The Merovingian Age

W estern Europe includes what is now Germany and Italy, the countries between them such as Switzerland and Austria, and lands to the west, including France, Britain, and Spain. At the beginning of medieval times, however, few of these nations existed; only during the course of the Early Middle Ages (c. 500–c. 1000) would they emerge from the ruins of the Western Roman Empire. The first half of the Early Middle Ages began with great unrest, as barbarian tribes swept over the region. Only the Catholic Church served to provide the area with a unifying culture. The church would in turn lend its support to one of those tribes, whose royal dynasty would give a name to an entire era: the Merovingian Age (481–751).

Dividing up Western Europe (400s–500s)

Europe in the late 400s and early 500s was a confusing mass of tribes, mostly Germanic (i.e., from a group of related tribes in northern Europe) and mostly moving westward and southward. More than a few of these peoples gave their names to regions and entire nations, names that would long outlast

Words to Know: The Merovingian Age

Abstract art:

Painting or other artwork that shows forms or designs, but does not represent objects as they really appear.

Aristocracy:

The richest and most powerful members of society.

Ascetic:

A person who renounces all earthly pleasures as part of his or her search for religious understanding.

Canonization:

Formal declaration of a deceased person as a saint.

Cloister:

A monastery, or sometimes the inner part of a monastery.

Convent:

A dwelling in which nuns live.

Dialect:

A regional variation on a language.

Divine:

Godlike.

Dynasty:

A group of people, often but not always a family, who continue to hold a position of power over a period of time.

Excommunicate:

To banish someone from the church.

Illumination:

Decoration of a manuscript with elaborate designs.

Manorialism:

An early form of feudalism that lasted from the late Roman Empire into the Merovingian age.

Monastery:

A place in which monks live.

Monasticism:

The tradition and practices of monks.

Monk:

A man who leaves the outside world to take religious vows and live in a monastery, practicing a lifestyle of denying earthly pleasures.

Nomadic:

Wandering.

Nun:

The female equivalent of a monk, who lives in a nunnery, convent, or abbey.

Order:

An organized religious community within the Catholic Church.

Papal:

Referring to the pope.

Purgatory:

A place of punishment after death where, according to Roman Catholic beliefs, a person who has not been damned may work out their salvation and earn their way to heaven.

Relic:

An object associated with the saints of the New Testament, or the martyrs of the early church.

Representational art:

Artwork intended to show a specific subject as it really appears, whether a human figure, landscape, still life, or a variation on these.

Rome:

A term sometimes used to refer to the papacy.

Serf:

A peasant subject to a feudal system and possessing no land.

Trial by ordeal:

A system of justice in which the accused (and sometimes the accuser as well) has to undergo various physical hardships in order to prove innocence.

Tribal:

Describes a society, sometimes nomadic, in which members are organized by families and clans, not by region, and in which leadership comes from warrior-chieftains.

Villa:

A type of country estate in Roman times; more generally, any kind of large, wealthy estate.

the tribes themselves. Though the Western Roman Empire was finished, out of its collapse would come many beginnings.

Such was the case, for instance, with the Burgundians, for whom a region—later to emerge as an important French kingdom—was named. They came in the 400s, only to be subdued by the powerful Franks, another Germanic tribe, in 534. And there were the Lombards, who in the 500s stormed out of Eastern Europe and into the part of Italy that came to be known as Lombardy. They, too, succumbed to the Franks in 774. As for the Franks, they settled in Gaul—which, because of them, would thenceforth be known as France.

The Franks in time dropped their Germanic language and adopted Latin, which would emerge as a local dialect and then as a full-fledged language, French. Before the Franks and before the Romans, however, Gaul had been controlled by the Celts, a group whose language had little relation to either Latin or German. Celts had spread from the European continent to the isle of Britain, where they came to be known as Britons; and beyond

Britain to Ireland, where the Celtic language of Gaelic is still spoken today.

Britain becomes England

When Rome added Britain to its empire in the first century a.d., Roman power had seemed limitless. Yet it was in Britain that the emperor Hadrian (ruled 117–138) had given physical form to the idea that Rome's power did indeed have limits: Hadrian's Wall. Built between 122 and 128 and possibly inspired by travelers' tales of the Great Wall of China, the wall extended some seventy-three miles across what is now Scotland and was designed to keep out a native Scottish people called the Picts. The Picts overran it several times, however, and threatened to do so again after the Romans permanently withdrew their legions in 410 to protect Rome itself from the Visigoths—another failed project.

By then the Britons had become Romanized and had accepted the Christian religion. They saw themselves as the last line of defense between civilization and barbarism. To assist their defense against the Picts, one of the Britons' leaders asked the help of three Germanic tribes—the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes—living in what is now northern Germany and Denmark. But once they arrived, the Germans realized how defenseless the natives were, so they simply took over the island.

Today the greater part of Britain is named England after the Angles, and the term "Anglo-Saxon" is used to describe persons of English descent. The German invaders' language, which completely replaced the Britons' Celtic tongue, ultimately became English, or rather Old English. An English-speaker today would have trouble recognizing Old English, yet modern English maintains many words from the distant past—usually short, highly direct terms such as "hit" or "gold."

Barbarian kingdoms of Western Europe

To varying degrees, the Germans of Western Europe were true bar-barians. In place of Rome's highly sophisticated system of justice, they practiced trial by ordeal (see box, "Trial by Ordeal"). They had turned from their own brand of paganism to Christianity; but they possessed little concept of Christian mercy or kindness.

More advanced were the Visigoths in Spain, who chased out the Vandals in the mid-400s and established a kingdom that would rule until the arrival of the Moors in 711. The Visigoths adopted Latin and, like the Franks, developed their own dialect. This became the foundation for one of the most widely spoken languages today: Spanish.

Meanwhile in Italy, the Ostrogoths under Theodoric (c. 454–526) invaded, killed Odoacer, and briefly established the most advanced of the early barbarian kingdoms. Raised with a profound respect for Roman civilization, Theodoric tried to preserve what was best about Rome. To do this, he kept his own people separate from the Romans, and put Romans in charge of Italy's civil administration while his own forces oversaw the military. Not long after Theodoric's death, however, Byzantine armies would eliminate the Ostrogoth kingdom.

The Byzantines, as it turned out, were unable to hold on to Italy, which succumbed to the Lombards a few years later. Italy would never again be the center of power in Europe that it had once been; that center had shifted northward, to what is now France and Germany. There the Franks would establish the first significant Western European kingdom of the Middle Ages, the Merovingian (mairoh-VIN-jee-un) dynasty.

Trial by Ordeal

The system of law practiced by the Germanic tribes of Europe in the 400s and 500s often demanded trial by ordeal. This meant that in order to prove his innocence, the accused had to walk over hot coals, stand with his arms outstretched for long hours, or endure some other form of torture. If the person was innocent, the logic went, he would be able to withstand these pains.

Sometimes the reasoning was even more twisted—and deadly. In some scenarios, the accused would be bound hand and foot and thrown into a river. A priest prayed that the water would reject the evildoer, meaning that if a person drowned, he was innocent. Those who survived, on the other hand, were guilty—and therefore were executed. Another form of ordeal was trial by combat. Accused and accuser underwent hand-to-hand combat, and whoever survived was judged the innocent party. The only advantage to this system was that it probably kept down the number of false or petty accusations.

The church

The north was on the rise, but Italy still had a few things going for

it—in fact, two big things. There was the legacy of the Roman Empire on the one hand, and on the other hand the spiritual empire of Christianity, led by the pope. Thanks to Constantine, the church had become tied to the Western Roman Empire, and with the fall of the latter, popes had increasingly taken on the Roman emperors' role as leaders of Western Europe. Popes drew their power in part from the influence of Christianity, but to a perhaps greater extent from the thousand-year influence of Rome. No doubt the apostles Peter and Paul would have been shocked to see this alignment between the church they had helped establish and the empire that had killed them; but much had changed in the five centuries since their time.

The Bible's New Testament had referred to all Christians as "saints," but by the a.d. 100s, believers in Rome and elsewhere had come to recognize certain figures as special. These people were canonized, or formally declared as saints, and thenceforth referred to as such—for example, "St. Peter." By the year 1000, there were more than 25,000 saints.

The saints would eventually come to be worshiped in their own right, complete with pictures and statues representing them, a practice that recalled Roman paganism. Just as there had been a god assigned to nearly every town and every profession—for instance, Vulcan was the god of blacksmiths—now there was a patron saint for each. Later, as nations emerged during the High Middle Ages, each would have its own patron saint; for instance, St. George was England's patron saint.

The identity of Jesus Christ

Belief in saints as intercessors, or go-betweens for God and people, arose in part because of church teachings that encouraged believers to think of God as so holy and so pure that no sinner could dare approach him directly in prayer. The Old Testament had taught the same thing; but according to the New Testament, Jesus, as God's son, was humankind's intercessor. The early Church, however, placed heavy emphasis on the fact that Jesus was God, and therefore downplayed the intercessor role.

This emphasis arose in response to heresies such as Arianism (the belief that Jesus Christ was not God) and Nestorianism. A Persian priest named Nestorius (died 451), who became bishop at Constantinople, had declared that Jesus had two separate identities, one human and one divine. The Council of Ephesus (EF-uh-sus) in 431 declared Nestorianism a heresy, but the belief found many adherents in the East—most notably the Far East, where it established a firmer foothold than any other branch of Christianity.

In 451, the Council of Chalcedon (KAL-suh-dahn) declared that Jesus had two natures, both human and divine, in one. This became the accepted position of western Christianity; but the Monophysites (muh-NAH-fu-zytz) in the Middle East, reacting to Nestorianism, began preaching that Christ was only divine and not human at all. This led the pope to excommunicate, or banish from the church, most believers in that region. Whole branches of Christianity, most notably the Armenian and Coptic (Egyptian) churches, split with Rome for good.

Jesus had become so removed from humanity that now Christians needed an intercessor to go to him, and the Council of Ephesus named one: Mary, mother of Jesus. In declaring Mary "Mother of God," the Council set her up as a potential figure of worship, allowing her to be linked with pagan mother goddesses such as the Greeks' Artemis or the Romans' Diana. The worship of Mary, still practiced in some parts of the world today, gained force during the High Middle Ages. It should be said, however, that for the most part the church did not officially encourage Mary-worship: as with the saints, it was a practice that arose from the people, and the church merely sought to make a place for it.

Monasticism

The 500s saw the appearance of two key figures in church history. The first was Benedict (c. 480–547), who established the tradition of monasticism (moh-NAS-ti-sizm), or the life of monks, men who leave the outside world to live in a monastery or cloister. There had been monks before Benedict, and indeed the idea of the ascetic (uh-SET-ik)—someone who gives up comfort to pursue spiritual wisdom—is an old one. Before Benedict, however, monks and ascetics were inclined to be undisciplined, practicing what amounted to self-torture. Benedict called for an end to such excesses.

In 529, Benedict and his followers demolished a pagan temple to build Monte Cassino, a high mountain retreat where they established the Benedictine (ben-uh-DIK-teen) Order. Not only were they the first true order of monks, and one that exists today, the Benedictines were the first to require that their members swear vows. Thus a man wanting to become a monk would live in the monastery,

enduring all kinds of hardships; then if he chose to go on, after a time he would take the vows. Among the things monks vowed to give up were sex, laughter, and possessions. They agreed to eat only one meal a day in winter and two in summer when days were longer; to speak only when necessary; to walk with their eyes turned to the ground; not to joke or laugh; and to let their sleep be interrupted for prayer.

Benedictine monasteries spread throughout Europe; meanwhile, the tradition of nuns and convents developed for women who chose to take vows of poverty and chastity. According to legend, the first convent was founded by Benedict's twin sister, Scholastica, near Monte Cassino in 530. Whatever the case, the first order of nuns was the Benedictine, and soon there were as many nuns as there were monks. Over the centuries that followed, these men and women would serve as a symbol of Christian meekness and kindness, often providing shelter and care for the poor. And at about the same time Benedict founded his order, another group of monks did nothing less than preserve Western civilization (see box, "How the Monks Saved Civilization").

Gregory the Great

Another key figure in early medieval Christianity was Pope Gregory I (the Great; ruled 590–604). Gregory's name is today associated with Gregorian chants, a type of prayerful singing in Latin with minor variations in tone, performed by Benedictine monks throughout the Middle Ages. Though he did not invent the chants, Gregory ordered that they be written down for future use.

In his writings, Gregory approved of the veneration, or admiration, of relics. Like belief in the saints, the idea that an object could be sacred because of its association with Jesus or the saints had little to do with the Bible, and everything to do with popular

beliefs. But that did not stop Gregory from asserting, for instance, that eyesight could be restored by contact with a set of chains supposedly used to imprison Peter and Paul. As the Middle Ages went on, relics abounded, none more venerated than the Holy Grail and the "True Cross." The former was the cup from which Jesus drank on the night before his crucifixion, the latter the cross on which he was killed. Despite many claims to the contrary, neither was ever found.

Eventually the stature of the popes would become such that they created relics of their own, making water or oil "holy" simply by praying over them. By that time, the pope was the most powerful man in Christendom (KRIS-in-dum), or the Christian world, and for that, too, later popes had Gregory to thank. Under his shrewd leadership, the papacy became firmly established as something much more than the office of Rome's bishop; gradually the pope became not just the spiritual, but the political leader of Western Europe.

How the Monks Saved Civilization

One popular misconception concerning the Middle Ages is the idea that the church squelched learning, which it associated with the pagan societies of Greece and Rome. Quite the opposite is true. With the Roman Empire gone and the barbarian tribes threatening to extinguish the candle of civilization, only the church kept it lit.

Much of that light came from Rome, of course, but Rome itself was threatened when the Lombards invaded Italy in 568. Around the same time, a group of monks traveled to the farthest reaches of the Western world—the British Isles. There, in dank, cold monasteries on the harsh coasts of the North Sea and the Atlantic, they copied down the Bible and early church writings. But they did not simply copy; the books they produced were works of art in themselves, with lavishly illuminated lettering that served to illustrate the fact that to these scholars, words were sacred.

Ireland was converted to Christianity by St. Patrick in the 400s, and in the following century, monks began arriving on the British Isles from continental Europe. The first major monastic settlement in the area was founded by the Irish missionary St. Columba (c. 521–597) at Iona, off the coast of Scotland, in 563. Monks from the Iona community in turn founded Lindisfarne off the coast of England in 634. The latter community would become famous for the Lindisfarne Gospels, and Iona became famous for the Book of Kells. Both were gorgeously illuminated manuscripts.

The communities of Iona and Lind-isfarne were destroyed by the last great wave of Germanic barbarians in the Middle Ages, the Vikings, in the 790s. Many of the monks left before the Vikings arrived; in any case, they and their brethren had managed to keep learning alive during the darkest years of the Middle Ages.

Gregory reinforced the church's power by teaching that the Bible was a difficult book that required interpretation by those trained to do so: priests and other leaders of the church. A version of the Bible had been translated by St. Jerome (c. 347–c. 419), and its name, the Vulgate, a term referring to the language spoken by common people, implied that it was meant to be understood by the masses. The Vulgate, however, was in Latin, a language that had long since been replaced by local dialects for everyday use. Yet it remained strong as a written language, and virtually every educated person in early medieval Europe understood Latin. The problem was that hardly anyone, outside of a tiny minority within the church, was educated: for many centuries, even most kings were illiterate. Eventually people had no idea of what the Bible said, and the church actively discouraged believers from attempting to read the Scriptures.

Finally, from Augustine's writings Gregory adopted the idea of Purgatory, a place for people who were too good to go to Hell, but had not quite made it to Heaven. He took this concept and added to it, suggesting that the loved ones of a deceased person pray for his or her soul. By the 1000s, the concept of Purgatory had become firmly established.

The Merovingians (481–751)

An earlier Frankish king gave his name to a dynasty that emerged among the Franks in the 400s, the Merovingians, but Clovis (ruled 481–511) was its first important king. By accepting mainstream Christianity in 496, he gained the support both of Rome (that is, the pope and the Church) and of powerful local priests.

He was also the only notable Merovingian ruler. This was because Clovis, like many German chieftains, believed that a king should divide his realm equally between all his sons instead of passing it on to the firstborn. While this was a generous idea, in practice it meant that a kingdom's power would be diluted quickly.

Nonetheless, the Merovingians were important in a number of regards. Under Clovis, they conquered much of what is now France—formerly home to the Burgundians and Visigoths, as well as other Frankish tribes—and western Germany. With the support of Rome, they were able to establish themselves as a stronghold of Christianity, a fact that became more important with the rise of Islam in the 600s. This papal-royal alliance set the tone for the Middle Ages. In the realm of the arts, the Merovingians were also trailblazers (see box, "Merovingian Art").

Manorialism

The Franks adopted few aspects of Roman law and administrative rule, but they did maintain one significant link with a late Roman practice. When Roman power was fading and the people could no longer look to the legions, or army, for protection, they had turned to the owners of large villas, or country estates, who controlled private armies. The serfs gathered their dwellings around the villa in what came to be called villages.

Merovingian Art

Ancient Greek and Roman artists had tried to depict human beings and other subjects as accurately as possible, and representational art became amazingly precise. Then as Rome began to decline in the a.d. 200s, so did Roman portrayals of the human figure. Faces and bodies began to look all the same, and artists' depictions of people looked more and more primitive.

With the rise of the Merovingians after Rome's fall, art took a sharp turn away from representation and toward abstract images. It was as though Merovingian artists realized that they had lost the ability to accurately represent subjects, so they moved in the opposite direction, producing gorgeous designs with only limited representative quality.

The artwork itself may have been abstract, but the objects produced by the Merovingians—belt buckles, decorative pins for fastening clothing—were decidedly practical. Much Merovingian art was intended to be portable, reflecting their still somewhat unsettled lifestyle, but the Merovingians also made a significant contribution to architecture by introducing the idea of a church bell tower. Monks in Merovingian France illuminated manuscripts and developed an elegant type of lettering called majuscule (MAJ-uh-skyool).

Villas were also known as manors (source of the word "mansion"), and the Frankish version of the late Roman system came to be known as manorialism (muh-NOHR-ee-ulizm). Under manorialism, large numbers of serfs became dependent on a large landowner for protection. A serf was like a peasant, a farmer with a small plot of land; but serfs, whose name comes from the same root as "serve," were more like slaves.

The manorial system provided the framework for feudalism. This system helped bring an end to the Merovingians as power shifted from Merovingian kings to the Frankish aristocracy, who exerted influence through the office of majordomo.

The house of Charles Martel

Today the term majordomo, meaning "mayor of the palace," refers to someone who takes charge in place of another, which is essentially what the majordomos did. The later Merovingian kings lived lives of pleasure, and could hardly be both-ered to run their kingdoms, but the majordomos were more than happy to assume that job—and the authority that went with it.

This was particularly true of the greatest majordomo, Charles Martel (c. 688–741). Martel, which meant "hammer"—thus suggesting Charles's power—was not a family name, or surname; the custom of surnames would not arise until centuries later. Under his leadership, beginning in 714, the kingdom withstood invasions by the Saxons and Frisians (FREE-zhunz), a Germanic people from what is now Holland.

Even more significant was his defense against invaders from the

south: the Moors, Muslims who had conquered Spain and were ready to take over France. Had the Moors succeeded in their invasion of France, which they began in 719, Europe might be quite different today; as it was, a force led by Charles drove back the Muslims at Tours (TOOR) in 732. Given his vital role in the Frankish leadership, it is not surprising that Charles judged it was time for his family to take full control.

For More Information

Books

Clark, Kenneth. Civilisation: A Personal View. New York: Harper, 1969, pp. 1–32.

Dijkstra, Henk, editor. History of the Ancient and Medieval World, Volume 8: Christianity and Islam. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1996, pp. 1032–44.

Dijkstra, Henk, editor. History of the Ancient and Medieval World, Volume 9: The Middle Ages. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1996, pp. 1159–64.

Hanawalt, Barbara A. The Middle Ages: An Illustrated History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Langley, Andrew. Medieval Life. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Severy, Merle, editor. The Age of Chivalry. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1969, pp. 13–42.

Web Sites

Book, Manuscript, and Printing History. [On-line] Available http://historymedren.about.com/education/history/historymedren/msubprint.htm (last accessed July 28, 2000).

The Catholic Encyclopedia. [Online] Available http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/ (last accessed July 28, 2000).

"The Franks." [Online] Available http://www.btinternet.com/~mark.furnival/franks.htm (last accessed July 28, 2000).