This community could sustain some quite elaborate theoretical interventions. Late in 828 Louis the Pious called four church councils for the following year, in Mainz, Paris, Lyon and Toulouse, to discuss the ‘anger of God’ - some unspecified natural disaster - and how he could be placated. According to Paschasius Radbert’s Epitaph of Arsenius (an often obscure biography, in dialogue form, of Wala), this involved specific requests for advice. Wala duly responded with a schedula, which he formally presented in one of the 829 councils: this seems to have criticized uncanonical episcopal elections and the lay control of church lands. Interestingly, Einhard presented a pamphlet of capitula to Louis at almost the same moment, and it is very likely to have been in response to the same generalized request for opinions. We do not have these, but we do have the summary of a similar pamphlet composed in Einhard’s circle around the same time, which denounces oppression and the full range of standard sins, in particular hatred and mistrust, a generic enough set of misdeeds it is true, and maybe less useful to Louis, but certainly heartfelt on Einhard’s part. In a bizarre framing, he attributes the second critique to the demon Wiggo, speaking through the mouth of a possessed girl, and the capitula to none other than the archangel Gabriel, appearing in a dream (in the guise of St Marcellinus) to a blind man, recently cured at Seligenstadt. Louis’s decision to open up debate allowed criticism to come from some unusual sources.
We must not overstate the success of this sort of discursive initiative. Einhard remarks sorrowfully that ‘of the things that [Louis] was ordered or urged to do by this small book he took the trouble to fulfil very few’. The 829 council of Paris listed many things that the Frankish people and king could and should do as well, but what Louis actually did was appoint Bernard of Septimania as chamberlain, a cure worse than the disease to most observers. Wala (though not Einhard) went over to the other side, and, together with Paschasius, was in Lothar’s camp at the Field of Lies; but Louis’s temporary overthrow was not reassuring to Wala at all. Paschasius’ account portrays himself and Wala dumb-struck at the ease with which Louis’s army melted away: ‘they had flown completely around, like chickens under wing . . . without serious counsel and careful arrangement . . .’ and, worst of all, without listening to Wala’s advice! Aristocrats were not taking it seriously enough, that is to say; they were simply engaging in politics, without considering its moral implications. It would be a common moan of intellectuals at later times of political change as well. All the same, scholars elaborated both sides of the key ceremonies of 833-4: Agobard of Lyon drafted part of the core accusations against Louis in his forced penance of 833; after Louis’s restoration the emperor had his own version of the 833-4 crisis written down by his bishops and abbots, and formally read out at the Thionville assembly in 835; meanwhile, Hraban Maur in 834 had written a tract on the duties of sons, which Louis reprised in instructions sent to Lothar in Italy in 836. Whether or not magnates were governed above all by realpolitik, they felt a strong need to express their political choices in moralized terms, and writers sought to argue about them as a result. Nithard, Lupus and then Hincmar would do the same for Charles the Bald later as well.
Did the increasingly elaborate education of Carolingian élites aim to be inclusive, or exclusive? It is not wholly clear. The more complex the Latin used by the educated strata, the further it departed from the Romance spoken by the huge majority of the population of the western and southern parts of the empire; the earliest form of French came to be seen as a separate language for the first time by authors precisely in the Carolingian period. And a high percentage of the Carolingian élite spoke German; ninth-century texts for the first time regularly describe people as bilingual, including Charlemagne, Louis the Pious and Wala, which implies that plenty of people were not. (Einhard was most struck by the fact that the demon Wiggo spoke Latin, for the girl he possessed only spoke German.) It might be that the complex Latin of our texts was only a court and clerical language, a ‘mandarin’ language, pronounced in an increasingly un-French way because of the influence of the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin, and therefore deliberately closed to most people, including even most aristocrats. But at least among the aristocracy there is good evidence of a wider awareness of Latin than that. Lupus of Ferrières could be trained for several years at Fulda in the 830s without ever having to learn German; Latin was totally hegemonic in this large monastic school in the middle of Germany, which had lay students too. Everard’s books show what an aristocrat might read or at least listen to (many would read less today), and it is notable that he expected his daughters, who inherited some of them, to do so as well: Judith was given some Augustine, some Alcuin, and the Lombard law code. And Dhuoda, down in Uzès, clearly shows in her Handbook someone who has bought the whole Carolingian package: not only had she read the Bible, some church fathers and some Christian Latin literature, but she could manipulate it with sophistication. It may have been wasted on her son William (see below, Chapter 21), but its very survival implies that he kept her text by him. Dhuoda is seen as being from the high Reichsaristokratie because she was married in 824 to Bernard of Septimania, in Aachen, too; but, given the striking absence of her own kin among the lists of relatives she thought William should pray for, one might wonder about that. Either way, a dense literary education was available to a lay woman by 810 or so, only twenty-five years after Carolingian schooling started, which, given the patriarchal values of the period, must surely mean that it was normal for aristocratic men, and not necessarily just the top families either.
Conversely, this was, overall, overwhelmingly an élite affair. The Carolingians did sometimes contemplate general schooling, but they did not seriously develop it. Similarly, there were some efforts to translate the Bible into German (though certainly not into proto-French), but they did not get past Genesis and the Gospels, for the most part in poetic versions. Indeed, the wide peasant world was hardly in the field of vision of any Carolingian king or intellectual except for preaching (a genuine commitment, but one which only reached a minority), or else as a source of wonder at ignorance, as in Agobard of Lyon’s exasperated attack on local beliefs in weather magic. Too great a separation would be an exaggeration; Agobard also inveighed against the idiocy of widespread beliefs that a cattle plague had been caused by malign dust sent by Prince Grimoald IV of Benevento, but a chance remark of Paschasius Radbert shows that Corbie intellectuals had been panicked by that too. Similarly, Einhard’s descriptions of the miracles and visions of Sts Marcellinus and Peter and their popular reception show no break at all between his sensibilities and those of the peasants around Seligenstadt. Education did not separate people from the religious culture around them, which did not fundamentally change from the sixth century to the tenth (above, Chapter 8). But the imagery of correctio and the need for education was confined to the aristocracy and to clerics, the political actors. Local priests, growing in number in this period as more rural churches were founded, were the lowest down the social scale it even theoretically reached. There are some signs (for example, in the signatures to Italian documents) that these priests could at least write, and bishops certainly expected them to be basically educated, often in a cathedral school. But even the common assumption in church statutes that priests would know the Psalter was not necessarily true of the majority, and little detailed control of their daily activities and culture was in practice possible; most priests came from local élites, and their social networks were linked to their localities, not to the bishops who sought to command them. The Carolingian project reached local societies through the structures of public justice, not through those of moral reform.
The educated, political world was nonetheless dense and many levelled, even if it only included élites. The court of Charlemagne, at the start of the process, saw legislation, theology, biblical commentary and poetry written; under Louis and his sons, the genres of educated writing increased further, with works on liturgy, history and political theory as well. These were sought after. Hraban Maur, th
e great biblical commentator of the 820s-850s, dedicated his (rather daunting) books to queens and kings, including a commentary on the Book of Judith sent to Queen Judith in the key year of 834. The Carolingian world also copied enormous quantities of texts, usually patristic writings but also including pre-Christian Latin works (these were only a small proportion of Carolingian copying, but it is because of that proportion that most classical Latin literature survives). Scholars wrote to each other begging for texts to copy; a dozen of Lupus of Ferrières’s letters in the 830s-850s are requests for books, some very specific, like the letter to Pope Benedict III (855-8) asking for the commentary of Jerome on Jeremiah ‘starting with the seventh book and continuing to the end’ - for many texts were defective or corrupt, and intellectuals sought both to complete them and to find the best versions. They were helped by a technical advance, the fast and easy-to-read Caroline minuscule script, which won out over older cursive hands in the late eighth century and had become uniform across most of the empire by the early ninth. Libraries of laymen could reach fifty books, as was the case with Everard of Friuli, but the larger monastic libraries could have hundreds, many of them containing more than one work. This added to the sense of the communality of culture, for writers in the different parts of the empire could increasingly assume that they had the same texts to hand.
This was the essential context for the growing importance of theological debate. This is already visible in the 790s, for Carolingian political circles were then flustered by the discovery of Adoptionism, the first new western heresy for nearly four centuries, associated with two Spanish bishops, Elipand of Toledo and Felix of Urgell (it used the image of adoption of the Son by the Father to explain Christ’s humanity). They also reacted very negatively to the Byzantine repudiation of Iconoclasm at Nicaea in 787 (above, Chapter 11). Carolingian theologians did not have full access to the Byzantine debate, and did not understand its principles (Greek was relatively little known in Carolingian Francia), but the continuing status of Byzantine theology ensured attention to the issue, and Theodulf of Orléans, in the Libri Carolini, wrote a detailed condemnation of the veneration of religious images in 790-93. The synod of Frankfurt in 794 formally rejected both doctrines, and Alcuin wrote at length against Adoptionism in 800, to match the work of his rival Theodulf. These were, emphatically, not widespread disagreements; it would be surprising if there were more than a dozen Adoptionists in the Carolingian lands (outside the ex-Visigothic far south), or hardline Iconoclasts for that matter. But they mattered to the state, and also to theorists. Theodulf took the trouble to create an Iconoclast pictorial programme for the apse of his private chapel at Germigny-des-Pres near Orléans, which still survives (see Chapter 10), and Iconoclast theorists (mostly from Spain) argued into the 820s, with Bishop Claudius of Turin going so far as to attack pilgrimages, and the veneration of the cross and of relics, as idolatrous - this went too far, however, and seems to have brought him condemnation in his turn.
Carolingian thought never claimed to be novel; in fact, like most late Roman, Byzantine and central medieval thought, it was explicitly the opposite, the return to older authority, often cited at great length. But Charlemagne and Alcuin made it possible for a critical mass of intellectuals to accumulate in Aachen and argue, and this took theology and political thought off in new directions whether writers liked (or realized) it or not. The ‘virtual’ community of the great monastic and cathedral schools of the ninth century, all in communication with each other, continued that critical mass. And the importance of theory to the political élite kept debate in the public eye, doubtless encouraging it further. People made very individual choices sometimes, like the deacon Bodo, a court scholar, who in 839 converted to Judaism and fled to Spain, to the horror of Louis the Pious and his courtiers. And every so often writers went outside the bounds of debate, and were condemned at church councils, as Amalarius of Metz was at Quierzy in 839 for his views on the liturgy, or as Gottschalk was at Mainz in 848 and Quierzy in 849 for his views on predestination (a condemnation which, significantly, was referred to in the Annals both of Fulda and of Saint-Bertin). These deserve some attention.
Amalarius of Metz (d. 850), successively archbishop of Trier and Lyon, was the main liturgical expert of the early ninth century, and was intermittently patronized by both Charlemagne and Louis. Out of office in the 820s, he wrote the Liber Officialis, a detailed exegesis of the allegorical significance of every act of the liturgy, which he circulated widely and revised in response to queries, criticisms and new information from Rome, three times in the next decade or so. This brought him back to royal and episcopal attention, and when Agobard was expelled from Lyon in 835 for supporting Lothar, Amalarius was appointed to replace him. This good luck was also bad luck, for Lyon seems to have been solidly behind Agobard, and Florus of Lyon, the major scholar left in the city, already thought that Amalarius’ allegories were ridiculous insults to the intelligence. Allegory was only supposed to be applied to the Bible, the word of God, which liturgical practices were not; and some of Amalarius’ attempts at symbolic meanings were simply bizarre - indeed, maybe heretical. Both Agobard and Florus wrote tracts against Amalarius, savagely pointing out his errors. This was why he was called to Quierzy in 838, to answer this criticism and to justify his arguments by authority. Amalarius replied that ‘whatever I have written I have read deep within my own spirit’ - in other words, he had no authority. This was fatal; he was condemned for heresy and was himself expelled from Lyon, although his works continued to circulate widely (the liturgy did, after all, still need explication).
Gottschalk was a more serious scholar; he was trying to make sense of Augustine’s theology of predestination, which he certainly did through appeal to authority, but which he interpreted in a novel way: that humans could separately be predestined to salvation and damnation, and that Christ’s crucifixion only affected the former, not the latter. Even after his condemnations in 848-9, this split the intellectual world of the 840s and 850s. Florus, Ratramn of Corbie, Prudentius of Troyes and Lupus of Ferrières supported Gottschalk, at least to some extent; Hincmar and Hraban vehemently opposed him. So did John the Scot, though his tract on the subject was itself controversial. The debate spun out of control in the 850s, and at least five church councils came to different views on it, until Charles the Bald and Lothar II together put a stop to it in 860, with a rejection of some of Gottschalk’s key positions at the synod of Tusey. As with Amalarius, an apparently arcane disagreement became the stuff of high politics; Francia briefly became the eastern Roman empire of Nicaea and Chalcedon, when correct doctrine was crucial for the stability of the state.
The political resonance of Amalarius’ condemnation was a simple one: he was both beneficiary and victim of the aftershocks of 833-4. When he was dismissed from Lyon, indeed, Agobard was called back, and it is hard not to feel that Amalarius might have had a different experience at Quierzy if Louis the Pious had not wanted to reintegrate old opponents. But it is still significant that the public debate was entirely a theoretical one; Florus undoubtedly held his views sincerely (he had protested to the Thionville assembly against Amalarius’ initial appointment), and Amalarius’ chosen defence, once he was forced to give it, would have sunk him, no matter what the political context. ‘Practical’ politics and abstract theological debate could run along parallel lines, reinforcing each other, thanks to the intensity of the moral imperatives of correctio. The Gottschalk dispute is a different case, for it did not map straightforwardly onto other political rivalries. Here, however, the issue of predestination bit into the whole intellectual underpinning of the Carolingian reform project. Authority was not an issue here (both sides rooted their arguments in Augustine); but if Gottschalk’s hardline predestination was to prevail, which (unlike that of many of his supporters) ignored the need for faith and good works, that is, human action, to get into heaven, then much of the Carolingian project was pointless. This was one of Hincmar’s core concerns, and, although his exte
nsive arguments were not always coherent, it was this, plus doubtless his personal influence with Charles the Bald, that won the day for him. The Carolingian project could not, he was in effect arguing, be allowed to be ruined by an intellectual argument devoid of social context. Of course, many disagreed with him; but all of them, including Gottschalk himself, would have seen the project as sacrosanct. Its moral purpose was at the root of their theological interests themselves, whatever the theological conclusions they each reached.
One essential element in the Carolingian politico-cultural world was Rome. Rome did not contribute much to the intellectual elaborations just discussed, but it had an authority that went back to the start of Carolingian kingship, and the king/emperors treated it with great care: most emperors were crowned in Rome, after all. For a start, the territory of Rome, the Patrimony of St Peter, was not formally incorporated into the empire. The Carolingians, and also local powers like the marquis of Spoleto, leant on Rome, but they never fully controlled it, and (despite attempts) seldom had much say in papal elections. Rome was, with 20,000-25,000 people, a huge and rich city by western standards, with its own political procedures, a set of rituals as elaborate as those of Aachen, an equally complex network of official hierarchies, and a dense factional politics which the Carolingians openly admitted they did not understand. They constantly sent representatives to try to work it out, but only too often, as the Royal Frankish Annals put it in 823, they ‘could not determine exactly what had happened’. The ever-changing succession of popes (there were twenty-one in the ninth century) meant that the factions had to be understood anew at each election. And tough popes, like Hadrian I (772-95), Paschal I (817-24), Leo IV (847-55), Nicholas I (858-67), John VIII (872-82), had unpredictable political positions, at least to Frankish eyes. Hadrian and his successor Leo III (795-816) were very close to Charlemagne, and keen to do what he asked in return for a free hand (and armed support when needed) in Rome and central Italy. This was a position shared by many of their successors; the presence of Gregory IV (827-44) at the Field of Lies may well have been his own choice, but he was part of Lothar’s entourage. By contrast, Paschal I seems to have executed two officials in 823 (the year of the Annals quote cited earlier) because they were supporters of Lothar; Paschal, a major church-builder, was locally controversial, but he was probably less controversial in seeking to undermine a Carolingian power that seemed, in those years at least, too close (above, Chapter 10). Lothar reasserted that power after Paschal’s death, but from then on, in practice, the Carolingians usually restricted themselves to intervening when factional struggles seemed too out of control.
The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 Page 53