237. Fall of Rome to Carolingian Age

Link to Table of Contents

A History of Europe

by Henri Pirenne 
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War



Book One
The End of the Roman World in the West

Chapter I
The Barbarian Kingdoms in the Roman Empire
2. The New States

p35 ... The court [of the Frankish king after the fall of Rome in the West] was composed of various dignitaries whose titles show that they were once borne by slaves, as was the case with all dignitaries of Germanic origin: the marshal (the horse-slave), the seneschal (the senior slave)... But these servants, these household officers, shared in their master's fortunes, and naturally enough, since what was royal was public, they became his ministers.... 

It wouldn't surprise me if Napoleon was aware of this and even reminded his marshals about the origin of their title from time to time. 


Chapter III
The Musulman Invasion
2. The Consequences of the Invasion

p50 ...For centuries Europe had gravetated about the Mediterranean. It was by means of the Mediterranean that civilization had extended itself; by means of the Mediterranean the various parts of the civilized world had communicated one with another. On all its shores social life was the same in its fundamental characteristics; religion was the same; manners and customs and ideas were the same, or very nearly so. The Germanic invasion had not changed the situation in any essential respect. In spite of all that had happened, we may say that in the middle of the 7th century Europe still constituted, as in the time of the Roman Empire, a Mediterranean unity. 

This is a little confusing as in the previous chapter Pirenne demonstrated that the Eastern Roman Empire of Justinian -- which had just reclaimed Italy, Africa, and Spain -- was in reality the Roman Empire.


Now, under the sudden impact of Islam, this unity was abruptly shattered. The greater part of this familiar sea -- which the Romans had called "our sea," mare nostrum -- became alien and hostile. The intercourse between the West and the East... was interrupted... The community in which they had lived so long was destroyed for centuries to come...
...

p51 the Byzantine Empire, henceforth confined between the coast of Illyria and the Upper Euphrates, devoted the bulk of its forces to withstanding the pressure of Islam. In its long history, down to the day when it finally succumbed, in the middle of the 15th century... it was to know some moments of splendour... But this history, most of the time was alien to that of Western Europe. Venice alone kept in touch with Byzantium, and found, in her role of intermediary between East and West, the beginning of her future greatness...

As for the West, its separation from Byzantium confronted it with a completely novel situation. This separation seemed to exclude it from civilization, since from the beginning of the ages all the forms of civilized life and all social progress had come to it from the East... For the Christianity of the West, when its traditional lines of communication were cut, became a world apart, able to count only on itself, and in respect of its further development it was turned to the still barbarous regions beyond the Rhine and the shores of the North Sea, European society, continuously expanding, crossed the ancient frontiers of the Roman Empire. A new Europe was created with the rise of the Frankish Empire, in which was elaborated the Western civilization which was one day to become that of the whole world.

Pirenne doesn't specifically mention piracy and the coastal raiding of the Saracens in the south and the Vikings in the north, but this had a substantial effect on "civilization" and trade along the coasts. Cities either fortified or moved inland to safer locations. He does, a little later, describe how the Venetian, Pisan, and Genoan navies eventually restored some degree of order to the Eastern Mediterranean so that trade could resume.

Book Two
The Carolingian Epoch
Chapter I
The Church


p55 During the vicissitudes of the 5th, 6th and 7th centuries, when Europe was torn by the conflicts of the Germans, the Empire, and Islam, what became of the Catholic Church, the great force of the near future? It contented itself with continuing to exist, or rather to vegetate. Its influence upon the course of events was negligible; its moral influence over society was imperceptible. And yet, amidst the ruins of the Empire, it remained intact. It had saved its organization, its hierarchy, its incalculable wealth in land. And it had no enemies. The Germans no less than the Romans were its dutiful children...

...it [the Church] had become barbarized. The Latin literature of Christendom, which was still so vigorous in the 4th century, the century of Saint Augustine, had nothing to show in the 5th century... After this the life of the mind became dormant... the world had to wait for Gregory the Great before the study of theology and religious and moral philosophy was revived, though in quite a new spirit... Introduced into Ireland in the 4th century, Christianity had rapidly spread through the country. In this remote isle, which had no communication with the Continent, it created for itself an original organization, in which the great monastic colonies were the centers of a most ardent religious life. In these centers there were large number of ascetics and proselytes, who, from the 6th century onwards, began to leave their native country, some to seek, in distant lands, inaccessible solitudes, and others, souls to be converted. When the Norsemen discovered Iceland in the 9th century they were astonished to find that the only inhabitants of its misty shores were monks who had come from Ireland. They were Irishmen, too, who devoted themselves with such enthusiasm to the conversion of Northern Gaul and Germany... One must have read the portraits which Gregory of Tours has traced of some of his colleagues to form any idea of the state of their knowledge and their morals. Many of them could hardly read... The honest Gregory is indignant... And what an example he furnishes in his own person... of the decadence of the Church! The Latin which he writes -- as he is aware -- is a barbarous idiom, taking strange liberties with grammar, syntax and the vocabulary; and his morality -- but this, unhappily, he does not realize -- is capable of very irregular indulgences and very surprising judgements. [I read him in translation, so I don't know about his Latin but can confirm the rest.] And after his time things were even worse...

p57 ...decadent though it was, the Church was the great civilizing force of the period... It was through the Church that the Roman tradition was perpetuated; it was the Church that prevented Europe from relapsing into barbarism... [In that last paragraph Pirenne used "barbarous" properly to refer to language and the degeneracy of language. But here he seems to be using "barbarism" in the more common sense of crude and savage. Or maybe this is the fault of the translator?] the Church remained intact, in spite of its temporary decadence; the clergy were protected by the mighty edifice that sheltered them, and by the discipline imposed upon them. Ignorant, negligent, and immoral though some of the bishops may have been, they could not absolve themselves from the essential duties of their functions... Writing, without which no civilization is possible, appertained so exclusively to the Church from the end of the Merovingian period that even to this day the word that describes the ecclesiastic also describes the scribe: clerc in French, clerk in English, klerk in Flemish and Old German, diaca in Old Russian. During the 8th century intellectual culture was confined to a sacerdotal class... Not only were the clergy venerated because of their religious character; not only did they posses, in the eyes of laymen, the prestige which knowledge enjoys in an ignorant community, but they were also an indispensable auxiliary to civil society. The State could not dispense with their services. In the Carolingian period, when the last traces of lay education had disappeared, it was from the clergy that the State was obliged to borrow its staff of scribes, the heads of its chancellery, and all those agents or counsellors in whom a certain degree of intellectual culture was essential. The State became clericalized, because it could not to otherwise, under penalty of relapsing into barbarism... [now "barbarism" seems to mean illiterate] this was not because their character as apostles of Christ made them peculiarly fit to serve it. The servants of Him who has said that His kingdom is not of this world had not learned from Him the conduct of secular affairs. If they had the requisite knowledge it was because they had acquired it from Rome... In short, it was not because it was Christian, but because it was Roman that the Church acquired and maintained for centuries its control over society... The inevitable collaboration between Church and State, which was presently established, bore within it the germ of formidable conflict, which no one could have foreseen in the beginning.

p59 On entering the service of the State, the Church did not submit itself to its employer. Whatever the concessions which it may have made, at certain moments... it still remained, with regard to the State, an independent power. It claimed and enjoyed, in Western Europe, a liberty which it did not enjoy in the Roman or the Byzantine Empire. This was... because the Church was from the first in an economic situation which enabled it to live and develop itself on its own resources... The immense fortune in real estate which lay at its disposal it owed to Constantine and his successors, who transferred to it the wealth of the pagan temples. They not only made the Church the greatest landed proprietor in the world; they also made it a privileged proprietor, by exempting its members from the poll-tax and its property from the land tax...

Whenever I think about the history of Europe I, unlike Pirenne, apparently, think about the great Houses. Starting with the ultimate noble House, the Habsburgs, I find that their lineage is traced back to the Etichonids in Alsace and Burgundy -- the area around Dijon is mentioned in Wiki as a possible point of origin around the 7th century. Curiously, they are described as being, "of Frankish, Burgundian or Visigothic origin" -- which is awfully vague. 

I can't find even that much about the House of Hohenzollern or of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. The House Bourbon (and House Capet) seem to be Frankish, as you would expect.