Origins of Europe

The Origins of EuropeAuthor(s): Eric FernieReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 71 (2008), pp. 39-53Published by: The Warburg InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20462775 .

Accessed: 06/03/2013 21:57

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Warburg Institute is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of theWarburg and Courtauld Institutes.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded on Wed, 6 Mar 2013 21:57:07 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=warburg

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20462775?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


THE ORIGINS OF EUROPE*

Eric Fernie

This paper begins with an accusation of theft. 'The fall of the Roman empire' is a common, indeed standard, phrase used to refer to the effects of events

such as the sack of Rome in 4io, and the deposing of Emperor Romulus Augus tulus in 476. Yet these events are relevant only to the fall of the western Roman empire. Of course everyone knows this; some authors even using the first formu lation and then changing to the second. What makes this self-deception of 'the fall of the Roman empire' possible, especially as we also all know that the eastern Roman empire continued beyond the fifth century, via Justinian in the sixth, until I453? Part of the answer seems to be that we-or at least those of us writing within the anglophone tradition-obscure the Roman status of the eastern empire by referring to it as the Byzantine empire, a term never as far as I know used by the rulers of that empire themselves. The combined effect of using 'Roman empire' for 'western Roman empire' and 'Byzantine empire' for'eastern Roman empire' is to deprive the eastern Roman empire of its romanitas (the 'theft' of my introduction) and, in turn, to make the West appear the sole inheritor of the Roman tradition.

I have introduced the paper with this observation because the end of antiquity in the West is a fulcrum in arguments about the origins of Europe, and because any discussion of those origins involves well-known terms and phrases which may allow more than one meaning. In fact, it is likely that there is not a single concept of any importance in this paper which has not been the subject of debate. This is so not least with the concept of the continent of Europe, since Europe is not a con tinent (in the sense of being separate and contained), but rather a region of Eurasia. Europe is never referred to as a subcontinent, as India is, despite the vastly greater barrier represented by the Himalayas than by the Urals or the Don.

Taking Europe to mean the culture identified with Europe for the last few centuries and in the modern world, the most prominent candidates for its origins are the Bronze Age, ancient Greece, the Roman empire, late antiquity in the West, the Carolingian dynasty, the Ottonian dynasty, and finally the Renaissance (or, after prehistory, one might say, the Greeks, the Romans, the barbarians, the Franks, the Saxons, and the Italians). All have been proposed as originators at various points over the last century; deciding between them is not a matter of establishing one right answer and six wrong ones, so much as weighing different criteria against one another. To me the evidence suggests that three criteria in particular are crucial, namely (a) cultural characteristics that are identifiable over an extended length of time; (b) an awareness of the concept of Europe; and (c) signs of a coherent process leading to the culture of present-day Europe.

* I would like to record my gratitude to Sandy

Heslop, John Onians, John Mitchell, Michael Herren

and Roger Stalley for their invaluable help with the

writing of this paper. The text is based on a lecture

delivered to the Society of Antiquaries of London in

February 2008.

39

JOURNAL OF THE WARBURG AND COURTAULD INSTITUTES, LXXI, 2008



40 ORIGINS OF EUROPE

Given the subject of the paper, it is appropriate to acknowledge at the outset the obvious fact that the periods into which the human past has been divided are entirely artificial: nothing more, it can be said, than tidy impositions on what are in reality infinitely complex overlapping sequences of events. Periods are no more real than seconds or centuries, but, as Heinrich Wolfflin put it, they are essential to historians if we are to retain our sanity.'

The Bronze Age

Building on the work of V. Gordon Childe and Christopher Hawkes, Colin Renfrew has made a convincing case for the existence of a prehistoric culture identifiable as European.2 By contrast with the diffusionist argument, which sees Europe as dependent on the Near East, Renfrew establishes that Europe is the only continent with a true Bronze Age, and that characteristics evident around I500 BC-such as chiefdoms, horse riding, a warrior culture, and a late urbanism-were peculiarly European phenomena. He points out further that aspects of these characteristics help to explain the culture of Europe north of the Alps in the middle of the first millennium AD, and proposes that the societies which emerged after the collapse of Roman power in theWest owed much more to these 'barbarians' than to romanitas. The origins of Europe, then, lie in the prehistoric period, thereby fulfilling the first criterion of identifiable characteristics which continue into later periods.

The Greeks

The Greeks of course changed the terms of the discussion dramatically, by in venting the concept of Europe itself. At an undetermined date before the fifth century BC, they named the continent after one of their mythological characters, and defined it as the land north of the Mediterranean and west of the Don. Some reports, conventionally attributed to Hippocrates (writing around 400 BC), contrast the culture of the peoples of Europe with that of the peoples of Asia. In the fourth century BC, Aristotle distinguished between the Greeks and the Europeans, defining the latter as barbarians who were 'full of spirit, but lacking in intelligence and skill'.3 The Greek intervention therefore marks the inception of the idea of Europe,

whether it includes or excludes the Greeks themselves, making it possible to speak of the second criterion, that of awareness.

At this point it may seem obvious that we have the answer also as far as the third criterion is concerned: not only did the Greeks invent the concept of Europe and its extent, they also provided us with major aspects of our ideas concerning

i. Heinrich W?lfflin, Principles of Art History. The

Problems of the Development of Style in Later Art, New

York n.d. (c.1960 [1915]), p. 227. 2. C. Renfrew, 'The Identity of Europe in Prehis

toric Archaeology', Journal of European Archaeology, u,

!994s PP- !53-73J see also J. D. Myres, 'The Ethnology, habitat, linguistic and common culture of Indo-Euro

peans up to the time of the migrations', in European

Civilisation. Its Origins and Development, ed. E. Eyre, 7

vols, Oxford 1934-39,1: Prehistoric Man, pp. 179-244,

including, facing p. 157, a map of primary types of

European civilisation in the early Bronze Age. 3. Hippocrates, Airs, waters and places, xn, xvi,

xxiii, tr. W H. S. Jones, Loeb edn, Harvard 1984, pp.

104-19, 133; Aristotle, Politics, vu. 1327b, tr. John

Warrington, London 1959, p. 201.



ERIC FERNIE 4I

politics, philosophy, science, history, medicine, literature and art. What more do we need? The answer to this is an acknowledgment of the effects of the Hellenistic and Roman empires, spread as they were over all three of the continents of the ancient world, thus making it difficult if not impossible to establish a coherent process in the history of Europe between the middle of the first millennium BC and the fifth and sixth centuries AD.

The Romans

The Greek label and definition of Europe continued in use into the Roman period. Thus Strabo in the first century AD says of Europe that 'it is both varied in form and admirably adapted by nature to the development of excellence in men and governments', and he identifies both the Greeks and the Romans as belonging to the continent. By establishing the provinces or prefectures of Italia, Gallia, Hispania, Germania and Britannia, the Romans contributed to the definition of distinct political sub-entities which lie at the base of the major political units of later Europe.4

The Barbarians, Christianity, and the End of Antiquity in the West

The barbarian invasions and Christianity's rise in power in the fourth and fifth centuries have been widely seen as introducing a new dimension to the concept of Europe. Norman Davies, for example, says that 'It was the four centuries following Constantine that brought Europe into being', and that 'it was in late antiquity that European history ceased to be an assortment of unrelated events ... and began to take on the characteristics of a more coherent civilizational process'.5 Thus, for example, Frankish rule was established across the old province of Gaul, the pope replaced the emperor as a figurehead, Benedictine monasticism was largely respon sible for recording and handing on the classical literary tradition, and (in the late sixth and seventh centuries) the Christian oikoumene began to be identified with Europe. On the last point, Gregory the Great, for instance, thought of the papacy as the centre to which the torn parts of Europe gravitated, and he was addressed by St Columban as the head of all the churches of 'the whole of Europe'.6 An Irish link to this way of thinking occurs in the writings of the monk Fergil who, in the seventh century, referred to there being two schools of grammatical thought 'in tota Europa'.7 As far as the Church was concerned, Europe appears to have existed as a cultural entity.

4- Strabo, Geography, 11.5, 26, tr. H. Jones, Loeb

edn, London and New York 1917-32,1, p. 485.

5. N. Davies, Europe. A History, Oxford, 1996, pp.

15, 218-19, 284; R. A. Brown, The Origins of Europe, London 1972, pp. 3-16. See also C. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages. Europe and the Mediterranean,

400-800, Oxford 2005, for example, p. 2: 'The early Middle Ages ... is the period when the polities first

formed that are the genealogical ancestors of the

nation states of today.' See B. Ward-Perkins, The Fall

of Rome and the End of Civilization, Oxford 2005, for a robust and welcome defence of the unfashionable

idea that there was a decline in the West from the 4th century to the 8th.

6. For Gregory, see W Ullmann, The Carolingian Renaissance and the Idea of Kingship, London 1969, p. 135; Sancti Columbani Opera, ed. G. S. M.Walker, Dublin 1957, p. 36 ('Pulcherrimo omnium totius

Europae ecclesiarum capiti...').




A i' ' c se D w E ' F 4 G

_ > S > o ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~in the reign of Diocletian __ \TIERMNMPE

i. The Roman Empire,. c. 297

_~~~~t 1 QQK ~~~~~~~~~~%*g r <a* lil99j~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ogli

The~~ prbe remins howve,C tha if we)stern Roa aniut ha no co-me

Y~~~~ ~ ~~~~~~ ~~~~~~ _ I . M5_ e.b

toendry of Prefotw westernVimperial l in 4 but, as H P poited out

emir sipl conine afe th chng of rulr. Pien hYpteid tha the Renof te Rmnwrld in the Wst wa bruh abut, no by th Gemai an

i ~ ~ ~ . .. IL?t 1 R ptw 8 ̂ ^ ll a_ " t1 .................

other in s o........f... han fifth centuries, but by the Arab,invasions of|the

seventh and eZighth. On this thr is no wiesra agreement.

prmrl adepr, madeupz ofvrosprvnez .Ul.sn (Fi. ). He arue that, on the contrary, t. he Roman worlde was no 29ad7miewicuthapndt

incluet he Mediterreainean howas thet Mdif Vterranean plus athe land whc h to an end, it is not clear how a European as opposed to a Frankish or ecclesiastical

political culture would have emerged. The end of antiquity in the West is arguably the most important change in theWest's history. It was traditionally identified with

the end of the western imperial line in 476, but, as Henri Pirenne pointed out

already in I925R the overall social, economic and other structures of the western

empire simply continued after th a the of rulers. Pirenne hypothesised that the

end of the Roman world in the West was brought about, not by the Germanic and

other invasions of the fourth and fifth centuries, but by the Arab invasions of the

seventh and eighth. On this there is now wide-spread agreement.

Pirenne noted that the Roman empire had habitually been thought of as

primarily a land empire, made up of various provinces (Fig. I). He argued that, on the contrary, the Roman world was not a land empire which just happened to

include the Mediterranean; it was the Mediterranean plus the lands which hap

pened to border it (Fig. 2) . The Arab invasions cut this world in two (Fig. 3) . These

invasions, according to Pirenne, did two things: they wrecked the economy of

the western Roman world, and they forced the rulers of the successor states to the

western Roman empire to accept that the Mediterranean no longer formed the

7- Epistolae i.i, in Virgilio Marone grammatico,

Epitomi ed Epistole, ed. G. Polara, Bari 1979, p. 182.1

am very grateful to Michael Herren for this reference.



ERIC FERNIE 43

2. The Roman Empire, c. 395 (archive of the author)

i-x~ ~~

Z~

' _E~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~J 2 _, -(

3. Ch oaliEphate, c. 7950 (archive of the author)




4. The Carolingian Empire, c. 814 (archive of the author)

core of their civilisation. Instead the Franks in particular transformed their state

in ways which culminated in the coronation of Charlemagne, as emperor of a

revived western empire, in the year 8oo (Fig. 4) A

Pirenne's views have been extensively debated over the last eighty years.

His arguments concerning the economic effects of the Arab invasions have been

especially criticised, as for example by Richard Hodges in the i98os, but in 200I

Michael McCormick mounted a convincing defence of Pirenne's economic propo

sition, a defence which Hodges has since accepted.9 Pirenne's other point has been

much more widely accepted, namely, the shattering change in world view forced

on the inhabitants of western Europe by the massive shift in the centre of gravity

of their polity and culture from the Mediterranean to north of the Alps.'0 Chris

8. H. Pirenne, Medieval Cities. Their origins and

the revival of trade, New York 1956 (first edn 1925); Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, London 1968

(first edn 1938); Times Atlas of World History, ed. G.

Barraclough, London 1978. The eastern Roman

empire is not directly relevant to Pirenne's thesis, as it

continued an unbroken even if disrupted existence.

Its centre remained in the same place, and it continued to be a maritime power.

9. R. Hodges and D. Whitehouse, Mohammed,

Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe. Archaeology and the Pirenne Thesis, London 1983, pp. 169-76; The

Corrupting Sea. A Study of Mediterranean History, ed.

P. Horden and N. Purcell, Oxford 2000, pp. 32-34; B. Bachrach, 'Pirenne and Charlemagne', in After Rome's Fall. Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval

History. Essays Presented to Walter Goffart, ed. A. C.

Murray, 1998, pp. 214-31; M. McCormick, Origins of the European Economy. Communications and Commerce

AD 300-900, Cambridge 2001, passim, especially pp.

576-77, 797-98; R. Hodges, Goodbye to the Vikings?

Re-Reading Early Medieval Archaeology, London 2006,

pp. 176-86. 10. C. Leonardi, Medioevo latino. La cultura dell'Eu

ropa cristiana, Florence 2002, p. 761.



ERIC FERNIE 45

Wickham has argued that the Merovingian and Carolingian states would have developed much as they did, even without the advent of Mohamed." I am not in a position to dispute Wickham's assessment, but, as already noted with regard to barbarian rule and the power of the Church, it is difficult to see how the Merovin gian state could have developed into a European polity if western Roman antiquity had continued as the social, political and economic framework in the western Mediterranean.

I described the shift from south to north as 'massive' advisedly. Eric Hobsbawm has supplied a context: 'Throughout its long history the belt of high cultures that stretched from east Asia to Egypt experienced no lasting relapses into barbarism, in spite of all invasions, conquests and upheavals ... China under Mongols and

Manchus, Persia, overrun by whatever conquering invaders from central Asia, remained beacons of high culture in their regions. So did Egypt and Mesopotamia, whether under Pharaohs and Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs or Turks. Invaded for a millennium by the peoples from steppe and desert, all the great empires of the old world survived with one exception. Only the Roman Empire was permanently destroyed."2 I would change only one thing in that brilliant formu lation: he does not mean the Roman empire, but rather the western Roman empire.

It has, then, been argued that late antiquity in the West sees the start of a coherent process towards the idea of Europe, the third criterion identified above, especially in the involvement of the barbarians in the running of the states of the old western Roman empire, and in the new importance of the Church, not least in the form of its explicitly European perspective. Against these admittedly strong points there is the over-riding impact of the end of western antiquity.

The Carolingian Dynasty

Pirenne's thesis makes the Carolingian era, from the 750s to the tenth century, the first post-antique age in the West. In so far as this proposal can be defended, it provides extensive support for the view that the origins of Europe can be traced to the period.I3 In other words, the start of the coherent process proposed by

Norman Davies for the fifth to seventh centuries makes more sense if sought in

the eighth and ninth, after the end of antiquity in the region. The evidence that the Carolingian period marks a beginning in many fundamental ways can be found in the five fields of politics, religion, law, economics and technology.

First, as far as politics is concerned, Charlemagne was referred to as the ruler of the kingdom of Europe, 'Pater Europae', 'Europae venerandus apex' and 'Euro pae veneranda pharus'. The division of the Carolingian empire by the Treaty of

ii. Wickham (as in n. 5), pp. 821-22.

12. E. Hobsbawm, 'The curious history of Europe', in E. Hobsbawm, On History, London 1997, pp. 223

24.

13. For arguments in favour of the Carolingian case see, for example, Ullmann (as in n. 6), pp. 135-39;

K.-F. Werner, 'Karl der Grosse oder Charlemagne?', in Bayerische Akademie derWissenschaften: Philologisch

Historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, IV, 1995, pp. 3-62; E. Manest?, 'Le radici medievali dell'"Europa'", in Le

radici medievali della civilta europea, ed. E. Manest?,

Spoleto 2002, pp. 1-17; and H. Fuhrmann, 'Karl der

Grosse: Versuch einer europ?ischen Ordnung', in Karl

der Grosse und Europa. Symposium, Frankfurt am Main

2004, pp. 17-27.



46 ORIGINS OF EUROPE Verdun in 843 provided the bases, in a much closer and more direct sense than the divisions of the Roman empire and late antiquity, of France and Germany and the states between them, over which they fought until the middle of the twentieth century (Fig. 5). The treaty itself identified the three kingdoms, Gallia, Germania and Italia, as the 'prestantiores Europae species', the dominant parts of Europe, a phrase which would have made little sense in the centuries of western Roman antiquity. 4

Secondly, as to the ecclesiastical arguments, for the first few centuries of its existence Christianity was no more associated with Europe than with any other part of the Graeco-Roman world, but, as already noted, in the late sixth and seventh centuries a link began to be made between the religion and the continent. In the second half of the eighth century, this association was given political form, at least for the Latin Church, with the establishment of an alliance between it and the Frankish crown. While it is difficult to overestimate the achievement of the popes in gaining autonomy for the 'Republic of St Peter' in the 730S in the maelstrom of Lombard and Byzantine politics, it is equally true that the papacy's chances of survival, and with them that of a separate Latin Church, would have been poor without the alliance with the Franks.'5 The Carolingians cemented this alliance through their policy of enforcing the uniform use of the Latin liturgy throughout their lands. As Notker puts it in his ninth-century biography of Charlemagne, the emperor was 'greatly grieved by the fact that all his provinces and indeed cities... continued to differ in the way they worshipped God, and particularly in the rhythm of their chanting.'6 Thereafter the Latin Church gradually became the church of all the states of western and central Europe, and the concept of Europe becomes indistinguishable, until the Reformation, from that of the Latin Church.

Thirdly, the legal arguments can be set out in the form of a series of obser vations from Robert Bartlett's incisive book of I994 on the making of Europe. As Bartlett argues that 'Europe existed as an identifiable cultural entity' only by I300, and does not discuss the importance or otherwise of the Carolingian period for its origins, it may not be clear why I am calling him in evidence. I do so because his observations gain strength for the Carolingian case from the very fact that they do not form part of an argument specifically about origins, or in support of the case I am making. Bartlett points out that the medieval coinages of northern and eastern Europe were modelled on Carolingian precedents; that the payment of tithes was first instituted by the Carolingians and the Anglo-Saxons; that the most import ant antecedents of the charter, the foundation of modern legal structures, were

14- F.-R. Erkens, 'Karolus Magnus - Pater Euro

pae?', in 79c. Kunst und Kultur der Karolingerzeit. Karl

der Grosse und Papst Leo III in Paderborn (exhibition

catalogue, Paderborn, 1999), 3 vols, Mainz 1999; 1, pp.

2-9, and W. Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Govern ment in the Middle Ages, London 1955, p. 95, nn. 3 and

4. On the need for caution in reading later history back into the ninth century, see Stuart Airlie, 'Review

article: After Empire: recent work on the emergence of

post-Carolingian kingdoms', Early Medieval Europe, ii3 1993, pp. 153-61.

15. On the Latin Church, see R. Bartlett, The

Making of the Middle Ages. Conquest, Colonization and

Cultural Change 950-1350, London 1994, pp. 18-19, 20,

102-03, 269. 16. Einhard and Notker the Stammerer. Two Lives of

Charlemagne, ed. and tr. L. Thorpe, Harmondsworth

1974, p. 102 (Notker, 1, ch. 10).



ERIC FERNIE 47

4'4

5. The Carolingian Empire, 843 (archive of the author)

Carolingian; and that the Carolingian chancery was the model for all the chanceries of medieval Europe. If one accepts Bartlett's arguments, then I would contend that coinage, tithes, charters and chanceries constitute a significant group of inno vations with lasting effects.'7 To Bartlett's points can be added Charlemagne's replacement of the degenerate Roman gold-based monetary system with a new one based on silver. This use of silver rather than gold has been taken as indicating the weakness of the Carolingian economy, but McCormick notes on the contrary that 'the great rise in European cities in the eleventh and twelfth centuries occurred precisely under the silver standard installed by the Carolingians, not under gold

X i8

Fourthly, with regard to the economic arguments, the origins of the modern economy, which is or was the European economy, have traditionally been traced back through the Industrial Revolution to the Enlightenment, and from there to the Renaissance, and no further. Although there have been exceptions among historians, this view was widely held up to the late twentieth century.'9 From I988, however, there is the curious historiographical fact that the date at which the modern economy is supposed to have begun went into a sharp and consistent

17- Bartlett (as in n. 15), pp. 283-304. 18. For the change from a gold to a silver stan

dard, see McCormick (as in n. 9), pp. 576-77, and F.

Crouzet, A History of the European Economy, 1000

2000, Charlottesvillle 2001, p. 6.

19- For a recent example of the case for the

economic revival beginning in the Renaissance, see J.

Henry, Moving Heaven and Earth. Copernicus and the

Solar System, Cambridge 2001.




retreat. In that year, Peter Spufford moved the start back from the Renaissance to the thirteenth century, in I996 Norman Davies pushed it to the twelfth century, in I998 Patrick Geary to the eleventh, in I999 Robert Fossier to the tenth, and in 200I Francois Crouzet to the seventh. The most fully supported opinion, that of

Michael McCormick, also of 200I, settled for the eighth century and the Caro lingian age. In 2002, AdriaanVerhulst provided more support for the Carolingian case, and in 2004 one reviewer of Verhulst's book offered the opinion that it was difficult to see how anyone could still support any other view.20

Fifthly and finally, as far as technology is concerned, while the Carolingian period had not previously been considered a time of technical advance, in I979 Jean Gimpel proposed that the three hundred years from the ninth century to the eleventh deserved to be known as the first industrial age. In his view more machines and techniques were adopted or invented in the West in this period than at any time before the Industrial Revolution itself. Among many innovations Gimpel and others single out the cam, a Greek invention previously used in machines for amuse ment or effect, now adapted to form water-driven hammers for forging and other purposes; the heavy-wheeled plough, which transformed agricultural production; and the collar harness, which increased the pulling power of horses five-fold, aid ing not only agriculture, but transport and mining as well.2' The building industry also underwent a revolution. In the seventh and eighth centuries, north of the Alps at least, stone buildings were largely restricted to the patronage of emperors, kings, queens and high churchmen. From the Carolingian period onwards, by contrast, there was a broadening of patronage, until by the eleventh century in many countries the majority of even rural churches were masonry structures, while dwellings and even shops were increasingly built of stone.22

The Carolingian period therefore has numerous points to recommend it as the start of a coherent process identifiable as leading to present-day European culture, with the added advantage that it begins after the end of western antiquity.

The Ottonian Dynasty

The next contender is the period of the Ottonian or Saxon dynasty in Germany and adjacent lands from 919 to I024. While most scholars have followed Pirenne in opting for the eighth century as marking the end of antiquity in the West, there is a school of thought which prefers a tenth-century date.23This parallels the case

20. P. Spufford, Money and its Uses in Medieval

Europe, Cambridge 1988; Davies (as in n. 5), pp. 291

92; M. Kishlansky, P. Geary, and P. O'Brien, Civiliza

tion in the West, New York 1998 (third revised edn), p.

226; R. Fossier, 'Rural economy and country life', in

The New Cambridge Medieval History, III. c. 900-c.

1024, ed. Timothy Reuter, Cambridge 1999, p. 27; Crouzet (as in n. 18), p. 3; McCormick (as in n. 8),

passim and especially pp. 576-77; A. Verhulst, The

Carolingian Economy, Cambridge 2002, pp. 132-35; review ofVerhulst, Speculum, lxxix, 2004, p. 856; Early

Medieval Europe, xn, 2003, pp. 259-323, 'Origins of

the European economy: a debate'. The whole of the

latter volume consists of the papers of a discussion at

Kalamazoo of McCormick's book, including an intro

duction and conclusion by McCormick himself. 2i. Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine, [London]

1979, passim and especially p. 69. 22. The stone industry is remarkably under

researched in many economic studies. For example, McCormick (as in n. 8), makes only 6 mentions in

1000 pages, and P. Spufford, Power and Profit. The

Merchant in Medieval Europe, London 2002, only 2

mentions in over 400 pages.



ERIC FERNIE 49

.1 ~ ~ ~ ~ 4

6. The Ottonian Empire, after 962 (archive of the author)

which has been made in favour of an Ottonian rather than a Carolingian origin for the European period as a coherent process by, amongst others, Georges Duby, Robert Fossier and most recently, in 2003, by Jacques le Goff.

Le Goff's points concern chiefly continuity and territory. On continuity he argues that the Holy Roman empire can be traced from the nineteenth century back to no earlier than the time of Otto I, emperor from 962 to 973.24 The evidence against this is by no means decisive, but two relevant points are that the core and extent of Otto's empire were based on the division of the Carolingian empire in 843 (Figs 5 and 6), and that Otto I presented himself as the successor to Charlemagne, for example in having himself crowned at Aachen according to the Carolingian rites.25

On territory, in arguing for the greater significance of the Ottonians, Le Goff points out that the Carolingian empire did not include Sicily, which was under Muslim rule; or the Christian states of Britain, Ireland and Spain, which were independent; or the Slav countries, which were still pagan (Fig. 4).26 I do not know

23. For example, M. Zimmermann, 'Aux origines de l'art roman: fragmentation politique, encellulement

social et croissance ?conomique', Les Cahiers Saint

Michel de Cuxa, xxiv, 1993, pp. 5-19.

24. J. Le Goff, L'Europe, est-elle n?e au moyen age?, Paris 2003, pp. 47-71.

25- H. Keller, 'Die Ottonen und Karl der Grosse'

Fr?hmittela?eliche Studien, xxxiv, 2000, pp. 112-31; B.

Sch?tte, 'Karl der Grosse in der Historiographie der

Ottonen- und Salierzeit', in Karl der Grosse und das

Erbe der Kulturen, ed. F.-R. Erkens, Berlin 2001, pp.

246-56. 26. Le Goff (as in n. 24), pp. 50-51.




what to make of this argument, for while Sicily was certainly in Muslim hands in the ninth century, it was equally certainly still so in the tenth, at the time of the Ottonians. Similarly Spain, Britain and Ireland were as much outside the Ottonian empire in the tenth century as they were outside the Carolingian state in the eighth and ninth, and, while the majority of the Slavs were converted in the tenth century, the Balts, Finns, Lapps and others all remained to be Christianised long after that date.

There is something odd going on, when an argument propounded by a scholar of Le Goff's standing can be so easily refuted. Something similar is evident in statements of other scholars who oppose the Carolingian argument. Fossier, for example, writing in I999, says that 'Contrary to what is believed by German historians in particular, the role of the Carolingian dynasty is not a particularly interesting topic: its effects beyond the Channel or the Pyrenees, and even the south of France and Italy, were non-existent or negligible... "a mere surface ripple", as Georges Duby put it.' One has to ask, were the effects of the Ottonian empire in these areas so much greater? There is a resort to exaggeration here which is difficult to explain.27

In my view, the move from western late antiquity to the Carolingians can be seen as a change on the largest scale, and that from the Carolingians to the Otto nians as one of dynasties.

The Renaissance

The Renaissance is demonstrably part of the history of Europe as a coherent process, and many authors see it as the start of that history.28 The most obvious support for this conclusion is the increased occurrence of the word Europe itself. Between the tenth century and fifteenth, the great majority of writers in the West used the term 'Christendom' to describe their society, whereas with the Renaissance this came to be replaced by 'Europe'. The writings of Pope Pius II exemplify the change, in the form of his outline description, De Europa, written in I458, and his mention of a plan to 'free Italy and all Europe from the fear of the Turk ... .29

At least three points can be made against the Renaissance as the beginning of the process. First, while it is true that few writers refer to Europe in the preceding centuries, at least William of Malmesbury, writing in the first half of the twelfth century, expresses himself in terms almost indistinguishable from those of Pius. He

27. Fossier (as in n. 20), p. 29. See J. Fried ('Otto der Grosse, sein Reich und Europa', in Otto der Grosse,

Magdeburg und Europa, ed. M. Puhle, 2 vols, Mainz

2001,1, pp. 537-62), for the breadth of Otto's contacts,

including those with England, Cordoba, Byzantium and Kiev, and for the judgement that 'Europe' was for

contemporaries 'ohne klare geographischen Dimen sion und vollends ohne politische Konnotation' ('lack

ing a clear geographical dimension and completely without political connotations').

28. J. R. Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the

Renaissance, London 1993, pp. xix and 3-7; Davies (as in n. 5), pp. 7-15; W C. Jordan, '"Europe" in the

Middle Ages', in The Idea of Europe from Antiquity to

the European Union, ed. A. Pagden, Cambridge 2002,

pp. 74-75; Bartlett (as in n. 15, p. 291) favours c. 1300.

29. Aeneae Sylvii Piccolominei Senensis... opera quae extant omnia... (Basel [1551]), pp. 387-471; de Europa.

Memoirs of a Renaissance Pope. The Commentaries of Pius II, tr. F. A. Gragg, ed. L. C. Gabel, London i960, P-35I



ERIC FERNIE 5I

says, for example, that the Saracens invaded Africa and Asia Minor, that without the Franks they 'would long ago have overrun Europe as well', and that there remains 'Europe, the third division of the world, and how small a part of that do we Christians live in! ... this small part, then, of our world is threatened by the Turks and Saracens with war.'30The change, then, is one of quantity, not content. Secondly, there are the political, ecclesiastical, legal, economic and technological developments already discussed, which appear to start in the Carolingian period and can be traced from there to the time of the Renaissance.

Thirdly, there is the copious evidence for what is now the accepted view that the Renaissance represents an intensification of earlier trends, rather than a sharp change of direction. Two quotations from the fields of science and manners can be used to illustrate the case. On science, against a supposedly medieval belief that the earth was flat, there is the late twelfth-century advice offered by Alexander

Neckam, in his De naturis rerum, to those constructing a very tall building: 'One must understand that no walls ... are parallel. Suppose that ... walls have been constructed so proportionally that they are no thicker at the bottom than at the top, still the surfaces will not be equidistant. For it is inevitable that the farther the walls rise from the earth, the greater will the distance between them be found to be. For since every object naturally gravitates toward a centre, understand that walls gravitate towards the centre of the earth, and you will find that the walls themselves are joined with each other at an angle.'The advice is, of course, practically speak ing, absurd, and nothing more than a vehicle for showing off, but it is technically correct, and Neckam takes it for granted that the earth is a sphere, with no need to justify himself.3I

With regard to manners, until recently the standard historical model contrasted a medieval mode which was formulaic and restricted to aristocratic set pieces such as banquets, with a Renaissance mode which considered all aspects of life and was recognisably modern. Against this John Gillingham in 2002 painted a different picture, at least for England, in that the courts of Henry I and Henry II had ideals comparable with those of the Renaissance. Thus the Liber Urbani of Daniel of Beccles of c. II50 begins: 'Reader, read and re-read me if you wish to lead a civi lised life.' He next describes what is needed not only for a civilised life, but also a long, healthy and happy one: what to eat and drink, when to bathe, how to exercise. You should cultivate an entertaining conversation, avoid quarrels. New clothes can cheer you up. He discourses on how to deal with friends and enemies, how to live at peace with fellow citizens: do not always insist on your rights, he says, and love moderation. If your wife is unfaithful ... pretend not to notice; if your lord's wife makes a pass at you, pretend to be ill. Gillingham points out that what has been called the new Renaissance rule 'of consideration towards one's fellows' is the very basis of Daniel of Beccles's whole approach. He concludes by noting that the stan dard pro-Renaissance view derives, as always, from the humanists, who drew all

30. William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum, ed. and tr. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson and M.

Winterbottom, Oxford 1998, ?? 92 and 347.6.

31. Alexander Neckam, De naturis rerum, ed. T

Wright, Rolls Series, London 1863, p. 282.




their models of good conduct and style from antiquity. Everything done or thought between 400 and I400 was simply dumped into a black hole.32 While, therefore, the change in the West late in the first millennium was one which saw the end of

western antiquity, the Renaissance can better be described as a cultural explosion within the context of a post-antique culture with a relatively consistent political framework.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the Renaissance period with regard to Europe is that it saw the start of the incorporation of eastern Europe into the concept, by which I mean Europe east of the Latin Church. The reason for this region's previous separation is its close identification with the eastern Roman empire. Just as the unitary Roman empire from the first century BC to the fourth AD extended over three continents, so did the eastern Roman empire in the fifth and sixth centuries. Even after the Arab conquests of the Near East and North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries, it still extended over parts of Europe and Asia, retaining footholds on the Asia Minor side of the Bosphorus into the four teenth century. Whereas the Carolingian revival of the western Roman empire and its extension in the form of the Latin Church were restricted entirely to Europe, by contrast the eastern Roman empire, despite shrinking by stages from three continents to two and from two to one, retained throughout the mantle of the Roman empire and with it a character difficult to identify with a single continent. The political units of eastern Europe could, then, according to this argument, only become part of the coherent development of Europe after the fall of the eastern empire in I453. Their absorption was also facilitated by the Reformation and the consequent loss of identification between 'Europe' and the Latin Church.

Conclusion

Acknowledging the extreme simplification involved in summing up a question of such complexity, the case presented here is that the origins of Europe can, according to different criteria, be said to lie in three of the periods discussed. By the criterion of the existence of characteristics which distinguish the region over an extended period of time, the origins of Europe lie in the Bronze Age. By the criterion of awareness of the concept, they can be traced to the Greeks. The third criterion of a coherent process leading to modern Europe is, because of its inherent vagueness, the most debated, with strong cases having been made for late antiquity in the West, the linked Carolingian and Ottonian periods, and the Renaissance. The case for the late antique period is weakened by the effect on any coherent process of the end of antiquity, and the cases for the Carolingian and Ottonian periods conversely strengthened because they resulted from that break. The Caro lingian state itself and its expansion in the form of the Latin Church lay entirely

within Europe; its rulers displayed an awareness of the concept of Europe; and there is plentiful evidence for a continuity in development from the ninth century

32. J. Gillingham, 'From Civilitas to Civility: Codes

of Manners in Medieval and Early Modern England,'

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, xii, 2002,

pp. 267-89.



ERIC FERNIE 53

to the Renaissance, in the fields of politics (both secular and ecclesiastical), law, economics and technology.

Given the character of the subject, an investigation of the origins of Europe cannot arrive at a firm conclusion, but I hope I have set out at least the main grounds on which choices can be made, and provided a basis for considering the Carolingian period the most convincing candidate, under the third criterion, for the beginning of the European age.

Courtauld Institute of Art



Documents

Origins of Europe