The Cultural Networks of Empire
Nithard's history, like every other primary text so far cited in this chapter, is in Latin, and is a representative instance of the strength of Latin culture and learning, and of the Roman cultural inheritance within the Carolingian Empire, actively promoted by Charlemagne.
From the 780s, the Carolingian kings, and the lay and clerical scholars they gathered at court and supported in major concentration of education and learning throughout the kingdom, contributed steadily to the consolidation of Latin in education, learning, religious worship, and law. They thereby secured access to the knowledge and texts of Classical antiquity and the early Christian era.[1329] This promotion of Latin learning and culture was more than a zeal for education and intellectual activity. The underlying aim can be summarized by the word correctio, in which the emphasis on correct language, correct texts, proper conduct, rigorous ecclesiastical discipline, religious reform, artistic creation, and intellectual endeavor were all to be combined in service of the Christian faith.[1330]As the realm expanded well beyond the bounds of the former Roman Empire in the west, so Latin culture was introduced into new territories as bishoprics—Münster, Paderborn, Halberstadt, Osnabrück, Minden—and monasteries—Werden, Corvey, Essen, Vreden, Freckenhorst. Some of these, notably Corvey and Werden, became major centers of learning in the later Carolingian and Ottonian period.[1331] Many of these centers were linked by personal associations and institutional connections, quite apart from the extensive exchange of texts and books, so clearly reflected in the abundant manuscript evidence from such places as Lorsch, St. Gallen, Laon, St. Amand, Auxerre, Tours, Fleury, Lyons, St. Germain des Pres, St. Denis, Regensburg, Freising, Cologne, Nonantola, Reims, Verona, and many more.
The extant books from these centers, most now housed in national libraries across the world as a result of the political and religious disruptions of the succeeding centuries, witness to an extraordinary effort to preserve the learning of antiquity and the early Middle Ages. This is coupled with equally remarkable creativity in the range of new texts produced on all the subjects comprising the seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, music, astronomy, arithmetic, and geometry, as well as theology, biblical exegesis, philosophy, geography, poetry, and medicine. In art and architecture there is the same potent mixture of emulation and innovation to be observed, from the mosaics and marble of the palace chapel at Aachen and the rich illuminations, elegant scripts, and ornamented initials of the books of the Carolingian royal chapel to the frescoes of the Johanneskirche in Mustair or the fine inscribed epitaph sent by the Franks to commemorate Pope Hadrian I in ca. 795, still to be seen in the portico of St. Peter's in Rome.The web of learning stretched right across the empire, and each new religious foundation over the next 200 years equipped itself with a similar arsenal of learned texts while adding its own distinctive specialisms. Corbie in Picardy, for example, was the mother house of Corvey in Westphalia. Figures of the intellectual stature of Hraban Maur, abbot of Fulda and archbishop of Mainz, had been educated at Tours; others from the Loire Valley, such as Lupus of Ferrieres, had spent time at Fulda; Einhard was educated at Fulda before pursuing his career at court. Arn, archbishop of Salzburg, was also abbot of St. Amand in the far northwest of the empire. The confraternity book of Reichenau from ca. 820 lists 40,000 names of the members of some 50 religious communities from east of the Rhine and north of the Seine rivers with which it had formed a prayer association.
This common Latin culture, grounded in the works of classical antiquity, the Latin Bible, the Latin writing of the church fathers, the early medieval writers from Italy, Spain, Gaul, North Africa, and the British Isles, Latin translations of Greek texts from the East, and the host of authors from the Carolingian period, was expanded as Frankish rule and Christianity extended ever further east and north. In due course, the Latin culture and educational and intellectual traditions consolidated in the Carolingian period embraced not just the medieval empire within western Europe, the concern of this chapter, but also Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary. This Latin culture and learning, held in common by the peoples and institutions of the entire region, has proved the most enduring legacy of the medieval empire to the Western world. Yet there were other unifying elements, not least the concept of empire and the imperial title, whose history it is time now to consider.
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