Quest of the Spirit: From Suffering to Acceptance

123.Larger Than Life! Pepin,Clovis,Ulfila,Charlemagne!

         Harun al-Rashid  (786-809) was a contemporary of Charlemagne and one of the most celebrated of Abbasid Caliphs. Under his rule, Baghdad became the commercial center of the Moslem world. Rashid was a scholar, poet, and a well-versed  historian,  who gathered scholars from several fields such as poetry, law, and astronomy, around him His fame spread throughout Europe. He and Charlemagne exchanged gifts and compliments as respective masters of the East and West. He is today known as the hero of many of the stories in  One Thousand  and One Arabian Nights. Charlemagne (782-816) is known for his greatness as a leader, as well as his father Pepin and his grandfather Charles Martel. Crowned Emperor of the Western Holy Roman Empire in 800 A. D. , Charlemagne was also a patron of the arts,  education, and religion. Although his grandfather Charles (the Hammer) Martel is given credit for saving Christianity from Moslem domination at the Battle of Tours in 732, Charlemagne, or Charles the Great, recognized and respected their differences in the two cultures and faiths. This strategic battle occurred exactly one hundred years after the death of Mohammed ( Hayes 478).  Almost seven feet tall, he and Rashid maintained  a state peace between their worlds  and communicated freely with one another with ideas, understanding , and toleration.

             Three hundred years before Charlemagne's reign, Clovis, King of the Franks (481-511) encouraged and achieved the conversion of the Franks to Christianity.Ambitious to consolidate  all of gaul under one rule, he directed the publication of Salic Law into Latin.  Clovis married a Bergundian princess who was a Catholic convert, and on Christmas Day 496, he was baptized at Rheims with three thousand soldiers and "received into the Church" (Hayes 466). According to historian Carlton J. H. Hayes, this event "marked the real beginning of the wholesale conversion of the Germans. As the Franks overcame the Alemans in northeastern Gaul and the Visigoths in southern Gaul, they gave their own name and their new faith to the greater part of the whole province; 'Gaul' became France; and 'France' the dominion of the Franks--was hailed by the Popes at Rome as the 'eldest daughter' of the Church" (Hayes 466).

              Just over one hundred years before Clovis' birth  lived Ulfila, an early missionary to the Germans "whose grandparents had been Christians in Asia Minor and had been taken captive in a Gothic raid and  carried off to lands north of the Danube" (Hayes 464). Asia Minor was the area where the apostle Paul had preached during his lifetime. Ulfila was later "sent as an envoy or a hostage to Constantinople." According to Hayes, "While he strengthened  his companions in their new faith and taught them to read and write, he did not neglect the pagan Goths whom he had left behind. To them he sent a stream of his disciples as missionaries, so that by the time the whole tribe of Visigoths were permitted by the Emperor Valens to enter the Roman Empire (376), the bulk of them had become Arian Christians. Not least among the achievements of Ulfila was his translation of the Bible into Gothic, the first book written in a German language" (Hayes 465).

                                                                                      Works Cited

Hayes, Carlton J. H. and  Parker Thomas Moon.  Ancient and Medieval History. New York: The                     Macmillan Company, 1935.