A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

When the king went for a drive, it was in an ox-cart driven by his ploughman. So in the Dark Ages,
the whole of Europe was rather like Ireland in the seventeenth century: poor, barren and very
provincial.
In fact, Ireland in the seventh century A.D. was a great deal ahead of most of the rest of Europe. In
the fifth century, a Briton named Patrick had been captured by Irish pirates and learned their
strange tongue; he went to Ireland and converted the country. The Irish, who were Celts, took to
learning as avidly as the Arabs would a few centuries later, and their monasteries became miniature
universities. All over Europe, it was the monasteries that preserved books and kept learning alive.
Now that the Roman emperor was in Constantinople, the pope had virtually become emperor of the
west; he enthusiastically encouraged rulers such as Clovis (later Latinised to Louis), who
conquered in the name of the Church. The various bishops and abbots were naturally granted land;
so the monks and churchmen of the Dark Ages were among the few who could count on eating a
square meal every day and drinking a glass of wine. Otherwise, life in the Dark Ages was as harsh
and difficult as it had been since human beings began to build cities in Mesopotamia. Most people
were chronically undernourished - as disinterred skeletons show - and an enormous percentage of
babies died at birth or soon after. Robber bands roamed what was left of the roads. If anyone could
have remembered the good old days of Roman occupation, they would have sighed with nostalgia.
It was the ‘law of expansion’ - expand or perish - that destroyed the Merovingians. Clovis divided
his realm between four sons, which was a mistake. The historian Morris Bishop says: ‘the realm
would soon have been subdivided into numerous tiny principalities had not the excess of heirs been
diminished by illness (poison) and accident (murder).’ (The Penguin Book of the Middle Ages, p.
20.) But there was nowhere for these feeble kings (rios fainéants) to expand to. They began to rely
increasingly on their major domos - or ‘mayors of the palace’ - so that the real power fell into their
hands. One of them engineered the kidnapping of the heir to the throne in 656, and the child, named
Dagobert, was brought up in Ireland while the major domo’s son occupied the throne. Dagobert
managed to get back to France and take his throne back - only to be murdered as he took a nap
under a tree when out hunting. Charles Martel, the man who drove the Arabs out of France, was a
major domo. It was his son, known as Pépin the Short, who sent a message to the pope asking
whether the throne ought to be in the hands of a hopeless incompetent; the pope answered no. So
Pépin held an election and seized the throne. And Pépin repaid the pope by taking an army to Italy
and inflicting a number of defeats on the barbarian Lombards, who were making life difficult for
the pope. He then handed over the captured cities; they became the basis of the Papal States, and of
the tremendous power and wealth that the Church would accumulate in the coming centuries.
Pépin had grasped the basic law of history, the law of expansion. He went on to expand his domain
until it extended as far as the Pyrenees. And the lesson was also grasped by his son Charles, who
came to the throne in 768, ruled for the next forty-six years and became known as Charlemagne,
Charles the Great. He was a giant of a man, six feet four inches tall, with a drooping blond
moustache, a powerful physique, and an appetite for women that compares with that of Attila the
Hun - it is possible to detect a distinct note of envy in H. G. Wells’s account of him in the Outline
of History. He understood the law of expansion so well that he spent most of life fighting - his fiftyfour
campaigns including expeditions against Lombards, Saxons, Frisians, Danes, Avars, Gascons
and the Arabs in Spain. The Saxons of north-east Germany proved particularly hard to subdue.
They were pagans, who still held human sacrifices. Like most barbarians, they spent much of their
time raiding and often crossed into Charlemagne’s northern territory, looting and burning.
Charlemagne had much the same experience with the Saxons that the Romans had had with their