By Kim Rendfeld
In Charlemagne’s day (748-814), astronomy was a blend of natural
philosophy and religion, a study of the creation — and the creator.
Medieval people saw God’s hand in everything, from providing
a good harvest to feed them through winter to healing the sick to deciding the
victor of the war. So they would do what they could to gain God’s favor. Three
days of litanies were part of the military strategy. In the medieval mind,
searching the night sky for clues to God’s will made sense.
The universe had to be orderly, and Carolingians relied on
Roman books to explain it: Pliny’s Natural
History, Macrobius’s Commentary on
the Dream of Scipio, Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury, and Calcidius’s Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus. Early
medieval intellectuals placed Earth at the center of the universe and the sun,
moon, and seven planets revolving around it in eccentric patterns — that is, circles
within each other but not sharing the same center — and at different angles to
the Earth’s plane. Planets, the keepers of God’s time, could also move in
epicycles, loops along a circle.
King Charles himself took a keen interest in astronomy and
corresponded with scholars about phenomena such as eclipses and the size of the
moon. His biographer Einhard elaborates, “He learned how to calculate and with
great diligence and curiosity investigated the course of the stars.” Charles passed on his interest in astronomy,
along with the six other liberal arts, to his children, both sons and
daughters. In a poem, the scholar Alcuin mentions a daughter gazing at the
night sky and praising God, who created it.
The pursuit of knowledge fit into Charles’s imperial
ambitions. In 780, he recruited foreign intellectuals, and in the decade that
followed, workers were converting the royal villa at Aachen to a palace, one of
many construction projects Charles would undertake.
Astronomical events were important enough to record in the
annals. The year 810 saw two eclipses of the sun and the moon, and 812 had a
midday eclipse of the sun. To Einhard, those eclipses, spots on the sun lasting
seven days, and a ball of brilliant fire that fell from the sky during a war
were among the signs that Charles was near the end of his life.
Einhard says Charles ignored the omens. Perhaps the emperor
decided not to make a big deal of them publicly. But a year after that last
eclipse, the 65-year-old monarch in declining health appeared to be putting his
affairs in order. He invited his son Louis, the king of Aquitaine, to the
assembly in Aachen, placed a crown on Louis’s head, and named him co-emperor. Charles
also ordered that his grandson Bernard be called king of Italy, succeeding Louis’s
late brother.
A few months after the assembly, a high fever and pleurisy
sent Charles to his bed. He died a week later on January 28, 814. The annals
say nothing about the sky that night.
Sources
- Einhard's The Life of Charlemagne translated by Evelyn Scherabon Firchow and Edwin H. Zeydel
- Carolingian Chronicles, which includes the Royal Frankish Annals and Nithard's Histories, translated by Bernard Walter Scholz with Barbara Rogers
- P.D. King's Charlemagne: Translated Sources
- Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne, by Pierre Riché, translated by Jo Ann McNamara
- Planetary Diagrams for Roman Astronomy in Medieval Europe, Ca. 800-1500, Volume 94, Part 3, by Bruce Eastwood and Gerd Grasshoff
- A History of Western Astrology Volume II: The Medieval and Modern Worlds by Nicholas Campion
- Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe by Stephen C. McCluskey
- Ordering the Heavens: Roman Astronomy and Cosmology in the Carolingian Renaissance by Bruce Eastwood
