The Church and the Carolingians

1. The Church and the Carolingians By: Diego Wagner

2. The Carolingian Rise • After the Fall of Rome, the Germanic tribe known as the Franks settled in Gaul (modern day France and Belgium). • Clovis (466-511) became the first Merovingian leader. • His kingdom stretched from the Pyrenees to Germany. • The Merovingian Dynasty ended in 751, and was replaced by Pepin the Short, the first Carolingian ruler. • The Merovingians ensured the rise of Nicene Christianity in Western Europe, as Clovis and 3000 soldiers were baptized.

3. Merovingian and the Church • After Clovis was baptized, he saw himself as a defender of the faith against Arians and pagans. • The Church, eager to assist, provided priests and missionaries to baptized and instruct the thousands of converts who were persuaded to accept Catholicism by the Franks. • Thus, a natural alliance was formed by the Church, who feared Germanic Arians, and the Franks, who wanted to secure their rule over people through a common religion.

4. Pepin the Short (Ramcharran?) Becomes King. • Pope Zacharias (741-52) wanted Pepin the Short to become king of Gaul. Coincidentally, Pepin becomes king the following year. • As the Pope had given Pepin a favor, it wanted one in return; the Pope appealed to Pepin to drive the Lombards out of Italy and to defend the Pope’s rights to the contested lands. • In 754, Pepin forms an alliance with the Pope against both the Lombards and the Byzantine empire, who also wanted that land. Henceforth, the Carolingian kings become the official protectors of the popes. • The popes also began to acknowledge them as “kings by the grace of God,” and then anointed them with holy oil, like the ancient kings of Israel Solomon and David.

5. Pepin continued • Pepin soon took the title of patricius Romanorum, or “father-protector of the Romans.” • The Franks defeated the Lombards and delivered the contested lands to the pope. These lands came to be known as the Papal States. This was called the Donation of Pepin. • The pope’s dependence of the Franks to gain territory called to attention the papacy’s vulnerability and dependence upon a secular power. • Many were attempting to make the pope the temporal ruler of the West, as well as its spiritual leader. • A forged document, known as the Donation of Constantine, allegedly listed Constantine’s extraordinary gifts to Pope Sylvester I and his successors. • Besides giving the Bishop of Rome jurisdiction above all other Bishops, it also granted them the entire Western half of the empire. The pope’s rule in the West was to be absolute and unhindered, since the Donation asserted that , “It is not right that an earthly emperor should have an authority there, where the rule of priests and the [Pope] has been established by the Emperor of Heaven.”

6. Carolingian Responsibility. • Whether or not Pepin was aware of the Donation of Constantine, he definitely did not fail to see the advantages it offered to the Frankish monarchy. • The Franks would be responsible for defending the Church against hostile dangers outside its borders and maintaining order within them which Pepin knew would bring wealth and power. • The aims Donation of Constantine were never fully realized, but it was used as one of the bases of papel authority for centuries.

7. Charlemagne “the Great” • Carolingian kings who ruled at the height of Frankish power took their name from Charlemagne (Carol Magnus, or Charles the Great 742-814), their greatest representative. • He was first and foremost a warrior, constantly campaigning. • He pacified the Northern frontier by conquering the Pagan Frisians. • In the East, his armies added Slavic and Avar lands to the Frankish kingdom. • In Italy, he crushed the Lombards and made himself lord of the entire peninsula and Byzantine territories, except the Papal States. • When crossing the Pyrenees, he attacked the Muslims, who had invaded France sixty years earlier. • By the time of his death, his empire covered all of Northern France, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, most of Italy and Western Germany, and parts of Western Europe and Spain.

8. Charlemagne continued • Charlemagne also saw himself as a defender of the faith, insisting that his objectives were spiritual, as well as temporal. • He envisioned a realm unified by the Catholic faith, and committed to making God’s will a reality on Earth. • He promoted Christianity by supporting missionaries, and remembered Augustine’s policy of concerning the Donatists- he used force when necessary to produce converts. • When he defeated the Saxons , he gave them a choice between baptism or death. • Furthermore, he supported the foundation of monasteries, enforced their strict observance of Benedictine rule, protected ecclesiastical authority, and collected an income tax from all Christians to ensure the financial health of the Church.

9. CH-CH-CH-CHIA and the Church • The alliance between the Franks and the papacy was evidently mutually beneficial when Pope Leo III (795-816) fled to Charlemagne after Roman nobles had kidnapped and beaten him and forced him to leave office. Charlemagne, as defender of the papacy, returned the following year with Leo and arranged for him to return to his office. • Thus, Pope Leo III was able to be both the Pope and the leader of Western Europe, through Charlemagne. • Charlemagne’s empire became known as the Holy Roman Empire. • Charlemagne’s coronation as emperor benefited the papacy because it solidified the relationship between the papacy and its Frankish defenders, and it suggested that the Church had the right to bestow temporal authority to secular rulers, including emperors.

10. The Carolingian Renaissance and School?… • Because the Western Roman Empire had fallen, in structure in all of western Europe had been destroyed. • Charlemagne’s reign brought about a revival of learning, which was a much more limited version of the Italian Renaissance. • Before Charlemagne, literacy and knowledge of the past was gone. • Charlemagne was convinced that a cultural revival should also be a religious one; he imposed higher education and moral standards on the clergy. He also called them to establish schools where boys of all classes would learn to read. • Alcuin of York (740-804) was a noble who was one of the learned individuals invited to Charlemagne’s “palace school.” • Under the leadership of Alcuin and other scholars, a uniquely Christian understanding of education emerged. Its purpose was to prepare individuals to understand the bible, the writings of Church Fathers, and other religious literature. • The first step was to understand Latin, the religious language in the West. Then came an acquisition of general education through seven general arts. Finally, those who mastered these liberal arts was then able to study what really mattered- theology and the Bible.

11. More about School  • Since study was dependent upon the availability of books, the job of tediously producing countless copies was given to special monastic workshops called Scriptoria. • Here the Carolingian handwriting of minuscule was developed and the production of exquisitely beautiful manuscripts became an art form. • Unfortunately, the Carolingian Renaissance had little impact on the intellectual lives of most people because most of the population was illiterate. • However, there were glimmerings of renewed interest in literature and scholarship.