Unit 6 World History Paper
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Carolingian Renaissance
So let’s look at this thinking globally in order to get a sense of how events happening in different world civilizations (and thus different chapters of your textbook) are working on each other. In this lesson, I want to talk about a set of three intellectual movements that shared some broad features but also had some major differences.
We’ll cover this so-called Renaissance by moving from West to East, and dealing with each particular element of it in its turn. The first of these movements I’m going to talk about is the so-called Carolingian Renaissance.
Above: The Carolingian Empire, circa 800 CE
Renaissance, as many of you know, means “rebirth.” Usually, when scholars say Renaissance, they’re talking about the Italian Renaissance, a movement of the thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen hundreds (ca. 1350 – 1550). That was an effort to recover the lost learning of Greece and Rome. But the Carolingian Renaissance was a much earlier movement that had a similar goal — recovering the lost learning of the ancient world.
There were a few reasons for a need for this movement. Let’s remember that up until the 1400s, if you needed to make a book, it had to be copied out by hand. So if you needed to make books, you had to make each one individually. We’ll also remember that the Western Roman Empire fell in the 400s. So by the late 700s and 800s, that is, the reign of Charlemagne and other Carolingians (that word means members of his dynasty), it had been four hundred years since the flourishing of the Roman Empire.
Now, the Roman Empire had been heavily urbanized with high rates of literacy. After the fall of Rome in the West, however, most of the cities either shrank drastically or vanished.
Above: The Bibliotheca Ulpia, Roman Library under Emperor Trajan
The resulting ruralization meant that literacy had plunged, and so too had the demand for books. So in the four centuries between the fall of Rome and the Carolingians, the only real demand for books came from the Church. The result was that although there were many copies of the Bible and other religious writings, a lot of other writing of Ancient Rome hadn’t survived or had only survived in a few manuscripts. You might have a famous book from the world of ancient Rome that had only one surviving copy.
Another thing that happened was that language itself had changed. The language that people spoke in Western Europe in the days of Rome had been Latin. After the end of the Roman Empire, however, the language people spoke was starting to change. Language changes, remember. The language that Shakespeare used was very different from our language, for example. So by the 700s and 800s, people’s everyday language was different from the language of Rome, but all the literature of the ancient world was still written in Latin. So people were having trouble reading and writing.
So you had skills in reading and writing in Latin that had deteriorated, and you had a lot of the writing of ancient Rome, whether literature, philosophy, or history, that was starting to get lost because nobody was copying books.
So Charlemagne had scholars like Alcuin of York (735 – 840) supervise new efforts to make sure that the ancient literature of Rome was getting recopied. We saw the creation of a new school for the nobility of the Frankish kingdom at Charlemagne’s palace at Aachen.
Above: Aachen Palace Chapel
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Units/Unit 6/A New Script.html
A New Script
As part of these efforts to improve learning, we saw the creation of a new script. Prior to this time, people had written in all capital letters without spaces between words, as represented by the image below.
As you can imagine, this made reading difficult. Alcuin and other scholars, however, devised a new script, one that we call a minuscule. Again, see the image below.
Minuscules are what we use today: there are upper-case and lower-case letters, and spaces between words.
So under the influence of Charlemagne and scholars of his court like Alcuin, we see the copying of books and the schooling of both clergy and laypeople in ancient literature, in geometry, in logic, and even in some basic philosophy. We see the copying of books, too. Even today, many of the oldest manuscripts of ancient Latin books are books that were copied in Charlemagne’s time. The earlier copies have since been lost, since old books can get lost or destroyed.
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Units/Unit 6/The Role of Ancient Literature.html
The Role of Ancient Literature
Notice that Charlemagne and his court were focused on the recovery of works written in Latin by the ancient Romans. Now then, back in the days of the Roman Empire (regressing from the ninth century back to the second century), in the Western Half of the empire, they’d spoken Latin. Remember, though, that there’d been an Eastern Half of the Empire. In that eastern half of the Empire, they’d spoken Greek.
The Eastern Empire hadn’t fallen, but it had faced invaders and catastrophes, shrinking drastically over the early Middle Ages.
What had happened to Greek literature in the years between about 500 and the 700s? Well, it declined. One reason for its decline was that in 529 Justinian ordered the old Pagan schools of Athens closed. Another is that the Byzantine Empire was fighting for its life in the 500s and 600s, and as a result, cities shrank and fewer resources were dedicated to education. Although the Byzantine Empire still had more schools and greater literacy than Western Europe, there’d been very little original Greek literature for much of the Early Middle Ages and not a lot of recopying of manuscripts. So it was that by the 700s, lots of Ancient Greek literature was in danger of getting lost in the same way that Latin literature was in danger of getting lost in Western Europe.
But that changed. In the first place, we saw the creation of a new style of writing. Like Ancient Latin, the alphabet of the Ancient Greeks hadn’t had spaces between words. At about the same time that the western Europeans were inventing minuscule, Greek-speakers in the Byzantine Empire were inventing a minuscule script for the Greek alphabet. A result was that now it was easier to read writing in Ancient Greek.
Over the late 700s, we’d seen more and more efforts to recopy ancient texts. The reason for this recopying was that the Byzantine emperors and the clergy were fighting over whether one should use images in worship. As each side tried to make its case, they used writings from the early Church, from centuries before, and so people needed to recopy and relearn these texts.
So in the 700s, that is the eighth century, we saw new efforts to recopy ancient literature. This effort picked up in the ninth century, that is, the 800s, especially among the emperors that we call the Macedonian Emperors. The first Macedonian emperor, Basil I, seized control of the Byzantine Empire in 867 and founded a dynasty that would last for nearly 200 years. Under Basil and his successors, churchmen in the Byzantine Empire made a massive effort to recopy and preserve ancient Greek writings in the field of literature, of philosophy, and of mathematics.
Under the patriarch of Constantinople Photius, the palace school at Constantinople became the center of learning for Byzantine elites in the same way that the palace school at Aachen became the center of learning for Carolingian elites.
So we have these two specific efforts to preserve the learning of the ancient world in the Empire of Charlemagne and the kingdoms of his successors. Later in the unit, we'll examine a third effort to revive the learning of the ancient world, this time further to the east in the world of the Abbasid Caliphate.
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Units/Unit 6/The Abbasid Caliphate.html
The Abbasid Caliphate
In many ways, the caliphate was also an heir to the heritage of Rome. Most of North Africa and the Levant had been part of the Roman Empire, and so when they were absorbed into the newly-formed Caliphate, so too was the heritage of Greece and Rome.
So first, let’s talk about some background. In 529, Justinian had closed the schools of Athens, and a great many pagan philosophers went east to Persia. These philosophers established their own schools and libraries, and then, in the early seventh century, the Caliph Umar conquered Persia, which became part of the Muslim Caliphate.
Now then, we had another sort of foundation for this transmission of ancient learning in that the Caliphate had a lot of Syriac Christians. They spoke Syriac, a Semitic language related to Arabic. And of course, they were familiar with Greek, the language of the Church. What that meant was that they’d already translated some key Greek concepts into Syriac, a language that was closely related to Arabic. Indeed, these languages were close enough that speakers of Arabic and Syriac could understand each other speaking. The two languages also used the same script. Below is an example of each. Note how they’re nearly the same.
So we’ve already got people who’ve been translating these Greek concepts into a language close to Arabic, and many of these Syriac Christians went to work for the Umayyad and then Abbasid caliphs.
The main Greek work that we see translated, especially from the time of the Abbasid Caliphs, however, is philosophy. We don’t really see a translation of Greek poetry and drama. Why not? Well, Arabic had its own school of polite literature, what we call adab. It encompassed things like poetry, essays, histories, and the like, and was thought to be what a well-educated man serving in the bureaucracy of the caliphs possessed. Because the Arabs didn’t speak a language derived from either Greek or Latin, they often used their own literature rather than that of the ancient world. The ancient works that they did translate were those of philosophy, of math, and of science.
The Arab Muslims had long valued knowledge from all sources. There’s a famous hadith of Muhammad’s that said, “Seek knowledge, in China if necessary,” as a way of saying that the good Muslim should seek out knowledge wherever it could be found.
And so we see Muslim interest in philosophy especially. Philosophy is useful for Muslims trying to talk about God. You’d have Muslims use logic and philosophy of language to try and find the tools to talk about God. Some Muslims believed that you could better understand God through philosophy by using it to examine the world that God had made.
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Units/Unit 6/Muslim Philosophy.html
Muslim Philosophy
The golden age of Muslim philosophy was under the Abbasid caliph al-Mamun (dates of rule, 813-33). In 830, he founded the House of Wisdom in his capital of Baghdad. The House of Wisdom was a massive school, library, and translation center, where you had philosophers from all over the Muslim world gathering to teach and write philosophy, all under the generous patronage of the caliphs. Building on the medicine and philosophy of the Greeks and Romans, the Muslims often made improvements in philosophy and in many ways surpassed their Greek and Roman predecessors.
One of the main triumphs of Muslim philosophy and learning was in the field of mathematics. Muslim mathematicians built on the work of mathematicians in Gupta India (dates 320-550). As Muslims came into contact with India, they picked up on Gupta math. These Muslims working off of Indian tradition gave us the numerals 0 through 9, which allow us to do mathematics without the use of an abacus. Indeed, these numerals came to be known as Arabic numerals, since it was Arabic writers who spread them from India to the Middle East and then to Europe.
Above: Arabic numerals vs. Roman numerals. Note the required use of an abacus on the right.
As you can see, you can’t really do math with Roman numerals (I, II, III, IV, etc.) without something like an abacus (pictured on the right above). But with Arabic numerals (on the left), you can do math on paper or parchment.
And it was a ninth-century Muslim mathematician whom we know as Al-Khuwarizmi who invented Algebra, which would later allow the invention of modern science.
To sum up, we’ve got a Renaissance, an effort to revive the learning of the ancient world that happens in the eighth and ninth centuries in three different places under three different sets of patrons, the Carolingian kings and emperors, the Byzantine Emperors, and the Caliphs. Try to think about these movements and why they occurred so close to each other in time.
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Table of Contents.html
| Surv World History/Civiliz I Section 08G Fall 2018 CO - Carolingian Renaissance & Abassid Caliphate
3. The Role of Ancient Literature |
