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April 4, 2023 • 27 mins

In this episode, we learn about the rule and Renaissance of the emperor Charlemagne. Chris also tells us about the lives of monks and nuns, and how being mediocre in early Medieval times was actually a good thing.

Half-Hour History: Secrets of the Medieval World is a co-production of iHeart Podcasts and School of Humans. It is a Curiosity Podcast.

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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world
history examined and science explained. This is one day University. Welcome.

(00:33):
You're listening to episode three of half hour History Secrets
of the Medieval World. I'm your host and resident history
nerd Mike Coscarelli. Last episode, we witnessed the fall of
Rome and the rise of the Vikings, end Islamic rule.
Now we're moving into Charlemagne's cultural golden Age, a Renaissance,

(00:54):
if you will take it away, Chris. You think a renaissance,
and everybody thinks of the da Vinci Code and Italian
Renaissance and all of those things. And there have been
many renaissances in history. The word renaissance is actually a

(01:17):
French word. It means nothing other than rebirth. The word Nativity,
which is another word for Christmas, is related to that
word naissance or rebirth. And so we're going to have
a renaissance right in the middle of the early medieval period, which,
though I don't like the phrase dark ages, I will

(01:37):
admit as dimmer than certain other centuries. And the story
of the Carolingian Renaissance, the Renaissance under Charlemagne, Carolus Magnus
actually takes us back a few centuries to someone that
we mentioned earlier named Clovis. Clovis is a tribal chieftain,
and he is in control of the area of what

(02:00):
had been Roman Gaul or Germania and converts to Christianity
around five h three. Now, some people say, did he
really convert to Christianity or did he convert to Christianity
because his wife, there are some members of his family
who had been sick who came back to health miraculously.

(02:21):
We're never gonna know what was in Clovis's heart, just
like we're never gonna know what was in Constantine's heart
when he begins to favor Christianity around three twelve. And
did ten thousand of his warriors convert as well? Is
that just a made up number? Did they really convert
or did they follow the faith because he told them too.

(02:42):
We're never gonna quite know. And there's a level at
which the historian can never quite know. But be that
as it may, it happened, and because it happens, and
because the energy of the empire was now in Constantinople
in the east, the power of Christianity and the energy

(03:02):
begins to get married with Northern up and that energy
is sitting there for several hundred years, and it gets
a big boost in seven thirty two something we just
saw in the prior topic, when Charles Martel, Charlemagne's grandfather
is the defense or fidei, the defender of the faith
or Christianity, and he pushes the Muslims back at the

(03:24):
Battle of Poitier in seven thirty two. Now, what happens
after that is very quickly the city of Rome, under
the authority of the Bishop of Rome, enters into a
relationship with the heirs of Clovis and Charles Martel. Charles
Martell's son is named Peppin sometimes it comes up as

(03:46):
Pippin in the sources, and he was not very tall.
He was called Pepin the short and he was in
a battle with some other tribal chieftains, and he appeals
to the pope. The pope was named Zachary here and
he says to the Pope, listen, who is in charge
up here? The person who has the paper claim or
the person who has the real power. And Zachary decides

(04:09):
it's you. It's the person who has the real power.
And this is a decision that's going to have profound implications,
because now Peppin owes his authority to the Pope, and
the Pope now has kind of a partner when he
needs some help, and so Zachary declares Pepin king, and
Peppin In thanks gives the Pope some land in central Europe,

(04:35):
central Italy that will be called the Papal States. And
that land in central Italy is probably the same patch
of land that Constantine had originally given to the church
in the three hundreds, what's sometimes called the donation of Constantine.
And even though the piece of paper is a forgery
was proved to be a forgery in the fourteen hundreds,

(04:57):
still it is very clear that what you have is
a military political person endorsing a certain religious leader, and
the religious leader endorsing the political person back. And this
all comes together under Charlemagne. Now his name wasn't Charlemagne.
His name was Charles carl Carolus in Latin Carolus magnus.

(05:20):
Charlemagne becomes the French version of that, and so he
gives his name to this period called the carol Lingian period.
Charlemagne had a very long reign, very long life, and
What happened was that a pope, a very unpopular pope
in Rome named Leo the Third, was ousted by his
own people in the year seven ninety nine. And this pope, Leo,

(05:44):
reaches back to that relationship between Zachary and Peppin and says, hey,
I need some help. Down comes Charlemagne into Rome, puts
Leo back in power, and on Christmas Day in the
year eight hundred, Leo, in thanksgiving, crowns Charles, the Holy
Roman Emperor. Now in the sources, Charles says, oh, gee,
if I had known he was going to make me emperor,

(06:05):
never would have shown up in his chapel, as completely
unbelievable idea. And Leo anoints Charles. He gives him purple
robes the purple is the color of the Roman emperor,
and a crown and a scepter. And so now we
have this question who is more powerful. Is it the

(06:26):
emperor who actually has the physical power, or is it Leo.
Leo has the religious power. But Leo wouldn't be standing
there if it wasn't for Charlemagne. And so Charlemagne becomes
a patron of the church. And Charlemagne's son Louis the Pious.
Listen to that title, right, the Pious obviously protected the
church as well, and that empire lasted for quite some time.

(06:49):
But Louis's children quibbled among themselves and that empire collapses.
So we have a carol Jian renaissance of roughly one
hundred years seven to fifty to eight fifty, and the
high point is that anointing on Chris Day in the
year eight hundred. Well, Charlemagne, in the aftermath of that anointing,
wraps himself and what we call the iconography of political theology.

(07:14):
There's a phrase, huh, iconography illiterate population. You have an
illiterate population. What I see is what I know. And
political theology a phrase that makes Americans and modern people
very uncomfortable is de rigour. At that time, from the
ancient times, political power and religious power had come together.

(07:34):
And so what Charles does is he wraps himself in
the mantle of Constantine. He says, I am the new Constantine.
In fact, he calls his capital at Akin the Tertsia Roma.
Remember we had Rome and then the Nova Roma Constantinople.
And so Charles says, well, it's been transferred up into
Akin or the Tertsia Roma or the third Roma, and

(07:57):
he strikes a seal using words that had been used
by Constantine a little bit of Latin. Here. This seal
reads Dominus nostaire Carolus, imperatur Pius felix, perpetuus Augustus, our
Lord Emperor, Charles Pious, Happy Augustus forever. And that seal

(08:21):
has the city of Rome with a cross and acin
as well making a marriage. And on his coins, Charlemagne's coins,
he depicts himself as a Roman emperor with laurel leaves
and the words Religio Christiana Christian religion and Renovatsio Romani imperie.
The renewal of the Roman Empire never died, but now

(08:43):
we're going to give it a booster shot and return
it again. So for Charlemagne, the City of God, Augustine
City of God has been incarnated in his empire. He
calls it a Christian society associatas Christiana in the sources,
and he wears titles in his documents. And when he

(09:04):
is he walks into a room and they call out
his titles, and some of these titles may shock us.
The vicar of Christ the vicar of Saint Peter, the
rector of the Christian people, the rector of true religion,
priest and king. And so you see that he is

(09:24):
putting himself on par maybe a little higher than that
Bishop of Rome. You can see that there's gonna be tension,
and we're going to see this tension in later topics
where we talk about nation building and papal monarchy. Okay,
that's the politics. What's the renaissance? Cliffhanger, Chris answers that

(09:47):
question when we come back from a quick break, what's
the cultural renaissance in this period? Like all renaissances, you
reach back and you push forward. We have to reach

(10:09):
back a little bit to before Charles to understand the
spiritual engine that fuels his Christian society, and it's Benedictine monasticism.
So we have to talk about Benedictine monasticism. And I
need to point out that when you look at the
sources of this period, whenever they refer to monks, they

(10:31):
also mean nuns. Whenever they refer to monasteries, they also
refer to convents. So if you ever hear anyone say
the monks prayed eight times a day, so did the nuns.
And we should say too that in this period these
folks are mostly lay people. Instead of taking formal vows

(10:52):
of poverty, chastity and obedience what some members of religious
orders today call no money, no honey, and a boss,
those vows aren't formali until about eleven hundred. They take promises,
and the most important promissio is stub billitas that they're

(11:12):
going to spend their lives in that monastery or that
convent and work on a conversion of their own heart,
a conversio morum, and a conversion of their entire spirit.
And the key person here is Benedict, Benedict of Norcia,
and Benedict is living around the year five hundred. He's
one of these late antique characters like Augustine, a Roman

(11:36):
in his training but a Christian in his heart. His
most famous abbey is the abbey of Monte Casino, which
was bombed by the Allies in World War two and
then rebuilt, and there he writes his rule or his regula.
Now it was not original. There have been rules floating
around that period for several hundred years, but Benedict was

(11:56):
an administrator and he took all of these rules here,
and he says, what's good about them and what's bad
about them. Let's dial up what's good, let's get rid
of what's bad. And they're very practical and they have
these Roman values in them, like mediocritoss. Now mediocritas mediocrity, right,
is a bad word in our society today. How is
the meal? It was mediocre? It was okay? Right? Italian say,

(12:19):
ohs kumsikumsa, it was okay. Mediocritos in this world, in
the Roman and early Medieval world, is a virtue. It
means you're steady. It means to be like EMTs or nurses, doctors,
firemen are today in the midst of crisis. They stay medium,
in the middle. They are in control of their emotions.

(12:41):
They're not cold fish, but they are in control of
their emotions. And the rule instead of being rigid. Yes,
the rule says you pray at these times and you
do these tasks. But the abbot and the abbess have
great discretion. If they see a monk or a nun
who's having a bad day, they tell them to take
the day off. They're allowed to know when to push

(13:03):
and when to pull went to and when to flow,
and this is the great gift of Benedict to religious life,
this notion of discretcio. So what is a day like
in a medieval early medieval monastery or convent. This is
going to be the stabilizing force that Charlemagne is really

(13:25):
going to emphasize because he's going to look at monasteries
and convents as stabilizing forces in his empire. The key
is the prayer life. And now the prayer life is
the Opus day e. When you say that, immediately some
people say, wait a second, isn't there a religious kind
of community in the Catholic Church today called Opus Day? Yes,
there is. That's not what we're talking about. Opus day
literally means the work of God, and the work of

(13:47):
God is to pray. That's your job as a monk
or a nun. And that prayer was eight particular times
in a day. And those prayers go on and on,
and the most famous one that a lot of people
know is vespers are called evensong. And this is a
Protestant churches as well as Catholic churches nowadays. Back in

(14:09):
our own period, we're all Christian. We don't have that
Catholic Protestant split for another thousand years and vespers or
evensong is something that a lot of people have attended,
even if they're not believers, because some great composers have
written vespers services. And what do they do the rest
of the time. They read, and they study individually and together.

(14:30):
There's a sense of a community trying to help each other,
and they work. And this was one of Benedict's great
contributions because in the Roman world, slaves worked. But what
Benedict does is he sanctifies work. And this is going
to be important later on in something called the twelfth
century Renaissance, that my work is my prayer. Why because

(14:51):
Jesus worked. Jesus had a trade, Because Mary worked, she
had to make bread, she had to take care of
the house, and there's something sanctifying about it. Plus the
fact that a monastery or a convent has to be
self sufficient, and so it needs to make its own
bread and needs to grind its own grain, and it

(15:12):
needs to make its own wax and candles, it needs
to make vellum, it needs to make ink. And also,
I think, as we all know, you can't study all
day long, even when you're in graduate school or you're
working on a degree, or you're reading, you have to
get up and you have to move around. You have
to turn your brain off, and sometimes your brain keeps
working in interesting ways when you're doing physical labor. What

(15:35):
was the key to monastic spirituality? What was monastic theology? Like, well,
it usually gets a bad name, you know. We have
this notion from movies like Monty Python on the Holy
Grail that monks just kind of lamented the psalms all
day long and knocked themselves on the head and whipped
themselves and it's all very silly. The big aspect of

(15:56):
study and prayer in the medieval convents and monastery was
this notion that there is an authority to the word
of God. There's something that I think we've lost in
the modern world, and that's intellectual humility. Yes, we want
to understand things, we want to push the envelope out,
and we're going to see that in a later topic

(16:16):
called scholasticism or scholastic theology, which gets very aggressive. And
you need both of those, right. You need to come
to a point when you study when you say, well,
I can't explain this anymore, because how do you explain
the love of God? How do you explain the fact
that Jesus is fully human and fully divine without being
a two hundred percent creature. Comes a point where there

(16:37):
are mysteries, and the monk and the nun will defer
to those mysteries much more readily than a scholastic theologian.
And there's a reverence for the texts. And this is
why the copying of texts becomes so important in the monastery.
To write out the texts is to read the words,
and to read the words is to pray the words

(16:58):
as well. And let's remember that nuns are doing this
as well. So nuns had a higher rate of literacy
than women who are outside of the convent. And so
what does Charlemagne do with this monastic Benedictine tradition to
add to his renaissance. What he does is he marries
this structure of Roman imperial administration with Christian morality, and

(17:22):
he says, I want my society to be Christian. I
need to send out word of how to organize the
society and how people should act so that we have
law and order. And these words are sent out in
books organized by chapters. The Latin word for chapter is capitula,
and so these collections of books are called capitularies. So

(17:45):
there are rules on marriage, there's rules on crime, there
are rules on how people interact with each other in
terms of buying and selling, inheritance, what happens when things
go wrong, negotiations, criminal and civil actions, law and order

(18:05):
and punishment. And the people who get sent out are
legates or messengers. They're called the missi dominici, the messengers
of the lord, the lord being the emperor here who
is Charlemagne. And these people themselves reach back into history
and they say, well, let's see we have Roman learning,

(18:27):
but Roman learning is mythological, and mythology from Greco Roman
times is polytheistic. How does that work with Christian monotheism
and the belief in this god man Jesus. And again
they reach back and they find one of these late
antique characters, one of whom is named Cassiodorus, an exact

(18:47):
contemporary of Benedict. He was a Roman aristocrat, and he said, oh,
there's no problem here. You can read the Pagan classics,
and you can read the Christian classics, and you can
learn certain skills of rhetoric, of logic of organization from
the Pagans, and you simply apply them to Christian morality,

(19:07):
and in fact, his most famous book is called an
Introduction to Divine and Human Readings. Well, this is great
for Charlemagne because it's exactly what he's trying to do.
He's trying to recreate the Roman imperial structure, but he's
trying to do it in a Christian context, using Christian values.
And so now we begin to find not only in

(19:29):
Charlemagne's kingdom, but elsewhere as well, people doing precisely this
up in England, character by the name of the Venerable Bead.
Now he's not venerable in any formal Roman sense nowadays,
where you venerate a servant of God venerable. He was
called venerable in his own day. People just you know
people in your life who everyone says that person is

(19:51):
just wise. And so he was known as the Venerable Bead.
And he was in English Benedictine, someone who was living
in a monastery, who spent most of his life between
two monasteries, Wheremouth and Yarrow, and he collected documents, he
read these documents, he copied them, and he wrote his
own histories. And the most famous one is called the

(20:12):
Ecclesiastical History of the English people, and so Bede is
doing at the most famous level what monks and nuns
are doing all over this Carolingian Empire, and also down
in Italy as well, some of which was controlled by Charlemagne.
They are organizing libraries places where you do the script

(20:37):
a scriptorium in plural scriptoria, and they're copying texts. Now,
I'd like to make two points about those texts. The
first is that we think we have from the Greco
Roman world about twenty percent of what was written. In
some cases, we have lists of books, but we don't

(20:59):
have all of the books. So we might have a
list of seventy or eighty plays by Escalus, but we
only have in hand about ten or twelve of them.
It would be having like having a library burned down
but still having the card catalog. You know, those books
existed at one point. Well, those twenty percent of Greco

(21:20):
Roman texts exist almost exclusively in the hand writing of
early medieval monks and nuns. Without them, we would have
lost touch with that ancient world. And so what we
look at as this very tedious work is actually an

(21:41):
act of devotion and an intellectual action as well. But
it's important to know that monks and nuns are not
really challenging those texts. They're transferring those texts to a
later period that scholastic theologians will then challenge. So let's
look upon these two things as partnership and not competition.

(22:01):
The other point that I wanted to make was the
physical copying itself takes place in very careful handwriting. There
have been studies of handwriting. The study of handwriting is
called paleography, and it is a study in its own right.
Some of you have been to museums, or if you've
opened books and you see these ancient Greek or Roman
texts and you can't make any sense of them. That's

(22:23):
because there's no punctuation in ancient Greek and in ancient Latin.
All the words run together, and when you come to
the end of the line, if your word isn't finished,
you just wrap around to the next line. If you've
ever seen a three or four or five year old
learning to write, this is exactly how it gets. So
if you put a piece of paper down in front

(22:44):
of a young child and you tell them to write
a long word, and they at first letter is huge,
and you say to them write small, they'll just go
to the end of the line and wrap around again.
And so the handwriting of ancient Rome began to deteriorate
when Rome started to go through its transformation, and the
imperial system in the organization began to get a little

(23:07):
bit weaker than it had been. So one of the
things that Charles orders is that handwriting improves, that documents improve,
and so punctuation begins to be brought in and a
very careful handwriting, a slower handwriting with basically lined paper
called Carolingian minuscule, takes place. And it's this kind of

(23:29):
careful handwriting that you see. So you can look at
what is chicken scratch or a spider web crawling across
a page in the year six hundred. By the year
eight hundred, it looks as if it's printed, that's how
regular it is. And then that was checked by a
senior monk or a senior nun to make sure that
there were no errors in it. And the lext logical

(23:51):
step is to start illuminating those manuscripts. And if you've
ever seen, for instance, a page from the Book of Kells,
a very interesting example of medieval monks and nuns taking
Celtic and Gaelic native pagan imagery like circles and squirrels
and tying them into the gospels. So you might have

(24:12):
an illuminated initial letter, or you may have an image of,
say Gabriel announcing to Mary that God had chosen her
to be the mother of Jesus, and you might see
a fancy representation of that basically in the margin next
to the text of what Christians call the Annunciation. So

(24:36):
now this big effort begins to take place, and we
have a second Benedict. We had Benedict of Nurcia around
five hundred. Charlemagne has his own Benedict, and his name
is Benedict of Anien. And Benedict of Anien worked under
all of these people, Pepin the Short, remember him, Charlemagne
and Charlemagne's son Louis the Pious, and he took Monte Casino,

(24:59):
and he built a new monastery, his own monastery, a
place called Dan and he made it a second center
of Benedictine monasticism. And remember that there's a relationship between
Benedictine monasticism and those capitularies and people living a moral life.
In Charlemagne's empire, and he had a standard perfect copy

(25:20):
of Benedict's rule at Inden. Two monks and two nuns
from every monastery and convent in Charlemagne's territories had to
come and study for a year at Inden. And while
they were there, a copy of Benedict's rule was made
for them, and they took that copy from a mother
monastery or a convent to their son or daughter monastery

(25:46):
or a convent. And you can see how this change
in handwriting is fueling this Carolingian Renaissance. Somebody came from
England named Alcuin of York and he was Charlemagne's tutor.
He had studied under Bead and he taught Charlemagne. So
you see these cycles coming together in the Carolingian Renaissance.

(26:07):
There is no idea of a dark age in this period.
What we have is a transformation of Roman culture to
a new Christian age. Thank you for listening to another
episode of Secrets of the Medieval World. Next week we'll
learn about feudalism, peasant life and revolution, agricultural revolution half

(26:34):
hour history. Secrets of the Medieval World from One Day
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