The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

by Chris Wickham

  It is a localization, all the same, that we should not exaggerate. People moved about; Columbanus himself is an example. Above all, pilgrims went to Rome, something which becomes well attested in the late sixth century and developed substantially in the seventh and eighth. The Anglo-Saxons are particularly prominent in our evidence; Benedict Biscop and Wilfrid each went several times. The routes became well known, with the result that, as Boniface of Mainz said in 747, in many cities of Italy and Gaul all the prostitutes were English. And there were Franks as well; several seventh- and eighth-century saints’ lives, for Amandus of Maastricht (d. 676), Bonitus of Clermont (d. c. 705) or the Bavarian Corbinian of Freising (d. c. 725), feature pilgrimages to Rome, some more than once. The Lombards in the 740s instituted a passport system on the Alpine frontier for pilgrims to Rome, giving them a sealed document which they expected back on the return journey. There is an entire literature of guides to Roman churches and tombs which begins in the seventh century, and pilgrim hostels for different ethnic groups, Franks, Frisians, Anglo-Saxons, were built between the Vatican and the Tiber. Outside Rome, there were regional pilgrim centres as well, like St Martin’s tomb at Tours, which attracted visitors from all across northern and central Gaul. This might seem less surprising, perhaps, given the extent of élite movement on secular business, and secular communication by letter, across the whole of the Frankish lands, as we saw in Chapter 5 for Desiderius of Cahors; still, pilgrimages involved peasants, too, as is very clear in Gregory of Tours’s collection of the miracles experienced by pilgrims to St Martin. The West’s local societies were by no means hermetically sealed. But this movement remained ad hoc, and did not as yet lessen the variety of the cultural trends of the post-Roman period. This fits the steady localization of economic exchange, too, which reached its peak in much of the West in the eighth century, as we shall see in the next chapter.

  The Christian culture of the early Middle Ages was, however disunited, not under threat. Lowland Britain lost most (though probably not all) of its Christianity after the Anglo-Saxons took over, but apart from that retreat, itself reversed in the seventh century, Christian missionaries steadily pushed northwards: into Ireland in the fifth, Pictland in the sixth, and then Frisia in the early eighth, and Saxony under Charlemagne. It is actually quite hard to reconstruct western Germanic paganism, which would have been highly variable anyway. Unlike Graeco-Roman paganism, it was not literate, and did not survive as a resource for later literary imagery either, as the classical gods did - and as those of Ireland did as well, thanks to the coherence and traditionalism of the Irish learned professions, into which the church was assimilated. We are left with hostile and often stereotyped descriptions of pagan rituals or cult-sites, like the Irminsul, the sacred idol of the Saxons, destroyed by Charlemagne in 772. But there is no reason to think that Christian belief changed much as a result of its exposure to a new frontier of paganism beyond the old bounds of the Roman empire, apart from sometimes in terminology, as with the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre, whose spring festival took place in the Easter period and whose name was borrowed by Anglo-Saxon Christians.

  What the rigorists of the early medieval church did have to face, all the same, was the fact that traditional rituals of varying origins survived everywhere, routinized into local Christian practice. The churchmen of the late empire had often opposed them, as we have seen, but had by no means uprooted them, and the churchmen of the early Middle Ages, in an era of weaker institutions, were even less likely to do so. This is sometimes expressed in terms of pagan survival or revival by our authors, as in the case of Martin of Braga. This is a rhetorical style that was commonest closer to the old Roman frontier, presumably because real pagans were closer there; so the Life of Eligius, bishop of Noyon (d. 660), moves smoothly from Eligius’ sermons against pagan practices, themselves by now a fairly formulaic set, to his preaching against ‘demonic games and wicked leapings’ held on St Peter’s day in Noyon. The participants here were much annoyed by this, however, as they held them to be ‘legitimate . . . customs’, and the implications in the text that this has something to do with paganism are further undermined by the fact that they involved the followers of the major Frankish aristocrat and Neustrian maior domus Erchinoald: these were Christians; it is just that they were performing rituals that Eligius (or his biographer) did not like, or could not control. When Anglo-Saxon missionaries spread from now-converted England back to the Continent, with Willibrord (d. 739) and then Boniface (d. 754), they used the imagery of paganism extensively as well. In Willibrord’s case he really was in pagan territory, in Frisia; but Boniface worked mostly in central Germany, fully part of the Frankish world even if disorganized ecclesiastically, and the ‘pagan’ practices he describes there were more likely to be local Christian customs, like those at Noyon. (Boniface, indeed, writing to Pope Zacharias in 742, complained that there were ‘pagan’ practices even on the streets of Rome, in the First of January celebrations which were still very popular, which Zacharias admitted was true.) As in the late Roman period, simple preaching against such customs was unlikely to get rigorists very far, precisely because they were seen as Christian already. The task of the church would either be to absorb and legitimize them, as perhaps with Eostre, or to set up more ‘orthodox’ religious rituals in rivalry. Religious processions on major saints’ days or to major cult-sites, for example, developed everywhere as part of a Christian ritual aggregation more clearly directed by bishops and other members of the church hierarchy.

  This does not mean that ‘the church’ (which was anyway not a concept anyone used in this period) operated as a coherent unit, however. Far from it; the authors of our sources disagreed, between themselves and with their contemporaries, often quite markedly, about what were legitimate religious practices and what were not, and, more generally, about what correct supernatural power consisted of in an age in which direct divine intervention in human society was considered normal. Let us look at four related aspects this: the sanctity of the living; cult-sites and the miraculous; good and bad supernatural acts; and the general issue of supernatural causation.

  There were not so many isolated ascetics in the West. Valerius of the Bierzo was atypical in this respect. There were some, certainly; Gregory of Tours tells us about several, as for example Hospicius, who in the 570s lived in a tower outside Nice, wrapped in chains, and who could perform miracles, or Vulfolaic, who spent time as a stylite on a column on the edge of the Ardennes, and whom Gregory met in 585 and was much impressed by. But his account of Vulfolaic expresses a significant ambivalence: bishops had come to the stylite and ordered him off his column, saying that the Ardennes hardly had the climate for it, unlike Syria, and instructing him to form a monastery. ‘Now, it is considered a sin not to obey bishops,’ Vulfolaic said (according to Gregory), so of course he did so, and the bishops smashed the column; Gregory met him in the monastery, where he had remained since then. Gregory’s view is clear: the bishops were probably wrong here, but disobeying them would have been worse. Indeed, when ascetics did disobey bishops, Gregory saw them as openly demonic, as with the unauthorized miracle-workers who on two occasions turned up in Tours and attracted crowds around them, and who were rude, not respectful, to Gregory. Gregory of course gives us a bishop’s view, and such charismatics could evidently gain a considerable following. But Gregory was not being hypocritical either. Bishops at least had a church organization to legitimize them and train them. The trouble about saintly individuals was that it was hard to know when they were alive if their wonder-working was divine or demonic. Ascetics could come to bad ends, like the Breton Winnoch, dressed only in skins, whom Gregory supported, but who drank too much of the wine offered by his followers and died of alcoholism. What value were his miracles then? The miracles of saints when they were dead were by contrast safer, ‘much more worthy of praise’, as Gregory says elsewhere, because they came from completed lives, and from people whose sanctity was testable; the bodies of the saintly dead were not co
rrupted, and smelt of roses, so that it could be seen that they were not ordinary sinners. Dead saints were also easier to control. Bishops could ensure that they were buried in cathedrals, or episcopally controlled churches like Saint-Martin at Tours, and could organize and take benefit from their cult. The cult of relics of the saintly dead became a dominant feature of the medieval church, in both East and West, but in the West it had little rival during the period covered by this book.

  Not everyone was as uneasy about living saints as Gregory of Tours. Gregory the Great, who had been a monk before becoming pope and was openly regretful about being forced back into the spiritual dangers of the secular world, was romantic about ascetics; his accounts of them stress the incomprehension of too-worldly bishops more than his name-sake in Tours ever did. Saints who were part of the standard church hierarchies, as bishops and abbots, or who accepted the authority of such hierarchies, were also not a problem to most authors, and there are any number of saints’ lives about them. And there was clearly a space for isolated charismatic sanctity in the mission situation, as with Patrick’s evangelization in Ireland in the fifth century (the savagery of his cursing of the incredulous was enthusiastically described in Muirchu’s seventh-century Life), or with Cuthbert’s miracle-working and companionship with angels in the 650s-680s, in the half-converted lands of what is now Northumberland, written up by two eighth-century authors (one of them being Bede). Patrick was also a bishop, and Cuthbert became one; these were not opponents of hierarchy. But the space for even this sort of charisma steadily decreased, as time went on. Aldebert was a bishop in central or eastern Francia in the 740s, and a rival to Boniface in the latter’s reorganization of the Frankish church. He had saintly relics with him, he dedicated churches and crosses, he knew the sins of supplicants before they confessed, his hair and nails were venerated, all standard signs of sanctity: and for this he was formally condemned and defrocked in a church council in Rome by Pope Zacharias in 745. Perhaps he had exaggerated, in that it was seemingly he who distributed his hair; he certainly exaggerated in brandishing a letter written by Jesus which had fallen from heaven in Jerusalem, and was picked up by the archangel Michael (Zacharias concluded he was mad), and in listing an unusual and thus perhaps demonic list of angels to pray to. But in a steadily more ordered church, he was by now out of place, and he had made the mistake of opposing Boniface as well: he had to go.

  These accounts show clearly that the miraculous was a normal part of the early medieval world; the contest was over who controlled it. Whatever modern rationalists may think about the possibility of miracles taking place, we must recognize that in the early Middle Ages, as under late Rome, there was little doubt about it. It is not that miracles were natural: the power (whether from God or from the saints) that they represented derived, precisely, from their being supernatural, a breach of the natural order. Writers did recognize that there was therefore a danger that they might not be believed, and often were more careful than usual to supply chains of sources for miracles, going back to authoritative eyewitnesses; but the incredulous were regularly stigmatized as ‘rustic’, too boorish to realize how divine providence worked. That is to say, it was incredulity, not (or not only) excessive credulity, that marked peasant inferiority in this period in the eyes of literary élites.

  Pilgrimages to saints’ tombs were especially marked by miraculous events. This is clearest in the miracle-book about St Martin written by Gregory of Tours, largely based on the records made by his priests at Martin’s shrine, which had become a large complex of buildings outside the city, focused on the reception of visitors. There was a network of such major cult-sites all across the West. In Gaul, which is relatively well documented, six of them seem to have been particularly important by the seventh century, the churches of Saint-Denis and Saint-Germain in Paris, Saint-Médard in Soissons, Saint-Pierre in Sens, Saint-Aignan in Orléans and Saint-Martin in Tours, all of which were made into monasteries by Queen Balthild around 660. The cult of St Martin, as we have just seen, was enthusiastically advertised by the bishops of Tours. The first two or three of these six, however, were by contrast very much Merovingian-backed cults, essentially royal foundations. In the most important of these, Saint-Denis, Merovingian kings were regularly buried, from Dagobert in 639 onwards. The kings’ support for Saint-Denis (and Saint-Germain, another royal burial place, and probably Saint-Médard as well) shows that a desire to control cult-sites, and to make political capital out of them, was not restricted to bishops. In the Christian topography of the early medieval West, the hot spots, the most powerful points, were all sites with the relics of saints, and it is understandable that people should want to play politics with them. Indeed, this could be very direct: it could involve theft. Rome, which was such a pilgrimage centre largely because of the huge number of saints buried there (thanks to the fact that pre-Constantinian persecution and execution of Christians, martyr-creating, was always most active in the imperial capital), perhaps had more saints than it needed, and certainly many more than it could guard. Stealing saints became particularly common there in the ninth century, as we shall see in Chapter 17. But fighting over saints’ bodies was older than that; Gregory of Tours is proud to recount how Martin’s body, shortly after he died in 397, was stolen by the men of Tours from Poitiers. All such thefts were justified; if they had not been, the saint would have stopped them, miraculously of course.

  Not all supernatural activity was seen as good. Saints’ lives and sermons are full of alternative wonder-workers, witches, magicians and soothsayers, who could cast spells, cure, affect the weather and tell the future. These were bad people in the eyes of the writers, but they were clearly numerous. People disagreed over whether they were fraudulent or had real (demoniacal) powers. Among secular legislators, Rothari in Italy in 643 thought that witches should not be killed, for ‘it is in no wise to be believed by Christian minds that it is possible that a woman can eat a living man from within’, but Liutprand in 727 banned soothsayers both male and female (they were to be enslaved); similarly, the Salic lawgivers in Francia prescribed heavy fines for casting spells to kill someone or to make a woman barren. Among ecclesiastical writers, there is a wider tendency to assume that demons were behind their activity (thus Caesarius of Arles, Gregory of Tours, Isidore of Seville and the Carolingian Hincmar of Reims), although an alternative Carolingian strand (Hraban Maur, Agobard of Lyon), like Rothari, denied that their spells could work at all. Actually, Gregory had it both ways on occasions. He tells a story of two children, servants of his, affected by bubonic plague, one of whom was treated by a soothsayer with amulets and died (that is, the magic did not work), while the other drank dust from St Martin’s tomb mixed with water and recovered. This links into the classic hagiographical topos of the magic battle in which the magician/ witch/pagan priest fails and the saint is successful, even if in this case Gregory names himself as an eyewitness. Conversely, plenty of his soothsayers really could tell the future, thanks to demons. One notable account from 577 has Prince Merovech and Duke Guntram Boso, both taking sanctuary from King Chilperic in Saint-Martin in Tours, and thus temporary and unwilling (in Merovech’s case, unpleasant) tenants of Gregory. Both tried to foresee what would happen to them. Guntram Boso went to a soothsayer, who said that Merovech would become king and Guntram his general, and later a bishop; to Gregory it was obvious that the devil was simply lying to him. Merovech used the sortes instead, an entirely Christian divinatory mechanism based on opening the Bible at random and reading sentences (he put the Bible on St Martin’s tomb for greater effectiveness) - unfortunately, and more accurately, these said he would die. Gregory used the sortes too, backed up by an angelic vision, which said the same. Here we see the degree to which this sort of personalized use of the supernatural could be both complementary and in rivalry. All the parties nevertheless assumed that the supernatural world could be manipulated, whether in a good or a bad way.

  This private control over the supernatural, ‘magic’, pers
isted, no matter how much it was reviled by rigorists. It would be reasonable to imagine that, throughout our period, most people had access to magic-workers of one kind or another, whether the local wise-woman or even, on occasion, the local priest. The tenth-century manuscripts containing books on medicine from Anglo-Saxon England, such as Lacnunga and Bald’s Leechbook, which are full of healing spells, came from monastic or cathedral copying-schools, after all. And, here as elsewhere, it must be stressed that the village wise-woman, too, would in most cases have seen her powers as operating in an entirely Christian context, and so would her clientele. The supernatural world was all around, and accessible. The virtue of saints (living or dead) could channel it and make miracles; more edgily, spells and sortes could command it. After all, as all our historians repeat, God’s justice intervened directly in human affairs, making the bad die young and the good prosper, ensuring that virtuous kings won their battles and wicked kings lost (or else, since this did not always occur, allowing the wicked to prosper in order to punish the sins of others). Anyone who believed this sort of immediate divine causation would have little real trouble with the miraculous, and maybe even the magical; there was so much space in Christianity for the exercise of supernatural power.