Carolingians

“ The Carolingian dynasty reigned in France from 751 to 987, when it was ousted by the Capetian dynasty. In Germany descendants of Pippin reigned till the death of Louis the Child in 911; in Italy the Carolingians maintained their position until the deposition of Charles the Fat in 887. Charles, duke of Lower Lorraine, who was thrown into prison by Hugh Capet in 991, left two sons, the last male descendants of the Carolingians, Otto, who was also duke of Lower Lorraine and died without issue, and Louis, who after the year 1000 vanishes from history. ”

“ Such, however, was not their policy; on the contrary, they needed a Death-struggle of the Carolingians (888–987) . king to act as agent for their private interests, since he alone could invest their rank and dignities with an official and legitimate character. They did not at once agree on Charles’s successor; for some of them chose Eudes (Odo) , son of Robert the Strong, for his brilliant defence of Paris against the Normans in 885; others Guy, duke of Spoleto in Italy, who had himself crowned at Langres; while many wished for Arnulf, illegitimate son of Carloman, king of Germany and emperor. ”

“ Under the Carolingians such followers appear in the host, in the royal household, in every branch of the administration. They are the most trusted agents of the King and possess considerable social consequence. They are called vassi, a name formerly applied to any kind of dependent, but now reserved for free men rendering free services to the King or some other lord, and subject to his jurisdiction. So valuableare these followers that, in the eighth and ninth centuries, the power of the great is largely measured by the number of vassi whom they can put into the field. ”

“ But under the last of the Carolingians it had in fact become elective, as is shown by the elections of Odo and Robert before that of Hugh Capet. The The royal power. electors were the chief lords and prelates of the regnum Francorum. But following a clever policy, each king during his lifetime took as partner of his kingdom his eldest son and consecrated and crowned him in advance, so that the first of the Capetians revived the principle of heredity in favour of the eldest son, while establishing the hereditary indivisibility of the kingdom. ”

“ Today the results of their scholarship are available to the public and the great hymns which they have fostered may be heard as well as read in their medieval form.
The assimilation by the Franks, of alien cultures whether through conquest or peaceful interchange, may have been to a certain extent inevitable and involuntary. Such phenomena occur in every period of history. It is the conscious appropriation by the Carolingian leaders of a cultural heritage and its organization through existing institutions which reveals their true genius. ”

“ CARLOMAN.
Grant me beside the freedom for myself
Salvation for another.
{56} ASTOLPH.
What, a monk
Still half of you! Such trouble for men’s souls—
But have your wish. Once on the battlefield,
Men will become your prey. This solid jaw
Means grip you will not loose. O Carloman,
If I can circumvent the Pope, and then
Stretch him a bleeding quarry at my feet—
CARLOMAN.
What, Zacharias!
But I plead for France;
Popes must not meddle with her.
ASTOLPH.
[as the Prior and Monks re-enter] I require
The services of Carloman: another
Whom he will choose attends him.
DAMIANI. ”

“ The Teuton Charlemagne, Roland and Oliver were as completely forgotten of the poets who met in that memorable combat of the Wartburg, as were the Teuton Sigurd and Dietrich. And if the Carolingian cycle survived, however much altered, I think it must have been thanks to the burghers and artizans of the Netherlands and of Provence, to whom the bluff, matter-of-fact heroism, the simple, gross, but not illegitimate amours of Carolingian heroes, were more satisfactory than any mystic quest of the Grail, any refined adultery of Guenevere or Yseult. ”

“ Ireland, then, in the late fifth century and the sixth, holds the lamp. Its light passes to England in the middle of the seventh century, and from thence, near the end of the eighth, to the Court of Charlemagne, where it initiates the Carolingian Renaissance. In the ninth century, when England is a [26] prey to the Danes, the Carolingian Court and the great abbeys of Germany are enjoying a vigorous intellectual life, stimulated and enriched by scholars from Italy and from Ireland. In a general view the tenth and eleventh centuries must figure as a period of degeneration ”

“ Then the inevitable crisis had come. For a hundred years the great feudal lords had disposed of the crown as they pleased, handing it back and forward from one dynasty to another. At the same time the contrast between the vast proportions of the Carolingian empire and its feeble administrative control over a still uncivilized community became more and more accentuated. The Empire crumbled away by degrees. Each country began to lead its own separate existence, stammering its own tongue; the different nations no longer understood one another, and no longer had any general ideas in common. ”

“ The wonderful house of the Carolings, which produced no less than five successive rulers of genius (of whom two had extraordinary genius, Charles Martel and Charlemagne) , were the human instruments of this great work. The Frankish Monarchy was hastening to ruin when they saved it. Saxons in the East and Saracens in the South were on the point of extinguishing the few surviving embers of civilisation which still existed. The Bishop of Rome was ready to fall a prey to the Lombards, and the progressive papacy of Hildebrand and Innocent ran imminent risk of being extirpated at its root. ”

“ Suddenly there came, in 800, his own coronation as emperor, Relations
of the Carolingian to the Eastern empire. an act apparently unpremeditated at the moment, taking him by surprise, as one gathers from Einhard’s Vita Karoli, and interrupting his plans. It left him representative of the Empire for the West only, confronting another representative in the East. Such a position he did not desire: there had been a single Empire vested in a single person since 476, and he desired that there should still continue to be a single Empire, vested only in his own person. ”

“ For example, in the abbey of Saint-Denis, near Paris, if we may draw conclusions from surviving examples, the Celtic style was in great favour. Another peculiarity in the decoration of the Carolingian MSS. is the tendency of the artist to mix his styles, and to attach details on a small scale, such as delicate sprays and flourishes, and minute objects, to large-scale initial letters, as though he felt that grossness required a corrective contrast. The art became more refined under the immediate successors of Charlemagne, and under Charles the Bald it culminated. ”

“ Perhaps it was a natural desire to emulate the splendor and ornament of eastern rites which led Charlemagne to favor Greek elements in western observance at the expense of the Gallican.
In the midst of Gallic, Celtic, Italian, Byzantine and oriental influences mingled in Carolingian culture, the presence of native genius is strongly felt. Charlemagne has been criticized for his devotion to classical rather than Germanic culture. Sacred poetry as produced in the Carolingian literary circles, was written in Latin and clothed in classical garb. ”

“ King Carolus is more lonely than the meanest wagon-drifer. He has not once a comrade’s knee to weep on. Among nobles and fine ladies and perukes he comes like a spectre out of a thousand-year mausoleum—and spectres mostly go about without company. ”

“ In their eyes, and in the eyes of Charlemagne’s own descendants, the Empire was something appendant to the kingship of the Franks, which made that kingship unique among others, but did not radically alter its character. True, the kingship might be divided among brothers by the old Germanic custom of partition, while the Empire must inhere in one person; but that was the one difference, and the one difficulty, which might easily be solved by attaching the name of emperor to the eldest brother. Such was the conception of the Carolings: such was not, however, the conception of the Church. ”

“ Thanks to Charlemagne, and through the The Carolingian Renaissance. restoration of order and of the schools, a common civilization was prepared for the varied elements of the Empire. By his means the Church was able to concentrate in the palatine academy all the intellectual culture of the middle ages, having preserved some of the ancient traditions of organization and administration and guarded the imperial ideal. Charlemagne apparently wished, like Theodoric, to use German blood and Christian unity to bring back life to the great body of the Empire. ”

“ The possession of slaves renders them proud, impatient of restraint, and gives them a haughtiness of manner which, to those unaccustomed to them, is disagreeable; but we find among them a high sense of honour, a delicacy of sentiment, and a liberality of mind, which we look for in vain in the more commercial citizens of the northern states. The genius of the Carolinian, like the inhabitants of all southern countries, is quick, lively, and acute; in steadiness and perseverance he is naturally inferior to the native of the north ”

“ The Carolingian, like the Merovingian, realm included many different peoples who were destined never to become one nation; and the whole Carolingian system of government virtually had existed in the Merovingian period. Before, as well as after, the dynastic change, the government throughout the realm was administered by Counts. Likewise the famous missi dominici, or royal legates, are found in Merovingian times; but they were employed more effectively by Charles Martell, Pippin, and, finally, by Charlemagne, who enlarged their sphere of action. ”

“ So Carolan began to give out a song he had made about the King of Mayo and all his family, and he brought Queen Mary into it and the three daughters. Then the Queen asked leave of the King to bring him in, because he made so good a song, but the King would not give in to it. Then Carolan began to draw down the King of Mayo's father and his grandfather into the song. And Queen Mary asked again for forgiveness for him, and the King gave it that time because of the song that had in it the old times, and the old generations went through him. ”

“ At breakfast on the following morning, when Carolan sang and played his composition, Baron Dawson, to the astonishment of all present, and of the bard in particular, stoutly denied the claim of Carolan to the melody, charged him with audacious piracy, both musical and poetical, and, to prove the fact, sang the melody to his own words amidst the joyous shouts of approbation of all his hearers,—the enraged bard excepted, who vented his execrations on the judge in curses both loud and deep.—Dublin University Magazine. ”

“ And so will it ever fight, no matter how our more elaborate ideas of what is good or evil may vary: the nation always glorifies the great and noble according to its own unreasoning reason.
This volume contains the principal hero-lays of the six great epic cycles of the Teutonic Middle Ages, and to them we have added the great mythical Carolingian cycle, which centred round the persons of Charlemagne and his heroes. The latter is mostly of Romance origin, and was composed by court troubadours for the delight of the royal palace, wherefore it never became the true inheritance of the masses. ”

“ The enrichment of the covers of books themselves, as distinct from the use of cases or shrines, has been usual in almost all ages and styles of decoration. When we come to speak of Carolingian MSS. we shall find several remarkable instances.
We must now pass on from this curiously attractive theme of Celtic calligraphy to its contemporary styles of France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, only remarking by the way that no other style of its time had so marked an influence on the local scriptoria into which it was introduced as this same Celtic of Ireland. ”

“ Do you think me at all worthy to govern my Empire, a domain as vast as the old Empire of Rome? Do you deem me worthy of reigning over the population of Armorica?"
"Charles, in my youth your grandfather proposed to me that I be the jailer of the last descendant of Clovis, an ill-starred boy, then a prisoner in an abbey, and having barely one suit of clothes to cover himself with. That boy, when grown to man's estate, was, upon orders of Pepin, your father, tonsured and locked up in a monastery, where he died obscure and forgotten. ”

“ Then Saint Columba, giving thanks to God, said to his followers, "Ye see, brethren, how much favour hath the earth of most blessed Kiaranus brought us."
LIII. A PANEGYRIC OF CIARAN
38. Most blessed Kiaranus living among men passed a life as of an angel, for the grace of the Holy Spirit burned in his face before the eyes of men. Who could expound his earthly converse? For he was young in age and in body, yet a most holy senior in mind and in manners, in humility, in gentleness, in charity, in daily labours, in nightly vigils, and in other divine works. ”

“ From Clovis to Charlemagne it was the regular practice to divide the realm at death among the ruler’s sons, and for the ablest among them to pursue and slay the others, and so unite the realm again. Besides this principle of internecine conflict, differences of race and language and degrees of Latinization ensured eventual disruption.
Nothing passes away, and very little quite begins, but all things change; and so the verity of social and political phenomena lies in the becoming, rather than in any temporary phase—as one may perceive in the Merovingian, later Carolingian, regnum Francorum. ”