CivStory

Monasteries, Cathedrals and Universities

A monastic rule, a revived western empire, translators in Toledo, early universities and Gothic cathedrals, and how Arabic and Greek learning reached them, up to the Black Death and Florence's dome.

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Part 1

By tradition in about 529, Benedict of Nursia founded a monastery on the hill of Monte Cassino, between Rome and Naples. His Rule, drawing on earlier monastic texts, ordered the monks' day around prayer, manual work and reading under an abbot. Almost all that is known of his life comes from the Dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great, and the Rule became the standard in Latin monasteries only under the Carolingians.

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Part 2

On Christmas Day 800 Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne, king of the Franks and the Lombards, as emperor in St Peter's in Rome. His wars had added Saxony, whose people were converted by force, and his court at Aachen gathered scholars such as Alcuin of York. Carolingian scribes copied much of the classical Latin literature that survives today, in a clear new script, Carolingian minuscule.

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Part 3

After Castile took Toledo in 1085, the city's Jewish, Arabic-speaking Christian and Latin scholars began turning Arabic works into Latin. From about 1130, and above all with Gerard of Cremona, who died in 1187, they translated mathematics, astronomy, medicine and philosophy, from the Persian scholars al-Khwarizmi and Ibn Sina to Arabic versions of Aristotle and Ptolemy. 'School of Translators' is a later name for this long activity, which fed the curricula of the new universities.

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Part 4

From the late 11th century students from across Europe came to Bologna to study Roman law with teachers such as Irnerius. They formed self-governing associations, universitates, that hired teachers and elected rectors; the founding date of 1088 was fixed only in 1888. With Paris and Oxford, Bologna became a model for Europe's universities, though older institutions of higher learning existed elsewhere, such as the Nizamiyya madrasas of the Seljuk lands.

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Part 5

On 11 June 1144 Abbot Suger consecrated the new east end of the royal abbey church of Saint-Denis, north of Paris. Pointed arches, rib vaults and wide stained-glass windows, none of them new in itself, were combined into one space filled with coloured light, which Suger, in his own account of the work, called a 'new light'. The combination is conventionally taken as the start of Gothic architecture.

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Part 6

In the Rhineland, the Benedictine abbess Hildegard completed Scivias, an account of 26 visions with their interpretation, around 1151, after Pope Eugene III had read part of it and encouraged her to go on. She also wrote on medicine and natural history, composed some 70 liturgical songs and a sung morality play, and corresponded with Bernard of Clairvaux, popes and emperors. In 2012 the Catholic Church named her a Doctor of the Church.

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Part 7

In October 1347 Genoese galleys returning from Caffa in Crimea brought plague to Messina in Sicily. Caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which had spread west from Central Asia, the pandemic killed perhaps a third to a half of Europe's people by 1351, on modern estimates that vary, and struck Cairo, Damascus and much of the Islamic world as hard. In many towns Jews were falsely accused of poisoning wells and massacred.

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Part 8

Florence, hard hit by the plague, kept building its cathedral. Filippo Brunelleschi, a goldsmith by training, won the 1418 competition to vault its octagonal crossing, some 45 metres across, and built the dome from 1420 to 1436 without full wooden centring, using two linked shells, herringbone brickwork and hoisting machines of his own design. It joined medieval building craft with new engineering, and the cathedral was consecrated in 1436.

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