After al-Mansur died in 775 A.D., his son al-Mahdi continued his policy of encouraging the arts and sciences, and of building schools. He reigned for ten years; then came Haroun al-Raschid of Arabian Nights fame, whose reign was mostly taken up with a lengthy war with the Byzantines, who were forced to retire, licking their wounds. And Arab history in the Middle Ages reached its climax with the twenty-year reign of Haroun’s son, al-Mamun the Great, in whom the Arab desire for conquest turned into a passion for knowledge. He built two observatories and a ‘House of Knowledge’ containing a vast library. He also became curious about that mysterious monument, the Great Pyramid, particularly when he heard a legend that it contained star maps of the ancients. His workmen hacked their way in and discovered the pyramid’s various passages, and the King and Queen’s Chambers; but they found no secret room with star maps. Nevertheless, al-Mansur’s scholars constructed the first complete map of the heavens and another of the earth. (Both have, unfortunately, disappeared.)
The general chaos of the Dark Ages can by no means be laid at the door of the Arabs. It came about, quite simply, by the fall of Rome, which left Europe to the barbarians. Apart from the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Huns and Vandals, there were the Slavs, the Burgundians, the Franks, the Lombards and the Saxons. Many of these barbarians were basically nomads, who disliked settling in towns even when they had conquered them, and preferred to move around restlessly from area to area, exacting their taxes in food and other goods. This hardly made for stable administration. The first of the great Prankish kings (the Franks were a German tribe), Clovis, became leader of his tribe in 481 A.D. at the age of fifteen, invaded Gaul and became converted to orthodox Catholicism. Having defeated Burgundians, Visigoths, Alamanni and the Romans occupying Gaul, he set up his capital in Paris. His dynasty became known as the Merovingians, after his grandfather Merowech. But his successors soon found that it was hard work being a king if you had no real power or wealth. Without the magnificent Roman civil service, it was practically impossible to run the country and collect taxes. The next best thing was to hand over various estates to local magnates, ‘counts’, making them promise to supply a small army if it was needed. But this meant that the counts, in effect, became little local kings and the central king had to live off his own estate and eat his own produce. ‘Taxes’ were impractical, even if the counts had been willing to pay them, for there was little money in circulation; the counts would have had to pay in eggs and cabbages. When the king went for a drive, it was in an ox-cart driven by his ploughman. So in the Dark Ages, the whole of Europe was rather like Ireland in the seventeenth century: poor, barren and very provincial.
In fact, Ireland in the seventh century A.D. was a great deal ahead of most of the rest of Europe. In the fifth century, a Briton named Patrick had been captured by Irish pirates and learned their strange tongue; he went to Ireland and converted the country. The Irish, who were Celts, took to learning as avidly as the Arabs would a few centuries later, and their monasteries became miniature universities. All over Europe, it was the monasteries that preserved books and kept learning alive. Now that the Roman emperor was in Constantinople, the pope had virtually become emperor of the west; he enthusiastically encouraged rulers such as Clovis (later Latinised to Louis), who conquered in the name of the Church. The various bishops and abbots were naturally granted land; so the monks and churchmen of the Dark Ages were among the few who could count on eating a square meal every day and drinking a glass of wine. Otherwise, life in the Dark Ages was as harsh and difficult as it had been since human beings began to build cities in Mesopotamia. Most people were chronically undernourished – as disinterred skeletons show – and an enormous percentage of babies died at birth or soon after. Robber bands roamed what was left of the roads. If anyone could have remembered the good old days of Roman occupation, they would have sighed with nostalgia.
It was the ‘law of expansion’ – expand or perish – that destroyed the Merovingians. Clovis divided his realm between four sons, which was a mistake. The historian Morris Bishop says: ‘the realm would soon have been subdivided into numerous tiny principalities had not the excess of heirs been diminished by illness (poison) and accident (murder).’ (The Penguin Book of the Middle Ages, p. 20.) But there was nowhere for these feeble kings (rios fainéants) to expand to. They began to rely increasingly on their major domos – or ‘mayors of the palace’ – so that the real power fell into their hands. One of them engineered the kidnapping of the heir to the throne in 656, and the child, named Dagobert, was brought up in Ireland while the major domo’s son occupied the throne. Dagobert managed to get back to France and take his throne back – only to be murdered as he took a nap under a tree when out hunting. Charles Martel, the man who drove the Arabs out of France, was a major domo. It was his son, known as Pépin the Short, who sent a message to the pope asking whether the throne ought to be in the hands of a hopeless incompetent; the pope answered no. So Pépin held an election and seized the throne. And Pépin repaid the pope by taking an army to Italy and inflicting a number of defeats on the barbarian Lombards, who were making life difficult for the pope. He then handed over the captured cities; they became the basis of the Papal States, and of the tremendous power and wealth that the Church would accumulate in the coming centuries.
Pépin had grasped the basic law of history, the law of expansion. He went on to expand his domain until it extended as far as the Pyrenees. And the lesson was also grasped by his son Charles, who came to the throne in 768, ruled for the next forty-six years and became known as Charlemagne, Charles the Great. He was a giant of a man, six feet four inches tall, with a drooping blond moustache, a powerful physique, and an appetite for women that compares with that of Attila the Hun – it is possible to detect a distinct note of envy in H. G. Wells’s account of him in the Outline of History. He understood the law of expansion so well that he spent most of life fighting – his fifty-four campaigns including expeditions against Lombards, Saxons, Frisians, Danes, Avars, Gascons and the Arabs in Spain. The Saxons of north-east Germany proved particularly hard to subdue. They were pagans, who still held human sacrifices. Like most barbarians, they spent much of their time raiding and often crossed into Charlemagne’s northern territory, looting and burning. Charlemagne had much the same experience with the Saxons that the Romans had had with their German ancestors. He would conquer them, set up garrisons and force them to agree to pay tribute; as soon as his back was turned, the Saxons massacred the garrisons and sacrificed some of the defenders to their pagan gods. Whereupon Charlemagne would return with his forces and inflict blood-curdling punishments. When this had been going on for more than twenty years he finally lost patience, beheaded every Saxon leader he could capture – several hundreds – and deported whole tribes to his own territories. Then he colonised Saxony with Franks. When he told the Saxons that they could choose between Christianity and execution, the English monk and scholar Alcuin – who lived at Charlemagne’s court – objected that this was no way to make good Christians. But Charlemagne was right and Alcuin was wrong; the Saxons were ‘converted’.
If we compare Charlemagne with some of his great predecessors – such as Constantine or Justinian – it seems clear that evolution had at last thrown up a higher type of man. He knew Latin and Greek and worked on a grammar of his native language. He was fond of music and books, collected old ballads, and filled his court with scholars and artists. He was huge, hearty, loved inviting people to dinner, and announced that anyone could come to see him to complain about injustice. During his periods at home he toured his dominions, organised local government, took an active interest in education and established new abbeys. Yet, oddly enough, he had no capital. A typical descendant of barbarians, he preferred to keep on the move – although he had a special fondness for Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle – so named after a superb chapel Charlemagne built there). He even had a half-mile-long bridge constructed over the Rhine at Mainz.