(1) The region was much fought over, being under the influence in successive eras of the Saracens, Carolingians , the Holy Roman Empire, the counts of Toulouse, the Catalans, René of Anjou, and the House of Savoy.(2) Shortly after the death of Charlemagne, the Carolingian empire split into a western, a middle, and an eastern kingdom.(3) The Carolingians attempted to put together a sort of western revival of the Empire.(4) The letters of the new script, called the Carolingian minuscule, were written in upper and lower case, with punctuation and words were separated.(5) Membership of the Frankish royal families, both the Merovingians and the Carolingians , was by contrast restricted to the male line, but the wives and mothers of kings were often from the aristocracy.(6) In 796 Alcuin retired from Charlemagne's Palace School at Aachen and became abbot of the Abbey of St Martin at Tours, where he had his monks continue to work with the Carolingian minuscule script.(7) Irish ideas had fed Carolingian notions of kingship, but the fully-fledged Carolingian royal ideology which played such a role in England was not retransmitted to Ireland.(8) Like their Greek and Roman predecessors, royalty and nobles with Carolingian blood coursing through their veins tended to marry their close or distant relatives in an effort to keep the bloodline relatively pure.(9) It was the landowner who provided the costly armies for the Carolingians .(10) With the diffusion of standardized Latin and Carolingian script in the centuries preceding the high Middle Ages, he suggested, the cost of storing information in multiple copies fell.(11) The Carolingians inherited land that retained some of the attributes of Roman administration, specifically laws and systems of taxation.(12) Yet it is important to note that the Frankish frontiers were inherited from those the Carolingian rulers subjected to Frankish rule rather than being the outcome of deliberate strategic choice.(13) It was the Wandering Scholars or Goliards who used the vernacular instead of classical or even medieval or Carolingian Latin.(14) But how was Carolingian rule perceived in Italy?(15) He traces the inception, and to some extent the dissemination, of the bipartite rural estate to the designs of the Carolingians .(16) Against these pressures the Carolingians could not stand.
