Canon of Flanders: Charlemagne’s Frankish Empire

In Rome on Christmas Day of the year 800, Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish king, Charlemagne, as emperor. For Charlemagne, that ceremony in the old St Peter's Basilica had great symbolic value. After all, the monarch saw himself as the heir to the western Roman emperors.

Charlemagne, a nobleman from a family with roots in the Maas valley, became autocrat of the Frankish Empire in 771. By waging war, he expanded his empire until it encompassed much of western and central Europe. This vast area he tried to organise as best he could. It was divided into several districts each headed by a provincial governor. Royal inspectors visited regularly to check on the governors. Charlemagne encouraged the development of art and science. He had schools founded, invited scholars to court and promoted intellectual life in abbeys. Much later his reign was referred to by historians as the Carolingian Renaissance.

As early as the 3rd century, Germanic tribes crossed the Rhine into the Roman Empire. Usually they were uninvited guests, but sometimes the Romans deliberately gave these newcomers a permanent home within the empire and made them military allies. Moreover, during the 4th century, the empire itself often organised military campaigns across the Rhine, with the aim of bringing people to our regions and present-day France with the intention of putting them to work as farmers or as soldiers.

Strong Frankish kings like Clovis and Dagobert I expanded their territory, but around the year 700 the rulers of this 'Merovingian' dynasty lost significance. Real power ended up with their mayors of the palace, managers of the household of the Frankish king. Eventually, the mayors of the palace also formally assumed power. They formed the Carolingian dynasty, with Charlemagne as its most important representative.

From the district of Flanders to County of Flanders

Charlemagne had made efforts to bring unity to his vast territory through inspections, laws and a single currency. But the Frankish rulers were in the habit of dividing their empire among their sons. Charles had only one surviving son, but his three grandsons each claimed a share of power for themselves. The division of the empire into three parts was established in 843 under the Treaty of Verdun. The River Scheldt formed the border between the western and middle part.

The separate kingdoms retained the guilds system. At first, the provincial governors were royal officials, but soon they swore allegiance to their sovereign, the feudal lord, and promised him military assistance in exchange for jurisdiction over the area the feudal lord was entitled to govern. The bond between provincial governors and the sovereign thus became much more personal than that of an official. Their title passed from father to son. This system of mutual loyalty formed the basis of what historians call 'feudalism'.

One such district was the Pagus Flandrensis, initially the (coastal) area around Oudenburg and Bruges. The term first appears in the 7th century and is probably derived from flauma, a reconstructed Germanic word meaning something like 'marsh' or 'flooded area'. The Flandrenses, originally just the Coastal Flemish, were thus 'the People of Swampy Areas'. Later, the regions around Kortrijk and Ghent were added and the county of Flanders was formed. East of the River Scheldt, other jurisdictions developed in a similar way, such as the Duchy of Brabant and the County of Loon.

From the manors, a small elite that held all the economic and military power ruled: the nobility. Ordinary people became increasingly unfree, sometimes in exchange for protection. They had to give up a large part of their harvest and work for free on the land of noble lords. From the 12th century onwards, this serfdom gradually disappeared in north-western Europe.

The spread of Christianity

Christianity was introduced to north-western Europe by Roman soldiers, as one of the many eastern religions they imported. However, for a long time to come, local people continued to believe in their own gods and religious stories.  A large-scale conversion only took place from the 7th century onwards facilitated by itinerant missionaries like Eligius, Amandus and Willibrordus. They replaced pagan shrines with Christian ones, founded places of worship as well as the first abbeys. By the 8th century, most people in the Southern Netherlands had been converted to Christianity.

Important abbeys, after 800, included the St Peter's and St Bavo's Abbey in Ghent and the Abbey of Lobbes in present-day Hainaut Province. At that time these large abbeys were the only intellectual centres, where the culture of writing and reading remained alive and some of the knowledge of classical antiquity was preserved and passed on. Much of that classical knowledge was nevertheless lost in Western Europe and would partly return centuries later thanks to Arab scholars.

Abbeys were also centres of power and land ownership. Some owned up to thousands of hectares of land. They were usually led by abbots descended from the Carolingian nobility. Though abbeys suffered badly during the Norman raids of the 9th century, they nevertheless remained important economic and cultural players throughout the Middle Ages.