of Charlemagne's family did not present examples of Christian
piety or devotion, but it may be in place here to mention that
Saint Rosalie, the patron saint of Palermo, was of a family said
to have descended from that of Charlemagne. Saint Rosalie,
becoming filled with a spirit of devotion, retired to a grotto
on Mount Pelegrino, where in solitude she passed her time in
prayer and penitence. Of her is told the legend that,
surreptitiously conveying bread concealed in her apron to feed
the hungry, without her father's consent, she was discovered by
him and requested to open her apron, when it was found that the
bread had been changed into magnificent roses._]

Charlemagne died in 813. From that time until the end of the tenth
century there were no women who can, by the greatest elasticity of which
the term is susceptible, be called Christian, and who, at the same time
were of any note in history. The gloom of the dark ages had not begun to
lift. There was nothing to stimulate the woman of ordinary birth to the
exercise of any powers save the most inferior. The broadening influence
of literature was unknown. Charlemagne encouraged study among his
courtiers; but he could not revive the smouldering embers. During the
succeeding centuries, Greek lore came to be forgotten in the Western
world. The manners, even among the noblest dames, were inconceivably
rude. Every woman, not excepting the daughters of the emperor, worked
with her hands in the common affairs of the household. What the morals
of the time were, we have already seen. Convents sprang up everywhere,
sheltering a great number of women, of both high and low degree.

They were refuges from the barbarities which accompanied warfare, and,
to a lesser degree, safeguards against the temptation of the world, the
flesh and the devil. The former fanatical enthusiasm for celibacy had
greatly subsided; bishops and priests not infrequently were married, and
even the nunneries gave occasion for lively stories which became
traditional. It was an age when two sisters, Marozia and Theodora, both
prostitutes, could decide the succession to the papal tiara. The former
secured it for her bastard son, and also for her grandson, the infamous
John XII., during whose pontificate, as Gibbon puts it, "the Lateran
palace was turned in a school for prostitution, and his rapes of virgins
and widows deterred the female pilgrims from visiting the tomb of St.
Peter, lest,