ABSTRACT
There is ample justification for considering the Carolingian age as an entity: its sources are readily at hand; the period lends itself to an easy delineation as it spans a time of no more than a hundred and fifty years; the ruling dynasty was the same throughout and exhibited the same basic, but characteristic features; and, above all, Frankish society and its government underwent what may in modern parlance be called a radical ideological transformation within these chronological limits. Lastly, from a wider historical point of view the Carolingian age deserves particular attention, because it constituted the period of Europe’s gestation and apprenticeship, the period in which the concept of Europe as a cultural, social, religious and especially political entity, sustained by its own forces, became for the first time an operational concept. For Europe was not a geographical expression, but denoted a perfectly well understood conceptual structure characterized on the one hand by the multiform if not heterogeneous complexion of the inhabitants under Carolingian rule, and on the other hand by the unifying and cementing bond of the Roman-Latin, Western as opposed to Byzantine, Christianity. It is these main features which, I believe, furnish sufficient justification for subjecting the period to a fresh analysis and interpretation within the confines of a limited amount of lectures.
