Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (20 page)

We could fill volumes enumerating the achievements of the Benedictines. That they single-handedly preserved much of ancient literature is well-known. Not so widely known is the enormous quantity of that literature that they saved. We are accustomed to think that, following the collapse of the Western Empire, most of the literary heritage of Greece and Rome was lost in the west and was only recovered after contact with the Arabs in Spain and Italy during the eleventh century and after the fall of Constantinople during the fifteenth. Yet this notion is quite simply untrue. The great majority of the literature of Greece and Rome that has survived into modern times was preserved by the monks of the sixth and seventh centuries and was never in fact forgotten. Thus for example Alcuin, the polyglot theologian of Charlemagne’s court, mentioned that his library in York contained works by Aristotle, Cicero, Lucan, Pliny, Statius, Trogus Pompeius, and Virgil. In his correspondences he quotes still other classical authors, including Ovid, Horace, and Terence. Abbo of Fleury (latter tenth century), who served as abbot of the monastery of Fleury, demonstrates familiarity with Horace, Sallust, Terence, and Virgil. Desiderius, described as the greatest of the abbots of Monte Cassino after Benedict himself, and who became Pope Victor III in 1086, oversaw the transcription of Horace and Seneca, as well as Cicero’s
De Natura Deorum
and Ovid’s
Fasti
.
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His friend Archbishop Alfano, who had also been a monk of Monte Cassino, possessed a deep knowledge of the ancient writers, frequently quoting from Apuleius, Aristotle, Cicero, Plato, Varro, and Virgil, and imitating Ovid and Horace in his verse.

By the end of what is generally termed the early Middle Ages (ie by the tenth and eleventh centuries) we find that monasteries all over Europe were in possession of substantial libraries stacked with the works of the classical authors, and that knowledge of Greek and even Hebrew was widespread. This is important, because it illustrates the continuity between this period and the world of late antiquity (fifth and sixth centuries), and would seem to vindicate the Revisionist historians who regard the Dark Age is little more than a mythical construct. It illustrates too that Christian Europe did not need to depend upon other societies and cultures (such as the Islamic) to reacquaint it with letters. Thus we find for example that Gerbert of Aurillac, at the turn of the tenth century, taught Aristotle and logic, and brought to his students an appreciation of Horace, Juvenal, Lucan, Persius, Terence, Statius, and Virgil. We hear of lectures delivered on the classical authors in places like Saint Alban’s and Paderborn. A school exercise composed by Saint Hildebert survives in which he had pieced together excerpts from Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Seneca, Terence, and others. It has been suggested that Hildebert knew Horace almost by heart.
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If the monks were classical scholars, they were equally natural philosophers, engineers and agriculturalists. Certain monasteries might be known for their skill in particular branches of knowledge. Thus, for example, lectures in medicine were delivered by the monks of Saint Benignus at Dijon, whilst the monastery of Saint Gall had a school of painting and engraving, and lectures in Greek and Hebrew could be heard at certain German monasteries.
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Monks often supplemented their education by attending one or more of the monastic schools established throughout Europe. Abbo of Fleury, having mastered the disciplines taught in his own house, went to study philosophy and astronomy at Paris and Rheims. We hear similar stories about Archbishop Raban of Mainz, Saint Wolfgang, and Gerbert of Aurillac.
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The monks, from the time of Benedict onwards, established schools all over Europe. Indeed, our word “school” is related to the word “Scholastic”, a term used to broadly define the system of thought and philosophy developed by the monks of this period. Scholastic thinking was based largely on Aristotle, and represented real continuity with the classical traditions of philosophy and rationality.

As well as teachers and educators, the monks established hospitals. These were the first institutions ever to provide free medical care to all, irrespective of financial circumstances. There were no parallels in pagan antiquity. In the words of one writer: “Following the fall of the [Western] Roman Empire, monasteries gradually became the providers of organized medical care not available elsewhere in Europe for several centuries. Given their organization and location, these institutions were virtual oases of order, piety, and stability in which healing could flourish. To provide these caregiving practices, monasteries also became sites of medical learning between the fifth and tenth centuries, the classic period of so-called monastic medicine. During the Carolingian revival of the 800s, monasteries also emerged as the principal centers for the study and transmission of ancient medical texts.”
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As noted by the above writer, their interest in healing led the monks naturally into medical research, and in course of time they accumulated a vast knowledge of physiology, pathology, and medication. Their studies of herbs and natural remedies led them into the investigation of plants, and they laid the foundations of the sciences of botany and biology.

As part of the Rule of Benedict, the monks were committed to a life of work, study and prayer, and the work part often involved manual labor in the fields. This led to a renewed respect for this type of activity amongst the aristocracy who, by the late Roman period, had come to regard manual work with contempt. Their labors in the fields produced a deep interest in agriculture and agricultural techniques. New technologies were developed by the monks, and everywhere they introduced new crops and production methods. Here they would introduce the rearing of cattle and horses, there the brewing of beer or the raising of bees or fruit. In Sweden, the corn trade owed its existence to the monks.

When Benedict established his Rule, much of Europe was still an uncultivated wilderness. This was true primarily of those areas which had never been part of the Roman Empire, such as Germany, but even of parts of Gaul and Spain, as well as Britain and Ireland, remained in this condition into the sixth and seventh centuries. In addition, the decline in population which the Roman Empire experienced from the end of the second century, had, by the sixth century, returned large areas of once-cultivated land even in Italy to a primeval wilderness. These areas the monks brought under cultivation, often deliberately choosing the wildest and most inhospitable tracts in which to set up their houses. Many of the virgin forests and marshes of eastern Germany and Poland were brought into cultivation for the first time by the monks. “We owe,” says one writer, “the agricultural restoration of a great part of Europe to the monks.” According to another, “Wherever they came, they converted the wilderness into a cultivated country; they pursued the breeding of cattle and agriculture, labored with their own hands, drained morasses, and cleared away forests. By them Germany was rendered a fruitful country.” Another historian records that “every Benedictine monastery was an agricultural college for the whole region in which it was located.”
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Even nineteenth century French historian Francois Guizot, a man not especially sympathetic to Catholicism, observed: “The Benedictine monks were the agriculturalists of Europe; they cleared it on a large scale, associating agriculture with preaching.”
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Although we can never be sure of this, it seems highly likely that the moldboard plough, as well as the horse collar and the system of crop rotation (all of which we shall mention further below), were innovations of the Benedictines.

It would be possible to fill many volumes outlining the vital contribution of the monks, particularly those of the early Middle Ages, to the founding of Europe. Their role cannot be emphasized strongly enough; yet it is one that has been curiously overlooked. In the 1860s and 1870s, when Comte de Montalembert wrote a six-volume history of the monks of the West, he complained at times of his inability to provide anything more than a cursory overview of great figures and deeds, so enormous was the topic at hand. He was compelled, he said, to refer his readers to the references in his footnotes, in order that they might follow them up for themselves.

* * *

None of the above strikes one as the signature of the decrepit and dying civilization portrayed by Hodges, Whitehouse and Ward-Perkins. Concomitant with the improvements and innovations wrought by the monasteries, the sixth century also saw the appearance in Europe of a whole series of new technologies that were to revolutionize every aspect of life. Some of these were native inventions, others were imports from Asia – the first wave of new technologies and ideas from the Far East which would, at a slighter later date (and often through the filter of the Arabs) bring to the West such life-changing products and techniques as paper-making, the windmill, printing, the compass, and gunpowder, as well as algebra and the “Arabic” numeral system with its concept of zero. It is important to stress here that, although all of the latter reached Europe from the ninth or tenth century onwards via the Arabs, none of them were Arab in origin; they derived from much further to the east, mostly from China, though several were from India. And it is vital to remember that the importation of the new technologies began long before the time of the Arabs, in the sixth or perhaps even the late fifth century.

First of the new techniques to appear – that we know of – was silk-making, which reached the Eastern Empire in the reign of Justinian (mid-sixth century). Shortly afterwards, silk-making industries were established at various places in the Mediterranean, including in Spain.

Next of the new technologies was the stirrup, introduced from Central Asia by the Avars in the second half of the sixth century. The latter tribe of nomad warriors, who entered the Hungarian Plain around 560, would have learned the idea from the Indians or the Chinese, where it was apparently devised centuries earlier. The stirrup was not an invention that impacted upon the life of ordinary citizens of the Empire, but it was extremely important militarily, and eventually led to the development of the heavily armored knight, mounted on extremely powerful horses, who formed the backbone of all medieval armies.

The above two are important in that they display the dynamism of the historical processes at work in the West during the sixth century; but their impact upon the population at large was limited. The same however cannot be said for the next innovations, which had a dramatic and far-reaching impact upon the entire population, and which revolutionized the lives of all Europeans in the following centuries.

By far the most important of these was the so-called moldboard plough.

Up until the third or perhaps the fourth century the only plough available in Europe was a simple scratch plough, known as an ard. This was a pointed piece of wood that was pulled by oxen through the top layer of soil, making a narrow ditch, or furrow, in which the farmer sowed seeds. The ard was fine for the light and shallow soils of the Mediterranean, but inefficient (if not entirely useless) in the heavy and rich soils of the North. However,

“During the fifth and sixth centuries, a whole new kind of plow was developed by local [European] engineers working to create a more efficient machine. This was the mouldboard plow, which included a series of technical elements and permitted the farmer to work heavier and more productive soils than was possible with the earlier tools. The new plow had an iron coulter, shaped like a knife, that sliced through the topsoil; a metal-tipped share that cut underneath the earth that had been sliced by the coulter; and a mouldboard, mounted obliquely behind the share, that turned over the chunks of earth as the plow moved along. The most complex plows had a pair of wheels in front of the coulter to ease the passage of the machine across the field. This new device meant that farmers could produce crops much more efficiently by plowing more quickly than had been possible before, by turning the soil rather than simply opening a small furrow and thus moving the nutrients from below into the upper layers, and by making accessible rich, heavy loams that could not be worked easily with the simple scratch plows.”
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The writer quoted above errs in placing the invention of the moldboard plough in the fifth century. New evidence indicates that it was known in Roman Gaul and Britain in the fourth century.
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However, it is beyond question that the new type of plough was popularized in the fifth and sixth centuries, at which time it became widespread throughout northern Europe.

It is interesting to note that in the 1960s Hugh Trevor-Roper was attributing the great expansion of Europe during the tenth and eleventh centuries to the introduction of this very technology.
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It was the latter tool, he said, which powered the growth in population evidenced by the revival of urban life and the expansion of Christendom’s borders on all sides during those centuries. Since we now know however that it was introduced three or four hundred years earlier, where does that leave Hodges and Whitehouse’s and a host of other writers’ view that precisely then Europe was a decrepit remnant of Imperial Rome in the midst of a demographic death plunge? Furthermore, if we admit that the new plough signaled a population expansion (it was designed specifically to bring into cultivation very heavy soils that had previously resisted farming), this would tend to support the “Revisionists” who deny the existence of a “Dark Age.”

Along with the arrival of the moldboard plough, there appeared in Europe the horse collar, which “allowed this faster and stronger animal to replace oxen on some farms as the draft animals pulling the plow,”
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whilst “The introduction of the three-field system increased agricultural yields. One set of fields was planted with winter cereals – wheat, barley, or rye. One was planted with peas or beans, or sometimes with oats and alfalfa as feed for horses. The third was left fallow. Livestock could graze on the fallow fields, manuring them for planting in the next season.”
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“These three changes,” the moldboard plough, the horse collar and the three-field system, “enabled farmers to feed their communities at an unprecedented level of efficiency. The new technologies were introduced at different times in different parts of Europe, but everywhere their impact was revolutionary.”
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The development of the moldboard plough, made of good quality steel, calls to our attention the striking developments in steel manufacture in the West from the fifth century onwards. We have seen the archaeological proofs, from Runder Berg in Germany and elsewhere, of the enormous scale of iron and steel manufacture at the time, and we have seen how among the Franks the manufacture and export of weapons, especially swords, became a major industry in the sixth and seventh centuries. We hear that, “The swords used by the Franks were often of exceptional quality – hard, durable, yet extremely flexible: one can almost believe in the swords of the heroic literature, which could be bent until the tip touched the pommel, only to snap back again, perfectly straight, or swords so sharp that they cut a human hair as it drifted down a river. The technique used in the best swords is known as ‘pattern welding’: a number of bars of different qualities of iron and steel are welded, hammered and twisted together, not only producing the necessary suppleness, but also providing the surface with attractive swirling patterns. The technique is pre-Roman and Celtic in origin, but reaches its heights in the workshops of Francia; in the sixth and seventh centuries Frankish swords seem to have been exported to much of the Germanic world.”
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