MEDIEVAL SOCIETY SPROUTS With Charlemagne one is in the Middle Ages. It is a time when the period of barbarians and the period of the Moors merged. I would say that even before the Carolingians, under the Merovigians, the Middle Ages was already present. A_011_CoronationCM.jpg - 177938 Bytes Pope Leo III crowns Charlemagne as Emperor Charlemagne’s Empire was a magnificent institution established and supported by the Holy See. His grandfather, Charles Martel, had expelled the Moors from France and broken their impetus at the Battle of Poitiers (732). The Moors remained on the Iberian Peninsula – Spain and Portugal – and were expelled only when Boabdil, the last King of Granada, was sent out of Spain by King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabel of Castile in 1492. But the Arabs from the Iberian Peninsula were no longer able to cross into France and go wherever they wanted in Europe. Their momentum had been broken at Poitiers. Charlemagne fought not only the Moors, but also the barbarians who came from the North and the East. He faced waves of German barbarian tribes invading the territories along the borders of the Rhine and Danube Rivers that would later constitute Germany and Austria. Facing those surges of barbarian hordes was an endless effort. After one tribe was defeated, another would come, and no one could predict when such attacks would end. Charlemagne combated as a perfect Catholic warrior, facing the enemy stalwartly without knowing if he would ever see a final victory. When the German danger was almost under control, another invasion began: the sailor-kings - the Vikings - the Norsemen who entered his Empire by way of the French rivers. They were very agile sailors who invaded France from the north in their relatively small boats, attacking, burning and looting innumerable cities. Charlemagne died at the point when this invasion was starting. After his death the Empire had a short period of union under the government of his son Louis the Pious, but soon it entered into civil wars caused by multiple disputes among his grandsons. His sons and grandsons were so insignificant that when the Chanson de Geste sang the glory of Charlemagne, it honored his nephew – Roland – as his perfect follower and not one of his direct progeny. No one took them into much account. The grandsons of Charlemagne, Lothar, Pepin, Louis and Charles, were also unable to hold for long either front of the war, in the Pyrenees against the Moors, or on the Rhine-Danube against the Germans. Those Kings utterly failed to organize an efficient system of defense such as their grandfather had achieved
Posted on: Thu, 05 Sep 2013 16:25:51 +0000
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