by Will Durant
Odo’s successor, Charles the Simple (898-923), protected the region of the Seine and the Saône, but raised no hand against Norse depredations in the rest of France. In 911 he conceded to Rolf or Rollo, a Norman chieftain, the districts of Rouen, Lisieux, and Évreux, which the Normans already held; they consented to do feudal homage for them to the king, but laughed in his face as they performed the ceremony. Rollo agreed to baptism; his people followed him to the font, and slowly subsided into agriculture and civilization. So Normandy began, as a Norse conquest in France.
The simple king had found a solution for Paris at least; now the Normans themselves would block invaders entering the Seine. But elsewhere the Norse raids continued. Chartres was pillaged in 911, Angers in 919; Aquitaine and Auvergne were plundered in 923; Artois and the Beauvais region in 924. Almost at the same time the Magyars, having ravaged southern Germany, entered Burgundy in 917, crossed and recrossed the French frontier unhindered, robbed and burned the monasteries near Reims and Sens (937), passed like consuming locusts through Aquitaine (951), burned the suburbs of Cambrai, Laon, and Reims (954), and leisurely looted Burgundy. Under these repeated blows of Norse and Hun the fabric of social order in France verged upon total collapse. Cried an ecclesiastical synod at Trosle in 909:
The cities are depopulated, the monasteries ruined and burned, the country reduced to solitude.… As the first men lived without law … so now every man does what seems good in his own eyes, despising laws human and divine…The strong oppress the weak; the world is full of violence against the poor, and of the plunder of ecclesiastical goods…. Men devour one another like the fishes in the sea.47
The last Carolingian kings—Louis IV, Lothaire IV, Louis V—were well-meaning men, but they had not in their blood the iron needed to forge a living order out of the universal desolation. When Louis V died without issue (987), the nobles and prelates of France sought leadership in some other line than the Carolingian. They found it in the descendants of a marquess of Neustria significantly named Robert the Strong (d. 866). The Odo who had saved Paris was his son; a grandson, Hugh the Great (d. 956), had acquired by purchase or war almost all the region between Normandy, the Seine, and the Loire as his feudal realm, and had wielded more wealth and power than the kings. Now Hugh’s son, called Hugh Capet, had inherited this wealth and power, and apparently the ability that had won them. Archbishop Adalbero, guided by the subtle scholar Gerbert, proposed Hugh Capet as king of France. He was unanimously elected (987), and that Capetian dynasty began which, in direct or collateral line, would rule France until the Revolution.
4. Letters and Arts: 814–1066
Perhaps we exaggerate the damage done by the Norse and Magyar raids; to crowd them into a page for brevity’s sake darkens unduly the picture of a life in which there were doubtless intervals of security and peace. Monasteries continued to be built throughout this terrible ninth century, and were often the centers of busy industry. Rouen, despite raids and fires, grew stronger from trade with Britain; Cologne and Mainz dominated commerce on the Rhine; and in Flanders thriving centers of industry and trade developed at Ghent, Ypres, Lille, Douai, Arras, Tournai, Dinant, Cambrai, Liége, and Valenciennes.
The monastic libraries suffered tragic losses of classic treasures during the raids, and doubtless many churches were then destroyed which had opened schools on the lines of Charlemagne’s decree. Libraries survived at the monasteries or churches of Fulda, Lorsch, Reichenau, Mainz, Trier, Cologne, Liége, Laon, Reims, Corbie, Fleury, St. Denis, Tours, Bobbio, Monte Cassino, St. Gall…The Benedictine monastery at St. Gall was acclaimed for its writers as well as for its school and its books. Here Notker Balbulus—the Stammerer—(840-912) wrote excellent hymns and the Chronicle of the Monk of St. Gall; here Notker Labeo—the Thick-lipped—(950-1022) translated Boethius, Aristotle, and other classics into German; these translations, among the first productions of German prose, helped to fix the forms and syntax of the new tongue.
Even in harassed France the monastic schools were lighting up these Dark Ages. Remy of Auxerre opened a public school at Paris in 900; and in the tenth century schools were established at Auxerre, Corbie, Reims, and Liege. At Chartres, about 1006, Bishop Fulbert (960-1028) founded a school that became the most renowned in France before Abélard; there the venerabilis Socrates, as his pupils called him, organized the teaching of science, medicine, and classical literature as well as theology, Scripture, and liturgy. Fulbert was a man of noble devotion, saintly patience, and endless charity. To his school, before the end of the eleventh century, would come such scholars as John of Salisbury, William of Conches, Berengar of Tours, and Gilbert de la Porree. Meanwhile, now at Compiègne, now at Laon, the Palace School established by Charlemagne reached the height of its glory under the encouragement and protection of Charles the Bald.
To this Palace School, in 845, Charles invited divers Irish and English scholars. Among them was one of the most original and audacious minds of the Middle Ages, a man whose existence casts doubt upon the advisability of retaining the phrase “Dark Ages” even for the ninth century. His name doubly revealed his origin. Johannes Scotus Eriugena—“John the Irishman, born in Erin”; we shall call him simply Erigena. Though apparently not an ecclesiastic, he was a man of wide learning, a master of Greek, a lover of Plato and the classics, and something of a wit. A story that has all the earmarks of literary invention tells how Charles the Bald, dining with him, asked him Quid distat inter sottum et Scotum— “What distinguishes” (literally, what separates) “a fool from an Irishman?”—to which John is said to have answered, “The table.”48 Nevertheless Charles was fond of him, attended his lectures, and probably enjoyed his heresies. John’s book on the Eucharist interpreted the sacrament as symbolical, and by implication questioned the Real Presence of Christ in the consecrated bread or wine. When Gottschalk, a German monk, preached absolute predestinarianism, and therefore denied free will in man, Archbishop Hincmar asked Erigena to write a reply. The resultant treatise De divina praedestinatione (c. 851) began with a startling exaltation of philosophy: “In earnestly investigating and attempting to discover the reason of all things, every means of attaining to a pious and perfect doctrine lies in that science and discipline which the Greeks call philosophy.” In effect the book denied predestination; the will is free in both God and man; God does not know evil, for if He knew it, He would be the cause of it. The answer was more heretical than Gottschalk’s, and was condemned by two church councils in 855 and 859. Gottschalk was confined in a monastery till his death, but the King protected Erigena.
In 824 the Byzantine Emperor Michael the Stammerer had sent to Louis the Pious the Greek manuscript of a book, The Celestial Hierarchy, believed by Christian orthodoxy to have been composed by Dionysius “the Areopagite.” Louis the Pious turned the manuscript over to the monastery of St. Denis, but nobody there could translate its Greek. Erigena, at the King’s request, now undertook the task. The translation deeply influenced Erigena, and re-established in unofficial Christian theology the Neoplatonist picture of a universe evolving or emanating out of God through different stages or degrees of diminishing perfection, and slowly returning through different degrees back into the deity.
This became the central idea of John’s own masterpiece, De divisione naturae (867). Here, amid much nonsense, and two centuries before Abélard, is a bold subjection of theology and revelation to reason, and an attempt to reconcile Christianity with Greek philosophy. John accepts the authority of the Bible; but since its sense is often obscure, it must be interpreted by reason—usually by symbolism or allegory. “Authority,” says Erigena, “sometimes proceeds from reason, but reason never from authority. For all authority that is not approved by true reason seems weak. But true reason, since it rests on its own strength, needs no reinforcement by any authority.”49 “We should not allege the opinions of the holy Fathers … unless it be necessary thereby to strengthen arguments in the eyes of men who, unskillful in reasoning, yield rather to authority tha
n to reason.”50 Here is the Age of Reason moving in the womb of the Age of Faith.
John defines Nature as “the general name for all things that are and that are not”—i.e., all objects, processes, principles, causes, and thoughts. He divides Nature into four kinds of being: (1) that which creates but is not created—viz., God; (2) that which is created and creates—viz., the prime causes, principles, prototypes, Platonic Ideas, Logos, by whose operation the world of particular things is made; (3) that which is created and does not create—viz., the said world of particular things; and (4) that which neither creates nor is created—i.e., God as the final and absorbing end of all things. “God is everything that truly is, since He makes all things and is made in all things.” There was no creation in time, for this would imply a change in God. “When we hear that God made everything, we ought to understand nothing other than that God is in all things—i.e., subsists as the essence of all things.”51“God Himself is comprehended by no intellect; neither is the secret essence of anything created by Him comprehensible. We perceive only accidents, not essences”52—phenomena, not noumena, as Kant would say. The sensible qualities of things are not inherent in the things themselves, but are produced by our forms of perception. “When we hear that God wishes, loves, chooses, sees, hears … we should think nothing else than that His ineffable essence and power are being expressed by meanings co-natural with us” (congenial to our nature) “lest the true and pious Christian be silenced concerning the Creator, and dare say nothing of Him for the instruction of simple souls.”53 Only for a like purpose may we speak of God as masculine or feminine; “He” is neither.54 If we take “Father” as meaning the creative substance or essence of all things, and “Son” as the divine Wisdom according to which all things are made or governed, and “Spirit” as the life or vitality of creation, we may think of God as a Trinity. Heaven and hell are not places, but conditions of soul; hell is the misery of sin, heaven is the happiness of virtue and the ecstasy of the divine vision (the perception of divinity) revealed in all things to the soul that is pure.55 The Garden of Eden was such a state of soul, not a place on the earth.56 All things are immortal: animals too, like men, have souls that pass back, after death, into the God or creative spirit from whom they emanated.57 All history is a vast outward flow of creation by emanation, and an irresistible inward tide that finally draws all things back into God.
There have been worse philosophies than this, and in ages of illumination. But the Church properly suspected it as reeking with heresy. In 865 Pope Nicholas I demanded of Charles the Bald that he should either send John to Rome for trial, or dismiss him from the Palace School, “that he may no longer give poison to those who seek for bread.”58 We do not know the outcome. William of Malmesbury59 relates that “Johannes Scotus came to England and our monastery, as report says; was pierced with the iron pens of the boys whom he instructed,” and died from the results; probably the tale was a schoolboy’s wishful dream. Philosophers like Gerbert, Abélard, and Gilbert de la Porrée were secretly influenced by Erigena, but for the most part he was forgotten in the chaos and darkness of the age. When in the thirteenth century his book was exhumed from oblivion it was condemned by the Council of Sens (1225), and Pope Honorius III ordered that all copies should be sent to Rome and there be burned.
In these disturbed centuries French art marked time. Despite Charlemagne’s example, the French continued to build their churches on the basilican plan. About 996 William of Volpiano, an Italian monk and architect, became head of the Norman abbey of Fécamp. He brought with him many of the devices of the Lombard and Romanesque style; and apparently it was his pupils who built the great Romanesque abbey church of Jumièges (1045-67). In 1042 another Italian, Lanfranc, entered the Norman monastery at Bee, and soon made it a vibrant intellectual center. Students flocked to it in such number that new buildings had to be provided; Lanfranc designed them, perhaps with some more expert help. Not a stone remains of his structures; but the Abbaye aux Hommes at Caen (1077-81) survives as a testimony to the powerful Romanesque style developed in Normandy by Lanfranc and his fellows.
All over France and Flanders in the eleventh century new churches were built, and artists adorned them with murals, mosaics, and statuary. Charlemagne had directed that church interiors should be painted for the instruction of the faithful; the palaces at Aachen and Ingelheim were decorated with frescoes; and doubtless many churches followed these examples. The last fragments of the Aachen frescoes were destroyed in 1944; but similar murals survive in the church of St. Germain at Auxerre. These differ only in scale from the style and figures in the manuscript illumination of the time. At Tours, in the reign of Charles the Bald, a great Bible was written and painted by the monks, and presented to the King; it is now No. 1 of the Latin codices in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris. Still more beautiful is the “Lothaire” Gospel also made at this time by the monks of Tours. The monks of Reims, in the same ninth century, produced the famous “Utrecht” Psalter—108 vellum leaves containing the Psalms and the Apostles’ Creed, exuberantly illustrated with a veritable menagerie of animals and a museum of tools and occupations. In these lively pictures a lusty realism transforms the once stiff and conventional figures of miniature art.
5. The Rise of the Dukes: 987–1066
The France that Hugh Capet ruled (987-996) now stood out as a separate nation, no longer acknowledging the suzerainty of the Holy Roman Empire; the unification of western continental Europe achieved by Charlemagne was never restored, except momentarily by Napoleon and Hitler. But Hugh’s France was not our France; Aquitaine and Burgundy were virtually independent duchies, and Lorraine would for seven centuries attach itself to Germany. It was a France heterogeneous in race and speech: northeastern France was more Flemish than French, and had a large German element in its blood; Normandy was Norse; Brittany was Celtic and aloof, dominated by refugees from Britain; Provence was still in stock and speech a Roman-Gallic “province”; France near the Pyrenees was Gothic; Catalonia, technically under the French monarchy, was Goth-alonia. The Loire divided France into two regions of diverse cultures and tongues. The task of the French monarchy was to unify this diversity, and make a nation from a dozen peoples. The task would take 800 years.
To improve the chances of an orderly succession, Hugh, in the first year of his reign, had had his son Robert crowned co-king. Robert the Pious (996-1031) is accounted a “mediocre king,”60 perhaps because he shunned the glory of war. Having some dispute over boundaries with the Emperor Henry II of Germany, he arranged a meeting with him, exchanged presents, and reached a peaceable agreement. Like Louis IX, Henry IV, and Louis XVI, Robert had a kindly feeling for the weak and the poor, and protected them as well as he could from the unscrupulous strong. He offended the Church by marrying his cousin Bertha (998), bore excommunication patiently there for and the taunts of those who thought her a witch; finally he separated from her and lived unhappily forever afterward. At his death, we are told, “There was great mourning and intolerable grief.”61 A war of succession followed between his sons; the elder, Henry I (1031-60), won, but only by the help of Robert, Duke of Normandy. When that long conflict (1031-9) ended, the monarchy was so impoverished in money and men that it could no longer prevent the dismemberment of France by powerful and independent lords.
About the year 1000, through the gradual appropriation of surrounding territory by great landowners, France was divided into seven main principalities ruled by counts or dukes: Aquitaine, Toulouse, Burgundy, Anjou, Champagne, Flanders, and Normandy. These dukes or counts were in nearly all cases the heirs of chieftains or generals to whom estates had been granted, for military or administrative services, by the Merovingian or Carolingian kings. The king had become dependent upon these magnates for mobilizing troops and protecting frontier provinces; after 888 he no longer legislated for the whole realm, or gathered taxes from it; the dukes and counts passed laws, levied taxes, waged war, judged and punished, as practically sovereign powers on thei
r estates, and merely offered the king a formal homage and limited military service. The authority of the king in law, justice, and finance was narrowed to his own royal domain, later called the Ile de France—the region of the Saône and middle Seine from Orléans to Beauvais and from Chartres to Reims.
Of all the relatively independent duchies, Normandy grew most rapidly in authority and power. Within a century after its cession to the Northmen, it had become—perhaps through proximity to the sea and its position between England and Paris—the most enterprising and adventurous province in France. The Norse were now enthusiastic Christians, had great monasteries and abbey schools, and reproduced with a recklessness that would soon drive Norman youth to carve new kingdoms out of old states. The progeny of the Vikings made strong governors, not too finicky about their morals, nor palsied with scruples, but able to rule with a firm hand a turbulent population of Gauls, Franks, and Norse. Robert I (1028-35) was not yet duke of Normandy when in 1026 his eye was caught by Harlette, daughter of a tanner in Falaise. She became his cherished mistress according to an old Danish custom, and soon presented him with a son known to his contemporaries as William the Bastard, to us as William the Conqueror. Weighed down by his sins, Robert in 1035 left Normandy on a penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Before going he called his chief barons and prelates to him and said to them:
