IV

ORIGO

Part II

The Birth of Europe, AD c.330–800

MEZQUITA

NO building in Europe better illustrates the cycle of civilizations than the Mezquita Aljama, now the cathedral church in Cordoba. Its oldest part dates from the reign of Abd-al-Rahman I (r. 755–88). As a treasure-house of Hispano-lslamic art, it ranks with the Alcazar in Seville or the fabled palace of Alhambra at Granada. But its originality lies in the use of materials taken from the demolished Latin-Byzantine Basilica of St Vincent which stood until 741 on the same site, and which had once been shared by Christian and Moslem congregations. What is more, both mosque and basilica rested on the foundations of a great Roman temple, which in its turn had replaced a Greek or possibly a Phoenician edifice. Only St Sofia in Istanbul can match such varied connections.

The proportions of the Mezquita befit a city which outgrew medieval Rome many times over. Together with its central Orange-Tree Courtyard, it covers an area of 130 m. x 180 m., surrounded by walls and decorated battlements. Most impressive, however, are the many features which combine Islamic and Christian elements. The great nave is filled with a forest of multicoloured marble columns supporting two layers of arches. The columns, topped by variegated capitals, came from the old basilica. The lower, ‘horseshoe’ arches are made from alternating segments of white limestone and red brick. The upper layer of round arches is pure Roman. The main northern door is covered with metal plates at the centre of which the word deus alternates with al-mulk lilah (‘The empire and power are God’s alone’). The exquisite Dove’s Door has an ornate Arabian arch embellished by a medieval ogive surround. The miharab or ‘niche of orientation’, indicating the direction of Mecca, was built by Syrian architects, who duly pointed it to the south. It takes the form of a small octagonal room under a single conchshell ceiling. It is entered by an archway in polychrome mosaic and preceded by a vestibule under three Byzantine cupolas. Persian-style cufie inscriptions abound, even in sections such as the Royal Chapel, which was refurbished with gothic ornament and feudal heraldry in the fourteenth century. Christian Baroque inspired the altar and entablature within the mosque, and the Chapel of the Incas.1

A few sites in Spain, like the Mezquita of Cordoba or the old city of Toledo, do convey a strong sense of continuity. Modern tourists love to be told that Muslim Spain introduced Europeans to oranges, lemons, spinach, asparagus, aubergines, artichokes, pasta, and toothpaste, together with mathematics, Greek philosophy, and paper, [XATIVAH]

But the fact is that the continuities are few. Muslim civilization in Spain was not just superseded; wherever possible it was eradicated (see p. 345). Visitors might get a truer sense of history if they visit the lonely Muslim castle of Trujillo in Extremadura or the deserted walled city of Vascos in Castille. In Cordoba, one should proceed from the Mezquita to the palace of Madinat al-Zahra (Medina Azahara) outside the city. It was once the residence of a caliph who could contact Egypt within twenty-four hours along a network of sun-mirror stations, and who required foreign ambassadors to approach his throne-room under a canopy three miles long and supported by a double row of his Berber soldiers. It once housed a population of 20,000 including a harem of 6,000. Damaged by the Berber revolt in 1010, its ruins were not rediscovered by archaeologists until 1911.2

When Spaniards shout ‘Ole’, many do not care to remember that they are voicing an invocation to Allah.

Islam’s impact on the Christian world cannot be exaggerated. Islam’s conquests turned Europe into Christianity’s main base. At the same time the great swathe of Muslim territory cut the Christians off from virtually all direct contact with other religions and civilizations. The barrier of militant Islam turned the Peninsula in on itself, severing or transforming many of the earlier lines of commercial, intellectual, and political intercourse. In the field of religious conflict, it left Christendom with two tasks—to fight Islam and to convert the remaining pagans. It forced the Byzantine Empire to give lasting priority to the defence of its Eastern borders, and hence to neglect its imperial mission in the West. It created the conditions where the other, more distant Christian states had to fend for themselves, and increasingly to adopt measures for local autonomy and economic self-sufficiency. In other words, it gave a major stimulus to feudalism. Above all, by commandeering the Mediterranean Sea, it destroyed the supremacy which the Mediterranean lands had hitherto exercised over the rest of the Peninsula. Before Islam, the post-classical world of Greece and Rome, as transmuted by Christianity, had remained essentially intact. After Islam, it was gone forever. Almost by default, the political initiative passed from the Mediterranean to the emerging kingdoms of the north, especially to the most powerful of those kingdoms in ‘Francia’.

In the course of that eighth century, therefore, when Europe’s Christians were digesting the implications of the Islamic conquests, the seeds of a new order were sown. The Bishop of Rome, deprived of support from Byzantium, was forced to turn to the Franks, and to embark on the enterprise of the ‘Papacy’. The Franks saw their chance to back the Pope. Indirectly, Charlemagne was the product of Muhammad (see below, pp. 284–90). According to Henri Pirenne, whose thesis shattered earlier conceptions as surely as Islam shattered the ancient world, ‘The Frankish Empire would probably never have existed without Islam, and Charlemagne without Mahomet would be inconceivable.’ The arguments of Pirenne have been diminished on detailed points, especially regarding the alleged break in commercial relations. But they revolutionized the study of the transition from the ancient to the medieval worlds.

To talk of Muhammad and Charlemagne, however, is not enough. Islam affected Eastern Europe even more directly than it affected Western Europe. Its appearance set the bounds of a new, compact entity called ‘Christendom’, of which Constantinople would be the strongest centre for some time to come. It set a challenge to the pagans on the eastern fringes of Christian-Muslim rivalry, who henceforth faced the prospect of choosing between the two dominant religions. Above all, it created the cultural bulwark against which European identity could be defined. Europe, let alone Charlemagne, is inconceivable without Muhammad.

Christianity’s rivalry with Islam raised moral and psychological problems no less profound than those already existing between Christianity and Judaism. Both Christians and Muslims were taught to regard the other as the infidel. Their misunderstandings, antagonisms and negative stereotypes were endless. It was never popular, least of all among the clergy, to stress how much the three great monotheistic religions held in common. As a result, a strong dichotomy developed between the Christian ‘West’ and the Islamic ‘East’. Medieval Europeans commonly referred to Muslims as ‘Saracens’, an epithet derived from the Arabic word sharakyoun or ‘easterner’. Among those Westerners who have imagined themselves to be the bearers of a superior civilization, there has been a long tradition of viewing the Muslim East with mindless disdain.

The Christian Church in the Age of the General Councils, 325–787

By the time of the first General Council at Nicaea in 325 (see p. 205), the Christian Church headed the largest religious community in the Empire. Since the Edict of Milan, it benefited from the policy of toleration; and it had the support of the reigning emperor. But its position was not entirely secure. It was not the established state religion, and it had many enemies in high places. It had made few inroads beyond the Empire. Progress, from the Christian point of view, and particularly from that of the ‘Orthodox’ party led by Athanasius, was going to be bumpy, [IKON]

Under Constantius II (r. 337–61) there was a brief resurgence of Arianism. Not for the last time, Athanasius was banished. In 340, when the Goths were still resident to the north of the Danube delta, they were converted to Christianity in its Arian form. As a result, when the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths entered the Empire and established their kingdoms in Italy, Gaul, Spain, and Africa, they took their Arianism with them. They presented a major obstacle to the spread of Orthodox Christianity among the barbarians, [BIBLIA] Another change of tack came with the Emperor Julian (r. 361–3), a philosopher-monarch known in the Christian tradition as ‘the Apostate’. Educated in the Christian faith by people who had murdered his family, ‘he had always declared himself an advocate of Paganism’. The end result was an edict of general toleration, and a last interval of respite for the Roman gods. ‘The only hardship which he inflicted on the Christians was to deprive them of the power of tormenting their fellow subjects.’ There is no evidence for the legend that his last words were Vicisti Galilaee, ‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean’.18

These experiences shook the Trinitarian party from their complacency. Athanasius in the East and Hilary of Poitiers (315–67) in the West, who had led the opposition to Constantius and Julian, were succeeded by the generation of the Church’s most brilliant and commanding Fathers. John Chrysostom (347–407), the ‘Golden Mouth’, Bishop of Constantinople, was the greatest preacher of the age, who ruffled many feathers in high society. Basil the Great (330–79), Bishop of Caesarea, came from a remarkable family that claimed no fewer than eight saints. He is generally accounted the founder of communal monasticism. His brother, Gregory of Nyssa (335–95), and his friend, Gregory of Nazianus (329–89), were both prominent theologians, who carried the day at the Second General Council at Constantinople (381). In the West, the Pannonian Martin of Tours (315–97) completed the evangelization of Gaul. Ambrose of Milan (c.334–97) was the leading ecclesiastical politician of the age. The Dalmatian Jerome (c.345–420) was the leading biblical scholar of the early church. The African, Augustine of Hippo, was probably the most influential of the Church Fathers.

Their efforts bore fruit in the reign of Theodosius (r. 378–95), who was the last emperor to rule both East and West and who gave his support to the Trinitarian party. Theodosius was a Spaniard, son of a general, and a man of ferocious temper. He turned to the Trinitarians for the simple reason that his predecessor, Valens, had been killed by the Arian Goths. Under his protection the Second General Council ratified the Nicene Creed. Trinitarian Christianity was supported with the force of law; Arianism was banned; paganism was persecuted. This is the point where the Trinitarians could start to enforce their claim to orthodoxy, and to condemn their rivals past and present as ‘heretics’, [INDEX] [RUFINUS] [ZEUS]

To many believers in subsequent centuries, this ‘triumph of Christianity’ was celebrated as a wonderful achievement. Theodosius was awarded the epithet of ‘Great’. But there was little in the teaching of Christ to recommend such a close association of spiritual and political authority. Moreover, Theodosius was hardly an example of Christlike virtue. In 388 he killed his co-emperor, Magnus Maximus; and in 390 he wreaked terrible revenge on the city of Thessalonika for daring to permit a rebellious riot. He ordered his officers to invite the whole population to the Circus, as if to the Games, and then to slaughter all 7,000 in cold blood. For this crime he was constrained by Ambrose to perform public penance, and he died in Milan, somewhat better apprised of the religion to which he had given such signal services.

Theologian and bishop, St Augustine (354–430) had trained as a rhetorician, and had once been an advocate of Manichaeanism. He was converted to Christianity in Milan in 386. His willingness to admit to human weaknesses makes him the most appealing writer. His Confessions, which recount the emotions of a young man called to renounce the comforts and pleasures of the worldly life, stand in stark contrast to the polemicist disputing with Donatists, Manichaeans, and Pelagians. Yet he analysed and systematized the intricacies of those doctrines with such mastery that he left little to be done until Thomas Aquinas almost 800 years later. He stressed the primacy of love in a way that almost recommends libertinism. Dilige et quod vis faç (Love and do what you want) and Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum (Love the sinner and hate the sins) were two of his maxims. At the same time, he stressed the necessity of the institutionalized Church. Salus extra ecclesiam non est (there is no salvation outside the Church), he wrote; also Roma locuta est; causa finita. (Rome has spoken; the case is closed.) The most popular of his 113 books, De Civitate Dei(The City of God), was inspired by Alaric’s sack of Rome, and describes a spiritual city built on the ruins of the material world. Nothing could be more expressive of the age. Augustine spent over thirty years as Bishop of Hippo in his native Africa, living by an ascetic rule that later inspired a number of Church orders including the Augustinian Canons, the Dominican (Black) Friars, the Praemonstratensians, and the Brigittines. He died in Hippo besieged by the Vandals.

INDEX

EARLY Church tradition credited Pope Innocent I (r. 401–17) with the first list of forbidden books, and Pope Gelasius (r. 492–6) with the first decree on the subject. The Gelasian decree adds lists of recommended and of supplementary reading to its pronouncement on the canon of authentic Scripture. Modern scholarship, though, doubts that the decree had any connection with Gelasius. What is certain is that the Church always guarded its right to pronounce on the propriety, or impropriety, of the written word. From the fifth to the fifteenth centuries, it placed any number of bans on individual authors, from Arius and Photius to Hus and Pico della Mirandola (1486). A further step was prompted by the advent of printing. Though there is some dispute again about precedence, Pope Innocent VIII (r. 1484–92) either initiated or consolidated the rule that all publications should receive a bishop’s licence, [PRESS]

Thanks to the flood of books produced during the Renaissance and Reformation, the Church hierarchy increasingly sought guidance from the Vatican; and the Council of Trent demanded action. The result was the Index Librorum Prohibitorum or ‘Guide to Prohibited Books’ drawn up by Paul IV in 1557. Owing to dissensions in the Vatican, that first version was suppressed; and it was the second version of 1559 which was eventually published. Revised yet again at the request of the Council, the Tridentine Index of 1564 set the norm for subsequent practice. In addition to the list of authors and works which had earned the Church’s disapproval, it set out ten criteria for judging them. Since 1564 Rome’s ‘Blacklist’ has been constantly extended. Its rules were modified in 1596,1664,1758,1900, and 1948. (See Appendix III, p. 1274.)

Over the years the Index has been subject to much criticism. It was always ineffective, in that the prohibited titles could always find a publisher in Protestant states beyond the Vatican’s reach. What is more, since forbidden fruits always taste sweeter, the Index could seriously be charged with actively promoting what it sought to suppress. Enemies of the Church were always quick to cite it as proof of Catholic intolerance. From the Enlightenment, liberated intellectuals have never failed to pour ridicule both on the individual decisions of the Index and on its very existence. Given the tally of world-beaters and best-sellers which it has tried to oppose, one can see the reason why.

On the other hand, the Index has to be judged in context. Every authority in modern Europe, whether secular or ecclesiastical, Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox, has shared the Vatican’s desire to control publications. Censors were at work in all European countries until the second half of the twentieth century. Many of those vociferous in condemning the Papal Index have failed to see a contradiction when they themselves seek to suppress books. One has only to look at some of the times and places in which the classics of European literature have been banned by authorities other than the Vatican:

AD 35	Homer	Opera omnia	Roman Empire
1497	Dante	Opera omnia	City of Florence
1555	Erasmus	Opera omnia	Scotland
1660	Milton	Eikonoklastes	England
1701	Locke	Essay on Human
		Understanding	Oxford University
1776	Goethe	Sorrows of Werther	Denmark
1788–1820	Shakespeare	King Lear	Great Britain
1835	Heine	Opera omnia	Prussia
1880	Tolstoy	Anna Karenina,
		and others	Russia
1931	Marie Stopes	Opera omnia	Republic of Ireland
1939	Goethe	Opera omnia	Spain
1928–60	D. H. Lawrence	Lady Chatterley’s Lover	Great Britain1

Of course, there is a fundamental liberal position which holds that all publications should be permitted, even when material is manifestly blasphemous, subversive, incitatory, obscene, or untrue. It demands that people tolerate what they abhor. This position was tested in the 1980s by so-called ‘revisionist history’, which denies the reality of the Jewish Holocaust, or by the Islamic fatwah pronounced on Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. In practice, many liberals shrink from the application of their own absolute principles. Every society, and every generation, has to determine its stance in relation to the shifting line between the acceptable and the unacceptable.2 Nor is it appropriate to compare the Papal Index with contemporary totalitarian censorship. In Nazi Germany 1933–45, and in the Soviet world 1917–91, all works were officially considered banned until specifically approved. In this regard, the principle of episcopal licensing might be judged more repressive than the Index.

In 1966 the head of the Vatican’s Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith announced that the prohibition of publications had been suspended. By that time, the Index contained some 4,000 titles.

Much of the above information derives from an impeccable source, each of whose eighteen volumes bears evidence of a favourable episcopal decision—NIHIL OBSTAT (There is no impediment) and IMPRIMATUR (Let it be printed).3

RUFINUS

RUFINUS Tyrannius of Aquileia (c.340–410), sometime associate of St Jerome, made his name on two related scores—as the Latin translator of Greek theological works, especially by Origen, and as author of the earliest book printed by the Oxford University Press. His commentary on the Apostles’ Creed, the Expositio Sancti Hieronymi in symbolum apostolo-rum, was printed in Oxford by Theodoric Rood of Cologne, and completed on 17 December 1478. It began, alas, with a misprint, an ‘x’ having been lost on the frontispiece, where the publication date appeared (wrongly) as M CCCC LXVIII.1

Since then, OUP’s list has seen both its ups and its downs:

Charles Butler, The Feminine Monarchie Or a Treatise Concerning Bees (1609)

John Smith, A Map of Virginia (1612)

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)

The Book of Common Prayer, and Administration of the Sacraments (1675– )

The Holy Bible, Containing the Old Testament and the New (1675– )

Edmund Pococke (ed.), Specimen Historiae Arabum (1650)

— Maimonides, Porta Mosis (1655)

— Greg. Abulfaragii historia compendiosa dynastiarum (1663)

[Richard Allestree] The Ladies Calling: by the Author of the Whole Duty of Man (1673)

Johann Schaeffer, A History of Lapland (1674) H. W. Ludolf, Grammatica Russica (1696)

William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (4 vols.. 1765–9)

F. M. Müller, Rigveda-Sanhita: Sacred Hymns of the Brahmins (1849–73)

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland (2 vols., 1981)

Reputedly, OUP’s most remarkable feat was in 1914, when a team of Oxford historians went into print in support of Britain’s war effort. The manuscript of Why We Are at War was delivered on 26 August, barely three weeks after the outbreak of war. The 206-page volume was edited, typeset by hand, printed, bound and ready for distribution by 14 September. Times change.2

Disturbances in the heart of the Empire inevitably weakened links with the periphery. In the fifth century, important peculiarities developed on the one hand in the ‘Celtic fringe’, and on the other hand in the Caucasus. The Celtic Church had adopted Christianity from Gaulish, anchorite monks. Its bishops were peripatetic hermits, and through the practice of single-handed consecration, extremely numerous. Ireland, which had never formed part of the Empire, was systematically evangelized by St Patrick (c.389–461), a Roman citizen from western Britain who landed in Ulster in 432. In this way Ireland had been secured for Christianity before the blanket of Anglo-Saxon heathenism fell over the rest of the British Isles. The Irish would repay their debt, [BRITO]

ZEUS

THE statue of Zeus was transported to Constantinople from the shrine at Olympia following the last Olympiad in AD 396. By then it was over eight centuries old, and had been long established as one of the ‘wonders of the world’. Completed c.432 BC by the exiled Athenian Pheidias, whose statue of Athena graced the Parthenon, it consisted of a gigantic ivory figure, wreathed and enthroned, some 13 metres high. Plated in part with solid gold, it portrayed the Father of the Gods holding a statuette of Winged Victory in his right hand and an inlaid, eagle-topped sceptre in his left. It had been described in detail both by Pausanias and by Strabo, who said that if the God moved, his head would go through the roof. Suetonius reports that when the Emperor Caligula’s workmen had tried to remove it in the first century AD, ‘the God cackled so loudly’ that the scaffolding collapsed and the workmen fled. So it stayed in situ for three more centuries. When it was finally consumed by the flames of an accidental fire in 462, in the capital of the Christian Emperor, Leo I, Olympia was already deserted. In 1958 German archaeologists excavating the temple workshops at Olympia found a terracotta cup inscribed with the graffito ‘I BELONGED TO PHEIDIAS’.1

BRITO

PELAGIUS (c.360–420) was a Welshman, or at least a Celt from the British Isles (‘Pelagius’ was once thought to be a Graeco-Roman caique of his name, Morgan). His friends called him ‘Brito’. He was a Christian theologian, and one of the few from Western Europe who participated in the leading doctrinal debates of his day. He lived at a time when orthodox doctrine, as formulated by the Greeks, was beginning to crystallize. Though his views were deemed heretical, he was none the less a vital contributor. He was a contemporary of St Augustine of Hippo, whom he provoked into formulating what became the definitive statements on such central issues as Divine Grace, The Fall of Man, Original Sin, Free Will, and Predestination. Together with another Briton, Celestius, whom he met in Rome, he laid emphasis on man’s capacity for virtuous action through the exercise of will, in other words, on responsible conduct. His central concept, known as ‘the power of contrary choice’, is contained in the formula Si necessitatis est, peccatum non est; si voluntatis, vitiari potest (If there be need, there is no sin; but if the will is there, then sinning is possible). He also held that the first step towards salvation must be made by an act of will.

These views were rejected partly because they were thought to minimize God’s grace and partly because they attributed sin to individual failings rather than to human nature. The label of Pelagianism is generally attached to theological standpoints which deny or limit Original Sin. They figured strongly in the seventeenth-century debates surrounding Arminius and Jansen. (See pp. 492, 502.)

In 410, having fled the Gothic siege of Rome, Pelagius and Celestius took refuge in North Africa, where further doctrinal charges were laid against them. One of the Councils of Carthage condemned six cardinal errors:

That Adam would have died even if he had not sinned.

That Adam injured himself alone, not the human race.

That new-born children, like Adam at birth, are without sin.

That the human race does not die through Adam’s death or sin.

That the law, as well as the gospel, gives entrance to Heaven.

That there were men without sin even before Christ’s coming.

Pelagius sailed for Palestine, only to find that Augustine’s De peccato-rum meritis (On the Merits of Sinners) had singled him out for attack. He survived one inquisition; but he was lost when the sympathies of Pope Zosimus were won over by the African bishops. In an edict of 30 April 418 the Emperor Honorius condemned him to confiscation and banishment. The Venerable Bede showed no sympathy for his ‘noxious and abominable teaching’:

Against the great Augustine see him crawl,
This wretched scribbler with his pen of gall!1

A movement to reconcile Pelagius with Augustine developed round the works of Bishop Honoratus of Aries (c.350–429). It held that Divine Grace and Human Will are coefficient factors in salvation. This ‘semi-Pelagianism’ was condemned at the Council of Orange (529). But its home, at the monastery of St Honorat on the Isle de Lerins off the Côte d’Azur, did not close. St Vincent of Lerins (d. 450) invented the famous ‘Vincentian Canon’ whereby all theological propositions can be tested against the threefold criteria of ecumenicity, antiquity, and consent. The monks of Lerins published the definitive edition of St Hilary’s Life of Honoratus in 1977.2

The Armenian Church came into being when the province still belonged to the Empire. Like its Celtic counterpart, it lost all direct contact with the centre and became eccentric in all senses of the word. When the Celts were turning to Pelagianism, the Armenians were turning to Monophysitism. Christianity had reached Georgia in 330, when the ruling house was converted by a Cappadocian slave-girl. Being one step removed from Armenia, it was less exposed to Asian politics and maintained closer links with Constantinople. (The Georgian Church had a separate and continuous history until forcibly incorporated into Russian Orthodoxy in 1811.) In 431 a third General Council was held at Ephesus, thereby creating a series. The seven General Councils recognized as binding by both East and West were Nicaea I (325), Constantinople I (381), Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451), Constantinople II (553), Constantinople HI (680–1), Nicaea II (787). The Council of Ephesus condemned the Nestorian heresy. Gibbon called it an ‘ecclesiastical riot’. Like its predecessors and successors, it was convened by the Emperor in Constantinople, who claimed the highest authority in Church affairs. It was entirely dominated by bishops from the East. The bishops in the West accepted the decisions, but with growing reluctance.

Doctrinal divergences persisted over the seemingly incurable habit of christological hairsplitting: over Christ’s nature, over Christ’s will, over Christ’s role in the genesis of the Holy Ghost. Does Christ have one single nature, that is, divine, or a dual nature both human and divine? The Orthodox leaders supported Diophysitism, and in the Definition of Chalcedon (451) affirmed the formula of One Person in Two Natures, ‘unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, and inseparably’ united. The Monophysites were condemned; but they continued to flourish in the East. The empress Theodora was a Monophysite, and so were the majority of Christians in Armenia, Syria, and Egypt. Does Christ have one will or two? Pope Honorius carelessly used the phrase ‘one will’ in a letter to Constantinople in 634. But the Orthodox leaders supported Diothelitism, which they affirmed at the sixth General Council in 681. The Monothelites were condemned, and the delegates of Pope Agatho acquiesced in the Council’s ruling. Within the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, does the Holy Ghost proceed from the Father, as the sole fount of divinity, and hencethrough the Son, or does it proceed jointly, from Father and Son together? Constantinople held to per filium (through the Son); Rome held to filioque (and the Son). The matter first surfaced in 589 in Spain, and by the ninth century was causing major ruptures. It has never been resolved.

The attraction of monasticism grew in proportion to political and social disorder. Eastern practices, both anchorite and communal, spread to the West. The earliest communal monasteries preceded the fall of the Western Empire. St Martin founded Ligugé in 360. But the greatest influence was that of Benedict of Nursia (c.480–550), who formulated the most widely adopted of all monastic rules. As imperial authority shrank, especially in the former Western provinces, the monasteries increasingly served as oases of classical learning in the barbarian desert. The conjunction of Christian teaching with an appreciation of Greek philosophy and the Latin authors had long been accepted in the East, especially in Alexandria; but in the West it had to be cultivated. The central figure in this regard was Flavius Magnus Aurelius Senator (c.485–580), known as Cassiodorus, sometime governor of Italy under Theodoric the Ostrogoth. Retiring to a monastery after the arrival of Belisarius, he advocated a system of education where sacred and profane subjects were seen as complementary; and he started the collection of ancient documents. It was none too soon, [ANNO DOMINI] [BAUME]

In the seventh century the shock of Islam changed the contours of the Christian world for ever. It ended the cultural unity of the Mediterranean lands and broke the dominance which they had always exercised over the northern outposts. By overrunning Persia, Syria, and Egypt, it determined that three of the five recognized Patriarchs—in Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria—would be forced to operate in partibus infidelium. The politics of the Christian Church was reduced from a healthy five-sided arena to a bitter two-sided contest between the Greek Patriarch in Constantinople and the Latin Patriarch in Rome. Before Islam, the Patriarch of Rome spoke with one Latin voice against four Greeks; after Islam, it was one to one. And the Roman Church enjoyed a greater margin for manoeuvre. Moreover, the threatening quarrel with the Monophysites in the East was not resolved. The new Muslim rulers proved more tolerant of heresy than Orthodox Christians had been. So the Monophysite Armenian, Syrian, and Coptic Churches were never recalled to the fold.

Most importantly, perhaps, Islam cut Christianity off from the rest of the world. Before Islam, the Christian Gospels had reached both Ceylon and Abyssinia; after Islam, they were effectively excluded for centuries from further expansion into Asia or Africa. Most Christians never saw a Muslim during their lifetime; but all of them lived in Islam’s shade. Islam, in fact, provided the solid, external shield within which Christendom could consolidate and be defined. In this sense, it provided the single greatest stimulus to what was eventually called ‘Europe’.

ANNO DOMINI

FOR six centuries after the birth of Christ, very few people were conscious of living in ‘the Christian Era’. Indeed, the basic chronology of history since ‘Christ walked in Galilee’ was not established before the work of Dionysius Exiguus, a Greek-speaking monk from Scythia Minor and friend of Cassiodorus who died in Rome c.550. It was the idea of Dionysius that the counting of years should be based on Christ’s Incarnation and that it should begin on the Day of the Annunciation, when the Virgin Mary had conceived. He fixed this date, Day One of Year One, at 25 March, nine months before the birth of Christ on 25 December. All previous years, counted in receding order, were to be designated ante Christum (AC), or ‘Before Christ’ (BC). All subsequent years were to be ‘Years since the Incarnation’, or Anni Domini, ‘Years of Our Lord’ (AD). There was no Zero Year.1

Many more centuries elapsed before the Christian Era, or Common Era, gradually came into use, first in the Latin Church, later in the East. The Venerable Bede (673–735), who was the author of a book on chronology, De Temporibus, had fully accepted the new system when he wrote hisHistory of the English Church and People in the early eighth century.

In the mean time, all sorts of local chronologies prevailed. The most usual system was that of regnal years. Historical time was measured by reigns and generations. Dates were determined by their point in the reign of a particular emperor, pope, or prince. The model was in the Old Testament: ‘And it came to pass in the fourth year of King Hezekiah, which was the seventh year of Hoshea, son of Elah king of Israel, that Shalmaneser king of Assyria came up against Samaria and besieged it…’

The Christian Era had to compete with numerous rival chronological systems. The table of Greek Olympiads, the four-year cycles between Olympic Games, which began with the Olympiad of Coroebus on 1 July 776 BC, was continued until the end of the fourth century AD. The Babylonian Era of Nabonassar, which was used by the Greeks of Alexandria, was known in medieval times from the works of Ptolemy. Its starting-point was equivalent to Wednesday, 26 February 747 BC. The Macedonian Era of the Seleucids, which began with occupation of Babylon by Seleucus Nicator in 312 BC, was widely used in the Levant. Known to the Jews as ‘the era of contracts’, it was used by them until the fifteenth century. The Roman Era was based on the passage of years since ‘the Foundation of the City’ [AUC.] In Spain, the Era of the Caesars can be traced to the conquest of Iberia by Octavian in 39 BC. Adopted by the Visigoths, it remained in force in Catalonia till 1180, in Castile until 1382, in Portugal until 1415. The Muslim Era of Hegira, which marks the flight of the Prophet from Mecca, corresponds to Friday, 16 July AD 622. It remains in force throughout the Muslim world.

Not surprisingly, given the complications, the calculation of the birth of Christ by Dionysius Exiguus has since turned out to be faulty. Dionysius equated Year One with Olympic Era 195 (1), with 754 AUC, and, mistakenly, with ‘the Consulship of C. Caesar, son of Augustus, and L. Aemilius Paullus, son of Paullus’. In reality, there is nothing to show that Christ was actually born in AD 1. According to whether one follows St Luke or St Matthew, the Christian Era began either in the last year of Herod the Great (4 BC) or in the year of the first Roman census in Judaea(AD6–7).

For Christians as for Jews, the prime historical date was the Year of Creation, or Annus Mundi. The Byzantine Church fixed it at 5509 BC, which remained the basis of the ecclesiastical calendar in parts of the Orthodox world, in Greece and in Russia, until modern times. Jewish scholars preferred 3760 BC—the starting-point of the modern Jewish calendar. The Coptic Church, like the Alexandrians, fixed on 5500 BC. The Church of England, under Archbishop Ussher in 1650, picked 4004 BC.

The critical comparison and harmonization of oriental, classical, and Christian chronologies awaited the great Renaissance scholar Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609). Scaliger’s De Emendatione Temporum (The Reform of Dates, 1583), written with Protestant interests in mind, coincided with the reform of the Julian calendar by Pope Gregory XIII. It marks the beginning of chronological science, and of modern concerns about the standard measurement of historical time.2

The Gregorian Calendar, however, known as ‘New Style’ (NS) and introduced into the Catholic countries of Europe in 1585, was not universally accepted. Most Protestant or Orthodox countries stayed with the Julian ‘Old Style’. They adopted the New Style as the spirit moved them: Scotland in 1700, England in 1752, Russia in 1918. So long as the two calendars co-existed, all international correspondence had to be conducted with reference to both. Letters had to carry the two versions of the date— ‘1/12 March 1734’ or ‘24 October/7 November 1917’.

As a result, numerous curiosities prevailed. Since the discrepancy between the calendars amounted in the seventeenth century to ten or eleven days, it was possible to sail across the English Channel from Dover and arrive in Calais in the middle of the following month. Similarly, since the Old Style year began on 25 March and the New Style year on 1 January, it was possible to leave Calais in one year and to reach Dover in the previous year. Europe did not work in full synchrony until the Bolshevik government abandoned the Old Style. Nothing happened in Russia between 31 January 1918 (OS) and 14 February (NS). From 1918 to 1940, the Soviet communists imitated the French revolutionaries by abolishing the seven–day week, replacing the names of days with numbers, and counting the ‘Years of the Revolution’ from 1917.3 [[VENDéMIAIRE]

BAUME

THE Abbey of Baume, says the Guide Michelin, was founded in the sixth century by the Irish monk, St Colomban. Its name, of Celtic origin, means ‘grotto’, and it was set in one of Europe’s most dramatic locations—at the bottom of an immense limestone gorge, the Cirque de Baume, in the depths of the pine woods of the Jura. Like a convent of the same name, fifty miles away on the River Doubs, where the blind St Odile received her sight, it is said to date from the era when Gallo-Roman civilization had been overrun by the pagan Burgundians, and when Christianity was being rebuilt by anchorite communities in the wilderness. It grew into an institution of great wealth and power, possessing several hundred villages and benefices. Eventually, the chapter turned itself into a secularized community of aristocratic canons. It survived until 1790, when revolutionaries dissolved the abbey, smashed most of its monuments, and changed the name of the town from Baume-les-Moines to Baume-les-Messieurs.1

In the history of Christian monasticism, the Burgundian communities like Baume form an important link between the anchorite system of the ancient world, as preserved in Ireland, and the great medieval foundations which appear from the tenth century onwards. After all, it was from Baume that Berno and his companions set out in 910 to found the great abbey of Cluny (see p. 315).

For readers of the Guide Michelin, however, it is a disappointment to find that many of these details of Baume’s past are at best unauthenticated legends. There is no hard evidence to connect Baume with St Colomban, and there is no reason to suppose that it was founded in the sixth century. In fact, the first definite mention of a Cellula at Balma dates from 869—which makes it younger than St Odile’s convent at Baume-les-Dames. In all probability, the link with St Colomban was invented by the monks of Cluny, who thereby embellished the pedigree of their parent house.2

Similar doubts surround Baume’s most colourful personality—Jean, Seigneur de Watteville (1618–1702), abbot for forty years during the reign of Louis XIV. Soldier, murderer, and monk, de Watteville had once fled from justice to Constantinople, where he rose to the rank of pasha and governor of Morea, before obtaining a papal absolution. According to Saint-Simon, he was an example of a sinner redeemed by true repentance. According to the record, he was a habitual turncoat whose treachery facilitated the brutal French conquest of his native province of Franche-Comté. His tombstone reads thus:

ITALUS ET BURGUNDUS IN ARMIS
GALLUS IN ALBIS

IN CURIA RECTUS PRESBYTER
ABBAS ADEST.
(‘Here lies an Italian and a Burgundian soldier, a Frenchman, when he took the cowl, an upright man in his office, a priest and abbot’).

Baume, therefore, provides the stuff of legend as well as history. People have always had a need to use the past for their own purposes. The writers of scientific monographs are playing a losing game. The past as transmitted to posterity will always be a confused mixture of facts, legends, and downright lies.

The emancipation of the papacy cannot be pinned on a particular date. The Bishops of Rome possessed a large measure of freedom long before they asserted their claims to supremacy. Growing differences between the Latin and the Greek parts of the Church led to frequent schisms of a temporary nature, but not to an irreparable breach. Oddly enough, in the first four centuries, when Rome was still the heart of the Empire, the Roman Church had often been dominated by Greeks and by Greek culture. Leo I (440–61) was the first to emphasize its Latinity. In the same period the Latin Patriarchs broke free from immediate political control, sheltering behind the city of Rome in its many affrays with the civil power. The resultant separation of ecclesiastical and secular authority, so typical for the West and so foreign to the East, was an established fact from then on. In the sixth century the Patriarchs of Rome had to face first the restoration of imperial power under Justinian, and then the Lombards. Two of their number, Silverius (536–7) and Vigilius (537–55), found themselves under imperial arrest. The latter was brutally bullied into submission by the imperial authorities on the Monophysite controversy.

Gregory I (540–604), the first monk to sit on St Peter’s throne, is often regarded as the architect of future papal power through both his administrative skills and his stand on principle. Self-styled ‘servant of the servants of God’, he ran the civil affairs of the city of Rome, negotiated a settlement with the Lombard kings, reorganized the Church’s lands and finances, and restored Roman contacts with Africa, Spain, Gaul, and Britain. His Regula Pastoralis (Pastoral Care) quickly became the handbook for medieval bishops. He repeatedly protested against his brother of Constantinople using the title of‘Oecumenical Patriarch’. By the time of his death, the balance was shifting in Rome’s favour. Preoccupied by the Muslim onslaught, the emperors lost almost all influence in Italy, though several desperate demonstrations of imperial claims were attempted. As a result of the Monothelite affair, Martin I (d. 655), the last papal martyr, died in exile in Crimea, having been kidnapped by the Exarch of Ravenna, flogged, and banished by a court in Constantinople, [CANTUS]

CANTUS

THE plainsong of the Latin Church, or cantus planus, is often called Gregorian Chant in honour of the Pope who fixed its eight component modes and collected some 3,000 melodies. Together with the related idiom of Byzantium, it is thought to have derived from Greek and especially Jewish traditions of chanting. In turn, it became the foundation on which European music was built. It was used for the unaccompanied singing of psalms, hymns, and antiphons, customarily in unison and in free rhythm. It had four main ‘dialects’—Ambrosian, Roman, Gallican, and Mozarabic, though the Roman school gradually gained ascendancy. Initially, it was not written down; and the early forms cannot be reconstructed with certainty, [MUSIKE]

The notation developed for plainsong passed through several stages. The Byzantines, like the Greeks, used a literal system to designate notes, supplemented by neums or ‘accents’ to indicate the movement of the melodic line. The Slavic Orthodox preserved the system long after it was superseded elsewhere:

a. 11th Century Kufisma Notation without stave, b. 12th-13th Century Russian notation using a Graeco-Byzantine literal system, c. 17th-20th Century: musical signs used in Russian Orthodox liturgical notation. (After Machabey.)

In the West, as expounded in the Frankish treatise De harmonica institutione by Hucbald of St Amand (c.840–930), a similar convention had been adopted whereby neums were placed over the syllables of the Latin text. Notker Balbulus of St Gall explored tropes or ‘melodies added to the main chant’. In the eleventh century, the musicologist Guido d’Arezzo (c.995–1050) invented a notational system which is the progenitor of the tonic sol-fa.

Taking the initial syllables of the lines of Ut queant laxis, the Hymn to St John the Baptist, he established the ascending hexachord of UT-RE-MI-FA-SOL-LA. The seventh syllable SI, for (S)ancte (l)ohannis, was added later. He also devised a spatial stave of up to ten lines, forerunner of the modern five-line stave. It had a mobile key signature, and carried a ‘square notation’ of ‘points’ and ‘rods’. It is debatable whether the notes had fixed duration or accentuation:

(‘Let Thine example, Holy John, remind us | Ere we can meetly sing thy deeds of wonder, | Hearts must be chastened, and the bonds that bind us | Broken asunder.’)

From the late twelfth century onwards, Gregorian chant was enriched by the art of polyphony, where two or more independent melodic lines were sung in parallel. The practice encouraged the growth of instrumental accompaniment. The medieval ear only recognized concordance in octaves, fourths, and fifths. But the introduction of fixed measures, perhaps from folksong and dance, and the need for counterpoint where the melodies crossed, encouraged the study of rhythm and harmony. These, together with melody, constitute the basic elements of modern musical form. The art of canon began in the thirteenth century. From then on, a standard vocabulary of musical phrase could communicate a wide range of emotion and meaning. Europe’s ‘language of music’ has a continuous history, therefore, from plainsong to Stravinsky.4

In the nineteenth century, the so-called ‘Caecilian movement’ regarded Gregorian chant as the one true source of European music. The Benedictine monks of Solesmes, near Le Mans, undertook the task of reconstituting its theory and practices. Their work, which inspired among other things Liszt’s Christus, is regarded as the principal modern authority.

In the eighth century, the Emperor could no longer mount even a demonstration of power in the West. In 710 Emperor Justinian II summoned the Roman Patriarch to Constantinople, and Constantine (708–15), a Syrian, dutifully obeyed. At their meeting—the last, as it proved, between Roman bishop and reigning emperor—the emperor ceremonially kissed the Roman feet, receiving absolution and communion in return. But Constantine was murdered shortly afterwards; and their agreement over Ravenna came to nothing. In 732 Emperor Leo fitted out a fleet to recover Ravenna, which had been conquered by the Lombards, and to arrest Gregory III (731–41) who had defied the edict on Iconoclasm. But the fleet sank in the Adriatic. Thereafter, for all practical purposes, the Roman Patriarchs were totally independent. No subsequent bishop of Rome ever sought the imperial mandate for his election. No imperial officials from Constantinople could ever exert their authority in Rome.

In any case, the Patriarchate of Rome already possessed the means to support its independence. As guardian of the Roman pilgrimage, which grew greatly in importance once Islam sealed off the road to Jerusalem, it attracted huge prestige and a ready income. In the Decretals it had a body of legal decisions that would come to service its wide jurisdiction, especially after the codification of Canon Law (see p. 349). In the Patrimony of St Peter (the Church’s landed estates), which would soon be greatly expanded, it possessed a solid basis for temporal power. In its alliances with the Lombards, and then with the Lombards’ rivals, the Franks, it had the means to obtain international protection. The unity of the Christian Church still existed in theory, in reality it had gone. The title of Papa had once been affectionately applied to all bishops. Henceforth it was reserved exclusively for the bishop of Rome. This was the era when the papacy was born, [REVERENTIA]

The seventh General Council (787), the second at Nicaea, was devoted to Iconoclasm. It declared in favour of an opinion sent from Rome by Hadrian I. Images could be venerated, but not with the same adoration due to God. This was to be the last occasion on which Rome and Constantinople were to take common action in matters of faith.

REVERENTIA

ONE day in the sixth century, whilst travelling with his mother between Burgundy and Auvergne, the young Georgius Florentius (the future Gregory of Tours) was caught in a storm. His mother waved a bag of holy relics at the lowering sky, the clouds parted, and the travellers passed on unscathed. At first, the conceited boy took the miracle to be a reward for his own good behaviour, whereupon his horse stumbled and threw him to the ground. It was a lesson in the wages of vanity. On another occasion, whilst visiting the shrine of St Julien at Brioude, Gregory developed a splitting headache. Putting his head into the self-same fountain where the head of the decapitated martyr had once been washed, he found the headache was cured. It was a lesson in reverentia—in the precise observation due to hallowed things and places, and in their healing power.

Since the end of the era of persecution, the cult of martyrs and the collection of holy relics was moving into the centre-ground of Christian life. Primary relics were those directly connected with the main figures of the Gospels. Secondary relics, with less immediate links, also came to be accepted. Constantinople became the main collecting and distributing centre. Its prize possessions, apart from two fragments of the True Cross, included the Crown of Thorns, the Sacred Lance, the Virgin’s Girdle, and several heads of John the Baptist. After the second Council of Nicaea ruled that all new churches should be consecrated in the presence of relics, a brisk trade developed. The body of St Mark was snatched from Alexandria in 823, and brought to Venice. The body of St Nicholas reached Bari in 1087. Western crusaders were to be the greatest relic-mongers of all.

The reverence for relics, so evident in Gregory of Tours, has often been dismissed as mere credulity. Yet close examination shows that it provided the vehicle not only for an emerging code of personal ethics but also for the more subtle games of social politics and social status.Reverentiawas the mark of a true believer. Its absence marked the pagan, the illiterate, or the complacent. Clerics who officiated at the translation of relics gained in stature, consolidating the consensus or approbation of the flock. Churches or cities in possession of high-grade relics gained in prestige, in divine protection, and no doubt in the revenue from pilgrims. It is a nice paradox that Christian belief in the soul’s departure for Paradise should have been surrounded by the paraphernalia of death, and by special veneration for bones and tombs. It was accompanied by an almost Baroque sensibility which stressed how the very special dead emitted the scent of lilies and roses, the aura of shining lights, and the sound of angelic choirs.1

With time, however, relics were necessarily devalued. When all the apostles, martyrs, and fathers of the Church had been claimed, there was a danger that every dead bishop would be declared a saint. Bishop Priscus of Lyons, who was elevated to the see in 573, would have none of it. He buried his predecessor, Nicetius, in a standard tomb, and allowed his deacon to wear Nicetius’ chasuble as a dressing-gown. As it happened, both Priscus and Nicetius were canonized, but only in 1308.

The Protestant Reformation waged war on relics, and many shrines were then destroyed. But the Protestant rage affected neither the Orthodox nor the Catholic world. The mummies or skeletons of the Very Special Dead can still be viewed in many an Italian church as in the catacombs of the Pecharskaya Lavra, the ‘Monastery of the Caves’ in Kiev. One of the most extraordinary collections of relics, the twelfth-century Treasure of the Priory of Oignies, has survived intact at Namur. Twice buried to defy the treasure-hunters of the French Revolution and of the Nazi Occupation, its priceless items include St Peter’s Rib, St James’s Foot, and the Virgin’s Milk. All are encased in dazzling reliquaries, each gruesomely shaped to fit the anatomical form of the contents, and fashioned from gold and silver filigree, gemstones, and silver-on-black niello. Designated among ‘the Seven Wonders of Belgium’, they are kept by the Sisters of Our Lady at 17 rue Julie Billiart, Namur.2

The Export of Christianity, 395–785

From the day that Christ said ‘Follow me’, Christianity has been an evangelical religion. And from St Paul’s confirmation that it was open to all comers, there were no limits to its potential constituency. But once the Empire had adopted Christianity as the state religion, religious conversion became a matter of imperial policy. For Christian rulers, the export of the faith was directed not just at individual souls but at whole nations: it was a question of strategic ideology. For the would-be converts, too, the acceptance of Christianity involved political considerations. There was much to be gained in terms of literacy and trade. But the decision to import Christianity from Rome, or from Constantinople, or from neither, involved a crucial political choice.

Ireland came to notice at an early date owing to the apparent spread there of Pelagianism. As a result, Germanus of Auxerre, a Gallo-Roman bishop, took a close interest both in the British Isles and in Brittany. One mission headed by Palladius, the ‘first Bishop of the believing Irish’, who landed at Wicklow in 432, was fruitless; but a second mission by St Patrick (c.385–461), a British disciple of St Germanus, had lasting results. At Tara in Meath he confronted the High King, Laoghaire, kindled the paschal fire on the hill of Slane, and silenced the Druids. The first episcopal see was established at Armagh in 444.

The Frankish conquest of Gaul was closely bound up with the religious divisions of the province. By the fifth century the Gallo-Roman population had been fully converted to Roman Christianity long since. But the Visigoths, Burgundians, and Alamans who first overran them were Arians, whilst the Franks in the north had remained heathen. Clovis did not accept baptism from the hands of St Remi, Bishop of Rheims, until some point between 496 and 506. But by doing so from one of the Roman bishops, he allied his Merovingian dynasty with the Gallo-Roman populace against their initial barbarian rulers. He is said to have used the Catholic bishops of Aquitaine as a ‘fifth column’. The ‘Catholic connection’ of the Franks, therefore, undoubtedly facilitated the consolidation of their power, and laid the foundation for their special relationship with Rome. Much of our knowledge about early Frankish Christianity derives from the Historia Francorum of Gregory of Tours (540–94). Yet Gregory’s eulogy of the Merovingians cannot hide the fact that Clovis, his ‘New Constantine’, was something of a savage. Gregory tells the story of the looted vase of Soissons, which had been smashed to pieces by a Frankish warrior who refused to share the spoil. Clovis waited until the Champ de Mars, the annual parade, of the following spring, where he chided the vase-breaker over the state of his equipment. As the warrior bent down to reach for a weapon, Clovis smashed his skull with a battle-axe, saying, ‘Thus didst thou to the vase of Soissons’.19

In the sixth century the Christian world was still reeling from the inroads of the barbarians. One series of counter-measures was undertaken by Irish missionaries. Another was launched by the Emperor Justinian, whose reconquests of Africa, Italy, and Spain were motivated in part by the desire to root out Arianism. A third was the work of Gregory I. The Irish missions, which began in 563 with the arrival of St Columba (c.521–97) on lona, were directed first at northern Britain and then at the Frankish dominions. Twenty years later St Columbanus (c.540–615) set out with a band of companions from the great monastery at Bangor, bound for Burgundy. He founded several monasteries, including Luxeuil; sojourned at Bregenz on Lake Constance; offended the Merovingian kings by excoriating their loose living; and died at Bobbio, near Genoa. St Gall (d. 640) missionized what is now Switzerland, giving his name to the great religious centre of St Gallen. St Aidan (d. 651) moved from lona to Holy Island (Lindisfarne) c.635, thereby advancing the conversion of England. In all these instances the Irish monks followed practices that were out of step with Rome. Major problems were to arise in the subsequent period in reconciling the Celtic and the Latin traditions, [IONA]

Iberian Christianity was shaken by the imperial invasion of 554. The Arian Visigoths had lived apart from their subjects, who constantly conspired with the imperials of the south. After decades of convulsion, in which the Visigothic kingdom barely held its own against internal rebellion and external attack, Reccared (r. 586–601)—son of an Arian father and a Roman mother—peacefully accepted Catholicism as an act of policy. The decision was confirmed by the second Council of Toledo (589). [COMPOSTELA]

In Italy, at almost the same moment, the Arian Lombards accepted Catholicism on the occasion of the marriage of their King Agilulf with the Catholic Frank, Theodelinda. At the basilica of Monza, near Milan, which they founded, the iron crown of Lombardy can still be seen with its inscription: AGILULF GRATIA DEI VIR GLORIOSUS REX TOTIUS ITALIAE OFFERT SANCTO IOHANNI BAPTISTAE IN ECCLESIA MODICAE. Conflict between Catholics and Arians persisted until the eventual Catholic victory at Coronate in 689. [LEPER]

IONA

ONE evening in May 597, the ageing St Columba expired on the altar steps of his abbey church on the tiny, treeless Hebridean island of lona. He had been copying the Psalms, and had just transcribed the verse of Psalm 34: ‘They that seek the Lord shall want no good thing.’ A native of Donegal, he had founded many churches in Ireland, starting with Derry, before landing with twelve brothers on the Innis Druinidh, ‘The Isle of Druids’ in 563. The ‘Apostle of Caledonia’, who crowned the King of Dalriada in his island church, he was instrumental in the expansion of Celtic Christianity and Gaelic civilization to western Scotland. By its mission to Lindisfarne in Northumbria, his community would also launch the Christianization of northern England. He died in the same year that St Augustine of Canterbury established the Roman mission in Kent.

The fate of the Celtic Church on lona is instructive. It survived the terrible Viking raid of 806, when the abbot and 68 monks were killed. The monks of St Columba’s tradition were driven out c.1200, when Reginald, Lord of the Isles, set up a Benedictine monastery and Augustinian convent in their stead. These establishments were already dead or moribund when, in 1560, the reformed Church of Scotland abolished monasticism outright. The island itself passed into the hands of the Campbell Dukes of Argyle, who in 1899 returned it to the Church of Scotland with a view to restoration. The reconstructed cathedral was reconsecrated in 1905. The reconstituted lona community, dedicated to ecumenical work and prayer, was founded by Dr George Macleod in 1938.1 Every age has its own brand of Christianity.

England is said to have caught the attention of the Roman Patriarchs when Gregory I saw fair-headed boys for sale in the slave-market. Non Angli, sed angelí (not Angles, but angels), he remarked. Shortly afterwards, in 596–7, he dispatched one of his monks, St Augustine of Canterbury (d. 605) to convert the heathen English. Within a short period Ethelbert, King of Kent, was baptized, and sees were set up at Canterbury, Rochester, and London. The complex story of English Christianity forms the life-work of the ‘Venerable’ Bede (673–735), monk of Jarrow in Northumbria, whoseHistory of the English Church and People is one of the monuments of the age. Bede was specially interested in the conflict between the northern and southern missions, with their rival centres at York and Canterbury, and in their eventual reconciliation at the Synod of Whitby (664). He also records the extensive correspondence of Pope Gregory with Augustine:

Augustine’s Eighth Question. May an expectant mother be baptised? How soon after childbirth may she enter church? And how soon after birth may a child be baptised if in danger of death? How soon after childbirth may a husband have relations with his wife? And may a woman enter church at certain periods? And may she receive Communion at these times? And may a man enter church after relations with his wife before he has washed? Or receive the sacred mystery of communion? These uncouth English people require guidance on all these matters.20

COMPOSTELA

ACCORDING to legend, the body of St James the Apostle, together with its severed head, was brought in a stone boat from Palestine to Galicia some time in the fourth century. The mooring-post to which the boat was tied is preserved in the tiny harbour church at Padrón near Corunna. News of the event began to circulate more widely, and some two hundred years later the site of the saint’s shrine at Libredon, or Santiago, attracted a growing stream of pilgrims. In 859, an invocation to St James gave the Christians of Leon a miraculous victory over the Moors. The saint gained the epithet of Matamoros or ‘Moorslayer’; and Leon grew into a sovereign kingdom. From 899 a new cathedral was built over the saint’s tomb as a focus for the pilgrimage. Its emblem was the pilgrim’s scrip and the Atlantic starshell, la compostela.

Pilgrims’ motives were not simple. Some set out from a belief in the power of famous saints to intercede for their souls. Some set out for a cure. Many went for the joy of fellowship, for a rollicking adventure, or for baser reasons of lust, gain, or escape. Santiago was specially attractive because it lay ‘as far as one could go’, and because it was chosen by the Church as a place of formal penance.

Four long pilgrim trails led half-way across Western Europe to Santiago (see Appendix III, p. 1253). One started at the Church of St Jacques in Paris, and led south via Tours, Poitiers, Saintes, and Bordeaux. The second started at Ste Marie-Madeleine at Vézelay in Burgundy, leading south-west through Bourges and Limoges. The third started at the cathedral of Notre Dame at Le Puy-en-Velay in Auvergne. All three converged at the Pass of Roncevalles in the Pyrenees. A fourth route left St Trophime in Aries, led westwards to Toulouse, crossed the Pyrenees at the Col de Somport, and met the three other routes at Puente la Reina on the River Arga. For the last 250 miles, through the ever-wilder scenery of Asturias, Burgos, and Leon, all pilgrims walked along the same Camino de Santiago until they stood before the Portal de la Gloria.

At its height in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the pilgrimage to Santiago was a major transcontinental business. English and Irish pilgrims often made first for Tours, or sailed to Talmont on the Gironde. The Germans and Swiss came down the Rhone to Lyons en route for Vézelay or Le Puy. Italians sailed to Marseilles or direct to Arles. Guide books were written. Abbeys and shrines on the way, such as the Abbey of Ste Foy at Conques, grew rich from pilgrims’ donations. The refuge at Roncevalles served 30,000 meals a year. Churchyards along the road received the remains of those who could go no further.

Historians discuss the factors which made for the unity of Christendom. Santiago de Compostela was certainly one of them.1

LEPER

IN 643 King Rothar of Lombardy issued a decree: ‘If any man become a I leper… and is expelled from his city or dwelling, let him not donate his possessions to anyone. For on the very day he is expelled, he is considered dead.’ This, in itself, is enough to dispel the myth that leprosy came to Europe with the Crusades.

The ostracism of lepers is attested throughout the Middle Ages. Byzantium, which possessed at least one lazar-house in the fifth century, shared the same attitudes. Leviticus 13 offered ample biblical support. Lepers were forced to live beyond town limits; they had to wear a long robe of distinctive colour marked by the letter L; and they had to signal their approach by bell, clapper, or horn, or by shouting, ‘Unclean, unclean!’ The sixth-century Council of Lyons formally placed them under the care of bishops. In fact, they lived from begging. In 1179 the Third Lateran Council formalized the procedures. Suspect lepers were to be examined before a priest or magistrate and, if found infected, were to be ritually separated from the community through an act of symbolic burial.

A description of this ceremony, the separatio leprosorum, was written down at St Algin’s in Angers. The penitent leper stood in an open grave with a black cloth over his head. The priest said: ‘Be dead to the world, be reborn in God.’ The leper said: ‘Jesus, my Redeemer… may I be reborn in Thee.’ Then the priest read the proscription:

I forbid you to enter church, monastery, fair, mill, marketplace or tavern … I forbid you ever to leave your house without your leper’s costume, or to walk barefoot… I forbid you to wash or to drink in the stream or fountain … I forbid you to live with any woman other than your own. If you meet and talk with some person on the road, I forbid you to answer before you have moved downwind … I forbid you to touch a well, or well cord, without your gloves. I forbid you ever to touch children, or to give them anything … I forbid you eating or drinking, except with lepers.2

The leper was then led in procession to the place of exile.

Some rulers sanctioned more ferocious methods. In 1318 Philip V of France charged the country’s lepers of being in league with ‘the Saracens’, and of poisoning wells. He ordered them all to be burned, together with Jews who gave them counsel and comfort.3 In 1371, 1388, 1394,1402, and 1404 the municipality of Paris vainly called for the leprosy laws to be enforced. The ferocity of their reactions derived from the rooted belief that leprosy was a punishment for sexual depravity. The disease carried a heavy moral stigma, which caused the risk of contagion to be grossly exaggerated.

Even so, leprosy affected high and low. It struck down Baldwin IV, King of Jerusalem, and Hugh d’Orivalle, Bishop of London (d. 1085). Physicians had no clue of its bacterial cause, and few suggestions for its relief. Following Avicenna, they stressed its supposed psychological symptoms of craftiness and lust. The leprosarium or lazar-house was a common sight beyond city walls. In England the leper colony at Hambledown, near Canterbury, grew into a sizeable settlement. At Burton Lazar it was located near the healing waters, later used for brewing.

Medieval literature used leprosy as a sensational device. In several versions of Tristan and Isolde, the heroine is saved from burning only to be thrown to the lepers:

Do sprach der herzoge, ich wil sie
minen sichen bringen,
die suln sie alle minnen
sô stirbet sie lesterlichen.

(The Duke spoke: I will bring her to my sick ones. They will all love her, so that she will die dishonourably.)

By all accounts leprosy greatly declined in sixteenth-century Europe. Its place was taken by syphilis [SYPHILUS.] But prejudices’did not change. In 1933 the OED defined it as ‘a loathsome disease’, elephantiasis graecorum. And in 1959 a popular American novelist could be criticized for repeating all the old degrading stereotypes.5 Leprosy was the medieval counterpart to AIDS.

Gregory was specially solicitous to adapt heathen practices to Christian usage.

We have come to the conclusion that the temples of idols … should on no account be destroyed. He is to destroy the idols, but the temples themselves are to be aspersed with holy water, altars set up, and relics enclosed in them … In this way, we hope that the people may abandon idolatry … and resort to these places as before … And since they have a custom of sacrificing many oxen to devils, let some other solemnity be substituted in its place… They are no longer to sacrifice beasts to the Devil, but they may kill them for food to the praise of God… If the people are allowed some worldly pleasures… they will come more readily to desire the joys of the spirit. For it is impossible to eradicate all errors from obstinate minds at a stroke; and whoever wishes to climb to a mountaintop climbs step by step …21

This caution no doubt explains the ultimate success of the missions: but it envisaged an extended period where thinly veiled heathen practices coexisted with a slowly evolving Christianity. Generally speaking, the Church was successful in its evangelical mission because it managed to appeal to the ‘barbarian’ outlook. It was able to convince its converts that only through baptism could one become part of the civilized order. The interplay of Christian authors with pagan themes, which is evident, for example, in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, provided a central feature of cultural life over a very long period.

In the East, the emperors were too preoccupied with the Muslim onslaught to show much concern for the souls of their non-Christian subjects and neighbours. For the time being, the great Sclavinia was largely left to its own devices, as were the Bulgars. In the seventh and eighth centuries Constantinople contented itself with the rehellenization and rechristianization of the Peloponnese and the islands. It is not an episode which commands much comment in modern histories of Greece. Crete remained in Muslim hands until the tenth century.

Despite the example of the Franks, the Germanic tribes to the east of the Rhine held Christianity at arm’s length for two centuries more. The task of conversion was left to English missionaries from the north, and to Frankish warriors from the west. St Wilfred of York (634–710), whose Catholic line had been carried at Whitby, began by preaching in Friesland in 678–9. But the central figure was undoubtedly St Boniface of Crediton (c.675–755), creator of the first German see at Mainz, founder of the great abbey at Fulda (744), and martyr of the faith at Dokkum in Friesland. Boniface had many close assistants, among them the well-named SS Sturm and Lull, who quarrelled over Fulda, St Willibald of Bavaria (c.700–86), the first known English pilgrim to the Holy Land, his brother St Winebald of Thuringia (d. 761), and his sister St Walburga (d. 779), abbess of Heidenheim.

The peaceable work of the English missionaries was complemented, not to say disgraced, by the merciless campaigns of the Franks in Saxony between 772 and 785. Submission to Christianity was an absolute condition of the Frankish conquest, where butchery and treachery were the normal instruments both of attack and resistance. The sacred grove of Irminsul was axed at the outset; and mass baptisms were performed at nearby Paderborn, and again in the Ocker and the Elbe. The Saxon rebels, some 4,500 of whom were beheaded in the massacre of Verden (782), were finally broken when their leader, Widukind, surrendered to the holy water. Missionary bishoprics were created at Bremen, Verden, Minden, Munster, Paderborn, and Osnabrück.

The advance of Christianity into central Germany marked the beginning of a strategic change. Up to that point Christianity had been largely confined to the Roman Empire, or to lands which retained an important leaven of ex-Roman, Christian citizens. To a large extent it was still the ‘imperial religion’, even in places that had long since severed their imperial links. But now it was edging into countries that had never claimed any sort of connection with the Empire. The Rhineland had once been a Roman province; Saxony had not. Whilst several ex-Roman provinces still awaited the return of the faith, especially in the Balkans, Christianity was starting to creep into untouched heathen territory. After Germany, Slavdom awaited its turn, and beyond the Slavs, Scandinavia and the Balts.

If the first stage of christianization, the conversion of the Empire, had taken 400 years, the second stage, the reconversion of the former Roman provinces, was drawing to a close after another 400. The third stage, the conversion of virgin heathendom, was to last for six long centuries after that (see pp. 321–8, 430). [BIBLIA]

At first sight it may seem that the processes which provide the main themes of the Dark Ages were not closely related. What is more, none of them came to an end during this period. The long procession of barbarian irruptions continued until the last Mongol raid of 1287 (see pp. 364–6). The split between East and West was projected from the imperial to the ecclesiastical plane, and was not formalized until 1054 (see p. 330). The Christian conversion of Europe’s pagans was not completed until 1417 (see p. 430). The soldiers of Islam were still on the march when the Ottomans landed in Europe in 1354 (see p. 386). Only then was the Roman Empire finally heading for extinction.

BIBLIA

THE 6th century Codex Argenteus (Cod. DG 1 fol. 118v) is kept in the University Library at Uppsala. It was brought to Sweden from Prague. Written in silver letters on purple parchment, it is probably the finest early copy of the Gothic translation of the Bible completed by Ulfilas (Wulfilla, c.311–83). Wulfilla, or ‘Little Wolf’, the Arian grandson of Christian captives, was consecrated ‘Bishop of the Goths’ during their sojourn on the Danube frontier. His translation of the Bible into Gothic started the long history of vernacular scriptures and of Germanic literature.

The Codex Amiatinus, now in the Laurentian Library in Florence, is not quite so old. It was written at Jarrow in Northumbria c.690–700 during the rule of Abbot Ceolfrid. It is the oldest extant copy of the Vulgate, St Jerome’s translation of the scriptures into Latin. It was based on an older Vulgate copy by Cassiodorus (see p. 266), and was presented by Abbot Ceolfrid to the Papacy, whence in turn it was lodged in the Abbey of Amiata. The vellum on which it was written was made from the skins of 1,500 animals.

It is worthy of note that Wulfilla completed his Gothic translation prior to St Jerome’s translation of the Bible into Latin. Both of them based their translation on older Greek texts, of which there was no single authoritative version. Modern reconstructions of the early Greek scriptures are based on the 4th-century Codex Vaticanus from Alexandria, on the 4th-century Codex Sinaiticus, brought from Mt. Sinai and sold to the British Museum by a Russian Tsar: on the 5th-century Codex Alexandrinus, also in the British Library, which came from Constantinople, and the 5th-century Codex Ephraemi in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

The task of establishing a totally accurate and reliable text of the scriptures, suited to each passing generation, has always been impossible. But the attempt has to be made ceaselessly. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and Aramaic, the New Testament in Hellenistic Greek. The former was put into Greek, as the Septuagint, for the use of the Greek-speaking Jews in Alexandria. So, in theory, a complete Greek text of both testaments may be thought to have existed from the 1st century AD onwards.

Those books which make up the present Bible, in its Catholic and Protestant forms, number almost one hundred. They could not be collated into a unified pandekt of both Testaments, until the basic canon was established in the 4th century. In the meantime, numerous variations of every book of the Bible, together with the uncanonical apocrypha, circulated separately. They are only known to modern scholarship in the fragments found in ancient papyri, in passages quoted by the Fathers, in various pre-Vulgate ‘Old Faith’ texts, and in the work of ancient Judaic and Christian critics. Among the latter, by far the most important was the wonderful Hexapla of Origen, who wrote out six Hebrew and Greek versions of the Old Testament in six parallel columns, [PAPYRUS]

Not even the Vulgate existed in systematic form. As St Jerome completed successive sections of his work, he sent each off to assorted destinations. They, too, have to be unscrambled from the variegated biblical compilations into which they were inserted. What is more, the work of medieval copyists resembled nothing more than the game of ‘Chinese Whispers’, where errors are compounded at every stage. It is easy to see why the Greek word biblia or holy ‘books’ (pl.) originally existed only in the plural. Uniform biblical texts were not attainable until the age of printing. [PRESS]

By then, however, Christendom was on the verge of the Reformation when Protestants would challenge all previous biblical scholarship. Protestant scholars were specially dedicated to vernacular translations for which they needed authoritative texts of the Hebrew and Greek originals. Hence a whole new era of bibliology was characterized by Protestant-Catholic rivalry.

In 1907 a Vatican Commission entrusted the preparation of a definitive edition of the Vulgate to the Benedictines. Work has continued throughout the twentieth century. When it may be complete, as one stoical Benedictine remarked, ‘God only knows’.1

None the less, these various processes did interact; and the essential effects of their interaction can be identified by the time that most of the Mediterranean was conquered by the armies of the Prophet. It was the four centuries following Constantine that brought Europe into being. This was the period when the majority of the Peninsula’s diverse peoples found their way to permanent homelands. This was the period when the rump of the Roman Empire became just one among many sovereign states in a community of ‘Christendom’ that was consolidating behind the screen of Islam. No one yet used the name of ‘Europe’ to describe this community, but there can be little doubt that it was already in existence.

Mons Iovis, The Pennine Alps, c.25 November AD 753. It was very late in the season, just before the winter snows. Stephen II, Bishop and Patriarch of Rome, was hurrying to cross the Alps before the roads were blocked. He had come from Pavia on the Po, the capital of the Lombard kingdom, and was entering the kingdom of the Franks. He was heading in the first instance for the monastery of St Maurice on the upper Rhône. From there he would make for the royal villa of Ponthion on the Marne—a journey of nearly 500 miles. Averaging ten or twelve miles a day, it would take him six weeks.22

The Mons Jovis, ‘Jupiter’s Mount’, carried one of two Roman roads constructed seven centuries earlier to link the provinces of Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul. Also known as Alpis Poenina or ‘Pennine Pass’, it had once been the gateway to the lands of the Helvetii. It reached an elevation of 2,476 m or 8,111 ft. The stone-paved roadway, 4 metres wide, had been designed for wheeled traffic, which in the old days would have covered the 55 miles from Augusta Praetoria (Aosta) to Octodorus (Martigny) in one day. In the eighth century the going was harder. The locals would have called it by a name that was part-way between the Latin Mons Jovis and the modern Monte love or Montjoux.*

Stephen II had been raised to St Peter’s throne in unexpected circumstances twenty months previously. The orphaned son of an aristocratic Roman family, he had been brought up in the patriarchal palace of St John Lateran, and had served Patriarch Zacharias (r. 741–52) as deacon. A career administrator, he had been sufficiently senior to put his signature to the acts of the Roman synod of 743. So a decade later he was probably in middle age. After Zacharias’s death he would have been present when an elderly priest, also called Stephen, was chosen to succeed. He would have shared the sense of shock when Priest Stephen died of a stroke, unconsecrated, after only four days; and he must have been totally unprepared when he himself was acclaimed on the same day. Thanks to Priest Stephen’s uncertain status, Deacon Stephen is variously numbered as Stephen II, Stephen III, or Stephen II (III).23

Map 11. Pope Stephen’s Journey, AD 753

Zacharias, a learned Greek from Calabria, had been pursuing a line of policy established by his predecessors, Gregory II (715–31) and Gregory III (731–41). Whilst resisting the Iconoclastic demands of Emperor Constantine Copronymos, he had taken care not to break with the Empire. At the same time he had followed northern affairs with close interest. He had been in constant touch with St Boniface, whom he commissioned as legate to romanize Frankish church practices. Most importantly, at the request of the Franks, he had issued a formal ruling which stated that it was desirable for royal titles to be held by those who actually exercised power. In effect, he had authorized the deposition of the last Merovingian king. He had signed a twenty-year truce with the Lombards on behalf of the city of Rome, and had tried to mediate in the Lombards’ quarrels with the Byzantine Exarch of Ravenna. But in the last year of his life he had been powerless to restrain the Lombards’ aggressive new king, Aistulf. In 751 Aistulf seized Ravenna, before marching south. When Lombard agents started to exact an annual tax from Rome, it was clear that the long-established freedoms of the city and the Patriarch were directly threatened. These were the events which had provoked the journey by Zacharias’s successor.

Francia or ‘Frankland’, the largest of the successor states to the western Roman Empire, had been ruled for 300 years by the descendants of Merovech (d. 458), grandfather of Clovis I. It stretched from the Pyrenees to the Weser. Of its three constituent parts, Neustria, centred on Paris, and Burgundy on the Rhone were still essentially Gallo-Roman, whilst Austrasia in the East, centred on Rheims, was the original Frankish homeland and predominantly Germanic. Over the generations it had frequently been partitioned and reunited. In the eighth century the Merovingian monarchy had lost all but nominal control to Austrasia’s hereditary ‘mayors of the palace’, the Arnulfings, who exercised effective rule over the whole country. In 751 it was the Mayor, Peppin III, Charles Martel’s grandson, who had sent envoys to Patriarch Zacharias to ask ‘whether it was just for one to reign and for another to rule’. On receiving the desired answer, he had deposed his king, Childeric III, and seized the throne. (See Appendix III, p. 1246.)

As the travellers toiled to the top of the pass, the state of the road amidst the grandiose rigours of the mountains must have made a deep impression. The once smooth pavement was cracked, jagged, overgrown, and in places completely washed away. Its great stone slabs had been left unrepaired for longer than anyone remembered. The imperial posts had ceased to function. In a hollow below the barren, mist-strewn summit, the ruins of the Temple of Jupiter Poeninus stood forlorn beside the frozen lake. Having lived all his life within sight of the decaying Forum, Stephen did not need to be reminded about the passing of Roman glory. But the desolation of the pass must have matched his mood. He cannot have ignored the fact that he was embarking on something that none of his predecessors had risked. Though Gregory II had once prepared a similar journey, it was called off. No bishop of Rome had ever crossed the Alps. When Stephen started the long descent to St Maurice he must have pondered the implications. He was not acting on impulse. He had sent for assistance to Constantinople, but in vain. He had visited Pavia, and had appealed to King Aistulf in person, but to no effect. He was turning to the Franks in a final, calculated step to avert disaster. If an anachronistic phrase is permitted, he was ‘calling in the New World to redress the balance of the Old’.

The Christendom in which the Roman Patriarch was seeking to establish a more central role was smaller than it had been in the past, or was destined to be in the future. It had been greatly diminished by the Arab conquests of the previous century, and had not yet spread to the lands in the centre and east of the Peninsula. The Byzantine Empire had withstood the Arab siege of 718, but was hemmed into the Balkans and Asia Minor. The Muslims had recently won the whole of the western Mediterranean and most of Iberia. Though driven back from the Loire some twenty years before, they still held much of southern Gaul, where the Gothic cities of Nîmes and Beziers were in a state of revolt. If Stephen had crossed the neighbouring pass of the Alpis Graia, some twenty miles to the west, he would have found himself descending into Muslim territory.

At that juncture, Latin Christendom was confined to a narrow corridor running from the British Isles to central Italy. Half-way between the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells, the Celtic art of illumination was at its peak. In England, the Venerable Bede had died just eighteen years back. His mantle in Anglo-Saxon scholarship had passed to Alcuin, who was to make his name in France. The central part of Germany had only just been converted. Its patron, St Boniface, had passed away only two years before, leaving the Abbey of Fulda and its choir-school in its infancy. The Lombard rulers of Italy had been Catholics since the previous century, but they looked with suspicion on the liberties of Rome. They smelled treason whenever the Patriarchs had sided with the citizens against Pavia. Their control of central and southern Italy, through the duchies of Tuscany, Spoleto, and Benevento, was contested by the Byzantines, whose themes (or provinces) of Sicily, of Calabria, and of Naples were still intact.

By far the greatest part of the European Peninsula was still held by heathen tribes. Scandinavia was fast approaching the point of explosion when its wild Viking raiders would pour out over the northern seas. The heathen Frisians and Saxons had been repeatedly ravaged by the Franks, but had not been finally subdued. At this very moment, the Frankish ruler whom Stephen was going to meet, Peppin the Short (r. 751–68), was resting at Bonn, having just completed the latest of his punitive campaigns into Saxony. Further east, the heathen Slavs held all the lands from the mouth of the Elbe to the Aegean. In addition to the Elbe, they commanded almost all the great rivers—the Oder, the Vistula, the middle Danube, and the Dnieper. Kiev had recently been recorded as a staging-post on the river route from the Baltic to the Black Sea and Mesopotamia.

Fortunately for Christendom, the Muslim world was in turmoil. The Abbasid caliphate was in the early stages of moving its centre of gravity from Arabia to Persia. Al-Mansur was on the march. His son, Harun-al-Rashid, who would be known to history as the hero of the Thousand and One Nights, was a young boy. The last of the defeated Umayyads was on his way to Spain to found the emirate of Cordoba.

The events of Patriarch Stephen’s journey have to be reconstructed from two main sources—one Roman, the other Frankish. The Vita Stephani forms part of the huge compilation known as the Liber Pontificalis, which is made up from a long series of biographies and decretals dating from the sixth to the ninth centuries.24 It is at pains to present the episode from the papal point of view. In contrast, the third continuation of the Chronicle of the Pseudo-Fredegar forms an appendix to the main Frankish record of the Merovingian era.25 It is confined to the reign of Peppin III, and was written on the orders of Peppin’s relative Nibelung. It is at pains to present the Carolingian point of view. The emphases and omissions of the two sources have given historians a broad range of interpretation.

The sources say little directly about the political bargain which inspired Stephen’s journey; yet the outline is clear. Although Peppin had taken the precaution of seeking papal advice before his coup d’état, and had probably been consecrated by St Boniface, his right to rule was obviously open to question. Equally, although Stephen II had consulted both the Emperor and the Lombard King, his appeal to the Franks must have been unsettling to both of them. The essence of the deal that was brewing, therefore, was that Rome should provide what Peppin lacked in legitimacy if the Franks would supply what Rome was lacking in force of arms. Stephen II was willing to give his religious sanction to Peppin’s rule in return for Peppin restoring political order in Italy.

Later tradition assumed that a sovereign Roman papacy had every right to act without reference to the Byzantine Emperor. But that was to read history backwards. Formally, the Patriarch of Rome did owe allegiance to the Empire. His virtual immunity in the Eternal City had been gained without legal sanction. Not that there is reason to suppose that he was deliberately seeking to damage the Empire’s interests. After all, he had started out in the company of the imperial ambassador, who accompanied him to Pavia for the interview with Aistulf. In recommending his plan to Peppin he was to use the phrase ‘for the cause of St Peter and the Roman Republic’. Prior to the formation of the Papal State, respublica romanorum could only have referred to the Byzantine Empire. Calling in one barbarian chief to fight off another was one of the Empire’s oldest tactics. So it has to be argued that calling in the Franks was not in itself an act of disloyalty. Stephen II did not breach his faith with the Empire until the end of the story.

The Patriarch’s initial progress is recorded in the Liber Pontificalis. He leaves Rome on 15 October, and travels to Pavia. The malignus rex langobardorum, ‘the evil king of the Lombards’, hears him out but fails to deflect him from his purpose. He leaves Pavia on 15 November:

Unde et cum nimia celeritate, Deo praevio, ad Francorum coniunxit clusas. Quas ingres-sus cum his qui cum eo erant, confestim laudes omnipotenti Deo reddidit; et coeptum gradiens iter, ad venerabile monasterium sancti Christi martyris Mauricii … sospes hisdem beatissimus pontifex… advenit.

(From Pavia, with God’s aid, he reached the gates of the Frankish Kingdom with tremendous speed. Having crossed [the pass] with his entourage, he gladly rendered praise to Almighty God. The start of the journey was steep, but the blessed pontifex [came through] unhurt to the venerable monastery of St Maurice, a martyr of Christ.)

He was travelling in the company of a dozen high-ranking priests, and was escorted by the Frankish envoys Duke Aitchar (Ogier) and the Chancellor, Bishop Chrodegang of Metz.

At St Maurice the Patriarch was welcomed into the Frankish realm by Peppin’s personal representative, Abbot Fulrad of St Denis. The monastery was built on the site of Agaunum, where five centuries before the Roman centurion Mauricius had met his death, having urged the soldiers of the Theban legion to disobey orders rather than fight their fellow Christians. From there, a message was sent to Peppin to arrange the rendezvous at Ponthion. The messengers found the King in the Ardennes, on his way back from Bonn. Peppin sent instructions for his young son Charles to ride out and meet the visitor on the road. After leaving St Maurice, Patriarch Stephen rounded Lake Lemanus and crossed the Jura. His encounter with the King’s son took place somewhere in Burgundy in late December. The twelve-year-old Charles had made a hundred miles south from Ponthion.

Stephen reached Ponthion on 6 January 754. According to the Roman account, the King came to greet him outside the town, dismounted, prostrated himself, and personally held the Patriarch’s bridle. At which point, in tears, the Patriarch beseeched the King’s aid:

‘Beatissimus papa praefatum Christianissimum regem lacrimabiliter deprecatus est, ut per pacis foedera causam beati Petri et republicae Romanorum disponeret.

(The blessed pope tearfully begged the supreme and most Christian king that he would reach agreements in the cause of peace, of St Peter, and of the Roman Republic.)

According to the Frankish account, ‘the Pope of Rome came into the King’s presence … showered rich gifts upon him and his Franks, and asked for his help against the Lombards and their king on account of their double dealing’.28 Peppin then handed Stephen to the care of Abbot Fulrad, to winter at St Denis.

In the following weeks Peppin exchanged embassies with Aistulf. A Frankish envoy was sent to Pavia, enjoining the Lombards to desist from their seizures of territory and their ‘heretical demands’. Aistulf countered by sending Peppin’s younger brother, Carloman, as his envoy to the Franks. (Carloman had retired to a monastery in Rome, and was thus a resident of the Lombard realm.) On 1 March the Franks held their annual parade, the Champ de Mars, at Bernacus (Berny-Rivière, Aisne). Then at Cariascum (Quercy), at Easter, on 14 April, they assembled to discuss the destination of the season’s campaign. Not without dissent, they decided to march against the Lombards.

Here the sources diverge. The continuator of Fredegard’s Chronicle relates how the Frankish army crossed the Alps at Mont Cenis and inflicted a crushing defeat on the Lombards in the Val de Susa. The Liber Pontificalis, in contrast, relates how at midsummer Stephen reconsecrated Peppin and his Queen Bertrada at St Denis, anointing them with holy oil and granting them the title of ‘Patricians of the Romans’. Peppin’s sons and heirs were given the papal blessing to rule in perpetuity. The historicity of these proceedings is confirmed in another contemporary document, apparently an eyewitness account, the Clausula de Unctione Peppini. One may surmise that Frankish commentators were embarrassed by the fact that Peppin’s desire for reconsecration underlined the impropriety of his earlier coronation.

The consequences took a couple of years to clarify. After the first Frankish victory, Aistulf submitted to Peppin and the Bishop was restored to Rome. Within months, however, the Lombards broke their oath and returned to their attacks. In 756, therefore, Peppin mounted a second campaign against Lombardy, capturing Pavia and crushing all resistance. On this occasion, if not before, the Franks took the former Exarchate of Ravenna away from the Lombards and donated it to the Patriarch. By doing so they created the territorial basis for the Papal State. By accepting it as part of the patrimony of St Peter, in defiance of Byzantine claims, the Bishop revealed that his allegiance to the Emperor had been renounced.

Yet several items remain confused. It seems that many important details were written into the sources after the event. In this kind of operation the papal chancery was specially expert. The Liber Pontificate states, for example, that the ‘Donation of Peppin’ was made not in 756 but in 753 at Quercy. What is more, it insists that Peppin was merely returning a property to which Rome possessed ancient title. As is now known, the papal chancery was concocting the spurious Donation of Constantine at this very time. Until the forgery was unmasked in the fifteenth century, all loyal Catholics were misled into believing that the Roman Church had received the Exarchate of Ravenna from the hands of the first Christian emperor 400 years before Peppin. It would appear, therefore, that the false ‘Donation of Constantine’ may have been concocted in order to reinforce the genuine Donation of Peppin. It also appears, in the midst of his chastisement of the Lombards, that Peppin established friendly relations with the Byzantines. The Frankish continuator says that he doesn’t know what happened to this friendship except that it didn’t flourish.29 What happened, of course, was that the Byzantines asked for the return of their Exarchate, only to be told that it had recently been given to the Pope. Betrayed by Rome and powerless against the Franks, the Byzantines were left trying to make common cause with the Lombards.

As so often in history, the long-term consequences were not foreseen. The Franks were unable to disentangle themselves from Italy. The Bishop of Rome put himself in a position to be recognized as the supreme Patriarch, ‘the Pope’ the papacy gained the territorial basis for a sovereign state; and the Franco-papal alliance became a durable feature of the international scene. By daring to cross the Alps, Stephen II had personally forged the link which gave the north a permanent voice in the affairs of the south. Above all, the authority of the Empire was critically weakened in the West. The boy who had ridden out to greet Bishop Stephen in Burgundy was left with the idea that he might found an empire of his own.

* ‘Vlach’ or ‘Wloch’ is the old Slavonic word for Latin. It gave rise to a number of Vallachias—Old Vallachia in Serbia, Vallachia Major in Thessaly, Vallachia Minor in northen Romania, Wallachia in southern Romania, and Maurovallachia, the land of the Negrolatini or ‘Black Vlachs’ in the Dinaric Alps. Wlochy is still the usual Polish word for ‘Italy’.

* The name Grand St Bernard was not adopted until after the 11th c, when St Bernard of Montjoux (d. 1008) built hospices on the summits both of the Alpis Poenina and of the Alpis Graia (the Little St Bernard). The breed of huge St Bernard dogs, which were trained to rescue travellers from the snow, dates from the same period, 3 centuries after Stephen 11’s journey.