Download PDF | Laury Sarti - Orbis Romanus_ Byzantium and the Legacy of Rome in the Carolingian World-Oxford University Press (2024).
417 Pages
Preface
The idea for this monograph grew and matured over the years while working on different topics and projects. My studies were facilitated by the help and advice of many friends and colleagues whom I would like to thank here. The research started in Berlin, where I benefited from the scholarship and advice of Stefan Esders and his students. Since 2020, this project has been associated with the Leibniz-WissenschaftsCampus. Byzanz zwischen Orient und Okzident.
Writing started in August 2019, and the manuscript was completed in Freiburg. Until then, many aspects had been discussed in the framework of different conferences in Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, Kalamazoo, Leeds, Münster, and Oxford, and the colloquia led in Freiburg by Birgit Studt and Jürgen Dendorfer. The late Dariusz Brodka, Simon Coupland, Anna Dorofeeva, Janel Fontaine, Ryan T. Goodman, Robert Kasperski, Maria-Elena Kammerlander, Rutker Kramer, Rory Naismith, Klaus Oschema, Levi Roach, Christian Rollinger, Marco Stofella, Fabian Stroth, and Ed Shine kindly offered me access to much-needed literature or other material.
Many among them are regularly on Twitter, which I found particularly beneficial during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the actual writing of this work took place. Cosima von Hohenthal, Paul Manderscheid, and Alexander Schie offered valuable help by providing needed scans and saving me time for my work. I am also most grateful for the scanning service the University of Freiburg offered during the pandemic, which was tremendously efficient and helpful. The same was true for the enormous work that has been undertaken and is still going on today throughout the world to digitalize medieval manuscripts, which allowed me to access the originals despite travel restrictions. I also benefited from the advice from Wolfram Brandes, Nikos Crissis, and, most notably, the supportive exchanges with Evangelos Chrysos, which altogether have improved my thinking and work.
This monograph is a significantly reframed, reduced, and reworked version of my habilitation thesis Orbis Romanus. Byzantium and the Roman legacy in the Frankish world (7th–11th centuries), submitted in June 2021 at the University of Freiburg and accepted in December 2021 based on the reviews by Matthias Becher, Jürgen Dendorfer, and Steffen Patzold. The remaining parts dealing with the Ottonian era have been or will be published as four individual articles, the more extensive discussions of the developments prior to the Carolingian era will be covered in a forthcoming monograph titled Merovingian connections. The Frankish kingdoms and the Roman empire (476–756).
Yaniv Fox, Sihong Lin, Anja Rathmann-Lutz, Till Stüber, and Charles West, at different stages, read and commented on at least one chapter. Hans-Werner Goetz most kindly read the entire provisional manuscript and offered valuable advice on improving my rather Spartan introduction, which was yet inadequate for a German habilitation thesis. The current book again comes with a significantly shorter but different version, which has benefited from the prior expansion. It was Rosamond McKitterick who, after kindly reading an early version of my book proposal, came up with the idea of reframing a much too extensive manuscript to create two well-focused monographs. Matthew Bryan Gillis offered valuable advice with the final book proposal, and Bonnie Effros was most helpful in finding a suitable publisher.
My special thanks go to Peter Schreiner, who has accompanied this project since its very beginning and was the first to read the manuscript. He contributed to it with his interest, encouragement, and advice. My personal thanks go to my husband, François, who always stood by me, and our two sons, Youri and Emil, for immensely enriching our lives. Emil was born in November 2019, and although he did not accord me much sleep during the nights, my fatigue was kindly washed away by the sweet presence of our two boys.
Introduction
After his imperial coronation in Rome, Charlemagne († 814) called himself “Augustus crowned by God, great and pacific emperor governing the Roman empire” (“Augustus a deo coronatus magnus pacificus imperator Romanum gubernans imperium”).1 His designation referred to an ancient past and a contemporary empire. By implicitly relating to the empire of Antiquity and its continuation in the east, Charlemagne’s title raises the question about the early medieval meaning of imperium Romanum and what ideas of a Roman empire and world it could convey to its contemporaries. Charlemagne’s rise to emperorship has been regularly interpreted as the apex of a Frankish emulation of the persisting empire (imitatio imperii),2 a concept also applied to define any other prior Frankish attempt to resort to Roman imperial tradition or culture.3 This notion of imitation implies that the imitator is appropriating what does not belong to him or her, and, thus, that he or she is alien to the model used.
This opinion, which is usually not expressed explicitly, is related to the sustained conviction about the inferiority of gentile polities and cultures compared to the remaining Roman civilization of the medieval east.4 In this study, I reassess the relation of the Frankish world to the orbis Romanus by focusing on the Carolingian era. The Merovingian developments and evidence from the tenth century are included whenever appropriate. Although the term orbis Romanus is only sporadically attested in the early medieval evidence, I use the underlying concept to study the sum of what may have been conceived as Roman from a Carolingian perspective. This Frankish vision of Romanness was characterized by the imperial past, the Byzantine present, and genuinely western Roman features belonging to the Carolingian kingdoms. Although the persisting Roman empire in the east was at the heart of the medieval Roman world, the orbis Romanus was not limited to what we call the Byzantine empire.
The Frankish kingdoms had emerged from inside the Roman world, with a large Roman population and continuity on virtually every level of society, including governance, law, the Church and Christian belief, language, and culture. They smoothly transitioned from what we call Roman to Frankish society by retaining some notable Roman characters and features as part of a gradually transforming world. I use the above as a starting point to (1) challenge further the significance usually attributed to the caesura between a Roman and a post-Roman west by arguing that the Carolingian world still belonged to the multiethnic orbis Romanus. When Charlemagne rose to the status of emperor, he meant to resurrect the tradition of western emperorship as known until 480. The idea that the Franks governed the same imperium as the emperor of the east was only abandoned at the time of Charlemagne’s successors. The continued participation of the Franks in the orbis Romanus was not based on an intense connectivity to the eastern empire, which had ceased by the seventh century, but on the significance attributed to their Roman identity and heritage. (2)
The investigation thus restitutes Roman identity to the Frankish west by arguing that although the Franks never designated themselves as Romans, Romanness had remained a constitutive feature of their Frankish identity and world. Comparable to the Romanness of the Byzantine east, Frankish Romanness had evolved and changed over the centuries, which means that both differed in detail. (3) The study also argues that the Byzantines acknowledged that the Franks had their share in the Roman world, which is why they conceived the Carolingians as a connatural people. The special status conceded to the Franks entailed that the Byzantines actively sought to ally with their western brothers. These and other related cases are made by discussing the following questions: Did the Frankish world belong or conceive itself to appertain to the Roman empire, and if so, how and until when? How did the Franks perceive their belonging to the Roman world once their membership to the empire had ceased?
Did the idea of a shared Roman empire persist beyond that period, and if so, when did it end? And lastly: to what extent and until when did the Franks consider themselves as inhabitants of a world conceived as Roman? To what extent was this world understood as identical to the home of the Byzantines, and when and how did this idea of a shared Roman world end? The above may be divided into two basic questions, which I will address in this order. The first question deals with the Frankish belonging to the empire and the persistence of the idea of an imperium shared with the Byzantines. It requires discussing the political relations between the two polities and their respective visions of empire. The second is the question about the positioning of the Frankish world toward the orbis Romanus, which is at the heart of the study. It requires dealing with a much broader scope of topics related to the three elements that defined this Roman world.
The first is the relation of the Franks to the ancient Roman past. This is addressed by studying Frankish visions of what we call Antiquity and how the Carolingians related to it. The second element is the relation of the Franks to the Byzantine world. This is approached by studying the connectivity between both worlds, the significance attributed to language, their respective visions of Roman identity, the role of the Church as a potential connecting factor, and the place of Byzantine culture in Carolingian society. The third aspect refers to genuinely Frankish notions and expressions of Romanness.
These are essential to understand the Frankish visions of the ancient and Byzantine world and related concepts of Romanness. Nikolaus Reitter and Herman Fischer first explicitly approached the question of whether the east and the west had remained part of a shared Roman orbis beyond the fifth century.5 In 1958, the Byzantinist Werner Ohnsorge, known for his extensive research on the relations between east and west, declared that all the evidence necessary to study the significance of the Byzantine world in the west had been collected and that it was time to study this topic beyond the wellattested events. Although many subsequent publications addressed relevant specific questions, a thorough monographic study of this topic as a whole, considering its full complexity, has remained lacking until this day.6 Studies on individual aspects related to the topic addressed here would not be able to challenge modern assessments of the position of the Franks in the early medieval world. Such a project requires an investigation from a wide perspective in the framework of a monograph. My investigation benefited from a wide range of research on related topics.
Attempting to discuss this prior research would mean filling a bottomless pit, which is why I limit myself here to brief mentions of some of the most influential scholars and projects. More elaborate but still exemplary discussions are addressed in the chapters that follow. The international research project Transformation of the Roman world (1993–7)7 had a sustained impact on how modern scholars conceive the end of what we call Roman Antiquity. It showed to what extent the medieval world was born by gradual transformations that impacted virtually every aspect of society, a transition taking place in the framework of a protracted and complex historical process. Significant research from the perspective of a specialist in medieval history was published by Michael McCormick, who investigated the Mediterranean exchanges to argue that the Frankish and Byzantine worlds were connected by comparatively regular travels.8 Among the most influential Byzantinist scholars working on relevant topics are Evangelos K. Chrysos and Peter Schreiner.9
The Frankish visions of Romanness were shaped by the exchange with Byzantium. In this context, Michael McCormick rightly stressed that “interaction between cultures rarely has one society passively undergoing the active influence of another,”10 to underline the complexity of any such process of change. Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz added that “a continuous taking, giving, and returning is significant of the relations between Byzantium and the west so that it is often difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain whether a usage originated in the eastern or the western part of the empire.”11 McCormick subjoined by saying of the Frankish and Byzantine world that “though these early medieval societies evolved away from their late antique roots, those common roots are everywhere discernible, and it is easy to mistake residual for recent borrowing. Indeed, the shared matrix could give rise to structural parallels, that is, similar developments that arose independently in each culture.”12 This complexity of any mutual connection and influence between the Byzantine east and the Frankish west thus implies that attempting to define an element’s origin regularly requires relying on modern definitions, which first of all reveal modern perceptions of what may or may not belong to a medieval orbis Romanus.
The sources able to inform us about—potentially divergent—medieval assessments of Romanness are often insufficiently explicit, which makes their interpretation or classification challenging. Tentative differentiations between ancient Roman, contemporary western, and Byzantine elements are possible, however, where medieval authors made appropriate attributions or where further and sufficiently reliable information is available. In this study, I sought to approach the material available by taking the perspective of its medieval contemporaries. The analysis focuses on elements the evidence identifies as “Roman” or “Greek”—the latter designation was preferably used by Carolingian sources to refer to the Byzantines—and aspects related with sufficient certainty to the Roman or Byzantine territories, their respective inhabitants, and culture. Where a synonymous English word is available, I use it to refer to the source terminology, if not, I refer to the Latin or Greek original. An exception is the term “Byzantine.” As it is crucial for this study to make clear distinctions between the different medieval notions of Romanness, I decided to maintain the characterization “Byzantine” to refer to the imperial east postdating the fifth century. Although the study addresses Carolingian Italy, the particularly complex situation here, resulting from its fragmentation into regions, with loyalties changing between the Byzantines, the Lombards, the pope, the Franks, the Muslims, and other local entities, entails that the peninsula is only considered in further detail when the western empire or apostolic Rome are concerned. Romanness belonging to Italy, with Rome, is identified by unambiguous additions.
The study uses a multidisciplinary approach, combining methods belonging to medieval historical research, including the history of ideas and mentalities, to those appertaining to archaeology, linguistics and semantic studies, the history of art, and architectural history. As it addresses a vast field of research, I chose an approach that affords both unprejudiced analysis of aspects like medieval perceptions and identities and well-founded assessments by focusing only on what is essential. This aims to keep the study at a reasonable length while treating the subject matter as a whole. References to prior research and literature are likewise limited to what seems essential. A densely written piece of research on a wide-ranging subject matter requires keeping any discussion or treatment focused and, if necessary, using particular pertinent and representative examples. Although generalizations cannot be avoided, I also use univocal evidence and case studies to address individual regional, local, and social differences. As mentioned, the methodology at the core of this study consists in focusing on the medieval perspective attested by the written and material evidence.
This approach seeks to avoid modern presuppositions and notions, including modern explanatory models not attested by the evidence. For the same reason, I refrain from using concepts usually referred to as renovatio or imitatio imperii, which, although occasionally used in the medieval evidence, are not unequivocally attested to have carried the meanings suggested by modern scholars. I take a similar approach in reference to some popular patterns of thinking, like the presupposition of a cultural gap between the alleged civilized Byzantines and the barbarian Franks, or basic notions of epochal distinctions between what we call Antiquity and the Middle Ages. If we want to understand how the Franks related to the Roman world and its heritage, it is essential to abstain from such modern or anachronistic notions and presuppositions, which inevitably carry preconceptions that may prejudice the reading of the evidence, and to focus on the evidence instead. The Frankish perceptions of the ancient Roman past and the Byzantine present were closely interrelated and affected by genuinely Frankish visions and notions of Romanness. None of these aspects thus should be addressed in isolation. I discuss them in seven thematic chapters (II–VIII), each treating a specific topic by addressing different sets of relevant questions. Chapter II discusses how the Frankish realms related to the Roman and Byzantine imperium and the persistent idea of a shared empire. It simultaneously introduces the reader to the historical context and some essential sources.
The subsequent chapters focus on how the Carolingian world related to the medieval orbis Romanus. Chapter III discusses the connectivity between the Frankish and the Byzantine world. Chapter IV then treats the Frankish perception of the Roman past and how it was related to the Frankish present. Chapter V further delves into this matter by focusing on the role of the Greek language in the Frankish world and the significance of Latin in the east. Chapter VI analyzes the medieval perceptions and notions of western and eastern identities emerging from exchanges between both regions and how they altered over the period in question. It is followed by Chapter VII dealing with the question of spiritual ecumenicity as a potential factor uniting east and west from a religious and cultural perspective. Finally, Chapter VIII studies the place of Roman and Byzantine culture in the west.
These chapters reconstruct differing evolutions that do not always point in the same direction, which confirms the benefits of studying the subject matter addressed by this study from a comprehensive thematic perspective. The complexity underlying relevant processes of change can only be addressed by considering the full range of relevant material and the different evolutions it can reveal. Chapter IX picks up the loose ends and ties them up to create a general overview to answer the questions posed. Any translation, figure, or drawing without further reference is my own.
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