University of Virginia Library

INTRODUCTION

The Plan of St. Gall emerged at the height of a search for cultural
unity that struck through the whole of Carolingian life. The role
of the Plan was to stand in some degree as both agent and result of a
quest uniquely intensive in the epochs of Western history. The web of
intellectual, political, and religious life that appeared as a close-woven
tapestry, however briefly, under Charlemagne left behind it images of
dramatic potency to the future life of Europe and the West.

The common thread of that tapestry lay in the emergence and establishment
of Christianity in the West. Having been recognized as a
leading religion of the Roman state by Emperor Constantine in 325 A.D.
the faith had to be guarded against both the efforts of the state to
interpret the new belief in its own terms, and against any tendency to
sap its strength through internal splits (as presented by such heresies
as Arianism, Donatism, Pelagianism, and the growing diversity of monastic
observances). This defense was accomplished on one hand through
the institution of national synods assembled to hold in check doctrinal
contrariety, and on the other through development of an administrative
structure parallel to the organization of the Roman state. By this means
Christianity could step, as a traditional force, into the gap created by
the collapse of Roman secular power.

This transition was hard won. During the barbarian invasions of
Rome the unity of the Church was shattered by the fact that the Germanic
conquerors were either pagans or adherents of Arianism. Three
centuries were needed to quiet the claims of other forms of faith in
favor of a common creed.

A great turning point was reached with the conversion ca. 496 of the
Frankish king Clovis to the orthodox faith, and the resulting adoption
of it by all pagan and Arian nations that fell under the sway of the
Franks. Church and state once more began to draw together. As Frankish
power grew the increasing sense of unity was expressed through a
series of alliances that changed the face of the world. It was under
Charles Martel, a Frankish statesman of highest caliber, that this new
world was rescued from the threat of being overrun by the Moslems in
732; it was by Frankish rulers of Martel's house that the Papal See was
delivered from the prospect of submission to the Lombards. The alliance
was formally recognized when Pope Stephen II in 754 annointed Pepin
king of the Franks in Paris; it attained its fullest expression in the year
800 when Charlemagne allowed himself to be crowned Emperor of the
Romans by Pope Leo III in Rome.

In this manner there came into existence a new Imperium Christianum
that had its center not in Rome but in the transalpine kingdom of the
Franks. The reality was brief. The Carolingian empire, beset by selfish
demands of lesser scions of a great house, broke apart after the death of
its founder, but the ideal survived and maintained itself as a major force
in the shaping of modern Europe. Like the concept of empire itself, the
scheme for an ideal monastic settlement transmitted to us in the Plan
of St. Gall survived the collapse of the Carolingian power structure by
which it was first nurtured, and left a permanent imprint on monastic
planning for centuries to come.

In the chronological table that follows we have tried to assemble under
the rubrics EVENTS, STRUCTURES, and WRITING, a chain of significant
historical, artistic, and intellectual events that contributed most to the
shaping of this new cultural entity, intertwined as they were in the
maelstrom of those great population shifts that distinguish settlement
patterns of the new from those of the ancient world. It is intended as a
working sketch supplementary to our principal task, and made in the
hope that it might allow one to see the Plan of St. Gall somewhat
synoptically in its broader historical context.

Under the rubric STRUCTURES we list of Roman monuments only
those we have reason to presume were known to Charlemagne and his
court, or which may have influenced Carolingian architecture in ways
not yet able to be defined with precision. We hope our selection reflects
the richness, variety, and contrariety of that wave of new architectural
forms that flooded the empire after the official recognition of Christianity.
The monuments listed that were built in the turbulent territory of
the nascent Christian kingdoms of the North will, we hope, reflect with
sufficient strength the syncretic character of the architecture of a new,
very disparate cultural environment exposed to strong stimuli received
simultaneously from the Near East as well as the vernacular traditions
of the barbarian North.

Above all we hope that our treatment of the Carolingian period succeeds
in setting into strong relief the emergence, within a multitude of
varying forms, of an architectural style of fundamental importance for
the future. This architecture owes its strength to the ability of its
creators to resurrect the greatness of the Roman past (revival of the
Early Christian transept basilica as a standard form of Carolingian
church construction) as it owes to their capacity and determination to
simultaneously transform this borrowed architectural concept along
Northern modular concepts of space.

It has not been acknowledged by our illustrious profession with the
conviction that abundant evidence merits, that the formation of the
Western world owes as much to the aesthetic and intellectual bent of
the "barbarian" heirs of Rome as it does to the stimuli received from
the sophisticated traditions of the South. The entries under the rubric
WRITING we hope will support our contention that this is a truth
applying not only to architecture but also to the creation, in a comparable
process of interaction between North and South, of new and
distinctly medieval concepts in Carolingian literature and music.