short judicial hearings in order to hunt, and Milo of Trier’s aristocratic attitude to episcopal office was epitomized by his death, killed by a wild boar. A militarized lifestyle marked kings and aristocrats in every respect, indeed; as we have seen, it was the major change in élite culture that followed the end of the Roman empire. Aristocratic clothing, marked by a large amount of gold and jewellery worn on the person and (for men) a prominent belt, similarly bejewelled, descended from the military costume of the Roman period, and so did the symbolism of the belt itself, which generally represented military or political office (though by now the belt was bigger and flashier than under Rome). Eligius of Noyon, when a secular official for Dagobert I in the 630s, was already saintly enough to give his ornamenta to the poor; Dagobert gave him another belt, however; he could not avoid wearing that.