From the late 7th century, English pilgrims visited Rome, creating a strong devotional link between Rome and Britain, which was reasserted wherever English missionary activity took place. Benedict Biscop, an English noble, traveled to Rome several times, returning with Roman books and pictures. He founded the twin monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow (the saintly scholar Bede was a monk of Wearmouth-Jarrow) and escorted the learned Theodore of Tarsus back to England when Theodore was appointed archbishop of Canterbury. Theodore’s pastoral and educational activities greatly enhanced English clerical culture, producing both a network of schools and a missionary consciousness that sent English monks, like their Irish predecessors, to the Continent. The most influential of these figures was Boniface (c. 675–754), the first archbishop of Mainz, who spent much of his adult life in missionary and reform work in and around the edges of the kingdom of the Franks. The letters of Boniface demonstrate his respect for Rome and provide important information about his missionary activities. His great monastery of Fulda played an important role in both reform and conversion. The bishops of Rome
Throughout their history, the bishops of Rome enjoyed great respect and veneration because of the antiquity of their see, its historical orthodoxy, the relics of its martyrs (including Saints Peter and Paul the Apostles), and the imperial and Christian history of the city of Rome. The material conditions of the 6th and 7th centuries, however, greatly limited any papal exercise of universal authority or influence, and the popes developed relatively little theory about papal authority of any kind over all Christians. Like other bishops, however, the bishops of Rome benefited from the idea of traditio (Latin: “tradition”), which stated that the authority of the Apostles had been passed down to the Christian higher clergy. They also gradually assumed more and more responsibility for the administration of the city itself. Because Rome was Rome and because the properties of the Roman church extended throughout Italy, the papal administration of the city and the invocation of its Christian, rather than imperial, past slowly turned it into the Rome of St. Peter, who accordingly assumed an increasingly important role in medieval spirituality. This Christianized Rome was a place that the diversified societies of western Europe could revere and visit because of its devotional centrality in the Latin Christian world.
Pope Gregory the Great receiving information from the Holy Spirit, represented as a dove, carved ivory book cover, c. 980; in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Between the 5th and the 11th century, many argued that, just as there had been a hierarchy of cities in the old empire, there was a hierarchy of bishops, and the bishop of Rome stood at its head. Although the idea of papal supremacy in Latin Christendom found a number of papal and nonpapal exponents during this period, it did not become dominant until the late 11th century. Even before then, however, the affection and respect for Rome built up in England and in the kingdom of the Franks did much to increase the attractiveness of the papacy. The Mediterranean world divided
During the 7th and 8th centuries, new invasions of the eastern part of the empire and the emergence of Islam, first in the Arabian Peninsula and then to the west in Egypt and Numidia and to the east in Persia, divided the old Mediterranean ecumenical world into three distinct culture zones: East Rome, or Byzantium; Islam; and Latin Europe. Byzantium and western Europe remained long on the defensive against Islamic pressures, which extended to the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711, Sicily in 902, and Anatolia in the 11th century. Each of these three cultures developed its own character based on different uses of and attitudes toward the Roman-Mediterranean ecumenical past. They maintained diplomatic and commercial contact with each other, though sometimes on a much-reduced scale, and continued to influence each other culturally even as they became more distinct. In spite of their increasing distinctiveness, they were never entirely separated, since both trade and the transmission of ideas passed through their porous edges. In addition, large numbers of Jews and Christians continued to live as privileged religious aliens in most of the Muslim world. The Frankish ascendancy The Merovingian dynasty
In the late 5th and early 6th centuries, Clovis (c. 466–511), the warrior-leader of one of the groups of peoples collectively known as the Franks, established a strong independent monarchy in what are now the northern part of France and the southwestern part of Belgium. He expanded into southern Gaul, driving the Visigoths across the Pyrenees, and established a strong Frankish presence east of the Rhine. His power was recognized by the eastern emperor Anastasius, who made him a Roman consul (a high-ranking magistrate). In the generations following the death of Clovis, the Frankish kingdom was often divided into the two kingdoms of Neustria and Austrasia, though it was occasionally reunited under Clovis’s successors, the Merovingian dynasty. It was later reunited under the lordship and (after 751) monarchy of the eastern Frankish Arnulfing-Pippinid family (later known as the Carolingian dynasty), which included Pippin II and his successors Charles Martel, Pippin III, and Charlemagne (reigned 768–814). This dynasty brought much of western Europe under Frankish control and established diplomatic relations with Britain, Iberia, Rome, Constantinople, Christians in the Holy Land, and even Hārūn al-Rashīd, the great caliph in Baghdad. Charlemagne and the Carolingian dynasty
Charlemagne and his successors also patronized a vast project that they and their clerical advisers called correctio—restoring the fragmented western European world to an earlier idealized condition. During the Carolingian Renaissance, as it is called by modern scholars, Frankish rulers supported monastic studies and manuscript production, attempted to standardize monastic practice and rules of life, insisted on high moral and educational standards for clergy, adopted and disseminated standard versions of canon law and the liturgy, and maintained a regular network of communications throughout their dominions.
Mark, St.St. Mark the Evangelist, illuminated manuscript page from the Gospel book of the court school of Charlemagne, c. 810; in the Stadtbibliothek, Trier, Germany.Stadtbibliothek, Trier, Ger.
Charlemagne drew heavily on most of the kingdoms of Christian Europe, even those he conquered, for many of his advisers. Ireland sent Dicuil the geographer. The kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England, drawn close to Rome and the Franks during the 8th century, produced the widely circulated works of Bede and the ecclesiastical reformer Boniface. Also from England was the scholar Alcuin, a product of the great school at York, who served as Charlemagne’s chief adviser on ecclesiastical and other matters until becoming abbot of the monastery of St. Martin of Tours. Charlemagne’s relations with the kingdoms in England remained cordial, and his political and intellectual reforms in turn shaped the development of a unified English monarchy and culture under Alfred (reigned 871–899) and his successors in the 9th and 10th centuries.