The 8th Century
Part SIX of my 12 Centuries in 12 Months Series...
It’s the dawning of the eighth century and we see the distinction of three separate civilizations that would make up the medieval world. The first has been well established for a long time: the Eastern Roman Empire, vis-a-vis Byzantine Empire. The second we saw develop in the last century: the Islamic Empire. This month we’ll see the final formation of the last. It will be the third leg, the final addition, to what I call the Medieval Imperial Tripod. We will also see some significant ideologies being established that helped define the Middle Ages.
SETTING THE SCENE
Last month we saw Islam explode out of the Arabian desert and claim its place on the medieval chessboard. The Arab conquests went from a slew of attacks for plunder and land grabs to a cohesive empire with its own currency, language, and religion. It was originally ruled by the Umayyad dynasty, a wealthy commercial elite family who had established their capital in Damascus.
The Byzantine Empire was bruised and battered from its losses to the Arab conquests. They had lost pretty much everything except the Balkans and Constantinople. No longer the dominant force in the Mediterranean, they were struggling. However, they could proudly claim they withstood the bombardment of Constantinople by the Arabs. Multiple sources claim it was this victory that halted the rest of Europe being absorbed into the Islamic Empire. Hollister states it was this defense that maintained the medieval division of the Roman heirs: Byzantium, Islam, and Western Christendom (Hollister, p 48). This is another essay, but I wrestle with this. It seems a bold claim. The Eastern Roman Empire had weathered quite a lot of invasions, it was ancient, spread out, and resilient. Constantinople was its capital, but I don’t think the entire empire would have crumbled and then Islam spread over the whole of the Western European map. Seems like a stretch. A bit melodramatic.
KEY PLAYERS
As always, the Church had a prominent role this century. Their role became symbiotically entangled with the Carolingians, a dynasty we will soon see replacing the Merovingians in Francia. While these two established their new budding relationship, the Islamic Empire experienced some sharp growing pains and then blossomed into its Golden Age. So, this century, the three main players were the Church, the Carolingians, and the Islamic Empire.
There were also some smaller players (and by small, I mean individuals), but their contributions to the century were grand. I’m talking about three religious men whose works were integral in shaping the Middle Ages and without which our understanding of the times would essentially be in the dark. See what I did there? The Dark Ages? Am I amusing only myself here?
The Arab conquests continued into the eighth century, but in 732 CE, exactly one hundred years from their start, their expansion was abruptly halted when they crossed the Pyrenees into Francia and were defeated at the Battle of Tours by the famous Charles Martel (I’ll discuss his fame further down).
Around this time, they also experienced a reshuffling of power when a civil war broke out. The current ruling family, the Umayyads, were struggling to hold their overextended empire together. They thought they had the support of the Mawali (non-Arab Muslims) but didn’t. Revolts began in Persia in 743 CE and continued to spread. The last Umayyad caliph was deposed and the remaining family members were hunted down and killed. Then in 750 CE, a leader of the revolts, named Abu Abbas, proclaimed himself caliph, instituting the Abbasid dynasty. They would continue to rule the Islamic Empire for the next 500 years and usher in the Golden Age of Islam.
The Abbasids encouraged all conquered peoples to participate politically, which built a government run by a variety of races and peoples. Their sophisticated bureaucracy resembled the Byzantine and Persian empires. In 762 CE, the Abbasid caliph moved the capital east from Damascus to Baghdad, shifting their focus from the former goal of western expansion to fostering trade with the East. From these trading relationships came a healthy exchange of information and ideas; a new wealth of medicine, science, art, and culture flowed into the empire. Arab scholars translated and preserved countless texts from the old classical world. It was an intellectual awakening.
Immediately following the Abbasids’ victory, a lone Umayyad family member escaped and fled to Spain, where he established himself as caliph of his own independent Muslim state in Cordoba. Its population, culture, wealth, and advances in science, medicine, art, and city administration (such as aqueducts, sanitation services, police force, etc.) were up to par with Baghdad. It was a rich city of learning and culture (Jones, p 147). I haven’t read a book dedicated solely to the Golden Age of Islam but I have a few in my reading cue. I’ve included them in the Further Reading list.
While the Islamic Empire experienced its civil war, there was another dynastic game of musical chairs happening a little further north. As you remember from last month the Frankish dynasty, the Merovingians, had established themselves as the dominant force in the West. However, their power was waning as their mayors of the palace slowly rose to prominence.
In 717 CE, Charles Martel became one of these mayors. But his vision was set on something loftier than just managing the administration of one kingdom, he wanted the reunification of Francia. Sadly, his plans were cut short by his death in 741 CE, leaving his lands divided between his two sons. Fortunately for one, the other quickly retired to a monastery, leaving him the sole ruler of everything. This son was Pepin the Short. Pepin was the one who got to go down in history as the crowned king of Francia, who established the Carolingian dynasty and implemented theocratic monarchical rule, a pillar of the Middle Ages (Side Note: Theocratic Monarchical rule wasn’t a new idea, it had existed prior to this. Pepin just made it the thing to do in the Middle Ages). But to get there, we need to explain a few other things first.
As I mentioned earlier, the Church was once again a key player. And again, another great schism arose: the Iconoclasm Heresy. During this time, icons (religious statues and pictures depicting God, Jesus, and the saints) were greatly revered...some argued, to an unhealthy level. In 726 CE, the worshipping of these icons became an issue for the Byzantine emperor. Leo III was concerned these icons held almost magical powers to the devout and decided it was idolatrous and dangerous; he banned icons and ordered them to be destroyed. But “an icon … was more than a symbol and less than an idol: an icon was a window into the sacred, a threshold at which a worshipper could stand and come that much closer to the divine,” (Wise-Bauer, p 358). So, when Leo III banned them, the people rebelled and rioted. Thus, the new schism between the “iconoclasts” (the icon smashers) and the “iconodules” (the icon lovers) was born. This violent schism would last for two centuries.
You know who else didn’t like this ban? The Western papacy back in Rome. Pope Gregory III (the first of the three influential religious men I mentioned) was against these bans, claiming them to be heretical. Thus, the gap between the western and eastern branches of Christianity grew bigger. Pope Gregory III issued a public condemnation of iconoclasm and wrote to Leo III. But his letter wasn’t just about the banning of icons. It was also about an emperor over in the east arrogantly exercising authority over religious issues in the west. In his letter, Pope Gregory III explained how the emperor was in no place to make religious decrees (Norwich, p 357). In 731 CE, he called a church council (they loved to do that, didn’t they?!) and excommunicated all the iconoclasts. What did the emperor do? Exactly what you’d expect…punished them back. He declared the Byzantine lands in Italy were no longer subject to the pope, but rather to the patriarch (Eastern Orthodox church branch) further entrenching that gap and isolating the pope (Wise-Bauer, p 361). Whew, let me catch my breath.
In 751 CE, the Lombards captured Ravenna, making the papacy in Italy even more vulnerable and in need of some new powerful and influential friends. Pope Gregory III had a good friend named St. Boniface, a Benedictine monk from Southern England (the second of the influential religious men) who was chummy with some powerful and influential friends.
Boniface had spent the first half of the eighth century as the Apostle of Germany, where his missionary work “brought an entirely new area of Western Europe into Latin Christian civilization” (Cantor, p 168). He founded great monasteries that were centers of learning, famous for their libraries and scriptoria. Then, as if that wasn’t a great enough accomplishment for one lifetime, he turned his efforts to reforming the Frankish Church. He set to work educating the clergy, establishing local parishes where his educated priests could reach people in even the smallest villages, thus establishing the medieval parish system, another pillar of the Middle Ages.
This is where we return to Pepin the Short. Pope Gregory III reached out to Boniface and asked him to facilitate an alliance between the papacy and the powerful, influential leaders in Francia, whom Boniface had grown close with through his work. The papacy agreed to crown Pepin the Short as king in exchange for Pepin’s military support against the Lombards. This was beneficial for both. The papacy would get help in Italy. But Pepin would get to elevate his power from simply being a mayor to being a king (if you remember, the Merovingians were still the Frankish ruling dynasty, but only in name. The mayors of the palace had long taken their power, but had yet to officially take their royal title). Having ecclesiastical support and papal authority while he essentially stole the crown off another man’s head was a gift too good to refuse. In 751 CE, Pepin the Short was crowned king, ending the Merovingians rule and establishing the Carolingian dynasty. (Side Note: He was first anointed king by St. Boniface after the deposition of the last Merovingian king Childeric III. Then I have crossed two dates for the crowning, one in 751 CE by Pope Zacharias, then again in 754 CE by Pope Stephen II…if you can enlighten me on the correct date and/or order of this, please do so in the comments.)
This wasn’t just another crowning of a king. It was a momentous event, shattering old foundational principles and setting new standards. “Frankish kings now claimed there was a sacred character to their rule. The stage was set for kings to begin to regard themselves as in direct contact with God: approved and protected by the Almighty and entitled to think of themselves as his deputies on earth,” (Jones, p 157). This was a new way of doing things. The old way of kingship was hard-won through victorious warfare and conquest, election, or inheritance. Now the king was essentially chosen and anointed by God. Theocratic monarchical rule became another pillar of the Middle Ages.
Have you lost count of how many pillars we’ve established so far? Don’t worry, I’ll go over them again later. Pillars help support the structure. It’s important to know the pillars that held up and supported medieval society.
So, it’s now mid-century and a lot has happened. Cantor sums it up well, “The 750s constituted one of the momentous turning points of medieval history. This decade was characterized by the final emancipation of the papacy from the framework of the eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire), the supplanting of the Merovingian dynasty by the Carolingians, and the penetration of the idea of the theocratic monarchy into Western Europe.”
NOTABLES
Pepin the Short may have established the Carolingian dynasty, but the ruler most well-known and attached to the Carolingians was Charlemagne, the “Founder of Europe.” What Charlemagne did for Francia and Western Latin Christendom is another pillar of the Middle Ages. He took his new dynasty and symbiotic relationship with the Church and built a centralized and cohesive empire with a vision of grandeur and prestige that rivaled the old Roman Empire (Grombich, p 128). He bound the feuding barbarian kingdoms, Francia, parts of Germany, Spain, and Italy, into a unified territory that closely resembles the EU today (Jones). He created another empire; one that began to see themselves as apart from the Roman (Byzantine) Empire, their own identity bound by a common faith, language, and heritage, and distinguished themselves as “European.” They became the third leg of the medieval imperial tripod that balanced out the Middle Ages.
Charlemagne started this massive reunification when he took over in 768 CE. He believed it was his duty to provide for the material, spiritual, and intellectual welfare of his subjects (Bishop, p 27). His grand vision was to restore the piety of the people, reform the church, and rescue the culture from the ignorance of the times. He was a charismatic ruler, an excellent military commander, and politician. “Great he was by every reckoning - great in physique, in prowess, in purpose, in intelligence, in industry” (Bishop, p. 23). He was essentially the whole package. Exactly what a king should be.
He conquered the Lombards, subdued the Saxons (in Germany, not England) and converted them to Christianity, absorbed Bavaria into his kingdom, fought the Slavs in Austria, destroyed the Avar state, all within just a few decades, expanding the Carolingian empire in every direction.
He combined the German system of semi-independent chiefs or dukes, responsible only to the great chief, with the Roman tradition of centralization, creating a highly efficient and organized system of government (Bishop, p 26). He granted land to his close friends who in turn divided their land to smaller vassals, who then owed them obedience, war service, and soldiers…the beginning of feudalism (Side note: feudalism is a highly debated term these days which we can discuss another time).
Charlemagne also believed a cultural movement was needed, not just the enlargement and securing of borders. He surrounded himself with scholars from all over the world, including Alcuin of York (the third influential religious man). In the 790s, Charlemagne built a new palace in Aachen, ended his relentless military campaigns and began focusing on reform. Aachen became one of the elite schools for rhetoric, religion, and the liberal arts. Charlemagne sponsored monasteries and abbeys, appointed bishops, and pushed to increase literacy. He started a campaign to preserve classical learning and worked to standardize education so the clergy would have a Latin education and could then give the people a basic education. He increased book and manuscript copying to save texts. He was a devout Christian, giving wealth and land to the papacy, but also had religious tolerance, even developing a friendship with the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad.
It all came to a glorified head at the very end of the century when Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Roman Church in 800 CE. This was a huge development that shifted power from the Mediterranean to North Francia, solidifying this new united Western Christendom thing. They acclaimed him as “Caesar” and “Augustus”, essentially creating a Catholic emperor, apart from the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople.
“Until the eighth century Italy had developed culturally as a satellite of Byzantine civilization. The Franks and Charlemagne bound Italy to North Europe rather than to an east Mediterranean bloc. The coronation implied that a new europa was in formation. It was also the beginning of the papal claim to make and rule the emperor, and through the emperor the world,” (Bishop, p 25).
This was a huge blow to the Byzantine Empire, who had spent decades holding onto the idea that it was still one and indivisible. “Now, without warning, the unthinkable had occurred. A jumped-up barbarian chieftain was calling himself Emperor and had been crowned as such by the Pope in Rome. Henceforth there would be two Empires, not one. The old order was gone. The Christian world would never be the same again,” (Norwich, p 382).
AS FAR AS I CAN TELL…
The eighth century was a momentous one merely for the major power shifts and the establishments of some of the pillars of medieval life.
We now officially have Western Christendom, an entity all its own that could stand apart from the other empires. It had resulted in an equilibrium of sorts, creating a tripod of empires: Byzantine Empire, Islamic Empire, and Western Christendom (united under the banner of the Frankish kingdom, anointed and given its preeminent standing by the Roman Orthodox Church).
This was a big deal. “In 800 Europe signified a new civilization that was coextensive with the area of Latin Christianity and created by the confluence of Germanic traditions and Latin-Christian culture. Compared to Byzantium and Islam, Europe was still poor and backward, but it had developed particular ideas and institutions of its own, had found leadership within its own ranks, and had become conscious of its own distinct existence and destiny,” (Cantor, p 185). This began the Holy Roman Empire, aka Western Christendom, which survived for a thousand years.
We also now have the custom and habit of theocratic monarchical rule. No longer were kings simply territorial warlords and chieftains who held their power as long as they could defend it. From now on, the monarchies in the Middle Ages were run by kings who held their status as rulers appointed by God and the Church. It further blurred the sacred and secular, opening up debate on who was the ultimate authority: the Church or the King, which will be an ongoing issue in the coming centuries.
Cantor claims all of this can be attributed to the Church. “The moving force in the rise of European civilization in the eighth century came from the church. Anglo-Saxon monks and the papacy willed the creation of the first Europe. Working together, they transformed the Frankish church and the nature of Frankish kingship and awoke political and intellectual capacities in the continental peoples, which led to the Carolingian Empire and the improvement in the educational and intellectual life that distinguished the eighth and ninth centuries,” (Cantor, p. 161).
In my humble opinion, this gives too much credit to the Church. I’m not sure I would say they “willed” Europe into being. Nor do I think they should be allowed to claim sole credit for the Carolingian Empire. It was a joint effort between the papacy, St Boniface, and Charlemagne (along with his predecessors), and was helped by circumstances of strained relations between the eastern and western church schisms, as well as the shift of focus for the Islamic Empire as they turned eastward, away from western expansion and busy with their own burgeoning golden age.
So, as far as I can tell, the happenings of the eighth century are responsible for completing the scaffolding of the Medieval Imperial Tripod. Yes, it’s a new term I’m coining. This tripod of empires will hold up and maintain the balance and stability of the Middle Ages for the upcoming centuries.
But not all was rainbows and cupcakes. A dark storm cloud was rolling in from the sea, about to pommel this newly unified Christian Europe. “Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race…” claims Alcuin of York as he wrote of the first supposed Viking raid on the monastery on Lindisfarne Island, off the coast of Britain in 793 CE. Stay tuned!
RESOURCES & FURTHER READING
Bauer, Susan Wise. The History of the Medieval World
Bishop, Morris. The Middle Ages
Cantor, Norman. The Civilization of the Middle Ages
Gombrich, E. H. A Little History of the World
Hollister, C. Warren. Medieval Europe: A Short History
Holmes, George. The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe
Jones, Dan. Powers & Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages
Norwich, John Julius. Byzantium, The Early Centuries
Samuels, Charlie. Timeline of the Middle Ages
Wallace-Hadrill, J.M. The Barbarian West, The Early Middle Ages, AD 400-1000
Readings on Golden Age of Islam (I haven’t read these yet, but they’re in my reading cue at the moment! If you have good books on this subject, please share in the comments):
Please Note: Some of the copies I used are older publications I found at my local library. These links take you to the most recent edition found on Amazon. So my page references might be incorrect, just FYI. Sorry!