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When the Canterbury illuminations were made, Charlemagne had already succeeded his father, who died in the year 768. During the next four decades he so extended his empire that it reached the Elbe in Germany and the Ebro in Spain; and included Bavaria, Lombardy and part of Carinthia. When he died in 814 it was as ' Augustus, Crowned by God, the great and peace bringing emperor of the Romans'. In crowning him with this title in the year 800, the Pope had offered him the 'adoration' due to an emperor, and before he died, Charles's claim to the imperial title was recognized by the Emperor of the East. Charlemagne, new representative of the old Rome as his title showed, was to win his place among the nine worthies of Christendom, worthies whose qualification is military success, like that of Joshua or Alexander or Caesar, or chivalrous bravery, like that of Hector. But it was not only as a great conqueror that he impressed his contemporaries: rather because his work meant the restoration of order in the political chaos of the times. And his own insistence on the need for a literary education arose in the first place from his awareness of the need for administrators; for monks who (as he told Abbot Baugulfus) would not only have good ideas, but would be able to express them properly on paper. Their suggestions might be sound, he told them, but their Latinity was not. Monasteries must therefore become educational centers. Incidentally, in Charles's view, a literary education was vital to a better understanding of the scriptures. But that does not seem to have come first with him. He was looking back, not to the golden age of Periclean Athens, or the Rome of Cicero or Virgil, but simply to an epoch when the ordinary man had been literate and civilized.

The revival of the arts at the court of Charles, however, does not originate only in a wish to restore the past. About forty years before Charles's accession, the Eastern Emperor, Leo the Isaurian, had begun a campaign to suppress the veneration of images. Under Leo's son it had become more violent, and had rent the whole of Christendom. During part of Charles's reign there was a temporary reaction in the east led by the Empress Irene, who was as extreme an iconodule as Leo had been iconoclast. The Roman authorities, anxious for a reconciliation and conscious of the weakness of their position, would gladly have come to terms with her views. But Charlemagne's advisers were suspicious, holding the opinion that there were serious objections to the extreme iconodule view; the actual worship of images was dangerous. But they argued that painting could be instructive for the illiterate, and that the decoration of a church contributed to its glories. This was the inspiration to which much Carolingian work was in the first instance due. But little 9th century church decoration had survived, and Carolingian art means for us mainly the books and ivories made for royal or noble patrons. The King's policy was laid down in the Libri Carolini, modified later in the light of experience, when his views about secular art became more liberal. But the decision not to adopt iconoclast principles, and to allow the use of images in moderation, was fraught with immense consequences. For it was out of Carolingian art that western Romanesque and Gothic art were to develop. If Charles had rejected images, their final return with the triumph of Orthodoxy in the Eastern Empire, in 843, might have been irrelevant to the history of the west.

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