Download PDF | Helmut Reimitz - History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, 550 - 850-Cambridge University Press (2015).
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This pioneering study explores early medieval Frankish identity as a window into the formation of a distinct Western conception of ethnicity. Focusing on the turbulent and varied history of Frankish identity in Merovingian and Carolingian historiography, it offers a new basis for comparing the history of collective and ethnic identity in the Christian West with other contexts, especially the Islamic and Byzantine worlds.
The tremendous political success of the Frankish kingdoms provided the medieval West with fundamental political, religious and social structures, including a change from the Roman perspective on ethnicity as the quality of the ‘Other’ to the Carolingian perception that a variety of Christian peoples were chosen by God to reign over the former Roman provinces. Interpreting identity as an open-ended process, Helmut Reimitz explores the role of Frankish identity in the multiple efforts through which societies tried to find order in the rapidly changing post-Roman world.
HELMUT REIMITZ is Professor of History at Princeton University. His previous publications include Cultures in Motion, Vergangenheit und Vergegenwärtigung: Frühes Mittelalter und Europäische Erinnerungskultur, Staat im Frühen Mittelalter and The Construction of Communities in the Early Middle Ages.
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The work on this book started in Vienna, where Herwig Wolfram, more than 30 years ago, finished the first edition of his study on the Goths which he himself called a Entwurf einer historischen Ethnographie, an outline of, or even an experiment in, historical ethnography. With this book, Wolfram started a time of intensive and lively experimentation and debate on the question of the salience of ethnic identity for social and political integration in the late and post-Roman world. In the decades since the first publication of the book his outline and his impulses have been further developed and were also changed in many ways by scholars from not only Vienna but also from many other places; new tools were developed and applied, reflections on the terminology, the inclusion of hitherto neglected evidence such as the rich body of patristic works and sermons, or the rich and varied manuscript transmission of many works written in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
In Wolfram’s own Vienna, it was above all Walter Pohl who – in close co-operation with Wolfram – based the research on new theoretical foundations by analysing ethnic identity as a discourse (in the sense of Michel Foucault). The multiple determination of ethnicity, which had formed Wolfram’s implicit starting point, was thereby turned into the object of historical study. Pohl thus analysed the cultural practices and performances and the political conditions within which the meaning of ethnic identity must necessarily be continually renegotiated.
His suggestions were crucial for the development of a comparative perspective on ethnic identity and ethnicity and to explore ethnic identity as one form of social identity among others. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the ongoing work and experiments in historicising ethnic identity and ethnicity in late Roman and post-Roman West culminated in a five-year project on ‘Ethnic Identities in Early Medieval Europe’ (2005–10) funded by the Wittgenstein prize of the Austrian Science Fund (Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung), which Walter Pohl received in 2004. It was during this project that my own Entwurf of a history of Frankish identity in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages started to take shape. I could not have been luckier. Not only have I profited directly and individually from the scholarly wisdom, the openness and generosity of my two teachers, Walter Pohl and Herwig Wolfram, who have continued to give invaluable advice and guidance also after my move to the USA and have both read various drafts of the manuscript, but the combination of their respective styles and temperaments also created a unique learning culture that motivated many people to join in the scholarly experiments in late Antique and early medieval history in Vienna.
They inspired lively discussions and debate with and among younger generations of scholars from Vienna at the Institut für Mittelalterforschung of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung. My debt for the inspiration and help that I received from my friends and colleagues working in the Viennese workshops, including Richard Corradini, Max Diesenberger, Nicola Edelmann, Clemens Gantner, Karl Giesriegl, Cinzia Grifoni, Gerda Heydemann, Marianne Pollheimer, Roland Steinacher, Vladmira Stipkova, Veronika Wieser and Bernhard Zeller, goes far beyond this book. This is also true for many colleagues and friends from other places than Vienna whom I have had the privilege and pleasure to meet. Stefan Esders, Andreas Fischer, David Ganz, Patrick Geary, Eric Goldberg, Yitzhak Hen, Michael Maas, Janet Nelson, Pavlína Rychterová, Karl Ubl and Ian Wood have all read drafts of the manuscript or parts of it and have generously continued to educate me, have given invaluable advice and comments and have also shared their unpublished work with me. For many conversations and the exchange of ideas, insights, published and unpublished, I am also greatly indebted to Julia Becker, Kate Cooper, Jennifer Davis, Albrecht Diem, Guy Halsall, Wolfgang Haubrichs, Martin Heinzelmann, Damien Kempf, Conrad Leyser, Régine LeJan, Simon MacLean and Julia Smith. While many of the conversations that helped shaping this book took place in Vienna, the book itself was written in Princeton, where I have had the privilege of becoming part of quite a different but equally inspiring and invigorating learning culture.
The lively scholarly exchange in the History Department, in programmes such as the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, the Program in Hellenic Studies, the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity or the Institute for Advanced Study, has been and still continues to be a constant source of inspiration, motivation and experimentation with new perspectives and tools. It was one of the particular excitements of writing this book to see how the project changed and received new directions in the process of writing it in this wonderfully stimulating environment. For the present book I should like to thank in particular Jeremy Adelman, Betsy Brown, Nicola Di Cosmo, Tony Grafton, Emmanuel Kreike, Michael Laffan, Nino Luraghi, Bhavani Raman, Dan Rodgers, Brent Shaw and in particular my late Antique and medieval colleagues and friends at the History Department, John Haldon and William Jordan, for their suggestions, feedback and advice. Peter Brown read several drafts of the manuscript, and returned them to me with numerous comments, copy-edits and invaluable suggestions. With his characteristic generosity he took even more time to discuss them with me in many conversations from which I have learned more than I can say. Jamie Kreiner has worked on this book with me for several years. Not only did she share her stimulating insights on Merovingian history and hagiography with me while we both studied, taught and were taught at Princeton, she also improved the whole book by revising my style in English, which she continued to do even after she started to teach at the University of Georgia. I cannot thank her enough for the help and inspiration she provided. Rosamond McKitterick not only supported this book through her scholarship and friendship over many years, she also supported its publication in the Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought series and read the manuscript several times. I have benefited enormously from her critical comments and suggestions as well as her editorial advice.
The great skills, generosity and good nature of Liz Friend-Smith and Rosalyn Scott of Cambridge University Press made the publishing process a truly enjoyable stage. I am equally grateful for the great care and dedication of my copyeditors, Jenny Slater and Christopher Feeney and my indexer Katherine Harper. Last but by no means least, I would like to thank my daughters, Clara-Maria and Agnes. They read the manuscript several times, checking spelling, quotations and bibliography. Their suggestions, corrections and improvements to this book made me a lucky author and a very proud father. I have received generous financial support for the work underlying this book from the History Department at Princeton University, in the form of the award of two honorific fellowships and the Harold Willis Dodds Presidential University Preceptorship (2011–14), the Institut für Mittelalterforschung of the Austrian Academy in Vienna, the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, the Wittgensteinprojekt on ‘Ethnic Identities in Early Medieval Europe’ funded by the Austrian Science Fund (Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung), the European Research Council Programme HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) through the project on ‘Cultural Memory and the Resources of the Past, 400–1000’, the Spezialforschungsbereich Visions of Community at the University of Vienna and the Advanced Grant of the European Research Council, ‘Social Cohesion, Identity and Religion in Europe (400–1200)’ awarded to Walter Pohl. Without the support of these institutions and programmes and the generosity of the people behind them, it would not have been possible to finish this book.
INTRODUCTION
This book explores the history of Frankish identity in the Merovingian and Carolingian kingdoms from the sixth to the middle of the ninth centuries – the period in which these kingdoms came to be seen as the Frankish kingdoms. Their rise to become one of the most important and enduring successor states of the Western Roman Empire started with Clovis I, the son of Childeric I, one of the client kings of Rome in its last days. But soon Rome was not there to have clients. At the end of his life in 511, Clovis found himself ruling over most of the former Roman provinces of Gaul. His descendants, the legendary Merovingian kings, established themselves as one of the longest-ruling royal families of the early medieval period, controlling roughly the territory of modern France, including some regions along the Rhine that are now part of Germany. Their rule ended only when members of the Carolingian family replaced them as kings around the middle of the eighth century. Among other strategies, the new kings legitimated their usurpation with intensified military expansion. Under Charlemagne (768–814) their kingdom comprised most of western and central Europe, and modern France and Germany were the core regions of what was to become the first medieval Christian empire in the West in the year 800. The Carolingian renovation of the Roman Empire was in many ways an experimental process. The creation of new imperial structures was built as much on the remaining resources of the late Roman Empire as on the experiences and experiments of post-Roman societies to reconfigure these resources in a new world.
In this way, the Carolingian world became one of the most important filters and transmitters of the social, religious and political syntheses by which post-Roman societies attempted to reorganise the diverse social and political frameworks inherited from the late Roman West. This perspective on the history of the post-Roman West defines the chronological boundaries of the book. It does not want to describe the end of a process in which Frankish identity established itself in its ‘true’ form in the middle of the ninth century. Experimentation in linking the name of the Franks to a common history and meaning started as an open-ended process and never resulted in the establishment of a single dominant conception of Frankish identity in the Merovingian and Carolingian period. The rich transmission of texts that were written and copied in the early medieval Frankish kingdoms has bequeathed us a particularly rich and varied body of sources in which older models, myths, fables and (hi)stories were rewritten, expanded and adapted in order to articulate new conceptions of Frankish identity. Yet, different as they were, the efforts of Merovingian and Carolingian scribes and scholars contributed to the long-lasting success of the Frankish name by continually investing Frankish identity with new meaning and social prestige. Such reflections not only established a wide and various repertoire to imagine the social and political horizons of communities that were identified as Franks, they were also connected to reflections about the imagination of the larger social whole to which these Frankish communities belonged.
They were part of a process in which the inhabitants of the regions that were increasingly called Europe came to imagine the world as one divided among peoples chosen by God to rule over the former Roman provinces. What we observe in this process is not the formation of Ethnicity with a capital E, but the formation of a specific social imagination of the world as one divided among Christian peoples which we might call a Western ethnicity. In this book we shall explore the formation of this Western form of ethnicity and its dynamic relationship with the history of Frankish identity until the middle of the ninth century, when a common understanding regarding the imagination of the social world as a world divided among peoples started to slide more firmly into place. Reflections on Frankish identity This book will thus explore the history of Frankish identity as part of ongoing social and political experiments and as a tool of orientation in the quickly and constantly changing late Antique and early medieval West. It will offer a history that goes ‘beyond groupism’, as Roger Brubaker has called the ‘tendency to take discrete, sharply differentiated, internally homogeneous and externally bounded groups as ‘basic constituents of social life … and fundamental units of social analysis’.1
The book is thus not a history of the Franks. It is a history of how people in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages used and shaped images and imaginations of Frankish identity in their efforts to make sense of their social world, and a history that reveals how early medieval people reflected on questions about who the Franks had been, what they had become and what they should be. For a long time, and even until now, many scholars have assumed that members of a Dark Age society rarely worried about such abstract questions. As a result, modern historical scholarship largely took Frankish identity for granted. And yet, the Merovingian and Carolingian kingdoms have left us an impressive variety of meanings and interpretations for the name of the Franks. The Merovingian kings legitimated themselves as reges Francorum, but the name turns up as a description for particular regions or groups within the realms of these kings too. Merovingian and Carolingian historians continued the debates about the etymology of the name of the Franks that had already started in the time of the Roman Empire.2 They also had different views on the origins of the Franks. In the various Frankish law books, the name of the Franks affirms that different Franks in different regions claimed an elevated social and legal status in contrast to other social groupings, including new Franks.
The name was used to legitimate the political claims of different elites and their position in the regnum. It was, however, also linked to Christian visions of community, to assert that a Christendom defined as Frankish took precedence over other Christendoms.3 Some studies do indeed discuss the ambiguity of the name of the Franks, which is documented in the extant sources, especially from the seventh century onwards.4 This ambiguity, however, has rarely been explored as a sign of deeper reflections about Frankish identity in the Merovingian and Carolingian kingdoms. Most scholars seem to have trusted that the Franks themselves would have known who they were. We shall see in the course of this book that Merovingian and Carolingian contemporaries were not so sure. A closer look at the history of the use of the Frankish name in the extant evidence from late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages reveals that Frankish identity was a complex phenomenon – for the inhabitants of the Frankish kingdoms themselves as well as for outsiders. What constituted being a Frank was not only much debated but also fiercely contested in different regions and social milieux. In these ongoing debates, the importance and meaning of Frankish identity changed in many different ways.
Most importantly, a gradual but nevertheless fundamental change occurred in these centuries as to how the larger social world was to be imagined to which these visions of Frankish communities had to be connected. In the Roman Empire, the collective identification of a gens, such as that of the Franks, Saxons or Alamans, was understood primarily as a quality of the ‘other’.5 The Roman imagination had organised the world into a powerful dichotomy of the civilised Roman world and the opposite, barbarian world of the gentes. By the ninth century, however, this perspective had fundamentally changed. Now the Carolingian Empire itself had become inhabited and ruled by gentes, such as the Franks, Saxons and Alamans.
They saw their own world as divided among peoples that God had chosen to rule over the former Roman provinces. The many different interventions and reflections about the meaning and role of Frankish identity from the sixth to the ninth century will help us to explore this process. But the history of Frankish identity will not only be used as a window into this process. We shall also see that the different reflections and interventions about the meaning and conception of Frankish identity played an influential role in the specific shape that the social imagination took when thinking of a world divided among peoples. The formation of such a conception of ethnicity was as much the result of a specific historical process as the formation of a discourse on Frankish identity. Both would be further transformed and developed for many centuries to come. Identity and processes of identification These introductory remarks give an impression of the approach to identity and ethnicity I shall be taking in this book.
It might be helpful, however, to make plain some of the methodological foundations I am using to explore identity and ethnicity in the Merovingian and Carolingian kingdoms.6 In building upon recent sociological and anthropological research, I understand ‘identity’ as a ‘toolkit’. This toolkit can be used to develop a dense array of strategies involving groups, individuals and their interrelationships.7 From such a perspective, ‘Frankish identity’ did not simply exist. It was a constant process of identifications and imaginations of who the Franks were. They had to be created and constantly re-created in a circuit of communication between an individual’s identification with a group (whether accepted by the group or not), the identification of the group as such or through its representatives and identifications of that group in the perceptions of outsiders.8 In such a view, we not only have to explore the formation of identity as an intrinsically relational phenomenon, but also have to let go of the romantic idea that we might be able to find more stable notions of identity behind extant articulations, or even instrumentalisations, of identification in our sources. As Stuart Hall observed on the ‘structure of identification’: The story of identity is a cover story. A cover story for making you think you have stayed in the same place though with another bit of your mind you do know that you have moved on. What we have learned about the structure of the way in which we identify suggests that identification is not one thing, one moment …
It is something that happens over time, is never absolutely stable, that is subject to the play of history and the play of difference.9 It is the aim of this book to explore what happened ‘over time’ in regard to Frankish identity. We shall thus explore the circuits of communication in which the meaning of Frankish identity was constantly created and re-created in identifications that built on imaginations of a Frankish past and its extension to the future. As we shall see these imaginations never built on the reality of core Frankish identity. They were ‘situational constructs’, which does not mean that they were just random appropriations of a name for a social group and its history.10 Such situational constructs take place in heavily contested social contexts. Through them people are able to create a ‘gap between the past and the future’ which in turn allows them to distinguish between reality and possibility.11 The realisation of an identity in processes of identification always goes beyond the experience of groupness and beyond what people perceive as real.
Ethnicity and ethnic identity In order to explore the formation and transformation of Frankish identity as an open-ended historical process, we shall also have to extend the approach to ethnicity. This is particularly important for research on early medieval identities. For a long time, early medieval ‘tribes’ were seen as the direct ancestors of the European nations.12 Nationalist concepts and claims of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were projected back onto early medieval collectives such as the Franks, Angles, Saxons, Suevians, Thuringians and so on, in such a way that the history of late Antique and early medieval gentes was constructed as the start of modern nations, such as the French, English, German and so on. The assumption was that an inborn essence in all of these peoples was what made their success and persistence possible. Because of their great political success, the Franks were even taken as evidence of the triumph of the nation over the supra national civilisation of the Roman Empire. Their history represented the ascent of the Germanic people in the former provinces of the Western Empire, who imposed more and more of their ‘Germanic’ mentality, traditions and institutions on the population of these provinces. The Gentilismus – the pride in being gentes – of the conquering peoples was considered to be a stronger mode of thought than was the Roman imperial consciousness of the provincials.13 During the last few decades, such tendencies of earlier historians have been thoroughly deconstructed.14 This process went hand in hand with the fundamental revision of the dramatic image of the ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’. As more recent works have shown, the ‘Fall of Rome’ was not a melodramatic ‘clash of cultures’ but rather ‘a long-term process of transformation, accentuated not by one fatal blow to classical civilisation, but as a multitude of transitions that eventually created rather different societies’.15
The changing meaning of ethnic identity has to be understood as part of this process. It was the result of these transformations, not a precondition of them. Understanding these changes, however, requires extending the historical approach to identities as open and dynamic processes – to what Rogers Brubaker has called ethnic ‘common sense’16 or what we might also call ‘ethnic discourse’ (in the sense of Michel Foucault).17 In order to do this, I suggest distinguishing between ethnic identity and ethnicity. Building on the definition suggested by Brubaker, I will explore ethnicity as a way of observing the social world as a world divided among ‘distinctive and analogous groups that are perceived as naturally constituted’.18 Such a definition is not only a more flexible one, allowing for the study of different ways to perceive and order the social world as a world divided among distinctive and analogous groups, it might also help to explore ethnic identity and ethnicity as different ways to observe them.
In this regard it might be helpful to combine Brubaker’s definition of ethnicity with the distinction between different forms of observation that has been developed by Nicklas Luhmann: the difference between observations of the first and second order.19 Whereas first-order observations are operations in which things are observed and differentiated, second-order observations are observations of those (first-order) observations. First-order observations create differences without considering the difference itself: the differentiated subjects that result from the observation are assumed to be definitive, without reflecting on the criteria for the distinction in the first place. Luhmann’s goal was above all to develop a theory to understand the complexity of modern society. The adoption of his ideas, however, may well help to explore the complexities of ancient and medieval societies as well.20 In taking stock of his ideas we might understand ethnicity as a conceptualisation of the world in a second-order observation. An ethnic identity is consequently a collective identity that such forms of observation observe – that is observed as belonging to a world divided among ‘distinctive and analogous groups’.
The distinction between ethnic identity and ethnicity might help us explore both aspects of ethnic processes – the imagination of the Franks as a gens or populus, as well as the imagination of the larger social whole to which gentes and populi were connected – and most importantly to study how the dynamic relationship between these two forms of observations shaped and reshaped both. Such a conceptualisation of ethnic identity and ethnicity as interdependent historical processes is not only crucial to explore how they were both subject to the play of history and difference in the early medieval West. It will also help us to define them more precisely in their respective historical contexts, which will allow us to differentiate ethnic identity from other visions of Frankish communities that connected the name to other or even alternative macro-social mappings. This in turn will enable us to understand how observations of Frankish communities as an ethnic identity were shaped by the interplay, coexistence and competition with other forms of social identities, such as Christian, civic, regional or military identity.21 To illustrate this methodological outline, let us look briefly at some early medieval perceptions, observations and imaginations of social groups and the larger social whole to which they belonged.
Late Antique and early medieval reflections on ethnic identity and ethnicity At the beginning of the tenth century, the former abbot of Prüm and current abbot of St Martin in Trier, Regino of Prüm saw the world as a world of nations whose populations were differentiated by descent, customs, language and law.22 In a recent and perceptive discussion, Matthew Innes has placed Regino’s anthropological observations in their context.23 Regino made these remarks in a dedicatory letter to Archbishop Hatto of Mainz, to accompany his comprehensive collection of canon law, Libri duo de synodalibus causis et disciplinis ecclesiasticis. Regino saw the social order of the world divided among peoples ‘as an analogy for difference in custom of the universal church’.24 This example shows not only that the early Middle Ages thought about the world in this way, it also helps illustrate how much conceptions of ethnicity were shaped by their interplay with other macro-social mappings. And it shows too how such social imaginations were used as tools to order and form one’s actual social world. After all, Regino used his conception of ethnicity to accommodate difference in a populus Christianus whose members as Christians were supposed to be all alike. ‘Identity’, as Walter Pohl observed, ‘is never only identical’.25
I hope to have shown by the end of this book the extent to which this observation of Walter Pohl’s applies to the formation of an early medieval Western conception of ethnicity in the centuries before Regino. We will also have seen that Regino built on a world view that had only slid more firmly into place about a hundred years before he wrote. The catalogue he uses to describe this world of peoples calls to mind modern attempts to define ethnicity, which draws our attention to how much modern scholarship of ethnicity is a product of its own European history.
That goes past the scope of this book, however, which focuses on the period before Regino was born. I do hope, however, that this history of Frankish identity and the study of the formation of Western conception of ethnicity in the Merovingian and Carolingian kingdoms up to the mid-ninth century may help develop a couple of new starting points when it comes to posing such questions to later periods of European history. It is in any case important for the subject of this book to maintain that the social imaginations of the world such as Regino’s – that is the imagination of the world as a world divided among peoples – was minted and continually re-minted by specific cultural and political contexts.
These developments are possibly even easier to detect in texts that originated in the centuries before Regino. As we shall see in the course of this book, Regino was building on a consensus about this social imagination that should be seen as the result of a longer process in the Frankish world. Consequently, the reflections about this order of the world that we have from earlier centuries can better convey how open the questions were about what a gens, natio or populus was, and what kind of order these concepts should be associated with in the post-Roman world. A good example of this comes from the Etymologiae sive origines, the project that Isidore of Seville worked on in the early decades of the seventh century. This was a twenty-volume encyclopaedia that Isidore compiled out of all the works that were available to him, and in it he used separate entries to explain the origins – and hence the meaning – of significant terms.26 In his definition of gens, Isidore did not use a catalogue of criteria like those that Regino would use 300 years later. Instead Isidore emphasised the structural aspects of ethnicity.27
A gens is a number of people sharing a single origin or distinguished from another natio in accordance with its own grouping as the ones of Greece or Asia Minor … The word gens is also so called on account of the generations of families, that is, from begetting, just as the word natio derives from being born.28 It seems that early medieval intellectuals did not need twenty-first-century sociologists and anthropologists to tell them that ethnicity was a ‘relational mode of social organisation, in which a society comprises a number of distinctive and analogous groups that are perceived as naturally constituted’.29 The backdrop for this affinity seems to be that Isidore was trying to find a way to call prevailing conceptions of ethnicity into question. It was a matter of finding new ways to define the social imagination of a gens, to emancipate it from the Roman world order to which the concept had previously been tied. In his Etymologies, Isidore not only restored the ‘monumental fabric of the ancients’, as his pupil Braulio of Saragossa would write in praise of his master,30 he also adapted it to a world that was ruled by the kings of the gens Gothorum. The kings of this gens had only recently converted to Catholic Christianity, and Isidore provided them and others in the kingdom with ‘all they needed to know’.31 When Isidore enumerated the peoples of the world in his reflection on the gentes, the Romans were one of them.32 Isidore’s encyclopaedic work was not the only one to rearrange the world. As Jamie Wood has recently shown, such a reorganisation also played a great part in his historical works, in which Isidore promoted the gens Gothorum as the legitimate successors of the Romans in Spain.33 For Isidore it was not the social and political integration of the gens Gothorum that concerned him most. He was, as Peter Brown observed, among the most enthusiastic episcopal advisers of the Visigothic kings, who ‘wished to create a new common social and political vision of their own true Christian commonwealth in thinly disguised competition with the “kingdom of the Greeks” – the self-styled “Holy Commonwealth” of East Rome’.34
In this context, the redefinition of ethnicity helped accommodate the autonomy of the various and increasingly confident post-Roman societies in the former Western Roman provinces.35 We shall see that this function of ethnicity played an important role for the history of Frankish identity in the early medieval period too. Middle grounds, brokerage and historical writing in late Antique Gaul We will trace the changing roles and meaning of Frankish identity in the transformation of the Roman world above all in historiographical texts. The reason for this choice is not that history and ethnic identity share some essential connection. As I mentioned earlier, I follow rather the approaches of those such as Walter Pohl and Rogers Brubaker in defining ethnicity as an imagination of the social world as divided among ‘distinctive and analogous groups that are perceived as naturally constituted’.36 The historical significance of a collective identity is as much ‘subject to the play of history and the play of difference’ as identities themselves.37 The question of the meaning of shared origins and histories for the construction of identity has to be examined on a much broader chronological and geographical scale than this book provides.38 The late Antique and early medieval authors whom this book will discuss, however, seemed to have assumed that a community’s sense of identity depended largely on efforts to convince itself and others of a shared past.39 This is exactly what seems to have prompted some authors – such as Isidore of Seville – to rearrange the accounts of older chronicles and adapt them to changing political and social frameworks.40 Like Isidore, other historians of the post-Roman world decided not simply to continue certain older works, such as Jerome’s Christian world chronicle or late Antique ecclesiastical histories. They instead chose to rewrite them substantially, in order to provide an up-to-date prehistory for a post-Roman society.41 The transformation of the Roman world had opened up new perspectives: in appropriating and reinventing the historiographical resources of the Roman world, early medieval historians transformed the larger social wholes of late Antiquity in their histories. As a comparison of the different historiographical projects in the Frankish kingdoms will show, these histories were not only in direct competition with the Roman models they were adapting. The perspectives they developed for the future of their respective societies were also competing with each other. In this respect, the stakes were not limited merely to the question of whether or not a specific identity should have an important place in history.
The arguments of the texts were also connected to differing conceptions of the larger social world in which a collective identity made sense and could be presented as being of great or little importance for the integration of society. It is above all this creation and re-creation of the larger social whole that I should like to investigate in the histories that were written in the Merovingian and Carolingian kingdoms. I shall begin with the Histories of Gregory of Tours, our first comprehensive history of post-Roman Gaul. In recent decades it has finally become commonplace that the brilliant beginnings of Merovingian historiography were not written as a History of the Franks.42 The vision of community that Gregory formulated for his society in the Histories was much more inspired by the will to establish a Christian ‘order of things’ in the history of Gaul. A number of studies have also shown that Gregory wrote from a late Antique perspective and that he stood much closer to social and literary traditions of the fifth and sixth centuries than to those of the generations to follow.43 It was, however, precisely in the Frankish kingdoms of the subsequent centuries where his Histories were enormously successful and influential. Soon after he died (most likely in 594) it became the reference work for the history of Gaul under Merovingian rule. No alternative history from the sixth century has come down to us, and all subsequent historians of Frankish history worked with or against Gregory’s historiographical legacy.44 Even texts that created very different visions of community had to refer to Gregory’s historiographical authority and develop and continue their competing conceptions out of his Histories. How later historians – not just authors of new works but also the compilers and copyists of his text – adapted Gregory’s conceptions of history and identity will be one of the main themes of this book. The history of Gregory of Tours will also help set the scene for the post-Roman world of the Merovingian kingdoms. As we know from his Histories, which deal for the most part with the time of Gregory’s episcopacy from 573 to 594, Gregory was deeply involved in the social and political fabric of his time, and his account was not an impartial or neutral representation. In fact, Gregory has become famous in the last few decades for his idiosyncrasies,45 but we shall also see that they were well entrenched in the society for which he wrote.
The Histories will thus be our starting point for exploring the social realities and changes to which Gregory responded with his vision of the past. It might therefore be helpful for the readers of this book to make a few introductory remarks about the late Antique history of Gaul and the regnum in which Gregory wrote his Histories. Gregory, like Isidore of Seville, did not treat the end of the Roman Empire as a catastrophe. In contrast to Isidore, however, to whom the end of the Roman rule over the Western provinces was important, Gregory did not represent the end of Rome as any particular caesura in his Histories. The Histories barely mention the ‘barbarian migrations’. Instead Gregory describes fifth-century Gaul as a world in which barbarians and Romans were not so different from each other. The Gallic emperor Avitus (d. 456/7) treated the wives of his senators as autocratically and barbarically as his contemporary, the Frankish king and Roman commander Childeric (d. 481/2) treated the daughters of the Franks.46 Both the Roman emperor and the barbarian king assaulted these women because they were in thrall to luxuria. Nor do barbarian and Roman commanders, such as the Roman magister militum Syagrius, seem very different, compared with Adovacrius, whom Gregory mentions as a leader of a Saxon group, or the comes Paul.47 This was also true of the ways they achieved their respective victories. There is a strong resemblance between Aetius, the Roman magister militum of the West who successfully defended Gaul against the Huns, and Clovis, who eventually brought almost all of Gaul under his rule. They are all essentially presented as ‘late Roman warlords’.
As selective and manipulative as Gregory may have been at times,49 his representation of the situation in the fifth century seems to convey a thoroughly realistic picture. It is at the same time a revealing picture of how false the notion is of a melodramatic clash of cultures between Romans and barbarians which is the result of a strangely contradictory collaboration between nationalist historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the authors and ideologues of the Roman Empire. If for different reasons, they both constructed sharp boundaries between a Roman civilisation and the barbarian-Germanic world. John Drinkwater has recently emphasised the great importance of the ‘Germanic bogeyman’ to late Roman politics for legitimating the reorganisation of Roman government and administration in the fourth century. The constant promotion of the ‘Germanic threat’ played a crucial part in presenting the emperors and imperial elites as defenders of their civilisation, and it justified ‘the imperial administrative structure in the West and the taxation that was necessary to sustain it’.50 In reality, however, this ‘absolute’ frontier between Roman civilisation and the barbarian world was much more permeable. What we observe in the northwestern periphery of the Roman Empire is the development of a large frontier zone, where the supposedly barbarian ‘others’ were in fact well accustomed to Roman politics and life.51 By the fifth century, in fact, they had long been part of late Roman politics. From the fourth century on, there is ample evidence that barbarian groups were federates of the Roman Empire, as auxiliary troops or even regular units of the Roman army – not least Frankish groups, who had been settled as farmers in northern Gaul. Particularly in Gaul we find ‘barbarians’ and, increasingly in the second half of the fourth century, Franks serving in the highest offices of the Roman army.52 In the process, these regions turned into what Richard White has called a ‘“Middle Ground,’’a place in between: in between cultures, peoples and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages’.53
As White has shown, these middle grounds are particularly dynamic zones of interaction and invention of social and cultural syntheses. On the middle ground diverse peoples adjust their difference through what amounts to a process of creative, often expedient, misunderstandings. People try to persuade others who are different from themselves by appealing to what they perceive to be the values and practices of those others. They often misinterpret and distort both the values and the practices of those they deal with, but from these misunderstandings arise new meanings and through them new practices – the shared meanings and practices of the middle ground.54 In Gaul, the meanings and practices of the Middle Ground became particularly important in the fifth century. It was in the course of the fifth century that we observe what has recently been called the ‘Destruction of Central Romanness’, the end of the ability of the Roman state to ‘maintain its supra-regional political structure’ over the different provinces and their local and regional elites.55 However, as Peter Brown has emphasised, the destruction of ‘central Romanness’ did not lead to a victory of the barbarians. In most provinces, it signalled a victory of ‘local Romanness’: Somehow a tacit deal between barbarians and local Romans was struck in the course of the fifth century. It was a deal based on innumerable ‘historic acts’ of symbiosis, collaboration, even of cultural treason … The empire was not so much destroyed as eroded and finally rendered unnecessary by a score of little Romes rooted in more restricted areas of control.56 The process is particularly well documented in Gaul. It was precisely in the Gallic provinces where a series of power blocs developed in which ‘late Roman warlords’ established new ‘little Romes’ in collaboration with local Romans. Gaul is divided into three parts, Caesar remarked in his commentary on his Gallic war.57 Just over five centuries later, after the deposition of the last Western Roman emperor in 476, Gaul was divided among many more power blocs. The Aquitanian provinces in modern southern France were ruled by Visigothic kings, and the Burgundian king Gundobad governed the region along the Rhône river. North of the Loire, the magister militum Syagrius commanded a regnum around Soissons. In the northeast, some territories were controlled by kings whom our sources identified as Frankish, Clovis and his father Childeric among them (see Map 1).58 For some of the Roman elites in the region, this development was a true loss of opportunities. A famous example is Sidonius Apollinaris, the son-in-law of the emperor Avitus, the prefect of Rome, and eventually the bishop of his hometown of Clermont in southern Gaul.59 By the time Sidonius died between 480 and 490, it had become clear that many members of the local and regional elites of Gaul were more than willing to create new local or regional Romannesses in cooperation with the ‘barbarian’ rulers. In the sixth century we find Sidonius’ descendants among them.60 It was not only secular bureaucrats, courtiers and military personnel who reorganised the political and social structures in the post-Roman world in cooperation with the new rulers. As Peter Brown has made plain in his recent study on ‘Wealth, the fall of Rome, and the making of Christianity in the West’, the leaders and members of Christian communities were also an important factor in the end of ‘central Romanness’ and its replacement by ‘little Romes’.61 Many of them came to see the ‘fall of Rome’ as an augmentation of opportunities to concretise their respective Christian visions in a new society. Among them were also some of Gregory of Tours’ ancestors, such as Nicetius, who was the comes of Autun and later bishop of Langres, Gallus of Lyons or Eufronius of Tours, all of whom Gregory presents in his Histories as influential figures in the formation of their own ‘true Christian commonwealth’ in the Merovingian kingdom.62 The members of the intellectual and cultural elite who ‘opted for local leaders, local armies, and local systems of patronage’ played a crucial role in re-creating the social and political frameworks of the late Roman world.63
In drawing on their Roman-Christian education, they helped develop concepts that integrated old and new social structures. The son-in-law of Emperor Avitus, Sidonius Apollinaris, obviously felt more committed to a central Romanness.64 However, the letters he exchanged with members of the Roman elite who were collaborating with the new rulers show how important their role was in the formation of new social and political structures. So we learn that one of Sidonius’ friends was apparently involved in new legislative groundwork happening at the Burgundian court.65 Sidonius even attested that he was the ‘Solon’ of the Burgundians. Likewise Syagrius, who was the great-grandson of a consul, became so fluent in Burgundian that according to Sidonius, the barbarians were afraid of speaking some barbarism in front of him.66 Sidonius’ letters are not the only sources that show the co-operation of local and regional elites. From the fifth to the seventh century we have ample evidence of figures like Syagrius.67 We see them acting as political advisers, in high military and political offices and as bishops at the courts of the new rulers of the successor states of the Roman Empire in the West. They negotiated contracts among different populations, cities and political leaders. They influenced the proceedings of Church councils, helped draft new legal frameworks and wrote speeches for the new rulers. They also composed histories.68 The engagement of Roman regional elites in the political and social reconfiguration of the Roman world resembles the work of people whom modern anthropologists and ethno-historians have called cultural brokers – that is, cultural intermediaries, who ‘stand guard over the crucial junctures of synapses of relationships’, which connect different social groups or systems to a larger whole. They are often products of the Middle Ground or figures who deliberately try to position themselves in spaces ‘in between’. As simultaneous members of two or more interacting networks (kin groups, political factions, communities or other formal or informal coalitions), brokers provide modes of communication between a community and the outside world. Their intermediate position allows brokers to promise more than they can deliver.
This in turn creates room for manoeuvre, which allows skilful mediators to promote the aims of one group while protecting the interests of another – and thus to become nearly indispensable to all sides.69 The concept of a cultural broker has played an important role in modern anthropology. It was introduced by Eric Wolf more than half a century ago and was further developed by Clifford Geertz only a few years later in his study on the changing role of cultural brokers in post-revolutionary Indonesia.70 Not least through the influential work of Clifford Geertz himself, who used the concept to challenge the concept of culture as a stable, self-contained and self-perpetuating system, the concept of ‘cultural brokerage’ as an analytical tool in anthropological and historical research has changed considerably since then. Its further development has contributed substantially to the critique of essentialist notions of culture and identity in a number of different social contexts.
Recent studies on (cultural) brokerage have demonstrated that the work of these brokers can never be understood as a mediation between cultural systems that are clearly distinguishable and fixed. Rather, it has to be seen as a creative performance in social contexts that are characterised by a complicated interplay between different social groups and identities that fuel the brokers’ actions and form the basis of their social prestige. Difference is the brokers’ stock in trade, but integration is what they offer. As recent studies on cultural and political brokerage have demonstrated, one of cultural brokers’ most important strategies is linking ‘the complicated interplays of local and extra-local influences’ to a larger social whole that could be shared by all of the different (real or imagined) social groups involved.72 In taking stock of these approaches I will explore the work of late Antique and early medieval historians in the Merovingian and Carolingian kingdoms in terms of (cultural) brokerage. This may help us move on to a new way of looking at the role of historical texts when we study identities in the early Middle Ages. Up to this point, the question has mostly been discussed in rather straightforward terms. Did historiography have any impact on ethnic, political or religious identities at all? And if so, which identity did a particular work construct? On the whole, recent historical, textual and literary critique has been increasingly sceptical towards the value of historiographical sources when it comes to offering an adequate reflection of ‘real’ communities (because the texts were too biased) and to measuring the impact they may have had in creating or promoting identities (because the audience and influence of the texts is only rarely attested).73 However, most historical texts did not construct a single identity. They balanced a whole range of possible identifications. Their narratives develop several options and explore their opportunities and limitations. They did not do this to promote the position or political tradition of any one single group that was politically or socially relevant.
The most successful historians in the post-Roman kingdoms positioned themselves in the space ‘in between’ (or sometimes above) different elites, groups, regional and local frameworks. Their task was to integrate the relevant social and political identities of their time into a historical framework – a common past – that all of the different (real or imagined) relevant social groups involved could share. As I have already briefly mentioned, the formation of the post-Roman kingdoms was a time that both demanded as well as allowed for intensified social experimentation. However, this experimentation took place within specific historical circumstances that defined changing limits and opportunities for the delicate balancing acts of (cultural) brokers. The study of their role in this process and its comparison with the works of historians will help us explore these opportunities and limits – the Spielräume – for the creation of new political, social and cultural syntheses in late and post-Roman Gaul. This in turn will allow us to explore the literary and social Spielräume of the politics of identity in the Merovingian and Carolingian kingdoms. Looking at how late Antique and early medieval historians tried to balance a whole range of possible identifications will also allow us to study how their work reacted to other possible identifications. They were part of a polyphonic discussion, and although most of those voices were lost, they can be reconstructed to a point through our texts’ reactions to them. The historical reconfiguration of the social world in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages was an ongoing conversation with the past, the present and the future.
Writing for the future The impressive statement with which Gregory of Tours concluded his ten books of histories shows how much early medieval historians thought about the future of their texts. After a comprehensive list of the bishops of Tours, he ended his work with a dramatic appeal. By the coming of ‘our Lord Jesus Christ and Judgement Day’, he called on his successors ‘never to cause these books to be destroyed or rewritten, selecting some passages and omitting others, but let them all continue in your time complete and undiminished as they were left by us’.74 We shall see in this book how the fate of the work exceeded even his worst expectations. Soon after Gregory’s death, Merovingian historians updated his Histories to fit the new political and social circumstances of the seventh century. They left off the last four books and treated the first six exactly as Gregory suspected they might: they included some chapters and omitted others. As the unusually high number of extant manuscripts from the Merovingian period suggests, it was this version that circulated most widely in the Merovingian kingdoms of the seventh century. It was also this version that later Merovingian historians such as the compilers of the Fredegar Chronicle and the author of the Liber historiae Francorum, used to rework to establish different visions of Frankish history. In doing so they built on the authority that Gregory’s narrative had apparently developed; yet at the same time they were also able to use the relatively broad Spielräume that his text offered in order to construct Frankish identity. It was precisely because Gregory had not written a history of the Franks that his narrative was all the easier to link to different conceptions of Frankish identity. Both these Merovingian texts, each of which reworked the six-book version of Gregory, not only developed an alternative to Gregory’s view of Frankish history and identity.
Their views also stood in competition with each other, and that competition reflects a lively debate about the definition and role of Frankish identity. As a result, Gregory’s Histories paradoxically stand at the start of the formation of a discourse about Frankish identity in historiographical texts of the Merovingian and Carolingian period. Merovingian and Carolingian historians have bequeathed us a particularly rich and varied body of sources for studying the formation of such a discourse. The historians of the Merovingian and Carolingian period carefully researched earlier histories, integrated older accounts into their own narratives and continued them. In doing so they adapted the works of earlier historians to new horizons in a constantly and quickly changing world. Following these works from the context in which they were written into the future for which they were written will help us to explore them not as simple reflections of different concepts of Frankish identity, but rather as histories that constituted and promoted identities in their attempts to offer perspectives for the future. What is particularly exciting about these historiographical reconfigurations in the Merovingian and Carolingian period is that the relative abundance of manuscripts allows us to extend this approach to the anonymous compilers and copyists of historical works.75 They too adapted their ‘originals’ through sometimes inconspicuous alterations, omissions or additions, and they arranged them with other texts to create larger history books to compile new histories for the future. The continuing work of cultural recovery can be particularly well studied in the rich transmission from the Carolingian period. The Carolingian historiographical workshops not only rearranged new versions of older histories, continued them and developed their own distinct historical perspectives, such as annalistic writings, but they also used old and new texts as building blocks for bigger historiographical compendia, constituting an ever-growing body of histories to reshape the past for the present. In this book we shall thus also look beyond modern editions to the rich and varied manuscript transmission, whose singularity enables us to examine the diverse futures that the texts’ different conceptions of (Frankish) history and collective identity engendered. This approach will not only help us read the old manuscripts as new texts and thereby broaden and differentiate our source base, but it will also be crucial in reconstructing the role of texts in social communication about identity and community. The variety of subtle differences in the extant texts and compilations show that these manuscripts were not isolated products of a Dark Age but the ‘fruit of urgent and intelligent debates which linked the last days of Rome in an almost continuous conversation’ with the Carolingian Empire.76 The study of the reception and transmission of the extant texts will thus help us evaluate the impact of historical narratives and the successive identifications they supported, and to trace that impact of their negotiations over the role and function of Frankish identity on the formation of ethnic repertoires in the early medieval world. The work of the copyists and compilers will also show us how early medieval historians worked with as much care in researching different versions of older sources and histories as they did in drafting new texts. To take just one example from the transmission of Gregory’s Histories, Gregory ostensibly was unable to find any reliable sources for the early history of the Frankish kings in Gaul. He learnt a lot about the history of the Franks, for example, from the Roman historian Sulpicius Alexander. But according to Gregory, Sulpicius Alexander does not discuss their kings.
The Merovingian compilers who produced a six-book version of Gregory’s Histories transmit a slightly different version of this sentence. Non tamen regem primum eorum ualentinus nominat. This may have been a simple scribal error. But it could also be understood as ‘Among the many things that the history of Sulpicius Alexander tells us, it does not mention their first king Valentinus.’ This spot at least struck the Carolingian compilers of Gregory’s work who compiled their own version of the Histories in the monastery of Saint-Hubert in the Ardennes in the middle of the ninth century.78 As part of that project they worked with different versions of the text (an abbreviated one and a complete one), so they had both versions of this passage about the first kings of the Franks. In their new version of Gregory’s Histories these Carolingian editors initially opted for the reading ullatinus. But they later corrected the choice and improved their earlier reading to ualentinus. 79 The work of the historical compilers at Saint-Hubert on Gregory’s Histories documents not only the care with which early medieval historians and historical compilers wrote new histories or new versions of older histories, it also shows the tension involved in this work, between the need or the desire to adapt these works to new horizons on the one hand and the efforts to maintain the authenticity and the authority of older narratives on the other. Investigating what were sometimes very subtle changes therefore provides important insights into the methods and strategies that would have been used in the original composition of these histories, too. The extent to which my view of the historical texts has been shaped by working on the manuscript transmissions will become clearer in the course of this book.
The Carolingian period in particular has left a rich and multifaceted manuscript tradition that offers us insights into the historiographical workshops of the early Middle Ages at very close range. Examining it will help us understand how closely the preservation, research, reworking and rearranging of old texts was tied to efforts to order and make sense of a world that was changing rapidly. Including the manuscript tradition in this study is important for another reason, too. Early medieval historians were concerned about the future of their texts. But they were not thinking of how they would be reconstructed in modern editions, as part of great undertakings like the Patrologia Latina, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica or the Corpus Christianorum. If we want to understand their work, we have to think beyond how their works were reconstructed in modern editions, as helpful and necessary as those are. The knowledge and picture of the past that early medieval historians had was framed in terms of schedae and codices. Although we have become accustomed to seeing such schedae and codices as iterations and variations of the same historical works, it was through these sources that historians passed on their conceptions of identity and history to later generations. Consequently, the 300 years that this study covers are not only a crucial period for historicising identity in the post-Roman West, but these centuries are also crucial for our understanding of the changing balance of continuities and discontinuities in regard to the writing of history. This period thus provides us also with some important starting points for the historicisation of historical writing, or – drawing on the inspiration of Jamie Kreiner – for the study of a ‘social history’ of historiography in the early medieval West.
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