[Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne] borrowed from Roman architecture in the design of churches and palaces such as his main palace at Aachen. Mindful of the Byzantine ban on icon painting currently in force, he promoted representational Christian art through frescoes, the first Christian sculpture, and above all the production of illuminated manuscripts containing realistic depictions of Bible stories.
This touched Charlemagne's foremost concern: education. Low rates of literacy plus a fragmentation of Latin into regional dialects in the centuries following the fall of Rome created problems both for the spread of church teaching and the administration of an empire. Medieval Latin needed to be standardised into a common language for western Europe.
So to Aachen Charlemagne brought scholars from across western Europe. He funded the copying of all surviving Latin texts and the development of monasteries as centers of learning. The driving intellectual force behind Charlemagne's program was Alcuin of York, adviser at Charlemagne's court, then abbot at the monastery of Tours, which he made the foremost training ground for the clergy. Abbey schools such as Tours were not oases of contemplation but engines disseminating Christian learning to the reaches of the empire, and with this came a newly uniform Latin as lingua franca for Europe's educated classes, together with a new and quicker way writing it down using lowercase letters - the way the words are printed in this book.
- Peter Davidson, Atlas of Empires, Chichester, 2018, p.85
See also:Blog: Precious vessels, 28 February 2011
Blog: 96 hours in the Eternal City, 16 October 2010
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