A Short History of Europe: From Charlemagne to the Treaty of Europe (2 page)

Charlemagne also encouraged a cultural revival, employing the greatest scholars of the day to facilitate it. The English monk, scholar, poet
and teacher, Alcuin of York (735–804), was invited to the court and became its most prominent teacher. Many of the most notable minds of the Carolingian era were taught there by him. Even Charlemagne took courses at his celebrated Palace Academy. Others such as the grammarian Peter of Pisa (744–99) and the theologian Agobard of Lyons (769–840) also contributed to the intellectual renaissance fostered
by the Emperor, revising the text of the Bible and publishing grammars, histories and ballads. In architecture, too, there was innovation and change. Carolingian architecture threw off the pervasive Byzantine influence, initiating the style that, with its round arches and groin vaults, would later become known as Romanesque.

Charlemagne revived the ancient term ‘Europe’ to distinguish his lands
from those of Byzantium and of the pagans beyond his borders. However, it was not destined to last and, when he finally died on 28 January 814, the concept died with him. So too did his empire. As was customary, his son, Louis the Pious (ruled 813–40), had been crowned co-emperor in 813 to avoid a destructive succession dispute on Charlemagne’s death. However, when Louis died in 840, the kingdom
was shared between the late king’s sons. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 allowed for this division.

The western lands of the empire, known as West Francia, were given to Charles the Bald (ruled 840–77); Lothair (ruled 840–55) became king of Middle Francia, comprising the Low Countries, Lorraine, Alsace, Burgundy, Provence and the kingdom of Italy; East Francia, now Germany and other regions to the
east, was to be ruled by the appropriately named Louis the German (843–76).

The great nations of Europe began to take shape.

The empire left by Charlemagne had become fragmented and soon descended into petty fiefdoms and internecine warfare. By the last years of the ninth century, a new kingdom had emerged in upper Burgundy and Count Boso was effectively
king of lower Burgundy. Italy had been ravaged for many years by invasion by Byzantines, Neustrians and Austrasians and any political authority that had once existed had long since been eroded. It was against such a background that a new terror arrived, a terror that would destroy people’s faith in central authority still further. The Frankish kings, who were supposed to provide protection,
seemed incapable of doing so against the new pagan threat from the north – the Vikings.

No one is entirely sure why the Norsemen set out on their initial voyages of conquest. It may have been due to over-crowding in their homeland but some suggest that they were merely an adventurous race in search of new opportunities. Whatever the reason, they raided and settled in Europe for some 200 years,
creating new states and often establishing themselves through time amongst the ruling elite of the countries they invaded. Above all, they created prosperity for their native lands, establishing political power for northern Europe for the first time.

The Swedes, known as Varangians, headed east, plundering the lands of the Baltic, the Bay of Riga and the Gulf of Finland and establishing camps
at Wolin on the Oder, on the Vistula and at Novgorod in modern-day northwest Russia. They even made it as far as Constantinople. The Danes and the Norwegians turned their attention to the south and west, causing panic in Ireland, Great Britain, Germany, Holland, France and as far as the Mediterranean and Greece.

The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
– the late ninth-century manuscript that narrates the history
of the Anglo-Saxons – gives 789 as the date of the first Viking raid on Britain. That summer, three Norwegian ships entered Portland Bay in Dorset. Four years later, Viking raiders attacked and plundered the monastery on the island of Lindisfarne, off the northeast coast of England, appropriating church treasures, killing many monks and carrying off as slaves those they did not kill. Two years
later it was the turn of the holy Scottish isle of Iona. The Vikings would return again and again to these places. In 875 the monks of Lindisfarne finally decamped, taking the relics of Saint Cuthbert with them. They would remain an itinerant community for several decades.

The Danes were the principal invaders. In 841, they took advantage of the political uncertainty caused by the death of Louis
the Pious, as the empire occupied itself with the fallout from the division of the empire between his three sons. Employing their customary strategy, they sailed up the river Seine to the city of Rouen which was ruthlessly attacked and plundered. Bordeaux was captured in 847, remaining hostage to the Vikings for many years. As became the custom, the West Frankish king, Charles the Bald, paid them
off. Unfortunately for him, and the terrified people of his kingdom, the raids continued. Charles ordered every settlement to prepare itself with defences, fortifications and troops but it was to no avail and, when 40,000 Vikings laid siege to Paris itself, Charles was forced to pay them off with 700lbs of gold. The Vikings retired to Burgundy.

Paying them off seemed to be the only way to stop
them, especially in Britain where the Viking invasions had a huge impact on everyday life as well as on the political life of the country. In 828, the house of Wessex had become pre-eminent when King Egbert (ruled 802–39) was recognised as
Bretwalda
– overlord of Britain. It was not long, however, before the Danes began to challenge Wessex superiority and Alfred the Great (ruled 871–99) spent
his entire reign as King of Wessex fending off the Scandinavian threat. Eventually, after defeating the Danish warlord, Guthrum (died c. 890) at the Battle of Edington, Alfred signed a treaty with the Danes that established the borders of their respective territories. The land under Danish control and subject to Danish law – an area roughly to the north of a line drawn between London and Chester –
became known as the
Danelaw
. Eric Bloodaxe (895–954), the last Danish king of the Northern Viking kingdom, was driven out of Northumbria in 954, but ultimate power in England would continue to be disputed by the Danes and the House of Wessex until 1066.

Events in France would prove fatal for the struggle for supremacy in England. In 911, the French king, Charles the Simple (ruled 893–922), signed
a treaty with the Viking leader, Rollo (c. 870–932). When Rollo had invaded Normandy, Charles realised that there was little point in continuing the struggle. If he paid the Vikings off, they would only return. Consequently, he gave Rollo and his followers the lands in Normandy that they had conquered on condition they fight off any raids by their Viking brothers. Rollo became ruler and possibly
Duke of Normandy. One hundred and fifty-five years later, his great-great-great grandson, William the Conqueror (ruled 1066–87) would become King of England after defeating King Harold II (ruled 1066) at the Battle of Hastings. The Normans would also extend their reach as far as southern Italy, conquered in the 1050s by Robert Guiscard (c. 1015–85) who was descended from the norsemen who had sailed
up the Seine several hundred years earlier.

It was not only the threat from the north that made Europe an unsettling place to live at the end of the Dark Ages. From the east came the Magyars, the last of the nomadic tribes to invade central Europe. Overwhelmed by their neighbours, the Pechenegs, and their ally, the Tsar of the Bulgars, they migrated over the Carpathian Mountains to the west,
settling finally in the Hungarian plains. As rapacious as the Vikings, they cut a swathe through the Carolingian Empire from 895 until 955, extracting huge ransoms and tribute monies. Later invasions brought the greatest nomadic empire of them all to Europe – the Mongols, also known as Tatars. In the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan (1162–1227) ruled a vast empire stretching from the Pacific to the
Black Sea, the largest empire in history; from 1336 to 1405, the Mongol Emperor Tamerlane ruled from Delhi in India to the Aegean. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Turks had arrived in the eleventh century and would wield influence in Eastern Europe for the next 800 years.

Such instability only served to weaken central power and destroy confidence in the Frankish monarchies and the end result was feudalism.
However, just as Charlemagne’s great empire was created partly to protect against invasion, the incursions of the Vikings, the Magyars and all the others led to the creation of the Holy Roman Empire and the Tsardom of Moscow.

As the Frankish empire began to wane, so did another former great power begin an astonishing resurgence. It had been the Emperor Theodosius (ruled 379–95)
– the last emperor to rule the Roman Empire in its entirety – who had made the fateful decision to split the empire in two on his death in 395, dividing it between his two sons, Honorius (ruled 395–423) in the West and Arcadius (ruled 395–408) in the East. As various invaders overran the Western half in the course of the next century, the Eastern Empire was left relatively unscathed.

In the sixth
century, the Eastern Emperor, Justinian I (ruled 527–65), had overseen an expansion of his territories but, during the next two centuries, his descendants had lost much of these gains. In the eighth and ninth centuries, the empire had been riven by a debilitating iconoclasm dispute – the issue being whether or not it was right to worship icons. It was destabilising and sometimes violent and the
empire reached its lowest ebb.

Towards the end of the ninth century, however, the Macedonian dynasty seized the throne. Basil I (ruled 867–86), a former peasant horse-breaker, who had risen to a position of prominence at the imperial court, came to power by murdering the previous emperor, Michael III (ruled 842–67), in September 867. Despite such an inglorious beginning to his reign, Basil launched
a remarkable rebirth of Byzantine fortunes, a rebirth perpetuated by his successors, Leo VI the Wise (ruled 886–912), Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (ruled 913–59), Romanos II (ruled 959–63), Nicephoros II Phocas (ruled 963–69), John I Tzimisces (ruled 969–76) and Basil II (ruled 976–1025), known as the ‘Bulgar Slayer’.

In the tenth century the Byzantines strove once again to expand their territory.
The Arabs had traumatised the empire by taking Thessalonika in 904 and massacring its inhabitants. Sicily and Crete had also fallen to them at the start of the tenth century. From 961, however, Byzantium began to fight back. Under the generalship of the future emperor, Nicephoros, Crete was retaken and the Mediterranean was freed from the scourge of Arab pirates. Nicephoros conquered Cilicia
– the Anatolian Peninsula – and advanced as far as Syria where he captured Aleppo. During this campaign, he earned the nickname, ‘The Pale Death of the Saracens’. Even better, from his conquests he also earned a fortune for himself and for the empire.

Others continued these heroic deeds and, by the beginning of the eleventh century, a Byzantine army stood at the gates of Jerusalem. The empire
also extended its authority into Armenia and into Caucasian Georgia to the north. It had not been easy as there were threats from all sides. Slavs and people called Avars, a powerful, multi-ethnic, Turkic tribal confederation, arrived from northern Russia, the Arabs were mustering on the eastern border and Lombards attacked Byzantine territories in Italy. Their greatest rivals, however, were their
neighbours, the Bulgars. Their mutual religion, Christianity, had helped to maintain a shaky peace between the two but, when Simeon I (ruled 893–927) came to the Bulgarian throne, that peace was shattered and a period of hostilities began. Simeon created a vast empire, stretching between the Adriatic, the Aegean and the Black Sea, to rival that of the Byzantines and he styled himself Tsar. The wars
he began continued until the Byzantines comprehensively defeated the Bulgars at the Battle of Kleidion in 1014. Basil’s revenge on the defeated army was, indeed, terrible. He is said to have taken 15,000 of them prisoner and divided them into groups of 100. He then blinded every man in each of the groups, except for one soldier whom he left with one good eye so that he could lead his 99 blind
colleagues back to Bulgaria. As he watched his sorry army arrive home, Tsar Samuil (ruled 997–1014) is reported to have been so shocked that he suffered a heart attack and died.

The Bulgar threat was no more. In 1018, they surrendered unconditionally and were incorporated into the Byzantine Empire that now included the whole of the Balkans and had the Danube as its northern frontier. The Bulgars
would remain under Byzantine control for 150 years. Territorial expansion, economic stability and the security of its borders now allowed the Byzantine Empire to develop militarily, politically, socially and culturally. The empire was organised into military zones known as ‘themes’ and it was constantly prepared to go to war. Cleverly, however, the Byzantines also sent missionaries out to their
enemies, believing that a shared religion would reduce the chance of war. Moreover, the imperial court presided over a bureaucracy that ensured uniform systems and legislation were enjoyed in every part of the Empire.

Constantinople became the cultural centre of the medieval universe with an intellectual elite, led by Photios (810–93), professor and patriarch of the city, teaching and working
there. Many great works were produced and Byzantine scholars also performed the valuable function of preserving numerous important works of Greek and Roman antiquity. Architecture, painting, mosaics and craftsmanship also underwent a renaissance. Architecture began to show a concern for external appearance and strove for an aesthetic perfection; painting became symbolic and abstract. Byzantine cultural
influence spread across the continent.

Eventually, however, the empire went into decline. Clergy and landowners enjoyed great privilege and taxation weighed very heavily on the less well-off. The economy began to suffer and the empire became less able to fend off external threats from the Seljuk Turks, who had settled in Asia Minor, and the Normans who, under Robert Guiscard, had seized parts
of southern Italy in 1071. Increasingly decadent emperors became more interested in palace intrigue than in governing the empire and, as soldier-farmers began to pay not to be in the army, mercenaries had to be hired to fight the Byzantine Empire’s wars.