Even the education of the poor was not wholly uncared for in the Iron Age. Witness the constitutions of Ado of Vercelli, Dado of Verden, and Heraclius of Liege, in which the establishment of “little,” or parochial, schools, is ordained, wherein poor children of both sexes, about the age of seven, are to be received and taught gratis, the girls and boys being always separated from one another. The regulations, simple as they are, have a very modern sound; and so also have those other constitutions of Riculf of Soissons, who, for the improvement of his parish priests, hit on a scheme of clerical conferences, in order to afford them means of mutual edification, on a plan precisely similar to that adopted in later times.
But we have dwelt long enough on the aspect which the tenth century presented in France. Something remains to be said of the state of schools and monasteries during the same period on the other side of the Rhine, where the achievements of the German prelates were crowned with a much larger share of success, and well deserve a chapter to themselves.
CHAPTER X.
THE AGE OF THE OTHOS.
A.D. 911 TO 1024.
Louis the Fourth, surnamed the Child, the last of the race of Charlemagne who bore rule in Germany, died in 911, leaving the empire torn to pieces with feudal wars and the devastations of Hungarians, Sclaves and Normans. As the right of choosing his successor belonged to the nobles, they offered the crown to Otho, duke of Saxony, who with singular disinterestedness refused it, and recommended as most worthy of the royal dignity, his own feudal rival, Conrad of Franconia, who accordingly received the crown. Not to be outdone in generosity, Conrad, at his death, named the son of Otho as his successor, and thus Henry the Fowler became the first German sovereign of the house of Saxony. His victory over the Hungarians at Marsberg, in 933, gave them their first decisive check, and in 936, his son Otho the Great completed the discomfiture of the barbarians at the great battle of Leck, after which they never again showed their face in Germany. In 952, Otho was crowned king of Italy, having been called into that country to oppose the usurper Beranger. Eight years later he was invited to Rome by Pope John XII. and crowned emperor, no prince having borne that title in the West for the space of forty years. Though on some occasions he failed not to evince that tendency to despotism in Church matters which was the hereditary vice of the German emperors, yet his reign was truly glorious, and is spoken of by ancient writers as a kind of golden age. His mother Matilda, and his two wives, Editha and Adelaide, the first of whom was an English princess, together with his brother Bruno, Archbishop of Cologne, were all canonised saints. He showed himself the friend of religion and learning, and caused his son, Otho II., to receive a learned education. His grandson, Otho III., who succeeded to the crown in 983, was also a scholar, and a pupil of Gerbert’s, and surnamed the Wonder of the World. At his death the crown passed to his cousin, St. Henry of Bavaria, whose brother-in-law, St. Stephen of Hungary, converted his people to Christianity, and changed those wild barbarians, so long the scourge of Europe, into a civilised and Christian nation.
Thus, for the space of a century, Germany was blessed with a succession of great Christian rulers, who, if they had some defects, were yet on the whole protectors of religion, and encouragers of learned men. Italy, indeed, is represented by most historians as presenting during the same period a scene of lamentable decay; and Tiraboschi gives the names of only two bishops as possessing any pretensions to learning, namely, Atto of Vercelli, and Ratherius of Verona. But allowance must be made for the exaggerations of party-writers, and there are facts which cannot be altogether reconciled with their sweeping statements. Studies were certainly carried on in the monasteries that escaped the rage of the Saracens, and Muratori cites a long catalogue of books, all either copied or collected at Bobbio during the tenth century. Baronius, whose strictures on the state of Italy are exceedingly severe, quotes the acts of a council held at Rheims in 992, wherein it is declared that there was scarcely one person to be found at that time in Rome who knew the first elements of learning. Considering the unhappy and scandalous factions which then held sway in the Roman capital, no picture of social disorder would seem too black for us to credit; yet bad as things were, one is staggered at the notion that no one in the city of the Popes and the Cæsars should know even how to read. A few years previously to the date assigned, Rome, as we shall see, not only possessed good masters herself, but supplied them to the German seminaries; nor is there any reason for supposing that her political disasters necessarily closed her schools. If, from the acts of a remote council, we turn to the writings of one thoroughly conversant with the state of Italy, the man of his age best qualified to judge of any matter connected with learning—I mean the famous Ratherius of Verona—we shall find a very different description of the state of things which he had witnessed with his own eyes. His testimony is the more remarkable from the fact that he was the great censor of his age, sparing neither clergy nor bishops in his caustic attacks. Yet he assures us that in his time, and he died in 974, there was no place where a man could get better instructed in sacred letters than in Rome. “What is taught elsewhere on ecclesiastical dogma,” he says, “that is unknown there? It is there that we find the sovereign doctors of the whole world; it is there that the most illustrious princes of the Church have flourished. There the decrees of the pontiffs are to be found; there the canons are examined; there some are approved and others rejected; what is condemned there is nowhere else approved, nor do men elsewhere approve of what is there condemned. Where, then, could I be more sure to find wisdom than at Rome, which is its fountain-head?”[131] About the same time Gerbert, the literary wonder of his age, arrived in Rome, where his scientific acquirements were so thoroughly appreciated by Pope John XIII. as to induce that pontiff to prevent his return into Spain; and he accordingly wrote to the emperor, advising him to secure the services of a man who was thoroughly well-versed in mathematics, and able to teach them to others. But how preposterous it seems to suppose that the mathematics of Gerbert should be thus highly valued in a city where hardly a man was to be found acquainted with the first elements of letters! Again, we find from Gerbert’s own correspondence that it was from Italy that he chiefly obtained his books. There is no city in that country, he says, where good writers and copyists are not to be found; a fact which conclusively proves that somebody was also to be found to buy what was written, for the book trade could not have been kept up without a fair supply of readers. And in the year 1000 only eight years after the above-named council had furnished Baronius with its dismal authority for proving Italy to be sunk in the grossest ignorance, we find a German noble named Wippo exhorting the emperor Henry II. to send the sons of the German nobles to be educated “after the manner of the Italians.” Not that it at all concerns us to whitewash the history of Italy in the tenth century, confessedly the very nadir of her ecclesiastical annals; but there is no reason for unfairly blackening even a damaged reputation, and the united testimonies given above may at least be taken as evidence that the words of the council must not be too literally understood.
In the present chapter, however, I propose to speak only of the state of letters in Germany, where the tenth century was certainly very far from deserving to be stigmatised as an age of iron or lead. All the monastic chroniclers bear witness to the rapid extension of letters, which was encouraged by the Saxon emperors, to the extraordinary multiplication of schools, and the harvest of great men whom they produced, so that even Meiners is forced to acknowledge that at no period did Germany possess so many virtuous and learned ecclesiastics. Much of this happy state of things is to be attributed to the labours and example of St. Bruno, the younger brother of Otho the Great, and, like him, a pupil of Heraclius of Liege. His education began at Utrecht, where he was sent at the mature age of four, to commence his studies under the good abbot Baldric. Utrecht had never entirely lost its scholastic reputation since the days of St. Gregory. Only a few years before the birth of Bruno the see had been filled by St. Radbod, a great-grandson of that other Radbod, duke of Friesland, who had so fiercely opposed the preaching of St. Boniface. Radbod the bishop, however, was a very different man from his savage ancestor; he was not only a pious ecclesiastic, but an elegant scholar, for he had been educated in the Palatine school of Charles the Bald, under the learned Mannon, whose heart he won by his facility in writing verses; and the cares of the episcopate never induced him altogether to neglect the Muses. Besides a great number of poems which he wrote during his residence at Utrecht, we have a Latin epigram, which he improvised at the moment of receiving the Holy Viaticum, and which is perhaps as worthy of being preserved as the dying epigram of the Emperor Hadrian.[132]