Charlemagne, crowned emperor in 800, if not perhaps the wondrous hero of tradition, was a very powerful factor in the history and civilization of his day, and exerted all his energy to introduce order and learning among the vast hordes of barbarians who more or less willingly acknowledged his rule. He stirred up all latent powers, introduced new ideas and stimulated an admiration for all Roman culture, being dazzled quite as much by the actual pomp and splendour of the Constantinopolitan court as by the memories of ancient Rome. He invited learned men from the East and the West, but the most famous were Alcuin, who was born at York, and his pupil, Eginhardt, who became Secretary and Chronicler to Charlemagne and his successor. The Carlovingian renaissance was a most composite production. Byzantine Art had long been known to the Northern races, and at this time its influence was spread still further by the presence of artists exiled by the iconoclasts; but the Anglo-Saxon influence was even stronger, encouraged as it was by the bands of missionaries, and by Alcuin and his followers. To these intermingled strains must be added the independent Gallo-Roman reminiscence, the study of the monuments, and also a strange, but undeniable Oriental tendency, arising from communications with the East and the Moors in Spain. This renaissance, though to a certain extent artificial, lasted for nearly three centuries and affected the civilization of the whole of Western Europe. Carlovingian art flourished for centuries in Germany, but the invasions of the Normans checked for a while the artistic progress of Northern France. What little art they had was in much the same Norse style, but freshly barbaric and not like that of the British Isles, which had undergone centuries of incubation and had the additional Latin element. It was to this Anglo-Saxon Art, conventional as it had become, the human form often being reduced to a geometrical figure, that the Carlovingian craftsmen turned for inspiration. Two classes of ivory carving arose, one copied almost directly from the miniatures in the Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, which were themselves derived from late Roman types; and the second following more closely in the steps of the Byzantines.