Download PDF | (Cambridge Medieval Textbooks) Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes, Simon MacLean - The Carolingian World-Cambridge University Press (2011).
465 Pages
INTRODUCTION
THE DAWN OF THE CAROLINGIAN AGE
Late in the year 753, Pippin, king of the Franks, heard news that the pope had left Rome and was coming to visit him. This journey – the first time a pope had ever crossed the Alps – presented the king with both a problem and an opportunity. On the one hand, he may have known that what Pope Stephen II wanted was military protection, with all the risk and expense that that entailed, against an opponent in Italy, the king of the Lombards, whose predecessor had been Pippin’s own godfather. On the other hand, the pope was just the kind of politically neutral and prestigious figure from whom Pippin could seek endorsement for the radical move he had made two years earlier, when he had usurped the throne of the Franks from the Merovingian dynasty that had held it for the previous two and a half centuries. Neither Pippin nor Stephen quite appeciated the impact that their actions that winter would have but, in a process that typifies the problems faced by historians of this period, political significance was quickly heaped onto their meeting and within a few years the circumstances surrounding it were being intensively rewritten.
Thus Stephen II’s biographer, a clerk in the papal bureaucracy, reports that Pippin sent his young son Charles to meet the pope 100 miles from his destination and to escort him to the king, who knelt in homage before him. A Frankish source, on the other hand, has the pope and his attendant clergy kneeling before the king. Other Frankish sources assert that Pippin had already sought the approval of Stephen’s predecessor for his usurpation; a claim apparently unknown to papal writers. It was certainly true that each could help the other. Frankish and papal sources concur that the pope anointed Pippin and his family. Pippin then secured the approval of the Frankish aristocracy and despatched campaigns in successive years which forced the Lombard king 1 2 3 4 Aistulf to sue for peace. Returning home, Stephen reinforced his attachment to the Franks by granting buildings near St Peter’s in Rome to the Parisian monastery of St Denis, the Frankish royal saint under whose auspices he had secured his alliance with Pippin. In the short term the effects of this alliance were not decisive for either party.
The popes remained relatively weak and for the next two decades the Lombards continued to menace their interests in and around Rome, while the Franks were generally reluctant to fulfil their newly acquired obligation to protect the papacy by committing themselves to military action hundreds of miles away across the Alps. In a longer perspective, however, these events represent what has long been interpreted by historians as an epochal turning point in the history of western Europe. For some historians of the first half of the twentieth century the change of ruling dynasty was regarded as ‘the most momentous act of the entire Middle Ages’, either because it inaugurated the pope’s involvement in the legitimation of kingship, or because of the break it signalled between Rome and the surviving ‘Roman’ empire in the east – the Byzantine empire that covered the Balkans and Asia Minor.
These views were crystallised in the 1920s in the work of the famous Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, who saw this break as only one component of a structural shift in the political and economic geography of Europe, as the lands of the western Mediterranean separated decisively from the eastern empire and struck up a more intense relationship with the kingdoms of the north, thus permanently fixing the shape of a new, specifically western, European civilisation. Pippin did not see himself as standard bearer of a new age in these terms. Indeed, he was motivated above all by a sense of his own vulnerability. As we shall see in greater detail in Chapter 2, by having himself proclaimed king in 751 in place of the reigning king Childeric III, Pippin had defied a strong sense among the Franks that the aura of legitimacy rested upon Childeric’s family, the Merovingians.
Pippin’s need to legitimise his action and to undermine the opposition of those hostile to his new royal status, including some members of his own family, lay behind his acquisition of papal blessing not only for himself but for his wife and sons as well. Nonetheless, the novelty of these rituals did reflect a self-conscious attempt to mark off and announce the beginning of a new political era. It was successful in ways that those present in 753–4 could not have foreseen: Pippin was born an aristocrat; his descendants would be kings and emperors of western Europe. Thanks to their monopoly on royal power in the Frankish realms between 751 5 6 7 8 and 888, the Carolingians (‘the family of Charles’ (Latin: Carolus) – named for Pippin’s father Charles Martel) are remembered as one of European history’s great dynasties. The first phase of their tenure witnessed a breath-taking territorial expansion. Seeking to consolidate their tenuous position, Pippin and his sons embarked on a spectacularly successful series of campaigns pursued in equal measure through extreme violence and ruthless political manoeuvring.
Within fifty years of Stephen’s visit to Paris, they had doubled their territory and accumulated an empire spanning approximately one million square kilometres, stretching south from the English Channel to central Italy and northern Spain, and east from the Atlantic to the fringes of modern Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic: easily the largest European political unit for many centuries. On Christmas Day 800 Pippin’s son Charles ‘the Great’ (or Charlemagne as he is known to posterity, the same boy who as a five-year-old had reportedly been sent to receive Pope Stephen in 753) was crowned emperor in Rome, the first man to bear this title in the West since the deposition of the last Roman emperor in 476. Five of his immediate successors were to be emperors and many more ruled as kings as generations of Carolingians maintained and dominated this huge empire through most of the ninth century, during which the territory was often formally divided between members of the family, but always remained a dynastic unit. The territorial integrity of the empire was definitively ended only in 888, hastened by a succession crisis within the family. Imperial aggrandisement was the basis, but not the end, of the dynasty’s achievement.
Inspired by court circles filled with scholars and spiritual advisers of international repute, the Carolingians also declared their aspiration to reform the social and moral behaviour of the peoples under their dominion. They sought to achieve this imaginative goal by exploiting to their limits the technologies of government available in the early Middle Ages. Pippin and his successors constructed a hierarchical political system which could allow the word of the king to penetrate to the furthest reaches of his realms; and they managed to do so in large part because of advances in the production, dissemination and preservation of knowledge. To some extent these advances were down to royal initiative. The foundation or revival by Carolingian rulers and aristocrats of institutions for which the written word was a central raison d’être – particularly, but not exclusively, the institutions of the Church – is a cardinal fact of the age.
This is of the utmost importance for historians because those institutions’ ability to copy existing works, to produce new ones, and to preserve both, has fundamentally shaped the record not just of the Carolingian period but of every 9 preceding century back to the dawn of western history. We owe a good proportion of what we know of every century before 900 to the hands of Carolingian scribes. Their work attests a fusion of economic vitality (manuscripts were very expensive), political will and intellectual ambition which confirms that the Carolingians were distinctive for much more than the novelty of their relationship with the popes.
The Carolingians thus left an indelible mark on the historical record, but they also bequeathed an ideological legacy which dominated the imaginations of their successors. The heroes of the dynasty did not take long to pass into the realm of mythology, and posterity quickly canonised Pippin’s family as a benchmark for dynastic prestige. It was this aura which, in 1000, drew the German emperor Otto III to Charlemagne’s palace chapel at Aachen where, as an act of piety and political theatre, he exhumed and re-interred the great emperor’s body, eyewitnesses reporting that apart from overlong fingernails and a touch of decay on the nose he remained bodily incorrupt and upright on his throne. In the twelfth century Suger, abbot of St Denis, built a new church to house the bodies of his patrons alongside the Carolingians already buried there, and thus to create a sense of dynastic continuity that flattered the great Capetian dynasty of his own day. Meanwhile, the German emperor Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’ sought to outdo the Capetians, and assert unmediated control of the Carolingian past, by translating Charlemagne’s remains to a new casket in 1165, and having him recognised as a saint.
Post-medieval imperialists have also looked to the eighth and ninth centuries to anchor their sense of themselves: the memory of the Carolingians was appropriated, for instance, by Napoleon, who visited Charlemagne’s tomb to contemplate the great emperor prior to his own coronation in 1804. He has also found a place in the ideologies of modern regimes of various hues including those of the Nazis (whose army contained a unit named after Charlemagne) and the European Union (which sponsors a prize for European unity named after him). It is, then, not surprising that modern historians, whose work is never uncontaminated by the wider ideological atmosphere in which it is written, continue to reinvent the contemporary relevance of the Carolingians by casting them in the role of ‘a family who forged Europe’, and seeing in their empire ‘the scaffolding of the Middle Ages’. Some of the most prominent debates about the origins of modern Europe have revolved around the significance of key events in Carolingian history.
The defeat by Pippin’s father Charles Martel of a Muslim army near Tours was traditionally seen as decisive in halting the 10 11 12 13 northward spread of Islam; Charlemagne’s imperial coronation in 800 was, centuries later, recast as the founding event of the ‘Holy Roman Empire’; the Treaty of Verdun in 843, by which the empire was divided into three parts, two of which corresponded roughly to France and Germany, has been seen as ‘the birth certificate of Europe’; and the end of the empire in 888 was the focus for an intensely ideological debate about the origins of the kingdom of Germany coloured by a barely concealed mid-twentieth-century political agenda. The modern baggage loaded on to these distant moments hints at how the period has been quarried as a source of material for highly charged controversies about modern national identities, particularly those of France and Germany. To some extent this way of thinking was hard-wired into the field from the start: sustained critical study of the period was inaugurated in 1819 by the founding of the Monumenta Germaniae historica (Historic Monuments of Germany), an institution whose purpose was explicitly framed as a patriotic attempt to raise German national consciousness through the publication of all texts relating to the medieval history of a country that was at that point still over fifty years from emerging as a full nation-state.
Conversely, mid-twentieth-century French historians like Louis Halphen, haunted by the cataclysm of World War II, wrote the Carolingian story as a great tragedy of failed European unity; while some more recent authors have sketched a very different narrative arc by explicitly claiming the empire as a foreshadowing of contemporary Europe, united in diversity. All these views find support in the sources because the empire was always united (as an ideal) and often divided (in reality): contemporaries saw themselves as simultaneously members of regional or national groupings and of an imperial community, emphasising one or the other depending on who they were talking to or about. Because contemporary Franks argued about their identity in recognisable terms, the contested history of the Carolingian empire is useful for writing any one of a number of modern stories about the past.
It is not the aim of this book to take issue with or propound any one of these possible narratives. Rather, its writing has been prompted by the fact that the most recent general surveys of Carolingian history published in English are now over twenty-five years old, and since they were written there has been a dramatic surge in research that has subjected many aspects of the field to new levels of scrutiny. As is proper, this work has not led to the incremental formation of consensus on all topics, but has opened up new questions by identifying the parameters and paradoxes within which debate about eighth-and ninth-century society can be framed.
Thus this often appears to be a world very alien to our 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 own, one in which the ruling class was simultaneously pious and violent (with no sense of dissonance between the two); in which officials fulfilled functions we call ‘governmental’ and yet had little concept of the state; in which peasants, though legally free, could be bound by complex obligations to landlords and rulers; and in which increasing efforts to define and prescribe Christian belief were made against a background of enormously varied religious practices.
The last twenty-five years have witnessed huge advances in historical comprehension of most of these areas, stimulated in part by increasing interest in the Carolingian period in the Anglophone scholarly world. Our aim is therefore not only to introduce the main features of the period to readers who may not be well acquainted with it, but also to synthesise and engage with the issues debated in the latest research. Working out how to fit all this together involves making difficult decisions, especially in a book aimed primarily at newcomers to the period. Political narrative is an essential framework for modern readers, as it was for contemporary authors. However, one of our aims in this book is to suggest that developments in social structures, rural and elite society, economic forces, religious beliefs and aspects of culture were inextricably tied up with political events, and with each other, in a complex multilateral relationship.
One way we have chosen to emphasise this (since writing three-dimensional ‘total history’ is impossible) is by playing down the political narrative that dominates most textbooks and weaving it throughout the book, mainly restricted to chapters at the beginning, middle and end. Nevertheless, the interleaved thematic chapters do broadly follow a chronological arc so that, for example, it makes sense to know about Charlemagne’s wars of conquest before discussing the establishment of structures of religious belief during his reign; but it is also sensible to analyse the main features of elite society before turning to the role of the aristocracy in the years leading up to the end of the empire. We hope that the book therefore not only serves to synthesise the recent flourishing of Carolingian studies, but also reflects scholars’ increasing awareness of the complex interrelationships between political, social and economic phenomena that are often regarded as discrete. At the same time, we have had to decide what to leave out. By focussing on broad themes such as belief, communications, village society and elite culture, we draw on examples that come from a range of geographical areas.
Naturally, we are drawn more regularly to some areas than others – those for which sources survive most abundantly, and those that we know best. An inevitable consequence of this is that some important areas are under-represented in this book, for instance northern Spain, southern Gaul and the eastern frontiers. Other very important topics have receded into the background because comprehensive introductory accounts are readily available elsewhere. In this category we might place art, literature and other high cultural aspects of the Carolingian reform; the role of law and law-making; and warfare. Still others which could have been placed centre-stage, such as the political role of women, the structures of the institutional Church and the workings of government, we have tried to fold into our thematic discussions. We cannot claim comprehensiveness, and the bibliography at the end of the book should be used by readers wishing to learn more about particular subjects.
WAS THERE A CAROLINGIAN WORLD?
Listing some of the topics that do not appear in this book means that we are obliged to try to justify the coherence of those that do. Self-evidently, the book rests on the proposition that the ‘Carolingian world’ in the eighth and ninth centuries constitutes a discrete historical time and place that deserves analysis; and in doing so it could be seen as privileging a narrative of European history defined by the deeds of a single powerful family that focusses disproportionately on the geographical areas where they owned their greatest estates (in particular the Seine basin, the Rhineland and the Po valley). An important critique along these lines was published in 1989 by the American historian Richard Sullivan, who argued that by underplaying the importance of regionalism and screening out underlying continuities, historians were guilty of overemphasising the distinctiveness and significance of the Carolingian empire and era. He was certainly correct to stress the significance of regionalism in the eighth and ninth centuries.
The geographical coherence of the empire is artificially enhanced by modern cartography, which can create the illusion of political boundaries as firm and uncontested lines. Contemporary thought did have a place for precisely defined borders – Carolingian kings thought they could impose restrictions on the passage across their frontiers of some commodities, particularly weapons and coins, which suggests a significant level of confidence in their ability to fix and police borders, as does Charlemagne’s imposition of a trade embargo in a dispute with King Offa of Mercia around 790. However, the varying degree of royal control in different parts of the Frankish realms means that our maps’ sharp edges begin to look frayed under close inspection.
Some areas were at times nominally part of the empire but in practice not fully integrated, such as northern Spain, central Italy and Brittany. Other parts of Europe, including the 21 22 23 24 kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England, were clearly beyond the frontier but through regular contact and cultural pressure absorbed many of the characteristics of Carolingian political culture. Nor was the empire cleanly defined against outsiders as a religious entity: while Charlemagne’s campaigns against the pagan Saxons are talked about in some sources in terms that suggest religious justifications were used, he also fought Christians in Brittany and Aquitaine, and his attacks on Muslim Spain were initiated not against an enemy defined by its different religion, but on behalf of one faction within the Caliphate against another. By the same token, Frankish Christian elites in the ninth century often pursued internal political and military interests by allying with non-Christian Scandinavians and Slavs. Concepts of religious difference overlapped with, and could be superseded by, a different set of assumptions concerning the cultural difference or similarity of the Franks’ neighbours.
Since the Carolingians found it impossible to impose or adhere to rigid geographical boundaries in their world, we have not sought to do so in this book. Our coverage is of course partly dictated by that of the primary sources, which survive more thickly from some areas than from others. Even the focus of many of the narrative sources on the Carolingians themselves lends little geographical consistency to the picture, both because rulers were itinerant and because, after 840, the division of the realm produced multiple simultaneous foci. It is certainly possible to distinguish regions such as the Rhineland or the Po valley, but what can be said about them varies according to the concerns of the source material. Overall, the reader will find that most of the evidence discussed in the following chapters is drawn from the core Frankish realm – modern France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Rhineland and southwestern Germany – and from northern and central Italy, where the Carolingians became dominant after 774.
But other areas will come into focus when the book turns to topics on which their material makes especially significant contributions: the English and Irish in the discussion of Christianisation; Brittany when we turn to village life; Scandinavia and the Arab world in relation to long-distance exchange. Most of these experienced the strength of Carolingian political power only slightly, if at all. But they all made vital contributions to the shaping of the Carolingian world, and were themselves directly or indirectly influenced by it. Carolingian influence fluctuated in intensity within the empire’s borders as well as beyond them. Despite the rhetoric of unity persistently transmitted by Carolingian rulers and their religious advisers, we have to be constantly aware of the empire’s great regional diversity in social and cultural terms.
The huge and 25 26 powerful monasteries of the middle Rhine or western Gaul, for instance, dominated landscapes defined by very different social, political and religious conditions from those surrounding the rather more impoverished churches of newly conquered Saxony. Similarly, not only did many peoples in the regions of the empire have their own lawcodes, but close study of how law operated in particular local societies has sharpened our appreciation of how different were the experiences of people who lived in a place like Catalonia from those of their, say, Bavarian contemporaries. Linguistic variety was almost equally kaleidoscopic. Acknowledging this variety does not, though, lead inevitably to the conclusion that the idea of a coherent Carolingian world is an illusion concocted to satisfy the fantasies of nineteenth-century nationalists or latetwentieth-century Europeanists; or that the persistence of internal differences is simply a sign that the Carolingian drive for unity and hierarchy should be judged a failure. Unity and diversity are not mutually exclusive – indeed, outside the totalitarian and absolutist states of the more recent past, large polities had to be built precisely through the acknowledgement of local identities by the central authority.
The Carolingian empire was not like the British empire with a clearly defined centre-to-periphery political economy, nor a centralised state on the model of the Roman empire, but rather an agglomeration of regions with their own identities and greater or lesser degrees of autonomy. In writing this book we have tried to keep in mind as much as possible the fact that there were many Carolingian worlds, each of which adapted in different ways to being part of a larger political entity, and readers should keep this in mind before reaching general conclusions. The chronological limits we have chosen to define the book are those which constitute the period during which the empire was united through rule by members of the same family, but these dates are also potentially porous. It is possible that political structures conventionally associated with the Carolingian takeover of the mideighth century are actually continuations of older phenomena for which we simply lack the sources.
The ideological novelty of Pippin’s anointing in 754 can certainly be played down using this sort of argument. At the other end of the period, despite the territorial disintegration of the empire in 888, members of the dynasty intermittently held royal status in parts of west Francia and Italy for another century. The Carolingian period neither began nor ended with a social revolution. Most historians would agree that most forms of change during the period were significant but gradual, governed by slow transformation rather than abrupt shifts or collapses that might have created the 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 clean edges useful to those interested in defining historical eras. On the other hand, the step change in the number of surviving written sources (which we will consider more fully in the next section) from around the time of Pippin’s usurpation could be seen as a significant historical fact in itself.
It might indicate a shift in contemporary consciousness as people and institutions responded to the new political circumstances – in this case by taking up writing with new enthusiasm. It would be possible to explain the jump in the number of surviving documents recording donations to monasteries in, for instance, the Rhineland, Alsace and Bavaria in the reigns of Pippin and Charlemagne, by casting these institutions as prominent markers of shifts in the organisation of local society prompted by the rise of the Carolingians. Yet this point itself indicates that the change of dynasty cannot be given sole responsibility for every major development. Donations to monasteries also survive in increasing numbers from areas beyond the Carolingians’ writ (at least initially), like Lombard Italy. What is more, the proliferation of monasteries at around this time itself affected the historical record.
While it is an open question whether monastic houses were better at producing written texts than were previous groups of scribes, it is certain that they were better at producing texts that would last, and better at preserving both their own and earlier texts, partly because they themselves proved durable as institutions. The relationship between patterns of source survival and changes in the social and political world they reveal is, in other words, something of a chicken-and-egg problem. What defined the Carolingian world above all was the ruling dynasty itself.
The dynasty thought of itself as such even when (as after 840) the territories of the empire were divided between multiple and competing kings: responding to a belittling jibe from the Byzantine emperor Basil I in 871, who had patronisingly observed that being ruler of Italy alone did not make him much of an emperor, Louis II fumed that the western empire was exactly that because of the common blood shared by all of its Carolingian rulers. This was not just ideological froth. The dynasty’s identity was not an incidental feature of the period; their longevity rested in part on their success in creating and imposing ways of thinking that self-consciously redefined the Frankish world as Carolingian. The rewriting of the past that became, as we shall see, such a feature of the cultural output of the age was shot through with a concern to locate the Carolingians in history. Contemporary intellectuals sought both to write the history of the Franks in terms of the deeds of Carolingian (and proto-Carolingian) rulers, and to find a place for the ‘Carolingian’ era itself in the schemes provided by established 34 35 36 37 38 models of long-term historical development – and ultimately, therefore, to make the empire’s rise seem inevitable and its continued existence natural.
Thus, writing in the middle of the 880s, Notker of St Gallen conceived of Charlemagne’s Frankish empire as a divinely ordained successor to the great empires of the past: a new, discrete and coherent entity ready to be loaded with religious and political significance. Texts like this could influence the thought-processes of the Frankish elite, but could not control them. Fragments of alternative discourses allow us to glimpse contemporaries imagining the possibility of a world not dominated by Carolingians. Yet even authors writing away from court in the ninth century were usually party to the same assumptions and modes of thought as those who enjoyed more regular contact with the king. By the time of Charlemagne’s grandsons, and certainly by Notker’s day, the court’s cultural and reform agendas had been internalised by provincial bishops and monks.
Such ways of thinking could filter down to ordinary lay people in a variety of ways: through the courts of the counts regularly convened in the king’s name; through daily use of coins bearing his name and image; through the prayers said for his soul in church on Sunday. An idea of the political implications of this can be gleaned from the fact that, of the many rebellions in the period between 785 and 888, only one was led by an outsider against the dynasty – that of Boso of Vienne – while the rest sought only to replace one Carolingian with another. Little wonder, then, that contemporary authors commenting on the dynastic crisis of 888 perceived it as the end of an era: with the accession of non-Carolingian kings and the consequent territorial division of the empire between different dynasties, something had very definitely finished. We can, in other words, describe this world as Carolingian because that is how contemporaries perceived it.
THE SOURCES FOR THE CAROLINGIAN WORLD
The most striking aspect of the historian’s evidence for the Carolingian world is simply its quantity: as we have already noted, far more texts survive from this era than from earlier ones. Only 1,800 manuscript books or fragments of books survive that were written in the continental west before ad 800, and many of those were copied in the eighth century. From the same part of the world, we possess over 9,000 manuscript books or fragments produced by scribes in the century from 800 to 900. These dramatic figures require some explanation. Only a minority of the 9,000 ninth-century manuscripts contained works composed in that century. Mostly they were copies of texts that had been written 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 many years earlier: Latin classics like Virgil, early Christian literature, or books of the Bible. We are dealing here with an increase in copying, quite as much as a rise in literary creativity. But is the increase itself a real one, or an accident of survival? Does it signify a genuine quantum leap in the rate of production of written texts? A number of developments of the Carolingian age may inadvertently have affected the rate of survival. This period saw the development of a new script in which most books came to be written. Caroline (or Carolingian) minuscule is easily legible to us – indeed, it is the forerunner of the font in which this book is printed.
This standardisation was evidently important in a contemporary context, though it is far from certain that its familiarity to modern eyes favoured the survival of books using the new script. More importantly, the Carolingian age benefited from long-term changes in the construction and materials of books that made them easier to preserve. Where in the ancient world the main writing material was papyrus, made from reeds, and books were scrolls of sheets of papyrus stitched together, by the Carolingian period writing was generally done on parchment, made from the skins of sheep, cows and goats and therefore far more durable than papyrus. Parchment leaves were stacked in quires and stitched together between hard or soft covers to form a codex – or what we would recognise as a book. Where papyrus scrolls were apt to rip and rot, parchment books could last for centuries – and have. These changes in the technology of the written word themselves suggest that the Carolingian age placed new emphasis on knowledge and its dissemination. Scribes before that time may not have been quite as scarce as the paltry survivals of their work suggest, but they were working in contexts and with techniques that had changed since the Roman period only in the dwindling amount of resources devoted to them.
The growth of Carolingian literate culture was largely the product of patronage directed at new institutions – principally monasteries – that were especially concerned to foster writing and learning. It is these which produced and preserved the very large documentary residue of the Carolingian world, including the original compositions of the time: histories, laws, land transactions and a host of other textual genres. Overall, we possess many more sources about the Carolingian period than about any previous era of comparable length. One area where the Carolingian impact on culture can be observed very easily is in the production of historical writing.
In the eighth and ninth centuries, remembrance of the past was a matter both of memoria – the commemoration of the dead, especially in books of the names of the deceased whose souls were the 47 48 49 subject of prayer (Libri vitae, libri memoriales) – and of historia – the relating of past deeds, and the form of the latter was changing as the annals, which started as by-products of liturgy, evolved into free-standing literature. Annals were one part of the outpouring of history, which sought (as mentioned earlier) to explicate the present and the recent past with reference to more distant times. Historical works written after 800 reveal constant debate about the place of the Carolingians in relation to past empires and the place of the empire in God’s plans for the future as hinted at in the Bible. Contemporary historians and annalists tacked accounts of their own times on to versions of the more distant past that modelled the present variously as a continuation of the Roman past, a reinvention of it, a Christian empire that was distinct from the Roman, or the final age of the world in the eschatological scheme popularised by St Augustine.
Often they did so by rewriting or suppressing uncomfortable memories of the more recent Merovingian past, anxious to mask the sour taste of usurpation and resistance. The fact that this debate existed at all suggests that whichever model they chose, contemporaries regarded the Carolingian period as a distinct historical era. The spill-over of this concern into continuous histories of the present makes even more obvious the role of numerous contemporary annalists and chroniclers in the ‘Carolingianising’ of the Frankish world. An initial model was established by the authors of the Royal Frankish Annals, which presented an account of history between 741 and 829 that defined the history of the Frankish people in terms of the deeds of Carolingian kings: their wars, assemblies, and itineraries were the scaffolding used to construct a narrative of the times. This way of thinking was obviously part of the court’s ideological armoury, but it also had a wider impact. The Royal Frankish Annals were copied, excerpted and reused many times during the ninth century to the extent that they became part of a canon that influenced both subsequent writers and the consciousness of the Frankish elite.
The extent to which Carolingian political success had itself shaped the historical record becomes clear when we consider the contrast between the material produced before and after around 750. The only contemporary narrative history from the late seventh and early eighth centuries is the Liber historiae francorum (‘Book of [the] History of the Franks’: hereafter referred to as the LHF). Completed in 727, probably in Soissons and perhaps by a woman, the LHF traces the history of the Franks from their legendary beginnings, drawing on and summarising earlier sources until the last of them, the fourth book of the Chronicle of Fredegar, ends in 642, from which point it provides an original, if 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 rudimentary, account of events up to 721, seen from the perspective of the Neustrian – that is, the west Frankish – aristocracy.
There are, in addition, a number of saints’ lives that have been mined for the snippets of information that they give on political events and personalities, especially when those lives related events within the living memory of their intended audiences. Such matters were not their main concern, however: when approached with due regard to their original purpose, they allow us to glimpse the complexity of Merovingian culture and belief and to sample the mood prevalent in aristocratic society. Although they depend on the LHF, the two other major narratives of the period from 687 to 721 post-date Pippin III’s takeover of the Frankish kingship in 751. Continuations of the Chronicle of Fredegar were most likely added after Pippin’s death in 768. Comparison with other sources reveals the tendency of these continuators, and especially the first, to garble events that had occurred only a generation earlier.
This indicates the extent to which they were writing with their eyes on the present, and sought precedents for their current situation in the relatively recent past. In this case we know that the continuations to Fredegar’s chronicle were written under the auspices of Pippin III’s uncle Childebrand, and of the latter’s son Nibelung. The way in which the continuators reworked the text of the LHF is very evident. Reporting the death of the Merovingian Childebert III (694–711), the LHF states ‘then the famous and just lord King Childebert of good memory, passed away unto the Lord’. The first continuator of Fredegar is significantly more laconic at this point: ‘it was now that King Childebert died’. Equally rooted in their time of composition are the Annales Mettenses priores (Earlier Annals of Metz), a set of annals first put together in a surviving version in 805. This work seeks, from its beginning at 688, to portray the history of the late seventh and eighth centuries as the history of the Carolingians.
Its demonstrable use of an earlier source at least for events up to 751 might only reinforce the view that its account is unreliably ‘pro-Carolingian’. Nevertheless, that earlier source, in so far as it can be discerned, can be set alongside other sources – letters written outside Francia, charters and coins – which seem to attest considerable power in the hands of earlier Carolingians, Pippin II and Charles Martel, before the 750s. Historians still debate the extent to which that power was exaggerated by later authors like those of the Annales Mettenses priores. The most succinct example of the latter’s perspective is in the biography of Charlemagne by his courtier Einhard, who claimed that the last 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 Merovingians possessed no more than a single estate, and travelled in an oxcart. Annals of a more conventional kind were written at various centres in Francia throughout the eighth and ninth centuries. Relating events to a particular year is a practice that dates back to antiquity, but it was given a new context by the organisation of time that the Christian Church gradually imposed.
The production of Easter tables, necrologies and martyrologies encouraged the recording of events annually, and this was made easier by the adoption from the beginning of the eighth century of dating by the incarnation of Christ. These yearly entries appear in eight early Carolingian annals. Interrelated, with often identical entries, and becoming ever fuller through the eighth century and into the ninth, they pursue a ‘pro-Carolingian’ agenda by relating only the deeds of the Carolingians, especially their military victories. They therefore sometimes transmit unique snippets of information that are less difficult to interpret than the narratives of the continuations of Fredegar and the Annales Mettenses priores. As a form of writing about the past, annals were taken up energetically in some areas beyond Francia, not least in the British Isles, where the later ninth century saw court-centred annalistic works take shape in several Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (the origins of the later Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) and in Wales (the Annales Cambriae).
Other regions preferred different historiographical forms. In Italy, just before Charlemagne’s imperial coronation, Paul the Deacon completed a history of his own people, the Lombards, that proved to be an important foundation for subsequent Italian historians. Nonetheless, it can be read as using the Lombard past as a vehicle for comment on what was for Italy by the 790s a Frankish present. The images of the past that Paul wrote into his History of the Lombards seem to have been aimed principally at a circle of courtiers, either those of Duke Arichis of Benevento or those of Charlemagne’s son Pippin, king of Italy under his father from 781. Many of the other writings about the past in this period seem similarly to have been intended, at least initially, for a fairly exclusive audience, whether courtiers of a ruler, an aristocratic entourage, or a monastic community (familia). Many may never have permeated beyond these immediate audiences. Nevertheless, in conveying messages to powerful social groups these writers had the opportunity to influence opinion and attitudes among the political community. The decade after Charlemagne’s death in 814 seems to witness a change in the historical perspective of Frankish writers.
Their concern was now not merely to offer ‘Carolingianised’ views of the past, but also to comment on recent events 64 65 66 67 68 69 in ways charged with the language of contemporary controversies. Thus both of the extant biographies of Louis ‘the Pious’ give voice to opinions on Louis’s sons’ revolt against their father in 833–4: in Thegan’s Life, written in 836, we can detect the views of the circle of Rhenish aristocrats who were his chief contacts; while the author known to us only as ‘the Astronomer’ (because of his interest in celestial objects) wrote just after 840 from the perspective of the court itself, and probably making use of its archive. After 843, with the formal division of the empire, the multiplication of royal courts and the frequency of conflict between kingdoms gave a further boost to the writing of contemporary history, most notably in the Annals of Fulda from the east Frankish realm, and the Annals of St Bertin from the West. We can get an impression of how such works might have been read by looking at the manuscripts which contained them. The biographies of Louis, for example, circulated principally alongside Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne and often with versions of the Royal Frankish Annals, and were edited and amalgamated to produce composite works of Frankish history with a distinctly Carolingian flavour. The texts of many annals, however, circulated piecemeal, meaning that they could be used as a form of news and comment, and might be tinged with traces of local colour.
The Annals of Lorsch, for example, preserved its very particular, east Frankish, memory of the revolt against Charlemagne by members of that region’s aristocracy under Hardrad. Historical writing is only one index of an increasing attention to literature in the decades following the accession of Charlemagne in 768. The emergence at that time of a group of men of letters, working initially at the royal court, has seemed one of the best indications that Charlemagne’s age witnessed a renaissance of learning: a return to classical standards of intellectual life after a slump in the later sixth, seventh and earlier eighth centuries. The apparent void may, however, be due in part to the vagaries of manuscript loss, and in any case the standard of work of the great literary figures of the late eighth and early ninth centuries must owe something to a pre-existing tradition of Latin letters. These men employed a variety of genres, but one with which they evidently liked to play was poetry: the ‘final phase of a thorough education’ at the time.
The sheer quantity of poetry preserved, as well as the number of surviving manuscripts including verse, shows that contemporaries saw poetry as neither unusual nor arcane as a medium for all sorts of ideas and sentiments. Slender threads of the Latin poetic tradition can be traced through the late seventh century and into the eighth, especially in Italy, where its range of uses – from 70 71 72 theology to civic identity to commemoration – serves as a warning not to underestimate how important a literary form it was to contemporaries. If it was partly the influx of Italians into the royal court, alongside other scholars from beyond Francia, that turned it into the centre of intellectual activity in Charlemagne’s kingdom, it is the surviving poetry that stands testimony to their conversations.
In the Carolingian age, Latin verse was a vehicle not only for the dedications and epitaphs for which it would remain popular throughout the Middle Ages, but for reflections on the lives and relationships of the poets, their nicknames, their friendships and their flytings. The surviving poems seem to have been very immediate in their aims. As Mary Garrison has noted: ‘apparently verse was intended to address and entertain contemporaries, not posterity’. Most prominently, the verses of these new poets were aimed at the king himself. Numerous lines of often extravagant praise were addressed to Charlemagne in particular. Epic set-pieces such as the so-called Paderborn Epic, purporting to depict the king’s encounter with Pope Leo III at that town in 799, present Charlemagne as the terrible scourge of his pagan enemies, aswell as the generous patron of the pope. Poems of this sort mirrored the classical form of the praise poem or panegyric, albeit with new tones and emphases.
Imitation of the classics continued as an ideal in later generations, growing in ambition as authors sought consciously to echo the epics and elegies of Roman poets like Virgil and Ovid. But such works were not merely imitative: they served all the various purposes that historians have identified in the works of Carolingian cultural protagonists. While the writing of historia, recording the deeds of the past, whether distant or very immediate, responded to the needs of discrete, often elite, groups, the culture of memoria had a wider impact. As we shall see in Chapter 3, memorialisation of the dead came to be bound up with patronage of churches and monasteries, and that patronage was generally enacted by or recorded in legal documents. Indeed, so great was the number of such documents, and so good were churches and monasteries at preserving them, that for some regions there is an impression that ecclesiastical patronage was the only reason to produce documents. This was clearly not the case, but it does point to the need to bear in mind that the documentary legacy of the early Middle Ages has been shaped by the way in which documents have been transmitted down the centuries; and that process has been dominated, until the modern era, by the Church.
The early medieval legal documents that we now possess survive in clusters associated with particular archives across the Carolingian world, mostly 73 74 75 76 those of monasteries and episcopal churches. Some of them – those which embody the pronouncements of rulers – fit quite well into the ‘Carolingianising’ of the record that we have noted in narrative histories: legal decrees divided into chapters (capitulae, and hence known as capitularies) provided the framework for the actions of those to whom power was delegated in the localities, while collections of them transmitted this fundamentally Carolingian structure to successive generations. In simple numerical terms, however, the great majority of surviving legal documents are charters, the single sheets of papyrus or (more usually) parchment with which business of all sorts was conducted (see for example Figure 1). We possess these in sufficient numbers to see that their subject matter extended well beyond the interests of particular church institutions, and down to the most small-scale and mundane activities: not only conveyances of property through gift, sale and exchange, but also testaments, judicial and extra-judicial dispute settlements, leases, inventories and many others. Figure 1. A charter from the abbey of St Gallen, modern Switzerland, which retains 750 original charters and contemporary copies written between the eighth century and 920.
This example, issued on 2 May 775 by one Sighiharius, was written by the abbey’s deacon, and later abbot, Waldo, who made a note on the dorse (reverse), summarising its contents: one of the first signs of systematic record management at St Gallen. The Carolingian period witnessed changes in society’s awareness of these 77 documents. Charters survive in increasing numbers from about the middle of the seventh century, giving some insight into literate culture and patterns of production, landholding and power in a few localities, and providing the skeleton of a political chronology. In many of the lands that came to form the Carolingian realm, the number of survivals increases markedly through the eighth century. This cannot be ascribed to a dramatically higher level of their production: those that do survive from the Merovingian period concerned business that was just as routine as the Carolingian examples, and as legal documents in the late Roman period. But in that earlier time, there had been reliable ways not only to preserve documents, but also to validate, re-affirm and re-record the legal business they contained. The network of Roman public legal offices – gesta municipalia – may not have been quite so extensive, elaborate or reliable as has sometimes been maintained, but it did ensure that documents were a crucial part of the framework of social regulation.
The continued appearance of references to parts of this framework – to the gesta as public centres of legal validation and record, with attendant officials – in the Merovingian and early Carolingian periods indicates two things. First, that at least in some regions the framework persisted after the end of Roman rule, and second, that it had disappeared by the mid-eighth century, while some of its functions had been taken up by those institutions – overwhelmingly, it would seem, churches and monasteries – capable of the regular production and, perhaps, the retention of relatively standardised documents. Legal recordkeeping no longer depended on organs of government in the way that it had done. Moreover, attitudes to archiving were changing. Those institutions that could preserve records – not just of their own legal business but of those who had entrusted documents to them – began to sift and shape their archives to help construct their institutional memory. Often, in fact, what was in their archives (and also, therefore, what had been lost) dictated the way they viewed their own past.
Thus, monasteries not only produced cartularies into which their scribes laboriously copied the sheaves of documents in their archives, but also cartulary chronicles, in which selected documents formed a framework for a narrative history of their institution – and in particular a very partial (in both senses) account of its acquisition of its properties. Careful consideration of the ways in which our record was created allows us to glimpse beyond it a world of document-users, both lay and clerical. Even as it stands, the record includes evidence for substantial engagement with documents by the laity: dossiers of documents involving only lay men and women were 78 79 80 81 preserved in a number of monastic archives in the eighth and ninth centuries, such as those of St Gallen in Alemannia and Monte Amiata in Tuscany.
That their protagonists possessed widely varying social statuses, and often also appear alongside churchmen conducting similar legal affairs, indicates both that document use by the laity was in many areas absolutely routine and that in any case a strict demarcation between lay people and clerics in this context is not really necessary. Although preserving documents for long periods may gradually have become the preserve of ecclesiastics, the use of documents at the time was certainly not. Charters offer insights well beyond levels of engagement with writing, or the bald mechanics of the landholdings that are the principal subjects of the majority of the survivals. Because they were redacted at assemblies of local people, some of whom attested them as witnesses, and because they often describe not only the extent of landed properties, but their agricultural uses and the names and, often, conditions of the people living on them, these documents constitute invaluable witnesses to many aspects of the everyday life of the mass of the population. These emerge best when a number of charters from a particular locality and a relatively restricted period can be studied together, as is increasingly possible thanks to a steady increase inmodern editions.
Cumulatively these bodies of documents reveal the composition, and some of the dynamics, of groups of local people, sometimes extending quite far down the social hierarchy. For these reasons, the charter evidence forms much of the basis of the observations on rural life and social structure in Chapters 5 and 6. While today’s historian theoretically enjoys a quantity of written sources for the Carolingian world barely higher than that available to previous generations, in practice he or she has readier access to much of it and is better able to appreciate the implications of its transmission, and so to place it in an appropriate context. Moreover, written sources can be set alongside a growing volume of material data, revealing hitherto hidden features of eighth and ninthcentury existence. The sustained attention that archaeologists have paid to the early Middle Ages over the last thirty years or so has produced a rising tide of data on aspects of life that our written sources mention only tangentially, if at all.
Archaeology can give a much more threedimensional view of the physical realities of early medieval life – not only of such things as dwellings, implements, ornaments and diet, but also of the physical condition of the people themselves. Such evidence is not a simple complement to the written sources; often, it challenges historians’ long-standing interpretations of their texts. Thus, the charters’ terminology for settlements, such as villa or fundus, in many areas remained relatively constant, while archaeology reveals dramatic changes taking place in the actual shape of human communities, such as the emergence of nucleated villages in many parts of Europe between the sixth and eighth centuries. New techniques of investigating the past also take us beyond material culture to movements of people themselves. Both recovered ancient DNA and samples taken from modern populations can be analysed to determine the movements, and the coming together, of biologically distinguishable populations in the past.
The problem of mapping this data on to the historical sources is difficult: medieval ethnic and cultural labels cannot be applied straightforwardly to genetic profiles.Nonetheless, this new and rapidly developing science holds out the possibility of a much better understanding of human migrations, a crucial issue for our period, flanked as it is by the ‘barbarian’ migrations of the fifth and sixth centuries and the Viking settlements of the late ninth and tenth. The growth in archaeological and biological data has been rapid, and their integration into the written history of the early Middle Ages is a significant preoccupation of students of the period. This drawing together of diverse and often fresh sources holds out the possibility that what has hitherto been frustratingly obscure or at least opaque might become clearer in the future.
This is perhaps especially the case with aspects of everyday life – diet, for instance, or housing – that are only glancing concerns for the major genres of written text. Our more complex and subtle appreciation of the meanings in these latter sources is a necessary corollary of the effort to read them alongside the new stories related by material culture and biology. As a result, at the start of the twenty-first century, the Carolingian world has never appeared with sharper definition, and greater scope for understanding.
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