136 Chapter 7
arrangements would not long survive him. Even had his
son and grandsons been willing to ignore the ancient
Salic law, the difficulties they faced would have been
insurmountable. The empire’s weak subsistence econ-
omy and poor communications could not sustain the
development of institutions that might have saved it.
For all its Roman and ecclesiastical trappings, the Car-
olingian Empire remained a Germanic chieftainship,
different from its predecessors primarily in scale.
Charlemagne’s interest in the church went beyond
mere political calculation. Though he used the
church—and the papacy—to further his interests, his
personal piety and dedication to the conversion of pa-
gans cannot be questioned. In addition to the essen-
tially administrative reforms instituted, he took a lively
interest in matters that might in other circumstances
have been left to the pope. He also tried, with some
success, to reintroduce the Gregorian chant and to
encourage the practice of auricular confession in which
the laity confess their sins, not to one another, but to
a priest.
A major obstacle to the adoption of these reforms
was the ignorance of the clergy. To correct their defi-
ciencies, he established a school at his palace in
Aachen and staffed it largely with Irish and English
scholars, the most famous of whom was Alcuin of York
(c. 732–804). Charlemagne intended these men to raise
the intellectual level of his court and to educate his
sons. Under the king’s patronage, his scholars began
the task of recovering the classics, especially the reli-
gious ones, and copying them accurately in the beauti-
ful, standardized hand known today as carolingian
minuscule (see illustration 7.7). It is the basis of all
modern systems of handwriting.
The major purpose of this activity was to provide a
body of texts that could serve the needs of clerical edu-
cation. Gathering the best minds of Europe together in
a common enterprise paid other dividends as well. The
courts of Charlemagne and his son, Louis the Pious,
would serve as an intellectual beacon in the dark days
to come. To be sure, the achievements of the Carolin-
gian Renaissance were in some cases forgotten if not
obliterated in the chaos of the ninth century. At no
time did their volume or importance equal that of later
classical revivals, but Charlemagne’s scholars laid the
foundations of medieval learning.Illustration 7.7
Carolingian Minuscule. Carolin-
gian minuscule is the basis of modern
writing. This example is from Bede’s
Expositio in Lucam,copied at Tours c. 820.