Europe: A History (59 page)
Gregory was specially solicitous to adapt heathen practices to Christian usage.
We have come to the conclusion that the temples of idols … should on no account be destroyed. He is to destroy the idols, but the temples themselves are to be aspersed with holy water, altars set up, and relics enclosed in them … In this way, we hope that the people may abandon idolatry … and resort to these places as before … And since they have a custom of sacrificing many oxen to devils, let some other solemnity be substituted in its place… They are no longer to sacrifice beasts to the Devil, but they may kill them for food to the praise of God… If the people are allowed some worldly pleasures… they will come more readily to desire the joys of the spirit. For it is impossible to eradicate all
errors from obstinate minds at a stroke; and whoever wishes to climb to a mountaintop climbs step by step …
21
This caution no doubt explains the ultimate success of the missions: but it envisaged an extended period where thinly veiled heathen practices coexisted with a slowly evolving Christianity. Generally speaking, the Church was successful in its evangelical mission because it managed to appeal to the ‘barbarian’ outlook. It was able to convince its converts that only through baptism could one become part of the civilized order. The interplay of Christian authors with pagan themes, which is evident, for example, in the Anglo-Saxon poem
Beowulf
, provided a central feature of cultural life over a very long period.
In the East, the emperors were too preoccupied with the Muslim onslaught to show much concern for the souls of their non-Christian subjects and neighbours. For the time being, the great
Sclavinia
was largely left to its own devices, as were the Bulgars. In the seventh and eighth centuries Constantinople contented itself with the rehellenization and rechristianization of the Peloponnese and the islands. It is not an episode which commands much comment in modern histories of Greece. Crete remained in Muslim hands until the tenth century.
Despite the example of the Franks, the Germanic tribes to the east of the Rhine held Christianity at arm’s length for two centuries more. The task of conversion was left to English missionaries from the north, and to Frankish warriors from the west. St Wilfred of York (634–710), whose Catholic line had been carried at Whitby, began by preaching in Friesland in 678–9. But the central figure was undoubtedly St Boniface of Crediton (c.675–755), creator of the first German see at Mainz, founder of the great abbey at Fulda (744), and martyr of the faith at Dokkum in Friesland. Boniface had many close assistants, among them the well-named SS Sturm and Lull, who quarrelled over Fulda, St Willibald of Bavaria (c.700–86), the first known English pilgrim to the Holy Land, his brother St Winebald of Thuringia (d. 761), and his sister St Walburga (d. 779), abbess of Heidenheim.
The peaceable work of the English missionaries was complemented, not to say disgraced, by the merciless campaigns of the Franks in Saxony between 772 and 785. Submission to Christianity was an absolute condition of the Frankish conquest, where butchery and treachery were the normal instruments both of attack and resistance. The sacred grove of Irminsul was axed at the outset; and mass baptisms were performed at nearby Paderborn, and again in the Ocker and the Elbe. The Saxon rebels, some 4,500 of whom were beheaded in the massacre of Verden (782), were finally broken when their leader, Widukind, surrendered to the holy water. Missionary bishoprics were created at Bremen, Verden, Minden, Munster, Paderborn, and Osnabrück.
The advance of Christianity into central Germany marked the beginning of a strategic change. Up to that point Christianity had been largely confined to the Roman Empire, or to lands which retained an important leaven of ex-Roman, Christian citizens. To a large extent it was still the ‘imperial religion’, even in
places that had long since severed their imperial links. But now it was edging into countries that had never claimed any sort of connection with the Empire. The Rhineland had once been a Roman province; Saxony had not. Whilst several ex-Roman provinces still awaited the return of the faith, especially in the Balkans, Christianity was starting to creep into untouched heathen territory. After Germany, Slavdom awaited its turn, and beyond the Slavs, Scandinavia and the Balts.
If the first stage of christianization, the conversion of the Empire, had taken 400 years, the second stage, the reconversion of the former Roman provinces, was drawing to a close after another 400. The third stage, the conversion of virgin heathendom, was to last for six long centuries after that (see pp. 321–8, 430). [
BIBLIA
]
At first sight it may seem that the processes which provide the main themes of the Dark Ages were not closely related. What is more, none of them came to an end during this period. The long procession of barbarian irruptions continued until the last Mongol raid of 1287 (see pp. 364–6). The split between East and West was projected from the imperial to the ecclesiastical plane, and was not formalized until 1054 (see p. 330). The Christian conversion of Europe’s pagans was not completed until 1417 (see p. 430). The soldiers of Islam were still on the march when the
Ottomans landed in Europe in 1354 (see p. 386). Only then was the Roman Empire finally heading for extinction.
BIBLIA
T
HE
6th century
Codex Argenteus
(Cod. DG 1 fol. 118v) is kept in the University Library at Uppsala. It was brought to Sweden from Prague. Written in silver letters on purple parchment, it is probably the finest early copy of the Gothic translation of the Bible completed by Ulfilas (Wulfilla, c.311–83). Wulfilla, or ‘Little Wolf’, the Arian grandson of Christian captives, was consecrated ‘Bishop of the Goths’ during their sojourn on the Danube frontier. His translation of the Bible into Gothic started the long history of vernacular scriptures and of Germanic literature.
The
Codex Amiatinus
, now in the Laurentian Library in Florence, is not quite so old. It was written at Jarrow in Northumbria c.690–700 during the rule of Abbot Ceolfrid. It is the oldest extant copy of the Vulgate, St Jerome’s translation of the scriptures into Latin. It was based on an older Vulgate copy by Cassiodorus (see p. 266), and was presented by Abbot Ceolfrid to the Papacy, whence in turn it was lodged in the Abbey of Amiata. The vellum on which it was written was made from the skins of 1,500 animals.
It is worthy of note that Wulfilla completed his Gothic translation prior to St Jerome’s translation of the Bible into Latin. Both of them based their translation on older Greek texts, of which there was no single authoritative version. Modern reconstructions of the early Greek scriptures are based on the 4th-century
Codex Vaticanus
from Alexandria, on the 4th-century
Codex Sinaiticus
, brought from Mt. Sinai and sold to the British Museum by a Russian Tsar: on the 5th-century
Codex Alexandrinus
, also in the British Library, which came from Constantinople, and the 5th-century
Codex Ephraemi
in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.
The task of establishing a totally accurate and reliable text of the scriptures, suited to each passing generation, has always been impossible. But the attempt has to be made ceaselessly. The
Old Testament
was written in Hebrew and Aramaic, the
New Testament
in Hellenistic Greek. The former was put into Greek, as the Septuagint, for the use of the Greek-speaking Jews in Alexandria. So, in theory, a complete Greek text of both testaments may be thought to have existed from the 1st century
AD
onwards.
Those books which make up the present Bible, in its Catholic and Protestant forms, number almost one hundred. They could not be collated into a unified
pandekt
of both Testaments, until the basic canon was established in the 4th century. In the meantime, numerous variations of every book of the Bible, together with the uncanonical apocrypha, circulated separately. They are only known to modern scholarship in the fragments found in ancient papyri, in passages quoted by the Fathers, in various pre-Vulgate ‘Old Faith’ texts, and in the work of ancient Judaic and Christian critics. Among the latter, by far the most important was the wonderful
Hexapla
of Origen, who wrote out six Hebrew and Greek versions of the Old Testament in six parallel columns, [
PAPYRUS
]
Not even the Vulgate existed in systematic form. As St Jerome completed successive sections of his work, he sent each off to assorted destinations. They, too, have to be unscrambled from the variegated biblical compilations into which they were inserted. What is more, the work of medieval copyists resembled nothing more than the game of ‘Chinese Whispers’, where errors are compounded at every stage. It is easy to see why the Greek word
biblia
or holy ‘books’ (pl.) originally existed only in the plural. Uniform biblical texts were not attainable until the age of printing. [
PRESS
]
By then, however, Christendom was on the verge of the Reformation when Protestants would challenge all previous biblical scholarship. Protestant scholars were specially dedicated to vernacular translations for which they needed authoritative texts of the Hebrew and Greek originals. Hence a whole new era of bibliology was characterized by Protestant-Catholic rivalry.
In 1907 a Vatican Commission entrusted the preparation of a definitive edition of the Vulgate to the Benedictines. Work has continued throughout the twentieth century. When it may be complete, as one stoical Benedictine remarked, ‘God only knows’.
1
None the less, these various processes
did
interact; and the essential effects of their interaction can be identified by the time that most of the Mediterranean was conquered by the armies of the Prophet. It was the four centuries following Constantine that brought Europe into being. This was the period when the majority of the Peninsula’s diverse peoples found their way to permanent homelands. This was the period when the rump of the Roman Empire became just one among many sovereign states in a community of ‘Christendom’ that was consolidating behind the screen of Islam. No one yet used the name of ‘Europe’ to describe this community, but there can be little doubt that it was already in existence.
Mons Iovis, The Pennine Alps, c.25 November
AD
753
. It was very late in the season, just before the winter snows. Stephen II, Bishop and Patriarch of Rome, was hurrying to cross the Alps before the roads were blocked. He had come from Pavia on the Po, the capital of the Lombard kingdom, and was entering the kingdom of the Franks. He was heading in the first instance for the monastery of St Maurice on the upper Rhône. From there he would make for the royal villa of Ponthion on the Marne—a journey of nearly 500 miles. Averaging ten or twelve miles a day, it would take him six weeks.
22
The Mons Jovis, ‘Jupiter’s Mount’, carried one of two Roman roads constructed seven centuries earlier to link the provinces of Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul. Also known as Alpis Poenina or ‘Pennine Pass’, it had once been the gateway to the lands of the Helvetii. It reached an elevation of 2,476 m or 8,111 ft. The stone-paved roadway, 4 metres wide, had been designed for wheeled traffic, which in the old days would have covered the 55 miles from Augusta Praetoria (Aosta) to Octodorus (Martigny) in one day. In the eighth century the going was harder. The locals would have called it by a name that was part-way between the Latin Mons Jovis and the modern Monte love or Montjoux.
*
Stephen II had been raised to St Peter’s throne in unexpected circumstances twenty months previously. The orphaned son of an aristocratic Roman family, he had been brought up in the patriarchal palace of St John Lateran, and had served Patriarch Zacharias (r. 741–52) as deacon. A career administrator, he had been sufficiently senior to put his signature to the acts of the Roman synod of 743. So a decade later he was probably in middle age. After Zacharias’s death he would have been present when an elderly priest, also called Stephen, was chosen to succeed. He would have shared the sense of shock when Priest Stephen died of a stroke, unconsecrated, after only four days; and he must have been totally unprepared when he himself was acclaimed on the same day. Thanks to Priest Stephen’s
uncertain status, Deacon Stephen is variously numbered as Stephen II, Stephen III, or Stephen II (III).
23
Map 11. Pope Stephen’s Journey,
AD
753
Zacharias, a learned Greek from Calabria, had been pursuing a line of policy established by his predecessors, Gregory II (715–31) and Gregory III (731–41). Whilst resisting the Iconoclastic demands of Emperor Constantine Copronymos, he had taken care not to break with the Empire. At the same time he had followed northern affairs with close interest. He had been in constant touch with St Boniface, whom he commissioned as legate to romanize Frankish church practices. Most importantly, at the request of the Franks, he had issued a formal ruling which stated that it was desirable for royal titles to be held by those who actually exercised power. In effect, he had authorized the deposition of the last Merovingian king. He had signed a twenty-year truce with the Lombards on behalf of the city of Rome, and had tried to mediate in the Lombards’ quarrels with the Byzantine Exarch of Ravenna. But in the last year of his life he had been powerless to restrain the Lombards’ aggressive new king, Aistulf. In 751 Aistulf seized Ravenna, before marching south. When Lombard agents started to exact an annual tax from Rome, it was clear that the long-established freedoms of the city and the Patriarch were directly threatened. These were the events which had provoked the journey by Zacharias’s successor.