Following the lead of Caesar and Constantine, who transformed their calendars as part of grand schemes to launch new political and religious eras, Charlemagne attempted to reform his calendar, too. Most important, he and his scribes incorporated into the civil machinery of his empire the anno Domini system of dating favoured by Dionysius and Bede. Charlemagne also followed in many of his decrees a growing trend in Europe to number the days of the months in sequential order instead of using the cumbersome Roman system of kalends, nones and ides. On Charlemagne’s tomb, planted in the centre of the octagonal cathedral he built at Aachen, the inscription reads:
In this tomb lies the body of Charles, the Great and Orthodox Emperor, who gloriously extended the kingdom of the Franks, and reigned prosperously for forty-seven years. He died at the age of seventy, the year of our Lord 814, the 7th Indiction, on the 28th day of January.
The emperor also tried to Frankify the names of the months, with less success. He proposed naming the months after the seasons of the year, festivals, and holy celebrations. Under Charlemagne’s system, January became Wintarmanoth, meaning ‘the month of cold’, and April became Ostarmanoth, still another reference to the goddess Eostre or Ostar, namesake for Easter. Though it never caught on, this calendar did have far more relevance to Franks in the late eighth and early ninth centuries than months designated by Latin tribes on the Tiber a millennium and a half earlier, who named their lunar months after goats, pagan gods and Latin numbers. Charlemagne’s months run as follows:
Charlemagne’s Months Roman Months
Wintarmonoth January
Hornung February
Lentzinmanoth March
Ostarmanoth April
Winnemanoth May
Brachmanoth June
Heuvimanoth July
Aranmanoth August
Witumanoth September
Windumemanoth October
Herbistmanoth November
Heilagmanoth December
In the midst of the darkness enshrouding Europe this sudden passion for an intellectual life seems a miraculous turnaround. Here was a barbarian king, disgusted with the low ebb of learning, throwing open his court to what his own chroniclers describe as a virtual cult of scholarship. At Aachen and elsewhere Charlemagne’s scholars, artists and musicians collected manuscripts, published histories and ballads, and corrected translations of the Bible. His architects and engineers built a 500-foot-long bridge over the Rhine at Mainz and erected numerous churches and palaces, including the magnificent Aachen Cathedral, a classic of the Roman-Byzantine style. Famous for its wide arches and octagonal interior, it was adorned by Charlemagne ‘with gold and silver, with lamps and with lattices and doors of solid bronze. He had the marble columns for this structure brought from Rome and Ravenna.’
Scholars attracted to Charlemagne’s patronage of learning, which included generous stipends, journeyed from all over Europe. From central Italy came the religious poet Paulinus of Aquileia and the grammarian Peter of Pisa. From north Italy came the Lombard scholar Fardulf, originally taken as a hostage during Charlemagne’s Lombard conquest; Fardulf later became a Charlemagne loyalist and was named abbot of St Denis in northern France. Others came as exiles from Moslem-occupied Spain.
But the most important scholar of all who came to Aachen was Alcuin of York (732-804), trained at Jarrow by Bede’s students. Praised by the Frankish chronicler Einhard as ‘the greatest scholar of the day’, Alcuin wrote widely on religious subjects, arranged votive masses for days of the week, corrected the unrefined Latin of the Franks’ religious texts, and standardized a new lower-case alphabet unknown in ancient Rome (and which you are reading right now). Alcuin served as Charlemagne’s personal tutor between 781 and 796, as this largely untaught barbarian chieftain made an admirable attempt to educate himself in between battles and campaigns. ‘The king spent much time and labour with him studying rhetoric, dialectics,’ says his enthusiastic aide and chronicler Einhard, ‘and especially astronomy; he learned to reckon, and used to investigate the motions of the heavenly bodies most curiously, with an intelligent scrutiny.’
This all sounds marvellous--except that it was not entirely true. Indeed, the emperor’s reign fell far short of the grand renaissance he dreamed of, and which some historians have claimed. Medievalists today insist Charlemagne’s intellectual accomplishments were mostly superficial, the pastime of a bright but unrefined warlord who treated learning as a precocious child might admire a shiny stone or delight in trying to work out a riddle or a puzzle. The emperor, these historians say, built libraries and filled them with manuscripts, but treated them as treasured ornaments, like fine cloth or rare spices--objects of status rather than texts to read and learn from. Of course, he was hardly alone in this attitude during an age when even supposedly learned monks spent lifetimes endlessly copying manuscripts that few understood or bothered to read closely. As for his clocks, Charlemagne considered them to be little more than toys, exquisite playthings that gave him a veneer of high culture when in reality his own artisans and scholars lacked the knowledge and skill to design and construct anything approaching the great water clock of Sultan Harun ar-Rashid.
Charlemagne seems to have collected scholars in much the same way. As a barbar fascinated by these symbols of a sophisticated culture, he did not entirely comprehend them but hoped to emulate them nonetheless. Even worse, most of these scholars were barely educated themselves. In 809, two decades after Charlemagne issued his edicts ordering that children be educated, this was proven when a legal proceeding at Aachen summoned the greatest experts in the empire on ecclesiastic time reckoning. These ‘experts’ were questioned in regard to Charlemagne’s orders to teach computus throughout the empire, but it is obvious from the record of the proceeding that they had little understanding of this science. Dressed in the medieval academic’s dark, heavy robes and felt hats, paid for by the emperor, these men of learning sadly did not grasp even the basics of Bede’s mathematics and calculations--or much else.
Charlemagne himself, educated as a warrior in the centuries-old tradition of Germanic leaders and kings, could barely read and could not write despite years of lessons from Alcuin and Peter of Pisa--and despite the insistence of Einhard that the emperor had mastered astronomy and time reckoning. ‘He . . . used to keep tablets and blanks in bed under his pillow,’ admits Einhard, ‘that at leisure hours he might accustom his hand to form the letters; however, as he did not begin his efforts in due season, but late in life, they met with ill success.’ Most of his nobles were entirely illiterate. Nor could most of his scribes and scholars except Alcuin write in decent Latin.
Another exception was Einhard himself, who wrote a reasonably clear, notably secular history of Charlemagne’s era. He also seems to have been more keenly aware of the intellectual shortcomings of the imperial court than other would-be scholars of his day. ‘I, who am a barbarian,’ he tells us, ‘and very little versed in the Roman language, seem to suppose myself capable of writing gracefully and respectably in Latin.’ He also complains that his history will be derided by both those who clung to the writings of the ancients and ‘despise everything modern’ and those who despised all learning, including ‘the masterpieces of antiquity’.
In such an environment it was all but impossible for true scholarship to flourish. Nor was it a place and a time where the calendar was likely to be fixed, even as it now drifted against the solar year by almost seven days since Caesar’s reform.
In 800 Charlemagne accepted the title of Holy Roman Emperor from the pope, an event that signalled the Church’s acknowledgment of what had been the political reality in Europe since at least the beginning of the Moslem conquests: that St Peter’s could no longer depend on either local Germanic kings in Italy or the Byzantines to protect Christendom in the West. Lacking armies and political power, the popes had long been leaning toward the Franks as their new protector. Charlemagne had cemented this relationship in 774 when he crushed the Lombards, who then ruled the no
rthern half of Italy, bringing the still nominally independent papal territories under his protection. This added a measure of security for the prelates at St Peter’s, though politics in Rome remained tumultuous enough that sixteen years after driving away the Lombards Charlemagne again found himself leading troops to Rome to aid a pope besieged not by an army but by powerful local factions in the chaotic city. In a potent demonstration of the Church’s frailty as an earthly power, Pope Leo III was waylaid in 799 in Rome, where Einhard says his enemies ‘had inflicted many injuries. . . , tearing out his eyes and cutting out his tongue’.
Charlemagne’s response was characteristically decisive. In November of 800 he marched on Rome, restoring order so swiftly that a grateful Leo proposed a novel reward that sharply underscored the dependency of the Church on the Frankish royal house: naming Charlemagne emperor of a new ‘Holy’ Roman empire. This was an astute political move by the newly blind and dumb Leo, fusing the secular might of Charlemagne with the formidable religious power of the Church, an update of Constantine’s fusion of the Roman imperium with the Church some five centuries earlier. Charlemagne reportedly resisted the crown at first, supposedly out of modesty, though unlike Caesar when Mark Antony offered him the diadem eight and a half centuries earlier, Charlemagne did not refuse the crown when it was publicly offered during a mass at St Peter’s on Christmas Day, 800.
Neither Leo nor Charlemagne may have realized it at the time, but this crowning was not merely an act joining a desperately weak pope with a powerful patron. It also acknowledged and reinforced two enormous changes in Europe that would profoundly affect all aspects of life over the next several centuries, including the calendar and the science of time reckoning.
First was the consolidation and victory of the Catholics in finally eradicating virtually all other sects in the West, as all Christians fell in line behind their rules for everything from dating Easter and punishing heresy to when it was acceptable to have sex. The second was formalizing the rising new political and economic order in Europe we call feudalism. Though still unformed and incomplete when Leo placed the jewel-encrusted gold diadem on the long white hair of the Frankish king, the rough outline of the fiefs, duchies, baronies, and royal domains were then taking shape in a system that would dominate Europe for centuries--with the Church as an integral component, both as a huge feudal landowner and as a legitimizer of sovereigns who as a class would henceforth claim their right to rule was sanctioned by God.
In this way the princes of Europe and the pope essentially agreed to a pact that gave the Catholic Church authority over all religious matters--including most science--backed by the power of the princes and their gendarmes and armies. At the same time the Church provided the princes with a potent religious undergirding to support their authority; and an all-pervasive code of conduct that would comfort their subjects with its message of hope and redemption, while keeping them under tight control.
Obviously this ‘pact’ was another body blow to any scientific endeavour that might challenge a dogma purporting to know the truth in all matters, including time. It also meant that anyone who presumed to suggest reforming the Latin calendar would have to go to St Peter’s rather than to kings and princes--something no one dared attempt until Roger Bacon tried it four and a half centuries later.
If the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was illiterate and treated time as a game and timepieces as toys, then what did time mean to a farmer in the Rhine River valley in the year 800? What sort of calendar did, say, a weaver use in central France? Or a fisherman on the often drizzly coast of Bede’s Northumbria?
Little is known about commoners during a period when even chronicles and official records of kings and nobles are scarce. On a continent of illiterates barely getting by, most people seem to have spent their days hoeing fields, avoiding wild beasts, worrying about crops and the weather, burying the dead, celebrating marriages and local saint’s days, and telling stories around hearth fires during the long, cold, deadly winters. They lived, ate their meagre portions, bore children, repaired leaks in their thatch roofs, tried to avoid armies if they came into the area, took an excited peek at the lord or king if he came along their road, grudgingly paid taxes, attended mass, followed the orders of the lord’s foreman, and died, all in a continuous cycle of days and years that to them had no discernible past or future.
Most Europeans lived in isolated rural communities, ignorant of the wider world. For instance, archaeology reveals that most people in Britain lived in farmsteads either by themselves or in little clusters. The latter were not even real towns; they were more like settlements of wood-plank or sod huts thatched in straw. Few towns, in fact, existed, or would exist until later in the Middle Ages, when groups of farmers banded together to form villages, and local squires and lords gathered their peasants into communal-style systems for agriculture. Some lords were beginning to organize their large estates into reasonably efficient units, some worked by slaves and others by serfs. But the transition from the chaos of the barbarian era to true feudalism was barely underway.
In 800, cathedrals, castles and local administrative manors for kings and nobles were the most highly organized communities in western Europe. This is where craftsmen, tradesmen, servants and beggars congregated, though in small numbers since there was little work--or spare change--for these classes. Even a ‘city’ such as London--described by Bede as ‘an emporium of many peoples coming by land and sea’--was really just a larger than average cluster of fading Roman stone buildings, a small port, and a community that shipped a few slaves and possibly some wool in exchange for luxury items, metals and a scattering of other products from the continent that few could afford.
To us, the world of the farmer on the Rhine and the weaver in France would have been one of dust and foul smells and mostly unhealthy-looking people wearing crude wool tunics, leggings and loose-fitting leather shoes, or no shoes at all. During the day they worked from dawn to dusk in backbreaking manual labour when crops had to be planted, tended and harvested; in the off season they had less to do. At night they slept in straw-topped huts in compounds shared with farm animals and heated with fires and stones baked hot during cold winter days.
In Charlemagne’s time and throughout the Middle Ages, over half the children died before age five. Life expectancy was only 35 years. Farming methods were crude, with wooden hoes, sticks and little knowledge of fertilizer or systems of crop rotations. This meant famines were frequent and often deadly. Even in good times the diet was poor: barley with a few vegetables in gruel served daily with a piece of stale bread and an occasional slice of cheese or fruit. Epidemics raged across districts and kingdoms every few years. Between 540 and 600, six known plagues struck major Mediterranean cities in the East and West, wiping out many, many thousands of people. Most feared was smallpox, apparently first seen in Europe in 451 when Attila’s warriors became stricken before a coalition of Romans, Ostrogoths and Franks defeated his Huns in France at the crucial Battle of Catalaunian Fields. Russian folklore also warns about kissing the Pest Maiden, and those who knew the Bible lived in fear of the fourth horseman in the Book of Revelations, sitting on his ‘pale horse . . . and his name that sat on him was Death’.
Thieves and bandits ran amuck in 800, though there was little to steal outside the well-guarded estates, cathedrals and small walled towns. Poems and stories from that long-ago era tell of a great fear of wild animals; dark, haunting forests where no one dared venture; and imaginary beasts and devils with fiery eyes and horns. People were earthy and pragmatic, but in the absence of scientific explanations for why the sun rose and fell and countless other mysteries they were also highly credulous and susceptible to even the most ludicrous superstitions and rumours. In 810 a buzz spread across Frankland that an enemy of Charlemagne was poisoning cattle with a magic dust. Another rumour insisted that ‘cloud-borne ships’ manned by ‘aerial sailors’ were on their way to ravage the land. Even the sensible Bede off-handedly describes dozens of miracl
es occurring within living memory of his own time--such as the curing of the blind man by Augustine, the Archbishop of Canterbury, while meeting with the heretic Celts under the oak tree.
Few people in this world had a need for formal calendars. Like Hesiod’s Greeks and pastoral cultures around the globe, Europeans in the age of Charlemagne were primarily interested in predictable cycles and cues from nature. Chaucer, for instance, starts The Canterbury Tales with a calendric guide to the seasons and crops that Hesiod would have understood perfectly:
Whan that April with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engenred in the flour;
Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heath
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye . . .
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
Anyone living in England during Chaucer’s age would have instantly understood the references to April as the time of ‘shoures soote’--’showers sweet’--and of ‘zephirus eek with his sweete breath’, referring to the west wind that blows sweetly after the ‘droghte’ of March. Indeed, Chaucer considers it vitally important to establish first in his reader’s mind the time of year when ‘folk to goon on pilgrimages’, though he evidently has little interest in the actual year or date beyond noting that this is April: the start of spring.
And why should he? He was writing for an overwhelmingly agricultural people closely connected to the soil, for whom time was more than anything a powerful constant: a progression of youth and old age, birth and death, and as always the rise and fall of the sun each day. Nothing symbolized this better than the medieval wheel of fortune that perpetually turned, with one’s lot sometimes up and sometimes down in a never-ending cycle. This great wheel of life represents the insecurity of an age when death and disaster lurked everywhere, and it explains to a large extent the mind-set of resignation about progress and change that deeply permeated this culture, caught in a constricting, repeating, seldom-altered circle of time.
The Calendar Page 13