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(piano)
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Man: I love to find out
where things come from.
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The question mark is Carolingian.
It comes from about 800.
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Woman: It is odd to find out the origin
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of something we take for granted
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like the question mark.
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We use the term Carolingian to refer
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to the time of Charlemagne
and his successors.
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Charlemagne, also Charles the Great,
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or Carolus Magnus, hence
the name Carolingian.
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Man: He was a king.
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He was famously crowned emperor in 800
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by the Pope in Rome and he ruled over
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a collection of kingdoms
that he had conquered,
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that his father had conquered,
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that his grandfather had conquered.
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Woman: He was a frank.
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Man: The ancient Romans
would have considered
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them barbarians.
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These are people who migrated
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into Western Europe from the East,
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and who settled into what is now Germany
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and Northern France.
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Eventually, over generations,
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this is before Charlemagne,
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they were able to consolidate their power
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and by the time we get to about 800,
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Charlemagne is ruling a
vast expanse of Europe.
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So how do we put together
this idea of this warlord
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conquering whole kingdoms and somebody
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who invents the question mark,
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who invents punctuation as we use it?
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Woman: Well strangely,
those things go together.
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Charlemagne had to govern a vast kingdom
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where there were many different languages
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and dialects spoken.
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He really needed to organize
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and educate to create a Christian
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kingdom, a Christian empire.
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Man: This was a really brutal period.
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These were warlords.
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These were when castles were being built
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because people were marauding.
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Armies were attacking.
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Fields were being burned.
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This was a tough period.
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Woman: So the stability that was there
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because of the Roman Empire,
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the relative stability is gone.
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There are really only vestiges
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of the civilizing functions
of the Roman Empire.
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Man: The Romans had law, they had roads,
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they had trade systems.
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They had educational systems.
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Woman: They had a vast bureaucracy
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and trained civil servants
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to help the government run.
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All of that was gone.
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Man: So they had to figure out
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how they could create systems again
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based in part on the old Roman systems,
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that were capable of holding
this empire together.
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But Charlemagne was deeply religious.
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He took his Catholic faith very seriously,
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and that became the binding agent
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for all of these diverse
peoples and lands.
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Woman: Charlemagne wanted to rule over
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a Christian kingdom and saw himself
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as a divinely ordained emperor.
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Man: The problem was that
most of his religious
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bureaucracy, his priests, were illiterate.
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He needed to find a
way that he could begin
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to educate these people
so that he could expose
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the population to a correct
version of Catholicism,
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that is, that they could get it right.
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Woman: And it was
important to get it right,
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because what had happened
over the centuries
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is that because of the lack of a central
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government and central structures,
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different tribes were
doing things differently.
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Different tribes had
their own set of laws.
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They had different ways of
practicing Christianity.
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You had too many diverse practices.
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He was interested in education.
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Educating the abbots,
the bishops, the priests,
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so that when they read the literagy,
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they were reading the correct thing.
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They were teaching the correct ideas.
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Man: Right, so we're not
talking about the peasantry.
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Woman: The priests are
teaching to those very people,
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but it's the priestly class that needed
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to be literate and educated.
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Man: Charlemagne is creating schools
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in order to accomplish this.
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He's bringing together
scholars for his own
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palace school in fact.
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From all across Europe.
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He brings in people
from Spain, from Italy,
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from England, from Ireland.
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He wants to learn how
to write Latin himself.
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Woman: Well, to get a
sense of how important
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learning was to Charlemagne,
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we have this quote from
an early biographer.
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"He avidly pursued the liberal arts
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"and greatly honored those teachers whom
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"he deeply respected.
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"To learn grammar he finally followed
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"the teaching of Peter of Pisa.
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"For the other disciplines,
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"he took as his teacher Alcuin of Britain,
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"the most learned man in the entire world.
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"Charlemagne invested a great deal of time
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"and effort setting rhetoric, dialectic,
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"and particularly astronomy with him.
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"He learned the art of calculating
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"and with deep purpose
and great curiosity,
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"investigated the movement of the stars.
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"He also attempted to learn how to write,
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"and for this reason, he used to place
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"wax tablets and
notebooks under his pillow
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"on his bed so that if
he had any free time,
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"he might accustom his
hand to forming letters.
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"But this effort came too late in life
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"and he achieved little success."
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I love that image of Charlemagne,
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the emperor sleeping with a tablet
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under his pillow so he can squeeze in some
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time to practice writing.
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Man: So Charlegmane created the political
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stability and the wealth that allowed him
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to begin to institute a kind of rigorous
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educational system.
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Not for the vast majority,
but for the bureaucracy,
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the clergy.
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Those people needed to be
able to read the Bible.
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They needed to be able to read Latin.
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This is a particularly important
moment in European history.
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Remember, Latin had been
spoken by the ancient Romans,
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but that was hundreds of years before.
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Woman: And Latin was importantly
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the language of government,
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and it was the language of the church.
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The two central authorities
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in Charlemagne's kingdom.
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Man: But language is a living thing
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and changes over time.
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This is the moment in history Latin
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begins to evolve into what we will
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eventually recognize as Spanish,
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as French, as Italian.
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The divergence of what had been Latin,
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Charlemagne was interested
in revising Latin,
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removing the change that had accumulated
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in Latin over the centuries,
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and reforming Latin,
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bringing it back to what he thought
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was its classical form,
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which means that we really have two
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different kinds of language.
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The high language Latin of the church,
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of government,
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and we have the common spoken languages
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of the people.
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So what does he do?
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He sets up schools throughout his kingdom,
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especially in monasteries.
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Woman: Charlemagne set up Scriptoria,
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places where the Monks could copy books.
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Man: Now what this allows is the ramping
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up of the production of religious texts
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and other ancient texts.
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So a number of manuscripts that come out
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of Scriptoriums increases dramatically.
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Woman: In the several hundred years
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before Charlemagne, we have
500 manuscripts that survive.
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But between 750 and 900,
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about the time that we consider the
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Carolingian period of Charlemagne
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and his successors,
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we have 7,000.
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So there is clearly a deliberate attempt
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to retrieve, to preserve and to copy text
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and also to correct texts.
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Man: Think about what
went into creating a book.
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These were handmade objects on materials
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that were quite expensive.
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This is long before paper
was used in the West.
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What they used was parchment, sheepskin.
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Woman: All of this is being done by hand.
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This is a really hard
thing for us to imagine.
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There is a Monk in a Scriptorium.
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By some accounts, one skilled
scribe could copy as many as
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7 pages with 25 lines
on each page in one day.
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So this is slow going.
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It's expensive and the scribes themselves
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had to be literate.
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Man: As a great quote by a scribe
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complaining about his work.
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Woman: "The art of scribes
is the hardest of arts.
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"It is difficult toil.
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"It is hard to bend the neck and plow
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"through the pages for three hours.
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"Three fingers write,
but the whole body toils.
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"Just as it is sweet for
the sailor to reach harbor,
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"so sweet is it for the writer to put
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"the final letter on the page."
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Man: Of course there was this newfound
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emphasis on doing it exactly right.
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Woman: And because they were so concerned
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about doing it exactly right,
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the Carolingians helped to develop
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a new kind of script called Minuscule.
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So just like Charlemagne was interested
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in standardizing, correcting the Bible
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and other texts,
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he was interested in standardizing
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writing so that more and more people
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could read it and more and more Monks
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would be able to copy it.
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Man: Right. He was lowering the bar
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in terms of the difficulty of writing
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so that he could create more efficiency
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and create more production
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so that more books could go out from the
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monasteries to the local churches
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and more people could get it right.
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Woman: Before this, writing had become
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very unclear.
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Words were elided with one another.
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Scribes often showed off with little
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calligraphic flourishes that made it
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difficult to read.
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Charlemagne was all about legibility.
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Making everything clear and correct.
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Charlemagne is all about correcting,
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reforming, standardizing, and wielded
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enormous power to make
those things happen.
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It's important to
remember at the same time
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that he is doing all
these fabulous educational
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and cultural reforms,
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he is also leading armies
and conquering people.
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Man: So all this education was necessary
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because Charlemagne was trying to create
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this Christian kingdom.
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He had moved beyond the borders that his
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father, his grandfather,
his great grandfather
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had accumulated.
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He moved South into Italy,
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conquering the Germanic
tribe, the Lombards,
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and taking on the title
King of the Lombards.
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He pushed successfully
into Spain just a bit
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in the area that is now
Catalonia and the Basque region.
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He pushed into Brittany
and probably with the
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most difficulty he subdued the Saxons.
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This was a non-Christian
tribe in the Northeast.
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Woman: He Christianized them.
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It took several decades.
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For all his educational reforms,
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we have to also remember that he
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could be a ruthless warrior.
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Man: There is one particular episode
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that really brings that home.
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Charlemagne apparently had thought
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he had subdued the Saxons.
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He had granted titles to their leaders
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as Aristocrats in his kingdom.
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But some of his men were attacked
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by a group of rebel Saxons
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and Charlemagne took his vengeance
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on Saxon captives,
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executing 4,500 in one day
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cutting off their heads.
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Woman: We still have an enormously
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important legacy from Charlemagne
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and his successors.
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Many historians call
this Carolingian period
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a Renaissance or at the
very least a Revival.
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A Revival of classical learning.
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Charlemagne intentionally looked back
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to ancient Rome,
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especially the period of ancient Rome
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that was Christian.
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For example, under Constantine.
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Above and beyond the question mark,
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90% of classical texts survived
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due to Charlemagne's scribes.
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Man: We're talking
about the great writings
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of ancient Rome.
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We have these because Charlemagne
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and Charlemagne's court thought that they
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were important.
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They copied them multiple times and some
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of those manuscripts have survived.
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Woman: In fact, some scholars believe
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that Charlemagne actually issued a call
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across his empire for rare and important
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books so that they would
be copied and preserved.
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Man: So we have a lot to
thank Charlemagne for.
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We have the question mark.
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We have our understanding
of classical authors
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and early religious texts.
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And people have seen Charlemagne
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as responsible for, to a large extent,
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inventing what we will come
to know as modern Europe.
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(piano music)
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