THE MEROVINGIAN AGE

5. RAVENNA: s. VITALE, COMPLETED 547.

mosaics covering them. These glowing surfaces with austere, gaunt
figures in sombre tints, seem just as immaterial, as magical and
weightless as the surging and drooping curves of the octagon.
The Franks in Gaul, the Angles and Saxons in Britain, the Visi-
goths in Spain could not possibly appreciate the complexity and
sophistication of such churches. Theirs was still the outlook of native
tribes, although Clovis had accepted in 496 what he understood
as Christianity. With the same merciless cruelty in which the Anglo-
Saxon warrior revelled in England, all but exterminating what had
remained of civilisation on the island, the princes of the Merovin-
gians sought to exterminate whole families of rivals. The pages of
Gregory of Tours, who wrote in the second half of the 6th century,
are full of assassination, rape and perjury. Yet this is how our own
civilisation began, and how all civilisations begin—in the darkness of
tribal barbarism. The Church was the only tie between these shifting
kingdoms and the spiritual achievements of the South. Thus Anglo-
Saxon brutality was tamed by Irish monasticism (inspired in some
obscure way by the Coptic Church of Egypt) in die North and by
missionaries from Rome in the South, until, early in the 8th century,
the Venerable Bede and the circle around him attained a height of
education unparalleled anywhere else in Europe. What they built