The Calendar (17 page)

Sometime around the turn of the ninth century the first Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne (742-814), was said to have acquired an hourglass large enough that it ran a full twelve hours before it needed to be turned.* Details of what this timepiece looked like are not recorded. One imagines teams of strong men in Frankish costumes--tights, loose tunics and bands of cloth wrapped around their legs--standing ready to flip a giant contraption made of polished wood and blown glass, filled with hundreds of pounds of sand. Looking on was an emperor in late middle age who by then had inherited or conquered virtually all of modern France, the Spanish Pyrenees, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Corsica, northern and central Italy and parts of the Czech Republic and the Balkans. It had been four centuries since so much territory in western Europe was unified under the rule of a single man.

*Sources are unclear about whether or not this hourglass existed. Most accounts do not mention it at all, with some experts contending that the hourglass was not invented until much later, in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. Others say hourglasses existed as early as the second century, BC.

Charlemagne, with a flowing beard, protruding belly and large, animated eyes, was a ruthless warrior who spent most of his seventy years in the saddle leading countless campaigns. He loved to eat game roasted on a spit, ignoring his doctor’s warnings that it was bad for his health. At night he listened to storytellers recount Frankish legends and excerpts from Augustine’s
City of God.
He also was fascinated by timepieces. Besides his twelve-hour hourglass, he received in 807 a famous gift from Sultan Harun ar-Rashid (766-809), fifth caliph of the Abbasid Dynasty and master of the Islamic world.

Best known to Eurocentric Westerners as the sultan in
The Thousand and One Nights,
ar-Rashid’s reign in Baghdad is known as a golden age for art and science in the Arab world, a period when the conquerors who had burst out of Arabia a century and a half earlier were settling down and integrating Islamic, Hellenistic, Persian and Indian cultures under their rule. They created a great flowering of learning of the sort that Charlemagne could only dream about in his cold stone-and-timber castle at Aachen, his capital west of the Rhine in what was then a landscape of rolling hills and dense forests near modern Bonn.

Responding to an embassy sent by Charlemagne, the caliph dispatched to Aachen a number of gifts: an elephant, a luxurious Persian tent, silk robes, perfumes, ointments--and an elaborate clock. It was made of brass, ‘a marvellous mechanical contraption, in which the course of the twelve hours moved according to a water clock, with as many brazen little balls, which fell down on the hour and through their fall made a cymbal ring underneath. On this clock there were also twelve horsemen who at the end of each hour stepped out of twelve windows, closing the previously open windows by their movements.’

For Charlemagne, such timepieces represented learning and progress, much like a Model T or an early Remington typewriter once signalled modernity in small, isolated towns across America. But ar-Rashid’s gift also must have underscored the Europeans’ backwardness. They had nothing approaching such a wondrous device as the caliph’s clock, a situation Charlemagne reportedly understood and deplored. Indeed, this remarkable warrior, when not off conquering, devoted considerable energy during his 47-year reign to support learning and a respect for intellectual pursuits notably lacking since the dismemberment of Rome four centuries earlier. Encouraging literary scholarship, architecture and art, Charlemagne issued decrees requiring all priests to be well-versed in basic knowledge. ‘Let those who can, teach,’ he ordered in 789.

He also insisted that his subjects learn and teach
computus
after hearing that few bishops or priests understood enough about mathematics and time reckoning to make competent calculations for the Easter holidays, or to maintain the Christian calendar. ‘Let the ministers of God’s altar . . . collect and associate with themselves children . . . that there may be schools for reading-boys,’ Charlemagne commanded in his 789 edict. ‘Let them learn psalms, notes, chants, the
computus
and grammar, in every monastery and bishop’s house.’

Following the lead of Caesar and Constantine, who transformed their calendars as part of grand schemes to launch new political and religious eras, Charlemagne attempted to reform his calendar, too. Most important, he and his scribes incorporated into the civil machinery of his empire the
anno Domini
system of dating favoured by Dionysius and Bede. Charlemagne also followed in many of his decrees a growing trend in Europe to number the days of the months in sequential order instead of using the cumbersome Roman system of kalends, nones and ides. On Charlemagne’s tomb, planted in the centre of the octagonal cathedral he built at Aachen, the inscription reads:

In this tomb lies the body of Charles, the Great and Orthodox Emperor, who gloriously extended the kingdom of the Franks, and reigned prosperously for forty-seven years. He died at the age of seventy, the year of our Lord 814, the 7th Indiction, on the 28th day of January.

The emperor also tried to Frankify the names of the months, with less success. He proposed naming the months after the seasons of the year, festivals, and holy celebrations. Under Charlemagne’s system, January became Wintarmanoth, meaning ‘the month of cold’, and April became Ostarmanoth, still another reference to the goddess Eostre or Ostar, namesake for Easter. Though it never caught on, this calendar did have far more relevance to Franks in the late eighth and early ninth centuries than months designated by Latin tribes on the Tiber a millennium and a half earlier, who named their lunar months after goats, pagan gods and Latin numbers. Charlemagne’s months run as follows:

Charlemagne’s Months           Roman Months
Wintarmonoth                          January
Hornung                                     February
Lentzinmanoth                          March
Ostarmanoth                             April
Winnemanoth                           May
Brachmanoth                            June
Heuvimanoth                            July
Aranmanoth                              August
Witumanoth                              September
Windumemanoth                     October
Herbistmanoth                          November
Heilagmanoth                           December

In the midst of the darkness enshrouding Europe this sudden passion for an intellectual life seems a miraculous turnaround. Here was a barbarian king, disgusted with the low ebb of learning, throwing open his court to what his own chroniclers describe as a virtual cult of scholarship. At Aachen and elsewhere Charlemagne’s scholars, artists and musicians collected manuscripts, published histories and ballads, and corrected translations of the Bible. His architects and engineers built a 500-foot-long bridge over the Rhine at Mainz and erected numerous churches and palaces, including the magnificent Aachen Cathedral, a classic of the Roman-Byzantine style. Famous for its wide arches and octagonal interior, it was adorned by Charlemagne ‘with gold and silver, with lamps and with lattices and doors of solid bronze. He had the marble columns for this structure brought from Rome and Ravenna.’

Scholars attracted to Charlemagne’s patronage of learning, which included generous stipends, journeyed from all over Europe. From central Italy came the religious poet Paulinus of Aquileia and the grammarian Peter of Pisa. From north Italy came the Lombard scholar Fardulf, originally taken as a hostage during Charlemagne’s Lombard conquest; Fardulf later became a Charlemagne loyalist and was named abbot of St Denis in northern France. Others came as exiles from Moslem-occupied Spain.

But the most important scholar of all who came to Aachen was Alcuin of York (732-804), trained at Jarrow by Bede’s students. Praised by the Frankish chronicler Einhard as ‘the greatest scholar of the day’, Alcuin wrote widely on religious subjects, arranged votive masses for days of the week, corrected the unrefined Latin of the Franks’ religious texts, and standardized a new lower-case alphabet unknown in ancient Rome (and which you are reading right now). Alcuin served as Charlemagne’s personal tutor between 781 and 796, as this largely untaught barbarian chieftain made an admirable attempt to educate himself in between battles and campaigns. ‘The king spent much time and labour with him studying rhetoric, dialectics,’ says his enthusiastic aide and chronicler Einhard, ‘and especially astronomy; he learned to reckon, and used to investigate the motions of the heavenly bodies most curiously, with an intelligent scrutiny.’

This all sounds marvellous--except that it was not entirely true. Indeed, the emperor’s reign fell far short of the grand renaissance he dreamed of, and which some historians have claimed. Medievalists today insist Charlemagne’s intellectual accomplishments were mostly superficial, the pastime of a bright but unrefined warlord who treated learning as a precocious child might admire a shiny stone or delight in trying to work out a riddle or a puzzle. The emperor, these historians say, built libraries and filled them with manuscripts, but treated them as treasured ornaments, like fine cloth or rare spices--objects of status rather than texts to read and learn from. Of course, he was hardly alone in this attitude during an age when even supposedly learned monks spent lifetimes endlessly copying manuscripts that few understood or bothered to read closely. As for his clocks, Charlemagne considered them to be little more than toys, exquisite playthings that gave him a veneer of high culture when in reality his own artisans and scholars lacked the knowledge and skill to design and construct anything approaching the great water clock of Sultan Harun ar-Rashid.

Charlemagne seems to have collected scholars in much the same way. As a
barbar
fascinated by these symbols of a sophisticated culture, he did not entirely comprehend them but hoped to emulate them nonetheless. Even worse, most of these scholars were barely educated themselves. In 809, two decades after Charlemagne issued his edicts ordering that children be educated, this was proven when a legal proceeding at Aachen summoned the greatest experts in the empire on ecclesiastic time reckoning. These ‘experts’ were questioned in regard to Charlemagne’s orders to teach
computus
throughout the empire, but it is obvious from the record of the proceeding that they had little understanding of this science. Dressed in the medieval academic’s dark, heavy robes and felt hats, paid for by the emperor, these men of learning sadly did not grasp even the basics of Bede’s mathematics and calculations--or much else.

Charlemagne himself, educated as a warrior in the centuries-old tradition of Germanic leaders and kings, could barely read and could not write despite years of lessons from Alcuin and Peter of Pisa--and despite the insistence of Einhard that the emperor had mastered astronomy and time reckoning. ‘He . . . used to keep tablets and blanks in bed under his pillow,’ admits Einhard, ‘that at leisure hours he might accustom his hand to form the letters; however, as he did not begin his efforts in due season, but late in life, they met with ill success.’ Most of his nobles were entirely illiterate. Nor could most of his scribes and scholars except Alcuin write in decent Latin.

Another exception was Einhard himself, who wrote a reasonably clear, notably secular history of Charlemagne’s era. He also seems to have been more keenly aware of the intellectual shortcomings of the imperial court than other would-be scholars of his day. ‘I, who am a barbarian,’ he tells us, ‘and very little versed in the Roman language, seem to suppose myself capable of writing gracefully and respectably in Latin.’ He also complains that his history will be derided by both those who clung to the writings of the ancients and ‘despise everything modern’ and those who despised all learning, including ‘the masterpieces of antiquity’.

In such an environment it was all but impossible for true scholarship to flourish. Nor was it a place and a time where the calendar was likely to be fixed, even as it now drifted against the solar year by almost seven days since Caesar’s reform.

In 800 Charlemagne accepted the title of Holy Roman Emperor from the pope, an event that signalled the Church’s acknowledgment of what had been the political reality in Europe since at least the beginning of the Moslem conquests: that St Peter’s could no longer depend on either local Germanic kings in Italy or the Byzantines to protect Christendom in the West. Lacking armies and political power, the popes had long been leaning toward the Franks as their new protector. Charlemagne had cemented this relationship in 774 when he crushed the Lombards, who then ruled the northern half of Italy, bringing the still nominally independent papal territories under his protection. This added a measure of security for the prelates at St Peter’s, though politics in Rome remained tumultuous enough that sixteen years after driving away the Lombards Charlemagne again found himself leading troops to Rome to aid a pope besieged not by an army but by powerful local factions in the chaotic city. In a potent demonstration of the Church’s frailty as an earthly power, Pope Leo III was waylaid in 799 in Rome, where Einhard says his enemies ‘had inflicted many injuries. . . , tearing out his eyes and cutting out his tongue’.

Charlemagne’s response was characteristically decisive. In November of 800 he marched on Rome, restoring order so swiftly that a grateful Leo proposed a novel reward that sharply underscored the dependency of the Church on the Frankish royal house: naming Charlemagne emperor of a new ‘Holy’ Roman empire. This was an astute political move by the newly blind and dumb Leo, fusing the secular might of Charlemagne with the formidable religious power of the Church, an update of Constantine’s fusion of the Roman imperium with the Church some five centuries earlier. Charlemagne reportedly resisted the crown at first, supposedly out of modesty, though unlike Caesar when Mark Antony offered him the diadem eight and a half centuries earlier, Charlemagne did not refuse the crown when it was publicly offered during a mass at St Peter’s on Christmas Day, 800.