The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century

Charles Homer Haskins

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THE RENAISSANCE OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY

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THE RENAISSANCE

OF THE

TWELFTH CENTURY

CHARLES HOMER HASKINS

LATE GURNEY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE

IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

A

CAMBRIDGE

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

TO

MY CHILDREN

COPYRIGHT I927 BY CHARLES HOMER HASKINS

COPYRIGHT I955 BY CLARE ALLEN HASKINS

FIFTH PRINTING, I97I

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE

THE title of this book will appear to many to con¬ tain a flagrant contradiction. A renaissance in the twelfth century ! Do not the Middle Ages, that epoch of ignorance, stagnation, and gloom, stand in the sharpest contrast to the light and progress and freedom of the Italian Renaissance which followed? How could there be a renaissance in the Middle Ages, when men had no eye for the joy and beauty and knowledge of this passing world, their gaze ever fixed on the terrors of the world to come? Is not this whole period summed up in Symonds’ picture of St. Bernard, blind to the beauties of Lake Leman as he bends “a thought-burdened forehead over the neck of his mule,” typical of an age when “humanity had passed, a careful pilgrim, intent on the terrors of sin, death, and judgment, along the highways of the world, and had scarcely known that they were sightworthy, or that life is a blessing” ?

The answer is that the continuity of history rejects such sharp and violent contrasts between successive peri¬ ods, and that modern research shows us the Middle Ages less dark and less static, the Renaissance less bright and less sudden, than was once supposed. The Middle Ages exhibit life and color and change, much eager search after knowledge and beauty, much creative accomplishment

VI

PREFACE

in art, in literature, in institutions. The Italian Renais¬ sance was preceded by similar, if less wide-reaching movements; indeed it came out of the Middle Ages so gradually that historians are not agreed when it began, and some would go so far as to abolish the name, and per¬ haps even the fact, of a renaissance in the Quattrocento.

To the most important of these earlier revivals the present volume is devoted, the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century which is often called the Mediaeval Renais¬ sance. This century, the very century of St. Bernard and his mule, was in many respects an age of fresh and vigor¬ ous life. The epoch of the Crusades, of the rise of towns, and of the earliest bureaucratic states of the West, it saw the culmination of Romanesque art and the beginnings of Gothic; the emergence of the vernacular literatures; the revival of the Latin classics and of Latin poetry and Roman law; the recovery of Greek science, with its Arabic additions, and of much of Greek philosophy; and the origin of the first European universities. The twelfth century left its signature on higher education, on the scholastic philosophy, on European systems of law, on architecture and sculpture, on the liturgical drama, on Latin and vernacular poetry. The theme is too broad for a single volume, or a single author. Accordingly, since the art and the vernacular literature of the epoch are better known, we shall confine ourselves to the Latin side of this renaissance, the revival of learning in the broadest sense — the Latin classics and their influence, the new

PREFACE

Vll

jurisprudence and the more varied historiography, the new knowledge of the Greeks and Arabs and its effects upon Western science and philosophy, and the new insti¬ tutions of learning, all seen against the background of the century’s centres and materials of culture. The ab¬ sence of any other work on this general theme must be the author’s excuse for attempting a sketch where much must necessarily rest upon second-hand information.

Some portions of the book are the result of the author’s independent investigations, as set forth more fully in his Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science (second edition, Cambridge, 1927) and in a parallel volume of Studies in Mediaeval Culture now in course of preparation. For the rest the reader is referred to the bibliographical notes at the close of the several chapters, with the reminder that on most subjects there is still room for further research. The topical order has seemed preferable to the biographi¬ cal or geographical; and while the index partially corrects the resultant inconvenience of breaking up the accounts of particular individuals or countries, it is hoped at the same time that the share of the principal countries in the movement has been made reasonably clear, and that some individuality still remains to such figures as Abaelard, John of Salisbury, and the Latin poets.

For the critical reading of portions of the manuscript my grateful thanks are due to my colleagues Messrs. E. K. Rand, C. H. Mcllwain, and George Sarton, and to M. Etienne Gilson of the Sorbonne. In all its later

PREFACE

• • «

Vlll

stages this book owes much to the accurate scholarship and sound judgment of Mr. George W. Robinson, Sec¬ retary of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University. I am glad also to acknowledge the assistance of Miss Irma H. Reed, Dr. Josiah C. Russell, and, especially, Mrs. Margaret G. Comiskey. Such aid has advanced my labors in many ways and has saved me from many errors and oversights.

Charles H. Haskins.

Cambridge, Massachusetts,

January , 1927.

CONTENTS

I. THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 3

II. INTELLECTUAL CENTRES 32

III. BOOKS AND LIBRARIES 70

IV. THE REVIVAL OF THE LATIN CLASSICS 93

V. THE LATIN LANGUAGE 127

VI. LATIN POETRY 153

VII. THE REVIVAL OF JURISPRUDENCE 193

VIII. HISTORICAL WRITING 224

IX. THE TRANSLATORS FROM GREEK AND ARABIC 278

X. THE REVIVAL OF SCIENCE 303

XI. THE REVIVAL OF PHILOSOPHY 341

XII. THE BEGINNINGS OF UNIVERSITIES 368

INDEX 399

THE RENAISSANCE OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY

THE RENAISSANCE OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY

CHAPTER I

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

THE European Middle Ages form a complex and varied as well as a very considerable period of hu¬ man history. Within their thousand years of time they include a large variety of peoples, institutions, and types of culture, illustrating many processes of historical de¬ velopment and containing the origins of many phases of modern civilization. Contrasts of East and West, of the North and the Mediterranean, of old and new, sacred and profane, ideal and actual, give life and color and movement to this period, while its close relations alike to antiquity and to the modern world assure it a place in the continuous history of human development. Both con¬ tinuity and change are characteristic of the Middle Ages, as indeed of all great epochs of history.

This conception runs counter to ideas widely preva¬ lent not only among the unlearned but among many who ought to know better. To these the Middle Ages are synonymous with all that is uniform, static, and un¬ progressive; ‘mediaeval ’ is applied to anything outgrown, until, as Bernard Shaw reminds us, even the fashion plates

4

THE TWELFTH CENTURY

of the preceding generation are pronounced 'mediaeval/ The barbarism of Goths and Vandals is thus spread out over the following centuries, even to that 'Gothic’ archi¬ tecture which is one of the crowning achievements of the constructive genius of the race; the ignorance and super¬ stition of this age are contrasted with the enlightenment of the Renaissance, in strange disregard of the alchemy and demonology which flourished throughout this suc¬ ceeding period; and the phrase ‘Dark Ages’ is extended to cover all that came between, let us say, 476 and 1453. Even those who realize that the Middle Ages are not 'dark’ often think of them as uniform, at least during the central period from ca. 800 to ca . 1300, distinguished by the great mediaeval institutions of feudalism, ecclesi- asticism, and scholasticism, and preceded and followed by epochs of more rapid transformation. Such a view ignores the unequal development of different parts of Europe, the great economic changes within this epoch, the influx of the new learning of the East, the shifting currents in the stream of mediaeval life and thought. On the intellectual side, in particular, it neglects the medi¬ aeval revival of the Latin classics and of jurisprudence, the extension of knowledge by the absorption of ancient learning and by observation, and the creative work of these centuries in poetry and in art. In many ways the differences between the Europe of 800 and that of 1300 are greater than the resemblances. Similar contrasts, though on a smaller scale, can be made between the cul-

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

5

ture of the eighth and the ninth centuries, between con¬ ditions ca. noo and those ca . 1200, between the preced¬ ing age and the new intellectual currents of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

For convenience’ sake it has become common to desig¬ nate certain of these movements as the Carolingian Renaissance, the Ottonian Renaissance, the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, after the fashion of the phrase once reserved exclusively for the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century. Some, it is true, would give up the word renaissance altogether, as conveying false impres¬ sions of a sudden change and an original and distinct culture in the fifteenth century, and, in general, as im¬ plying that there ever can be a real revival of something past; Mr. Henry Osborn Taylor prides himself on writing two volumes on 'Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century 1 without once using this forbidden term. Never¬ theless, it may be doubted whether such a term is more open to misinterpretation than others, like the Quattro¬ cento or the sixteenth century, and it is so convenient and so well established that, like Austria, if it had not existed we should have to invent it. There was an Italian Renaissance, whatever we choose to call it, and nothing is gained by the process which ascribes the Homeric poems to another poet of the same name. But — thus much we must grant — the great Renaissance was not so unique or so decisive as has been supposed. The contrast

1 New York, 1920.

6

THE TWELFTH CENTURY

of culture was not nearly so sharp as it seemed to the humanists and their modern followers,, while within the Middle Ages there were intellectual revivals whose in¬ fluence was not lost to succeeding times, and which par¬ took of the same character as the better known movement of the fifteenth century. To one of these this volume is devoted, the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, which is also known as the Mediaeval Renaissance.

The renaissance of the twelfth century might conceiv¬ ably be taken so broadly as to cover all the changes through which Europe passed in the hundred years or more from the late eleventh century to the taking of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204 and the contempo¬ rary events which usher in the thirteenth century, just as we speak of the Age of the Renaissance in later Italy; but such a view becomes too wide and vague for any purpose save the general history of the period. More profitably we may limit the phrase to the history of culture in this age — the complete development of Romanesque art and the rise of Gothic; the full bloom of vernacular poetry, both lyric and epic; and the new learning and new litera¬ ture in Latin. The century begins with the flourishing age of the cathedral schools and closes with the earliest universities already well established at Salerno, Bologna, Paris, Montpellier, and Oxford. It starts with only the bare outlines of the seven liberal arts and ends in posses¬ sion of the Roman and canon law, the new Aristotle, the new Euclid and Ptolemy, and the Greek and Arabic

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

7

physicians, thus making possible a new philosophy and a new science. It sees a revival of the Latin classics, of Latin prose, and of Latin verse, both in the ancient style of Hildebert and the new rhymes of the Goliardi, and the formation of the liturgical drama. New activity in his¬ torical writing reflects the variety and amplitude of a richer age — biography, memoir, court annals, the ver¬ nacular history, and the city chronicle. A library of ca. i ioo would have little beyond the Bible and the Latin Fathers, with their Carolingian commentators, the ser¬ vice books of the church and various lives of saints, the textbooks of Boethius and some others, bits of local his¬ tory, and perhaps certain of the Latin classics, too often covered with dust. About 1200, or a few years later, we should expect to find, not only more and better copies of these older works, but also the Corpus Juris Civilis and the classics partially rescued from neglect; the canonical collections of Gratian and the recent Popes; the theology of Anselm and Peter Lombard and the other early scho¬ lastics; the writings of St. Bernard and other monastic leaders (a good quarter of the two hundred and seventeen volumes of the Latin Patrologia belong to this period); a mass of new history, poetry, and correspondence; the philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy unknown to the earlier mediaeval tradition and recovered from the Greeks and Arabs in the course of the twelfth century. We should now have the great feudal epics of France and the best of the Provencal lyrics, as well as the earliest

8

THE TWELFTH CENTURY

works in Middle High German. Romanesque art would have reached and passed its prime, and the new Gothic style would be firmly established at Paris, Chartres, and

A

lesser centres in the He de France.

A survey of the whole Western culture of the twelfth century would take us far afield, and in many directions the preliminary studies are still lacking. The limits of the present volume, and of its author’s knowledge, compel us to leave aside the architecture and sculpture of the age, as well as its vernacular literature, and concentrate our attention upon the Latin writings of the period and what of its life and thought they reveal. Art and litera¬ ture are never wholly distinct, and Latin and vernacular cannot, of course, be sharply separated, for they run on lines which are often parallel and often cross or converge, and we are learning that it is quite impossible to main¬ tain the watertight compartments which were once thought to separate the writings of the learned and the unlearned. The interpenetration of these two literatures must constantly be kept in mind. Nevertheless, the two are capable of separate discussion, and, since far more attention has been given to the vernacular, justification is not hard to find for a treatment of the more specifically Latin Renaissance.

Chronological limits are not easy to set. Centuries are at best but arbitrary conveniences which must not be permitted to clog or distort our historical thinking: his¬ tory cannot remain history if sawed off into even lengths

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

9

of hundreds of years. The most that can be said is that the later eleventh century shows many signs of new life, political, economic, religious, intellectual, for which, like the revival of Roman law and the new interest in the classics, specific dates can rarely be assigned, and that, if we were to choose the First Crusade in 1096 as a con¬ venient turning-point, it must be with a full realization that this particular event has in itself no decisive impor¬ tance in intellectual history, and that the real change began some fifty years earlier. At the latter end the period is even less sharply defined. Once requickened, intellectual life did not slacken or abruptly change its character. The fourteenth century grows out of the thir¬ teenth as the thirteenth grows out of the twelfth, so that there is no real break between the mediaeval renaissance and the Quattrocento. Dante, an undergraduate once declared, “stands with one foot in the Middle Ages while with the other he salutes the rising star of the Renais¬ sance”! If the signature of the thirteenth century is easy to recognize in the literature, art, and thought of ca . 1250, as contrasted with the more fluid and formative epoch which precedes, no sharp line of demarcation sepa¬ rates the two. We can only say that, about the turn of the century, the fall of the Greek empire, the reception of the new Aristotle, the triumph of logic over letters, and the decline of the creative period in Latin and French poetry, mark a transition which we cannot overlook, while two generations later the new science and philoso-

IO

THE TWELFTH CENTURY

phy have been reduced to order by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. By 1200 the mediaeval renaissance is well advanced, by 1250 its work is largely done. In a phrase like c the renaissance of the twelfth century/ the word ‘century’ must be used very loosely so as to cover not only the twelfth century proper but the years which immediately precede and follow, yet with sufficient em¬ phasis on the central period to indicate the outstanding characteristics of its civilization. For the movement as a whole we must really go back fifty years or more and forward almost as far.

Furthermore, the various phases of the movement do not exactly synchronize, just as in the later Renaissance there is not complete parallelism between the revival of classical learning, the outburst of Italian art, and the discoveries of Columbus and Copernicus. Certainly the revival of the Latin classics begins in the eleventh cen¬ tury, if indeed it may not be regarded as a continuous advance since Carolingian times, while the force of the new humanism is largely spent before the twelfth cen¬ tury is over. The new science, on the other hand, does not start before the second quarter of the twelfth century, and once begun it goes on into the thirteenth century in unbroken continuity, at least until the absorption of Greek and Arabic learning is completed. The philo¬ sophical revival which starts in the twelfth century has its culmination in the thirteenth. Here, as throughout all history, no single date possesses equal importance in all lines of development.

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

ii

Unlike the Carolingian Renaissance, the revival of the twelfth century was not the product of a court or a dy¬ nasty; and, unlike the Italian Renaissance, it owed its beginning to no single country. If Italy had its part, as regards Roman and canon law and the translations from the Greek, it was not the decisive part, save in the field of law. France, on the whole, was more important, with its monks and philosophers, its cathedral schools culmi¬ nating in the new University of Paris, its Goliardi and vernacular poets, its central place in the new Gothic art. England and Germany are noteworthy, though in the spread of culture from France and Italy rather than in its origination; indeed, the period in Germany is in some respects one of decline as we approach the thirteenth century, while England moves forward in the closest re¬ lation with France, as regards both Latin and vernacular culture. Spain’s part was to serve as the chief link with the learning of the Mohammedan world; the very names of the translators who worked there illustrate the Euro¬ pean character of the new search for learning: John of Seville, Hugh of Santalla, Plato of Tivoli, Gerard of Cremona, Flermann of Carinthia, Rudolf of Bruges, Robert of Chester, and the rest. Christian Spain was merely a transmitter to the North.

Such names, for the most part only names to us, sug¬ gest that the twelfth century lacks the wealth and vari¬ ety of striking personalities in which the Italian Renais¬ sance abounds. It has no such mass of memoirs and

12

THE TWELFTH CENTURY

correspondence, its outstanding individuals are relatively few. Nor can it claim the artistic interest of portraiture. Its art is rich and distinctive both in sculpture and archi¬ tecture, but it is an art of types, not of individuals. It has left us no portraits of scholars or men of letters, very few even of rulers or prelates. It has not even given us likenesses of its horses, such as adorn the palace of the Gonzaga dukes at Mantua.

Of the antecedent conditions which produced this in¬ tellectual revival, it is not easy to speak with much def¬ initeness. The eleventh century is in many ways obscure, while the tenth is obscurer still, and the origins of intel¬ lectual movements are not easy to trace under the most favorable circumstances. One very obvious fact in the later eleventh century is the rapid development of trade and commerce, particularly in Italy, and the consequent quickening of urban life in the same region. One is tempted to draw a parallel with the economic and urban antecedents which recent writers have emphasized as explaining the Italian Renaissance of the Quattrocento; but the renaissance of the twelfth century was not spe¬ cifically Italian, indeed it was in some respects most marked beyond the Alps, where economic revival had scarcely begun, so that the movement cannot be ex¬ plained solely in the terms so dear to economic determin¬ ism. There was also a certain amount of political advance, as seen in the Norman lands of England and Sicily, in

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

13

Catalonia, and in the process of feudal consolidation in France, an advance which promoted a certain degree of peace and the travel and communication which go on best in a peaceful society. All these influences counted in the Mediterranean and also in the intercourse between the Mediterranean and the Northern lands, while the more prosperous feudal and royal courts were, as we shall see in the next chapter, centres which favored litera¬ ture both Latin and vernacular. The church, of course, shared in the growing prosperity, so that among both regular and secular clergy there was more to spend for travel and for the buying and copying of manuscripts, and thus greater physical opportunity for learning and study. The growth of the papal monarchy drew clerks and laymen in ever increasing numbers along the road to Rome, also frequented, like the other great routes of pilgrimage, by a crowd of religious wayfarers for whom many of the chansons de gestes were produced. Moreover, the closer definition of the ecclesiastical system was re¬ flected in the pamphlet literature of the investiture con¬ troversy, in the canonistic writings which followed, and in general in a larger and better organized body of written records of every sort.

While a general quickening of the spirit naturally accompanied the more active life of this age, a more direct connection with the intellectual movement can, in some instances, be shown. Thus the revival of the Roman law in Italy toward 1100 was closely associated

THE TWELFTH CENTURY

with the growth of economic and social conditions to which this superior jurisprudence was applicable. The formation of the pilgrimage romances went with the growing number of pilgrims who took the road to Rome and Compostela. The translations of scientific and philo¬ sophical works from the Arabic depended upon the Chris¬ tian reconquest of Northern Spain, which reached Toledo in 1085 and Saragossa in 1118, thus opening the learning of the Saracens to the Christian scholars from the North who turned eagerly to the Peninsula. The translations from the Greek wrere facilitated by the Norman conquest of Sicily and Southern Italy, and by the commercial and diplomatic relations maintained with Constantinople by the city republics of the North. The geographical posi¬ tion of Salerno undoubtedly assisted its rise to dominance in mediaeval medicine. History grew more voluminous and varied as action increased in variety and interest; histories of the Crusades required Crusaders even before historians !

Time was when the Crusades themselves would have served as an ample explanation of this, as of every other change of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Did not 'these costly and perilous expeditions’ strengthen (or weaken!) monarchy, exalt the Papacy, undermine feudalism, create the towns, set free the human spirit, and in general usher in a new age ? Does not Gibbon, for example, declare that the poverty of the crusading barons "extorted from their pride those charters of freedom

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

15

which unlocked the fetters of the slave, secured the farm of the peasant and the shop of the artificer, and gradually restored a substance and a soul to the most numerous and useful part of the community”? Unfortunately for all such easy guesses and facile rhetoric, historians now distinguish between the Crusades and the age of the Cru¬ sades, and point out that they were only one phase, and that not the most important, of the life of a vigorous epoch. They brought East and West into closer contact, stimulated trade, transportation, and the use of money, and helped to accelerate many tendencies already at work; but their specifically intellectual consequences are less tangible and probably less significant. Gibbon rightly saw that ‘The ardor of studious curiosity was awakened in Europe by different causes,” if not entirely by “more recent events”; and a recent writer has pointed out that “a man may travel much and yet see little,” so that “St. Louis, as Joinville shows him to us, or Joinville himself, was not intellectually changed by his crusading.”1 In any case the Crusades fail us as a cause of the Latin Renaissance, for it began well before the First Crusade, and the two movements scarcely touch.

When we have exhausted all such explanations, good or bad, there remains a final residuum which does not yield to these methods of proximate analysis. Anselm, Abaelard, Irnerius, Turold (or whoever be the author of the Song of Roland ), Adelard of Bath at one end of the

1 E. J. Passant, in Cambridge Medieval History , v. 331.

i6

THE TWELFTH CENTURY

century, Frederick II, Francis of Assisi, and the great schoolmen at the other, cannot be accounted for by reck¬ onings of time and milieu, still less by an inheritance which (save perhaps for Frederick II) we can no longer trace. Between such manifestations of individual genius and the vague generalization that so active an age in men's affairs was likely to be active also in the things of the mind, there is still room for further inquiry as our knowledge grows. Such inquiry needs particularly to be pushed back into the eleventh century, that obscure period of origins which holds the secret of the new move¬ ment, well before those events of crusade and conquest which fail as explanations chiefly because they come too late. Meanwhile we may simplify the problem in some degree by remembering that we have to deal with an in¬ tensification of intellectual life rather than with a new creation, and that the continuity between the ninth and the twelfth centuries was never wholly broken. While it is true in general that “each succeeding mediaeval cen¬ tury, besides inheriting what had become known in the time immediately preceding it, endeavored to reach back to the remote past for further treasure, 5,1 the twelfth century reached out more widely and recovered more.

The resurgence of learning and literature in the ninth century which is generally known as the Carolingian Renaissance had its source and centre at the court of

1 H. O. Taylor, 'Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century , i, p. viii.

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

17

Charles the Great and his immediate successors. Origi- nally confined to the establishment of a decent standard of education among the Frankish clergy, this movement had developed an interest in learning for its own sake, bringing into Gaul scholars from England, Italy, and Spain, and training the new generation which was to carry on their work. It was a revival rather than a new birth, a revival of the Latin Fathers, the Latin classics, and the Latin tongue which had suffered so severely in the ‘Dark Ages’ just preceding. Its theological treatises were compilations of material from the Fathers; its Latin prose and verse dealt largely with old subjects, though they set new standards of composition for the period which followed. The movement conserved rather than originated; yet it reformed the handwriting of Europe by creating that Caroline minuscule which we still use as our alphabet, and its scribes saved to the modern world the Latin classics, nearly all of which have come down to us, directly or indirectly, through Carolingian copies. Libraries had been collected; humanists had appeared in men like Lupus of Ferrieres and John the Scot. The Latin language never fell back into the depths of the Merovingian age, and the European intelligence never lost the great gains of the ninth century.

So far as the Carolingian renaissance centred in the court and the palace school, it came to an end with the dissolution of the Frankish empire in the later years of the ninth century and left no immediate representatives

i8

THE TWELFTH CENTURY

at the courts of the lesser kingdoms which succeeded. The official annals come to an end in 882; “the stream of capitularies ceased to flow”; the imperial officers no longer go about on their vigilant rounds. Fortunately, however, Charlemagne had insisted upon the establish¬ ment of schools in every monastery and cathedral, and it was in these local centres that the intellectual movement had chiefly flourished. They include great monastic es¬ tablishments like Tours and Fulda, Reichenau, St. Gall, and Lorsch, Fleury and Saint-Riquier and Corbie; cathe¬ dral centres like Metz and Cambrai, Rheims, Auxerre, and Chartres. With the wealth and exemptions which these establishments had acquired under Caroiingian pro¬ tection, there was no inherent reason why teaching and writing should not go on there, irrespective of the fate of the Caroiingian dynasty; but they owed their origin to the peace and good order which Charlemagne had estab¬ lished, and they might easily disappear when these were destroyed. The tenth century, that ‘century of iron,5 furnished the acid test. This was an age of anarchy and ‘fist law,’ when “no one thought of common defence or wide organization: the strong built castles, the weak be¬ came their bondsmen, or took shelter under the cowl: the governor — count, bishop, or abbot — tightened his grasp, turned a delegated into an independent, a personal into a territorial authority, and hardly owned a distant and feeble suzerain/’ 1 And what the king or the local

1 James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire , edition of 1909, p. 80.

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

19

lord left to the monastery in theory, he might take over in practice as lay abbot. If these local princes, who were at least nominally Christian, might still treat the church with a certain respect, this could not be expected from the Christless invaders, Saracens, Hungarians, and Northmen, who now poured into the Frankish empire and found monasteries and cathedrals rich subjects for plunder and destruction. Each year '‘the steel of the heathen glistened.” In 846 the Saracens looted St. Peter’s at Rome; in 843 the Northmen killed the bishop of Nantes before his high altar; in 854 they burnt St. Martin’s church at Tours; in 886 they were with diffi¬ culty bought off from Paris. Whole regions were devas¬ tated, like Flanders, the valleys of the Meuse, Seine, and Loire, and the territory which was to become Normandy. So the cloisters of Bavaria fell before the Hungarians, and those of Central Italy before the Saracens. Many great monasteries were entirely destroyed, and the monks who fled for their lives took with them few books and fewer pupils. Even the walled cathedral cities were not wholly spared.

Throughout the tenth century it is Germany that best maintains the Carolingian traditions, so that under the Saxon Ottos German historians love to speak of an ‘Ottoman Renaissance.’ Whereas invasion and localism caused decline in France and Italy, the region of Saxony showed the results of its conquest and Christianization by Charlemagne and of the establishment of the monasteries

20

THE TWELFTH CENTURY

and bishoprics of the new faith. And just as Otto the Great followed Charlemagne in his revival of the Empire, so he brought Italian grammarians and theologians to strengthen the intellectual movement to which he and his brother Bruno, archbishop of Cologne, gave strong support. Connecting links of this sort may be seen in the grammarian Stephen of Pavia, the theologian Ratherius, bishop of Liege and Verona, the poet Leo of Vercelli, and the famous Liutprand of Cremona, whom Otto used as his ambassador to Constantinople.

As we come into the eleventh century, German culture shows little vitality from within. True, certain of the Emperors, Henry II, Henry III, and Henry IV, had a respectable education and possessed intellectual interests, while the Latin literature of the early eleventh century could boast the canonistic treatise of Burchard of Worms (d. 1025), the visions and temptations of the monk Otloh of Regensburg, the schools of Notker of Liege (d. 1008), the translations of Notker of St. Gall (d. 1022), and a very considerable body of annals and biography. There was, however, no real court-centre of learning, and the monastic centres of earlier times were on the decline. Intellectual advance in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries came less from within than through contact with Italy and France. With Italy relations were perforce kept open, after the revival of the Empire by Otto the Great, by the Romerzug for the imperial crown and by the scholars and books which came north in the Emperor’s

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

21

train, as in the case of the manuscripts for Henry IDs cathedral at Bamberg. However unfortunate were the political consequences of the Holy Roman Empire for the German lands, the results of the connection with Italy were of the first importance for German culture. With France the ties were quite different, created chiefly by the studies of German ecclesiastics in the schools of Northern France, and later by the colonizing activities of Cluni and Citeaux in reforming and extending monas- ticism in Germany. Such relations are well known in the twelfth century, but we read much earlier that Bishop Heribert of Eichstadt (1021-42) despised one “who had been educated at home rather than in the valley of the Rhine or in Gaul.” We must beware, however, of stress¬ ing the political frontier in an age when such frontiers meant very little. Cologne and Liege seem to have been in closer intellectual relations with Rheims, Chartres, and Fleury than with the North and East of the German kingdom.

In Italy the revival of culture was first manifest in the South, where the contact was direct with the Greek and Mohammedan worlds. Southern Italy had remained a part of the Byzantine empire until well into the eleventh century, and after the Norman conquest it preserved its Greek monasteries and a considerable Greek-speaking population, especially in Calabria. Sicily was under Arab domination from 902 to 1091, and here tod Greek and Arab elements survived under the Norman rulers.

22

THE TWELFTH CENTURY

Both of these regions maintained trade with Northern Africa and the East, as we see in the commerce of a city like Amalfi, which traded with Syria and possessed its own quarter at Constantinople. Already we can discern the background for the brilliant court of Frederick II twro hundred years later. While, however, it is natural to assume an important part for Greek and Arab civiliza¬ tion in the Latin revival, such influences are not easy to trace specifically in this early period. The clearest case is that of Constantine the African, ca. 1015-87, who made translations and adaptations of important medical v/orks; but Constantine himself is a hazy figure, and scholars are generally of the opinion that the development of medical studies at Salerno antedates his translations and is con¬ nected rather with an older local tradition. Certainly versions of Dioscorides and the Greek physicians meet us in manuscripts of the Beneventan hand between the ninth and eleventh centuries, so that some knowledge of these writers preceded Constantine. The important fact for our purpose is that by the eleventh century Salerno has become the chief medical centre in Europe. While the fame of Salerno as a school lay entirely in the field of medicine, there is some evidence of early activity in other directions. Archbishop Alfano (1058-85) showed uncommon skill in the metre of his Latin verse, which covered a variety of subjects, occasional as well as ecclesi¬ astical, and indicates a respectable acquaintance with the Roman poets, while his name is attached to a version

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 23

from the Greek of the De natura hominis of Nemesius. At Monte Cassino we read of the historian Amatus and the computist Pandulf of Capua, while Constantine the African ended his days here and the monk Alberic wrote the first manual of the new art of epistolary composition (dictamen). We shall later have occasion to speak more fully of Monte Cassino as an intellectual centre; here it is only necessary to emphasize its connection with the re¬ vival of learning in the eleventh century.

In Northern Italy this is^the age of the reemergence of the Roman law, in the sense of a full course of study based on the text of the Corpus Juris. Whatever the earlier in¬ fluence of the Lombard lawyers and whatever the facts about the earliest Roman schools, it is in 1076 that we meet the first citation of the Digest , after nearly five cen¬ turies, and the first notable Bolognese master in the person of Pepo, “ the bright and shining light of Bologna.” By the end of the century Bologna is the acknowledged leader and Irnerius the acknowledged master. In two other fields this period in Italy is marked by new works of wide influence, the Glossary of the Lombard lexicogra¬ pher Papias (ca. 1050), and the musical writings of Guido of Arezzo, which remain significant even if their author is no longer credited with the introduction of the modern system of notation. In all, a respectable showing for Italy, well before we are in sight of the Crusades!

A further fact to be noted in the Italy of the eleventh century is the survival of education among the laity.

24

THE TWELFTH CENTURY

Without taking too literally the lines of the German his¬ torian Wipo which make all Italian youth sweat in the schools, we can see clear evidences of the persistence of the older traditions of lay culture here long after they had disappeared beyond the Alps. The Italian layman, says Wattenbach, “read his Virgil and Horace though he wrote no books.” If this class did not express itself in literature, it at least furnished the soil for the lay pro¬ fessions of law and medicine, which early rose to promi¬ nence in Italian society; it also comprised the important group of the notaries, transmitting from father to son an office which had preserved through the Dark Ages the institution of the Roman tabelliones. The notaries con¬ stituted an element of much importance in the Italian cities, where they distinguished themselves as local his¬ torians, and the notariate passed to other countries with the spread of the Roman law.

If Italy was the cradle of law and medicine, France was in this age superior in the liberal arts, and preemi¬ nent in philosophy, theology, and Latin poetry, not to mention the vernacular verse. To what extent France was influenced by Italy at this time is an obscure ques¬ tion, in learning as well as in architecture and sculpture. Certainly Gerbert had visited Italy, while Lanfranc of Pavia brought the light of learning to the Norman school ' of Bee, where he was succeeded by another Italian, Anselm of Aosta; yet we should be careful in using such facts to support wide conclusions. Gerbert had been in

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

25

Spain before he went to Italy, nor is it clear that his mathematics had its origin outside of the limits of Gaul; Lanfranc was by temper a lawyer rather than a theo¬ logian; Anselm, a real theologian, shows no discoverable indebtedness to Italian masters. In all essential respects the French learning of the eleventh century seems to root directly in the soil of the Carolingian tradition.

The continuity is perhaps most evident at Rheims, where Flodoard carries his valuable annals to 966 and Gerbert begins to teach in the cathedral school before 980. Gerbert’s teaching covered the whole range of the seven liberal arts, logic and rhetoric (with abundant classical illustrations) no less than mathematics and astronomy, but he dazzled contemporaries by his treat¬ ises on arithmetic and geometry, and by his use of astro¬ nomical instruments which, simple though they were, appeared to them ‘almost divined Also he eagerly col¬ lected manuscripts. He was, says Taylor,1 “the first mind of his time, its greatest teacher, its most eager learner, and most universal scholar.” His pupil Abbo, who became abbot of Fleury-sur-Loire in 988, did much for logic and astronomy at this ancient centre of Carolin¬ gian culture, whence Orleans was later to derive its liter¬ ary traditions. Another pupil probably was Fulbert, chancellor and from 1007 to 1029 bishop of Chartres, which from now on takes first rank as a cathedral school.