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96 Stephen Dunford: The Journey of The IrIsh
Irish missionaries carrying the Christian Gospel to other lands
The missionary forays of the Irish monks continued successfully for five centuries and their influence was felt from the North Sea to the Mediterranean and from the Bay of Bis- cay to the banks of the Elbe. The great Emperor Charlemange, Charles the Great or Pater Europea-‘The Father of Europe,’ as he was also known, who was born in 742 and died in 814, is famously celebrated for uniting most of Western Europe during his reign.
But his time is also associated with a movement known as The Carolingian Renais- sance, a period of intellectual and cultural revival brought about through the medium of the Christian Church. Finding that there were none to surpass the Irish scholars, Charlemagne constantly sought them out and placed many in charge of his schools, not the less readily, perhaps, because they asked nothing in return, it is told, except “food and raiment, a con- venient dwelling, and ingenuous minds”.
So it happened that Charlemagne gathered to his court great numbers of Irish scholars and it is known that at one time the prominent position of court tutor was held by Clement, an Irishman. Furthermore, the Irish astronomer, Dungalus or in Irish Dungall, who once studied at Bangor, is credited with clarifying and interpreting for the Emperor (in a docu- ment still preserved and dated 811) the mysteries of the eclipses of the sun which occurred
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