Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities

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M E D I E VA L P O L I T I E S A N D M O D E R N M E N TA L I T I E S

This is a collection of influential and challenging essays by British medievalist Timothy Reuter, a perceptive and original thinker with extraordinary range who was equally at home in the Anglophone or German scholarly worlds. The book addresses three interconnected themes in the study of the history of the early and high Middle Ages. Firstly, historiography, the development of the modern study of the medieval past. How do our contemporary and inherited preconceptions and preoccupations determine our view of history? Secondly, the importance of symbolic action and communication in the politics and polities of the Middle Ages. Finally, the need to avoid anachronism in our consideration of medieval politics. Throwing new light both on modern mentalities and on the values and conduct of medieval people themselves, and containing articles never previously available in English, this book is essential reading for any serious student of medieval Europe. Ti m ot h y R eu ter was formerly Professor of Medieval History at the University of Southampton. He published and translated numerous books and articles on medieval history and was the editor of the third volume of The New Cambridge Medieval History (Cambridge, 1999). Reuter died in October 2002 before he could finish preparing these essays for publication; the necessary footnoting, translating and editing have been carried out by Janet L. Nelson.

M E D I E VA L P O L I T I E S A N D M O D E R N M E N TA L I T I E S TIMOTHY REUTER edited by janet l. nelson

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521820745 © Cambridge University Press 2006 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2006 isbn-13 isbn-10

978-0-511-24922-8 eBook (EBL) 0-511-24922-5 eBook (EBL)

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978-0-521-82074-5 hardback 0-521-82074-X hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Editor’s note Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Editor’s introduction

page vii ix xi xiii

part i m odern mentalities: historiographies, methodologies, preconceptions 1 Modern mentalities and medieval polities

3

2 Medieval: another tyrannous construct?

19

3 The insecurity of travel in the early and high Middle Ages: criminals, victims and their medieval and modern observers

38

4 Debating the ‘feudal revolution’

72

5 Pre-Gregorian mentalities

89

6 Whose race, whose ethnicity? Recent medievalists’ discussions of identity

100

part ii the s ymbolic l anguage of medieval p olitical action 7 Nobles and others: the social and cultural expression of power relations in the Middle Ages

111

8 Regemque, quem in Francia pene perdidit, in patria magnifice recepit: Ottonian ruler representation in synchronic and diachronic comparison

127

v

vi

Contents

9 Contextualising Canossa: excommunication, penance, surrender, reconciliation

147

10 Velle sibi fieri in forma hac: symbolic acts in the Becket dispute

167

part iii political structures and int ent ions 11 Assembly politics in western Europe from the eighth century to the twelfth

193

12 Sex, lies and oath-helpers: the trial of Queen Uota

217

13 Plunder and tribute in the Carolingian empire

231

14 The end of Carolingian military expansion

251

15 The Ottonians and Carolingian tradition

268

16 The making of England and Germany, 850–1050: points of comparison and difference

284

17 King, nobles, others: ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ in the Ottonian period

300

18 The ‘imperial church system’ of the Ottonian and Salian rulers: a reconsideration

325

19 Peace-breaking, feud, rebellion, resistance: violence and peace in the politics of the Salian era

355

20 The medieval German Sonderweg? The empire and its rulers in the high Middle Ages

388

21 Mandate, privilege, court judgement: techniques of rulership in the age of Frederick Barbarossa

413

22 All quiet except on the Western Front? The emergence of pre-modern forms of statehood in the central Middle Ages

432

Index

459

Editor’s note

Tim Reuter had been planning to publish a collection of his papers with Cambridge University Press, but died, on 14 October 2002, before he could complete it. The material included is almost entirely as Tim planned it. Only one paper (on the recent historiography of medieval political ritual) has been impossible to retrieve, and perhaps was never written. In its place, an unpublished paper on medieval ethnicity has been included. Of the twenty-two papers, eleven are reprinted here as originally published (they have been scanned, and a few minor additions and corrections put in). Seven (and these include the longest) have been translated from Tim’s German. Four have been edited from Tim’s unpublished texts. More than half of the book, therefore, consists of work hitherto unavailable to an English-speaking readership. Where additional material has been added to the notes, or notes supplied, this has been made clear by the use of square brackets. Tim intended to add a section of ‘Addenda, corrigenda and responses to criticism’, and that has proved impossible to reconstruct. Otherwise, the present volume is as near as possible to what he intended. In preparing Tim’s work for the Press, I have incurred some debts of gratitude. First and foremost, I owe Tim’s widow Georgina Reuter warm thanks for her friendship and support throughout the project, and for much practical help in retrieving material from Tim’s computer. Second, I am very grateful to those friends and colleagues of Tim’s (and mine) – Stuart Airlie, David Ganz, Patrick Geary and John Gillingham – who between them read through my translations of Tim’s German, suggested changes that were invariably improvements and sometimes corrections, and, in John’s case, also gave much counsel and aid during the project’s final stages; and also to Sarah Hamilton for making it possible to reference chapter 9 properly, and to Susan Reynolds for casting her sharp eyes over two of the scanned chapters. Third, my thanks go to Alice Rio for preparing the Index. Fourth, I want to thank Simon Whitmore at Cambridge University Press, who has provided unfailing help and encouragement throughout. vii

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Editor’s note

Lastly, I want to thank those many historians in the UK (especially the Bucknell Group and also Henrietta Leyser), Germany (especially Martina and Wilfried Hartmann) and further afield, who admired Tim’s work as a scholar and appreciated him as a man: their enthusiasm for the project has helped carry it to completion. In the end, it has been a labour of love. Janet L. Nelson

Acknowledgements

The editor and publisher of the present volume would like to thank the following publishers and organisations for permission to reprint or translate the following chapters: Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd, for chapter 2, Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Sigmaringen, for chapters 3, 8, 10, 19 and 22, the Past and Present Society for chapter 4, the Journal of Ecclesiastical History for chapters 5 and 18, Boydell and Brewer Ltd, Woodbridge, for chapter 7, Routledge, Taylor and Francis Books Ltd, London, for chapter 11, the Kommission für bayerische Landesgeschichte bei den Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften for chapter 12, the Royal Historical Society for chapter 13, Oxford University Press for chapter 14, Macmillan Ltd, Basingstoke for chapter 16, Philipp von Zabern Verlag, Mainz for chapter 17, and the Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, King’s College London, for chapter 20. The following chapters first appeared in the following publications: Chapter 2 in The Medieval History Journal 1 (1998), pp. 25–45 Chapter 3 in Johannes Fried ed., Träger und Instrumentarien des Friedens im Hohen und Späten Mittelalter, Vorträge und Forschungen 43 (Sigmaringen, 1996), pp. 169–201 Chapter 4 in Past and Present 155 (1997), pp. 177–95 Chapter 5 in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History 45 (1994), pp. 465–74 Chapter 7 in Anne Duggan ed., Nobles and Nobility in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 85–98 Chapter 8 in G. Althoff and E. Schubert eds., Herrschaftsrepräsentation im ottonischen Sachsen (Sigmaringen, 1998), pp. 363–80 Chapter 10 in Gerd Althoff ed., Form und Funktion o¨ffentlicher Kommunikation im Mittelalter (Sigmaringen, 2001), pp. 201–25 Chapter 11 in Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson eds., The Medieval World (London, 2001), pp. 432–50

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Acknowledgements

Chapter 12 in Kaiser Arnolf. Das ostfränkische Reich am Ende des 9. Jahrhunderts, ed. Franz Fuchs, Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte, Beiheft 19 (Munich, 2002), pp. 253–70 Chapter 13 in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series 35 (1985), pp. 75–94 Chapter 14 in Peter Godman and Roger Collins eds., Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious (814–840) (Oxford, 1990), pp. 391–405 Chapter 16 in Alfred P. Smyth ed., Medieval Europeans: Studies in Ethnic Identity and National Perspectives in Medieval Europe (London, 1998), pp. 53–70 Chapter 17 in Bernd Schneidmüller and Stefan Weinfurter eds., Ottonische Neuanfänge (Mainz, 2001), pp. 127–51 Chapter 18 in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History 33 (1982), pp. 347–74 Chapter 19 in Stefan Weinfurter ed., Die Salier und das Reich, III. Gesellschaftlicher und ideengeschichtlicher Wandel im Reich der Salier (Sigmaringen, 1991), pp. 297–325 Chapter 20 in Anne Duggan ed., Kings and Kingship in Medieval Europe (London, 1993), pp. 179–211 Chapter 22 in Joachim Ehlers ed., Deutschland und der Westen im Mittelalter, Vorträge und Forschungen 50 (Sigmaringen, 2002), pp. 327–51 (Chapters 1, 6, 9, 15, 21 are published for the first time.)

Abbreviations

AHR ASE DA EHR EME FMS HJ HZ JEcclesH JL JMH LM MGH AA Capit. Conc. Const. D DD Epp. Epp. DK Epp. sel. Lib. de lite SRG SRM SS

American Historical Review Anglo-Saxon England Deutsches Archiv English Historical Review Early Medieval Europe Frühmittelalterliche Studien Historisches Jahrbuch Historische Zeitschrift Journal of Ecclesiastical History P. Jaffé ed., Regesta pontificum Romanorum, 2nd edn S. Loewenfeld et al., 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1885–8) Journal of Medieval History Lexikon des Mittelalters Monumenta Germaniae Historica Auctores antiquissimi Capitularia regum Francorum Concilia Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum Diplomata Diplomata regum et imperatorum; Die Urkunden der deutschen Könige und Kaiser Epistulae Epistulae der deutschen Kaiserzeit Epistulae selectae Libelli de lite imperatorum et pontificum saeculis XI et XII conscripti Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum Scriptores xi

xii SSDM ¨ MIOG NCMH P&P PBA PL QFIAB Quellen Settimane Spoleto TRHS ZfRG, KA ZRG, GA ZRG, RA

Abbreviations Scriptores des deutsches Mittelalters ¨ Mitteilungen des Instituts für Osterreichische Geschichtsforschung The New Cambridge Medieval History Past and Present Proceedings of the British Academy J.-P. Migne ed., Patrologia Latina Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken Quellen der deutschen Kaiserzeit Settimane di Studio del Centro italiano di Studi sull’alto medievo, Spoleto Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, kanonistische Abteilung Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, germanistische Abteilung Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, römanistische Abteilung

Editor’s introduction

Grant that medieval history has any usefulness, and you see that this book is not just very useful but urgently needed. Compared with the amount available in English on medieval France, Italy and even Spain, relatively little exists on Germany, though it is an area that is beginning to receive increasing attention in the teaching of medieval history at postgraduate as well as undergraduate levels in the English-speaking world. Medieval Germany’s size and diversity, its economic and political importance, and its cultural productivity, merit study for their own sake. The distinctiveness of medieval Germany suggests that studying it could have relevance for explanations of Germany’s history in Europe in modern as well as medieval times. The sheer depth and volume of German historiography on medieval Germany, and German historians’ tradition of reflecting deeply on methodology, means that here ‘general issues of interpretation and understanding’ can be addressed particularly effectively.1 Yet there are obstacles. The study of the Middle Ages not only in the United Kingdom but also in North America has been skewed in favour of France, and to a lesser extent Italy, particularly since the First World War, for reasons that have a great deal to do with twentieth-century history and nothing to do with historical understanding. What Tim Reuter called Anglolexia, meaning inability to speak or read any language other than English, is becoming a form of cultural impairment increasingly widespread in Anglophone countries. Like other disabilities, this one is unfortunate, hard to live with and resistant to cure. Though German is essential for studying German history of any period intensively at postgraduate level, it is taught in increasingly few UK schools these days. History is at risk of becoming a subject for Anglolexics only – and this at a time when European 1

Quotations in this Introduction, unless otherwise attributed, are from Tim Reuter’s draft synopsis of the present collection.

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union is a reality, and closer educational contacts within Europe an urgently sought goal. In his inaugural lecture to the Chair of Medieval History at the University of Southampton,2 Tim Reuter began, teasingly, with the claim only to want to establish that medieval history ‘is socially and politically innocuous’ – and then went on to show that because ‘even we harmless medieval historians’ are ‘tribes [that] fit into the world they inhabit’, they can’t ‘simply get innocently on with’ what they do. They reflect those worlds, past and present. They reflect, first and foremost, the national states that existed when state-financed professional history began to be taught and learned, that is, in the nineteenth century; and they reflect the national identities and agendas which still powerfully shape (though they don’t entirely constitute) academic environments. If the earlier medievalist sub-tribe, that is, historians working on the period before c. 1000, are less prone than central and later medievalists to confine their operations within national frameworks, more inclined to study whatever they study as ‘variants of a generic European society’, that is not the result of some particular virtue: it reflects partly the smaller quantity of information they have to work with, but mostly the fact that they are rather less exposed to the pressures of national Grand Narratives. In any case, that intra-tribal difference is only a matter of degree. All medievalists work, inevitably, within a national culture. What gives Tim’s work its special character is the fact that it escapes the usual confines. It deals with both earlier and central medieval history; and it was produced, successively, then up to a point simultaneously, from within two national cultures. Tim claimed no credit for having spent twelve years of his career in Germany. Yet it was the result, of course, of a deliberate decision (to apply for a job at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Munich), and its consequences, though intellectually entirely positive, were not, especially initially, entirely comfortable in personal terms. Though Tim’s father was of German birth, Tim himself was an Englishman, brought up speaking only English, and wholly educated in the English system. Tim was thirty-six when he moved to Munich. He was a good enough linguist to know when he got German not quite right; and he was a sensitive enough tribesman to know when he got cultural wires just slightly crossed. In other words, moving to the job at the MGH took courage not wholly dissimilar to that of the anthropologist setting up house in a village in another culture. 2

Chapter 1, below.


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The decision to straddle conventional historical fields – German and English; secular and ecclesiastical; legal, political and social – had been made already in Tim’s choice of supervisor, Karl Leyser at Magdalen College, Oxford, and of doctoral topic, ‘The Papal Schism, the Empire and the West, 1159–69’. That brief but critical period in Europe’s history turned out to be a window of huge intellectual opportunity for Tim, enabling him to range thereafter from law to ritual, from high politics and high culture to group-identities and low life, embracing a world of Christendom-wide dimensions and social depth. An insistence on the strangeness of that world, and the long effort therefore required to perceive its workings, was among many lessons Tim learned from Karl Leyser. A year in Vienna in 1969–70 (‘in the field’ as it were) to gain familiarity with the German language and hence with German scholarship was the supervisor’s wise suggestion. Return to England, and resuming everyday contact with that supervisor, allowed Tim to share for good Leyser’s oblique vantage-point on German history, ‘in but not of’ the German academic tradition.3 Like Leyser too, Tim’s natural preference was for writing articles rather than books. Leyser’s influence and insights can be found, explicitly and implicitly, in every chapter of the present collection. It can be seen, too, in the very fact of Tim’s coverage of an unusually lengthy span of European history, for Leyser moved apparently effortlessly between the earlier and central Middle Ages. Tim’s first major piece of book-production, the collection of papers mostly by German historians which he edited and largely translated, was The Medieval Nobility: Studies on the Ruling Classes of France and Germany from the Sixth to the Twelfth Century (1979). It was at about the time of the move to Germany four years later that Tim began to work seriously on the Carolingian period, and to do the groundwork for Germany in the Early Middle Ages, 800–1056 (1991). Translating from Latin, and meticulously annotating, the Annales Fuldenses, the Annals of Fulda (1992), helped convince him that in a territorial, political, sense, Germany was a ninth-century creation. His ongoing work on the post-Carolingian period, from the tenth to the twelfth century, made him equally convinced of the importance of kings in creating a common German identity. But in Tim’s view, to impute policies and purposiveness to medieval rulers was to risk anachronism. Compared with modern rulers, ‘the constraints on medieval politicians and polities were more extensive, the expectations lower, and 3

For an evocative sketch of Leyser’s work and influence, see T. Reuter, ‘Karl Leyser the Historian’, in vol. II of Karl Leyser’s collected papers, edited by T. Reuter, Communications and Power in Medieval Europe (London, 1994), pp. ix–xvi. Reuter also edited Warriors and Churchmen in the High Middle Ages: Festschrift for Karl Leyser (London, 1992).

xvi


the objectives not shaped by the same calculus of means and ends’. It is not just because Otto I, say, has left no personal record that we must always reckon with the context – in terms of entourage, institutions, ideas about honour – in which he operated and which allowed him action as well as constraining his agency (chapter 15). Though German history was always Tim’s main research focus, few of his papers are concerned with Germany alone. His early career at the University of Exeter had reinforced his interest in comparative history, and he decided to offer a Special Subject in contemporary British history (the Wilson Government in the 1960s) as well as courses in medieval Europe. The Exeter years were a time of important professional and personal development.4 Tim became as passionate about teaching as he was about research. He was alerted to the disabling effects of Anglolexia on History students’ learning. He took on the task, and assumed the role, of translator of modern German historiography on the Middle Ages. The Medieval Nobility was followed by translations of a best-selling handbook by the leading German medievalist (and President of the MGH during Tim’s Munich years) Horst Fuhrmann,5 and of a major reinterpretation of the medieval Church in the age of reform by the doyen of German ecclesiastical historians, Gerd Tellenbach.6 At Munich, Tim may have been, or felt himself, an outsider as a Briton; yet vis-à-vis his British compatriots he became something of an outsider as an honorary German, able to interpret and criticise British medieval scholarship for German readers through the dozens of reviews of Anglophone historiography he published in the MGH annual Deutsches Archiv. Translation, hence bridging historiographical worlds, was an important part of the way Tim perceived his own distinctive contribution to the discipline.7 4

5 6

7

He met and married Georgina. He was active in the Association of University Teachers at national as well as local level, and also active in the Labour Party whose recent history he taught with academic detachment. As a medieval historian, he found like-minded colleagues, among them Frank Barlow whose work on Thomas Becket (the book was published in 1986) had many links with Tim’s own dissertation topic and sustained his long-standing interest (chapter 10), and John Critchley whose Feudalism (1973) was a pioneering exercise in comparison. Important too was Tim’s role in the conference on St Boniface of Crediton held at Exeter in 1980, and the publication of its proceedings later in the same year, edited by Tim. Here his paper on ‘St Boniface and Europe’ linked the AngloSaxon saint’s mission with a wider and longer Continental history. H. Fuhrmann, Deutschland im hohen Mittelalter (1978), trans. T. Reuter as Germany in the High Middle Ages c. 1050–1200 (Cambridge, 1986). G. Tellenbach, Die westliche Kirche vom 10. bis zum frühen 12. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1988), trans. T. Reuter, The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1993). In this respect Tim differed from Karl Leyser, who, as Tim pointed out in ‘Karl Leyser the Historian’, p. xv, ‘showed little inclination to act as a missionary or other kind of intermediary between two


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Comparison was for Tim a natural take on the medieval past: his deep interest in exploring the medieval origins of the German ‘special way’ necessarily involved looking at other ways (see chapter 20). Tim’s departure for Munich in 1981 came very soon after the co-creation of a group – an intermittent symposium – of early medieval historians interested in comparative history, and committed to argumentative give-and-take.8 Tim was part of that group for the rest of his life; and connecting the Exeter years with the Munich years and what came after was Tim’s concern with the comparing of societies and of kingdoms. From this arose his lively appreciation of the distinct flavours of national historiographies, and the differing national trajectories that had produced or influenced these contingent developments. Tim perceived no less clearly that the down-side of this diversity was lack of contact or communication between exponents of different historiographical traditions, and he was struck by the absence of much discussion of this subject in print. A major purpose of the present collection as he originally designed it c. 2000 was to confront the problem head-on, and, in the light of that engagement, provoke historians to produce more discriminating accounts of what European histories share and what divides them. To put it in Tim’s own terms, his readers must decide whether to ‘fall back on a kind of nationalist nominalism’, or regard the products of these different histories, in the end, as ‘local variants of a generic European society’. Tim thought we should open our minds to the second of those possibilities by becoming more critically conscious of our own tenacious preconceptions, and more reflective about alternative views and conceptual frameworks. These concerns are uppermost in the historiographical and methodological essays in Part I, but they are equally evident, if not always explicit, in virtually every paper in Parts II and III. This, above all, gives the book its coherence, force and timeliness. The juxtaposition of the work of ‘German’ Tim and ‘English’ Tim in these pages brings its own revelations of difference, of connexion and of complementarity. Comparative state-formation was just one of the major themes that preoccupied Tim in the last decade of his career. A second was the symbolic language of political action. Here Tim saw himself as developing the work of Karl Leyser, Gerd Althoff and Geoff Koziol. But his own approach was

8

historiographical worlds; he preferred rather to make his own way’. Tim said important things about his own way in his Inaugural Lecture at Southampton (chapter 1, below). For an appreciation of his role as intermediary, see W. Hartmann’s evocative memoir in Deutsches Archiv 58 (2002), pp. 891–2. See J. L. Nelson, ‘European History’, in A. Deyermond ed., A Century of Medieval Studies, The British Academy Centenary volumes (Oxford, 2007), ch. 4, n. 110.

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distinctive in its cross-cultural comparative range (see chapter 8), and in its combination of a very thorough grasp of medieval canon law and liturgy (Tim as an undergraduate had been a student of Walter Ullmann)9 with a feel for politics (Tim, lifelong, and wherever he found himself, was a keen and committed follower of the contemporary political scene). Texts, their production-contexts and transmission-histories, fascinated Tim. He had worked for decades on an edition of the letter-collection of Wibald of Stablo, a crucial source for his original doctoral subject; and some of his later papers suggest an enthusiastic re-engagement with that task (chapters 20–2).10 Tim was delighted by the invitation, not long after his return to England, to join the board of Oxford Medieval Texts, and he brought rare expertise to editorial work. He was equally fascinated by the expression of ideas and values in non-verbal ways, and by the interplay of communication and power (see especially chapters 7–10). Like Ullmann, Tim not only took seriously the idea of an exchange of political ideas between Church and state, but saw the relevance there of signs and symbols. He became, not just an ecclesiastical historian, nor a political historian, but a cultural historian. In this he followed a trend, but he also, increasingly in the Southampton years, became an international leader and shaper of the turn of the trend. Again, this is an intellectual trajectory to be followed in every chapter of this book, just as the professional themes of the Exeter years recurred and extended in the Southampton years.11 The interplay of communication and power was central to the history of the Church. Episcopal power supplied a lasting foundation, on which was built, eventually with the co-operation of bishops themselves, the rapid growth of papal government in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. A third evolving theme in Tim’s later work was the study of episcopal power across the longue durée. It emerges only fitfully in the present collection,12 for Tim intended this to be the subject of a large-scale project. In 2002, Tim was 9

10 11

12

T. Reuter and G. Silagi, Wortkonkordanz zum Decretum Gratiani, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Hilfsmittel 10/i–v (Munich, 1990), 5 vols., and also available on the web as an electronic database, would have amazed and delighted Walter Ullmann. Tim’s friend and former MGH colleague Martina Hartmann is currently completing the Wibald edition. Once based again in England, Tim soon became involved in the profession at national level: for instance, he was elected to the Council of the Royal Historical Society in 1999, and joined the Advisory Editorial Board of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History in 2000. It is touched on, though, in many chapters, notably 5, 10, 18 and 21. See also ‘Filii matris nostrae pugnant adversum nos: Bonds and Tensions between German Prelates and their Milites in the High Middle Ages’, in G. Picasso ed., Chiesa e mondo feudale nei secoli X–XII, Miscellanea del centro di studi medievali 14 (Milan, 1995), pp. 247–76; ‘Property Transactions and Social Relations between Rulers, Bishops and Nobles in Early Eleventh-century Saxony: The Evidence of the Vita Meinwerci’, in W. Davies and P. Fouracre eds., Property and Power in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 165–99; ‘Gifts and Simony’, in E. Cohen and M. de Jong eds., Medieval Transformations: Texts,


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already ill but his doctors foresaw, with luck, a further five years of active life for him. Completion of the project seemed feasible, and he applied for and was awarded funding from the British Academy. Tim died three months later, at the age of fifty-five. He himself would have hoped that the project could be taken forward by other hands. It seems likelier to be attempted by a team than a lone scholar. For as well as being among the outstanding medieval historians of his generation, Tim combined knowledge, skills and interests in a unique and irreplaceable way. His loss is cruel. Fortunately for his discipline, nationally and internationally, he left behind a body of work whose scale and significance is becoming increasingly recognised and appreciated. It will endure. What Tim himself intended in the present volume was ‘not a bog-standard collection of reprinted scholarly articles, of interest only to immediate specialists on the topics they deal with’, but a book that might reach ‘the intelligent general public’ as well as an academic market because it addressed ‘general issues of interpretation and understanding’. Let this book, then, be useful, interesting and thoughtprovoking to new generations of scholars, students and general readers. Let it promote European thinking, learning and language-acquisition. Let it be part of Tim’s monument. Power, Gifts in Context (Leiden, 2000), pp. 57–68; and ‘Ein Europa der Bischöfe: das Zeitalter Bischof Burchards von Worms’, in W. Hartmann ed., Burchard von Worms (Stuttgart, 2000), pp. 1–28.

part i

Modern mentalities: historiographies, methodologies, preconceptions

chap t e r 1

Modern mentalities and medieval polities

‘Today, the question “What do you do?” means “How do you earn your living?”’, wrote W. H. Auden of the successful poet’s dilemma. On my own passport I am described as a ‘Writer’; this is not embarrassing for me in dealing with the authorities, because immigration and customs officials know that some kinds of writers make lots of money. But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation I never answer ‘writer’ for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer ‘poetry’ would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry. The most satisfactory answer I have discovered, satisfactory because it withers curiosity, is to say ‘Medieval Historian’.1

I don’t want to wither your curiosity this evening, but in spite of my professional pride I suspect that Auden’s recipe probably works. My subject has a low reputation for practical value as well. A few years ago the Ministry of Defence ran a recruiting advertisement showing a scene which was a modern version of ‘the Gatling’s jammed and the colonel’s dead’. The caption was ‘What Use is a Degree in Medieval History?’, and the clearly implied answer was: none whatever. The only thing to be said for it was that it gave you a Trained Mind, which would serve you well when pinned down by the Ukrainians across the valley. A brief parenthesis here: this is a defence historians themselves use, especially when faced by quality assessors demanding to be shown transferable skills. It’s difficult to subscribe to it: to claim that a subject trains your mind is to make it the equivalent of the exercises you do in fitness studios – you know they must be doing you good, because they’re so tedious that you wouldn’t dream of doing them for pleasure. That’s a diversion, however – a good medieval figure of speech with which to begin a medievalist’s lecture. I’m not going to offer you a defence

1

[This is the author’s Inaugural Lecture at the University of Southampton, in 1995. A few notes and references have been reconstructed based on his indications.] W. H. Auden, ‘The Poet and the City’, in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London, 1963), p. 74.

3

4

Modern mentalities

of my subject tonight, because it needs none. I simply want to establish that my subject is socially and politically innocuous. As a moderately well-paid, white European, middle-class, middle-aged male, I obviously oppress by my very existence, and no amount of carefully chosen race-gender-and-ageneutral language, or abstention from car-ownership, or purchase of coffee from Cafédirect can compensate for this. But I don’t add to oppression with the subject I study: like the late Paul Eddington, we medieval historians can claim that we do very little harm, compared, for example, with – I had a long list in an earlier draft, but I think you can fill in your own favourites. The study of medieval history does not obviously reinforce hegemonic discourse. Nor does it obviously subvert it. When Dr Nicholas Tate of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority recently demonstrated his ignorance of what historical studies are by calling on teachers of history to pay less attention to interpretations and more to providing children with an established account of the past including ‘heroes and heroines’ as role-models, some national dailies asked historians for hero-lists. Some of these were ‘establishment’, some ‘alternative’; but all concentrated on the modern period. The only medieval ‘hero’ named was William the Conqueror, and it wasn’t really clear why he was included or how he might be instrumentalised. Andrew Roberts praised him for bringing about ‘the coming together of the English people’; presumably he had the burial pits on Senlac Hill in mind. So if you want to understand how medieval communities functioned, can you simply get innocently on with what you are doing? Well, yes in the sense that that’s mostly what we do. But equally, no: even we harmless medieval historians aren’t isolated from the societies we live in, from which we import assumptions and then re-export them in the guise of seemingly neutral, research-based truths. British medievalists are not unique in this, of course, and I shall be looking at our counterparts elsewhere, for these universal processes come in distinctive national flavours. I spent twelve years at the heart of the German medieval tradition at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Munich, before coming here. I was then in that tradition, and yet not wholly of it, having had a normal English academic socialisation. At the same time I was reviewing extensively for the house journal of the MGH, which has an annual annotated bibliography of 4–500 pages. Since my mother tongue is English, it was easier for me than for my colleagues to deal with most of the English-language work, and as an English native-speaker I found myself taking on most of the output of Anglolexic medievalists. Here too I was reading as an outsider; not


5

quite the kind of outsider a German would have been, but equally not as a part of that tradition. I avoided schizophrenia – I hope – but I did emerge with a sharpened awareness of the sheer contingency of what an academic discipline is and does. There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and even if every single one is not right, many of them are. The yes and the no link to my two themes this evening. the behaviour of medieval historians as a set of tribes and the ways in which these tribes fit into the world they inhabit. Yet these divisions along national lines are not simple. The medieval polities of my title are those which existed between about 400 and about 1300/1350, which as far as I’m concerned is when early modern history begins. Within this millennium, however, there’s a clear difference between the historians of the early Middle Ages, where I spend some of my time, and those of the high Middle Ages, where I spend the rest of it. Early medievalists meet at international conferences like the one held every spring in the beautiful town of Spoleto. But their internationality is not defined simply by British, Dutch and Polish historians eating strangozzi with truffle sauce, or sniffing the early Umbrian spring’s evocative smells of wet cobblestones and wood-smoke, or even by the piles of ećus handed out as grants by the European Science Foundation. Early medievalists tend to be international in the sense that they are familiar with each others’ existence and writings in a whole range of languages, international in the way they think of their early medieval societies as local variations of a generic European society. As we’ll see, this is not typical of all of us. If early and high medievalists are distinct academic subtribes, where does the division fall? General agreement puts it, for differing reasons, within a few decades either side of the millennium. It’s no coincidence that this is also the point from which most modern European countries can trace a recognisable descent. When does England begin to exist, for example? You could point to the conversion to Christianity in the sixth century, or perhaps to the rulers who exercised a kind of overlordship in the seventh and eighth, or of course you could go for 1066 and the burial pits at Hastings. But the consensus is a different one, and not only among us professionals. John Major is not unusual in seeing England as being defined by ‘a monarchy founded by the kings of Wessex over 1,100 years ago’. In his inaugural lecture at Oxford in 1870 John Ruskin spoke of England as a land ‘rich in an inheritance of honour, bequeathed to us through a thousand years of noble history’. Like John Major’s speechwriter, Ruskin was probably thinking of Alfred’s accession in 871, about to be centenarised

6

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and instrumentalised by the Victorians. The rest of Europe is similar in end-result, though the specific bundle of key dates and events varies from country to country: wherever you live, somewhere between about 900 and 1100 you can start to see where the society you inhabit (or study) has come from. But will you view that society as a local variant of a generic European society? At this point I ought of course to show that that is indeed the right way to view things. That would take another lecture, so I’ll ask you to take it largely on trust for this evening. To see that we should even if we often don’t, consider some of the books which would figure on any list of the best products of Anglolexic medievalism since the war – Richard Southern’s The Making of the Middle Ages, Sandy Murray’s Reason and Society in the Middle Ages, Susan Reynolds’ Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, Rob Bartlett’s The Making of Europe.2 These do treat post-millenial Europe in precisely this way, and they do so very illuminatingly; and yet they have the rather curious status of being widely admired but comparatively uninfluential. The approach they imply has not caught on more generally: the watershed period may be The Crucible of Europe, in Geoffrey Barraclough’s phrase,3 but only in the sense that that’s when we all start being different from one another, a Europe des patries. There’s no English exceptionalism in this; the French and Germans are the same. The most obvious and straightforward reason for this retreat into a national Middle Ages for the period after the millennium is that comparison is difficult and there’s enough to do without it: more stuff in the archives, more historians around, more cluttered bibliographies. But that’s not the whole story, because there is also less desire to keep up; it’s not an attitude enforced by the community of scholars. I think this has much to do with the way the subject has grown. The rise of ‘professional’ historical writing in nineteenth-century Europe was largely state-financed, and it was expected to reinforce an officially defined national identity, in England, France, Germany and elsewhere: even Dr Nicholas Tate is not a new phenomenon. As Reba Soffer has said of university history teaching in this country, writing about the interaction between history teaching in the universities and the formation of elite attitudes in this country between 2

3

R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London, 1953); A. Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1978); S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe (Oxford, 1984, 2nd edn Oxford, 1997); R. Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350 (London, 1993). G. Barraclough, The Crucible of Europe (London, 1976).


7

1870 and 1930: ‘The past was used to document the values preserved and extended through England’s evolution rather than to explain what had really happened in a particular historical time and place.’4 Comparisons were made, but they were intended to stress our otherness and our superiority. In other words, embedded in the very beginnings of the subject as a discipline, in this country and elsewhere, was a Grand Narrative about how the various We’s are Us and not Them; and although we perhaps no longer consciously think like this, that’s not enough. You may expel Grand Narratives with a pitchfork but they will always return, as Horace might have said to Lyotard. That’s an external cause, but there are internal ones also. Medieval historians (like other sorts of historians) have an anthropology which has taken a different course in each country – they occupy different territories, and have different academic neighbours (and different attitudes to them). These variations have shaped their sets of concepts, technical terms and working assumptions at least as much in response to their own land-claims (and those of academic allies and rivals) as in harmony with those used by their equivalents in other countries. For example, you can explain some of the differences between the preoccupations of French and English medievalists by the different relationships between historians and geographers in the two intellectual systems, as has often been noted; equally, legal history has traditionally been done by lawyers in Germany to a far greater extent than it is here. That’s not to say that there aren’t quite genuine regional variations, not least because of our different starting-points. Where does what we think we know about the operation of medieval polities before about 1300 come from? The answer is that the knowledge base is very variable. We write political history from a number of different kinds of source: contemporary and later narratives of various sorts, letters written by contemporaries, legal documents recording property transactions, records of administration – Domesday Book, though in fact highly untypical, is probably the one most familiar to the non-specialist – law-codes. But the surviving mix of these varies greatly over time and place. At one extreme you have regions like the Iberian peninsula in the seventh century, from which we have few narratives, very few records and an abundance of law-codes, or the kingdom of Burgundy (meaning the Rhône valley and the western Alps) in the tenth century, from which we have very little evidence at all. At the other you 4

Reba Soffer, Discipline and Power: the University, History, and the Making of an English Elite, 1870–1930 (Stanford CA, 1994), p. 129.

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Modern mentalities

have Normandy or Saxony in the early eleventh century, which have left us narratives with a baroque abundance of symbolically laden anecdote but precious little else, or Catalonia or Tuscany in the same period, where there are rich archives but no narratives. For reasons which ought to be clear by now, medievalists tend not to be aware of the peculiarities of their chosen area, but if you do take a bird’s-eye view you can see just how great the variety is and how unlikely it is that different kinds of material will in themselves yield similar accounts. There is thus a paradox: all these societies may indeed be regional variations of one society, but the variety of evidence obscures this and makes it easy to fall back on a kind of nationalist nominalism, especially as historians are trained to stress difference rather than similarity: ‘not on Easter Island’ or ‘not in the south’ are working phrases for us just as much as for anthropologists, sociologists and geographers. Of course, these regional differences may actually have been around for 900 years or so, but in that case it’s odd that they should map to the boundaries of our era rather than to those of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. Belgian, Dutch, Swiss, Austrian medieval history exist because of what is around now much more than because of what was around then; even England and France are in a sense anachronistic terms for the high Middle Ages, and that’s even truer of Germany, Spain and Italy. Yet each ‘national’ community of medieval historians has its own preoccupations and working assumptions: its own discourse, if you like. These distinctions of socialisation and evidence affect even quite lowlevel problems. For example, one of the debates currently exciting historians of the French Middle Ages is whether there were political and social changes in the period around the millennium so important as to amount to a ‘feudal revolution’: a dissolution of public order and its replacement by interpersonal obligations, a regrouping of power and settlement around fortifications.5 Although the historians who have discussed these changes have drawn up a supposedly European model, they’ve done it almost exclusively from French history, plus one or two studies of Mediterranean regions by French medievalists. In doing so they’ve used the locally current terminology: seigneurie banale, for example, which translates roughly as ‘lordship based on usurped public authority’. As a result it’s actually quite difficult for those of us working on English or German history, say, to tell 5

See T. Bisson, ‘The “Feudal Revolution”’, P&P 142 (1994), pp. 5–42, and the debate involving D. Barthélemy, S. White, T. Reuter and C. Wickham, and Bisson’s response, in P&P 152 (1996), pp. 196–205, 205–23, and P&P 157 (1997), pp. 177–95, 195–208, 208–25. [The author’s contribution appears below as chapter 4.]


9

whether the model fits or not. The words we use and the standard assumptions we make are subtly different; we can perhaps translate the terms used, but it’s more uncertain whether we can either translate the things they refer to or say confidently that we are looking at something different. I want to look now in a little more detail at some of the effects of these combinations of national differences and academic socialisation and identify some ways in which these variations are most conspicuous. Three caveats to begin with. First, I’m using political history for my examples because I’m most familiar with it, not because I’m claiming any kind of priority for it. It simply happens to make up most of the history I’ve done up to now, though I’m making no promises about the future, and so I’m better placed to analyse the intellectual anthropology than I would be for, say, gender history or intellectual history, though I know enough about these to know that there are comparable regional variations in both attitudes and evidence. Second, I’ll be talking more about English historians than others simply because this is Southampton, not because our practice is uniquely wrongheaded or problematic: if this lecture-theatre were in Stuttgart or St Andrews I’d be using different examples to make the same general argument. Third, I’m going to be more generalising and more prescriptive than I would if I were writing a book: few of us are like this all the time, and some of us are not like this most of the time, but all of us are like this enough of the time to make what I have to say meaningful and necessary. Of the possible ways of treating medieval polities – apart from moving to do a different kind of history altogether – I’d point to three. You can decide that the traditional ‘national’ focus is not really a very significant or meaningful one, and that it’s more interesting to go off and look at a region. This has been the response, by and large, of French and Italian medievalists, and of some German medievalists as well. Or you can decide that the narratives which survive from the past are the only or at least the principal reality we can know, in which case you would start to analyse them in great detail. This has been a significant German response in the last few decades. Or, finally, you can seek to go below the veil of contemporary narrative and reach down to what really happened; and this has been, and by and large still is, the stance of English medievalists. Thirteenthcentury England, for example, has recently seen the rise of a whole school of historians who prefer to examine the record evidence to find out what was really going on, explicitly rejecting Powicke’s aim to write history ‘from the heart of a subject, by what people thought and said and felt’, meaning from the writings of contemporary observers.

10

Modern mentalities

Where does this idea of penetrating the veil of narrative come from? What lies behind this neglect of narrative sources by English medievalists, by comparison with their continental counterparts? There’s a whole range of possible reasons for this anti-literary stance. It’s a natural response, first of all, to the Public Record Office [now The National Archives], with its rich records of government beginning about two centuries before most of the rest of Europe. There is also the way historians in this country are socialised. Until the recent rise of taught MAs there was little explicit training in method; it was passed on informally, not without distortions and vulgarisations. One of these is the idea that the evidence of the past found in archives is of inherently superior quality. This you can trace in part to the great works on method by writers like Droysen and Seignobos which summed up the professionalisation of historical writing in the nineteenth century. They distinguished between sources as ‘traditions’ and ‘survivals’. ‘Traditions’ are produced when writers intend to inform about their subjectmatter; the intention produces bias and distortion. ‘Survivals’, by contrast, give us information in passing, and so untouched by their authors’ conscious intentions. The problem is that all written remains of the past are simultaneously tradition and survival. The account of Henry I given by the Norman historian Orderic Vitalis is ‘tradition’, but it is also the ‘survival’ of Orderic’s own thought-processes and those of the world he lived in. Equally, a writ issued by the same king is a ‘survival’ in what it happens to tell us about the judicial process, but in what it says about the issue involved or indeed the king’s opinion on the matter it is a ‘tradition’. This is a rather subtle distinction to keep in one’s head for more than about five minutes, however, and historians have often preferred a once-for-all distinction between kinds of source: some are traditions, some are survivals. The distinction meshes neatly with the peculiarly adversarial flavour of the English legal system, which is very influential culturally: we instinctively think in terms of the ‘reliability’ of testimony, much as in a law-court, and as in a law-court we are naturally disposed to reject mere hearsay, rather than asking ourselves what it can tell us. I’ve sometimes been told that no one thinks like this any more; but they do, they do. Here are two recent quotations from English historians, writing as it happens about twelfth-century Norman Sicily. The first is: ‘Modern historians . . . are disinclined to believe too much of what chroniclers report unless their hearsay can be confirmed by reference to official documents.’6 The second runs: ‘This is not to deny that the chronicles 6

D. J. A. Matthew, The Norman Kingdom of Sicily (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 167–8.


11

and travellers’ tales which constituted the diet of past historians are without a vitamin value of their own’:7 an unsuccessfully deployed triple negation, with the Freudian consequence that the author says what he really believes rather than what he means. Many of you will have seen reports of a new biography of King Alfred which claims that the Life of him by his friend and contemporary Bishop Asser of St David’s was really written over a century later.8 I’m not going to take sides here, especially not in the presence of several Alfredian experts. But I have noticed that both sides in the looming controversy, at least as quoted in the press (academic journals take longer to respond to these things), appear to be taking up rather unsophisticated positions: either Asser really wrote the Life of Alfred attributed to him, in which case it’s by a contemporary who knew Alfred well and therefore a reliable source; if Byrhtferth of Ramsey wrote it in the early eleventh century, it’s worthless. To pass over contemporary narratives in favour of records is likely to mean missing out on contemporary consciousness and rationality and substituting your own. As my Birmingham colleague Chris Wickham has put it, it’s like trying to reconstruct what the Faculty of Arts intends from Faculty Board minutes, which of course aren’t very helpful at all for that purpose.9 Without contemporary gossip, there’s no way into contemporary minds. The most striking recent demonstration of this is a massive tome by the distinguished German medievalist Carlrichard Brühl, which shows how what we call France and Germany slowly emerged from the wreckage of the ninth-century Carolingian empire.10 It’s a work with a great deal to commend it, especially in its incisive demolitions of earlier historiography. Its weakness is Brühl’s rejection of the accounts of events given by tenth-century historians. He prefers to construct his own from charters and from minimal annalistic accounts which seemingly record mere facts untouched by contemporary concerns. The result is not greater objectivity; it’s a tenth-century world populated by Carlrichard Brühl. But Brühl is, in German terms, unusual; he’s consciously reacting against a trend in current German scholarship. Translate him into English and he’d look much less out of place. 7 8 9 10

D. Abulafia, The Two Italies: Economic Relations between the Norman Kingdom of Sicily and the Northern Communes (Cambridge, 1977), p. 24. Alfred P. Smyth, King Alfred the Great (Oxford, 1995). [For a sense of how the debate has evolved in the past decade, see several of the contributions to T. Reuter ed., Alfred the Great (Aldershot, 2003).] C. Wickham, ‘Gossip and Resistance among the Medieval Peasantry’, P&P 160 (1998), pp. 3–24, at 16–17. C. Brühl, Deutschland – Frankreich: Die Geburt zweier Völker (Cologne and Vienna, 1990).

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Modern mentalities

Hence although we have one of the richest collections of narrative sources of any medieval European country we have paid little attention to editing them by comparison with our German, French or Italian colleagues, and many of our current editions are a hundred years old or more: even the good ones were constructed on editorial principles which no one would now hold valid; many have been rendered obsolete by the discovery of new manuscripts or new relationships between known manuscripts, almost all are woefully lacking in adequate historical commentary. The Oxford Medieval Texts series is remedying this, but very slowly and very eclectically. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for example, though it determines our view of three centuries of English political history, still has no completed modern edition.11 Nor do the two most important works of the greatest of our medieval historians, William of Malmesbury – indeed, one of these has not even been translated into English.12 Source-criticism has also been pursued very one-sidedly. The manuscript tradition of the ASC has been exhaustively discussed; the manuscripts and libraries William of Malmesbury consulted have largely been identified; but for neither the ASC nor for William do we have studies of style and vocabulary, conceptual frameworks, or intellectual and political horizons. John Gillingham has done some remarkable work recently on twelfth-century historians as proponents of a new and consciously imperial English attitude to the Celtic peoples, and I very much hope that this will be influential in method as well as in content.13 But on the whole we’re still inclined to treat literary texts as low-grade archives which can be mined for ‘facts’. There’s little sense that we need to read them as narratives, in full awareness of what literary theorists have to tell us about narratology, authorial voice, and so on. There are exceptions, of course, but I fear that for many of us heuristics and hermeneutics are spelled with an x and refer to characters in a well-known cartoon Gaulish village. The foregrounding of record evidence may also reflect a much more general colonialist response: Edward Said has noted how Orientalism – the construction of a stereotyped and homogenising image of other cultures – rejects or ignores the genres of history-writing which these cultures use to 11 12

13

[Fine new editions of Manuscripts ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ have now appeared under the general editorship of D. Dumville and S. Keynes.] [This situation has now been partly remedied by the appearance of R. A. B. Mynors, R. Thomson and M. Winterbottom eds. and trans., De Gestis Regum Anglorum, Oxford Medieval Texts, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1998, 1999), and D. Preest trans., The Deeds of the Bishops of England (Gesta pontificum anglorum) (Woodbridge, 2002).] John Gillingham has reprinted these papers in his The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity, and Political Values (Woodbridge, 2000).


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construct themselves, seeking to dominate its subject-matter by substituting an ‘objective’ style of historical writing.14 This certainly strikes a chord with me, though I can’t at present see what ideological function Medievalism with a capital M might have. The foregrounding certainly reflects a strong belief, by no means confined to medievalists, that in archives you find not only evidence but virtue. The late and great Richard Cobb, once very critical of the social historian Natalie Zemon Davis, recently called her ‘a very good example of someone whose conclusions have all been strictly based on very.sustained research in French urban archives’. I’m sure that he meant to contrast her with the semiotics-of-the-banana-and-iconography-of-thepostcard school of cultural studies. Nevertheless, if archives are all it takes, then the Dean can uprate my department’s next RAE rating by funding us all to go to France. I’d like myself to put in a pre-emptive bid for somewhere nice and sunny like Albi. What characterises Davis’s work is original thinking, not least about the stories one finds in archives,15 but even for Richard Cobb, hardly a dry positivist himself, street cred is not learned in the head. Embedded in our academic socialisation is a belief that the new facts we discover can be expected to generate the necessary new ideas themselves, as in the rather naive models of scientific discovery prevailing before Thomas Kuhn pointed out the difference between drawing new pictures and shading in existing outlines.16 But of course we are also here mirroring attitudes current in society at large: in no other culture known to me is the view so widely held that doing is more real, more serious, more meaningful, than thinking. We are mirroring these attitudes not just in the sense that we ourselves display them, but also, of course, in the sense that we teach our students to hold and approve them. The production of archival material is often seen as a sign of progress in itself. One recent historian writes: ‘offices survived chiefly as functional ideals, hardly at all as objectively defined procedures; they no longer produced records as such’, in the course of an argument depicting the petty ‘officials’ of twelfth-century states as ‘men predisposed to violence’ rather than engaged in government as we should understand it.17 Just as the virtuous historian is one who reads records, so the virtuous state is one which writes them. Indeed, an older and still influential English historiographical tradition, 14 15 16 17

E. Said, Orientalism (London, 1978). N. Z. Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1988). T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962). T. Bisson, ‘Medieval Lordship’, Speculum 70 (1995), pp. 743–59, at 750.

14

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that of Thomas Tout and the ‘Manchester School’, saw the history of our medieval polity as consisting precisely in the development of administrative practices.18 It saw real historical progress as lying here, in the changing organisation of government, rather than in the more superficial conflicts between kings and aristocrats for domination of the polity stressed by a still older school of constitutional historians: the ‘Sir Humphrey’ school of medieval history, and this is certainly a view which many historians of eleventh-, twelfth- and thirteenth-century England still subscribe to, even though few medieval historians now consciously think of themselves as training future civil servants. I have moved imperceptibly from our sources to the worlds we construct with them. Here also we can throw what the English do into sharper relief by looking at what others do. At one end of a possible spectrum we have the Icelanders. The Grand Narrative constructed by their scholars and politicians from the late nineteenth century was based on the family sagas; it was one of a country which had once been free, egalitarian and democratically self-governing, until the greed of its emergent elites delivered it up to King Hákon of Norway in the 1260s. It looks rather like the utopias of American militiamen, in fact, though with its compulsory social insurance it’s not a complete libertarian paradise, and of course freedom rested on the craftsmanship of the well-swung axe rather than on the more impersonal technology of AK-47s and AN-FO bombs. Consequently this imagined community of the past was both morally and literally truer than the present: ‘I was taught never to believe a single word in the newspapers, and nothing but what is found in the sagas’, as a character in one of Haldór Laxness’s novels says. The dominant narratives are thus ones of lost independence: they’re about how statelessness failed, not why the state took so long to emerge. Iceland, you may think, is hardly typical. But consider the Germans. There was a time when there too the medieval period stood as an inspiration; but the Germans’ imagined past was one in which their rulers had exercised imperial hegemony over Europe. When at the time of German reunification in the 1860s the eleventh-century imperial palace at Goslar was rebuilt and decorated with frescoes, these summoned up a vanished imperial past to legitimise the emerging imperial present. This view has not vanished completely – a deservedly popular student textbook first published in 1978 saw the early death of Henry VI in 1197 as a ‘catastrophe for Germany’ which 18

F. M. Powicke, ‘Thomas Frederick Tout, 1855–1929’, PBA 15 (1931), pp. 491–518.


15

ushered in the apparent political chaos of the German later middle ages.19 But as Germans have turned from hegemonial dreams after 1945 German medievalists have been built up a new and sophisticated account of their medieval polity, a much less top-down one than the previous model. This has been based largely on the close reading of narrative texts; of necessity, since the surviving records of medieval German central government take up no space at all in the German PRO at Koblenz. Yet it, too, has not been value- or present-free. West German medievalists came to stress the consciousness of narrators rather than the being which was being narrated as an implicit response to the vulgar materialist orthodoxy on the other side of the barbed wire; and they came to stress the polycentric character of the medieval German polity not only because it was there but also because this too provided a tradition for a devolved and federal present.20 English practice obviously varies a good deal (as does German or Icelandic or French, for that matter), but there are certainly dominant features. One is an unwillingness to use any level of magnification other than that of the incipient nation-state: no to devolution and no to European integration. Another is a belief in the smack of firm government. As has been pointed out both by satirists like Sellar and Yeatman and by more serious historians, the English approve of Strong Kings and disapprove of those who stand in their way. These views are not unknown elsewhere in Europe, though perhaps unexpectedly they have been commonest among the medievalists of communist Eastern Europe. But the proportions go to make up an instantly recognisable mixture. Medieval English history is by European standards unusually unregional. True, the North–South divide was there; indeed, though elements of it go back further, it was very largely shaped by the way in which England was put together between Alfred’s time and the Norman Conquest. But the regional identities still clearly visible in the ninth century – Wessex, Kent, Mercia, East Anglia, Northumbria – are fading rapidly in the tenth and eleventh centuries: only Northumbria re-emerges as a hard political fact at regular intervals between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries. It would be hard to write the political history of any English region in the high Middle Ages. In so far as there were local focuses, these were based on shires; and shires are not like continental regions, pays or Länder. They are fairly homogeneous administrative units covering the country like a 19 20

H. Fuhrmann, Deutsche Geschichte im hohen Mittelalter (Göttingen, 1978), trans. T. Reuter as Germany in the High Middle Ages c. 1050–1200 (Cambridge, 1986), p. 186. See T. Reuter, ‘A New History of Medieval Germany’, History 61 (1981), pp. 440–4.

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network, with few anomalies, and owing their creation to the actions of royal government. The centrality of the centre is a thus unignorable fact of our history. As Karl Leyser put it: We tend to think that centralisation, bureaucracy, too much government and taxation are very recent troubles . . . contrary to . . . all the best historical traditions. The reverse is true. They are deep-seated and deeply-rooted phenomena in English political society, part of its birth.21

But these things are, in a European context, highly anomalous. There was little about the history of this island in the seventh and eighth centuries which would have led an observer to predict them, and they need far more explanation than they have received, though Anglo-Saxon historians are now turning to this.22 Instead, their very prominence has led us to treat them as natural, as the norm. The Grand Narrative of medieval English political history is that of the developing power and efficiency of the state. An important result of this is a positive, few-questions-asked attitude to state power. Look at the 1920s and you will find a strain of admiration for Mussolini ranging from John Buchan and Dornford Yates to Aldous Huxley and Bernard Shaw. The 1930s saw similar tendencies among defenders of the Soviet Union; Orwell famously reworded their euphemistic apologetics as ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. In fact, of course, it is only a short step from justifying castor-oil by pointing to punctual trains to arguing that the punctuality depends on the castor-oil, or even to claiming that the abundance of castor-oil proves the punctuality. Similar arguments have resurfaced in current discussions of the ‘Asian Tigers’. Medievalists commonly follow this line of argument. In 952, some of the townsmen of Thetford killed their abbot, Eadhelm. The king sent a small army to harry the town – meaning burning buildings and beating people up. One medievalist’s comment on this and similar incidents is: ‘Royal violence maintained peace.’23 Some two hundred years later, Henry II introduced a number of changes into criminal procedure, a kind of Criminal Justice Act of the 1160s, designed to make it harder for criminals to get away with it – no non-reporting of crime, no concealing of previous 21

22 23

K. Leyser, ‘The Anglo-Saxons “at Home”’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 2 (1981), pp. 237–42, reprinted in Leyser’s collected papers, Communications and Power in Medieval Europe, ed. T. Reuter, 2 vols. (London, 1994), vol. I, The Carolingian and Ottonian Centuries, pp. 105–10, at 109. See P. Wormald, The Making of English Law (Oxford, 1999), and several contributions to Reuter ed., Alfred the Great. J. Campbell, ‘Was it Infancy in England’, in M. Jones and M. Vale eds., England and her Neighbours, 1066–1453: Essays in Honour of Pierre Chaplais (London, 1989), pp. 1–17, at 6, reprinted in Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State (London, 2000), at p. 185.


17

convictions in court until after the verdict, and so on. These changes have acquired iconic status in most accounts of the reign.24 His grandfather was notorious even in his own lifetime for having thieves hanged and forgers castrated (if Jack Straw or Michael Howard come up with these ideas in the next few months, remember: you heard it here first). Historians have indeed asked whether these things were cruel – by contemporary standards – but they’ve rarely asked whether they actually worked. They’ve preferred to assume that with so much castor-oil around, some of it at least must have gone down the right throats. These attitudes have not come about because English medievalists all stand somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun: in my experience of them they’re much more likely to be Guardian-reading, left-liberal members of the chattering classes. These attitudes are inherent in the top-down view of the English ‘state’ which its own history has brought about; they’re reinforced by our academic apprenticeships; they’re passed on in our teaching. Of course, my sense of what is strange about English or German writing on medieval history is just as conditioned as anyone else’s. There is no anti-gravity shield available, no way to reflect on the contingency of ideas which is not in itself contingent: Mannheim’s paradox, as Clifford Geertz has termed it.25 Those naive enough to think that they can lift themselves by their own ideological bootstraps will simply find themselves impaled as yet another theoretically erroneous butterfly in the critical taxonomies produced by Routledge and Polity Press. But of course it doesn’t follow that all forms of intellectual link with the world we inhabit are equally satisfactory, and that’s my peroration. The inaugural lecture is a strange genre, normally a mixture of personal reminiscence, popular entertainment and programmatic declaration. I’ve reminisced a little. I hope I’ve entertained you a little; to the extent that I’ve been programmatic, I’ve been advocating two related things. The first is that we – medieval historians – need a greater willingness to reflect on our working assumptions, on where they’ve come from and how they fit into our intellectual make-up and our social and political background. It’s a plea not without its own dangers. We historians often look amazed at the crop-circles in neighbouring disciplines’ cornfields; the aliens have landed in their space-ships again, driven by theory at warp speed. But these aren’t the risks most obviously facing Anglolexic medievalists at the moment, any more than an excessively European focus 24 25

[See the author’s comments and references in chapters 16, 19, 20 and 21, below.] C. Geertz, ‘Ideology as a Cultural System’, in his The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), pp. 193–233, at 194.

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is. And that’s my second plea: that we should acquire greater knowledge and awareness both of how things appear, and of how they are done, elsewhere in Europe. And I do mean Europe: the metonymy of France for Europe, traditional in this country, is dangerous, for although medieval France is the elsewhere we’re most likely to know about if we know about elsewhere at all, it’s also in many ways the one which is least different from our own world, and it’s the awareness of the possibility of difference which is most needed. Historians are bad prophets on the whole, but somehow I doubt that when my successor comes, as I hope she will, to give her inaugural lecture as Professor of Medieval History, she will feel she has to criticise either her colleagues’ preoccupation with theory and methodology or their predilection for making explicit and informed European comparisons. With luck, these things will, like the technical skills and the hard grind in archives and manuscript collections on which we pride ourselves, have become by then a self-evident part of our professional socialisation and that of our European colleagues.

chap t e r 2

Medieval: another tyrannous construct?

This article examines how far the use of the term ‘medieval’ restricts or distorts our understanding of the period conventionally termed so. The tripartite ancient–medieval–modern scheme entered historical writing in the seventeenth century, but the term soon took on its own life outside historiography. Within historiography, the tripartite division has remained the dominant periodisation, even though plausible alternatives have been offered. However, those working as European medievalists only rarely see themselves as forming a group studying a coherent and discrete sociocultural formation: apart from anything else, Europe itself is as problematic a notion as the Middle Ages. The term, within academe, is now largely a conventional one. This appears also to be the case for the use of the term in extra-European contexts: it denotes either a post-classical age or a feudal society (here as in non-academic usage, medieval and feudal are often synonymous). The temporal limits vary, though there are broad similarities. The article argues that the term is too conventionalised to be of much use in any dialogue between medievalists of different parts of the globe: it does not clearly define either a social formation or a stage of development. The title of this article is adapted from that of a well-known article by E. A. R. Brown on feudalism.1 In the course and under the influence of the Cold War, non-Marxist western medievalists, at least those working in German- and English-speaking countries, had already agreed to restrict the notion of feudalism to a small bundle of phenomena centred around the delegation of political and judicial authority and the organisation of military

1

Acknowledgements: Chris Wickham (Birmingham) and Bob Moore (Newcastle) have provided stimulating critiques of earlier drafts of this article, but are of course not responsible for any misconceptions it still contains. E. A. R. Brown, ‘The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe’, AHR 79 (1974), pp. 1,063–88.

19

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service. Brown took this a stage further, and argued against seeing even these more limited aspects of medieval society as having been linked together or as displaying consistent patterns across time and space. The argument has recently been developed and elaborated by Susan Reynolds.2 It is in fact a double argument. On the one hand, there is the issue of, if you like, ‘classification’: is it helpful to our understanding to see these phenomena, whatever their surface differences, as being linked by significant common characteristics? On the other hand, there is the issue of ‘reification’: do those of us who use the word feudal (whether in the restricted politicomilitary sense, or in the sense current in French historiography since the time of Marc Bloch, with its cultural and socio-economic extensions, or in the Marxist sense) run the risk of turning feudalism, a classificatory construct by origin, into a thing which takes on its own explanatory and predictive power?3 Though to my knowledge no comparable debate has been conducted among European medievalists about the terms ‘medieval’ and ‘Middle Ages’, much the same issues of classification and reification might in practice arise out of their use. In that sense, it is no accident that ‘feudal’ and ‘medieval’ are virtually interchangeable terms in non-academic speech and writing. The early history of the terms ‘medieval’ and ‘Middle Ages’ seems to be reasonably well established. They are not of contemporary usage. Christian intellectuals living in what we call the European Middle Ages located themselves in time in terms of quite different periodisations. First and foremost, they saw themselves as living after Christ’s first coming, a reference point for all reckoning of time.4 Schemes for periodising human history generally depended on the Four Empires of Daniel’s prophecy and/or on the belief that the world would, sooner rather than later, come to an end. But from Petrarch’s time, and with increasing frequency from the late fifteenth century onwards, terms such as media tempora, media tempestas, media antiquitas, media aetas and medium aevum start to occur in scholarly 2 3

4

S. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals (Oxford, 1994). I have found an essentially historiographical survey by J. S. Critchley, Feudalism (London, 1978), which sets out to cover ‘as much what is called feudal, and why, as it is about what is feudal, i.e., what can or ought to be so called’ (p. 7), helpful on many of these issues. A convenient introduction to the early medieval invention of reckoning by the Year of the Lord (Anno Domini) can be found in Kenneth Harrison, The Framework of Anglo-Saxon History to a.d. 900 (Cambridge, 1976). I have not been able to trace the origins of bc reckoning, though since the abbreviations for it in the various European countries are based on the vernacular it is presumably post-medieval. The euphemistic non-credal rendering of these two time-reckonings as ce and bce appears to date from the late nineteenth century, though my impression is that it is only in the past two or three decades that it has gained common currency.


21

writing.5 The initial impulse behind the use of such terms was not one of periodisation as such: it was one of cultural and aesthetic judgement. The writers who used them took over the antiqui/moderni distinction used by writers of both Antiquity itself and the Middle Ages, but for a variety of reasons they needed to be able to dissociate themselves from their medieval predecessors. If the period between the fall of Rome and the (supposed) rediscovery of Antiquity was seen as a unity, it was an aesthetical and cultural unity, one defined in largely negative terms as an era of decadence or darkness or barbarism (this is also the period when ‘Gothic’ was invented as a generic adjective, one which described the world which followed the Goths’ sack of Rome). The transformation of this non-historical periodisation into one which historians used seems to have taken place in the seventeenth century. If the explicit appropriation of the term for historians is still credited to a German professor, Christoph Keller (Cellarius), whose Historia Medii Aevi appeared in 1688, it is now clear that he merely articulated a notion which had been developing for several generations before that.6 It is also clear that for European historians the tripartite division he established – Antique, Medieval, Modern – has remained the dominant one since the eighteenth century. However, residual uncertainty about when the period should be taken to begin and end is a reminder that as a period it has often been defined less by reference to a set of salient characteristics than in terms of what K. N. Chaudhuri has termed ‘solar dates’: events which are so self-evidently of outstanding importance that they can be taken to mark historical turning-points.7 Since what is self-evidently of outstanding importance is itself subject to change over time, the starting point can vary from the inception of Diocletian’s reform through the death of Constantine in ad 337 to the death of the last western emperor in ad 476 or even 5

6

7

These developments are conveniently followed in G. L. Burr, ‘Anent the Middle Ages’, AHR 18 (1912/13), pp. 710–26, and ‘How the Middle Ages Got Their Name’, AHR 20 (1914/15), pp. 813–14; P. Lehmann, ‘Vom Mittelalter und von der lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalter’, in his Erforschung des Mittelalters, vol. I (Stuttgart, 1941), pp. 46–62. I have not been able to see G. S. Gordon, Medium Aevum and the Middle Ages (London, 1925). See also E. Pitz, Der Untergang des Mittelalters: Die Erfassung der geschichtlichen Grundlagen Europas in der politisch-historischen Literatur, des 16. bis 18. Jahrhunderts, Historische Forschungen 35 (Berlin, 1987). G. Barraclough, ‘Medium Aevum: Some Reflections on Medieval History and on the Term “The Middle Ages”’, in History in a Changing World (Oxford, 1954), pp. 54–63; W. A. Green, ‘Periodisation in European and World History’, Journal of World History 3 (1992), pp. 13–53. This is a very useful survey to which I am much indebted in the following discussion. Pitz, Untergang des Mittelalters, does not appear to mention Keller, though there may be the odd reference buried in his 800-odd pages, which lack both index and bibliography. K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 92–111.

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later,8 and the finishing point can be the fall of Constantinople in 1453, or the ‘discovery’ of the Americas in 1492, or the epochal moments of Renaissance and Reformation, or, in more recent writing, the point from which European global hegemony – economic, political and, more recently, cultural as well – began to be established.9 Even so, such variation of starting and finishing points still leaves a core period which would lie, so to speak, within everyone’s Middle Ages: say circa 450/500 to circa 1450/1500. It is in any case also possible to choose general starting and finishing points without any overtones precisely to avoid reference to such ‘solar dates’: the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, for example, founded in 1819 to edit the sources for medieval Germany, took from the beginning the dates ad 500 and ad 1500 as the beginning and end of the period it saw as its own, and a similar approach is often found in the definition of university survey courses. Once terms have been invented, of course, their original owners and users no longer control them. Outside the discussions of historians and philologists, the Middle Ages have led a life of their own. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to a lesser extent also in our own, the Middle Ages – as a social construct rather than an objective past reality – have been a source of inspiration, reaction and response in a variety of contexts. Recognition of this has indeed spawned a minor academic industry of its own, the study of ‘medievalism’, meaning the interaction between perceptions of the medieval past and current intellectual, artistic and even socio-political creative activity.10 But alongside such responses, and in the twentieth century increasingly dominating them, has been the original Enlightenment contrast between ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’, ‘medieval’ here standing for a stage which we may perhaps have had to pass through but which we have now transcended and whose vestiges in political, social and economic life are to be criticised and combated, though its cultural and intellectual remains may perhaps still be appropriated once the sanitising glaze of the heritage 8

9 10

Keller’s own works are rare even in major European libraries, and I have not myself seen them. The summaries of his periodisation in scholarly literature differ on whether he saw 337 or 476 as the start of the Middle Ages. See Green, ‘Periodisation’, who notes that although the reasons for ending the medieval era around ad 1500 have varied greatly over time, the watershed has been retained in almost all periodisations. See, for example, M. Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, 1981); K. L. Morris, The Image of the Middle Ages in Romantic and Victorian Literature (London, 1984); R. J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought 1688–1863 (Cambridge, 1987); C. A. Summers, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, 1990); B. G. Keller, The Middle Ages Reconsidered: Attitudes in France from the Eighteenth Century through the Romantic Movement (New York, 1994). The topic is most easily accessed through the reviews and articles of the annual Studies in Medievalism, 7 vols.


23

industry has been applied. This is not any longer, certainly not primarily, a feature of the internal intellectual life of the west. It is outside scholarly contexts that the dominant contemporary use of ‘medieval’ in European and North American contexts is to denote that which is not ‘modern’ and therefore not acceptable, or, as medieval historians are always irritatedly noting, to label what is not acceptable as not modern, as a survival from an earlier age. The overtones of aesthetic and cultural judgement which were there at the birth of the concept, to be overlaid with moral judgement by post-Reformation debates and the Enlightenment, are now directed against (mostly) other people’s presents rather than our own pasts.11 The non-academic baggage which goes with the term will concern us throughout this discussion, but I want to turn first to the use of the term within current scholarly discourse. First of all, we may note that ‘medieval’, like other similar terms, is often apparently used simply to delimit without evaluation. The implication of this kind of usage is not that the period referred to has some kind of unity, or a place in a sequence of development however conceived, but merely that by convention all history between two dates is called ‘medieval’, rather, as the University of Oxford still refers to all history after ad 284 as ‘Modern History’, meaning by that no more than that is not ‘Ancient’.12 Many UK university history departments still require their undergraduates to take at least one course in ‘medieval’ history in the course of their studies. There may be a justification of principle offered for this in the need to ensure that students are exposed to a wide range of history in the course of their studies. But the requirement does not, I think, usually spring from any real sense of the unity or significance of the period limited by whatever the local arbitrary dates happen to be. The underlying reason is more likely to be the pragmatic one that the ‘medievalists’ Doctor X and Professor Y teach on relatively unfamiliar and hence relatively unpopular areas of the past and will therefore be underloaded (or rather: ‘and their colleagues working in more recent history will be overloaded’) unless students are directed to take their courses. Nevertheless, even a conventional and unreflective periodisation of this kind does start to affect consciousness and self-perception. It hardly needs documenting that modernists, and still more the educated lay public, do 11

12

For a set of minor but telling examples see the analysis of public commentary on the Gulf War by J. M. Elukin, ‘Medieval Language in Politics: Making the World Safe for Feudalism’, Studies in Medievalism 6 (1994), pp. 232–5. For the development of the UK university syllabus in history and its Sitz im Leben see R. N. Soffer, Discipline and Power: The University, History, and the Making of an English Elite, 1870–1930 (Stanford CA, 1994).

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see the Middle Ages, conceived fairly vaguely and unreflectively, as possessing some kind of generic unity; and this attitude undoubtedly affects ‘medievalists’ themselves. The great international conferences at Kalamazoo and, in more recent years, at Leeds are predicated on the assumption that scholars who work on any aspect of the period between Late Antiquity and the early Modern era will therefore automatically have something to say to each other.13 They are dealing with a society which is felt to have retained at least some core characteristics in spite of all transformations: a sense of politico-religious unity at least in principle, a common cultural and literary inheritance, a transregional common material culture, widespread use of pre-capitalist and pre-modern forms of economic and political organisation, a closed society not yet expanding outwards and impinged upon by the outside world only in the limited forms of invasion and long-distance trade. Yet although some, perhaps all, of these generalised abstractions are true at a level of generalised abstraction, few medievalists who have taken time to reflect on their period would be enthusiastic about seeing the period as a unity on that basis, not least because it inevitably tends to privilege the ‘look and feel’ of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as the core Middle Ages, an era towards which the societal developments of earlier centuries were ineluctably tending. There is perhaps one justification which arises out of the subject matter itself for treating the medieval period of European history as a distinct and separate one, though it could hardly be said to apply equally to all aspects of it. Modern history is written largely from record evidence, from archival deposits laid down by governments and other institutions. Though historians clearly need to know something about the processes by which these records came into being and were preserved, and about the purposes they were intended to serve, acquiring this knowledge appears to be a fairly straightforward affair: modern historians can (and do) treat the records as reasonably transparent accounts of past reality, and if corrections need to be made to secure transparency, they are fairly homogeneous ones. The further back you go in time, the more difficult this becomes. Even to begin to make sense of an eleventh-century chronicle or a tenth-century royal charter requires a good deal of specialised technical knowledge. Of course, 13

The conference at Kalamazoo, Michigan, has met every May for some thirty years, with an attendance of about 2,500–3,000 and papers given on all aspects of medieval culture: art, history, religion, literature, material remains, modern interpretations. The conference at Leeds was founded in conscious imitation of the Kalamazoo conference, and has met every July since 1994. For further details see http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/index.html and http://www.leeds.ac.uk/imi/imc/imc.htm respectively.


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this is also true of even more distant areas of the past: it applies to the history of Antiquity, and for western historians it clearly applies even to the quite recent pasts of other parts of the globe. But there is a further differentiating factor which is, so far as I know, unique to the European Middle Ages, at least to the period between about ad 600 and about ad 1300: the ever-present possibility of outright forgery or partial falsification of the record.14 The actual extent of medieval forgery is, so far as we can judge, not all that great; but historians still have to be constantly on their guard in a way perhaps not true of other periods and regions. Nor is this simply a matter of certain kinds of record evidence: this is also a period of falsified historiography, and of ascriptions of works of art and literature to people who, in fact, did not produce them. Clearly, such problems exist for other regions and periods also; but the whole shape and feel of historical enquiry must inevitably change when forgery and deception are no longer, as they are for modernists, exceptional explanations to be reached for only when the inconsistency of evidence allows no other possibility, but everyday occurrences. Yet, this is still a second-order problem: medievalists may need particular technical skills to do their work and may need to cultivate a greater degree of professional wariness than some of their colleagues in other fields, but this is hardly enough to define a whole period. Moreover, as I have already suggested, once we turn away from defining periods as stretches of time lying between Chaudhurian solar dates to defining them as stretches of time and place whose history exhibits characteristic common and dominant features, the notion of a ‘medieval’ period starts to become more problematic. The problems are both spatial and temporal; I will deal with issues of periodisation first, though, as we shall see, the two are in part related. The first issue which arises is one of sheer size. Modern historians or the non-professional general public may feel content with a timeless ‘medieval’ past analogous to the ‘ethnographic’ present, and indeed it may make sense as a practical intellectual strategy to think in this way: medievalists often show a similarly homogenised view of the very long and variegated period conventionally termed Antiquity for much the same reasons of convenience. But once you are actually working inside a period, the need to subdivide it becomes acute. Whatever the conventions of enormous international conferences, fourteenth-century specialists do not in their daily practice have 14

See on this Fälschungen im Mittelalter. Internationaler Kongress der Monumenta Germaniae Historica, München, 16–19 September 1986, 6 vols. (Munich, 1988–90).

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much in common with historians of the post-Roman era, and vice versa. So we subdivide. Different regions of Europe have different conventions, some linguistic or purely contingent in origin, some more obviously dictated by subject matter. Romance-speaking countries (France, Italy, Spain) tend to use a metaphor drawn from rivers or mountains to subdivide into High and Low (meaning earlier and later); Germanic-speaking countries (including the Anglophone world) prefer to draw their metaphor from the sun to produce a threefold division of Early, High and Late, though for England the Memorableness of 1066 as a dividing point produces in effect a High–Low division running alongside this, even if the terminology itself is not used.15 Though these subdivisions may occasionally have faintly moralising or judgemental overtones (especially with Low, which for the Middle Ages as for Antiquity can imply decadence and decline), in general they are even more conventional and descriptive in actual usage than the main Antiquity–Middle Ages–Modern division. A scholarly debate about whether a sixth- or fifteenth-century date lies within the Middle Ages or not is perhaps just still conceivable, though it would no longer seem very interesting; a debate about whether an eleventh-century date is haut or bas Moyen Age is not. But there are alternative periodisations, which not only divide the conventional fourth/fifth- to fifteenth-century medieval period but link the resulting divisions to periods conventionally regarded as lying outside the Middle Ages. The two main ones on offer work from different ends of the period to arrive at similar results. The first starts from the observation that the society and culture of Antiquity did not suddenly stop at some point between ad 300 and ad 600 but faded slowly over a much longer period. It has come in various flavours. Already, in the interwar period, historians like Dopsch and Pirenne were stressing, with differing arguments, evidence and periodisations, the underlying continuities across the watershed of the political disappearance of the Roman Empire in the west.16 A number of French historians have more recently sought to stress continuities between the Gallo-Roman epoch and the era of Frankish history ending in the tenth century, thus nibbling away at the ‘medieval’ period to create a greatly extended Late Antiquity. Some, notably Elisabeth Magnou-Nortier 15 16

For 1066 as one of the two memorable dates in English history, see W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (London, 1930), passim. Alfons Dopsch, Wirtschaftliche und soziale Grundlagen der europäischen Kulturentwicklung aus der Zeit von Caesar bis auf Karl den Grossen, 2 vols., 2nd edn (Vienna, 1923–4); Henri Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne (Brussels, 1937). The literature discussing Dopsch’s and especially Pirenne’s views is too extensive to be listed here.


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and Jean Durliat, have stressed institutional continuity (without providing much explanation of why this ended or should ever have ended);17 others, such as Robert Fossier, Guy Bois, Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel have stressed structural continuities which in their view remained largely intact until the radical transformations of the period around the year 1000.18 Such notions have been taken up in Anglophone historiography,19 and a recent large-scale collaborative project funded by the European Science Foundation, which has been investigating the transformation of the Roman world, has clearly been inspired by them at least in part, though as its title suggests, it has stressed transformation more than continuity;20 so, arguably, has the recent launch of a periodical, Early Medieval Europe, devoted to the period from the fourth to the eleventh centuries, though both the title and the period covered show that the intention here is not primarily that of extending the notion of Late Antiquity. The second periodisation in effect seeks to extend the later Middle Ages and cut it off from the earlier period. The idea of an ‘Old Europe’ stretching from some point between ad 1000 and ad 1300 through to the late eighteenth century, to end with the Industrial and French revolutions, has been articulated by a number of scholars: briefly by Geoffrey Barraclough and Otto Brunner, at greater length by Dietrich Gerhard.21 Here, too, there is at least one journal which takes up this periodisation: the Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, founded in 1974. The editorial foreword to the first issue explicitly endorses the Brunner/Gerhard notion of an ‘Old European’ age from the twelfth to the eighteenth century, which is seen as ‘the central period of post-antique European history’, flanked by an ‘archaic’ period 17

18

19

20

21

J. Durliat, Les Finances publiques. De Dioclétien aux Carolingiens, 284–888, Beihefte der Francia, 21 (Sigmaringen, 1990); on this and the work of Magnou-Nortier and other ‘hyper-romanists’ see C. J. Wickham, ‘La Chute de Rome n’aura pas lieu’, Le Moyen Age 99 (1993), pp. 107–26. The extensive literature on this is most easily approached through the debate which followed T. N. Bisson’s attempt to restate and develop the thesis of a ‘feudal revolution’: T. N. Bisson, ‘The “Feudal Revolution”’, P&P 142 (1994), pp. 5–42, and D. Barthélemy, S. D. White, T. Reuter, C. J. Wickham and T. N. Bisson, ‘Debate: The “Feudal Revolution”‘, P&P 152 (1966), pp. 196–223, and 157 (1997), pp. 177–225. Implicitly in the span covered by textbooks like J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Barbarian West, 300–1000 (London, 1953) and R. Collins, Early Medieval Europe, 300–1000 (London, 1991); more explicitly in R. E. Sullivan, ‘The Carolingian Age: Reflections on its Place in the History of the Middle Ages’, Speculum 64 (1989), pp. 267–306. Bob Moore has pointed out to me the historiographical significance of Peter Brown’s work for giving early medievalists a sense of the coherence and importance of Late Antiquity as a period; Brown has edited a monograph series with the title ‘The Transformation of the Classical World’. Barraclough, ‘Medium Aevum’, pp. 61–2; O. Brunner, ‘Das Problem einer europäischen Sozialgeschichte’, in his Neue Wege der Sozial und Verfassungsgeschichte, 2nd edn (Gottingen, 1968), pp. 80–102; D. Gerhard, ‘Periodization in European History’, AHR 61 (1956), pp. 900–13, and Old Europe: A Study of Continuity, 1000–1800 (New York, 1981).

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and an ‘industrial’ period.22 Here, too, one can feel intuitive sympathy with the idea of a ‘long ancien régime’ which would mean that specialists in fourteenth- and seventeenth-century history have much to say to each other (and probably also that the fourteenth-century specialist will have more to say to the seventeenth-century than to the seventh-century specialist). Clearly also – at least at the level of superstructure – there are substantial continuities over this period, not least in the dominance of an aristocratic, dynastically minded, court-centred high culture which allowed members of a European elite to feel themselves at least as much in common with each other as with the other inhabitants of their own kingdom or principality. Neither of these new periodisations really depends on a comprehensive theory of historical development. The ‘hyper-romanists’ and ‘mutationists’ essentially accept the Ancient–Medieval–Modern division, simply wishing to begin the Middle Ages much later (though many of the mutationists owe something to a neo-Marxist succession of social formations approach). The adherents of Old Europe justify their construct largely on empirical, intuitive, qualitative grounds: this goes with this as much as, or more than, it goes with that. This kind of multiplication of significant periods is at least partially explicable in ecological terms: if it is true, as it is often said to be, that half the scholars who have ever lived are alive today, then we should expect greater competition for scholarly territories, and the more likely outcome of that will be attempts to defend smaller, more coherent and hence more manageable territories. A further, in itself laudable and understandable impulse, is the need medievalists feel not to isolate themselves still further from the mainstream of a contemporary culture which increasingly lacks temporal depth.23 The notion of an Old Europe sits as well with this as do works intended to show the need for continuing awareness of our ‘medieval’ origins.24 There are of course other issues involved here besides mere periodisation. I have used the term European medieval history so far as if it were unproblematic apart from the nature of the word ‘medieval’, but, of course, that is far from being the case. ‘Europe’, like ‘Asia’, is a social construct; it 22 23

24

‘Vorwort der Herausgeber’, Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 1 (1974), p. 1. This is particularly noticeable in neighbouring disciplines where many departments of literature, theology and philosophy now show little interest in their teaching and research in the period before the nineteenth century. For examples of this genre see J. R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton NJ, 1970), and G. Barraclough, The Crucible of Europe (London, 1976) (with a view of the history of post-Carolingian Europe as that of the ‘origins’ of contemporary Europe).


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is probably more questionable to talk about ‘European’ history than it is about ‘medieval’ history, and certainly there are a whole number of different Middle Ages within Europe, however conceived. Apart from anything else, the lands to the north and east of the Roman limes quite obviously did not proceed from Antiquity to the Middle Ages in the same way; this is not to argue that the Celtic, Scandinavian and Slavonic regions were completely unaffected by the existence of Mediterranean antiquity, merely that they were not affected by its existence in the same way as, say, northern Gaul and north-western Spain were. But even within Romania there are differences: notoriously, Mediterranean lands, whether they are now Islamic or Christian, share many common cultural and social features not found in the north, or not in that way or to that extent, from urbanism to clientelismo and machismo; notoriously also, this Mediterranean culture (or these Mediterranean cultures; there are numerous local variants) differs from that (or those) of northern Europe in ways which often predate and/or outlive the ‘medieval’ timeframe. Those who talk of the European Middle Ages rarely confront these spatial divisions; it is more usual for them to privilege certain areas and periods.25 This can be seen from a brief examination of two highly influential general interpretations of European medieval history in its central transition period.26 Richard Southern’s Middle Ages were ‘made’, very largely, in northern France, between about ad 1000 and ad 1150. Not all of his examples were drawn from that region by any means; but their tendency, even when they come from Arezzo or Barcelona, is to illustrate trends which were strongest there.27 Southern’s book is impressionistic, even pointilliste; it suggests as much as it argues explicitly, and its argument is essentially metonymic. Robert Bartlett’s more recent survey is both more explicit and more materialist in its approach, but it too, over a longer period, seeks to show how and why northern France acted as the social and cultural metropolis for an ever-widening European periphery. The civilisation of ‘Old Europe’ as defined or at least sketched by historians and sociologists like Brunner, Barraclough and Gerhard, is here provided with an account 25

26

27

An exception to this is G. Holmes ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1988). In spite of the popular-sounding title, it is a significant collaborative interpretation which takes the continuing north–south divide as an organisational principle. For the issues discussed in this paragraph see also M. Rubin, ‘The Culture of Europe in the Later Middle Ages’, History Workshop Journal 33 (1992), pp. 162–75; T. Reuter, ‘Medieval Ideas of Europe and their Modern Historians, History Workshop Journal 33 (1992), pp. 176–80; R. Balzaretti, ‘The Creation of Europe’, History Workshop Journal 33 (1992), pp. 181–96, and C. Wickham, ‘Making Europes’, New Left Review 208 (1994), pp. 133–43 (review of Bartlett, see below n. 28). R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London, 1953).

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of its origins: by ad 1300/ad 1350 Europe had become European, that is, had become a recognisable cultural, social and political entity, by being Frankicised (often forcibly so, especially on its outer rim).28 Bartlett’s analysis of course presents some problems for the conventional use of ‘medieval’. If it is not until around ad 1300–50 that the familiar elements of medieval European civilisation can be seen to be reasonably well dispersed across Europe, then for most of the period before that ‘medieval’ can only work as a mere time division: in any given part of Europe we have to open the box to find out what is inside (quite apart from the danger that Europe will itself be defined geographically by the presence of such a ‘medieval culture’, so producing a kind of circularity). The difficulty is actually more apparent than real. It is clear that Europe, in the fourteenth century and indeed in the twentieth, is characterised by the coexistence of a surprisingly homogeneous high culture (using the word sociologically rather than aesthetically) alongside substantial elements of localised practice and regional diversity.29 If we want to talk about ‘medieval’ Europe, and especially if we want to do so for comparative purposes, we are likely to find that the second word in the phrase gives us more trouble than the first. Yet, in spite of considerable difficulties of definition and demarcation, it is probably fair to say that in a context of European history alone the use of terms like ‘medieval’ and ‘Middle Ages’ can be dealt with fairly pragmatically. In spite of the apparent parallels with ‘feudal’ and ‘feudalism’, here there is far less danger in practice: we learn from the beginning of our professional socialisation to use the terms to denote rather than to predict, and to avoid reifications like ‘medieval man’ or ‘the medieval mind’. I do not find in my own practice that the term presents difficulties or gets in the way, and nor, as far as I can see, do my colleagues. As I have tried to show above, there are other ways of cutting the cake which make at least as much sense historically; but none of them makes so much more sense as to make one want to argue for the adoption of a new terminology in place of rather than alongside the old. It is enough if historians remain aware in their work and thought of the existence of possible alternatives. The question which I now want to address is whether this position works globally as well as locally. 28 29

Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (London, 1993). On these issues see R. Bartlett, ‘Patterns of Unity and Diversity in Medieval Europe’, L. Søndergaard, ‘Diversity and Cultures in the Later Middle Ages’ and Uffe Østergaard, ‘The Meaning of Europe: Empire, Nation-states, Civilization’, in B. McGuire ed., The Birth of Identities: Denmark and Europe in the Middle Ages (Copenhagen, 1995), pp. 29–45, 243–74, 301–44.


31

The use of the term ‘medieval’ outside the context for which it was originally invented, western Europe, is clearly crucial for this discussion, but it is unfortunately also the aspect of the question on which I have least authority to write, not least because of where my knowledge comes from. Over the past twenty-five years, I have quite often wanted to inform myself about some aspect or other of extra-European history, for purposes of comparison in particular. I have naturally tended to turn to work written in English (or perhaps French or German) rather than in languages I do not read; equally naturally, this work is likely to have been written by scholars who themselves come from my own cultural sphere and whose mindset, therefore, has been formed, at least in part, by terminology and periodisation drawn from the history and historiography of that sphere. It is, therefore, easier for me to see whether western scholars use the term ‘medieval’ about other parts of the globe than to tell whether it fits happily into local practice and thinking. But even allowing for this reservation, it does seem that the term ‘medieval’ is, indeed, in general and unproblematised use in a number of contexts outside its original one of European history. A few examples, which I hope are representative, may help to substantiate this claim. As far as I can see, the use of the term and its place in an Ancient– Medieval–Modern schema for Indian history began as an alternative to or synonym for the division Hindu–Muslim–British, though there have always been some misgivings about this.30 But in much of the recent works the term has been used without further explanation. B. Stein’s substantial monograph, Peasant, State and Society in Medieval South India, introduces the word ‘medieval’ in the title and on the first page of the introduction with no discussion, and uses it repeatedly throughout. There is an extensive discussion of the problem of how most appropriately to define and delimit the region ‘South India’, but the periodisation is taken for granted: it appears also that ‘medieval’ is synonymous with ‘early’ and with ‘pre-modern’.31 This is evidently not mere unreflective Eurocentrism on Stein’s part, for a 30

31

An interesting early objection is to be found in I. Prasad, History of Medieval India from 647 a.d. to the Mughal Conquest (Allahabad, 1925), p. xxi; the Ancient–Medieval–Modern division is applied ‘according to the fashion of the day’ but there is a ‘fundamental . . . unity, a sameness which no historian can have failed to notice’ about Indian history, using an ‘Orientalist’ trope against the imposition of western periodisation. Cf. also J. L. Mehta, Advanced Study in the History of Medieval India, vol. I (New Delhi, 1980), p. ix, who problematises the congruence of Ancient– Medieval–Modern with Hindu–Muslim–British, and the full and thoughtful discussion by B. D. Chattopadhyaya, The Making of Early Medieval India (Delhi, 1994), pp. 1–37. B. Stein, Peasant, State and Society in Medieval South India (Oxford, 1980), pp. 30–63 (definition of region), 1–2, 29 (synonymous with ‘pre-modern’), v (synonymous with ‘early’). In his All the King’s Mana: Papers on Medieval South Indian History (Madras, 1984), p. 303, Stein offered the notion of the ‘middle period’ as a ‘dark age following a golden age’.

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similar uncommented use of the term in a related context can be found in Harbans Mukhia’s 1985 article on ‘Peasant Production and Medieval Indian Society’.32 The term appears to be no less at home in the writings of western scholars writing on Islamic history.33 ‘Medieval’ apparently works for Persian/Iranian history as well, at least for western scholars like A. K. S. Lambton and David Morgan.34 It is also used for Chinese history, though here my knowledge is confined to the English-language work of (mostly American) Sinologists, and the periodisation varies considerably: for Johnson and Dien it is the period between the end of Han and the end of Tang,35 for Lieu it is the period from late Tang to early Ming,36 while V. Hansen can write with no apparent need to explain or justify the term that the ‘Southern Song (1127– 76) is widely regarded as the final phase of China’s medieval transformation, a process which had begun some six centuries earlier’.37 The only extensive discussion of the appropriateness of the term which I have found is in a monograph by a Japanese Sinologist, Tachigowa Micho, and here ‘medieval’ appears to be used largely as a synonym for ‘feudal’, since the work is a contribution to extensive discussions among Japanese Marxist historians of the application of a Marxist stages-of-development schema to Chinese history.38 To an outsider, there appear to be two different strands of thought at work in most of these usages. The first is that of ‘medieval’ as post-antique 32 33

34

35

36 37 38

In T. J. Byres and H. Mukhia eds., Feudalism and Non-European Societies (London, 1985), pp. 228–51. See, for example, the titles of the monographs by M. Dols, Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society (Oxford, 1992), and M. Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350 (Cambridge, 1994). Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History, ed. with introduction and conclusion by Edmund Burke, vol. III (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 171–206 (ch. 9: ‘The unity of later Islamic history’), labels the periods 1000–1250 and 1250–1500 as respectively the High and Late Middle Ages of Islamic history. Burke’s editorial comment, p. xvii, that Hodgson used the term ‘“the Middle Periods” (pointedly not the Middle Ages) of Islamic history’, appears misplaced. A. K. S. Lambton, Continuity and Change in Medieval Persia: Aspects of Administrative, Economic and Social History, 11th–14th Century (London, 1988), p. 15; D. Morgan, Medieval Persia, 1040–1797 (London, 1988), pp. ix, 27–8, 158. However, whereas Morgan sees the period as essentially pre-modern (hence his decision to end in 1797 rather than 1501), Lambton appears to be arguing by analogy with the ‘barbarian’ invasions of western Europe when she writes that the ‘Mongols did not bring a new religion which was to be the basis of a new civilisation’. D. G. Johnson, The Medieval Chinese Oligarchy (Colorado, 1977), p. 1; A. E. Dien ed., State and Society in Early Medieval China (Stanford CA, 1990), p. vii. In each case the period is carefully defined, but the use of the term is not further explained. S. N. C. Lieu, Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China, 2nd edn (Tübingen, 1992), p. ix. V. Hansen, Changing Gods in Medieval China (Princeton NJ, 1989), p. 3. T. Micho, Medieval Chinese Society and the Local ‘Community’, trans. J. A. Fogel (Berkeley, 1985); see especially pp. xiv–xvi, 3–7, 36–9.


33

or post-classical. The second is that of ‘medieval’ as a synonym for ‘feudal’, conceived either from a non-Marxist, Lattimore/Coulbourn comparative studies approach or from a Marxist stages-of-development perspective. Neither of these perspectives makes much sense in the context of the history of Africa or of the pre-Columbian Americas, and I have not (admittedly, once again, only after dipping into available literature in a casual and unguided manner) found it there: when British archaeologists refer to the Nubian kingdom of Solwa as ‘medieval’, they are clearly thinking of Sudan as an outpost of Mediterranean antiquity rather than as a region of Africa.39 Now, it may be that if I were more familiar with these diverse historiographical traditions across the Eurasian landmass I should be able to go back to a time within them when their historians had argued fiercely and thoughtfully about the appropriateness of terms like ‘medieval’ and ‘Middle Ages’. But that would not greatly affect the argument I wish to make, which is that even if such debates once existed they appear to have largely composted into the soil of our current professional socialisations. There does not, to an outsider casually dipping toes into the historiographical water, appear to be any more sense in these traditions that the term ‘medieval’ might be problematic than there is within the one in which I myself work. Nor need there be; for as long as historians confine themselves to their own tradition the same pragmatic considerations which, as I have tried to show above, apply to ‘medieval’ in the context of European history will, presumably, apply equally well in the context of, say, Indian or Chinese history. ‘Medieval’ can remain a conventional term used by agreement within a community of scholars to denote a period in a particular area, just as we can all agree to call things blue or red without having to carry an ISO colour chart around with us. There may be an implicit and potentially misleading sense of the unity of the period so denoted, but as long as we remain conscious that such an assumption is likely to be problematic we should not come to too much intellectual harm. However, once we start to become more aware of each other – and it seems plausible to suppose that globalisation will have effects on the concepts as well as the resources available to medieval historians across the planet – the local conventions may start to conflict with each other. So far, this has not much affected the practice of European medievalists, because although they have, in the past four decades, become increasingly willing 39

D. A. Welsby and C. M. Daniels, Soba: Archaeological Research at a Medieval Capital on the Blue Nile (London, 1991).

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to take on board comparative evidence from outside Europe, they have generally preferred to turn to the ‘ethnographic present’ of social anthropologists for their supplies: a European medievalist is far more likely to display some degree of familiarity with the Kula ring or the peace in the feud than with iqta’ or chun ti’ en. If anything, most European medievalists seem to have been put off historical, as opposed to anthropological, comparison by the distant echoes of failure on the battlefield of comparative studies of feudalism. I cannot from my own knowledge say how far globalisation has affected the practice of non-European medievalists, though I note Chaudhuri’s remark that the historians of different regions of Asia are more inclined to make comparisons with western Europe than with other parts of Asia,40 certainly this seems to be true of Japanese medievalists, who are now slowly establishing an outsiders’ presence within European medieval studies which may turn out to be analogous with the first entry of American medievalists on to the scene about a century ago. Once we start to do comparative history, we are immediately faced with a critical dilemma: do we compare societies (or aspects of societies) at the same point of time, or at the same stage of development? Historians in general seem to prefer comparisons between stages rather than between times. This applies whether or not they offer or embrace some overall view of the development of human society (a Marxist or neo-Marxist one), for example: even those who do not still have a notion of appropriateness in comparison. For an example, consider Hans-Ulrich Wehler when confronted in the course of the Germans’ ‘Historians’ Dispute’ (Historikerstreit) by what he saw as an unacceptable attempt to relativise Nazi genocide through historical comparison (or pseudo-comparison). He argued as follows:41 Germany must . . . be compared in the first instance with western countries and measured against their political norms, their legal and constitutional traditions . . . If one decides to risk the much more difficult diachronic comparison, great caution is required. The slaughter wreaked by Idi Amin’s tribal warriors or Pol Pot’s Red Khmer with modern weapons are as unsuitable as could be imagined for a comparison with the industrialised machinery of annihilation of the Third Reich . . . Idi’s Uganda is perhaps suitable for a comparison with the Merovingian period. 40

41

Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe, p. 11. If, as I suggest below, the future lies in part in our working collaboratively and comparatively, the way in which ‘medieval’ constructs western Europe as a developmental norm may itself be enough to make us think of abandoning the term – we could of course use permanent scare-quotes, but that would get tiring quite quickly. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit? Ein polemischer Essay zum ‘Historikerstreit’ (Munich, 1988), pp. 214–15, 169.


35

The issues at stake here are complex ones, not least because the debate was much less about ‘mere’ history than many historical debates are; it was far more a debate about contemporary politics and the morality of attitudes to the past.42 But the impulse of argument is significant: even for historians explicitly not wedded to any general theory of human development, historical comparisons must be, in some sense ‘appropriate’; approximate simultaneity is not enough. Neither Wehler, nor other historians like Martin Broszat, who had pleaded for a ‘historicisation’ of the Nazi era without any desire to encourage relativising through trivial or sloppy comparison, offered a definition of appropriateness: it was clearly to be a matter of the kind of moral and historical judgement which comes with training and experience – in other words, a professional matter. What is involved here is more clearly articulated by Perry Anderson’s remark that ‘there is no such thing as a uniform temporal medium: for the times of the major Absolutisms . . . were, precisely, enormously diverse . . . no single temporality covers it’.43 If one is to make historical comparisons, in other words, these may be diachronic in terms of the time defined by the revolving of the earth round the sun, but they should be synchronic in terms of the passage of human society through recognisable and definable stages of social and economic development. What these stages are is something which has been and still is the subject of much debate, both scholarly and scholastic. Anderson’s own position is, sophisticatedly and eclectically, Marxist, and the majority of schemata on offer probably derive at one or more removes from those put forward by Marx and Engels, though with an increasing tendency to abandon the dichotomy of ‘Oriental despotism’ and ‘feudalism’ as alternative and mutually exclusive forms of pre-capitalist social formations – now seen as largely the product of Marx’s and Engels’ own Orientalism (in a Saidian sense) – and to substitute some more general notion such as ‘tributary society’.44 Most of the explicitly non-Marxist ones, though they may also have some independent intellectual roots in a Weberian view of human societal development, are best seen 42 43 44

A convenient and thoughtful English-language survey of the dispute is provided by Charles S. Maier, The Unconquerable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge MA), 1988. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974), p. 10; for a critique see A. G. Frank, ‘A Plea for World System History’, Journal of World History 2 (1992), pp. 1–28. On these issues see C. Wickham, ‘The Uniqueness of the East’, in Byres and Mukhia, Feudalism, pp. 166–96; B. O’Leary, The Asiatic Mode of Production (Oxford, 1989), and J. Haldon, The State and the Tributary Mode of Production (London, 1993). ‘A Recent Survey of World History’, in L. S. Stavrianos, Lifelines from Our Past: A New World History (London, 1990), divides all human history into ‘kinship societies’, ‘tributary societies’ and ‘capitalist societies’, before echoing Otto of Freising’s eschatological approach to world history by discussing ‘human prospects’.

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as Cold War products: disguised versions of the Marxist schemata adapted for the purpose of explaining western exceptionalism, underpinning (and underpinned by) modernisation theory.45 The few genuine alternatives available are too general to be of much use. Hodgson’s division of all human history into an ‘agrarian age’, up to about ad 1800, followed by a ‘technical age’ from then on, appears to be true but trite (as well as eliminating a vast swathe of pre-agrarian history!).46 Jaspers’ notion of an Axial Age in world history, in which the intellectual and moral foundations for most, if not all, of the important world civilisations were laid,47 looks too much like an attempt to extend the (supposedly) foundational character of European antiquity to its analogues in the rest of the world, though, as we have seen, such an approach is implicit in at least some of the applications of ‘medieval’ to extra-European history. In any case, like Hodgson’s scheme, it is more descriptive than analytical. The one substantial alternative on offer – in a number of variant forms – in effect does away with stages of development altogether, and by implication perhaps also with synchronic or diachronic comparison: instead, it attempts to see all human history as a linked whole, with shifting core and hegemonic regions which influenced peripheries not just in the era of increasing European domination after ad 1500 but long before that. This is world system (or world systems) history, sometimes with the added adjective ‘hemispheric’ to underline the fact that it is primarily applicable to the Eurasian landmass: sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas and the southern Pacific lands are certainly now part of a world history, but have, in the past, not always been so (or not fully so).48 A recent sketch, using some of the insights gained from this approach, of how the first medieval European take-off of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – Bartlett’s world revisited – might be seen in these terms (in effect, as a surprisingly successful 45

46 47

48

For example the approaches of W. H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the World Community (Chicago, 1963); D. North and R. P. Thomas, Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge, 1973); E. L. Jones, The European Miracle, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1987) and Growth Recurring: Economic Change in World History (Oxford, 1988). Green, ‘Periodisation’, pp. 43–4. Karl Jaspers, The Origins and Goal of World History (New Haven, 1953); for a development of Jaspers’ sketch, see the collaborative volume by S. Eisenstadt ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany NY, 1986). Most conveniently approached in A. G. Frank and B. K. Gills eds., The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand (London, 1993), with debates between I. Wallenstein, the proponent of a post-1500 and therefore post-medieval world system conceptually related to the ‘rise of the West’ models cited above, and Frank, the proponent of a ‘world-systems’ view of history going back much further. See also L. Benton, ‘From the World-Systems Perspective to Institutional World History: Culture and Economy in Global Theory’, Journal of World History 7 (1996), pp. 261–95.


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provincial sideshow) has recently been offered by the British medievalist R. I. Moore.49 This is indeed an attractive additional perspective, though it is hardly going to be enough in itself. Much of what has happened in all parts of human history may indeed have been affected to a greater extent than has conventionally been assumed by developments in other, surprisingly distant societies, but this will rarely have been in ways which we can plausibly delineate. To borrow a Chaos Theory example: even if a butterfly’s wingflap can cause a hurricane on the other side of the globe, not every such wingflap will in fact do so, nor will the knowledge in itself be enough for us to understand hurricanes. The implication of all this for the use of the term ‘medieval’ is, I think, this: ‘medieval’, both because of its origins and because it is too often used as a purely descriptive or conventional term, will not give much help to historians in a globalised world looking for insight through comparison. It may provide a preliminary filing system to determine what is appropriate for comparison, but it does not offer conceptual protocols which will enable us to carry out comparison. As a synonym for ‘feudal’ it is clearly as problematic as that word itself. It might work as a synonym for ‘post-classical’ or ‘postaxial’, if we were to adopt Jaspers’ scheme and develop it, but that would, in effect, be to revert to the aesthetic and cultural origins of the term ‘medieval’ and to privilege the consciousness of elites over the being of all (including elites). This is not attractive to me, and I think not a step many of us would want to take. And if we do not, then it probably follows that the medievalists of the world can best unite, paradoxically, by forgetting that they are ‘medievalists’ except by convention. To do this would not necessarily entail signing up to some version of evolutionary determinism: ‘feudal’ or ‘tributary’ are additional weapons in our conceptual armoury rather than an entire battle-plan. If there is still much to be won by historians from Marxist succession-of-social-formation models, there is also much to be won from closer acquaintance by historians with a thinker much admired by Marx. Darwinism and neo-Darwinism evolutionary theory is not only potentially a rich source of analogies, metaphors and insights for historians; it has the advantage of having random change and adaptation as its motors, rather than a teleology which can all too easily underpin an unhistorical triumphalism.50 49 50

R. I. Moore, ‘The Birth of Europe as a Eurasian Phenomenon’, Modern Asian Studies 31 (1997), pp. 583–601. For the way in which such an approach might be developed see W. G. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory, vol. II: Substantive Social Theory (Cambridge, 1989), and C. J. Wickham, ‘Systactic Structures’, P&P 132 (1991), pp. 188–203.

chap t e r 3

The insecurity of travel in the early and high Middle Ages: criminals, victims and their medieval and modern observers On the death of William the Conqueror in 1087, the anonymous author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle wrote a lengthy obituary-notice, in which, among other things, he said: ‘We must not forget the good order he kept in the land, so that any man, if he himself were of any substance, could travel unmolested throughout the country with his bosom full of gold.’1 In this sentence, we can see all four elements of our cluster of issues: the criminal, who waited impatiently for loot; the victim, plagued with the fear of being robbed; the ruler, whose self-perception required him to act to stem the problem; and the observer, who gives, or seems to have given, information either about crime in general or about particular criminal acts. Highway robbery represents only part of the general insecurity of the Middle Ages, but it was insecurity of an especially dangerous kind. On the roads, a person was cut off from the protection of the normal social environment – if also from the dangers of that environment. The people you met were strangers to you, and therefore threatening: William of Poitiers praises it as one of William the Conqueror’s greatest achievements that in Normandy during

1

For this printed version, I have largely stuck to the text of the lecture as given, expanded here and there with references from the very helpful discussion. I should like to thank the participants, and also Jinty Nelson (London), Chris Wickham (Birmingham) and Patrick Wormald (Oxford), and the members of the electronic discussion-groups HUMANIST and ANSAXNET, especially Pat Connor (University of Virginia) and Charles Wright (University of Maryland), for further information on relevant literature and exempla. The Peterborough Chronicle, 1070–1154, ad a. 1087, ed. C. Clarke, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1970), p. 12: ‘Betwyx oð rum þingum, nis na to forgytane et gode frið þe he macode on isan lande, swa þet an man – þe himself aht wære – mihte faran ofer his rice, mid his bosom full goldes, ungederad’. The limitation þe himself aht wære recalls the dangers only marginally considered in what follows, which were inflicted on the settled part of the population by travellers (see n. 4), and the exclusion, frequently encountered later, of such men from the profits of conductus (receiving stolen goods), which they had come by unlawfully. For a more sober and probably more realistic appraisal of the king’s peace by a king himself, see S. D. Keynes, ‘The Fonthill letter’, in M. Korhammer ed., Words, Texts and Manuscripts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Helmut Gneuss on the Occasion of his Sixty-fifth Birthday (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 53–98, at 78 with n. 98: Athelstan speaks of men who do not watch over their cattle owing to their ‘overconfidence in public peace’.

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The insecurity of travel

39

his reign, a man did not immediately have to take flight if other armed men encountered him on the road.2 As soon as you left home, you perceived such men as strange and dangerous. There was no lack of ‘national’ prejudice in our period and it is evident from a number of statements in the sources how ancient is the fear of north Europeans that they would be fleeced and poisoned in Mediterranean lands.3 As for the indigenous people through whose lands medieval travellers rode or walked, they too perceived the strangers as dangerous to life and possessions.4 Precisely because of this lack of protection, and these potential conflicts between travellers and natives encountering each other along the road, not to mention the special riskiness of being on the road at all, the degree of security came to be considered a sort of litmus-test of a ruler’s competence and of the state of public order. In this paper, the theme will be treated not just from the standpoint of public order, but from the different standpoints of all those concerned. As we shall see, it is the aims and motivations of those opposed to order that are transmitted to us least directly: they have to be inferred. Our task will be to make clear the intersections between the economic, political and ideological aspects of the problem, and hence arrive at answers to the following 2

3

4

William of Poitiers, Histoire de Guillaume le Conquérant II, 45, ed. R. Foreville (Paris, 1952), p. 262: ‘Provincialium tuto armenta vel greges pascebantur, seu per campestria, seu per tesqua; segetes falcem cultoris intactae expectabant, quas nec attrivit superba equitum effusio, nec demessuit pabulator. Homo imbecillus aut inermis equo cantans qua libuit vectebatur, turmas militum cernens, non exhorrens.’ The final sentence recurs in II, 3, p. 156; and cf. also I, 59, p. 144: ‘Homines advenae cernentes apud nos quoties hac, illac, pergere inermes et quodque iter cuique vianti tutum pateri, hujuscemodi beatitudinem quotiens exoptavere suis regionibus hanc pacem, hanc dignitatem Guillelmi virtus patriae peperit.’ ¨ L. Schmugge, ‘Uber “nationale” Vorurteile im Mittelalter’, DA 38 (1982), pp. 439–59, and P. Meyvaert, ‘“Rainaldus est malus scriptor Francigenus” – voicing national antipathy in the middle ages’, Speculum 66 (1991), pp. 743–63, offer plenty of material and comment. For Italians as a people inclined to commit crimes of poisoning, murder, cheating and robbery against travellers from northern Europe, see Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon VII, 2, ed. R. Holtzmann, MGH SRG n.s. IX (Berlin, 1955), p. 400 (English trans. D. Warner, Ottonian Germany: The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg (Manchester, 2000), pp. 308–9): ‘Multae sunt, pro dolor! in Romania atque Longobardia insidiae. Cunctis huc adventientibus exigua patet caritas; omne, quod ibi hospites exigent, venale est, et hoc cum dolo, multique toxico hic pereunt adhibito.’ See also William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum ii, 201 [ed. R. A. B. Mynors, R. Thomson and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1998– 9), I, pp. 364–9]: pilgrims going to Rome in the time of Gregory VI faced dangers that included praedones, latrones, insidiatores, latrunculi, sicarii (‘robbers, bandits, liers in wait, thieves, murderers’). See the passage from William of Poitiers quoted above. The decrees of Frankish and Anglo-Saxon kings, and those of the Peace of God movement, show what problems could also be caused by travellers: for examples, see H. Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, 2 vols., 2nd edn C. F. von Schwerin (Leipzig, 1906, 1928), II, p. 370, and H. C. Peyer, Von der Gastfreundschaft zum Gasthaus. Studien zur Gastlichkeit im Mittelalter, MGH Schriften XXXI (Hannover, 1987), pp. 45–7. See also Ruodlieb V, ll. 457–60, 585–620, and VI, ll. 1–17, ed. F. P. Knapp (Stuttgart, 1977), pp. 68, 74–8, for possible conflicts between travellers and natives.

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questions: how insecure were (or seem) the roads in high-medieval Europe, and who caused insecurity and why? We are then necessarily confronted by a further question: how far could or should we risk general answers? Almost every statement in this field is by implication a statistical one. You do not need to be a specialist in the sociology of crime to know that even for our own well-counted age, crime statistics are a highly problematic business. In what follows, therefore, just as much attention will be given to methodological problems as to the actual data. The methodological problems are determined above all by the nature of sources which are sporadic and chance survivals. That is particularly true of the period under consideration here, that is, from the Carolingians to the beginning of the fourteenth century, although early- and late-medieval sources and studies will occasionally be cited for comparative purposes. For our period, with the exception of England, virtually no continuous series of court records survive. What we can know about crime in general and highway robbery in particular has to be put together from scarce normative sources on the one hand, and brief references to such matters in narrative, documentary and hagiographical sources on the other. These sources virtually never report directly about an event, or in neutral terms: their authors usually write for quite another purpose, and often enhance their accounts with general observations. Now, this means that in place of a sociology of violent crime in the Middle Ages, we often have to be satisfied only with confirmation that any such sociology is simply not to be had, because of the difficulties of the sources: we might call this a scholarly state of secure and assured insecurity. To some extent, we can overcome this insecurity by bringing in English material. Royal writs that become increasingly numerous from the midtwelfth century preserve some insights into the everyday reality of robbery. In addition, from the beginning of the thirteenth century we have court records, at first only the odd example, but increasingly series without gaps. The availability of these sources means that for Anglo-Saxon medievalists, historians and legal historians alike, crime and criminality are fashionable concepts.5 By contrast, the continental historiographical tradition, 5

J. Röhrkasten, Die englischen Kronzeugen, 1130–1330, Berliner Historische Studien 16 (Berlin, 1990), esp. ch. 5, ‘Kriminalität’, pp. 332–416, offers a good entrée into the problems here. See further the monographs of J. Bellamy, Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1973); B. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities 1300–1348 (Cambridge MA, 1978); R. W. Kaeuper, War, Justice and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1988); Edward Powell, Kingship, Law and Society: Criminal Justice in the Reign of Henry V (Oxford,


41

especially in Germany, seems not to want to make this phenomenon a topic for discussion and analysis. In the medieval sections of the new DahlmannWaitz, there is no heading of ‘crime’ or ‘criminality’ in either ‘legal history’ or ‘social history’. And if you look there under ‘Basic Concepts in History’, you jump from Utopie to Verein without passing Verbrechen, although crime as a concept might be considered not unrelated to utopia and union, and you will not find an entry for Kriminalität either.6 On the other hand, the catchword ‘peace’ plays a rather subdued role in the English historiography (save perhaps in some technical terms in legal history); and the key antonym of ‘crime’, or ‘unrest’, is not ‘peace’ but ‘justice’. The distinctiveness of the English sources and of the English historiography sets off a striking contrast with Germany. The scarcity of source materials has already been mentioned. In view of this situation, historians often adopt the following strategy: you formulate a plausible generalising hypothesis, and illustrate it with two or three examples from different periods and regions. This goes (especially, but not exclusively) for works that deal with a phenomenon or a special group, say, travellers, or pilgrims, throughout the entire Middle Ages.7 It is hard entirely to avoid such a strategy; but it must be embarked on consciously

6

7

1989); P. C. Maddern, Violence and Social Order: East Anglia, 1422–1442 (Oxford, 1992). Important particular studies are E. L. G. Stones, ‘The Folvilles of Ashby-Folville’, TRHS 5th ser. 7 (1957), pp. 117– 36; J. G. Bellamy, ‘The Coterel gang: an anatomy of a band of fourteenth-century criminals’, EHR 79 (1964), pp. 698–717; R. W. Kaeuper, ‘Law and order in fourteenth-century England: the evidence of special commissions of oyer and terminer’, Speculum 54 (1979), pp. 734–84; M. T. Clanchy, ‘Highway robbery and trial by battle in the Hampshire eyre of 1249’, in R. F. Hunnisett and J. B. Post eds., Medieval Legal Records Edited in Memory of C. A. F. Meekings, 2nd edn (London, 1980), pp. 26–50; N. Fryde, ‘A medieval robber baron: Sir John Molyns of Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire’, in Hunnisett and Post eds., Medieval Legal Records, pp. 197–221; A. Harding, ‘Early trailbaston proceedings from the Lincoln roll of 1305’, in Hunnisett and Post eds., Medieval Legal Records, pp. 144–68. Important from the standpoint of method are R. B. Pugh, ‘Some reflections of a medieval criminologist’, PBA 59 (1973), pp. 83–103, and M. T. Clanchy, ‘Law, government and society in medieval England’, History n.s. 59 (1974), pp. 73–8. W. Schild, ‘Kriminalität’, in LM 5, cols. 1533–4, is an exception. But the literature there given relates to either the later Middle Ages, or the entire medieval period in the framework of very general reflections on the necessity of a historical criminality. The history of criminality in the European early and central Middle Ages remains to be written. On the methodological presuppositions and the historiography of the subject for the later medieval and early modern periods, especially with reference to the dominant tendency in the historiography since Otto Brunner to view all use of violence as part of the ‘lawful’ conduct of feud, see now the helpful and thought-provoking ideas of U. Andermann, Ritterliche Gewalt und bürgerliche Selbstbehauptung. Untersuchung zur Kriminalisierung und Bekämpfung des spätmittelalterlichen Raubrittertums am Beispiel norddeutscher Hansestäste, Rechtshist. R. 91 (Frankfurt, 1991), pp. 13–62. For instance, J. Sumption: Pilgrimage: An Image of Medieval Religion (London, 1975), pp. 175–82; N. Ohler, Reisen im Mittelalter (Munich, 1986), pp. 146–52; A. McColl, The Medieval Underworld (London, 1979).

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and in a carefully considered way, for the dangers are obvious. For a subject like high politics, we could meanwhile bring in anecdotal material with a degree of confidence and extract from it the typical and the untypical,8 but that would only be possible because we could sketch in as background knowledge our information on political issues. In the case of highway robbery, we lack a sense of the general scene. ‘Telling examples’ in such circumstances are not always reliable; and when they are confronted with other examples that seem to prove the opposite, it is difficult to weigh up one set against the other. On apparently more thoughtfully chosen variants of this strategy, by which you offer a collection of assertions in the sources (or sources of a certain genre, such as saints’ Lives or miracle-books) as a representative and random test for the whole of the past, my opinion is little better. The attempt of Alexander Murray, for instance, to evaluate saints’ Lives and miracle collections of the tenth and eleventh centuries in a quasi-statistical way, to prove that the number of highway robberies rose in the eleventh century – and then explain that by reference to the increasing monetisation of the economy, which made it easier for robbers to carry off loot – is, although stimulating in many respects, in the last analysis not fully convincing.9 Of course, there are contemporary statements about the security or insecurity of the roads, but it is exactly this sort of thing that is of little use for our purposes. The quotation from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle at the beginning of this paper – and something similar could be said of what the Chronicle’s continuator in the monastery of Peterborough wrote at the death of Henry I of England in 113510 – does not operate as a conclusion about contemporary criminality or the offering of a ‘representative opinion poll’. It is a topos of 8 9

10

On relevant methodological problems and dangers, see T. Reuter, ‘Pre-Gregorian Mentalities’, J EcclesH 45 (1994), pp. 465–75 [in this book, chapter 5, below]. A. Murray, ‘Money and robbers, 900–1100’, JMH 4 (1978), pp. 55–74. To be particularly criticised is the fact that Murray works with a relatively small number of (mostly hagiographical) sources, yet argues as if this represents strong and neutral evidence of reality as it was. Further, he fails to distinguish clearly enough between types of robbers (people running protection-rackets, professional robbers, noble robbers) and between robbery and theft. Nevertheless, I owe to this article, despite my criticisms, much in the way of material and ideas. For the distinction between a ‘crime wave’, usually not objectively ascertainable, and a ‘punishment wave’, much easier for us to detect, see P. Wormald, ‘A hand-list of Anglo-Saxon lawsuits’, ASE 17 (1988), pp. 247–81, at 278–81. The Peterborough Chronicle ad a. 1135, on Henry I, p. 54: ‘God man he wes and micel æie wes of him: durste nan man misdon wið oð eron his time. Pais he makede men and doer. Wua sua bare his byrþen gold and sylure, durste nan man sei to him naht bute god’ (‘he was a good man, and was held in great awe. In his days no man dared to wrong another. He made peace for men and animals. Whoever carried a burden of gold and silver, no man dared say to him anything but good.’ This passage comes from the pen of the second continuator, and should be read in conjunction with the negative assessment of Stephen (pp. 55–6) and positive one of Henry II (p. 60).


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praise for rulers, such as we encounter already in the Bible,11 or in panegyrics for Roman emperors.12 It was widespread in the Middle Ages, especially where legitimation was called for, in the Vita Heinrici IV,13 for instance, or in the Chronicle of Gilbert of Mons,14 or in the assertion of an AngloNorman historian that the Normans brought law and order to England.15 The saying, that a ruler was so strong that no one ventured to threaten his peace, not even by an unauthorised appropriation of valuables found on the road, let alone by attacks on unprotected travellers, was a favourite example of the topos, to be found not only in Latin historiography16 11

12

13

14

15

16

See III Reg. 12: 21 and 25: ‘Salomon autem erat in ditione sua, habens omnia regna . . . offerentium sibi munera et serientium ei cunctis diebus vitae eius . . . Habitabatque Iuda et Israel absque timore ullo, unusquisque sub vite sua et sub ficu sua, a Dan usque Bersabee cunctis diebus Salomonis.’ B. D. Shaw, ‘Bandits in the Roman empire’, P&P 105 (1984), pp. 3–51, esp. 33 (Augustus) and 44–52 (on the ideological function of the contrasting pair robber: ruler). On the problematics here, see G. Halsall, ‘Violence and society in the early medieval west: an introductory survey’, in Halsall ed., Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 1–45, esp. 13–15 (I am grateful to Patrick Wormald for kindly giving me this reference in advance of the book’s publication). Cf. the passages cited at nn. 1, 2 and 10, above, and also Vita Heinrici IV. Imperatoris c. 8, ed. W. Eberhard, MGH SRG LVIII (Hannover, 1899), pp. 28–9, on the influence of the Imperial Landpeace of Mainz (1103): ‘quod scelera prohibebat, quod pacem et iusticiam revocabat, quod iam latro viam non obsedit, quod silva suas insidias non occultavit, quod mercatori nautisque liberum erat suam ire viam, quod vetitis rapinis raptor esuriebat’. This passage can be compared with Ekkehard of Aura’s account of the last years of Henry IV’s reign: the Chroniken of Frutolf and Ekkehard and the anonymous Kaiserchronik, ed. F.-J. Schmale and Irene Schmale-Ott (Darmstadt, 1972), p. 186 (Ekkehard I, ad a. 1104): ‘His tamen exceptis [i.e. the murder of Sigehart of Burghausen] undique terra satis quievit pace simul et fertilitate necnon aeris qualitate.’ That such ways of thinking lived on in twentieth-century historians emerges from Schmale’s comment, p. 187, n. 17, that pax was presumably a consequence of the Mainz Landpeace. Giselbert of Mons, Chronicon Hanoniense c. 57, ed. L. Vanderkindere (Brussels, 1904), p. 97: ‘Balduinus miles novus audiens multos in Hanonia furos et latrones commorari, qui de confidentia multorum potentum, ad quos sanguinis linea pertinebant, in malis operibus vivere non dubitabant, illos ubique perquirebat, alios igne concremans, quosdam vero aquis submergens, alios vivos sepeliens, nulli eorum pro magna parentela parcebat.’ Such praise was certainly not restricted to kings; see also the comment on Archbishop Hillin of Trier in Gestorum Treverorum continuatio tertia c. 3, MGH SS XXIV, p. 381: ‘In diebus suis terra a bellis, rapinis et incendiis quievit.’ Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum VI, 1, [ed. D. Greenway, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1998), pp. 338–9]; Thomas of Walsingham, Gesta abbatum Sancti Albani, ed. H. T. Riley, Rolls Series 28/4/1 (London, 1867), pp. 41–2. For such topoi as ‘the traveller goes unmolested even when he carries valuables’, or ‘lost valuables lay untouched by the roadside’, in medieval Latin historical works, see (roughly in chronological order of writing): Anonymi Valesiani Pars Posterior c. 72, MGH AA IX, p. 324, on Theoderic the Great: ‘tantae enim disciplinae fuit, ut, si quis voluit in agrum suum argentum vel aurum dimittere, ac si intra muros civitatis esset, ita existimaretur’, and cf. c. 73, where we are told that in Theoderic’s time no city-gates were required; Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica II, 16, eds. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), p. 192, referring to Edwin of Northumbria: ‘Tanta . . . pax . . . fuisse perhibetur ut, sicut usque hodie in proverbio dicitur, etiam si mulier una cum recens nato parvulo vellet totam perambulare insulam a mari ad mare, nullo se ledente valeret’, and following on from this, the story of a publicly provided drinking-cup that no one dared to remove, and cf. other instances in this note, below, and for Irish material, see next note. Of King Alfred, William of Malmesbury says, Gesta Regum ii, 122, pp. 188–91: ‘Hoc commento pacem infudit provinciae; ut etiam

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but also in Old Irish17 and Old Norse literature.18 The recurring formula ‘from one end of the kingdom to another’ is especially notable: it was probably an idealised situation which contrasted with the rather different intensities of a ruler’s actual penetration of the spaces of his realm or territory. In a variant of the topos, the ruler decreed an often cruel exemplary punishment, and only after that did his land enjoy untroubled peace, as in Dudo of St Quentin’s anecdote where Duke Rollo of Normandy hanged two thieves in order to bring security to his land,19 or as in a later example (less clouded by mythologising) in the Erfurt Annals’ account of Rudolf’s protection of peace in Thuringia in 1289–90, in the course of which he had

17

18

19

per publicos aggeres, ubi semitae in quadrivium finduntur, armillas aureas juberet suspendi, quae viantium aviditatem riderent, dum non essent qui eas abriperent’; Robert of Torigny’s additions to the Gesta Normannorum Ducum of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis and Robert of Torigni II, 14 (20), ed. E. van Houts, Oxford Medieval Texts, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1992–5), I, p. 70, on Duke Rollo of Normandy: ‘dux . . . armillas aureas in quercu pependit, que per tres annos ob timorem ipsius intacte ibidem fuerunt’. Saxo Grammaticus, Historia Danorum, ed. with trans. and commentary by P. Fisher and H. Ellis Davidson, 2 vols. (Woodbridge, 1979–80), I, p. 156, II, p. 92, has a similar story about the legendary King Frothi (for the reworking of the Frothi legend by Snorri Sturluson, see below n. 18); and cf. nn. 1 and 10 above for comparable passages in the Peterborough manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). Glossary of Cormac, cited by R. Flower, The Irish Tradition (Oxford, 1947), pp. 53–4: ‘Ana: these were the little cups set by the wells under the strict law . . . That weary travellers might drink from them they set these vessels by the wells, and the kings put them there to test the observance of the law.’ A. J. Goedheer, Irish and Norse Traditions about the Battle of Clontarf (Haarlem, 1938), pp. 17–18, 31–2, cites the Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh’s panegyric on Brian Boruma, the Irish high-king at the beginning of the eleventh century: ‘a solitary woman came from Tory, in the north of Ireland, to Cliodhna, in the south of Ireland, carrying a ring of gold on a horse-rod on her back, without being either robbed or insulted, whereupon the poet sang: “From Tory to pleasant Cliodhna with a ring of gold on her back, in the time of bright-sided fearless Brian, a solitary woman went round Ireland”’, and also that of the Cath Mhuighe Rath: ‘authors record that a solitary woman might travel in Ireland without fear of being violated or molested, though there were no witnesses to guard her, from well-known Osgleann in Umhall, in the west of the province of Connacht, to the famous remarkable rock of Eoghan in the east, and from fair-surfaced, woody grassy-green Inis Fail exactly in the south of Ireland . . . to the loud-roaring, water-shooting cliffs of Tory in the north’. Cf. Audacht Morainn, ed. F. Kelly (Dublin, 1976), pp. 6–9, and Introduction pp. xv–xviii; T. O’Cathasaigh, The Heroic Biography of Cormac Mac Airt (Dublin, 1977), pp. 85–6. For these references, I am grateful to Charles Wright (University of Maryland). Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda, trans. A. Faulkes (London, 1987), pp. 106–7: ‘Skiold had a son called Fridleif who ruled the territory after him. Fridleif’s son’s name was Frodi. He succeeded to his father’s kingdom in the period when the Emperor Augustus established peace over all the world. It was then that Christ was born. But because Frodi was the greatest of all the kings in northern countries, the peace was attributed to him throughout all Scandinavia, and Scandinavians called it Frodi’s peace. No one harmed anyone else, even if he came upon his father’s killer or his brother’s killer, whether free or bond. Also at that time there were no thieves or robbers, so that a gold ring lay for a long time on Ialangr heath.’ Dudo of Saint-Quentin, De moribus et actis primorum Normannorum ducum II, 32, ed. J. Lair (Caen, 1865), pp. 172–3. On the grisly executions of thieves and robbers carried out on the orders of Henry I of England, see The Peterborough Chronicle, p. 46, ad a. 1124; also S. L. Mooers, ‘A re-evaluation of royal justice under Henry I’, AHR 93 (1988), pp. 340–58.


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a number of predones (robbers) hanged by way of exemplary punishment.20 The use of such topoi may – perhaps – say something about contemporaries’ subjective feelings, though here to go from a topos towards inferring consciousness of a particular situation, still less to generalise about some kind of public opinion from a single witness, is taking a bold step. This sort of material gives no reliable information about the objective security of the time in question. The same goes for the inversion of this topos, often in the form ‘in earlier times, everything was secure, but now, thanks to the weaknesses of the king’s subjects, everything has become so insecure that none of them dares so much as to put his foot outside the door’. This is a turn of phrase we often find, for instance in the lament of Wulfstan of York c. 1000 that since the death of Edgar (975), robbers had so much increased that now there were more robbers than righteous persons,21 or in Ekkehard of Aura’s account of the horrible conditions after the death of Henry V’s reign.22 It is important to stress this, because with especially drastic descriptions of disorder, it is often hard to keep reminding ourselves that here too, exactly as with the praise of rulers, what we are dealing with is not sociology but rhetoric: criticism of ruler or society. 20

21

22

Chronica sancti Petri Erfordensis moderna, in Monumenta Erphurtensia saec. XII, XIII, XIV, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SRG XLII (Hannover, 1899), pp. 293, 295. See W. Rösener, ‘Zur Problematik des spätmittelalterlichen Raubrittertums’, in H. Mauer and H. Patze eds., Festschrift für Berent Schwineköper (Sigmaringen, 1982), pp. 469–88, at 478–9 (with older specialist literature), and Andermann, Ritterliche Gewalt, p. 18, who stresses the significance of this passage as an exemplum in nineteenth-century historiography, hence an anachronistic reading. K. Jost ed., Die ‘Institutes of Polity, civil and ecclesiastical’. Ein Werk Erzbischof Wulfstans von York (Bern, 1959), p. 81. This passage is characteristically treated by Murray, ‘Money and robbers’, p. 75, as if Wulfstan was setting out to establish an objective situation. For the conceptual association of royal power and crime in Murray’s work, cf. also ‘Money and robbers’, p. 73: ‘when the monarchy’s grip on the same region [i.e. Thuringia] next conspicuously weakened, latrones are there again’. Frutolf and Ekkehard, Chroniken, p. 322 (Ekkehard III, ad a. 1116): ‘Scindebatur inter hec et huiusmodi regnum Teutonicum . . . et quia rex aberat, unusquisque non quod rectum, sed quod sibi placitum videbatur, hoc faciebat . . . Post hec occasione nacta undique latrunculi pullulabant, qui nullam temporibus vel personis distantiam exhibentes, ut dici solet, rapere et clepere, invadere et occidere nilque per omnia victis reliqui facere satagebant,’ and also ibid., pp. 342, 344, 362 (Ekkehard IV, ad a. 1119, 1120, 1123). For further examples of this kind of ruler-criticism, see Adalbero of Laon, Carmen ad Robertum regem, vv. 66–7, ed. C. Carozzi (Paris, 1979), p. 6; Thietmar, Chron. VIII, 23, p. 520: ‘sicut nobis nullus aut regnet aut imperet dominus, depredamur’; Sextus Amarcius, Sermones I, ll. 89–100, ed. K. Manitius, MGH Quellen VI (Weimar, 1969), pp. 55–6; The Peterborough Chronicle ad a. 1136, pp. 55–6. J. Campbell, ‘Was it infancy in England? Some questions of comparison’, in M. Jones and M. Vale eds., England and Her Neighbours, 1066–1453: Essays in Honour of Pierre Chaplais (London, 1990), pp. 7–8, denies, wrongly in my view, since this cannot be ascertained, that there could have been any actual foundation for such a critique. See also M. Barber, ‘Catharism and the Occitan nobility: the lordships of Cabaret, Minerve and Termes’, in C. Harper-Bill and R. Harvey eds., The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood 3. Papers from the Third Strawberry Hill Conference, 1988 (Woodbridge, 1990), p. 11, for further citations from Orderic and from William of Puylaurens suggesting a link between royal weakness and banditry.

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A further problem involved in interrogating the sources properly relates to language and meaning. Precisely because words like praedo, latro, fur and so on were exclusively freighted with negative connotations, they were eminently suited for metaphorical use. In the thought and writings of the Gregorians in the eleventh century, for instance, the prelate guilty of simony was a fur et latro, drawing on John 10: 8. Of course it is clear that the spirituales latrones of the Gregorian period were not robbers in the literal sense;23 but other cases are not so clearcut. For example, was Egeno, the man Henry IV allegedly put up to bringing a formal accusation against Rudolf of Rheinfelden and Berthold of Zähringen, really a latro, as he appears in Lampert of Hersfeld’s account?24 Notably fluid in this context were the cross-overs between toll and robbery. Guibert of Nogent, in typically polemic style, presents the two as virtually identical.25 In Gregory VII’s complaints against Philip I that he had collected payments in cash from traders and pilgrims, attention was drawn to the difference between Philip and a highway robber: more predonis.26 In Suger’s Life of Louis the Fat, the distinction has as good as disappeared. Thomas of Marle and Hugh of Le Puiset come to be represented as psychopathic robbers and murderers, without any reference to their own view of themselves.27 Even before the 23

24

25

26 27

On the phrase, see R. Schieffer, ‘Spirituales latrones. Zu den Hintergründen der Simonieprozesse in Deutschland zwischen 1069 and 1075’, in HJ 92 (1972), pp. 19–60. A limiting case is offered by the complaint of the pro-Anacletan Gerald of Angoulême about the conflict between the proInnocentian cathedral chapter of Albi and the pro-Anacletan Bishop Hubert: ‘que inobedientia adeo processit, quod domus episcopalis eversa et destructa et mater ecclesia, que domus Dei erat, satellitibus munita, spelunca latronum facta est’, cited by J.-L. Biget, ‘Sainte-Cécile et Saint-Salvi. Chapitre de cathédrale et chapitre de collégiale a` Albi’, in Le Monde des chanoines (XIe–XIVe s.), Cahiers de Fanjeaux 24 (Toulouse, 1989), pp. 65–104, at 74. Even if the men mentioned here were acting violently, they were not actual latrones on that account. The opposed sides in the religious conflicts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries also made polemical use of such terminology: see, in a comment on the Paterines, Arnulfi Gesta archiepiscoporum Mediolanensium III, 20, MGH SS VIII, p. 23: ‘nulli interim requies erat praedonum in diripiendis substantiis clericorum’. Lampert of Hersfeld, Annales ad a. 1070, in O. Holder-Egger ed., Lamperti Opera Omnia, MGH SRG XXXVIII (Hannover, 1894), pp. 133–4: ‘homine sceleratissimo, qui, si quid ingenuitatis a parentibus accepisset, id per furta, per latrocinia, denique per omnia viciorum probra iam dudum oblitterasset’; cf. ibid., p. 135: ‘[Archbishop Anno] Egenen . . . teneri fecit eumque catenis oneratum plerumque ad spectaculum vulgi deduci iussit’, and p. 172: ‘comprehensus in quodam latrocinio a popularibus cecatus est’. Guibert of Nogent, Autobiographie III, 8, ed. E.-T. Labande, Les Classiques de l’histoire de France au moyen aˆge 34 (Paris, 1981), p. 340: ‘Teudegaldus homo erat funestissimus . . . Ingelranni Codiciacensis diu officialis atque praepositus, qui transitorias redhibitiones apud pontem qui Soordi dicitur observans, commentium paucitatem aliquotiens aucupabatur et, cum eos rebus omnibus spoliasset, ne quando illis contra eum interpellare liceret, ejectos in flumine supplumbabat’. Gregory VII, Registrum II, 5 and 18, ed. E. Caspar, MGH Epp. sel. I, pp. 130–1, 150–1 (English trans. H. E. J. Cowdrey, The Register of Gregory VII (Oxford, 2001), pp. 97, 112). Suger, Vita Ludovici Grossi cc. 7, 24, 31 (Thomas of Marle), and 19–22 (Hugh of Puiset), ed. H. Waquet, Les Classiques de l’histoire de France au moyen aˆge 11, 2nd edn (Paris, 1964), pp. 30–4, 172–8, 250–6 and 150–70. Particularly characteristic are the emphatically unappreciative account of


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Battle of Worringen in 1288, which in my view was simply the final phase of a political conflict about lordship, one side claimed to be campaigning against latrones,28 just as Charles of Lorraine in the West Frankish politics of the 970s and 980s had been deprived of legitimacy by the defamatory allegation that his following consisted of latrones.29 Rhetorical distortions could come in, too, in the context of formal accusations, judgements and edicts: especially misleading here is the unreflecting assumption that in contrast to the narrative sources, official documents themselves should be seen as objective, and, their authenticity once assumed, should be dealt with as unproblematic from a source-critical viewpoint. In thirteenth-century England, it was frequently asserted that a robbery had been committed ‘on the king’s road’, because the road was associated with a special peace.30 In a great trial in Hampshire in 1248–9, pushed through by Henry III of England against local opposition, after

28

29

30

Hugh’s death in the Holy Land, p. 170, and the details about Thomas’s toughness towards traders at the very moment of his own death, pp. 252–4. For the late-medieval artistic representation of Thomas’s death as by hanging, a thoroughly understandable ‘interpretation’ derived by the Grandes Chroniques from Suger’s passage, see C. Raynaud, La Violence au moyen aˆ ge, XIIIe–XVe siècle, d’après les livres d’histoire en français (Paris, 1990), pp. 58, 170, 314; see also C. Aboucaya, ‘Politique et repression criminelle dans l’oeuvre de Suger’, in Mélanges Roger Aubenas (Montpellier, 1974), pp. 9– 24, and D. Barthélemy, Les Deux Ages de la seigneurie banale: pouvoir et société dans la terre des sires de Coucy (milieu XIe–milieu XIIIe siècle) (Paris, 1984), pp. 69–98. Gesta abbatum Trudonensium, continuation tertia, MGH SS X, p. 405: ‘Iohannes primus Brabancie dux volens stratam publicam ratione ducatus Lotharingie . . . tutam et liberam ad desambulandum conservare, cum copioso exercitu ultra Mosam transiens, Wuronc castrum obsedit, pro eo quod archiepiscopus Coloniensis Siverdus ibi raptores servaret, qui mercatores spoliarent et captivarent’. For the background, see the collection edited by W. Janssen and I. Stehkämper, Der Tag bei Worringen. 5. Juni 1288, Veröffentlichen der staatliche Archive des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, R. C., Quellen und Forschungen 27 (Düsseldorf, 1988), but unfortunately without any contribution on John of Brabant. Charles of Lorraine: Gesta Episcoporum Cameracensium I, 96 and 101, ed. L. Bethmann, MGH SS VII, pp. 440, 442–3, and Richer, Historiae IV, 10, ed. R. Latouche, Les Classiques de l’histoire de France au moyen aˆge 12, 17 (Paris, 1964), vol. II, p. 158. For a similar accusation, see Galbert of Bruges, Histoire du Meurtre de Charles le Bon, comte de Flandre (1127–1128), c. 113, ed. H. Pirenne (Paris, 1891), p. 160: ‘milites et latrunculi quidem, qui erant in parte Willelmi consulis’. Especially liable to be termed latro or praedo were those who threatened church property: see for instance Ex miraculis S. Wigberti c. 13, MGH SS IV, p. 226; Sigebert of Gembloux, Vita Deoderici I. episcopi Mettensis c. 12, MGH SS IV, p. 469; Anselm of Liège, Gesta episcoporum Leodiensium c. 55, MGH SS VII, p. 222; and Gesta Episcoporum Cameracensium I, 93 and 112 (as above), pp. 438–9, 450. For the defamatory use of latro and latrocinium that probably lay at the root of this tradition in the political rhetoric of antiquity, see R. MacMullen, ‘The Roman concept of robber-pretender’, Revue internationale des droits de l’antiquité 3e série 9 (1963), pp. 221–36; Shaw, ‘Bandits’ (as above n. 12); and on the rhetorical use of the pirate metaphor, see M. Schumacher, ‘Teuflische Piraten. Kleiner Beitrag zur historischen Metaphorologie’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 74 (1992), pp. 249–56. F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland, A History of English Law from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward I, ed. S. F. C. Milsom (Cambridge, 1968), vol. II, p. 464. Cf. the very useful commentary to the edition of sources by A. R. DeWindt and E. B. DeWindt, Royal Justice and the Medieval English Countryside, Studies and Texts 57 (Toronto, 1981), who distinguish clearly between the king’s and other roads at p. 362, no. 535, p. 470, no. 737, and p. 471, nos. 740, 743.

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the spectacular robbing of merchants from Brabant on the high road near Alton, a number of men were sentenced to death, not because they had taken part in the attack itself but because they been in league with unidentified ‘outlaws’.31 Given the legal formalism prevailing at that time, such vagueness may seem surprising; but even in the early modern period, that is, at a point when the information in court records can more easily be checked against other sources, historians specialising in this material find a lot of imprecision in such accusations.32 We find something similar in the English judicial records’ frequent statements that the accused, who was usually not present, was a vagabondus and therefore not in any tithing: for the historian it would be a rash inference that someone allegedly of no fixed abode belonged to the classes dangereuses, for what we are really encountering here are attempts on the part of those giving sworn evidence as members of the hundred or tithing to protect themselves from the financial demands of the sheriff.33 The publicus latro of the sources was not necessarily a professional criminal and serial offender, but most likely someone whose guilt at least in the particular case was said to be obvious, diffamatus, ‘known to the court as of ill-repute’; the label was often applied on grounds that were legal and technical.34 Punishment too needs to be considered from this viewpoint. Some of those who took part in the revolt of Pippin the Hunchback against Charlemagne were hanged in 793, and this was probably meant to underline the fact that their motives were vile – they were punished as if they were robbers:35 an idea also to be found in the late antique usage of latro, 31

32

33

34

35

Clanchy, ‘Highway robbery’ (as n. 5), pp. 36–7. The case is particularly informative because we have not only the detailed account of Matthew Paris but also the court record (edited by Clanchy in an appendix) – an exceptionally rare occurrence. Helpful on this problem for the early modern period is J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Seventeenth-Century England: A County Study (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 9–11; also J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750 (London, 1984), pp. 34–9, 41–72 (also dealing with the issue of criminal statistics). For these institutions, see W. A. Morris, The Frankpledge System, Harvard Historical Studies 4 (New York, 1914); H. R. Loyn, The Governance of Anglo-Saxon England 500–1087 (London, 1984), pp. 140–8 (with exaggerated stress on the territorial aspect); W. L. Warren, The Governance of Anglo-Norman England (London, 1987), pp. 41–2, 203–5. DeWindt and DeWindt, Royal Justice (as n. 30), offer good comments on practical aspects of the problem. The Assise of Clarendon (1166), ed. W. Stubbs, Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional History from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward the First, 9th edn (Oxford, 1913), pp. 143–6, repeatedly stresses the importance of an accused person’s bad reputation for ultimately treating his case differently: see cc. 1, 2, 11, 12 (‘si ipse fuerit diffamatus et habeat malum testimonium de publicamento . . . non habeat legem’) and 14. S. Abel and B. von Simson, Jahrbücher des fränkischen Reiches unter Karl dem Großen 2 (Leipzig, 1883), p. 46, n. 6. For hanging as punishment for robbery and theft, see H.-R. Hagemann, ‘Vom Diebstahl im altdeutschen Recht’, in S. Gagner, H. Schlosser and W. Wiegand eds., Festschrift für Hermann Krause (Cologne, 1975), pp. 1–20, at 5–11.


49

latrocinium for the unlawful exercise of public power.36 The hanging of the Italian Count Thasselgard, reported by Wipo,37 or of the Saxon brigands whom Thietmar apparently could distinguish clearly in his Chronicle from the noble leaders of followings,38 were measures that could deprive those concerned not only of life but also legitimacy. It was probably for similar reasons that the Landpeace of Mainz (1235) decreed that anyone who imposed unlawful tolls should be punished ‘like a common robber and way-layer’, though it remains uncertain whether this stipulation was ever implemented.39 Up to a point, the conceptual equipment and the mentalities of a medieval writer coincide with those of the modern historian, and special caution is therefore needed. The topos of the strong ruler attracts all the more attention from us because, at least as far as the historical past is concerned, we are inclined to apply a theory of deterrence, even when we are perfectly conscious of the fact that there is probably no direct causal link between the heaviness of the punishment and the infrequency of crime. We often cherish the idea that we are dealing here with something like an anthropological constant which needs no closer explanation. The minute royal severity was relaxed, many men would begin to act like robbers and murderers:40 an assumption easily explicable by reference to a theologically understood notion of original sin conflated with an ethnologically understood notion of original freedom. This is not to deny either original sin or original freedom: but our point of departure has to be the assumption that even violent and criminal actions were performed for a rational purpose (zweckrational, to use Weber’s term). It is precisely the literary nature of the sources that makes it so easy to exaggerate in our minds the number of medieval psychopaths. Yet in another context, the idea of goal-directed rationality (Zweckrationalität) is a rather dangerous assumption. According to a current line of argument, the Peace of God movement should be understood as a reaction, on the part of at least some of those involved, to an increased loosening of the 36 37 38

39 40

See n. 29. Gesta Chuonradi c. 18, in Wipo, Opera, ed. H. Bresslau, MGH SRG LXI (Hannover, 1915), pp. 37–8. Thietmar (as n. 3), VII, 51, p. 460 (trans. Warner, p. 343): ‘Merseburg . . . tunc multi latrones a gladiatoribus singulari certamine devicti suspendio perierunt’. There is an obvious contrast to the ring-leaders of aristocratic gangs of thugs mentioned in VII, 50; but it is unclear whether the inclitus satelles Bruncio, whose hanging on the orders of Henry II is reported at VII, 28, pp. 306–8, was executed as a latro or on other grounds. Mainz Landpeace c. 7, MGH Const. II, no. 196, p. 243. For this ruling see also Andermann, Ritterliche Gewalt (as n. 6), p. 119. See n. 21.

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bonds of peace,41 and indeed any preventive measures can be explained and understood as a reaction to an objectively growing problem. For instance, the peace-keeping measures of the English government under Edward I – one thinks especially of the Statute of Westminster (1285) and the setting-up of commissions of trailbaston at the end of the 1290s – are frequently presented as conscious answers to rising criminality. Probably such measures were in fact introduced by the government in the belief that a dissolution of law and peace was on the rise. But, in the first place, additional explanations are conceivable, such as the self-presentation of the realm as protector of order at a time when ‘private’ justice was to be reduced.42 Secondly, whether or not insecurity had actually increased in objective fact was something that escaped Edward I’s knowledge just as surely as it escapes ours.43 Nevertheless, some periods give us the appearance of times of disorder, legal insecurity and endangerment: the sixth and seventh centuries, compared with the German imperial period from c. 1100 to c. 1250; the tenth and eleventh centuries compared with the Carolingian period; the fourteenth century compared with the twelfth and thirteenth. Like the author of the Peterborough version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, we see powerful, peacekeeping rulers, active in law-giving; and we assume that the roads were safer in their reigns. We draw this conclusion from more or less clearly evidenced political authority over a social reality for which evidence is lacking.44 For us, then, the objective situation is not ascertained with any ultimate security, nor can it be, in so far as we are concerned with longer-term changes for better or worse. For these reasons, too, comparisons across space or time are at best highly problematic, at worst, completely pointless. 41

42

43

44

Best for this material is H. Hoffmann, Gottesfriede und Treuga Dei, MGH Schriften XX (Stuttgart, 1964); but for interpretation see also H.-W. Goetz, ‘Protection of the Church, defense of the law, and reform: on the purposes and character of the Peace of God, 989–1038’, in T. Head and R. Landes eds., The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000 (Ithaca NY, 1992), pp. 259–79. Contributions in Head and Landes stress the complex connexions of the Peace Movement’s social and mass-psychological aspects. For these developments, see T. F. Plucknett, Edward I and the Criminal Law (Cambridge, 1960); D. W. Sutherland, Quo Warranto Proceedings in the Reign of Edward II, 1278–1294 (Oxford, 1963); M. Prestwich, Edward I (London, 1988), pp. 267–97; and Harding, ‘Early trailbaston proceedings’ (as n. 5 above). Pugh, ‘Some reflections’ (as n. 5), attempts a thoughtful and interesting quantification of the problem, largely on the basis of London court records. See Edward’s writ cited below, n. 140, which offers a good example of the adoption of elements of the topoi of praise of the ruler (on which see n. 10 above) for the objectives of the ruler’s own official self-presentation. Kaeuper, War, Justice and Public Order (as n. 5), pp. 170–83, proffers the thesis of a ‘crisis of order’ in England and France at the end of the thirteenth century, but leaves open the question of whether this crisis occurred in contemporary consciousness or (also) in reality, though he obviously seems inclined to the latter view. Shaw, ‘Bandits’ (as n. 12), pp. 44–52, underlines the ideological significance of anecdotes about rulers and bandits in the Roman imperial period: something similar is true for the Middle Ages.


51

All this must be kept in mind as regards the following attempt to sketch some aspects of our theme. First, the perpetrators will be considered, then those directly and indirectly affected. We can distinguish various types of robbers – better, perhaps, understood as ideal-types in Weber’s sense. There probably were people who committed robbery occasionally, and some who did so out of sheer need, but they confront us rather seldom in the sources of the early and central Middle Ages. We might find in one case a mention of a knight for whom things went badly after the end of the ‘anarchy’ of Stephen’s reign in England, so that he had to become a highwayman;45 or we might find elsewhere a theologian’s reference to ‘notorious thieves who steal because of hunger’.46 It is only in the legal records of the later Middle Ages – as examples we could cite the fragment of a list of criminals held in the Châtelet prison in the years 1389 to 1392,47 or the records of criminal hearings at Bern in the early sixteenth century discussed by Arnold Esch48 – that it becomes clear that robbery in the sense of petty thieving was done in very many cases by amateurs, in part quite opportunistically, in part because the perpetrators really had no choice. Especially in big cities like London or Paris, though not only there, we come across accused persons who appear to have been completely without means, and who robbed or stole only tiny amounts.49 The assumption that in the period before legal 45

46

47

48

49

H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, The Governance of Medieval England (Edinburgh, 1963), p. 132. For something extremely rare, personal testimony from a bandit himself (in this case a man of rather high social rank), see H. W. C. Davis, ‘Henry of Blois and Brian fitz Count’, EHR 25 (1910), pp. 297–303: ‘Rex Henricus dedit mihi terram. Sed ipsa mihi et hominibus meis sic aufertur pro vestro precepto, quod facio, quod in hoc extreme angusto non colligo unam acram bladi de terra quam dedit mihi; et ideo non est mirum si capio ex alieno ad vitam meam et meorum hominum sustendandam.’ (I am grateful to Karl Leyser for this reference.) J. W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and his Circle (Princeton NJ, 1970), vol. I, p. 319, and vol. II, p. 214: ‘publici fures qui furantur ex macie’. For the ethical problem, from a theological viewpoint, of the stealing of food in order to survive, see also Andermann, Ritterliche Gewalt (as n. 6), pp. 54–5. Murray, ‘Money and robbers’ (as n. 9), offers some examples of such ‘small fish’. M. Duples-Agier, Registre criminel du Châtelet de Paris du 6 Septembre 1389 au mai 1392, 2 vols. (Paris, 1941) was unfortunately not accessible. For analyses of this material, see B. Geremek, ‘La Lutte contre la vagabondage a` Paris’, in Richerche storiche ed. economiche in memoria di Corrado Barbagallo (Naples, 1970), vol. II, pp. 213–36; G. W. Coupland, ‘Crime and punishment in Paris, September 6, 1389 to May 18, 1392’, in S. A. Hanna ed., Medieval and Middle Eastern Studies in Honor of Aziz S. Atiya (Leiden, 1974), pp. 64–85; B. Geremek, Les Marginaux parisiens aux XVe et XVIe siècles (Paris, 1976); E. Cohen, ‘Patterns of crime in fourteenth-century Paris’, French Historical Studies 11 (1980), pp. 307–27. A. Esch, ‘Räuber, Diebe, Wegelagerer. Reviere, Beute, Schicksale in Berner Verhörprotokollen des frühen 16. Jahrhunderts’, in U. Bestmann, F. Irsigler and J. Schneider eds., Hochfinanz, Wirtschaftsräume, Innovationen. Festschrift für Wolfgang von Stromer, 3 vols. (Trier, 1987), vol. II, pp. 741–63. Cohen, ‘Patterns of crime’ (as n. 47), pp. 310–11; Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict (as n. 5), pp. 53–4, 128– 34; DeWindt and DeWindt, Royal Justice (as n. 30), pp. 90–1; Clanchy, ‘Highway robbery’ (as n. 5),

52

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records begin such petty criminals also existed in large numbers may well not be wrong, but actual examples surface only rarely and fleetingly in saints’ Lives and miracle-collections. As far as punishments go, in the records that we have, the main distinction is between robbers without fixed abode or social position, qui de loco ad locum iter faciunt [et] rapinas et depraedationes peragunt, to cite a West Frankish capitulary of 884,50 and robbers who operated from home or from a centre of lordship and perhaps in their own self-estimation were not robbers at all. The fact that the two categories were surely blurred in practice will not stop us using them. We shall return to the robber-nobles. First, though, we shall consider some aspects of professional robbery. The latro in the real sense is very clearly defined in the Edict of Chilperic (561 × 584): malus homo qui male in pago faciat et non habeat, ubi consistat, nec res, unde componat, et per silvas vadit et in presentia nec agens nec parentis ipsum adducere possunt.51 This particular problem concerned law-givers over and over again, whether in Frankish capitularies or in the assises of Henry II of England.52 Historians have tended to think that those rulers were dealing with an especially difficult and frequently occurring phenomenon. Now such latrones certainly did exist. Our starting-point has to be, not least, that the legal system of the early and high Middle Ages itself attests to their existence, for – and this emerges very clearly from literary narratives53 – what could the outlaw have lived on, given that he either would not or could not live by supporting himself, save on robbery and savageness? But the extent to which the interest of law-givers was directed at such men of

50

51

52 53

p. 46. How far such findings from the later-central and late Middle Ages can be transferred to the early and earlier-central Middle Ages is obviously uncertain, but such a transfer appears plausible. Anyone not completely without resources had at their disposal a number of possibilities to enable them to avoid accusation and punishment – summed up in the proverb ‘they hang the little fellows but they let the big fellows get away’. Karolomanni Capitulare Vernense c. 6, MGH Capit. II, no. 287 (March 884), p. 373. The text survived in canon law as a canon of the Council of Meaux-Paris: see the rubric to Gratian C 6 q 3 c 5, and Ivo of Chartres, cited by Hoffmann, Gottesfriede (as n. 41), p. 202. For a similar slightly earlier ruling, see Council of Quierzy (857) c. 9: ‘si aliqui iterantes depraedationes et rapinas per regnum nostrum fecerint’, ed. W. Hartmann, Die Konzilien der karolingischen Teilreiche, 843–859, MGH Conc. III, p. 391. ‘A wicked man who commits crimes in the district and has nowhere to live and lacks the wherewithal to make compensation, and moves around through the woods and no royal agent nor the man’s kinsmen can bring him into the [king’s] presence’, MGH Capit. I, no. 4, c. 10, p. 10. On this see J. Goebel, Felony and Misdemeanor, vol. I (no further volume appeared) (New York, 1937), p. 53; J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Long-Haired Kings and Other Essays in Frankish History (London, 1962), pp. 130, 197, stressing something unusual in both the problem, and its solution, with the king explicitly concerned over a ruling that the criminal could be killed by anyone without his being avenged; see also Halsall, ‘Violence and society’, (as n. 12). Assise of Clarendon (1166) (as n. 34), pp. 143–6, esp. cc. 15–18. See M. Keen, The Outlaws of Medieval Legend, 2nd edn (London, 1977).


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violence says more about the administrative and procedural difficulties to which they gave rise. If the legal system began from the assumption that every person was embedded in one of the most diverse social groupings and had a fixed abode, in which he could be summonsed in respect of his guaranteed possessions, then that same system hardly had any handle on the man who was without kin, residence or other property in a neighbourhood where he was quite unknown. Chilperic, Charlemagne, Henry II and others, had to be active in such cases, because the normal mechanisms could not reach this far, and not necessarily because such wrongdoers were so numerous. For those who lived by robbery, we must ask how and where? Per silvas vadit, said the Edict of Chilperic. Must we imagine the woods and mountains of the European early and central Middle Ages as full of robbers? Scepticism is required here. On the one hand, it was by no means the case that in the early Middle Ages the forest still belonged to the area of pure Nature, empty of humankind; it was, on the contrary, economically managed and used, and, at the same time, in symbolic representations of distinctions between social ranks, the forest was made a recreational area for a royal and noble elite, so that both forms of exploitation presupposed controls and controllers.54 Furthermore, we have to assume that forest which really was wild and empty of people was precisely not a place where robbery was particularly profitable. One of the few sources that lets us see anything from the point of view of the criminals actually tells of the long waits in the forest before any victim came by.55 Besides, this thief from Bern, a very small fish, probably had a home: every day his wife brought him and his mates something to eat. Robberies were committed in the forest or from the forest because many main roads ran through the forest, and it was from there that you could ambush and attack travellers. That was so obvious that it counted as something exceptionally suspicious if you moved from the road-way to the road-side.56 Not only for robbers but for 54

55 56

There is a good survey in C. Wickham, ‘European forests in the early Middle Ages: landscape and land clearance’, in L’ambiente vegetale nell’alto medioevo, Settimane Spoleto (1990), pp. 479–545, esp. 485–9. R. Bechmann, Des Arbres et des hommes: la forêt au moyen aˆ ge (Paris, 1984), English trans. as Trees and Man (New York, 1990), pp. 262–9, has some relevant comments but is on the whole thin and disappointing. Esch, ‘Räuber’ (as n. 48), p. 744. In the discussion on the present paper, Klaus Grubmüller drew attention to the frequent appearance of this motif in later-medieval narrative literature. According to the Laws of Wihtræd of Kent c. 28, and those of Ine of Wessex c. 20, the stranger who hung about at the side of the road and did not draw attention to himself by blowing his horn could be struck down like a thief caught in the act: F. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, vol. I (Halle, 1903), pp. 14, 99. Bechmann, Trees and Man (as n. 54), p. 263, cites (unfortunately supplying no reference) a similar ruling from Normandy in 1306: a stranger found in the wood could claim guidance but had to confirm on oath that he had lost his way.

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people being rightly or wrongly persecuted, the forest was the first place of refuge. For men in political opposition, staying in the woods offered a prime possibility for evading the ruler’s control, as in the case of the English earls Edwin and Morcar in 1071, or of some of their Old Saxon contemporaries after they had escaped from the prison of Henry IV.57 Robbers probably did live in the woods long-term, but we need not imagine that this was the normal case. The relationships between robbers and hermits are interesting in this context. Both kinds of men had withdrawn from the world, but for quite different reasons.58 Robbers hove in sight as rivals for the same dwelling-place. The English hermit Robert of Knaresborough at the beginning of the thirteenth century hit upon the idea of living in a mill, for his hermitage had first been plundered by robbers, then rebuilt by the lord of Knaresborough, and finally been once more destroyed by the lord because Robert was letting it be used by thieves and outlaws.59 Yet attacks on hermits are mentioned more often. The Swabian hermit Meginrat was murdered c. 861 by two latrones.60 In the Life of St Romuald by Peter Damian, we read of a latro who in the absence of one of the monks broke into his hut, and of other latrones who attacked Romuald’s own hermitage.61 Here, the forest, or more generally the wild country, was not a dwelling-place but a place for committing evil deeds. The association between robbers and the forest was strengthened, of course, by art and medieval narrative literature,62 especially in the case of Robin Hood and other legendary bandits. It now seems certain that the legend of Robin Hood is to be dated to the thirteenth century, although the earliest explicit mention of it is preserved in the poem Piers Plowman, written c. 1377, and the tradition of the extant Robin Hood ballads dates 57

58

59

60 61 62

The Peterborough Chronicle (as n. 1), ad a. 1071, p. 4; see also S. Reynolds, ‘Eadricus silvaticus and the English resistance’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 54 (1981), pp. 102–5; Lampert of Hersfeld, Annales (as n. 24), ad a. 1076, p. 260, on the sons of Count Gero who, after the crushing of the Saxon princes in 1075, ‘cum urgeret penuria, contractis ex sui similium numero aliquantis copiis, rapto sibi victum querere ceperunt’. See J. Le Goff, ‘Le Désert-forêt dans l’Occident médiévale’, in his L’Imaginaire médiévale, 2nd edn (Paris, 1991), pp. 59–75; J. Leclercq, ‘Monks and hermits in medieval love stories’, JMH 18 (1992), pp. 341–56, at 343. J. C. Holt, Robin Hood, 2nd edn (London, 1989), p. 154, without reference, but probably following The Metrical Life of St Robert of Knaresborough Together with Other Middle English Pieces in British Museum MS 60, ed. J. Bezire, Early English Text Society 228 (London, 1953). Vita S. Meginrati cc. 10, 11, MGH SS XV, pp. 447–8. Peter Damian, Vita S. Romualdi cc. 43, 44, ed. G. Tabacco, Fonti 94 (Rome, 1957), pp. 84–6. For the role of the wood in visual art, see Raynaud, Violence (as n. 27), pp. 68, 70–1, with reference to the sequences of images in the Grandes Chroniques, and in other vernacular works of history. R. P. Harrison, Wälder. Ursprung und Spiegel der Kultur (Munich, 1992) has not yet been available. See also Le Goff, ‘Le Désert-forêt’ (as n. 58).


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to the period after 1450.63 The proof of the original date lies not least in the fact that Robin Hood and other names of his fellow-robbers are attested in the second half of the thirteenth century, and a historical model has recently been seen in an outlaw who turns up in a legal document from Yorkshire in the 1220s.64 But the fact that this Robert Hood who lived in the forest with a band of robbers came from Wakefield actually proves nothing. Real-life bandits did not always spend all their lives among the free, but tried to swim in water like the famous fish. Banditry in the sense of Eric Hobsbawm’s classic study, that is, where the ‘social’ bandit is defined as a man who (a) represents the opposition of local society to a distant central power usually seen as corrupt and oppressive in so far as it is embodied in its local representatives, and (b) who often equips himself with an ideology centring on social justice and the restoration of a past age of order, is only conceivable in our period up to a rather limited extent.65 The preconditions for such a character to appear, namely that the ‘central power’ might be present in sufficient intensity to present a counter-force to bandits, yet not intensively enough to be able entirely to exclude them, existed perhaps in thirteenth-century England or Sicily, but nowhere else in Latin-Christian western Europe.66 Those bandit-groups that are historically documented had a rather different structure. At a lower social level, they could be loose associations of men formed for a particular purpose, which held together only for a limited time while their objective was being attained.67 Similar groups operating at a higher social level, for instance, in early fourteenth-century England, the Folville gang or the Coterel gang, both well-documented and wellresearched, consisted of men who were certainly not without means, and 63 64

65

66 67

Holt, Robin Hood (as n. 59), pp. 15–40; see also P. R. Coss, ‘Aspects of cultural diffusion in medieval England: the early romances, local society and Robin Hood’, P&P 108 (1985), pp. 35–79. Holt, Robin Hood, pp. 40–54, 187–91, 212; D. Crook, ‘Some further evidence concerning the dating of the origins of the legend of Robin Hood’, EHR 99 (1984), pp. 530–4; D. Crook, ‘The sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood: the genesis of a legend?’, in Thirteenth-Century England, 2: Proceedings of the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Conference, 1987, eds. P. R. Coss and S. Lloyd (Woodbridge, 1988), pp. 59–68. E. Hobsbawm, Bandits (London, 1969, 2nd edn 1972); see also E. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (Manchester, 1959), pp. 13–29. For criticism of Hobsbawm’s thesis of social banditry, see Shaw, ‘Bandits’ (as n. 12), pp. 44–52, and 4–5, summarising the critique of A. Blok (discussed by Hobsbawm only in his second edition). The controversy turns mainly on the question of whether the ‘social’ bandit really existed – Hobsbawm’s view – or whether he belonged to the imaginaire of pre-modern society – as Blok and Shaw contend. Even Hobsbawm himself stresses the significance of others’ perceptions for the (self )-definition of the social bandit. Hobsbawm, Bandits (1st edn, as n. 65), pp. 21, 35–6; for the Roman Empire, see Shaw, ‘Bandits’ (as n. 12), pp. 30–43. Cohen, ‘Patterns of crime’ (as n. 47), p. 327; Esch, ‘Räuber’ (as n. 48), pp. 744–5.

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who did not live in the forest. As nobles and clergy, they had a fixed address, and although they were not averse to violent attacks, they preferred to inflict their violence on the inhabitants of their own neighbourhood, while the locals for their part managed in the end to deter them by concerted pressure to bring their crimes before a court.68 These practitioners of ‘furcollar crime’, to borrow a nice expression coined by Barbara Hanawalt,69 should be compared with men who run protection-rackets in our own times, and it is no coincidence that their crimes were often perpetrated in places other than on the public highway. Elsewhere too, for instance with the famished desperadoes of the Korvey Chronographer,70 group-crime seems to have been similarly practised against local settlements: there, as Vikings and Saracens already knew, more profit could be made for the same expenditure. In such gangs, we can also see that the ideal-types identified above – professional robbers and noble robbers – actually represented only the extremes of a continuum. Especially in the earlier Middle Ages, the sources simply do not permit any precise classification. Instead, they often give us an accidental glimpse of a latro described as being anything but an unknown person with neither means nor home, and this provides a warning against exaggerating the numbers of ‘professional’ robbers.71 Herbert Grundmann and Heinrich Fichtenau have pointed to a tendency on medieval authors’ part to label the actions of noble power-holders as latrocinium and the nobles themselves as latrones.72 Even when a source offers no information 68

69 70

71 72

Stones, ‘The Folvilles’ (as n. 5); Bellamy, ‘The Coterel gang’ (as n. 5); Fryde, ‘A medieval robber baron’ (as n. 5); Holt, Robin Hood (as n. 59), pp. 97–100; Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict (as n. 5), pp. 136–8, 184–215. For gangs in late-medieval Bohemia, see F. Hoffmann, ‘Janácˇovo tovaˇriˆsstvo ´ [Janaca Genossenschaft]’, in Casopis matice moravské 90 (1971), pp. 830–93; F. Hoffmann, ‘K povaze drobné války, záˆst´ı a násilných cínu◦ pˇred hus´ıtskou revoluc´ı [Zum Charakter des Kleinkriegs, der Fehde und der Gewalttaten vor der hussitischen Revolution]’, in Pocta akademicu Václavu Van˘ećkovi k 70. narozcninám, ed. K. Malý (Prague, 1975), pp. 55–75. I am grateful to Jiˇri Kejˇr of the University of Prague for these references. B. Hanawalt, ‘Fur-collar crime: the pattern of crime among the fourteenth-century English nobility’, Journal of Social History 8 (1975), pp. 1–17. Annalium Corbeiensium continuatio saeculi XII et historia Corbeiensia monasterii annorum MCXLV– MCXLVIII cum additamentis (Chronographus Corbeiensis), ed. I. Schmale-Ott (Münster, 1989), pp. 60–4. For nobles or office-holders who, allegedly or really, supported bandits, see the examples given above in nn. 14, 28, 101. Here points of connexion between the ideal-types are evident. H. Grundmann, ‘Adelsbekehrungen im Hochmittelalter. Conversi und nutriti im Kloster’, in his Gesammelte Schriften 1: Religiöse Bewegungen, MGH Schriften XXV/1 (Stuttgart, 1976), pp. 133–4; H. Fichtenau, Lebensordnungen im 10. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1984), pp. 559–63 [English trans. by P. Geary, Living in the Tenth Century: Mentalities and Social Orders (Chicago IL, 1991), pp. 428– 9]. See also above, nn. 23, 35, and the comments of Murray, ‘Money and robbers’ (as n. 9), pp. 57–8, who rather underestimates the problem of distinguishing between genuine and rhetorical


57

about the status of latrones, we should nearly always reckon with the possibility that we are not necessarily hearing about ordinary robbers. The attack on Tostig, Edward the Confessor’s brother-in-law, and ArchbishopElect Ealdred of York somewhere north of Rome in 1061 offers a good example. The English sources that report the episode, including the nearcontemporary Vita Edwardi, consistently mention praedones and latrones.73 It is only through a reference to it in a letter of Peter Damian that we know that the attackers were in fact Count Gerard of Galera and his following; and without that information we might well have classed this attack under the heading ‘ordinary robbers’.74 Often it is only tiny details that allow us to suspect something similar. In the Life of Odo of Cluny, we learn of an attack on the abbot by forty latrones, including a man named Aimo, qui erat insignior caeteris (‘who was of higher status than the rest’). Impressed by Odo’s holiness, Aimo refused to take part in the attack: Sicque invicem sunt divisi et ad propria reversi (‘so they parted company and all went home’). Later, Aimo asked Odo to impose a penance for his offence ac dehinc a latrocinii pravitate cessavit (‘and thereafter he desisted from the wickedness of robbery’). Aimo was the robbers’ leader; and he could make the decision to give up his life of crime. Each of the robbers had a home. If we are generally inclined to accept such stories, however hagiographically coloured, as snippets of reality, then we ought to treat Aimo as a noble.75 A Jewish responsum which mentions robbers’ attacks deals with the possibility that the victim might later enter into negotiations with the robbers about the return of the stolen goods:76 had the robbers been seen as homeless men, or had they hung out in unknown lairs, this might have looked a dangerous and seemingly pointless undertaking, but it could have made good sense in the case of robbers with known residences, for it would then in fact have been a matter of paying over a ‘ransom’ for the goods’ release – something attested often enough in the case of human beings. On the one hand, the victim operated here as a sort of receiver of his own stolen goods. In the case of valuables for whose disposal specialist knowledge or skills were required,

73 74 75 76

latro-descriptions in the sources; and Andermann, Ritterliche Gewalt (as n. 6), pp. 27–33, 63–121, with a good discussion of the problems of the later-medieval material in light of Brunner’s idea of the ‘lawful feud’. F. Barlow ed., The Life of Edward the Confessor who Rests at Westminster, Attributed to a Monk of Saint-Bertin, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1992), pp. 52–6 (with list of later English sources at 52, n. 128). Peter Damian, Epistulae no. 89, MGH Epp. DK IV/2, pp. 566–7. John of Salerno, Vita Odonis abbatis Cluniacensis II, 19, PL 133, col. 71. I. A. Agus, Urban Civilization in pre-Crusade Europe: A Study of Organized Town-life in North-western Europe during the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries Based on the Responsa Literature, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1965), no. XLIV, p. 134.

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such a deal would have been good business for the perpetrators too. On the other hand, we are not far away here from the exaction of a toll; and we already observed that the transition from robbery to toll-taking was rather fluid.77 Yet such transitions could constitute lines of development. In Flodoard’s Annals, Saracens appear in Alpine regions first as murderers: in the 920s, pilgrims allegedly could not use the Alpine passes between Francia and Rome because of the Saracen threat to their lives. In a later mention in Flodoard’s 951 annal, the Saracens had got cleverer: meatum Alpium obsidentes, a viatoribus Romam petentibus tributum accipiunt, et sic eos transire permittunt.78 The nature of the problem here was strikingly well summed up by Eleanor Searle in commenting on a document of Count Waleran of Meulan, in which he granted the monks of Fécamp the right to a toll and gave them freedom to use it however they wanted. ‘This is scarcely what we might think of as governmental authority; it implies rather that he had located his front door where he could threaten and profit from even humble folk, and that his men might be very unpleasant with “shun-pike” traffic when they happened upon it . . . this is as close to robbery as to government.’79 The other side of noble robbery is the prosecution of feud. Here we could set aside, without any hesitation, the distinction between legal and illegal feud, for that distinction was apparently unimportant for the actual pursuit and outcomes of feud.80 We naturally tend to think of pilgrims, traders and other travellers who got caught up in the conduct of a feud as ‘innocent bystanders’, a view which might gain some support from the decrees of the Peace of God councils.81 Seen from the victim’s viewpoint, that is of course not incorrect. From the criminal’s standpoint, though, other considerations need to be taken into account. The conduct of a feud, like that of a war, did not have as its objective the military obliteration of the enemy: rather, the idea was to weaken him economically, and to humiliate him.82 Quite apart 77 78

79 80 81 82

See n. 25, above. ‘Besieging the pass over the Alps, they take tribute from way-farers making for Rome, and [only] then will they let them go through’, Flodoard, Annales, ed. P. Lauer (Paris, 1905), pp. 44–5, 65, 74, 132. For essential context, see F. Pannetta, I Saraceni in Italia (Milan, 1973); J.-P. Poly, Provence et la société féodale (879–1166) (Paris, 1976), pp. 6–13; P.-A. Armagier, ‘La Capture de saint Ma¨ıeul de Cluny et l’expulsion des Sarrasins de Provence’, Revue Bénédictine 73 (1963), pp. 316–23. E. Searle, Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, 840–1066 (Berkeley CA, 1988), p. 131. On this, see Rösener, ‘Zur Problematik des . . . Raubrittertums’ (as n. 20), and Andermann, Ritterliche Gewalt (as n. 6), pp. 45–63, 317–22. Goetz, ‘Protection’ (as n. 41), pp. 264–70, assembles all the rulings on protected groups. See especially the excellent paper of J. Gillingham, ‘William the Bastard at war’, in Studies in Medieval History Presented to R. Allen Brown, eds. C. Harper-Bill, C. J. Holdsworth and J. L. Nelson (Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 141–58.


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from the fact that traders, at least, would not be in business on their own account but, before the thirteenth century, only operated as agents of a lord or master, attacks on travellers served to destroy the economic resources of a toll-taker who was the enemy in a feud.83 Of course that did not exclude the aspect of enrichment: here duty could be united with pleasure, and the resultant forms of behaviour were indistinguishable from robbery. The case of a Jew who made many enemies in a particular locality because he was prepared to buy loot from a magnate who had got it through highway robbery and plundering raids shows that in some circumstances even noble robbers needed fences.84 There were other cases where the economic aspect was less prominent, notably those involving attacks on important personages, office-holders and suchlike. VIPs seem at first sight to have been especially endangered by crime, for anecdotes about their being captured or robbed are numerous enough in the period from 900 to 1300. But we need to bear in mind that it was precisely such cases that attracted most attention: we need only to think of the kidnapping of Abbot Maiolus of Cluny in 972 and the reaction that caused.85 Often some personal issue underlay an attack on a well-known personage, in the form of an enmity between criminals and victims, or between the factions or groups to which they belonged. We know, for example, a number of cases in which holders of high office were taken captive on their way to Rome, particularly in the Alps. It is often clear that the element of robbery or ransom played no role or only a minor role. The capture of Bishop Eskil of Lund in 1157, or of Cardinals Henry and Hyacinth in the following year,86 or the attack on an imperial embassy in 1106,87 or that on the abbot of Reichenau in the 1070s,88 were all acts 83

84 85 86

87 88

This aspect of feuding in connexion with travel was expressly mentioned in c. 9 of the Landpeace of Mainz, MGH Const. II, no. 196, p. 244. Feuds against traders were evidently possible too: see Arnold of Lübeck, Chronicon III, 12, ed. L. M. Lappenberg, MGH SRG (Hannover, 1868), p. 97: ‘[Philip of Cologne] quosdam negotiatores de Duseburch per fines suos transeuntes prepediendo detinere et res illorum pro quadam iniuria ab eis sibi irrogata quasi pro pignore apud se reservaret’. Agus, Urban Civilization (as n. 76), no. XXIII, p. 99. Armagier, ‘Capture de saint Ma¨ıeul’ (as n. 78). Ottonis et Rahewini Gesta Frederici I imperatoris III, 9 and III, 21, eds. G. Waitz and B. von Simson, MGH SRG (Hannover, 1912), pp. 174–5, 194–5; Ottonis episcopi Frisingensis et Rahewini Gesta Frederici seu rectius Cronica III, 11 and III, 24, ed. F.-J. Schmale (Darmstadt, 1965), pp. 410–12, 446–8; for the context see O. Engels, ‘Friedrich Barbarossa und Dänemark’, in A. Haverkamp ed., Friedrich Barbarossa. Handlungsspielräume und Wirkungsweisen des staufischen Kaisers, Vorträge und Forschungen 40 (Sigmaringen, 1992), pp. 353–85, at 353–5. G. Meyer von Knonau, Jahrbücher des deutschen Reiches unter Heinrich IV. und Heinrich V., vol. V (Leipzig, 1904), pp. 294–6. Gregory VII, Registrum (as n. 26), VI, 18, pp. 429–30 (trans. Cowdrey, pp. 302–3): the capture of the abbot of the Reichenau by Bishop Eberhard of Parma. Such dangers were not limited to the Alps

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that were politically motivated. At times of tension between emperor and pope, even messengers to Rome were in danger, for instance in the reigns of Henry V,89 or Frederick Barbarossa,90 and again at the end of the reign of Otto IV.91 When the attack is described purely in terms of a crime, there too we can often enough suspect a non-economic, political motive: for instance when a man named Landelin fell upon the archbishop of Tours and his following in 1075.92 The high-road was a suitable place for a deadly attack on an opponent, as we can see in the cases of Boniface of Tuscany in 1055,93 the young Count Frederick of Goseck in 1085,94 or Conrad of Beichlingen in 1103.95 How did travellers and office-holders try to protect themselves against the criminal acts of robbers? Legislation against robbery and related offences in the form of capitularies, edicts, assises and so forth is not of so much interest to us here, for this tells us little about the how, the when and the how often of robbery. We can learn more from ancillary measures mostly of an administrative kind, but sometimes legislative too. Many of these are not specifically directed against the robber but against his surroundings and his hide-out. We saw earlier that the forest was more the robber’s place of action than his residence. As a consequence, we find examples of forests being cleared or cut back by holders of landed power to make robbers’ trade more difficult. In Hampshire, in 1249, as a result of the attack on the merchants from Brabant mentioned above, efforts were made to make the ‘pass of Alton’ (actually a stretch of road running through a wood, not a pass

89 90

91

92

93 94 95

or to VIPs: see Wibald to Eugenius III, for a cleric from Erwitte, captured on his way to the pope, P. Jaffé, Monumenta Corbeiensia, Bibliotheca rerum Germanicarum, vol. I (Berlin, 1864), p. 139, no. 61. Gesta Alberonis auctore Balderico c. 5, MGH SS VIII, p. 246: ‘rex enim ipsi Romam eunti omnes vias obstruxerat, et de morte ipsius omnibus fidelibus suis preceperat’. Cronica Jocelini Brakelonda de rebus gestis Samsonis abbatis monasterii Sancti Edmundi, ed. H. E. Butler (London, 1949), pp. 48–9 (Samson came under suspicion from imperial officials during the victorine Schism, but claimed to be a Scot); Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum I, 39, ed. J. Strange (Cologne, 1851), vol. I, p. 40 (the story of a female courier acting for Bishop Folcmar of Trier during the episcopal conflict in that see). Emonis Chronicon, ad a. 1211, MGH SS XXIII, p. 471: ‘Custodes nanque in prediis, quos posuerat Otto iam excommunicatus a domno papa, spoliaverunt clericos litteras de curia deferentes’ (this occurred in the Appennines between Rome and Bologna). Gregory VII, Registrum (as n. 26) II, 20, to Archbishop Richerius of Sens, pp. 152–3 (trans. Cowdrey, p. 113): Rudolf of Tours had alleged that ‘[Lanzelinus] in via sibi armata manu obviasse et quibusdam suorum depredatis quibusdam etiam vulneratis et, quod crudelius est, in faciem suam proprio consanguineo interfecto multis contumeliis se dehonestasse’. That last verb suggests the conduct of a feud. Arnulfi Gesta archiepiscoporum Mediolanensium III, 5, MGH SS VIII, p. 18. Chronicon Gozecense I, 15, MGH SS X, p. 146 (the killing took place during a hunt). Ekkehard (as n. 13), p. 184.


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in the literal sense) safer for travellers, by having those who held land there cut down their trees in return for a certain compensation.96 In 1285, the Statute of Winchester included a general decree that the woodland alongside the main roads should be bared of trees so as to discourage robbery.97 In the Steiermark in 1220, a wood was given to a brotherhood of priests ut ibi spelunca latronum cessaret et ex semita publica via fieret et deo ibi pretiarum actiones persolverentur (‘so that an end would be put to the den of robbers there, and out of the track would be made a public road and prayers would be offered to God there’).98 Then as now, an important measure in the struggle against crime was the attempt to cut the criminals out of their social and economic framework. Just as much as the robbers themselves, those who helped or protected robbers were equally threatened with punishment. On the one hand, we find people who by applying or threatening force could bring violent criminals under control or care for them with basic sustenance or other necessaries.99 But, as indicated above, there were also men of higher social standing who used their connexions to protect latrones from punishment. This was a problem for Frankish kings, and for Anglo-Saxon kings too;100 the phenomenon also seems to have been addressed in the oath-formulae of the Peace of God Movement.101 Rulers in the twelfth and thirteenth 96 98

99 100

101

97 Prestwich, Edward I (as n. 42), p. 280. Clanchy, ‘Highway robbery’ (as n. 5), pp. 42–3. ¨ Urkunde Leopolds VI. von Osterreich und Eberhards II. Von Salzburg für die Priesterbruderschaft des ¨ Archidiakonats Obersteiermark, Urkunden zur Geschichte der Babenberger in Osterreich, prepared by O. Freiherr von Mitis, revd H. Fichtenau and E. Zöllner (Vienna, 1935), vol. II, no. 231, p. 34. For examples see above nn. 31 and 59. See on this problem the Capitulary references cited above n. 50; for England, see S. Keynes, ‘Crime and punishment in the reign of Æthelred the Unready’, in People and Places in Northern Europe 500–1600: Essays in Honour of Peter Hayes Sawyer, ed. I. Wood and N. Lund (Woodbridge, 1991), pp. 67–81, at 71–2. See the Peace-Oath of Vienne, in G. de Manteyer, Les Origines de la maison de Savoie en Bourgogne, repr. (Geneva, 1978), pp. 91–9, at 93–8: ‘illum hominem qui istam pacem fregerit et ad meum conductum venerit vel fuerit . . . ei emendare faciam aut emendabo pro illo infra spatiam XV dierum . . .’ (for the date and place see Hoffmann, Gottesfriede (as n. 41), pp. 47–8); Sacramentum pacis (Beauvais 1023?), in C. Pfister, Etudes sur le règne de Robert le Pieux (Paris, 1885), pp. lx–lxi: ‘Et illum hominem qui istam pacem infregerit se sciente non conducam postquam scivero, et si nescias fecerit et ad meum conductum venerit et fuerit, aut emendabo pro illo aut emendare faciam intra spatium quindecim dierum, postquam in rationem missus fuero aut ei meum conductum vetabo.’ What is being addressed here, of course, is lords’ control over their followings, an important aspect of the later rulings of the Peace of God and also of Land-peaces (there are Anglo-Saxon parallels here, see references in n. 33 above), but also addressed is the symbiotic relationship between the ‘formal’ feudal lord on the spot and the less formal power-holders in a region. For a later example, see MGH D F I 774, the so-called Rhine-Frankish Land-peace of 1179: ‘precipimus principibus, nobilibus, liberis et ministerialibus, ut persequantur predones, fures, latrones, falsarios monetarum et qui eos hospitantur, qui dicuntur cern’; and for the general problem here, see T. N. Bisson, ‘The “feudal revolution”’, P&P 142 (1994), pp. 6–42.

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centuries also had to struggle against such protection-rackets,102 which, in other cultures and periods too, must be rated as very important in the successful practice of banditry.103 The key thing was not just the general isolation of the criminal but the breaking of the economic circulation of stolen goods. Measures against receiving stolen goods could be met with as early as the Frankish period, and in later centuries these were renewed. In particular, high-value moveable goods such as horses and cattle were meant to change hands only in precisely regulated and controlled conditions.104 Professional robbers and, as we have seen, not only they, needed the opportunity to exchange their stolen loot, for they could not live directly on goods like items from church treasuries, books and high-quality textiles, that were both precious and easily carried off.105 Even cattle, frequently enough stolen, were things that could be used for robbers’ own consumption only to a limited extent. The young Helmbrecht assumed that he would want to sell his booty and indeed would have to do so.106 The great exception was money, but in this case too, people had to accept some losses: you simply could not spend foreign currency, nor in the thirteenth century gold coins, and gold and silver bullion too, without giving yourself away as a robber.107 The legal procedure of inquisition, as found for instance in Henry II’s England, represents an attempt to impose ever greater restrictions on the robber’s ability to retreat. It was a matter of presenting those in the robber’s protective social environment with the uncomfortable alternatives of either accusing him or risking being accused themselves as it were on the grounds of failure to assist the course of justice. Also in England can be found related attempts to find ways of making groups responsible for 102

103 104

105 106 107

Receptatores (‘receivers’) were repeatedly mentioned in the Assise of Clarendon (as n. 34); for an example, see Holt, Robin Hood (as n. 59), p. 98. Following the attack on merchants in Hampshire in 1248, the Government had to take special measures after the accused had first been acquitted by a jury: Clanchy, ‘Highway robbery’ (as n. 5), pp. 26–36. See also the passage from Giselbert of Mons cited at n. 14, above. See Shaw, ‘Bandits’ (as n. 12), pp. 37–8, and also Hobsbawm, Bandits (as n. 65), passim. Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte (as n. 4), II, p. 755; T. Reuter, ‘Plunder and tribute in the Carolingian Empire’, TRHS 5th ser. 35 (1985), pp. 75–94, at 85 with n. 54; Loyn, Governance (as n. 33), p. 149. This important aspect of the robber’s trade is repeatedly stressed by Murray, ‘Money and robbers’ (as n. 9), esp. pp. 64–6. Wernher der Gartenaere, Helmbrecht, ed. F. Oanzer, revd K. Ruh, 9th edn (Tübingen, 1968), lines 384–5: ‘wol behalde in dem winder / ez enwelle et nieman rinder’. I make this point against the tendency of Murray, ‘Money and robbers’, to argue as if money was the solution to all robbers’ problems of exchange. The otherwise very stimulating and helpful book of P. Spufford, Money and its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1988), unfortunately does not, as far as I can see, deal with the connexion between money and crime.


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the conduct of their members.108 Comparable measures can be found on the Continent, even if usually less developed: in Charlemagne’s efforts to extend the scope of the oath of fidelity;109 in the Peace Movement’s regulations on defence against raptores;110 in the institution found in twelfth- and thirteenth-century southern France and Catalonia which Thomas Bisson has termed the ‘organised peace’;111 and last but not least in the obligation, chronologically as well as geographically widespread in Europe, to join in the hot pursuit of robbers once a public alarm signal has been given.112 A further measure taken to protect travellers, whether traders, pilgrims, students or other wayfarers, was the creation of new forms of accommodation. The rise of specialised hospitality in the high Middle Ages offered above all some shelter for the night.113 Such accommodation was not only of a commercial kind, but also included pilgrim hostels in increasing numbers which, though not, or not primarily, set up as commercial ventures, should be seen in the context of a growing division of labour. It would be hard to name a thirteenth-century parallel for the fate of Archbishop Robert of Tours, attacked and killed together with his retinue by latrones in the Alps in 931 as the travellers slept in their tents.114 The protection that a secure lodging offered against the public danger of a night in the open became in no way complete: on the contrary, the concentration of travellers in inns and 108

109 110

111 112

113

114

For these aspects of trial by jury, which were in some cases two-edged because they facilitated local conspiracies, see Clanchy, ‘Highway robbery’ (as n. 5), pp. 35–6, 45, and DeWindt and DeWindt, Royal Justice (as n. 30); and for tithings, etc., see n. 33, above. MGH Capit. I, no. 33, c. 2, p. 92. For the peace-militias, see Hoffmann, Gottesfriede (as n. 41), pp. 104–30. The various rulings of the Peace of God and of Land-peace decrees against help (conductus) for those who broke the peace (above, n. 102) should also be seen in this context. T. N. Bisson, ‘The organised peace in southern France and Catalonia (c. 1140–1233)’, AHR 72 (1977), pp. 290–311. G. Buchda, ‘Gerüfte’, in Handbuch für Rechtsgeschichte, vol. I, cols. 1584–7, and H. Holzhauer, ‘Gerüfte’, in LM 4, cols. 1357–8. Both authors maintain that this was a later-medieval institution. See however Pax dei incerta, MGH Const. I, no. 426, c. 6, p. 608: ‘Si furtum acciderit aut rapina aut bellum patriae ingruerit, et clamor more patriae exortus fuerit, armati omnes insequantur . . .’, and Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte II, pp. 628–30; and for the English ‘hue and cry’, see Pollock and Maitland, History (as n. 30), vol. II, pp. 578–9. The fundamental work here is Peyer, Von der Gastfreundschaft (as n. 4); see also L. Schmugge, ‘Zu den Anfängen des organisierten Pilgerverkehrs und zur Unterbringung und Verpflegung von Pilgern im Mittelalter’, in H. C. Peyer ed., Gastfreundschaft, Taverne und Gasthaus im Mittelalter (Munich, 1983), pp. 37–60, and T. Szabó, ‘Xenodochia, Hospitäler und Herbergen – kirchliche und kommerzielle Gastung im mittelalterlichen Italien (7. bis 14. Jahrhundert), in ibid., pp. 61–92. Flodoard, Annales (as n. 78), p. 48. Shaw’s finding, ‘Bandits’ (as n. 12), pp. 9–10, that in antiquity, high-status travellers too could sometimes vanish without trace, goes for the Middle Ages too. For the case of a Jewish traveller lost without trace, see Agus, Urban Civilization (as n. 76), no. XXII, p. 97.

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taverns attracted criminals. From the period for which only literary sources are available, we find plenty of evidence for the risk of being robbed either by the innkeeper or by fellow-guests, or even of being murdered.115 This is an impression generally confirmed by the criminal court records in the case of England: in London, for instance, in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, at least thirty mercatores were killed in their lodgings and all their possessions taken.116 The inn and the pilgrim hostel were in fact especially suited to robbery because they offered the robber the advantages of the house (with luck you could steal property from its lawful owner without using force and without being caught) as well as those of the open road (anonymity, absence of social controls or public authorities). On the roads themselves, measures taken to protect travellers were not exactly numerous. There were, to be sure, certain groups, especially traders and pilgrims, who were frequently under the special protection of officeholders.117 But that meant little more than the naming of a court to which a man could turn after something had happened to him; and even that sort of help did not come free, but often had to be paid for. Practical protection on the roads through the enforced prohibition of the carrying of weapons, and through the stationing of representatives of law and order, as happened in antiquity, was to be found only seldom in the early and high Middle Ages.118 The carrying of weapons was very rarely subjected to a general prohibition but only banned at certain times or for certain groups.119 And, for obvious reasons, such prohibitions were often lifted in the case of travellers.120 Ownership of the peasant’s weapon, a heavy 115

116 117

118

119

120

Murray, ‘Money and robbers’ (as n. 9) offers some graphic examples. For the tendency of latemedieval authorities to exert strengthened supervision of landlords and guests as well, see also Peyer, Von der Gastfreundschaft (as n. 4), pp. 55, 57–8, 65 and 240–57. Röhrkasten, Die englischen Kronzeugen (as n. 5), p. 369. Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte II, pp. 54, 63, cites material from the Frankish period. The basic idea underlying this seems to have been the ruler’s special duty to protect the defenceless. As noted at the beginning of this paper, travellers were defenceless through the very fact of travelling (or at any rate more defenceless than at other times). On the stationarii and other forms of institutionalised policing in antiquity, see R. MacMullen, Enemies of the Roman Order: Treason, Unrest, and Alienation in the Empire (Cambridge MA, 1966), pp. 257–60; Shaw, ‘Bandits’ (as n. 12), pp. 33–4, 46–7. H. Fehr, ‘Das Waffenrecht der Bauern im Mittelalter’, ZRG, GA 35 (1914), pp. 111–211; Goetz, ‘Protection’ (as n. 41 above), p. 271; Hoffmann, Gottesfriede (as n. 41), passim. In general terms, medieval prohibitions on the carrying of weapons did not go beyond specifying particular ‘pacified’ places such as a town or a royal palace, or special institutions, like markets or ecclesiastical feasts. At least in theory (and we know nothing much about practice), government regulations in antiquity were more consistent on this subject: see MacMullen, Enemies (as n. 118), pp. 256–7. Peyer, Von der Gastfreundschaft, p. 45 with n. 32. That travellers normally did carry weapons can be inferred, too, from the expectation that the landlord or host would be the likely person to take weapons into his care, pp. 30–1, 33, 67 etc.


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wooden staff, was hardly something that could be supervised.121 The direct protection of highways outside urban areas was exceptional too, though Italian city-states from the thirteenth century onwards often made the attempt to protect the roads of their contado.122 Some of the pilgrim hostels of western Europe are well known for having been built and run by knightly orders, clearly for the protection of pilgrims on the road.123 But there is no evidence that the knightly orders active in such protection bothered themselves with the stretches between hostels or ever operated as traffic police. In territories that had once been part of the Carolingian Empire, the institution of the escort-toll, or conductus, is documented from the twelfth century onwards: its etymology on its own suggests accompanying travellers physically.124 We hear very little indeed about who those companions were, though. Certain anecdotes – for instance one about Engelbert of Cologne who was said to have given a trader a glove as a ‘protective escort’ which would be effective in all circumstances125 – and regulations for cases when an escort was refused, raise the suspicion that for normal travellers the escort was of the strictly symbolic kind. The sum paid over was not so much a hire-charge for a stout young fellow as an insurance-contract, and the insurer, then as now, tried to pack as many catches as possible into the small print.126 Similarly symbolic, but not necessarily to be neglected on that account, was the clothing of pilgrims and crusaders. Pilgrims were obviously exposed to the dangers of the roads, but one gets the impression that attacks on them are not often mentioned in the sources,127 and this impression is strengthened by complaints about the unlawful use of pilgrim-garb by

121 122

123 124

125 126 127

See Holt, Robin Hood (as n. 59), pp. 167–70. T. Szabó, ‘Straßenbau und Straßensicherheit im Territorium von Pistoia (12.–14. Jahrhundert). Untersuchungen zur Verkehrspolitik einer mittelalterlichen Kommune’, QFIAB 57 (1977). See also Clanchy, ‘Highway robbery’, pp. 38, 41, for an attempt in Henry II’s England to post watchmen at particularly dangerous stretches of road. L. Schmugge, ‘Die Anfänge des organisierten Pilgerverkehrs im Mittelalter’, QFIAB 64 (1984), pp. 1–83, at 57–62. L. Fiesel, ‘Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Zollgeleits’, Vierteljahrschrift der Wirtschaftsgeschichte 15 (1919), pp. 466–506; L. Fiesel, ‘Zum früh- und hochmittelalterlichen Geleitsrecht’, ZRG, GA 41 (1920), pp. 1–40; L. Fiesel, ‘Woher stammt das Zollgeleit?’, Vierteljahrschrift der Wirtschaftsgeschichte 19 (1926), pp. 385–412; M. Schwaab, ‘Geleit und Territorium in Südwestdeutschland’, Zeitschrift für württemburgerische Landesgeschichte 40 (1981), pp. 398–417. A. Hilka ed., Die Wundergeschichten des Caesarius von Heisterbach (Bonn, 1933), vol. III, p. 242. Fiesel, ‘Woher stammt das Zollgeleit?’ (as n. 124), p. 396. This does not mean, though, that such attacks never happened. For the later Middle Ages, see for instance A. Gransden, ‘Letter of recommendation from John Whethamstede for a poor pilgrim, 1453/4’, EHR 106 (1991), pp. 932–9, with extensive references.

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such people as traders and other travellers.128 The protection offered by the pilgrim’s characteristic clothing was clearly not without some efficacy, but whether in defence against toll-payments or freedom from robbers is a question that cannot be answered. Important persons were often defended by their large retinues against robbers of the normal type; yet it was precisely their retinues that made such personages easily identifiable. For officials who wanted to travel in times of political difficulty without drawing attention to themselves, disguise might recommend itself under certain circumstances: Anselm of Canterbury once adopted this strategy on a journey to Rome,129 as did Folmar of Trier during the disputed election to that bishopric,130 and Albert of Liège after his election.131 In the cases of Abbot Joscelin of Bury St Edmunds and a female messenger during the Trier election-dispute, the sources explicitly mention that disguise or dissembling was necessary so that the traveller could get through with the written messages they were carrying.132 Yet disguise was not simple: a successful outcome could be hindered not only by lack of requisite linguistic knowledge but also, often enough, by inability to suppress body language and gestures that revealed rank.133 Travelling incognito for a person of high status meant exposure to the risks that ordinary travellers had to put up with, but it was sometimes seen as a lesser evil. The ability of many rulers of the high Middle Ages to capture their enemies on the roads or successfully deny them passage, 128

129 130

131

132 133

J. A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader (Madison AL, 1969), p. 163; Y. Dossat, ‘Types exceptionnels de pèlerins: l’héretique, le voyageur déguisé, le professionel’, in Le Pèlerinage, Cahiers de Fanjeaux 15 (Toulouse, 1980), pp. 207–25; L. Carlen, Wallfahrt und Recht im Abendland (Freiburg (Switzerland), 1987), pp. 221–4. Eadmer, Historia Novorum in Anglia, ed. M. Rule, Rolls Series 81 (London, 1884), p. 94. Gestorum Treverorum continuatio tertia c. 8, MGH SS XXIV, p. 385. Albero of Trier dressed himself in a similar way on an earlier journey to Rome in the time of Henry V, Gesta Alberonis auctore Balderico c. 5, MGH SS VIII, p. 246, and Welf V assumed pilgrim garb on his way to Italy to marry Matilda of Tuscany in 1089, Annales Rosenveldenses c. 33, MGH SS XVI, p. 101. A. D’Haenens, ‘Aller a` Rome au moyen aˆge’, Bulletin de l’Institut historique Belge de Rome 50 (1980), pp. 93–129, at 111, 116; see also pp. 110, 114, for the threatening behaviour of officers of the French king and the archbishop of Rheims towards the bishop-elect of Tournai and his accompanying delegation in 1114, causing the party to make a detour. For the evidence, see above, n. 90. For the famous episode when Becket disguised himself as a peasant when he fled from England in 1164, but revealed himself as of high status by showing an interest in a hawk, see F. Barlow, Thomas Becket (London, 1986), p. 119. Hugh Capet’s disguise on his return journey from Rome in 980 did not save him from suspicion, Richer, Historiae (as n. 29), III, 88, pp. 112–14. Richard Coeur de Lion on his return journey in disguise from the Third Crusade was recognised by his distinctively high-born behaviour and taken prisoner: K. Norgate, Richard the Lion Heart (London, 1924), pp. 268–9 (with source-references). The attempt of William Longchamps, chancellor and bishop of Ely, to flee from Dover in disguise in 1191, failed because of his inadequate knowledge of the English language: Giraldus Cambrensis, Vita Galfridi archiepiscopi Eboracensis II, 12, ed. J. S. Brewer, Rolls Series 21/4 (London, 1873), pp. 410–11. Such cases may also involve authorial use of topoi.


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probably reveals something about the level of control possible on major routes.134 Thus Emo of Bloemhof had to entrust his papal mandates to traders because all clerics on the road northwards were being searched by Otto IV’s agents for papal letters.135 The most effective protection was to travel in larger groups: a security measure easy to use and documented very early on. In the Life of John of Gorze, we learn of a particular region in which not even a large group could travel safely, and that presupposes the method’s effectiveness in normal cases.136 Long-distance traders formed caravans, but by no means always. It seems to have been only in the later Middle Ages that such traders began commonly to travel in larger groups for greater protection. In the central medieval period, there is little evidence for that, and the groups we meet in the sources are very small ones. The statutes of the traders’ guild of Valenciennes in the second half of the eleventh century lay down that an individual guild-member may not travel onwards if a guild-brother asks him for help,137 and thirteenth-century English evidence, like Jewish response-literature from an earlier period, offers a number of cases in which just a pair of traders travel in a tiny group.138 There were obvious risks for long-distance traders in doing such a thing, but that was exactly the way to increase potential profits. One responsum deals with a case in which one trader persuades another carrying similar wares to travel to another town so as to avoid flooding the market with goods and disadvantaging both of them.139 We can assume up to a point that the incidence of robbery did not 134

135 136

137

138

139

Unger of Posen was captured in imperial territory en route from Poland to Rome: for the date see J. Fried, Otto III und Boleslaw Chrobry (Stuttgart, 1989), pp. 110–16. For the ability of King Stephen to forbid the Irish bishop Malachy to travel to England, see M.-T. Flanagan, Irish Society, Anglo-Norman Settlers, Angevin Kingship: Interactions in Ireland in the Late Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1989). For Henry II’s control of roads and harbours during the Becket conflict, see Barlow, Becket, pp. 115–19, 191, 310. See above, n. 91. Murray, ‘Money and robbers’ (as n. 9), p. 74. We should not forget the element of topos in such assertions. For an example from a quite different period, see I. Bell, Crime and Literature in Augustan England (London, 1991), p. 35, with this quotation from an anonymous English author c. 1700: ‘if some remedy be not found to stop this growing evil, we will shortly not dare to travel in England, unless, as in the deserts of Arabia, it be in large companies and armed’. See O. G. Oexle, ‘Die Kaufmannsgilde von Tiel’, in H. Jankuhn and E. Ebel eds., Untersuchungen zu Handel und Verkehr der vor- und frühgeschichtlichen Zeit in Mittel- und Nordeuropa VI: Organisationsformen der Kaufmannsvereinigungen in der Spätantike und im frühen Mittelalter (Göttingen, 1989), p. 90 with nn. 106 and 107. An example is the often-cited attack of robbers on the merchants from Brabant in Hampshire in 1249; see also J. Röhrkasten, ‘Gefährdung und Sicherung des hansischen Handels in England. Ein Fall von Straßenraub 1308’, in Hansische Geschichtsblätter 105 (1987), pp. 33–49; and Agus, Urban Civilization (as n. 76), no. X, p. 69, no. XII, p. 75, no. XV, p. 82, no. XVI, p. 84. Agus, Urban Civilization, no. XVI, p. 84.

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necessarily reduce profit-margins: so long as price-elasticity was operating, losses could be passed on to customers, and risks probably also helped to keep the numbers of competitors low. Let us now try to draw up a balance-sheet. The first thing to stress is that references in the sources of the type ‘no one can use such-and-such a road without being robbed or murdered’ ought to be treated sceptically, even when they look ‘official’, as in the case of the following mandate of Edward I of England, which states: ‘Through outlaws, robbers, thieves and malefactors, mounted and on foot . . . wandering by day and night, so many and great homicides and robberies were done that no one with a small company could pass through those parts without being taken and killed or spoiled of his goods . . . and no religious or other person could pass without being taken or spoiled of his goods.’140 For, in the end, such a statement does not arise from simple pragmatic observations. Predators who destroy or drive away their plunder inevitably go hungry; you should not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Even in crime, an element of market economy has to be taken into account: if robbers creamed off so much that traders could no longer pass the inevitably increased prices on to their final customers, or if the risk for other travellers became too high, in practice, for those concerned, there must have remained alternatives to simply staying at home. They could pay for protection; they could turn to local office-holders with requests or with threats; they could use other routes. At all events, the robber, whether of the humbler or noble variety, who overstretches his bows has to reckon with the loss or considerable reduction of his net income.141 Now of course none of the above tells us how great the actual danger was. I have already noted that any reliable conclusion on this point is simply impossible to reach, whether about absolute estimates or about comparisons across time or space. But certain indications warn us against overestimating the objective danger. The risk seldom seems so high as to deter everyone from venturing on to the roads. The picture gained from the period between 900 and 1300, however impressionistic, is one of a steady increase in travel. There were many aspects of life in which attendant risk was not considered although people must in fact have expected it. It was no part of the normal, legally acceptable excuses that were commonly admissible to say that one 140 141

Cited from Holt, Robin Hood (as n. 59), pp. 97–8. No analysis exists, as far as I know, of the economic aspects of violent crime in historical epochs. For pioneering attempts, see F. C. Lane, ‘The economic consequences of organized violence’, JEcclesH 18 (1958), pp. 401–17; and B. Hanawalt, ‘Economic influences on the pattern of crime in England, 1300–1348’, American Journal of Legal History 18 (1974), pp. 281–97.


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had been attacked on the way to court and therefore missed attendance at a hearing or otherwise failed to appear. That is true, at least, for English law, and probably for canon law as well.142 And although we might cite some cases where messengers or other men were robbed and hence lost the mandates or other document they were carrying, apparently no decisions made in such cases, if they existed, were included in collections of decretals or other lawbooks. As for pilgrimage, we find no account being taken of risk even in quite sensitive situations. The pilgrim bound by a vow had to prove that he had been at the pilgrimage-destination. No one ever offered the excuse that they had embarked on a pilgrimage but been prevented from completing it through being attacked by robbers. Here, no doubt, some part was played by the slow incorporation of intention into Church teaching in questions of law and morality. But even in a case where we know that someone could be released from a vow on convincing grounds, namely, that of the crusader’s oath, the argument that you had been robbed seems not to have played any significant role. The form-letters of the papal penitentiary seem to regard illness, poverty, old age and pressing public obligations as ‘normal’ grounds for being excused.143 Only occasionally do we find decrees, for instance in the rules of the Cistercian General Chapter, that present the possibility of being robbed on the road as part of ‘normal’ life.144 When we turn to consider a subjective feeling of being in danger, we find a paradoxical situation. As already noted, we hardly have any good reason to regard the excuses mentioned in the sources as usable descriptions of objective conditions in any statistical sense. On the other hand, this finding is almost irrelevant for the question of insecurity; for security is a feeling that is by no means solely determined by the objective facts. It is probably impossible to say whether, objectively considered, there was greater insecurity on the roads in the tenth and eleventh centuries than in the twelfth and thirteenth. On the other hand, for most regions, the curve of the evidence is quite usable as a description of a subjective feeling of security. 142 143

144

This is in clear contrast to the repeated mention of such dangers in Roman Law texts dealing with quite other themes: Shaw, ‘Bandits’ (as n. 12), pp. 8–9. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader, p. 134. Brundage cites as an exception, however, the case of Bishop John of Norwich who stated in 1190 that he was so poor as a consequence of being attacked by robbers that he could not take part in the Third Crusade. See J.-M. Canivez ed., Statuta Capitulorum Generalium Ordinis Cisterciensis ab anno 1116 ad annum 1786, 8 vols. (Louvain, 1933–41), 1204, c. 12, vol. I, p. 298: ‘Abbates qui in via Capituli spoliantur, nihilominus ad capitulum veniant, et abbates per quos transibunt eis charitative subveniant.’ For actual cases, see 1197, c. 50, 1205, c. 35, vol. I, pp. 220, 315. But it is surprising here that there is such a tiny number of such cases, given the very large number of abbots excused, or not excused, for non-attendance at the General Chapter.

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The same goes for measures taken against crime on the highways. We should be thoroughly sceptical about whether the repeatedly attested enactments of exemplary penalties had any objective deterrent effect. Exaggerated and undifferentiated punishments probably resulted in the very opposite of protection: if, as frequently happened, robbery carried the death penalty, then it was hardly surprising if victims were not only robbed but murdered as well, so that they could neither call out the watch nor give testimony before a court at some later stage.145 But when Henry I of England had thieves hanged in large numbers by his sheriffs,146 or when Rudolf I smoked out nests of robbers in Thuringia,147 the impact on contemporaries’ subjective feelings of security was probably quite considerable. And that was precisely the point. Yet we should not over-estimate the subjective feeling of insecurity in the face of robbers. There is plenty of evidence that those who had to make journeys felt at least as much anxiety about the physical dangers of travel. In Richer’s famous account of his journey from Rheims to Chartres by way of Meaux in 991, during which one of the pack-horses died, what loom large are the rotten bridges, the rain, the onset of darkness and hunger. True, Richer had to leave a servant-boy behind to guard the baggage, but the dangers obviously did not seem so serious that the miles who accompanied Richer felt unable or reluctant to set off on the road in the middle of the night with fresh horses to look for the boy.148 We find something similar in the pilgrim-guides. Nicholas of Munkathvera in Iceland, in his Itinerary to Rome where he otherwise seems to offer no comment of his own, writes a` propos the stretch between San Quirico and Acquapendente that the inhabitants of a ‘fortified town’ (Radicofani?) were ‘very bad’, which is probably a reference to the dangers of being waylaid there.149 Yet two detailed thirteenth-century accounts of journeys to Rome mention other dangers and difficulties for travellers, especially those involved in crossing rivers, without saying anything about robbers.150 The Liber Sancti Jacobi, whose value as a witness for the realities of pilgrimage is not beyond dispute, 145

146 148

149 150

See the case cited at n. 25 above, from Guibert of Nogent, although we should discount the moralising tone here, as in other comparable exempla. See also Cohen, ‘Patterns of crime’ (as n. 47), p. 318. 147 See n. 21, above. See n. 19, above. Richer, Historiae (as n. 29) IV, 50, pp. 224–30. On the significance of such varied travel experiences for medieval travellers, see also H. Fichtenau, ‘Reisen und Reisende’, in Beiträge zur Mediävistik. Ausgewählte Aufsätze, 3: Lebensordnungen – Urkundenforschung – Mittellatein (Stuttgart, 1987), pp. 1–79, at 8–15. F. P. Magoun, ‘The pilgrim-diary of Nikulas of Munkathvera: the road to Rome’, Medieval Studies 6 (1944), pp. 314–54, at 350. Albert of Stade, Annales Stadenses, MGH SS XVI, pp. 335–40; Emonis Chronicon (as n. 91).


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however, does mention robbers, but seems just as interested in the illegal levying of tolls on travellers and in natural dangers.151 Part and parcel of security, in the end, is the ability to estimate and predict. If any secure finding can be drawn from this whole complex of problems over the longue durée, it is that the increased propensity to travel, characteristic of the high Middle Ages, was accompanied by routinised robbery in the form of demands for toll-payments. But, for all the complaints about unjust tolls, you get the impression that these were perceived as less burdensome than the danger of robbers, despite its being conceivable that such payments entailed higher losses on average than those resulting from robbery. Philip I of France, as mentioned above, caused scandal by demanding a large, one-off, payment from Italian merchants ‘bandit-style’ (more predonis). His successor Philip Augustus a century later was able to raise much larger sums in tolls without generating any audible protests. You ask yourself, in the outspoken words of Berthold Brecht, ‘What is highway-robbery compared with the exaction of a road-toll?’, or those of St Augustine, ‘Justice apart, what are kingdoms but bands of robbers on a large scale?’ Justice apart, you might want to add rationality: higher costs were acceptable in so far as they were also calculable. In part, this is explicable simply in terms of the less violent nature of toll-exactions. In normal circumstances, there was no risk to life and limb at the toll-station, but being robbed was a different story. In the subjective consciousness of a wide swathe of public perceptions, therefore, praedones and latrones, in the sense of wild and strange men with hostile intent towards travellers, were a great danger. Yet, looked at objectively, dangers to physical well-being, to goods and chattels, could come from rulers and also from neighbours, friends and kinsfolk, and these were dangers that people encountered not just on the road but also at home. People were more familiar with them, though, and there lay the difference. 151

J. Vielliard ed., Le Guide du pèlerin de Saint-Jacques de Compostelle, 3rd edn (Mâcon, 1963). For criticism of this source, see K. Herbers, Der Jakobuskult des 12. Jahrhunderts und der ‘Liber sancti Jacobi’. Studien u¨ ber das Verhältnis zwischen Religion und Gesellschaft im hohen Mittelalter (Wiesbaden, 1984); A. von Mandach, ‘Neues zum “Pilgerführer der Jakobswege”’, in R. Plotz ed., Europäische Wege der Santiago-Pilgerfahrt, Jakobus-Studien 2 (Tübingen, 1990), pp. 41–57. The medieval tradition seems to have been limited to Spain, and the history of the work’s origin is complex and multi-layered. It can hardly be considered a witness on which we can base generalisations about trans-Pyrenean pilgrim-consciousness.

chap t e r 4

Debating the ‘feudal revolution’

The ‘feudal revolution’ has become conventional shorthand for the disappearance, around the millennium, of a ‘centre’ able to control the localities, and the appropriation by those bent on local dominance of the shell of legitimate authority which this process left behind. The combination of this with shifts in structures of family and settlement yielded encellulement, which was rather more than Italian incastellamento writ large: at a political and cultural level it means the dominance of small-scale forms of organization with very little set over them by way of more overarching forms of rule or community.1 Discussions of the ‘feudal revolution’ originally stressed changes at fundamental levels of social and political organization, but T. N. Bisson’s reconsideration underlines the accompanying changes in mentalities, especially in relation to the social role of violence. The contrast as he depicts it is not a simple one between peace before and violence after the millennium, but between an older violence whose primary role was the maintaining of public order and a newer ‘private’ violence practised by the masters of castles and their followers. This was ‘personal, affective, but inhumane; militant, aggressive, but unconstructive’.2 Unconstructive or not, Bisson depicts lords and their armed gangs as holding something

1

2

P&P 152 (1996) published two contributions (by Dominique Barthélemy and Stephen D. White) to a Debate on the article in P&P 142 (1994) by T. N. Bisson on ‘The “Feudal Revolution”’. This paper is a further contribution to that debate. I am grateful to Tessa Webber for comments on an early draft, and to Chris Wickham for several lengthy discussions of the issues and of my attempts to get to grips with them. The term is that of R. Fossier, Enfance de l’Europe: Xe –XIIe siècles, aspects économiques et sociaux, 2 vols. (Paris, 1982); for a discussion of incastellamento and its relationship to encellulement, see C. J. Wickham, The Mountains and the City: The Tuscan Appennines in the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 1986), pp. xxiii–xxvi. Critiques of the idea that encellulement was universal throughout Europe or all-embracing are offered from different standpoints by K. Leyser, ‘The Ascent of Latin Europe’, in his Communications and Power in Medieval Europe: The Carolingian and Ottonian Centuries, ed. T. Reuter (London, 1994), pp. 218–19; J. Campbell, ‘Was it Infancy in England? Some Questions of Comparison’, in M. Jones and M. Vale, eds., England and her Neighbours, 1066–1453: Essays in Honour of Pierre Chaplais (London, 1990), pp. 1–17. T. N. Bisson, ‘The “Feudal Revolution”’, P&P 142 (1994), p. 18.

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like an ideology of violence, as seen both in the sparse narrative sources of the period and in the language used by charters. Lordship was not only in fact predatory, as no doubt it had always been and would long remain, but it also consciously saw itself as such.3 The ‘feudal anarchy’ of earlier discussions here finds its feudal anarchists. Bisson’s stress on the ideology of lordship is helpful, but his presentation raises two sets of problems, one largely conceptual and methodological, one largely geographical and historiographical. The first is how we determine the prevalence and social meaning of violent behaviour and the reliability and effectiveness of public order. Bisson’s picture of a new kind of ‘affective’ violence is rhetorically persuasive and anecdotally substantiated, but it would not be difficult to meet it with counter-anecdotes documenting mindless ninth- and tenth-century violence. There was, after all, no shortage of this, and Bisson himself supplies some of the material. To do this, however, would be to resort to a familiar and tedious way of conducting historical debates: since the technique cannot produce clinching proofs, it allows no closure except that produced by exhaustion or boredom. To adduce counter-anecdotes is merely to claim that nothing really changed, which is just as much a disguised statistical inference from anecdotal evidence as is a claim for change. Trying to assess a quantitative problem using qualitative evidence means that impressionism and anecdotalism masquerade as hard data instead of fulfilling their proper functions within the rhetoric of historical explanation. An all-observing Martian visitor might know whether violence increased from the late tenth century onwards, but we cannot, and contemporaries could not either (though they may have thought that they could).4 A little introspection may help to drive this point home. Is there less respect for law-enforcers and the judiciary than there once was? Are we and our property more at risk than formerly? Is violence more ‘affective’ than it once was – different in character, less restrained by social norms? Has the crime rate gone up? If police statistics make it appear to have done so (or remained steady, or declined), what does that mean? We are not significantly better placed to answer such questions about our own societies than the eleventh-century subjects of our enquiry were about theirs, in spite of the much wider access to fact, pseudo-fact and opinion provided by mass communication and opinion polls. 3 4

See also T. N. Bisson, ‘Medieval Lordship’, Speculum 70 (1995). Such considerations should make us suspicious of statements like that of Hans-Werner Goetz (quoted approvingly by Bisson, ‘Feudal Revolution’, p. 22): ‘Without doubt the Peace of God was a reaction to mounting troubles . . . at the moment when lordships appeared.’

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The answers we do give to these questions will certainly express – primarily, rather than secondarily – our view of our own society. I see no reason to suppose that we are in this respect different from our equivalents in the tenth and eleventh centuries. To complain about violence, in other words, is always to complain about the state of public life. When Thietmar of Merseburg, writing around 1017, said that ‘if we [Saxon bishops] do not obey the local count in all things we are preyed on as if no king or emperor ruled over us’, he was making a point about Henry II’s rule in Saxony at least as much as he was offering a sociological analysis of the behaviour of Saxon magnates.5 Furthermore, since nobody supposes (or indeed supposed) that Henry II did not rule in Saxony, this quotation might lead us to treat some of its analogues elsewhere with more caution: when tenth-century West Frankish sources tell us that the king was absent or ineffective, as they sometimes do, they are not necessarily a guide to how safe it was to walk the streets at night.6 The tendency to play up disorder if a ruler is absent or felt to be unsatisfactory for one reason or another is characteristic of hagiographers and historians of the early and high Middle Ages. Henry V of Germany, Robert Curthose of Normandy and Raymond VII of Toulouse all had opposition to them legitimized in contemporary writing by reference to their inability to keep the peace.7 When a ruler like Charles the 5

6

7

Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, VIII, 23, ed. R. Holtzmann, MGH, SRG, new ser., IX (Berlin, 1935), p. 520. The whole passage is worth quoting: ‘The pride of these lords arouses the fury of their followers, and since it is enough for these, does not permit others to remain as equals in these regions. If any neighbour should offend unintentionally against them, no composition, however exemplary, is adequate, and no settlement is too strong to be broken. Their neighbours are flailed by this scourge, since they allow no one to stand up against them, whether they are in the right or not. The bishoprics established in these regions are severely oppressed by their power, and we, their administrators, find that we are allowed to retain our honour and something of our substance only if, contrary to God and justice, we comply with their will in all things; if we do not, however, we are despised, and are despoiled as if there were no lord as king or emperor set over us.’ [For another translation, see now D. Warner, Ottonian Germany: The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg (Manchester, 2000), pp. 376– 7.] For an analysis of a wide range of examples of this kind of passage in narrative sources, see T. Reuter, ‘Die Unsicherheit auf den Straßen im europäischen Früh- und Hochmittelalter: Täter, Opfer und ihre mittelalterlichen und modernen Betrachter’, in J. Fried ed., Träger und Instrumentarien des Friedens im Hohen und Späten Mittelalter, Vorträge und Forschungen 43 (Sigmaringen, 1996) [trans. above, chapter 3]. For example, Richer, Historiae, I, 4, ed. R. Latouche, Classiques de l’histoire de France, XI, 2nd edn (Paris, 1964), p. 12, or the often-quoted ‘The justice of kings and princes was asleep’, Chronicon Mosomense seu Liber fundationis monasterii sancti Mariae O. s. B. apud mosomum, ed. with French trans. M. Bur, Chronique ou livre de fondation du monastère de Mouzon (Paris, 1989), p. 18. Frutolfs und Ekkehards Chroniken und die anonyme Kaiserchronik, eds. F.-J. Schmale and I. Schmale-Ott, Ausgewählte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters, Freiherr vom SteinGedächtnisausgabe, XV (Darmstadt, 1972), p. 322 (Ekkehard III, s.a. 1116); see also pp. 342, 344, 362 (Ekkehard IV, s.a. 1119, 1120, 1123). For Robert and Raymond, see M. Barber, ‘Catharism and the Occitan Nobility: The Lordships of Cabaret, Minerve and Termes’, in C. Harper-Bill and R. Harvey eds., The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood, III, Papers from the Fourth Strawberry Hill Conference, 1988 (Woodbridge, 1990), p. 11.


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Fat of East Francia or Æthelred II of England fails against external threats, we will also find that accounts of internal disorder pile up in the pages of annalistic writings covering his reign;8 failure in one area of rule leads people to look more closely and critically at others, a pattern familiar enough from the Anglo-Saxon polities of our own era. The counterpart to this is praise for the effective ruler, a bright sun casting deep historiographical shadows in which much can lie hidden. Examples of this are legion: in our context, we need only consider the difference in tone between Radulfus Glaber and Adhémar of Chabannes. The two were near contemporaries and shared much subject matter, but at the heart of Adhémar’s third book lies Duke William of Aquitaine, potius rex quam dux, and the depiction of such figures does not sit well with more than a passing glance at the darker side of society.9 Such judgements on public order, both positive and negative, have long helped to disguise the étatiste prejudices of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians as citations from contemporary sources.10 To abandon implicit quantification frees us to ask what purpose an act of violence served and what purpose was served by calling an act violent. This requires us to differentiate. Bisson does indeed do so, but his distinction between traditional, order-serving violence and new, ‘affective’ castellanic violence seems to me to blur some distinctions which need to be made and to stress others artificially. Beating up the peasants in one’s own neighbourhood or district is not the same as beating up the monks of the neighbouring monastery; not only are the latter very likely one’s social equals, they are also people with whom one has ongoing social relations. Actually it was rare for the new dangerous classes to beat up monks directly; they were more likely to beat up their dependants, just as they were more likely, when conducting feuds with neighbouring castle-owners, to harass dependants and destroy infrastructure than to engage in direct combat. If your neighbour and rival is exacting tolls, then even preying on travellers becomes an act directed against him, his economic resource-base and his honour (though no doubt to merchants and pilgrims it did not feel like that). We cannot easily tell 8

9

10

For Charles III, see the discussion in T. Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, c.800–1056 (London, 1991), pp. 115–21; for Æthelred II, see Simon Keynes, ‘Crime and Punishment in the Reign of Æthelred the Unready’, in I. Wood and N. Lund eds., People and Places in Northern Europe, 500–1600: Essays in Honour of Peter Hayes Sawyer (Woodbridge, 1991), pp. 67–81. B. S. Bachrach, ‘Potius rex quam esse dux putabatur: Some Observations Concerning Adémar of Chabannes’ Panegyric on Duke William the Great’, Haskins Society Journal 1 (1989), pp. 11–21. I have not yet been able to consult Richard Landes’ new monograph on Adhémar [Relics, Apocalypse and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034 (Cambridge MA, 1995)]. For a fuller discussion of this point, see Reuter, ‘Die Unsicherheit auf den Straßen’ [trans. above, chapter 3].

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which was primary: the outcome of continued feuding may have been territorially based ‘banal’ lordships, but that need not have been the aim of the participants from the beginning. The analogy of both folklore and film suggests that when rival mobs fight in New York or Palermo, these struggles characteristically take the form of feud and indeed are legitimized by a code of conducting feud, even if they are also about control of territory. Discussions of ‘law and order’ are also made difficult by our distinction between the ‘civil’ and the ‘criminal’. To open a dispute over property rights with a ‘violent’ move – burning crops or flogging peasants, for example – was a common early medieval practice which was not necessarily treated as a criminal act, either in the period we are considering or during the golden age of public order provided by Carolingian Francia.11 If I were to begin my prosecution of a claim to Professor Bisson’s house by assaulting him or his friends, or by burning down his fence and garden shed, this would (in theory at least) be treated quite separately from my property claims in modern European or American legal systems: as a criminal offence against public order and as a matter for separate civil damages, regardless of how a civil court might adjudicate my property claim (and the adjudication would at least in principle not be affected by my criminal behaviour). Neither Carolingian courts nor Carolingian rulers would have made these distinctions: the real, yet ritualized, violence which symbolized precisely the ‘opening-of-dispute’ of the Carolingian and post-Carolingian world might get a mention in the ultimate settlement, whether this was recorded in royal placitum or feudal convenientia, but it would rarely get separate treatment or punishment. In fact, we do not know that much about how Carolingian courts or law-enforcement agencies dealt with such ‘affective’ or ‘criminal’ violence – homicide, arson, grievous bodily harm – as arose outside the context of property or political disputes: in other words, outside the context of feud.12 Bisson explicitly contrasts the regulated violence of feud with the ‘new’ castellanic violence, but to me his new men of violence appear to be practising feud, and his ‘anti-inventory of seigneurial rights’ drawn from early peace legislation might equally be read as a handbook for the conduct of aristocratic feud.13 J. Dhondt and K.-F. Werner long ago pointed out that during the emergence of the principalities in the early tenth century – a 11 12 13

C. J. Wickham, ‘Conclusion (Section 3)’, in W. Davies and P. Fouracre eds., The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 234–5. One or two examples are offered by C. J. Wickham, ‘Rural Society’, in R. McKitterick ed., The New Cambridge Medieval History, II, c.700–c.900 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 533–4. Bisson, ‘Feudal Revolution’, p. 18.


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process, incidentally, which we used to call ‘feudal anarchy’ and think of as violently subversive of the old order; in the days before princes had become respectable and castellans the new villains – violence was by no means opportunistic and random, but on the contrary largely confined within ancient borders and directed against opponents against whom coercion, force, warfare or violence (depending upon one’s point of view) had some show of justification.14 We are not normally so well placed to show it, but my guess is that if we were we should find that the same was true at the castellanic or comital level after 1000: that Bissonic ‘violence’ was usually not ‘affective’, but quite meaningful and controlled, both in the means used and the targets chosen. Note that although the new men are often said metaphorically to be latrones or the like, we do not find them using their fortifications as a base for random and widespread raiding; it is their neighbourhoods, where they are presumably landed, which they dominate, and their neighbours with whom they feud. A feuding culture is one in which questions of legitimacy, both as to ends and means, are constantly being posed; you cannot sustain feud without it, as a reading of any Icelandic saga will show.15 Bisson’s exercisers of power in the late tenth and early eleventh century are evidently flourishing, supported by ‘swelling masses of armed horsemen’, even if these suffer from hunger and status-anxiety.16 Yet these lords appear – probably uniquely in European history – to have been able to exercise ‘affective’ power stripped of the governmental trappings which legitimized it and to practise violence without being concerned about having to justify it either to themselves or others. In fact, we can see from Bisson’s own material that they were so concerned. The count of Rouergue, even in the hostile account of the monks of Sainte-Foy, claimed from the peasantry whom he ‘oppressed with his power’ something which, at least in his view, was ‘due submission’ from them.17 The widespread use of the term consuetudo has obvious legitimatory overtones, which those affected met precisely by calling the things it legitimized ‘bad’ customs. Equally legitimatory is the way in which the names (and often the forms) of what was claimed mimicked an earlier Carolingian order: fodrum, gistum, heribannum, and so on, might all have been substantially 14 15

16 17

K.-F. Werner, ‘Kingdom and Principality in Twelfth-Century France’, in T. Reuter ed., The Medieval Nobility (Amsterdam, 1979), pp. 247–9. W. I. Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law and Society in Saga Iceland (Chicago, 1990), pp. 179–220, esp. 181: ‘The bloodfeud is frequently moral, often juridical and always political’; and the discussion of legitimacy, pp. 189 ff. Bisson, ‘Feudal Revolution’, p. 18. Liber miraculorum sancte Fidis, II, 5, ed. A. Buillet (Paris, 1897), p. 108, as cited by Bisson, ‘Feudal Revolution’, p. 16, n. 40.

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privatized by the eleventh century, in West Francia at least, but they had not simply disappeared and been replaced by a completely different set of exactions (nor incidentally need they in an earlier era have been any less harsh or exacting for being really or notionally public in character).18 There may no longer have been a king or a fisc for any practical purposes in most of West Francia, but the public order and sets of public institutions so eloquently invoked in the capitularies of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious still helped to legitimize the holders of power in the localities, whose clerics indeed now stressed that they were the equivalents of kings (and did not mean by that simply that they could do as they pleased).19 This should be borne in mind when considering the peace and truce of God movement. Bisson presents what seems to me to be a very traditional view of this, as an alliance between clerics and the helpless against the new predators.20 But the whole apparatus of oaths, crowds and relics which recent historians have found so interesting was, I think, not aimed at forcing compliance on a whole class of unwilling predators, as Bisson implies, and would hardly have worked if it had been. Rather, the collective oath-takings offered some degree of guarantee to members of that class that all would be bound, that there would be no free-riders reaping the benefits of the peace without having to pay the penalties. The qualifications in a text like the oath of Beauvais are not a compromise between sheep and wolves; they show the respect in which oaths were held in this society. To swear generalized respect for all church buildings, for example, might mean a choice: allowing wrong-doers to get away with crimes; or imperilling both the honour and the souls of those who swore the oaths, should they be confronted with a wrong-doer who had taken refuge in a church or a building physically associated with it. Such dilemmas much concerned Gerard of Cambrai: a blanket prohibition against seeking to recover stolen property might lower the incidence of feud, but it would also mean an amnesty for wrong-doers, just as a ban on bearing arms would allow wicked men to flourish in the future.21 A similar concern for the formal observance of oaths can be seen 18

19

20 21

Convenient summaries of these processes can be found in J.-P. Poly and E. Bournazel, The Feudal Transformation, 900–1200, trans. C. Higgit (London, 1991), pp. 25–39; the coercive and often extortionate nature of ‘public’ powers is stressed by Bisson, ‘Feudal Revolution’, p. 14. A famous but not untypical example is the claim on behalf of Hugh of Ampurias in 1019 that ‘the power which the kings once had there, this count Hugh has’, as cited by P. Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du Xe a` la fin du XIe siècle: croissance et mutations d’un société, 2 vols. (Toulouse, 1975–6), I, p. 165. Bisson, ‘Feudal Revolution’, pp. 18, 20–1. Gesta episcoporum Cameracensium, III, 53, ed. L. C. Bethmann, MGH, SS VII (Hannover, 1846), p. 487.


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in the repeated use of formulae like me sciente or se sciente (wittingly), which should be seen less as escape clauses in small print for those who had no intention of keeping their oaths in any case than as expressions of the serious concern felt by both clerics and lay magnates about the risks entailed in breaking oaths.22 Bisson apparently views the new specificity of oaths as a sign of weakness,23 but it was rather the non-specific, morally based oath of loyalty which had been devalued by its inflationary use in Carolingian times.24 The new style of oath is probably better seen as a first step towards that juridification of political life which is so characteristic of the twelfth century. But it is also a sign that the disappearance of effective royal intervention from many regions of West Francia had not dispensed the political classes from the need to weigh up and justify their actions in terms of wider norms. In the absence of kings, many of these wider norms could be provided by the church. The oath of Beauvais is textually almost identical with two earlier oaths which appear to have been presented to the participants in Burgundian peace assemblies a decade or so earlier.25 Here we have one form of European public order which undoubtedly survived across the great divide of L’An Mil, though it has been distinctly neglected by historians: episcopal solidarity and co-operation which found expression in diocesan and provincial councils and in exchanges of letters between bishops.26 That 22

23 24

25

26

See n. 25 below and also the texts edited in Constitutiones et acta publica, 1: 911–1197, ed. L. Weiland, MGH, Const. I (Hannover, 1893), pp. 596–617): for example, ‘Treuga Dei archidiocecesis Arelatensis’, no. 419, p. 597, c.4: ‘Qui vero treuvam promissam habuerint et se scientibus infringere voluerint . . .’; or no. 424, p. 604, c. 11 of the 1083 Cologne peace, spelling out that participation in court proceedings where corporal sentences are imposed is not a violation of the peace. In the text above, I have written ‘magnates’, where Bisson uses the term ‘knights’ (‘Feudal Revolution’, p. 18), for those who were to swear. Since the texts refer to what is to be done with offenders who enter into meum conductum, they would seem to be aimed more at leaders than at members of war-bands. Bisson, ‘Feudal Revolution’, pp. 24–8. The repeated use of these oaths in Carolingian succession politics can be followed in J. L. Nelson, Charles the Bald (London, 1992), index, s.v. ‘oaths’; for comment, see J. L. Nelson, ‘The Quest for Peace in a Time of War’, in Fried ed., Träger und Instrumentarien, pp. 87–114; K.-F. Werner, ‘Important Noble Families in the Kingdom of Charlemagne’, in Reuter ed., Medieval Nobility, pp. 180–1; K. Leyser, ‘Three Historians’, in his Communications and Power in Medieval Europe, pp. 25–6. For references, see H. Hoffmann, Gottesfrieden and Treuga Dei, Schriften der MGH, XX (Stuttgart, 1964), pp. 47, 51, 56. See ibid., pp. 15–16, for an oath taken by the obedienciarii of Saint-Julien, Brioude (undated, but probably late tenth century or early eleventh century), which also has verbal overlaps with the peace-council oaths. This is much more than the continuation of Carolingian moralizing studied by E. Magnou-Nortier, ‘Les Evêques et la paix dans l’espace franc (VIe –XIe siècles)’, in L’Evêque dans l’histoire de l’église (Angers, 1984); it includes a whole range of activities, some of which can be seen in collections of letters like those of Fulbert and Gerbert, some of which will become more clearly visible when the canons of tenth- and early eleventh-century church councils have been properly edited. I hope to return to European episcopality at much greater length elsewhere.

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such trans-diocesan co-operation was at work here is evident from the textual relationships; moreover, its presence is confirmed by the anonymous author of the Gesta Pontificum Cameracensium, who relates how Gerard of Cambrai was approached to join the peace movement precisely by the bishops of Beauvais and Soissons, presumably around the time of the oath of Beauvais.27 Episcopal solidarity should not be seen as the equivalent of modern municipalities declaring themselves nuclear-free zones; the power it expressed was respected. The legitimacy possessed by the church needs stressing, because in their dealings with the church the new classes showed just how much they themselves sought and found legitimacy in their relations with it; the despoilers of the church were also its benefactors. This is a familiar point or paradox, of course, but one of some significance, given Bisson’s view of the new power-holding class as one composed of men who were neither capable of, nor interested in, building anything of permanence or substance.28 In fact, what they built was visible and traditional enough: no sooner did castellans and seigneurs come on the scene than they began to invest in the preservation of their own memoria, just like their elders and betters.29 Churchmen were inventive in devising appropriate new forms of gift to the church (for example, the ‘return’ by aristocrats of tithes and parish churches to monasteries) and new forms of institutions to endow (for example, small dependent priories and houses of canons regular for those who could not afford a full-scale house with its normal minimum of twelve monks).30 Though it would be over a century after the millennium before an ideology of knighthood could be said to have been fully developed, this too began in the era of the ‘feudal revolution’ itself: when Urban II said ‘let those now become Christ’s soldiers who have long been robbers’ he was 27 28 29

30

Gesta episcoporum Cameracensium, III, 27, p. 474. Bisson, ‘Feudal Revolution’, pp. 18, 34–42. See J. Howe, ‘The Nobility’s Reform of the Medieval Church’, AHR 92 (1988). On the phenomenon in general, see P. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance (Princeton NJ, 1995), pp. 76– 80, 177–8; for patterns of gift-giving, showing castellans and seigneurs becoming active almost as soon as they appear on the scene, see D. Poeck, ‘Laienbegräbnisse in Cluny’, FMS 15 (1981), pp. 68–179; C. B. Bouchard, Sword, Mitre, and Cloister: Nobility and the Church in Burgundy, 980–1198 (Ithaca NY, 1987), pp. 131–2, 160–9. On the return of churches and tithes, see the summary of recent scholarship in G. Tellenbach, The Western Church from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century, trans. T. Reuter (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 286–93; Bouchard, Sword, Mitre, and Cloister, pp. 177–80. It is now a commonplace that the ‘new orders’ of the twelfth century were better placed to exploit endowments from less wealthy customers: R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1970), pp. 240–72; C. B. Bouchard, Holy Entrepreneurs: Cistercians, Knights, and Economic Exchange in Twelfth-Century Burgundy (Ithaca NY, 1991). Here, too, the chronology needs pushing well back into the eleventh century.


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completing a process, not initiating one.31 The ideology abolished the distinction within the political community between the king (and the agents he chose to associate with him), who had prescribed forms of conduct and duties, and the rest, who did not; all were now, in theory, miniature kings. Like the think-tanks of our own time, eleventh-century clerics were trying to steer the course of debate, but they were also offering ideas and institutions in response to demand.32 Bisson’s men of violence wanted an ideological legitimation: this does not make them less violent, but it helps us to understand them as something more than merely psychopathic. ∗∗∗ The second set of problems raised by the ‘feudal revolution’ in its various guises is geographical and historiographical in nature. As all of us in our hearts know, European medieval history is essentially French history: everything starts in France, from administration, architecture and Arthurian romances, through chivalry, crusades and castles, to universities and watermills. Early medieval political history is Merovingian and Carolingian history; the Carolingians end in 987 rather than in 887–8, or 911; then there is a slight hiccup before a new order is established, as fortunately it is by the mid- to late-twelfth century. It is this hiatus, a blot on an otherwise impressive record, which cries out for explanation, and an explanation which fits French history will, of course, fit European history. The mild satire of the previous paragraph cannot compete with reality. For the past fifteen years at least medievalists have listened to a debate about the mutation or révolution féodale conducted almost exclusively among French- and English-speaking historians of France (counting Catalonia 31

32

Fulcher of Chartres, Historia Hierosolymitana, I, 3, ed. H. Hagenmeyer (Heidelberg, 1913), p. 136. For the papal role in this process, see G. Althoff, ‘Nunc fiant Christi milites, qui dudum extiterunt raptores: zur Entstehung von Rittertum und Ritterethos’, Saeculum 32 (1981), pp. 317–33; I. S. Robinson, ‘Gregory VII and the Soldiers of Christ’, History 58 (1973), pp. 169–92; and, of course, Carl Erdmann, Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens (Stuttgart, 1935), pp. 51–85 [The Origins of the Idea of Crusade, trans. M. W. Baldwin and W. Goffart (Philadelphia, 1977)]. Here the chronology is also disputed; it has been argued that both the tripartite schemata of social organization and the church’s sponsorship of weapons and warriors retained their Carolingian emphasis on ‘public’ office-holders up to the early eleventh century, so allowing the history of mentalities to reflect the feudal mutation/revolution: G. Duby, Les Trois Ordres ou l’imaginaire du féodalisme (Paris, 1978) [The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago, 1980)]; for tripartition and blessing, see J. Flori, ‘Les Origines de l’adoubement chevaleresque’, Traditio 35 (1979), pp. 214–15, 249–50; J. Flori, L’Idéologie du glaive: préhistoire de la chevalerie (Geneva, 1983); J. Flori, L’Essor de la chevalerie, XIe –XIIe siècles (Geneva, 1986), pp. 43–9. Neither Adalbero of Laon nor Gerard of Cambrai seem to me to have been as reactionary as they have been depicted, however; and ecclesiastical acknowledgement of a legitimate warrior ethic can be found in the ninth century, as shown by J. L. Nelson, ‘Ninth-Century Knighthood: The Evidence of Nithard’, in C. Harper-Bill, C. Holdsworth and J. L. Nelson eds., Studies in Medieval History Presented to R. Allen Brown (Woodbridge, 1989).

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for these purposes as French). Although the debate has been conducted almost entirely on the basis of evidence from within what French historians call the hexagon – a Platonic ideal form of that eternally existing geographical and cultural France of which specific historical instances are mere shadows on the wall – we have nevertheless been offered a general European phenomenon, one by no means confined to the territory once ruled or claimed by Charles the Bald. The apparent belief of Guy Bois that one can reconstruct a tournant in the whole of European history from a few charters relating to a tenth-century Burgundian village is only the most extreme form of this stance.33 It is high time that we widened the perspective. If we are being offered an account of socio-political change which applies only or mainly to West Francia, then we must ask: why West Francia but not elsewhere? If, by contrast, we are indeed dealing with a European or at least a pan-Carolingian affair, then the Mâconnais will hardly serve as a metonym for the whole of European history between 950 and 1050, even with Latium and Catalonia as cognates. In either event we might want to look more closely at other areas of post-Carolingian Europe, counting England for these purposes as an honorary Carolingian realm. Should the debate continue, we might want to extend the geographical range even further. We can presumably leave Celts, Slavs, Magyars and Scandinavians out of the discussion, but we might well benefit by drawing in the relations between the poor and the powerful in late tenth-century Byzantium and the fragmentation of political power in Al-Andalus, though there is no space to develop this here.34

33

34

G. Bois, La Mutation de l’an mil: Lournand, village mâconnais, de l’antiquité au féodalisme (Paris, 1989) [The Transformation of the Year One Thousand, trans. J. Birrell (Manchester, 1991)]; cf. C. Wickham, ‘Mutations et révolutions aux environs de l’an mil’, Médiévales 21 (1991), p. 32: ‘the belief (apparently) common to numerous French historians that the history of Europe is in reality a history of France, and that nothing else is worth studying’ [‘la croyance (apparemment) commune a` de nombreux historiens français que l’histoire de l’Europe est en réalité une histoire de France et que rien d’autre ne mérite d’être e´tudié’]. On dynatoi and penetes, see R. Morris, ‘The Powerful and the Poor in Tenth-Century Byzantium: Law and Reality’, P&P 73 (1976), pp. 3–27; P. Lemerle, Agrarian History of Byzantium from the Origins to the Twelfth Century: The Sources and Problems (Galway, 1979), pp. 90–108; A. Harvey, Economic Expansion in the Byzantine Empire, 900–2000 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 37–44; M. Kaplan, Les Hommes et la terre a` Byzance du 6 au 11 siècle (Paris, 1992). The debate about whether the oppression of the poor really took place in a sense echoes (or anticipates) recent arguments about whether the ‘feudal revolution’ was actually a mere documentary ‘revelation’. For Islamic Spain, see P. Chalmeta, ‘Concessiones territoriales en Al-Andalus’, Cuadernos de historia 6 (1975); D. Wasserstein, The Rise and Fall of the Party Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain, 1002–1086 (Princeton, 1986); E. Manzano Moreno, La frontera de al-Andalus en epoca de los Omeyas (Madrid, 1991); M. J. Viguera Molins ed., Los reinos de Taifas: Al–Andalus en el siglo XI, Historia de España Menendez Pidal, VIII (Madrid, 1994).


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Bisson is more conscious of these problems of geographical perspective than most of those who have discussed the ‘feudal revolution’,35 and he suggests that the revolution first found in West Francia did indeed overtake the rest of Europe sooner or later: in England after 1066; in Germany after 1075; in Leon-Castille after 1110.36 But he states or suggests the case without setting it out in much detail. The Urracan succession crisis aside, it is surely hard to sustain in detail a reduction of the political upheavals following the Norman Conquest on the one hand, and the combination of Gregorian revolution and Saxon revolt on the other, to mere froth on the waves of the feudal revolution. To do so, moreover, means blurring significant distinctions between England, Germany and the supposedly defining case of France. The radical changes affecting German society as a result of the fifty years of civil war between 1073 and 1122 (arguably up to 1156) were indeed accompanied by something that one might wish to call violence. But this took place within a polity which from its inception had scarcely known the concept of public order thought to have characterized Carolingian West Francia until around the millennium; even in ninth-century East Francia there is little sign of the comital courts or placita which Wickham sees as so characteristic of the Carolingian order.37 The Ottonians ruled, but did not govern (except in the limited sense of organizing their fiscal resources in east Saxony quite intensively). In this they largely followed East Frankish precedent, even while inventing rulership afresh in some respects.38 A careful reading of Thietmar’s Chronicon will reveal plenty of public disorder in early eleventh-century Saxony, in the form of often shockingly violent interactions between Saxon magnates, which frequently went quite unpunished. But it also reveals a kind of public order maintained by counts and bishops as well as by kings, without there always being a

35

36 38

For a willingness to consider non-Islamic Spain as a whole, see P. Bonnassie, ‘From the Rhône to Galicia: Origins and Modalities of the Feudal Order’, in his From Slavery to Feudalism in South– Western Europe, trans. J. Birrell (Cambridge, 1991). By contrast, Poly and Bournazel, Feudal Transformation, reveal almost no sense of possible life beyond the hexagon, as their index clearly shows; the phrase ‘from Ghent to Barcelona, from Poitiers to Mâcon’, for example, delineates the known world (p. 95). 37 C. J. Wickham, ‘Debate’, P&P 155 (1997), p. 203. Bisson, ‘Feudal Revolution’, p. 29. On the patrimonial limitedness of Ottonian government, see K. Leyser, ‘Ottonian Government’, in his Medieval Germany and its Neighbours, 900–1250 (London, 1982); on the Ottonian reinvention of rulership, see T. Reuter, ‘Regemque, quem in Francia pene perdidit, in patria magnifice recepit: Ottonian Rulership in Synchronic and Diachronic Comparison’, in G. Althoff and E. Schubert eds., Herrschaftsrepräsentation im ottonischen Sachsen, Vorträge und Forschungen, 46 (Sigmaringen, 1998) [below, chapter 8].

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strong sense that more of one might have meant less of the other.39 This public order was one of norms rather than institutions, lacking Carolingianstyle supervision by missi or exhortation by capitulary. In this respect also it followed East Frankish precedent. The shift from the large ‘refuge fortification’ (Fluchtburg) to the smaller fortress which was both home to a family and centre of its consciousness has been noted by German historians and given a chronology not much different from that found further west; however, they have not placed it at the centre of a mutation (except in family structure), and it is doubtful if it could be made to sustain one.40 Lemarignier’s collapse of the pagus cannot be invoked here, for east of the Rhine the pagus in that sense had rarely existed, and even where counties had been coherent territorial units, they had largely ceased to be so long before the end of the Ottonian-Salian theocracy without, apparently, any effect on theocratic rule at all.41 The crisis of medieval Germany did not end the old order by castellanizing it and replacing public courts with private arbitration and predation, for castles were there already, and public courts were of negligible importance. What itinerant rulership was deprived of between 1073 and 1080 was legitimacy and logistics, not a hold on public order which it had never possessed. Henry IV’s authority did not do a Cheshire-cat vanishing like that of the early Capetians; it was smashed publicly by making him appear a tyrant and an enemy of God’s Church, and by preventing him from travelling outside a reduced set of heartlands. The rulership restored in the course of the twelfth century shows remarkable continuities with that practised in the Ottonian and Salian period, including a lack of concern for public order: even Barbarossa did not devote much attention to it.42 39

40

41

42

See the quotation from Thietmar, above, n. 5; for a fuller view of these tensions, see T. Reuter, ‘Unruhestiftung, Fehde, Rebellion, Widerstand: Gewalt und Frieden in der Politik der Salierzeit’, in S. Weinfurter ed., Die Salier und das Reich, III: Gesellschaftlicher und ideengeschichtlicher Wandel im Reich der Salier (Sigmaringen, 1991) [trans. below, chapter 19]. Surveys with full references to the literature in O. Engels, ‘Das Reich der Salier – Entwicklungslinien’, in Weinfurter and Seibert eds., Die Salier und das Reich, III, pp. 499–505; J. Freed, The Counts of Falkenstein: Noble Self-Consciousness in Twelfth-Century Germany (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 74, no. 6) (Philadelphia PA, 1984), especially for the links between these developments and the ‘Schmid-Tellenbach’ view of the development of agnatic lineages. J.-F. Lemarignier, ‘La Dislocation du pagus et le problème des consuetudines’, in Mélanges d’histoire du moyen aˆ ge dédiés a` la mémoire de Louis Halphen (Paris, 1951); for the nature of east-Frankish/German counties and their role in ‘royal government’, see T. Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, 800–1056 (London, 1991), pp. 92–4, 218–20. For these developments, see T. Reuter, ‘The Medieval German Sonderweg? The Empire and its Rulers in the High Middle Ages’, in A. Duggan ed., Kings and Kingship in Medieval Europe (London, 1993), pp. 179–211 [reprinted below, chapter 20]; and K. Leyser, in T. Reuter ed., Communications and Power in Medieval Europe: The Gregorian Revolution and Beyond (London, 1994).


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England, by contrast, Carolingianized itself late and arguably more thoroughly than the Carolingians had ever been able to do for their own empire. One may still have doubts about the ‘maximalist’ view of the Old English state so eloquently developed in recent years, especially by James Campbell and Patrick Wormald.43 The use by rulers of harrying (i.e., state-directed Bissonic violence) as a means of law-enforcement suggests a lack of sophistication surprising in a polity allegedly so advanced.44 But undoubtedly kings made serious attempts at law-enforcement,45 and the royal grip on the polity was tight by contemporary standards – so tight, indeed, that one could take it over simply by capturing its central apparatus, as in contemporary Constantinople or Cordoba, but precisely not as in contemporary France or Germany.46 The Norman Conquest was hardly the last instance of this: the successions of 1100 and 1135, as well as the coups attempted by John in 1192–3 and by Louis in 1215–17 – failing in the end, but hardly doomed from the beginning – show that this structural continuity survived a very long time. The predatory methods applied by William’s north-French followers to England did indeed leave deep marks on English society (not to mention Welsh, Scottish and later Irish society), but they took place in a world in which public institutions at no point effectively ceased to exist, not even during the short period of the Anarchy, where what was at issue was much more who should control public institutions than whether or not they should exist.47 Violence there certainly was, but there was 43

44

45

46

47

We still await a comprehensive statement of the case: see provisionally Campbell, ‘Was it Infancy in England?’; J. Campbell, ‘The United Kingdom of England: The Anglo-Saxon Achievement’, in A. Grant and K. J. Stringer eds., Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London, 1995); J. Campbell, ‘The Late Anglo-Saxon State: A Maximum View’, PBA 87 (1994) [all three papers now reprinted in J. Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State (London, 2000)]; P. Wormald, ‘Engla Lond: The Making of an Allegiance’, Journal of Historical Sociology 7 (1994), pp. 1–24 [reprinted in P. Wormald, Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West: Law as Text, Image and Experience (London, 1999), pp. 359–82]. Campbell, ‘Was it Infancy in England?’, p. 6, with two tenth-century examples; cf. also Harthacnut’s harrying of the tax rebels in Worcester in 1041, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, recensions C and D, in English Historical Documents, I, c.500–1042, ed. D. Whitelock, 2nd edn (London, 1979), p. 235; ‘Florence’ of Worcester’s account, ibid., p. 291. Campbell’s comment – ‘Royal violence maintained peace’ – encapsulates the prevailing étatisme of medievalists in four words. P. Wormald, ‘A Hand-List of Anglo-Saxon Lawsuits’, ASE 17 (1988), pp. 247–81 [repr. Wormald, Legal Culture, pp. 253–87]; Simon Keynes, ‘The Fonthill Letter’, in M. Korhammer ed., Words, Texts and Manuscripts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Helmut Gneuss on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 53–97; Keynes, ‘Crime and Punishment’. K. Leyser, ‘The Anglo-Saxons “At Home”’, in Leyser, Communications and Power in Medieval Europe, ed. Reuter, p. 109. Of course, this did not exclude subsequent predation in the localities: R. Fleming, Kings and Lords in Conquest England (Cambridge, 1991). For a balanced account of government during the ‘Anarchy’, see G. White, ‘Continuity in Government’, in E. King ed., The Anarchy of King Stephen’s Reign (Oxford, 1994); cf. also C. W. Hollister, ‘The Aristocracy’, and C. Coulson, ‘The Castles of the Anarchy’, ibid., pp. 64–6, 67–78, respectively.

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never a point at which there was nothing else. Bisson’s analysis, ‘in England assaults on church lands and dispossessions were common from about 1070, were repressed under Henry I, then exploded in notorious troubles under Stephen (1137–45)’, seems to me to owe too much to traditional Strong King/Weak King schemata.48 If these two brief accounts should make us wonder whether there might be something specifically West Frankish and requiring specifically West Frankish explanations about the ‘feudal revolution’, consideration of West Francia itself should make us still more wary about treating it as a general phenomenon. For just as Germany has its own Midi in Swabia and Bavaria, and England by inversion in the lands north of the Humber, so France itself, with its wide regional variation, does not wholly fit the model supposedly derived from its history. There must be serious doubts about the accuracy of the capitularies’ picture of Carolingian reality anywhere, but there can be no doubt that the Carolingian polity was never homogeneous, not even at its core under Charles and Louis. German historians commonly and misleadingly compare the nature of Ottonian rule with an image of Carolingian power under Charlemagne and Louis the Pious;49 but to take evidence from tenth-century southern and east-central France and compare it with a generalized Carolingian past is just as misleading. Burgundy, Provence and France south of the Loire were not Frankish heartlands, and we do not know all that much about the nature of local order there even at the height of Frankish rule. Royal absence from the south did not begin in 987; it had already been practised by Charles and Louis, and it was built into the West Frankish kingdom from birth.50 In the north, by contrast, the face of public order, though it changed, never vanished; there were substantial continuities in the operation of the major principalities – Normandy, Flanders, Anjou, royal Francia – between the tenth and the eleventh centuries. Adriaan Verhulst, speaking of the socio-economic face of the mutation, the spread of the ‘classic demesne regime’ of estate organization, has complained gently but firmly about the tendency of ‘meridionalists’ to ignore or glide over the real differences between France south and north of the Loire. His complaints apply with as much force to socio-political historians as they do to socio-economic ones.51 48 49

50 51

Bisson, ‘Feudal Revolution’, p. 29. For example, H. Keller, ‘Zum Charakter der “Staatlichkeit” zwischen karolingischer Reichsreform und hochmittelalterlichem Herrschaftsausbau’, FMS 22 (1989), pp. 248–64; for comment, see Reuter, ‘Regemque, quem in Francia pene perdidit’ [trans. below, chapter 8]. P. Classen, ‘Die Verträge von Verdun und von Coulaines 843 als Grundlagen des westfränkischen Reiches’, HZ 196 (1963); Nelson, Charles the Bald, pp. 135, 163–4, 174. Interview with Monique Bourin, Médiévales 21 (1991), pp. 60–1.


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One of these real differences lies in the kinds of thing we can know. Our view of regions whose history is primarily known through charters with a bit of hagiography thrown in (like that of most of the post-Carolingian Midi, for example) will be inherently different from our view of regions whose history is primarily known through narrative sources, especially when these are rich and juicy: think, for example, of Gregory of Tours’ Francia, Bede’s Northumbria, Thietmar’s Saxony or Orderic’s Normandy; or indeed of the necessary contrasts between our view of Visigothic Spain, derived largely from law-codes, and our view of Merovingian Gaul, derived largely from writers like Gregory of Tours. I doubt whether there is any methodological corrective which will let us allow for such differences fully and confidently. And they cut both ways: fuller charter evidence would undoubtedly transform our view of Henry II’s Saxony as seen by Thietmar of Merseburg or early eleventh-century Normandy as seen by Orderic, but so would a southern French or Catalan Thietmar transform our view of the Midi.52 Fuller charter evidence would also transform our view of the Midi, of course: the reason why we tend to be offered comparisons of the tenth- and eleventh-century Midi with a more generalized Carolingian past is because the history of the ninth-century Midi is not rich enough. But what we can know is determined not only by the flavour of the sources, but also by the traditional recipes used to cook them, meaning the divergent traditions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiographies. The mutation féodale is a by-product of a very specific French historiographical tradition, that of the regional monograph. This in turn is firmly rooted in that deliberate avoidance of the concentration on rulers and their doings which the founders of the Annales school enjoined both by example and by precept; but to avoid one specific Grand Narrative is not to avoid them all, however, and the regional monographs of recent decades have, it seems to me, been just as indebted to those offered by G. Duby, P. Toubert and P. Bonnassie as older writing was to the étatiste tradition. The tradition has exported the mutation to Latium, Lombardy and Catalonia, and in Catalonia at least it is much in demand among the inhabitants; its apparent absence from England and the Reich may reflect as much as anything else the absence of this kind of study for these regions. I do not mean to argue that there is a fundamental flaw in the approach; on the contrary, these regional studies dripping with thick description are probably the most significant contribution in the post-war era of French, perhaps of any, historiography to our understanding of medieval society. 52

Cf. T. N. Bisson, ‘Unheroed Pasts: History and Commemoration in South Frankland before the Albigensian Crusades’, Speculum 65 (1990), pp. 281–308.

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We would almost certainly all be better off if there existed works with titles like Espaces ecclésiastiques et réseaux familiaux dans la Bavière Luitpoldingienne or Contestations et légitimations du pouvoir au bassin de la Tamise, VIIIe –XIe siècles. What I do mean to argue is that there is in this tradition – as equally, of course, in the English, German, Italian and Spanish historiographical traditions, all of which tend to avoid eye-contact with strangers – a specific way of looking at things.53 The seigneurie banale, whose origins, nature, extent and relation to public order are ultimately what this whole debate is about, seems to me, as a specialist in German history, to be something they have in Other Countries. But an Espaces ecclésiastiques et réseaux familiaux might well turn out to be full of it, just as an equally hypothetical German monograph on Adelsherrschaft und Reformmönchtum in Aquitanien des 10. Jahrhunderts would probably draw more on Selbstverständnis than on Grundherrschaft (itself not quite the same thing as seigneurie banale) for its conceptual apparatus. I could not be sure whether this would be because the French find seigneurie banale where the Germans find Selbstverständnis, or because one or the other or both really had been in the regions in question all along and I just had not known how or where to look for them; moreover, I suspect that most of us would not be able to choose. If we do not want the historiography of medieval Europe to remain a set of parallel universes explored by metonymy rather than comparison, we shall need to look much more explicitly and with much greater sophistication than has been usual at where we and our neighbours stand, and how we and they got there. 53

Thoughtful observations on this problem can be found in C. J. Wickham, ‘Problems of Comparing Rural Societies in Early Medieval Western Europe’, TRHS 6th ser. 2 (1992), pp. 222–5; see also my forthcoming inaugural lecture, ‘Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities’ [above, chapter 1].

chap t e r 5

Pre-Gregorian mentalities

Verwandte, Freunde und Getreue. Zum politischen Stellenwert der Gruppenbindungen im früheren Mittelalter. By Gerd Althoff. pp. xi + 237. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990. 3 534 04125 9 Amicitiae und Pacta. Bündnis, Einung, Politik und Gebetsgedenken im beginnenden 10. Jahrhundert. By Gerd Althoff. (Schriften der Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 37.) Pp. xxxii + 419. Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1992. 3 7552 5437 4 Living in the tenth century. Mentalities and social orders. By Heinrich Fichtenau. (Trans. by Patrick Geary of Lebensordnungen des 10. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart 1984.) Pp. xxi + 472. Chicago–London: University of Chicago Press, 1991. £39.95. 0 226 24620 5 Ottonian book illumination. An historical study. 2 vols. I: Themes; II: Books. By Henry Mayr-Harting. Pp. 271, 36 colour plates, 118 black and white plates; pp. 299, 25 colour plates, 142 black and white plates. London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1991. £48 per volume. 0 90520 389 5; 0 90520 390 9

‘The world of the tenth century is, or ought to be, strange to us, much stranger than that of the twelfth with its lyrical, individualistic, witty and rationalizing traits. Its kings, clerks, poets and women, even its saints, were beginning to have more in common with us than they did with their Carolingian and Ottonian forbears . . . [they] can be understood on many levels, some of them very demanding and dominated by exacting philological disciplines and critical methodology, others ruled by imagination and sensitiveness alone. Widukind of Corvey and his contemporaries cannot be understood like that.’1 The authors whose work is to be reviewed here have implicitly accepted Karl Leyser’s judgement of a decade ago. Rather than the imaginative and sensitive reconstruction of individual consciousness 1

Karl Leyser, Rule and conflict in an early medieval society: Ottonian Saxony (London, 1979), p. 1. For a similar contrast see also Mayr-Harting, Ottonian book illumination, II, p. 183.

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in the manner of Powicke, Southern and Brooke, they prefer to use often unfamiliar aspects of familiar sources – well-known historiographical and hagiographical texts in the case of Althoff and Fichtenau, equally wellknown manuscript illustrations in the case of Mayr-Harting – in order to reconstruct the collective consciousness and behaviour patterns of a world dominated by rituals, ceremonies and gestures. The very existence of such thought- and behaviour-patterns has often been overlooked, and even when they have been noticed their meanings still do not leap from the page but must be painstakingly teased out. Althoff has for some years now been working on the ritual and nonverbal elements of the politics of the German Reich from the ninth to the twelfth centuries and the two books pull together much of his work so far, without by any means bringing it to a close.2 Of the two books, Verwandte, Freunde und Getreue has a much wider geographical and temporal span than Amicitiae, which is concerned to set some peculiar and prominent forms of behaviour in the post-Carolingian era against their Carolingian background. Both books are fine examples of what Johannes Fried has called the ‘new constitutional history’,3 seeking as they do to reconstruct the rules and norms (rather than the laws and institutions) which governed political behaviour. The thesis of Amicitiae is that in the Carolingian era rulers kept their distance from their magnates, and tried to restrict the scope of mutual obligations. In the post-Carolingian world this distance closed: rulers and magnates became each other’s ‘friends’. This is visible not just in Henry I’s dealings with his great magnates at the beginning of his reign – he entered into amicitiae with them and ostentatiously refused to set himself apart from them by accepting unction – but also in the large numbers of group entries of the names of laymen, living and dead, in libri memoriales in the first third of the century. These Althoff interprets convincingly as the fossilised record of those occasions when such groups realised themselves by having themselves collectively commemorated, not least as part of the necessary preparations for the coming wars against the Hungarians, for which it was essential that the east Frankish elite sank its internal differences. For those who have often been puzzled by the obsessive interest taken by many 2

3

See most recently G. Althoff, ‘Konfliktverhalten und Rechtsbewußtsein: die Welfen in der Mitte des 12. Jahrhunderts’, FMS 26 (1992), pp. 331–52, and ‘Demonstration und Inszenierung. Spielregeln ¨ der Kommunikation in mittelalterlicher Offentlichkeit’, FMS 27 (1993). For West Francia the recent study by G. Koziol, Begging pardon and favor: ritual and political order in early medieval France (Ithaca, 1992), should also be noted. Johannes Fried, Die Formierung Europas, 840–1046 (Munich, 1991), pp. 154–8, though Fried has a much broader spectrum of work in mind, not all of which would fit into the category approved above.


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German medievalists in these unpromising sources, Althoff’s work provides en passant an invaluable guide to the changes of direction in these obsessions as well as a demonstration in the long documentary section of just how refined are the methods now being used to deal with these sources.4 It is now clear that they will not, as was once hoped, yield a significant clarification of the genealogical problems of the ninth and tenth centuries; but they will, properly interrogated, tell us much about the group consciousness both of religious communities and of associations of members of lay elites. Verwandte, Freunde und Getreue is an attempt at a historical sociology of group formation among the political elites of the Carolingian and postCarolingian kingdoms, running from the early eighth century up to the emergence of rationality and of the juridification of political life in the late twelfth century: family groups based on kinship and artificial kinship; co-operative groups based on forms of association such as amicitia and coniuratio; hierarchical groups based on lordship, such as followings and magnates in their collective relationship to rulers. It might at first seem that this is conventional Verfassungsgeschichte, but a glance at its pages will distinguish it from the way in which older writers like Kern or Mitteis dealt with very similar subject-matter – not least in the clarity of its argument and in its refusal to burden the reader with immense bibliographical footnotes. Charters and law codes play a subordinate role; the rich illustrations drawn from primary sources are almost all taken from historiographical and hagiographical texts (with a strong bias towards the east Frankish/German kingdom). Althoff sets out to establish the rules of the political game as understood by its players, and the three core chapters on relatives, friends and followers are bracketed by an opening survey of the historiography which sets the agenda for the study and by a closing chapter on rituals: demonstrative forms of behaviour; the regulation of political debate and of conflict; the celebration of community in banquets and ceremonies. Fichtenau’s book, first published in German in 1984,5 is here translated into English by Patrick Geary, who has in this way put us all in his debt: the result is very readable, occasionally perhaps a little over-literal.6 The 4 5 6

Althoff, Amicitiae, pp. 37–9, 54–68. Lebensordnungen des 10. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1984), 2 vols. paginated as one, republished in full in a single-volume paperback, Munich 1992. Our debt to the publishers is rather less, because the footnotes have been dropped at their insistence and replaced by brief chapter bibliographies and references to the sources for the most important episodes discussed. This seems all the more regrettable in that Fichtenau’s footnotes are helpfully primary rather than heavily secondary. Moreover, any space saved has simply been squandered on self-indulgently ugly typography of the kind produced by people more interested in design than in books. The index is also much less full than that in the original, especially as regards subject-matter,

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work will stand comparison with Marc Bloch’s wonderful evocation of a whole world and way of life in La Société féodale. It has an elegant structure, of which tenth-century rhetoricians and exegetes would certainly have approved, with an arching form divided into six sections: ‘ordo’, ‘familia’, ‘nobilitas’, ‘religio’, ‘vulgus’, ‘confusio’. Each sub-group of three parallels and reflects the other. Below the section level the ordering is often unexpected (usually in an enlightening way): bishops, for example, appear not so much under ‘religio’ as in the third section on ‘nobilitas’ (with some pages in the first section on ‘ordo’). Fichtenau claims in his preface to be reviving the almost extinct genre of Kulturgeschichte; like its older exponents, he relies heavily on hagiographical texts for his exposition, but unlike them he does not simply accumulate details in a positivistic manner but puts them together in a highly evocative interpretation. His experience in diplomatic also allows him to draw on unpromising charter material where appropriate. His work completely belies the notion of the tenth century as being ‘poor in sources’; there are few aspects of the life of the lay and clerical elites of the period which are not discussed and illustrated with telling examples. Mayr-Harting’s work, divided into two separate but related volumes, is more difficult to summarise both in its intentions and its results.7 The author in his preface likens the relationship between religion and politics in Ottonian society to the interplay of violin and viola in the slow movement of Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante, but the book which has this relationship as its principal subject is neither so binary in form nor so monophonic in texture. A better parallel would be a Purcell Fantasia for strings: a work with a rich polyphonic and thematic texture, so complex in form and structure as to make it impossible for listeners to tell on first hearing what point they are at, which is another way of saying that the work will repay careful rereading.

7

and it occasionally conflates two persons into one: the entry for Balderich confuses Balderich, bishop of Liège, with the Westfalian count of the same name, and that for Thangmar does not distinguish between Otto I’s half-brother and the biographer of Bernward of Hildesheim, for example. Here again some criticism must be made in passing of the presentation, though there are no aesthetic grounds for complaint. The volumes look and feel superb; the difficulty lies in using them. The plates are interspersed among the text but the footnotes relegated to the back of each of the two volumes. Since many of the illustrations are referenced not just by the immediately juxtaposed text, this means a great deal of page-turning and inserting of book-markers if one wishes to follow the argument closely. The work would actually have been easier to use, though no doubt less aesthetically pleasing, if the text had been placed in one volume and the bibliography, plates and footnotes in another (which would also have saved the duplication of bibliographies). The reproductions, both in colour and in black and white, seem to be of very high quality, though this reviewer, who is not so far as he knows colour-blind, was unable to distinguish the two shades of blue in colour plate I referred to in vol. I, p. 45.


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Summarised crudely, the first volume is about the new and fresh attention paid in Ottonian – as compared with Carolingian – ‘court’ art to the life of Christ and about the links between this and contemporary religiosity and political theology. The second volume moves on from a further discussion of this topic, centred around the Bamberg Apocalypse MSS, to discussions of provincial centres, each of which brings out a particular point: Trier under Egbert and its parallels (art and the Reichskirche), Cologne (as a contrast to the ‘Reichenau-centred idea of Ottonian art’),8 Fulda (art and the sacramental/pastoral work of a missionary church), Corvey (Carolingian–Ottonian continuity and links through the Vitus-cult with political mission in Prague). It concludes by drawing a contrast between the Christocentric art of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries (‘magical, ritualistic and iconic’) and the ecclesiocentric art of the Gregorian era (‘a new art of rationality and textual study’),9 though the roots of the later development are shown by Mayr-Harting to lie in elements of Ottonian art itself. Mayr-Harting addresses himself both to art historians and to those more ‘ordinary’ historians who may be expected to read this Journal. His task is even more difficult than those which Fichtenau and Althoff have set themselves, since while to read – if not ‘read’ in the sense used in current literary criticism – annals and saints’ Lives no more than a good knowledge of Latin is required, it is immediately apparent that Ottonian art is not so readily approachable. Post-medieval ideas of realism and representation place barriers between us and it more evidently than they do between us and the Latin literature of the age (though as we shall see, this is at least in part an illusion). As Mayr-Harting repeatedly reminds us, tenth-century artists and patrons, though their learning can often be deduced from their iconography, did not make use of this learning to leave us explicit statements of their aesthetic principles. Our formulations of their aesthetic can be tested – somewhat subjectively – for internal coherence; but there are no contemporary formulations to be interrogated.10 Moreover, even if only half of the lost models and intermediaries posited by Mayr-Harting and by the scholars whose work he subjects to critical review really did once exist – and however compelling the arguments may appear in any individual case, the cumulative effect of such arguments, as with their parallels in textual criticism, is to populate the past with an immense number of ghosts, not 8 10

9 Ibid., II, p. 183. Mayr-Harting, Ottonian book illumination, II, p. 99. For a twelfth-century example see Jean-Claude Bonne, ‘Depicted gesture, named gesture: postures of the Christ on the Autun Tympanum’, History and Anthropology 1 (1984), pp. 77–95.

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all of which, one feels, were ever anything more than that11 – the context of what we still have seems even more fragmentary than that of the literature of the period: the contextual elements of wall painting and tapestry, for example, have hardly survived at all. It is primarily the area covered by the successor-states to the Carolingian empire which appears in these works. In view of the immense linguistic and source-critical problems raised by the Norse and Icelandic sagas it is perhaps not surprising that these have found no mention,12 and the Latin sources for Norse, Slav and Magyar history in the tenth and early eleventh centuries are also much later than the period they record and correspondingly difficult to use. But the contemporary hagiography and historiography of Anglo-Saxon England, post-Visigothic Spain and postLombard southern Italy might profitably have been drawn on more fully to enrich texture and insight without too much risk or difficulty, as MayrHarting in fact has done to illuminate his discussion of Ottonian art. Though the present reviewer inclines to the view (as implicitly do the authors here reviewed, except Mayr-Harting when in search of influences and models) that the contemporary Byzantine and Islamic worlds were so different as not to be comparable with that of post-Carolingian Latin Europe, this also perhaps needs demonstrating rather than assuming. It should be added that we are inevitably dealing with elites. Fichtenau’s section on vulgus is noticeably different in texture from the other chapters, being based far more on secondary works (though also on the impressive interdisciplinary work now being done on material remains). Althoff, even in his more general Verwandte, Freunde und Getreue, rarely descends below the level of the military following; yet the dealings between the members of elites and the rural masses on whom they depended and who in their turn found group identity not least in their relation to a common lord were also subject to norms and rules expressed in rituals, a topic which badly needs further exploration.13 11

12

13

Though the recovery of fragments of a ninth-century Turonian Bible at Trier whose existence had already been posited (Mayr-Harting, Ottonian book illumination, II, pp. 209–11) shows, as with parallel examples of sources whose existence was first deduced by nineteenth-century Quellenkritik and which later did indeed turn up in manuscript form, that such methods are not to be dismissed out of hand. However, the method applied to these by current American Icelandic specialists – in effect, to treat the world depicted by the sagas as if it were real – bears a strong resemblance to the way Althoff, Fichtenau and Koziol handle more familiar tenth-century Latin sources. See C. Wickham, ‘Problems of comparing rural societies in early medieval Western Europe’, TRHS 6th ser. 2 (1992), pp. 221–46, at pp. 238–40, for discussion and bibliography, and below, n. 18. As noted by Wickham, ‘Problems’, p. 244.


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What these very disparate works have in common is their willingness to engage with the mind-set of a world we have lost, a world which experienced no great break or threshold between the sacred and the secular, unlike the apparently more rational post-Gregorian world which succeeded it. Indeed, it becomes apparent that the emphasis on purity, on cleansing the sacred from contamination by the secular, so characteristic of the later eleventh and early twelfth centuries, accompanied as it was by rationality and juridification, led merely to a world in which the sacred subsisted in a more clearly defined sphere of its own but at the same time exerted less influence on the secular, which now equally possessed its own sphere.14 In the pre-Gregorian world also – whatever view is taken about the role played by literacy and orality in the ninth or the twelfth centuries – the oral was at least as important as the written: it was a world which depended in all kinds of ways on non-verbal communication in the form of ritual, ceremony and gesture. It is precisely the success of Althoff, Fichtenau and Mayr-Harting in coming to terms – in very various ways – with this world which provokes some uncertainties and methodological reflections. It is often said (by historians) that the difference between historians and social anthropologists is that the former cannot interrogate their informants. This, however, is to underestimate literary and rhetorical elements in the practice of social anthropologists which they themselves no longer neglect: the division between ‘field work’ and ‘writing up’ necessarily means that at the time when the account of the foreign society is being prepared for its professional audience such interrogation is difficult if not impossible. The real difference is rather that field-workers have not only their notes and tape-recordings but also their memories and their understandings of the context to guide them in the interpretation of these notes (as did the tenthand eleventh-century authors whose works we try to understand), whereas historians must construct their memories and understandings as it were from the notes and tape-recordings alone. In the brief accounts of ritual and symbolic behaviour used by Fichtenau, Althoff and Koziol we necessarily have only skeletons or abstractions of complete rituals, and we can often not be sure that we are being told everything. It is as if art historians had only summary sketches and card indexes of iconography to practise on, all the originals having been destroyed by time. A good example of this is the much discussed ritual banquet following Otto I’s coronation in 14

This is the central thesis, stated with far more subtlety and power, of G. Tellenbach, Die westliche Kirche vom 10. bis zum frühen 12. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1988), now translated by the present reviewer as The Church in Western Europe from the tenth to the early twelfth century (Cambridge, 1993).

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936, at which the king was served by the dukes; the meaning of this event, together with that of its rerun in 986 during the minority of Otto III, is in a general sense clear enough, but we do not have enough views of either ceremony to say precisely what they meant – and they may not have meant the same things to all participants and observers.15 The restrictions imposed by writing in a learned language may have led to the use of one Latin word to describe rather different things, as for example in the much discussed pacta of the reigns of Henry I and Otto I.16 Contemporaries themselves could have problems deciding what rituals and symbols meant: even an act obviously charged with public meaning like Lothar’s reversal of the eagle on the palace at Aachen in 978 could be given quite differing interpretations by Richer of Rheims and Thietmar of Merseburg.17 It is inherent in this language of ritual, symbolism and gesture that it allows, like all languages, for ambiguity and multiple levels of meaning. To read the historiography and hagiography of the pre-Gregorian era like anthropological field workers’ notebooks is in any case to take some risks. There is an old-fashioned question of Quellenkritik which the last two generations of medievalists have learned to duck under elegantly and wave a hand at: ist es eigentlich gewesen? Althoff and Fichtenau would argue that this is not the point: that the episodes and anecdotes we have to deal with are coherent in themselves, and can be taken in a spirit of se non é vero é ben trovato.18 Certainly there is a sense in which it need not matter what is ‘true’; but it still makes a difference – or ought to – to our view of the rituals and behaviour patterns of the tenth and early eleventh centuries whether we think they really happened or are confined to the pages of Thietmar of Merseburg or Dudo of Saint-Quentin. The usual fix for this is to say that while we can discern fictional or ‘literary’ elements in historiography and 15 16 17

18

Koziol, Begging pardon, pp. 307–8, has a helpful discussion of the inherent ‘polysemy’ of rituals and ceremonies; but much of this is necessarily lost to us. On these see Althoff, Verwandte, Freunde und Getreue, III-13, and more extensively in Amicitiae, pp. 75–81, 88–96. Richer, Historiae III, p. 71, ed. R. Latouche (Paris, 1937), p. 88: the eagle was by custom turned towards the kingdom against which the king possessing Aachen was making war; Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon III. c. 8, ed. R. Holtzmann (Berlin, 1935), p. 106: the eagle was by custom turned towards the kingdom of the king possessing Aachen. ‘It does not follow from this that every detail must have occurred as Widukind depicts it. But the account must be taken seriously as the statement of a well-informed observer’: Althoff, Amicitiae, p. 92, n. 286; ‘Whether the entire story is fiction, or only its combination with the anecdote concerning the death plot, is unimportant’: Fichtenau, Living in the tenth century, p. 27, and, in similar vein, pp. 126, 248, 386, 416. See also Koziol, Begging pardon, p. 117: ‘Robert Latouche, Richer’s editor, believed that none of this really happened; but that hardly matters. What matters is that this is how Richer wanted the event to be remembered. This is how it should have happened.’


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hagiography,19 and can correct for these by taking such things as topoi and narrative motifs into account, the incidental details of such episodes can be taken as reliable, because the authors must have been concerned to present a realistic or plausible story to their audience. Here the wish seems father to the thought. Our notions of ‘realism’ and ‘plausibility’ can no more be assumed to have been those of the tenth century than can modern ideas of realism and representationalism be applied to pre-Gregorian art. Indeed, in a world pregnant with symbolism and familiar with multiple layers of meaning and exegesis in its dealings with the texts which had come down to it, it would be dangerous to assume that in its own production of texts the details which to us seem merely incidental to the narrative flow were offered simply to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing topos. This becomes even more crucial when we are confronted with something which is not merely incidental detail but a central part of the narrative. What are we to make, for example, of the ‘realism’ of writers like Wipo, drawn on at several points by Fichtenau and by Althoff in Verwandte, Freunde und Getreue?20 This is not to advocate a return to a destructively positivist hypercriticism, as has recently been applied to writers like Widukind and Richer by Carlrichard Brühl;21 it is merely to ask that we should be told whether we are dealing with an imaginaire with nothing more than its own internal coherence or one with some objective correlatives. A parallel can be found in the difficulty faced up to (if not wholly resolved) by Mayr-Harting. If with historical and hagiographical works we are unsure how far the stories we interpret with our anthropological eye correspond to some kind of past reality, whatever we may understand by that, so with the illuminations there is a similar uncertainty, seen most clearly in the Herrscherbilder themselves. Whose understanding of the ruler do they reflect, and to whom do they speak? These are questions which cannot wholly be resolved by a closer analysis of the relationship between patron and artist, or of the actual use made of the codices once created by clerics and donated by rulers to other clerical establishments, though both 19

20 21

And indeed in such things as charters, law codes and ordines, which we must also learn to treat as forms of literature with their own rhetorical conventions. The old distinction between objective and subjective types of source – nowhere leaned on more trustingly than in that offshore island many of whose high and late medievalists are still all too prone to suppose that ‘record evidence’, once the discrimen veri et falsi has been made, will tell the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth – looks less and less plausible and helpful. Fichtenau, Living in the tenth century, pp. 173, 176, 179, 385–6; Althoff, Verwandte, Freunde und Getreue, pp. 81, 115–16, 131, 172–3, 199. Deutschland–Frankreich: die Geburt zweier Nationen (Cologne, 1990), passim, esp. pp. 421–4 on Widukind, and pp. 564, 589–93 on Richer.

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are important, and Mayr-Harting’s book is crucial not least for the way in which he helps to dissolve those reified constructs, the ‘court’ and the ‘scriptorium’ or (artists’) ‘school’. We find it easier to examine the way in which the miniatures – not just those depicting contemporary secular rulers in idealised form, but others as well – reflect and gloss each other as well as both the texts they accompany and a fairly restricted set of additional texts used for the exegesis of liturgy and Scripture, than to show how this apparently closed and self-mirroring system of aesthetics and theology related to other forms of belief more visibly reflected in action. A number of writers before Mayr-Harting, notably Ernst Kantorowicz and Lothar Bornscheuer, have talked about the ‘Christocentric’ or ‘Christomimetic’ kingship of the Ottonians, but almost always in the same important but limited context of high art and high liturgy.22 Here too the multiplicity of meaning can present problems, as when Mayr-Harting sees Christocentric symbolism in Thietmar’s account of Henry II’s imperial coronation in 1014.23 We still know little enough about Ottonian Christomimesis during the remaining hours of the day and days of the year, though there is not nothing to be known. When Thietmar of Merseburg says in connection with a royal judgement given against his relatives ‘omnes populi mussant et christum Domini peccare occulte clamant’,24 is he translating a complaint in fact formulated quite differently (if at all) into his own high clerical terms, or is he offering us evidence that Christomimesis was indeed taken seriously more widely and indeed used as a standard by which to measure the behaviour of real live kings on other occasions? A certain reluctance to confront the question of objective correlatives explicitly and head-on seems a curious echo, no doubt an unconscious one, of ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’. In view of the significance of texts qua texts in the new constitutional history we should perhaps pay more attention to recent and current work in literary criticism, not in order to take over shifting theories and approaches en bloc but to allow these to provide us with new insights and new ways of looking at things while permitting us to remain what we are, much as many of us would now with far less hesitation and scruple consult the work of sociologists and social 22 23

24

But see also Leyser, Rule and conflict, pp. 75–107, for an attempt to see Christomimetic rulership in a broader context. Mayr-Harting, Ottonian book illumination, I, p. 65 and n. 26, referring to Thietmar, Chronicon VII, c. 1, p. 396, who describes Henry’s reception by twelve senators, ‘quorum VI rasi barba, alii prolixa mistice incedebant cum baculis’. This may be an allusion, as Mayr-Harting thinks, to depictions of Christ in Majesty with the apostles; but it may equally refer to Aaron and Moses (cf. Psalm 132, 3, one of the Vulgate’s rare references to beards), or to both, or to something else entirely. Thietmar, Chronicon VII, c. 8, p. 406.


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anthropologists without ceasing to be historians. There is otherwise the danger of a ‘double truth’ emerging in our work, allowing us both to read texts as texts in the various manners made available by critical theory and to practise more traditional Quellenkritik, without any pressure to resolve the resultant conflicts and contradictions. One final point may be made: the study of the archaic and ritualised elements of pre-Gregorian culture may lead to an implicit misreading of the post-Gregorian world, though it would of course be quite unfair to make our authors responsible for this. The attractive modernity of a John of Salisbury or an Heloise, the apparent rationality and secularity of a Roger II or Henry II, the introspectiveness and religious sensibility of an Anselm of Canterbury or a Bernard of Clairvaux can all seduce us into seeing them as having been much closer to us than they actually were. The alterity of European culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, both sacred and secular, is badly in need of rediscovery and re-emphasis. One approach will certainly be the application of the methods deployed in the works reviewed here to the artistic and literary sources for Western Europe in the high Middle Ages.

chap t e r 6

Whose race, whose ethnicity? Recent medievalists’ discussions of identity

The title says ‘medievalists’; but I’m not going to cover the whole of the Middle Ages. I want to concentrate on the period between Late Antiquity (starting, say, around 300/350) and the Great European Shift which lies somewhere between 980 and 1130 and which has been conceptualised in a whole range of different ways we don’t need to go into here. As I’ll explain shortly, this is a period in which questions of ethnicity have become highly though not universally significant to medievalists. I did a search through the International Medieval Bibliography CD-ROM, as one does, in preparation for this talk, using the obvious keywords, and even after I’d eliminated all the entries where identity was used in a positivist sense and other such ‘false hits’, there were still a staggeringly large number of articles touching on the subject – I’d guess about 800–1,000 in the past twenty-five years. They turn out to have been distributed quite unevenly across Europe, but although, as you will see, that is grist to my argumentative mill, I’m not going to make too much of it without knowing more than I do about the IMB’s coverage and selection policy. Now, setting this in the thematic context of this conference, I’d make some qualifications. Questions of identity and ethnicity have been of considerable interest. Questions of race have not – few people use the term, and related forms of terminology have been sanitised (e.g. the use by the Vienna school of Ethnogenese, ethnogenesis, rather than Stammesformierung, the making of tribes). True, there is more evidence than some early medievalists have been prepared to admit for group hostilities in the period before about 1000. It is true that these are much better evidenced in the high Middle Ages (think of John Gillingham’s work on the emergence of the Celtic stereotype in the course of the twelfth century [Gillingham 1992a, 1992b, 1995, 2000]), but I think there is already evidence of similar attitudes earlier, This paper was read at the Anglo-American Historians’ Conference in London in July 1999, ‘Race and Ethnicity’.

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e.g. in the writings of Saxon historians of the tenth century. But I wouldn’t want to claim that these attitudes were primary. For early medievalists, ethnicity is not about race; it’s about (or not about) nationality. Discussions of who they were are often ghostly counterparts of discussions about who we are and where we’ve come from, as I’ll be trying to show. As a result, some forms of group consciousness have seemed much more interesting and promising than others. There are serious difficulties in doing all this work, as indeed in any work on early medieval history. The first is one which I guess is common to work on this subject in any period and geographical area, but particularly so here: the difficulty of distinguishing between externally and internally defined group identities, or rather of extrapolating from the former to the latter. This is notoriously true in the case of the Germans, for example, a particularly well-studied example of group identity. They appear to others as Germans long before they seem to have appeared to themselves as Germans. But it is true of this period much more generally; there is a contrast here with more recent eras, when it is often argued that groups define themselves by looking at others – in the first millennium, the definition of others does not appear to have much to do with the definition of self. The second is even more problematic: it is the question of typicality. Much of our evidence has of necessity to be derived from the terminology used by usually isolated historians and hagiographers. Group expressions of ethnicity simply don’t exist for this period. Any naive notions we might once have had about ethnicity being plausibly and reconstructibly correlated with what archaeologists call ‘material culture’ have long since been dispelled. To quote Steve Shennan: ‘“Ethnicity” may . . . be a rather special kind of group-identity . . . [but] if . . . patterns of group definition are shortterm and fluctuating . . . then any material aspect of them may not be detectable at the relatively low levels of chronological resolution normally available to prehistorians’ [Shennan 1989: 19, 21]. What we are left with is individual utterances by individual minds, and it is rarely possible for us to be able to reconstruct a sufficiently complete context for the utterances to interpret them with certainty. The idea that we can reach relatively high statistical probability when extrapolating from our fragmentary and pointilliste evidence to the ethnic models pursued by individual members of an ethne seems horribly optimistic to me. The third difficulty is that we don’t in any case know much about early medieval forms of group consciousness of any kind (at least I don’t think we do, though from very differing perspectives both Otto Gerhard Oexle and Susan Reynolds might disagree [Oexle 1996; Reynolds 1997]). There

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are one or two minor and well-studied exceptions, like monastic convents or high aristocratic families, but neither offers us a very close parallel or analogue. As an example to illustrate some of these issues, let me offer you the Avars – for those of you who’ve not met them, the nomadic ruling class of a Balkan empire which existed from the mid-sixth century until its defeat by the Carolingians in the 790s. Following these defeats, residual Avar groups continue to appear in Frankish sources until about the 820s; by the 870s the author of The Conversion of the Bavarians and the Carentani is already talking about peoples who had formerly been Avars. The tenth-century patriarch of Constantinople, Nicholas Mystikos, talks of their disappearing, while the Russian Tale of Bygone Years (twelfth-century in the form we have it) quotes a proverbial saying ‘they vanished away like the Avars’. So here we have an ethnic grouping vanishing before people’s eyes. What we don’t have is any really readable internal evidence to play back this intriguing process to us. Walter Pohl, an extremely bright Viennese historian who has written the definitive history of the Avars, has argued that ‘it simply proved impossible to keep up an Avar identity after Avar institutions and the high claims of their tradition had failed’ [Pohl 2003: 574]; but we don’t know when or how Avar identity ceased to be meaningful to Avars, though clearly it must have done at some point, since there aren’t any now. It’s far from clear that Avars thought they were Avars when they still were Avars, if you see what I mean. Much of the most significant and methodologically interesting work has been done on the very early part of my period, and it’s been done in the face of sparse and often oblique sources. The two great heroes are two German-speaking scholars, Reinhard Wenskus and Herwig Wolfram [Wenskus 1961; Wolfram 1979]. Between them, they helped in the 1960s and 1970s to establish a much more fluid notion of what early medieval ethnicity was: I’ve just shown you the Avars passing away, but a few centuries earlier we can find peoples coming into being, a process for which the more or less uncontested term Ethnogenese, ethnogenesis, was coined by Wenskus and Wolfram. Groups of varied ethnic origins (though that statement of course begs questions in itself ) coalesce around a ‘core of tradition’, historical myth-making encompassing ‘primordial deeds’, which created a sense of commonness – rather as it does in the case of many modern political parties, a parallel which may or may not be significant. That point itself has taken some time to be established; both Wenskus and Wolfram have depicted the earlier state of scholarship, with a hint but only a hint of parody, as conceiving peoples as being fixed, capable only of changing their names


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(so that the early medieval Saxons corresponded to the Tacitean Chauci, and the major issue in deciding where the Bavarians came from when they arrived in the early sixth century is in identifying them with some earlier group). It is possible to parody their position in turn as being one of flux followed by fixation: there is a period of ethnogenesis, but then we have the people; ethnogenesis, like history, comes to a full stop; it takes some time to make the Bavarians out of whatever mix we choose to stress, but once made they are there. More recently, members and associates of Wolfram’s Vienna school like Walter Pohl and Pat Geary have come to see early medieval ethnicity as ‘reproduced through ethnic practice’ and, in Pat Geary’s phrase, ‘a situational construct’ [Pohl 1997: 8; Geary 1983]. If Renan’s nation was une plébiscite de tous les jours, early medieval ethnicity was une pratique de tous les jours. This is undoubtedly an advance on unchanging peoples. But I’m not sure where it gets us. Just as philosophers of consciousness are very uncertain that we can tell what it means to be a bat, so I am very uncertain what it means to be a Goth or an Alan, or whatever – beyond this putative membership of a community bound by common memories. Goths or Alans or whatever, as groups, we can manage; they make up that series of waves of which history is chiefly composed. But being an individual Goth is something else again. Pat Geary has stressed, with lots of good evidence, that even external viewers could impute varying forms of ethnicity to an individual, depending on the context; presumably the individual himself (it is, almost invariably, himself ) could do so as well, and not necessarily in the same way. There’s been a lot of work done recently on whether names constitute ethnic markers; the answer appears increasingly to be that they don’t in this period, so far as we can tell. It used to be thought that the rulers of Rhaetia, the Victorids, must have been ‘Roman’ relicts, because of their consistent use of ‘Roman’ names (like Victor, most conspicuously). But in terms of ‘biological ethnicity’ this now appears not to be the case [Wolfram 1985, 1987: 113–15]; and it is not even clear that their Roman names meant that they felt Roman. Whatever that might mean; because I don’t think we’d be a great deal further advanced if everything else remained pretty much equal except that we were indeed in a position to show that names were ethnic markers. There is a further, very important point, which Pat Geary has stressed and which I would like to reinforce: not only are you more likely to have ethnicity ascribed to you the higher up the social ladder you are, you are more likely to have it in contexts of high politics. Ethnicity appears to have lit up in the presence of rulers in much the same way as fluorescent clothing

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does in the presence of street-lighting. That is a statement derived from external attributions, of course, but my guess is that it would be equally true of self-attribution, were we to know anything much about that; in other words, our knowledge of what it means to be a high-class Goth is extensive compared with our understanding of what it means to be a Goth in the street. The period I’m choosing to look at is significant not just for this early phase of badly documented and difficult to understand ethnogenesis, but, in a rather later part of it, for somewhat better documented if no easier to understand natiogenesis, if I can coin a new term. This is such an obvious point that I don’t need to labour it: the Warsaw conference of 1968 on the origins of European nations in the ninth to eleventh centuries, for instance, and the Barraclough formulation ‘The Crucible of Europe’ [Barraclough 1976], suggest that something like the map of much of present-day Europe starts to appear between 850 and 1050. If you want it laboured at greater length, let me put in a plug here for the introduction I’ve written to the third volume of The New Cambridge Medieval History [Reuter 1999]. Many of the points I’ve made about really early medieval ethnicity apply here also: it’s no clearer what it means – if anything – to be an eleventh-century German on the street than a sixth-century Goth on the street; ethnicity, or ‘nationality’, is a situational construct and a class marker; and so on. What I want to stress is that these are forms of past consciousness which potentially matter to us, where the earlier ones do not. Broadly speaking, the Spaniards aren’t Visigoths; the Italians aren’t Lombards; the French aren’t Franks. Bits of these traditions might be significant, but only bits (for example, the Visigoths as founders of Spanish National Catholicism). There are minor exceptions, of course: the Bavarians are indeed Bavarians, and celebrated 488 enthusiastically if for no very strong reason. True, many of us are Anglo-Saxons – but Anglo-Saxon is (a) a late ninth/tenth-century formulation and not an early medieval one, so it fits quite well with the generalisation I’m making (b) in current usage, by De Gaulle out of Kipling, rather than expressing any more serious continuity with the early medieval past. Now you can best see what historians have made of this by taking a quick tour around European historiographical traditions, looking at how these have variously dealt with ethnicity in the early Middle Ages. That sounds more authoritative than it is likely to be: let me remind you before I start of one of A. E. Housman’s best epigrams: ‘Like all pretenders to encyclopaedic knowledge, Wolff had more than a touch of the impostor about him.’ But with that caveat – no money back if not satisfied – let me divide Europe


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into a number of zones. The first is Club Med. On the whole, though in my judgement for rather different reasons, Italian, Spanish and French historians have shown comparatively little interest in questions of ethnogenesis, proto-nationalism, and so forth. Spanish historians have recently looked to this period to legitimise regional identities (a question I’ll come back to), but it doesn’t seem to me that anyone is terribly interested in the origins of Hispanidad any more. Nor are the Italians (I’ve checked this with Chris Wickham, who confirmed my rather uninformed suspicions). And the French definitely are not. It’s not just people like Michel Rouche refusing to see Aquitainianness in ethnic terms [Rouche 1979]; it’s the consistent rejection by French scholarship of Kienast’s suggestion that actually tenth-century West Francia had stem-duchies just like tenth-century East Francia [Kienast 1968]. There is a sense that France has always been French (hence the attraction of weird against-the-grain continuity theories) which rather stifles interest in ethnogenesis or the origins of nationalism. From my rather distant perspective it seems that for English historians (I’m going to leave the other three nations in the archipelago on one side because I don’t know enough to do otherwise, not because I want to sideline them) these themes have recently become more interesting. Ethnogenesis has crossed the channel in the last fifteen years or so, and affected views of the very early medieval period [Foot 1996; Pohl 1997]. It has had a much more selective effect on the later era. Compared with the attention which has been given to the emergence of Englishness, for instance, the disappearance of Mercianness (or its emergence, for that matter) is evidently not seen as significant, because there is a kind of historiographical blind spot for explaining why and how the English were and are one of the largest ethnic groups if not the largest in Europe with no real ethnic subdivisions. I think it’s fair to say that it’s the Germans (i.e. German-speakers) who’ve been most interested in these topics – I have already sketched some of the historiographical development. I would suggest a number of reasons for this. Most important probably is the questioning of past, self and identity following partition and Holocaust, especially given the repeated failure over the last 150 years of attempts to unite all German-speakers in a single nation. But there is also the obvious point that the Germans in the nineteenth century had already taken on a kind of historiographical protectorate over the ‘Germanic peoples’ of the first millennium, which allowed them to transcend national boundaries and write about most of early medieval Europe in a manner which was far from usual at that time. In eastern Europe, finally, I would say that the tenth century still matters a great deal, and consequently it has been difficult to come to terms

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with more recent approaches to ethnicity. Many Hungarian historians have difficulty in seeing the Magyars as a polyethnic confederation whose Magyarness emerged gradually as a result of the territorial settlement post-955; they prefer to see them coming fully formed across the Carpathians. Slovaks would like the Moravians as honorary ancestors. Rumanians and Greeks (rather like some schools of French historical writing) would like as much continuity and as little interruption as possible. I’m actually less familiar with these debates than it might sound, for obvious linguistic reasons, but I know enough to know that they exist, and to be able to make a guess at the reasons: for the inhabitants of polities which have had repeated interruptions and transformations in their existence, both territorially and politically, where ethnicity only partially corresponds to nationality or territorial boundaries, even the luxury of an apparently neutral attitude to the remote past is a rather expensive one. But the presentness of the post-Carolingian era is with us in western Europe as well. Some forms of past ethnic identity have seemed much more interesting than others. Perhaps the best example is Lotharingia, which is a well-documented but in my judgement not very well-studied case of ethnogenesis occurring before our very eyes, so to speak, even if it has rather unusual features (the people named for the ruler rather than the reverse). Lotharingianness carries no kick. This is not a systematic pattern of neglect of regional ethnicities, however; arguably the long-standing federalism of Germany and the recent devolution to regions in Spain has created a revival of interest there (just as political developments in this country have given certain kinds of historical ethnic differentiation fresh interest since the 1970s). I suppose the argument of this piece has been a twofold one. The first general point is that the investigation of ethnicity does not, in the end, tell us a great deal about what was going on in the period between 300 and 1100 except in respect of itself. An awareness of its slipperiness, its nature as a ‘situational construct’, its fluid and ongoing character, will perhaps save us from some obvious traps, but it will not in itself take us a great deal further. The second is the historiographical point that any analysis of how discussions of ethnicity, group consciousness, nationalism, WirGefühl etc. are rooted in the local historiographical tradition is rooted, in turn, in the specific political and historical development of its society. I’ll finish with a couple of reservations about this second point. The first of these is the familiar problem which arises when we try to do any kind of analysis of argument as ideology: Mannheim’s Paradox means in effect that there is no solid ground on which to stand whilst applying the lever of


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ideological analysis, because that analysis is itself inevitably and inherently ideological [Geertz 1973: 194]. In practice that can probably be overcome by the simple application of robust pragmatism. The second difficulty, that of professional competence, is more problematic. There is, of course, a sense in which one simply can’t be a historian without doing historiography, and in that sense we are all historiographers. Certainly it just isn’t possible to understand much about early medieval history without understanding how early medieval historians have been organised and professionally formed across Europe. But it’s also true that historiography is a discipline of its own with its own professional rules of engagement. That applies redoubled in spades, of course, to recent or contemporary cultural and intellectual history. Even if I can deal with my own ideological rootedness, why should anyone take seriously what a historian of early medieval Europe has to say about nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomena? I think at that point I’ll stop, before I start trying to prove that it’s actually not possible to do early medieval history at all.

ref eren c es [I have supplied details of a few references: JLN] Barraclough, Geoffrey 1976 The Crucible of Europe, London. Foot, Sarah 1996 ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity Before the Norman Conquest’, TRHS 6th ser. 6, pp. 25–49. Geary, Patrick 1983 ‘Ethnic Identity as a Situational Construct in the Early Middle Ages’, Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 113, pp. 15–26. Geertz, C. 1973 ‘Ideology as a Cultural System’, in his The Interpretation of Cultures, New York, pp. 193–233. Gillingham, John 1992a ‘The Beginnings of British Imperialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology 5(4), pp. 392–409. Gillingham, John 1992b ‘Conquering the Barbarians: War and Chivalry in TwelfthCentury Britain’, The Haskins Society Journal 4, pp. 67–84. Gillingham, John 1995 ‘Henry of Huntingdon and the Twelfth-Century Revival of the English Nation’, in S. Forde, L. Johnson and A. Murray eds., Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages, Leeds Texts and Monographs, pp. 75–101. Gillingham, John 2000 The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity and Political Values, Woodbridge [this collection of papers includes Gillingham 1992a, 1992b and 1995]. Kienast, Walther 1968 Der Herzogstitel in Frankreich und Deutschland (9. bis 12. Jahrhundert), Munich–Vienna. ¨ Oexle, Otto Gerhard 1996 ‘Gilde und Kommune. Uber die Entstehung von “Einung” und “Gemeinde” als Grundformen des Zusammenlebens in Europe’,

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in P. Blickle ed., Theorien kommunaler Ordnung in Europa, Schriften des historischen Kollegs Kolloquien, Oldenburg, pp. 75–97. Pohl, Walter 1988 Die Awaren. Ein Steppenvolk in Mitteleuropa, 567–822, Munich. Pohl, Walter 1997 ‘Ethnic Names and Identities in the British Isles: A Comparative Perspective’, in J. Hines ed., The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century: An Ethnographical Perspective, Woodbridge, pp. 7–40. Pohl, Walter 1998 ed., Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300–800, Leiden. Pohl, Walther 2003 ‘A Non-Roman Empire in Central Europe: The Avars’, in H.W. Goetz, J. Jarnut and W. Pohl eds., Regna et Gentes: The Relationship between Late Antique and Early Medieval Peoples and Kingdoms in the Transformation of the Roman World, Leiden, pp. 571–95. Reuter, Timothy 1999 ‘Introduction: Reading the Tenth Century’, The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. III, Cambridge, pp. 1–24. Reynolds, Susan 1997 Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300, 2nd edn, Oxford. Rouche, Michel 1979 L’Aquitaine des Wisigoths aux Arabes, 418–781, Paris. Shennan, Stephen J. 1989 ‘Introduction: Archaeological Approaches to Cultural Identity’, in S. J. Shennan ed., Archaeological Approaches to Cultural Identity, London, pp. 1–32. Wenskus, Reinhard 1961 Stammesbildung und Verfassung. Das Werden der frühmittelalterlichen Gentes, Cologne–Graz. Wolfram, Herwig 1979 Die Goten. Von den Anfängen bis zur Mitte des 6. Jahrhunderts, Munich. Wolfram, Herwig 1985 ‘Ethnogenesen im frühmittelalterlichen Donau- und Ostalpenraum (6. bis 10. Jahrhundert)’, Nationes 5, pp. 97–152. ¨ Wolfram, Herwig 1987 Die Geburt Mitteleuropas. Geschichte Osterreichs vor seiner Entstehung, Vienna.

part ii

The symbolic language of medieval political action

chap t e r 7

Nobles and others: the social and cultural expression of power relations in the Middle Ages This contribution was conceived as an exploration of some of the ways in which the evident power of the medieval ceti dirigenti was created and maintained,1 as a good opportunity to do some hard thinking about what seemed and still seems to me to be one of the most important issues facing medievalists. The return on investment has turned out lower than expected, and I am now certain that better scholars have been here and returned, if not empty-handed, then at any rate not bearing the armfuls they had initially hoped for. Although the source and nature of political, social and cultural power is a subject which historians in general and medievalists in particular have instinctively tended to shy away from, there is an extensive and highly sophisticated literature on the subject in the related disciplines of sociology and political science. I shall draw, tentatively, on some of this, without claiming anything like expert or comprehensive knowledge of the literature. The topic requires not an article but a large book; what is offered here is a series of possible entry points to the understanding of a complex of problems, and such answers as may appear are in the main highly provisional. One reason for the difficulties lies, as it so often does, in the development of historiographical tradition. We are all familiar with the medievalists’ division of labour in this area, though we may not have articulated that familiarity to ourselves. Power relations amongst the upper classes, for which we have from most periods a good deal of evidence, have been the object of subtle analyses, using a range of methodologies. Together, these constitute a modern approach to medieval political history, which includes not only traditional political narrative and constitutional history but also 1

The version published here retains much of the initial lecture form; the footnoting is light and bibliographically eclectic. Fuller bibliography may be found in the other papers in this volume [A. Duggan ed., Nobles and Nobility in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2000)] and in T. Reuter, ‘The Medieval Nobility in Twentieth-Century Historiography’, in M. Bentley ed., Companion to Historiography (London, 1997), pp. 177–201.

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what Johannes Fried has called neue Verfassungsgeschichte, ‘new institutional history’.2 With this, we know where we are and where we are going, even if the journey is not so certain as to become dull. The history of the exercise of aristocratic power over virtually everybody else is quite different. We have more evidence of the results of that exercise than of the exercise itself. Its investigation has often enough been left to economic historians, who have tended to treat it as a given in the short run and as determined by economic trends in the long run – as no doubt, amongst other things and taking the long run as the one in which we are all dead, it was. Relations between nobles, however defined, and peasants, however defined, are not only differently documented; historians (and usually different kinds of historian) have perceived and conceptualized them differently from relations amongst members of the ceti dirigenti. The same goes for relations between nobles and other town-dwellers, a separate subject about which little will be said here for reasons of space. Even Marxist and Marxisant historians, who have been governed by what still seems to me to be the essentially correct perception that the economics of exploitation in pre-capitalist modes of production depended on extra-economic coercion, have had relatively little to say about how that coercion actually functioned, and about whether to conceptualize it as a coercion which was always present and felt or as an ‘in-the-last-instance’ coercion which underlay other, subtler forms of domination, social control and interaction. A final difficulty to be mentioned at the outset is the sheer range of the subject, and the relative shortage of useful source-materials. It is the ‘long ancien régime’, from around 1300 to around 1800, which starts to have material of real substance to offer, and historians of the early and high Middle Ages working on this topic can only envy their late medieval and early-modern colleagues, who have material at their disposal which is simply not available to medievalists. Answers to many of the questions posed here are likely to be best provided by microhistory, but though we may admire the work of historians like Carlo Ginzberg, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, David Sabean or Alan MacFarlane we cannot easily emulate it, though we can draw on some of it for suggestive analogy and analysis.3 However, it is not only a matter of sources but of temporal and regional variation. We are here considering social relationships which might be 2 3

T. Reuter, ‘Pre-Gregorian Mentalities’, JEcclesH 45 (1994), pp. 465–74, at 466 [reprinted above, chapter 5]. D. Sabean, Power in the Blood (Cambridge, 1984), is particularly suggestive for the issues raised here.

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described as ‘classed’ or ‘casted’ (by analogy with ‘gendered’); but these relationships found articulations which were undoubtedly ‘gendered’, and were also ‘aged’ and ‘regioned’ and differentiated in other ways as well. Which may be no more than a rather neologistic way of saying that things varied a lot. In these circumstances, impressionistic generalizations cannot be the end-product, only a set of opening hypotheses, to be tested on the ground against specific power-relations in specific contexts. The basic question to be posed is ‘how did they get away with it’? The members of the elite strata of the societies we study as medievalists, at most times and in most places, were mainly concerned with competition amongst themselves to increase or maintain their share in the fruits of domination. It was in this competition that they appear to us and seem to have appeared to themselves to have invested the bulk of their time, energy and resources: the global domination of these strata over the rest of society was, so it seems, something which largely took care of itself. The Middle Ages are not unique in this, of course: it is characteristic of all human societies beyond the hunter-gatherer stage of development. What we have to do now is to move from banal generalization to investigation of the specific forms taken by this automatic and largely unchallenged domination in medieval western Europe. We should not, of course, ignore the contribution of direct and unmediated coercive force, in particular of bullying and brutality, to such dominance.4 To acknowledge that the medieval world was not run using permanent coercion, unlike, say, a slave-plantation or a gulag or a chain-gang, is not to rule out the possibility of the use of force altogether.5 In the early Middle Ages, at least, it was definitely on the agenda. Gregory of Tours offers a truly horrific story of a low-status couple who married against the will of their lord and took refuge in a church. The priest mediated a settlement by which the lord promised never to part them in life; but after they had emerged from the church he fulfilled his promise by having them buried alive in the same pit.6 Of course there are folktale overtones in this 4

5

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This is especially worth noting given a recurrent tendency amongst social and economic historians to stress the cooperative and communitarian elements in early medieval lord–peasant relationships; for a classic example see the debate between H. Vollrath, ‘Herrschaft und Genossenschaft im Kontext frühmittelalterlicher Rechtsberatungen’, HJ 101 (1981), pp. 33–71, and H.-W. Goetz, ‘Herrschaft und Recht in der frühmittelalterlichen Grundherrschaft’, HJ 104 (1984), pp. 392–410. Even in these examples, we still have to distinguish between the permanent and visible reminder of the possibility of coercion and its permanent exercise. Not even chained galley-slaves were whipped continuously. Gregory of Tours, Historiarum libri decem, vol. III, eds. B. Krusch and W. Levison, 2nd edn, MGH, SRM I/1 (Hannover, 1951), pp. 197–8.

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story, as in other anecdotes which turn on the oath which is observed to the letter while being broken in spirit (Isolde’s oath to Mark, for example, echoed in the close of Grettissaga, or the treachery practised by Hatto of Mainz against the Babenberger Adalbert). But here we are closer to reality. Nothing we know about the behaviour of Merovingian rulers and aristocrats towards each other suggests that they would have been incapable of such actions, and such behaviour was not confined to the barbarian era. Professor Bisson, I and others have recently been engaged in debating the nature of the Feudal Revolution, and while we have disagreed on many things, we are agreed that much tenth- and eleventh-century domination was established by methods confined in our own era to mafiosi and terrorists, whether state or otherwise.7 The inherent possibility of physical brutality lay behind much verbal and gestural brutality. Marc Bloch has a nice discussion of the case of a twelfth-century aristocrat, Joel, who was reclaiming possession of a serf, Warin, who had allegedly been freed by his father, because he was refusing to cooperate with Joel’s pious patronage of the monastery of Marmoutier. The Marmoutier notitia which records this gives Joel’s words as follows: ‘Greatly irritated against him, I told him that he was my collibertus, that I could sell him or burn him and give his land to whomever I wished, as being my collibertus’ land.’ Bloch commented, quite rightly, that there was no legally acknowledged right to burn servile dependents in twelfthcentury France, and noted that ‘no fire was lit and no confiscation took place’.8 The dispute ended with a settlement which was quite favourable to Warin. But to see Joel’s threats as mere idle bluster, designed to cover up his weakness when faced with a situation which he could not and in fact did not control, is to miss some of the point.9 He may not actually have been able to burn Warin (or even have intended to do so); but he lived in a world where he could make such threats with complete impunity and where perhaps not much could have stopped him from carrying them out 7

8 9

T. N. Bisson, ‘The “Feudal Revolution”’, P&P 142 (1994), pp. 5–42; D. Barthélemy, ‘Debate: The “Feudal Revolution” I’, P&P 152 (1996), pp. 196–205; S. D. White, ‘Debate: The “Feudal Revolution” II’, P&P 152 (1996), pp. 205–23; T. Reuter, ‘Debate: the “Feudal Revolution” III’, P&P 155 (1997), pp. 177–95 [reprinted above, chapter 4]; C. J. Wickham, ‘The “Feudal Revolution” IV’, P&P 155 (1997), pp. 195–208; T. N. Bisson, ‘Reply’, P&P 155 (1997), pp. 208–25. M. Bloch, ‘The “Colliberti”: A Study in the Formation of the Servile Class’, in M. Bloch, Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages, ed. W. R. Beer (Berkeley, 1975), pp. 93–149, at 99–103. For a more nuanced reading of this episode and the role of anger within it see R. E. Barton, ‘“Zealous Anger” and the Renegotiation of Aristocratic Relationships in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century France’, in B. H. Rosenwein ed., Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca NY, 1998), pp. 153–70, at 153–4, 161–3.

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had he chosen to do so, even if he might have suffered some mild penalty thereafter. Moreover, we should not underestimate the functional effect of collective aristocratic behaviour. Notoriously, the ‘three orders’ model of society which emerged in the course of the ninth and tenth centuries implied mutual obligations of support and protection between lords and dependents. Though Georges Duby saw it as losing its charms and also its abilities to reflect social reality by the early thirteenth century, this may reflect more its fossilization as an idea than its loss of power over minds. It can be found well articulated in a fifteenth-century Lollard tract, for example,10 and it is the implicit theoretical underpinning of the relationship of mutual support and protection explored by Otto Brunner in his study of late medieval German seigneurialism, Land und Herrschaft.11 It is a construct to which we shall have to return when considering the ideological arm of noble domination. Here we may follow the recent study by Gadi Algazi and stand the notion on its head.12 For against whom did the labouring classes need those who fought to protect them? Against those who fought. Algazi gives a very plausible functional explanation of the collective effects of a culture of aristocratic feuding: since such feuding was primarily directed against other aristocrats’ infrastructure, against the crops, utensils, houses and animals on which their rural dependents relied to keep themselves alive and produce surplus value for their superiors, it reproduced the need for protection from lords as a collective, even though individual lords might be the economic and political losers in such feuding. Less extreme forms of bullying and coercion were also important. Michael Toch has drawn attention in an important article to the ritual use of force and of brutally undeferential language in establishing domination: ‘He gave him a strong slap in the face, saying, you shall be my servant.’ Lords demanded without social graces: ‘They forced the peasants to show them the way.’ The bad-tempered unpredictability of lords reflected the lack of 10

11

12

Jack Upland, Friar Daw’s Reply and Upland’s Rejoinder, ed. P. L. Heyworth (Oxford, 1968), II, pp. 11–17: ‘Preestis office to preche þe gospel truli and to preze in hertei deoutli, to mynistre þe sacramentis freli, to studie in Goddis lawe oonli, and to be trewe ensuampleris of holi mennes lijf continuli, in doyinge and in suffringe. Lordis office to iustifie mysdoers in ward & to defende Goddis seruauntis from letters of her office. Comouns office to truli labour for þe sustinaunce of hem silf, & for prestis and for lordis doynge wel her office.’ Cited in an anonymous final-year Glasgow dissertation in 1998. Most conveniently consulted in O. Brunner, Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria, trans. H. Kaminsky and J. van Horn Melton (Philadelphia, 1992), with a valuable historiographical introduction; the discussion of Schutz und Schirm can be found at pp. 218–22. G. Algazi, Herrengewalt und Gewalt der Herren im späten Mittelalter: Herrschaft, Gegenseitigkeit und Sprachgebrauch (Frankfurt, 1996).

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social restraint they felt in their dealings with inferiors, for whom social and physical humiliation were constantly present as a possible outcome.13 Even saints, who as we know were by and large noble, readily used force when they appeared in visions to members of the lower orders. Often they had to do so. Saints who wished to approach the great in this world behaved like courteous aristocrats: rather than burst directly into the dreams of the great, they let them know that they required attention, just as a noble calling on another noble would have himself announced. Such was the fear inspired in the serving orders by their masters that saints frequently needed to appear more than once in visions and with escalating terror, using force in order to persuade the messengers to take the message. Yet at no point are we dealing solely with the direct application of arbitrary coercive force. One aspect of the way in which elites maintain their dominance is today quite well understood and theorized: they equip themselves with a whole series of social markers which express and actualize that dominance. In particular, they use the social markers of appearance, speech, dress, food and rituals of social interaction. Let us examine these in turn. Nobles were immediately recognizable as such. First of all, they were better fed, and therefore larger. Horst Fuhrmann has pointed out that whereas average heights in the rest of the population were considerably lower than they are today, the skeletal evidence for identifiable members of royal and high aristocratic families suggests that many of them were of much the same height as middle-class males in the OECD countries today.14 He was drawing specifically on evidence from eleventh- and twelfth-century Germany, but his conclusions clearly have much wider validity. Moreover, aristocratic families took some pains to preserve this physical differentiation. It is a commonplace in discussions of monastic life to say that monasteries were used, amongst other things, as a dumping ground for old and physically and mentally disabled members of aristocratic families. A frequently cited comment by a twelfth-century abbot is that ‘some are lame, others are one-eyed, blind even, others are one-armed, but on the other hand, all are noble’, and it is not difficult to collect other examples of the blind, lame and simple-minded in monasteries.15 Generally this behaviour-pattern 13 14 15

M. Toch, ‘Asking the Way and Telling the Law: Speech in Medieval Germany’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16 (1986), pp. 667–82. H. Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, c. 1050–1200 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 9–10. P. Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession (Chicago, 1991), p. 46: in the twelfth century Bondeville contained ‘two simple-minded girls’ and Obazine had a child blind from birth. See also M. de Jong, In Samuel’s Image: Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West (Leiden, 1996), pp. 168–9, and the well-known observations of Peter, abbot of Andernes on taking office in 1161 about the drunk, the lame and the blind in his monastery ‘but almost all are noble’, cited by P. Delehaye, ‘L’organisation scolaire au XIIe siècle’, Traditio 5 (1947), p. 230.

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has been considered in terms of the social role of monasteries – it gives a fresh gloss on the phrase ‘care in the community’, and aristocratic investment in closed communities can be seen as welfare provision as well as piety – but it clearly had an important functional explanation as well. By literally shutting ‘imperfect’ members of their families away from view, aristocrats collectively preserved a social image of themselves as different from others. In a world where mental and physical disabilities were common and visible, aristocrats appeared collectively exempt from such scourges.16 The fact that aristocrats were well fed was in itself a social marker, quite apart from any physiological effects this may have had. To be noble was to eat meat rather than vegetables and to drink wine rather than water or ale.17 Charlemagne’s irritation with his doctors at being put on a diet of stews rather than roast (Einhard implies that this was low-cholesterol food, but it may simply have been a matter of poor teeth in old age) was, I think, not just the grumpiness of the senior citizen forced to change his dietary habits, but also annoyance, perhaps even concern, at losing grip on a social marker.18 Karl Leyser suggested that there was a practical reason for the notoriously excessive meat-consumption of Frankish and post-Frankish aristocratic warriors: it was a high-protein diet needed to sustain stamina in battle.19 But it also set dominant elites apart from those they dominated: to eat meat, and often in large quantities and daily except for the Church’s feast-days, was quite literally conspicuous consumption. Even where dietary patterns intersected, as they clearly did with bread, social markers were maintained, white bread being for the toffs and coarse brown bread for the plebs, whether we look at the imaginaire of Arthurian romance or at the provisions for pensions in kind found in twelfth-century Westfalian charters.20

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18 19 20

For a suggestive analogy, consider the way the East India Company dealt with Europeans who went mad: W. Ernst, Mad Tales from the Raj (London, 1991), pp. 23–4, 37. The company also insisted that the European widowed and destitute be forcibly repatriated if their inability to command European status-markers threatened the dominant classes’ image; ibid., pp. 11–16. A. Guerreau-Jalabert, ‘Aliments symboliques et symbolique de la table dans les romans arthuriens (XIIe–XIIIe siècles)’, Annales ESC 47 (1992), pp. 561–94. My colleague Chris Wickham refers me to M. Montanari, L’alimentazione contadina nell’alto medioevo (Naples, 1979). [See also in English translation, M. Montanari, The Culture of Food (Oxford, 1993).] Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, c. 22, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SRG (Hannover, 1911), p. 27. K. Leyser, ‘Money and Supplies on the First Crusade’, in T. Reuter ed., Communications and Power in Medieval Europe: The Gregorian Revolution and Beyond (London, 1994), pp. 77–95, at 86. Guerreau-Jalabert, ‘Aliments symboliques’; F. Irsigler, ‘Divites und pauperes in der Vita Meinwerci: Untersuchungen zur wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Differenzierung der Bevölkerung Westfalens im Hochmittelalter’, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 57 (1970), pp. 449–99.

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The most obvious social marker of our own society, dress, clearly served as one in medieval societies also. I shall pass over the details here, not because they were unimportant, but because here especially, as a historian with a pronounced lack of visual sense and a lack of grounding in Realienkunde, I am aware of my own shortcomings. We may note one or two aspects of dress as a social marker which appear to have been crucial. First, there is the importance of particular kinds of clothing as defining the aristocratic selfimage, most notably furs: remember Adam of Bremen’s remark that we – meaning us aristocrats – were willing to risk our immortal souls for the sake of a sable coat.21 Remember also that church councils took repeated pains to ensure that even high-ranking clerics did not appropriate these symbols of secular aristocratic domination: no fur coats, no brightly coloured, because expensively dyed, clothing.22 Second, there is the importance which dress played in the sumptuary codes which were drawn up with increasing frequency in most parts of Europe from the twelfth century onwards.23 Partly this was a question of increasing ease of acquisition. Even today, the simple investment of economic resources is enough to acquire high-status clothing and other external social markers (at least in the forms offered by well-known brand-names like Armani and Boss – really exclusive tailors are said, in the UK at least, to require introductions and proof of status before offering their services). This was evidently already becoming true in the later Middle Ages; but it was also a question of what was most immediately obvious as a social marker. To place restrictions on the acquisition of the obvious front-rank marker was to put a trip-wire well in front of the citadel, though we shall have to consider later how successful such efforts were. Another very obvious social marker was the organization of space. This could be the subject of a paper in itself, and I can only make a few points here. The first is that we are easily inclined to forget the cultural aspects of such phenomena as incastellamento or the nucleated village of the high and late Middle Ages with its tenements grouped around a church (usually the lord’s church) and a lordly dwelling which was on a quite different scale 21 22

23

Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum, IV. 18, ed. B. Schmeidler, MGH SRG (Hannover, 1917), pp. 245–6. Cf. John of Salisbury’s account of the protests against such a prohibition at the council of Rheims (1148): Historia Pontificalis, ed. M. Chibnall (London, 1956), p. 8. The prohibition was a long-standing one; cf. the authorities cited in Gratian, Causa xxi, questio iv. A subject in itself; for an introduction see A. Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions (Basingstoke, 1996); C. K. Killerby, ‘Practical Problems in the Enforcement of Italian Sumptuary Law, 1200–1500’, in T. Dean and K. J. P. Lowe eds., Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 99–120; D. O. Hughes, ‘Sumptuary Legislation and Social Recognition in Renaissance Italy’, in J. Bossy ed., Disputes and Settlements (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 69–99.

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from other houses. These are not simply the incidental spatial by-product of an intensification or reorganization of lordship; they are its continuing social and cultural expression. More generally, we have to recognize that the rhythms of most medieval landscapes were punctuated by visible signs of aristocratic dominance in the form of fortifications, dwelling-houses, churches and, not least important, monasteries and other religious houses, where for much of our period the memory of those who were important and had names was preserved and that of those who were not important was not. Ecclesiastical and urban historians have long acknowledged the significance of spatial shaping in towns for religious and secular purposes, but it was also present in the countryside. Perhaps most important of all the markers was speech. Even in our own society, the acquisition of dominant speech-patterns and other forms of what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘cultural capital’ remains more difficult than appropriating other social markers,24 and in medieval western Europe it was very difficult indeed. The defining characteristic of those who did not belong was their ‘rustic speech’. It was the inability of the free peasants of Wolen to make themselves understood at the royal court ‘because of their rustic speech’ which lost them their lawsuit against their lord in the mid-eleventh century: in effect, they were frozen out and ignored.25 This is also a specific example of the more general phenomenon that the possessors of Bourdieuesque ‘social capital’, those who ‘know how things are done’, exercise control over any games which are being played – this is not just a matter of speech, but of manners. It is a commonplace of vernacular literature that even the aristocrat as completely unknown stranger is recognizable as someone who must be treated as an aristocrat by his ‘courteous speech’.26 But it is not only a matter of how you speak, but also of how you exchange speech. Michael Toch has reminded us how pronouns expressed differentiation: second person singular for the lower orders, second person plural for the higher ones (the use of third person singular and third person plural, which create a linguistic space in which high and low are prevented from addressing one another directly at all, appears to be post-medieval). He has also stressed the expectational shaping of speech exchanges: 24 25 26

P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 171–87. T. Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, c. 800–1056 (London, 1991), p. 215. Thus the hero of Ruodlieb is instantly recognized as noble by the huntsmen he meets on entry into the Great King’s kingdom: The Ruodlieb, I. 72–94, ed. C. W. Grocock (Warminster, 1985), p. 32. Stuart Airlie has reminded me that Bede’s account of the captured noble Imma also implies that it was difficult if not impossible for a noble to conceal his nobility: Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, IV. 22, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), pp. 400–4.

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the lord does most of the speaking, while the peasant takes the part of the silent listener . . . This verbalized taciturnity reflects the experience that talking to and being talked to by a lord are dangerous. By waiting for his superior to speak, the peasant conforms to the pattern of deference.27

There are, of course, some difficulties in apprehending past reality here. Though we can read the imaginative literature of the medieval past with sensitivity in order to recreate some aspects of past reality, we are in the last resort dealing with an imaginaire: there is no one-to-one correspondence. Even types of source which might at first sight appear to provide a more direct representation turn out to be problematic; as Patrick Geary has recently pointed out, the inscribing of direct speech in records and narratives does not somehow magically fix and preserve orality like a taperecorder or video-recorder, but instead creates a ‘fictive character’ within the written record, one which is disjoint from actual past utterances.28 Toch, for example, cites a late-medieval court record as an example of deferential speech:29 Questioned . . . as to the lord’s right to collect deceased tenants’ cattle and belongings, this man admits that such has indeed been unchallenged practice. ‘But whether this is the monastery’s right or not, he does not know’. Despite this disavowal, he continues: ‘He also says that the lords have this declared as their right, and he has never heard that anyone has taken them to court on this.’

But although this might seem an example of ‘acquiescence plus reticence’, it is clearly also a lawyer’s translation of whatever the peasant might actually have said into ‘evidence’ that the claim has not been challenged (and therefore has the status of prescriptive right). It is a rewriting of what was actually said in terms which make it useful to those for whom the rewriting was being done. The collective effect of all these social markers was to create a world in which aristocrats were unmistakably different, immediately recognizable. For themselves, at least, the dominant classes reinforced these perceptions by constructing a classed world. The evident differences were legitimated and explained by representations and myths of origin. The legal and social status of Catalonian peasants and their lords’ legal right to mistreat them (the wonderfully named ius maletractandi) were accounted for by their 27 28

29

Toch, ‘Asking the Way’, p. 670. Orally at a seminar in Southampton, March 1998; see his forthcoming contribution to the proceedings of the Royal Historical Society’s conference on Oral History, held in March 1998 [P. Geary, ‘Land, Language and Memory in Europe 700–1100’, TRHS 6th ser. 9 (1999), pp. 169–84]. Toch, ‘Asking the Way’, p. 675.

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alleged descent from those who had failed to remain faithful at the time of the Islamic conquest: their past cowardice legitimized their present subordination.30 In Hungary, their alleged descent from those who had failed to respond to a military summons by Attila had a similar effect.31 Elsewhere, the dominant classes equipped themselves with origin myths which legitimated their difference: Trojan descent and the like made them outsiders within by right of past conquest. Noah’s curse of Ham and his descendants was also pressed into service. The emergence of the rhetorical question ‘Who was then the gentleman?’ across late-medieval Europe was not a spontaneous appeal to the classless state of nature in the Garden of Eden; it was a ju-jitsu attempt to wrest control of historical legitimation away from those who possessed it. Such myths were reinforced by constructions of the rural population which dehumanized them. In imaginative literature and in visual representations they were presented as semi-monsters, brutish, wild, inhuman (depictions which they shared with Jews, Saracens and other outsiders). Even those voices which urged their treatment as defenceless fellow-humans and as Christians did so within the context of an ‘in spite’: in spite of their bestiality.32 The collective effect of the appropriation of exclusive social markers and the construction of legitimatory myths was to create a sense of confidence – even if this overlay unease and fear – amongst the dominant. One way in which this found expression was in a whole series of stories about aristocrats who had to disguise themselves but were unable to do so, or at least to do so completely effectively.33 A few examples from the high Middle Ages may illustrate this. Becket, fleeing from the council of Northampton to France disguised as a lay brother, was nearly recognized from the way in which he looked at a hawk which a nobleman was carrying: I imagine that it was not only the connoisseurship with which he viewed the bird, as has 30 31

32 33

P. Freedman, ‘Catalan Lawyers and the Origins of Serfdom’, Mediaeval Studies 48 (1986), pp. 288–314; ‘Cowardice, Heroism and the Legendary Origins of Catalonia’, P&P 121 (1988), pp. 3–28. R. C. Hoffmann, ‘Outsiders by Birth and Blood: Racist Ideologies and Realities Around the Periphery of Medieval Culture’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 6 (1983), pp. 14–27. See also K. Schreiner, ‘Religiöse, historische und rechtliche Legitimation spätmittelalterlicher Adelsherrschaft’, in O. G. Oexle and W. Paravicini eds., Nobilitas: Funktion und Repräsentation des Adels in Alteuropa, Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 133 (Göttingen, 1997), pp. 376–430. P. Freedman, ‘Sainteté et sauvagerie: deux images du paysan au moyen aˆge’, Annales ESC 47 (1992), pp. 539–60. For a fuller discussion of the anecdotes presented in this paragraph, see T. Reuter, ‘Die Unsicherheit auf den Straβen im europäischen Früh- und Hochmittelalter: Täter, Opfer und ihre mittelalterlichen und modernen Betrachter’, in J. Fried ed., Träger und Instrumentarien des Friedens im Hohen und Späten Mittelalter, Vorträge und Forschungen 43 (Sigmaringen, 1996), pp. 169–201, at 196–7 [trans. above, chapter 3].

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generally been surmised, but also the fact that he was, by looking closely at a nobleman’s hunting-animal, failing to maintain the social distance which would have been appropriate for someone of his assumed rank, which threatened to give him away. Hugh Capet was also suspected of being not what he claimed to be when returning from Rome in disguise after visiting Otto II in 980, and of course Richard Lionheart’s disguise failed him altogether when returning from the Third Crusade. William Longchamps, attempting to flee from Dover in disguise in 1191, was exposed to the crowd by his lack of knowledge of English: this too I would gloss not as an absolute ignorance of the language, though that is conceivable, but as an inability to command the appropriate socio-linguistic register. These anecdotes and others like them may reflect past reality, but they also reflect the elite’s own self-image: our nobility shines through unmistakably even when we try to disguise ourselves. So far I have tried to suggest ways in which the dominant classes saved themselves the trouble of constantly having to apply a Leninist ‘who whom?’ by the exercise of a Gramscian social and cultural hegemony. But this is open to at least two objections. The first is that it is still, by and large, history from above. It explains how the dominant classes constructed the world and expected it to function, but assumes too readily that those for whom it was constructed accepted the construction. The second, even more fundamental, is that, even if we do assume that it functioned more or less as I have suggested, that does not in itself explain dominance, because the appropriation of social markers and the ability to define the world are not the cause of dominance but belong to its products. As to the first point, that we cannot assume that the social and cultural hegemony which I have just sketched to you was actually received in the way which theories of hegemony assume, I largely agree. The work of the contemporary anthropologist and sociologist James Scott is particularly helpful in this respect. His work on Weapons of the Weak shows how dominance is in fact most often resisted not through open defiance, which would today be dangerous, just as it would have been in our period, but through acts of sabotage, pilfering, going slow, and so forth: all of these are easily enough documented from our period.34 Note also that most, though not all, openly articulated movements of resistance in our period, from the Stellinga uprising in the ninth century through the Patarini movement 34

J. C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven CT, 1985).

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in the eleventh to the Jacquerie in the fourteenth century,35 were shaped vertically as much as horizontally: there are at the least elements of conflict within the dominant classes visible, in the course of which a minority group has recourse to the manipulation of popular discontent. Scott also has important things to say about the way in which cultural and social hegemony can be publicly affirmed while being privately denied or rejected: there is a public transcript, to which the hegemonial group can – generally – command or compel assent, but this does not necessarily extend inside people’s heads.36 The siphoning off of physically or mentally ‘imperfect’ members of the aristocracy into religious houses is an example of this: it may indeed, as I have suggested, have helped to create and sustain a public transcript of aristocratic perfection, but that does not necessarily mean that no one was aware of the existence of a ‘hidden transcript’ in which this perfection was known to be mythical: monastic servants and dependents would have had such knowledge, and been able to think accordingly, even if they could not challenge the public transcript openly. There is an important further point about dominance, which is that it was (and is) not in practice exercised in such a way as to emphasize the group us/them distinctions, but on the contrary in such a way as to play these down. Kipling’s Indian short stories give quite a good steer on the kind of differentiation with which we must reckon. His Anglo-Indians have, amongst themselves, a collective view of ‘the natives’ and a whole range of social markers which distinguish them from those over whom they rule. But they are careful, in dealing with individual ‘natives’, to observe social distinctions within the dominated group. There are those who must be treated with respect (and who presumably gain in status within their own social segment from the fact that they are treated with respect), and there are those who need not be so treated. This has to be borne in mind when we look at relationships between the lordly class and rural non-nobles. True, we find lords dealing with rural communes and village collectives, but we should not assume that these non-noble groupings were internally structured on an egalitarian basis. It is not hard to find the equivalents 35

36

E. J. Goldberg, ‘Popular Revolt, Dynastic Politics and Aristocratic Factionalism in the Early Middle Ages: The Saxon Stellinga Reconsidered’, Speculum 70 (1995), pp. 467–501; H. Keller, ‘Pataria und Stadtverfassung, Stadtgemeinde und Reform: Mailand im “Investiturstreit”’, in J. Fleckenstein ed., Investiturstreit und Reichsverfassung, Vorträge und Forschungen 17 (Sigmaringen, 1973), pp. 321–50, at 324–35; D. M. Bessen, ‘The Jacquerie: Class War or Co-opted Rebellion?’, JMH 11 (1985), pp. 43–59. J. C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, 1990), especially chapter IV, pp. 70– 107: ‘False Consciousness or Laying it on Thick?’

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of village elders in our period, if we begin to look. Just as nobles, as we noted at the outset, invested the bulk of their time, energy and resources in competition amongst themselves, so too did those whom they dominated, though such competition is much less clearly visible to us in our surviving source materials. Such competition in practice had the effect of diverting attention from the real ‘who whom’ of medieval societies. So also did the fact that much dominance was exercised through intermediaries. Peasants and others not only did not find it easy to deal with nobles because of the latter’s cultural dominance; they had, much more often, to deal with representatives of various kinds: reeves, bailiffs, mayors, overseers. These intermediaries often themselves became the primary focus of resentment. There is a whole set of anecdotes which play on what might be called the Haroun al-Raschid theme, where the ruler or lord goes unknown amongst his people, or meets them directly in unexpected circumstances, and hears their plaints: the wellknown tale of Geoffrey of Anjou meeting a forester and learning from him how his agents deceived him and oppressed his people is one example.37 We know that lords mistrusted their agents – think of the provisions in the Capitulare de villis, or Meinwerk of Paderborn, arriving at one of his curtes and, finding weeds in the fields, ordering the wife of the villicus to be deprived of her ‘ambitious clothing’.38 The triangulation of lords, their agents and their dependents helped to create a veiling solidarity between lords and dependents: it is significant, I think, that many of the hostile stories about social climbers who appropriated the social markers of the dominant classes concern precisely such intermediate figures, from the reeves of Ekkehard of St Gall onwards. This is not only true of historical and hagiographical sources, but also of imaginative literature: the criticism of social climbing implicit in Meier Helmbrecht is a good example.39 But perhaps the most fundamental objection to explanations of aristocratic dominance in terms of Gramscian cultural hegemony is that even to the extent that this actually functioned as posited, this functioning was the effect of a dominance which was logically and structurally prior to it, not the other way round. Partly, of course, this is a matter of how we see 37 38

39

Discussed, along with other examples, by Bisson, ‘Feudal Revolution’, pp. 35–9. Capitulare de Villis, ed. V. Boretius and A. Krause, MGH Capit. I (Hannover, 1893), no. 32, pp. 83–90; the suspicion is summed up in c. 60, p. 88: ‘Nequaquam de potentioribus hominibus maiores fiant, sed de mediocribus qui fideles sint.’ For Meinwerk’s difficulties with his villici, see Vita Meinwerci episcopi Patherbrunnensis, cc. 147–51, ed. F. Tenckhoff, MGH SRG (Hannover, 1921), pp. 78–80; the story of the ambitious reeve’s wife is told in c. 148. See Peasant Life in Old German Epics: Meier Helmbrecht und Der arme Heinrich, trans. C. H. Bell, Records of civilization: Sources and studies 13 (New York, 1931).

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the world. We can and do and should avoid the aporia of cause and effect, chicken and egg, by considering past societies as functioning systems. In E. P. Thompson’s memorable formulation: ‘class is not this or that part of the machine but the way the machine works once it is set in motion – not this and that interest, but the friction of interests – the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise’.40 But a systemic approach carries its own dangers; in particular, it makes it more difficult to account for substantial change across time, and this is a serious difficulty here. Although I have so far presented the kind of undifferentiated Middle Ages of which we are all professionally socialized to be deeply suspicious, we must be aware of the fact that the aristocratic dominations of the eighth and of the fifteenth centuries, though they shared common elements of substance, were not identical. I want to conclude by sketching the trajectory of aristocratic domination in our period. I have already by implication argued that there was a shift of emphasis as time progressed from direct dominance to indirect dominance by means of the social and cultural markers I have listed. This is not one of those simple developments beloved of historians by which everything becomes more complex and sophisticated until we arrive at the unimaginable complexity and sophistication of our own societies; it reflects the diffusion of aristocratic domination between the early and the late Middle Ages. The transformation of nobility to incorporate (at least in some respects) previously non-noble groups of warriors in the high Middle Ages, and the gentrification which marked the late Middle Ages, were phenomena which accompanied an objectively increasing appropriation of surplus value from the rural population. There were, quite simply, more nobles around in the later Middle Ages than there had been in previous eras. And ‘around’ is used advisedly: they were spatially more diffused, more omnipresent. Considering the class as a class, we can say that its members maintained and developed dominance by sharing and diffusing it, even if as individuals they were pursuing a quite different strategy. It is perhaps for this reason that the evidence which stresses the use (and the misappropriation) of social markers comes mostly from the late Middle Ages. There was an increasing investment in this kind of cultural dominance. In the last resort, however, it was an investment with diminishing returns. The last two centuries of the medieval era saw substantial movements of rebellion at least once in most parts of Europe (Italy, where urban dominance of the countryside gave a rather different curve to the trajectory, 40

E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 939.

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is probably the great exception). These were only the most visible forms of breakdown; aristocratic domination, the collective ability to choose the game and define its rules, was subverted still more by the daily effects of the market pressures created by the post-plague rise in the value of labour relative to other resources. Both kinds of pressure from below made use of some of the ideologies of domination by taking them seriously, as is well known from the grievances of 1381 and 1525. A regrouping became necessary, and it took the form of a redefinition. The old forms of social and cultural domination were reinscribed in a political order which was also in the process of being reformed. An order formerly willed by God would in future be willed not only by God but by his princes, who maintained order, estate and Polizey (in its sixteenth-century sense) for their own purposes, but in doing so increasingly defined infringements of and challenges to social and economic hierarchy as public, political offences.41 The nobility became a part of the ancien régime, and fell along with it, or rather, was transformed along with it; but that is a subject for another conference. 41

See H. Kaminsky, ‘Estate, Nobility, and the Exhibition of Estate in the Later Middle Ages’, Speculum 68 (1993), pp. 684–709, and for more systematic surveys of the ‘stratification’ of the late medieval and early-modern nobility, e.g. H. M. Scott ed., The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 2 vols. (London, 1978); J. Dewald, The European Nobility, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 1996). More general surveys from which medievalists may learn much of structural and comparative interest include Oexle and Paravicini, Nobilitas; M. Bush, Noble Privilege (Manchester, 1983); M. Bush, Rich Noble, Poor Noble (Manchester, 1988); and H.-U. Wehler ed., Europäischer Adel 1750–1950 (Göttingen, 1990), especially the article by O. G. Oexle, ‘Aspekte des Adels im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit’, pp. 19–56.

chap t e r 8

Regemque, quem in Francia pene perdidit, in patria magnifice recepit: Ottonian ruler representation in synchronic and diachronic comparison1 For German-speakers, the word Repräsentation and its derivates have overtones absent from their relatives in the Anglo-Saxon world. From private citizens invited by advertising to purchase representative items of consumption like furniture or kitchens, through to federal and state presidents, who dispose of substantial budgets for Repräsentation, contemporary Germany is linguistically soaked with a notion of representation implying a display of wealth, taste and solidity appropriate to one’s rank in society and affirming that rank. Yet underlying this notion is a deeper sense that representation must imply the independent existence of something to be represented; it may well have a legitimate role of its own, but this cannot be sustained without real substance behind it, and indeed any attempt to ‘represent’ a substance which was not there would be met with ridicule and satire. A similar presupposition is evident in the distinction between the ‘dignified’ and ‘efficient’ parts of a constitution, familiar to English-speaking specialists in political science since it was first formulated as a daringly cynical observation on the role of the monarchy by Walter Bagehot some 130 years ago.2 Though the ‘dignified’ parts of a constitution (or indeed of any social system) may have a vital role to play in the functioning of the whole, they cannot exist on their own without an ‘efficient’ segment to give them meaning. Medievalists also tend to believe this. To talk of Staatssymbolik with 1

2

Illness prevented me from attending the Reichenau conference and even completing my paper in 1994. As a result, I have for convenience written my contribution in English rather than German. My knowledge of what was said and discussed at the meeting is largely derived from the brief summaries in protocol no. 339 of the Konstanzer Arbeitskreis; if in what follows I seem to be offering a different account or evaluation of events and phenomena from that offered by others in this volume [G. Althoff and E. Schubert eds., Herrschaftsrepräsentation im ottonischen Sachsen (Sigmaringen, 1998)], this should not necessarily be taken as deliberate and conscious contradiction. [The Latin in the title says: ‘The king whom he [Otto I] had lost in Francia, he splendidly regained in his own fatherland’. For a possible alternative meaning, see below, p. 128.] Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, in N. St John-Stevas ed., The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, 5 vols. (London, 1974), vol. V, p. 206.

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Percy Ernst Schramm is precisely to imply that there is a state somewhere with a separate real existence which can be symbolised;3 and it is probably to ignore or overlook the possibility of a state considered as a set of social relations which can be apprehended only (or at least primarily) in its symbolisation, both by those of us who observe it now and by those who participated in it at the time, a polity which exists largely if not completely by means of its symbols. Such a view seems to me to be implicit in the quotation in my title, which is an epigram from Widukind’s Res gestae Saxonicae. Describing the beginning of the rebellion against Otto I in 953 by his son Liudolf of Suabia and his son-in-law Conrad of Lotharingia, he relates how at Mainz Archbishop Frederick had only with reluctance provided the due servitia for Otto; how Otto, unwilling to celebrate Easter amongst his enemies at Ingelheim, had shifted to Aachen; how there too he had found that nothing had been prepared for him (not surprisingly, since Aachen lay in Conrad’s sphere of influence). Only when he had reached Dortmund could he recover his position: regem, quem in Francia pene perdidit, in patria magnifice recepit.4 Otto had been in danger of ‘losing the king’, of losing his identity as king, precisely because at a key point he would not have been able to behave and to be seen to behave in a manner which a modern German-speaker might term repräsentativ. The passage hovers on the edge of a Kantorowiczian separation of the ‘King’s Two Bodies’. As the excerpt cited in the text is prefaced by the clause maternis gaudiis et officiis decenter curatur it is conceivable that the implied subject of the sentence is Mathilda, not Otto, which would of course make it less interesting; but Otto is the subject which a natural reading of the passage would understand, and it has been so understood. To be a king is thus not simply a matter of status or action, but also of style. Action does not inherently require an audience; style does. Kingship, 3

4

P. E. Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik, 3 vols., MGH Schriften XIII (Stuttgart, 1954–6); P. E. Schramm, ‘Das Grundproblem dieser Sammlung: Die “Herrschaftszeichen”, die “Staatssymbolik” und die “Staatspräsentation” des Mittelalters’, in his Kaiser, Könige und Päpste. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, 4 vols. in 5 (Stuttgart, 1968–71), vol. I, pp. 30–60, and ‘Grundbegriffe des Bereichs’, in Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik, vol. IV, ii, pp. 682–705; for commentary see J. M. Bak, ‘Medieval symbology of the state: Percy E. Schramm’s contribution’, Viator 4 (1973), pp. 33–63 and J. M. Bak, ‘Introduction: coronation studies – past, present, and future’, in J. M. Bak ed., Coronations: Medieval and Early Modern Monarchic Ritual (Berkeley CA, 1990), pp. 1–15. Widukind of Corvey, Rerum gestarum Saxonicarum libri III, III, 14, eds. H.-E. Lohmann and P. Hirsch, MGH SRG LXI, Hannover, 1935), p. 111; for the meeting at Dortmund see Adalbert of St Maximin, in Reginonis abbatis Prumiensis Chronicon cum continuatione Treverensi, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SRG L (Hannover, 1891), p. 166; J. F. Böhmer ed., revd E. von Ottenthal, Die Regesten des Kaiserreichs unter Heinrich I. und Otto I. 919–973 (Hildesheim, 1967), no. 227d.

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in other words, is a social construct. Isidore of Seville thought that if you acted like a king (that is, rightly and rightfully), then you were one,5 but it would be equally true to say that if you were perceived as a king, then you were one, and if not, not, as the quotation in the title implies. For Widukind and his contemporaries, the exercise of rulership consisted to a large extent – how large an extent we shall have to discuss – in the public theatre of assemblies and church festivals.6 This theatre served to stress the differences between rulers and others: these differences were in some respects so fundamental that they ought never to be blurred, and in other respects so minimal that the danger of their being blurred was constantly present. Even when amongst friends and neighbours in Merseburg, Henry I remained a dominus; all, including the king, might be drunk, but the king nevertheless remained in control of himself and his surroundings, and this in one of the most dangerous situations of early medieval political life, the aristocratic drinking-bout.7 We are here in territory which has now become reasonably familiar. Its study began in the 1920s with a move away from the supposed realities of a timelessly understood politics towards the investigation of ‘signs of lordship and symbols of state’, to use Percy Ernst Schramm’s phrase. These were by and large classical forms of royal self-dramatisation with a heavy emphasis on the great ecclesiastical and liturgical climaxes like coronations, crown-wearings, consecrations of bishops and churches, openings of councils, great church feasts. Linked with these was the study of images of the ruler and of rulership as found in coins, seals, paintings and sculpture.8 In the past two decades this interest has come to be complemented by 5 6

7

8

Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive Originum libri XX, IX 4, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1911) (no pagination). Widukind (as n. 4), I, 39, p. 59: Et licet in conviviis satis iocundus esset, tamen nichil regalis disciplinae minuebat. Tantum enim favorem pariter et timorem militibus infundebat, ut etiam ludenti non crederent ad aliquam lasciviam se dissolvendum. In a paper given at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, in May 1995, Philippe Buc (Stanford) noted the echoes in this passage of Gregory I’s views on proper behaviour for bishops, which themselves owed much to notions current in late antiquity about the proper conduct for aristocrats. For the social and sociological context of the drinking-bout in the high middle ages see M. J. Enright, ‘Lady with a mead-cup: ritual, group cohesion and hierarchy in the Germanic warband’, FMS 22 (1988), pp. 170–203; G. Althoff, ‘Der friedens-, bündnis- und gemeinschaftsstiftende Charakter des Mahles im früheren Mittelalter’, in Irmgard Bitsch et al. eds., Essen und Trinken in Mittelalter und Neuzeit (Sigmaringen, 1987), pp. 13–26; G. Althoff, ‘Fest und Bündnis’, in D. Altenburg, J. Jarnut and H.-H. Steinhoff eds., Feste und Feiern im Mittelalter. Paderborner Symposion des Mediävistenverbandes (Sigmaringen, 1991), pp. 29–38; D. A. Bullough, ‘Friends, neighbours and fellow-drinkers: aspects of community and conflict in the early medieval West’, H. Chadwick Memorial Lecture (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 12–16. Most notably associated with the work of Percy Ernst Schramm; for fuller references see the works cited in n. 3.

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the study of more flexible, non-ecclesiastical forms of self-dramatisation, notably in work by Heinrich Fichtenau, Karl Leyser and Gerd Althoff.9 I do not want here simply to recapitulate their work on ritual and staging in Ottonian politics, though I shall draw on it and offer some fresh nuances. I want rather to try to determine the relationship of these kinds of studies to other views of the Ottonian polity. It seems to me that one of the most obvious characteristics of Ottonian scholarship during the past two generations has been its tendency to develop along parallel lines of enquiry, parallel in the sense that they never meet and never need to meet. Itineraror Pfalzenforschung has proceeded largely without reference to Beumann’s concern for contemporary historians’ consciousnesses, or Schramm’s for Staatssymbolik, or Althoff’s for group activities, and of course vice versa. As with the elephant in the fable, touched and reported on by the blind, all we seem to have are incomplete and possibly inconsistent reports of something which clearly exists but whose shape is in the last resort uncertain. One way of getting closer to a shape for the elephant would undoubtedly be to compare across time and across cultures. In what follows I shall be introducing a wide range of examples. I shall not confine myself to the Ottonians’ immediate contemporaries and predecessors in western Europe, but also draw on polities much further afield, including pre-colonial kingdoms in Africa and Asia. The point of doing this is not to put Ottonian Saxony on some kind of level footing with, say, Renaissance Venice, or Elizabethan England, or T’ang China, or the kingdom of Bali before 1906, or the kingdom of the Buganda before the British takeover in the early twentieth century; the differences are so obvious that they scarcely need to be dwelt on. There is a clear danger in lumping together all pre-industrial polities into a kind of Gondwanaland, a single continent, so to speak, from which all polities are derived: we know the risks well enough from earlier generations of scholars, who thought that they could construct a view of the Germanic from societies which were widely scattered in time and space and linked only by membership of a common linguistic family. What comparison can do is not fill in the blanks in our knowledge or offer direct parallels, but to suggest insights and ways of looking at things. 9

H. Fichtenau, Lebensordnungen des 10. Jahrhunderts, Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 30/12 (Stuttgart, 1984), English translation by P. Geary, Living in the Tenth Century (Chicago IL, 1991); K. Leyser, Communications and Power in Medieval Europe: The Carolingian and Ottoman Centuries, ed. T. Reuter (London, 1994), especially pp. 189–215: ‘Ritual, ceremony and gesture: Ottonian Germany’ (also in German in FMS 27 (1993), pp. 1–26); for Althoff’s extensive work see the articles collected in his Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter. Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt, 1997), and the bibliography given there, pp. 314–15.


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To begin with, it might be helpful to locate the position of Ottonian politics on a number of spectra. The first of these I can most easily define by offering two extreme examples taken from a range of polities with broadly comparable socioeconomic infrastructures. At the one end we have, for example, the Angevin government of the Anglo-Norman realms in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, at least as conventionally perceived: hard-nosed, relying comparatively little on such things as assemblies and the rituals of the church year, and backed up by a deep substratum of what were by medieval standards pretty homogeneous and bureaucratised institutions.10 At the other end of the spectrum, we might take as an example the kingdom of Bali prior to the Dutch assumption of power in 1906, as described in a famous passage by the American cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz: The expressive nature of the Balinese state, and of the political life it supported . . . was always pointed, not towards tyranny, whose systematic concentration of power it was hopelessly incompetent to effect, not even very methodically towards government, which it pursued indifferently and even hesitantly, but rather towards spectacle, towards ceremony, towards the public dramatisation of the ruling obsessions of Balinese culture: social inequality and status pride. It was a theatre-state in which the kings and princes were the impresarios, the priests the directors, the peasantry the supporting cast, stage crew, and audience . . . To govern was not so much to choose as to perform. Ceremony was not form but substance. Power served pomp, not pomp power.11

Both these examples are, of course, challengeable. Angevin government looks the way it does to us at least as much because of the ruling obsessions of Anglolexic medievalists as because it was like that (or only like that);12 equally, Geertz’s view of the Balinese polity just quoted is not the only one which can be and has been offered, even by Geertz himself.13 But for 10 11

12

13

See, for example, E. A. Jolliffe, Angevin Despotism (London, 1963); W. L. Warren, Henry II (London, 1977); W. L. Warren, The Governance of England, 1086–1272 (London, 1987). C. Geertz, ‘Politics past, politics present: some notes on the uses of anthropology in understanding the new states’, in his The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973) (article first published 1967), pp. 327–41, at 334–5; the passage is to be found verbatim in C. Geertz, Negara: The Theater State of Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton NJ, 1980), p. 124. For some first signs of interest in the ritual and expressive side of Angevin government, whose neglect by historians is matched only by the range of sources available for it, see M.-T. Flanagan, Irish Society, Anglo-Norman Settlers, Angevin Kingship: Interactions in Ireland in the Late Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1989), pp. 169–207; G. Koziol, ‘England, France, and the problem of sacrality in twelfth-century ritual’, in T. N. Bisson ed., Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe (Philadelphia PA, 1995), pp. 127–48. The analysis of pre-colonial Balinese society offered by Geertz, Negara (as n. 11), itself offers a much more nuanced and highly layered view than is implied simply by the quotation in the text. For critiques of Geertz’s approach see the discussion and bibliography in A. Biersack ‘Local knowledge,

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our purposes the two examples will provide the colours on one notional piece of litmus-paper. Most of us would, I think, see the Ottonian world, inside and outside Saxony, as much closer to that of Geertz’s Bali than to that of the colourless efficiency we associate with the Angevins, both in its inability and indeed unwillingness to achieve ‘tyranny’ – meaning an imbalance between the power of the ruler and the power of others within the polity – and in its indifferent and even hesitant pursuit of government. These considerations lead us to a second piece of litmus-paper, with a different colour-scale. Consider the important article published by Hagen Keller in 1989 on the nature of the state, in the era between Carolingian imperial reform and the ‘expansion of government’ in the high middle ages.14 Here the Ottonian and Salian eras appear as a canyon dividing the high plateau of intensive and responsible government of the Carolingian era from that of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, though Keller shows a healthy scepticism as to how far present appearance corresponds to past reality, at least as far as the contrast with the Carolingians is concerned. The rule of the Ottonians’ and Salians’ contemporaries in West Francia could similarly be seen as a low point, a failure which has provided a contrasting and legitimating episode in the Grand Narratives of state development offered by many French, English and American historians.15 What we are talking about here is the intensity and consciousness of central government: how far does it appear to be seeking control and direction or at least supervision of political life in the localities? Again, it’s fairly clear that the Ottonian polity can be located well towards the minimalist end of the scale, especially by comparison with the maximalist view of the contemporary Old English state offered by James Campbell and Patrick Wormald, a comparison to which we shall have to return.16

14 15

16

local history: Geertz and beyond’, in L. Hunt ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley CA, 1989), pp. 72–96, especially at 80–1. H. Keller, ‘Zum Charakter der “Staatlichkeit” zwischen karolingischer Reichsreform und hochmittelalterlichen Herrschaftsausbau’, FMS 23 (1989), pp. 248–64. See T. N. Bisson, ‘The feudal revolution’, P&P 142 (1994), pp. 6–42 and the subsequent debate with contributions by D. Barthélemy, S. White, P&P 152 (1996), pp. 196–223, and by T. Reuter and C. Wickham, with a response by Bisson, P&P 155 (1997), pp. 177–225. J. Campbell, ‘Was it infancy in England? Some questions of comparison’, in M. Jones and M. Vale eds., England and her Neighbours, 1066–1453: Essays in Honour of Pierre Chaplais (London, 1990), pp. 1–17; J. Campbell, ‘The united kingdom of England: the Anglo-Saxon achievement’, in A. Grant and K. J. Stringer eds., Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London, 1995), pp. 31– 47; J. Campbell, ‘The Late Anglo-Saxon state: a maximum view’, Proceedings of the British Academy 87 (1994), pp. 39–65; P. Wormald, ‘Engla Lond: the making of an allegiance’, Journal of Historical Sociology 7 (1994), pp. 1–24.


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Note that these two pieces of litmus-paper are in fact measuring different things, though they are superficially similar. There is no necessary correlation between a high degree of ritualisation or theatricality or use of symbolic language in public life and a low level of government, as the examples of Otto’s contemporaries in Constantinople17 and in Cordoba,18 or indeed of China throughout most if not all of the imperial era, make clear.19 There is probably a higher degree of correlation between the level and intensity of government and its need for legitimation. Here we can invert a proposition advanced by Jürgen Habermas. If a state power takes on increased areas of responsibility, it will, Habermas argues, need a greater degree of legitimation to meet these, or else must face a crisis of legitimacy. If this is plausible, then presumably the reverse holds: a state which reduces its areas of responsibility could make do with less legitimation without suffering a legitimacy crisis. This is, perhaps, one of the factors which allowed Ottonian rulers to deal so leniently with rebels; their bank account of legitimacy was in less danger of becoming overdrawn than that of their Carolingian predecessors or of their Salian successors.20 It may also be significant that whereas we have occasional references to Carolingian court jesters, figures who come to be mentioned again in Europe from the late eleventh century onwards, we have none that I know of to Ottonian ones.21 The safety-valve 17

18

19

20

21

See Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos, De cerimoniis aulae byzantinae, I–II, ed. P. Reiske (Bonn, 1829 (the French edition by A. Vogt, 2 vols. (Paris, 1937), is, regrettably, incomplete), and as commentary A. J. Toynbee, Constantine Porphyrogenitus and his World (Oxford, 1973), pp. 575–605; A. Cameron, ‘The construction of court ritual: the Byzantine Book of Ceremonies’, in D. Cannadine and S. Price eds., Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 106–36; P. Magdalino, ‘The bath of Leo the Wise and the “Macedonian Renaissance” revisited: topography, ceremonial, ideology’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 42 (1988), pp. 97–118. For Cordoba see the classic account of the embassy by John of St Arnulf, Vita Iohannis Abbatis Gorziensis, . cc. 119–36, ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS IV, pp. 371–3, 77, and most recently D. Wasserstein, The Caliphate in the West (Oxford, 1993). On court ritual in the T’ang period see the remarkably suggestive studies by H. G. Wechsler, Offerings of Jade and Silk: Ritual and Symbol in the Legitimation of the T’ang Dynasty (New Haven CN, 1985), and D. MacMullen, ‘Bureaucrats and cosmology: the ritual code of T’ang China’, in Cannadine and Price eds, Rituals of Royalty (as n. 17), pp. 181–236. Both authors stress the political importance of ritual, but also its flexibility. See on this G. Althoff, ‘Königsherrschaft und Konfliktbewältigung im 10. und 11. Jahrhundert ’, FMS 23 (1989), pp. 265–89 (repr. in Althoff, Spielregeln [as n. 9], pp. 21–56); T. Reuter, ‘Unruhestiftung, Fehde, Rebellion, Widerstand: Gewalt und Frieden in der Politik der Salierzeit’, in S. Weinfurter ed., Die Salier und das Reich, III: Gesellschaftlicher und ideengeschichtlicher Wandel im Reich der Salier (Sigmaringen, 1991), pp. 297–325 [translated as chapter 19, below]. See, for example, Notker Balbulus, Gesta Karoli magni imperatoris 1 13, ed. H. F. Haefele, MGH SRG n.s. XII (Munich, 1980), p. 17, for Carolingian jesters, and for the eleventh century the anecdote about William the Conqueror discussed in J. L. Nelson, ‘The rites of the Conqueror’, in her Politics and Ritual in the Early Middle Ages (London, 1986), pp. 400–1. The subject deserves further investigation; it should be noted here that the ioculatores banished from the wedding of Henry III with Agnes of Poitou belong in a different category.

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function of the licensed fool’s inversive and transgressive behaviour was simply not needed. Equally, though visions played a not unimportant role in Ottonian historical and hagiographical writing, for example in Thietmar’s Chronicon,22 political visions as a vehicle for expressing opposition or dissent which could not easily be formulated more directly do not figure in the way they clearly did in the Carolingian era.23 A third scale for measuring difference is given by the context or audience for political action. Again, examples may help us to understand and define it. At one end of a possible spectrum we have a significant episode in early Ottonian politics, the punishment of Eberhard of Franconia and his followers after their attack on a Saxon vassal of Eberhard. As is well known, each was made to carry a dog publicly for a considerable distance.24 At the other end of a possible spectrum, consider an example from a quite different time and place: Kenilworth, the estate of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, where in 1575 a masque was put on for the entertainment of the visiting Queen Elizabeth I of England, in which a contemporary debate about whether and whom the queen should marry was given literary (and therefore safer) expression in the form of a stage performance full of allusions to classical literature.25 The contrast is readily apparent, though not as easy as it might seem to define. It is not a matter of a contrast between simple unambiguous 22

23

24

25

E.g. Thietmar, Chronicon, II, 16, ed. R. Holtzmann, MGH SRG n.s. IX (Berlin, 1935), pp. 56–8 (vision of Brun of Cologne being accused in heaven); III, 5, pp. 100–12 (vision of Willigis of Mainz’s mother), and for dreams and visions by kings, see II, 26, p. 70, and VI, 91, p. 382 [trans. by D. Warner, Ottonian Germany: The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg (Manchester, 2001), pp. 103–4, 130; also 111, 297]. Thietmar’s visions mostly announce deaths, however; of those mentioned here, only the one concerning Brun could be taken as a political vision. From the extensive literature on this subject, I cite only W. Levison, ‘Die Politik in den Jenseitsvisionen des frühen Mittelalters’, in W. Levison, Aus rheinischer und frankischer Frühzeit (Düsseldorf, 1948), pp. 229–46; P. Dinzelbacher, Visionen und Visionsliteratur im Mittelalter, Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 23 (Stuttgart, 1981); P. E. Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (Lincoln NE, 1994). An exception to the generalisation in the text above is the action discussed by G. Althoff, ‘Magdeburg – Halberstadt – Merseburg. Bischöfliche Repräsentation und Interessenvertretung im ottonischen Sachsen’, in Althoff and Schubert eds., Herrscherrepräsentation, pp. 267–93. Widukind (as n. 4), II, 6, p. 72. See G. Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, 6: Die Deutsche Reichsverfassung von der Mitte des neunten bis zur Mitte des 12. Jahrhunderts, 3rd edn by G. Seeliger (Berlin, 1896), p. 605 with nn. 5 and 6; Bernd Schwenk, ‘Das Hündetragen. Ein Rechtsbrauch im Mittelalter’, HJ 110 (1990), pp. 289–308; Leyser, ‘Ritual, ceremony and gesture’ (as n. 9), p. 197. On related punishments such as harmiscara see M. De Jong, ‘Power and humility in Carolingian society: the public penance of Louis the Pious’, EME 1 (1992), pp. 46–7 and J. Hemming, ‘Sellam gestare: saddle-bearing punishments of medieval Europe and the case of Rhiannon’, Viator 28 (1997), pp. 45–64. S. Fry, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (Oxford, 1995), pp. 56–96; Fry also offers a convenient bibliographical entry-point to the huge and growing literature produced by early modern historians and literary critics on the representation and self-representation of power in the early modern era.


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symbols on the one hand and complex polyvalent symbols drawing on context and intertext on the other, for in a society fairly recently Christianised like Ottonian Saxony the dog would also have carried a range of symbolic values. The difference is rather that the whole of this range would not necessarily have been accessible to most of the participants in the spectacle. Ultimately, we are dealing with a function of the level of written learning and culture prevailing among the political elite. In Elizabethan England, as also in Renaissance Venice or Florence, or in Constantine Porphyrogenitos’ Constantinople, or indeed the imperial court of T’ang China, the ritual and public symbolism which made up and defined ruler representation were embedded in a knowledge of history, of religion, and of a literary canon which was not confined to circles of specialists. There might indeed be specialists in formal public ritual, but they were working and composing for an informed audience. This backdrop of common understanding empowered a symbolism which could be understood on many levels, and in allusiveness which could reach high levels of sophistication. It is a characteristic of a society marked by a certain kind of learning rather than simply of one with a high degree of literacy. We ourselves, for example, inhabit highly literate societies, but we no longer possess as a matter of course the range of knowledge which enables us to interpret with ease symbolic action and spectacle in our own or other societies; we need interpreters, as can be seen from the role of Kremlinologists (until recently, at least), Sinologists or noted experts on Vatican politics in our world. The Ottonian political elite undoubtedly lacked such a common dimension of learning in its shared culture, and this may help to explain one very marked trait of Ottonian ruler representation: its lack of historical content. Many of the societies I have just mentioned not only had annual cycles of festivals and rituals, as the Ottonians did: many of the feasts and rituals which figured in the annual cycles were references to a singular event located in historic time. The late-medieval festival celebrating the marriage of Venice with the sea is one kind of example,26 the celebrations of rulers’ birth- and accession days found across a very wide range of societies another. Benjamin Ray, writing about the political symbolism of the east African kingdom of the Buganda, has pointed to the importance of the ‘ritual enactment of founding deeds’.27 In so far as Ottonian political culture did have a historical referent, it was the history recorded in the New 26 27

On this see E. Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton NJ, 1981), pp. 119–34, and more generally on historical festivals pp. 75–92, 135–81. B. C. Ray, Myth, Ritual and Kingship in Buganda (New York and Oxford, 1991), pp. 14–20; the quotation in the text is from p. 19.

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Testament: the royal and not only the ecclesiastical year was punctuated by the festivals of Christmas, Palm Sunday, Easter and Whitsun. The Great Events of Liudolfing/Ottonian history were not re-enacted in this way. To refer to the victory at the Lechfeld by giving additional stress to the feast of St Lawrence, even to the point of allowing archbishops to wear their pallia on that day, was a much more indirect and translated way of memorialising it.28 The same applies to ruler representation as found in Ottonian art: Henry Mayr-Harting may be right in arguing that Ottonian court-artists rediscovered the New Testament and developed narrative techniques for depicting the history of Christ, but their depictions of rulers are in general timeless and hieratic.29 A sharp contrast is provided here by some contemporary Byzantine representations of Romanus Lecapenus and Basil II, both of which set the ruler they depicted in a historical context which compared him explicitly with earlier rulers.30 This ahistoricity links, to my mind, with the absence in Ottonian culture of a historically grounded view of what kingship was or should be. Whatever kingship actually meant or could have meant to the Saxons, it does not seem to have been strongly defined by past practice. It is a commonplace to say that the East Frankish Carolingians had not visited Saxony since 852. It is not quite true, since there were visits in transit to campaign against the Slavs in 862, 869 and 892; but it is true enough. The pattern of Carolingian diplomata-issuing for Saxon recipients may also suggest a reduced level of contact between the Carolingian East Frankish kings and the Saxons, though the early Liudolfings clearly derived some of their power-base from the marriages between Liudolfing women and Carolingian men.31 The important point is that by the early tenth century there were no longer any accurate memories of the Carolingians; indeed, what from our point of view is a historical muddle is characteristic, for good reasons, of tenth-century 28

29 30 31

H. Beumann, ‘Laurentius und Mauritius. Zu den missionsgeschichtlichen Folgen des Ungarnsieges Ottos des Großen’, in H. Beumann ed., Festschrift Walter Schlesinger, Mitteldeutsche Forschungen 74/2 (Cologne and Vienna, 1974), vol. II, pp. 238–75; and in H. Beumann, Ausgewählte Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1966–1986 (Sigmaringen, 1987), pp. 139–76; H. Keller, ‘Machabaeorum pugnae. Zum Stellenwert eines biblischen Vorbilds in Widukinds Deutung der ottonischen Königsherrschaft’, in H. Keller and N. Staubach eds., Iconologia sacra. Mythos, Bildkunst und Dichtung in der Religionsund Sozialgeschichte Alteuropas, Festschrift Karl Hauck (Berlin and New York, 1994), pp. 417–37; T. Zotz, ‘Pallium et alia quaedam archiepiscopatus insignia’, in H. Maurer and H. Patze eds., Festschrift Berent Schwineköper (Sigmaringen, 1982), pp. 155–75. H. Mayr-Harting, Ottonian Book Illumination: An Historical Study, 2 vols. (London, 1991). J. Shepard, ‘Byzantium in equilibrium, 866–944’ and ‘Byzantium expanding, 944–1025’, cc. 22 and 23, in T. Reuter ed., NCMH vol. III, pp. 563, 595. K. Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony (London, 1979), pp. 4–5.


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historians, as Patrick Geary has recently pointed out.32 This is not merely a matter of technical inaccuracy; it implies ceasing to have a real feel for the past. The process of mythologising the Carolingians began, of course, in the ninth century itself, as we can see from Einhard and Notker; but what we find in most tenth-century writers is not so much mythologising and ideologising – I don’t think Notker was much read in the tenth century, for example – as mis-remembering. We know that Widukind read Einhard carefully – where Einhard stated that the Saxons had become one people with the Franks, Widukind when citing Einhard deliberately added quasi (‘as if’); but it is clear that he didn’t draw on him for a model of kingship, though he occasionally borrowed appropriate motifs, as when he echoed aspects of Einhard’s account of Charles’s treatment of rebels in his own description of how Otto dealt with the rebels of the 941 plot.33 It’s also clear that he no longer had a clear idea of the course of later ninth-century Carolingian history (and nor if it comes to that did Liudprand or Richer).34 Whatever the overtones implied by the choice of Aachen as a coronation site in 936, 961 and 983, they were not primarily dictated by a living memory of ninth-century Carolingian rulership.35 We thus are faced with a polity with no centre, little government and little historical depth. Before going on to look at the practicalities of how Ottoman rulers represented themselves, I want to make a fourth general point and add a rider about its implications for our source-criticism. It is important to realise that although certain words and phrases in the vocabulary of representation were reserved for rulers, it is not in general true that the language of ritually or symbolically coloured self-portrayal was confined exclusively to them. A few examples, mostly well-known, will serve to illustrate this point. Hermann Billung’s usurpation of Otto I’s rightful reception-place at table and bed in Magdeburg in 972 has been 32

33

34

35

P. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance (Princeton NJ, 1995), especially pp. 134–57; see A. S. Remensnyder, Remembrance of Kings Past: Monastic Foundation Legends in Medieval Southern France (Ithaca NY, 1995), though she is dealing with a region where Carolingians had rarely been a real presence even when they were alive. Widukind (as n. 4), I, 15, p. 25 and II, 31, p. 92 (with which passage compare Einhard, Gesta Karoli, c. 20, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SRG XXV (Hannover, 1911), pp. 25–6). For Widukind’s relationship to Einhard, see H. Beumann, Widukind von Korvei (Weimar, 1950), pp. 45, 141–4 and elsewhere. See Widukind (as n. 4), II, 6 and 28, pp. 25–6, 40–1; for similar confusions about the ninth-century rulers, see Liudprand of Cremona, Antapodosis I, 5 and 14, ed. J. Becker, MGH SRG XLI (Hannover, 1915), pp. 7, 16; Richer, Historiae I, 4, ed. R. Latouche (Paris, 1930–7), vol. I, p. 10. On this see K. Hauck, ‘Die Ottonen und Aachen, 876 bis 936’, in Karl der Große, Lebenswerk und Nachleben, IV: Das Nachleben, ed. W. Braunfels and P. E. Schramm (Düsseldorf, 1967), pp. 39–53. It was really only after the disappearance of real live ruling Carolingians in 987 that Otto III could fully appropriate the Charles the Great-Aachen tradition: see K. Görich, Otto III. Romanus, Saxonicus et Italicus (Sigmaringen, 1993), pp. 265–6, with further literature.

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much discussed in recent years,36 but, whether we see in it a demonstrative assertion of ducal status within Saxony or a coded commentary on Otto I’s long absence in Italy, its message was clearly intended for Otto I. Yet such a political instrumentalisation of the Goldilocks motif need not entail a royal audience or victim. The anonymous author of the Gesta episcoporum Cameracensium, whose main theme is the tensions and rivalries between the bishops of Cambrai and the secular lords in and around the town, offers two parallel stories.37 In the first, Charles of Lorraine invades the bishopric in the course of the political manoeuvrings of the late 970s, and sleeps with his wife in the bishop’s bed.38 In the second, a local opponent of the bishops, the current castellan, invades the episcopal palace on the death of Bishop Gerard and again demonstratively occupies the bishop’s table and bed. Here too we have the demonstrative occupation of another’s bedchamber as an act charged with protest and opposition, though this time it is opposition to a bishop, not a ruler.39 Equally, bishops might, as Ottonian kings did, insist on a ritual submission of their lay opponents following a conflict, with bare feet and penitential mien: I have collected a number of examples of this, though I haven’t yet found one prior to Henry II’s reign.40 If these parallels are perhaps explicable in terms of the reciprocal relations of imitatio regni and imitatio sacerdotii between bishops and rulers,41 we can in fact find at least traces of a similar reciprocal imitation when we look at the behaviour of lay magnates. We know comparatively little about how counts and dukes took up or exercised their offices in the Ottonian Reich; but it would be a mistake to suppose that whereas kings had a whole series of elaborate initiation rites in the form of coronation and Umritt (a ritual 36

37

38 39

40

41

Thietmar, Chronicon (as n. 22), II, 28, pp. 72–4 (trans. Warner, p. 113); Leyser, Rule and Conflict (as n. 31), pp. 25, 94; G. Althoff, ‘Das Bett des Königs in Magdeburg. Zu Thietmar II, 28’, in H. Maurer and H. Patze eds., Festschrift Berent Schwineköper (Sigmaringen, 1982), pp. 141–53; Leyser, ‘Ritual, ceremony and gesture’ (as n. 9), pp. 198–201. Gesta episcoporum Cameracensium, I, 101 and 118–19, ed. L. Bethmann, MGH SS VII, pp. 442–3, 453–4; for a similar piece of behaviour, cf. the actions of John, the castellan of Cambrai, on Gerard’s death, Gesta Lietberti episcopi, c. 5, MGH SS VII, p. 492. See K. Leyser, ‘987: the Ottonian connection’, in Communications and Power (as n. 9), pp. 165–79, at 174–5. For a later example of an invasion of a bishop’s sphere of intimacy by a count see the incident at Nevers in 1182 described in M. Mansfield, The Humiliation of Sinners (Ithaca NY and London, 1995), p. 10. See T. Reuter, ‘Filii matris nostrae pugnant adversum nos: bonds and tensions between prelates and their milites in the German high middle ages’, in G. Picasso ed., Chiesa ce mondo feudale nei secoli X–XI (Milan, 1995), pp. 247–74, at 252. P. E. Schramm, ‘Sacerdotium und Regnum im Austausch ihrer Vorrechte’, in Kaiser, Könige und Päpste (as n. 3), vol. IV/1, pp. 57–102.


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riding-around the realm), followed by demonstrative rituals to punctuate their year’s ruling, counts and dukes merely existed in a pragmatic world devoid of all symbolic meaning. We can find Hermann of Meissen forgiving his enemies on becoming margrave, much like a king.42 Another anecdote of Thietmar tells of a count who had been proceeding to take up office in Swabia, when his opponents stole the banner which symbolised both his office and his legitimate claim to it from the camp he had pitched overnight. As a result of this, he was forced to abandon his claims. The story has been frequently cited as the earliest evidence for banner-fiefs in the Reich; but it is perhaps more interesting as showing that a count (and by analogy presumably also a margrave or duke) might need Herrschaftszeichen in order to exercise office legitimately.43 Widukind’s epigrammatic remark that Otto ‘nearly lost the kingship in Francia’ comes into sharper focus when we contemplate Thietmar’s account of how a Swabian count appointed by the king did indeed lose his countship once he had lost the ability to symbolise it. It appears, then, that in Ottonian Saxony and more generally in the Ottonian Reich, indeed in post-Carolingian Francia, kings and the members of the political community over which they ruled directly shared a common language of power. This would be quite unsurprising to political anthropologists, several of whom have made the point that royal ritual is an assertion of difference within similarity: Maurice Bloch, for example, has shown how the ritual of the royal bath in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Madagascar made use of a symbolism universally prevalent within that society to make a specific point.44 Yet when we try to explore this language we are confronted by a problem of representation, using the word in a rather different sense. How far are we looking at past reality, and how far at a common set of conventions for describing that reality used by historians and hagiographers in the tenth and early eleventh centuries?45 Another example may illustrate the point. At a crucial moment during the rebellion of Henry, Eberhard and Giselbert in 939 Otto angrily refused the demand of a count that the monastery of Lorsch should be given to him in benefice, citing the well-known words of 42 43 44

45

Thietmar, Chronicon (as n. 22), VI, 55, p. 342 (trans. Warner, p. 276). Ibid., V, 21, pp. 245–6 (trans. Warner, p. 220). M. Bloch, ‘The ritual of the royal bath in Madagascar: the dissolution of death, birth and fertility into authority’, in Cannadine and Price eds., Rituals of Royalty (as n. 17), pp. 271–4, and note also p. 296: ‘On the one hand the ritual of the royal bath is the same as the ordinary rituals of blessing by which each and every Merina assures and represents the reproduction of his family and himself . . . On the other hand the ritual of the royal bath is a ritual of the pre-eminence of the king, represented in the ritual as the violent conqueror and absorber of cattle. T. Reuter, ‘Pre-Gregorian mentalities’, JEcclesH 45 (1994), pp. 465–74 [chapter 5, above].

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Matthew 7:6 that holy things should not be given to dogs. As Karl Leyser has pointed out, the request and its rejection were given added force by the fact that Otto’s queen Edith had taken refuge in the monastery during the crisis.46 A generation later we have Adam of Bremen’s equally well-known account of the origins of the Slav uprising of 983. A niece of Hermann Billung was to have been given in marriage to the Abodrite prince Mistul, but the marriage was frustrated by a publicly delivered insult by Margrave Dietrich: the duke’s kinswoman is not to be given to a dog.47 Here too we probably have an allusion to Matthew 7:6. These two examples may show one of a number of things. They may be evidence for a common vocabulary of political debate, in which both rulers and other highly placed Saxon nobles could refer to their close female kin in biblically coloured terms. They may on the other hand merely be evidence for a common vocabulary of literary description, in which authors could use similar biblical topoi to point up the attitudes of both kings and other highly placed Saxon nobles towards their close female kin. The problem here is probably irreducible, as David Warner has recently noted;48 but the fact that it can’t easily be dealt with doesn’t mean that it isn’t there. Another problem facing any kind of global assessment of how the Ottonian rulers represented themselves to and were perceived by their nobility is the gaps in our knowledge. Take hunting, for example. We have enough anecdotal evidence for the tenth and early eleventh centuries to say with confidence that hunting was important for the rulers of Wessex and of West and East Francia: rulers of Wessex from Alfred through to Cnut engage in hunting (references in Asser, in the Vita Dunstani, in one of Cnut’s lawcodes), as do the Ottonians (Otto I was hunting when Edith died in 946 and at a crucial point during the rebellion of 953–4) and the West Frankish rulers. But only for the West Frankish rulers do we get a sense that hunting-parties were used quite deliberately to reinforce relations between rulers and princes (as between Odo and the count-bishop of Nˆımes in 889, and again in the 980s.49 Are we dealing with a real difference here? Janet Nelson has noted the importance of hunting for bonding between kings and nobles in the Carolingian era: is this a contrast between West Frankish traditionalism and a different style of Ottonian rulership? Or is it just a 46 47 48 49

K. Leyser, ‘The Ottonians and Wessex’, in Communications and Power (as n. 9), pp. 73–104, at 90–1. Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum II, 42, ed. B. Schmeidler, MGH SRG II (Hannover, 1917), pp. 101–3. D. Warner, ‘Thietmar of Merseburg on rituals of kingship’, Viator 25 (1994), pp. 53–76, at 75. M. Zimmermann, ‘Western Francia: the southern principalities’, in T. Reuter ed., NCMH, vol. III, pp. 420–55.


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matter of the fortuitous distribution of the anecdotal references which have survived?50 Even these need not be complete in all details: do we know, for example, whether it was a live or a dead dog which Eberhard of Franconia’s followers were expected to carry as punishment? If we now turn to the actual forms and effects of Ottonian ruler representation, the first point to be made is that it is important to distinguish between the forms used in the ruler’s absence, and the way he chooses to present himself (or his entourage chooses to present him) when on view. The means of representation when absent are inevitably symbolic in nature: palaces on hills or spurs of rock.51 Together with the great episcopal and monastic churches – in Saxony of course frequently built or rebuilt thanks to royal largesse – they made up a representative landscape, one in which the ruler was symbolically omnipresent in a way which marked him off from even the most powerful nature. Undoubtedly the most important, though they are still incompletely catalogued for all west European kingdoms in this era, were royal palaces. Many of these, in Ottonian Saxony and Thuringia at least, were more than the mere pieces of logistic support for the royal iter to which Pfalzen- and Itinerarforschung (specialist research on palaces and itineraries) has tended to reduce them; they were also objects of high visibility, dominating the landscape, as a glance through the only regional section of the catalogue of German royal palaces which has been completed, that for Thuringia, will show: Allstedt, Dornburg, Rohr, Saalfeld are all located on hills: a large-scale counterpart to the Sakrallandschaft (sacred landscape) which German historians have found so characteristic of the architectural policies of tenth- and eleventh-century bishops.52 Once entered, these buildings became miniature representative landscapes. The royal palaces we must envisage as symbolically inhabited by the king even in his absence: cycles of wall-pictures and tapestries set him in a historical context, as we know from the description of Henry I’s palace at Merseburg.53 Here too we should probably envisage aristocratic residences as slowly coming to be like this, though on a smaller scale: the family castle replaces the Fluchtburg (refuge-stronghold) east of the Rhine at about the same time as it does in West Francia, and we have just about enough 50 51 52 53

J. L. Nelson, ‘The Lord’s anointed and the people’s choice: Carolingian royal ritual’, in Cannadine and Price eds., Rituals of Royalty (as n. 17), pp. 137–80, especially 166–72. Die Deutschen Königspfalzen, ed. T. Zotz et al. (Göttingen 1984–91), pp. 1–3 (Allstedt), 83–102 (Dornburg), 420–64 (Rohr), 465–96 (Saalfeld). E. Herzog, Die ottonische Stadt (Berlin, 1964); H. Maurer, Konstanz als ottonischer Bischofssitz (Göttingen, 1973). Thietmar, Chronicon (as n. 22), I, 18, pp. 24–5 (trans. Warner, pp. 80–1); Deutschen Königspfalzen, vol. I (Göttingen, 1963), pp. 158–206 (Merseburg), at 174.

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anecdotal evidence – in the account of the Vita Meinwerci for example of Meinwerk’s mother, the notorious Adela, who had woven a tapestry depicting the deeds of her husband Balderich – to suggest to us that such visualisations of family history were not confined to rulers.54 Other buildings besides palaces enjoyed the king’s symbolic presence as well. The Ottonians did not replicate East Frankish Carolingian practice in establishing royal chapels (such as those at Aachen, Frankfurt and Otting) across their Land, but major churches, both inside and outside Saxony, were royal sites in a number of ways. Kings were often present, first of all, at dedications and rededications of churches.55 Once built, cathedral and abbey churches contained the king, through the books which he had given them,56 and, perhaps even more significantly, through the diplomas which he had issued for them.57 It is important to note signs that Ottonian diplomas were symbolic expressions of the king’s presence. In their size, in their ornate script, in their huge seals depicting the king in majesty, they proclaimed royalty, and we should not assume that they were always kept locked away just because that is how modern archives treat them.58 As Heinrich Fichtenau has shown, charters were often written to be recited, and when recited they were presumably displayed.59 It is also important to realise that this is a form of representation which doesn’t simply apply to the king’s relations with his ecclesiastical magnates. It is easy to fall into the belief that there was one set of relations between the king and his clerics, expressed in a set of Christian symbols, in churches and illuminated manuscripts and biblically inspired discourse on the nature of 54 55

56

57

58

59

Vita Meinwerci episcopi Paderbornensis, c. 138, ed. F. Tenckhoff, MGH SRG LIX (Hannover, 1920), p. 71. [For Adela, see below, chapter 19.] See K. J. Benz, Untersuchungen zur politischen Bedeutung der Kirchweihe unter Teilnahme der deutschen Herrscher im hohen Mittelalter. Ein Beitrag zum Studium des Verhältnisses zwischen weltlicher Macht und kirchlicher Wirklichkeit unter Otto III. und Heinrich II., Regensburger historische Forschungen 4 (Kallmanz, 1975), and R. Hausherr, Dombauten und Reichsepiskopat im Zeitalter der Staufer, Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz, 1991, no. 5, pp. 42–51. H. Keller, ‘Herrscherbild und Herrschaftslegitimation. Zur Deutung der ottonischen Denkmaler’, FMS 19 (1985), pp. 290–311; H. Hoffmann, Buchkunst und Königtum in ottonischer und frühsalischer Zeit, MGH Schriften XXX/1 and 2 (Stuttgart, 1986), pp. 7–24; Mayr-Harting, Ottonian Book Illumination (as n. 29). See Thietmar, Chronicon, III 1, p. 96 (trans. Warner, p. 127), and as commentary N. Fickermann, ‘Thietmar von Merseburg in der lateinischen Sprachtradition’, Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands 6 (1957), pp. 21–76, at 33–43 for the fluid boundaries between books and diplomas. C. Brühl, ‘Purpururkunden’, in C. Brühl, Aus Mittelalter und Diplomatik. Gesammelte Aufsätze, 1 (Hildesheim, 1989), pp. 601–19, and most recently G. Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca NY, 1992), pp. 87–90. H. Fichtenau, ‘Bemerkungen zur rezitativischen Prosa des Hochmittelalters’, in H. Fichtenau, Beiträge zur Mediävistik. Ausgewählte Aufsätze, 1 (Stuttgart, 1975), pp. 145–62.


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rulership, and quite a different one between the king and his lay magnates, inhabiting a Germanic world governed by the norms of the Gefolgschaft (military retinue) and little troubled by clerical notions. In fact, by the time we get to Thietmar’s age, at least, and to judge by texts like Ruotger’s Vita Brunonis and Gerhard’s Vita Uodalrici probably earlier, most major secular magnates spent at least a part of their lives in the orbit of one or more prelates: not necessarily subordinate to them, but sharing in local cycles of festival and assembly which replicated the grand Ottonian cycle at a local level, and so at the receiving end of the transmission of ruler representation through the major churches. I don’t think anything else in contemporary Europe really corresponds to this: it may again be a source problem, but the triangular relationship between bishops, kings and ealdormanic families in Anglo-Saxon England doesn’t look like this, and nor do the often tense relations between bishops, kings and local magnates in West Francia. But the major occasion for ruler representation was the assembly. Assembly politics are the determining feature of western European polities, from the seventh century if not before, through to the twelfth century if not after. I don’t think their importance has really been grasped by historians – English historians in particular, but others as well. This is partly because we learned early on – in a sense rightly, in another sense wrongly – to dismiss an older view of them which saw them as proto-parliamentary representative institutions. Clearly they weren’t that, but they were of crucial importance, particularly when, as in the Ottonian Reich in general and Ottonian Saxony in particular, there was little else. Unlike their Carolingian predecessors, and their Anglo-Saxon and Byzantine contemporaries, Ottonian rulers were not present-in-absence through their legislative activity; equally they did not dispose of a network of homogeneous local administrative units in the form of shires or themes which could be addressed by the ruler through the written word.60 We have comparatively few detailed accounts of Ottonian assemblies, and those we do possess occur largely as stylised set-pieces within the accounts of the great historians, especially of Widukind and Thietmar. But we know enough to be able to characterise them. They were in general 60

For a comparison of the two polities see T. Reuter, ‘The making of England and Germany, 850– 1050: points of comparison and difference’, in A. P. Smyth ed., Medieval Europeans: Studies in Ethnic Identity and National Perspectives in Medieval Europe (London, 1998), pp. 53–70 [reprinted in this book, chapter 16, below]; and see now H. Keller, ‘Zu den Siegeln der Karolinger und der Ottonen. Urkunden als “Hoheitszeichen” in der Kommunikation des Herrschers mit seinen Getreuen’, FMS 32 (1998), pp. 400–41.

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highly staged events, whose ritual and symbolism were rarely if ever subverted (or at least are rarely if ever presented by their depicters as being subverted). They bear little resemblance to the Carolingian assemblies depicted by Hincmar of Rheims – in an equally stylised manner, of course: their time was taken up with processions, liturgical events and prayers, and the reception of ambassadors from abroad, as Carolingian ones of course also were, but not with discussions on legislation and matters of public policy. They do not normally appear as moments when discussions could take place: as Gerd Althoff has shown, it was a culture which found it extraordinarily difficult to formulate criticism or dissent without moving straight to feud and hostility.61 Agriculturally and liturgically, the year moved continuously, if at varying pace, around its cycle; politically, time froze except on campaigns and at assemblies. It was here, for the most part, that movement and interaction were possible at all.62 Assemblies were not merely occasions when the ruler could represent himself as a ruler in the flesh; they were almost the only occasions when the polity could represent itself to itself. Outside the assembly there were the local politics of feud and convivium; but only at the assembly could this centreless polity define itself, and it did so in terms of the ruler. This in the last resort was how the secular magnates within the Reich saw themselves. The contrast between this kind of polity and that of Anglo-Saxon England, very different in spite of obvious similarities, is encapsulated in two letters contrasting respectable native customs with reprehensible foreign ones. In the first, written in Old English, the anonymous author criticises the recipient, Edward, for deserting English custom and going around ‘in Danish fashion’ with open neck and a long fringe. We can’t date this more closely than the early eleventh century – it could have been written under any ruler. In the second, Abbot Siegfried of Gorze wrote to Abbot Poppo of Stavelot about Henry III’s proposed marriage to Agnes of Poitou, which took place in 1043. He was against the marriage not only because the two parties to it were too closely related, but also because Agnes could be expected to bring foreign customs with her such as would not have been allowed by the Ottos and the Henrys. The English had laws, customs, language; the Germans had no way of defining 61

62

G. Althoff, ‘Colloquium familiare – colloquium secretum – colloquium publicum. Beratung im politischen Leben des früheren Mittelalters’, FMS 24 (1990), pp. 145–67, and in Spielregeln (as n. 9), pp. 157–84. I summarise here work which is developed at greater length in my paper, ‘Assembly politics, 700– 1200’, in P. Linehan and J. L. Nelson eds., The Medieval World (London, 2001), pp. 432–50 [reprinted in this book, chapter 11, below]; see also T. L. Bisson, ‘Celebration and persuasion: reflections on the cultural evolution of medieval consultation’, Legislative Studies Quarterly 7 (1982), pp. 181–204.


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a common identity and inheritance except in terms of the kings who ruled them.63 Yet self-definition in terms of the ruler did not mean that everyone else in the polity was defined out of existence, as in a sense it did in contemporary Cordoba or Constantinople. Rulers might not take part in forms of collective action in the same way as other participants, but the other participants did take part, and the polity defined collectively in terms of its rulers also legitimised its other members. When kings were presented for acceptance to their ‘people’, meaning in practice the great magnates, this act legitimised not only rulership but also those who were to be ruled. We can see this in Widukind’s account of the 936 kingmaking at Aachen, and more particularly in Thietmar’s account of the subsidiary election of Henry II at Merseburg in 1002. We can see it equally in the well-known state banquets of 936 and 986 (the latter presumably an echo of the former), at which the dukes served by filling the offices of state. Whether they merely directed affairs or acted themselves as butler, steward and so forth is not easy to decide and of subordinate importance here: what is more significant is that such acts expressed not only the subordination of their power to that of the king, but also enhanced the legitimacy of their own position. Indeed, rulership as a one-man show is difficult to conceive of; the theatre of rulership required others to play their part as well. The focus may be on the charisma of rulership as expressed in ceremonies which, to quote Clifford Geertz once again, ‘mark the center as center and give what goes on there its aura of being not merely important but in some odd fashion connected with the way the world is’;64 but this does not merely draw power from those displaying their subordination, it transmits power back to them as well. This brings me to my final point. In the passage on Bali quoted earlier, Geertz referred to the role of the peasantry in Bali’s state theatricality: ‘supporting cast, stage crew, and audience’.65 One of the major gaps, it seems to me, in the recent historiography of Ottonian Saxony, has been the absence of any attempt to show how the elaborate structures of logistics, ritual and consciousness impinged on the great bulk of the population, on whom the producers of these things in the last resort depended. There are obvious reasons for this: both the traditional division of labour between 63 64

65

See Reuter, ‘The making of England and Germany’ (as n. 60) [in this book, chapter 16]. C. Geertz, ‘Centers, kings and charisma: reflections on the symbolics of power’, in S. Willentz ed., Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual and Politics since the Middle Ages (Philadelphia PA, 1984), pp. 13–40, at 24. Geertz, Negara (as n. 11), p. 124.

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economic and social history on the one hand and other kinds of history on the other, and also the virtual silence of Ottonian sources on these social groups as on so much else, together conspire to produce the omission. When Widukind, describing Otto I’s deathbed, says missarum deinde officiis celebratis, pauperibus iuxta morem manus porrexit (‘then when the rites of the mass had been celebrated, he stretched out his hand to the pauperes, according to custom’), he is clearly offering a conventional picture of royal piety, and as we know, pauperes are not necessarily the ‘poor’ in our sense.66 But this is at least a rare moment in Ottonian historical writing when people outside the political community enter on stage at all. This shortage of reference shouldn’t be taken to mean that the Ottonian elite felt so secure that they had no need to be conscious of their lordship over others: in the worries of the Casus S. Galli about the yuppification of estate bailiffs, in Thietmar’s reference to an urban riot in Strassburg (plebeius furor), in Alpert of Metz’s hate-filled account of the merchant guild at Thiel, in the Ottonian ecclesiastical establishment’s treatment of the lower-class and egalitarian saint Hilmerad with his lower-class followers, we can see considerable insecurities. Most significant of all are the frequent anecdotes in Ottonian hagiography telling how, when saints appeared in visions to servants instructing them to take messages to their masters or mistresses, they had to do so repeatedly, and sometimes even to use physical violence on them, before the servants would act. For the saints themselves to use intermediaries in this way was courteous aristocratic behaviour; it would often have seemed ill-bred (and might no doubt have risked evoking a response appropriate to ill-breeding) to appear directly in the dreams of the intended recipients.67 But the terror of those who were expected to take the messages says something, at least, about how effectively the Ottonian political elite’s collective self-representation centred on the king and maintained a distance between them and everyone else. 66 67

Widukind (as n. 4), III, 75, p. 152. On these examples see K. Leyser, ‘The German aristocracy from the ninth to the early twelfth century: a historical and cultural sketch’, in K. Leyser, Medieval Germany and its Neighbours, 900– 1250 (London, 1982), pp. 161–4. On this aspect of aristocratic behaviour see W. I. Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking (Chicago, 1990), p. 86.

chap t e r 9

Contextualising Canossa: excommunication, penance, surrender, reconciliation

On 27 or 28 January 1077 the excommunicated German king Henry IV, after standing in sackcloth and barefoot in the snow on three successive days in the courtyard of the Tuscan margraves’ castle at Canossa, was allowed into the presence of Pope Gregory VII, who lifted the sentence of excommunication which had been laid on him the previous year, on certain conditions. The immediate resonance of the act was perhaps less than we might have expected, certainly less than the immediate resonance of Henry IV’s excommunication nearly a year beforehand. But awareness of its importance and its symbolic significance gradually grew, then and since. Many reformers of the sixteenth century saw Gregory VII’s pontificate as a turning-point, the moment at which the medieval church took the crucial step down the road to popery.1 With the revived nineteenth-century interest in the Kaiserzeit, Canossa took on a new, nationalistically interpreted meaning. Plans to include the scene in the historic wall-paintings in the restored Salian palace at Goslar – a crystallisation of the link between the new Reich and the old one – were modified to the extent that the scene as depicted lost most of its meaning, as a result of a public outcry and official intervention. When in 1872 Bismarck said, ‘We shall not go to Canossa, neither in body nor in spirit’, he did not have to spell out the allusion. It was clear to his many educated contemporaries who had devoured the third volume of Wilhelm von Giesebrecht’s History of the German Imperial Era.2 Even today, for educated Germans at least, a Canossagang is as much a standard phrase as ‘eating humble-pie’ is for us.

1

2

[A few of the footnotes to this paper were in the author’s text, but most have been reconstructed, some from his indications, by Sarah Hamilton and JLN.] J. Gillingham, The Kingdom of Germany in the High Middle Ages, Historical Association Pamphlet G.77 (London, 1971), pp. 4–6; cf. John Roberts [Thomas Swinnerton], Lyfe of Hyldebrande, Called Gregory, the VII Pope of that Name, A Mustre of Scismatyke Byshoppes of Rome, Otherwise Naming Themselves Popes (London: Johan Byddell, 1534). H. Zimmermann, Der Canossagang von 1077. Wirkungen und Wirklichkeit, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz, Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen

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For modern medievalists, the drama at Canossa also marks a turningpoint. Gerd Tellenbach in a memorable phrase termed the struggle between emperor and pope ‘a struggle for right order in the world’.3 At Canossa the nature of the right order within a Christian society was acknowledged in a way which could hardly have been more public or definitive. The era of Christian rulership which had begun in the eighth century with the unction of Pippin III and continued with the theocratically flavoured rule of the later Carolingians and their successors and analogues in east and west Francia, in Wessex and León, ended at Canossa. Until then the king had been a mediator cleri et plebis, a link between clergy and people; by virtue of his anointing he stood between and above both.4 Now he was revealed as – more or less – a layman, one who in spite of consecration was nevertheless subject not only to the spiritual guidance but also to the judicial authority of the clergy. This might even extend to the ability to say that a king was not fit to be a king, to depose him and to release his subjects from their obedience.5 This was a development which affected kings beyond the frontiers of the Reich and had consequences long after Henry IV had been buried alongside his ancestors in the cathedral church at Speyer. True, there were no ecclesiastical depositions of kings in twelfthcentury western Europe. Popes and prelates became more cautious after the experience of the long struggles which followed the events of 1076–7. But rulers also became cautious. Even cool and calculating figures like Henry I or Henry II of England knew that there were limits beyond which they could not go (and Henry II, who arguably did go beyond them, had to put all his efforts into avoiding deposition). Western European kingship needed to be reinvented, to be put on a new ideological, moral and juristic basis, as it largely was in the course of the twelfth-century renaissance. It was this revitalised rulership which in the thirteenth century was to clash on a number of occasions with a papacy which had also not stood still: but none of the many depositions and attempted depositions of rulers in that century, not even that of Frederick II in 1245, had anything like the impact

3 4

5

Klasse, 1975, no. 5 (Wiesbaden, 1977), at pp. 6–18, with Bismarck’s speech cited at p. 6, n. 4; and for the wall-paintings in Goslar, see p. 48. G. Tellenbach, Libertas. Kirche und Weltordnung in Zeitalter des Investiturstreites (1936), trans. R. Bennett as Church, State and Christian Society (Oxford, 1940), p. 1. See the Ordo of Seven Forms, ed. C. Erdmann, Forschungen zur politischen Ideenwelt im Frühmittelalter (Berlin, 1951), pp. 87–9; for a new edition, and a new name for the ordo (‘Eleven Forms’), see R. Jackson ed., Ordines Coronationis Franciae. Texts and Ordines for the Coronation of Frankish and French Kings and Queens in the Middle Ages, vol. I, Ordo XIV (Philadelphia PA, 1995), pp. 154–67. F. Kern, Gottesgnadentum und Widerstandsrecht (Leipzig, 1914), revd edn R. Buchner (1956), pp. 97–8. The English translation of the 1914 edition by S. B. Chrimes, Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1939), omits Kern’s notes and excursuses.

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of Henry IV’s deposition in 1076 and his restoration to office – or not, as the case may be – at Canossa in 1077. What I want to do is to sketch the events leading up to Henry IV’s journey, and then to look more closely at the meeting at Canossa itself, and at what the actions and symbols used by the participants meant to them and to their audience. As my title implies, and as we shall see in more detail in due course, these actions and symbols were not all what they seem to be at first sight. ∗∗∗ The Reich which Henry IV ruled over was a multiple kingdom, a form of polity which would continue to play an important, indeed a dominant role in Europe up to the end of the seventeenth century and beyond.6 He was first of all king of what we now call Germany, though Henry IV and his contemporaries did not call it that. This itself might well be considered a multiple kingdom, since there were strong provincial identities and political customs which a ruler could not easily or safely override. He was also king of Burgundy, though that plays little part in this story. And he was king of Italy, meaning the Lombard kingdom stretching from the Alps down into central Italy.7 As emperor-to-be – in 1077 Henry IV had not yet been crowned emperor – he also exercised rights of protection at the very least over Rome and the ramshackle agglomeration of estates and rights misleadingly known as the papal state. It is perhaps not surprising then that there should be three interwoven but distinct strands of conflict leading up to Henry IV’s deposition and restoration: a Saxon, a north Italian and a Roman. The Saxon conflict is the most straightforward, but also the most fundamental. The Reich had been refounded in the tenth century by an alliance between Saxon and Frankish aristocracies under a Saxon king; but the dynasty had come to an end in 1024, and the related Salian house which took power then, though in many ways showing great continuity with its Ottonian predecessors, had shifted the centre of gravity of the Reich southwards.8 Many of the Saxon aristocracy felt increasingly alienated from their rulers, and this alienation was reinforced by claims made by Conrad II, 6 7 8

See J. Elliott, ‘A Europe of Composite Monarchies’, P&P 137 (1992), pp. 48–71. The most recent study of Henry IV’s reign is in English: I. S. Robinson, Henry IV of Germany, 1056–1106 (Cambridge, 1999). K. Leyser, ‘The Crisis of Medieval Germany’, PBA 69 (1983), pp. 409–43, at 440 [repr. in K. Leyser, Communications and Power in Medieval Europe, ed. T. Reuter, 2 vols. (London, 1994), vol. II, The Gregorian Revolution and Beyond, pp. 21–49; K. Leyser, ‘From Saxon Freedoms to the Freedom of Saxony: The Crisis of the Eleventh Century’, ibid., pp. 51–67]. On the special position of Saxony within the Ottonian and Salian Reich, see chapter 19 below, with references.

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Henry III and Henry IV on lands held by aristocrats which their ancestors had received by royal grant: kings claimed these back when direct heirs failed or when their holders proved politically unreliable. In the summer of 1073 the storm broke: at a meeting at Hötersleben the greater part of the east Saxon aristocracy, lay and ecclesiastic, rose up against Henry IV, and the king’s few supporters in the land were swept away. By contrast with the aristocratic revolts of the tenth century, the Saxons had no member of the royal family around whom they could cluster. In their search for political allies in other parts of the Reich they were thus forced to argue that Henry IV’s tyranny was so great that he could no longer be accepted as king, and they backed this claim up by spreading ugly rumours about the king’s private life – we shall see the significance of these later.9 They do not seem to have had much contact with Gregory VII at this stage, however. The north Italian conflict is much more difficult to summarise, and I shall have to simplify it a good deal. The Ottonians and Salians who ruled Italy from 962 onwards found that the hollowing out of royal power in Italy between 898 and 962 had left them little opportunity for active intervention.10 In the mountainous regions of Tuscany and Piedmont some real power was still held by margraves; but on the plains power had already passed to urban oligarchies, who ruled the cities and their surroundings through the bishops whom they chose. In many cities these oligarchies were threatened from the mid-1050s onwards by movements of socio-religious protest, the Patarini, whose attacks on religious corruption among the higher clergy had clear implications for the distribution of power within the cities.11 Though the popes and their entourages repeatedly sought to mediate, especially in Milan, the main centre of conflict, Gregory’s predecessor Alexander II had slowly moved – perhaps under Gregory’s 9

10

11

Lampert, Annales, a. 1073, in O. Holder-Egger ed., Lamperti Monachi Herfeldensis Opera, MGH SRG (Hannover and Leipzig, 1894), pp. 151–2. See now T. Struve, ‘War Heinrich IV. ein Wüstling? Szenen einer Ehe am salischen Hofe’, in O. Münsch and T. Zotz eds., Scientia Veritatis. Festschrift für Hubert Mordek zum 65. Geburtstag (Sigmaringen, 2004), pp. 273–88, where the charges are found false. See G. Sergi, ‘The Kingdom of Italy’, in T. Reuter ed., NCMH, vol. III, pp. 346–71, and G. Tabacco, ‘Northern and Central Italy in the Eleventh Century’, in D. Luscombe and J. Riley-Smith eds., NCMH, vol. IV(i), pp. 72–93. C. Violante, La Pataria Milanese e la riforma ecclesiastica, I: Le premese (Rome, 1955); H. Keller, ‘Die soziale und politische Verfassung Mailands in den Anfängen des kommunalen Lebens’, HZ 211 (1970), pp. 34–64; H. Keller, ‘Pataria und Stadtverfassung, Stadtgemeinde und Reform: Mailand im “Investiturstreit”’, in J. Fleckenstein ed., Investiturstreit und Reichsverfassung, Vorträge und Forschungen 17 (Sigmaringen, 1973), pp. 321–50.


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influence – towards more open support of the Patarini. By contrast, Henry IV had in Milan backed the old oligarchy under Archbishop Wido. Worse still, he had accepted Wido’s resignation and designation of Godfrey as his successor, and allowed Godfrey to be invested with the archbishopric even though Godfrey had already been rejected by the Milanese and excommunicated by the pope.12 Alexander II excommunicated five of Henry’s counsellors for this in the closing months of his pontificate, and Henry’s association with them meant that he too was subject to lesser excommunication.13 Already in 1073, then, radicals in northern Italy looked to the papacy for support; conservatives looked to Henry. The Roman conflict was a potential rather than an open one.14 Henry’s father had intervened repeatedly in papal affairs between 1046 and 1055, first to remove unsatisfactory popes and then to appoint satisfactory ones: a series of German bishops distinguished by energy and an irreproachable way of life held the papacy from 1046 to 1057, and in this period the transformation of the papacy began. It changed from a distant headship over the church acknowledged by all in theory without significant practical consequences into an active leadership of the church at the head of a hierarchy: an early example of a transformation similar to that which was to affect secular rulership over the next 150 years. The essential basis of Henry III’s actions was his ability to come south with a large army and beat the Romans into submission; but it was legitimised by his taking the title of patricius Romanorum, which allowed him the first voice in an election of the bishop of Rome.15 This happy cooperation changed rapidly on the death of Henry III in 1056. Henry IV was a minor and unable to act effectively in Italy at a distance: but the international and local group of cardinals and their advisers now running the papal court needed support and protection against local aristocrats just as much as before. They tried to get it from the imperial court, but when it was not forthcoming they turned to local 12

13

14

15

H. E. J. Cowdrey, ‘The Papacy, the Patarenes and the Church of Milan’, TRHS 5th ser. 18 (1968), pp. 25–48, repr. in H. E. J. Cowdrey, Pope, Monks and Crusaders (London, 1984), V; H. E. J. Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII 1073–1085 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 65–71. Bonizo of Sutri, Liber ad amicum, ed. E. Dümmler, MGH Lib. de lite I, c. 6, p. 600, c. 7, pp. 601, 605; see R. Schieffer, Die Enstehung des päpstlichen Investitursverbots für den deutschen König, Schriften der MGH XXVIII (Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 109–10; Robinson, Henry IV, pp. 125–6. For a general account see G. Tellenbach, The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century, trans. T. Reuter (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 141–84; for the point that the conflict was not inevitable, see ibid., p. 145: ‘[Henry III] could not foresee what was to happen in the two decades following his death; there were no signs of a conflict between empire and papacy in his lifetime, nor of a general shift within Christendom, not even in its peripheral regions.’ Ibid., p. 144.

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powers – Godfrey the Bearded, margrave of Tuscany, and from 1059 also the Norman princes of southern Italy: since both of these could be considered enemies of the Reich, this did not improve relations with the imperial court.16 In 1059 also, a synodal decree assigned the cardinal bishops the chief voice in papal elections: this had few practical consequences, as no papal election that we know of was conducted in the way laid down by the election decree of 1059, but it is symptomatic that Henry IV’s rights in the matter were mentioned only at the end in a throwaway reference.17 The distance that had grown up between the papal and imperial courts is best seen in the disputed papal election of 1061: for three years the imperial court backed the wrong horse, and though a reconciliation was achieved, a coolness remained.18 Gregory VII, who was elected by popular acclamation, made no attempt even to notify the imperial court of his election.19 There were thus grounds enough for hostility between Henry and Gregory, but for several years these were overshadowed by the Saxon uprising. So long as this threatened the whole basis of Salian power, Henry had little time or energy to give to Gregory, nor could he easily raise an army and move south of the Alps with it in the traditional manner of his Ottonian and Salian predecessors.20 Henry therefore did his best to maintain good relations with Gregory: immediately after the outbreak of the Saxon uprising he wrote to the pope in terms which surprised Gregory himself.21 In the 16

17

18

19

20 21

For a recent analysis of relations between the imperial court and Rome in the early years of Henry IV’s minority see Robinson, Henry IV, pp. 36–42. On the Normans see: H. E. J. Cowdrey, The Age of Abbot Desiderius: Montecassino, the Papacy and the Normans in the Late Eleventh Century (Oxford, 1983), pp. 112–17. For the text, see K. M. Woody, ‘Sagena piscatoris: Peter Damiani and the Papal Election Decree of 1059’, Viator 1 (1970), pp. 52–4; for a translation see M. C. Miller, Power and the Holy in the Age of the Investiture Conflict: A Brief History with Documents (Boston and New York, 2005), pp. 71–3. See the accounts of the Cadalan schism, with different emphases, in H. E. J. Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 49–53 and I. S. Robinson, Henry IV of Germany, 1056–1106 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 41–54. Gregory VII, Das Register Gregors VII, ed. E. Caspar, MGH Epp. sel. (Berlin, 1955) (hereafter Registrum), I, 1 (Gregory notifies Abbot Desiderius of his election mentioning the ‘great tumult and uproar of the people’ which led to it), I, 2 (notifies Prince Gisulf of Salerno), I, 3 (notifies Archbishop Guibert of Ravenna, I, 4 (copy of notice sent to Beatrice of Tuscany, Abbot Hugh of Cluny, Archbishop Manasses of Rheims, King Swein of Denmark and the abbot of Marseilles), pp. 1–7. For evidence that there was opposition to Gregory’s election at the imperial court see Robinson, Henry IV, p. 128; Lampert of Hersfeld records that the German bishops tried to persuade Henry IV to declare Gregory’s election invalid (Lampert, Annales, a. 1073, p. 145); Bishop Gregory of Vercelli, the imperial chancellor in Italy, was also reported to be leading a conspiracy against the new pope. In addition to the works by Leyser mentioned in n. 8 above, see the detailed, broadly chronological account, in Robinson, Henry IV, pp. 72–104. Die Briefe Heinrichs IV, ed. C. Erdmann, MGH Deutsches Mittelalter I (Leipzig, 1937), no. 5, pp. 8–9; trans. T. E. Mommsen and K. F. Morrison, Imperial Lives and Letters of the Eleventh Century, 2nd edn (New York, 2000), no. 5, pp. 141–2. Cf. Gregory VII, Registrum, I. 25, pp. 41–2.


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following year he did penance in public for his association with the excommunicated counsellors, and tried to smooth over differences between papal legates and the archbishops of Cologne and Mainz.22 Gregory in turn saw him as a possible regent should the pope lead a crusade to the east in 1074.23 As late as the summer of 1075 Gregory could write very warmly to Henry, inviting him to provide for a new bishop for Bamberg after the deposition of Bishop Hermann.24 But 1074 was also the turning-point. The Saxons, who had been allowed to rase the Harzburg and other royal fortresses by an agreement between them and Henry IV negotiated by the German archbishops, went too far. Not only did they destroy the fortifications, but also a church; and they desecrated the graves of Henry’s brother and son.25 You have only to think of the enormous investments made by contemporary aristocrats in the cult of their dead and the preservation of the family memoria to envisage the reaction: the network of allies which the Saxons had built up outside their homeland, especially among the south German magnates, fell away, and in the following year Henry was able to enter Saxony in force, destroying a Saxon army at the Unstrut in June and unable to follow up his victory to the full only because there was not enough food to support his army – from late June to early August was the hungriest period of the year in Europe until very recently. However, the Saxons were unable to hold out any longer. Their leader, Otto of Northeim, made a separate peace with Henry, and the others submitted to him in October at Speyer: most were imprisoned.26 Henry, following his victory over the Saxons, took a more forceful line in northern Italy. Around September he confirmed the appointment of Thedald, the candidate of the anti-Patarene party in Milan, as archbishop.27 He also appointed bishops in Fermo and Spoleto – in the heart of the papal ‘state’.28 The consequence was that Gregory began to remonstrate more forcibly in the autumn, at precisely the time when the Saxons were being 22

23 25 26 27

28

H. E. J. Cowdrey ed., The Epistolae Vagantes of Pope Gregory VII (Oxford, 1972), no. 14 at pp. 36–7. See also Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, pp. 98–9. Doing penance in public was not necessarily the same as doing public penance: see below, n. 55. 24 Ibid., III, 3, pp. 246–7. Gregory VII, Registrum, I, 49, pp. 75–6. See chapter 19 below, with refs. at n. 3. Carmen de bello Saxonico Book III, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SRG (Hannover, 1889), ll. 284–6. Arnulf of Milan, Liber gestorum recentium, iv, 8–v, 5, ed. C. Zey, MGH SRG LXVII (Hannover, 1994), pp. 212–24; Landulf Senior, Historia Mediolanensis, 3, 30–3, 32, ed. L. C. Bethman and W. Wattenbach, MGH SS VIII (1848), pp. 97–9; Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, pp. 130–1. Gregory VII, Registrum, III, 10, at p. 264: ‘Et nunc quidem, ut vulnus vulneri infligeres, contra statuta apostolicae sedis tradidisti Firminam et Spoletanam ecclesiam . . . quibusdam personis nobis etiam ignotis.’ Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, p. 131.

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crushed; his first letter to Henry is undated, but was probably sent in early September.29 His second, more strongly worded protest, reminding Henry of the fate of Saul, reached Henry at Christmas.30 By this time the king had restored his position completely – or thought he had – and certainly saw no reason to show restraint: old resentments boiled up, not only for Henry, but also for the German episcopate, many of whom had found Gregory’s autocratic treatment of them humiliating and distasteful. At a hastily summoned meeting at Worms on 24 January 1076, Henry declared that Gregory had been chosen pope without reference to him as patricius Romanorum, hence unlawfully (and that his actions as pope confirmed this), and he invited him to draw the consequences.31 It was by no means the first time that a German ruler had invited a pope to resign; but it was the first time this had been done from a distance, and this turned out to be a fatal error. The message reached Gregory at Rome in mid-February, at the Lent synod of 1076, and he responded by excommunicating Henry ‘until divine mercy shall turn the hearts of the wicked to penitence’, forbidding him to exercise rule over Italy and the kingdom of the Germans – Gregory was almost the inventor of this term, which was intended to belittle the scope of Henry’s rule – and releasing the king’s subjects from their oaths of obedience.32 The effect was immediate and electrifying: many of those who had been present at Worms began to seek reconciliation with Gregory. Henry’s response was unimpressive: he tried to get Gregory excommunicated, but the bishop he finally persuaded to do it died shortly afterwards, and this only seemed to confirm that his cause was ill-fated.33 In the course of the summer his support collapsed, as can be seen by the way in which many of the Saxons who had been imprisoned following their surrender in the previous autumn were either released or allowed to escape (which in 29 30

31 32 33

Gregory VII, Registrum, III, 7, pp. 256–9. Ibid., 10, pp. 263–7, at p. 267: ‘Atque hoc ut timor Dei, in cuius manu et potestate omne regnum est et imperium, precordiis tuis altius quam nostra ammonitio infigat, in mente habeas, quid Sauli post adeptam victoriam, qua propheta iubente usus est, de suo triumpho glorianti et eiusdem prophetae monita non exequenti acciderit et qualiter a Domino reprobatus sit, quanta vero gratia David regem ex merito humilitatis inter virtutum insignia subsecuta fuerit.’ Die Briefe Heinrichs IV, nos. 10–12, pp. 12–17, trans. Mommsen and Morrison, Imperial Lives and Letters, pp. 145–51. For the date of the meeting see Lampert, Annales, pp. 253–4. Gregory VII, Registrum, III, 10a, pp. 270–1. Bishop William of Utrecht declared Gregory excommunicated on Easter Sunday (27 March): Hugh of Flavigny, Chronicon, MGH SS VIII, p. 458. William’s sudden death a month later was interpreted by Gregory’s supporters as divine judgement: Berthold of Reichenau, Annales, a. 1076, MGH SS V, p. 283; Lampert, Annales, a. 1076, pp. 258–9. See Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, p. 144; Robinson, Henry IV, pp. 149–51.


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normal times would have had very serious consequences for those holding them).34 By the autumn, when Henry and his supporters met at Oppenheim, on the opposite side of the Rhine from the hostile magnates’ meeting at Tribur, the game was up. Henry had to accept a number of restrictions on his rule, and he was given an ultimatum to free himself from excommunication within a year (that is, by 15 February 1077). Otherwise the princes would feel free to elect a new ruler.35 At the same time the magnates invited Gregory to come north to a meeting at Augsburg on 2 February to judge on the issues in dispute between Henry and themselves.36 It was at this point that Henry began to try to break out of the circle he found himself in. He retracted the sentence of repudiation issued at Worms; he appeared publicly at Speyer, the Salians’ house-bishopric, as a penitent; and he exchanged envoys and proposals with Gregory several times, no doubt sounding out the terms on which he might be released from excommunication.37 Henry was anxious for any reconciliation to take place in Rome away from the glare of publicity in his heartland, just as the princes wanted the decision to take place north of the Alps.38 Gregory in turn kept the German magnates informed – but unfortunately not us, because although his letters have survived, they merely served to accredit the bearers, as was normal practice at this time, and give no further details.39 But Henry not only negotiated; he was determined to force the issue, and although the magnates had hoped to guard against his leaving the country – at least two royalist bishops who sought to travel south at this time were prevented from doing so by opposition magnates – he was able to slip away

34

35

36 37

38

Lampert, Annales, a. 1076, pp. 257–8, 263–9; Berthold, Annales, ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS V (Hannover, 1844), a. 1076, pp. 283–4; Bruno of Merseburg, Saxonicum bellum. Brunos Buch vom Sachsenkrieg, ed. H.-E. Lohmann, MGH Deutsches Mittelalter II (Leipzig, 1937), cc. 83–4, pp. 78–80. See Robinson, Henry IV, pp. 151–2. For the terms of the agreement see Die Briefe Heinrichs IV, ed. C. Erdmann, MGH Deutsches Mittelalter I (Leipzig, 1937), no. 24, pp. 72–3; trans. Mommsen and Morrison, Imperial Lives and Letters, pp. 154–5. For detail about the meetings at Tribur and Oppenheim, see Lampert, Annales, a. 1076, pp. 382–92; Berthold, Annales, a. 1076, pp. 286 (l. 14) to 287 (l. 6); Bruno, Saxonicum bellum, c. 88, pp. 326–31. On the meeting, and the events which followed, see H. Beumann, ‘Tribur, Rom und Canossa’, in J. Fleckenstein ed., Investiturstreit und Reichsverfassung (Sigmaringen, 1973), pp. 33–60; E. Hlawitschka, ‘Zwischen Tribur und Canossa’, HJ 94 (1974), pp. 25–45; Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, pp. 150–5; Robinson, Henry IV, pp. 156–61. Lampert, Annales, a. 1076, p. 281; Berthold, Annales, a. 1076, pp. 286–7; Bruno, Saxonicum bellum, c. 88, p. 83; see Robinson, Henry IV, pp. 156–7. Berthold, Annales, a. 1077, p. 289; Lampert, Annales, a. 1076, p. 283. The envoys included Abbot Hugh I of Cluny who visited Henry at Speyer before going on to Rome: H. E. J. Cowdrey, The Cluniacs and the Gregorian Reform (Oxford, 1970), p. 160. For a full list of royal envoys see Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, p. 155. On Henry’s penance, see ibid., p. 153. 39 Cowdrey ed., Epistolae Vagantes, nos. 17–18, p. 48. Lampert, Annales, a. 1076, p. 283.

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from Germany in November.40 He celebrated Christmas at Besançon and in spite of an unusually hard winter was able to complete an extremely risky Alpine crossing successfully.41 Henry caught up with Gregory at Canossa, and there followed the scene I sketched at the beginning of this paper. ∗∗∗ There are a number of accounts of what actually happened at Canossa: there is a full-ish one in a letter written by Gregory VII to the German princes to explain himself;42 there are two longer ones, in part dependent on this, but containing much additional detail, in the Annals of Lampert of Hersfeld and Berthold of the Reichenau;43 and there are a number of somewhat later accounts in Italian sources, notably in Lives of two of the participants, Bishop Anselm II of Lucca and Margravine Mathilda of Tuscany.44 These accounts diverge on whether Henry surprised Gregory, as Gregory himself claimed, or whether the whole thing was worked out in advance, as Lampert implies.45 But they agree in substance on the main sequence of events: negotiations immediately preceding the meeting, Henry’s public self-abasement in the snow, reconciliation on terms laid down in writing and confirmed by an oath taken on the king’s soul, communion granted by Gregory, and festive meal to confirm the new harmony. The balance of probability seems to be that Henry did not in fact stand in the snow for three whole days, but rather that he made three successive appearances before returning to another castle down the road provided for him by Mathilda. Archaeology has confirmed some of the details of the scene, even details supplied by the notoriously untrustworthy Lampert: we now know where the inner courtyard in Canossa lay, where Henry is said to have stood in view of Gregory and others between 25 January and 27 January, and the location of the reconciliation of 27 January or 28 January, when Henry was finally allowed through the inner door into the church.46 Here he 40 41 42 43 44

45 46

Bishops Rupert of Bamberg and Thierry of Verdun were captured by Duke Welf of Bavaria and Count Albert of Calw: Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, p. 155. Lampert, Annales, a. 1077, p. 286; see G. Meyer von Knonau, Jahrbücher des Deutschen Reiches unter Heinrich IV. und Heinrich V., 6 vols. (Leipzig, 1890–1907), II, 741–2. Gregory VII, Registrum, IV, 12, pp. 312–14. Lampert, Annales, a.a. 1076–7, pp. 286–98; Berthold, Annales, a. 1077, pp. 288 (l. 21) to 290 (l. 31). Vita Anselmi episcopi Lucensis, ed. R. Wilmans, MGH SS XII (Hannover, 1856), pp. 1–35; Donizo, Vita Mathildae comitissae metrica, 2, 1, ed. L. Bethmann, MGH SRG V (Hannover, 1856), ll. 58–118, pp. 381–2. See also Bonizo of Sutri, Liber ad amicum, 8, ed. E. Dümmler, MGH Lib. de lite I, pp. 609–10. The most recent discussion is that in E. W. Wies, Kaiser Heinrich IV. Canossa und der Kampf um die Weltherrschaft (Munich, 1996). L. Tondelli, ‘Scavi archeologici a Canossa. Le tre mura di cintra’, Studi Gregoriani 4 (1952), pp. 365–71, with map of Canossa at p. 369.


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prostrated himself in the shape of a cross at Gregory’s feet before being raised up and given communion by the pope. Where the sources are less helpful, however, is in making clear the meaning of what happened and the thinking which governed the participants’ actions. What I want to do now, having set the scene for you, is to try to make this somewhat clearer. I’ll begin by discussing the significance and symbolism of Henry’s public humiliation, and I’ll then go on to set it in a wider political context. The traditional interpretation of Henry IV’s symbolic self-humiliation at Canossa is that he was spontaneously doing public penance, and at first sight this is what Gregory VII himself claimed immediately after Canossa: ‘of his own accord and without any show of hostility or defiance, he came with a few followers to the fortress of Canossa where we were staying. There, on three successive days, standing before the castle gate, laying aside all royal insignia, barefoot and in sackcloth, he did not cease with many tears to beseech apostolic help and comfort . . . At last, overcome by his persistent show of penitence and the urgings of all present, we released him from the bonds of anathema and received him into the grace of Holy Mother Church.’47 There are, however, more difficulties with a straightforward penitential interpretation than might appear at first sight. To see why, we need to look more closely at penance. Once again I’ll have to provide a somewhat crude summary of a complicated development, made still more complex by the difficulty of working out what actual practice was from a maze of conflicting provisions.48 Only gradually did the Christian church come to terms with the problem of those who had committed grave sins after baptism – which is one reason why baptism was frequently deferred until very late in life, as it famously was by the Emperor Constantine. What had been worked out by the fifth and sixth centuries was a public penance which could be performed once and once only and allowed the baptised to regain their hope of salvation following grave sin. Penitents publicly acknowledged their sinfulness (though they did not necessarily confess in public), and then entered the order of penitents, ordo poenitentium. There was no question of their being immediately restored to communion. They took a special place within the church, and had to abstain not only from 47

48

Gregory VII, Registrum, IV, 12, pp. 312–13. [The author took the English translation from The Correspondence of Pope Gregory VII: Selected Letters from the Registrum, trans. E. Emerton (New York, 1932), pp. 111–12, but see now that by H. E. J. Cowdrey, The Register of Pope Gregory VII, 1073–85: An English Translation (Oxford, 2002), pp. 221–2.] For a brief review of the history of penitential practice see S. Hamilton, The Practice of Penance, 900–1050, Royal Historical Society Studies in History new series (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 1–24.

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communion but also from the exercise of their ‘civil rights’. A penitent remained married, but must abstain from conjugal intercourse; if male, he was not to bear the cingulum militare, the ‘soldier’s belt’, the symbol of full participation in civil society.49 A penitent could not act as king.50 From the seventh century onwards this one-off arrangement came to be supplemented by ‘private penance’; in this the Christian had to perform what were often long penitential exercises laid down in a system of tariffs, but was not necessarily excluded from communion for life or until the hour of death. Carolingian reformers in the eighth and ninth centuries began by condemning this system, which had grown up in the British Isles, but in the end accepted it and merged it with the older system of public penance by making a distinction between public sins which required public penance and private ones which could be expiated by private penance.51 This distinction is laid down in normative sources like conciliar canons, but we have little evidence for the practice of public penance in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries.52 That doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen, but we have no reason to suppose that it was a frequent or familiar occurrence. The penitent frequently had to abstain from communion, for a time at least. But penitents were not excommunicated in the sense of being cast out of the community of the faithful. Excommunication was for the renitent; it was for those who refused to acknowledge their sins, and it meant exclusion not only from Christian communion but also from the Christian community.53 And whereas the provisions by which penitents returned to full membership of the church are well known, if not always easy to interpret, the lifting of a sentence of excommunication was rather different. The Pontificale Romano-Germanicum laid down that a penitent was to appear before the bishop who had excommunicated him and those whom he had offended, and then be received back into the community 49 50 51 52 53

K. Leyser, ‘Early Medieval Canon Law and the Beginning of Knighthood’, in his Communications and Power in Medieval Europe, ed. Reuter, pp. 51–72, at pp. 57–65. As was demonstrated by the case of Louis the Pious in 833: M. de Jong, ‘Power and Humility in Carolingian Society: The Public Penance of Louis the Pious’, EME 1 (1992), pp. 29–52. R. Kottje, ‘Busspraxis und Bussritus’, in Segni e riti nella chiesa altomedievale occidentale, Settimane Spoleto 33 (Spoleto, 1987), pp. 369–95, at pp. 369–71; Hamilton, Practice of Penance, p. 5, n. 17. Hamilton, Practice of Penance, passim. For a summary of the law of excommunication in this period see Burchard of Worms, Decretum, XI: De excommunicatione, PL 140, cols. 855–76. E. Vodola in Excommunication in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1986), focuses mainly on evidence from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries but provides a review of the earlier evidence at pp. 1–27. On Gregory VII’s excommunication of Henry IV, ibid., pp. 20–7 but her focus is on the changes in the law of excommunication which followed the 1078 canon ‘Quoniam multos’.


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of the church and have a suitable penance imposed for his fault – which would normally have implied continuing abstention from communion.54 In terms of strict canon law, then, the best we can make of Henry’s action is that by his public humiliation he demonstrated that the punishment of excommunication had served its purpose: since he was evidently repentant, he was now a suitable candidate for reception into the order of penitents. But even this is problematic, because, as you will remember, those doing public penance could not be full members of civil society.55 Henry IV could not have rescued his kingship in this way; indeed, the deposition of Louis the Pious in 833 had been initiated precisely by forcing him to do public penance, and the fact that the Saxons continued to make accusations about Henry’s sexual aberrations, and to claim that Henry had not been granted communion by Gregory VII at Canossa, shows that Henry’s opponents were well aware of the implications of Henry’s becoming a penitent. There were indeed between the ninth and eleventh centuries occasional acts by rulers which have been loosely described as public penances: for example Louis the Pious’s act of contrition at Attigny in 822, or Otto III’s penances on a number of occasions, or acts performed by Henry II and his contemporary Robert II of France.56 Henry IV’s own father, Henry III, had on several occasions humbled himself and asked his enemies to forgive him as he forgave them: victorious on the battlefield at Menfö in 1044, at assemblies 54

55

56

Ordo XXI: Qualiter episcopus reconciliet vel recipiat excommunicatum, Le Pontifical romanogermanique du dixième siècle, ed. C. Vogel and R. Elze, 3 vols., Studi e testi, 226, 227, 269 (Vatican City, 1963, 1972), I, pp. 317–21. Although Henry had already performed penance in 1073 for associating with his excommunicated counsellors, it is not clear that he had previously entered into canonical public penance: when he appeared in public as a penitent at Speyer in 1076 this was as part of his attempt to bring an end to the consequences of his excommunication, one which failed because in canon law excommunication could only be lifted by the bishop who had imposed it (in this case the pope): Burchard, Decretum XI, 7, PL 140, col. 861: ‘Nullus autem episcopus alterius parochianum excommunicare vel reconciliare praesumat sine conscientia vel consensu proprii episcopi.’ This echoed the rubric in the liturgical rite of reconciliation: Le Pontifical, ed. Vogel and Elze, XCI.5, p. 318. But in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the distinctions in canon law and in ecclesiastical practice between penance, public penance and excommunication were not clear-cut, as they were to become in the hands of twelfth-century professional canon lawyers. De Jong, ‘Power and Humility’; S. Hamilton, ‘Otto III’s Penance: A Case Study of Unity and Diversity in the Eleventh-Century Church’, in R. Swanson ed., Unity and Diversity in the Church, Studies in Church History 32 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 83–94; S. Hamilton, ‘A New Model for Royal Penance? Helgaud of Fleury’s Life of Robert the Pious’, EME 6 (1997), pp. 199–200. For comments about Henry II’s penitential piety see Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, VI, 92, p. 384: ‘Cum se multum peccasse aut ipse sentit aut aliqua fideli castigatione perpendit, canones coram se poni qualiterque id debeat emendari, ut quaeratur, precipit ac secundum haec scripta mox scelus peractum purgare contendit. Maior tamen est ei consuetudo periculose delinquendi, quam in salutari penitentia permanendi’, trans. D. Warner, Ottonian Germany: The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg (Manchester, 2001), p. 299.

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in Constance and Trier in 1043, perhaps also at his imperial coronation in 1046.57 But though these could be described as public penitential acts they were not public penances.58 Far from it; they were voluntary acts of self-abasement made from a position of power and dominance. They appealed to an ethic of Christian rulership in order to enhance the power and authority of the ruler who made them, and there was no question that these rulers had at any point been excommunicated or stood formally and publicly accused of serious sins. If Henry IV’s action was not wholly explicable in terms of a conventional penance, what was it? Well, going barefoot and wearing sackcloth was a polysemic piece of symbolism. Bishops occasionally did it when entering their cathedral cities for the first time, for example, a mixture of imitatio Christi and penitential humility.59 Monks in tenth- and eleventh-century France did it to implore assistance from rulers against wrong-doing.60 And a well-informed contemporary observer at Canossa might well have interpreted the symbolism as a deditio, a ritualised surrender, which borrowed elements of public penance – especially the clothing – for a somewhat different purpose. The deditio had been performed regularly by rebels in the Reich from the late tenth century at least, and probably earlier than that.61 The rebel or rebels took on the appearance of penitents: they wore sackcloth; they appeared barefoot ‘as the royal majesty requires’; they humbly submitted themselves – but to the ruler, not to a bishop or pope. Henry IV himself had accepted the submission of a whole series of rebels in this fashion in the years before Canossa – Dedi of Lower Lusatia, Otto of Northeim, Magnus Billung, and not least at the great Saxon submission at Speyer in the autumn of 1075, only weeks before the conflict between Gregory and Henry broke out.62 57 58 59 60 61

62

K. Schnith, ‘Recht und Friede: zum Königsgedanken im Umkreis Heinrichs III’, HJ 81 (1962), pp. 22–57, esp. pp. 38–50; Hamilton, Practice of Penance, pp. 177–82. Cf. R. Schieffer, ‘Von Mailand nach Canossa: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der christlichen Herrscherbusse von Theodosius der Grosse bis zu Heinrich IV’, DA 28 (1972), pp. 333–70. M. Miller, ‘The Florentine Bishop’s Ritual Entry and the Origins of the Medieval Episcopal adventus’, Revue d’histoire écclesiastique 98 (2003), pp. 5–38, at pp. 10–17. G. Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca NY, 1992), pp. 224–9. G. Althoff, ‘Königsherrschaft und Konfliktbewältigung im 10. und 11. Jahrhundert’, FMS 23 (1989), pp. 265–90, repr. in G. Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter. Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt, 1997), pp. 21–56; G. Althoff ‘Das Privileg der deditio’, in Althoff, Spielregeln, pp. 99–125; [see also below, chapter 19, for the author’s view of deditio]. John Cowdrey has also observed, albeit briefly, the parallels between the secular ritual of deditio and what occurred at Canossa: Pope Gregory VII, pp. 160–3. For the submission of Dedi see Lampert, Annales, a. 1069, p. 108; for that of Otto and Magnus Billung on Whitsunday 1071 see Lampert, Annales, a. 1071, p. 119. Cf. Bruno, Saxonicum bellum,


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Now there are a number of points which need to be made about the deditio. First of all, it was not a spontaneous gesture, at any rate not normally. Indeed, it would have been rather unwise to make it spontaneously, because it was – formally, at least – unconditional surrender. Everything we know suggests that it was normal practice, before making a deditio, to negotiate with the ruler through intermediaries in order to settle the terms and, most importantly, to ensure that it would be acceptable. When the Roman rebel Crescentius attempted to submit to Otto III in 999, according to Rodulfus Glaber, his submission was rejected; presumably he had not cleared it in advance with Otto, though it may also be that this was his second submission: you could only do the deditio once.63 Second, the need to ensure in advance that the submission would be acceptable, would not have fatal consequences, meant that the intermediaries took on a very important role. They were the ones who played the public role of intercession with the ruler when the secular penitent presented himself, urging him to show mercy and receive the rebel back into his grace. Usually they were also those who had negotiated the terms in advance. This meant that – at any rate in the Ottonian and Salian Reich – it was a role best played by certain kinds of people: archbishops and bishops, and close female relatives of the ruler. Queens and queen mothers in particular were expected to intercede with rulers in the tenth- and eleventh-century Reich. This is a further reason why a contemporary might well have interpreted Henry’s submission as a deditio. Just as queens and prelates were seen prominently interceding with emperors, so here also we find the prelates Abbot Hugh of Cluny (also Henry’s godfather), Bishop Anselm of Lucca, and his mother-in-law and wife Adelheid and Bertha of Turin as well as his relative Mathilda of Tuscany, all interceding with Gregory.64 A further point about the secular deditio is that although it did not guarantee immediate restoration to office, it certainly implied it; a king

63

64

cc. 99, 102, pp. 90–2; Robinson, Henry IV, pp. 64–72, 102. For the great Saxon submission of 1075: Lampert, Annales, a. 1075, p. 235; Bruno, Saxonicum bellum, cc. 48–9, pp. 46–8; Carmen de bello Saxonico ll. 284–6, 289–90, p. 23; Robinson, Henry IV, p. 102. Rodulfus Glaber, Historiarum libri quinque, ed. and trans. J. France, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1989), I, 12, p. 26. For a detailed consideration of the implications of Otto III’s rejection, see G. Althoff, Otto III, trans. P. G. Jestice (Pennsylvania, 2003), pp. 75–81. For intercessors, see Zimmermann, Canossagang, pp. 37–8, 134–6, and below, chapter 19. For the evidence for these particular intercessors see Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, pp. 156–7. Although the sources make no mention of Anselm of Lucca’s presence, he was probably in attendance: K. G. Cushing, Papacy and Law in the Gregorian Revolution: The Canonistic Work of Anselm of Lucca (Oxford, 1998), pp. 56–7. On Mathilda see T. Struve, ‘Mathilde von Tuszien-Canossa und Heinrich IV’, HJ 115 (1995), pp. 41–84, esp. pp. 44–5.

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who received the submission of a rebel and then immediately dined with him would in effect be announcing full restitution. It might be thought odd that one should interpret a submission in the religious context of excommunication in terms of a secular ritual; but of course the distinction is meaningless here. The religious overtones of the deditio were intended. It was the king as vicarius Christi who received the penitent rebel. And this was par excellence the century in which ‘sacerdotium and regnum exchanged their prerogatives’, to quote the title of a famous paper by Percy Ernst Schramm.65 So it was not only kings who asked for submission in this way. Bishops, like rulers, might also insist that their opponents should submit to them as rebels, barefoot and in penitential garments: Archbishop Gero of Magdeburg and Margrave Gero in 1017; Bishop Richard of Verdun and Duke Godfrey of Lotharingia in 1047; Archbishop Eberhard of Trier and Count Conrad of Luxembourg in 1053.66 These nobles were, in a sense, penitents; but they were penitents who had offended politically, who had rebelled against the bishop or made attacks on his cathedral city. Such rituals were indeed so widespread that at a diocesan synod at Hildesheim in 1025 there was a revolt by the east Saxon magnates, led by Duke Bernard Billung of Saxony and his brother Thietmar: they would, they said, keep their boots on in future.67 Nor was this kind of ritual behaviour confined to the Reich north of the Alps; popes knew about it too. When in 1068 Henry’s legates to Pope Alexander II, Archbishop Anno of Cologne and Otto of Northeim, duke of Bavaria, made the mistake of visiting the antipope Honorius II beforehand, now no longer pope but still firmly ensconced as bishop of Parma even though excommunicate, they were treated very roughly indeed by Alexander (perhaps acting on Gregory-Hildebrand’s advice here). Anno had to make a public request for papal forgiveness dressed in sackcloth and ashes.68 A different but closely related form of submission had been practised by popes and prelates for some thirty years before Canossa: the symbolic renunciation of the staff of office by a prelate.69 Bishops and 65 66

67 68 69

P. E. Schramm, ‘Sacerdotium und Regnum im Austausch ihrer Vorrechte’, in Kaiser, Könige und Päpste, 5 vols. (Stuttgart, 1968–71), vol. IV/1, pp. 57–102. Thietmar, Chronicon, VI, 96 and VII, 50, pp. 390, 458–60; Gesta Treverorum, c. 32, MGH SS VIII, p. 174; Godfrey the Bearded to Rambert of Verdun, Laurentii Gesta Episcoporum Verdunensium, c. 2, MGH SS X, p. 492; Vita Altmanni, c. 24, MGH SS XII, p. 236. See T. Reuter, ‘Property transactions and social relations’, in W. Davies and P. Fourace eds., Property and Power in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 165–99, at p. 190, n. 106. Annales Altahenses maiores, ed. W. von Giesebrecht, revd E. L. B. von Oefele, MGH SRG IV (Hannover, 1891), a. 1068, p. 74; see Robinson, Henry IV, p. 109. T. Reuter, ‘Pastorale pedum ante pedes apostolici posuit: Dis- and Reinvestiture in the Investiture Contest’, in R. Gameson and H. Leyser eds., Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-Harting (Oxford, 2001), pp. 197–210.


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abbots accused of simony or other malpractice came to the pope, normally at Rome, and laid their staff on the altar or at the pope’s feet; the pope would then take it and return it to the prelate, thus restoring him to office and wiping away the taint of simony or whatever the bishop had been accused of. The first example of this known to me is at the council of Rheims in 1049, when Hugh the bishop of Nevers, who had been accused of simony, was restored to office in this way by Leo IX.70 The following decades saw this ritual surrender of office repeated on a number of occasions, for example by Gerard II, bishop of Cambrai, in 1077, or by Herbert Losinga, bishop of Norwich, in 1093.71 So what the rituals of Canossa provided was a public surrender as an integral part of a less public compromise. It is clear that Henry IV needed such a compromise if he was to rescue anything at all of his kingship; but did Gregory VII need one? The answer is undoubtedly yes. When Henry IV came south in the winter of 1076/7 he was desperate; but Gregory VII’s position was distinctly awkward as well. First of all, Henry was not alone; he was joined immediately on his arrival in northern Italy by a very substantial Lombard army, drawn from those urban elites whose control of their towns through their bishops was threatened by the Patarene movements which Gregory supported.72 Gregory regarded these as dangerous opponents: he had excommunicated them along with Henry IV but with even more fervour in 1076, and he continued to denounce them at a safe distance in the months which followed Canossa.73 They also posed a direct threat to him. He had been making for Mantua on his way northwards to Germany. Here he was to meet the magnates’ escort on 8 January.74 When he heard of Henry’s arrival in Italy, his response was certainly not to suppose that he was dealing with a penitent ruler, whatever assurances may have been given in his negotiations with Henry

70

71

72 73

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Anselm of Rheims, Historia dedicationis ecclesiae beati Remigii Remensis, cc. 26–7, 31, ed. J. Hourlier, in La Champagne bénédictine. Contribution a` l’année Saint Benoˆıt (480–1980), Travaux de l’Académie Nationale de Reims 160 (Reims, 1981), at pp. 238, 240, 246–8; text cited in Reuter, ‘Pastorale pedum’, n. 7. For Alexander II: JL 4549 to Wifrid of Narbonne in the case of Froterius of Nˆımes; for Gerard II of Cambrai: Gregory VII, Registrum, IV, 22, p. 330, trans. Cowdrey, Register, pp. 233–5; for Herbert Losinga: The Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. R. Darlington and P. McGurk (Oxford, 1998), III, pp. 68–71, and William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum, ed. W. Stubbs, Rolls Series (London, 1870), II, 74, p. 151, both cited in Reuter, ‘Pastorale pedum’, p. 202 and nn. 19–20. Cowdrey ed., Epistolae Vagantes, no. 19, pp. 50–5. ‘Excommunicatio episcoporum Langobardiae’ (Roman synod February 1076), Gregory VII, Registrum, III, 10a, p. 269; for complaints about the hostility of Lombard bishops (April 1076), ibid., III, 14, pp. 275–6; Cowdrey ed., Epistolae Vagantes, no. 19 (spring 1077), pp. 50–4. Cowdrey ed., Epistolae Vagantes, no. 17, pp. 46–8.

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during the last three months of 1076. He would have known from the previous 120 years of Ottonian and Salian history what to expect: here, in all probability, was an angry German ruler, backed by an army, come to deal with a recalcitrant pope, as Otto I had done with John XII and Benedict V, as Otto III did with John Philagathos, and as Henry III had done only thirty years before with Silvester III, Benedict IX and Gregory VI. Gregory VII acted accordingly; he moved rapidly southwards back towards Rome, and took refuge in the well-fortified castle at Canossa, the centre of Mathilda of Tuscany’s lordship, where Henry IV overtook him. But Gregory VII was not only frightened; he was also stuck. He was supposed to be in Augsburg on 2 February; but there was no way for him to get there. Gregory and his entourage needed food, lodgings, guides and protection for their journey north. The only person who could provide these, by drawing on rights of servitium and gistum, was Henry IV himself, and since Gregory’s journey was meant to allow the pope to preside over a tribunal at which the complaints of the princes against their king were to be heard, Henry had little incentive to do so.75 The main point of the settlement of Canossa was Henry’s agreement to provide such an escort. The German princes, who had invited Gregory, could not deliver; the escort which had been supposed to meet Gregory in Lombardy never turned up. Even though Henry was excommunicate, even though the magnates had been informed by Gregory that the king was seeking a reconciliation, and knew how badly they were threatened if he secured one, they were still unable to get an escort for Gregory south of the Alps, a sign of how much of Henry’s royal power and authority had survived the attacks on it.76 This, incidentally, explains the princes’ hasty reaction after the news of Canossa broke: their action in electing Rudolf of Rheinfelden as ‘anti’-king at Forchheim in March 1077 did not so much ignore Gregory’s absolution of Henry as stage a pre-emptive strike against its likely consequences.77 ∗∗∗ Canossa was a way out of difficulties for both sides. It is therefore not helpful to talk in terms of who won or who lost. Both Gregory and Henry were subject to short-term political pressures, but they also had images of themselves which mean that our modern calculus of political rationality is not wholly applicable. What was done at Canossa was a deal, nevertheless; but the deal incorporated significant elements of public ritual, and this 75 76 77

K. Leyser, ‘Ottonian Government’, EHR 96 (1981), p. 95. Cowdrey ed., Epistolae Vagantes, no. 19, at p. 52; Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, p. 168. Berthold, Annales, a. 1077, pp. 291–2.


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ritual was inherently ambiguous, probably had to be. The ritual of the deditio resembled a penitent’s submission so closely that it is difficult to say which was being performed here, and perhaps it is even meaningless to try to make the distinction. But the two rituals had much in common. On the one hand, they were meant to express contrition, and therefore had to be seen to be spontaneous: contrition, whether secular or religious, implies free will, the ability to choose. On the other hand, this spontaneity had to be planned.78 There was too much at stake in terms of honour and power for anyone to want to risk genuine spontaneity; and in an era which has been termed an ‘age of liturgy’ it is not clear that spontaneity in our sense was even possible.79 Everything we know about such rituals of submission suggests that they were carefully worked out in advance and that their efficacy was guaranteed by intermediaries. Henry IV’s self-abasement was real; but it was staged, and the participants knew their lines. The polysemic nature of the submission leaves us with a paradox. In retrospect, the submission at Canossa perhaps did indeed mark the end of theocratic kingship and the beginnings of the new division of political labour between a more sharply defined clerical hierarchy and an increasingly autonomous regal governance, a division whose implications were to be worked out in the following hundred years. But Gregory and Henry and their friends and mediators faced more immediate issues, and to resolve them they turned to familiar forms of conflict resolution. They drew on a language of ceremony and ritual which in its ambiguity, in its inextricable mixture of the sacred and the secular, was as characteristic as anything could have been of the old order of things. Henry submitted as a penitent and as a rebel; we find it hard to tell the difference because contemporaries did too. It was not least this ambiguous mix which made it so difficult for Gregory, for his contemporaries and for a long list of modern historians to work out precisely what had been done at the end of January 1077, which made it in particular so unclear whether Henry had been restored to kingship or merely to communion. And only a few months after Canossa, Gregory and his fanatical supporter Hugh of Die were to set a new course for the ‘struggle for right order in the world’ by targeting another ceremony in which the secular and the sacred were inextricably entangled: the investiture of prelates with ring and staff.80 This was something which had – here I 78 79

80

Althoff, ‘Königsherrschaft und Konfliktbewältigung’, in Althoff, Spielregeln, pp. 29–32. E. H. Kantorowicz, ‘Kingship under the Impact of Scientific Jurisprudence’, in M. Clagett, G. Post and R. Reynolds eds., Twelfth-Century Europe and the Foundations of Modern Society (Madison WI, 1961), pp. 151–66. Gregory VII, Registrum, IV, 22, pp. 330–4.

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share the view of Rudolf Schieffer – not been at issue in the chain of events leading from Worms to Canossa:81 Henry IV was first warned and then excommunicated in 1075–6 for disobeying papal commands in respect of Milan and for presuming to pass judgement on a pope, not for practising ‘lay investiture’. Now, it was to take the best intellects and political skills of western Europe nearly fifty years from the first condemnations of investiture issued in late 1077 and early 1078 to disentangle the issues raised by the investiture of prelates conceptually and practically. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that at Canossa, with only a few days to rehearse and stagemanage the drama, no such disentangling was achieved or even aimed at. 81

R. Schieffer, Die Entstehung des päpstlichen Investiturverbots für den deutschen König, MGH Schriften XXVIII (Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 132–61, 205.

chap t e r 10

Velle sibi fieri in forma hac: symbolic acts in the Becket dispute 1

In this paper, I consider medieval politics as a game. Various more or less suitable metaphors could be used here.2 Chess may seem particularly apposite, bearing in mind its strict rules, and its repertoire of generally recognised moves: openings, combinations and endgames. The Becket dispute can also be thought of as theatre.3 But if I stress here the theatrical element in the history of the dispute, that means something quite different from what, since Tennyson’s time, has been the hallmark of the way these events have been represented in stage-plays. For Tennyson, Eliot, Anouilh and Fry, the conflict was first and foremost a moral one: either it was about differing conceptions of law and public interest (thus, Tennyson and Fry), or, in the age of totalitarianism, it was about the rediscovery of absolute moral principles by an individual who had spent long years in the service of a state presenting itself as the embodiment of the highest values, hence fundamentally immoral (thus, Eliot, who depicted political compromise as making a pact with evil, and also, up to a point, Anouilh). The film directed by Peter Glenville, and often shown on German television, was loosely based on Anouilh’s play, but in fact veered between those two representations.4 All these creative works were concerned with exploring, 1

2 3

4

I have made substantial changes to the content and argument of this paper in light of comments and discussion at the Reichenau conference and at colloquia in Oxford and Southampton. I have also altered the title. [A few additional references to works published very recently have been added. For the quotation in the title, and a translation, see below, at n. 19. JLN.] For the metaphors ‘game’, ‘play’ and ‘text’ for cultural phenomena, see C. Geertz, ‘Blurred genres: the refiguration of social thought’, in C. Geertz, Local Knowledge (New York, 1983), pp. 19–35. V. H. Turner, ‘Religious paradigms and social action: Thomas Becket at the Council of Northampton’, in V. H. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca NY, 1975), pp. 60–96, offers an interpretation of a significant episode from the standpoint of a social anthropologist using the ‘theatre’ metaphor. On the literary representation of the Becket dispute, see B. Püschel, Thomas a` Becket in der Literatur (Bochum, 1963); F. Jost, ‘Un thème littéraire: Thomas a` Becket’, in F. Jost, Essais de littérature comparée (Freiburg, Switzerland, 1966), vol. II, pp. 9–88, 345–79; P. Jolivet, ‘Le personnage de Thomas Becket dans “Der Heilige” de C. F. Meyer, “Murder in the Cathedral” de T. S. Eliot et “Becket ou

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exposing, understanding, by means of drama, the real or apparent contradictions in the ‘character’ of Becket. Reconciling such contradictions was a priority too for Becket’s biographers after his martyrdom, and since the nineteenth century this has been much debated by well-known historians.5 Yet the idea of ‘character’, conceived as a person’s solid inner core, which, if rightly understood, will explain all their actions, is not very helpful here – indeed, in the form employed by an older generation of historians, it is not really defensible, because it largely depends on circular arguments. If in what follows I talk about theatre or a production or ‘spectators’ and performers, I disclaim any intention of explicitly or implicitly evaluating the archbishop. I am not trying to determine if Becket was a gifted actor or a virtuoso hypocrite, or whether he represented his cause with genuine and consistent conviction. Anyone who thinks that such questions can be settled definitively for their own selves, let alone others, should be referred to Augustine’s Confessions. Instead, I want to ask how it was possible for the dispute to be made intelligible as such by the ‘players’, and how conflict, reconciliation and willingness to be reconciled, or the opposite, could be signalled. Relevant here is the relationship between the tool and the job in hand: how far could the repertoire of moves, strategies and rules be adopted and applied by the players for their own ends, and how far were the ends determined and embodied by this repertoire itself? All this may sound rather abstract; and we must stay for a moment at this level of abstraction. Later, as we move on to something more concrete, the initial abstractions should, I hope, become clearer. In the last two or three decades, medievalists have become aware that medieval politics, at least in

5

l’Honneur de Dieu” de Jean Anouilh’, Etudes Germaniques 16 (1961), pp. 235–41; J. Dierickx, ‘King and archbishop: Henry II and Becket from Tennyson to Fry’, Revue des Langues Vivantes 27 (1962), pp. 424–35; J.-M. Grassin, ‘Le mythe littéraire de Thomas Becket a` l’époque moderne’, in Thomas Becket. Actes du colloque internationale de Sédières, 19–24 août, 1973, ed. R. Foreville (Paris, 1975), pp. 285–97. A detailed and up-to-date appraisal of the voluminous historiography on Becket is still lacking; but see J. W. Alexander, ‘The Becket controversy in recent historiography’, Journal of British Studies 9 (1970), pp. 1–26. The most recent and best biographies are F. Barlow, Thomas Becket (London, 1986), and D. Knowles, Thomas Becket (London, 1970), and, for Becket’s opponent, W. L. Warren, Henry II (London, 1973, 2nd edn 1977). See also D. Knowles, ‘Archbishop Thomas Becket: a study in character’, PBA 35 (1949), pp. 177–205, repr. in D. Knowles, The Historian and Character (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 98–128, and D. Knowles, The Episcopal Colleagues of Thomas Becket (Cambridge, 1951). Other important works are E. Walberg, La tradition hagiographique de St Thomas Becket avant la fin du XIIe siècle (Paris, 1929); C. N. L. Brooke and A. Morey, Gilbert Foliot and his Letters (Cambridge, 1965); B. Smalley, The Becket Conflict and the Schools (Oxford, 1973); A. J. Duggan, Thomas Becket: A Textual History of his Letters (Oxford, 1980), and now A. J. Duggan ed. and trans., The Correspondence of Thomas Becket, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2000); and M. Staunton, The Lives of Thomas Becket (Manchester, 2001), a useful collection of translated extracts with commentary. [See now H. Vollrath, Thomas Becket (Göttingen, 2004) and A. J. Duggan, Thomas Becket (Oxford, 2004).]

Symbolic acts in the Becket dispute

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the period 800 to 1100, were shot through by models of ritualised behaviour and symbolically loaded actions. This meant that such behaviour was not limited to particular occasions or moments – coronations, for instance, or ceremonial crown-wearings – which were intensively studied by an earlier generation of scholars precisely because they appeared to be concentrated moments of symbolic articulation, and hence could be contrasted with the ‘normal’ run of medieval politics. It is now clear that even this ‘normal’ run, just as much as the high points, was equally freighted with symbolism and ritual. In the Carolingian and post-Carolingian periods, politics were conducted by means of a meta-language which, by analogy with recognisable language-families like Germanic, Slavic or Romance, we could call ‘Symbolic’. This meta-language consists of elements of natural language (written and spoken), of visual representations, of guidelines for staging in the form of ‘scripts’ or ‘scenarios’ for scenes and action-sequences, and finally ‘props’, that is, symbolically charged objects and places. Some general points are worth making. The meta-language was very widely diffused. For Liudprand of Cremona and John of Gorze, for example, the political worlds of Constantinople or Cordoba might seem in many ways unfamiliar and unexpected, yet they were far from being completely unknown.6 The ‘language’ was pan-European, although there were certainly various dialects. Then, like any other language, the meta-language had a grammar, a syntax and a vocabulary. The rules were generally clear and well known to ‘native speakers’. One reason that the language metaphor is so appropriate is that we can observe people discovering new ‘sentences’ and ‘paragraphs’ in their ‘language’ to master new situations.7 Grammar, syntax and vocabulary, on the other hand, are much less easy to spot. We are just beginning to decode them from quite fragmentary traces. For some places and periods, for instance England between Alfred and the Norman Conquest, the necessary sources for such decoding may simply be lacking. It has become usual to term many of the statements in this meta-language ‘rituals’ or ‘ritual behaviour’. In my view, such labels ought to be confined to ‘Symbolic’ sentences and paragraphs in which what counts is a precise ‘text’. For instance, subordination can be expressed in ‘Symbolic’ in various ways; but it is only possible to talk about a ‘subordination-ritual’ if in a particular society and at a particular time subordination can be expressed 6 7

See J. L. Nelson, ‘Rulers and government’, in T. Reuter ed., NCMH, vol. III: c. 900–c. 1025 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 95–129, at 126–9. See G. Althoff, ‘Die Veränderbarkeit von Ritualen im Mittelalter’, in G. Althoff ed., Form und Funktion o¨ffentlicher Kommunikation im Mittelalter (Sigmaringen, 2001), pp. 157–76.

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only via a specific symbolic sentence – for instance, by taking off your shoes, putting on sackcloth and ashes, and throwing yourself at the feet of ruler or opponent.8 The remnants of this meta-language have come down to us exclusively in ‘indirect speech’. For Henry II’s election in 1002, for example, we do not possess the complete ‘Symbolic’ text, even though we are quite well informed about it, for such a text could only really be firmly established through such modern inventions as a multi-media presentation or hypertext. What we actually have is a contemporary paraphrase of the ‘statement’ from the pen of Thietmar of Merseburg. Once we have grasped this, we can see important methodological consequences. Statements in Symbolic could certainly be every bit as ambivalent or multivalent as statements in everyday language, but the fact that they have been transmitted in ‘indirect speech’ greatly increases the possibility that we misunderstand or misinterpret them or that we quite simply lack adequate information about important aspects of what actually happened. I referred a moment ago to the Carolingian and post-Carolingian periods as an age of symbolic acts. This is indeed the period which has been best and most deeply researched by scholars. Yet with the transition from archaic to pre-modern political forms in the ‘long’ twelfth century, that is, between 1050/60 and 1200/20, the meta-language of ‘Symbolic’ lost but little of its significance. Geoffrey Koziol recently drew attention to this fact: ‘between the sacred liturgies of pontifical kings and the political theatre of statist monarchs lies the twelfth century, whose political rituals we understand scarcely at all. Historians working on the twelfth century all dutifully reiterate the traditional beliefs that kings ruled in the image of God and the Old Testament rulers of Israel and that the great ceremony for communicating this typology was the royal anointing. Yet when these historians get down to the real business of Norman and Angevin kingship they describe feudal levies, financial exactions, and judicial reform, with not another word about pontifical kings.’9 To this should be added: with hardly another word about the symbolic expression of conflict, community, subordination and reconciliation in twelfth-century political theatre whose stage remained, as earlier, the royally summoned assembly, the Hoftag or great court Council. 8 9

G. Althoff, ‘Das Privileg der deditio’, in G. Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter. Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt, 1997), pp. 99–125, surveys and extends the earlier literature. G. Koziol, ‘England, France, and the problem of sacrality in twelfth-century ritual’, in T. Bisson ed., Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe (Philadelphia PA, 1995), pp. 124–48, at 124.


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The difference between the Carolingian/post-Carolingian period and what came after, is the fact that we have much fuller sources. Instead of just one, often unclear, ‘sentence’ from Widukind, or Thietmar, or Richer, now we often have several detailed accounts of an event, and such accounts are less symbolically and rhetorically coloured than in the tenth or eleventh century, hence give an impression of being more realistic and closer to reality. This too is problematic, however, for getting at reality is an acute problem in historical source-criticism, and in the area of symbolism, the problem is particularly acute. Take the Becket dispute. Most of the sources make frequent use of a ‘realistic’ style of depiction.10 The angle of vision frequently changes, and we are given snatches of rapid verbal exchanges. There is a famous example of this in Alan of Tewkesbury’s account of the appearance of royal envoys before the papal curia at Sens in November 1164. The first speaker is Gilbert Foliot, bishop of London, describing Becket’s recent conduct at the Council of Northampton: ‘And if we had given our assent to his proposal, the business would now have got to a much worse state. But because he could not have our connivance in the line he was taking, as indeed he did not deserve to have it, he tried to twist back the blame for his own boldness onto the lord king and onto us, and indeed onto the whole kingdom. To this end he took flight to harm the reputation of our shared brotherhood, although no-one had done him any violence or even threatened it. As it is written: “the wicked man flees when no-one pursues him.” [Proverbs 28: 1]’ At this the lord pope said: ‘Be more forbearing, brother!’ And the bishop of London replied: ‘My lord, I am being forbearing towards him.’ And the lord pope responded: ‘I am not saying, brother, that you should be more forbearing towards him, but towards yourself.’11

Gilbert was ashamed and fell silent, and his colleague Bishop Hilary of Chichester tried to take up the theme. Alas, he too went into a tailspin 10

11

Most of the Vitae, as well as the letters and a pair of polemic writings were edited by J. C. Robertson and J. B. Sheppard, Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, Rolls Series, 7 vols. (London, 1875–85), cited hereafter as MB with volume number. For the relationships between the Vitae, see Walberg, Tradition, and Barlow, Becket. See also Staunton, Lives. For modern editions of letters, see now above all Duggan ed., The Letters of Thomas Becket; W. J. Millor and C. N. L. Brooke eds., The Letters of John of Salisbury, II: The Later Letters, 1163–1180 (Oxford, 1979); A. Morey and C. N. L. Brooke eds., The Letters and Charters of Gilbert Foliot (Cambridge, 1967); F. Barlow ed., The Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, Camden Society, 3rd series 61 (London, 1939). Alan of Tewkesbury, Vita S. Thomae c. 19, MB II, p. 338: ‘“Et si ei in suo proposito noster favisset assensus, iam res ipsa ad deteriorem calculum devenisset. Verum quia nostram conniventiam, sicut nec debuit, ad id quo tendebat habere non potuit, nisus est in dominum regem et nos, immo in totum regnum, suae temeritatis culpam retorquere. Quocirca ad decolorandam mutuae fraternitatis famam, vim nemine inferente, vel minas intentante, fugam iniit, sicut scriptum est “fugit impius nemine persequente”. Ad haec dominus papa, “Parce”, inquit, “frater.” Et Londiniensis, “Domine, parcam ei,” et dominus papa, “Non dico, frater, quod parcas ei, sed tibi.”’

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when his Latin grammar failed him and he used the verb oportere incorrectly, much to the entertainment of the assembly: ‘You’ve made a very bad job of getting to port,’ shouted one amused spectator. The passage has to be cited in the original for the decisive play on words to be appreciated.12 Such vivid and ‘naturalistic’ narrative gives us the impression of having in front of us the precise wording of this exchange – ‘as it really happened’, so to speak. Yet it would be naive and dangerous in terms of method to assume that we have here anything like accurate reportage, and not only because Alan was writing some fifteen years after these events. Realism, as anyone who has made even a brief foray into literary studies knows, is in no way different from other forms of discursive presentation: on the contrary, it is a stylistic device like any other. What needs to be asked is whether realism is really involved in this and other scenes in the Becket dispute that are drawn in such ‘lifelike’ fashion. For not only are politics themselves conveyed by symbols, ritual and game-rules, but so too are our sources’ representations of politics. A similar but more sharply contoured problem emerges from the Icelandic family sagas, which offer as fascinating a mixture of precisely observed dialogue and forms of symbolic action as do the sources for Becket. In the past, scholars took the sagas more or less for a written record of unaltered and truthful oral representation of reality; more recently, they have been read, instead, as thirteenth-century romances whose relationship to reality was probably what the authors intended but which nevertheless remained rather chancy.13 The truth probably lies, as it so often does, somewhere in between: the problem lies in our inability in any selected concrete case to determine precisely where. True, we know more about Becket and Henry II of England than we do about Njal or Gunnar or Flosi or Kari; but even in the former case it is hard to distinguish with any ultimate certainty between the conventions of political practice and the conventions of representation. It is important to stress this here because in what follows, for the sake of simplicity, I shall only occasionally consider such problems of source criticism. The following discussion will be largely concerned with analysing the forms of symbolic expression employed during the dispute. I begin with 12

13

Ibid. c. 20, MB II, pp. 338–9: ‘Et certe virum tantae auctoritatis id non decuit, nec oportuit, nec aliquando oportuebat . . . Insuper suos, si saperent, non oportuerit sibi in talibus praebuisse assensum. Audito itaqua qualiter facundus ille grammaticus prosilierit de portu in portum, soluti sunt in risum universi. Inter quos unus proprumpens in vocem, “Male”, inquit, “tandem venisti ad portum.”’ [I am grateful to John Gillingham for help on this passage. JLN] See W. I. Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law and Society in Saga Iceland (Chicago, 1990), pp. 43–76.


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a brief history of the course of the conflict. I then examine some aspects of the dispute that are especially informative for my theme, and in particular those relevant to making political content visible and to exposing the rules of the political game. Finally, I attempt an answer to the question of why the moves and the forms of the political game evident in the sources have not yet received their due attention in the historiography of the dispute. First, then, the events.14 Becket was born in c. 1120, the son of a London merchant. By the 1150s, he had achieved a brilliant career in the service first of Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury, and then of the young King Henry II, whose chancellor he became, with financial support from the income of the archdeaconry of Canterbury. When Theobald died after twenty-five years in the post, Henry had the idea (allegedly on the model of Barbarossa’s appointment of Rainald of Dassel15 ) of making his chancellor archbishop. In May 1162, Henry pushed through Becket’s election regardless of the muted opposition of the monks of Canterbury and of the bishop of Hereford (and later of London), Gilbert Foliot. Tensions soon emerged between Henry and his new archbishop: Becket resigned the chancellorship, and Henry took this badly; and then there were other points of friction, some of a financial nature, others matters of law including (but there were other issues too) questions of ecclesiastical jurisdiction over magnates and lay jurisdiction over clerics.16 The conflict, obvious at the Council of Woodstock in July 1163, became serious at the Council of Westminster in October of that year. Henry directly challenged clerical immunity, and when the bishops, led by Becket, were not prepared to recognise ‘the customs of [the king’s] grandfather’ (avitae consuetudines), at least not without the reservation clause ‘saving their order’ (salvo ordine suo), Henry left the assembly without a word or greeting, which shocked some of the bishops so much that they followed suit.17 In the king’s view, it was essential to re-establish the customary relations between ecclesiastical and secular institutions as maintained, allegedly or in reality, in the time of Henry I. Here was just one aspect of the young king’s largescale policy of recovering royal rights following the ‘interregnum’ of the usurper Stephen.18 14 15 17 18

For the following sketch and for the account of events, reference should be made to the detailed biography of Barlow, Becket, which follows the sources closely. 16 Barlow, Becket, pp. 88–9, 93–4. Smalley, Becket Conflict, p. 119. Herbert of Bosham, Vita S. Thomae III, 25, MB III, p. 275. See Warren, Henry II, pp. 54–65, 91–108, and the more detailed account of E. Amt, The Accession of Henry II in England: Royal Government Restored, 1149–1159 (Woodbridge, 1993).

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After papal legates intervened, Becket yielded at first, and, in Henry’s presence, he gave assurances of his preparedness to accept ‘the grandfather’s customs in good faith’. Henry now insisted that Becket make this commitment in public: ‘it was his will that a commitment to observe the royal customs should be made to him in this form (velle sibi fieri in forma hac): in the sight of the bishops and magnates of the realm and in a public hearing’.19 Interestingly, the king was to invite his magnates to the assembly, while Becket was to invite ‘his’ bishops.20 For this purpose, a new assembly took place in January 1164, this time at the palace of Clarendon near Salisbury. The bishops had closed ranks again, despite the worst threats of the king and the secular magnates, when Becket surrendered, without consultation and quite suddenly, and ordered the other bishops to do likewise. It was at this point, and not before, that Henry had a precise list of the avitae consuetudines drawn up, under sixteen heads. Becket took receipt of his chirograph-copy of the consuetudines, but asked for a delay before he attached his seal to it.21 After the assembly, he suspended himself from his priestly functions and requested Pope Alexander III to absolve him from the assent he had given. He twice attempted, in vain, to go to see Alexander at Sens: this would have involved leaving the kingdom without the customary royal permission, hence a breach of the avitae consuetudines. Alexander, though, was not prepared to approve the consuetudines. He could ‘tolerate’ only six of the total sixteen chapters.22 The next and critical phase of the conflict took place at a new assembly in October 1164, this time in the royal palace at Northampton. Becket had been summoned because a knight (miles) of the archbishopric had cited him to appear before a royal court on a charge of denial of justice and Becket had neither appeared nor offered an acceptable essoin (excuse for delay).23 Becket came to Northampton and was promptly condemned for 19

20 21 22

23

Herbert of Bosham, Vita S. Thomae III, 26, MB III, p. 277: ‘Obligationem de regiis consuetudinibus observandis velle sibi fieri in forma hac, in episcoporum et procerum regni conspectu et audientia publica’; see also Anonymus I, Vita S. Thomae c. 32, MB IV, p. 33. Anonymus I, Vita S. Thomae c. 32, MB IV, p. 33. Barlow, Becket, pp. 98–103; Knowles, Becket, pp. 87–93. Barlow, Becket, p. 105. For the best text of the Constitutions, with Alexander’s reaction, see D. Whitelock, M. Brett and C. N. L. Brooke eds., Councils and Synods and Other Documents Relating to the English Church (Cambridge, 1981), no. 159, pp. 852–93. On this point of contention, see Barlow, Becket, pp. 108–10, and M. Cheney, ‘The litigation between John Marshal and Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1164: a pointer to the origin of novel diseisin?’, in J. A. Guy and H. G. Beale eds., Law and Social Change in British History: Papers Presented to the British Legal History Conference, 14–17 July 1981, Royal Historical Society Studies in History 40 (London, 1984), pp. 9–26.


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contempt of the king’s jurisdiction; he stood ‘in the king’s mercy’ and had to hand over the whole of his moveable property as a fine.24 Then Henry demanded financial accounts for a number of incomestreams that Becket had had charge of during his time as chancellor. Becket declared that he had been exempted by the king from any such demands before his election as archbishop. Furthermore, he claimed that because of these charges, he had not been legally summonsed. Clearly the king was set on ruining Becket. The bishops counselled unconditional surrender, thus in practice a personal deditio (surrender) and/or resignation from office. Bishop Henry of Winchester offered the king a sum of money if he would receive Becket back into the royal gratia: Henry would not accept this.25 Becket rejected all these proposals, forbade the bishops to take part in judicial proceedings, appealed prophylactically to the pope and ordered the bishops to excommunicate all those who might use violence against him. The decisive session took place in the palace in separate rooms: on the upper floor, the king and the secular magnates; on the lower floor, Becket and the bishops whom the king had freed from the obligation to reach a verdict after they had appealed to the pope against Becket.26 Becket left the assembly and was condemned in absentia, but was able to prevent the judgement of the court from being formally pronounced. After Henry had postponed answering his request for permission to leave, the archbishop secretly left Northampton and went into exile in France.27 On Becket’s six-year exile, I quote the judgement of David Knowles: ‘There began a period of six years, which was full of fruitless discussion and perpetual frustration for all concerned, and of which much of the tedium can be felt by all who try to follow the course of events in various circles as given by half-a-dozen incomplete and often contradictory narratives.’28 A precise reconstruction was difficult even for the hagiographers writing shortly after Becket’s martyrdom: hence the largest collection of Becket’s 24

25 26 27 28

Barlow, Becket, pp. 109–10. On condemnation by the Angevins to loss of royal grace, see J. E. A. Jolliffe, Angevin Kingship, 2nd edn (London, 1963); Warren, Henry II, pp. 387–9; P. R. Hyams, ‘What did Henry III of England think in bed and in French about kingship and anger?’, in B. H. Rosenwein ed., Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca NY, 1998), pp. 92–124, at 100–3. For further parallels, see K. Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian ¨ Saxony (London, 1979), pp. 33–42, 113–23; G. Althoff, ‘Huld. Uberlegungen zu ein Zentralbegriff der mittelalterlichen Herrschaftsordnung’, in Althoff, Spielregeln, pp. 199–228. William fitzStephen, Vita S. Thomae c. 43, MB III, p. 54. Barlow, Becket, pp. 112–14. For Northampton, see also the very full account of Knowles, Becket, pp. 94–100. Barlow, Becket, pp. 115–16. On the licentia abeundi, see also S. D. Brown, ‘Leavetaking: lordship and mobility in England and Normandy in the twelfth century’, History 79 (1994), pp. 199–215. Knowles, Becket, p. 101.

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letters to originate within his circle, that produced by Alan of Tewkesbury in 1175–6 on the basis of preliminary work by John of Salisbury, offers a chronology that is totally confused at two points, because the editor was led astray by details in William of Canterbury’s biography.29 A more detailed account would be beyond the scope of this paper, without getting us much further forward. But we should at least keep in view certain circumstances that provided a framework for these events. In the first place, the Becket affair was not the only concern: for Pope Alexander it was important to keep the support of the English and French kings in the papal schism, while the two kings were concerned for their mutual relations.30 Secondly, no one could force Henry to give way. Becket in exile was in practice out of play, and Henry could help himself to the enormous revenues of the archbishopric. Thirdly, and I shall come back to this in my analysis of the politics involved, all the participants would only come closer politically if they could come closer physically. As long as the parties did not or would not meet, the conflict could not be ended: a feature we can recognise today in such important and deep-seated disputes in our own times as those in Northern Ireland and former Yugoslavia. Then as now there was a vicious circle: only the taking-up of direct negotiations could signal preparedness for reconciliation, but direct negotiations were necessary before it could be established whether the bases for such preparedness existed. This was why the most important moments during the six-year struggle were the meetings between Becket and Henry II. There were several of them, and it is striking that the first movement in the course of the dispute came after the two disputants met at Montmirail at the beginning of 1169. Willingness to meet was, as I have said, at one and the same time a preparedness to be reconciled or to allow reconciliation to take place, and a signal that this was indeed what was aimed at. Nevertheless, reconciliation was a long and difficult business. The contentious questions were not so much the questions of principle from the beginnings of the conflict (of which, in any case, by no means all were of a fundamental nature), but other and new things. In the foreground were the violations, alleged and actual, of the rights of Canterbury during Becket’s absence. Of these, unquestionably the most important was the coronation of the king’s designated successor, 29 30

Duggan, Thomas Becket: A Textual History, p. 91; Duggan, Correspondence, I, p. lxxxiv. For the ‘diplomatic’ background to the conflict, see T. Reuter, ‘The papal schism, the empire and the west, 1159–69’, unpublished D. Phil. Dissertation (University of Oxford, 1975); W. Georgi, Friedrich Barbarossa und die auswärtige Mächte. Studien zur Außenpolitik (Frankfurt, 1990), esp. pp. 135–40, 251–80; J. Laudage, Alexander III und Friedrich Barbarossa (Cologne, 1997), pp. 154–7. Warren, Henry II, pp. 528–9, plays down the significance of the schism for the Becket dispute.


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Henry (III), in London in July 1170, by Becket’s old rival and enemy Archbishop Roger of York. This act infringed Canterbury’s claim to have the right to crown English kings.31 In the foreground, too, were what we might call procedural aspects of peace-making: guarantees that Becket had truly been reconciled with the king, and vice versa. Over this issue arose such protracted problems as Becket’s insistence on a reservation clause (salvo honore Dei, or the like) and Henry’s reluctance to give Becket the kiss of peace, something the king managed to avoid right to the end.32 The most contentious questions remained matters of priority even after the formal reconciliation. After Becket had returned to England, his excommunication of the bishops who had taken part in the coronation of the ‘Young King’ in June 1170 caused fears that he still wanted to call the peaceconditions into question, while the difficulties Becket experienced at the hands of certain royal officials when he tried to re-establish the rights and revenues of the archbishopric made the king’s intentions seem equally questionable.33 From this point on, the final act of the drama was action-packed yet brief: only one month separated Becket’s arrival on English soil and his Christ-like entry into Canterbury from his murder by the four knights of the king’s household – something that needs no description here.34 The parallels with the killing of Jesus Christ were certainly highly stylised in the hagiographers’ accounts (without, incidentally, any particularly exact following of chronology: the Gospels’ ‘Crucify! Crucify!’ scene was inevitably brought in for the account of the trial scene at Northampton).35 Yet at the same time and no less certainly, these parallels were recognised by the participants; and, especially in this phase, one has the impression that Becket and the others involved were following a script, unwritten it is true, but there as an idea none the less. After the murder in the cathedral too, the significance of personal meetings continued: peace-agreements, now between Henry and Alexander, could be re-established, in 1172, only through a direct meeting between the envoys of Henry and Alexander.36 The dispute was finally closed only when Henry came to Canterbury in 1174 and did public penance before the tomb of the martyr who in contemporaries’ eyes was not only virtually but really present. This was an important moment in the course of the dispute, and 31 33 35 36

32 See below, n. 62. Barlow, Becket, pp. 68, 206–7, 209–10; Warren, Henry II, pp. 502–5. 34 Knowles, Becket, pp. 141–9; Barlow, Becket, pp. 235–48. Barlow, Becket, pp. 221–35. John of Salisbury, Vita S. Thomae c. 17, MB II, p. 313. The complete text of the ‘Concordat’ of Avranches has not been preserved, but the terms can be reconstructed: see Whitelock et al. eds., Councils and Synods, no. 166, pp. 942–56; Barlow, Becket, pp. 260–2; Warren, Henry II, pp. 530–4.

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one strikingly neglected by many modern historians. I shall come back to it in my concluding section.37 We come now to the political techniques employed during the conflict. What we can observe in the Becket dispute is this: the continued existence of many traditional forms of political communication, especially the pointed staging of emotions, the symbolisation of political content and the adherence to defined and well-known political ‘rules of the game’. Most of these rules were generally well known throughout Europe as constructions within the meta-language I discussed at the beginning of this paper; but some of them were easier to understand in the meta-language’s local English dialect. Conspicuous among these rules was a long-familiar distinction between a public and a private sphere, notably in the context of giving counsel and letting oneself be counselled; something rather more new was the ability to articulate politics in terms of conflict using rational, often quasi-legalistic forms of argument; also new is, I think, the ability to shape political projects for oneself and especially for others, hence to act with a corresponding goal-orientated rationality (Zweckrationalität, to use Weber’s expression). One particularly important aspect of this was the cultivation by kings of a conscious and calculated unreliability. Karl Leyser once tellingly observed: ‘The most common characteristic of twelfth-century rulers . . . seems to have been chicanery [Hinterfotzigkeit might be the best German equivalent]. It was, like their ira and gratia, institutionalised and a wellrecognised practice.’38 As far as the production of ‘staged’ emotions is concerned, many forms of political communication in the Becket dispute could fit well into the ninth-, tenth- and eleventh-century landscapes so well ploughed by Althoff, Leyser, Koziol, Schreiner, Buc and others. A man ‘displayed’ his expression and bearing to make certain points. Henry II on the first day of the decisive Council of Northampton made his appearance only very late in the day – allegedly, he had gone hunting with his falcons along every riverbank en route, probably not just because of his passion for hunting but also to demonstrate a certain careless indifference.39 Displeasure would be equally clearly signalled. Henry had several times flown into terrifying outbursts of frenzied rage in public: a sign that the situation was serious, you might think, if you didn’t know that this kind of thing belonged to the established repertoire of any twelfth-century king who had passed the 37 38 39

Below, p. 189. K. Leyser, ‘Some reflections on twelfth-century kings and kingship’, in K. Leyser, Medieval Germany and its Neighbours, 900–1250 (London, 1982), pp. 241–67, at 253. William fitzStephen, Vita S. Thomae c. 38, MB III, p. 50.


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test of professional royal competence. Ira regis that gave the impression of being out of control was in fact nearly always calculated and finely calibrated.40 This was by no means the only way to show displeasure. At the beginning of the Council of Northampton, the king refused Becket the kiss of peace – precisely the gesture that, as mentioned above, was to play a major role in the final phase of the Becket dispute. ‘Ushered into the antechamber, Becket sat and waited for the king who at that moment was hearing Mass. When the king came in, Becket stood up respectfully and showed a calm and untroubled face, to offer and receive in sincerity what is customary among the English, the kiss of peace, should the king have this in mind. He received no kiss.’41 There is evidence for Angevin kings on other occasions, too, deliberately adopting a pose of silence towards an enemy, or simply ignoring him.42 Clearly these gestures belonged to a repertoire that was well known, long before the days of modern handbooks of man-management. In fact Becket must have known what was to happen. Before the Council of Northampton, Henry had refused to write to him directly so as to avoid having to use the customary greeting-formula of wishing him well;43 and when Becket tried to have a meeting with the king in the familiare regis domicilium at Woodstock, he was turned away from the door: ‘a janua repulsus’.44 King Louis VII of France, Becket’s protector and advocate during his exile, also employed such demonstrative gestures. After the breakdown of negotiations at the Montmirail meeting, Louis blamed Becket for having needlessly insisted on the reservation clause. On the return journey, Louis therefore refused to come to Becket’s table, would not greet him and had the royal supply of provisions to him stopped, so that Becket was offered nothing, and even though he was in Louis’s following, he had to beg from the archbishop of Sens or the bishop of Poitiers: ‘this thoroughly terrified many of his [Becket’s] men as though they were 40

41

42

43

G. Althoff, ‘Ira regis: prolegomena to a history of royal anger’, in Rosenwein ed., Anger’s Past, pp. 59–74, writes (p. 74) of a ‘renaissance of royal anger in the twelfth century and the concomitant reappearance of demonstrative anger in the repertoire of royal behaviour’. The implicit contrast with earlier centuries seems to me rather overdrawn, but there can be no question of the significance of royal anger for twelfth-century political life. William fitzStephen, Vita S. Thomae c. 38, MB III, p. 50: ‘In cameram primam intromissus, sedit regem expectans, qui tunc missam audiebat; cui venienti venerabiliter assurgens, vultum exhibuit constantem, placidum, ad osculi consuetam Anglis gratiam offerendam verecunde recipiendam paratum, si rex praeoccuparet. Ad osculum non est receptus.’ K. Leyser, ‘The Angevin kings and the holy man’, in K. Leyser, Communications and Power in Medieval Europe, vol. II: The Gregorian Revolution and Beyond, ed. T. Reuter (London, 1994), pp. 157–75, at 164, 168. 44 Ibid. c. 37, MB III, p. 49. William fitzStephen, Vita S. Thomae c. 39, MB III, p. 51.

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now to be deprived of all human help’.45 Becket himself was capable of adopting a deliberate and well-aimed disregard for normal conventions. In 1166 he wrote Henry three letters of admonition, the third of which opened with the following salutation: ‘These are the words of the archbishop of Canterbury to the king of the English’.46 This letter was entrusted to a mere single monk, whereas the two earlier ones were transmitted by abbots. The conveying of a calculated insult through the formal phrasing of a letter, and the choice of messenger to carry it, can be paralleled elsewhere in medieval European history.47 Emotions like joy and grief were equally clearly ‘staged’. On the news of Becket’s murder, Henry II donned sackcloth and ashes, locked himself in his private room and refused food and drink for three days.48 Alexander III remained in his room for a week and let it be known, quite understandably, that no English visitors would have access to him.49 Alexander had even adopted a biblical model for his conduct when news came of the death of the antipope Victor IV: he told the cheering cardinals to be silent and wept for his dead enemy ‘like David for Absalom’.50 Joy was expressed likewise in a similarly demonstrative fashion. On the eve of the Becket dispute, there occurred a famous episode at Southampton after Christmas 1162. Becket welcomed Henry after his return to the kingdom: And lo and behold, as the archbishop along with the king’s son [the Young King, for whose upbringing Becket was responsible] entered the king’s lodging and the king and everyone came forward to meet him, there was great joy and exultation throughout the whole hall. King and archbishop hastened to exchange kisses and embraces and greeted each other with mutual honour . . . And in the morning of the following day, the two men met again and journeyed on together: for the whole journey the two were apart together, keeping all the rest at a distance, and they spoke together in a confidential and private way, paying each other compliments.51 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Alan of Tewkesbury, Vita S. Thomae c. 33, MB II, p. 349: ‘quod plurimum suos perterruit quasi jam omni humano auxilio destitutos’. MB VI, nos. 152–4, pp. 266–84, esp. no. 154, the decisive letter; see Barlow, Becket, pp. 144–5. H. Hoffmann, ‘Zur mittelalterlichen Brieftechnik’, in K. Repgen and S. Skalweit eds., Spiegel der Geschichte. Festgabe für Max Braubach zum 10. April 1964 (Münster, 1964), pp. 141–70, at 145–7. Letter of Arnulf of Lisieux to Alexander III, ed. Barlow, Letters of Arnulf, no. 72, p. 123. Letter of a royal nuntius to Richard of Poitiers, MB VII, no. 751, p. 476: ‘Generaliter interdictum est ne Anglici ad eum haberent accessum.’ Letter of a nuntius to Becket, MB V, no. 53, pp. 90–1. Herbert of Bosham, Vita S. Thomae III, 19, MB III, pp. 115–16: ‘et ecce una cum regis filio regis hospitium ingrediente pontifice, rege, et universis occurrentibus, per totam aulam gaudium magnum et exsultatio; rege et pontifice in mutua ruentibus oscula et amplexus, et sese invicem honore praevenientibus . . . Et mane convenientes diei crastinae simul conficiunt iter, toto itinere soli duo, caeteris amotis omnibus, familiariter et secreto colloquentes et sibi invicem applaudentes.’


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This kind of confidential but at the same time public tête-à-tête was acted out by Becket and Henry later as well, at gatherings which were intended to settle the dispute and indeed did so if only temporarily.52 As often in the politics of the early and central Middle Ages, all this is not so much a matter of giving outward expression to a basic and pre-existing reality, as of constructing reality through the very act of staging it. Emotions could be expressed not just by individuals but by collectivities. Especially in England, there were in ‘the long twelfth century’ several cases of bishops who had fallen into disgrace being bullied at assemblies. The treatment of William of St-Calais, bishop of Durham, in 1088 is one example,53 Anselm at the Council of Rockingham in 1095 another;54 and to some extent similar are King Stephen’s arrest of several bishops in 1139,55 or the rough handling of Hilary of Chichester in 1157 during the legal battle over the exemption of the royal monastery of Battle.56 There clearly existed a generally well-known repertoire of procedural forms for such occasions. At the Councils of Clarendon and Northampton, the secular magnates proclaimed in noisy fashion their disapproval of the grievances for which they held Becket responsible. ‘Traitor!’, they shouted, and they indicated by gestures what Becket’s fate should be. Although in reality contemporaries saw neither execution nor mutilation as likely outcomes of the conflict,57 Roger of York at Northampton summoned his clerics to him so that they could quit the scene together and not stay to watch while the archbishop was slain.58 Like William of Durham and Anselm, Becket was cold-shouldered by the magnates the moment the king had made his own displeasure clear.59 Like Becket, furthermore, Anselm and other English bishops in the twelfth 52

53

54 55 56 57 58 59

For example during the Fréteval meeting in summer 1170: Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, Vie de Saint Thomas le Martyr de Cantorbire, vv. 4338–55, trans. J. Shirley as Garnier’s Becket (London, 1975), pp. 115–16. F. Barlow, William Rufus (London, 1983), pp. 85–9. There is debate about the authenticity of the main source, the De iniusta vexacione Willelmi episcopi Dunelmensis, ed. H. S. Offler, in Chronology, Conquest and Conflict in Medieval England, Camden Miscellany 34, Camden 5th series 10 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 49–104; but the contemporary colour is unmistakeable. Barlow, William Rufus, pp. 338–42. E. J. Kealey, Roger of Salisbury: Viceroy of England (Berkeley CA, 1972), pp. 174–84; K. Yoshitake, ‘The arrest of the bishops in 1139 and its consequences’, JMH 14 (1988), pp. 97–114. Warren, Henry II, pp. 429–32. Some barons did bring up, in a demonstratively noisy and explicit manner, the fate of one of Becket’s predecessors: William fitzStephen, Vita S. Thomae c. 55, MB III, pp. 64–5. Alan of Tewkesbury, Vita S. Thomae c. 9, MB III, p. 331. William fitzStephen, Vita S. Thomae c. 55, MB III, pp. 64–5: ‘ex illo die amplius ad hospitium ejus non venerunt eum videre barones vel alii milites, intellecto regis animo’; cf. the bishops’ behaviour towards William of Durham, De iniusta vexacione, p. 81: ‘Nemo enim illorum ut aiebant audebat eum osculari vel alloqui’, or William Rufus’s demand to the bishops to withdraw their friendship from Anselm, Barlow, William Rufus, p. 341.

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century went into exile. We can see this, indeed, as a ‘rule’ specific to English politics, an established, almost ritualised procedure which could be seen as, at very least, a well-understood move in the political chess-game. The symbolisation of political meaning played such a significant role in the Becket dispute that pages could be filled on the subject. Here I will pick out only a few particularly revealing examples. One key episode at the Council of Northampton is very informative. Becket’s condemnation on grounds of his financial irregularities was about to proceed, when Becket insisted on carrying the cross himself as he entered the hall of the king’s palace. (He also carried under his robe, in case of a physical attack, a consecrated host in a special container.) Some of the bishops present tried to talk him out of this idea: it was not fitting; moreover it was comparable to carrying a weapon in the king’s presence. ‘If he draws his sword [note here something frequently to be found elsewhere in the dispute, a typical mixture of metaphor, symbol and reality], what will you do?’60 Becket replied that he carried his cross only for protection and as a sign of peace (pax), but a peace signalled in this way was obviously an aggressive peace, as in the saying: ‘there will be no war, but in the struggle for peace no stone will be left standing on another’. In fact the scene was partly ruined by that spoilsport Roger of York. One of the points of perpetual dispute between the two metropolitans was the right of the archbishop of York to have his cross carried before him in the province of Canterbury as well as that of York; and because Roger had had this right confirmed by the pope, probably during the vacancy before Becket’s election, he seized the opportunity to state his claims loud and clear by also entering the hall with his cross carried before him: the same symbolic act twice over, but each one with a totally different meaning.61 The most important symbolic act of the whole dispute was one that never happened: the kiss of peace which Henry and Becket ought to have given each other as a public sign that the dispute was over, but which Henry successfully blocked. Louis VII’s view was that such a symbolic closure was indispensable: Becket should under no circumstances be induced to return to England without having received Henry’s kiss.62 Important too was 60 61 62

William fitzStephen, Vita S. Thomae c. 47, MB III, p. 57; Alan of Tewkesbury, Vita S. Thomae c. 8, MB II, p. 330. William fitzStephen, Vita S. Thomae c. 48, MB III, pp. 57–8. Ibid. c. 109, MB III, p. 113: ‘Nos imus in Angliam ludere pro capitibus. Rex Francorum: Ita mihi videtur. Equidem, domine archiepiscope, non dato tibi osculo, si mihi crederes, [te] regi tuo non crederes’ (‘“We go to England to play for [our] heads.” The King of the Franks said: “So I see. But, if you trust me, Lord Archbishop, if the kiss has not been given, you should not trust your king.”’


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Becket’s insistence ‘that this gesture is a solemn ceremonial form recognised among every people and in every religion. Without the kiss of peace, no peace-agreement between contesting parties could ever be concluded.’63 Henry did not kiss Becket. Indeed when they met at Tours in autumn 1170 he carefully arranged for a Mass for the dead to be sung so that he was not constrained to give Becket the kiss that was a liturgical convention at all other Masses. Instead, he found an alternative symbolic way to declare his commitment to peace, and that was his performance of a kind of groomservice. Henry even ‘embraced’ Becket but did so without giving him a kiss of peace.64 Such symbolically loaded signs were also ‘read’ and interpreted by the onlookers. Right up to the end, Louis VII read Henry’s refusal to give Becket the kiss of peace as a symbol of his lack of genuine preparedness for peace.65 But even more distant observers too had sharpened eyes for such things, in much the same way as modern journalists read signs and symbols to interpret for their readership the obscure goings-on of the Kremlin or of the Vatican or any other closed political systems that are anything but transparent to us. In the royal chapel, and in the diocese of London, liturgical changes were made, so that the archbishop was not named in prayers. ‘When word came that [Henry and Becket] had reached agreement, then he [Gilbert Foliot, bishop of London] mentioned the archbishop in the liturgy – something that many who heard it took note of.’66 Such ‘taking note’ on the part of observers is something that crops up frequently in the Lives of Becket. It remains possible, of course, that this is a form of literary commentary on events. Here again, we could cite as parallels the Icelandic Sagas where anonymous authors stick to an unwritten rule of narrative which forbids direct comment on or evaluation of events, but at the same time get around that rule by writing such phrases as ‘people thought that . . .’ or ‘in the opinion of many people, this was . . .’.67 It became clear at many points in the conflict that men who were enemies found it very difficult to engage directly with each other. At Northampton, 63

64 66

67

Becket to the papal legate Bernard of Nevers, MB VII, no. 644, p. 246. K. Schreiner, ‘“Gerechtigkeit und Frieden haben sich geküst” (Ps. 84: 11). Friedensstiftung durch symbolisches Handeln’, in J. Fried ed., Träger und Instrumentarien des Friedens im hohen und späten Mittelalter, Vorträge und Forschungen 43 (Sigmaringen, 1996), pp. 37–86, at 82–5, offers a detailed discussion of the kiss of peace in the course of the Becket dispute, thus allowing me to limit myself to certain essentials. 65 See n. 62. William fitzStephen, Vita S. Thomae c. 107, MB III, pp. 110–11. William fitzStephen, Vita S. Thomae c. 78, MB III, pp. 83–4: ‘Cum rumor erat de eorum concordia, tunc faciebat [Gilbert Foliot] de archiepiscopo memoriam; quod multi auditores notabant.’ In a similar way, too, many people ‘noted’ Henry’s refusal to give Becket the kiss of peace: ibid. c. 112, p. 115, and cf. c. 108, p. 113. L. Lönnroth, ‘Rhetorical persuasion in the sagas’, Scandinavian Studies 42 (1970), pp. 157–89.

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Becket hardly seems to have spoken to the king after the first day: instead, statements of accusation and defence, and proposals for negotiations, always passed through intermediaries (internuntii), although the spatial divide between the parties was no more than that between the two storeys of a building.68 In the first phase of serious peace-negotiations, too, the papal legates held separate talks with Henry and with Becket.69 In similar situations in our own times, we probably assume that negotiations do in fact take place, and that intermediaries function as useful instruments for reaching agreement that might in principle have been achieved in other ways. But that was not so in the twelfth century. Internuntii were expected to have sufficient status and honour of their own to be able to act as guarantors for the implementation of agreements. Thus at the Council of Northampton, several bishops showed their good intent by pressing Henry on the terms for settling the conflict, and offering him money out of their own pockets. Once a mediator had brought about a meeting between contending parties, his honour was lost if a conclusion could not then be reached. It is generally assumed that Louis VII was angry at the failure of the Montmirail meeting because he wanted to exploit a resolution of the conflict for his own ‘geopolitical’ ends; but the plain and simple truth is more likely that it was a question of Louis’s honour and of saving his own face.70 Because the dispute was a public dispute, it had to be settled publicly. This gave rise to a whole series of difficulties. First, there was a set of wellknown distinctions in the politics of the early and central Middle Ages between various types of assembly and their appropriate procedural forms. Gerd Althoff’s typology – colloquium publicum, colloquium secretum, colloquium familiare – is well exemplified in the course of the Becket dispute. Public gatherings carried particular risks in a political culture in which rank and honour were strongly stressed. Only with difficulty could differences of opinion be expressed in such an arena. Instead, people looked for a carefully planned staging of events which hardly left any room for spontaneous action and in which the outcome sought could if possible be agreed beforehand with all participants. In a ‘secret’ meeting, on the other hand, deals could be struck and things could be said that were never possible in a ‘public’ one: that was the very reason why the gathering itself was termed secret, not because any outcomes were intended to be kept confidential. 68

69

Barlow, Becket, pp. 113–14; William fitzStephen, Vita S. Thomae c. 42, MB III, p. 53. On the role of intermediaries in conflicts generally, see Althoff, ‘Privileg der deditio’, pp. 100–1, and also his ‘Demonstration und Inszenierung’, in Spielregeln, pp. 229–57, at 238–40. 70 See above, n. 45. Barlow, Becket, pp. 171–3.


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Somewhere in between came the colloquium familiare, a meeting involving friends and advisers which presupposed a certain freedom of speech. Becket’s silences resulted in part from the fact that he ignored such fundamental distinctions – whether consciously or unconsciously must remain an open question. Perhaps despite his long familiarity with the game-rules by which this aristocratic world played, he remained in the last analysis something of an outsider, never entirely at home within it. He was prepared to express open dissent even at public assemblies. Indeed that was how the dispute began. Even in the final scene of Becket’s life, John of Salisbury vainly tried to prevent him from engaging in a public row with the four king’s knights and instead to get him to discuss the situation with his own ‘council’, that is, within the circle of his own clerical ‘learned ones’ (eruditi). Becket’s view, in any case, was that there was nothing to discuss.71 At the same time, he showed himself incapable of handling the discourse of the colloquium familiare, of striking the right note. According to William fitzStephen’s account, after the Montmirail meeting, one of the clerics in Becket’s entourage had problems with his horse which refused to budge, and said, ‘Hey, get on with you, saving the honour of God and Holy Church and my order!’72 Becket, who is never recorded as having had a sense of humour, apparently reacted with irritation. Here, I think, in the cleric’s words, we catch a note that has a curiously modern ring. Within smaller groups, there was a freedom of speech and behaviour that was the reverse of the very formalised public side of the court. It was typical of the politics of this period that even a political leader was not expected to act alone, but always to have himself ‘well counselled’ beforehand. Precisely the charge brought against Becket was that he would not be counselled. At the beginning of the dispute, at Clarendon, as Gilbert of London and his other episcopal colleagues saw it, Becket had given in suddenly, without any previous consultation with his fellow-bishops.73 At the Montmirail meeting early in 1169, as noted above, Becket insisted on the reservation-clause salvo honore Dei against Louis VII’s advice and to his great annoyance.74 The specific ground-rules of public assemblies brought about special difficulties in the case of conflict-settlement: on the one hand, conflicts had to be publicly settled, on the other hand, public assemblies could only function when all parties were agreed, that is, when the conflict was already settled. Intermediaries were in particular demand on such occasions, 71 73 74

72 William fitzStephen, Vita S. Thomae c. 93, MB III, pp. 96–7. Barlow, Becket, p. 242. See Foliot’s lengthy letter to Becket, in Morey and Brooke eds., Letters and Charters of Gilbert Foliot, no. 170, pp. 229–43, esp. 233–4; Staunton, Lives, pp. 223–37, esp. 228–9, gives a good translation. Above, n. 45.

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therefore. This was not only a matter of the wish of a reasonable outsider such as Alexander III to see the dispute brought to an acceptable end. It was also a matter of the very great difficulty of acting in any other way. Even private meetings presupposed a degree of friendship and general consensus that would be restored only during the course of the conflict. Thus it is significant that after their first meeting at Fréteval, Henry and Becket demonstrated their agreement by talking with each other ‘in public intimacy’. The right public arena had to be established first. True, Becket and Henry could still operate publicly at a distance, but so long as they did this, the means at their disposal actually lent themselves only to signalling the continuation of enmity. Operating at a distance meant in practice harming your enemy from a distance; sending writs and orders to royal officials to carry out confiscations and banishments; pronouncing excommunications and interdicts; sending appeals to the pope; circulating letters intended for a wider audience. The conflict could only be ended face to face, but it could also only be ended before a public. In the twelfth century, this sort of public existed only for the brief duration of a royal council or an assembly. Even at the end of the conflict, a public was not available – or rather, the right sort of public wasn’t. Only a few of the participants at the assemblies at Clarendon and Northampton were present at the meetings at Fréteval and Tours. Becket returned to England without the English political public having witnessed the reconciliation between him and the king. In maintaining that it was best if he gave Becket the kiss of peace in England,75 Henry II was not only acting in a procrastinating and devious way. The icy atmosphere that Becket encountered on his return ought to make us wary of any too-straightforward inference here. Evidently a royal writ beginning, ‘Know that Thomas has made a settlement with me and mine according to my will’, had much less impact than a publicly staged reconciliation might have done – which says something about the effectiveness or otherwise of the written word in Angevin England. What we have seen is a political community in which politics were conducted in ways and forms that any member of a Carolingian or postCarolingian kingdom would have recognised instantly, apart from a few innovations and the odd sign of English exceptionalism. Yet the usual way of depicting the Becket dispute is as a phenomenon characteristic of the twelfth century and of English political culture. Such a reading fits very well in the grand narrative of the historiography of medieval English 75

William fitzStephen, Vita S. Thomae c. 107, MB III, p. 111.


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politics, that is, the basic meta-history that gives meaning to any particular account or analysis. This meta-history stresses above all the continuous development of a state that is supposed to have been especially advanced, that is, centralised, from the tenth century onwards.76 Viewed from this standpoint, the roots of the Becket dispute lay in the Church’s claims to special jurisdiction in certain areas, that is, over not only criminous clerks but also various types of case, and claims to constitute a jurisdictional hierarchy of its own beginning with archidiaconal and episcopal courts and finally going outside the country itself right up to the court of the pope. Against this Henry II set the claims of the Crown to all jurisdiction over men and property in which (to use a slightly anachronistic expression) a public interest was involved, and either to exercise this jurisdiction himself or to control it through supervision and rights of appeal. The points of conflict were thus relatively straightforward; and since Henry’s position was essentially a reasonable one, which fitted so well with the historical development of the English state, this was the position which, give or take a few face-saving adaptations and compromises, finally triumphed. In the recent accounts of Warren and Barlow, the Becket dispute begins with Clarendon and ends with the so-called Concordat of Avranches in 1172 and a further settlement with the papal legate Hugo Pierleoni in 1175–6. ‘In the end it proved possible to satisfy almost all Henry’s requirements without serious injury to the Church’s essential “liberties”’, as Warren puts it.77 In a similar vein, Barlow writes of Henry’s tactics at the Council of Clarendon: ‘It would have been more prudent to try to get his way on a few important, but limited, issues . . . which were amenable to practical solutions.’78 You wonder why people made such a huge fuss over anything so simple! And in fact historians for a long time have stressed the unreasonableness and intransigence on both sides, and their inability to move in the direction of rational compromise and accommodation. To quote Warren again: both parties were addicted to ‘a dangerous posturing which was to inveigle the two of them deeper and deeper into inexorable conflict’.79 At the same time, historians have emphasised the changing aims of the participants during the whole course of the dispute, especially at its beginning and at its end. Interpreting the dispute as, above all, a conflict over ecclesiastical jurisdiction is certainly not a discovery of modern historians: some of Becket’s biographers framed their narratives of the dispute in this 76 77

See J. Campbell, ‘The late Anglo-Saxon state: a maximum view’, PBA 87 (1994), pp. 39–65. 78 Barlow, Becket, p. 105. 79 Warren, Henry II, p. 457. Warren, Henry II, p. 448.

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way throughout, and devoted a lot of space to the biblical and canon-law bases of both royal and archiepiscopal positions.80 Yet the contemporary correspondence and the slightly later accounts which report the innumerable meetings and preliminary negotiations hardly give the impression of a dispute that was first and foremost over ecclesiastical jurisdiction. What they focussed on was much less the ‘basic causes’ of the dispute – if jurisdictional questions can be termed such – than the dispute itself and its consequences: the revenues and rights of Canterbury (including the right to crown kings); excommunications; Henry’s willingness publicly to demonstrate by the kiss of peace his full acceptance of Becket back into the royal grace; Becket’s willingness publicly to recognise Henry as king and lord by unconditionally acknowledging the royal honour and dignity inherited from his grandfather. From the start, the dispute very rapidly became a dispute about the dispute. Right at the beginning stood a series of actions on Becket’s part through which he publicly disregarded, or seemed to disregard, the king. He laid down the office of chancellor without consulting anyone on the subject; he spoke out publicly against the transformation of ‘sheriff ’s aid’ into a regular form of taxation; he excommunicated the royal vassal William of Eynsford without royal permission and then at first refused the king’s request that the excommunication be lifted.81 Above all, at the Council of Westminster he publicly rebuffed the king’s demand that the royal honour and dignity be accorded respect and recognition. Then, as Becket, during the informal negotiations between Westminster and Clarendon, signalled his preparedness to give way, Henry’s response showed his concern for adherence to the proper form: ‘it was his wish that Becket should acknowledge his obligation to abide by the king’s customs in the following manner: in the sight of the bishops and magnates of the realm and in a public hearing’.82 Only thus could satisfaction be guaranteed for the injury of the preceding public refusal. Henry’s insistence on a written version of the avitae consuetudines was not just an instance of how a king could take a step too far in a moment of triumph (Henry IV of Germany did that vis-à-vis the Saxons in autumn 1075): it had become the more necessary because of the public character of the preceding debate. Now it had to be demonstrated publicly and with crystal clarity that the restoration of peace was genuine. For Becket, though, this was again a sign that people had no trust in his promises. He reacted strongly, initially refusing to append his 80 81

For instance, Herbert of Bosham, Vita S. Thomae III, 23–4, MB III, pp. 266–72, or the Summa causae inter regem et Thomam, MB IV, pp. 201–12. 82 Above, p. 174 and n. 19. Barlow, Becket, p. 105.


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seal to his copy of the document. This put a question mark against the peace that had only just been settled. In exactly the same way, at the end of the dispute, by excommunicating the bishops who had participated in the Young King’s coronation, Becket once again put a question mark against another newly arranged peace. This paper has dealt with a political community in which, although it was now possible to articulate conflicts in the language of reason and political calculation, the primary language of politics was still the metalanguage of honour, rank and satisfaction for injuries to honour and rank. Furthermore, only to a limited extent was this meta-language suited to the realising of different kinds of political ends. Rather, it largely determined those ends. The symbolic and ritualised forms of interaction did not give expression to an underlying reality: they were that reality. This is why we need to turn the traditional understanding of the dispute upside down: Henry and Becket were not enemies because they could not agree about principles: they could not agree about principles because they had become enemies. In conclusion, I want to draw attention to a neglected episode from the final phase of the dispute. During the great rebellion of 1173–4 led by Henry’s sons and his wife against his rule, the Old King made a journey to Canterbury in July 1174. The fact is extremely well known, but only seldom is it correctly evaluated. Warren, for instance, so far as I can see never mentions Henry’s journey in his account of the Becket dispute, offering instead pages of analysis of the Concordat of Avranches.83 Knowles, similarly, sees the episode as unimportant (‘a gesture’), and mentions it only in the context of the rebellion.84 Only Barlow dedicates a whole paragraph to it, and although he shows more interest in Avranches and the fate of Becket’s eruditi, he certainly sees that Henry’s penitential journey marked the true end to the dispute.85 For contemporaries, though, the episode was of the highest significance. It was far more interesting than the Concordat of Avranches, and over the course of centuries it remained fixed in visual and verbal memory, until in 1538 on the orders of Henry VIII Thomas Cromwell and his agents overthrew the cult of the saint for so long acknowledged by English kings, and did so with purposeful and public brutality that was every bit as heavy with symbolism as Henry II’s action in 1174.86 83 84 86

Warren, Henry II, pp. 530–49. Henry’s penitential journey is mentioned, however, in Warren’s account of the sons’ rebellion, ibid. p. 135. 85 Barlow, Becket, pp. 269–70. Knowles, Becket, p. 153. J. Butler, The Quest for Becket’s Bones (New Haven and London, 1995), pp. 112–33. See my colleague George Bernard’s detailed discussion of the de-canonisation process in [The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (London, 2005)].

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Henry entered Canterbury without any adventus (ceremonial reception) and walked to the cathedral. Indeed from the city-gate to the cathedral he even went barefoot. Before the martyr’s tomb, he did penance for his sins and ‘made his peace with the martyr’. The monastery (Christ Church Canterbury, Becket’s cathedral chapter) ‘renounced all anger against him’ – note here the language of feud – and after this he was scourged by the assembled prelates and monks. As so often, the meta-language of public politics employed the vocabulary of ecclesiastical penance, yet there are also glimmerings here of the widespread symbolic act of deditio. Henry abased himself before the saint in an act of submission while the assembled prelates pleaded with Thomas on Henry’s behalf just as they had pleaded with Henry on Thomas’s behalf at the Council of Northampton. The usual procedure following a deditio was the restoration of the suppliant to the grace and favour of the one who received his submission. ‘Now God set aside his wrath against the king.’ As is well known, it was widely believed that Thomas actually had ‘restored’ Henry when in the days immediately following Henry’s penance he ensured that the king’s troops won victory over the rebels. The symbolic language of noble feud required a conclusion, and closure, such as this. Precisely because he had not been able to do so during Becket’s life, Henry had to submit to him all the more completely after his death. In the end, honour was satisfied.

part iii

Political structures and intentions

chap t e r 11

Assembly politics in western Europe from the eighth century to the twelfth

The phrase ‘assembly politics’ in the title is deliberately ambiguous: it refers both to politics conducted through assemblies and to politics conducted at assemblies. To address this apparently narrow theme is in fact to address a much wider problem: as we shall see, it was mainly at assemblies that early and high medieval polities were able to act and indeed to exist. ‘Polities’ and ‘politics’ are here merely neutral signifiers for past human activities to which we would probably apply similar terms in our own societies; their use does not imply that prominent lay and ecclesiastical personages in this period conceived of any of their activities as ‘politics’ or of the regna within which they operated as ‘polities’.1 Indeed, to make that point is precisely to raise the issue of how we are to avoid anachronism in dealing with our remote pasts. The principal approaches on offer duck this difficulty. We can write conventional political history for this period by casting it as accounts of the strategies and tactics pursued by the principal actors in their attempts to acquire and retain and enhance their power and of the ways in which these attempts conflicted with each other. But if we do this we shall smooth out the lumpiness of the past. Conventional political history presents rulers and ruled as engaged continuously in political activity and calculation: our sources may not so present them, but the narrative strategies implicit in such writing will reframe the past to make it look like this, just as actors in a film – unless it is very experimental indeed – are assumed to be and implied as being engaged in action even when they are off camera. To shift from political to constitutional or institutional history avoids this difficulty at the cost of introducing others. The lumpiness of the past appears to be recovered, because the rhetoric of constitutional history lies precisely in investing some past activities with more significance than others. But it is a lumpiness derived more from present reification than from past 1

On the limited degree of conceptual abstraction in political thought in this period see Nelson 1994: 65.

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reality. The patterns of behaviour of rulers and ruled – if patterns are what they really were – are abstracted, to be reinscribed in an implicit grand narrative of ever-thickening institutionality. The result is all too often a grand narrative which does not entirely ensure suspension of disbelief. We may recall Karl Leyser’s devastating critique of a century of constitutional historians’ work on the Ottonian polity: The older school assumed – with some exceptions – the state and a volume of government without asking very precise questions of how it worked from day to day. It was in its abstractions a shadow-history of institutions that did not really exist. (Leyser 1982b: 80)

That criticism is perhaps particularly easy to make of Ottonian Verfassungsgeschichte; but it is arguable that even the constitutional or institutional history of a more formed and focused polity like England presents related difficulties, if not such extreme ones: the degree of abstraction and reification in recent surveys such as those by Henry Loyn and Lewis Warren on the governance of medieval England is high (Loyn 1984; Warren 1987). It would be wrong to deny altogether the existence of ‘governance’ in the world they are writing about, yet it is still hard to accept that this was all that the relationship between rulers and the political community was about. Assemblies are a prominent feature of most contemporary accounts of this relationship, yet medievalists are inclined to take them more or less for granted. We are interested in their course and outcomes, but we are rather less interested in their form and function, though both were of great importance in the period selected for discussion here. The starting point is somewhat arbitrarily chosen, but although assemblies did not suddenly come into existence in the eighth century, we rarely get enough sense of their flavour and function in the preceding period to be able to say convincing and coherent things about them. The closing point, around 1200, is clearer: it is marked by the shift from assemblies to proto-parliaments and other kinds of representative institutions, which takes place from the 1180s in Spain, from the early decades of the thirteenth century in England, slightly later in France, and as usual rather differently and belatedly in Germany (Bisson 1982).2 By around 1200 also we have clearly begun to move towards a world in which political interaction was no longer confined to assemblies; 2

On parliaments see Moraw 1989, who stresses how long it took for the Reichstag to develop out of the Hoftag; Blockmans 1978. Fundamental on the self-realisation of political (and other) communities in this period is Reynolds 1997.

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governments were increasingly governing continuously rather than in brief spurts. It is possible also that people’s attitudes changed from the thirteenth century onwards: to speak one’s mind at assemblies shifted from a duty to a right, perhaps even a pleasure, though this may be an illusion created by increasingly prolific source-material. Although a constitutional historian’s approach may not necessarily be the most profitable one, there are certainly questions about assemblies which can be framed in such terms and which still need satisfactory answers, in particular questions about the frequency of and the participation in assemblies. By the end of the twelfth century, rulers such as Henry II and Frederick Barbarossa were holding assemblies several times a year (Schimmelpfennig 1996: 89–90). Had this always been the case? Obviously there are problems here of evidence and definition. The terminology used for such meetings in our almost exclusively Latin sources is very variable, but it includes: placitum (‘plea’) and curia (‘court’; both terms often imply a judicial meeting, but are not confined to such a usage); colloquium (‘conference’) and conventus (‘gathering’); concilium (‘council’) and synodus (‘synod’; both terms mostly used of ecclesiastical assemblies, but again not exclusively so); magiscampum (‘Mayfield’, in the eighth and early ninth centuries); exercitus (literally, ‘army’).3 The problem is not so much that of uncertainty about whether contemporaries meant subtly differing things by their varied terminology, as that of deciding whether we should call something an assembly when we happen to know about it only from kinds of evidence which do not bother to apply a term to it at all. The problem can be nicely illustrated by considering a related kind of meeting, church councils. Tenth-century church councils in West Francia or France hardly ever issued legislation, so we know about them largely from charters issued at them. Some of these explicitly refer to the meetings at which they were issued as synods, others do not, but there is no reason to suppose that these differences reflected a real difference in how the meetings were perceived at the time (Schröder 1980: 13–32). When we come to deal with secular assemblies the problem is still greater, because the charters issued at these were issued by kings, not by episcopal collectives. For the period before the later eleventh century, royal charters in Europe rarely had witness-lists. In theory at least, since they were their own authentication 3

For the terminology see Niermeyer 1954–76: cols. 201–2, 235, 270, 288–90, 392, 801–4; Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch 1968–97: cols. 866–7 (colloquium), 1,175–7 (concilium), 1,822 (conventus); Latham and Howlett 1975–97: 383, 419–20, 479–80, 537. See also Waitz 1883: 563–4; Ganshof 1968: 22–3.

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and were unchallengeable as to substance, they did not need them (Bresslau 1912: 642–6; Bresslau 1931: 202–4).4 In consequence, royal charters may well have been issued at assemblies (and we know that they often were), but they frequently do not tell us this, nor do they normally tell us through their witness-lists about who was there. The one substantial exception to this generalisation, Anglo-Saxon England, simply presents us with a different set of problems. Not only are there uncertainties about the authenticity of royal charters on a scale long since eliminated elsewhere in Europe; Anglo-Saxon diplomata did not in any case usually bear full details of their date and place of issue, so even where we feel reasonably confident about the authenticity of a particular charter (or at least of its witness-list), we cannot necessarily convert the information it provides into information about an assembly held at a specific time and place (Keynes 1981: 126– 34, 232–4). For our knowledge of assemblies and their participants across Europe we depend more and more, as we go back in time, on narrative sources and on casual survivals of legal material such as law-codes and capitularies. By way of compensation we have some evidence of past norms from earlier periods. Both for Anglo-Saxon and early Anglo-Norman England, and for the Ottonian and Salian Reich, we have good reason to suppose that rulers regularly held large gatherings at the three great church feasts of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun, at which they may also have worn their crowns in state.5 Even in the Carolingian period, the way in which annalists from the time of the Royal Frankish Annals onwards often record the places where rulers celebrated Christmas and Easter suggests that this practice was not a post-Carolingian invention. Celebrating church feasts does not in itself imply a large gathering; but crown-wearings almost certainly do – there is not much point in wearing your crown among a small circle of close friends, immediate family and the local bishop. This is all the more true when a ruler needs what Brühl has termed a Befestigungskrönung (‘confirmatory coronation’) after his legitimacy has been impinged on (e.g. Louis II in 871 after his capture by the Beneventans, or Stephen’s crownwearing in 1146 at Lincoln, where he had been defeated and captured in 4

5

Witness-lists do not become common until the early twelfth century in Germany, rather earlier in France (cf. Lemarignier 1965: 42–78). Their function was to some extent fulfilled in earlier royal charters by the names of those who ‘intervened’ to further the transaction; cf. Bresslau 1931: 193–201; Fauβner 1973: 388, 435–6; Gawlik 1976. For the Anglo-Saxon and early Anglo-Norman rulers see Biddle 1986; for Ottonian practice see Hüschner 1993. On the practice of crown-wearing see, besides Biddle, Brühl 1989b; Jäschke 1970; Brühl 1989c; Ott 1998.


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1141, or Richard I’s after his return from being held for ransom in 1194). But it also holds under more normal circumstances, as can be seen from the descriptions by William of Malmesbury of the crowds at William I’s assemblies (Biddle 1986: 51–2). Also from the Carolingian period, we have Hincmar of Rheims’s claim – or that of his source – in his account of Carolingian royal government, De ordine palatii, that there would normally be two assemblies each year in Carolingian kingdoms, one a general one and one a more specialised preparatory one attended only by the most important men of the kingdom and the ruler’s chief advisers (Gross and Schieffer 1980: 82–5).6 There has been a good deal of rather inconclusive debate about this statement. The real problem is that although Carolingian assemblies are quite easy to identify, because they punctuate the accounts of the principal eighth- and ninth-century annalists, it is rarely possible to say anything much about who attended them and on what scale (Waitz 1883: 563–78; Seyfarth 1910: 78–81; Weber 1962: 75–84; Rosenthal 1964; Ganshof 1968: 21–3). However, Hincmar’s statement that there was one general assembly a year in the Frankish realm lines up well with an institution of an earlier period, the Marchfield, the annual assembly of the Frankish ‘nation in arms’ in early March. There has been a tendency in recent years to deny that the Marchfield existed and to argue that there has been a confusion with a ‘field of Mars’ (i.e. of war) (Lévillain 1947/8; Wallace-Hadrill 1962: 95, n. 1; Bullough 1970: 85 and n. 3; Bachrach 1974). But to argue this is to overlook a large body of evidence which suggests that seventh- and eighth-century Franks did indeed think that there would be a major political assembly on 1 March, not least the fact that when the assembly was moved to May in the mid-eighth century it immediately changed its name to ‘Mayfield’. This does not, of course, mean that this happened each and every year; early medieval polities simply did not work like that.7 It means merely that there was a general, other-things-being-equal assumption within the political community that there would be one at that time unless there was some reason either for not holding it or for holding it at some other time. If we take this point, we can see that Hincmar’s apparent belief that there would be one general assembly a year represents a continuity in the ninth century of older Frankish practice. That the origins of continental 6 7

On Hincmar’s use of an older work by Adalhard, see Gross and Schieffer 1980: 11. For discussions of the actual timing of assemblies in the Frankish realms see Seyfarth 1910: 62–71, 87–99; Weber 1962: 68–72; Rosenthal 1964; Sierck 1995: 276–322. The tendency to hold assemblies at particularly significant points in the liturgical year (major feasts as well as the triad of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun) has been particularly stressed by Sierck.

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royal assemblies are to be found in a military-political gathering also ties in with the observation by Thomas Bisson and Karl Leyser among others that the boundaries between assemblies and armies were often blurred – even peacetime assemblies sitting in judgement could be called exercitus, while the verbs used in Latin sources for the summoning of assemblies are those used for the summoning of armies (Bisson 1966; Leyser 1994b: 62). Already we are faced by questions about definition and participation. If in the Frankish world there was an understanding that there would be a general assembly at least once in the year, normally in the spring, but there was also an understanding that the ruler would appear ‘in state’ at the times of the great church feasts, then we evidently have different kinds of assembly, or at least meetings which we should call assemblies, at different times. In practice we can probably not define assemblies more closely than by saying that we are dealing with one whenever the ruler had in his presence a substantial number of people who were not permanent members of his entourage, though there is an element of circularity about that definition which is probably inescapable (Lindner 1990; Schimmelpfennig 1996). It is important to note that such meetings were not confined to regnal communities. Princes with quasi-regal status might also hold them, and lower down the scale the shire-meetings held regularly in late Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman England, or the mallus publicus held regularly in Carolingian and post Carolingian counties, might be thought of as local assemblies, at which a local or regional political community came together in much the same way as a regnal community did at a royal assembly (Fleming 1995; Schmidt-Wiegand 1984; Estey 1947). How such meetings were made known and called into being are largely unanswered and perhaps largely unanswerable questions. People were sometimes summoned, though this is not an activity which has left much trace in the surviving sources (Waitz 1896: 428–3). We know from Carolingian and east Frankish/German evidence that if summoned either to a royal or to a local assembly you were indeed expected to turn up.8 But were members of the political community entitled to turn up, even if they had not been summoned, to an assembly they knew was about to take place? At least in the Frankish and post-Frankish world there seems to have been a pragmatic distinction between general assemblies and assemblies by invitation. Hincmar refers to such a distinction, as we noted earlier; but in the eleventh and twelfth centuries meetings of all kinds, both secular and ecclesiastical, 8

Cf. Mitteis 1927 and Reuter 1991b: 319–25 [in this book, chapter 19], on the role of contumacy/nonappearance in ‘political’ trials. At a rather lower level, note the use of the verb admallare (to ‘encourt’): Niermeyer 1954–76: 20. For participation in thirteenth-century county courts see Coss 1991: 4–5.


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were often called frequens. This seems to have meant not that they were held often but rather that they were ‘well-frequented’. Sometimes the word seems to imply the assembly was of a kind which anyone who wanted could attend, and that presumably implies that there were assemblies of other kinds.9 What is clear as a basic rule of political etiquette is that those who had come, whether explicitly invited or not, could not depart without the ruler’s leave – though it would be hard to say how far down the sociopolitical scale this obligation went (Reuter 2001: n. 27).10 To depart early or without leave, as Becket did from the Council of Northampton in 1164, was to make dissatisfaction and opposition clear (Reuter 2001). Equally, on the rare occasions when a ruler left an assembly early or without a formal concluding ceremony, as for example Henry IV of Germany did in the summer of 1073, or Henry II of England did at the end of the Council of Westminster in October 1163, this was a means of showing displeasure (Lohmann 1937: 31–2; Reuter 2001: n. 17). A further point about participation is that assemblies, even when ‘regnal’ rather than ‘principal’ in character, often seem to have had a regional catchment area. We can see this in the practice of West Saxon rulers in the tenth century of holding meetings very often in locations along the Thames, presumably to facilitate attendance by Mercian magnates, now notionally part of the kingdom but still in a sense not wholly of it (Hill 1981: 85– 92), or in the way in which successive rulers of the east Frankish/German polity held assemblies at Regensburg for Bavarians or at Worms and the mid-Rhine region for Swabians – and in the twelfth century, when the centre of political gravity of the Reich had shifted southwards, of holding assemblies at places such as Fulda for Saxon magnates (Mayer 1959; MüllerMertens 1980: 210–21; Müller-Mertens and Huschner 1992: 318–22). The principle appears to have been that you summoned assemblies to an appropriate place on the edge of your own core region when encouraging attendance on a scale larger than usual from those whose power lay outside that core. More could be said about these issues, and about venues (for larger gatherings, assemblies were often open-air meetings with accommodation in tents, but royal and ecclesiastical palaces were also used). However, to examine assemblies simply on the basis of frequency and composition would be to ignore some of their most crucial features. We need to consider the style of interaction at assemblies: to turn from who and when to how. We 9 10

Cf. Wibald of Stavelot’s letter to Anselm of Havelberg in late 1149: ‘Curia futura est Bavemberch, non tamen frequens, ad quam familiariter venire iussi sumus’ (Jaffé 1864, 330, no. 211). For a ninth-century example see Nelson 1991: 119 (864).

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then need to turn to the what, in order to ask why assemblies were so important. By taking the how and the what together we can try to answer the question more holistically than can be done simply by listing their various functions. How did assemblies actually operate? One of the curious features of the subject is that for most of the period covered and most of the area covered we know surprisingly little about this. Those who are most familiar with English history would probably suppose that the richness of late-eleventh- and twelfth-century accounts of assemblies under rulers from William II to Richard I is the norm. But it is not; indeed, if this had been more widely realised there might have been more analysis than there has been of how assemblies operated, based precisely on these accounts of trials and meetings from Anglo-Norman and Angevin England. From other periods and regions there is much less: Widukind and Thietmar, for example, tell us a fair bit about the electoral assemblies of 936 and 1002, but not much about other occasions; Richer offers us a brilliant rhetorical set piece about the 987 election, but does not tell us much about the dynamics of this or other similar occasions (Leyser 1994c: 174–7; Latouche 1930–7: II. 150–63). That does not mean that we cannot say anything – there is a great deal we can piece together from fragmentary evidence – but merely to point out that what we should think of as full accounts of assemblies are much rarer than one might think. This appears to be true also of the Carolingian era. Here, for example, is Hincmar, wearing his annalist’s hat, on the 864 assembly at Pˆıtres, one of the defining moments of ninth-century west Frankish rulership and one with whose staging and scripting Hincmar had a good deal to do. On 1 June at a place called Pˆıtres, Charles held a general assembly, at which he received not only the annual gifts but also the tribute from Brittany . . . he ordered fortifications to be constructed there on the Seine to prevent the Northmen from coming up the river. With the advice of his faithful men and following the custom of his predecessors and forefathers he drew up capitula to the number of thirtyseven, and he gave orders for them to be observed as laws throughout his whole realm. (Nelson 1991: 118)11

This is fairly typical except in its fullness. It tells us what was done, but not how it was done. Even the more detailed accounts of assemblies which we possess in general deal with specific aspects: for example, with their functions as courts, or as electoral bodies. To get at some of the more general features of their behaviour we have to dig deeper. 11

For Hincmar’s role see Nelson 1994. See also Hannig 1982 on the relationship between Frankish rulers and followers at assemblies.


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Once again, there is a significant parallel for our topic in the study of church councils. Until comparatively recently these have been perceived by church historians as black boxes. We know pretty well what a council is – an assembly of prelates – and we know what the products of a council look like – a set of canons. So unless there happen to be records of debates at such councils (which are then examined primarily for their subject matter rather than for what they tell us about the way in which debates took place) we can take the details as read. Recent research, however, culminating in a comprehensive edition of the Ordines for celebrating a council (Schneider 1996), has shown that councils were in form primarily liturgical occasions. The ultimate biblical basis of conciliar activity – Christ’s statement that wherever two or three are gathered together in my name, there I shall also be – was given constant and staged liturgical expression at councils in this period and beyond, from small diocesan synods up to major councils of the Latin Church as a whole.12 Now we cannot simply equate assemblies with councils, though the boundaries between the two could be fluid across much of the area and period we are concerned with: the later Carolingians made some attempt to draw a clear line, as Charles the Great and Louis the Pious had not (Hartmann 1989: 7–10; Ganshof 1957: 27–8), but it is hard to perceive in the Ottonian Reich, and even harder in Anglo-Saxon England (Wolter 1988: 482–9; Oleson 1955: 91–100; Vollrath 1985: 10–18; Cubitt 1995: 44–59). What is important is that we should perceive assemblies as staged occasions. They were not simply gatherings which came together and proceeded on a pragmatic and ad hoc basis according to what was necessary; they were, as Thomas Bisson has pointed out, moments of celebration and persuasion (Bisson 1982). Much of this celebration will have been liturgical: no assembly, except in the most exceptional circumstances, without the Eucharist, though there is a clear distinction to be made between councils, which were in themselves complete liturgical moments, and assemblies, which included liturgical elements without being defined or wholly constrained by liturgy, though they were held frequently enough at liturgically significant points of the year (Sierck 1995; Schaller 1974). Elements such as processions, litanies, laudes and the reception-ceremony known as the adventus regis are mentioned only rarely in narrative accounts of assemblies, and of course there were no ordines to lay down their place in a set of stage-directions. But these things are mentioned frequently enough to make it clear that they were a 12

Matthew 18: 20, cited in two of the most influential early ordines edited by Schneider 1996, nos. 3 and 7 (pp. 210, 311).

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natural and standard part of such gatherings. Otto I’s last assembly, spread between Magdeburg and Quedlinburg, was punctuated by processions to church in which Otto – as was his custom, we are told – was accompanied there by bishops and back (to a meal) by a great crowd of ecclesiastics, dukes and counts, while at the end of our period Becket, arriving late for the Council of Northampton in 1164, found Henry II at Mass (Holtzmann 1935: 76; Reuter 2001). Where they are not mentioned, this is more probably because they were taken for granted by writers and their audiences than because they did not take place. Of course, to point to elements of staging and of ritualised or symbolised collective behaviour is not necessarily to deny the existence of more ad hoc and less structured elements, and hence of ways of ‘reading’ these gatherings which legitimately treat the layer of staging and symbolic action as transparent and go through and beyond it. Anyone familiar with meetings of an analogous kind in our own culture (for example, meetings of political parties at all levels, parliaments and councils, boards of firms or universities or hospital trusts) will know that these too are staged occasions with their own rituals and expectations, but will also know that that does not preclude either the unpredictable, or the open and often quite unstructured debate, or even conflict. Yet our culture expects and allows for these: we accept the existence of staging and ritual in our gatherings when it is pointed out to us, but we perceive them primarily as places of functional interaction. Participants in assemblies in the period we are dealing with here probably saw the staging and ritual as primary, and were more troubled than we might be when consensus and unanimity failed to materialise. Recorded examples of open conflict suggest that these were rare and shocking events. When Otto of Wittelsbach was so provoked by Rainald of Dassel’s translation of a papal letter to Frederick Barbarossa at the assembly at Besançon in 1157 as to draw his sword and threaten the papal legates (Waitz and von Simson 1912: 176–7); when Anselm and Becket found themselves facing not so much an assembly acting as a judicial body as a group of royal supporters threatening to become a lynch mob (Barlow 1983: 338–42; Barlow 1986: 111–15; Knowles 1970: 94–100; Reuter 2001); when Conrad II was so disturbed by the behaviour of his son and the bishop of Freising at an assembly in 1035 at which the fate of Duke Adalbero of Carinthia was to be decided that he broke into an uncontrollable outburst of rage (Bulst 1949: 49–52, no. 27; Heidrich 1971; Althoff 1997b: 41–3)13 – these were not normal events. 13

See more generally Althoff 1998 and other contributors to Rosenwein 1998 on ‘demonstrative’ royal anger.


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They were disruptions of the expected course of assemblies which produced powerful collective efforts to restore the harmony which had been disturbed. What lay behind these attitudes is something which has been explored by Gerd Althoff in a number of recent studies. Althoff’s conclusion, which can be extended well beyond the accounts of political action in the tenth-, eleventh- and twelfth-century Reich on which it is based, is that we are dealing with polities which collectively feared and shunned open expression of conflict or disagreement (Althoff 1997c). They did so because they lacked a language in which conflict or opposition could be expressed in a controllable form. To oppose, or to contradict in public, was to insult; and to insult, in a society in which the protection of one’s honour was the trip-wire defending the protection of one’s property and rights and hence one’s power and standing, was to invite feud. The characteristic form of public political action was therefore not that of transparent mediation between divergent interests or claims openly expressed, but that of opaque ritualised behaviour symbolising closure and reaffirming an order which should if at all possible be seen not to have been threatened. This applies to the little things as well as to the big ones. Althoff, I and others have spent some time on showing how rebellions were ended in the Reich by acts of ritualised submission and surrender, and these insights are certainly applicable to other regions of Europe besides the Reich (Reuter 1991b; Althoff 1997d; Althoff 1997e). The Becket conflict, for example, as I have shown elsewhere, was initiated by open disruptions of order and consensus at assemblies, of a kind which caused both sides to feel an almost irredeemable sense of injury: the difficulties and delays in bringing about closure in the dispute reflected the problems of agreeing on the stagemanagement of closure (Reuter 2001). But matters which might well be less controversial in content, from appointments to bishoprics, abbacies and high secular posts down to the granting of privileges appear also, when we have enough details to judge, to have been for preference carried out, suitably staged, at assemblies. Staging of course implies stage managers and directors. Unlike the contemporary Byzantine and Islamic polities, and unlike more distant worlds such as imperial China, stage-management did not take the form of preestablished but nevertheless flexible and manipulable rituals governed by tradition recorded in written form and its expert and literate guardians. The relatively low level of literacy and formal education among the political elite meant that a discourse based on reference to written records of rituals – reference either as conformity or as deliberate and conscious extension,

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transgression, allusion – could not develop at this time, as it undoubtedly did in western Europe from the fourteenth century onwards (Reuter 1998: 369–71). Stage-management in this period meant rather the agreement of terms and forms by intermediaries. Conflict resolution in particular required internuncii, people who were trusted by both sides and who could arrange the precisely nuanced terms in which subsequent closure could be publicly expressed as well as guarantee with their own honour and persons the settlements so reached (Althoff 1997b: 30). If we look closely at the accounts of the most prominent political crises and discords of the period, whether we are considering the disruptions to imperial order of the 830s and 840s or the dispute between Henry IV and Gregory VII, or the Becket dispute, we find intermediaries beavering away, both before and during the assemblies at which such disputes were principally conducted.14 There is also evidence for a sphere of more private consultation, at which things could be said which could not possibly be said in ‘public’. It is a feature of such detailed accounts of assemblies as exist that they frequently refer to demands by individual participants to break for consultations. Archbishop Conrad of Mainz, asked by Alexander III to accept Salzburg rather than be restored to Mainz as part of the settlement of the schism at Venice in 1177, requested an adjournment and ‘took counsel with his friends’ before agreeing, and this was a typical not an exceptional case (Arndt 1866: 455). To argue that the language in which politics was publicly expressed was one of carefully staged spontaneity does not preclude the use of the language of political calculation in other contexts: we find this at odd moments in letter-collections, and we find it also in accounts of colloquium familiare and colloquium secretum, terms which mark a contrast between private meetings and the public colloquies at which the language of political calculation would have been completely out of place. When we move on from looking at the ways in which assemblies operated to consider what they dealt with, it becomes clear that – with the exception of military campaigns, though these were often enough a kind of assembly on the march – the major issues which concerned early and high medieval polities were treated mainly or exclusively at assemblies: legislation; diplomacy; court hearings for the political elites; military planning; any kind of consultation about the state of the realm. 14

For intermediaries see Althoff 1997a: passim; specifically on the Carolingian civil war, Lauer 1926: 68– 74 (attempts at mediation before Fontenoy), and 92–4 (peace initiatives of late 841); on intermediaries at Canossa, Reuter 1991b: 322–3 and Althoff 1997d: 240–4; on their role in the Becket conflict, Reuter 2001.


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Assemblies were the places for promulgating legislation or sub-legislative instructions. This is how Charles the Great and Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald behaved (Ganshof 1957: 35–40, 52–62; Hannig 1982; Nelson 1992), and their example was imitated by the hegemonic rulers of Wessex after its early-tenth-century Carolingianisation (Wormald 1978; Wormald 1999). The decline in importance of legislation across most of western Europe in the post-Carolingian era meant the decline of this aspect of assembly functionality, but it was not transferred elsewhere, and when secular legislation revived in the course of the twelfth century it was in the main at assemblies that it was proclaimed, whether in the Landfrieden of Henry IV, Frederick Barbarossa and Louis VII or in the assises of Roger II of Sicily and Henry II of England (Wadle 1986; Leyser 1994g: 151–3; Hudson 1994: 255 with n. 4). Even when rulers or those acting on their behalf began to promulgate legislation in a more proto-absolutist fashion, it was still in the main presented as the product of a ruler sitting amid the regnal community. The term often used in the twelfth century, ‘assise’ in its Latin and vernacular cognates, implies a ‘session’, a sitting down together (Niermeyer 1954–76: 65). It was used to clothe legislation with the authority of assembly even where it had no such origins: the earliest surviving Sicilian royal legislation purports to be the text of an assise issued by Roger II with his kingdom at Ariano in 1140, though in fact it is a learned compilation of the 1180s drawn from a variety of sources (Zecchini 1980; Ariano 1996; Houben 1997: 136– 48; Matthew 1992: 185–8). Privileges for individual beneficiaries (churches, monasteries, major and lesser secular office-holders), which were the more normal form of ‘legislation’ across Europe throughout this period (Krause 1965), also seem to have been issued for preference at assemblies, though in view of their importance for our knowledge of assemblies’ existence there is some danger of a circular argument here.15 Certainly the characteristic form of the privilege, at least in the Frankish and post-Frankish world, was that of a symbolic object: large enough to be visible even in a full assembly, with elaborately decorative script and highly prominent seals. Was it something to be handed over in public with suitable ceremony, perhaps including the formal reading of its contents, not simply to be collected from a chancery clerk on payment of a fee, even if a fee might need to be paid as well (Reuter 1993: 194–6; Reuter 1998: 377)? Diplomacy was scarcely conceivable in this period without a backdrop of regnal assemblies. From the eighth through to the twelfth centuries, European rulers met face to face infrequently, though when they did 15

See the discussion summarised above, at n. 4.

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so this was normally at assemblies (Voss 1987; Kolb 1988). Rather, they defined membership of their exclusive club by their repeated participation in exchanges: of brides, of gifts, of ambassadors. Like crown-wearings, such exchanges would have lacked most of their point had they taken place in private. An audience was required, and assemblies provided it. It was here that ambassadors were formally received and formally given leave to return to their masters (e.g. Reuter 1992: 67, 73, 75). If they happened to turn up when no assembly was scheduled, they might well be asked to wait until one was. If they had brought gifts, it was here, in public, that the wrappingpaper was removed (Leyser 1982c: 114–17; Leyser 1994d: 81–3). If they had come to collect a bride, it was at assemblies that she would be seen off and given a kind of preliminary reception into her new community.16 The documentation of such practices is admittedly confined almost completely to regnal assemblies; but given the known tendency of great aristocrats to imitate rulers in their behaviour, and lesser aristocrats to imitate greater ones, it is probable that similar forms of public exchange and acknowledgement went on lower down the socio-political scale as well. It was at assemblies also that disputes between members of the political community (including disputes between a ruler and members of his political community) were normally resolved. This is one of the bestdocumented and most-studied functions of assemblies. Characteristically, the ruler, though he presided over the assembly as a court, did not himself pass judgement: he would normally invite one or more of the more high-ranking persons present to utter the sentence, which was then both his sentence and that of the community in whose presence it had been uttered. This was true even when he was a party to the dispute: Henry the Lion was condemned by the sentence of the princes at Gelnhausen (Appelt 1985: 360–3, no. 795), while much of the difficulty in the final scenes at the Council of Northampton lay in finding someone willing and able to promulgate the sentence on Becket which Henry II was determined to have (Knowles 1970: 97–9). Last but not least: it was at assemblies, except in cases of dire defensive emergency, that military campaigns were normally agreed on and support was raised for them.17 This is really only a specific instance of a more general principle. Any kind of consultation about what would later be called status regni (the ‘state of the kingdom’ or perhaps ‘affairs of state’) would normally and naturally take place at assemblies. Again, regnum does not here mean 16

17

As for example Joanna of England in 1176 (Warren 1973: 143). For a very early example in Gregory of Tours, see Krusch and Levison 1937–51: 318: Chilperic invites the leading Franks to celebrate the betrothal of his daughter Rigunth to the Visigothic king. See the discussion of the Mayfield above, and Leyser 1994e: 29–30.


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‘kingdom’ alone. It is to be taken in the sense defined by Karl-Ferdinand Werner: a reasonably well-defined territorial entity with a continuing sense of political (and possibly also legal and cultural) identity (Werner 1981). As we have already noted, there is no very real difference, except in scale, between regnal assemblies and, for example, the meetings held by dukes of Normandy or Aquitaine or the counts of Flanders in the eleventh century, or the corts of the counts of Barcelona, or the assemblies summoned by dukes of Bavaria in 932, 933 and 990 (to name only some of the occasions we happen to know about). The distinction between regnal and princely becomes still more blurred if we take into account those assemblies held by rulers but primarily aimed at a particular regional clientele. Any ethnic or regnum-based political grouping could find itself and define itself at an assembly. Moreover, it was in this form that it found collective action easiest, indeed found it possible at all: if we look back at the list just given of the kinds of things which were normally done at assemblies and difficult if not impossible to do elsewhere, we begin to realise that it was through embodying itself as an assembly that what has been referred to throughout this chapter as the ‘political community’ was empowered and enabled to practise politics. Jürgen Habermas has argued that the ‘public’, when thought of not as the antonym to ‘private’ but as a ‘principle of social order implying a permanent overseeing of state power’, was a product of the Enlightenment which did not exist and could not have existed before the eighteenth century (Habermas 1962: 17–21; cf. Althoff 1997d: 229). As a statement about the medieval and early modern past this is highly problematic, but, as so often when sociologists venture beyond the recent past, they frequently sharpen our own perceptions even when we find that we cannot accept theirs. For our period it would be truer to say that there was indeed a ‘public’, but it was a public which did not, except perhaps at moments of great crisis and heightened tension, have a permanent existence: it came into being at assemblies, and dissolved again when they ended. So indeed did politics of any kind to a great extent: Agriculturally and liturgically, the year moved continuously, if at varying pace, around its cycle; politically, time froze except on campaigns and at assemblies. It was here, for the most part, that movement and interaction were possible at all. Assemblies were not merely occasions when the ruler could represent himself as a ruler in the flesh; they were almost the only occasions when the polity could represent itself to itself. Outside the assembly there were the local politics of feud and convivium; but only at the assembly could this centreless polity define itself, and it did so in terms of the ruler. This in the last resort was how the secular magnates within the Reich saw themselves. (Reuter 1998: 378–9)

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That passage refers specifically to the Ottonian Reich, but it might be thought to apply more generally: even smaller units such as dioceses and principalities could scarcely function except in this way, coming together at diocesan synods and local assemblies (moots, things, the comital mallus). In a world largely lacking transpersonal permanence, an ongoing public sphere and adequate communications, virtually everything of importance had to be settled face-to-face, from conflict resolution through to the reception of ambassadors and the appointment of office-holders. Formally, it was the ruler who summoned assemblies and they were his assemblies; but if he had not existed the polity would have had to invent them. Indeed, up to about 1200 in most parts of western Europe it was precisely when the king ceased to exist that polities did have to invent their own assemblies. Unless a deceased ruler was succeeded by an adult son already confirmed in office (and often even then), an assembly had to be held to determine the succession to a kingdom or principality. By contrast, it was a sure sign that a ruler who was still alive was in serious political trouble when his leading men began to summon and meet in assemblies for themselves; such behaviour meant that he might well cease to exist, as a ruler, and, if really unlucky, as a person as well (Giese 1979: 149–54, 186–91; Holt 1992: 225–36). Although 1200 has been chosen as a stopping point, it should be noted that even in the later twelfth century, when elements of a more modern kind of polity were clearly visible, western European kingdoms still offered such moments of celebratory or solemn coming together as much as they ever had. We can see these in the great meetings held by Henry II at Clarendon and Northampton in the 1160s, or at Westminster in 1176, when embassies from all over Europe arrived and his daughter Joanna was sent off to her husband, William II of Sicily (Warren 1973: 143), or in Louis VII’s meeting at Soissons in 1155, at which a general peace was proclaimed – indeed, the increase in ‘regnal’ meetings under Louis VI was a sign that the Capetian kingdom was becoming a genuine kingdom once more (Bournazel 1975: 134–43, 157–61). It is visible not least in the two great assemblies held by Frederick Barbarossa in 1184 and 1188, the first to mark the knighting of his two eldest sons, the second, the ‘assembly of Jesus Christ’, to proclaim a new crusade following the fall of Jerusalem. With the first, much discussed by historians (Lindner 1994; Fleckenstein 1972; Moraw 1988), we are evidently in the world of the great feasts marked by conspicuous consumption and competitive representation so characteristic of later medieval and early modern Europe; yet there is significant continuity here from the Carolingian era through to the eve of the new era in which such


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assemblies would merge imperceptibly into parliaments (while retaining much of the celebratory and consciousness-enhancing elements of the old assemblies). The slow transformation of this assembly-dominated world needs a few words at the close. Earlier it was suggested that assemblies had begun to take on a rather different function from the late twelfth century onwards. Certainly they did not disappear; but they were now coming to be set in a context of more continuous political activity. Kingdoms and principalities in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe were no longer defined solely by and at those moments when their stakeholders met together. The growth of courts (meaning permanent or semi-permanent royal entourages) and of residences, the thickening networks of homogeneous judicial and administrative institutions, and last but not least the development of transpersonal conceptions of the polity, all meant that assemblies (whether ‘representative’ or not) were slowly transformed into functional parts of a larger whole, rather than being the occasions at which the larger whole changed from being virtual to being real.18 But in the period we have been concerned with here, they had been precisely that. This chapter has obviously blurred a lot of distinctions which a more extensive and detailed study would need to refine and make more explicit. It is clear, for example, that the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman polities, though showing many similarities with their continental analogues, were subtly different, in ways which still have to be properly explored. It is also clear that most of the evidence and examples for this chapter have been drawn from those parts of Europe where people cook with butter rather than olive oil, mainly because in this period the olive-oilers showed themselves much more reticent about narrative interpretation of what they were doing. It may be that Italy and the polities of Christian Spain are not quite adequately covered by the generalisations offered earlier. Elsewhere we may also assume or suspect regional differences, and again the varied survival of evidence may well have elided them for good. Not much can be said before the twelfth century about Scandinavia and Sclavinia, though some material is offered by Sverrissaga and the more contemporary sections of Heimskringla, as well as by Cosmas of Prague and Gallus Anonymus. But even if what has been said applies more strongly to transalpine Europe’s Carolingian and post-Carolingian core than to other 18

I have sketched much of the background to this institutional thickening of rulership, though without specific reference to assemblies, in Reuter 1993. There is now extensive German scholarship on the development of residences. For the development of the ‘modern’ state in the later Middle Ages, Genet 1990 should be consulted.

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chap t e r 12

Sex, lies and oath-helpers: the trial of Queen Uota

The Regensburg Continuator of the so-called Annals of Fulda reported the following episode in the year 899: Then a scandal, and worse, a crime, unheard of for many years, was published about Queen Uota: that she had yielded her body to a lustful and wicked union. She cleared herself of the accusation at Regensburg in the month of June with seventytwo oath-helpers before the judgement of the leading men who were present.1

This annalistic entry provides all we directly know about this case. It is true that Hermann of Reichenau gives a report of the same event: Queen Uota, accused of the crime of adultery with certain men, was absolved at an assembly at Regensburg by the oath-givings of seventy-two princes.2

But since Hermann or his source(s) demonstrably used the Annals of Fulda, we have to infer that we are not dealing here with an independent testimony, and that Hermann knew no more than we do. In particular, the information that the oath was taken by seventy-two ‘princes’ (principes) should be read as Hermann’s ‘cultural translation’ into the terms of his own time, something found elsewhere in his Chronicle entries relating to the later ninth and early tenth centuries.3 1

2

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Annales Fuldenses, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SRG VII (Hannover, 1891), p. 132: ‘Tum vero multis temporibus inauditum scelus et, quod non oportuit, facinus de regina Uota divulgatum est, id est ut corpus suum inlecebroso ac iniquo manciparet coniugio. Quod ipsum Radaspona urbe mense Iunio iuxta primorum presentium iudicium LXXII iurantibus difinitum comprobatur’, trans. T. Reuter, The Annals of Fulda (Manchester, 1992), pp. 138–9. [Hereafter these annals will be cited as AF, with page numbers of TR’s translation in brackets. On the Regensburg Continuator, see now S. MacLean, Kingship and Politics in the Late Ninth Century: Charles the Fat and the End of the Carolingian Empire (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 24–7.] Hermann of Reichenau, Chronicon, ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS V (Berlin, 1844), p. 111: ‘Outa regina adulterii crimine cum quibusdam viris informata LXXII principum iuramento Ratisponae in conventu absoluta est.’ See T. Reuter, ‘Unruhestiftung, Fehde, Rebellion, Widerstand: Gewalt und Frieden in der Politik der Salierzeit’, in S. Weinfurter ed., Die Salier und das Reich, vol. III (Sigmaringen, 1991), p. 321,

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What we know about this episode is therefore very limited. Ernst Dümmler offered this comment: For the royal family, this was a still more grievous happening; but, as with so many other events in this period, any more detailed explanation of what actually occasioned it is lost to us . . . About the rights and wrongs of the accusation, no conclusions can be drawn, therefore: probably no very intimate relationship ever existed between Arnulf and his wife, because the emperor had slept with other women at an earlier date and the grown-up offspring of such unions apparently took precedence in his heart over the feeble product of his marriage. Yet some of Arnulf’s charters were issued, in customary fashion, at the request or intervention of his beloved wife Ota – the last of such charters is dated to 2 July 899, hence, after her trial and acquittal. In any event, since the son of the accused queen was destined to succeed to the realm, it was seen as fortunate for the throne that no stain of suspicion besmirched the relationship to which that son owed his existence.4

Dümmler’s views on marriage and sexuality in the later Carolingian period obviously throw more light on such relationships in Wilhelmine Germany than on those of the ninth century. Such retrospective projections of bourgeois convention into medieval social practices can often be found in the work of historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the relationship between Welf V and Matilda of Tuscany, for instance, was generally thought doomed by modern medievalists because of the unnaturally large age-gap – in the ‘wrong’ direction – between husband and wife, whereas contemporaries were unequivocal in seeing impotence brought on by the huge status-gap between the partners as the reason for the break-up of the marriage.5 I shall return later to Dümmler’s comment on the potential risk for the legitimacy of Louis the Child. To understand the trial of Uota correctly, we have to take into account the political context. In other words, we have to consider not just powerrelations at the end of Arnulf’s reign but also the special position of the queen and other royal women in the political discourse of the Carolingian period. First, then, we must put together the little that is known about Uota herself. Arnulf had several concubines and several children born ‘out of wedlock’.6 We can list the individuals involved: the mother of Zwentibold on Hermann’s reading of the execution of Berchtold and Erchanger in 917 as an ill-fated deditio [translated as chapter 19, below]. 4 E. D¨ ummler, Geschichte des ostfränkischen Reiches, vol. III: 876–928. Die letzten Karolinger. Konrad I., 2nd edn (Leipzig, 1888), pp. 462–3. 5 See for example G. Meyer von Knonau, Jahrbucher des Deutschen Reiches unter Heinrichs IV. und Heinrichs V., vol. IV: 1085–1096 (Leipzig, 1903), pp. 274, 447–8 (‘ganz unnatürliche . . . Verbindung’). On this whole affair, see Bernold, Chronicon, ed. Pertz, MGH SS V, pp. 449, 461, and Cosmas of Prague, Chronica Boemorum II, 32, ed. B. Bretholz, MGH SRG n.s. II (Berlin, 1923), pp. 127–9. 6 I shall not explore here the question of whether Arnulf’s earlier relationships were originally considered ‘consent-based marriages’ ((Friedel)-ehen), and only later reconfigured in terms of concubinage.

Sex, lies and oath-helpers

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of Lotharingia, slain in 900,7 and the mother of Ratold, who finally appears in the sources as Arnulf’s deputy in Italy in 896;8 also a woman named Ellinrat who makes an exchange in one of Conrad I’s charters (it is generally assumed that the ‘like-named kinswoman Ellinrat’ named in this document was the daughter of Arnulf and Ellinrat, although this is not a wholly convincing argument);9 and finally Arnulf had another unnamed daughter (perhaps to be identified with the putative Ellinrat) whom Count Engelschalk, one of the Wilhelminer clan, abducted in 893.10 Arnulf’s wife Uota (also recorded as Oda, Ota, Outa and Uta – the name-form used in this paper is arbitrarily chosen), is mentioned for the first time in 888 in a charter for the monastery of Lorsch in which Arnulf asks for prayers for Louis the German (his grandfather), for himself and for his unnamed wife. It is possible that this mention of a wife represents a mindless copying of the charter’s model (a charter of Louis the German), but this is not very likely: both Louis the German and Louis the Younger were buried at Lorsch, hence arrangements for the senior ruler’s commemoration there on the part of Arnulf and his wife should be appreciated as a programmatic statement of Carolingian continuity and the dynasty’s future.11 The Bavarian Continuator of the so-called Annals of Fulda mentions Arnulf’s wife in the annal for

7

8 9

10 11

The sources for the 890s discussed here mention only concubines. On the Friedelehe theory, see now E. Ebel, ‘Die sogenannte “Friedelehe” im Island der Saga- und Freistaatszeit (870–1264)’, in D. Schwab et al. eds., Staat, Kirche, Wissenschaft in einer pluralistiischen Gesellschaft. Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Paul Mikat (Berlin, 1989), pp. 243–58; W. Joch, Legitimität und Integration. Untersuchungen zu den Anfängen Karl Martells, Historische Studien 456 (Husum, 1999), pp. 12–15; and B. Kasten, as cited in n. 13 below. For the evidence on Arnulf’s children, see K. F. Werner, ‘Die Nachkommen Karls des Großen bis um das Jahr 1000 (1.–8. Generation)’, in W. Braunfels and P. E. Schramm eds., Karl der Große. Lebenswerk und Nachleben, vol. IV: Das Nachleben (Düsseldorf, 1967), p. 456 and family-tree V, b20. Zwentibold and Ratold were born before 889: AF p. 118 (trans. p. 118), where the sons are said to have been born ex concubinis, hence, not from the same mother. For Zwentibold, see M. Hartmann, ‘Lotharingien im Arnolfs Reich. Das Königtum Zwentibolds’, in F. Fuchs ed., Kaiser Arnolf. Das ostfränkische Reich am Ende des 9. Jahrhunderts. Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte, Beiheft 19 (Munich, 2002), pp. 122–42. AF 896, p. 129 (trans. p. 134). MGH DD Konradi I, no. 20 (24 May 914), ed. T. Sickel. Die Urkunden Konrad I, Heinrich I und Otto I, MGH Diplomata regum et imperatorum Germaniae I (Hannover, 1879–84): Ellinrat, concubina videlicet Arnulfi serenissimi regis, exchanged with St Emmeram a chapel and possessions at Ergolding in return for land at Pinkofen and Unolchinchoua; the second Ellinrat is termed aequivoca and iunior, but not filia. [Hereafter, diplomata of German rulers are cited in abbreviated form: D. LG for Diplomata of Louis the German, ed. P. Kehr, MGH DD regum Germaniae ex stirpe Karolinorum I (Berlin, 1934); D. Arn. for Diplomata of Arnulf, ed. P. Kehr, MGH DD regum Germaniae III (Berlin, 1940); D. LC for Diplomata of Louis the Child, ed. T. Schieffer, MGH DD regum Germaniae IV (Berlin, 1960), followed by the charter number.] AF p. 122 (trans. p. 124). D. Arn. 23 (12 May 888), modelled on D. LG 63, Die Urkunden Ludwigs des Deutschen no. 63 (23 June 852), ed. P. Kehr, MGH DD regum Germaniae (Berlin, 1934), p. 86. For the royal burials at Lorsch, see AF 876, 881, pp. 86, 97 (trans. pp. 79, 91).

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889, though, again, without naming her.12 The marriage took place, then, around the time of Arnulf’s seizure of power, if not before.13 Karl Ferdinand Werner and other scholars argued that Uota was a Conradine, and that the marriage strengthened an alliance between a rising Arnulf and this powerful family of the Middle Rhine and Middle Franconian region.14 But this assumption is not without problems. The name ‘Uota’ is not otherwise documented among the Conradines,15 although ‘Ita’, probably an unrelated name, is occasionally to be found, and the male form of the name Uota, ‘Udo’, is well documented in the family. Donald Jackman has shown not only that Uota’s belonging to the Conradines is anything but certain and quite without direct evidence, but also that the supposed relationship between the elder Conrad and Arnulf (and hence Louis the Child too) should be explained in another way, that is, in terms of kinship through the Welf family, from which Arnulf’s grandmother Emma came.16 The few known facts about Uota’s life and possessions shed a little light on our concerns, if only in general terms. References to Uota’s possessions appear in several royal charters. Most of these relate to lands given to her by Arnulf, probably as part of their marriage-settlement: D. Arn. 171, for the cleric Nithard, granting ownership of lands at Hartkirchen which Nithard had previously held as a benefice from Uota; Bishop Engilmar of Passau appears as requester; the document is not precisely datable (but perhaps belongs to the end of 898?); ¨ of the estate at Velden D. Arn. 176, a grant to the royal chapel at Otting in the Isengau which Arnulf had previously given to his wife and which she had conceded as a benefice to the priest Deotrich (July 899); Arnulf’s charter in favour of Uota has not been preserved); D. Arn. 190, a grant for St Emmeram of the city of Regensburg, for the welfare of the soul of Louis and at the request of Uota (forgery); 12 13

14

15

16

AF 889, p. 118 (trans. p. 118). The suggestion of Brigitte Kasten, Königssöhne und Königsherrschaft. Untersuchungen zur Teilhabe am Reich in der Merowinger-und Karolingerzeit, Schriften der MGH 44 (Hannover, 1997), p. 547, that Arnulf repudiated his concubines and married Uota as a wife appropriate to his rank in 888 after he became king, rather as Lothar II married in 855, is an entirely plausible, but not a necessary, conclusion. See also B. Kasten, ‘Chancen und Schicksale “uneheliche” Karolinger im 9. Jahrhundert’, in Kaiser Arnolf. Das ostfränkische Reich am Ende des 9. Jahrhunderts, ed. F. Fuchs, Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte, Beiheft 19, Reihe B (Munich, 2002), pp. 17–52, esp. 41. Werner, ‘Nachkommen’, p. 456, and see for an implicitly similar view Kasten, Königssöhne, pp. 547– ¨ ¨ 8; also E. Hlawitschka, ‘Wer waren Kuno und Richlind von Ohningen? Kritische Uberlegungen zu einem neuen Identifizierungsvorschlag’, Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Oberrheins 128 (1980), pp. 1–49, at 18, 37, 40 (genealogical ordering without political interpretation). Hlawitschka, ‘Kuno and Richlind’, p. 18 n. 83, comes to the opposite conclusion, but cites only Uda, daughter of a dux Cuno who cannot be securely identified, and Uota herself, together with the male name-form Udo, mentioned above. D. Jackman, The Conradines: A Study in Genealogical Methodology (Frankfurt, 1990), pp. 136–9.


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D. LC 12, a grant for Säben, of the royal estate of Brixen, which Arnulf had earlier granted to Uota and which both had granted to their son Louis (dated September 901, but apparently drawn up in 908/9, hence, perhaps after Uota’s death); D. LC 26, a grant for St Emmeram, of the royal estate of Velden, with the agreement and at the request of Uota, who had received the estate from Arnulf per imperiale preceptum (August 903, and compare the forged charter of the same date on the basis of the same model); D. LC 28, grant for Freising of the estate of Föhring, which Uota had received from Arnulf by charter and now returned to Louis (November 903); D. LC 52, a list of gifts, donatio regis Ludovici super variis bonis et locis, quam genetrici suae fecit et cui sorores suas substituit (‘the donation of King Louis concerning various goods and places, which he made to his mother, and [then] to her sisters in her place’), which perhaps (but not certainly) corresponds to a charter of which only the protocol and eschatocol survive (March 907). Theodor Schieffer assumed that this was a gift of Louis to Uota, with the agreement of her (otherwise unattested) sisters as her prospective heirs and successors; but in my view it is more likely that what were at stake here were possessions that Louis had granted Uota and now wanted to re-grant to her sisters: if so, this would suggest that Uota died in or before March 907. In addition, Uota appears in the following royal charters as requester: D. Arn. 44 for Abbot Snello of Kremsmünster, grant of two pieces of royal land at Oberndorf, May 889; D. Arn. 107a for Gandersheim (preserved only in the form of a list), grant of land at Kaiserswerth and Godesberg (requested by Uota along with Hildegard, daughter of Louis the Younger); undatable, but perhaps to be linked with the campaign against the Abodrites in 892, and hence with the allegations against Hildegard in 895 (see comments on AF 895 in Reuter’s translation, p. 130 n. 2); D. Arn. 143 for Hugbert (interpolated in favour of Reichenau), with Uota requesting together with Archbishop Hatto of Mainz, April 896; D. Arn. 154 for the church of Worms, gift of rights to tithe, requested by Uota together with Hatto of Mainz and Thietloh of Worms, June 897; D. Arn. 170 for Freising, grant of freedom from tolls, requested by Uota together with Engilmar of Passau, December 898; D. Arn. 190 for St Emmeram, a forgery purporting to grant the city of Regensburg to the monastery for the well-being of the soul of Louis the Child and at the request of Uota;

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D. LC 26, for St Emmeram (as above); Uota appears here as a requester under Louis the Child, though at the same time acting on her own account. We know from two Ottonian charters of two exchanges made by Uota with Hatto of Mainz, through which Oberlahnstein and Nierstein came into the possession of the church of Mainz.17 The supposition that these were among Uota’s family-lands depends on the assumption that she was a Conradine; but these properties could just as easily have been parts of Uota’s dos, especially as the Ottonian charters both claim to be confirmations of documents (no longer extant) of Louis the Child.18 The advocates acting for Uota in these transactions are named as Ruthard and Burchard: assuming that these were close male relatives, as would be a fair expectation, this would indeed suggest something about Uota’s familymembership though without necessarily pointing in the direction of the Conradines. All this material, however, sheds only a little light on the context of Uota’s trial. She clearly had good relations with certain bishops, notably Hatto of Mainz. The lands granted to her by Arnulf seem to have lain for the most part (so far as we have information about their extent) in Bavaria, but that is hardly surprising, for while the praeceptum of Arnulf mentioned in several documents must have belonged to a period when Arnulf had acquired (royal) control over church property, a confirmation, or a grant, could equally well have belonged to the time before Arnulf became king, and that could perfectly well explain the limitation of such grants to Bavaria (with the exception of Nierstein and Oberlahnstein). In modern historiography, it has sometimes been suggested that Uota’s ‘demotion’ in the reign of Louis the Child should be seen as a result of the trial we are considering in this paper.19 It is true that after 900 Uota never functioned as regent for her son, appeared as a requester for a charter only once and must have relinquished some of her property. Yet, since we know nothing about the total extent of that property, and nothing about Uota’s state of health (apart from the likelihood that she was dead in 907, if the above reading of D. LC 52 is accepted), it would be rash 17 18

19

Urkunden Ottos II, no. 150 and Urkunden Ottos III, no. 156, ed. T. Sickel, MGH DD regum et imperatorum Germaniae II (Hannover, 1888–93), pp. 168–9, 567–8. A royal charter would certainly have been required had the property here concerned been part of Uota’s dos; and a royal charter would have been necessary, anyway, for a ‘normal’ exchange between a layperson and a major church. Dümmler, Ostfränkische Reich, p. 496; see also, though less clear, S. Konecny, Die Frauen des karolingisischen Königshauses. Die politische Bedeutung der Ehe und die Stellung der Frau in der fränkischen Herrscherfamilie vom 7. bis zum 10. Jh. (Vienna, 1976), p. 145.


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to infer that she handed over her lands at Velden, Föhring and Brixen to Freising, Regensburg and Säben because she was forced to do so: other explanations are possible.20 As for the connexions with Hatto of Mainz, and the relationship with the Conradines, if it existed, these would make the assumption of a ‘fall from power’ after 900 look rather implausible. That Uota did not act as regent for her son can be explained in other ways. In the first place, regency did not exist in this period, or at best did so only de facto.21 In the second place, such a role for a child-king’s mother/dowager queen was uncommon in the Carolingian period generally.22 Third, it is not clear that Uota herself was a queen. She was called regina by the annalist in the passage quoted at the beginning of this paper, but in Arnulf’s charters she is always entitled coniux, and this generally continued (‘father’s spouse’) in the charters of her son, except for a single document (D. LC 12), issued after her death, in which she is called regina. The Fulda Annalist and Regino of Prüm speak of ‘[Arnulf’s] legitimate wife/marriage’ in the context of her son’s succession.23 I think the whole question of whether East Frankish kings’ wives were usually crowned and anointed, and hence counted as queens, needs more clarification. These women certainly were not consortes regni, comparable to the dominae of the tenth century.24 It is impossible to speak of a ‘demotion’ of Uota after 900, ultimately on grounds of the allegations made in 899, if no ‘promotion’ can be demonstrated earlier. We must therefore look for some other possible explanations. Even if we had had some firm information about Uota’s family, that might not help much with our attempts to explain the problematic episode in question. The gaps in our knowledge about particularly significant highborn women in Arnulf’s time are too large for us to be able to risk any 20

21 22

23 24

Quite apart from the fact that the actual transfers of property could equally well have happened after Uota’s death, we must take into account the likelihood of gifts made late in life for the welfare of the soul. At least in the case of Velden, we know that the property was not directly in Uota’s hands. T. Kölzer, ‘Das Königtum Minderjähriger im fränkisch-deutschen Mittelalter. Eine Skizze’, HZ 251 (1990), pp. 291–323. There were in fact very few possible cases: in 812 (Bernard of Italy), 855 (Charles of Provence) and 879 (Louis III and Carloman, both of whom had reached their majority), there seems to have been no thought of giving the queen-mother a share in government, hence the only case comparable to 900 might have been that of Ermengard, queen-mother of Louis of Provence, after the death of Boso in 887, though even then Louis was shortly afterwards ‘adopted’ by Charles the Fat [see MacLean, Kingship and Politics, pp. 112–13, 162–6]. AF p. 134 (trans. p. 140): ‘[Louis] de legali uxore natus’; Regino of Prüm, Chronicon, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SRG L (Hannover, 1890), p. 148: ‘quem ex legitimo matrimonio susceperat’. F.-R. Erkens, ‘“Sicut Esther regina.” Die westfränkische Königin als consors regni’, Francia 20 (1993), pp. 15–39, with comprehensive references, including the older but still important work of T. Vogelsang, Die Frau als Herrscherin im hohen Mittelalter. Studien zum consors regni formel (Göttingen, 1954). The position documented for West Francia and Italy in the ninth century seems not to have obtained in the East Frankish/German kingdom before the tenth century.

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interpretation along the lines of a family feud. That does not mean, though, that the grounds for the accusation made in 899 are completely obscure. The issue is not so much whether the allegations were justified: even if, as Dümmler surmised, Uota took a false step, whether through frustration or a desire for revenge, the accusation, which obviously was not raised by the king, was a political event of the first importance. We need to take two things into consideration. First, in the Carolingian period, any public casting of doubt on the queen’s honour was in fact a coded attack on the ruler himself. Second, we can observe a further point in the later Carolingian period, that kings whose health seemed to be failing became the object of attacks that were not just coded but absolutely direct. Stuart Airlie, Genevieve Bührer-Thierry and Elizabeth Ward have shown already that the sexual purity of Carolingian queens could serve as a kind of metaphor for the political integrity of the ruler.25 A key testimony here is the description of Bernard of Septimania in Paschasius Radbertus’s Life of Wala: As soon as he [took the office of chamberlain], he wrought havoc in the palace like a wild boar, destroyed all good counsel, shattered all the rights of reason, drove out and scattered all office-holders, ecclesiastical and secular alike, took possession of the emperor’s bed, broke all commitments, brought disorder where there had been order.26

The (alleged) adultery with the empress is here only one sign of the disorder created by the one-sided preferment of a single counsellor.27 With this man the emperor shared rights belonging to him alone over his own wife, just as he shared the rights over the empire that belonged to him alone. Both are wicked and to be interpreted as signs of the ruler’s incapacity. A similar case to that of Bernard of Septimania was Liutward of Vercelli. The Mainz Continuator of the Annals of Fulda told of the sexual aggression of Liutward’s relatives against high-born nuns, and Regino of Prüm reported 25

26 27

E. Ward, ‘Agobard of Lyons and Paschasius Radbertus as critics of the Empress Judith’, Studies in Church History 27 (1990), pp. 15–25, and E. Ward, ‘Caesar’s wife: the career of the Empress Judith, 819–829’, in P. Godman and R. Collins eds., Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious (Oxford, 1990), pp. 205–27; G. Bührer-Thierry, ‘La reine adultère’, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 35 (1992), pp. 299–312; S. Airlie, ‘Private bodies and the body politic in the divorce case of Lothar II’, P&P 161 (1998), pp. 3–38. See also Konecny, Frauen, pp. 97–8, 141–5, 147–50. Paschasius Radbertus, Vita Walae II, 7, ed. Pertz, MGH SS II (Berlin, 1829), p. 551; see Ward, ‘Agobard of Lyons’, p. 23; Bührer-Thierry, ‘Reine adultère’, pp. 301–2. On this aspect of medieval rulership, see H. Naumann, ‘Rätsel des lezten Aufstandes gegen Otto I, (953–954)’, AKG 46 (1964), pp. 133–84; F.-R. Erkens, ‘Fürstliche Opposition in ottonisch-salischer ¨ Zeit. Uberlegungen zum Problem der Krise des frühmittelalterlichen deutschen Reiches’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 64 (1982), pp. 307–70.


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allegations that at the end of Charles the Fat’s reign the emperor’s wife Richardis had been bedded by Liutward.28 A similar kind of attack on Arnulf could likewise have been conceivable. To be sure, he might have passed for a far more successful ruler than Charles the Fat. But, since his first illness on the Italian campaign of 896, Arnulf had lost much of his forceful impact on events. Symptomatic of some dissension is the report conveyed by Hermann of Reichenau that in 897, Arnulf, ‘trusting no one’, had required the swearing of a general oath of loyalty to himself and his son.29 The remark in the Annals of Fulda that the sick Arnulf had spent the winter of 897 ‘in hidden places’30 suggests, like the oath-swearing, a rather insecure position. Arnulf’s own father Karlmann had been attacked in the final phase of his reign by Erempert and other Bavarian counts at the royal estate of Ergolding.31 But all of this raises the possibility of a direct, physical, attack on the ruler; and, under such circumstances, a coded attack in the form of an accusation against the ruler’s wife would surely have been unnecessary, quite apart from the fact that a dominating adviser like Bernard or Liutward cannot be identified in Arnulf’s reign. As noted earlier, it has often been assumed that the accusation against Uota was actually intended to challenge the legitimacy of her son Louis the Child. Pauline Stafford argues that the prime accusers were Adalbero of Augsburg and Hatto of Mainz, who later withdrew their charge.32 Yet it is not so easy to see who might have benefited from such an opening-up 28

29 30 31

32

AF pp. 105–6 (trans. pp. 101–2); Regino, Chronicon, p. 127. See Konecny, Frauen, pp. 141–2, 147–8; J. L. Nelson, ‘A tale of two princes: politics, text and ideology in a Carolingian annal’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 10 (1988), pp. 105–41, esp. 107, 119 (repr. in J. L. Nelson, Rulers and Ruling Families in Early Medieval Europe (London, 1999), chapter XVI). Hermann, Chronicon, p. 111; see further on this conjuncture, Dümmler, Ostfränkisches Reich, pp. 456–7. AF p. 130 (trans. p. 137). Annales ex annalibus Iuvavensibus antiquis excerpti, ed. H. Bresslau, MGH SS XXX (ii), p. 742. On the background to this attack (the evidence for which was still unknown to Dümmler), see the apparently speculative comments of K. Brunner, Oppositionelle Gruppen im Karolingerreich (Vienna, 1979), p. 150. [See also Reuter’s remarks at AF trans. p. 86 n. 5.] P. Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers (Athens GA, 1983), p. 95: ‘Uota . . . was accused of adultery by a magnate faction which included Adalbero of Augsburg, and Hatto, bishop of Mainz. At one stage their aim seems to have been the exclusion of her son, Louis the Child, from the throne, and the advance of the claims of her illegitimate stepsons. The claims to regency which Uota, and especially her family, might put forward were to be discredited. But in this case the factions shifted during the course of accusation and ordeal. A group led by Adalbero and Hatto came to feel that a legitimate Carolingian was preferable, doubly so if, like Louis, he was an infant and was under their control. Having accused Uota and checked the power of her kin, they took control of the child themselves and then acquitted the queen.’ See also Stafford’s comments at p. 82: ‘Adultery throws doubt on paternity, it is a weapon of rival claimants to the throne’ – but in our case this remains pure supposition, and even in the much better documented case of Judith the legitimacy of Charles the Bald seems never to have been raised; cf. Konecny, Frauen, p. 98.

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of the succession question. In view of the stormy political weather of 899, it seems very unlikely that a more influential East Frankish faction could have been formed in court or kingdom, whether favouring Zwentibold, Charles the Straightforward, Louis of Provence or Berengar of Italy. The situation in the summer of 899 confirmed one thing without any doubt, that Arnulf was suffering from a renewed attack of illness. It was well known that he had had to break off his Italian campaign in 896 gravi infirmitate capitis detentus, and return to Bavaria. There his health was further damaged through what sounds like the collapse of an upper storey – almost an occupational hazard of earlier medieval kings and their retinues (think of Charlemagne, Louis the German, Emperor Henry III).33 Although most secondary accounts assume that from 896 onwards Arnulf was terminally ill,34 he actually seems to have recovered to some extent from the spring of 897. The one thing during the subsequent two years that suggests continuing ill-health is the shrinking within the confines of Bavaria of both the royal itinerary and the circle of charter-recipients. Both of those indicators could, however, by explained by the military situation in those years.35 But in the spring of 899, Arnulf was probably no longer fully capable of conducting public affairs: royal commissioners were entrusted with seeing through the settlement between Zwentibold and Charles the Straightforward, although Arnulf up to this time had always taken personal responsibility for the exercise of hegemony in the former Frankish empire. We probably have to infer, then, a serious stroke in 896, and after a period of recovery, another stroke (or series of strokes) in 899.36 Arnulf’s grandmother Emma, and his father Karlmann, both died after suffering strokes, and the 33

34

35 36

Dümmler, Ostfränkisches Reich, p. 437 with n. 3. For the parallel cases, see Einhard, Vita Karoli magni c. 32, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SRG XXV, 6th edn (Hannover, 1911), p. 36; AF p. 71 (trans. p. 62); Chronicon Eberbergense, ed. W. Arndt, MGH SS XX (Hannover, 1868), p. 14. For the comparable accident at the Assembly of Mainz in 1184, see Giselbert of Mons, Chronicon, ed. L. Vanderkindere (Brussels, 1904), p. 117. See for instance Dümmler, Ostfränkisches Reich, pp. 437–8, 460; H. Löwe, ‘Deutschland im fränkischen Reich’, in B. Gebhardt ed., Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte, vol. I: Frühzeit und Mittelalter, ed. H. Grundmann (Stuttgart, 1970), pp. 210–11. E.-M. Eibl, ‘Zur Stellung Bayerns und Rheinfrankens im Reiche Arnulfs von Kärnten’, Jahrbuch für die Geschichte des Feudalismus 8 (1984), pp. 73–113, at 85–6, 109–10. For a diagnosis of epilepsy, see H. J. Oesterle, ‘Die sogenannte Kopf-operation Karls III. 887’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 61 (1979), pp. 445–51. Long-distance diagnoses from more than a thousand years later can hardly be very secure, but the ‘paralyses’, with, in some cases, consequent loss of speech, which are attested in the cases of Emma, Karlmann and Arnulf (see next note) hardly fit epilepsy. At the time of writing this paper, I was unacquainted with two articles by G. Wolf, ‘Die Kopfoperation Kaiser Karls III. 887’, Archiv für Diplomatik 45 (1999), pp. 15–19, and ‘Die erbliche Disposition zur Apoplexie und Aphasie bei den späten Karolingern’, in ‘Satura mediaevalis’ – Festschrift für Gunther Wolf zum 65. Geburtstag (1995), I, pp. 339–50 (unfortunately this has been inaccessible). Wolf is evidently no believer in the epilepsy theory, arguing instead for apoplexy as the wholly disabling and


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same seems to have been true of his uncle Charles the Fat. But we know nothing definite about the last illness of Louis the Younger.37 The renewed illness of Arnulf in 899 was therefore, perhaps, not necessarily perceived as the final phase of a well-known long-term situation but as something new, unexpected and threatening. In this context, another story told by the Regensburg Continuator of the Annals of Fulda acquires great interest. At about the same time as the trial of Uota, charges were brought against three men: At that same time, and in that same great public meeting held in the royal town of Regensburg, the king was attacked by paralysis and fell ill; this was because a poison had been administered to the king by men and women so that he should become paralysed by it. One of these was called Graman, who was convicted of ¨ high treason and beheaded at Otting; another fled into hiding in Italy, and a third was a woman called Ruodpurc, who was found by strict investigation to have been the instigator of the crime, and perished on the gallows at Aibling.38

Such accusations, with their undertones of witchcraft and black magic, are to be found in the earlier Middle Ages in times of crisis. The bestknown case is probably the execution of a witch shortly after the murder of Charles the Good of Flanders in 1128, as described by Galbert of Bruges.39 A very close parallel to the Arnulf story is that recounted by Ademar of Chabannes for Aquitaine in 1028: Count William of Angoulême was gripped by a mysterious illness, and as his life ebbed away, three women were accused of witchcraft and his daughter-in-law was accused of poisoning

37

38

39

perhaps genetically determined illness which afflicted several of the East Frankish Carolingians in the family’s later generations. AF p. 83 (trans. p. 75): ‘Hemma quoque regina morbo paralisi correpta usum loquendi amisit’; p. 92 (trans. pp. 85–6): ‘[Carlmannus] paralisi morbo correptus usum loquendi amisit’; p. 97 (trans. p. 91): ‘Hludowicus invalescente morbo . . . diem ultimum clausit’; pp. 115–16 (trans. pp. 113–14): ‘[Karolus imperator] magna infirmitate adgravatur. Postea . . . pro dolore capitis incisionem accepit . . . Mox vero Caesar gravissima infirmitate detentus est . . . ultimum diem feliciter clausit.’ See also pp. 129, 132 (trans. pp. 134, 139) for Arnulf’s illnesses. AF p. 132 (trans. p. 139): ‘Ipso quoque tempore eiusdem magni et communis civitate regia placiti rex paralisy solutus infirmatus est; secundum autem ut [Kurze, following Pertz, suggests, ‘factum est autem eo quod’; but equally conceivable would be ‘secundum quibusdam autem quia’, or the like] regi nocuum quoddam a viris ac feminis daretur, ut inde paraliticus efficeretur. Quorum unus vocabatur Graman, qui reus maiestatis convictus et ideo Otinga decollatus est, alter vero fuga lapsus in Italia latuit; et alia quoque femina nomine Ruodpurc, quae eiusdem sceleris auctrix deprehensa certa examinatione inveniebatur, Eipilinga in patibulo suspense interiit.’ The name Graman, and also the ‘noble’ penalty of beheading, and the flight of the second conspirator to Italy (presumably to kin or powerful protectors), indicate aristocratic participants. Galbertus of Bruges, De multro, traditione, et occisione gloriosi Karoli comitis Flandriarum, cc. 110, 112, ed. J. Rider, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Medievalis 131 (Turnhout, 1994), pp. 155–6. See also the translation of J. B. Ross, The Murder of Charles the Good, Count of Flanders, by Galbert of Bruges, Columbia Records of Civilisation 61 (New York, 1960), pp. 47, 71, 291–2.

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him.40 Emma, the wife of King Lothar of the West Franks, was accused of having committed adultery with Bishop Adalbero of Laon and also of having poisoned the king himself;41 and the link between alleged adultery and alleged witchcraft crops up again in the story of Judith.42 Similar allegations are reported from eleventh-century Normandy,43 and the attacks on Isabeau of Bavaria and Margaret of Anjou after their respective husbands went mad show that the proposed model for understanding this kind of political crisis is applicable to the later Middle Ages as well:44 the unexpected and inexplicable serious illness and death of the ruler, or of some other highborn personage, could evidently act as a signal setting off the search for sexual failings on the part of his wife or investigations of malicious attacks on his person behind which that wife could be the supposed instigator if not actually the perpetrator. In the thought-patterns underlying such accusations, women’s sexuality, together with their role in the preparation of food, constituted danger for men through contamination.45 The annalist establishes no direct connexion between the two episodes, apart from the linkage required by the chronology, but the comparison with similar cases makes such a connexion very likely for Arnulf as well. Liutprand of Cremona in the Antapodosis transmits what is probably a distorted echo of these events. Liutprand tells of how, after Arnulf’s imperial coronation, Wido’s widow persuaded one of Arnulf’s followers to give 40

41 42

43

44

45

Ademar of Chabannes, Chronicon, lib. III, c. 66, eds. R. Landes and P. Bourgain, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Medievalis 129/1 (Turnhout, 1999), pp. 185–7; on this and on the source-critical difficulties, see M. Blöcker, ‘Ein Zauberprozess im Jahre 1028’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte 29 (1979), pp. 533–55; R. Landes, Relics, Apocalypse and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034 (Cambridge MA, 1995), pp. 183–93, 374–6. Konecny, Frauen, pp. 149–50; Stafford, Queens, pp. 94–5; Bührer-Thierry, ‘Reine adultère’, p. 305. Konecny, Frauen, pp. 97–8; cf. also the execution of Gerberga as a witch in 834, Annales de SaintBertin, ed. F. Grat et al. (Paris, 1964), p. 14 (trans. J. L. Nelson (Manchester, 1991), p. 31 and n. 12); see M. Blöcker, ‘Frauenzauber – Zauberfrauen’, Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Kirchengeschichte 76 (1982), pp. 1–39, esp. 12–13, 28–32. D. C. Douglas, William the Conqueror (London, 1964), pp. 413–15 (but though his examples bring together the above-mentioned themes of women, sexuality and food, he provides no context in heightened political crises). R. A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI: The Exercise of Royal Authority, 1422–1461 (London, 1981), p. 719. The charges against Isabeau of Bavaria seem not to have been contemporary, however: see T. Straub, ‘Isabeau de Bavière: Legende und Wirklichkeit’, Zeitschrift für Bayerische Landesgeschichte 44 (1981), pp. 131–55, esp. 133–4; R. C. Famiglietti, Royal Intrigue: Crisis at the Court of Charles VI, 1392–1420 (New York, 1986), pp. 42–5, 228–9 (on the alleged poisoning of Charles by Isabeau), and R. Gibbons, ‘Isabeau of Bavaria, queen of France (1385–1422): the creation of a historical villainess’, TRHS 6th ser. 6 (1996), pp. 51–73. See in general M. Douglas, Purity and Danger (London, 1966). Obviously the above formulation ought not to imply that Uota and other highborn women had cooked for their husbands with their own hands. For suspicion to be aroused, the widely attested and well-understood responsibility of wives for the management of the noble or royal household was quite sufficient.


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him a drink ‘which certainly did not endanger his life but robbed him of his sharpness of mind’.46 In Liutprand’s view, this was probably only one further example of the corrupt character of highborn Italian women (‘Italian hussies’, in Philippe Buc’s phrase).47 His account of the politics of the 890s is well known to be anything but factually accurate; but it is quite possible that, whether through deliberate intention or through confusion, Liutprand here conflated rumours circulating about the first and second strokes suffered by Arnulf. Something that might push speculation further in this direction is the number of Uota’s male and female oath-helpers. In the first place, the number seventy-two recalls canon-law regulations: it is well known that a bishop could be judged only by twelve episcopal colleagues, or, if this could not be managed, by the testimony of seventy-two suitable witnesses. Here the numbers twelve and seventy-two probably derive from the numbers of the Apostles and of the other disciples.48 Given the elevated position of the queen in the Carolingian period, it might be suggested that people readily saw a similarity between the queen’s status and that of a bishop. On the other hand, these regulations concerned specifically the witnesses to accusations; and moreover, as noted above, it is by no means certain that Uota was a queen. If the number given was not merely produced by the annalist’s whim, it might most readily be linked with the rules about witnessing given in some of the barbarian law-codes. According to Lex Ribuaria, if anyone wished to deny the killing of an adult woman below the age of forty or the killing of a member of the royal retinue, he had to offer his denial with seventy-two witnesses. In some manuscripts, this number of witnesses is given for all offences for which a 600-solidi compensation was set.49 That such ideas were still alive in the ninth and tenth centuries is clear from the fate of canon 23 of the Council of Mainz in 847: in the original wording, anyone who wanted to deny the murder of a priest had to do so with twelve witnesses, but in the versions of the canon as recorded 46 47 48

49

Liutprand, Antapodosis I, 32, in J. Becker ed., Die Werke Liutprands, MGH SRG XLI (Hannover, 1915), p. 25. P. Buc, ‘Italian hussies and German matrons: Liutprand of Cremona on dynastic legitimacy’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 29 (1995), pp. 207–25. For the derivation of the numbers, see Pseudo-Anastasius, ep. II, c. 24, in Decretales PseudoIsidorianae, ed. P. Hinschius (Berlin, 1863), p. 70; for the rule about the necessary number of accusatory witnesses, see Pseudo-Silvester, c. 2 (ibid. p. 449), and Pope Leo IV’s letter to the bishops of Britain, P. Jaffé, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, 2nd edn G. Wattenbach, S. Loewenfeld et al., 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1885–7), I, no. 2,599. Lex Ribuaria 12, 2, ed. F. Beyerle and R. Buchner, MGH Leges nationum Germanicarum III (1954), p. 78. On the number of oath-helpers (normally six or a few more), see H. Brunner and C. von Schwerin, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, 2 vols., 2nd edn (Berlin, 1928), II, pp. 520–4.

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from the tenth century onwards, the number of witnesses was increased to seventy-two.50 It is true that the murder under investigation was to be dealt with by a ruler without any specific code-based regulation, but it is quite conceivable that in such a case, people aimed at this maximum number of witnesses. Who these seventy-two oath-helpers, male and female, actually were, we have no idea. It is not just from motives of political correctness that I have consistently referred to the possibility of female participation, but rather to warn against the assumption that the witnesses must have been male. True, women in the Carolingian period were generally considered not legally competent; but in certain circumstances, women too could give oaths in person, as Judith and Richardis did or were invited to do; and in general terms, the principle operative in the legal life of the early Middle Ages was that which said that oath-helpers should be of equal or comparable rank. In the present case, it was not a matter of a ‘political’ trial, but rather of a public demonstration that no danger would ensue to the bodily health of the lordly husband from the alleged impurity of his wife, so perhaps women of comparable rank would represent a more suitable support than the seventy-two princes brought in by Hermann of Reichenau. We can conclude, therefore, even if we cannot demonstrate with absolute certainty, that the accusation against Uota went together with the accusation against Arnulf’s alleged poisoners. As we have seen, adultery along with attempted husband-poisoning, in a combined action, formed a thoroughly feasible and habitual charge in times of crisis. If this suggestion is right, the whole affair should probably be understood not so much as a political act or event – an attempt to cast doubt on the legitimate birth of Louis the Child or to exclude the political influence of the queen’s relatives (whoever they may have been) – as an apparently hysterical defence-measure in view of this new deterioration in Arnulf’s health. As in West Francia in 987, in Aquitaine in 1028 or in Flanders in 1128, a crisis occasioned by the ruler’s illness or sudden death led to the quest for an appropriate scapegoat. The charges against Uota and against the alleged poisoners of Arnulf were unconnected with the question of the succession, but followed from a desire to explain the decline in the king’s bodily state and thus to restore the status quo. 50

W. Hartmann, Die Konzilien der Karolingerzeit III: 843–859, MGH Concilia III (Hannover, 1984), p. 173 and n. a (to c. 21).

chap t e r 13

Plunder and tribute in the Carolingian empire

In 882 the Emperor Charles III was forced to break off his siege of the Norsemen’s camp at Asselt and make peace with them.1 One of their leaders, Gottfried, got a Carolingian wife and the benefices in Frisia formerly held by Rorich; the other, Siegfried, got a large sum in gold and silver. Commenting on these events, the Mainz cleric who composed this section of the Annals of Fulda wrote:2 and what was still more of a crime, he did not blush to pay tribute, against the custom of his ancestors, the kings of the Franks, and following the advice of evil men, to a man from whom he ought to have exacted tribute and hostages.

This is undoubtedly polemic in intention, but the accusation is not, or not directly, that Charles III should have fought the Northmen, but that he should have taken tribute and hostages from them like a proper Frankish king. In saying this, the annalist was following a long tradition; earlier writers liked to demonstrate the power of the kings they wrote about by listing the tribute they took. For the Merovingian period we know of tribute-payments by the Lombards, the Bretons, the Thuringians, the Saxons, the Frisians and the Basques, as well as by other smaller German tribes. Such payments could be made in gold and silver, or in kind. The Lombards had to pay 12,000 solidi annually; these solidi predate the Carolingian monetary reform, which makes the sum a very large one indeed. The pre-monetary Saxons and Thuringians paid tributes in cows (later 1 2

I am grateful to Wilfried Hartmann, Janet Nelson, Ernst Tremp and Ian Wood for their comments and suggestions. ‘et quod maioris est criminis, a quo obsides accipere et tributa exigere debuit, huic pravorum usus consilio contra consuetudinem parentum suorum, regum videlicet Francorum, tributa solvere non erubuit’, Annales Fuldenses, ed. F. Kurze, MGH, SRG (Hannover, 1895), s.a. 882, p. 99 (cf. also pp. 108–9). See E. Dümmler, Geschichte des ostfränkischen Reiches, 2nd edn, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1887–8), II, pp. 202ff.

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horses) and pigs respectively.3 For the Carolingian period we have rather fewer reports of tribute-payments, largely because many of the regions from which the Merovingians had extracted tribute had been incorporated into the Carolingian empire. Nevertheless, we hear of the Beneventans paying 350 lb of silver per year, and the Bretons paying 50 lb;4 what sums the tributary Slav tribes along the eastern frontier paid is not recorded, but the larger groups like the Abodrites, the Sorbs and the Bohemians were probably good for payments on the Breton scale, and the Great Moravian empire will have paid – after 8745 – rather more. Such payments were usually annual, but they could also be once-off affairs. In 756 the Lombard king Aistulf had to hand over a third of his treasure to the Franks, while in 787 and again in 844 the Beneventans bought off Frankish attacks with large payments – in 844 it was a multa, a fine, of 100,000 aurei.6 Tribute was, so to speak, the gilt-edged income of the Franks from warfare; plunder was less calculable, but in the heyday of the Carolingian empire no less important. The annalistic sources for the eighth century regularly mention praeda and spolia (normally without maintaining the classical distinction between the two). One can of course dismiss this as a topos, but one should not do so. The majority of these writers had probably never heard of a topos; what they used were clichés and formulae,7 and these, unlike topoi, which have a literary function, are used to make the description of reality easier. Even if formulae like cum praeda multa are only intended to mean that the Franks won, it is still significant that victory and plunder were more or less coterminous. The sources are sparing with details; the more utilitarian the object of plunder, the less likely it is to be explicitly mentioned. The taking of victuals, for example, is hardly ever mentioned in Frankish accounts of Frankish raiding (though it is for the Norsemen),8 but must be taken for granted, particularly in the fast punitive raids of destruction the Carolingians came to specialise in, 3

4

5 6 7 8

G. Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, 8 vols. in 9 (Berlin, 1880–96), II, ii, pp. 250–4. On Merovingian tribute-taking see also I. Wood, The Merovingian North Sea (Occasional papers on medieval topics, 1, Alings˚as, 1983), pp. 11–12. Annales regni Francorum, ed. F. Kurze, MGH, SRG (Hannover, 1892), s.a. 814, p. 141 (cf. also the entry for 812, p. 137); Annales Bertiniani, eds. F. Grat, J. Vielliard, S. Clémencet and L. Levillain, Société de l’histoire de France (Paris, 1964), s.a. 863, p. 96; 864, p. 113. For the treaty of Forchheim between Zwentibald of Moravia and Louis the German see Annales Fuldenses, s.a., pp. 82–3. The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar with its Continuations, ed. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (London, 1960), c. 38, p. 108; Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 787, p. 74; Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 844, p. 46. On the formulaic nature of Carolingian annalistic writing cf. H. Hoffmann, Untersuchungen zur karolingischen Annalistik, Bonner Historische Forschungen, 10 (Bonn, 1958), pp. 69–75. E.g. by Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 861, p. 86.


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which were generally carried out by a scara, a rapid deployment force – fast-moving because without a baggage train, and living off the land.9 How Frankish armies behaved in enemy territory is shown quite adequately by the frequent complaints about how they behaved before they got there.10 A further important form of plunder was slaves. The enslaving of Saxons is mentioned in 748 and 796, for example.11 It also recurs in the reports of the expeditions against the Slavs in the ninth century. Here we have enslaving of heathens (though Saxony in the 790s ought to have been stretching a point), but the enslaving of Christians did not call for particular restraint, if reports of the Breton campaigns of 818 and 824 are anything to go by; Christian slaves are an object of continuing concern in Carolingian church legislation.12 Whether slaves were taken as servi casati, as appears to have been the case with many of the Saxons, or sold off to slave-traders, they represented a substantial part of the profits of warfare. Apart from these things, the hoard of the enemy ruler is often mentioned: so in Frisia in 735, in Lombardy in 755 and 774, in the Avar empire in 795 and 796 and in the Great Moravian empire in 870.13 Temple treasures were also a preferred object of plunder: gold and silver were taken when the Irminsul was burnt in 772,14 and temple-plundering probably took place in the early raids on Frisia15 and in the raids on the various Slav tribes in the ninth century; in view of the sacral nature of Avar kingship16 we should perhaps see the treasures heaped up in the Avar hring as falling in this category. 9

10

11

12

13

14 15 16

F. L. Ganshof, Frankish Institutions under Charlemagne (Providence, RI, 1968), pp. 64, 68; J. F. Niermeyer, Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus (Leiden, 1954–76), pp. 943–4, s.v. scara, scarire, scaritus. A study of the origin and use of this term would be worthwhile. In 860 the armed followings of the three Carolingian rulers who met at Koblenz laid the surrounding countryside waste, cf. Annales Xantenses, ed. B. von Simson, MGH, SRG (Hannover, 1909), s.a. 861, p. 19, and for the behaviour of Charles the Bald’s army in 866, Annales Bertiniani, s.a., pp. 132–3. For the Merovingian evidence, see J. P. Bodmer, Der Krieger der Merowingerzeit und seine Welt, Geist und Werk der Zeiten, II (Zürich, 1967), pp. 94–7. Continuator of Fredegar, ed. Wallace-Hadrill, c. 31, p. 101 (748); Annales Laureshamenses, ed. E. Katz (St Paul, 1889), s.a. 796, p. 41 and Chronicon Laurissense Breve, ed. H. Schorr von Carolsfeld, Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für a¨ ltere deutsche Geschichtskunde, 36 (1911), pp. 15–39, here IV, 26, p. 34. Ermoldus Nigellus, Carmen in honorem Hludovici, ed. E. Faral, Classiques de l’histoire de France au moyen aˆge 14, 2nd edn (Paris, 1964), ll. 1,599–600, 2,020–1; for the legislation, Ch. Verlinden, L’esclavage dans l’Europe médiévale, I: Péninsule Ibérique–France (Bruges, 1955), pp. 706ff. Continuator of Fredegar, ed. Wallace-Hadrill, c. 17, p. 92 (Frisia); ibid. c. 39, p. 108 and Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 774, p. 38 (Lombardy); S. Abel and B. von Simson, Jahrbücher des fränkischen Reiches unter Karl dem Großen, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1883–8), II, pp. 98–104, 106–7, for references to the Avar treasure; Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 870, p. 71: (Carloman) ‘ditatusque gaza regia revertitur’. Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 772, p. 34. The treasure collected by Liudger in Frisia and given by him to Charlemagne perhaps belongs in this category: Vita Liudgeri 1.14, MGH, SS II, p. 408, ll. 49–52. J. Deer, ‘Karl der Große und der Untergang des Awarenreiches’, Karl der Große. Persönlichkeit und Geschichte, ed. H. Beumann (5 vols., Düsseldorf, 1965–7), I, pp. 758–62, 777.

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Here also belong the thesauri which Charles the Bald collected on his first Italian expedition in 87517 : the Vikings were not the only churchrobbers in Francia any more than they were in Ireland. Apart from treasure, the form of plunder most frequently mentioned explicitly is arms and horses. Horses are referred to particularly often: in Gascony in 763, in Moravia in 871 and after the battle of Andernach in 876.18 With these last categories we reach the point where plunder and tribute show noticeable similarities: the sources are most generous with details and obviously most interested when the object of plunder was trophies and luxury goods: gold, silver, precious stones and cloths, horses, arms. These were ‘noble’ items, which were valued, as we shall see, not just for their utilitarian worth. Who benefited from all this? Tribute came to the king; the question of what happened to the plunder is less easy to answer. It appears certain that the hoards were reserved to the king, even if he did not himself take part in the campaign. The Avar campaign shows this well: Charlemagne had led the first Avar expedition in 791 in person, but the expeditions of 795 and 796 which captured the hring and the accumulated Avar loot of over two centuries were commanded by his son Pippin and the margrave Eric of Friuli. Nevertheless, the treasure was shipped in cartloads to Aachen.19 It seems likely that a lot of the more ordinary plunder also came to the king, even when he was not with the army. Spoils were sent to him as the trophies of victory – so after the Bretons were defeated in 799 for example, when their leaders’ arms, inscribed with their names, were sent to Charlemagne, or in 865 when Robert the Strong presented trophies taken from the Norsemen to Charles the Bald.20 Possibly the loot sent by Louis the Pious to his father in Aachen after the sack of Barcelona in 801 should be interpreted as trophies, but it seems to have been on a rather larger scale than that: Ermold was able to use it for panegyric purposes 17 18 19

20

Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 875, p. 84: ‘omnes thesauros, quos invenire potuit, unca manu collegit’; cf. also ibid. p. 75. Continuator of Fredegar, ed. Wallace-Hadrill, c. 44, p. 113; Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 870, p. 75; 876, p. 89 (on this battle cf. also the comments by Hincmar, Annales Bertiniani, s.a., p. 209). Abel and von Simson, Karl der Große, II, pp. 98–104, 106–7. It should be noted, however, that the king’s control was not always complete: Louis II, according to Prudentius of Troyes, failed to press the siege of Bari in 852 because he had been told it contained a large treasure and he did not want his warriors to loot it, Annales Bertiniani, s.a., p. 65. Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 799, p. 108 (the E-text, p. 109, here offers no significant alterations); Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 865, p. 122. Cf. also the Spaniard John, who offered a share of the spoils to Louis the Pious when he was sub-king of Aquitaine, ‘equum obtimum et brunia obtima et spata India cum techa de argento parata’, and received land in return: Die Urkunden der Karolinger, MGH, DD (Hannover, 1906), I, p. 242, no. 179 (795).


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to present Louis the Pious as a generous war-lord.21 The only time when plunder definitely stayed with those who took it was, paradoxically, after home matches. Those who were lucky enough to catch Vikings loaded with plunder and defeat them seem to have kept it: the Frisians who fought a Viking band in 885 found ‘such a mass of treasure in gold and silver and other movables that all from the greatest to the least were made wealthy’.22 Of course, some of what was taken will have stuck to the fingers of those who took it at all times. But all the same it would seem that here the Carolingians had made some advances over their Merovingian predecessors. One would dismiss Gregory of Tours’s well-known anecdote about the vase of Soissons, in which so powerful a ruler as Clovis appears unable to claim anything more than the share of the plunder which falls to him by lot, as mere saga, were it not for the fact that division of booty by casting lots is recorded elsewhere.23 Moreover, both Gregory of Tours and Fredegar record a number of incidents which suggest that in Merovingian times the armies could plunder and hold on to what they had plundered. ‘Follow me’, says Theuderich to his warriors, ‘and I will lead you into a country where you may find gold and silver as much as you may desire, whence you may take cattle, slaves and clothing in abundance.’24 The Austrasians complain about a peace made by Sigebert with Guntramn: ‘Do as you promised and give us a chance to fight and take plunder, otherwise we won’t go back home.’25 Such incidents imply kings as providers of opportunities for plundering, rather than as distributors of plunder. The Carolingians were more active: not only are they themselves recorded as taking plunder, which may simply be a convention among annalists, we have other indications as well. In 847, for example, the three sons of Louis the Pious met at Meerssen and decided to send an embassy to the king of the Danes to persuade him to stop his subjects from raiding Frankish territory.26 This certainly reflects a Frankish belief that a king should be capable of controlling his subjects, and indeed Louis the German had been able to negotiate successfully with Horic for the return of loot and captives after the sack of Hamburg,27 21

22 23 24 25 26 27

Carmen in honorem Hludovici, ll. 678–9: ‘Vidistis quae olim Maurorum funere misit:/Regem, arma et vinctos, magna trophea simul’ (spoken by Charlemagne to the Franks before Louis’s coronation as emperor in 813). Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 885, p. 103; cf. also ibid., s.a. 876, p. 98: ‘Frisiones . . . cum Nordmannis dimicantes victores extiterunt omnesque thesauros . . . abstulerunt atque inter se diviserunt.’ Gregory of Tours, Historiae, 2.27, eds. B. Krusch and W. Levison, MGH, SRM I, I (Berlin, 1937–51), p. 72; on division by lot cf. Bodmer, Krieger, pp. 100–1. Gregory of Tours, Historiae, 3.11, pp. 107–8. Fredegar, Chronicon, 3.71, ed. B. Krusch, MGH, SRM II (Berlin, 1878), p. 112. Annales Bertiniani, s.a., pp. 54–5; MGH, Capit. II, p. 70, no. 204, c. 3. Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 845, p. 51; Dümmler, Ostfränkisches Reich, I, pp. 283–4.

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but it also in my view says something about the Carolingians’ view of plundering-expeditions – they were, or should be, under royal control and direction. Whoever drew up the Ordinatio Imperii thought so too.28 A further indication that the Carolingians benefited more from warfare than their Merovingian predecessors is their attitude to their hoards. The Merovingians, at least until the end of the sixth century, had a regular if declining income from taxation and tribute, and their hoards were certainly there for distribution as well as for impressing people – Merovingians set up as sub-kings, like Sigebert III, got a hoard of their own to start them off.29 But they do not seem to have been so lavish as the Carolingians were (though here as in so much else Dagobert I may have anticipated later developments): the hoards came intact to their heirs, whereas both Charlemagne and Louis the German are recorded as having distributed the bulk of their treasure in alms to the poor and the church.30 Some of this sharing out was done by these kings during their own lifetime (without objection from their heirs, so far as we know), but in Charlemagne’s case it was left to Louis the Pious to fulfil the terms of the will – which he largely did.31 Evidently the expected inflow was so large and reliable that rulers could here afford to be lavish. The pious and the poor and needy were not the only or even the primary recipients of the king’s bounty. According to the Chronicon Laurissense Breve Charlemagne divided the Lombard treasure among his army after the capture of Pavia in 774. The Avar booty was also shared out. Some went to Rome, some to England and perhaps Ireland,32 but the main beneficiaries recorded were the Franks, and in particular the Frankish nobility. The Royal Frankish Annals in the original version talk of sharing out among the optimates, clericis sive laicis, ceterisque fidelibus; in the revised version this has become, more precisely, ‘he shared out the rest (i.e. apart from what went to Rome) among the optimates and aulici ceterique in palatio suo militantes’.33 The Lorsch Annals talk of division 28 29

30 31 32 33

MGH, Capit. I, p. 271, no. 136, c. 6. Fredegar, ed. Wallace-Hadrill, IV. 75, p. 63; cf. Waitz, Verfassungsgeschichte, II, I, pp. 182–3, and R. Doehaerd, ‘La richesse des Merovingiens’, Studi in onore di Gino Luzzato (Milan, 1949), I, pp. 30–46, on Merovingian hoards. Einhard, Vita Karoli, c. 33, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH, SRG (Hannover, 1911), pp. 37–41; Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 869, p. 69. A. Schultze, ‘Das Testament Karls des Großen’, Aus Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Gedächtnisschrift für Georg von Below (Stuttgart, 1928), pp. 46–81. Abel and von Simson, Karl der Große, II, p. 107; J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Charlemagne and England’, Early Medieval History (Oxford, 1975), pp. 165–6. Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 796, pp. 98, 99.


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among ‘churches, bishops, abbots and counts, as well as all his faithful men’.34 The recipients, in other words, were Charles’s own following and the magnates commended to him, his following in a wider sense – which corresponds roughly to the leudes and antrustiones of Merovingian times. These share-outs were once-off affairs, as were the gifts by rulers to their children and to ambassadors; but there was also regular gift-giving, as we learn from Notker the Stammerer, with gifts graded according to the recipients.35 Hincmar goes so far as to describe the annual assembly as a place where gifts were ‘generally’ exchanged, and it is a very moot point whether the dona militum he mentions in another passage are the annua dona, to which we shall come shortly, or gifts made to the vassi dominici.36 The context on the whole implies royal expenditure rather than income. Similar things occurred lower down the political ladder: annual gifts to vassals are described in an admittedly not quite kosher diploma of Charles the Bald for Saint-Benoˆıt-sur-Loire as an obligation incumbent on the abbot, along with royal service and the upkeep of buildings.37 Here we can see magnates passing gifts on to their own followings, by which I mean those vassals of theirs of some independent standing plus their military households – bodyguards who accompanied their lords without being given grants of land in benefice or otherwise. The latter are known to us from the times of Tacitus and Gregory of Tours but their existence in the Carolingian period, though acknowledged, has been somewhat neglected in favour of the constitutionally more interesting development of beneficed vassals.38 It is often assumed that the normal professional fighting-man in the Carolingian era was a 34 35 36

37 38

Annales Laureshamenses, s.a. 795, pp. 40–1. Notker Balbulus, Gesta Karoli Magni Imperatoris, II. 21, ed. H. Haefele, MGH, SRG, nova series (Berlin, 1961), p. 92. De ordine palatii, eds. T. Gross and R. Schieffer, MGH, Fontes Iuris Germanici Antiqui III (Hannover, 1980), 11, pp. 478–9: ‘propter dona generaliter danda’; ibid. 1. 360: ‘De honestate vero palatii seu specialiter ornamento regali nec non et de donis annuis militum, absque cibu et potu vel equis, ad reginam . . . pertinebat . . .’. Schieffer and Gross argue in their edition (p. 72, n. 165) that these are the normal dona annua, against Waitz, Verfassungsgeschichte, III, p. 549, who saw them as gifts to the milites. The sentence as a whole is undoubtedly talking about the queen’s responsibility for outgoing expenses, and as there are Anglo-Saxon parallels, Waitz’s interpretation seems the more plausible. Cf. J. L. Nelson, ‘The church’s military service in the ninth century: a contemporary comparative view?’, Studies in Church History 20 (1983), p. 24 with n. 36, though I am not sure I agree with her that the gifts to the warriors must have been in cash; cf. the evidence for non-monetary gifts by the king to warriors assembled by Waitz, Verfassungsgeschichte, IV, p. 250. Recueil des actes de Charles le Chauve, ed. G. Tessier, 3 vols. (Paris, 1943–55), I, p. 468, no. 177. For instance M. Bloch, Feudal Society (London, 1961), pp. 163ff., F. L. Ganshof, Feudalism (3rd edn, London, 1964), p. 35, to cite only two classic discussions; both authors see the unbeneficed vassal as an increasingly marginal phenomenon. More recently B. S. Bachrach, ‘Charles Martel, mounted shock combat, the stirrup, and feudalism’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 7 (1970), pp. 70–2 and Nelson, ‘Military service’, passim, have laid more stress on unbeneficed warrior followings.

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vassal with a benefice, that is, the holder of a small fief (a ‘knight’s fee’ or a ‘Rittergut’). But most of the vassalitic39 benefices whose size is mentioned in the Carolingian era are large: generally the benefice consists of one or more villae, that is, an estate of anything from twenty to 200 mansi, generally several times the amount specified in capitularies as the minimum for military service.40 Benefices smaller than this seem to have been the exception rather than the rule, and in any case one should not automatically assume that they represented the entire land-holding of their owner. Beneficed vassals, whether of the king or of magnates, were generally big men themselves, a minority compared with fighting-men who lived as a following at the expense of their lords, though such followings in the field will generally have included beneficed vassals as well. Hincmar, in De ordine palatii, talks of the fighting-men in the palace without fixed positions or incomes, who lived from gifts of food and clothing, gold and silver, horses and arms – ‘frequent’ gifts, be it noted, which in Hincmar’s view made them enthusiastically willing to serve the king.41 The Carolingians were not the only people to maintain such warbands. True, they legislated against trustis and collecta,42 but only against their misuse – and what that was, they decided. Certainly they must have been prepared to tolerate the thing itself, because there are numerous references to warbands led by ecclesiastics. In 830, for instance, during the first crisis of Louis the Pious’s reign, Hilduin of Saint-Denis was accused of turning up to an assembly hostiliter when he had been asked to come simpliciter.43 The acta of the council of Douzy record a similar charge against Hincmar of Laon, and Hincmar of Rheims in the course of his extensive writings frequently presupposes the existence of such followings.44 Archbishop John of Ravenna, according to Nicholas I, went about with ‘nearly five hundred 39

40 41 42

43 44

As opposed to the precarial benefices which were often granted in return for gifts of land to a church and are frequently recorded in the Bavarian traditiones, for example; here we find much smaller pieces of property and the use of the word beneficiolum, cf. Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch, I. A–B (Munich, 1959–67), cols. 1,432–3, s.v. MGH, Capit. I, pp. 134–5, no. 48, c. 2 (807): all with three or more mansi are to serve; I, p. 137, no. 50, c. 1 (808): all with four or more mansi. De ordine palatii, 11, pp. 439–46. O. G. Oexle, ‘Gilden als soziale Gruppen in der Karolingerzeit’, Das Handwerk in vor-und frühgeschichtlicher Zeit, eds. H. Jankuhn et al., Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, phil.-hist. Klasse, dritte Folge, 122 (Göttingen, 1981), I, pp. 301–8, 339–41. The objection was to the use of armed bands in improper ways – e.g. attacks on missi dominici or intimidating county courts – and perhaps also to armed bands bound together by mutual oaths; on the Carolingians’ fear of coniuratio see S. Epperlein, Herrschaft und Volk im karolingischen Imperium, Forschungen zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte, 14 (Berlin (E.), 1969), pp. 42–50. Astronomus, Vita Hludovici, c. 45, MGH, SS II, p. 633. Nelson, ‘Military service’, pp. 22–4.


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men and as many horses’.45 The charge in such cases was not that such things were per se illegal but merely that they were inappropriate or improper under the circumstances. One would naturally expect lay magnates to have had such followings as well, and indeed they did. Hincmar talks of the pueri (note the term ‘the boys’, familiar from Merovingian sources) vel vassalli; everyone sought to maintain as large a following of these as was possible without theft and robbery.46 The author of the Epitaphium Arsenii, a generation earlier, thought that this was impossible: writing about Bernard of Septimania he commented that ‘nowadays no one leads fighting-men at his own expense, but instead maintains them through violence and theft’.47 Note here incidentally that the author has non-beneficed followings in mind: expenses, stipendia, are direct payments, not benefices. We can see such gangs of warriors in action frequently in the annals and hagiography of the Carolingian era, just as we can in the pages of Gregory of Tours. It was presumably such a band which Bernardus filius Bernardi had with him when he left a royal assembly armata manu in 864, and the comites of Count Gerald who joined him in an attack on the house of Egfrid in 868 were ‘companions’ rather than counts.48 Similarly, it was because he had been rash enough to send all his warriors out to spy on the enemy that Count Robert was surprised by the Normans in 885 and killed.49 It is true that we cannot always say with certainty that such followers were unbeneficed, but it is generally clear from the context that they were the constant companions of their lord, and the one presumably implies the other. The fate of Hugo’s followers in 885 certainly does not suggest that they held land: they escaped with their lives, but lost their clothes, horses and weapons.50 Nothing is said about their land being confiscated, and the inference is that they had none. Such bands, then, though they may have included some beneficed fightingmen, were essentially the comitatus of Tacitus’ time, a warrior following. The references by Hincmar and the author of the Epitaphium to theft and robbery are thus not accidental or merely polemical. It is in the nature of a warrior following that its members need constant rewards. Germanic Treue 45 47 48 49 50

46 De ordine palatii, 11, pp. 455–8. MGH, Epp. VI, p. 615, no. 105. Radbert, Epitaphium Arsenii, ed. E. Dümmler (Berlin, 1900), p. 83; for stipendia cf. also Hincmar, Ad Carolum Calvum, PL 125, col. 1,050D. Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 864, pp. 113–14; 868, p. 141. Abbo, Le siège de Paris par les Normands, ed. H. Waquet, Classiques de l’histoire de France au moyen aˆge 20 (Paris, 1942) 11. 442–59, pp. 48, 50. Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 885, p. 103. On Hugo’s uprising see now G. Tellenbach, ‘Die geistigen und politischen Grundlagen der karolingischen Thronfolge. Zugleich eine Studie u¨ ber kollektive Willensbildung und kollektives Handeln im neunten Jahrhundert’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 13 (1979), pp. 286–8; for similar followings in Ottonian Saxony, K. J. Leyser, Rule and Conflict in Ottonian Saxony (London, 1979), pp. 17–21.

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may be enough for modern constitutional historians,51 but was certainly not enough to enable a Carolingian ruler or magnate to keep a following together. This is forcefully demonstrated by the account in the Annals of Lorsch of Charlemagne’s behaviour after the discovery of the conspiracy headed by his eldest son Pippin in 792:52 King Charles held an assembly at Regensburg; and when he saw his faithful men, bishops, abbots and counts, who were with him there, and the rest of the faithful people, who had not joined with Pippin in that terrible conspiracy, he rewarded them many-fold with gold and silver and silks and other gifts.

The rewards expected were once again the same luxury goods I have already mentioned. The basic pay, so to speak – clothing, food, drink, accommodation – was expected, and by no means taken for granted, as is shown by the frequent occurrence in Carolingian sources of such words as nutrire, nutritor, nutrimen to describe all kinds of relationships between persons: lord and follower, teacher and pupil, abbot and monk.53 But what really counted was the ‘noble’ gifts, though the distinction is not always easy to make: for the professional warrior, for instance, arms and horses were a necessity, and should perhaps be considered as basic pay. We must, then, think of a very large-scale circulation of goods on this level of gift-giving and tribute-payment, which ran largely parallel to and independently of the normal ‘economic’ circulation of goods (though there were naturally interfaces between the two).54 It was motored by the inflow of tribute and plunder from beyond the borders, and it was largely, if not exclusively, controlled by the king. It provided a language in which to express power-relationships; like all good languages, it had the advantage of being ambiguous. In 798 Alfonso II of Asturias sent Charlemagne trophies 51

52

53

54

W. Kienast, ‘Germanische Treue und “Königsheil”’, HZ 227 (1978), pp. 265–324, attempts a nuanced defence of the notion against the attacks by F. Graus, but it is so nuanced that I find it impossible to follow over large stretches. ‘Fecit rex Carlus conuentum apud Reganesburug; et cum cognovisset fideles suos, episcopos, abbates, et comites, qui cum ipso ibi aderant, et reliquum populum fidelem, qui cum Pippino in ipso consilio pessimo non erant, eos multipliciter honoravit in auro et argento et sirico et donis plurimis’, Annales Laureshamenses, s.a. 793, p. 38. In connection with education the usage is classical; but it appears to be in the Carolingian period that such words begin to be used of the relationship between lord and follower: cf. e.g. Einhard, Vita Karoli, preface, p. 1: ‘nutritoris mei Karoli’ and p. 2: ‘nutrimentum in me inpensum’; Ermold, Carmen in honorem Hludovici, ll. 166, 658, 1,144; MGH, Capit. II, p. 283, no. 256, c. 4. Among the numerous provisions in the capitularies regulating sales, there is one of particular interest in this context, MGH, Capit. I, p. 142, no. 55 c. 2: ‘ut nullus audeat in nocte negotiare in vasa aurea et argentea, mancipia, gemmas, caballos, animalia . . .’, an almost complete list of ‘noble’ items. It is significant that they could be sold at all, though by daylight only and before reliable witnesses; the prohibition of night (i.e. secret) sales was perhaps intended not only as a general measure against fencing stolen goods, but also to try to prevent feuds arising over the possession of such items.


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following his capture of Lisbon: loricae, mules and captured Moors. The Royal Frankish Annals call these insignia victoriae; the revised version glosses this: licet pro dono mitterentur, magis tamen insignia victoriae videbantur.55 The implication seems clear: one sends trophies to one’s lord, and even if Alfonso thought he was just sending Charlemagne presents, that was not how the Franks viewed the matter. And yet the implication is not as clear as all that, for only a couple of years earlier Charlemagne himself had sent similar trophies to Offa and perhaps other rulers in the British Isles; no one, least of all Offa, would have taken these gifts as signs of subjection. We should here note the similarities between such tribute and the internal tribute which seems to have begun and ended with the Carolingians, the dona annua,56 which were paid in the same ‘currency’ of precious things as tribute and plunder. Like the income from tribute, they must have amounted altogether to very considerable sums. Louis the German says in a charter for St Gallen that the monastery should pay ‘like the other monasteries’ no more than two horses with shields and lances per year, and a diploma of Louis the Pious for Brioude specifies half this amount.57 We know that there were exemptions and monasteries which never had such gifts required of them,58 but nevertheless one can still extrapolate from this an annual ‘income’ of at least 200 horses and shields, possibly more. The bishoprics paid more substantial amounts – Zwentibold reduced Trier’s obligation to six horses per year59 – and recovered at least some of their costs by themselves requiring annual gifts from monasteries in their diocese.60 Like tribute, such gifts could scarcely be described as 55 56

57

58

59 60

Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 798, pp. 104, 105. Waitz, Verfassungsgeschichte, III, p. 591, IV, pp. 107–10; Ganshof, Frankish Institutions, p. 43 with n. 321. Although they are described in Carolingian sources as an ancient institution, the earliest datable reference is c. 6 of the Council of Ver (755), MGH, Capit. I, p. 34. The reference in Formulae Bituricenses, ed. K. Zeumer, MGH, Formulae Merowingici et Karolini Aevi (Berlin 1882–6), p. 178, no. 18, is Carolingian. The last mention of them, so far as I can see, is at Quierzy in 877: MGH, Capit. II, p. 363, no. 282. MGH DD I, Die Urkunden der deutschen Karolinger, ed. P. Kehr (Berlin, 1934), p. 100, no. 70 (852); J. F. Böhmer, Die Regesten des Kaiserreichs unter den Karolingern. 751–918, 2nd edn by E. Mühlbacher (Innsbruck, 1908), no. 797 (825). See the Notitia de servitio monasteriorum, ed. P. Becker, in Initia Consuetudinis Benedictinae, Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum, 1 (Siegburg, 1963), pp. 485–99; Böhmer-Mühlbacher, no. 929 (3 July 834) for Kempten is a diploma of exemption. MGH, DD IV, Die Urkunden der deutschen Karolinger, ed. T. Schieffer (Berlin, 1960), pp. 50–1, no. 18 (898). Cf. the charter of Archbishop Wenilo of Sens for Saint-Rémy, Sens, Die Konzilien der karolingischen Teilreiche 843–859, ed. W. Hartmann, MGH, Concilia (Hannover, 1984), III, p. 59, no. 10: ‘Episcopus quoque in exigendis muneribus abbatem eiusdem loci non gravet, sed sufficiat ei ad annua dona equus unus et scutum cum lancea’; diploma of Charles the Bald for Saint-Pierre, Rouen (ed. Tessier, II, p. 410, no. 407 (876)).

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voluntary – though in passing one may wonder whether in a society like that of Carolingian Francia the notion of a voluntary gift has much meaning. Hincmar referred to them as a tax for the upkeep of the army, and they are equated with taxation in an Italian capitulary of Louis II.61 But – like tribute – they were not an ordinary form of tax. They were called dona and treated as such: that is, they were ‘noble’ and handed over in public, as chroniclers noticed,62 with ceremony – at the same time and in the same way as tribute (indeed, poets like Hibernicus Exul and Dungal as well as annalists often make no distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ tribute).63 In this way the Carolingians overcame, at least for a while, the hostility to public taxation which existed both before and after their time, in Austrasia at least. Just as the Franks salved their pride by making gifts rather than paying taxes, so the tribes around the Frankish empire probably preferred to see themselves as making gifts rather than paying tribute. Even in Frankish sources the distinction between tribute and gifts is not a fixed one: Aistulf ’s demands from the papacy in the 750s are described by the continuator of Fredegar as tributa vel munera for example, and there is a similar ambiguity in the various accounts of Charles III’s payment of 882 with which I began.64 On the other hand it was possible, for purposes of panegyric, to go further and see tribute as expressing not only submission but possession: Ermoldus Nigellus describes the Frankish demands for tribute-payment from the Breton ruler in terms appropriate for a peasant paying for his mansus: Murman is to pay a census for cultivating Frankish fields.65 I do not want to suggest that consciousness determined being, however; tribute was not just a language for expressing or concealing political relationships. Payment was enforced: when a Slav tribe on the borders of the east Frankish kingdom refused its customary tribute, an 61 62

63

64 65

MGH, Capit. II, pp. 93–4, no. 217, c. 4 (865); Hincmar, Ad Carolum Calvum, PL 125, cols. 1,050D– 1,051A. Continuator of Fredegar, ed. Wallace-Hadrill, c. 48, p. 116; Annales sancti Amandi, s.a. 807, MGH, SS I, p. 14; Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 827, p. 173, 829, p. 177; Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 832, p. 8, 833, p. 10, 835, p. 17, 836, p. 19, 837, p. 21, 864 p. 113, 868, p. 150, 874, p. 196; Fragmentum Chronici Fontanellensis, s.a. 851 (MGH, SS, II, p. 303). Hibernicus Exul, Ad Karolum Regem, ed. E. Dümmler, MGH, Poetae Latini medii aevi I (Berlin, 1881), p. 396; cf. also Dicuil, Versus, ed. K. Strecker, MGH, Poetae Latini medii aevi IV (Berlin, 1923), p. 917. Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 870, p. 72: ‘Francorum iudicio et Baioariorum necnon Sclavorum, qui de diversis provinciis regi munera deferentes aderant . . .’. The Breton prince Salomon also handed his tribute over at the same time as the Franks presented the dona in 864: Annales Bertiniani, s.a., p. 113. Continuator of Fredegar, ed. Wallace-Hadrill, c. 36, p. 104: ‘tributa vel munera quod . . . requirabant’; for 882 see above, n. 2. Ermoldus Nigellus, Carmen in honorem Hludovici, ll. 1,328–30, p. 104: ‘En mea rura colit late . . ./ . . ./Nempe tributa vetat’; cf. also ll. 1,392, 1,465–7.


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army was instantly sent to collect it and to take reprisals.66 Tribute was in practice institutionalised plunder, for the recipient particularly attractive because the victim plunders himself. The payments may have expressed or concealed subjection and dependence, but they were in the first instance payments. The precious things circulating as tribute, plunder and gifts had a vital political function not only at the level of Selbstverständnis: they served to create and reinforce political relationships, to determine military and hence political power. All this has consequences for our understanding of the Carolingian era. In the first place, we may look again at the Carolingian army. The question of how the Carolingians recruited their fighting-men has generally been considered from the point of view of military obligation: the general duty of military service incumbent on all free men, or perhaps on all free land-holders, and the specific duty defined in terms of what would later be called feudal law, incumbent on all vassals. Attempts to deal with the inherently slightly improbable notion of a general obligation of military service by arguing that the ‘free men’ of the capitularies were a particular group, the liberi regis, who had special obligations, are looking increasingly unconvincing.67 It seems worthwhile considering the question of incentive: what were the gains to be expected from warfare and who could profit from them? From this point of view it is immediately evident that the profits of Carolingian warfare were of a kind which could not easily benefit the small land-holder without a following of his own. Lacking such a following he could not turn the profits of warfare into political capital. Slaves were perhaps more worthwhile – Duby has shown how widespread was the possession of slaves in the Carolingian period68 – but here also the advantage of slave-taking was definitely with the magnate with large estates to exploit. Unless the small man himself joined a following he had to fight at his own expense without much likelihood of getting something in return: we have already seen that the kings distributed the returns of warfare to the optimates. There are hints in the sources that people made such cost-benefit analyses: a fragmentary Italian capitulary of Charlemagne complains that those who lived near the border were unenthusiastic or 66 67

68

Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 874, p. 81; 877, p. 89. For objections to the theory see E. Müller-Mertens, Karl der Große, Ludwig der Fromme und die Freien, Forschungen zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte, 10 (Berlin (E), 1963); H. K. Schulze, ‘Rodungsfreiheit und Königsfreiheit. Zu Genese und Kritik neuerer verfassungsrechtlicher Theorien’, Historische Zeitschrift 219 (1974), pp. 529–50; J. Schmitt, Untersuchungen zu den Liberi Homines der Karolingerzeit (Europäische Hochschulschriften, Reihe III, 85, Berne, 1977). I hope to deal more fully elsewhere with the problems discussed in the following section. G. Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy (London, 1974), pp. 32, 86.

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hostile when raids were being contemplated.69 Evidently they did not expect the gains to outweigh the certain losses: the expenses of warfare and the danger of reprisals. For the leaders of warbands from further away the profit and loss calculation was a quite different one. Even where the results of warfare included territorial expansion, the Carolingians generally hung on to the gains themselves or distributed them in large parcels to members of the high aristocracy, as in Bavaria and Alemannia, where the gains were distributed among a small number of Austrasian magnate families,70 or in Lombardy, where the ‘Northerners’ who came in after Hrodgaud’s rising in 776 came in at a high level and the land-holders of intermediate rank were left largely undisturbed.71 There was not much in the way of military colonisation by small landholders, apart from the special case of the aprisio-regime on the Spanish border.72 The expense of military service on the other hand was considerable. This has little or nothing to do with the introduction of cavalry service and its supposed costliness:73 warfare of the kind waged by the Franks in the eighth century – which was on a scale and intensity different from anything previously attempted, in spite of the parallels with the formation of the first Frankish empire in the late fifth and sixth centuries – was extremely expensive for the participants, however they fought. If we accept then that the small freeman would have lost rather than gained from Carolingian warfare it seems improbable that he can at any time have formed the backbone of the Carolingian army. This conclusion appears at first sight to contradict the evidence from the capitularies. From 69

70

71

72

73

MGH, Capit. I, p. 208, no. 101, c. 3: ‘Quomodo causam confinales nostri odio semper habent contra illos qui parati sunt inimicis insidias facere et marcam nostram ampliare’; cf. also ibid. I, p. 206, no. 99, c. 3. Cf. I. Dienemann-Dietrich, ‘Der fränkische Adel in Alemannien im 8. Jahrhundert’, Probleme der alemannischen Geschichte, ed. T. Mayer, Vorträge und Forschungen . . . , 1 (Lindau, n.d. (1955)), pp. 149–92; M. Mitterauer, Karolingische Markgrafen im Südosten, Archiv für o¨ sterreichische Geschichte, 123 (Vienna, 1963), pp. 78–84. D. Bullough, ‘Europae pater: Charlemagne and his achievement in the light of recent scholarship’, EHR 85 (1970), pp. 82–3. For the ‘Northerners’ see the prosopography by E. Hlawitschka, Franken, Alemannen, Bayern und Burgunder in Oberitalien (774–962), Forschungen zur oberrheinischen Landesgeschichte, 8 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1960). On pp. 310ff. Hlawitschka gives a list of small men (Staatssiedler) found in Italian sources who came from north of the Alps, but there are surprisingly few of them before the end of the ninth century. There is a good discussion of the aprisio system in Müller-Mertens, Karl der Große, Ludwig der Fromme und die Freien, pp. 61–6; for the evidence – very scanty apart from Italy – for military colonists elsewhere see ibid. pp. 74–8 and Schmitt, Liberi Homines, pp. 110–35. The importance of ‘heavy cavalry’ in Carolingian warfare continues to be overestimated; for a useful corrective see Bullough, ‘Europae pater’, pp. 84–9, who rightly points to the Carolingians’ ability to move armies and mount effective sieges.


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800 onwards a series of provisions regulate the military service due from liberi homines; only those with more than a certain amount of property had to serve, while those with less had to club together to support one of their number. These provisions have generally been interpreted as a reduction in obligations which shows that towards the end of Charlemagne’s reign the burden of military service had become unsupportable for the pauper liber homo;74 before that, all free men had been obliged to perform military service. It is difficult to see, however, why such service should have become problematic only after nearly a hundred years of almost continuous wars of aggression; and in fact the evidence is misleading. Almost all the passages refer to specific situations in which defensio patriae is envisaged: the provisions in Charlemagne’s capitularies, for example, fall within the period between 802 and 811, when Danish invasions were expected.75 Most of the other provisions come from times of crisis as well: the expedition against Corsica in 825 and Benevento in 866, or the general alarm of 828–9 after the failures on the Danish and Spanish borders.76 Not all of these campaigns could be classified as defensio patriae in the strictest sense – then as now the word defence had ambiguities – but they were not normal plundering-expeditions. It is likely that the resources of military manpower provided by the warbands were not adequate for such defensive warfare, and hence recourse was had to other means of raising troops. This seems all the more likely as such warfare – coast watch and boatbuilding77 – would have brought little gain for warbands and their leaders, and at the same 74

75

76

77

This is common ground: cf. Schmitt, Liberi Homines, pp. 211–24; Müller-Mertens, Karl der Große, Ludwig der Fromme und die Freien, pp. 120–33; J. Fleckenstein, ‘Adel und Kriegertum und ihre Wandlung im Karolingerreich’, Settimane di studi sull’alto medio evo 27 (1981), p. 82. There is disagreement only about whether Charles’s measures were primarily intended to maintain Frankish military power (so, Müller-Mertens and Fleckenstein) or were rather an expression of a new Herrscherethos (so, Schmitt). For defensio patriae cf. H. Dannenbauer, ‘Die Freien im karolingischen Heer’, Grundlagen der mittelalterlichen Welt (Stuttgart, 1958), pp. 242–3. The earliest specific reference I have found is the Olonna capitulary of 822 (MGH, Capit. I, p. 319, no. 125, c. 18), but the context of Charlemagne’s military preparations in the last decade of his reign is quite clearly a defensive one; cf. H. Sproemberg, ‘Die Seepolitik Karls des Großen’, Beiträge zur Belgisch-Niederländischen Geschichte, Forschungen zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte, 3 (Berlin (E), 1959), pp. 1–30. The one apparent exception is a capitulary which deals with the possibility that the Saxons might be sent into Aquitaine or against the Bohemians (MGH, Capit. I, p. 136, no. 49, c. 2), but what could be demanded of a recently conquered tribe is not necessarily a guide to what could be done elsewhere. Corsica: MGH, Capit. I, p. 325, no. 162, c. 3; Benevento: ibid. II, pp. 94–5, no. 218, c. 1; 828/9: ibid. II, p. 5, no. 185, c. 7, no. 186, c. 7. On these years see F. L. Ganshof, ‘Am Vorabend der ersten Krise der Regierung Ludwigs des Frommen. Die Jahre 828 und 829’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 6 (1972), pp. 40–5. Sproemberg, ‘Seepolitik’, pp. 20–4.

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time considerable risk if it should actually come to any fighting. Similarly, it was in 832, at a moment of crisis when his ordinary resources failed him, that Louis the Pious attempted a mass mobilisation.78 The evidence for a general obligation to serve in the army – apart from defensio patriae – is much thinner and more ambiguous for the period before 800 than is often supposed, and it may well be that the demands made in the capitularies represented an increase on previous practice, not a reduction. It should also be noted that at such moments of crisis there was not just a general duty incumbent on all free men to fight; slaves and the unfree could also be mobilised or subjected to penalties for failing to fight, which should make us rethink the idea that the ‘freedom’ of the ordinary Frank depended on his right and duty to bear arms.79 I do not want to exaggerate, and we are still some way away from the total specialisation between those who fight and those who plough which we find in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; this can be seen not only in the evidence of the capitularies, which because of its normative character is hard to interpret, but also in the occasional references to spontaneous resistance to the Vikings by the rural population, even if here also it is not always easy to say what strata of society the annalists have in mind.80 A further point concerns the nature of Carolingian society, or perhaps better the flavour. In spite of the pessimistic (or realistic) view taken by such scholars as Fichtenau and Duby, the Carolingian period still seems to us as somehow more advanced, more civilised, less archaic than the Merovingian era: after the heroic age, to borrow a phrase used by Mr Grierson in a similar context.81 But this is probably an optical illusion; what we lack is the anecdotalised savagery provided by Gregory of Tours, Fredegar and the other authors of the Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum. Much is concealed 78

79

80

81

Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 832, pp. 7–8: ‘denuo annuntiatum est placitum generale kalendas septembris Aurelianis habendum, ibique unumquemque liberum hostiliter aduenire’. So far as I can see, this is the only occasion in the whole of the Carolingian period when such a mass mobilisation is unambiguously and explicitly referred to in a narrative source. In 832 Louis the German was thought to be raising an army of all the Bavarians, free and unfree (Annales Bertiniani, s.a., p. 5); in 802 Charlemagne laid down penalties for the unfree as well as for freemen, should they fail to give help when required in the event of a coastal attack: W. A. Eckhardt, ‘Die Capitularia missorum specialia von 802’, Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 12 (1956), p. 502, c. 13b. Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 859, p. 80 (where, incidentally, the discussion in note 1 is superfluous: the text means what it says, namely that the coniuratio was suppressed by powerful Franks); Regino of Prüm, Chronicon, ed. F. Kurze, MGH, SRG (Hannover, 1890), s.a. 882, p. 118. P. H. Grierson, ‘Commerce in the Dark Ages: a critique of the evidence’, TRHS 5th ser. 9 (1959), p. 139.


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by the classicising renewal of Carolingian intellectual and spiritual life, which is nevertheless apparent at a second glance: the nomadic or seminomadic existence of the Carolingian elite, involving much travelling and fighting punctuated by large-scale feasts with conspicuous consumption of meat and alcohol. The Lives of Louis the Pious by Thegan and the Astronomer are here a better guide than Einhard’s stately tableaux. Such things would be more apparent if we had more in the way of Beowulf or Icelandic saga: but the Hildebrandslied and (perhaps) Waltharius point the way; such things may well have been found in the antiquissima et barbarissima carmina which Charlemagne tried to collect and Louis the Pious tried to forget.82 We have heard much about the destructive effects of the Vikings on Frankish society in the ninth century: we forget that for most of Europe in the eighth and ninth centuries it was the Franks who were the Vikings,83 and that the existence of a Frankish empire presupposes Frankish imperialism. It was not, however, a Byzantine imperialism. The Franks too could harbour pretenders and make ‘chequerboard’ alliances with the tribes beyond their immediate enemies. But they did not distance themselves from their neighbours as the Byzantines did. The clashes were not clashes between radically different worlds: the two sides understood each other very well. Bretons, Danes, Moravians and Franks shared to a surprising extent a common political culture. Disaffected Frankish princes may not normally have fled across the frontier – though Louis the German did just that in 84084 – but that was only because they generally had uncles to turn to who had a more direct interest in offering help and more to offer. When this was not the case, they were quite prepared to take help from Viking bands or from their neighbours if it was forthcoming – look at Pippin of Aquitaine or Hugo of Lotharingia, both of whom allied themselves with Vikings, or at Louis the German’s sons, who when it suited them allied themselves with the Moravian ruler Rastiz.85 These relationships across the border can be found among the high nobility as well. The rulers of Brittany and Moravia could, at least under favourable circumstances, 82

83 84 85

This is a minefield, however: see the cautions issued by D. Geuenich, ‘Die volkssprachige ¨ Uberlieferung der Karolingerzeit aus der Sicht des Historikers’, Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 39 (1983), pp. 113–16. Note the Byzantine proverb quoted by Einhard, Vita Karoli, c. 16, p. 20: ‘If a Frank is your friend, then he is not your neighbour.’ Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 840, pp. 30–1. On Pippin see Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 859, p. 81 and 864, p. 105; on Hugo see above, n. 50 and Regino, Chronicon, s.a. 885, p. 123; on Carloman and Louis the Younger see Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 861, p. 85 and Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 866, p. 65.

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hope to maintain a clientele among their immediate Frankish neighbours;86 and for disaffected aristocrats or estranged spouses, going into exile across the border was a real possibility.87 The alliance between Nominöe and the Widonid margraves of Brittany is paralleled in the other direction by the ‘Frankicisation’ of the Moravian prince Pribina.88 Such things would not have been possible, or at least would have had to have taken different forms, if both sides had not been playing essentially the same game. One should also look to the nature of Carolingian warfare for an explanation of the differences in the development of east and west Francia. There can be no question that west Francia even after two generations of raiding by Norsemen and Saracens still had a more advanced economy at the end of the ninth century than did east Francia; but this was not reflected in political power. The east Frankish kings were able to impose their will in the settlement of the Lotharingian succession, and to intervene three times in west Francia (if without any very notable success). It was certainly coincidence that the Carolingian kingdoms were reunited under an east Frankish ruler, Charles III; but it is significant that he spent comparatively little time in the west – two or three months at the beginning of his reign there, and rather longer in the following year. His stamping-ground was east Francia, and Alemannia in particular.89 Arnulf’s hegemonial position was not simply due to his being the only post-888 regulus with obviously Carolingian blood, but reflects the military and political superiority of the east Frankish kingdom: it is a pre-echo of the later Ottonian hegemony. This contrast between economic underdevelopment and political superiority will certainly not sustain any monocausal explanation: but one of the underlying reasons was the fact that the east Frankish kingdom was the only one of the three kingdoms produced by the division of Verdun with an open frontier and the consequent possibilities of plundering and tribute-taking.90 These emerge very clearly from a reading of the Annals 86

87

88 89 90

L. Levillain, ‘La marche de Bretagne, ses marquis et ses comtes’, Annales de Bretagne 58 (1951), pp. 89– 117; J. Boussard, ‘Les destins de la Neustrie du IXe au XIe siècle’, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 11 (1968), pp. 15–21; Mitterauer, Markgrafen, pp. 180–1. Die Urkunden der Karolinger, I, p. 251, no. 187: Aio, a Lombard, flees to the Avars; Council of Mainz, 852, c. 12, MGH, Concilia III, p. 248: the case of Albgis, who fled to the Moravians; Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 869, pp. 67–8 (Gundachar) and 899, p. 133 (Isanric), both of whom took refuge with the Moravians. A. C. Sós, Die slawische Bevölkerung Westungarns im 9. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1973), pp. 29–47; H. Wolfram, Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum (Vienna, 1979), pp. 50–7, 129–41. For his itinerary see Böhmer-Mühlbacher, nos. 1,577a–1,765b. For a similar point about Austrasia in the sixth century see R. Collins, ‘Theudebert I, “Magnus rex Francorum”’, in Idea and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society. Studies Presented to J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, eds. P. Wormald et al. (Oxford, 1983), pp. 14–15.


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of Fulda, for example, which record Louis the German as being able to put several armies into the field on more than one occasion;91 and it is in the ninth century that in Germany a new word for slave appears alongside the classical servus, ancillus and mancipium: sclavus.92 Such opportunities were missing in the west. The Spanish frontier, with the consolidation of Islamic power in the ninth century, did not offer the opportunities it had done in the time of Charlemagne and Louis of Aquitaine. Intervention was above all not possible, because Aquitaine itself was only nominally part of Charles the Bald’s kingdom for the first twenty years of his reign.93 Brittany was a poor substitute, and the tribute-payments by Nominöe and Salomon certainly did not compensate in political wealth for the negative balance of payments of the west Frankish kingdom: the Danegeld payments of 845, 853, 860, 862, 865, 877 and 884; the ransom-payments for important magnates like Louis of Saint-Denis in 858 and Roland of Arles in 869 and for towns.94 Viewed in this light, Charles the Bald’s decision to try for the kingdom of Italy and for the imperial title in 875 may seem more rational than it did to Hincmar and has done to most modern historians: it was not just a chance to dress up in Greek togas.95 Such differing opportunities helped to determine the political development of what were to become France and Germany. The Ottonian Reich was in this as in so many other ways a continuation of the Carolingian empire by more or less the same means. What did Henry I do after halting the military decline of east Francia and securing a breathing-pause in the fight against the Hungarians, according to Widukind? ‘He fell upon the Slavs . . . and made them pay 91 92

93

94 95

Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 858, p. 49; 869, p. 68. C. Verlinden, ‘L’origine de sclavus=esclave’, Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi 17 (1943), pp. 97–128, dates this change in Germany to the tenth and eleventh centuries (elsewhere in Europe not until the thirteenth). But see the diploma of Arnulf for Würzburg, Die Urkunden der deutschen Karolinger, ed. P. Kehr, MGH, DD (Berlin, 1940), III, p. 99, no. 66 (889): ‘homines ipsius ecclesiae sive accolas vel sclavos’: vel sclavos is an addition to the text of the Vorurkunde, a charter of Louis the Pious dated 19 December 822 (Böhmer-Mühlbacher, no. 767). The transition can be found in a diploma of Louis the German for Altaich, Die Urkunden der deutschen Karolinger, I, p. 117, no. 80 (857): servos Sclavos vel accolas. L. Auzias, L’Aquitaine carolingienne (778–987) (Toulouse, 1937), pp. 176ff. It was only after 864 that Charles the Bald managed a thorough purge of office-holders in Aquitaine: ibid. pp. 328–60. Cf. also P. Classen, ‘Die Verträge von Verdun und von Coulaines 843 als politische Grundlagen des Westfränkischen Reiches’, HZ 196 (1963), pp. 1–2, 34. The evidence is comprehensively surveyed by E. Joranson, The Danegeld in France, Augustana Library Publications 10 (Rock Island, IL, 1923). Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 876, p. 86; cf. P. E. Schramm, ‘Karl der Kahle’, in Kaiser, Könige und Päpste. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Geschichte des Mittelalters (Stuttgart, 1968), II, pp. 133–4. On the treasures, see above, at n. 17. Hincmar’s criticisms are discussed by J. L. Nelson, ‘The “Annals of St Bertin”’, in Charles the Bald. Court and Kingdom, eds. M. Gibson and J. L. Nelson, British Archaeological Reports, International Series, 101 (Oxford, 1981), p. 26.

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tribute.’96 In the west, the elite turned to other forms of political and military organisation – the principality, the castellany, the beneficed miles. These may seem more ‘progressive’ to us, but they were probably adopted more faute de mieux than in a spirit of progress. The old methods could no longer be made to work. 96

‘Irruit super Bohemos . . . et fecit eos tributarios’: Widukind of Corvey, Rerum gestarum Saxonicarum libri tres, I, c. 35, MGH, SRG (Hannover, 1935), pp. 48–51. On the role of tribute-payments in the political economy of the Ottonian Reich see now K. Leyser, ‘Ottonian government’, EHR 96 (1981), pp. 739–41.

chap t e r 14

The end of Carolingian military expansion

It is a commonplace that the expansion of the Carolingian empire slowed down rapidly after 800 and came to a halt under Louis the Pious. It is also well known that both Charles in the last years of his reign and Louis the Pious experienced difficulty in raising armies. This paper will re-examine these two well-established facts and suggest some explanations, continuing lines of argument already developed in a previous article.1 It may be as well to begin by chronicling the end of expansion. The crushing of the Avars in the 790s was the last really large aggressive military operation conducted by the Carolingians; the final incorporation of the Saxons into the Frankish empire, marked by the peace of Salz in 803 and the de-Saxonization of Transalbingia in the following year, brought to an end what Einhard rightly described as the most serious of all the wars fought by the Franks.2 In the period between 802/3 and the crisis of 830 there was intermittent warfare on a number of fronts: in the south-west against the Muslims of Spain and the Basques; in the north-west against the Bretons; in the north-east against the Danes and their Slav allies; in the south-east against the Serbs and the Bulgars; and in Italy against the Byzantines and Beneventans. In addition there were invasion scares in the 800s on the north French coast, real invasions in southern Italy and Frisia, and skirmishes in the Mediterranean islands.3 1 2

3

T. Reuter, ‘Plunder and Tribute in the Carolingian Empire’, TRHS 5th ser. 35 (1985), pp. 75–94, esp. pp. 87ff. [in this book, chapter 13, above]. For the Avars see J. Deér, ‘Karl der Große und der Untergang des Awarenreiches’, in H. Beumann ed., Karl der Große: Persönlichkeit und Geschichte (Düsseldorf, 1965), I, pp. 719–91. On the end of the Saxon wars see M. Lintzel, ‘Der Sachsenfrieden Karls des Großen’, Ausgewählte Schriften (East Berlin, 1961), I, pp. 175–98; A. Jenkis, ‘Die Eingliederung Nordalbingiens in das Frankenreich’, Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Schleswig-Holsteinische Geschichte 78 (1955), pp. 81–104; Einhard, Vita Karoli, c. 7, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SRG, p. 9. Detailed references are unnecessary here; they may be found in S. Abel and B. von Simson, Jahrbücher des fränkischen Reiches unter Karl dem Großen, II (Leipzig, 1883), and B. von Simson, Jahrbücher des fränkischen Reiches unter Ludwig dem Frommen, I (Leipzig, 1874). For military affairs during the last

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Summed up like this there is no apparent difference – except for the invasions, real and threatened – between the period 802–30 and what had gone before, but a closer look reveals a rather different picture. In the nearly ninety years between the accession of Charles Martel and the conclusion of peace with the Saxons the Franks took the field virtually every year, in most cases with what appears to have been a major army led by the mayor of the palace or the king.4 Moreover, campaigning was almost invariably carried out on enemy territory, either as punitive or tribute-taking raids or as expeditions of conquest. After 800 we have very little of this. The war against Byzantium in Italy was inconclusive. The campaigns to extend the Frankish conquests south of the Pyrenees were also not particularly successful. Some historians have seen the campaigns against the Slavs of 805–8 as a continuation of previous Frankish expansion, but the Annales regni Francorum suggest that these expeditions were not very rewarding; certainly the next we hear of the Bohemians is in 845, when fourteen of their leaders submitted to Louis the German in Regensburg, evidently in the hope that this would give them some protection against the threat from the emergent Moravian empire.5 This does not suggest that the young Charles had established any firm hold over them in his campaigns. Only the Breton campaigns of 818 and 824 show something of the flavour of eighth-century Frankish campaigning, largely because we have a lengthy panegyric account of them by Ermoldus Nigellus. Otherwise what we find are mostly ad hoc responses of a defensive nature to external threats; and these were not confined to hard-pressed frontier commanders. In 810–11 Charles heard a rumour that Godafrid, the Danish ruler, was about to invade. He collected a large army and ‘castris positis minarum Godofridi regis praestolatur eventum’, to quote the Annales regni Francorum.6 Whereas in 795 the news of internal strife among the Avars had been the signal for the Franks’ final onslaught on their Balkan empire,7 there was no such reaction to the civil war following Godafrid’s assassination in 812. The Annales regni

4

5

6

years of Charles’s reign see also F. L. Ganshof, ‘The Last Period of Charlemagne’s Reign: A Study in Decomposition’, The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy (London, 1971), pp. 241–3. The chronology of the campaigning in the 720s still needs to be established; the reports in the early annals are contradictory. For later years there was apparently no campaigning in the crucial period 749–51, when the change of dynasty was being carried through, nor in 759 or 790. For both the latter years the revised version of the Annales regni Francorum, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SRG, pp. 17, 87 – for 790 see also the original version, ibid. p. 86 – notes explicitly that no expedition was mounted. Annales Fuldenses, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SRG, p. 35. M. Hellmann, ‘Karl und die slawische Welt zwischen Ostsee und Böhmerwald’, in Karl der Große (as n. 2), pp. 717–18, thought that these campaigns led to the submission of the Bohemians and cited Einhard, Vita Karoli, ch. 15, as evidence, but in view of the silence of Frankish sources between 807 and 845 this seems doubtful. 7 De´ Ed. Kurze, p. 131. er, ‘Untergang’ (as n. 2), pp. 765–6.


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Francorum record with great interest the ups and downs of the various factions among the Danish royal house but show that the Franks were reluctant to undertake any military intervention even on behalf of friendly exiles; on the one occasion when a show of strength was mounted, in 815, it was a very half-hearted one.8 Again, border disputes had played a major role in both the Saxon and Avar wars – or at least in the consciousness of the Frankish historians who recorded them – and the contrast between the Frankish responses of 772–8 or 791 to Saxon and Avar threats on the one hand9 and Louis the Pious’s reaction to identical threats from the Bulgar khan in the 820s is striking. The first reaction to the Bulgarian embassy of 824 demanding a settlement of the border question was one of alarm: ‘Quos ille [Louis] cum audisset ac litteras, quae adlatae fuerant, legisset, rei novitate non inmerito permotus ad explorandum diligentius insolitae et numquam prius in Franciam venientis legationis causam Machelmum quendam de Baioaria cum ipsis legatis ad memoratum regem Bulgarorum direxit.’10 In the following years the Franks could neither bring themselves to negotiate a peace settlement nor to take the offensive, and were prepared to clutch at straws such as the rumour that the khan had died. In view of this the catastrophe of 827, when the frontier commander Balderich failed to prevent a Bulgar army from devastating parts of Pannonia, is not surprising. It would seem that the margraves had instructions to do nothing without clearing it with the court first.11 It would be worth considering whether a similar restraint lay behind the apparent reluctance of Hugh of Tours and Matfrid of Orleans to reach the south-western front with their army on time in 828, though here tensions within the Frankish elite will also have lain behind the accusations of sloth and cowardice made against them.12 8 9

10 11 12

Ed. Kurze, pp. 137, 138–9, 141–2. Annales regni Francorum (revised version), s.a. 790, ed. Kurze, p. 87: ‘Agebatur inter eos [the Franks and the Avar ambassadors] de confiniis regnorum suorum, quibus in locis esse deberent. Haec contentio atque altercatio belli, quod postea cum Hunis gestum est, seminarium et origo fuit’; Einhard, c. 7, p. 9: ‘Suberant et causae, quae cotidie pacem conturbare poterant, termini videlicet nostri et illorum [the Saxons’] poene ubique in plano contiguis.’ Both Einhard and the reviser of the Annales regni Francorum were looking back on these events with the consciousness of a time when defence of the frontiers had become the major military priority of the Carolingian empire, and we should not too readily assume that Charles and his contemporaries saw the Saxon and Avar wars in the same way. However, Deér, ‘Untergang’ (as n. 2), pp. 755–8, 784, has shown that at least for the Avars the border dispute did indeed lie behind the outbreak of hostilities; and there is no doubt about the nature of the Frankish response to the challenges. Annales regni Francorum, ed. Kurze, p. 164. For Franco-Bulgar relations in the 820s cf. von Simson, Ludwig der Fromme, pp. 223, 235–6, 253, 277, with full references. Ibid. p. 276 with n. 3.

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If we turn from the narrative to the legal sources we find a defensive attitude already apparent in the Divisio regnorum of 806, where Charles’s three sons are urged to be content with the portions granted them and to defend them against external attack,13 and it is seen still more clearly in the Ordinatio imperii of 817, which imposes serious restrictions on the freedom of Lothar’s brothers and sub-kings to wage war; only in response to invasion were they to act on their own initiative.14 The capitularies also show a quite new interest in defensive measures after 800. Boats are to be built and manned and arrangements for a coastal watch put into force.15 There is a new emphasis on securing the borders, and it appears to be in Charles’s last years and under Louis that a systematic attempt was made to garrison the frontiers by giving vassi dominici benefices there.16 Further evidence for an increasing defensive-mindedness after 800 can be found in a different kind of capitulary provision, that which lays down that all are to be prepared to fight as soon as the summons comes. This occurs first in the so-called Programmatic Capitulary of 802 in a provision whose significance is not immediately apparent but clarified by later repetitions in a more explicit context.17 It is evident that the kind of fighting expected here 13

14

15

16

17

MGH Capit. I, p. 127, no. 45, prologue: ‘eo videlicet modo, ut sua quisque portione contentus iuxta ordinationem nostram, et fines regni sui qui ad alienigenas extenduntur cum Dei adiutorio nitatur defendere, et pacem atque caritatem cum fratre custodire.’ Ibid. pp. 271–2, no. 136, chs. 6, 8 and esp. ch. 7: ‘Item volumus ut nec pacem nec bellum contra exteras et huic a Deo conservato imperio inimicas nationes absque consilio et consensu senioris fratris [Lothar] ullatenus suscipere praesumant. Impetum vero ostium subito insurgentium vel repentinas incursiones iuxta vires per se repellere studeant.’ See on this H. Sproemberg, ‘Die Seepolitik Karls des Großen’, Beiträge zur belgisch–nederländischen Geschichte, Forschungen zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte, 3 (East Berlin, 1959), pp. 1–29, esp. pp. 20–4. Cf. MGH Capit. I, Capitulare Baiwaricum (?803), ch. 9, p. 159, no. 69: ‘Ut marca nostra secundum quod ordinatum vel scaritum habemus custodiant una cum missis nostris’; Capitulare missorum Italicum (802–10), cc. 3, 8, p. 206, no. 99; Capitula cum primis conferenda (808), c. 9, p. 139, no. 51: ‘De marcha nostra custodienda terra marique’; Capitula tractanda cum comitibus episcopis et abbatibus (811), c. 2, p. 161, no. 71: ‘Quae causae efficiunt, ut unus alteri adiutorium praestare nolit, sive in marcha sive in exercitu ubi aliquid utilitatis defensione patriae facere debet’; Capitula missorum (821), cc. 4, 5, pp. 300–1, no. 148. Here and henceforth dates of capitularies which do not correspond to those of the edn by Boretius and Krause are taken from the table in F. L. Ganshof, Was waren die Kapitularien? (Weimar, 1961), pp. 162–73. Capitulare missorum generale (802), c. 24, MGH Capit. I, p. 97, no. 33: ‘Ut omnes pleniter bene parati sint, quandocunque iussio nostra vel annuntiatio advenerit’, repeated in the accompanying Capitularia missorum specialia, ed. W. A. Eckhardt, ‘Die Capitula missorum specialia von 802’, DA 12 (1956), p. 502; Capitula cum primis constituta (803), c. 1, MGH Capit. I, p. 139, no. 52: ‘De marcha ad praevidendum: unusquisque paratus sit illuc festinanter venire, quandocumque necessitas fuerit’; Capitula per episcopos et comites nota facienda (802–13), c. 3, MGH Capit. I, p. 141, no. 54: ‘Ut omnes praeparati sint ad Dei servitium et ad nostram utilitatem, quandoquidem missus aut epistola nostra venerit, ut statim nobiscum venire faciatis.’ See also the letter issued by Louis and Lothar in 828, below, n. 42. In Charles the Bald’s reign we have frequent exhortations to this effect, e.g. in the


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is the repelling of invaders – offensive campaigns could be planned at more leisure. Ganshof and Werner have drawn attention to the way in which Charles and Louis sought to increase the rapidity with which troops could be mobilized, making use of the missatica to do so; in view of the emphasis on preparedness in the capitularies of Charles’s reign I am inclined to agree with Werner against Ganshof that these changes were not first introduced under Louis.18 But in either case it is clear that here too the context is one of defence (or internal danger – the method first appears clearly in the crisis following Bernard’s rebellion in 817) and not of a war of conquest. At the same time as these indications of a defensive attitude begin to mount up in the sources, we also find provisions which seem to show that Charles and Louis were finding it increasingly hard to raise armies. The complaints and provisions are familiar, and need only be briefly rehearsed: men seek to escape their military obligations by commendation or entry into the Church;19 others simply refuse to serve;20 those who do serve are badly armed and provisioned;21 in order to distribute the burden more justly, those owning less than a minimum amount of land or other property are to club together to support one fighting-man.22 All this has been taken to show that the Franks had finally become war-weary and were no longer able to

18

19

20 21 22

Capitulare missorum Silvacense (853), c. 10, MGH Capit. II, p. 273, no. 260, or the Edictum Pistense (864), addendum, c. 1, MGH Capit. II, p. 328; there are also references in the narrative sources to such a state of readiness, e.g. Annales Bertiniani, eds. F. Grat, J. Vielliard and S. Clémencet (Paris, 1964), s.a. 867, p. 136. The key reference is a passage in a letter from Hetti of Trier to Frothar of Toul, MGH Epp. V, p. 277, no. 2: ‘Notum sit tibi, quia terribile imperium ad nos pervenit domni imperatoris, ut omnibus notum faceremus, qui in nostra legacione manere videntur, quatenus huniversi se praeparent, qualiter proficisci valeant ad bellum in Italiam’; Frothar is to instruct all the counts, abbots, abbesses, royal vassals, ‘vel cuncto populo . . . quibus convenit miliciam regiae potestati exhibere’, that they should all be ready to leave for battle at half a day’s notice. Cf. F. L. Ganshof, Frankish Institutions under Charlemagne (Providence, RI, 1968), pp. 63–4; K. F. Werner, ‘Missus – marchio – comes: Entre l’administration centrale et l’administration locale de l’Empire carolingien’, in W. Paravicini and K. F. Werner eds., Histoire comparée de l’administration (IVe –XVIIIe siècles) (Munich, 1980), pp. 191– 239, p. 115 with n. 25. Statuta Rhispacensia, Frisingensia, Salisburgensia (799/800), c. 44, MGH Capit. I, p. 230, no. 112, where the problem is clearly much the same as that attacked by Bede in his letter to Egbert of York; Capitulare missorum in Theodonis villa datum secundum, generale (805), c. 15, MGH Capit. I, p. 125, no. 44; Capitulare Olonnense mundanum (825), c. 2, MGH Capit. I, p. 330, no. 165. Capitula de rebus exercitalibus in placito tractanda (811), c. 6, MGH Capit. I, p. 165, no. 73. Capitulare Aquisgranens (801–13), c. 9, MGH Capit. I, p. 171, no. 77; Capitulare missorum in Theodonis villa datum secundum, generale (805), c. 6, MGH Capit. I, p. 123, no. 44. MGH Capit. I: Capitula de causis diversis (806), c. 2, p. 136, no. 49; Memoratorium de exercitu in Gallia occidentali praeparando (807), c. 2, p. 134, no. 48; Capitulare missorum de exercituo promovendo (808), c. 1, p. 137, no. 50; Capitula de expeditione Corsicana (825), c. 3, p. 325, no. 162; Capitulare Olonnense mundanum (825), c. 1, p. 329, no. 165. MGH Capit. II: Capitula ab episcopis in placito tractanda (829), c. 7, p. 7, no. 186; Capitula missorum (829), c. 5, p. 10, no. 188; Capitulum pro lege habendum Wormatiense (829), c. 7, pp. 19–20, no. 193.

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carry on the military effort at its eighth-century level.23 If this interpretation is correct, then the end of Carolingian expansion was predestined. But is it correct? It rests essentially on the assumption that Carolingian armies still depended to a significant extent on the kind of military service referred to in these capitularies, namely a Volksaufgebot (general summons) of free men. We need not enter here into a discussion of the question whether ‘free men’, the liberi or Franci homines of the sources, is a term which denotes all free men or only a specific group, the so-called liberi regis, whose ‘freedom’ was the outcome of their direct dependence on the king, to whom they owed census and other obligations including military service. If the latter theory in its extreme form were tenable then it would affect the outcome of the argument, but though there evidently were people in the Frankish empire who correspond more or less to the idea of the liberi regis as developed by Mayer, Dannenbauer and others, the idea that the capitularies meant such men only cannot be sustained.24 There are two aspects to the question of service: whether it was due from all free men or only from those with a certain minimum of property; and under what circumstances it was due. The first aspect was discussed extensively by an earlier generation of legal and constitutional historians, and the discussion has recently been revived; of necessity, however, it has been inconclusive, since there is no evidence one way or the other.25 The second question, that of the circumstances 23 24

25

So e.g. E. Müller-Mertens, Karl der Große, Ludwig der Fromme und die Freien, Forschungen zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte, 10 (East Berlin, 1963), pp. 129–30, 140–1. Though the term liberi regis is frequently used in scholarly discussion it should be noted that it is a term of art and does not occur in the primary sources. The theory was first advanced by T. Mayer, notably in ‘Königtum und Gemeinfreiheit im frühen Mittelalter’, Mittelalterliche Studien (Lindau, 1959; article first publ. 1943), pp. 139–63, and ‘Die Königsfreien und der Staat des frühen Mittelalters’, Das Problem der Freiheit in der deutschen und schweizerischen Geschichte, Vorträge und Forschungen, 2 (Constance, 1955), pp. 7–56, and by H. Dannenbauer, ‘Die Freien im karolingischen Heer’, Grundlagen der mittelalterlichen Welt (Stuttgart, 1958), pp. 240–64, and ‘Königsfreie und Ministerialen’, ibid. pp. 329–53. For criticisms see, in chronological order, Müller-Mertens, Die Freien (as n. 23), passim; H. Krause, ‘Die liberi der lex Baiuvariorum’, in D. Albrecht et al. eds., Festschrift für Max Spindler (Munich, 1969), pp. 41–73; H. K. Schulze, ‘Rodungsfreiheit und Königsfreiheit: Zu Genese und Kritik neuerer verfassungsrechtlicher Theorien’, HZ 219 (1974), pp. 529–50; J. Schmitt, Untersuchungen zu den Liberi Homines der Karolingerzeit, Europäische Hochschulschriften, 3rd ser. 85 (Berne, 1977), passim. There is a convenient summary of the debate in English by F. Staab, ‘A Reconsideration of the Ancestry of Modern Political Liberty: The Problem of the So-Called “King’s Freemen” (Königsfreie)’, Viator 11 (1980), pp. 51–69. On the controversy between Waitz and Roth on this question see the trenchant comment by A. Boretius, Beiträge zur Kapitularienkritik (Leipzig, 1874), p. 72: ‘Einen directen Beweis ermöglichen die Quellen weder für die Grundauffassung von Roth [who argued that all men were obliged to serve regardless of their wealth], noch die von Waitz [who argued that in the Frankish period there was always a property qualification].’ Much more recently B. S. Bachrach, Merovingian Military Organization, 451–751 (Minneapolis MI, 1972), pp. 65–9, has posited a property qualification, referring to the ‘eloquent silence of the Frankish law codes’ on universal obligation and arguing from


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under which service was due, though it has not escaped attention, has been somewhat neglected. In my view it is far more important. Leaving aside the question of who the free men were and whether there was a property qualification for military service, in what circumstances could a Frankish ruler call on all free men – or all qualified free men – for military service? The Merovingian evidence is, to put it mildly, difficult to interpret. The legal sources are almost silent. The Merovingian formularies have no reference to military service as such except for one rather ambiguous example in the Formulae Andecavenses – a significant contrast to the Carolingian period.26 The Merovingian diploma which mentions payment of a 60 (or 600?) shilling fine by the ‘homo Ibbo’ for non-performance of military service also does not tell us on what grounds the service was due, but Ibbo was evidently a man of substantial means, as the diploma records his sale of lands to the abbey of Saint-Denis in order to pay the fine.27 He was certainly no ordinary freeman, and may well have been a commended follower of Childebert. The law-codes tell us little: the army is occasionally mentioned in Lex Salica and Lex Ribuaria, but only as the context, not as the object of a provision.28 The narrative sources do not tell us much about the composition of armies: we can do little with phrases like collecto

26

27 28

Formulae Andecavenses, no. 37 (see n. 26), that there was selection; against this see M. Weidemann, Kulturgeschichte der Merowingerzeit nach den Werken Gregors von Tours (Mainz, 1982), II, p. 250 with n. 29, who points out that although members of all social groupings are found in armies in the sixth century, this is not enough to establish a general obligation to military service but that on the other hand Bachrach’s theory of a property qualification also lacks concrete evidence. Formulae Andecavenses, no. 37, ed. K. Zeumer, MGH Formulae, p. 16, concerns a gift by a father to his son in return for the fact that the son was ‘in utilitate domnorum partibus Britannici seu Wasconici austiliter ordine ad specie mea’; this tells us nothing about why the father paid for his son’s service, or why the son had to perform it. For Carolingian exemptions from heribannus in the formularies see Cartae Senonicae, no. 19, ibid. p. 193); Formulae Salicae Merkelianae, no. 41, ibid. pp. 256–7); Collectio Pataviensis, no. 3, ibid. pp. 457–8). None of these are earlier than the early years of Charles’s reign. MGH DD I, p. 61, no. 68 (Childebert III for St-Denis, 695). The army occurs in the following passages in the Frankish law-codes: Pactus Legis Salicae, c. 26, 1, MGH Leges Nationum Germanicarum IV, i, p. 96: ‘Si quis alienum letum, qui apud domino suo in hoste fuerit . . . dimiserit’; c. 63, 1, ibid. p. 229: ‘Si quis hominem ingenuum’ (C-MSS: hominem) ‘in hoste . . . occiderit’; Lex Salica, c. 37 (D- and E-MSS: 36), MGH Leges Nationum Germanicarum IV, ii, p. 77, is essentially Pactus, c. 26; Lex Salica, c. 71 (72) is Pactus, c. 63, as is Lex Ribuaria, c. 66, 1, MGH Leges Nationum Germanicarum III, ii, p. 118, which like the C-MSS of the Pactus omits the word ‘ingenuus’. Lex Ribuaria, c. 69, 3, ibid. p. 121, has ‘Si quis autem post fide facta sacramentum in hoste bannitus fuerit . . .’. The most significant passage is Lex Ribuaria, c. 68, 1, ibid. p. 119: ‘Si quis legibus in utilitatem regis sive in hoste seu in reliquam utilitatem bannitus fuerit et minime adimpleverit, si egritudo eum non detenuerit, sexaginta solidos multetur’; c. 2 lays down a 30 solidi fine for the ‘Romanus aut regius seu ecclesiasticus homo’ who commits the same offence. This is clearly the 60s. heribannus of Carolingian times; but the law-codes do not tell us what ‘legibus . . . bannitus’ (lawfully summoned) means, and this is precisely the point at issue here.

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exercitu or iubet exercitum movere.29 It is true that they sometimes equate populus with exercitus, but we cannot translate populus by Volk or ‘people’ in the way that Waitz and Brunner were prepared to do: the word is much too ambiguous.30 There are some pointers, however. There is no evidence for a Heerschau, a mustering of all the people in arms. That is not to say that Levillain and Bachrach are correct in arguing that campus Martis or Martius was simply the term for the place where the army assembled, with no temporal connotation.31 There is a good reason to suppose that in the Frankish empire in the seventh and early eighth centuries there was a normal expectation that an assembly would be held on 1 March; but this assembly, though it had a military function, was an assembly of optimates, so far as we can see.32 The most helpful indication lies in the geographical or ethnic names sometimes included in the descriptions of armies which the narrative sources occasionally offer us. These fall into two classes: ‘gentile’ or regional – ‘the Burgundians’, ‘the Austrasians’ – where major armies are being raised for expeditions across the border, and pagus-based – ‘the men of Tours’, ‘the men of Auxerre’ – for small defensive operations against rebellious dukes, Merovingian pretenders and border incursions.33 In other words, where the pagenses – that group of free men who play a significant role in Merovingian and Carolingian courts34 – are most clearly the group summoned to military service, the military service required is local and not a war of conquest. This of course need not mean that where the army is 29

30

31

32 33

34

See G. Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, 8 vols. in 9 (Berlin, 1880–96), II, ii, p. 207 n. 2, and Weidemann, Kulturgeschichte, II, pp. 238–52, who cite a large number of passages from Gregory of Tours, Fredegar and other authors. See e.g. Waitz, Verfassungsgeschichte, II, ii, p. 205: ‘Das Heer ist eben nur das Volk, eine Heerversammlung muß auch als eine Volksversammlung angesehen werden’, though Waitz displays a refreshing common sense about how far the whole people really participated. On populus see K. F. Werner, ‘Important Noble Families in the Reign of Charlemagne’, in T. Reuter ed. and trans., The Medieval Nobility (Amsterdam, 1979), pp. 137–8 with n. 1. L. Levillain, ‘Campus Martius’, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des chartes 107 (1947–8), pp. 62–8; B. S. Bachrach, ‘Was the Marchfield Part of the Frankish Constitution?’, Mediaeval Studies 36 (1974), pp. 178–85. I intend to deal with the problem of the campus Martis/Martius elsewhere. A distinction already noted by Waitz, Verfassungsgeschichte, II, ii, pp. 215–16; the evidence is conveniently assembled by Bachrach, Military Organization, p. 66 n. 58 and Weidemann, Kulturgeschichte, II, pp. 240, 242. On the connection between military and court service see the two articles by H. Fehr, ‘Landfolge und Gerichtsfolge im fränkischen Recht: Ein Beitrag zur Lehre vom fränkischen Untertanenverband’, Festgabe für Rudolf Sohm dargebracht zum goldenen Doktorjubiläum von Freunden, Schülern und Verehrern (Munich, 1914), pp. 389–427, and ‘Das Waffenrecht der Bauern im Mittelalter’, ZRG, GA 35 (1914), pp. 111–211, esp. pp. 122–4, though his work suffers from the systematizing and abstracting tendencies characteristic of legal historians of the period.


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given a gentile or regional name it did not in fact consist of an agglomeration of contingents drawn from a number of pagi; nevertheless, it is for a number of reasons unlikely that this was normally the case.35 In the first place, there are one or two passages in Fredegar where it is quite clearly stated that it is the leudes of a ‘tribal’ territory who are summoned,36 and this seems highly likely in other cases. Charles’s Spanish campaign of 778, for example, included an army ‘de partibus . . . Baioariae’: in view of the strained relations between the Carolingians and Agilolfings at this time it seems improbable that the Bavarian army could have been a levy of free men from Bavaria, but it is not at all difficult to visualize a substantial contingent from among the pro-Frankish members of the Bavarian aristocracy.37 In the second place it is very hard to see how armies raised on such a basis could possibly have functioned. Werner has rightly argued that we should not assume a priori that barbarian armies must have been small,38 but he does not suppose that all the pagenses from, say, Burgundy or Austrasia were ever summoned. Yet nowhere in the sources for the Merovingian or early Carolingian period is there anything which looks like a possible selection mechanism. Even selection on the basis of a property qualification would still have produced very large armies, and there is any case no hard evidence for it. It will not do simply to take the capitulary provisions of the period 800–30 and project them indefinitely into the Frankish past.39 These first hints at a division between offensive warfare conducted by picked troops who stood in a special relationship to the king and defensive warfare for which there was something like a general call-up are immediately confirmed when we examine the Carolingian evidence. I begin with the most explicit statement on the subject, which occurs in a small collection 35 36

37 38

39

Weidemann, Kulturgeschichte, II, p. 245, points out that nowhere in the sixth century is there any indication of such larger armies being subdivided into pagus-contingents under a comes. Waitz, Verfassungsgeschichte, II, ii, pp. 221 n. 3, 222 n. 2; I cannot follow Waitz when he states, commenting on these passages, that there was no essential difference in this period between a summoning of the leudes and a summoning of the whole populus. For relations between Tassilo and Charles at this time see K. Reindel, ‘Baiern im Karolingerreich’, in Karl der Große (as n. 2), I, p. 222 and n. 14. K. F. Werner, ‘Heeresorganisation und Kriegführung im deutschen Königreich des 10. und 11. Jahrhunderts’, Settimane di studio 15 (1968), pp. 813–22. In his (justifiable) polemic against the views of Lot and Delbrück he seems to me to go too far, however: even if divided into several columns, an army of 15,000–20,000 cavalry with a corresponding number of infantry and followers, which he posits for the largest Carolingian military operations (ibid. 821), would have been two or three times larger than the largest town north of the Alps in the eighth and ninth centuries, and have presented insurmountable logistic problems. Pace Ganshof, Frankish Institutions, p. 61. H. Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, 2nd edn by C. Freiherr von Schwerin (Munich, 1928), II, p. 271, begs the question when he states of the Frankish period in general: ‘Die Grundsätze, nach denen im Falle des einzelnen Aufgebotes die Wehrpflichtigen heranzuziehen seien, bestimmte der König.’

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of capitulary texts dealing with military matters found in two manuscripts but which was edited by Baluze, Pertz and Boretius rather unexpectedly in a footnote to the acta of the first meeting at Meerssen:40 Et quia in hostem aut propter terram defendendam aut propter terram adquirendam itur, de lantweri, id est de patriae defensione, non aliter secundum istum modum in lege aut in capitulis imperatorum scriptum habemus, nisi in anterioribus capitulis de pauperibus Francis, qui, si non habent, unde heribannum persolvant, ut se in servitium regis tradant, et tamdiu in eodem servitio maneant, usque dum ille heribannus fiat persolutus . . . Similiter in posterioribus capitulis de pauperibus Francis ibidem scriptum invenimus, ut unusquisque comes describat, quanti sint in suo comitatu, qui per se hostem facere non possunt, ut alios adfanniant, sicut ibi scriptum est.

The general service laid down in the capitularies as being required of liberi homines, according to this capitulum, was Landwehr.41 This interpretation is suggested by other capitulary evidence as well. Louis the Pious and Lothar laid down in 828 that all those who were ‘exercitalis itineris debitores’ were to be ready to fight as soon as summoned, ‘quia undique inimicos sanctae Dei ecclesiae commoveri et regnum a Deo nobis commissum infestare velle cognoscimus’; at the same time they were asking their missi to draw up lists of those available for service either in person or as contributors to the service of another.42 Lothar I had already made the distinction in Italian capitularies.43 The most telling evidence is also the earliest: a capitulary of 806 lays down that if the Saxons are to fight on the Spanish border or in Pannonia, one in six shall fight; if against the Bohemians, one in three; only against the Sorbs, ‘si . . . patria defendenda necessitas fuerit’, are all to fight. Two things should here be noted. First, only in the event of defensio patriae were all obliged to fight. Second, the Saxons’ patria 40

41

42 43

Conventus apud Marsniam primus (847), MGH Capit. II, p. 71 n. *, from MSS Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 4628 A (tenth-century, from Saint-Denis) and 10758 (ninth-century, from SaintRémi, Reims). For a description of the latter MS see W. A. Eckhardt, ‘Die von Baluze benutzten Handschriften der Kapitularien-Sammlungen’, Mélanges offerts par ses confrères étrangers a` Charles Braibant (Brussels, 1959), pp. 129–33. Dannenbauer, ‘Freien im karolingischen Heer’, p. 243, also pointed to the importance of defensio patriae, but his argument was lost to sight in the course of the criticisms brought to bear on the Königsfreie theory. Fehr, ‘Landfolge und Gerichtsfolge’, p. 392, argued that ‘propter terram adquirendam’ is to be translated as ‘um . . . verloren gegangenes Staatsgebiet zurückzugewinnen’, and hence that both forms of warfare mentioned at the beginning of the passage were defensio patriae. If this were so, however, it would be difficult to see why the distinction between terram defendendam and terram adquirendam should need to be made at all. Hludowici et Hlotharii epistola generalis (828), MGH Capit. II, p. 5, no. 185 (A-version); for the instructions to the missi see above, n. 22. Memoria Olonnae comitibus data (822–3), c. 18, MGH Capit. I, p. 319, no. 158, cited below, n. 46; Capitulare Olonnense mundanum (825), c. 4, MGH Capit. I, p. 330, no. 165.


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was Saxony. Here we have the nub of the matter. The traditional duty of Landwehr was not appropriate for a Großreich, where a dangerous attack could be many miles away from the relatively restricted area which each man considered his patria.44 In view of the fact that the provisions about free men clubbing together almost always occur in times of a real or perceived acute threat to the Frankish empire,45 and in view of the fact that no selection mechanism can be shown to have existed before 800, it would seem that these provisions were not an attempt to lighten the burden of military service for those who had in the course of years of campaigning become too impoverished to be able to bear it. On the contrary, they were an attempt to extend a traditional obligation to make it more workable and useful in the context of a greatly enlarged empire and of a defensive military posture. Here a rather later provision in the Edict of Pˆıtres is very suggestive: clearly in the context of defensive warfare against the Vikings Charles the Bald lays down that those who cannot support the burden of military service are to do guard-duty and bridge-building, and those who fail to do so are to pay the ban of 60 shillings, but at the same time ‘ad defensionem patriae omnes sine ulla excusatione veniant . . . et qui ad defensionem patriae non occurrerint, secundum antiquam consuetudinem et capitulorum constitutionem iudicentur’, meaning that they should suffer the death penalty.46 Here we have a clear distinction between defensio patriae in the narrower and in the wider sense. A similar distinction is to be found in my view in the much-discussed capitulary dealing with the raising of an army from the region between the Seine and the Loire in 807.47 This opens with the words: ‘Memoratorium qualiter ordinavimus propter famis inopiam, ut de ultra Sequane omnes exercitare debeant.’ With Boretius I take this to mean that ‘because of the famine we have ordered [exceptionally] 44

45 46

47

On patria see Fehr, ‘Landfolge und Gerichtsfolge’, pp. 419–27, and the remarks by K. F. Werner, ‘Hludovicus Augustus: Gouverner l’empire chrétien – idées et réalités’, in P. Godman and R. Collins eds., Charlemagne’s Heir (Oxford, 1990), pp. 3–124, at pp. 25, 98. Reuter, ‘Plunder and Tribute’, pp. 89–90. Edictum Pistense (864), c. 27, MGH Capit. II, pp. 321–2, no. 273. Fehr, ‘Landfolge und Gerichtsfolge’, pp. 393–4, interprets the passage as meaning that all free men were obliged to perform defensio patriae, but only those free men not otherwise excused were obliged to do military service. This cannot be the case, since those who were excused from service were also excused from contributions; cf. the formulae cited above, n. 26. For the penalty envisaged cf. Memoria Olonnae comitibus data (822), c. 18, MGH Capit. I, pp. 319–20, no. 158: ‘Quicumque enim liber homo aut a comite suo admonitus aut ad [sic] ministris eius ad patriam defendendam ire neglexerit, et exercitus supervenerit ad istius regni vastationem vel contrarietatem fidelium nostrorum, capitale subiaceat sententiam’; if they are summoned and the attack does not take place then they are to pay ‘secundum legem suam’, which presumably means a wergeld-payment rather than the 60s. ban. Memoratorium de exercitu in Gallia occidentali praeparando (807), MGH Capit. I, pp. 134–5, no. 48.

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that all from beyond the Seine should do military service’; in other words, this was not normally expected.48 The question of military obligation is important for our understanding of the so-called ‘Freienpolitik’ of Charles and Louis the Pious, which has been the object of much recent discussion.49 This is a topic in itself, but it should be pointed out here that whatever the language used by Charles and Louis while they tried to protect the pauperes liberi homines they were not simply being guided by their sense of the duty of a Christian emperor. Their aims were highly utilitarian and it is no accident that like the Merovingians they refer to utilitas regis in this context.50 There is no reason to suppose that they wanted to pursue an egalitarian policy of treating all free men as equals before the law.51 The idea that they did rests essentially on a phrase in a set of instructions to a missus which has been persistently taken out of context: ‘non est amplius nisi liber aut servus’.52 Taken in context, this does not mean that the only legal categories recognized by Charles and Louis were those of free and unfree: the phrase concludes an answer to a specific question by the missus about the status of the children of a marriage between parents of different status and with different lords, and means what it says, namely that the children must be either free or unfree. But there is also no reason to suppose that Charles and Louis aimed on general grounds at preventing the mediatization of the small free man in order to preserve royal power against that of the aristocracy; they apparently had no objection to free men having lords, provided that they continued to be available for military service.53 Their interest stemmed from the changed situation in which the Carolingian empire found itself, and it is to this that we must now return. If the interpretation just offered of the nature of general military obligation in the Carolingian empire is correct, then it would seem that the shift to a defensive posture in the decades following Charles’s imperial coronation preceded and produced the new interest in the service due from liberi homines. It was not precipitated by the increasing difficulties encountered 48 49 50 51

52 53

Boretius, Beiträge, pp. 102–3; against this interpretation see Waitz, Verfassungsgeschichte, IV, p. 558 n. 4. See the refs. above, n. 24. See e.g. the capitularies cited above, nn. 16 and 17; for Merovingian usage cf. above, n. 28. For the interpretation of the phrase as an expression of Charles’s Ständepolitik see e.g. MüllerMertens, Die Freien, p. 60 (as n. 23); J. Fleckenstein, ‘Adel und Kriegertum und ihre Wandlung im Karolingerzeit’, Settimane di studio 27 (1981), pp. 67–94, at p. 73. Responsa misso cuidam data (802–13), c. 1, MGH Capit. I, p. 145, no. 58. MGH Capit. I: Capitulare missorum de exercitu promovendo (808), c. 1, p. 137, no. 50; Capitulare Bononiense (811), c. 9, p. 167, no. 74; Concessio generalis (823), c. 3, p. 321, no. 159.


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in enforcing such service. It follows that if explanations for the end of Carolingian expansion are possible at all, they are to be sought elsewhere than in war-weariness. Curiously enough, historians have not speculated very deeply about why Carolingian expansion should have stopped precisely when it did. Some simply take the end as given.54 Others have pointed to the increasing difficulty of holding together a Großreich and the dangers of indefinite expansion,55 or to Charles’s imperial coronation, the new sense of responsibilities which ensued, and the need for consolidation.56 Any explanation one may offer has to take into account the fact that the end of expansion was evidently a conscious decision. The capitulary evidence reviewed above makes this very clear. And it was not simply a question of personalities. Even if Charles was old and Louis interested in other things, that did not of itself entail the end of expansion. One of the measures of the power of a Frankish king was the extent to which he could leave others to do his fighting and war-leading for him; by these standards both Charles and Louis were very powerful indeed. If we look elsewhere for explanations, then a number of possibilities immediately suggest themselves. The first is one of consciousness: that Charles and Louis distinguished between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ expansion. By 814 the Carolingian empire included virtually everything which had ever been part of the Merovingian empire either directly or as tributary, but it did not go beyond this to any significant extent. The apparent exception, the Avar empire, had been destroyed without being absorbed. What had been aimed at, all along, was a renovatio regni Francorum. This seems quite attractive at first sight, but it will not sustain detailed examination. It is true that Lombard Italy and Visigothic Spain had paid tribute on and off to the Merovingians – but the incorporation of the Lombard kingdom (which in any case retained its special status) and of some of the remnants of Visigothic Spain had nothing to do with such ancient history.57 Otherwise it is hard to see why the Franks should consistently have left the Bretons 54 55

56 57

So e.g. J. Fleckenstein, ‘Das großfränkische Reich: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Großreichsbildung im Mittelalter’, HZ 233 (1981), pp. 281, 291 n. 61. W. Schlesinger, ‘Die Auflösung des Karlsreiches’, Karl der Große (as n. 2), I, p. 821: ‘eine Expansion ins Grenzenlose wäre in der Wirkung wohl destruktiver gewesen als eine wenn auch notgedrungene Beschränkung’. T. Schieffer, ‘Die Krise des karolingischen Imperiums’, in J. Engel and H. M. Klinkenberg eds., Aus Mittelalter und Neuzeit: Gerhard Kallen zum 70. Geburtstag dargebracht (Bonn, 1957), p. 3. The references for Lombardy can be found in R. Holtzmann, ‘Die Italienpolitik der Merowinger und des Königs Pippin’, in H. Dannenbauer and F. Ernst eds., Das Reich: Idee und Gestalt. Festschrift für Johannes Haller (Stuttgart, 1940), pp. 95–132, though his conclusion – that Pippin was indeed carrying on Merovingian traditions – is difficult to sustain.

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as tributaries, in spite of the fact that there were here very old claims, and some old and not so old scores to settle. Another explanation which springs to mind combines consciousness and being. A Christian empire presented peculiar formal difficulties. It could not be tolerated that there should be pagans within its boundaries, but the nature of Christianity required an inner conversion and not just a ‘Judaizing’ adherence to its outward forms – the opportunities inherent in Islam were not available to the Carolingians. It follows from this that expansion beyond certain limits was simply not possible because of the shortage of suitable manpower, not to do the fighting, but to do the converting afterwards; in other words, the Carolingians had their hands full with Saxony.58 This was clearly a problem, but it is doubtful whether it is enough in itself to explain the end of expansion. In the first place expansion did not necessarily entail conquest: the extension of tribute-taking was also a possibility, and here there were evidently no compunctions about taking tribute from heathens. In the second place, it is not the case that the Franks were so preoccupied either before or after 800 with internal mission that they had no qualified men to spare for further missionary activities: Danes, Swedes, Slavs and Avars were the object of missions.59 A further line of argument would be that after acquiring a large empire and an imperial title to go with it the Carolingians felt, so to speak, that they had arrived, and, like parvenus everywhere, sought to adopt the behaviourpatterns of those they hoped to emulate. That meant in this case going Byzantine, which I take to imply adoption of a more or less fixed residence and of a kind of rulership which one might call administration reinforced by ceremonial. A Byzantine ‘foreign policy’ would aim at conserving rather than expanding the empire and make as much use of diplomatic methods – harbouring pretenders, acting as arbitrator in the internal politics of neighbouring tribes, using baptism as a political device to establish a ‘family of kings’ – as of military force. Clearly there were such developments – under Louis in particular the resemblances between Carolingian and 58

59

For the Carolingian mission in Saxony and the way in which it was long organized by established churches in the Frankish heartland – Rheims, Châlons, Liège, Würzburg – see H. Büttner, ‘Mission und Kirchenorganisation des Frankenreiches bis zum Tode Karls des Großen’, in Karl der Große (as n. 2), pp. 454–87, esp. pp. 473–5; a good account with more recent literature can be found in E. Freise, ‘Das Mittelalter bis zum Vertrag von Verdun’, in Westfälische Geschichte, ed. W. Kohl (Düsseldorf, 1983), I, pp. 304–10, 329–32. For the Slavs and Avars see Büttner, ‘Mission’, pp. 477–80, and the Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum, ed. H. Wolfram (Vienna, 1979), pp. 42–8 (text of chs. 5–8), 90–113 (commentary, with further references). For the Scandinavian mission see ch. 8 by Hauck in the present volume [P. Godman and Roger Collins eds., Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious (814–840) (Oxford, 1990)].


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Byzantine methods of dealing with those lying beyond the borders become very apparent.60 But it is still an open question whether they produced the new defensiveness or were produced by it. The explanations just mentioned need not be entirely discounted, but a rather different line of argument may take us further. In the course of the twenty years preceding Charles’s death the position of the Frankish empire changed in a number of ways. First, the Franks, as Einhard gloatingly recalls, had become unimaginably rich following the destruction of the Avar empire, and they had not exactly been poor before.61 Second, this wealth had made their empire an attractive target for equally warlike neighbours, notably Vikings and Saracens, but also Slavs: it is very striking that the first attacks on the Frankish empire follow almost immediately upon the destruction of the Avar empire, but in view of what we know from the ninth century about how well informed Vikings and Saracens were about where the loot was to be found, it is not at all surprising.62 Third, the very success of Frankish imperialism in the eighth century had led to a shortage of victims who were both conquerable and profitable. The best opportunities were offered by Spain, but here there were tough opponents, and the Pyrenees and the unreliability of the Basques meant that campaigns in the Iberian peninsula were unusually risky, as the repetition of Roncevaux in 824 showed.63 What was left of Byzantine Italy was not easily conquered. Otherwise there were only Danes, Slavs and Anglo-Saxons. It was still possible to ravage the Slav tribes, as was done in the first decade following Charles’s imperial coronation, but it is hardly likely that this brought in enough to enable the Frankish elite to live in the style to which it had become accustomed. Attacks on either Danes or Anglo-Saxons, on the other hand, presented difficulties not easily overcome so long as the Franks proved unable to develop any serious naval power in the northern seas. Lastly, a 60

61 62

63

Fundamental on Byzantine techniques for keeping order beyond the borders without recourse to military means is still D. Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth (London, 1971), esp. pp. 272–7. Louis’s dealings with the Abodrites and the Danes show the effectiveness (and the limitations) of arbitration between rival members of royal or ducal houses; for the use of baptism see ch. 8 in the present volume [Godman and Collins eds., Charlemagne’s Heir]. Vita Karoli, ch. 13, p. 16. The first attacks – apart from those on Sardinia and Corsica – took place in 799; see W. Vogel, Die Normannen und das fränkische Reich bis zur Gründung der Normandie (799–911) (Heidelberg, 1906), pp. 51–2. Pace Vogel, it is not really known whether the attack on Aquitaine in 799 was carried out by Saracens or Vikings; but the general uncertainty is shown by Charles’s attempt in 800 to put the coastal defences in order against the danger from pirates: Annales regni Francorum, ed. Kurze, pp. 110 (original version) and 111 (E-version, which specifically refers to Vikings). For a characteristic example of Vikings knowing exactly where the best pickings were and making straight for them see the Miracula s. Bertini, ch. 1 (MGH SS XV), p. 509, ll. 27ff. Annales regni Francorum, ed. Kurze, p. 166.

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number of leading members of the Frankish aristocracy were killed in battle: Charles’s legates in Saxony in 798; Eric of Friuli and Gerold of Bavaria in the following year fighting against the Serbs and the Avars respectively; and Hadumar of Genoa in 806 fighting against the Saracens.64 We know that even under so powerful a ruler as Charlemagne such losses produced political crisis.65 It seems plausible to suppose that the Frankish aristocracy – who were nothing if not calculating – came to revise their profit-and-loss assessments of warfare. It was evidently becoming more risky than it had previously been, and even in the heyday of expansion there had always been a great sensitivity to such risks, as is shown for example by the opposition to Pippin’s Italian campaigns.66 At the same time there was less to be gained from it than there had been, and more to lose if plundering attacks should occur on the home front while the elite were campaigning elsewhere. Hence the decision to consolidate, to eschew any military adventurism, and to go on to the defensive. Whatever the reasons behind the new policy, it had fatal structural consequences. I have tried to show elsewhere that the Frankish armies of conquest in the eighth century were much more like those of the fifth and sixth than has been supposed, namely magnates with unbeneficed warrior followings, and that the circulation among the aristocratic elite and their warrior followings of the loot gained by successful warfare played a crucial role in determining both the momentum of Frankish expansion and the allocation of power within the Frankish empire.67 If expansion was no longer on, for whatever reason, that did not mean that the demands of the warrior followings were reduced; and the only way in the long run in which these could be satisfied without expansion was by internal expansion, in other 64 65

66

67

Abel and von Simson, Karl der Große, II, pp. 143–5, 189–99, 361. See also J. B. Ross, ‘Two Neglected Paladins of Charlemagne: Erich of Friuli and Gerold of Bavaria’, Speculum 20 (1945), pp. 212–35. On the aftermath of the disaster at Roncevaux see F. L. Ganshof, ‘Une crise dans le règne de Charlemagne: Les Années 778 et 779’, Mélanges d’histoire et de littérature offerts a` Charles Gilliard (Lausanne, 1944), pp. 135–6. What lay behind Hardrad’s conspiracy of 785–6 has not yet been satisfactorily explained – the most recent treatment, by K. Brunner, Oppositionelle Gruppen im Karolingerreich (Veröffentlichungen des Inst. für o¨ sterreichische Geschichte, 25; Vienna, 1979), pp. 46–53, is not very illuminating. But it followed closely on a period of military failure in the Saxon wars, culminating in the heavy losses at the battle of Süntel noted by the revised version of the Annales regni Francorum (ed. Kurze, pp. 61, 63) and in the Saxon uprising of 784 (cf. Abel and von Simson, Karl der Große, I, pp. 469–72). See the report in Einhard, Vita Karoli, ch. 6, p. 8, discussed by W. Affeldt, ‘Das Problem der Mitwirkung des Adels an politischen Entscheidungsprozessen im Frankenreich, vornehmlich im 8. Jahrhundert’, in D. Kurze ed., Aus Theorie und Praxis der Geschichtswissenschaft: Festschrift für Hans Herzfeld (Veröffentlichungen der historischen Kommission zu Berlin, 37; Berlin, 1972), pp. 404–23, esp. pp. 410–15. Reuter, ‘Plunder and Tribute’, pp. 78–87.


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words by increasing one’s share of political power and the rewards which went with it. It is in the context of military stagnation, not of an internal ‘decomposition’ produced by moral decline or inadequate administrative structures,68 that many of the developments of the period 800–30 need to be seen: the complaints about oppression of the pauperes and about landgrabbing; the palace purge of 814 and the rebellion of 817; and not least the attempt by Louis in 822 to set an example of forgiveness and reconciliation, virtues which evidently became more desirable as resources dried up. Faction and ‘internal expansion’ did not suddenly appear on the scene after 800, though they are rarely clearly visible before then; but so long as the Frankish empire was still growing and bringing in the money they were not structurally dangerous. Once this was no longer true, then the internal crises of the 830s were only a matter of time, not of personalities or ideologies. 68

Ganshof, ‘Decomposition’ (as n. 3), seems to me to put far too much emphasis on the importance of good administration: the Carolingians could do without this if other things were going right.

chap t e r 15

The Ottonians and Carolingian tradition

This paper is a version of a contribution to a volume of essays which will appear in connection with the major international exhibition on the Ottonians being mounted in Magdeburg in 2001.1 There has already been an international colloquium linked with the exhibition, Ottonische Neuanfänge (Ottonian New Beginnings), which took place in May of last year – it’s perhaps significant for the place of history in German cultural life that this colloquium got a full-page review in the German equivalent of The Times – but the exhibition itself will have what in Germany are the usual accompaniments to a major historical exhibition: a lavish catalogue, probably in several volumes, and an accompanying volume of essays by the experts in the field, destined to sit on the coffee tables of the educated German bourgeoisie for the next few years, but perhaps also to be read.2 The title was set for me when I was invited to participate. I accepted it without problems because it seemed to me to offer opportunities to reflect on a number of issues which crop up repeatedly in doing the kind of cultural political history which I specialise in. First, there is the question of the nature of ruling dynasties: how their members perceived themselves (and how and how far we can know anything about that), and how modern historians perceive them, which is by no means always the same thing; linked to this is the question of how ruling

1

2

[This paper is as read in an English version to an English audience in October 2000, and is in fact considerably fuller than the German paper the author contributed to the Exhibition Catalogue, Otto der Grosse, Magdeburg und Europa, ed. M. Puhle (Mainz, 2001), pp. 179–88. I have lightly annotated the author’s text, mostly with references to material in English, as well as slightly amplifying his bibliography. The problem of Ottonian ‘forgetting’ of the Carolingian past is discussed in depth in this book, chapter 8, above. JLN] ‘Otto der Grosse, Magdeburg und Europa’ attracted large audiences. See T. Reuter, ‘Review article: The Reich and its neighbours a thousand years ago: historical exhibitions in Magdeburg and Mannheim’, German History 20 (2002), pp. 211–20. The papers read at the international colloquium were published by B. Schneidmüller and S. Weinfurter eds., Ottonische Neuanfänge (Mainz, 2001). [The translation of the author’s contribution appears below as chapter 17. For the Exhibition Catalogue, see the preliminary note above.]

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dynasties perceived each other (and the extent to which they consciously did this). Then, there is the question of rulership and its perception and definition – probably in any society, but specifically in pre-industrial and pre-democratic societies. Rulership, not only in first-year undergraduate essays but also in much professional historians’ discourse, is often presented as a sequence of voluntaristic acts, but the more I contemplate the rulers of my period, for all their evident power – simultaneously unconstrained by convention or constitution but constrained by habits, expectations and the available managerial technology – the more I am inclined to a view of rulership as a social construct, as created by a response to demand from the political community rather than being imposed on that community. Then again, we have here, as we shall see, the problem of knowing anything, and certainly of knowing a great deal, about the actions and intentions of the rulers themselves. Otto I for us is not so much a clearly defined individual as a kind of historians’ code for himself and his entourage. This of course is a much more general historiographical problem: we find it at its crudest in discussions of whether Henry VIII, say, or Adolf Hitler, were personally responsible for the formulation and implementation of policy, or whether much was done in their name without their being aware of it.3 Historians have often tended to come down on one side or the other of such questions by making fairly arbitrary choices – at least they have in the period I work and write on; I wouldn’t want to imply anything about what are no doubt far more sophisticated analyses for periods which are more richly sourced than mine is. For me, the early medievalists’ reaction is in effect a failure to acknowledge that there is a problem at all: the difficulty is not usually that we are dealing with something which could sustain a mechanical metaphor, like an engine, but rather with something which needs a more electronic metaphor.4 Rulership is a black box: there are visible inputs and outputs, but the internal functioning by which the first are converted into the second is all too often not available for our scrutiny and our analysis. Let me begin by offering a little background for those of you who don’t enjoy the unsurpassable blessing of being a medieval historian. For initial 3

4

These particular problems are discussed in highly sophisticated ways by G. Bernard, The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (London, 2005) and I. Kershaw, Adolf Hitler, vol. I: Hubris (London, 1996), respectively. Recent biographers of Charlemagne have tended towards the voluntaristic approach: J. Schneider, Charlemagne (Paris, 1999); D. Hägermann, Karl der Große. Biographie (Berlin, 2000). For broader reflections on recent biographies of early medieval rulers, see S. Hamilton, ‘Early medieval rulers and their modern biographers’, EME 9 (2000), pp. 247–60. [See also chapter 20 in the present volume, p. 407.]

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orientation: ‘the Ottonians’ is the conventional (but not contemporary) designation for a family of rulers who provided kings in what would later be called Germany between 919 and 1024, kings who also came to rule over most of northern and central Italy and exercise hegemony over ‘France’ and Burgundy as well as over eastern and northern Europe, and from 962 onwards to bear the imperial title.5 ‘The Carolingians’ is the equally conventional designation – with slightly more claims to being contemporary – for a family of rulers who provided kings over most of the area covered by the pre-1972 European Community: the Low Countries, France, Western Germany, Italy (though only as far down the peninsula as just south of Rome) between 751 and 888, and in West Francia (what would later come to be called ‘France’) between 888 and 987. Between 771 and 840 this gigantic empire was ruled as a single complex by two rulers: Charles (magnus, ‘the Great’ or ‘Charlemagne’) from 771 to 814 (as a papally crowned emperor from 800 onwards), and his sole surviving legitimate son Louis (‘the Pious’) from 814 to 840, though in each case with sons acting as sub- or under-kings in areas like Aquitaine and Italy with their own strong regional consciousnesses and traditions. Between 840 and 888 it was ruled by a number of kings, all descendants of Louis the Pious, who were capable of coming together for joint action, but equally capable of fighting one another. The basic lines of division established in 843 after a civil war produced three kingdoms, west, middle and east, but from the 850s onwards the accidents of death and deliberate policy led to the fragmentation of the middle kingdom and the absorption of most of its separate pieces by either east or west. From 888 onwards the family’s monopoly on the highest office was broken. Carolingians ruled for most of the following century in West Francia, but there were no more Carolingian kings in East Francia after 911, and no more Carolingian kings elsewhere within the Frankish empire, except for Lotharingia, after 888. And after 987, when the last surviving West Frankish male Carolingian was passed over on the death of his nephew in favour of a representative of a dynasty which had challenged the Carolingians for West Frankish kingship on a number of occasions between 888 and 987, there were no Carolingian kings ruling anywhere in Europe (though there were still some male 5

For anglophone readers, the best introductions are those of K. Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony (London, 1979), and Communications and Power in Medieval Europe, vol. I, The Carolingian and Ottonian Centuries, ed. T. Reuter (London, 1994), and T. Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages (London, 1991). See also T. Reuter ed, NCMH vol. III, esp. the editor’s Introduction, pp. 1–24, and the chapter by E. Müller-Mertens, ‘The Ottonians as kings and emperors’, pp. 233–66.


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aristocrats who could claim direct descent from Charles the Great in the male line). It’s worth pausing at this point to reflect on what traditions the Carolingians established. To put it at its simplest: they invented most of the forms of rulership practised in pre-French Revolution Europe, by taking existing traditions of barbarian rulership, Christianising them, and combining them with forms, attitudes and institutions borrowed from the Christian Roman empire of late antiquity. I’ll enumerate some of the key ones, in no particular order. First, kings ruled by moving from palace to palace (there are echoes of this even today in the multiple palaces of the house of Windsor); the court was not a place or an institution so much as the shifting group of people who surrounded the king on his journeys, and the kingdom came most fully into being at those moments when the great men of the kingdom, lay and ecclesiastic, joined the king in assemblies, which were often affairs of public ritual affirmation of solidarity as much as they were business meetings.6 Second, kings were set apart from the rest of society by being crowned and, still more important, by being anointed, in a ceremony whose immediate origins are disputed but which ultimately is quite clearly an adaptation of an Old Testament ritual.7 Because of this, they exercised a measure of control over all clerics, and the societies over which they ruled were defined as being Christian: one might take tribute from the pagans beyond the frontier, but these peoples had to be Christianised if their territories were to be fully incorporated. The ruler’s concern for justice, which of course is also a quite ideology-free matter of the exercise of power, was presented as being part of his duty as a Christian ruler.8 Third, within political society, kings were also set apart. They were not despots – they rarely condemned to execution members of such aristocratic oppositions as came fleetingly into being, and they could not simply do as they wished. But they were more than simply first among equals (primus inter pares, a phrase which in a political context appears in any case to be a Renaissance invention). Other aristocrats practised fairly symmetrical 6 7

8

[See chapter 11, above.] See J. Semmler, Der Dynastiewechsel von 751 und die fränkische Salbung (Düsseldorf, 2003), p. 32. On what the ordo antiquitus actually meant, see J. L. Nelson, ‘Inauguration rituals’, in P. Sawyer and I. N. Wood eds., Early Medieval Kingship (Leeds, 1977), pp. 50–71, repr. in J. L. Nelson, Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London, 1986), pp. 283–308, at 286, 290–1, and now A. T. Hack, ‘Zur Herkunft der karolingischen Königssalbung’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 110 (1999), pp. 170–90, at 177–80. P. Fouracre, ‘Carolingian justice: the rhetoric of improvement and contexts of abuse’, La Giustizia I, Settimane Spoleto 42 (1995), pp. 771–803.

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exchanges of children in marriage, but rulers controlled their sons’ marriages carefully, and normally did not let their daughters marry at all.9 Fourth and last, the eighth-century Carolingians incorporated the German peoples east of the Rhine, previously more under Frankish hegemony than directly under their rule, into the Frankish kingdom.10 In southern and central Germany this was a fairly straightforward if not entirely bloodless process, but the Saxons in the north were conquered only after a series of highly destructive wars. Peace and incorporation came in the early 800s, after which Franks and Saxons became, as Charlemagne’s biographer put it, ‘a single people’.11 Einhard wrote from a Frankish perspective: we’ll see shortly that some Saxons didn’t see things in quite the same way. What all this meant for their Ottonian successors, I’ll consider shortly, but I think it’s important also to look briefly at the broader development of the political memorialisation of the Carolingians. The Carolingians presented themselves as a dynasty, as the ruling family, while they were still ruling.12 But they were not remembered in quite that way. What was remembered was above all Charles the Great, and his career had a startling revival in the course of the twelfth century, following the success of the Crusades. Contemporary biographies of Charles were reworked in the twelfth century to make him a key figure in the Christian reconquest of Spain and in the fight against Islam; the Roland material was reworked and developed in the Chansons de Geste. The Germans attempted to have him canonised as a saint in 1165, though this never quite stuck. At about the same time, the huge historiographical complex associated with the monastery of Saint-Denis known as the Grandes Chroniques de France began – in a Latin form – to stress the continuity between current French rulers and their predecessor Charlemagne.13 9

10 11 12

13

For comments in English on Charlemagne’s family-politics, and further references, see J. L. Nelson, ‘Charlemagne – pater optimus?’, in P. Godman, J. Jarnut and P. Johanek eds., Am Vorabend der Kaiserkrönung (Paderborn, 2001), pp. 269–81. For rule by consensus and the importance of assemblies in consensus-building, see J. L. Nelson, ‘Rulers and government’, in R. McKitterick ed., NCMH, vol. II, pp. 95–129. See T. Reuter, ‘The lands beyond the Rhine’, in J. Story ed., Charlemagne: Empire and Society (Manchester, 2005), pp. 183–94. See chapter 8, above. S. Airlie, ‘Semper fideles: L’aristocratie comme constituant du pouvoir carolingien’, in R. Le Jan ed., La royauté et les élites dans l’Europe carolingienne (Lille, 1998), pp. 129–42; S. Airlie, ‘The palace of memory: the Carolingian court as political centre’, in S. Rees-Jones, R. Marks and A. Minnis eds., Courts and Regions in Medieval Europe (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 1–20; and S. Airlie, ‘Talking heads: assemblies in early medieval Germany’, in P. S. Barnwell and M. Mostert eds., Political Assemblies in the Earlier Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2003), pp. 29–46. For twelfth-century views of Charlemagne, see J. Fentress and C. Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992), pp. 154–62, 170–1.


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The turning of Charlemagne into a general pan-European Good Thing is so striking a twelfth-century development that it’s easy to forget that some elements of this were in place much earlier. The Slav word for ‘king’, for example, is kral, demonstrable from the ninth century onwards. To be a king was to be a ‘Charles’ for the peoples beyond the Christian frontier. Even within the Frankish empire, we can see by the late ninth century many signs that Charlemagne was coming to take on the role of a general signifier for the good old days. Archbishop Hincmar of Reims, writing a treatise on government around 880–1, claimed to have derived much of his detailed information from a treatise written by one of Charles the Great’s advisers some sixty or seventy years earlier (modern scholarship has tended more and more to the view that Hincmar was not simply making this claim up, but it is still significant that it was a figure from the time of Charles the Great who was offered as a source of wisdom).14 In the East Frankish kingdom, slightly later, Notker the Stammerer reworked Einhard’s nearcontemporary biography of Charles by adding a whole string of saga-like anecdotes to create a mixture of political allegory and roman a` clef. Here too, Charles stood plain and simple for the good old days; and he was being used to demonstrate to contemporary Carolingians that they needed to change or to consider their ways.15 On the whole, it was more common in the ninth and tenth centuries for Carolingian rulers to suffer odious comparisons with their illustrious ancestor than to be able to bask in the glow of their direct descent from him. In southern France, for example, regions and monasteries which had barely acknowledged the authority of the late West Frankish Carolingians increasingly developed for themselves a legendary past in which Charles played a crucial if often highly implausible role.16 Let’s turn now to the Ottonians. The Ottonians began their career, like virtually all the new ruling families in the Frankish world after 888, as allies and supporters of the Carolingians. They are found as war-leaders (duces, ‘dukes’) in Saxony from the mid-ninth century, leading and profiting from warfare on the north-eastern frontier of the Carolingian empire; they made marriage alliances with the Carolingians on at least two occasions. On the 14

15

16

For further references on the date and authorship of the De ordine palatii, see J. L. Nelson, ‘Aachen as a place of power’, in M. De Jong and F. Theuws with C. van Rhijn eds., Topographies of Power in the Earlier Middle Ages (Leiden, 2001), pp. 217–42. See M. Innes, ‘Memory, orality and literacy in an early medieval society’, P&P 158 (1998), pp. 3–36; and S. MacLean, Kingship and Politics in the Late Ninth Century: Charles the Fat and the End of the Carolingian Empire (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 199–229. A. Remensnyder, Remembrance of Kings Past: Monastic Foundation-Legends in Medieval Southern France (Ithaca NY, 1995).

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death of Conrad I in 918, the then Saxon duke, Henry, was chosen to be king by the Franks and Saxons of the eastern kingdom. Within the kingdom itself his rule was very un-Carolingian, in several ways. He was offered, but refused, royal anointing, saying that it was sufficient for him to rule where his ancestors had not. It seems plausible that this rejection was intended as a signal: Henry was not going to rule over, but with, his great men. Then, he established his authority within the kingdom by making alliances and treaties of ‘friendship’ with the two southern dukes (of Swabia and Bavaria), who were left with a substantial measure of autonomy. This willingness to enter into ritualised political ‘friendships’ was a definite break with Carolingian traditions. The Carolingians had kept themselves to themselves. They entered into ‘friendship’ relationships with other Carolingians, and with external rulers, but emphatically not with their own magnates.17 Yet Henry’s un-Carolingianity was not part of a programme of taking the East Frankish kingdom out of the pan-Frankish world. He concluded a treaty with Charles the Simple of West Francia in 921 whose text refers to both rulers as ‘kings of the Franks’. And he competed with both Charles and his successors in West Francia for rule over Lotharingia – a fragment of the middle kingdom established in 843 which had acquired a regional identity of its own in the half-century which followed. Lotharingia was crucial not only because of the extensive royal lands located there, but also because it was the Frankish heartland tout court. It was the region the Carolingians had originally come from, in their own days before kingship; and it was where many of the palaces associated with Carolingian rule were located, especially and above all Aachen, the palace and chapel complex established by Charles the Great. In bidding for Lotharingia, Henry was bidding for hegemony within the pan-Frankish world which had survived the formal break-up of Carolingian rule over it in 888; and by the end of his reign he appears to have achieved it: he was the first western European ruler to achieve success in battle against invaders for at least a generation, and in the last year of his life he was able to call a meeting with his fellow rulers of West Francia and Burgundy at which he appears to have been much the senior partner. The Frankishness of this un-Carolingian rulership was reinforced under Henry’s son and successor, Otto I. Otto, unlike his father, did not refuse unction and coronation. He had himself crowned at the outset of his reign, 17

[This interpretation of Henry’s rulership has been powerfully advocated by G. Althoff and J. Fried: for references and a note of caution, see chapter 17 in this book, pp. 308–9.] Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, pp. 148–220, gives a fresh account of the Ottonians.


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and, significantly, he chose Aachen as the place where this was done, thus establishing a link with Carolingian rulership. He built on his father’s European or pan-Frankish hegemony: he exercised a kind of protectorate over the West Frankish and Burgundian kingdoms, he took over the kingdom of Italy in 951; and in 962 he had his position acknowledged by having himself crowned emperor in Rome by Pope John XII. These changes were paralleled by internal shifts. Unlike his father, he did not enter into alliances with his great men.18 The coronation ceremony was concluded by a great banquet at which the dukes ritually and symbolically served the king; and the first twenty years of his reign were marked by two major aristocratic uprisings which appear to have been directed not least against the new style of more distant rulership which Otto wished to practise. Now in what I’ve said so far I’ve been assuming the validity of conventional interpretative constructs. In other words, I’ve been arguing as if our perception of what an Ottonian was, or what a king was, can simply be fed back into the mind of an Ottonian or a king. But what do we and can we actually know about what it meant to Otto I to be himself? The answer, it seems to me, is virtually nothing directly, and not a great deal indirectly either. What has survived to us as echoes of Otto I’s consciousness is almost all the product of his associates and his entourage. What do we have? Royal charters survive in quite considerable numbers, and they tell us something about the public projection of rulership in a number of ways. First of all, they apply titles to rulers. Second, they often open with a proem, a rhetorical preamble which offers a generalised justification for the royal action embedded in the charter. Third, they quite frequently make reference to earlier royal grants and the charters embodying these. Fourth, where they have survived as originals rather than merely as copies of the original text, they carry a seal whose imagery can tell us something about the nature of the rulership being projected.19 Richer, but more complex and more distant, are contemporary or nearcontemporary accounts of Otto’s actions. By tenth-century standards these are unusually rich and varied. Those who wrote them were by no means outsiders – the major narrative accounts for Otto’s reign come from the pens of: Widukind of Corvey, a monk in one of the major Saxon monasteries and a relative of Otto I’s mother; Liudprand of Cremona, an Italian bishop who knew Otto, preached at his court and served him on two embassies 18 19

See preceding note. H. Keller, ‘Zu den Siegeln der Karolinger und der Ottonen. Urkunden als “Hoheitszeichen” in der Kommunikation des Herrschers mit seinen Getreuen’, FMS 32 (1998), pp. 400–41.

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to Byzantium; and Adalbert of St Maximin, sent by Otto to missionise the Russians in 960, and subsequently chosen by him to be the first archbishop of his newly founded see at Magdeburg.20 We’re not dealing with ‘monkish chroniclers’ here, but with members of the second circle of the ruling elite. Even so, they are a step or two away from the inner circle and its thoughts and intentions, and their accounts are shaped by their own educations and their own purposes in writing. What we learn from them cannot be taken – though all too often it has been so taken – as direct evidence of what Otto I and his family thought. Equally rich, but at the same time fragmentary and still more difficult to interpret, are the surviving physical remains associated with Otto: buildings, manuscripts, works of art. Only the manuscripts survive essentially unchanged.21 The buildings are known from their later forms or from archaeological excavations, and there is relatively little by way of surviving artwork from Otto I’s reign. Even the imperial crown and insignia preserved in Vienna are not certainly tenth-century, and they have in any case been reworked since. All this takes me back to the point I made earlier. To talk about Otto I is to talk about a black box: we mean, and have to mean, Otto I (or any other Ottonian ruler) and his advisers and specialists. We shouldn’t assume that the king was an ignorant axe-swinger who knew nothing of what was being done, said and depicted in his name, but we equally can’t assume that the fragments of past action and consciousness which have survived to us are the fragments of the king’s past consciousness. So, with all these caveats, what can we know about the attitudes of the Ottonian rulers to their Carolingian predecessors? The first point to be made is that there is surprisingly little direct reference to them.22 The great historiographical works of the East Frankish tenth century don’t show much knowledge of Carolingian history overall. On the whole their authors 20

21

22

There is no English translation of Widukind’s Deeds of the Saxon Dukes, though the work of Leyser (cited above, n. 5) gives many insights into it and its author. A translation of Adalbert’s Continuation of the Chronicle of Regino of Prüm, with a translation of Regino’s Chronicle itself, is forthcoming from S. MacLean. The old translation of Liudprand’s historical writings by F. A. Wright (London, 1930) has been reissued with an introduction by J. J. Norwich, The Embassy to Constantinople and Other Writings (London, 1993), and a new fully annotated translation is forthcoming from R. Balzaretti. Thietmar of Merseburg’s Chronicon, of exceptional value for the latter half of the Ottonian period, has been translated with excellent introduction and notes by D. Warner: see Sources, below. Helpful orientations are provided by H. Keller, ‘Herrscherbild und Herrschaftslegitimation. Zur Deutung der ottonischen Denkmäler’, FMS 19 (1985), pp. 290–311, and H. Mayr-Harting, Ottonian Book Illumination, 2 vols. (London, 1994). For this and what follows, see works cited above at n. 5, and in the bibliography of secondary works below.


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were present-minded and recent-past-minded. It’s significant, I think, that both Widukind and Liudprand of Cremona were frankly confused about the identities of a number of later Carolingian rulers – in a way hardly surprising, given that Carolingians had the tedious habit of calling all their legitimate male children either Louis, Charles, Pippin or Carloman, and yet demonstrating that for those who wrote about current Ottonian history, the late ninth century was the legendary rather than the recent past. Perhaps even more surprising is that references to the ‘great’ Carolingians, especially Charles the Great, were very rare in the writings of tenth-century East Frankish historians. Widukind writes of the ‘kings of the Charleses’ (regibus Karolorum), and it’s not always clear whether he is thinking here of the dynasty or the people. For him, Charles the Great was the king who did two things: he enclosed the Hungarians in a great wall to prevent them from raiding Europe, and he was the man who had thought it wrong that the Saxons should remain pagans. In the thirtieth year of his rule he succeeded . . . in reaching a lasting solution, by which a people which formerly had been allies and friends of the Franks now became their brothers and, so to speak, one people through the Christian faith, as we now see.23

Now this statement is embedded in a lengthy opening narrative which in effect gives the Saxons’ view of their own past history, going back to the sixth century. The whole of that narrative is suffused with the tensions visible in that brief extract. Yes, the Saxons had become Christians relatively recently, and it was the Franks who had coerced and persuaded them into doing so; but they had a respectable history of their own, even back in their pagan days, and the statement by Einhard, Charles’s near-contemporary biographer, that the Franks and Saxons had become one people was explicitly taken up by Widukind and re-formed: they had become ‘brothers’, and ‘one people through the Christian faith’, but only ‘so to speak’ (quasi in Widukind’s Latin). Though I’ve switched from Otto I to Widukind in my discussion here, I see no reason why Otto I should have thought noticeably differently from Widukind in this respect: the Saxons were not Franks, but separate from them and their equals. This consciousness of a separate and distinguished Saxon identity, for which there is a fair amount of tenthcentury evidence, must have worked against a straightforward and explicit assertion of continuity between Carolingian and Ottonian rulership. In 23

Widukind of Corvey, Rerum gestarum Saxonicarum libri III, I, 15, ed. P. Hirsch and H.-E. Lohrmann, MGH SRG LX (Hannover, 1935), p. 25.

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their dealings with other rulers within the pan-Frankish world, Ottonians – or those who wrote and symbolised on their behalf – might choose to assert a Frankish identity, but that could never be the whole story. At home, such issues were evaded rather than met head-on. Henry, Otto and their successors were not titled ‘king of the Franks’ by the clerics who composed their charters, but nor were they titled ‘king of the Saxons’. They were simply ‘by the grace of God king’, with rare exceptions. For much the same reasons, their clerics avoided any explicit titular formulation of the nature of the empire over which Otto I had been crowned emperor in 962. It was not for another thirty years that the title ‘emperor of the Romans’ became established, and even then there were misgivings – not least because the Saxons were probably even less keen on being described as Romans than they had been about becoming Franks. So the evidence – mostly indirect, admittedly, but still – suggests a certain hesitation about straightforward appropriation of the Carolingian tradition, even by rulers exercising hegemony within what was still a Frankish world. The polarity Frankishness/Saxonness was clearly one reason for the hesitation. Another, perhaps more obvious, was that there were real live Carolingians ruling to the west between 936 and 987. The signs and forms of supremacy within a pan-Frankish world had to be subtly nuanced in order to take this crucial fact into account; and they were. First, the Ottonians did appropriate symbols of Carolingian tradition when they thought they could get away with it. Otto I was crowned at Aachen, as we have seen; his son and grandson were elected king there. Control over Aachen in particular and Lotharingia more generally formed a crucial plank in Ottonian political behaviour. It’s not an accident that the response of the West Frankish king to an Ottonian raid in 978 was to direct a counterraid against Aachen, concluding with the highly charged symbolic act of reversing the direction of the eagle on the palace roof. Second, the Ottonians took pains to demonstrate publicly their European hegemony especially in so far as it affected the Carolingian rulers of West Francia. Otto I intervened in West Francia on a number of occasions in the 940s and 950s in support of his Carolingian royal colleague, presiding over a pan-Frankish church council at Ingelheim in 948 at which Louis IV was restored to full kingship, and organising a ‘family meeting’ at Cologne in 965 attended by most members of the Ottonian family (except for Otto himself, who was in Italy) but also by the French king and his leading magnate, both of them children of Ottonian mothers. The Carolingian family itself was appropriated here, and subsumed publicly into the Ottonian family.


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Third, the thrust of Ottonian support in West Frankish politics shifted sharply in the 970s and 980s: as the Carolingian rulers there became less comfortable with Ottonian overlordship (and more determined to recover Lotharingia for themselves), the Ottonians looked more and more to the Carolingians’ great rivals, the Capetian dukes of Francia. The change of dynasty in 987 came about with the Ottonian court pulling strings quietly but firmly in the background to secure the defeat of the Carolingian candidate for kingship. Once there were no longer Carolingians around to remind the political public of what that meant, the Ottonians could move much more directly to appropriate Carolingian tradition. Within a few years of 987, Otto III – who had been a minor at the time: the effective intervention came from his guardians – had adopted Charles the Great’s slogan of ‘renewal of the empire of the Romans’ on his seals.24 Still more public than the public representation of seals was Otto’s action in the year 1000, when he went on pilgrimage to Aachen, and had Charlemagne’s tomb opened, an action which found historiographical echoes as far apart as Hildesheim and Merseburg in Saxony, Limoges in central France and Novalese in northern Italy. The precise meaning of the action has long been debated among historians, but Knut Görich has recently made an attractive case for thinking that what Otto probably intended was the first stage of a canonisation of Charles as a saint: crucial steps in that process (which in the late tenth century did not require papal approval) were the ‘finding’ (inventio) and ‘relocating’ (translatio) of the body. The reports agree that Otto and his companions found the body uncorrupted (except for some slight tooth decay), and that Otto himself took relics from the tomb. By the early eleventh century, then, the Ottonian rulers had begun to appropriate Charlemagne (much more than the Carolingians) directly, an appropriation which was successfully sustained until the French twelfth-century counter-moves to which I have already referred. There is, of course, yet another way of looking at the Ottonians’ relationship to Carolingian tradition, that of government and institutions. In recent historiography, a significant role has been played by the sharp contrast between the claims of the Carolingian state, on parchment at least, to rule from the centre through legislation and edicts, passed on to and enforced by a network of local officials, and the virtual statelessness of the 24

G. Althoff, Otto III. (Darmstadt, 1997), is now available in English translation by P. G. Jestice (Philadelphia PA, 2003). See the thoughtful comments of D. Warner, ‘Ideals and actions in the reign of Otto III’, JHM 25 (1999), pp. 1–18, and S. Hamilton, ‘Early medieval rulers and their modern biographers’, EME 9 (2000), pp. 247–60, esp. 256–60.

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Ottonian Reich. The English rulers of the ninth and tenth centuries, incidentally, did indeed appropriate Carolingian state-tradition quite directly: most Anglo-Saxon lawcodes from Alfred onwards were heavily indebted in tone and in specific provisions to Carolingian legislation (as were AngloSaxon coinage and weights and measures – it’s worth remembering that the pounds and ounces now being stoutly defended by the Sun and small shopkeepers were, by origin, Frankish, and were adopted by Anglo-Saxon rulers in order to be able to trade freely with the Eurozone represented by the Frankish denarius or silver penny). But the Ottonian rulers of East Francia showed virtually no interest in such things.25 I think there are two obvious reasons for this. The first and most important is that there is no evidence from anywhere in the Europe of the high Middle Ages that that is how either Charlemagne or the Carolingians were remembered. In Revolutionary France Charlemagne could be depicted on friezes as a great legislator, along with Moses and Solon; but the Charlemagne of the Middle Ages was a warrior, a conqueror, a Christian ruler and a lover of justice (not of laws or of judges or of state officials). Carolingian traditions of government clearly existed at the time, but it is modern legal and constitutional historians who have shown most interest in them. The contrast between Carolingian étatisme, especially as it was found under Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, and Ottonian statelessness, was not something which would have struck either the Ottonians or any of their contemporaries. The second point is that in spite of their imperial title the Ottonians were not the successors of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious as rulers over the whole of the Frankish world, even if they exercised hegemony within it. What Henry and Otto did was to revitalise a rather different community, the kingdom of East Francia first given formal existence by the partition of 843. And the traditions and political culture of that kingdom were much more like those of the Ottonian Reich than they were like those of the unified Carolingian empire in its heyday. Its first ruler, Louis the German, barely legislated, and certainly did not attempt to work through a network of royal officials. His kingship was highly and explicitly Christian, yet it was not reinforced by royal unction, which seems to have entered the traditions of East Frankish kingship quietly and without much fuss. He may not have made formal bonds of friendship with his great men, but he certainly worked with and through them, and he treated them fairly 25

See further, chapters 16 and 17 in this book.


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gently even when he fell out with them.26 This form of Carolingian tradition was continued seamlessly by the new dynasty, but it was not seen as Carolingian tradition, simply as the way things were. Any attempt to impose what modern historians have seen as the essence of Carolingianism on a political culture in which it had no roots would have been doomed to failure (just as, by contrast, the Carolingianisation of late Anglo-Saxon England worked very effectively because it could draw on much older traditions of centralising royal government going back to the seventh and eighth centuries).27 I’ll close by suggesting one or two more general implications of all this. First, it seems to me that legitimation from the past is an issue for all rulers in the dynastic era of European history, i.e. between the fifth and the eighteenth centuries. It becomes particularly important when there is – or could be said to be – a change of dynasty: the members of the new ruling dynasty have to demonstrate their legitimacy by appropriating continuity and asserting contrast. Second, I would say that in the instance I’ve been looking at but probably elsewhere as well, the past is not what you thought; it is what you can remember. Continuity may be explicit in such things as brides, institutions or counsellors, but it is more likely to be both implicit and explicit in reference to shared symbols and memories, not all of which will necessarily seem as significant to modern historians as they did to contemporaries. Third, the assertion of both continuity and of contrast is a joint enterprise. Rulers can’t do it alone; they need their experts in symbolism and ritual, in the production of the props of rule and the instruments of government. It’s not always possible for us to distinguish the driving minds within this collective enterprise of ruling families and hired spin-doctors, and it is often likely to be dangerous to try too hard to do so. Fourth, and finally, there are peculiarities about the period I work on which are less likely to be general, at least in such an extreme form. It is not entirely the case that the tenth century is an age of darkness or of obscurity; but it certainly is the case that the source-material is often sparse, and still more often fitful. It may be that we can talk about the dynastic self-projection of Tudors, or Bourbons, or Habsburgs, or Hohenzollern with rather more confidence than I can muster for the Ottonians, simply 26 27

For a fine full-scale study of Louis the German’s reign in broad accord with this account, see now E. Goldberg, Struggle for Empire: Kingship and Conflict under Louis the German (Ithaca NY, 2005). See further, chapter 16 in this book.

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because there is more material, and above all because as time moves on towards our own, we are more and more likely to have direct evidence of what was going on in rulers’ minds. For the period I deal in, such evidence very seldom exists. We know a little about the consciousness of saints and intellectuals in tenth-century Europe; about rulers we know only what they did and what was done in their name. sources (ET = English translation) Annales Fuldenses, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SRG (Hannover, 1891), ET by T. Reuter, The Annals of Fulda, Ninth-Century Histories, vol. II (Manchester, 1992). Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SRG (Hannover, 1911), ET by P. E. Dutton, Charlemagne’s Courtier: The Complete Einhard (Peterborough ONT, 1998), pp. 15–39. Notker the Stammerer, Gesta Karoli Magni imperatoris, ed. H. Haefele, MGH SRG, new series XII (Berlin, 1959), ET by L. Thorpe, Einhard and Notker the Stammerer: Two Lives of Charlemagne (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp. 93–172. Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, ed. R. Holtzmann, MGH SRG, new series IX (Berlin, 1955), ET by D. Warner, Ottonian Germany: The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg (Manchester, 2001). Widukind of Corvey, Rerum gestarum Saxonicarum libri III, eds. H.-E. Lohmann and P. Hirsch, MGH SRG LX (Berlin, 1935), and also, with German translation, in Quellen zur Geschichte der sächsischen Kaiserzeit. Widukinds Sachsengeschichte, Adalberts Fortsetzung der Chronik Reginos, Liutprands Werke, eds. A. Bauer and R. Rau (Darmstadt, 1971). s el ec t b ib l io gr a ph y Althoff, G. and H. Keller, Heinrich I und Otto der Große. Neubeginn auf karolingischem Erbe, 2 vols. (Göttingen and Zurich, 1985). Althoff, G. Amicitiae und Pacta. Bündnis, Einung, Politik und Gebesgedenken in beginnenden 10. Jahrhundert, Schriften der MGH XXXVII (Hannover, 1992). Althoff, G. Die Ottonen. Königsherrschaft ohne Staat (Stuttgart, 2000). Brühl, C. Deutschland – Frankreich. Die Geburt zweier Völker (Cologne, 1995). Ehlers, J. Die Entstehung des Deutschen Reiches (Munich, 1994). Folz, R. Le souvenir et la légende de Charlemagne dans l’Empire germanique médiéval (Paris, 1950).


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Fried, J. Der Weg in der Geschichte. Die Ursprünge Deutschlands bis 1024 (Berlin, 1994). ¨ Görich, K. ‘Otto III. o¨ ffnet das Karlsgrab in Aachen. Uberlegungen zu Heiligenverehrung, Heiligsprechung und Traditionsbildung’, in G. Althoff and E. Schubert eds., Herrschaftsrepräsentation im ottonischen Sachsen, Vorträge und Forschungen 46 (Sigmaringen, 1998), pp. 381–430. Hauck, K. ‘Die Ottonen und Aachen, 876 bis 936’, in W. Braunfels and P. E. Schramm eds., Karl der Große. Lebenswerk und Nachleben, vol. IV (Düsseldorf, 1967), pp. 39–53. Kämpf, H. ed., Die Entstehung des Deutschen Reiches (Darmstadt, 1956). Keller, H. ‘Zum Charakter der “Staatlichkeit” zwischen karolingischer Reichsreform und hochmittelalterlichem Herrschaftsaufbau’, FMS 23 (1989), pp. 248– 64. Reuter, T. Germany in the Early Middle Ages, c. 800–1056 (London, 1991). Schneidmüller, B. Karolingische Tradition und frühes französisches Königtum. Untersuchungen zur Herrschaftslegitimation der westfränkisch-französischen Monarchie im 10. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 1979).

chap t e r 16

The making of England and Germany, 850–1050: points of comparison and difference

The post-Carolingian era is by common consent the period in which the recognisable ancestors of modern European nation-states were formed, and yet the processes of formation were very varied ones. We may set out the issues which this chapter seeks to address in three quotations from Karl Leyser: Anglo-Saxon England in the tenth century presents more similarities with the world of the Reich than at any other time of their respective histories. It had a regnal structure with a partially ethnic basis, and it knew the predominance or at least hegemony of one kingdom, Wessex and its society, over all the others, largely because it gave them their kings. The continental Saxons enjoyed similar advantages thanks to the east Frankish kingship of their leading family, the Liudolfings. The rulers of Wessex in the tenth century acquired an imperium which did not so much imitate the Ottonians as develop like forms of overlordship even ahead of them.1

The second is Leyser’s anticipatory summary of much of the work of scholars such as Campbell and Wormald, with whom he was in close contact: We tend to think that centralisation, bureaucracy, too much government and taxation are very recent troubles in our polity, quite novel English diseases, contrary to the mainstream of all the best historical traditions. The reverse is true. They are deep-seated and deeply rooted phenomena in English political society, part of its very birth.2

The third is found in a discussion of Ottonian government: The older school [of constitutional historians of medieval Germany] assumed . . . the state and a volume of government without asking very precise questions of how it worked from day to day. It was in its abstractions a shadow-history of institutions 1 2

K. J. Leyser, ‘The Ottonians and Wessex’, in T. Reuter ed., Communications and Power in Medieval Europe: The Carolingian and Ottonian Centuries (London, 1994), p. 73. K. J. Leyser, ‘The Anglo-Saxons “At Home”’, in T. Reuter ed., ibid., p. 109.

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The making of England and Germany, 850–1050

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that did not really exist . . . even the institutions that did exist, disappear behind the personal links between people.3

The medieval German polity, in other words, was indubitably not like the Anglo-Saxon one: from its beginnings it was decentralised (or better: polycentric), unbureaucratic, untaxed, lacking any homogeneous network of administrative institutions which could be controlled by a ‘centre’. So we have a paradox: two of the great tenth-century European success stories turn out to show remarkable similarities at quite fundamental levels of process and structure, and yet the polities produced by these successes might well be taken as the two ends of a continuum on which all other European polities – at least within Latin Christendom – could be located. It is this paradox which will be explored here. Comparative research in this area is in short supply. Relations between the two countries have been tackled recently if not wholly satisfactorily by Ortenberg,4 and also by some German scholars such as Georgi and Sarnowsky,5 but they have been more interested in relationships than in comparisons, in the diplomatic ties and cultural connections by which the two polities and their elites influenced each other. Comparisons are more difficult than relationships, and they are made more difficult still by differences in historiographical traditions, a point to which we shall return. What is offered here is as much a trying-out ideas for size as a presentation of nicely polished conclusions and explanations. There will be some contradictions, which will not simply be the fault of the author. The material itself is neither transparent nor straightforward. We may begin by sketching the similarities and the differences, and then go on to look at how one might account for the differences. What for convenience we call Germany was a ninth-century creation.6 Its initial core was the old Agilolfing duchy of Bavaria, turned into a ‘normal’ Frankish province between 788 and 794, and transformed into a sub-kingdom (rather like the apanages of Capetian sons in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) for Louis the Pious’s second son Louis (‘the German’) between 814 and 817. In the course of the succession disputes of the 830s Louis ‘the 3 4 5

6

K. J. Leyser, ‘Ottonian Government’, in K. L. Leyser ed., Medieval Germany and its Neighbours, 900–1250 (London, 1982), pp. 80–1. V. Ortenberg, The English Church and the Continent in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (Oxford, 1992). W. Georgi, ‘Bischof Keonwald von Worcester und die Heirat Ottos I. mit Edgitha im Jahre 929’, HJ 115 (1995), pp. 1–40; J. Sarnowsky, ‘England und der Kontinent im 10. Jahrhundert’, HJ 114 (1994), pp. 47–75. The following paragraph summarises T. Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, c. 800–1056 (London, 1991), pp. 45–84.

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German’ claimed the other Frankish-ruled territories east of the Rhine (Suabia, Franconia, Saxony, Thuringia), and this was broadly what he ended up with in the settlement of 843. As it happened, this settlement stuck. The kingdom it created was at times subdivided in the course of the ninth century, but never permanently: the divisions and redivisions of 876– 80 were reunited by 882, and the proposed division of 889 never took effect. And although it had Alsace and Lotharingia (meaning not just present-day Lorraine but Benelux and Frisia as well) added to it between the 860s and 920s, these always retained a separate sense of identity: Lotharingians wrote about their patria as a separate kingdom even in the eleventh century, while writers like Thietmar of Merseburg quite clearly showed their distrust of Lotharingia as a Godless place where people did not keep their oaths or listen to their bishops or respect their lords.7 Territorially, though, unification was essentially complete by 900: the polity was transformed in the course of the tenth century, but it was modelled on its ninth-century precursor. The last major change was the temporary diversion of the Lotharingians towards West Francia between 911 and the early 920s (West Frankish rulers continued to show interest in it, and its elites in them, until at least the mid-eleventh century, but with no lasting effects). Moreover, the subdivision which had been practised in the ninth century was now no longer an option. There was no division in 936, when Henry I left two surviving sons who were of age. Otto I never created a sub-kingdom for his sons Liudolf or Otto II – the nearest he came to it was sending Liudolf off to Italy in 956 to deal with Berengar II.8 A division may have been contemplated between two of the candidates for kingship in 1002, Henry II and Hermann of Suabia, but nothing came of it, and on Henry II’s childless death in 1024 there was no proposal to divide. Division was not necessarily normal in such circumstances by this time, but it was clearly a possibility, and it is significant that it was not even considered.9 If we now turn to England in the same period we find matters complicated by the inherent tendency among Anglo-Saxon historians, noted by Patrick Wormald, to see a kingdom of England or of the English as somehow 7

8

9

Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, VI, 48, ed. R. Holtzmann, MGH SRG, NS IX (Berlin, 1935), p. 334. On the special role of Lotharingia in the late-Carolingian regnal reformations see E. Hlawitschka, Lothringen und das Reich an der Schwelle der deutschen Geschichte (Stuttgart, 1968). Adalbert of St Maximin, Continuatio Reginonis, s.a. 956, in Regino of Prüm, Chronicon, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SRG (Hannover, 1890), p. 169; on indivisibility see the discussion in C. Brühl, Deutschland– Frankreich. Die Geburt zweier Völker (Cologne, 1990), pp. 331–41, with rich bibliography. He concludes that it was essentially a Carolingian practice, not imitable by the dynasties which succeeded them. Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, p. 187.


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always there, really: manifest destiny.10 Partly this is geographical determinism of the kind which makes historians tend to assume that there ought to be one Spanish state or one Italian state within the respective peninsulas, or to talk quite happily of Irish reunification as if there had ever been a single Ireland. Peninsulas and islands provide their own justification. Hence accounts of seventh- and eighth-century England have often played down the clearly visible tensions, both religious and political, between the various kingdoms, and especially between the northern rulers of Deira/Bernicia and the southern rulers. They have tended to stress (almost certainly beyond what the brief passages in Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle will take) the significance of the seventh- and eighth-century bretwaldas.11 Though other views are no doubt possible, it seems plausible to argue that English history proper began at much the same time as French and German history did: in, or better from, the late ninth century.12 It began with Alfred’s stabilisation of a core kingdom based on Kent and Wessex in the 880s, to be established by general acknowledgement of its direct rule or hegemony within the largest island of the East Atlantic archipelago between 900 and 975.13 Alfred and/or his entourage were evidently claiming some kind of ideal supremacy over the ‘English people’ long before Edgar and his successors were able to exercise it fully in reality. ‘Reunification’ took at least half a century, and some of the details are distinctly unclear, especially as regards the North: how and how far did this become ‘England’ after the death of Eirik Bloodaxe in 954; what exactly was the status of the late-tenth/early-eleventh-century principality ruled by the high reeves of Bamburgh? English unification was not especially deep-rooted by tenth-century standards. On the contrary, there are arguably hints at tensions between Wessex and Mercia in the royal successions of 924–5 and of 955–7; and the division between Cnut and Edmund in 1016 still fell along these lines, which were also acknowledged in Cnut’s initial partition of 1017.14 By continental 10 11

12

13 14

P. Wormald, ‘Engla Lond: The Making of an Allegiance’, Journal of Historical Sociology 7 (1994), pp. 1–24. On which see P. Wormald, ‘Bede, the Bretwaldas, and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum’, in P. Wormald et al. eds., Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 1983), pp. 99– 119; S. Keynes, ‘Rædwald the Bretwalda’, in C. B. Kendall and P. S. Wells eds., Voyage to the Other World: The Legacy of Sutton Hoo (Minneapolis, 1992), pp. 103–23. For these problems of periodisation see Brühl, Deutschland–Frankreich; J. Ehlers, ‘Die Anfänge der französischen Geschichte’, HZ 240 (1985), pp. 1–44 is valuable on the ‘beginnings’ of French (as opposed to west Frankish) history. The best recent account of these developments is P. Stafford, Unification and Conquest: A Political and Social History of England in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (London, 1989), pp. 24–56. For details see ibid., pp. 47–9, 71–2.

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standards the kingdom was late in adopting indivisibility and clear succession practices, not early. And although there clearly was a harmonisation of regional and local customs and loyalties in England, there is a danger of overstressing these. One of the consequences of English exceptionalism is a tendency to project the lack of regionality which is such a characteristic and in European perspective unusual feature of later English history further back into the past than it will really go. Let us now have a look at similarities and differences. There are surprising similarities between the political evolutions of the two kingdoms. Both turn out essentially to be multi-regnal empires under kings from a dynasty of successful war-leaders. The kingdoms were put together in the first half of the tenth century by a mixture of military force and alliances between their rulers and leaders with regional power-bases. One of the most significant lines of enquiry in recent German scholarship has been the role of ‘friendship’ in Henry I’s establishing of royal power: early-tenth-century dukes such as Arnulf of Bavaria, Burchard and Hermann of Suabia, Giselbert of Lotharingia acknowledged overlordship of a kind, but they did so by entering in effect into alliances with the king.15 This was a political style which faded from Otto I’s reign onwards, but not without trace: the Reich remained a joint enterprise between rulers and magnates.16 At least up to 1002, arguably to 1024, the kingdom was ruled by Saxon kings, and the Saxons liked to see themselves as an imperial people with a role rather like that of the West Saxons within the emerging polity of Engla Lond. But they never achieved full acknowledgement of this status, because of the claims of those who were not Saxons.17 The kings of Wessex extended dominion over their country in much the same way as the Ottonians in theirs. They fought battles, yes, as in Edward the Elder’s Mercian and East Anglian campaigning and Aethelstan’s victory at Brunanburh, but they also used cajolery and alliance, as in the way they brought the kingdom of York under their overlordship in the 940s and 950s, or the way in which they consolidated the power of a set of ealdormanic dynasties in Mercia and East Anglia by royal marriage alliances.18 Both kingdoms were also imperial in 15 16

17

18

G. Althoff and H. Keller, Heinrich I. und Otto der Groβe. Neubeginn auf karolingischem Erbe (Göttingen, 1985), pp. 56–80. K. J. Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Germany (London, 1979), pp. 9–23, 92–112; H. Naumann, ‘Rätsel des letzten Aufstandes gegen Otto I. (953–954)’, in H. Zimmermann ed., Otto der Groβe (Darmstadt, 1976), pp. 70–136; G. Althoff, ‘Königsherrschaft und Konfliktbewältigung im 10. und 11. Jahrhundert’, FMS 23 (1989), pp. 265–90. Leyser, Rule and Conflict, pp. 110–12; J. Semmler, ‘Francia Saxoniaque oder die ostfränkische Reichsteilung von 865/76 und die Folgen’, DA 46 (1990), pp. 337–74; J. Fried, Der Weg in die Geschichte bis 1024 (Propyläen Geschichte Deutschlands 1, Berlin, 1994), pp. 476–80. Stafford, Unification and Conquest, pp. 37–9.


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claims and behaviour: the dominance exercised over Welsh and Scots kings by the West Saxon kings was paralleled by that exercised by Ottonians over Elbe Slavs, Poles, Bohemians and Hungarians, and it is interesting to note how both kingdoms intervened in West Frankish succession politics between 936 and 948 in much the same way as Charlemagne had thought to intervene in Northumbrian or Danish affairs in the 800s.19 Yet there are crucial differences as well, both in the forms which regionality took, and in the nature of the ‘states’ at the centre. We can see notable differences at the level of regionality. What would come to be called Germany was a conglomeration of ethnically defined regions: Saxony (and Thuringia), Franconia, Suabia, Bavaria (with Carinthia and Austria). Even Lotharingia (with its attachment Frisia), which began life simply as a Carolingian sub-kingdom in 855, had acquired its own ethnicity by the end of the ninth century.20 But though there were some slight anomalies within these regions (for example the position of Frisia within Lotharingia, or the question of whether Thuringia was separate from Saxony), they were broadly speaking indivisible, they had a history and they continued to operate as political forces. In the succession crises of 1002 and 1024, for example, the elites which acknowledged the new ruler did so organised in ethnic groupings.21 They thus corresponded to the kingdoms absorbed by Wessex: Kent, Mercia, East Anglia and Northumbria were the formal equivalent of duchies such as Suabia and Bavaria. But apart from the difference of size, which should not be neglected (tenth-century Bavaria alone – and Bavaria was never quite a kingdom except for brief episodes between 817 and 833 and again in the late 870s – was much the same size as Edgar’s Wessex), there were key differences in the subdivisions. In Germany there were certainly counts, but counties as such were hardly visible as territorial units, and certainly east of the Rhine there is little sign that they were the basis of troop-raising (that was done at the level of the duchy or the diocese), or the focus of local loyalties. The English shires were very different – just how different and how unusual is often overlooked. Even in ninth-century Wessex armies were raised and led on a shire basis, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle accounts of the Viking raids demonstrate.22 In the tenth century the steady progress of the domination of Wessex northwards was marked 19 20 21 22

Brühl, Deutschland–Frankreich, pp. 461–502; for Charlemagne and England see J. M. WallaceHadrill, Early Medieval History (Oxford, 1975), pp. 155–80. Hlawitschka, Lothringen; Brühl, Deutschland–Frankreich, pp. 243–67. E. Boshof, Königtum und Königsherrschaft im 10. und 11. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1993), pp. 55–82, is the best introduction to the rich scholarly literature on these two crucial royal elections. For example, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. D. Whitelock, with D. C. Douglas and S. Tucker (London, 1961), s.a. 851 (Devon), 853 (Kent, Surrey), 860 (Hampshire, Berkshire), pp. 188–90.

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by the ‘shiring’ of the lands incorporated: here again the north and east were different, both in the lateness and incompleteness of the shiring and in the very much larger and often differently named units which it produced (Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Durham, Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland, Lancashire). The two ‘states’ themselves also present a considerable contrast, as the opening quotations suggested. This remains true even for those scholars, like the author, who are still slightly sceptical about the ‘maximalist’ view of the power of the Old English state, to which we shall return. What demonstrates the centralised nature of the polity more clearly than any amount of arguments from coinage could do is, paradoxically, the ease with which it could be taken over. There was a violent internal succession in 978; Svein and Cnut took over from Aethelred and Edmund in the early eleventh century; Harold and Hardacnut competed for the succession with Alfred, to be succeeded by Edward, with Scandinavian claimants in the background; William notoriously succeeded in 1066 against other claimants, and was threatened again in 1086; even the Anglo-Norman and Angevin succession crises of 1100, 1135, 1153–4, 1192–3 and 1216–17 might be seen in this light. All these strangers and foreigners appear to have had no great difficulty in establishing a sense of their legitimacy once they had established a sense of their continuing presence. What by tenth-century standards was a highly centralised state evidently possessed such institutional stability that even radical breaks in political succession did not lead to an insuperable political crisis: like a car, it needed a driver, but anyone who knew how to drive could drive it. Germany was quite different. There was a sense in which Ottonian success recreated a ninth-century kingdom, but the Ottonians were not seen by their historiographers as offering seamless continuity with a ninth-century past. Historical writing in Wessex in the tenth century was essentially a matter of continuing the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and so linking the present with a very long past. This is a startling contrast with the Reich, where writers such as Widukind, Liudprand and Thietmar showed little knowledge of, or interest in, the kingdom’s Carolingian origins, and only Adalbert offered a work which was a continuation of a Carolingian history, Regino of Prüm’s Chronicon.23 There was little which gave the kingdom coherence as a kingdom except its existence; there was only a succession of itinerating kings. Hence there was a need for symbols in a way not felt in Wessex. Crucial items of regalia, especially the Holy Lance, but also the imperial 23

[See chapter 15, above.]


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crown, took on an important role in the transfer of power. Henry II forced Heribert of Cologne to surrender the Holy Lance to him, thus establishing a claim to the kingdom in 1002; his widow Cunigunde confirmed Conrad II’s election in 1024 by handing over the regalia.24 Such things had to represent the abstract notion of the kingdom in Germany precisely because there was no institutional core round which a transpersonal view of the state could condense. It is not surprising that there was a strong stress on local presence as well as on hereditary right in royal successions. In 1002 and in 1024, when there was no close relative of the deceased king to take over without further question, there were a number of people with the kind of dynastic claim which would certainly have been taken account of in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Europe, including some ‘foreigners’, as for example the Capetian rulers of France. Yet no one – not even they themselves – seems to have considered them as possibles. The ‘magic circle’ was restricted to members of the political elite in Francia and Saxonia. Hence it is also not surprising that a writer such as Thietmar of Merseburg could say – anticipating what was going to happen when his childless lord Henry II finally died – that ‘rule by strangers is the worst evil’.25 Strangers, for Thietmar, were people who were not Saxons; Widukind, in a famous passage, also described a crisis point in the early years of Otto I in terms of a threat to Saxon rule.26 Faced with such differences, there are essentially two approaches possible, and both have something to be said for them. The first is to explain the differences away; the second is to explain them. Let us think first of all how one might explain the differences away. Here also there are two possible approaches. The first would be to argue that the differences were in reality much less great than they have seemed. One might argue, first of all, that Germany is really much more like England than might appear at first sight. This is a position which has been hinted at but not fully expounded on a number of occasions by James Campbell. Apparently alarmed at the 24 25

26

Thietmar, Chronicon, IV, 50, ed. Holtzmann, p. 188; Wipo, Gesta Chuonradi imperatoris, in H. Bresslau ed., Die Werke Wipos, MGH SRG (Hannover, 1915), c. 7, p. 30. Thietmar, Chronicon, I, 19, ed. Holtzmann, pp. 24, 26: ‘quia maxima perdicio est alienigenos regnare: hinc depressio et libertatis venit magna periclitatio’; for comment see K. J. Leyser, ‘From Saxon Freedoms to the Freedom of Saxony: The Crisis of the Eleventh Century’, in Reuter ed., Communications and Power in Medieval Europe, pp. 57–8. Widukind of Corvey, Rerum gestarum Saxonicarum libri III, II, 24, ed. P. Hirsch and H.-E. Lohrmann, MGH SRG LX (Hannover, 1935), p. 87: ‘nec ultra spes erat regnandi Saxones’. The passage is usually understood as meaning ‘there was no longer hope of rule for the Saxons’, though it could also mean ‘there was no longer hope [for Otto I] of ruling the Saxons’. See also ibid., II, 20, pp. 84–5: ‘Multos quippe illis diebus Saxones patiebantur hostes, Sclavos . . . Francos . . . Lotharios . . . Danos itemque Sclavos.’

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implications of his own work on the administrative backbone of the Old English state, perhaps because it might appear to confirm that English exceptionalism lies at the roots of our society, he has suggested that if we were to look more closely at the sources for the government of Carolingian Francia or of Ottonian Germany we would see fragmentary evidence for institutions and administration of a much greater sophistication than are commonly supposed to have existed.27 This is a tempting assumption, but it is probably not really tenable. No doubt there were more administrative records in tenth-century Saxony and indeed in the tenth-century Reich than we now know of, but that does not make it into a highly organised polity.28 Indeed, there is much evidence to show that it was not because, as several scholars have suggested, of the very loose nature of law and order, the importance of ritualised and symbolic action in its politics, and the absence of clear administrative structures.29 One could also reverse the argument and suggest that the Old English state was not all it has been made out to be. This is also tempting, but it is not easy to sustain. Writing in 1996 it is particularly tricky, because the ‘maximalist’ case has been stated in skeletal form in advance of the big works which are to set it out in full: Campbell’s Ford lectures and Wormald’s long-awaited survey of English law. To mount arguments against it is thus an attack on hidden gun emplacements. But some considerations may be offered in advance of these. The strongest arguments in favour of maximalism are drawn from the coinage, and from the evidence of law-codes which not only look and feel like Carolingian capitularies but can clearly be shown to have made use of Ansegis’s capitulary collection.30 The argument 27

28 29

30

J. Campbell, ‘Observations on English Government from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century’, TRHS 5th series 25 (1975), pp. 159–65; J. Campbell, ‘The Significance of the Anglo-Norman State in the Administrative History of Western Europe’, in J. Campbell ed., Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London, 1986: first published in 1980), pp. 155–70; J. Campbell, review of Karl Leyser, Communications and Power in Medieval Europe, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 17 (1995), pp. 41–8 at p. 44. Leyser in his Medieval Germany and its Neighbours, pp. 69–101, distinguishes between the Ottonians’ quite intensive rule of their own fiscal resources and their much looser rule of the polity they governed. See on these various aspects Althoff, ‘Königsherrschaft’; G. Althoff, Amicitiae und Pacta. Bündnis, Einung, Politik und Gebetsgedenken im beginnenden 10. Jahrhundert (Hannover, 1992); T. Reuter, ‘Unruhestiftung, Fehde, Rebellion, Widerstand: Gewalt und Frieden in der Politik der Salierzeit’, in S. Weinfurter ed., Die Salier und das Reich, vol. III: Gesellschaftlicher und ideengeschichtlicher Wandel im Reich der Salier (Sigmaringen, 1991), pp. 297–325 [translated as chapter 19, below]; Leyser, ‘Saxon Freedoms’, pp. 51–68. Coinage: arguments summarised in Campbell, ‘Observations on English Government’, pp. 39– 42. For law-codes see P. Wormald, ‘Æthelred the Lawmaker’, in D. Hill ed., Ethelred the Unready: Papers from the Millenary Conference, British Archaeological Reports, British Series 59 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 47–80; P. Wormald, ‘“Inter cetera bona . . . genti suae”: Law-making and Peace-keeping in the Earliest English Kingdoms’, in La Giustizia nell’alto Medioevo (secoli V–VIII), Settimane Spoleto 42 (1995), pp. 963–96.


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from coinage in effect echoes the kind of argumentation offered frequently enough by Pope Gregory VII for papal power: ‘if they could do that, what could they not do?’ If, as the evidence seems to suggest, Anglo-Saxon rulers from Edgar onwards were successfully practising renovatio monetae (in effect a bullion tax), they were evidently able to call in obsolete coins and prohibit their circulation, and this suggests a degree of penetration of royal authority into the structures of local power about which other contemporary rulers north of the Alps could only have dreamed. Yet this is not as clear as it seems at first sight. Power does not necessarily come as a single currency in which all specific forms of government and administration have clear prices. Close control of the coinage is perfectly compatible with much weaker or less sophisticated forms of power in other areas of law and politics – one may think, for example, of the use of ‘harrying’ for law-enforcement and tax-collecting.31 And the point about capitularies is quite simply this: once upon a time, Carolingian historians thought about the Carolingian state in ‘maximalist’ terms; it was only gradually, with the more intensive study of the capitularies, the main source of evidence for Carolingian institutions, that their slipperiness as sources was revealed.32 The Anglo-Saxon law-codes may turn out to be more slippery than has been supposed. We should, of course, still know about much of tenth- and eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon government, not least from the evidence of Domesday Book, even if not a single law-code had survived, but we should know much less about it. Nevertheless, though the maximalist case is probably not impregnable, it does not at present seem likely that it can be comprehensively rebutted. And if we are simply comparing, it is clear, for example, that whatever view we take of the nature of Anglo-Saxon law-codes there were such things, whereas there were no Ottonian law-codes or even legislation outside Italy – a contrast which as much as anything else encapsulates the differences between the two polities. A second kind of explaining away would operate at a level of conceptuality and historiographical development. One might argue that the seeming differences are in fact optical illusions created by the preconceptions 31 32

This argument is developed in T. Reuter, ‘Debate: The Feudal Revolution, III’, P&P 155 (1997), pp. 177–95. F. L. Ganshof, Was waren die Kapitularien? (Darmstadt, 1958); R. Schneider, ‘Zur rechtlichen Bedeutung der Kapitularientexte’, DA 23 (1967), pp. 273–95. The continuing debate on the nature of the Carolingian county – see H. K. Schulze, Die Grafschaftsverfassung der Karolingerzeit in den Gebieten o¨stlich des Rheins (Berlin, 1973); M. Borgolte, Geschichte der Grafschaften Alemanniens in fränkischer Zeit (Sigmaringen, 1984); H. K. Schulze, ‘Grundprobleme der Grafschaftsverfassung’, Zeitschrift für württembergische Landesgeschichte 44 (1985), pp. 265–82 – shows how difficult it can be to read capitulary evidence as a simple mirror of past reality.

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and preoccupations of the English and German national historiographical traditions, and certainly it is clear that a much greater awareness of such differences is one of the keys to progress in our subject. One might also argue that, though the differences are indeed real, they are secondary, because we impose on tenth-century polities our own preconceptions of what is really important. The two lines of argument converge in practice, so in what follows I shall take them together. James Campbell has recently argued, discussing the hints at much more careful planning of taxation and administration in the sources than might at first sight appear to have existed, that the narrative sources for tenth-, eleventh- and twelfth-century English history give a misleading picture – kingship was not just about hunting, praying, court ceremony and womanising, which were simply the froth on the top of serious government. This is a variant of one of the standard tropes of English medievalists: narrative sources unreliable, back to the archives. One might, however, turn the argument round: for tenth- and eleventh-century kings and aristocrats, the polity was defined and expressed precisely in terms of the celebration of community implicit in hunting, praying, crown-wearing and even womanising. The means used to support these activities were of secondary importance. To quote Clifford Geertz’s famous account of the nineteenth-century kingdom of Bali before the Dutch took over in 1906: ‘Power served pomp, not pomp power.’33 One might argue that, precisely because of the point about the Old English state made by Leyser, quoted at the opening of this chapter, English political medievalists are peculiarly state-fixated: the importance of the state in our history becomes self-reinforcing, so that real substance is seen to lie in administrative practice and innovation rather than in the relations between the members of the political community. There is an additional point here of some importance. How we view medieval polities of all kinds depends inevitably and inherently not only on the historiographical traditions we are working within, but also on the sources which we have to work with. Now, the sources for tenth- and eleventh-century German history are not only in absolute terms bulkier than they are for Anglo-Saxon England; they are also different in quality. Far more royal charters survive from Ottonian rulers than from AngloSaxon ones – there are getting on for 2,000 genuine ones for the period 919–1056 – but they have not until recently seemed to reveal a great deal about the workings of royal administration. German medievalists, especially since the war, have won their insights into the polity they study by looking 33

C. Geertz, Negara (Princeton, NJ, 1980), p. 13.


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very closely at the narrative sources available, and there can be no doubt that these are incomparably richer than those available for Anglo-Saxon England.34 Again, it is not just a matter of bulk, but also of juiciness. There is no comparison between Widukind’s account of Otto I’s reign and the Chronicle accounts of the same period in English history in terms of what the two are able to tell us about the working assumptions of contemporary politicians, and Widukind is only one of the narrative sources available, while in Thietmar of Merseburg’s Chronicon we have a source for the workings of the Saxon political community rivalled in this era, if at all, only by Ordericus Vitalis’ account of eleventh-century Norman history. A world seen through these kinds of source is bound to look different from one which is seen through law-codes and sparse narratives. A means of exploiting the evidence of royal charters which has been developed to a high pitch of sophistication by German medievalists is the study of how itinerant kingship actually worked. There is a long line of development from Rieckenberg and Mayer through to the most recent works by Eckhard Müller-Mertens, who has combined the information from royal charters (which in the German kingdom normally carry information about the date and place of issue) with what is known about road systems, royal estates and palaces, to show where German rulers went, how often they went there and how long they stayed there.35 Coupling this with studying where recipients were when they received charters allows a very precise and nuanced picture of royal government. The outcome turns out to be not only what is evident even from the narrative sources, namely that kings were found much more often in some regions than in others, but something much more subtle and shaded: that even within royal heartlands there were great differences of intensity in the royal presence. Now it is clear to all of us that it would be virtually impossible to do the same kind of thing for Anglo-Saxon kings’ itineracy, because of the nature of royal charters, which generally lack a place of issue or a precise date, as well as clear marks of authentication, beyond pointing to the obvious fact that kings spent far more of their time in core Wessex than anywhere else; but we perhaps ought to remember that if we could differentiate their activities more precisely, then the picture of homogeneity of administration which emerges from the law-codes and other evidence might shift significantly 34 35

H. Beumann, Widukind von Korvei (Weimar, 1950); E. Karpf, Herrscherlegitimation und Reichsbegriff in der ottonischen Geschichtsschreibung des 10. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1985). E. Müller-Mertens, Die Reichsstruktur im Spiegel der Herrschaftspraxis Ottos des Groβen (Berlin, 1980); E. Müller-Mertens and W. Huschner, Reichsintegration im Spiegel der Herrschaftspraxis Kaiser Konrads II (Weimar, 1993).

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towards a more German picture. We might find, for example, that Mercian recipients tended to come to receive charters to locations along the line of the Thames rather than travelling into the heartland of Wessex to do so, much as south German recipients tend to be found meeting the king in Regensburg or Worms, Speyer and Mainz. We may turn now to the a priori more plausible assumption that these differences in the nature and intensity of royal government in the two polities are indeed real ones, even allowing for some of the points made above. How is it then that broadly similar starting-points, and indeed processes, produced such broadly dissimilar outcomes? Some of the reasons have already been briefly mentioned. Germany is on an altogether different scale from England; and the administrative and legal inheritance from the ninth century was also not comparable. More importantly, the accounts of the processes of ‘unification’ given above have perhaps suggested a greater degree of convergence than really existed. The gradual extension of shiring northwards, as Wessex secured hegemony over what was to become England, is not paralleled by anything in tenth-century German history. The Reich came together in the ninth century by royal fiat and was reconstructed in the early tenth century as a kind of confederation. Unification was sealed by successful and charismatic war-leadership at a much more fundamental level than it was in England – Brunanburh was clearly important, but equally clearly it did not have the same kind of significance for the Cerdicians as Otto I’s victory over the Magyars at the Lech did for the Ottonians. Most important are the divergences in the development of a regnal ethnicity. One might expect Germany’s early and well-established coherence to have produced an early and well-established sense of ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’ identity, but this is not so. In the ninth century the kingdom was normally called ‘the kingdom of the eastern Franks’, though its Frankish component was very much a minority interest, or else it was called ‘Germany’ (Germania), which in a ninth-century context was a reminiscence of the terminology of late antiquity, not an anticipation of a later identity. There were people who had a sense of the common identity of the kingdom’s inhabitants, but they were outsiders: inhabitants of Italy, earlier than anyone else in Europe, made a shift from referring to those who spoke German as teutisci (from theudisc, the language of the ‘people’, theod) to using the term for those who lived there or came from there. The Slav term (nemci) is also said to be tenth-century. The royal chancery itself rarely designated the kingdom by a territorial or ethnic term: the standard royal title in the mid-tenth century was simply Otto dei gratia rex, ‘Otto by the grace of God


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king’. To the extent that contemporaries thought of it as having an ethnic component, it was a Saxon kingdom, or perhaps a kingdom which rested on a coalition of Franks and Saxons.36 There was no common language; Saxons and Bavarians could probably understand each other, but they spoke Saxon (like Otto I, for example) and Bavarian.37 Until the late eleventh century references to the kingdom of Germany as regnum Germaniae or regnum Teutonicorum can be counted on your fingers. It is true that the Greater Salzburg Annals say of the events of 918–19 that ‘the Bavarians again submitted themselves to Arnulf and made him to be king in the kingdom of the Teutons’, but they are a highly problematic text, in terms of both transmission and meaning.38 The most plausible explanation of the term is that it was local Salzburg usage influenced by north Italian practice; it is certainly not likely to have been what was in the minds of the eastern Franks and Bavarians who chose Arnulf of Bavaria as king on Conrad I’s death.39 The term regnum Teutonicorum did not come into general use until popularised by another Italian, Gregory VII, who undoubtedly used it in order to cut Henry IV down to size: he was a king of the Germans just as Salomon was a king of the Hungarians or Philip king of the French, with no particular status or pretensions beyond theirs.40 In England, by contrast, we can see a terminology emerging for the kingdom and its political community much earlier than in Germany. It is not easy to work out what it is: as scholars such as Fichtenau and Wolfram have taught us, the first place to go to see how kings perceive themselves – or rather how they are presented by their entourages – is royal charters, but unfortunately Anglo-Saxon diplomaticists persist in the belief that it is possible to be slightly dead or partly pregnant, and discussion of royal titles is made much more difficult when there is a subtly graduated range of conditions rather than the standard ones known on the continent: genuine, interpolated, forgery on the basis of a genuine charter, contemporary forgery, later forgery. So it is still not absolutely certain, for example, that the Alfredian charters in which he is called ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons’ are genuine/contemporary or not. But even if you take the kind of radicalpessimistic view found in Smyth’s recent biography – and as a general methodological rule one ought to be suspicious of claims that a text has 36 38 39 40

37 Br¨ For references see above, nn. 17 and 20. uhl, Deutschland–Frankreich, pp. 187–205. ‘Bawari sponte se reddiderunt Arnulfo duci et regnare eum fecerunt in regno Teutonicorum’, Annales Iuvavenses maximi, s.a. 919, ed. H. Bresslau, MGH SS XXX (ii) (Leipzig, 1932), p. 742. H. Thomas, ‘Regnum Teutonicorum = Diutiskono Richi? Bemerkungen zur Doppelwahl des Jahres 919’, Rheinische Vierteljahresblätter 40 (1976), pp. 17–45. E. Müller-Mertens, Regnum Teutonicum (Berlin, 1970).

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been forged if other independent texts which would prima facie seem to support it have to be declared forged as well – it would appear that this style had emerged as common, even dominant, by the middle of the tenth century.41 Certainly for Widukind, writing in Saxony in the 960s, the inhabitants of the largest island in the archipelago ‘are called Anglo-Saxons to this day’.42 The terms for self were of two kinds. The first was the conventional type based on the kingdom, also in standard use on the continent: so we have kings of the ‘West Saxons’ or ‘Mercians’ or ‘Northumbrians’. The second is more general: ‘Anglo-Saxons’; generically ‘Saxon’ (especially in contexts suggesting kinship with the continental Old Saxons);43 or ‘English’ (here as terms like Engla-Lond or Engla-Land or Engla lage, and already in the ninth century Englisc and Angelcynn).44 Patrick Wormald, looking at all this, has suggested that we have here a case of ideas becoming reality. The notion of the unity of the English was, so he argues, a creation of two men: Gregory the Great and Bede. It is Gregory who defined them as Angli rather than something else in the famous Angli/angels anecdote; and it is Bede who defined an ethnic coherence by writing an Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which cut across regnal divisions. This work, we should note, was part of the Alfredian translation programme, and its Old English version survives in more manuscripts than most of the other works translated in that period of frantic activity, as well as having an extensive Latin transmission. So by the time England was ‘united’, between 871 and 973, there was already what German historians call a Wirgefühl, a ‘sense of usness’, waiting to articulate the newly created pan-English kingdom.45 The contrast between the two kingdoms is summed up as neatly as it could be in two letters contrasting respectable native customs with reprehensible foreign ones. In the first, an anonymous early eleventh-century author criticises the recipient, Edward, for deserting English custom and going around ‘Danish fashion’, with open neck and a long fringe.46 In the 41

42 43 44 45 46

A. P. Smyth, Alfred the Great (Oxford, 1995), pp. 371–400; S. Keynes, review of Smyth (1995) in JEcclesH 47 (1996), pp. 529–51. On Anglo-Saxon titulature see H. Kleinschmidt, ‘Die Titulaturen englischer Könige im 10. und 11. Jahrhundert’, in H. Wolfram and A. Schrader eds., Intitulatio 3. Lateinische Herrschertitel und Herrschertitulaturen vom 7. bis zum 13. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1988), pp. 75–129. Widukind, Res gestae Saxonicae, I, 8, p. 10: ‘Anglisaxones usque hodie vocitantur’. Leyser, ‘The Ottonians and Wessex’, pp. 73–5. Wormald, ‘Engla Lond’; S. Foot, ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity in the Early Middle Ages’, TRHS 6th series 6 (1996), pp. 25–49. For the term see W. Eggert and B. Pätzold, Wir-Gefühl und regnum Saxonum bei frühmittelalterlichen Geschichtschreibern (Berlin, 1984). Translated in D. Whitelock ed., English Historical Documents (London, 1979), I, no. 232, pp. 895–6; for commentary see Wormald, ‘Engla Lond’, p. 18.


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second, Abbot Siegfried of Gorze wrote to Abbot Poppo of Stavelot about Henry III’s proposed marriage to Agnes of Poitou, which took place in 1043. He was against the marriage not only because the two parties to it were too closely related, but also because Agnes could be expected to bring reprehensible French customs with her – no one in northern Europe in the eleventh century seems to have had much time for the Aquitanians – such as would not have been allowed ‘by the Ottos and the Henrys’.47 The Germans had no way of defining a common identity and inheritance except in terms of the kings who ruled them: it was precisely the ambiguities of these rulers’ positions (Saxons among the other ethnicities, Germans also ruling over Italy and claiming hegemony over Burgundy and France) which made the adoption of any kind of regnal ethnicity so difficult. The English had laws, customs, language to define Engla Lond. In consequence, it mattered much less who actually ruled the kingdom, as we saw above. To the standard tropes of recent historical discussion of the problems discussed in this volume belongs the priority of the state or kingdom over ethnicity and nationality. The members of the ‘imagined community’, in Benedict Anderson’s phrase, are defined by their relationship to their ruler before they come to be defined by their relationship to each other.48 Yet there are problems with such a view for the post-Carolingian era. Not only were most kingdoms ‘multiple kingdoms’ – a term used more by early modern historians than by medievalists, but equally applicable to the earlier period – and so ones which present us with layers of ethnicity and community, but the relationship between ethnicity or ethnicities and the kingdoms in which they were found is not a straightforward or constant one. The successful hegemonies created by the rulers of the two Saxon empires, for all their similarities, demonstrate this as clearly as anything could. 47

48

W. von Giesebrecht, Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, vol. II: Blüthe des Kaiserthums, 5th edn (Leipzig, 1885), p. 715; for other contemporary criticisms of the western Franks in general, and Aquitanians in particular, see Gesta Episcoporum Cameracensium, III, ed. L. C. Bethmann, MGH SS VII (Hannover, 1846), 2 and 66, pp. 466, 481; Rodulfus Glaber, Historiarum libri quinque, ed. J. France, III, ch. 40 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 164–6. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, 1983); for a recent, though for our period not wholly satisfactory, synthesis see H. Schulze, States, Nations and Nationalism from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford, 1995), pp. 95–136.

chap t e r 17

King, nobles, others: ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ in the Ottonian period

In this paper, I do not use the terms of my title, ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, in their original, strict sense. Strictly speaking, the ‘base’ would mean the sum-total of all economic relations in the society of the Ottonian age, while ‘superstructure’ would mean the sum of all other social phenomena which ultimately depended on the ‘base’. Instead, I use the terms here as a convenient shorthand for the vast bulk of the population, on the one hand, and a tiny elite group, on the other. This shorthand has the advantage of acting as a constant reminder that the elite lived very largely off the (mostly agrarian) production of the other group. There are good reasons why these social and economic aspects of the Ottonian period are seldom acknowledged in modern scholarship: as we shall see, our secure knowledge of the ‘base’, that is, of the specifically Ottonian part in the economic and social development of the Reich in the early Middle Ages, is fairly small, and can hardly be expected to increase much. All the same, the relationship between base and superstructure remains interesting, problematic and neglected. The question of what this relationship was like looks all the more urgent when we consider the more recent historiography of the Ottonian period in a comparative European perspective. What were the broad lines of development in the European tenth century? We can leave out the peripheral zones of the north and east whose history was distinctive in that it had only just begun, and we can assume a fundamentally different line of development in the Byzantine empire and in the Islamic states along the southern and western shores of the Mediterranean, because here the preconditions were quite different.1 Having narrowed the field of enquiry, we can say that for western Europe there are probably three distinct answers to my question: we can call them, respectively, Romanist, Anglo-Saxon and German. 1

See T. Reuter, ‘Debate: the “feudal revolution”, III’, P&P 157 (1997), pp. 177–95, at 189; T. Reuter, ‘Introduction: reading the tenth century’, in T. Reuter ed., NCMH, vol. III: c. 900–c. 1024 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 1–24, at 15–16.

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For French, Italian and – in so far as relevant here – Spanish2 medieval scholarship, the period corresponding to that of the Ottonians is one of major political and social upheavals. In the first place, kingship lost its political, legal and social importance: in Italy and southern France, this was under way already before the middle of the tenth century, in central and northern France it occurred at the latest c. 1000.3 What matters is not so much the failing political power of the various kings as the fact that the political community of these kingdoms gradually ceased to be a political community. In particular, assemblies and other forms of regnal self-representation and self-perception took place increasingly seldom.4 Further, the kingdom almost completely lost its former role as the motor of cultural production and concentrated ecclesiastical activity. At the same time, though we should not necessarily formulate this in terms of cause and effect, the old Carolingian public order grew weaker and weaker at local level. There was no longer a homogeneous network of pagi, and only exceptionally did any public judicial institutions survive.5 In place of a mallus publicus led by a count along with the boni homines of the neighbourhood, there appeared to an ever-increasing extent ‘private’ ways of dealing with crime and settling disputes, with their corresponding written forms of querimonia and convenientia.6 That did not mean that now, across-the-board, 2

3

4

5

6

Conditions in the small kingdoms of León and Navarre and in the county of Castile (as it then was) were too diverse to be taken into account here. But Catalonia, which today is part of the domain of Spanish medievalist scholarship sketched above, was then still part of the West Frankish realm, and was strongly affected by these developments, even though with a slight time-lag: see the fundamental work of P. Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du Xe a` la fin du XIe siècle: croissance et mutations d’une société, 2 vols. (Toulouse, 1975/6). J.-P. Poly and E. Bournazel, La mutation féodale, 2nd edn (Paris, 1991), pp. 63–106, and J.-P. Poly and E. Bournazel eds., Les féodalités (Paris, 1998), pp. 1–206, offer a good overview of French developments; see also J. Dunbabin, ‘West Francia: the kingdom’, D. Bates, ‘West Francia: the northern principalities’, and M. Zimmermann, ‘West Francia: the southern principalities’, all in Reuter ed., NCMH, vol. III, pp. 372–97, 398–419, 420–55. For developments in Italy, see the lapidary account of G. Tabacco, The Structures of Power in Medieval Italy (Cambridge, 1989 translated from the Italian original published in 1979), and G. Sergi, ‘The kingdom of Italy’, in NCMH, vol. III, pp. 346–71. For the significance of assemblies as forms in which early and high-medieval communities represented themselves, see now T. Reuter, ‘Assembly politics, 700–1200’, in P. Linehan and J. L. Nelson eds., The Medieval World (London, 2001), pp. 432–50 [reprinted in this book, chapter 11, above]. Classic accounts of this process of collapse were given by J.-F. Lemarignier, ‘La dislocation du pagus et le problème des consuetudines (X–XI siècles)’, in Mélanges d’histoire du moyen aˆ ge dédiées a` la mémoire de Louis Halphen (Paris, 1951), pp. 401–10, and G. Duby, La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la régon mâconnaise, 2nd edn (Paris, 1971, first published 1953), pp. 89–108; and see also G. Duby, ‘The evolution of judicial institutions in Burgundy in the tenth and eleventh centuries’, in G. Duby, The Chivalrous Society, trans. C. Postan (London, 1977), pp. 15–58. S. D. White, ‘Pactum . . . legem vincit et amor judicium: the settlement of disputes by compromise in eleventh-century western France’, American Journal of Legal History 22 (1978), pp. 281–308; S. D. White, ‘Feuding and peacemaking in the Touraine around the year 1100’, Traditio 42 (1986), pp. 195– 263; W. Davies and P. Fouracre eds., The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge,

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in contrast to earlier periods, only the law of the stronger was in control. On the one hand, the apparently strong system of public order of the Carolingian period had often enough been a façade behind which manipulation and lawlessness could occur. On the other hand, even with the new, private and autonomous forms of dispute-settlement, there remained more than just a theoretical possibility that the party in the wrong would in the end be defeated. But the crucial thing was the dwindling of public order, even if order as such never completely vanished.7 From the last quarter of the tenth century onwards, those intermediate powers – dukedoms, marquisates, counties – which a century or so earlier had either come or pushed themselves to the fore, lost control of more or less everything beyond their own backyards.8 These smaller territories which until then had in practice functioned like little kingdoms and had often enough been termed regna by contemporaries,9 now fell apart as had the kingdoms that once contained them. There were a number of losers from these processes of change. First, high-aristocratic office-holders lost power because their authority could no longer be taken for granted. Second, parts of the class of aristocratic landlords, including monasteries, collegiate churches and major ecclesiastical institutions, came under immense pressure. Those that lacked control of any fortress and any armed following of fairly considerable dimensions found themselves engaged in an unequal struggle with the new wielders of lordship – signoria or seigneurie banale. Their defence attempts in the form of the organised Peace of God were only partially successful.10 But third, and the worst affected, were the free in general. Their status was increasingly depressed, so that they formed a new, homogeneous class of ‘serfs’ (dependents, semi-freemen) along with former slaves and

7 8 9

10

1986); P. J. Geary, ‘Living with conflicts in stateless France: a typology of conflict management mechanisms (1050–1200)’, in P. J. Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca NY, 1994), pp. 125–60. The most famous convenientia, if probably an atypical one, is that between William of Aquitaine and Hugh of Lusignan of c. 1030: see G. Beech, Y. Chaugin and G. Pon eds., Le Conventum (vers 1030): un précurseur aquitain des premières épopées (Geneva, 1995). [See also the edition, English translation and excellent commentary of J. Martindale, cited below, n. 63.] For the argument that such detailed narrative documents were new in form, but not in terms of what was narrated, see D. Barthélemy, ‘La mutation féodale a-t-elle eu lieu?’, Annales ESC 47 (1992), pp. 767–75. C. J. Wickham, ‘Debate: the “feudal revolution”’, P&P 157 (1997), pp. 195–208, at 203–4. See above, n. 5. J. Dhondt, Etudes sur la naissance des principautés territoriales en France (IXe–XIe s.) (Bruges, 1948); K. F. Werner, Structures politiques du monde franc (VIe–XIIe siècles) (London, 1979); W. Kienast, Studien u¨ ber die französischen Volksstämme des Frühmittelalters (Stuttgart, 1968). H. Hoffmann, Gottesfriede und Treuga Dei, Schriften der MGH XX (Stuttgart, 1964); T. Head and R. Landes eds., The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000 (Ithaca NY, 1993).


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quasi-slaves.11 The overall result was the fragmentation and reassembling of lordship, which from now on was increasingly exercised from fortresses and castles as coercive lordship, and experienced as such.12 The key-words in the historiography here are incastellamento (the fortification of settlements) and encellulement (the formation of cell-like clusters of power), and also signoria and seigneurie.13 Lively debate continues to surround the significance of these phenomena, usually encapsulated in the concepts of ‘revolution’ or ‘feudal revolution’.14 But there is widespread agreement that they occurred, or at least that it looks as if they occurred. Thus we have a development at the high-political, intellectual and ecclesiastical level which fits to a considerable extent with economic and social developments: the two levels are mutually illuminating as well as complementary. It is true that the main phase of this development occurred in most regions of the West Frankish kingdom and in Italy rather late in the Ottonian period, in the quarter-centuries before and after the year 1000, yet precursors of these subsequent trends can be seen in the preceding half-century as well. Yet in Anglo-Saxon England, the ‘Ottonian period’ looks quite different. There, royal, diplomatic and military success was accompanied, at least until the late tenth century, by internal peace and social stability. Fortifications were built only with royal authorisation.15 Castle-based lordship played as small a role as the privatisation of justice or of other aspects of 11

12

13

14

15

P. Bonnassie, From Slavery to Feudalism in South-Western Europe (Cambridge, 1991); G. Bois, La mutation de l’an mil (Paris, 1989); D. Barthélemy, ‘Qu’est-ce que le servage en France au XIe siècle?’, Revue Historique 287 (1992), pp. 233–84. The element of power that was affective and lacked ideological legitimation was particularly stressed by T. N. Bisson, ‘The “feudal revolution”’, P&P 142 (1994), pp. 5–42, and T. N. Bisson, ‘Medieval lordship’, Speculum 70 (1995), pp. 743–59. On incastellamento, see especially P. Toubert, Les structures du Latium médiéval: le Latium méridional et la Sabine du IXe a` la fin du XIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Rome, 1973), and C. J. Wickham, The Mountains and the City (Oxford, 1986), pp. xxxiv–xxxvii, and C. J. Wickham, Il problema dell’incastellamento nell’Italia centrale: l’esempio di San Vincenzo al Volturno (Florence, 1985). For encellulement, see R. Fossier, Enfance de l’Europe: aspects économiques et sociaux (Xe–XIIe siècles), 2 vols. (Paris, 1982), pp. 288–601. ‘Signoria’ and ‘seigneurie banale’ are discussed in more detail below, nn. 26–8. Bois, Mutation, raised fierce criticism; cf. A. Guerreau, ‘Lournand au Xe siècle: histoire et fiction’, Le Moyen Age 96 (1990), pp. 519–37, and the special number of the journal Médiévales 21 (1991). For the Anglophone debate, see Bisson, ‘Feudal revolution’, and the ensuing debate with contributions from D. Barthélemy and S. D. White, P&P 152 (1996), pp. 196–223, and Reuter and Wickham in P&P 155 (1997), pp. 208–25. The somewhat fierce and emotionally charged controversy between J.-P. Poly and E. Bournazel on the one hand and D. Barthélemy on the other can be followed in Poly and Bournazel eds., Les féodalités, and Barthélemy, La mutation de l’an mil, a-t-elle eu lieu? Servage et chevalerie en France des Xe et XIe siècles (Paris, 1997). ¨ K.-U. Jäschke, Burgenbau und Landesverteidigung um 900. Uberlegungen zu Beispielen aus Deutschland, Frankreich und England, Vorträge und Forschungen Sonderband 16 (Sigmaringen, 1975).

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public power.16 True, there were periods of turbulence among propertyholders: some of these periods were both violent and profound in their effects, as for instance those after the death of Edgar (975) and especially in the second and third decades of the eleventh century after the Danish conquest under Canute. According to the prevailing interpretation, however, they are to be explained in terms of high politics, not of social change.17 The explanation of this stability lies in the political development of England, in the Anglo-Saxon Sonderweg, as it were. First, from about 870, the kings undertook a thoroughgoing modernisation on the Carolingian model, indeed what had remained only aspirational under the Carolingians was now, up to a point, made reality.18 Second, and during the same period, there occurred a unification of what had hitherto been a number of separate kingdoms in England under the leadership of the kings of Wessex, a kingdom which until the early ninth century – a couple of brief episodes apart – had occupied a rather peripheral position among the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, especially compared with Mercia and Northumbria.19 This unification was carried through largely by violence and conquest. It brought with it an enforced introduction of the neo-Carolingian forms of organisation of the kingdom of Wessex.20 At the close of the tenth century, Wessex wielded a hegemonial, Ottonian-like tribute-taking overlordship over large parts of the east Atlantic archipelago, but one that structurally was built on very different lines. The king disposed of a network of institutions, including subordinate local courts with something resembling bureaucratic traits, that was not only dense but, for its time, extraordinarily homogeneous, and in addition he laid undisputed claim to the right to operate social and legal controls over all levels of society, through legislation among other things.21 In part as a by-product of the resulting stability, England between c. 950 and 1050 experienced a phase of strong 16

17

18 19 20

21

P. Wormald, ‘Lordship and justice in the early English kingdom: Oswaldslow revisited’, in W. Davies and P. Fouracre eds., Property and Power in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 114–36; J. Campbell, ‘The late Old English state: a maximum view’, PBA 87 (1994), pp. 39–65. P. Stafford, Unification and Conquest: A Political and Social History of England in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (London, 1989), pp. 57–9; R. Fleming, Kings and Lords in Conquest England (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 3–103. See especially Campbell, ‘The late Old English state’. B. Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1990), pp. 128–56; B. Yorke, Wessex in the Early Middle Ages (London, 1995). T. Reuter, ‘The making of England and Germany, 850–1050: points of comparison and difference’, in A. P. Smyth ed., Medieval Europeans (London, 1998), pp. 53–70 [reprinted in this book, chapter 16, above]. See now the fundamental work of P. Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, I: Legislation and its Limits (Oxford, 1999), especially on the legislative process.


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economic growth.22 This could well have alleviated conflicts over distribution of wealth, and may have allowed for a degree of social mobility: consider the well-documented possibility that a ceorl (free man, kulak) could rise to be a thegn (lesser noble with obligations to military service).23 Direct comparisons between these two lines of development and those in contemporary East Frankish-German history are difficult for several reasons. The differences are explicable in part quite simply because the available sources for these lands are so unlike those for the areas just considered. Anyone interested in the tenth-century history of Catalonia or Burgundy must write another kind of history. For those regions, there are no Widukinds, no Thietmars, in fact there is really nothing you can use to write a narrative history of the superstructure. Instead of these, we have a great mass of charters from the late tenth century whose density and explicitness, especially in the late tenth-century material, are of a kind of which the Germanophone medievalist can only dream: documents that reveal something of the background to property transactions, and often describe in detail how disputes were conducted and how they were brought to an end. In part, too, we have to take into account the development of different historiographical traditions in the various European countries, and the varying forms of professional socialisation and different approaches that these entailed. For French scholarship, to give an example, the proliferation of noble fortifications in the tenth century is considered, first and foremost, in terms of innovation in the techniques of power, making possible the feudal ‘mutation’ or ‘revolution’. By contrast, the conclusions reached by ‘the Freiburg School’, for whom the noble fortress appears an indication of altered family structure within the nobility and an anchorage-point for a new kind of family-consciousness, have certainly met with a response in western Europe at large, but play no central role in those broader interpretative constructs.24 22 23

24

R. Hodges, ‘Society, power, and the first English industrial revolution’, in Il secolo di ferro: mitto e realtà del secolo X, Settimane Spoleto 37 (1997), pp. 125–7. F. M. Stenton, ‘The thriving of the Anglo-Saxon ceorl’, in F. M. Stenton, Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1970), pp. 383–93; R. Faith, The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship (London, 1997), pp. 127–8. K. Schmid, Geblüt, Herrschaft, Geschlechterbewusstsein. Grundfragen zum Verständnis des Adels im Mittelalters, eds. D. Mertens and T. Zotz, Vorträge und Forschungen 44 (Sigmaringen, 1999), pp. 103–6, and the editors’ introduction, pp. xxiv–xxv; J. B. Freed, ‘The counts of Falkenstein: noble selfconsciousness in twelfth-century Germany’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 74 (6) (Philadelphia PA, 1984), pp. 1–13. For the wider response, see the editors’ foreword to Schmid’s posthumously published Habilitationschrift, and also Duby, Chivalrous Society, pp. 59–80; J. Martindale, ‘The French nobility in the early Middle Ages: a reappraisal’, P&P 75 (1977), pp. 5–45; J. C. Holt, ‘Feudal society and the family in early medieval England, III: patronage and politics’, TRHS 5th series 33 (1983), pp. 1–26, at 4–5, 15; C. B. Bouchard, ‘The origins of the French nobility: a reassessment’, AHR 86 (1981), pp. 501–32.

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Conversely, fortresses as instruments of local aristocratic power assume no particularly high profile in German scholarship on the Ottonian period. The roots of such differences must surely be sought in historiographical rather than in historical developments: in France, the initiative was taken by scholars working on regional history, while in Germany it is seldom possible to research noble fortresses in this context at all. Hence the subject gets moved into the field of research into family history.25 Serious problems can also arise when concepts have to be transferred from one historiographical zone to another, and one language to another. In French and Italian scholarship, seigneurie and signoria correspond approximately to the German concept of Herrschaft, but with the significant difference that the Romance words are neutral generic terms which require some kind of qualifier – signoria fondiaria, for instance, in contrast to signoria territoriale, or seigneurie banale, as distinct from seigneurie foncière.26 A point worth noting is that the vast amount of charter-material from northern and central Italy often makes its possible to differentiate precisely between overlapping layers of lordship (Herrschaft) from an early date.27 Among German medievalists, on the other hand, frequently encountered concepts like Adelsherrschaft or Grundherrschaft are quite deliberately used in less precise ways, because for decades scholars in general have tended to think that it would be an anachronistic misperception of early medieval reality to distinguish between the forms of power wielded by great landlords on the criteria of actual or alleged origins.28 You can pose the question of 25

26

27 28

O. Engels, ‘Das Reich der Salier – Entwicklungslinien’, in S. Weinfurter ed., Die Salier und das Reich, 3 vols. (Sigmaringen, 1991), vol. III, pp. 479–541, esp. 499–502; see also G. Streich, Burg und Kirche während des deutschen Mittelalters, Vorträge und Forschungen Sonderband 29/I–II (Sigmaringen, 1984), pp. 327–404, 461–88; H. Ebner, ‘Die Burg als Forschungsproblem mittelalterlicher Verfassungsgeschichte’, in H. Patze ed., Die Burgen im deutschen Sprachraum. Ihre rechts- und verfassungsgeschichtliche Bedeutung, 2 vols., Vorträge und Forschungen 19 (Sigmaringen, 1976), vol. I, ¨ pp. 11–82, esp. 17–19; H.-W. Heine, ‘Burgen der salischen Zeit in Niedersachsen. Ein Uberblick’, in H. W. Böhme ed., Burgen der Salierzeit, Teil 1: In den nördlichen Landschaften des Reiches (Sigmaringen, 1991), pp. 9–84, esp. 9–11. See Wickham, Mountains and the City, pp. xiv, xviii–xxiii, 105–8: in the linguistic usage of Italian historiography, signoria is seldom used for ‘landlordship’ (which is not used, either, to translate Grundherrschaft). For problems of comprehension in this area, and especially that of untranslatability, linguistic and conceptual, see M. Pelz, ‘Signoria rurale – Grundherrschaft, storiografia italiana – storiografia tedesca: una messa a confronto’, Società e storia 69 (1995), pp. 583–98. In general on the problems involved in ‘translating’ concepts, see C. J. Wickham, ‘Problems of comparing rural societies in early medieval western Europe’, TRHS 6th series 2 (1992), pp. 221–46, esp. 222–5. See G. Dilcher and C. Violante eds., Strutture e trasformazioni della signoria rurale nei secoli X–XIII (Bologna, 1996). On historiographical developments, see especially K. Schreiner, ‘“Grundherrschaft”. Entstehung und Wandel eines geschichtswissenschaftlichen Ordnungs- und Erklärungsbegriffs’, in H. Patze ed., Grundherrschaft im späten Mittelalter, Vorträge und Forschungen 27 (Sigmaringen, 1983), pp. 11–74, and the supplement to that, ‘Signoria fondaria: un concetto moderno per una realtà medievale’, in Dilcher and Violante eds., Strutture e trasformazioni, pp. 83–119.


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whether any development analogous to that of seigneurie banale occurred in Ottonian Germany, but it is an extremely hard one to answer, not least on account of the prevailing terminology. Bannherrschaft, ‘power to impose punishments’, is a concept seldom used nowadays,29 while Vogtei, ‘advocacy’, an institution of Carolingian origin which evolved almost exclusively in Germany and in fact played a larger role there in the post-Carolingian period than before, appears in German medieval scholarship with a functional sense very different from its original one. Yet there are certainly resemblances between the generic concepts of advocacy or sub-advocacy, as displayed in the exercise of rights of lordly immunity, and the expansion of seigneurie banale – though not until the eleventh century are complaints about the exercise of such rights often recorded. Because of these differences in the source-materials and in the meanings of concepts, then, western European models cannot easily be transferred to Germany – at least, not unless the concepts are clearly translated. Furthermore, neither the French–Italian–Catalan model nor the Anglo-Saxon one is undisputed, let alone indisputable; neither the one nor the other is entirely convincing. Nevertheless, they both work in more plausible and coherent ways than the social-history model that nearly always implicitly and seemingly unreflectively underlies most accounts of the Ottonian period. In these widely accepted accounts, the evolution of the regnum Teutonicum as it was then coming into being fits neither the Mediterranean nor the insular model. The temporary political fragmentation of the early tenth century is seen as a new accentuation of what was already happening rather than as a new development.30 In our view, or from our viewpoint, things went on only at the level of ethnic or quasi-ethnic entities: there were struggles for pre-eminence among the evolving duchies, especially in Franconia and Saxony, and these were being waged at approximately the same time as similar struggles in parts of West Francia and Italy, for instance in Aquitaine or Tuscany.31 But struggles for dominance in subregions of duchies or at still more local levels apparently did not occur or 29

30

31

See especially G. Seeliger, ‘Die soziale und politische Bedeutung der Grundherrschaft im früheren Mittelalter. Untersuchungen u¨ ber Hofrecht, Immunität und Landleihen’, Abhandlungen der philologisch-historischen Klasse der Königl. Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften 22, 1 (Leipzig, 1903); G. Seeliger, Staat und Grundherrschaft in der a¨ lteren deutschen Geschichte (Leipzig, 1909). The key issue here is the origin of new duchies: see H. Stingl, Die Entstehung der deutschen Stammesherzogtümer am Anfang des 10. Jhdts. (Aalen, 1974); H.-W. Goetz, ‘Dux’ und ‘Ducatus’. Begriffs- und verfassungsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Entstehung des sogenannten ‘jüngeren’ Stammesherzogtums an der Wende vom 9. zum 10. Jahrhundert (Bochum, 1977); M. Becher, Rex, Dux und Gens. Untersuchungen zur Entstehung des säschischen Herzogtums im 9. und 10. Jahrhundert (Husum, 1996); and for a good survey of relevant research, J. Ehlers, Die Entstehung des deutschen Reiches (Munich, 1994), pp. 82–3. Goetz, ‘Dux’ und ‘Ducatus’, pp. 16–19, 347–51, 354–5.

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at least cannot be seen in the sources. Fortifications were certainly built at the beginning and end of the tenth century, but a rise of the castellans, that is, a transfer of power from members of the high aristocracy to their castle-dwelling tenants, did not occur in the German Reich in the tenth and eleventh centuries, except perhaps in parts of Lotharingia.32 Like their colleagues further west, German economic and social historians assume that a blending-process in the tenth century brought about a certain homogenisation of the lower social ranks, with the effect that several originally distinct groups fused to form a new homogeneous class of dependents, servi in the medieval rather than the classical sense.33 This fusion, which seems in western Europe to have been, as we noted above, the visible and audible consequence of a process accompanied by violence and brutality, apparently took place on East Frankish-German soil silently and without violence, a consequence, as it were, of the social character of the feudal economy. This apparent or real lack of social conflict might seem reminiscent of English developments, but there is a snag in this comparison as well. In both cases, to be sure, there were large imperial realms; but precisely the process of forcible association and unification which went with the making of the Anglo-Saxon empire did not occur and could not have occurred in the Ottonian Reich. The rule of the Saxon kings was extended, in its decisive early stages, in a more or less peaceful and collaborative way.34 The acceptance of Liudolfing overlordship outside Saxony had virtually no importance for power-relations within each region, let alone for the organisational forms of power. Not only were the old Carolingian foundations largely absent here, but the circumstances of Ottonification simply did not permit any forcible introduction of Carolingian institutions, in Saxony or 32

33

34

Struggles between bishops and urban castellans, as in Worms or Cambrai, come into another category, though castellans are well attested precisely in Lotharingia. But in the Lower Rhine region there is certainly no indication in the story of the well-documented feuds between Wichmann and Balderic that the castellans or fortress-commanders there acted on their own responsibility: see Alpert of Metz, De diversitate temporum, eds. H. van Rij and A. Sapir Abulafia (Amsterdam, 1992), I, 1–5, 8, II, 1–13, 15–17, pp. 8–16, 18–20, 42–70, 74–6. See the review of the literature by W. Rösener, Agrarwirtschaft, Agrarverfassung und ländliche Gesellschaft im Mittelalter (Munich, 1992), pp. 71–2, but stressing the time-lag and incompleteness of the process by comparison with the West. This is now accepted as a generally held opinion for the reign of Henry I: see G. Althoff, Amicitiae und Pacta. Bündnis, Einung, Politik und Gebetsgedenken im beginnenden 10. Jahrhundert, Schriften der MGH XXXII (Hannover, 1992), pp. 21–36, and J. Fried, Der Weg in die Geschichte. Die Ursprünge Deutschlands bis 1024 (Berlin, 1994), pp. 462–71. Althoff has certainly argued repeatedly and up to a point plausibly for the introduction of a more monarchic regime by Otto I, but that was largely a matter of forms of social transactions between ruler and magnates rather than an introduction of Saxon institutions anywhere else in Germany.


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anywhere else. As we shall see, the Ottonians were neither willing nor able to control or guide processes of social change. The foregoing account conceals no implicit demand for some interpretative straitjacket that would bring the developments of the Ottonian period into conformity with those of western Europe. Efforts were made by medievalists in the former German Democratic Republic to link the rise of the Ottonian Reich with social changes. That was perfectly understandable and correct enough as a starting-point; yet what then emerged, as the following passage illustrates, was all too often an argument a priori, that is, deduced from assumptions already in place: In Saxony, particularly harsh class-conflicts had a profound influence on the further development of feudal relations of production and the aristocracy’s state-like instruments of power. It is not only very likely that in Saxony, to a much greater extent than in other regions of the East Frankish kingdom, rent in kind took the place of labour services, but these class-struggles brought in their wake in Saxony a relatively favourable formation of feudal relations of production which made possible a much more rapid upturn of the economy compared with that in the other regions of the East Frankish kingdom.35

Quite apart from the reverse processes assumed here – for in so far as measurements are possible (and that is not very far, see below, p. 316), in Saxony at this period labour services seem largely to have taken the place of rents in kind – we do not know nearly enough about the various regional economic developments of the tenth century to offer any empirical basis for such statements. Methodologically, we should renounce arguments a priori: social conflicts must not be assumed when they did not happen. Periods of relatively low social tension are at least conceivable, although it is equally the case that an absence of social conflict or of social change would require explanations of its own. But, as indicated at the beginning of this paper, the course of East Frankish-German history in the tenth century as depicted in more recent historiography seems to be not so much played out in front of a constant social background as without any social background whatsoever, whether low in tensions or high in tensions. In the second half of this paper, we shall ask some questions about this social background, even though we shall certainly not always be able to offer very satisfactory answers. We begin with the relationship between the king and the aristocracy, in order through conflicts within the aristocracy to get 35

H.-J. Bartmuss, ‘Das Entstehen und die Festigung des deutschen Feudalstaates und die Herausbildung des deutschen Volkes (Mitte des 9. bis Mitte des 10. Jahrhunderts)’, in J. Herrmann ed., Deutsche Geschichte, vol. I: Von den Anfängen bis zur Ausbildung des Feudalismus Mitte des 11. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1982), pp. 348–92, with the cited passage at 361.

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at relations between the upper ranks, the ceti digenti, on the one hand, and the rest of society on the other. In conclusion, we shall offer two possible global interpretations of the Ottonian period in social-historical perspective. The first point to be made is that the circle of the ‘political community’ was very small – in Saxony, at any rate, it may have consisted of approximately a hundred and fifty or two hundred people; and these, with the exception of female members of the royal family, were virtually all men. This estimate is in part, but not only, a product of the viewpoint presented in our sources. Widukind’s social cartography, for instance, was as gapridden and subjective as his geographical mapping.36 Among the members of this circle there were often considerable tensions, but in most cases these were managed and settled by well-established ‘rules of the game’. Basically, by means of these rules, there was, as far as possible, no impact on the positions of either the particular participants or the elite as a whole.37 Even within this circle, the ruler neither could nor would always settle conflicts.38 As far as conflicts between members of this circle and wider social groups were concerned, the king was effectively uninterested. By contrast with the Carolingian period, it is virtually impossible to find any trace of a claim on the part of the monarchy to regulate or control relationships within the conduct of this small circle, provided the king’s own interests were unaffected.39 A concept of the public good appeared only seldom, and at the level of historians’ rhetoric; the term res publica had become, in contrast to the Carolingian period, a mere literary flourish, and rare at that.40 Similarly the king’s peace, that is, the idea that violent crime damaged 36

37

38

39

40

See J. Ehlers, ‘Sachsen. Raumbewußtsein und Raumerfahrung in einer neuen Zentrallandschaft des Reiches’, in B. Schneidmüller and S. Weinfurter eds., Ottonische Neuanfänge. Symposion zur Ausstellung ‘Otto der Grosse, Magdeburg und Europa’ (Mainz, 2001), pp. 37–58. The fundamental works here are those of K. Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony (London, 1979) and G. Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter (Darmstadt, 1997). [Examples from the reign of Henry II are given in this book, chapter 19, below.] Cf. Leyser’s lapidary statement, Rule and Conflict, p. 33: ‘The king did not regard himself as exempt from the social obligations which bound his nobles nor is he seen standing outside the ring of feud and revenge.’ According to the material assembled by F. Hausmann an A. Gawlik, Arengenverzeichnis zu den Königs- und Kaiserurkunden von den Merowingern bis zu Heinrich VI. (Munich, 1987), the arengas of Ottonian royal diplomata hardly ever mention a royal duty to protect the poor and powerless. Such claims first reappear in the Salian period (see for example MGH D K II, no. 219; DD H III, nos. 352, 356), and then become frequent in the twelfth century. In Widukind, res publica is more or less synonymous with regnum, meaning territory or realm: see for instance Widukind, Res gestae Saxonicae, ed. P. Hirsch and H.-E. Lohmann, MGH SRG LX (Hannover, 1935), I 25, II 30, II 36, III 64, III 70 (pp. 38, 92, 95, 139, 146). In Thietmar the term appears only once (Chronicon, ed. R. Holzmann, MGH SRG, n.s. IX (Berlin, 1955), VIII 34, p. 532, trans. D. Warner, Ottonian Germany: Thietmar of Merseburg’s Chronicon (Manchester, 2000), p. 385);


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not only the victim but the king as guarantor of public order, simply did not exist. In the Carolingian period, such ideas played a considerable role in the extension of royal power, and in neo-Carolingian Wessex they were fairly systematically developed.41 In the Ottonian Reich, any king’s peace in the tenth century is untraceable, whether in conceptual or practical, administrative terms; and even in the eleventh century it existed at most in a few special cases or by way of some particular proclamation, and then nearly always with clear limits to its chronological, spatial or thematic currency.42 The protection of the pauperes (‘the poor’, ‘the powerless’) was no longer a royal duty, except in such peculiarly conservative contexts as royal coronation ordines. Pauper in this period stops being the antonym of potens (this is something that happened in England as well): the opposite of poverty was no longer power, but wealth.43 How can we explain this absence of a social-political element in the fabric of Ottonian rulership? Its suppression can be accounted for in several ways. The Carolingian tradition of interventionist rulership was probably much more weakly developed in the East Frankish kingdom than elsewhere, not least because the necessary administrative structures for putting it into practice were not available there.44 Nevertheless, there are good reasons for thinking that all this was a result less of royal incapacity or lack of interest, than of social groups taking sides. Although the social orders of Carolingian and post-Carolingian Europe bore a strongly hierarchical stamp everywhere, social distinctions were nowhere so evident in

41

42 43

44

strikingly it occurs substantially more often in the twelfth-century reworking. For the trans-personal idea of the regnum in the Carolingian period, see H.-W. Goetz, ‘Regnum. Zum politischen Denken in der Karolingerzeit’, ZRG, GA CIV (1987), pp. 110–87, and J. L. Nelson, ‘Kingship and empire’, in R. McKitterick ed., Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 52–87. For Wessex, see above p. 304. For the Carolingian period, see F.-L. Ganshof, Carolingian Institutions (Providence RI, 1968), pp. 28, 95–7, and, especially on the protection of the pauperes, E. MüllerMertens, Karl der Große, Ludwig der Fromme und die Freien (Berlin, 1963). On royal peace-keeping in the Ottonian period, it is not only the sources that are silent, but modern historians too: see for a virtual history of Landfrieden, L. Quidde, Histoire de la paix publique en Allemagne au moyen aˆ ge (Paris, 1929). [See chapter 19, below.] ´ R. Michalowski, ‘Swiadomo´ sc´ spoleczna soskiej grupy rza¸dza¸cej w wiekach X–XI: “nobilis, dives, pauper” – próba analizy semantycznej’ [= ‘Das Selbstbewußtsein der sächsischen Herrscherschicht im X. und XI. Jahrhundert: “nobilis, dives, pauper” – Versuch einer semantischen Analyse’], Commentationes 19 (1974), pp. 13–28; M. R. Godden, ‘Money, power and morality in late Anglo-Saxon England’, ASE 19 (1990), pp. 41–65, esp. 42–54. H. Keller, ‘Zum Charakter der “Staatlichkeit” zwischen karolingischer Reichsreform und hochmit¨ telalterlichem Herrschaftsausbau’, FMS 23 (1989), pp. 248–64; P. Moraw, ‘Uber Entwicklungsunter¨ schiede und Entwicklungsausgleich im deutschen und europäischen Mittelalter’, in P. Moraw, Uber König und Reich. Aufsätze zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte des späteren Mittelalters (Sigmaringen, 1995), pp. 293–320, esp. 296–301.

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the former Carolingian empire as they were in Saxony. Widukind famously stressed these divisions: ‘Up until today the Saxon people is divided into three according to descent and law, apart from the slaves.’45 And, in other people’s perceptions, apart was where slaves always were. Under no circumstances could men of lower status be treated as equals. ‘Thiadric was his slave, for he was born of a concubine, and it would have been wholly unfitting for him ever to give his hand to his own slave.’46 When fortresses and towns were surrendered, the slaves were classed as booty among other material possessions, not as human beings.47 It was not only in Widukind’s history that the opposites master/slave carried a considerable weight of the political metaphor that was used in the Ottonian period to convey disgrace and loss.48 Otto’s brother Henry was led in chains quasi vile mancipium.49 Before the Battle of the Lech, Otto urged his warriors to fight for overlordship of Europe. It was a question of avoiding slavery and specifically the enslavement of the warriors Otto was addressing, not of any wider group. There was no word here of protection of the patria or the community.50 To be lords meant to be lords over slaves; to be lorded over meant to be a slave.51 This should not be read merely as a literary borrowing of a pair of antonyms from Sallust:52 it reflected perfectly the social realities of Widukind’s time. 45 46

47 48

49 50 51 52

Widukind I 14, p. 23: ‘usque hodie gens Saxonica triformi genere ac lege preter conditionem servilem dividitur’. Widukind I 9, p. 11: ‘Thiadricum vero suum servum tamquam ex concubine natum, et ideo indecens fore proprio servo umquam manus dare’; see the commentary on this and related passages by K. Leyser, ‘Ritual, ceremony and gesture: Ottonian Germany’, in K. Leyser, Communications and Power in Medieval Europe: The Carolingian and Ottonian Centuries, ed. T. Reuter (London, 1994), pp. 189–213, esp. 191–2. Widukind I 36, p. 54; III 54, p. 133. See for instance Widukind II 20, p. 84: ‘his pro gloria et pro magno latoque imperio, illis pro libertate ac ultima servitute varie certantibus’; II 28, p. 89: ‘Nepotes quoque Isilberhti servituti regiae se subiciebant’; II 28, p. 90: ‘modo, ut scitis . . . pene ex libero servus factus sum’; III 54, p. 133: ‘Satis tibi esset, si bellum gereres contra unum nostrum de servis domini mei’; III 67, p. 141: ‘Lusiki . . . ad ultimam servitutem coegit’. Thietmar (who, however, often uses the word-cluster servus/servitus rather in a religious sense) comments thus on the imminent end of the Saxon dynasty, Chron. I 19, p. 24: ‘maxima perdicio est alienigenos regnare: hinc depressio et libertatis venit magna periclitatio’; cf. Chron. V 10, p. 232, lamenting the rise of Boleslav Chrobry: ‘Deus indulgeat imperatori, quod tributarium faciens dominum adhoc unquam elevavit, ut . . . semper sibi prepositos auderet in subiectionem paulatim detrahere . . . in servitutis libertatisque detrimentum capere’ [trans. Warner, pp. 81, 212]. Widukind II 11, p. 75. Widukind III 46, p. 127: ‘Pudeat iam nunc dominos pene totius Europae inimicis manus dare. Melius bello . . . moriamur, quam subiecti hostibus vitam serviliter ducamus.’ Widukind I 35, p. 48: ‘Saxonia ex serva facta est libera et ex tributaria multarum gentium domina.’ On the ideology of freedom in Saxon historians, see K. Leyser, ‘From Saxon freedoms to the freedom of Saxony’, in K. Leyser, Communications and Power in Medieval Europe: The Gregorian Revolution and Beyond, ed. T. Reuter (London, 1994), pp. 51–67.


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In such circumstances, the monarchy hardly saw any reason to consider social-political intervention in favour of the weak. When we turn to relationships between the various strata of the aristocracy, our sources for the most part leave us in the lurch. It is clear that we are dealing with an aristocratic society – our comments refer largely to Saxony, for we are even less well informed about the southern German scene – which also put strong emphasis on the smallest social distinctions. But these are differences at and within the highest stratum. Writers like Widukind and Thietmar hardly ever mention the names of those who do not belong to what was earlier termed the ‘magic circle’ of the political community. Even the milites and vassalli of the great churches and high nobility seem, in as much as they are often mentioned by name, to have belonged to the same class: men like Hemuza, vassal of Henry of Walbeck, or the three slain satellites of Arnulf of Halberstadt, were important men, who had virtually nothing in common with the armed milites gregarii of contemporary West Francia53 (though it should be noted that the names of lesser milites are also recorded in the necrologies of the great churches of the East Frankish kingdom).54 The ministeriales and proto-ministeriales are hardly discernible as a social group.55 The circumstances in which the East Frankish Reich was formed were hardly such as to allow the creation of an imperial aristocracy on the Carolingian model.56 Seeds of that lay in the role of some very important families in royal service, the Conradines and the Luxemburger, for instance,57 and perhaps the way appointments were made to some episcopal sees,58 but that 53

54

55

56 57

58

Thietmar VI 15 and 22, pp. 292, 300 [trans. Warner, pp. 248, 252]. Thietmar usually qualifies the noun miles with adjectives like egregius, inclitus or optimus, thus denoting a man of high rank. Cf. J. Johrendt, ‘Milites’ und ‘militia’ im 11. Jahrhundert. Untersuchungen zur Frühgeschichte des Rittertums in Frankreich und Deutschland, Diss. Erlangen (1971), pp. 136–8, 144, 152–3. Gerd Althoff pointed this out in the discussion at the ‘Otto the Great’ Symposium; and see also Althoff ed., Das Necrolog von Borghorst (Münster, 1978), p. 184 (where those who fell at the Battle of Cotrone are listed). See T. Zotz, ‘Die Formierung der Ministerialität’, in Weinfurter ed., Die Salier, pp. 3–50; and ¨ P. Neumeister, ‘Beobachtungen und Uberlegungen zur Ministerialität des 9., 10. und 11. Jahrhunderts’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 43 (1995), pp. 421–32. Leyser, Rule and Conflict, pp. 102–6, 109–10. Still essential is G. Tellenbach, ‘Vom karolingischen Reichsadel zum deutschen Reichsfürstenstand’, in H. Kämpf ed., Herrshaft und Staat im Mittelalter (Darmstadt, 1956), pp. 193–242. See further on the Luxemburger, M. Parisse ed., La maison d’Ardenne, Publications de la section historique de l’Institut du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg 95 (Luxembourg, 1981); and on the Conradines, see the mainly genealogically orientated study of D. Jackman, The Conradines (Frankfurt, 1990). Already under Otto I and still more so under his successors, we can trace a certain tendency (no more than that) for candidates from outside the region to be appointed to episcopal sees, see J. Fleckenstein, Die Hofkapelle der deutschen Könige 2: Die Hofkapelle im Rahmen der ottonisch-salischen Reichskirche (Stuttgart, 1966), p. 57; H. Zielinski, Der Reichsepiskopat in spätottonischer und salischer Zeit,

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was all. In the Ottonian period, there was no opposition between imperial aristocracy and regional aristocracy; just how important the opposition had been earlier is not a question that need be addressed here. Caste-conflicts between different ranks of nobles, such as we hear of in early eleventhcentury Italy were probably unthinkable in Germany,59 and we hear little of conflicts between individual family members of different ranks of the nobility (as distinct from conflicts between families or large clans). None of that means, of course, that the Ottonian age was free of conflict: on the contrary, power struggles and feuds were frequent. But such things are presented to us in the sources as if they had nothing to do with questions of power-distribution or hierarchy. As far as we can tell, they were always about iniuria, and about honor, in short, about reputation and threats thereto,60 and they were played out within the ‘magic circle’. Just how unusual this picture is becomes clear from comparisons with other areas of Europe. The story of Gerald of Aurillac has perhaps had its day as a ‘perfect example’ of developments in the West Frankish kingdom, but it could still be usefully thought-provoking when we turn to consider the Ottonian scene. In his Life, written by Odo of Cluny, Gerald is presented not just as a new kind of lay saint but as a royal vassal, whose ties to the Crown are at risk of being cut off by other nobles who are his rivals.61 To a nobleman of the high Carolingian era such as William, for whom Dhuoda wrote her Handbook around the middle of the ninth century, the king remained, at least in Dhuoda’s eyes, of central significance.62 Gerald would probably have wished himself back in such an era, but it no longer existed. A noble life with comparable ethical and political dilemmas was quite inconceivable in early tenth-century Saxony, or Franconia, or Swabia. Why? Was such a mediatising of the aristocracy at this level simply uninteresting, or were there other reasons for the sources’ silence? A further, slightly later, comparative case-study might be the famous convenientia between William of Aquitaine and Hugh of Lusignan, dating

59 60 61 62

1002–1125 (Stuttgart, 1984), pp. 66–73; A. Finck von Finckenstein, Bischof und Reich. Untersuchungen zum Integrationsprozeß des ottonisch-frühsalischen Reiches (919–1056) (Sigmaringen, 1989), pp. 34–47. H. Keller, Adelsherrschaft und städtische Gesellschaft im Oberitalien 9. bis 12. Jahrhundert (Tübingen, 1980), pp. 303–85. [See this book, chapter 19, below.] Odo of Cluny, Vita sancti Geraldi Aureliacensis comitis, PL 133, cols. 639–704; see S. Airlie, ‘The anxiety of sanctity: St Gerald of Aurillac and his maker’, JEcclesH 43 (1992), pp. 372–95. Dhuoda, Manuel pour mon fils, ed. P. Riché with French translation by B. de Vregille and C. Mondésert, 2nd edn (Paris, 1991), esp. III 4, pp. 148–52. [See also the edition and English translation by M. Thiébaux, Dhuoda: Handbook for her Warrior Son (Cambridge, 1998).]


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from the early eleventh century.63 Here again, we find a hierarchy of higher and lower ranks; and compared with that, it is of secondary importance that the directness and brutality of the language used in this text probably did not entirely correspond to the realities lying behind it.64 Are such ways of thinking and the pursuit of such political goals simply not transposable on to the aristocracy of the German-speaking lands? There the widely – indeed frequently – attested noble feuds operated in a static way, rather than a dynamic one. As to relationships between the aristocratic upper ranks and the lower ranks in the countryside, a large number of open and even unasked questions remain. For the period we are interested in, the evidence for these relationships is well known to be exceptionally scarce. For certain parts of the East Frankish Reich in the age of the Ottonians, charters of donation survive in considerable quantities; but charters of donation as such have very little to say on forms of social organisation, far less, in fact, than the new-style documentary forms in western and southern Europe. We might have gained more information from estate-surveys and the like, if only we did not also have to contend with a large gap precisely here. Between the mid- and late-Carolingian lists of properties like those of Fulda, Hersfeld, or Weißenburg, or that of Prüm, originally drawn up in 893 though preserved only in a revised version of the early thirteenth century,65 and the revival of survey-records from the beginning of the eleventh century onwards, exemplified in the Corvey dues-register or the St Emmeram survey of 1031,66 virtually nothing survives, and nothing whatsoever from the Ottonians’ Eastphalian heartland area. Even the well-kept series of the Werden surveys, while attesting a certain continuity of survey-making in Westphalia, basically confirms the general picture: after an initial spurt in the 63 64

65

66

See the edition of J. Martindale, Status, Authority and Regional Power: Aquitaine and France, 9th to 12th Centuries (London, 1997), essays VIIa, VIIb (the edition, with English translation), VIII. Conventum, ed. Martindale, Status and Power, VIIb, p. 544: ‘Non eos tibi interrogo propter tuum malum, set etiam per hoc quod meus tu es ad facere meam voluntatem’; p. 546: ‘Tu quid meus es, quomodo teneas hoc quod ego non dedi tibi extra meo grado?’ The various sources are conveniently listed and annotated by D. Hägermann, ‘Quellenkritische Bemerkungen zu den karolingerzeitlichen Urbaren und Güterverzeichnissen’, in W. Rösener ed., Strukturen der Grundherrschaft im frühen Mittelalter (Göttingen, 1989), pp. 47–73. [On the Prüm survey and its context, a valuable introduction in English is now Y. Morimoto, ‘Aspects of the early medieval peasant economy as revealed in the Polyptych of Prüm’, in P. Linehan and J. L. Nelson eds., The Medieval World (London, 2001), pp. 605–20.] Corvey: H. H. Kaminsky, Studien zur Reichsabtei Corvey in der Salierzeit (Cologne, 1972), pp. 195– 222; St Emmeram: P. Dollinger, Der bayerische Bauernstand vom 9. bis zum 12. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1982), pp. 455–63.

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mid–late ninth century, the practice was resumed only from c. 1000/1020 onwards.67 This dearth of source-materials means that we know extremely little about the size of rural property-units, still less about social differentiation among the lower levels of the rural population. On the matter of size, it is widely assumed that royal domain-lands and the estates of major churches – bishoprics and great abbeys – were of very different size from the typical properties of the nobility, even those of the uppermost rank. Yet, given that we are dealing here with a circle of exchanges of considerable dimensions, and just taking into account the very varied possible forms of gift, confiscation or conditional grant, that assumption looks inherently implausible. We also know of large landed properties owned by high-born laymen, such as the great lordship of Dodico concentrated around Warburg, or that of Lesum confiscated from the Billungs: both these are first documented in the early eleventh century, but can hardly have originated then.68 It would be nice to know what proportions there were of large concentrations of property, small estates and scattered holdings, in particular regions or in the hands of particular owners, but the sources are simply inadequate for such a purpose. That is truer still of what we know of the various levels of the rural population to be encountered in Saxony: liti/lati/lazzi, liberti, landsetion, servi, coloni, mancipia, and even rarer terms such as iamundlingi, mundlingi, malman, muntman.69 Even if we had a clearer picture of these differentiations, we still would not be in position to reach even approximately plausible assessments of the proportions of the various groups in the population as a whole. The greatest problem arises in the field of research into the varied forms of organisation that have been shown existed on lordly estates. True, we can differentiate distinct forms at least in the sense of a Weberian idealtype. First we find a system of what German scholars call ‘Villikation’, 67 68

69

See R. Kötzschke ed., Die Urbare der Abtei Werden, I: Die Urbare vom 9.–13. Jahrhundert (Bonn, 1906). On Dodico, see F. Irsingler, ‘Bischof Meinwerk, Graf Dodico und Warburg’, Westfälische Zeitschrift 126/127 (1976/7), pp. 181–200; on Lesum, see G. Althoff, ‘Die Billunger in der Salierzeit’, in S. Weinfurter ed., Die Salier, I, pp. 309–31, at 319–20. Lesum was large enough to be able to support a royal stay. W. Rösener, ‘Zur Struktur und Entwicklung der Grandherrschaft in Sachsen in karolingischer und orttonischer Zeit’, in A. Verhulst ed., Le grand domaine aux époques mérovingienne et carolingienne. Die Grundherrschaft im frühen Mittelalter (Ghent, 1985), pp. 173–207, at 195, 202–3, assembles what can be learned from the Werden and Corvey material. On the iamundlingi, see R. Wenskus, ‘Die soziale Entwicklung im ottonischen Sachsen im Lichte der Königsurkunden für das Erzstift Hamburg-Bremen’, in L. Fenske et al. eds., Institutionen, Kultur und Gesellschaft. Festschrift für Josef Fleckenstein zu seinem 65. Geburtstag (Sigmaringen, 1984), pp. 501–14.


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that is, with a typical mix of the home-farm directly exploited by the lord and dependent peasant farms whose inhabitants were bound to perform labour services on the home-farm. Following Verhulst’s researches, it is now generally acknowledged that this form of organisation originated in the heartland area of the Carolingian empire, the area between the Rhine and the Loire, in the period between c. 750 and c. 850, and then spread, with some delays, into the other parts of what had formerly been the Frankish kingdom.70 Among the form’s simpler variants we should mention the manor-farm arrangement (Gutshofsverfassung), in which the lord’s homefarm was worked by his own manpower, especially, that is, with slaves, and the dues-office arrangement (Hebeamtsverfassung), in which the lord’s actual share was limited to a place for the renders and the collecting of money rents and dues in kind. Mixed forms are obviously conceivable, and we do actually find them: we need to reckon with, in particular, home-farms and manor-farms that functioned as dues-collecting stations for scattered possessions in the surrounding neighbourhood that were not integrated into the lordly estate as such. Not much is gained, though, by a mere statement about ideal-types. We would rather know what changes occurred in tenth-century Saxony in the relative proportions of the various forms. For the differences between homefarm organisation, manor-farm organisation and dues-office arrangement are significant not just economically but socially, and hence in religious and cultural terms, as well. The form and scale of the social controls wielded by landlords over their subordinate populations were very different under the organisationally intensive arrangements of the home-farm system (système bipartite) from those that prevailed on the rent-based pattern. It may be that there was a certain extension of the home-farm system in early medieval Saxony, but this assumption, while not in itself implausible, rests on a very slim source-base.71 The fact is that for the tenth century generally we are badly informed about peasant life. Take, for instance, the titles of two of the collective volumes edited by Werner Rösener on this collection of 70

71

A. Verhulst, ‘La genèse du regime domanial classique en France au haut moyen aˆge’, in Agricoltura e mondo rurale in Occidente nell’alto medioevo, Settimane Spoleto 13 (1966), pp. 135–60; A. Verhulst, ‘La diversité du régime domanial entre Loire et Rhin a` l’époque carolingienne: bilan de quinze années de recherches’, in W. Janssen and D. Lohrmann eds., Villa – curtis – grangia. Landwirtschaft zwischen Loire und Rhein von der Römerzeit zum Hochmittelalter, Beiheft der Francia 11 (Munich, 1983), pp. 133–48. By way of commentary, see Rösener, ‘Zur Struktur und Entwicklung’, especially pp. 179–80, on the assumptions of East German medievalists on forms of land-lordship in Saxony. Rösener, ‘Zur Struktur und Entwicklung’, makes the case for this assumption. See also his earlier work, ‘Strukturformen der a¨lteren Agrarverfassung im sächsischen Raum’, Niedersächsisches Jahrbuch für Landergeschichte 52 (1980), pp. 107–43, esp. 139–40.

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themes. In the case of the central Middle Ages, both ‘land-lordship’ (Grundherrschaft) and ‘peasant society’ (bäuerliche Gesellschaft) are dealt with; in the case of the early Middle Ages, only ‘structures of land-lordship’ are to be found.72 Or take Heinrich Fichtenau’s grand book, Lebensordnungen des 10. Jahrhunderts.73 While for the most part the book is enriched by lovely ‘speaking’ examples from the saints’ Lives, the notes to the sections on ‘peasant existence’ and ‘stratification and mobility’ in the chapter ‘Vulgus’ largely consist of references to discussions in the secondary literature. The peasant society of the early Middle Ages can be captured only in some fortunate, exceptional cases. As far as tenth-century Saxony is concerned, usually not even the structures are clearly recognisable.74 For us, the prime concern is with the relationship between the Ottonian elite and the lower social layers that sustained it. Despite the huge gaps in our knowledge, we can gain something – at least about the attitude of the upper echelons to the rural population – from the classic works of the great Ottonian historians. For Widukind, for instance, the lower orders and the rural population hardly existed. As Matthias Springer has shown, to my mind very convincingly, Widukind’s famous agrarii milites were no peasant-fighting-men, but warriors settled in the countryside.75 Other than them, and apart from Slavs regarded as barely human and a few vague shapes from a dim pre-history, members of the lower orders practically never come into his narrative. His vocabulary in the semantic field of landed possessions is similarly threadbare: area occurs once, villa three times.76 The picture is not very different for the other great historians of the mid-tenth century. Yet Thietmar of Merseburg, writing a bit later, has rather more to say about such matters – and this, anyway, is not surprising, since he was a bishop: while for Widukind a villa seems to have meant a fortified royal manor, the word crops up several times in Thietmar with the sense of manor, manorial estate, or estate-complex, and for him curtis too 72

73

74

75 76

For the book on the earlier medieval period, see n. 65 above; the later medieval volume is Grundherrschaft und bäuerliche Gesellschaft im Hochmittelalter, Veröffentlichung des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 115 (Göttingen, 1995). Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 30 (Stuttgart, 1984), pp. 437–96. [The English translation by P. Geary is entitled, Living in the Tenth Century (Chicago IL, 1991). Fichtenau in his Introduction to the translation, p. xvi, considers the meanings of ordo and ‘Ordnungen’. An English translator has to choose between ‘orders/patterns/systems of living’ – or, like Geary, may prefer just ‘living’.] See, however, E. Wisplinghoff, ‘Bäuerliches Leben am Niederrhein im Rahmen der benediktinischen Grundherrschaft’, in Janssen and Lohrmann eds., Villa – curtis – grangia, pp. 149–63, chiefly with reference to the Werden material. M. Springer, ‘Agrarii milites’, Niedersächsisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 66 (1994), pp. 129–66. area: III 69, p. 145; villa: II 10, p. 74; III 16, p. 112; III 46, p. 128.


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(a word unknown to Widukind) is a significant idea.77 Even villici (bailiffs, estate-managers) appear, if in supporting roles, like the villicus iniquus who betrayed Thietmar’s cousin Werner, and the villicus Suidger of Mainz who was slain before his lord’s eyes.78 But especially striking are the points at which we find something that seems to reveal the basic preconceptions of both writers, and hence of the Saxon elite. Thietmar describes how the great church of Metz lost more than 800 mancipia because they were forced into exile as followers of the Luxemburger revolt, ‘quite apart from those who left with the knowledge of their masters’.79 Here the prepositi perhaps constitute a reference (if hardly a very clear one) to forms of lordly estate-organisation, but other instances are vaguer. Widukind writes of a Hungarian attack in 954: the Magyars had deprived Count Ernst of more than a thousand of the familia sui iuris.80 Guncelin of Meißen sold familiae to Jews,81 and we find ourselves close to the gifts known from the Corvey Traditiones when Henry II grants the church of Merseburg two familiae from each of the royal curtes in Thuringia and Saxony.82 Such references are as ambiguous as the statements in the Traditiones, however. What exactly is being given or removed here? People? Land and people? Income in the form of renders? Thietmar’s complaint that the diocese of Merseburg after its suppression was split up ‘in the customary way of a Slav familia’, raises the suspicion that these people were treated like slaves in the nineteenth-century American South. Conrad II’s prohibition against the church of Verden selling its mancipia points in the same direction.83 But this cannot be other than a guess. The form and method in which the numerous, often Slav, familiae and mancipia were organised in the Ottonian period, and how their economic surplus was extracted from them, is probably the largest still-open question which we can do no more than pose here. 77 78 79 80 81 82

83

curtis occurs some twenty times in Thietmar’s original version, frequently in the expression curtis mea or sua, only occasionally as curtis regia. Thietmar VII 4–5, p. 404; VIII 24, p. 522 [trans. Warner, pp. 310–11, 377–8]. Thietmar VI 51, p. 338 [trans. Warner, p. 273]. Cf. the razzia of the warriors of Boleslav, VII 64, p. 478 [trans. Warner, pp. 352–3]: ‘plus quam mille mancipia in his partibus sumpserunt’. Widukind III 30, p. 118. Thietmar VI 53, p. 340 [trans. Warner, p. 274]. Thietmar VI 102, p. 394 [trans. Warner, p. 305]: ‘de omnibus curtis, quas in Thuringia et in Saxonia habuit, duas nobis tradidit familias’ (cf. MGH D H II, no. 221 (28 July 1010): ‘duas familias cum omnibus suis acquisitionibus’, including the bondsman Ezeka and his familia). Thietmar III 16, p. 116 [trans. Warner, p. 140]: ‘Tunc omnia nostrum prius aecclesiam respicientia divisa sunt miserabiliter, Sclavonicae ritu familiae, quae accusata venundando dispergitur’ (or is Thietmar’s ritus here referring to a Slav legal custom?). For Verden, see D K II, no. 130, and H. Hoffmann, ‘Kirche und Sklaverei im frühen Mittelalter’, DA 42 (1986), pp. 1–24.

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How ought we to represent the economic and social development of the Ottonian period in general? It is of course conceivable that we are dealing here with a booming economy. We now know that there was silver-mining in the Harz Mountains already in the Carolingian period, but that in the late 960s its yield was considerably increased thanks to the discovery of new seams.84 The wars so successfully waged against the Hungarians were by no means just defensive wars, but assured the Ottonians and their high-born following a tribute-based hegemony in eastern Europe. Furthermore, even before the end of the Hungarian threat, the Liudolfings waged profitable wars of plunder on the borders of Saxony; and even though its scale cannot be quantified, the slave-trade with the Islamic regions of Spain, and perhaps other parts of Europe as well, is a highly productive activity that should be taken into account.85 If we assume a still very favourable relationship between the population and its farmlands on the one hand, and a rather loosely organised lordship over land and dependents on the other (though not land-lordship as normally understood, or at least not as the dominant form of social organisation), then, at least in the period before the great Slav revolt of 983, we might have the bases for an extensive type of social system in which struggles over the distribution of wealth – even those between the noble elite and the rest of society, hardly had to be fought, or if they were, not very fiercely. The social idyll of the Ottonian period which some have managed to infer from the silence of its contemporary historians might thus be a fact: in Saxony, clocks really did move to another tempo. While the preconditions for an economic boom might have existed, there are also signs that the trend of development was running in quite a different direction. Above all, an intensification of the agrarian economy is something to be reckoned with in ninth- and tenth-century Saxony. As discussed above, it has generally been assumed that the classical bipartite system was able to spread eastwards from its original home in the heartlands between the Rhine and the Loire in the two centuries after about 800. It is true that we do not know whether this extension was sufficient to make manorial arrangements the commonest or most important form of organisation, but that is a point of lesser importance in the present context. Even if the expansion of the newer, more intensive forms of exploitation 84 85

For the most recent archaeological research, see C. Ehlers, ‘Die Anfänge Goslars und das Reichs’, DA 53 (1997), pp. 45–79, at 48–9. Fried, Der Weg in die Geschichte (as n. 34), p. 76. The comprehensive but unfortunately incomplete work of C. Verlinden, L’esclavage dans l’Europe médiévale, 2 vols. (Ghent, 1955–77), covers neither England nor Germany. A monographic treatment of slavery in German-speaking lands is an urgent scholarly desideratum.


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only occurred here and there, they could hardly have been accommodated into an extensive economy of surpluses without some disruption: for such intensifications probably indicate that the older, extensive methods were no longer working profitably, or no longer working profitably enough. Similar considerations apply to the generally assumed levelling of status in this period between the free in general and servi casati (housed serfs). If such a levelling really did happen, it would likewise constitute another symptom of more intensive forms of economic management. A further methodological problem should be noted here, as it were in parentheses. Since the researches made in charter-studies and legal history in the period around the First World War, the levelling of status of the ordinary free man has been explained by reference to the extension of the power of lordship, or seigneurial power, by analogy with a West Frankish model. This assumption, however, in the German case goes along with a certain idea of active royal lordship.86 We have seen that Ottonian kings were hardly active in social-political matters, and certainly did not command the network of intermediate courts whose prior existence any social policy would have depended on. It is therefore not surprising if we find that the implementation of the content of privileges was largely left to the privileged themselves – and this is something which in the case of rights to issue coinage can easily be checked objectively.87 It is hardly permissible to argue that the development of immunities and banal lordship derived from the development of formulae in royal charters, not because this was a matter of ‘mere’ formulae,88 but because the putting into effect of royal charters can no longer be considered something self-evident. We thus know little for certain as to whether banal lordship expanded in tenth-century Saxony, given a state of research which at present relies very heavily on royal charters. But by the same token, whether a levelling of the status of the ordinary free occurred and whether it is to be attributed to an extension of seigneurial lordship, which means, in the last analysis, to royal policy, the tenth century seems like a blank spot in the otherwise well-documented history of social tensions in Saxony. The so-called Stellinga revolt in the early 840s is perhaps 86 87 88

In methodological terms, typical is R. Wenskus, Soziale Entwicklung (as n. 69), who infers social developments from changes in the word-order in royal charters. See B. Kluge, ‘OTTO REX/OTTO IMP. Zur Bestandnisaufnahme der ottonischen Münzprägung’, in Schneidmüller and Weinfurter eds., Ottonische Neuanfänge, pp. 85–112. See B. Schweineköper,‘“Cum aquis aquarumve decursibus”. Zu den Pertinenzformeln der Herrscherurkunden bus zur Zeit Ottos I.’, in K.-U. Jäschke and R. Wenskus eds., Festschrift für Helmut Beumann zum 65. Geburtstag (Sigmaringen, 1977), pp. 22–56, on the not wholly formalistic character of documentary forms.

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better seen as the pursuit of aristocratic factional struggles by other means rather than as a class-struggle;89 but it bears witness either way to the existence of considerable status- or caste-conflicts in Carolingian Saxony, even if these were only used as tools of noble elites. The course of the Saxon civil wars of the 1070s and 1080s shows that such conflicts persisted later still and in fairly sharp form.90 It may be high time that the position of the ordinary free (and perhaps of the half-free too) in early-medieval and central-medieval Saxony was described in new ways. The task has become all the harder because Widukind’s agrarii milites and the king’s free men (Königsfreien) of Dannenbauer and Baaken have largely faded from the historiographical screen.91 As noted earlier, the development of noble castles in Germany should also be seen, ultimately, as a sign of intensified lordship and conflicts over distribution of resources. The chronology of this lags a little behind that of northern and middle Francia, but not by very much.92 There may have been a certain delay in the introduction of a new type of fortification built of stone and designed as a residence, but the implications of this technical innovation mostly related to high politics and the relationship between king and nobility, in so far as the latter now felt themselves better defended and hence more independent. But the control of castle-lords over the local peasantry (and in the longer run over the lesser nobility too) could be achieved with fortifications of the older type as well. Not least, however, there are clear symptoms of conflict to be detected in the Ottonian period if we listen out for them attentively enough. As soon as we shift our focus from the epic tone of the historian of the 960s to the rather more garrulous writers of the early eleventh century, such as Thietmar and the authors of the late-Ottonian and early-Salian episcopal Vitae, we find in Saxony and also on the Lower Rhine and in Lotharingia gang-warfare of the kind we recognise from western and southern Europe. We can only get at the surface of the feuds of the early Ottonian period, apart from high-political affairs like the dispute between branches of the 89 90

91 92

E. J. Goldberg, ‘Popular revolt, dynastic politics and aristocratic factionalism in the early Middle Ages: the Saxon Stellinga reconsidered’, Speculum 70 (1995), pp. 467–501. G. Baaken ed., Königtum, Burgen und Konigsfreie,Vorträge und Forschungen 6 (Sigmaringen, 1961); L. Fenske, Adelsopposition und kirchliche Reformbewegung im ostlichen Sachsen, Veroffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 47 (Göttingen, 1977), pp. 13–45, 293–325 (strongly relativising the roles of ‘ordinary’ or ‘royal’ free in the Saxon revolt); W. Giese, Der Stamm der Sachsen und das Reich in ottonischer und salischer Zeit (Wiesbaden, 1979), pp. 149–73. On agrarii milites, see Springer, ‘Agrarii milites’; and on the rise and fall of the Königsfreien theory, see Rösener, Agrarwirtschaft, pp. 68–70, with the most important literature. See above, n. 25.


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Billung family.93 But social tensions found expression not only in open fighting but in the things people worried about too. A good deal of what looks like noble disdain may actually have masked social anxieties. We have already considered the opposition between lord and slave (Knecht) in Ottonian historical writing. But the slave is by no means just a passive victim whose fate is to be avoided if at all possible. He can also be arrogant and dangerous. For Thietmar the conduct of the inhabitants of Pavia and of the murderers of Count Wichmann constitutes servilis presumptio; and presumption is also the term he uses for the Slav revolt of 983. Thietmar’s own enemy, Aethelbert, has the effrontery to attack an episcopal curtis with a servilis collectio (‘a servile gang’).94 Plebeius furor is something not just to be despised, but feared.95 It is probably constraints of genre that explain why Widukind and Thietmar – whom we have analysed here as representative of other writers as well – seldom find occasion to mention such things directly. Yet the attitudes that sound out from their silences and glancing allusions are worth noting. They are perceptible, for instance, in the treatment of the ‘protest-saint’ Haimerad by the author of his Vita: with all due caution in dealing with this controversial source, I think it is unmistakable that Haimerad, with his strong following from among the lower orders, was perceived as a provocation and a threat by most members of the Ottonian ruling class in Thietmar’s generation.96 But we can hardly infer that if Haimerad could have been carried back into the golden age of Ottonian expansion he would have encountered any more openness and tolerance in Widukind’s generation. Drawing up a balance-sheet of the foregoing reflections, we can see that the Ottonian period’s apparent freedom from conflict and tension is the result of various factors. In part, no doubt, it was there in contemporary reality: the idea of a German Sonderweg in the age of feudal revolution can be heavily qualified, perhaps, but it cannot be totally denied. In part, it was the construct of contemporary writers who, through ignorance or lack of interest, paid little attention to certain aspects of the world around 93 94 95 96

The best overview I know is that of Leyser, Rule and Conflict, Part I: ‘Otto I and his Saxon Enemies’. Thietmar VI 8, p. 282; VII 47, p. 456; III 17, p. 118;VIII 19, p. 516 [trans. Warner, pp. 242, 340–1, 141, 374]. Thietmar VI 7, p. 282 [trans. Warner, p. 241]. Ekkebert, Vita Haimeradi, MGH SS X, pp. 595–607. See H. Keller, ‘“Adelsheiliger” und Pauper Christi in Ekkeberts Vita sancti Haimeradi’, in J. Fleckenstein and K. Schmid eds., Adel und Kirche. Festschrift für Gerd Tellenbach (Freiburg, 1968), pp. 307–24; T. Struve, ‘Hersfeld, Hasungen und die Vita Haimeradi’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 51 (1969), pp. 21–33; H. Keller, ‘Ekkeberts Vita Haimeradi’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 54 (1972), pp. 26–63, esp. 51 on Haimerad’s rejection by contemporaries and his castigation as a hypocrite, and 59 on the relatively late growth of his cult.

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them. And in part, it is the result of a long tradition of historical research which also displayed little interest in such matters. In the end, the relative weight of those three factors is very difficult to determine, given our present knowledge. But we can surmise that even the golden age of Otto I was not quite so free of social conflicts as the current state of research all too often makes it seem at the moment.

chap t e r 18

The ‘imperial church system’ of the Ottonian and Salian rulers: a reconsideration

There is a general consensus among historians that there was something quite special about the church policy of the Ottonian and Salian rulers of Germany from Henry I to Henry III. The normal reliance of the medieval king on his prelates was here turned into a deliberate and systematic exploitation of the potential of the Church as an instrument of government. These rulers used bishops and abbots, whom they appointed, as a counterweight to a turbulent and unreliable lay nobility. Many historians have, so to speak, followed them in this, have turned from the Ottonians’ and Salians’ complex and seemingly unsatisfactory relations with their aristocracy to their church policy. Here they have seen plan, system and harmony, so much so that the Church has come to be regarded as the principal instrument of government available to these rulers. Our picture of the Ottonian and Salian ‘imperial church system’, the Reichskirchensystem of German historians, has been much refined by recent scholarship,1 but the essential outlines have not greatly altered since the time of Waitz and Giesebrecht. The purpose of what follows is to re-examine these outlines. The qualifications, doubts and reinterpretations offered are not all new; many have been expressed or at least hinted at in the existing literature.2 But they

1

2

Much of the initial work for this paper was done while I was working in Germany on a scholarship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. My thanks are due to them and also to Christopher Holdsworth, Karl Leyser and Janet Nelson, who were kind enough to comment on an earlier draft. Notably by J. Fleckenstein, Die Hofkapelle der ottonisch-salischen Reichskirche., Schriften der MGH ¨ XVI, 2 (1966); L. Auer, ‘Der Kriegsdienst der Klerus unter den sächsischen Kaisern’, I, MIOG ¨ lxxx (1972), pp. 48–70; C. Brühl, Fodrum, Gistum, Servitium (1971), pp. 316–407, and II, MIOG Regis, 2 vols. (Cologne, 1968); H.-P. Wehlt, Reichsabtei und König, dargestellt am Beispiel der Abtei Lorsch mit Ausblicken auf Hersfeld, Stablo und Fulda, Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 28 (1970). For further bibliography see L. Santifaller, ‘Zur Geschichte des ottonischsalischen Reichskirchensystems’, Sitzungsberichte der o¨sterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.hist. Klasse 229, vol. I (Vienna, 1964) and O. Köhler, ‘Das ottonische Reichskirchensystem. Ein Forschungsbericht’, in Adel und Kirche. Festschrift für Gerd Tellenbach (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1968), pp. 141–204. See for example below, nn. 5, 26, 51, 106. In general the specialist literature has been more cautious than general works.

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have never been fully articulated, and it seems worth looking again at the Reichskirchensystem as a whole to ask how far in fact it did perform or could have performed the functions usually attributed to it, and to ask also how far it was a system. The focus of attention will inevitably be on the German bishoprics (and to a lesser extent the royal abbeys) before the Investiture Contest, but it will also be necessary to look at the position elsewhere in Europe at this period, because an appearance of uniqueness and system has been fostered by considering conditions in the Reich in isolation. The broad outlines of the Reichskirchensystem as it is usually presented are well enough known. The Ottonians and Salians kept a tight hold on appointments to bishoprics and royal abbeys, often rejecting local candidates and putting in their own men, and endowed these institutions with land and rights, which were expected to be used on the king’s behalf and in his service. This control enabled the kings both to exploit the wealth of the Church and to use the Church as a trust fund in which wealth and rights could be safely deposited. Provided that there was control over appointments, the fisc could in effect be farmed out without being alienated. Grants of land and rights to laymen might disappear into the general mass of hereditary property; this was not the case with grants to ecclesiastics. Ottonian and Salian bishops and abbots did not usually breed, and when they did their children did not benefit from their father’s positions.3 Thus, while the offices of duke or count became increasingly difficult to control or to rely on, the Ottonians’ and Salians’ control of the Church meant that the whole of their Reich was still covered by a network of posts which remained under royal control and which fell vacant fairly frequently: the average length of an episcopate in this period was about fifteen years, and in about two-thirds of all years two or more bishoprics fell vacant; the figures for royal monasteries are more difficult to calculate, but a fair estimate would be that in a normal year about six to ten monasteries and nunneries lost their prelates. It is an essential feature of the Reichskirchensystem as it is generally conceived that it was indeed a system; that it was the result of a deliberate policy which served a number of purposes.4 It is not supposed that this policy began in its fully developed form under Henry I; two periods in particular are supposed to have seen a substantial increase in royal reliance 3 4

A. Hauck, Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands, 5th edn (Leipzig, 1925), III, pp. 566–7, gives a few examples of incelibate bishops. See typically O. Köhler, Das Bild des geistlichen Fürsten in den Viten des 10. 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts, Abhandlungen zur mittleren und neueren Geschichte 77 (1935), p. 9: ‘The bishops were to become the basis of royal power . . . tools of the royal will . . . supporters of the idea of a Reich against ducal tendencies.’

The ‘imperial church system’

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on the Church. The first is the last two decades of Otto I’s reign, when he is held to have turned to the episcopate as an alternative to the failed strategy of rule through dukes drawn from his own family.5 The second is the reign of Henry II, when royal control over church appointments was greatly increased and was accompanied by a more intensive exploitation of the Church than earlier rulers had practised.6 The policy had important corollaries. First, it is supposed to have given the Ottonians and Salians an additional reason for wishing to control the papacy and Italy. Although few tenth- and eleventh-century popes enjoyed high personal prestige, the papacy remained an authority generally acknowledged by the German episcopate. It was vital to control the papacy in order to be able to short-circuit this potentially dangerous outside influence.7 Second, it was as a part and a consequence of the Reichskirchensystem that the Ottonians and Salians came to take on the attributes of a rex et sacerdos, of priestly kingship.8 At the great Church feasts of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun and on other important occasions, the ruler appeared in splendour as the vicarius Christi. His special and direct relationship with God was depicted in an occasionally bizarre iconography and was stressed liturgically.9 All this is supposed to have quietened uneasy consciences among churchmen. In a famous passage in his Chronicon, Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg said: Our kings and emperors, set in the stead of the highest ruler in this earthly pilgrimage, dispose of this matter [the appointment of bishops] alone, and are deservedly set over their other prelates. For it is quite unfitting that those whom Christ made princes of the earth in his image should be under the rule of any except those who, like the Lord, exceed all mortals in the glory of unction and coronation.10 5

6 7 8 9

10

Auer, ‘Kriegsdienst, I’, pp. 322, 335; J. Fleckenstein, ‘Das Reich der Ottonen im 10. Jahrhundert’, in B. Gebhardt, Handbuch der Deutschen Geschichte, 9th edn by H. Grundmann (Stuttgart, 1970), I. pp. 245–6. For dissent from this communis opinio, see K. J. Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony (London, 1979), p. 27; E. Otto, Die Entwicklung der deutschen Kirchenvogtei im 10. Jahrhundert, Abhandlungen zur mittleren und neueren Geschichte 72 (1933), pp. 151–2: ‘One cannot say that [Otto I] wanted to subordinate the lay princes with the help of the Church. Nothing could be done with the help of the Church as a power; the basis of its strength was small and dwindling.’ T. Schieffer, ‘Heinrich II. und Konrad II. Die Umprägung des Geschichtsbildes durch die Kirchenreform des II. Jahrhunderts’, DA 8 (1951), pp. 394–5; Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, p. 220. K. Bosl, ‘Deutschlands staatlich-politisches Gewicht im Zeitalter der Ottonen und ersten Salier’, in Gebhardt, Handbuch, I, p. 764; Santifaller, ‘Reichskirschensystem’, p. 40. See below, and nn. 143–4. Both the liturgical/ceremonial and the iconographical aspects of kingship have been the subject of intensive study, following the pioneering work of P. E. Schramm and E. H. Kantorowicz. The premises and results of much of this work, which began as a reaction against an excessive positivism in medieval political history, have now become somewhat rarified; for acute observations on how these aspects of kingship related to other more earthy ones see Leyser, Rule and Conflict, pp. 75–108. Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon I, 26, ed. R. Holtzmann, MGH, SRG, nova series, IX (1935), p. 33.

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Third, the concentration of resources on the Reichskirchensystem is said to have had fatal consequences for Salian rulership when the quasi-divine status of the king and royal appointments to ecclesiastical office came under fire in the course of the eleventh-century reform movement. The Ottonians and Salians, it is held, had put too many eggs in one basket; Gregory VII and Urban II cut through the handle and the eggs were smashed.11 This, then, is what Karl Leyser has called ‘the schematic Ottonian church system of common historical parlance’.12 In examining it, we may begin by looking more closely at the way in which men became bishops and the kind of men they were. When Nithard of Liège died in 1042 the chapter wanted Wazo and sent him to Henry III with the episcopal staff and letters, presumably of election. The king considered the matter with his court. Many said that the election had been made without royal approval; that bishops should be promoted from the ranks of the chaplains; and that Wazo had not sweated at the royal court to earn his promotion. Henry was at first inclined to agree with this, but was persuaded otherwise by Bruno of Würzburg and Herimann of Cologne, and agreed to Wazo’s election.13 This story illustrates the ‘constitutional’ elements in the Reichskirchensystem as generally conceived: the need for royal approval of elections and the importance of membership of the capella. It also hints at other things which are less frequently mentioned by historians, though they are referred to often enough in the Vitae and Gesta of Ottonian and Salian bishops: the fierce scramble for bishoprics when they fell vacant, and the need in the scramble to have powerful and influential backers. The need for royal approval of elections was clearly something felt throughout the tenth and early eleventh centuries, but it is quite hard to pin down what it meant and what the legal basis for it was. The ‘older’ bishoprics – those not founded by the Ottonians themselves – had the right of free election, which meant in particular not having an outsider thrust upon them against their will. This right might be guaranteed by a royal privilege, but this was not necessary.14 Increasingly, however, the Ottonians and Salians came to regard such a right as implying merely the right to propose a candidate. Particularly under Henry II the king often refused to 11 12 13 14

H. Mitteis, The State in the Middle Ages, trans. H. F. Orton (Amsterdam, 1975), pp. 109, 192. K. J. Leyser, review of Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, EHR 85 (1970), p. 115. Anselm of Liège, Gesta episcoporum Tungrensium, Traiectensium et Leodiensium, c. 50, MGH, SS VII, pp. 219–20. G. Weise, Königtum und Bischofswahl im fränkischen und deutschen Reich vor dem Investiturstreit (Berlin, 1912), pp. 57–63, 95–7.


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accept such a proposal and instead insisted on a candidate of his own.15 The forms of electio canonica were preserved by the chapter’s giving its ‘free election’ subsequently, a procedure now also extended to the newer Ottonian foundations, and there was some attempt to tidy up episcopal privileges, either by leaving out any reference to the right of election or by inserting a reservation: aequo consensu regis, though this was not followed through with any great consistency.16 It might seem, then, as if rulers acquired an ever tighter control over episcopal appointments, but this would be an over-simplification. There was considerable resistance to royal designation of outsiders; perhaps in consequence, Henry II’s successors showed themselves less willing than he had been to override the chapter. Most chapters at least tried to elect, even if they could not carry it through, and often the unsuccessful candidate would be promised a later bishopric.17 Moreover, there is a danger of over-systematisation. Where we know anything about the circumstances of an election, it is generally true that the court was involved.18 But it does not follow that where we know nothing about the election the king probably had a hand in it. Schlesinger’s statement that ‘just as the lord of the church appointed the priest of his Eigenkirche, so the king appointed the bishops of Merseburg, Meissen and Zeitz’,19 is – at least for Meissen and Zeitz – largely hypothesis. Quite apart from the question of whether the royal power to nominate really was a proprietary one,20 we do not even know the precise dates of office of some of these bishops, and it does not follow from the fact that some had been capellani that they were the king’s nominees.21 Royal influence over episcopal elections seems to have been more intense in Ostfalia and in the Rhine and Main valleys than elsewhere. These were the areas where kings were frequently 15 16

17 18

19 20

21

Hauck, Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands, III, pp. 28–33, 397–407; Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, pp. 208–11. The clauses are found in all renewals of episcopal privileges of election after 1002 except that for Halberstadt, D H II 13. But there were very few of these renewals, and they did not coincide with episcopal elections, where such privileges seem normally to have played little part. For an example of simple omission of the right of free election from a confirmation of a privilege by Henry II, see H. Bannasch, Das Bistum Paderborn unter den Bischöfen Rethar und Meinwerk (983–1036) (Paderborn, 1972), pp. 46–7. On developments under Henry II see Weise, Königtum, pp. 117–19; Schieffer, ‘Heinrich II. und Konrad II.’, pp. 394–7. Hauck, Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands, III, pp. 29, 400–3; Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, p. 208. C. Brühl, ‘Die Sozialstruktur des deutschen Episkopats im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert’, in Le Istituzioni ecclesiastiche della ‘societas christiana’ dei secoli XI–XII: diocesi, pievi e parrochie, Atti della Sesta Settimana Internazionale di Studio [Mendola], Milano, 1–7 settembre 1974 (Milan, 1977), p. 51. W. Schlesinger, Kirchengeschichte Sachsens im Mittelalter (Cologne, 1962), I, p. 269. Probably it was not. See P. Classen, ‘Das Wormser Konkordat in der deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte’, in J. Fleckenstein ed., Investiturstreit und Reichsverfassung, Vorträge und Forschungen herausgegeben vom Konstanzer Arbeitskreis fur mittelalterliche Geschichte 17 (1973), pp. 453–4, commenting on the controversy on this subject between Julius Ficker and George Waitz. See below, and n. 43.

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present and had more concentrated power through their fiscal lands and rights,22 and in that respect there is not so much difference as might be supposed between an Otto I and a west Frankish count controlling his local bishopric. Not until the eleventh century did royal control over elections in Bavaria23 and Swabia24 become general, and it was never complete. The case of royal abbeys is more straightforward. The grant of electio libera signified the ‘freedom’ of being taken into royal protection, freedom from the claims of the founder or founders, and privileges granting it could simultaneously describe the current abbot as having been chosen by the king. Not until 1073 do we find a privilege specifically excluding royal nomination.25 Even so, royal choice of abbots seems to have been by no means universal, even in the eleventh century.26 As far as the men who were chosen are concerned, historians have drawn attention to two overlapping groups: members of the royal chapel and men related by blood or marriage to the royal house. The importance of the chapel is obvious. By becoming a capellanus one became, in effect, a clerical vassal of the king.27 A capellanus could take part in such central government as the Ottonians and Salians indulged in: in the writing of letters and charters (though this was menial work, less well rewarded with promotion than that done by other capellani); in embassies; in acting as the king’s representative. The capella has been studied in a fine book by Josef Fleckenstein, a sequel to an earlier study of the Carolingian origins of the institution.28 And yet Fleckenstein’s own work shows very well that the capella was not a homogeneous body of men. An Ottonian capellanus might be anything from an insignificant notary to a well-heeled aristocrat holding several benefices and perhaps with patrimony of his own. Those at the bottom probably had little contact with those at the top, and it is unlikely that they shared common interests. Not all capellani had kept in 22

23 24

25

26 28

For the royal iter, see below; there is a good map of the Salian demesne in J. Engel ed., Grosser Historischer Weltatlas herausgegeben vom Bayerischen Schulbuch–Verlag, II: Mittelalter (Munich, 1970), pp. 78–9. S. Hirsch and H. Pabst, Jahrbücher des deutschen Reiches unter Heinrich II. (Leipzig, 1878), I, pp. 84–7; Auer, ‘Kriegsdienst, I’, pp. 406–7. H. Maurer, Der Herzog von Schwaben (Sigmaringen, 1978), pp. 153–60: even when the dukes did not appoint to the bishoprics of Chur, Constance, Augsburg and Strassburg, the bishoprics were part of the duke’s sphere of ecclesiastical influence (p. 159); so were many of the Reichsklöster (pp. 161–81). T. Mayer, Fürsten und Staat (Weimar, 1950), p. 25. For early privileges see for example DD O 134 and 192 for Lorsch. D H IV 260 for Einsiedeln runs: ‘Cumque abbatem constituendum tempus poposcerit, non quilibet regis potestate eis praeponatur, sed quem fratrum electio idoneum iudicaverit, regis tam petitione quam constitutione huius nominis onus subire cogatur.’ 27 Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, p. 177. Wehlt, Reichsabtei und König, pp. 317, 323–4, 374–6. Ibid.; the earlier work is Die Hofkapelle der deutschen Könige, I: Grundlegung. Die karolingische Hofkapelle, Schriften der MGH, XVI, 1 (1959).


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close contact with the ruler – Wazo of Liège, who had become a capellanus under Conrad II, had not done so.29 The evidence that men were or had been capellani is so tenuous or speculative in many cases that it hardly suggests that their links with the court were close ones.30 There is some evidence from the reign of Conrad II and Henry III for the capellani acting and feeling as a group; but it was a group more like a trade union than an officers’ mess, resenting the outsiders who were still getting the jobs to which it felt its members were entitled: a Bardo of Mainz or a Wazo of Liège.31 Even in the period from Otto III’s majority to Henry II’s final illness (994– 1021), over a third of all bishoprics went to men outside the capella, and the normal proportion, even under Henry III, was much higher, usually more than half. Moreover, chapel-appointments were not spread evenly over the forty-odd sees: Speyer, Verden and Metz had no ex-capellanus as bishop between 919 and 1056; Worms, Würzburg and, in the eleventh century, Cologne, Augsburg and Bamberg were occupied almost continuously by capellani.32 Those men who did pass through the capella to the episcopate were not of a different type from those who did not, either in their relations with the king or socially. Capellani were not all equally close to the king, as we have seen, and some men who undoubtedly were close were appointed to bishoprics without going through the capella – Gundechar of Eichstätt and Warmann of Constance, for example.33 One or two – Anno of Cologne and Durand of Liège – were of modest or even unfree origin,34 but the overwhelming majority were high aristocrats. They might well have expected 29 30

31 32 33 34

Anselm of Liège, c. 43, pp. 215–16. Of the eight bishops of Würzburg from Poppo I (941–61) to Adalbero (1045–90), only two – Poppo I and Bruno – were certainly members of the capella before their elections. See the review of the evidence in A. Wendehorst, Das Bistum Würzburg, I: Die Bischofsreihe bis 1254, Germania Sacra, neue Folge 1 (1962), pp. 61, 63–4, 67–8, 70–1, 75–6, 89, 101–3. Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, makes all eight bishops ex-capellani, expressing doubts only about Meinhard (pp. 212, 226) and Bernward (pp. 79, 81 n. 131). Here and elsewhere Fleckenstein has deduced membership of the capella from other known contacts with the court or by making plausible identifications. No doubt many of these deductions are correct, but the cumulative effect of a presumption in favour of capella-membership must be to exaggerate its importance. For Wazo’s case, see above, and n. 13; for Bardo, see Vita Bardonis maior, c. 15, MGH, SS XI, pp. 329–30. These figures are taken from the lists in Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, pp. 52–3, 75, 114–15, 211–12, 224–6, 289–90 (but for Würzburg, see above, n. 32). Anonymus Haserensis, c. 25, MGH, SS VII, p. 260; Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, p. 225. D. Lück, ‘Erzbischof Anno II von Köln, Standesverhältnisse, verwandschaftliche Beziehungen und Werdegang bis zur Bischofsweihe’, Annalen des historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein 112 (1970), pp. 9–31, has shown that Anno’s origins, though modest, were less lowly than had been supposed; for Durand, see Anselm of Liège, c. 36, p. 209. Brühl, ‘Sozialstruktur’, p. 48, points to a number of other cases where a former presumption of low or servile birth has had to be abandoned.

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promotion in any case. The bishopric of Worms illustrates this nicely. It was certainly a chapel-bishopric; but the five bishops from Franco to Arnold (999 to 1065) seem to have belonged to the same Hessian kingroup, as perhaps did their predecessor Hildebald (979–88), also a capellanus.35 Other bishoprics were also held for long periods by members of a kindred: Metz by the Luxemburger, Verden by the Billungs.36 No doubt the king usually confirmed these appointments; he may even have chosen from among the eligible members of a kin-group; but he did not necessarily do more than that. The highly aristocratic nature of the episcopate explains another feature of the Reichskirchensystem which has been misinterpreted: the large number of bishops related to the royal house.37 As the Ottonian ruling elite consisted of a small number of interrelated kindreds, this was inevitable.38 Relationship to the royal house is simply a special case of interrelatedness among Ottonian and Salian prelates. Pairs of brothers were not uncommon;39 references to cognatio are so common that it is exceptional to find a bishop about whom anything at all is known beyond the name who has no episcopal relatives.40 The same is probably true of abbots. It does not follow automatically from the fact that a bishop or abbot was the king’s cognatus that he owed his appointment to cognatio, or even that he stood especially close to the king: a good example is Gebhard of Regensburg, who was Conrad II’s half-brother, but is known not to have had a particularly close relationship with Conrad.41 The ‘royal’ bishops cannot be treated as a 35 36

37

38

39

40

41

W. Metz, ‘Zur Herkunft und Verwandschaft Bischof Burchards I. von Worms’, Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 26 (1976), pp. 31–42. H. Renn, Das erst Luxemburger Grafenhaus (963–1136) (Bonn, 1941), pp. 9, 44–6, 124; H.-J. Freytag, Die Herrschaft der Billunger in Sachsen, Studien und Vorarbeiten zum historischen Atlas Niedersachsens 24 (1951), p. 46 and genealogical table. H. Schnitger, Die deutschen Bischöfe aus den Königssippen von Otto I. bis Heinrich V. (Munich, 1938), provides a convenient guide to these: some fifty bishops elected between 936 and 1106 were related to the ruling house, and a further twenty probably were (p. 94). See also Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, p. 55. See R. Schölkopf, Die sächsischen Grafen, 919–1024, Studien und Vorarbeiten zum historischen Atlas Niedersachsens 22 (1957) and the comments by K. Schmid, ‘Bemerkungen zu einer Prosopographie des frühen Mittelalters’, Zeitschrift für württembergische Landesgeschichte 23 (1964), pp. 215–27; Leyser, Rule and Conflict, part I: ‘Otto I and his Saxon enemies’, passim. Heribert of Cologne and Henry of Würzburg: Vita Heriberti archiepiscopi Coloniensis auctore Lantberto, c. 4, MGH, SS IV, p. 742; Heribert and Gozmann of Eichstätt: Anonymus Haserensis, cc. 32–3, MGH, SS VII, p. 263 (they were also related to Heribert of Cologne, c. 27, p. 261); Franco and Burchard I of Worms: Vita Burchardi episcopi Wormatiensis, c. 3, MGH, SS IV, p. 833; Warmann and Eppo of Constance: Annales Hildesheimenses, s.a. 1034, ed. G. Waitz (MGH, SRG, 1878), p. 38. R. Holtzmann’s introduction to Thietmar, pp. vii–xv, shows how numerous Thietmar’s relatives were; the number is larger than in most other cases only because we are exceptionally well informed about Thietmar’s family. See the observations by K. J. Leyser, ‘Debate: Maternal kin in early medieval Germany’, P&P 49 (1970), p. 134. Schnitger, Bischöfe aus den Königssippen, p. 67.


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group any more than the ‘chapel’ bishops. Chapters might often themselves seek to elect men in either category, because of the influence they had at court or just because they thought them suitable: the initial choice of Bruno in 953 came from Cologne, and Ohtric, Magdeburg’s rejected candidate in 981, was a capellanus, though not of long standing.42 What has been said so far may have cast some doubt on the conventional view of the Ottonians and Salians filling vacancies with men whom they had carefully chosen as suitable members of a system. Even where the king did definitely appoint or confirm the appointment, others had a say. When Rothard of Cambrai died in 995, Notker of Liège urged his archdeacon, Erluin, to hurry to Mathilda of Quedlinburg, Otto III’s aunt, whose familiaris Erluin was, so that he might be appointed through her influence. Otto III’s sister, Sophia, also had a candidate, Azelin, the son of Baldwin of Flanders; and it was only after a struggle that Otto was persuaded to appoint Erluin.43 Here we can see promotion-hungry ecclesiastics grouping themselves around members of the royal house, just as the lay aristocracy did.44 We can also see the importance of bishops who tried to get their protégés appointed, as indeed we have already seen it in the account of the election of Wazo of Liège. Some, like Gerald of Cambrai, merely designated their own successors.45 Others spread their nets more widely. Otto I’s brother, Bruno of Cologne; Notker of Liège; Willigis of Mainz; Anno of Cologne; Bruno of Würzburg:46 these and others took pains to ‘place’ their relatives and clerical followers in good posts, and these connections and the ties of cognatio were as important in giving the Ottonian and Salian episcopate a sense of corporate identity as the ties with the court through the chapel which Fleckenstein has stressed. The king played a vital part in many elections, but he did not have a free hand or the opportunity to impose a ‘policy’. Rather, he selected from among candidates for the bestowal of patronage; 42

43 44 45 46

Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, p. 31 (Bruno), p. 42 (Ohtric). Bruno’s election was naturally welcome to Otto I, but Fleckenstein seems to press the sources too far when he says that the election was ‘directly arranged by the king’. Gesta episcoporum Cameracensium, c. 110, MGH, SS VII, p. 448. Azelin again tried to buy the bishopric on Erluin’s death (c. 122, p. 454). Leyser, Rule and Conflict, pp. 14–22, 27, 43. Gesta Lietberti episcopi, c. 12, MGH, SS VII, p. 489. See in general Leyser, Rule and Conflict, p. 33. Bruno: Ruotgeri Vita Brunonis, c. 37, ed. I. Ott (MGH, SRG, nova series, X, 1951), pp. 38–9. Notker: Anselm of Liège, c. 29, p. 205. Willigis: Vita Burchardi episcopi Wormatiensis, c. 2, MGH, SS IV, p. 833; Vita Bernwardi episcopi Hildesheimensis auctore Thangmaro, c. 2, MGH, SS IV, p. 759 (see c. 1, p. 758 for Bernward’s other episcopal relatives and connections); Thietmar, Chronicon VI, c. 35, p. 316 (for the promotion of Meingaud of Trier). Willigis was himself a protégé of Folcold, capellanus and tutor to Otto II and bishop of Meissen 969–92 (Thietmar, IV, c. 6, pp. 136–8). Bruno: Wendehorst, Bistum Würzburg, p. 95. Anno: Lück, ‘Anno’, pp. 31–59.

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he was, in effect, the means by which not only he but others – queens, bishops and nobles – could advance their kinsmen and protégés. Though the king was thus not the only patron, the system hinged on him, and his ability to give high church office was crucial for his relations with the leading noble families of the Reich;47 he could please not only the recipient of office, but also the petitioner. Bishoprics could be given to win back a disaffected kindred, as when Otto I gave Halberstadt to Hildiward, saying ‘here is the wergeld for your father’.48 They could be held back if a family’s loyalty was suspect, as Otto I tried to do to Gero when he was elected to Cologne in 969.49 Bishoprics went surprisingly often to members of local kindreds. The appointment of ‘foreigners’ – men from other stems – was certainly practised,50 but it was not necessarily a means of putting a man loyal to the king into foreign parts, as has sometimes been suggested, and in so far as it did mean that it also meant that the king had to defend and protect the bishop, rather than the other way round.51 It could also benefit the kindred from which the candidate came, both by reducing competition within the kindred for its hereditary resources and by opening up new areas to its influence: when Liemar went north to the archbishopric of Bremen in 1072, he took some of his family with him,52 and though he was a ministerialis there is no reason to suppose that aristocrats did not behave in the same way. If the king’s control over elections and candidates was something less than total, his control over bishops once elected was much the same as that over the lay nobility, and it was exercised in the same way – the bestowing or withdrawing of the royal gratia. If there was a difference it was that bishops perhaps needed the king’s goodwill and protection more than the lay nobility did; they were certainly more naked and exposed when they lost 47

48 49 50 51 52

Cf. E. N. Johnson, The Secular Activities of the German Episcopate, 919–1024 (University Studies of the University of Nebraska, XXX–XXXI, 1932), p. 98: ‘They [the bishops] represented the same family interests [as the lay aristocracy] and often enough were awarded their bishoprics as a specific means of placating family interests.’ Thietmar, Chronicon II, c. 21, p. 62; see Leyser, Rule and Conflict, pp. 33–4, on the background to this. Thietmar, Chronicon II, c. 24, p. 68; on the background, see Leyser, Rule and Conflict, p. 24, and Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, p. 42 n. 165, who points to chronological difficulties in the story. The frequent installation of Saxons in Lotharingian bishoprics is noted by Auer, ‘Kriegsdienst, I’, p. 324. Auer, ‘Kriegsdienst, II’, p. 67; T. Schieffer, ‘Gerald I. von Cambrai (1012–1051). Ein deutscher Bischof des II. Jahrhunderts’, DA 1 (1937), p. 359. A. Heinrichsen, ‘Süddeutsche Adelsgeschlechter in Niedersachsen im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert’, Niedersächsisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 16 (1954), pp. 24–112, at 46–7; see also Lück, ‘Anno’, pp. 31–59.


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it. Bishops lobbied the king for favours and collected large sums of money to buy back the king’s goodwill.53 Bishops who had been too closely associated with rebellions might be briefly sent into exile; even cruder methods were possible in the early period, though the blinding of a Herold of Salzburg remained a rather shocking exception.54 They could not be deposed, and this alone should make us doubtful about thinking of them as a kind of civil service. Hauck was already aware of this problem, and the way in which he tried to dispose of it is characteristic of the way in which a ‘system’ has been built up by generalisation from a few examples. He argued that since it was certainly possible for the Ottonians and Salians to depose Italian bishops it must have been equally possible for them to depose German ones,55 and he cited a threat of deposition alleged to have been made by Henry II against Gundechar I of Eichstätt for refusing to consent to the handing over of a part of his diocese to the newly erected bishopric of Bamberg. Gundechar did indeed give in, which explains the hostility of his local chronicler, who regarded the exchange eventually accepted by Gundechar as iniquitous. But the chronicler also makes Henry II say that he expected compliance because Gundechar was of humble origins; his predecessor had not been, and could not therefore be bullied in this way.56 Irremovability is confirmed by the survival in office of those bishops, who were quite numerous, who flirted with or joined rebellions.57 The Eichstätt affair illustrates another important point about Ottonian and Salian bishops. Whatever they may have been before they became bishops, they succeeded to an office which they had to uphold, and they

53

54

55 56

57

Wolbodo of Liège collected money to buy back Henry II’s favour, but then gave it away to the poor, an action which Henry approved (Anselm of Liège, c. 34, MGH, SS VII, p. 208). See also the case of Wazo of Liège (c. 66, p. 229). For purchase of gratia by the lay aristocracy see Leyser, Rule and Conflict, pp. 38–42. For the case of Rothad of Strassburg and Frederick of Mainz in 939, see R. Köpke and E. Dümmler, Jahrbücher des deutschen Reiches unter Kaiser Otto dem Grossen (Leipzig, 1876), pp. 93–4; for Abraham of Freising in 974 and Henry of Augsburg in 978, see K. Uhlirz, Jahrbücher des deutschen Reiches unter Otto II. (Leipzig, 1902), pp. 54, 92. For the blinding and deposition of Herold of Salzburg by Henry of Bavaria, see Köpke and Dümmler, Jahrbücher, p. 248. Hauck, Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands, III, pp. 408–9. Anonymus Haserensis, c. 25, MGH, SS VII, pp. 260–1; for the details see E. Freiherr v. Guttenberg, Regesten der Bischöfe von Bamberg (902–1023) (Veröffentlichungen der Gesellschaft für fränkische Geschichte, VI. Reihe, 1932), no. 131. According to Rupert of Deutz, when Heribert of Cologne refused to assist Henry II in the siege of Hammerstein in 1020 Henry came to Cologne, ‘hoc proposito habens, ut eum pontificatu amoveret, aut certe, si hoc rationabiliter fieri non posset, quolibet modo iniuriose illum et indigne tractaret’ (quoted by H. Müller, Heribert, Kanzler Ottos III. und Erzbischof von Köln (Cologne, 1977), p. 188). The wording suggests that deposition could be threatened but hardly carried out; withdrawal of gratia was the real means of disciplining bishops. See above, n. 54, and below, p. 336.

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had a chapter to remind them of it should they forget.58 This applied equally to the new bishoprics: read Thietmar of Merseburg on his efforts to restore the lands of Merseburg, a see only forty years old when he succeeded to it, and amalgamated with Magdeburg for half that period.59 When the needs of their see clashed with the demands of the king it was often the latter who had to give way. It took Otto I many years and a good deal of effort to establish an archbishopric at Magdeburg, and he had to wait for the archbishop of Mainz and the bishop of Halberstadt to die before he could do so.60 Henry II’s foundation of Bamberg went through more quickly, but it aroused just as much opposition, and Henry of Würzburg, at least, could not be easily reconciled to it.61 The claims of the bishopric also explain some, if not all, of the involvements of bishops in rebellions. They could not afford to sacrifice the economic and political base of their sees. This helps to explain the episcopal support which Henry the Quarrelsome had,62 and the way in which the episcopate divided between the various candidates for the succession in 1002,63 as well as things like the tacit support given to rebellion by Frederick of Mainz in 952–3 and Burchard of Halberstadt and Hezilo of Hildesheim in the 1070s.64 Monasteries were more amenable to royal pressure; abbots could be deposed or transferred, and this distinguished even the largest and richest royal monasteries from bishoprics. Yet here too royal intervention was very varied. Some large houses, like Stavelot, rarely had their abbots deposed 58 59 60 61 62 63

64

On the development of cathedral chapters, see now R. Schieffer, Die Entstehung von Domkapiteln in Deutschland (Bonner Historische Forschungen, 43, 1976). H. Lippelt, Thietmar von Merseburg. Reichsbischof und Chronist (Mitteldeutsche Forschungen, 72, 1973), pp. 89–115. D. Claude, Geschichte des Erzbistums Magdeburg bis in das 12. Jahrhundert (Mitteldeutsche Forschungen, 67, 1972), I, pp. 66–85. Wendehorst, Bistum Würzburg, pp. 79–80; E. von Guttenberg, Das Bistum Bamberg (Germania Sacra, II, i, 1937), pp. 29–31. For another objector see above, p. 335. Uhlirz, Jahrbücher Ottos II., pp. 54, 92; M. Uhlirz, Jahrbücher des deutschen Reiches unter Otto III. (Leipzig, 1954), pp. 12–16. Arnulf of Halberstadt and Bernward of Hildesheim were for Ekkehard of Meissen (Thietmar, Chronicon V, c. 4, p. 224). Hermann II of Swabia had considerable support outside Swabia, but inside it the bishops of Constance and Chur supported him ‘non tantum ex animo quantum in civitatis contiguo’ (Thietmar, Chronicon V, c. 13, p. 236), having noted the fate of the bishop of Strassburg, who had not supported Hermann and had had his city burnt and plundered in consequence (Thietmar, Chronicon V, c. 12, p. 234). See Maurer, Herzog von Schwaben, pp. 156, 159. On the episcopate as a whole in 1002 see Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, p. 158: ‘initially mostly undecided’. Frederick of Mainz: H. Beumann, ‘Die Mainzer Erzbischöfe Friedrich und Wilhelm und das Papsttum des 10. Jahrhunderts’, in Festschrift für Johannes Bärmann (Wiesbaden, 1966), I, pp. 12–13. Burchard and Hezilo: C. Erdmann, Studien zur Briefliteratur Deutschlands im II. Jahrhundert (Schriften der MGH I, 1938), pp. 123, 130; W. Heinemann, Das Bistum Hildesheim im Kräftespiel der Reichs- und Territorialpolitik (Quellen und Darstellungen zur Geschichte Niedersachsens 72, 1968), pp. 43–6. See also Johnson, Secular Activities, pp. 29–39, 97, 100, on bishops and rebellions.


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or nominated by the ruler, even though the house lay on the edge of the large fiscal complex around Aachen and was thus immediately accessible to royal influence.65 Other houses, like Corvey or Fulda, experienced more frequent royal interference. The fact that they sometimes tried to resist this shows that the king was not regarded as having unlimited rights in such matters, even though in practice a ruler like Henry II almost invariably had his way.66 Here, too, we see bodies with traditions and interests of their own, which could not simply be overridden either by the king or his nominee. In particular, any attempt to transfer a monastery to the potestas of a bishop was likely to be resisted.67 So far we have examined the view that German bishops and abbots resembled officials of the state in the manner in which they were appointed and in their liability to be removed from office. We may now turn to the view that they were expected to act as officials; that the prelates in the Reichskirchensystem were instruments of royal government. At first sight it may seem absurd to do this. Santifaller has drawn up impressive if not wholly accurate lists68 of royal privileges granting immunity, ban, fiscal rights and even counties to abbeys and especially to bishoprics, and these may suggest a policy of delegating rights to reliable men. Yet, once again, the reality was rather different. Bishops and abbots performed considerable services for their rulers – we shall see later what these services were – and in return for this they expected rewards. One of Henry II’s diplomata said that more could be asked of those to whom more was given;69 but for ecclesiastics the causal connection was reversed. Now there is a definite shift discernible in the way in which the Ottonians and Salians rewarded their churchmen. From the late tenth century gifts of land and men, which had predominated under Henry I and Otto I, gave way to gifts of governmental rights. Gifts of land and men continued, but they became much smaller in size and negligible as a proportion of what bishops and abbots already held, leaving aside obvious exceptions like the new bishopric of Bamberg 65

66

67

68 69

Wehlt, Reichsabtei und König, pp. 375, 377; D. Flach, Untersuchungen zur Verfassung und Verwaltung des Aachener Reichsgutes von der Karolingerzeit bis zur Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts, Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 46, p. 176, especially pp. 87–90 on the servitia sent by Stavelot to the palace at Aachen. H. H. Kaminsky, Studien zur Reichsabtei Corvey in der Salierzeit (Abhandlungen zur Corveyer ¨ Geschichtsschreibung, IV, 1971), pp. 47–58; M. Sandmann, ‘Die Folge der Abte’, in K. Schmid ed., Die Klostergemeinschaft von Fulda (Münsterer Mittelalterschriften, VIII, 1978), I, p. 194. For the case of Lorsch in Otto III’s reign see Wehlt, Reichsabtei und König, pp. 45–6; for Malmédy’s struggle with Cologne under Henry IV, see the Triumphus S. Remacli de Malmundariensi Coenobio, c. 9, MGH, SS XI, p. 453; Lampert of Hersfeld, s.a. 1063, 1071, pp. 89, 125–6. In ‘Reichskirchensystem’, pp. 78–115. D H II 433, quoted by Brühl, Fodrum, p. 127; the reference is to Luke 12: 48.

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which was endowed on a very lavish scale.70 One of the reasons why gifts of rights came to predominate was simply that these were cheaper to make. If a ruler handed over a mansus or a curtis, he was a mansus or a curtis the poorer; true, it remained in a sense the property of the Reich, and services were due for it, but the king, whatever his rights in theory, would not normally take it back from a bishopric except to grant it to another church, though monasteries might be rather more roughly treated.71 Only the king could give permission to hold a market or to mint coins, but by giving such permission he did not necessarily impoverish himself in the slightest. He was not always himself in a position to exercise such rights, but by allowing others to do so he could reap a return: such privileges were often paid for,72 and the church they enriched could be expected to render larger servitia. Of course, not all governmental rights were like this. In so far as the Ottonian count still actually handed over to the fisc the king’s portion of the fredus or bannus (fines imposed for breaches of the peace or of royal commands), the grant of a county or immunity with ban did actually reduce royal wealth. But such grants did not greatly affect royal power, as we shall see; their main importance was often a financial one, and once again servitia, which were not normally exactable from the lay nobility, will have compensated for the loss.73 Grants of rights, then, were not normally delegations by the ruler of powers he would otherwise have exercised directly. This does not exclude the possibility of conscious policy, but this is in fact not very probable. Rulers acted consciously, but the initiative did not usually come from them. Collections of royal diplomata are too often read as being the surviving records of governmental action and policy; they are also, and much more, the 70 71

72

73

Guttenberg, Bistum Bamberg, pp. 33–6, 52–3; Mayer, Fürsten und Staat, pp. 248–75. St Maximin’s, Trier, claimed to have lost over 6,000 mansi through forced enfeoffments under Henry II. See E. Wisplinghoff, Untersuchungen zur frühen Geschichte der Abtei S. Maximin bei Trier von den Anfängen bis etwa 1150 (Quellen und Abhandlungen zur mittelrheinischen Kirchengeschichte, XII, 1970), pp. 36, 82ff.; the figure is absurd, but the story is not, especially as Henry II is also known to have carried out ‘secularisations’ at Corvey and Hersfeld. For grants of whole monasteries in beneficio, see Maurer, Herzog von Schwaben, p. 178, and H. Schwarzmaier, Königtum, Adel und Klöster im Gebiet zwischen oberer Iller und Lech (Studien zur Geschichte des bayerischen Schwabens, VII, 1961), pp. 136ff. H. Bresslau, Handbuch der Urkundenlehre, 2nd edn (Berlin, 1931), I, pp. 382–3, referring to chancery charges, a portion of which must have come to the ruler. For an example of large-scale payment to the ruler see below, and n. 81. The importance of ban and immunity for the development of territories is so obvious that their financial side, probably more important in this early period when jurisdiction meant fining rather than punishment, is often overlooked. See e.g. D O III 66 for Gandersheim with the comments of R. Scheyhing, Eide, Amtsgewalt und Bannleihe (Forschungen zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte, II, 1960), p. 316. On lay nobles’ de facto exemption from servitia, see Brühl, Fodrum, pp. 178–9.


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surviving records of occasions when rulers – pestered, cajoled and bribed – made concessions to their clerical followers. Just as lay nobles sought to increase and consolidate the wealth and prestige of their families, so bishops and abbots sought to increase the wealth and prestige of the churches committed to their care. Recent work on the lay nobility of the Ottonian and Salian Reich has emphasised the importance of Königsnähe, closeness to the king, in establishing lay fortunes. It was no less important for prelates; few Ottonian and Salian Vitae omit a reference to the prelate’s relations with the king.74 Prelates needed governmental rights especially. The late tenth and eleventh centuries in Germany saw the beginnings of the territorialisation of lordship by the secular nobility: the amalgamation of scattered rights, property and governmental powers – delegated, usurped or ‘autochthonous’ (i.e. inherent in the birth or status of their holder) – into territorial units of government.75 If bishops and abbots were to hold on to what they had, they too needed such rights, and exemptions from the rights of others. There is still room for argument about whether the lay nobility in fact had autochthonous rights,76 but clearly ecclesiastical institutions did not. Nor could they easily usurp such rights. Ecclesiastics were not always the innocent parties in the disputes of the period, but they were too dependent on local dynasts for the exercise of their powers to be able to make much independent headway against them. Consequently, ecclesiastics turned to the king for grants of immunity and other rights. Just what was involved in practice can be seen by looking at one of the most spectacular features of the Reichskirchensystem, the granting of whole counties to bishoprics and bishops.77 There are three main points to be made. The first is that when we can uncover something of the circumstances of such grants, it seems to have been the bishops who demanded them rather than the rulers who simply handed them over or delegated them. Paderborn, for example, was well endowed with counties by the end of Henry II’s reign. The first of these grants was made in the reign of Otto I or II. It was an act of compensation for the loss Paderborn had sustained 74 75 76

77

Köhler, Bild des geistlichen Fürsten, p. 22. The classic discussion of this is still W. Schlesinger, Die Entstehung der Landesherrschaft, vorwiegend nach mitteldeutschen Quellen, I (all published) (Dresden, 1941). The theory was first developed by O. v. Dungern and widely adopted (see Schlesinger, Landesherrschaft, pp. 144ff.); but see the criticisms by M. Mitterauer, ‘Formen adeliger Herrschaftsbildung ¨ 80 (1972), ¨ im hochmittelalterlichen Osterreich. Zur Frage der “autogenen Hoheitsrechte”’, MIOG pp. 265–318, especially pp. 266–9. See Santifaller, ‘Reichskirchensystem’, pp. 105–15, for a list of such grants; Mayer, Fürsten und Staat, pp. 257–70. Unless otherwise noted, the following discussion excludes grants of comital or quasicomital rights over episcopal cities alone.

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through the acquisition of tithes by the abbey of Corvey.78 The others were all given in the time of Bishop Meinwerk (1009–36). Meinwerk was a former capellanus and a distant relative of Henry II, and was thus in a good position to ask for favours. In spite of this, he had to wait until the lay holders of the counties died, and often experienced delay and trouble in making the grants good against their surviving relatives. Moreover, it is clear that Meinwerk pestered Henry until the gifts were made, even on one occasion going so far as to get Benedict VIII to intervene.79 At Worms, Hildibald and Burchard I used their contacts at court in order to secure control of counties and of their city, and Hildibald also resorted to forgery – a further indication that prelates could not automatically count on such grants from the king.80 We know from other sources that bishops sought after counties: Adam of Bremen describes the lengths to which Archbishop Adalbert was prepared to go to get hold of them.81 Clearly the Ottonians and Salians had no objection in principle to such grants, but it does not follow from the mere fact of the grants that a positive policy lay behind them. This is confirmed when we look at the distribution of such grants. Many bishoprics, including some of the richest and most important, received few or none. Those which did get them did not all get them for the same reasons. There might, for instance, seem to be an obvious reason why the Alpine bishoprics of Chur, Brixen and Trent should have received counties: the need to keep the Alpine passes to Italy open and in friendly hands. Yet none of these bishoprics was under close royal control, and in the case of Chur, at least, it is likely that the bishop was able to secure comital rights so easily and so early because Hungarian and Saracen raids had left no important lay powers in the area,82 just as the bishops of Aosta, Grenoble and Tarentaise were able to take over their counties in the neighbouring kingdom of Burgundy at the end of the tenth century.83 Elsewhere there is 78 79 80

81

82

83

Bannasch, Bistum Paderborn, p. 31. Ibid., pp. 308–13; Benedict VIII’s intervention is recorded in D H II 440. Burchard I’s struggle to gain control over the episcopal city is graphically described in the Vita Burchardi episcopi Wormatiensis, cc. 7, 9, MGH, SS IV, pp. 835–7. See A. Seiler, Das Hochstift Worms im Mittelalter (Giessen, 1936), pp. 31–8; J. Lechner, ‘Die a¨lteren Königsurkunden für Worms und ¨ 22 (1901), pp. 361–419, 529–74. die Begründung der bischöflichen Fürstenmacht’, MIOG Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae Pontificum, III, 46, 3rd edn by B. Schmeidler (MGH, SRG, 1917), pp. 188–90; he offered large sums to Henry III and Henry IV and pensions to some of the holders of the counties. No local power at least: Chur was in the tenth century very much under the influence of the dukes of Swabia (Maurer, Herzog von Schwaben, pp. 156–7, 191, 207). The grants for Chur are DD O I 139 (fiscal rights of county; intervention by the duke of Swabia), 148 (toll), 191 (royal half of city and rights of toll and mint), 209 (comital rights in Graubünden). R. Poupardin, Le Royaume de Bourgogne (888–1038) (Paris, 1907), pp. 254 n. 3, 321–2.


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little sign before 1056 that bishops were given counties so that they could be a more effective counterweight to a powerful secular nobility. Such a policy ought to be visible in the two south German duchies, if at all; yet no Bavarian bishop got one except Brixen and, probably, Freising,84 and no Swabian bishop got one except Chur.85 In Saxony the bishop of Paderborn was able to acquire a large number of the counties in his diocese because they were mainly held by families who were, in the words of the most recent study of the subject, ‘insignificant in national politics’.86 Only in Franconia, where the bishops of Mainz, Worms and Würzburg were well endowed,87 and in Lower Lotharingia, does the granting of counties seem to have conformed to the traditional conception, and even here it was uneven: the important see of Cologne, for example, had only one.88 In practice, almost all the counties given to bishops continued to be run by laymen, who simply held from the bishop instead of the king. The exceptional provision in one of Henry II’s grants to Paderborn89 that Meinwerk should administer the county through a ministerialis of the bishopric confirms the normal practice. The effect of the extensive grants made to Hildesheim in 1051 was not that Azelin of Hildesheim became a powerful magnate overnight, but simply that the Brunonids, who had held the county from the king, now held it from Azelin and his successors.90 It has been claimed that ‘a loyal bishop could exercise far stricter control over his vassals through his continuous presence than the king, who was often absent for long periods’,91 but this is optimistic; bishops were also absent from their diocese for long periods, often on royal service. Nor is it clear what ‘control’ would have meant. Immunity, ban and comital rights might keep ecclesiastical dependants from being sucked into the orbit of local magnates; they did not confer jurisdiction over the magnates themselves. Control certainly did not mean supervision of comital administration. The Carolingians had made some attempt to do this through capitularies and missi dominici, but even then it was almost unknown for a count to be deposed for maladministration, and this is a fortiori true of the Ottonian 84 85 86 87

88 90

Brixen: D K II 103; Freising: D O II 80, which is interpolated but in this respect credible (cf. Santifaller, ‘Reichskirchensystem’, p. 106). Strassburg received a grant from Henry IV in 1077. For Chur see above, n. 82. Bannasch, Bistum Paderborn, p. 311. Mainz: M. Stimming, Die Entstehung des weltlichen Territoriums des Erzbistums Mainz (Quellen und Forschungen zur Hessischen Geschichte, III, 1915), pp. 22–3; Worms: D H II 226, 227 (and see also above, n. 80); Würzburg: D O III 366 (but see Wendehorst, Bistum Würzburg, p. 82, for doubts about how far this grant was carried out), D H II 268. 89 D H II 440. Santifaller, ‘Reichskirchensystem’, p. 107 no. 7. 91 Ibid., p. 68. Heinemann, Bistum Hildesheim, pp. 41–2.

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Reich, which had neither capitularies nor missi dominici. It is, in any case, not clear how far the Carolingians succeeded east of the Rhine in establishing a comital system as it is usually conceived, with the count acting as the king’s representative in a defined area.92 Control, then, will have meant at most preventing political disloyalty, and Ottonian and Salian bishops could normally only do this when they had local family connections or the king behind them; they could not usually act on their own. Thus, Meinwerk of Paderborn was able to make something of his grants by using his relatives, well established in the region; but the bishopric of Worms, occupied continuously from 979 by outsiders whose family lay further afield, could not.93 Grants of immunity, with or without ban, were commoner and more evenly distributed than counties, but here too we must beware of thinking that the grant put large areas under the control of a reliable official. Immunity developed in the course of the tenth century to mean not simply exemption from the acts of supposedly public officials like counts but positive rights of jurisdiction and command as well. The immunist became, more or less, his own count. At the same time he had to have an advocate, a layman, to run his immunity, and increasingly the Carolingian arrangement, whereby such men were appointed, often ad hoc, by the immunist, was being replaced by one where the immunist had one advocate who controlled his immunity permanently. The simultaneous transformation of immunity from an essentially financial into an essentially politico-judicial institution tended to benefit advocates rather than immunists.94 Bishoprics suffered less and later from this development than did monasteries, but it had already gained considerable ground by the early eleventh century. In theory the advocate’s exercise of the right of ban was subject to royal approval and he had to be invested with it by the king. But the choice was limited, and to deprive a man of his advocacy, if this could be done at all, was a 92

93 94

The thesis of a network of counties covering the Reich has been undermined by work on Saxony. See Freytag, Billunger, pp. 23–7; Schölkopf, Sächsische Grafen, pp. 16–17; K.-H. Lange, Der Herrschaftsbereich der Grafen von Northeim, 950 bis 1144, Studien und Vorarbeiten zum historischen Atlas Niedersachsens 24 (1969), pp. 5–6. Recently the traditional view has been powerfully restated by H. K. Schulze, Die Grafschaftsverfassung der Karolingerzeit in den Gebieten o¨stlich des Rheines, Schriften zur Verfassungsgeschichte 19 (1973). The issue remains undecided, but it is clear in any case that some areas remained outside the comital system, notably forests: see H. Kaspers, Comitatus nemoris (Düren, 1957), pp. 39ff., 229–30, and, on the importance of forest and forest ban for territorial development, Mayer, Fürsten und Staat, pp. 266–70. Bannasch, Bistum Paderborn, pp. 313–14; Seiler, Hochstift Worms, p. 38. On the following developments see E. E. Stengel, Die Immunität in Deutschland bis zum Ende des 11. Jahrhunderts (Innsbruck, 1910), I (all published), pp. 588–98; Otto, Kirchenvogtei, pp. 80–129, 141–2; Mayer, Fürsten und Staat, pp. 1–49; Scheyhing, Bannleihe, pp. 202–3, 313–17.


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significant political act. It is also worth noting that ecclesiastics depended on the king to control their advocate, not the other way round. The difficulties have been neatly summed up by Hans-Joachim Freytag in his study of the Billungs: ‘Many privileges [of immunity] should be considered more as expressions of wishes than as descriptions of fact, and it should also not be forgotten that the advocacies of immunities, since the Church was not allowed to shed blood, were held by the dynasts, who were also the counts. The creation of immunities often scarcely affected their power, since they functioned as count and advocate . . . [only] the judicial district itself, the comitatus was broken up.’95 The last statement can be questioned,96 but it is certainly true that more rights of immunity existed on parchment than in practice. To say that Ottonian and Salian ecclesiastics did not act as agents of local government for their rulers is not to say that they did nothing for them at all. On the contrary, they did a great deal. The field armies of the period would have been smaller without the episcopal and abbatial contingents. Just how much smaller is hard to say. We do have a document – the Indiculus Loricatorum – which lists the number of troops to be provided for an Italian expedition by various lay and ecclesiastical magnates, but we cannot be certain whether it refers to an initial army or to reinforcements.97 In any case it has obvious omissions – Saxony, for example – and it is likely that lay contingents played a larger role in Ottonian and Salian armies than it and other sources might suggest. But clearly ecclesiastical troops were important, and not only in Italy: Saxon bishops had to take their turn in garrisoning the fortified stronghold at Meissen, and Lotharingian bishops helped to defend the western frontier of the Reich.98 Ecclesiastics also maintained the royal household in a number of ways. The Ottonians and Salians had no fixed centre of government, though a favoured residence (Aachen under Otto III or Merseburg under Henry II) might at times seem 95 96

97

98

Freytag, Billunger, p. 25, and see pp. 17ff. for good observations on the episcopal counties and immunities. ¨ 1 (1935), pp. 212–13; E. Klebel, See the review of Otto, Kirchenvogtei by K. H. Ganahl in MIOG ¨ Ergänzungsband, xiv ‘Eigenklösterrechte und Vogteien in Bayern und Deutschösterreich’, MIOG, (1939), pp. 179–80. Klebel’s conclusions – that advocacies were neither hereditary nor normally held by counts in Bavaria before about 1050 – have been undermined by W. Störmer, Früher Adel (Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, VI, 1973), II, pp. 424–56, who produces numerous counter-examples. MGH, Const., ed. L. Weiland (Hannover, 1893), I, p. 632 no. 436. For the problems of dating – 980 or reinforcements in 981, 982 or 983 – see Auer, ‘Kriegsdienst, I’, pp. 372–9; K. F. Werner, ‘Heeresorganization und Kriegsführung im deutschen Königreich des 10. und 11. Jahrhunderts’, in Ordinamenli militari in occidente nell’ alto medioevo, Settimane Spoleto 15 (1968), II, pp. 823–6. Auer, ‘Kriegsdienst, I’, pp. 336, 344, 402–6.

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like one. They moved about the country, and they and their entourages needed to be fed and housed. Bishops could provide hospitality (gistum) in their palaces, which were often shared with the king or had a special quarter reserved for him. Bishops and abbots also sent servitia, large renders of food and drink, to the royal court when it was not quartered on them.99 Most of the evidence for these practices comes from royal abbeys rather than bishoprics, but bishops were afflicted with them as well, at least in the eleventh century, and occasionally expressed their resentment at both gistum and servitia.100 Kings also held canonries in some cathedral chapters, a custom which can be traced back to Henry II and, in a sense, to his predecessor Otto III.101 It seems to have had less to do with the king’s desire or need to be seen as rex et sacerdos, for which it would have been a highly inappropriate vehicle, than with his need to be able to exploit the revenues of the chapter as well as those of the bishop; separate provision for the chapter was becoming common practice just at this time.102 It also had a noneconomic side: the king, and sometimes his queen, became participants in the prayers and other spiritual benefits of the religious communities they joined, just as they did when they had themselves commemorated in the great royal monasteries. Canonries may also have helped to support capellani while at court;103 the king could thus reward his clerical followers without personal expense. These things were important, but they were by no means systematic. The ways in which the king exploited the resources of the Church changed over the period and, more importantly, the demands made on particular churches varied greatly. Auer has shown that only the Franconian bishoprics were heavily used for military service throughout the period. The province 99 100

101

102 103

Brühl, Fodrum, pp. 160–1. Ibid., pp. 197–213; Wehlt, Reichsabtei und König, pp. 74–7. U. Schmitt, Villa regalis Ulm und Kloster Reichenau. Untersuchungen zur Pfalzfunktion des Reichsklostergutes in Alemannien (9.–12. Jahrhundert), Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 42 (1974), pp. 32–56, gives a good account of how servitia functioned in the case of an institution rarely visited by the king. For opposition, see Brühl, Fodrum, pp. 126–7 (interpreting Thietmar, VII, 30 as an indirect criticism of Henry II; for an alternative view see below, n. 140, where the passage is quoted), 157, 207; Heinemann, Bistum Hildesheim, pp. 39–40. ¨ Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, pp. 151–5; J. Fleckenstein, ‘Rex canonicus. Uber Entstehung und Bedeutung des mittelalterlichen Königskanonikates’, in P. Classen and P. Schubert eds., Festschrift Percy Ernst Schramm (Wiesbaden, 1964), I, pp. 57–71, with references to earlier literature. Otto III was certainly a canon at Aachen; whether he was a canon at Hildesheim depends on a passage in D O III 390 for Hildesheim: ‘pari sententia episcopo et fratribus nostris in Deo carissimis . . .’. Fleckenstein interprets this to mean that Otto III must have been a canon there; Heinemann, Bistum Hildesheim, p. 28 n. 122, challenges this, I think rightly. Schieffer, Domkapitel, pp. 255–63, 280ff. Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, pp. 120–34; Leyser, in his review, pp. 115–16, raises doubts as to how common this practice was.


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of Trier was important only in the tenth century, while the Bavarian bishoprics seem to have become significant only in the eleventh.104 The bishops of Saxony and Lotharingia had to be spared whenever there was danger on the eastern or western border, and it is not certain that the suffragans of Hamburg–Bremen had a militia at all.105 The use of bishoprics and abbeys to support the royal iter was equally varied. Bishoprics seem to have been used more heavily for this in the eleventh than in the tenth century, and they were not used evenly. Paderborn and Merseburg, for example, seem to have been visited far more frequently during the reign of Henry II than at any other time before or after, though this may reflect the fortuitous survival of evidence and the fact that Merseburg seems to have been part of the patrimony of the Bavarian Liudolfings.106 What we do know is that kings stuck to a small number of main roads except in emergencies or on occasions when they were leading armies to or beyond the borders of the Reich. Not all bishoprics lay within this network, and not all those which did were actually on the roads. The result was that some bishoprics were rarely if ever visited by a ruler – Hildesheim, Trier and Bremen being notable examples.107 Servitia may have helped to even out the burden, but this can only be conjecture. Nor was the exploitation of the Church through canonries even or systematic. It began with a small number of churches, Hildesheim in particular, and was gradually extended; but it never took in all bishoprics, and by the reign of Henry III some of the load was being taken by the new royal foundations at Goslar and Kaiserswerth.108 More intangible benefits were also provided. As the Ottonians consolidated successful war-leadership into European hegemony, they followed the usual pattern for medieval nouveaux riches: they sought to surround themselves with literati and intellectuals. Otto I’s following could already boast a Rather of Verona and a Liutprand of Cremona, and his younger brother Bruno of Cologne deliberately built up a household of literati who could be promoted to bishoprics.109 By the time of Otto III, the court, if not an intellectual centre, was at least a place where intellectuals could be found. The artistic and literary productions associated with the Ottonian and Salian court could not have been paralleled anywhere else in western Europe. Wealth of this sort was valued as highly as land or relics, but it had 104 106

107 109

105 Ibid., pp. 342, 370, 399–400. Auer, ‘Kriegsdienst, I’, p. 67. Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, pp. 134–45, 218–19, 227–8, 278–80, gives lists of the places most frequently visited by different rulers; see also Brühl, Fodrum, pp. 117–39 and maps III and IV. For Merseburg, see Leyser, Rule and Conflict, pp. 18–19. 108 Fleckenstein, Hofkapelle, pp. 277–8, 282–7. Brühl, Fodrum, p. 209. Vita Brunonis, c. 37, pp. 38–9.

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no narrower political function. One should not assume that the Ottonians and Salians needed ecclesiastics, because of their literacy, to run their government.110 The sort of rule which needs writing was even less important in Ottonian Germany than it had been in Carolingian Francia; it is significant that among the capellani the notaries seem generally to have occupied the lowest rank. As Erdmann long ago pointed out,111 it was intellectuals, not politicians and civil servants, who used most ink in the eleventh century. If we compare the position of bishops and abbots in the Reich with that of their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, what seems striking is the similarities, not the differences. Moreover, the differences had their origins not in royal policy but in the ways in which the different kingdoms had developed and were organised. A good example is the exercise of rights of mint and market. In the Reich, these were normally acquired by royal grant, though such grants may sometimes only have confirmed an already existing mint or market. In France, royal privileges granting these rights were rare after Charles the Bald’s reign, but bishops and abbots frequently exercised them nevertheless, as they also did in Anglo-Saxon England, here as a rule with royal permission.112 The common factor was the desire of prelates to develop their lands economically. Whether they went to the king for a grant or set up in business on their own depended on whether a royal diploma was worth having. In France it was not.113 The development of the immunity in the Reich from a negative one (keeping out public officials) to a positive one (exercise of jurisdiction by or on behalf of the immunist) is paralleled in France.114 Bishops sought to acquire comital powers or their equivalent over their towns in France, England, Burgundy and Italy.115 Again, there were differences, but these were the result of differing political structures. In Italy, the bishops were not so much territorial lords in themselves as 110 111 112

113

114 115

Pace Johnson, Secular Activities, p. 99. C. Erdmann, ‘Die Anfänge der staatlichen Propaganda im Investiturstreit’, HZ 154 (1936), p. 506. R. Kaiser, ‘Münzprivilegien und bischöfliche Münzprägung in Frankreich, Deutschland und Burgund im 9.–12. Jarhundert’, Vierteljahresschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 63 (1976), pp. 289–338; F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1970), pp. 535–6; F. Barlow, The English Church, 1000–1066, 2nd edn (London, 1979), pp. 160, 218. K. F. Werner, ‘Kingdom and principality in twelfth-century France’, in T. Reuter ed., The Medieval Nobility: Studies in the ruling classes of France and Germany from the sixth to the twelfth centuries (Europe in the Middle Ages: Selected Studies, XIV, Amsterdam, 1979), pp. 244–5. J.-F. Lemarignier in F. Lot and R. Fawtier eds., Histoire des institutions françaises au moyen aˆ ge. III. Institutions ecclésiastiques (Paris, 1962), p. 36. In France the bishops of Rheims, Langres, Beauvais and Châlons-sur-Marne, among others, had such rights: see Lemarignier, p. 12; Poupardin, Bourgogne, pp. 445–51. Burgundy: Poupardin, Bourgogne, pp. 430–57; H.-E. Mayer, ‘Die Alpen und das Königreich Burgund’, in T. Mayer ed., Die Alpen in der europäischen Geschichte, Vorträge und Forschungen 10 (1965), p. 74, with a not very plausible interpretation of some of these grants as a ‘pass policy’ of the kings of Burgundy.


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the means through which lordship was shared among and exercised by the clans from which they came.116 In Anglo-Saxon England it was, for historical reasons, the monasteries not the bishoprics which were rich and desirable, and it was these which were most favoured with grants of governmental rights, though bishops often owned their burghs wholly or in part.117 It was unusual for these rights to extend beyond the episcopal or abbatial town, but so it was in the Reich, where only a small number of prelates controlled rural counties.118 Nor was the king’s relationship with the churches under his control different. Other kings besides the Ottonians and Salians had a capella. The word was hardly used in Anglo-Saxon England, but the thing was known, and the fact that half the bishops in office in 1050 and 1066 had previously been king’s priests suggests that it functioned in the same way as did that of the Reich, though it had fewer chancery functions to perform. The rulers of Wessex appointed to bishoprics and royal monasteries – often in spite of privileges of free election – with probably less opposition than their Ottonian and Salian counterparts.119 The later Carolingian and early Capetian rulers of France found that many bishoprics and royal monasteries became mediatised and escaped their control. Those that were left to them they controlled as tightly as they could, though their influence fluctuated. They put in their own candidates and were even prepared to depose bishops, something the Ottonians and Salians did not attempt in Germany, as we have seen.120 In Italy, though kings played a significant role in confirming appointments, bishops were usually local men, and their power did not depend on the king; indeed, it was the bishops who could make and break rulers.121 In all these kingdoms, including the Reich, the extent of the ruler’s control did not depend on the theoretical nature of kingship but on practical considerations: did he dispose of sufficient power and influence in the area to make his wishes felt? Was it worthwhile for the chapter and the 116

117 119 120

121

E. Dupré-Theseider, ‘Vescovi e città nell’Italia precommunale’, in Vescovi e diocesi in Italia nel medioevo (sec. IX–XII). Atti del II Convegno di Storia della Chiesa in Italia, Roma 5–9 settembre 1961 (Padua, 1964), pp. 73–82, 91–101; H. Keller, ‘Die Entstehung der italienischen Stadtkommunen als sozialgeschichtliches Problem’, FMS 10 (1976), pp. 169–78, especially p. 176. 118 Santifaller, ‘Reichskirchensystem’, pp. 105–10. Barlow, English Church, pp. 165–71. Barlow, English Church, pp. 99–110, 119–37. W. M. Newman, Le Domaine royal sous les premiers capétiens (987–1180) (Paris, 1937), pp. 67–8, 210–24; P. Imbart de la Tour, Les Elections épiscopales dans l’église de France du IXe au XIIe siècles. Etude sur la décadence du principe électif (Paris, 1891), pp. 438, 443, 447; Lemarignier, pp. 43–4. Lemarignier saw the French rulers as having something like a Reichskirchensystem, only with less system and uniformity than in the Reich; as we have seen, this is an illusory comparison. S. Pivano, Stato e chiesa da Berengario I ad Arduino (888–1015) (Turin, 1908), pp. 35–111; DupréTheseider, ‘Vescovi e città’, pp. 67–70.

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local magnates to listen to them? Royal bishoprics and abbeys performed the same kinds of services for their rulers as did those in the Reich: they advised the king, rendered gistum and servitia and furnished contingents of troops. Indeed, the rulers of England, France, Burgundy and pre-Ottonian Italy probably depended more heavily on their prelates for armies than the Ottonians and Salians did.122 The use of churches for hospitality was certainly less in Italy, perhaps also in France, than in the Reich, but this was largely because the churches were less well off.123 Twelfth- and thirteenth-century German bishops and abbots struck their contemporaries in England and France as being a different kind of prelate from those found in the West – more militaristic, far more like secular princes. These differences would not have been discernible in the tenth and eleventh centuries, though many German bishoprics and abbeys would have seemed fabulously wealthy and powerful by French or English standards.124 Had the Reichskirchensystem really been different in kind from other national Churches, one would expect it to have had a different kind of organisation. It did not. There was no Reichskirche in the sense of a special or separate organisation; there were only those churches which belonged by right to the kingdom, as the Concordat of Worms put it, and over and above that the king’s wider duty of protection towards all churches ex iure suscepti regni.125 Churchmen in Germany met in synods and were bound together by ties of confraternity, as well as by the links of cognatio and patronage we have already examined. But in these respects their practice was no different from that of any other national Church in tenth- and eleventhcentury Europe. Synods did discuss matters of general importance as well as the internal organisation and discipline of the Church, but they did so under the king’s direction, and often under his presidency.126 Had the Reichskirche been a quite distinct element in Ottonian and Salian rulership it 122

123 124 125

126

The importance of ecclesiastical troops in England emerges quite clearly from the references in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. 992(C), 1001(A), 1016(C); I owe this last reference to Karl Leyser. For France and Italy see E. Lesne, Histoire de la propriété ecclésiastique en France, II: La propriété ecclésiastique et les droits régaliens a` l’époque carolingienne, fasc. ii (Lille, 1926), pp. 456ff., 472ff.; fasc. iii (Lille, 1928), p. 62; G. Tabacco, ‘Il regno italico nei secoli ix–xi’, in Ordinamenti militari . . ., II, pp. 779–80, 784, 786. Brühl, Fodrum, pp. 231–40 (France), 430–1 (Italy). For Burgundy see Thietmar, Chronicon VII, p. 30, quoted below, n. 140. Brühl, ‘Sozialstruktur’, pp. 44–5. D H III 18, quoted by J. Fleckenstein, ‘Zum Begriff der ottonisch-salischen Reichskirche’, in E. Hassinger et al. eds., Geschichte, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft, Festschrift für Clemens Bauer zum 75. Geburtstag (Berlin, 1974), p. 69; the whole article is an important discussion of the nature of the Reichskirche. M. Boye, ‘Die Synoden Deutschlands und Reichsitaliens von 922–1059. Eine kirchenverfassungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung’, ZfRG, KA 18 (1929), pp. 131–284, especially pp. 241–55.


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should have been capable of functioning collectively at moments of danger for the crown, of making declarations of solidarity, as some of the west Frankish episcopate had done for Charles the Bald in 858 and some of the east Frankish episcopate did for Conrad I at Hohenaltheim in 916.127 But the German Church did not appear collectively in the great crises of the Ottonian Reich, the rebellions of 939, 951–4 and the 970s128 and the succession-crises of 983–5, 1002 and 1024. At these moments bishops and abbots looked to save themselves and their foundations, not the crown, as they were again to do in the reign of Henry IV. The Reichskirche was, like any other national Church, a part of the Catholic Church. If it had a head, it was the pope, and it has been argued that the Ottonians and Salians needed to control the papacy in order to preserve their hold on their own churchmen.129 This, too, needs qualification. The often-quoted statistic130 that between 962 and 1056 twelve out of the twentyfive popes were appointed by the Ottonians and Salians, and five deposed, is deceptive. Deposition could only be done on the spot – a lesson which was apparently lost on Henry IV – and only Henry III managed to appoint from a distance. Except for Otto III’s two appointments, Gregory V and Sylvester II, the other appointments before 1046 were essentially confirmations of local choices.131 There was, in fact, little need for control. To suppose that the inner logic of the Reichskirchensystem required a subservient papacy is to project the post-Gregorian papacy back into the tenth and early eleventh centuries. At no time before 1056 did any pope look as if he were about to give directions to the imperial episcopate which a ruler might have resented. Nor did members of the episcopate naturally turn to the papacy for help. William of Mainz wrote querulously to Agapetus II in 955; Dietrich of Metz was accused of having written complaining letters about Henry II 127

128

129 131

MGH, Capit., II, pp. 427ff., no. 297. See on this, E. Dümmler, Geschichte des ostfränkischen Reiches, 2nd edn (Leipzig, 1887), I, pp. 435–40; J. Devisse, Hincmar, archevêque de Reims, 845–882 (Geneva, 1975), I, pp. 306–27. Even though by no means all the west Frankish bishops took part, and indeed it was aimed especially at those who did not, it was still a specifically ecclesiastical demonstration in favour of Charles the Bald. On Hohenaltheim see M. Hellmann, ‘Die Synode von Hohenaltheim (916). Bemerkungen u¨ ber das Verhältnis von Königtum und Kirche im ostfränkischen Reich zu Beginn des 10. Jahrhunderts’, in H. Kämpf ed., Die Entstehung des deutschen Reiches (Wege der Forschung, I, 3rd edn, 1971), pp. 289–312. Henry the Quarrelsome was excommunicated by the episcopate in 976, but this was a response not only to his rebellion but also to his attacks on the bishopric of Regensburg. See Uhlirz, Jahrbücher Ottos II., p. 79 and n. 15. 130 Santifaller, ‘Reichskirchensystem’, p. 172. See above, and n. 7. The popes Leo VIII, John XIII, Benedict VII, John XIV and Benedict VIII. See J. F. Böhmer, Regesta Imperii. II. Sächsisches Haus, 919–1024, 5. Papstregesten 911–1024, ed. H. Zimmermann (Vienna, 1969) (hereafter cited as B. Z. and no.), nos. 329, 386, 527, 621, 1,075.

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to Sergius IV.132 These were minor incidents which left no ripples and no tradition. It was otherwise in west Francia. Here popes mediated between kings and their subjects and dealt with disputes over bishoprics.133 But this did not reflect Ottonian strength and Carolingian weakness. Not alone at least; for there were opportunities in the crises of the Reich for the popes to intervene, had they wished to do so. They did not, because it was not their style. In west Francia they were asked to do so, and this tradition had already grown up in the ninth century; in east Francia there were few occasions when the pope concerned himself or was asked to concern himself with the internal politics of the kingdom.134 Nor could the papacy easily be used to control the German episcopate. The privileges issued by John XII and XIII were not in themselves enough to enable Otto I to set up an archbishopric at Magdeburg.135 At most a pope could legitimise ex post facto what had been done, as with Herold of Salzburg.136 If one were to explain the Ottonians’ and Salians’ relations with the papacy in terms of calculated policy one would have to talk, not of the Reichskirchensystem, but of imperial coronations and the growing commitment of these rulers to Church reform. But it is probably better to say that they simply carried out the duty of protection established by the Carolingians, if in a rather heavy-handed way. If the Reichskirchensystem was not guaranteed by control over the papacy, it was also not underpinned by any coherent ideology. Ruotger’s Vita Brunonis comes nearest to a justification of the type of ecclesiastical prince found

132 133

134

135 136

B. Z. nos. 249, 1,065. Papal warnings and excommunications of the king’s enemies: B. Z. nos. 26 (926 to Herbert II of Vermandois), 161, 162 (942, ordering the recognition of Louis IV), 209 (947 to Hugh the Great). For election disputes at Rheims see B. Z. nos. 208, 213, 218; 691–3, 696, 706, 708, 710, 718, 727, 756, 795–6. In 867 Nicholas I wrote to the sons of Louis the German reminding them of their duty to their father: Annales Fuldenses, ed. F. Kurze (MGH, SRG, 1891), p. 66 (the letter has not survived). In 885 Charles III wanted Pope Marinus to legitimise his son Bernard and to depose certain bishops, Annales Fuldenses, p. 103 (on the background to this see E. Hlawitschka, Lothringen und das Reich an der Schwelle der deutschen Geschichte, Schriften der MGH XXI (1968), pp. 27–8). In 900 Hatto of Mainz wrote to the pope about the recent election of Louis the Child, but, as in 885, probably because an imperial coronation was anticipated: see H. Beumann, ‘Die Einheit des ostfränkischen Reiches und der Kaisergedanke bei der Königserhebung Ludwigs des Kindes’, Archiv für Diplomatik 23 (1977), pp. 142–63. The difference between east and west Frankish attitudes to the papacy has been demonstrated for the lay nobility by J. Fried, ‘Laienadel und Papst in der Frühzeit der französischen und deutschen Geschichte’, in H. Beumann and W. Schröder eds., Aspekte der Nationenbildung im Mittelalter (Nationes . . . II, 1978), pp. 367–406. See above, n. 60. Papal approval for the creation of new dioceses was of course necessary, but it was not sufficient. B. Z. nos. 302, 420.


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in the Reich, and it is curiously defensive in tone.137 Later writers, like Sigebert of Gembloux in his Life of Dietrich I of Metz, might look back with nostalgia to the good old days when prelates served God and Caesar in harmony,138 but most Ottonian and Salian ecclesiastics would probably have felt uncomfortable when confronted with the implications of ‘nemo militans Deo implicet se saecularibus negotiis’. Ruotger offered a defence in the need to uphold, and to help the ruler uphold, that Augustinian pax and tranquillitas without which the Church could not do its work. A less theologically grounded justification could be found in the duty to defend the status of the see or abbey and of the saint to whom it belonged. But few offered any justification. Nor did they like to look too closely at the basis for royal control of appointments. The passage from Thietmar of Merseburg near the beginning of this article has often been quoted as if it were a coherent theoretical statement about the rightness of kings’ appointing to bishoprics. But in the sentences which follow, Thietmar says that he has heard that elsewhere in Europe bishoprics are controlled by dukes and even by counts;139 and this is the main point. Thietmar knew what such control implied: the loss not only of status for the bishop but of the wealth and power of the bishopric. Kings were there to protect bishops from this, and it was a matter for complaint when they could not do so, as often happened.140 Gerald of Cambrai also thought that it was the king’s duty 137

138

139 140

On it see F. Lotter, Die Vita Brunonis des Ruotger. Ihre historiographische und ideengeschichtliche Stellung (Bonner Historische Forschungen, 9, 1958); H. Hoffmann, ‘Politik und Kultur im ottonischen Reichskirchensystem. Zur Interpretation der Vita Brunonis des Ruotger’, Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter 22 (1957), pp. 31–55; F. Prinz, Klerus und Krieg im frühen Mittelalter (Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, II, 1971), pp. 175–200; and O. Köhler, Das Bild des geistlichen Fürsten in den Viten des 10., 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts, Abhandlungen zur mittleren und neueren Geschichte 77 (1935), especially pp. 21ff. All these writers assume that Bruno was either typical or ideal-typical of the Reichskirchensystem; in fact, as the only legitimate son of a king to hold a bishopric during this period, he could scarcely have been less typical, and his viceregal position in Lotharingia owed far more to his royal blood than to a new kind of church policy. Vita Deoderici I. episcopi Mettensis, c. 7, MGH, SS IV, p. 467: ‘Iure felicia dixerim Ottonis tempora, cum claris praesulibus et sapientibus viris res publica sit reformata, pax aecclesiarum restaurata, honestas religionis redintegrata.’ Thietmar, Chronicon I, 26, p. 33. See the long complaint of injuries done to him and his fellow-bishops, Thietmar, VIII, 19–27, pp. 514–24, especially the bitter comment in VIII, 23, p. 520: ‘Episcopatus in hiis partibus constituti ab eorum potentia [that is, of the local counts] sunt nimium depressi; et nos eorum procuratores, si contra Deum et iusticiam eius voluntati eorum in cunctis satisfacimus, honorem et aliquam utilitatem habemus; sin autem, contempnimur, et sicut nobis nullus aut regnet aut imperet dominus depredamur.’ The same idea lies behind his scathing comments on Rudolf III of Burgundy (VII, 30, p. 434), a man who in Thietmar’s view only took from his bishops without being able to protect them: ‘ad suam vero utilitatem pauca tenens ex inpensis antistitum vivit et hos vel alios in aliquo extrinsecus laborantes eriperi nequit. Unde hii manibus complicatis cunctis primatibus velut regi suo serviunt et sic pace fruuntur.’

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to protect the bishop, not the other way round.141 Thietmar wanted royal control over the Church in order to exclude other and worse forms of control. He did not suppose that it was right in itself: he was unhappy about his own promotion and about the way in which Henry II treated several elections in his metropolitan see of Magdeburg; and he feared for Otto I’s salvation after his many sins, including the deposition of a lawfully elected pope.142 The ‘sacerdotal’ or ‘theocratic’ elements143 in Ottonian and Salian rulership did not really underpin the system either. They may have had their functions in helping to distance the rulers from their subjects and in helping to end rebellions peacefully.144 But they could not and did not support a strict case for kings’ appointing to bishoprics and abbeys. If Henry IV and Henry V seem to have fought for so long in defence of them, this was because giving up ‘sacerdotalism’ affected their view of themselves and their status – and also because they were fighting internal enemies who could not easily be pacified. The resistance to royal appointments which began in the late 1060s, though it coincided with attacks in polemical literature, stemmed from more practical considerations. Previously, chapters expected to benefit by having a man close to the king who could secure for his institution the benefits of royal favour. A court subject to coups d’état no longer inspired confidence, and the advantages of having a man in the king’s favour no longer seemed to offset the disadvantages of not being able to make a local appointment.145 Once confidence was restored, as it was to 141

142 143

144 145

He objected to joining a treuga Dei, saying that peace-keeping was the ruler’s responsibility: see Schieffer, ‘Gerald I.’, pp. 344–5, 347–8; H. Hoffmann, Gottesfriede und Treuga Dei (Schriften der MGH XX, 1964), pp. 57–64. Thietmar, Chronicon II, 45, p. 94; II, 28, pp. 72–4; VI, 43, pp. 326–8; and, on his concern with episcopal elections, Lippelt, Thietmar von Merseburg, pp. 127–9. The literature on this is now enormous. See F. Kern, Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages, trans. S. B. Chrimes (Oxford, 1939) (for the full scholarly apparatus one must consult the German version: Gottesgnadentum und Widerstandsrecht, 2nd edn, by R. Buchner, Darmstadt, 1954); E. H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A study in medieval political theology (Princeton, 1957). For recent sceptical comments see K. F. Morrison, Tradition and Authority in the Western Church, 300–1140 (Princeton, 1969), pp. 373–89; J. L. Nelson, ‘Royal saints and early medieval kingship’, Studies in Church History 10 (Cambridge, 1973), p. 43. In so far as these elements did exist, they were not confined to the Reich: see J. T. Rosenthal, ‘Edward the Confessor and Robert the Pious: eleventh-century kingship and biography’, Mediaeval Studies 33 (1971), pp. 7–20, with a somewhat exaggerated thesis of a new ‘hagiological’ type of ruler; R. Deshmann, ‘Christus rex and magi reges: kingship and theology in Ottonian and Anglo-Saxon art’, FMS 10 (1976), pp. 367–405. Leyser, Rule and Conflict, pp. 92–107. Two articles by J. Fleckenstein, ‘Heinrich IV und der deutsche Episkopat in den Anfängen des Investiturstreites’, in Adel und Kirche. Festschrift für Gerd Tellenbach (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1968), pp. 221–36, and ‘Hofkapelle und Reichsepiskopat unter Heinrich IV.’, in J. Fleckenstein ed., Investiturstreit und Reichsverfassung, Vorträge und Forschungen herausgegeben vom Konstanzer


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some extent under Henry V and Lothar III, and still more under Frederick I, outsiders appointed by the king became acceptable once more. Neither the constitutional changes brought about by the Concordat of Worms nor the supposed ‘desacralisation’ of kingship made much difference to this.146 We may now sum up and point some conclusions. Ottonian and Salian rulers exercised considerable influence over the choice of bishops and abbots of royal monasteries. This influence, however, differed in degree, not in kind, from that exercised by their contemporaries and predecessors elsewhere in Europe. Where it was used, it was used not to fill important offices with reliable officials, but in a spirit of patronage, to reward and punish individuals and kin-groups. It was one of the means which the Ottonians and Salians had at their disposal to keep their greedy and feuding aristocratic followings loyal to them. Neither did the services which German ecclesiastics performed for their rulers differ greatly from those found elsewhere in Europe. Parallels can also be found for the exercise of governmental rights by ecclesiastics. If grants of immunity and ban seem to have been more important for German ecclesiastics, this was because of differences in the ways in which local government and jurisdiction were organised in Germany and in the rest of Europe, not because of a different kind of royal policy. This can be clearly seen in the Ottonians’ and Salians’ own dealings with Italian bishops: here the emphasis was not on governmental rights but on powers to repossess lands and rights which had been alienated, especially through leasehold tenure.147 In each case the recipients got the kind of grant they most needed and wanted, and these transactions should be seen as favours to the recipients rather than delegations of power. Bishops and abbots in the Ottonian and Salian Reich, as elsewhere, got far more protection from the king than they gave him. One should also stress – as recent specialist studies have increasingly done148 – the variety of royal

146

147 148

Arbeitskreis für mittelalterliche Geschichte 17 (1973), pp. 117–40, show how Henry gradually lost control over episcopal appointments in the early years of his majority. Recently R. Schieffer, Die Entstehung des päpstlichen Investiturverbots für den deutschen König (Schriften der MGH XXVIII, 1981), especially pp. 7–47, 95–107, has shown that investiture, and hence royal involvement as such in elections, did not become an issue until the late 1070s; the attacks by Humbert in Adversus Simoniacos found no contemporary resonance. D. Schäfer, ‘Zur Beurteilung des Wormser Konkordats’, Abhandlungen der königlichpreussischen Akademie der Wissenschaft, phil.-hist. Klasse (Berlin, 1905), I, pp. 8–37; G. Wolfram, Friedrich I. und das Wormser Concordat (Marburg, 1883); R. Jordan, Die Stellung des deutschen Episkopats im Kampf um die Universalmacht unter Friedrich I. bis zum Frieden von Venedig (1177) (Würzburg, 1939), pp. 120–8; R. L. Benson, The Bishop-Elect: A study in medieval ecclesiastical office (Princeton, 1968), pp. 251ff. ¨ 48 (1934), pp. 229, 240, 288–9. M. Uhlirz, ‘Die italienische Kirchenpolitik der Ottonen’, MIOG See above, pp. 328–33, 343–6.

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influence over and interest in the Church. It was by no means consistent or systematic; there were considerable local variations. This conclusion is, of course, entirely in keeping with the thrust of the last two generations of German medieval scholarship, which has been in the direction of local and regional studies and has tended to stress – perhaps even to overstress – the difficulties of making valid generalisations about institutions in Germany as a whole.149 The concept of a Reichskirchensystem was first developed by an earlier generation of scholars, for whom such generalisations were not only possible but the main purpose of their work: the powerful attractiveness of Verfassungsgeschichte lay precisely in the way in which it offered a means of ordering the mass of the discrete and the particular. The concept has survived even though the framework in which it was embedded has been discarded, and it is time it too was discarded. 149

W. Schlesinger, ‘Verfassungsgeschichte und Landesgeschichte’, in Beiträge zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte des Mittelalters. II. Städte und Territorien (Göttingen, 1963), pp. 9–41, 254–61; T. Mayer, ‘Der Wandel unseres Bild vom Mittelalter. Stand und Aufgaben der mittelalterlichen Geschichtsforschung’, Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte 94 (1958), pp. 1–37.

chap t e r 19

Peace-breaking, feud, rebellion, resistance: violence and peace in the politics of the Salian era From the history of the eleventh1 and early twelfth centuries, three acts of violence stand out because they found a particularly resonant echo in contemporary historians. The first was the murder of Count Wichmann in 1016 on his way home from a convivium with his rivals Count Balderich and his wife Adela. The act itself was perpetrated by a servus who had evidently been put up to it by the couple. The detailed coverage of the murder in the narrative sources is explicable not least in terms of the interests and family records and traditions of several contemporary bishops of Saxony and Lower Lotharingia whom it directly affected.2 The second episode was the destruction by Saxon rebels in 1074 of the castle-chapel on the Harzburg and the Salian tombs including those of the brother and son of Henry IV. This too aroused a great deal of attention, both because of the horrific nature of the deed, and because it marked a turning-point in the

1

2

The reign of Henry II will receive coverage in this paper, first because the year 1024 marks no kind of break where present themes are concerned, second because the works of Thietmar of Merseberg and Alpert of Metz provide much relevant material which also has to be deployed to permit some understanding of the rather source-poor period under Conrad II and Henry III. So as not to overload the notes with quantities of citations of regional historiography, I have largely confined my references in what follows to the Jahrbücher der deutschen Geschichte, especially when local contexts seem less important. These were: Thietmar of Merseburg, who reported the murder in his Chronicon VII, cc. 47–9, ed. R. Holtzmann, MGH SRG ns IX (Berlin, 1935), pp. 456–8 [trans. D. Warner, Ottonian Germany: The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg (Manchester, 2001), pp. 340–2]; Meinwerk of Paderborn, Adela’s son by her first marriage, whose role finds a trace in the later Vita Meinwerci cc. 132, 135–40, ed. F. Tenckhoff, MGH SRG (Berlin, 1921), pp. 63–5, 69–72; and Adalbold of Utrecht, of whom Alpert of Metz offers a vivid description in his De diversitate temporum II, 1–13, ed. H.van Rij and A. S. Abulafia (Amsterdam, 1980), pp. 42–70. On the murder itself, see S. Hirsch, H. Pabst and H. Bresslau, Jahrbücher des deutschen Reiches unter Heinrich II, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1862–75), vol. II, pp. 345–54, vol. III, pp. 39–54; F. W. Oediger, ‘Adelas Kampf um Elten (996–1002)’, Annalen des Historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein 155 (1954), pp. 67–86; H. Bannasch, Das Bistum Paderborn unter den Bischöfen Rethar und Meinwerk (983–1036), Studien und Quellen zur Westfälischen Geschichte 12 (Paderborn, 1972), pp. 85, 175–6, 253.

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war between Henry and the rebel Saxons.3 The third event was the killing of Count Sigehard of Burghausen by his own ministerials at Regensburg in 1104. Responsibility for the murder was laid at the door of Henry IV, and the defection from him of a number of south German magnates as a result signalled the beginning of the end for his regime.4 A common factor in all three of these events was something seen as quite exceptional and particularly scandalous: the participation of groups, or members of groups, who normally had nothing, or at least nothing like this, to gain from conflict. In contemporary eyes, what seemed so appalling in Wichmann’s murder was not only the betrayal of hospitality, but – and especially – the role of Adela. It was not that there was any lack of powerful and energetic women in the eleventh century otherwise: only think of the part played by another Adela, uxor saevissima (‘fiercest of wives’), in Lampert’s account of the rebellion of Dedi,5 or the Margravin Gertrude, prepotens per Saxoniam vidua, marchionissa Saxonica nobilissima et potentissima (‘a widow dominant throughout Saxony, the most noble and most powerful Saxon margravin’).6 But for women to take such a very active, and also treacherous, part in political life was unacceptable. What was so shocking about Sigehard’s murder, by contrast, was the collective deed of a group which in general still took no part in framing political action on their own account. Had Sigehard’s ministerials killed his rivals or enemies in the course of a feud, that would have been nothing out of the ordinary. Even the betrayal or killing of his lord by an individual member of a military retinue did happen occasionally, without raising anything like such a sense of outrage.7 But the collective act of an entire following against their own household-lord raised spectres that people simply did not want to confront – for if others were to follow this example, then no one could 3

4 5 6 7

On this attack, see especially Lampert of Hersfeld, Annales s.a. 1074, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SRG (Hannover, 1894), pp. 183–4, and Bruno’s Buch vom Sachsenkrieg, ed. H.-E. Lohmann, MGH SS DM II (Leipzig, 1937), pp. 35–6, 42. On this, see K. J. Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony (London, 1979), p. 93; W. Giese, Der Stamm der Sachsen und das Reich in ottonischer und salischer Zeit (Weisbaden, 1979), pp. 159–60. So far as I can see, it has not been noticed that the burial on the Harzburg of Conrad, a brother of Henry IV who died young, implies a dating at least for the burial chapel in the last years of Henry III. There can probably be no question here of a later translatio. On the dating of the fortresses of Henry IV, see most recently L. Fenske, Adelsopposition und kirchliche Reformbewegung im o¨stlichen Sachsen, Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 47 (Göttingen, 1977), pp. 29–30. For Conrad’s death on 10 April 1055, see E. Steindorff, Jahrbücher des deutschen Reiches unter Heinrich III., 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1874–81), vol. II, p. 317. G. Meyer von Knonau, Jahrbücher des deutschen Reiches unter Heinrich IV. und Heinrich V., 7 vols. (Leipzig, 1890–1909), vol. V, pp. 195ff., esp. pp. 196–7, n. 3. Lampert of Hersfeld, Annales, pp. 106–7. See Fenske, Adelsopposition, p. 342, with sources and commentary. As in the cases of the young Dedi or Kuno of Beichlingen: see below, p. 365.

Peace-breaking, feud, rebellion, resistance

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ever feel safe again.8 As for the tomb-violation on the Harzburg, that was considered so abominable not just because of the act itself but because of who did it: the act was a most severe threat to a central and resourceintensive form of self-representation and self-awareness on the part of the high nobility, that is, the Christianised cult of the dead; the fact that the main perpetrators belonged to another social level gave the whole episode undertones that could almost be called those of class-conflict. Beginning with these examples is a way of showing that in the Salian period there were limits to the application of violence, and that universal condemnation would ensue for anyone who overstepped them. As long as such violent action remained within the political community, no such limits really existed. Indeed, a large part of eleventh-century politics centred around violence and its deployment: threats of violence, application of violence, avoidance of violence, renunciation of violence. This is something that strikes anyone who involves themselves in deep reading of the contemporary sources, and it explains why modern scholarly discussion of this complex of themes in fact continues a long tradition. More than a century ago, Georg Waitz summed up the prevailing opinion in a fine passage: In those days, acts of violence were perpetrated against all justice by the fighting classes of the population against peaceful peasants and townsfolk. In every century complaints about robberies were particularly rife, and the growing distance of a warrior- or knightly-class from the townsfolk and peasants could only increase the evil. High-ranking men took part in such acts as well, and from their fortresses they exerted a wide variety of types of criminal violence, often only for the sake of extracting loot, in other cases out of revenge for real or alleged offences done to them. Self-help was the thing: people sought satisfaction not through a legal decision but by weapons: bloody feuds sprang up and laid waste the land often and for long periods . . . In all these cases, it was the king’s job to be active, to intervene, to mediate, to punish, to impose order.9

But the king’s ‘tough regime’ led to revolts, and rulers like Henry II and Henry III had to busy themselves with ‘suppressing the insubordination 8

9

The contemporary sources speak only of Sigehard’s own following in connexion with the murder. Only later sources imply a general rebellion of all the princes’ ministeriales present at Regensburg. The interpretation of K. Bosl, Die Reichsministerialität der Salier und Staufer, Schriften der MGH X, vol. I (Stuttgart, 1950), pp. 96–7, who thought that the cause of Sigehard’s murder was a legal judgement about the rights of ministeriales in general, probably rests on these later sources, and also on a confusion between the judgement on advocates made in Regensburg with the Notitia on advocates in the bishopric of Augsburg, in which Sigehard appears as a witness: see MGH Const. I, no. 75, pp. 126–7. G. Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte. Die deutsche Reichsverfassung von der Mitte des neunten bis zur Mitte des zwölften Jahrhunderts, revd. G. Seeliger, vol. VI, 2nd edn (Berlin, 1896), pp. 524–6.

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and arrogance of various individual princes’.10 As far as this point of view went, of the high aristocracy as a fighting class, in contrast to the king with his concern for law and order, Waitz neither discovered nor significantly developed it. In his time, it was almost something self-evident, not least because it fitted so well with a view of the world that was liberal, anti-feudal, enlightened, and at the same time nationalistic and centralising.11 Moreover, it seemed to make due allowance for the language of the sources, which seldom showed any understanding for peace-breaking and the use of force. Up to a point, this way of thinking still predominates. Such modifications as have been generally received since Waitz’s day go back to two lines of research for which the names of Fritz Kern and Otto Brunner can be taken as representative. On the one hand it was observed that ‘resistance to the power of the state’ could be justified on principle and in some quite specific ways. Where Waitz assigned only four pages to the right of resistance, and in that context considered little more than the fact of resistance,12 Kern advanced an account of the justification of the right to resist as a piece of European history, in terms not just of law, but of ideas.13 True, Kern too often bolstered his argument by citing eclectic examples from different periods and different parts of Europe, and there is something deeply problematic about the very idea of a right to resist, that is, not just a lack of consciousness of acting illegally on the part of rebels, but the possibility of hailing a revolt even after it had collapsed as successfully asserting the lawfulness of resistance. Nevertheless, Kern’s work marked a huge step forward in the understanding of what went on in the eleventh century. Almost equally important were the aftershocks of Otto Brunner’s work on the ordered process of feud in the later Middle Ages.14 If this was just one historian’s reappraisal of feud, many other scholars, legal historians15 and anthropologists,16 devoted new research to feud in the middle decades 10 11 12 13

14

15 16

Waitz, Verfassungsgeschichte VI, pp. 495–6. See in general E. W. Böckenförde, Die deutsche verfassungsgeschichtliche Forschung im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1961). Waitz, Verfassungsgeschichte VI, pp. 495–8. F. Kern, Gottesgnadentum und Widerstandsrecht im früheren Mittelalter (Leipzig, 1914), revd edn R. Buchner (Darmstadt, 1954). All references are to the revised edition. [The English translation by S. B. Chrimes, as Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1948) is of the work of 1914.] O. Brunner, Land und Herrschaft, 5th edn (Vienna, 1965), esp. pp. 1–110. The first edition appeared in 1939. The English translation by H. Kaminsky and J. van Horn, as Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria (Philadelphia, 1992), is from the 4th edition of 1959. See J. Goebel, Felony and Misdemeanor, vol. I (New York, 1937); cf. the review by H. Mitteis in Mitteis, Die Rechtsidee in der Geschichte (Weimar, 1957), pp. 318–38, with further literature. See M. Gluckman, ‘The peace in the feud’, P&P 8 (1955), pp. 1–14; also J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘The blood-feud of the Franks’, in his The Long-Haired Kings and Other Studies in Frankish History (London, 1962), pp. 121–47; and E. Gellner, Saints of the Atlas (London, 1969).


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of the twentieth century. The conclusions of this work now have to be taken as securely established: namely, the insight that feud in general terms was not chaotic, that there were specific rules for the conduct of feud, and that while a given feud was ongoing there were nearly always people who, either because of their official position, or through their relationship to both parties, strove to perform roles of mediation or reconciliation. Even here, though, some qualifications have to be registered. First and foremost, it is not permissible simply to project back on to the eleventh century the almost ritualised feuding-procedures of the fourteenth and fifteenth.17 Certainly, we can recognise certain rules of the game of feuding, but generally speaking we know too little of feuds’ precise outcomes. Nor should we interpret just any violent acts as feud in the narrower sense. If I talk about feud in the discussion that follows, I mean it in the customary sense of a conflict prosecuted by two sides in a series of phases. Finally, a third direction of research in this area can be identified, though it is probably not yet generally accepted, in recent work on relations between rulers and magnates: namely a tendency in considering any insertion of violence, whether in dealings between nobles or between nobles and rulers, to take this simply as a given and then just look for its purpose and meaning, and work out the underlying social and political norms (but not legal ones).18 It is clearly impossible to examine in this paper all forms of disruption to peace and order in the Salian period. Even limiting myself to the area of the regnum Teutonicorum has to mean leaving some things out. Here, then, I shall be almost exclusively concerned with conflicts involving the elite. Of course there will be occasional references to feuds and disturbances at the level of the familia, as in the Household Ordinance of Bishop Burchard of Worms, the charters of Henry II and Conrad II concerned with household regulations, and also in the Annals of Niederaltaich.19 But how those 17

18

19

These objections apply above all to the work of J. Gernhuber, Die Landfriedensbewegung in Deutschland bis zum Mainzer Reichslandfrieden von 1235, Bonner Rechtswissenschaftliche Abhandlungen 44 (Bonn, 1952), pp. 3–20, 22–30, 49. Gernhuber himself, of course, suggested limits to some of Brunner’s theses. Leyser, Rule and Conflict, pp. 9–47, 77–107; H. Keller, Zwischen regionaler Begrenzung und universalem Horizont. Deutschland im Imperium der Salier und Staufer 1024 bis 1250, Propyläen Geschichte Deutschlands 2 (Berlin, 1986), pp. 73–89; G. Althoff, ‘Königsherrschaft und Konfliktbewältigung im 10. und 11. Jahrhundert’, FMS 23 (1989), pp. 265–90. I am very grateful to Gerd Althoff for the opportunity to use and cite the proofs of what began as a paper to the Barmberger Historikertag in 1988. Ordinance of Burchard: MGH Const. I, no. 438, pp. 639–44, esp. c. 30, pp. 643–4; Regulations for disputes between members of different ecclesiastical familiae: MGH D H II, no. 501 (between Worms and Lorsch), and esp. no. 507 (between Fulda and Hersfeld). Ordinance of the familia of Weissenburg: MGH D K II, no. 140 (interpolated), and that of the familia of Limburg: MGH D K II, no. 216. Annales Altahenses s.a. 1036 and 1037, ed. W. von Giesebrecht and E. L. B. von Oefele, MGH

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disturbances worked out in practice is almost always quite beyond our knowledge, and practice is precisely what I am concerned with. Examples of the Peace of God and of Landpeace will also be of only marginal concern, for the people dealt with here were those who had to superintend the maintenance of peace in such cases, not those affected by the imposition of peace.20 It would also be possible to exclude from consideration conflicts between prelates, on the grounds that these were only rarely conducted by means of violence.21 Closer inspection reveals, though, that the participants involved in the conflicts we can know about can be classified in three groups: member of the lay high nobility, bishops, and rulers. What now remains to be investigated are the conflicts between these three groups: conflicts between laymen of the high nobility (and their followings), conflicts between nobles and bishops,22 and last but not least conflicts between nobles (lay and ecclesiastical) and rulers.23 With feuds as with rebellions,

20

21

22 23

SRG (Hannover, 1891), p. 20 (conflict with fatal results in Regensburg) and esp. pp. 21–2 (conflict involving burning and killing within the familia of the monastery at Reichenhall). The opinion of Gernhuber, Landfriedensbewegung (as n. 17), p. 14, that ‘in the eleventh century, the German peasant in general no longer conducted feuds apart from blood-revenge, but lived fully under the rule of the penitential system’, remains to be proved. On the Peace Movement, see n. 92 below. Whether expressions like latrocinium masked lawful feuds, as suggested by Gernhuber, Landfriedensbewegung, p. 28, seems to me very doubtful. The narrative sources use words like latro and latrocinium to express not only strong disapproval but also by implication social contempt. See Lampert of Hersfeld, Annales, pp. 113, 135, 172, on Egeno, the accuser of Otto of Northeim, or Ekkehard, Chronica s.a. 1116 and 1123, in Frutolfs und Ekkehards Chroniken und die anonyme Kaiserchronik, ed. F.-J. Schmale and I. Schmale-Ott, Ausgewählte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters 15 (Darmstadt, 1972), pp. 324, 362, on latrones and predones. Certainly their activities were made likelier by the disturbances caused by war, but there is a clear distinction here between princes and thieves. See also Thietmar, Chronicon VII, 50–1, p. 460 [trans. Warner, pp. 342–4], for the contrast between conflict-settlement, on the one hand, and hanging robbers (who are unnamed), on the other. The famous conflict between the followings of the abbot of Fulda and the bishop of Hildesheim, described by Lampert, Annales s.a. 1063, pp. 81–3, though in many respects typical of struggles over rank and pecking-order among the nobility, remains rather exceptional between prelates. In principle, abbots and their monasteries belong here as well, but for the most part they were too weak to engage independently in conflicts with nobles. Some groups of participants remain rather marginal phenomena, or else no generalisations can be drawn from them. Conflicts between bishops and rulers, in so far as they occurred, could hardly be distinguished in their external manifestations from comparable conflicts between high-born laymen and rulers. Conflicts within the royal family might mostly be considered as special cases of conflicts between rulers and nobles. To some extent, we can see after-effects of the Ottonian tradition according to which the opposition took shape behind members of the royal family (see Leyser, Rule and Conflict, pp. 11–31). This was true in a way of the relationship between Bruno of Augsburg and Henry II, see Hirsch et al., Heinrich II., vol. III, p. 289, and Wipo, Gesta Chuonradi c. 1, ed. H. Bresslau, MGH SRG, 3rd edn (Hannover, 1915), pp. 10–11: ‘utilis et clarus ingenio, si fraterno odio, quo imperatori oberat, non obscuraretur’. Gebhard of Regensburg can be considered in this context as well. He was made a monk at the Council of Frankfurt in 1027, probably to make him less dangerous, H. Bresslau, Jahrbücher des Deutschen Reichs unter Konrad II., 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1879, 1894), vol. I, p. 230 with n. 2; for Gebhard’s part in the revolt of 1055, see Steindorff, Heinrich


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our concern is focused on the behavioural forms of an elite which was certainly hierarchically organised yet did not always think in a consistently hierarchical way. The boundaries were fluid between the ‘private’ sphere of peace-breaking and feud, on the one hand, and the ‘public’ sphere of resistance and rebellion, on the other. The pursuit of conflict against the ruler’s will, especially in the case of office-holders, could easily be construed as revolt. Rebellions, though, as Gerd Althoff has been able to demonstrate and as I shall underline further in what follows, were usually fought out on both sides like feuds.24 In statistical terms, there can be no doubt that the most frequent kinds of conflict in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries were those conducted among the high-born laity and their followings. Yet it’s precisely here that our evidence and the potential for finding any further information are unfortunately very limited, because such conflicts are often mentioned in the narrative sources only en passant and without detail. For us to know anything about the origin of the conflict is particularly unusual. There is a strong temptation to treat such conflicts as parts of well-planned and sustained territorial policies; yet they could probably just as easily have arisen from some apparently quite trivial cause.25 That is not quite the same, though, as saying these conflicts were irrational. It belonged to the essence of such an aristocratic society that there was a pecking-order which was constantly being tested. It was not absolutely necessary to take revenge at once: you could wait for a favourable opportunity.26 You could delay reacting to some real or alleged provocation, yet you might risk thereby losing power and influence.27 The defence of honour was at the same time defence of power and possessions.

24 25 26

27

III., vol. II, pp. 317ff. Henry IV’s son Conrad was treated like a noble office-holder after his rebellion: ‘invasore prius ex decreto curiae diiudicato . . .’, Vita Heinrici IV imperatoris c. 7, ed. W. Eberhard, MGH SRG, 3rd edn (Hannover, 1899), p. 27; see Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. VI, pp. 26–7. Henry V, on the other hand, represents a special case as the leader of the only successful revolt in this period (perhaps Duke Lothar of Saxony might also be included too). Althoff, ‘Königsherrschaft und Konfliktbewältigung’, esp. pp. 288–9. Cf. the conflict between Fulda and Hildesheim, above, n. 21, or that between Margrave Gero and Arnulf of Halberstadt over a clerical huntsman, below, n. 64. See the behaviour of Wiprecht of Groitzsch, Annales Pegavienses, MGH SS XVI, p. 241: ‘Prosperis ita Wicperto succedentibus, ipse tamen prospertitatis et pacis impaciens et iniuriarum sibi aliquando ab huius provinciae nobilioribus illatarum reminiscens, praedas non modicas ex eis frequenter ex insperato superveniens agebat’ (‘When things then went very well for Wicpert, he was, nevertheless, impatient of prosperity and peace, and he remembered the wrongs done to him at some point by the nobler men of this province, and he fell on them unexpectedly and frequently perpetrated no small acts of violent robbery upon them.’ Cf the Count Karl mentioned by Thietmar, Chronicon VII, 3, p. 400 [trans. Warner, p. 309], who lost his countship as a result of unjustified accusations, and who ‘endured this outrage with equanimity’ (qui . . . illatum facinus aequinamiter portavit).

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We are not nearly so well informed on the course and settlement of disputes as we would like to be. Acts of destruction like burnings and the thefts of people and movables were probably common.28 The destruction of a favourite castle counted as a particularly insulting act. The feud between Gunzelin of Meissen and his nephew in 1009 was conducted in that way by both sides;29 and the burning-down of Nijmegen by Gottfried of Lothringen in 1047 can probably be viewed in a similar context.30 Regular battles between the two parties were rarer, but they did occur; so too did nocturnal attacks and ambushes in which, as we shall see presently, those primarily involved in the feud were not spared.31 Thereafter, though, a settlement of the dispute was quite possible. Feud in the form of a vendetta prolonged across several generations between families or groups is not recorded in the eleventh century, as far as I can see. The ‘normal’ outcome was probably the conclusion of peace reinforced by an oath: a settlement reached through the mediation of friends and relatives of the two parties and made acceptable by compensatory payments.32 An important question for our inquiry is how such conflicts were viewed by participants and also by other contemporaries. When detailed information is available, a certain degree of variation is visible. On the one hand, very much alive is the idea of a ‘public’ order destroyed by such conflicts; yet on the other hand, it is unmistakeable that the recourse to violence on the part of members of this upper class is seen as something legitimate. Even the ruler had to avenge himself for iniuriae, and did so, even though he actually ought to have renounced revenge in virtue of his office.33 Others were not constrained in that way. It seems to have been an exception when Margrave Hermann of Meissen, on taking up his office in 1009, forgave 28

29 30 31

32

33

Robbery, as Gernhuber, Landfriedensbewegung, pp. 28, n. 9, and 218, observes, was not seen as a legitimate way of conducting a feud in this period, and thus is contrasted in the sources with other frequently used expressions like praedare. While it was not ‘permissible’, robbery was extremely common. Thietmar, Chronicon VI, 53, p. 340 [trans. Warner, p. 274]. Steindorff, Heinrich III., vol. II, p. 19, with evidence for the importance of Nijmegen under the early Salians. See the cases considered below, pp. 363–5. Further examples were the feuds of Wiprecht of Groitzsch, above, n. 26, or the besieging of Udo of Alsleben, Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. V, p. 184. It is known that Conrad II himself, in the period before he became king, engaged in many such conflicts. See the mediation of Adalbold of Utrecht between Balderich and Eichmann, below, p. 366, or the course of the feud between Gero and Arnulf of Halberstadt, below, p. 368; also Thietmar, Chronicon VII, 50, p. 460 [trans. Warner, pp. 342–3] with several other examples. Compensation is presented as something quite normal in the Chronicon Gozecense II, 10–11, MGH SS X, p. 153 (the reconciliation between the son of Frederick of Putelendorf and Louis the Leaper), and see the same source, I, 18, p. 147, for other cases. See below, p. 372.


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his enemies and created a clean slate, on the model of the beginning of a royal reign.34 In an interesting passage about the opponents of Otto of Northeim in 1070, Lampert of Hersfeld distinguished between those who had acceptable grounds for their actions, and those who ‘took up arms against him solely out of a lust for loot’ (sola rapinarum cupiditate arma contra eum capiunt). It was lawful, in Lampert’s opinion, that a man should move against Otto out of loyalty to the king, or concern for the community, or to avenge himself for any kind of privatae iniuriae.35 Lampert’s main rhetorical purpose was no doubt to expose those who in his view had become Otto’s enemies from baser motives. Still, his putting on a par of concern for the community and the pursuit of feud is very revealing. It was not only writers who accepted the legitimacy of the use of violence. This is clear from a number of cases in which conflicts ended up in deaths apparently without the ruler or any other office-holder intervening or concerning himself at all with the affair. The following list is in no way complete, but does assemble some highly informative examples. At the end of 1034, the men in the following of Margave Ekkehard II killed his brother-in-law Count Dietrich of ‘Osterland’. We hear nothing about any punitive measures against Ekkehard. True, no source explicitly states that Ekkehard was behind the killing, yet it is not very likely to have taken place without his knowledge and agreement.36 At any rate, a lord’s responsibility for the actions of his following seems to have been implicitly assumed at this period, as we can infer from the treatment of the attack on Bishop Arnulf of Halberstadt by the men of Bernard of the Ostmark,37 or the revolt in Bavaria in 1055.38 In 1036, Duke Adalbero of Carinthia, already deposed from office, slew his enemies, Counts William and Hartwig of Friesach.39 Later we hear about Adalbero’s exile and, after the deaths of Conrad II and 34

35 36

37 38

39

Thietmar, Chronicon VI, 55, p. 342 [trans. Warner, p. 276]: ‘After this, Count Hermann was installed by a representative of the king and thereupon remitted his debtors whatever they had been owing him, affirming this with his right hand.’ Lampert, Annales s.a. 1070, p. 115. Bresslau, Konrad II. (as n. 23), pp. 128–9. Bresslau assumes a feud between Dietrich and the following of Ekkehard, without Ekkehard’s personal participation. See also S. Lüpke, Die Markgrafen der Sächsischen Ostmarken in der Zeit von Gero bis zum Beginn des Investiturstreites (940–1075) (Leipzig, 1937), p. 49, with identification of the participants. See below, p. 368. Cf. the passage in the account of the coniuratio of Welf III and Gebhard III of Regensburg in Chronici Herimanni Continuatio codicis Sangallensis, MGH SS XIII, p. 731: ‘Geberhardus Ratisponensis episcopus et Welffus dux licentiam repatriandi ab Italia impetraverant, militesque eorum, illis, ut aiunt, ignorantibus, contra imperatorem coniuraverunt.’ In the idea of milites conspiring against the emperor ‘without their lords’ knowledge, so they say (ut aiunt)’, the chronicler sounds an unmistakeably sceptical note. Bresslau, Konrad II., vol. II, pp. 159–60.

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Conrad the Younger, his efforts to recover the duchy, without the killings of the two counts playing any apparent role here.40 In 1048, Gottfried the Bearded killed Adalbert of Upper Lotharingia but never received any special punishment for it.41 In a much-discussed episode immediately following Henry III’s death, there was an open battle between the Ekbertines led by Brun, and Otto, brother of Margrave William, in which not only Brun and Otto but also an unnamed son of Count Bernard were all slain. What was going on here was evidently an attempt by Otto to overthrow the child-king Henry IV and assume the kingship himself; but at the same time there was a private enmity between the two disputants.42 In August 1061, the deaths of the Swabian counts Burchard and Wezel of Zollern in a battle which also claimed the lives of others had no after-effects that we know of (for the visit of the royal court to Swabia shortly afterwards should be linked with negotiations over the schism of Cadalus).43 The inimicitiae in Bavaria in 1067–8 reported in the Annals of Niederaltaich also deserve mention here, although all we can read about them are general stock terms with hardly any details. The king is unmentioned, and, so far as this annalist’s account goes, the role of Otto of Northeim is confined to taking money from both sides and doing nothing.44 The background to the murder of the young Dedi in 1069 is equally obscure.45 After the outbreak of bellum civile in 1073, it clearly becomes more difficult, and often impossible, to draw a distinction between private conflict and civil war. We can identify some cases, however, in which the wider conflict does not seem to stand in the foreground. Thus, we do not know if the killing of Adalbert of Ballenstedt by Count Egeno II of Conradsburg sometime between 1076 and 1085/6 occurred out of ‘concern for the empire or vengeance for some insult’ (to borrow Lampert’s terminology).46 But the killing of Gottfried of Lower Lotharingia in 1076 seems to have had no connexion with the struggle between Henry IV and his enemies, even though Henry visited the lower Rhineland immediately afterwards.47 Incidents like the violent end of Dietrich of Katlenburg in a ‘tumult’ in 40 42

43 44 45 46 47

41 Ibid., vol. II, p. 46. Steindorff, Heinrich III., vol. I, p. 59. Lampert, Annales, pp. 71–2. See also Fenske, Adelsopposition, pp. 23–4, and K. Leyser, ‘The Crisis of Medieval Germany’, PBA 69 (1983), pp. 409–43, at 440 [repr. in Leyser, Communications and Power in Medieval Europe, ed. T. Reuter, 2 vols. (London, 1994), vol. II, The Gregorian Revolution and Beyond, pp. 21–49, at 46–7]. Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. I, p. 214; J. F. Böhmer, revd T. Struve, Regesta Imperii III, 3, 1. Die Regesten des Kaiserreiches unter Heinrich IV. 1056 (1050)–1106 (Cologne, 1984), no. 227. Annales Altahenses, pp. 73, 75. Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. I, pp. 622–4; cf. Fenske, Adelsopposition, p. 74. Annalista Saxo, ad a. 1062, 1117, MGH SS VI, pp. 693, 754. Cf. Fenske, Adelsopposition, pp. 89, 93–4. Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. II, pp. 650–2.


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1085, the slaying of Ekbert II of Meissen in 1090, or the death of the Count Palatine Siegfried in Hoyer of Mansfeld’s attack on the Saxon opponents of Henry V at Warnstede in 1114, all seem best categorised, at first sight, as clearly in the ‘public’ sphere;48 yet the killings of Ekbert and Siegfried by the king’s retainers and amici look very like episodes in feuds.49 Other conflicts with fatal outcomes can probably be classified as of a ‘private’ nature: such were the death of Frederick of Putelendorf in an inheritance dispute with Louis of Thuringia in 1085, the killing of Hermann of Salm also in the course of an inheritance dispute in 1088 and the murder of Kuno of Beichlingen in 1103.50 The key feature here is not so much the death of a participant, though that was probably a risk that could never quite be discounted. Instead, what is important is the fact that killing and murder could feature among the means brought into the prosecution of conflicts. Thus the young Dedi was fatally stabbed in the privy and so too was Gottfried of Lotharingia, while in other cases too the attack was a treacherous one. In light of such examples which could easily be multiplied from Thietmar’s Chronicle,51 caution seems advisable before any assumptions are made about any very formalised or rule-bound feuding process in the eleventh century. Important too is the absence of the king or any other office-holder. It is exceptional for the king’s absence to be noted, as in Bavaria in 1066–7. To some extent, we have to reckon with gaps in our sources of information; and particular political circumstances could explain the king’s non-action in many of the abovelisted cases – but not in all, and especially not for the period after the outbreak of the Saxon revolt. The most obvious explanation for the king’s failure to be present is that the right to prosecute a feud was as good as universally recognised, and that even a fatal outcome could not necessarily be foreseen. Such an explanation has a lot to be said for it. Yet it is contradicted by other examples that point in another direction. Here, in the whole period, we find something like the idea of a ‘public order’ for whose maintenance 48 49 50

51

Dietrich: ibid., vol. IV, pp. 2–4, Fenske, Adelsopposition, pp. 79, 108–9; Ekbert: Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. IV, pp. 292–3; Siegfried: Fenske, Adelsopposition, pp. 344–5. For the ruler as conductor of feud, see below, pp. 366–7. Frederick: Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. III, p. 448; Hermann: ibid., vol. IV, pp. 226–8; Kuno: ibid., vol. V, pp. 184–5, drawing attention to the similar case of the murder of Louis of Mömpelgard in 1102; on Kuno, see K.-H. Lange, ‘Die Stellung der Grafen von Northeim in der Reichsgeschichte des 11. und frühen 12. Jahrhundert’, Niedersächsisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 33 (1961), pp. 95–6. See for instance the feud in the Hassegau, which Thietmar describes in Chronicon VII, 44, p. 452 [trans. Warner, p. 338], or the career of his nephew Werner, Chronicon VI, 48–9, VII, 4–7, pp. 334–6, 402–6 [trans. Warner, pp. 270–2, 310–12].

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the ruler and others too have to take responsibility, and this means that the ruler himself both can and should underwrite the prosecution of a feud. According to Alpert’s account of the feud between Count Balderich and Wichmann, Bishop Adalbold of Utrecht fixed a hearing between the two disputants. He warned them to appear, and continued: ‘If, however, they refuse to desist from their obstinacy, he made it clear that they would be forcibly compelled by the power of the emperor and his troops to leave off the tumult they had begun.’52 Already before this, Henry II had summoned the pair to appear before him and ‘when he could not bring either of them to become friendlier through reconciliation without offending many people, he ordered them to have peace between themselves by royal power’.53 Other incidents reported by Thietmar confirm that Alpert was not just expressing a personal point of view.54 We find rulers who at least try to end a feud, or to punish those involved, later as well. Something of the kind seems to lie behind the use of the word ‘peace-making’ (pacificare) in the Hildesheim Annals’ account of Conrad II’s last journey to Saxony.55 A compulsory peace-making (Landpeace) with general or regional scope is often attested – as, in fact, for every ruler from Henry II to Lothar III (with the exception of Conrad II). Here the ruler insisted that his magnates agreed to make peace and confirmed this by swearing an oath.56 The policy of exiling, used already by Carolingian rulers to end feuding and to punish perpetrators of feud, is documented for the Salian period too.57 Obviously, such efforts 52 54

55 56

57

53 Ibid., II, 4, p. 48. Alpert of Metz, De diversitate temporum II, 7–8, p. 54. See Thietmar, Chronicon VIII, 17, p. 514 [trans. Warner, p. 373], on the reconciliation between Gottfried of Lotharingia and Count Gerhard imperatoria potestate; for the background here, see Hirsch et al., Heinrich II., vol. III, pp. 62–3, 65–6. Thietmar describes other cases at the assembly at Allstedt in 1017, Chronicon VII, 50, p. 460 [trans. Warner, pp. 342–3]. Henry II at first wanted to arrange a settlement of the feud between Gunzelin and Hermann of Meissen too: Chronicon VI, 54, p. 340 [trans. Warner, p. 275]. Annales Hildesheimenses s.a. 1039, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SRG (Hannover, 1878), p. 43: ‘sicque compendioso itinere peragrata orientali Saxonia, rebusque pacificatis, Nuvimagon tetendit . . .’. Instances are extensively cited by Waitz, Verfassungsgeschichte VI, pp. 527–45; see also Gernhuber, Landfriedensbewegung, pp. 28ff., and R. Kaiser, ‘Selbsthilfe und Gewaltmonopol. Königliche Friedenswahrung in Deutschland und Frankreich im Mittelalter’, FMS 17 (1983), pp. 65–9. The recently much-discussed measures of Henry III in 1043–4 belong in this context, I think, despite the religious element. See on this K. Schnith, ‘Recht und Friede. Zum Königsgedanken im Umkreis Heinrichs III.’, HJ 91 (1961), pp. 22–57; H. Thomas, ‘Abt Siegfried von Gorze und die Friedensmassnahmen Heinrichs III. Vom Jahre 1043’, Chronik des Staatlichen Regino-Gymnasiums Prüm (1976), pp. 125–37; M. Minninger, ‘Heinrichs III. interne Friedensmassnahmen und ihre etwaigen Gegner in Lothringen’, Jahrbuch für westdeutsche Landesgeschichte 5 (1979), pp. 33–52. See for instance the case of Hilderich, who had slain a certain Altman and in 1036 through the intercession of the queen and others secured the lifting of the sentence of exile, Annales Hildesheimenses, p. 38; Henry II had already promised to decree exile as the punishment for breach of the peace of a house, Thietmar, Chronicon VII, 6, p. 404 [trans. Warner, pp. 311–12]. For the treatment of feud in Carolingian capitularies, see F.-L. Ganshof, Frankish Institutions under Charlemagne (Providence RI, 1968), pp. 95–7.


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were seldom very effective. But they show that the ruler was aware of his obligation to maintain peace, that he could apply compulsory measures for this purpose, and that there would be no contesting the lawfulness of such royal actions. That rulers did not always take such action should not be attributed exclusively to the incompleteness of the sources. Rather, the freedom to decide between intervention and non-intervention constituted a major instrument in the exercise of royal power. Alpert’s comment (cited above) on Henry II’s conduct in the feud between Wichmann and Balderich is a significant one. Only because both parties had considerable support did Henry confine himself to a non-partisan compulsory peacemaking. It was obviously commoner for a ruler when he intervened to take the side of one disputant or the other. That too is documented on other occasions.58 It was precisely for this reason that the ruler was often called in. The peace-making he imposed certainly stood in opposition to the feud’s continuance, but at the same time the king’s intervention was, from the disputants’ standpoint, a further means of conducting the feud. For the ruler himself, it was first and foremost a political tool. He could intervene where it seemed useful, or opportune, or necessary, but he did not have to do so. This freedom of manoeuvre, which Thietmar describes very tellingly in one of his asides,59 diminished in a direct relationship with the king’s diminishing capacity to influence the conduct of feuds. The royal Landpeace of 1103, though useful enough in propaganda terms, was no substitute for that capacity: it emphasised the ruler’s responsibility for peace at a time when the political resources to assure peace were precisely what the ruler lacked.60 There were many conflicts between noble laymen and bishops, and we are much better informed about them. For the first half of the eleventh century, a clear dividing-line is visible. While in the case of feuds between laymen the ruler could decide against intervention, as far as conflicts between bishops and nobles were concerned, the relevant principle was ‘my bishop, right or wrong!’ This rule emerges more or less explicitly in Thietmar 58

59

60

As in Henry II’s case, in the opinion of Thietmar, in the feuds between Dedi and Werner, and between Gunzelin and Hermann, Chronicon VI, 49 and 53–4, pp. 334–6, 340 [trans. Warner, pp. 271– 2, 274–5]. Something similar was behind the revolt of Dedi and Adalbert of Ballenstedt, see Fenske, Adelsopposition, pp. 34–6. For rulers taking sides in disputes between lay nobles and prelates, see below pp. 368–71. Thietmar, Chronicon VII, 5, p. 404: ‘Speravit enim in suam venientem potestatem in exemplum aliis periturum aut precio ineffabili ab hoc redempturum’ [trans. Warner, p. 311]; see also VI, 56, p. 344: ‘Huius rei nec rex ultor seu defensor fuit’ [trans. Warner, p. 276]. MGH Const. I, no. 74, pp. 105–7; see Vita Heinrici IV imperatoris c. 8, pp. 28–9. For Ekkehard of Aura’s critique of royal peace-keeping, see Chronica s.a. 1116, 1118, 1125, pp. 324, 340, 374: ‘iusticiis regni non multum invigilavit’.

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of Merseburg, both in his critique of King Rudolf of Burgundy, who in Thietmar’s view was unable to guarantee his bishops the right amount of support and therefore was no righteous ruler, and in his complaints about conditions in Saxony towards the end of his life, where the counts of the region deployed violence against the bishops, ‘as no lord would either rule or command on our behalf’.61 Although the ira and terror of the ruler did not have always and everywhere the same terrifying impact, the extent of the support and protection that Henry II gave his bishops emerges very clearly from the narrative sources. A contrast was already clear at the beginning of the reign, when Henry made peace with Hermann of Swabia: he renounced all claims to restitution on his own account, but he insisted that Hermann should compensate the Bishop of Strassburg for the plundering of his city. Though this was not so unselfish as in the impression Thietmar gives, the contrast was nevertheless clear enough.62 In the long series of conflicts between members of the Saxon high nobility and Saxon bishops at the end of the second decade of the eleventh century, Henry II stood almost consistently on the bishops’ side:63 in the cases of Arnulf of Halberstadt against Margrave Gero after the bishop was attacked by Gero’s retinue;64 of Thietmar himself, although not in a very concerted manner, in the conflict against Ekkehard II and Hermann of Meissen;65 for Meinwerk 61

62

63

64

65

Thietmar, Chronicon VII, 30, VIII, 23, pp. 434, 520 [trans. Warner, pp. 327–8, 377]. On these passages, see T. Reuter, ‘The “imperial church system” of the Ottonian and Salian rulers: a reconsideration’, JEcclesH 33 (1982), pp. 371–2 [in this book, chapter 18, pp. 351–2 above]. Thietmar, Chronicon V, 22, p. 247 [trans. Warner, p. 220]; see also V, 13, pp. 234–6 [trans. Warner, p. 214]. For the background, see S. Weinfurter, ‘Die Zentralisierung der Herrschaftsgewalt im Reich durch Kaiser Heinrich II’, HJ 106 (1986), pp. 271–2. It seems questionable whether these attacks really did represent a revolt of the Saxon aristocracy against the bishops and hence against the ‘imperial power’ and the ‘imperial Church policy’. It is more likely that we are dealing here with a string of particular conflicts with very diverse causes. For the opposite view, see Fenske, Adelsopposition, p. 18; P. Leidinger, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Grafen von Werl, Studien und Quellen zur westfälischen Geschichte 5 (Paderborn, 1965), pp. 91–2; Leyser, ‘Crisis’, in Communications and Power, pp. 27–8. Thietmar, Chronicon VI, 96–8, pp. 388–90 [trans. Warner, pp. 301–2]. The course of the conflict is interesting. After the bishop had tried to forbid a cleric in Gero’s entourage from holding a hawk on his hand, Hugal, the leader of Gero’s milites, demanded to know cur seniorem suum sic inhonorare voluisset. The bishop appealed to canon law, but offered a settlement if ‘mutual friends’ found him culpable (et ubi culpabilis a communibus invenior amicis, digna emendatione restituo). Hugal refused, and demanded that the bishop should either give an oath (of purgation) immediately, or promise to pay compensation to Gero and his following, but Arnulf rejected that in his turn. Then the affair degenerated into an attack on Arnulf in his own church. Henry II became very angry, and Gero tried to calm him down by means of internuntii; but he had to pay 300 pounds and purge himself of guilt with an oath, while his milites had to perform ecclesiastical penance. Thietmar’s account of the meeting at which Gero and Arnulf were reconciled is significant: Huc [i.e. at Halberstadt] nostri eorundemque amici conveniunt, et ego [i.e. Thietmar] cum illis affui; in other words, although the king reached a judgement, its execution and the reconciliation were carried out privately. Thietmar, Chronicon VIII, 22–4, pp. 516–18 [trans. Warner, pp. 376–8].


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of Paderborn against Thietmar Billung;66 for Gero of Magdeburg against Margrave Bernhard;67 and for Dietrich of Münster against Hermann of Werl.68 This tradition was continued under Conrad II and Henry III. Welf II famously had to make recompense by loss of his countships and by exile for his proceedings against Bishops Brun of Augsburg and Egilbert of Freising, both of them close confidants of Conrad II.69 The deposition of Conrad of Bavaria by Henry III was justified not least by Conrad’s attack on Bishop Gebhard III of Regensburg and the torching of the episcopal castle at Parkstein.70 Yet the first signs of a rather more nuanced attitude were apparent already under Henry III. He got involved in differences of opinion with Gerhard I of Cambrai and Wazo of Liege;71 and it is particularly striking that Henry III did not support Gerhard’s successor Lietbert in his struggle against the castellans of Cambrai. After Henry III’s death, the earlier seemingly automatic protection of the bishops by the king in such conflicts dwindled almost at once – unsurprisingly, too, given the change necessitated by the minority of Henry IV. Symptomatic of this change were the disputes between the Empress Agnes and Gunther of Bamberg,72 between Henry of Augsburg and Counts Diepold and Rapoto over a countship,73 and between Anno of Cologne and the Lotharingian count palatine Henry.74 Henry of Augsburg was also attacked by royal familiares.75 The loss of protection and support was revealed very clearly in bishops’ new vulnerability, in a quite literal sense. It is often said that the Investiture Contest brought about a desacralisation of kingship. The desacralisation of the bishop was just as apparent. Under the Ottonians and early Salians, not a single bishop of the regnum Teutonicum met with a violent end within the territorial boundaries of the Reich, yet in the reign of Henry IV a number of such cases occurred. The fact that bishops fell on battlefields, as 66 67

68 69 71 72 73 74 75

Bannasch, Bistum Paderborn (as above, n. 2), pp. 50, 79, with further references. Thietmar, Chronicon VII, 44, p. 450, VII, 50, p. 458, VIII, 17, p. 514 [trans. Warner, pp. 338, 342–3, 373]. See D. Claude, Geschichte des Erzbistums Magdeburg bis in das 12. Jahrhundert, 1, Mitteldeutsche Forschungen 67/I (Cologne, 1972), pp. 295–6: here Bernhard had to plead for forgiveness nudis pedibus, like a subdued rebel before the king (see below, pp. 381, 383). Leidinger, Grafen von Werl (as above, n. 63), pp. 27–9, 91. 70 Annales Altahenses ad a. 1053, p. 48. Bresslau, Konrad II., I, p. 198. ¨ E. Boshof, ‘Das Reich in der Krise. Uberlegungen zum Regierungsausgang Heinrichs III’, HZ 228 (1979), pp. 265–87, at 283–4. Böhmer, revd Struve, Regesta Imperii III, 1, nos. 251, 275; see M. L. Bulst-Thiele, Kaiserin Agnes (Leipzig, 1933), pp. 40–1. Böhmer, revd Struve, Regesta Imperii III, 1, no. 178. G. Jenal, Erzbischof Anno von Köln (1956–75) und sein politisches Wirken, 1, Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 8, 1 (Stuttgart, 1974), pp. 110–13. Annales Augustani ad a. 1063, MGH SS III, p. 127.

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did Werner of Magdeburg in 107976 and Burchard of Lausanne in 1088,77 might be considered more of an accident, although it was something new compared with the preceding period. But the murder of bishops was qualitatively something quite different. In 1066, the bishop-elect of Trier was murdered by enemies from within the local aristocracy.78 In April 1089 Burchard of Halberstadt died in a revolt in the town of Goslar, though whether or not Margrave Ekbert of Meissen paid the assassins is unclear.79 In 1099, Conrad of Utrecht was stabbed to death, not by a magnate, admittedly, but by a Frisian trader.80 And in 1105, Bishop Gebhard IV of Regensburg, who had remained loyal to the king, was slain by one of his own military following.81 Four cases within a space of forty years is not enough to constitute a trend, perhaps, even if we were to add in the murder of Dietrich of Naumburg-Zeitz in 1123 by a conversus.82 Nevertheless, the circumstances and consequences are worth noting. In none of these cases did Henry IV make the slightest effort to punish any of the murderers or to restore peace in the bishopric affected. In some cases, of course, particular explanations can be found: in 1066, Henry was just at the beginning of his independent reign and preoccupied with his forthcoming visit to Rome, while, immediately following the murder, the king was seriously ill.83 In 1105 as well, he had more important matters to attend to, and, moreover, Burchard of Halberstadt had been one of his chief opponents whom the king had no special concern to avenge and whom he probably had no longer considered as bishop since the installation of Hamezo as anti-bishop in 1085.84 Yet, at least in the case of Conrad of Utrecht, who was one of his own supporters, Henry’s inaction is striking. In disputes between bishops and lay aristocrats, Henry IV and his son adopted different ways of proceeding. In the feud between Archbishop Berthold of Salzburg, whom Henry himself had installed, and Count Eberhard of Spanheim, Henry inclined to take the count’s side.85 In 1102, towards the end of his reign, Henry certainly outlawed Frederick of Arnsberg in traditional style after his attack on Archbishop Frederick of Cologne, yet it is significant for some kind of general trend that this did not lead to 76 78

79 80 82 85

77 Ibid., vol. IV, p. 228. Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. III (as above, n. 4), p. 142. Ibid., vol. I, pp. 503–11; Jenal, Anno II, 1 (as above, n. 74), pp. 46–7. See now F.-R. Erkens, ‘Die Trierer Provinz am Vorabend des Investiturstreits’, Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte 125 (1989), pp. 109–58, at 145–6. Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. IV, pp. 210–13; see also Fenske, Adelsopposition, pp. 116–17. 81 Ibid., p. 237. Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. V, pp. 67–8. 83 Ibid., vol. I, p. 524. 84 Fenske, Adelsopposition, p. 111. Ibid., vol. VII, pp. 256–7. H. Dopsch, ‘Salzburg im Hochmittelalter’, in Geschichte Salzburgs. Stadt und Land, I, ed. H. Dopsch and H. Spatzenegger, 2nd edn (Salzburg, 1983), pp. 248–9.


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Arnsberg’s downfall.86 In 1113, Henry V was able to give traditional royal support to Bishop Richard of Verdun against Count Rainald of Bar;87 yet Henry himself conducted a feud against Bishop Godebold of Utrecht in 1123.88 The change in the royal attitude towards bishops, which was certainly hastened by some bishops’ opposition in the 1070s and 1080s, is not the only indication that bishops were coming to occupy a new place within the structures of the Reich. The contexts of the murders listed above are very revealing. To die in a feud, or to be secretly attacked by aggrieved members of your own warrior following, were among the occupational hazards of lay nobles in this period.89 The extension of this hazard from the secular aristocracy to the higher clergy is further evidence for the development of the episcopal ideal signalled not long ago by Odilo Engels,90 as well as for a shift in the bishop’s actual position away from a rather monastic orientation and towards that of a territorial lord, who would thus be exposed to the usual risks involved in the wielding of power. It is hardly surprising that we find bishops who knew how to take appropriate defensive measures. When Count Gozwin was killed by the militia of Bishop Adelbero of Würzburg in 1065, or when Henry the Fat was slain by milites of the cathedral of Utrecht when he arrived in Friesland in 1101, we observe episodes that accord nicely with the general trend suggested.91 The role of bishops in the adoption of the Peace of God in the regnum Teutonicum can also be viewed in this context. Although some continuity with bishops’ earlier efforts at mediation in particular feuds can be seen here as well, the earliest examples of the Peace of God in Liège and Cologne were at the same time part and parcel of the territorial ambitions of the local bishops.92 86 88

89 90

91 92

87 Ibid., vol. VI, pp. 279–82. Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. V, p. 162. Annales Palidenses ad a. 1123, ed. P. Scheffer-Boichorst (Innsbruck, 1870), p. 142: ‘Imperator . . . Sculenburg ad iniuriam episcope Traiectensis Godebaldi obsidet.’ For the pre-history of this episode, see Ekkehard, Chronica ad a. 1123, pp. 360–1, with the accusation of treason against the bishop and his consequent imprisonment. For further sources, see Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. VII, pp. 250–1. Some members of the victim’s retinue are mentioned as the killers in the cases of the younger Dedi as well as Kuno of Beichlingen and Ludwig of Mömpelgard. O. Engels, ‘Der Reichsbischof (10. und 11. Jahrhundert)’, in Der Bischof in seiner Zeit. Bischofstypus und Bischofsideal im Spiegel der Kölner Kirche. Festgabe für Joseph Kardinal Höffner, Erzbischof von Köln, ed. P. Berglar and O. Engels (Cologne, 1986), pp. 41–94. Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. I, pp. 272–3, 453, and vol. V, p. 121. For the Peace Movement in Germany, see Gernhuber, Landfriedensbewegung (as above, n. 17); E. Wadle, ‘Heinrich IV. und die deutsche Friedensbewegung’, in Investiturstreit und Reichsverfassung, ed. J. Fleckenstein, Vorträge und Forschungen 1 (Sigmaringen, 1973), pp. 141–73; T. Körner, Iuramentum und frühe Friedensbewegung (10.-12. Jahrhundert) (Berlin, 1977). For the territorial factor, see O. Engels, ‘Vorstufen der Staatwerdung im Hochmittelalter – Zum Kontext der

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As suggested above, violent struggles between magnates and rulers show many similarities with feuds between magnates. Indeed the ruler himself also conducted feuds against nobles he mistrusted. It seems no coincidence that the accession of Conrad II as depicted by Aribo of Mainz (that is, by Wipo) began with an indulgence.93 Wipo was trying in his account to establish a clear distinction between Conrad the great noble and Conrad the king. In Wipo’s mind, royal consecration had the same effects as baptism: it made Conrad into ‘a new man’, who had he not been king could certainly have exacted vengeance for wrongs suffered, but who as king renounced revenge.94 Even for supporters of kingship, this kind of view was not without its problems. It was only a small step from renouncing feud to public feebleness; and it is also unsurprising, therefore, when we find efforts being made to represent a religiously motivated ‘Christ-like’ renunciation of revenge as ‘noble revenge’ that bound the virtues of Christian rulership into the values of an aristocratic society.95 In reality, however, the ruler’s attitude to prosecuting feuds himself also looks very different from that visible in the Ottonian period.96 It was reported of Conrad and of his son too that they avenged themselves. When Duke Adalbero of Carinthia was deposed, according to the Worms cleric on whose testimony we rely for our information on this, Conrad bore an old grudge against Adalbero (veteris existente causa odii . . . animatum), and when the two met to talk about this, ‘the emperor laid out his grounds for feeling wronged’ (imperator iniuriam suam exposuit).97 Iniuria is the standard expression in eleventh-century terminology for a wrong that justified the prosecution of a feud. More modern interpretations which suggest that Adalbero was

93 94 95

96 97

Gottesfriedensbewegung’, HJ 87/98 (1978), pp. 71–86, esp. pp. 83–6, where the focus, despite the impression given by the title, is wholly on Cologne. Wipo, Gesta Chuonradi c. 3, p. 23: ‘Omnis sancta ecclesia nobiscum rogat gratiam tuam pro his, qui contra te hactenus deliquerunt et offensione aliqua gratiam tuam perdiderunt.’ Ibid.: ‘Et quamquam vindicare posset suas iniurias, si numquam rex fieret, tamen pro nulla tantae potestatis fiducia ad ulciscendum aliquid reservebat.’ See Ruodlieb III, 6–14, V, 35–42, ed. B. Vollmann (Faksimilie-Ausgabe des Codex Latinus Monacensis 19486 der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek München und der Fragmente von St Florian 2, 1) (Wiesbaden, 1985), pp. 70, 87, with the comments of K. Hauck, ‘Heinrich III. und der Ruodlieb’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 70 (1948), pp. 372–419, and W. Braun, Studien zum Ruodlieb (Berlin, 1962), pp. 18–24, who, probably rightly, rejects any direct reference to Henry III. See also Vita Heinrici IV imperatoris c. 7, p. 27, on Henry’s attitude to his son Conrad: ‘Cum autem eum ab incepto revocare non posset, non tam suam iniuriam ulcisci, quam exemplum iniuriae per ultionem tollere querens, filium exheredare et fratrem eius H. adhuc puerum in regnum promovere cogitabat.’ The king renounced revenge, yet did not abandon his own sense of what was right. On ‘the uneasy side-by-side’ of Ottonian ‘royal sacrosanctity’ and royal involvement in ‘justice’ that included feuds, see Leyser, Rule and Conflict, pp. 98–102. Die a¨ ltere Wormser Briefsammlung, ed. W. Bulst, MGH Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit III (Weimar, 1949), no. 35, p. 50.


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deposed on grounds of ‘public policy’ (maybe because of his contacts with the Hungarians) cannot be rejected out of hand but are not directly supported by the contemporary source.98 Of the deposition of Conrad of Bavaria in 1053, Hermann of Reichenau says that charges were brought against Conrad, ‘against whom the king had previously been roused’.99 There were characteristic features of the form and manner in which rebels were proceeded against: the ruler’s supporters burned and plundered the lands of the accused.100 Even in the final phase of Ernst’s uprising, it was ‘certain men who favoured the emperor’ who stole the horses of Ernst and his associates; then Manegoldus miles imperatoris laid an ambush for Ernst who would, he knew, wish to avenge these iniuriae.101 The prosecution of something like a feud by the king against a magnate can be seen most clearly in the relationship between Henry III and Gottfried of Lotharingia during the years from 1044 to 1056. The course of the struggle was analysed in detail some years ago by Egon Boshof,102 and so we can limit ourselves here to only a few points. Interesting in the present context is the fact that in 1044 at the outset of the conflict, Henry III seems to have been the aggressor; and equally significant are various references in the sources to Gottfried’s attempts to make his peace with Henry, and to Henry’s enmity which extended to Gottfried’s brother, Cardinal Frederick.103 In general, we should beware of assuming that it was always the rebel who began the conflict: we have to reckon with a royal initiative in Gottfried’s case, as earlier in the dispute between Henry II and Henry of Schweinfurt, and as later in the quarrels between Henry IV and Otto of Northeim or Ekbert of Meissen, or between Henry V and the Count Palatine Siegfried. If there were many similarities in motivation and method between magnate-feuds, on the one hand, and conficts between rulers and magnates, on the other, there were also considerable differences which we ought to 98

99 100 101 102 103

See I. Heidrich, ‘Die Absetzung Herzog Adalberos von Kärnten durch Kaiser Konrad II, 1035’, HJ 91 (1979), pp. 70–94, somewhat against Bresslau, Konrad II., vol. II, p. 134, who thought there had been cases in the period before Conrad became king. See also Althoff, ‘Königsherrschaft und Konfliktbewältigung’, pp. 280–1. MGH SS V, p. 132: ‘cui iam prius infensus erat’. See Althoff, ‘Königsherrschaft und Konfliktbewältigung’, p. 283, n. 69 (in the case of Otto of Northeim). Wipo, Gesta Chuonradi c. 28, pp. 45–6. E. Boshof, ‘Lothringen, Frankreich und das Reich in der Regierungszeit Heinrichs III.’, Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter 42 (1978), pp. 63–127. Ibid., pp. 65–6, 70, 89, 107–8. But the idea that Henry III had explicitly excluded Gottfried from the amnesty issued to mark his imperial coronation in 1046, as asserted by Boshof, p. 89, and others, seems to rest on a misunderstanding of the Annales Altahenses ad a. 1047, p. 44. The passage says only that in Gottfried’s opinion, Henry did not stick to the terms of the amnesty in Gottfried’s own case.

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notice. In magnate-feuds, the rules of the game and the justifications almost always have to be inferred from what actually happened. The lawfulness of resistance against the ruler, by contrast, was already the subject of debate and reflection in the period before the outbreak of the Saxon War, and not only among clerics and intellectuals. In cases where the ruler was directly involved as a participant, however, the methods of dispute-settlement were rather different. The most important distinctive feature here in the early eleventh century was that the ruler, in contrast to other disputants, was to a considerable extent in a position to determine the rules, course and outcome of conflicts. To the extent that this was no longer true in the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V, we can measure a certain loss of royal authority but also a loss of consensus within the political community of the Salian Reich. Let us begin with the question of legitimate resistance against the ruler. Already before there came to be an intensive phase of reflection and debate on legitimate resistance in the wake of the Saxon revolt and the excommunication of Henry IV,104 occasional comments on this question can be found in the narrative sources of the earlier eleventh century, and these comments permit some inferences about contemporary discussions. In two much-discussed passages, for instance, Thietmar rebuts the spokesmen of justified resistance to the king, and argues strongly for necessary obedience to the ruler ordained by God.105 But in the first of these passages, at least, it looks as if Thietmar’s opponent did not claim an unlimited right of resistance. The word necessario recalls the arguments attributed to the Saxons in the 1070s, and again in the period before the battle at Welfesholz, that their resistance was grounded in necessitas and so they had no other choice.106 No such argument can ever be found in connexion with magnate-feuds. Thietmar himself stood for ‘rule by God’s grace’, as it were in Kern’s sense, not only on principle, but also because, as Kern already noted, because a revolt hardly has ‘success’ 104 105

106

See Kern, Gottesgnadentum, pp. 168–70, 197–9; I. S. Robinson, Authority and Resistance in the Investiture Contest: The Polemical Literature of the Late Eleventh Century (Manchester, 1978). Thietmar, Chronicon V, 32, p. 256 [trans. Warner, pp. 226–7], on the case of Henry of Schweinfurt, Thietmar’s first cousin, in 1002: ‘Dicat aliquis, non ignorans causam tantae presumptionis, necessario eum hoc fecisse’, and VI, 48, p. 334 [trans. Warner, p. 271], on the Lotharingians: ‘Quos nonnulli iniusticiam dominorum suorum pati nolentes laudant, nos autem quasi ignavos econtra vituperant.’ On these passages, see Waitz, Verfassungsgeschichte VI (as above, n. 9), p. 495, nn. 2 and 3; Kern, Gottesgnadentum, p. 205, n. 443; Leyser, Rule and Conflict, pp. 95–6. Lampert, Annales ad a. 1073, pp. 154, ‘necessitas rebellionis’, and 158, ‘rebellandi necessitatem’; Frutolf, Chronica, p. 76; Ekkehard, Chronica, p. 312. See Giese, Stamm der Sachsen, pp. 151–66, 190–1.


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as its objective.107 The same advice was given, according to Abbot Williram of Ebersberg, by Thietmar’s contemporary, the old Count Ulrich of Ebersberg, to his two sons Adalbero and Eberhard: they should never rebel against the king nor invite him to visit them on any pretext whatsoever, ‘because thereby your wealth will be squandered’.108 There are other passages, too, in the great narrative sources of the earlier eleventh century in which it is implicitly assumed that there could be a ‘lawfully’ justified feud against the ruler. Thus Wipo writes of the revolt of Ernst (the stepson of the Emperor Conrad) that after Ernst’s final outlawry the Empress Gisela had declared publicly that in this affair she would neither take vengeance nor would she bear a grudge. Wipo thought this at once regrettable and praiseworthy.109 His gloss on Gisela’s behaviour leaves the surmise that the revolt of Ernst could be considered a family dispute within an aristocratic house. Gisela, in Wipo’s view, had to choose between her husband and her son, not between the ruler and her son. Up to this point, we have been considering justifications for resistance which were inferred from various rebels’ understandings of their own conduct. In Kern’s terminology, these were examples of an ‘individual right to resistance’.110 Evidence for discussions of resistance derived from a specific understanding of the royal office before the 1070s is very rare and by no means unanimous. Criticism of rulership, in the sense of a general, or generalisable, critique of a ruler’s justice or fairness, as opposed to a ‘political’ critique of particular ‘extra-political’ decisions, is occasionally expressed in the narrative sources; but it is impossible to say whether these are individual opinions on the part of a given writer or views held by a wider circle. These comments apply to the two best-known examples of criticism of this kind. In Thietmar of Merseburg’s account of the judicial proceedings after the death of Werner, it comes as a surprise that Count Wichmann attacks the judgement handed down by the iudices and thus expressed only indirect criticism of the emperor’s way of proceeding, while 107

108

109

110

Thietmar, Chronicon V, 32, p. 256 [trans. Warner, p. 227]: ‘Saciusque arbitror esse, alcius de die in diem ascendere, quam ruinam inexuperabilem subito incurrere.’ See Althoff, ‘Königsherrschaft und Konfliktbewältigung’, p. 269, and Thietmar V, 35, p. 260 [trans. Warner, p. 228], for the comments of Ernst’s following on the meaning of resistance. Chronicon Eberspergense, MGH SS XX, p. 14. The warning against giving hospitality to the king is a vaticinium ex eventu after the unfortunate episode at Persenbeug in 1045: see Steindorff, Heinrich III. (as above, n. 3), pp. 229–31. Wipo, Gesta Chuonradi c. 25, p. 44: ‘imperatrix . . . filium inconsultum sapienti marito postponens publicam fidem dedit omnibus, quicquid illi [Ernst] accidisset, nullam ultionem neque malum animum pro hac re se reddituram fore’. See Althoff, ‘Königsherrschaft und Konfliktbewältigung’, p. 280. Kern, Gottesgnadentum, p. 144.

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the populus only dared ‘to complain secretly’.111 But still more important in this way of presenting things is Thietmar’s own embarrassment: his amici are ‘friends by blood’, to use one of his favourite turns of phrase,112 and what he expresses here are, above all, the views of a kindred under threat, the family of the counts of Walbeck.113 Whether his criticism was actually expressed by the whole populus, as Thietmar presents it, thus seems questionable. The second much-cited case is reported in Hermann of Reichenau’s Chronicle under the year 1053. Here, by contrast, we can see no family interest on the part of the author.114 According to Hermann, the immediate grounds for criticism was the deposition of Conrad of Bavaria by the judgement ‘of certain leading men’ (quorundam principum – the phrase obviously carries critical undertones), but Hermann was not related to Conrad, so far as we know.115 Here again, the criticism is reported by only a single chronicler; and here again, according to the source, it was not expressed publicly, but in whispers (the use of the verb mussare/mussitare in the two passages is very striking). In any case, a right of resistance is not directly derived from the criticism of the ruler. Yet it is noteworthy, too, that the magnates’ conduct was influenced by the ruler’s presence: this, as we shall soon see, is of fundamental importance. Hermann of Reichenau’s famous passage about Henry IV’s king-making should be placed in a rather different category, though it too is hard to interpret. Here we are told that Henry III ‘caused his own son and namesake to be chosen by all, and made obedience be promised to him [Henry IV] after his [Henry III’s] death, if he [who?] should be a just ruler in the future’.116 Here, perhaps, we are dealing with a right of resistance that is 111

112

113 114

115 116

Thietmar, Chronicon VII, 8, p. 406 [trans. Warner, p. 313]: ‘Interim cesar in Alstedi populis iura dabat et, ut presentes affirmabant, meis haec amicis denegabat. Insula, quae Porei dicitur, quia prius comes Bernhardus predictum voluit occidere Wirinharium, per iniustos iudices sibi eam cesar precepit assignari. Hoc Wicmannus comes prohibit et iniustum esse affirmat; omnes populi mussant et christum Domini peccare occulte clamant.’ See Thietmar, Chronicon VI, 71, p. 360 [trans. Warner, p. 285]: Ulrich of Bohemia had Boleslav Chrobry as his amicus consanguinitate; and VI, 94, p. 386 [trans. Warner, p. 300]: Bruno of Querfurt was Thietmar’s amicus mihi consanguinitate. See Leyser, Rule and Conflict, pp. 99, 115; H. Lippelt, Thietmar von Merseburg. Reichsbischof und Chronist, Mitteldeutsche Forschungen 72 (Cologne, 1973), pp. 46–8, 190. Hermann of Reichenau, Chronicon, MGH SS V, p. 132: ‘Quo tempore regni tam primores quam inferiores contra imperatorem magis magisque mussitantes, iam dudum eum ab inchoatae iusticiae, pacis, pietatis, divini timoris, multimodaeque virtutis tenore, in quo de die in diem debuerat proficere, paulatim ad quaestum et incuriam quondam deficere, multumque se ipso deteriorem fore, causabantur.’ ¨ On Hermann’s kin, see M. Borgolte, ‘Uber die persönlichen und familiengeschichtlichen Aufzeichnungen Hermanns des Lahmen’, Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins 127 (1979), pp. 1–15. MGH SS V, p. 133: ‘Imperator Heinricus magno aput Triburiam conventu habito, filium aequivocum regem a cunctis eligi, eique post obitum suum, si rector iustus futurus esset, subiectionem promitti fecit.’ On subiectio, see Waitz, Verfassungsgeschichte VI, p. 483, n. 4, and more generally Böhmer, revd Struve, Regesta Imperii III, 3, 1, no. 13, with further references.


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held on principle and claimed in advance; yet it is not at all certain whether the reservation (‘if’) relates to the future conduct of Henry III, hence in practice represents only a kind of gesture towards mutual obligation.117 The passage, anyway, seems quite isolated; there is nothing to suggest that it expresses a view of royal office that was current in the mid-eleventh century. Even after the turning-point of 1073–7 it was exceptional for lay princes to justify the right of resistance on principle. An ‘individual right of resistance’ remains prevalent; and as an expansion of this came the idea that one man’s iniuria would be the iniuria of all.118 What has been demonstrated for feuds between magnates also applies to a large extent to the patterns of conflicts between rulers and magnates. Here too we usually lack information about the causes of conflict.119 But in a way we seldom encounter in the case of ‘normal’ feuds, the beginning of a revolt frequently remains so obscure that we generally know nothing about what action or event precipitated it, and the fact of the rebellio is treated as a given. That both sides had to be, so to speak, in a hostile relationship with each other is demonstrated by the many examples of alleged ‘dissimulation’ on one side or the other.120 It was up to the ruler, in fact, to decide whether 117

118

119 120

The issue centres on who is the subject of the phrase ‘si rector iustus futurus esset’: on this question, see H. Gericke, ‘Die Wahl Heinrichs IV’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 3 (1955), pp. 739–41. Probably against any reference to Henry IV is the fact that any alleged report by Hermann of a conditional election was never mentioned by any of the polemicists of the later eleventh century. It was first advanced by Paul of Bernried in his Vita Gregorii VII cc. 95, 97, ed. J. M. Watterich, Pontificum Romanorum . . . Vitae, vol. I (Leipzig, 1863), pp. 530, 531–2, in an exposition of the contractual basis of Henry IV’s kingship; see Kern, Gottesgnadentum (as above, n. 13), p. 224, n. 483. Paul knew the passage through its citation in the Chronicle of Bernold, MGH SS V, p. 426. The passage in Lampert, Annales ad a. 1073, p. 152, ‘[the Saxons] sacramento se ei fidem dixisse, sed si ad aedificationem, non ad destructionem aecclesiae Dei rex esse vellet; si iuste, si legittime, si more maiorum rebus moderaretur; si suum cuique ordinem, suam dignitatem, suas leges tutas inviolatasque manere pateretur’, seems to imply general considerations rather than any precise reference to the circumstances of Henry IV’s election, and the same goes for other comparable passages in Lampert and Bruno; see Waitz, Verfassungsgeschichte VI (as n. 9 above), p. 498, n. 2. That Hermann died during Henry III’s reign is a further reason for linking si rector iustus futurus esset with Henry III; in Hermann’s case, we do not have to reckon with the possibility of a ‘contamination’ from the later view of the writer himself as it evolved at a later date, as we do perhaps in the case of Lampert. Bruno, Saxonicum Bellum c. 26, ed. H.-E. Lohmann, MGH Deutsches Mittelalter II (Leipzig, 1937), p. 30; MGH Const., ed. L. Weiland (Hannover, 1893), I, no. 106, c. 6, p. 158. The argument was also used on the royal side: see Lampert, Annales ad a. 1073, p. 157: ‘violatae regiae maiestatis iniuriam non ad se solum pertinere, publicam esse contumeliam omnium eorum, qui se regem creassent’; and Bruno, Saxonicum Bellum c. 30, pp. 32–3. See Keller, Deutschland (as above, n. 18), pp. 84–5. Thietmar, Chronicon V, 31, p. 257 [trans. Warner, p. 226]: ‘tum iniquam presumpcionem Bolizlai et aspiracione Henrici dissimulans . . .’; Annales Altahenses ad a. 1044, p. 38: ‘rex illum [Gottfried] ad se venire praecepit, quod ille causa dissimulationis indubitanter fecit’. Contrast the view of Boshof, ‘Lothringen’, p. 71, that this should be understood not as a deceptive manoeuvre, but as an attempt not to allow the breach to become too public. Cf. Annales Altahenses ad a. 1069, 1070, pp. 77, 79, for ‘dissimulation’ on Henry IV’s part in the case of Otto of Northeim.

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he was confronted by a revolt. Of course, there were actions that could not be ignored: the second revolt of Gottfried of Lotharingia began with the destruction of Nijmegen and Verdun,121 and the Saxon revolt of 1073 also from its outset left no room for argument about how to interpret it. But not all revolts in this period began so violently or expressively, not even such a dangerous conspiracy as that of 1055.122 The forms of conflict-settlement also differed somewhat from those customary in the conduct of feuds: by definition they took into account the ruler’s position, and that was something specific to this type of conflict. Apart from the deaths of the rebels, there were three possible ways of resolving such conflict in this period. The first could come about as a quasijudicial process.123 In the second, the ruler could accept the rebels’ unconditional surrender, and then do with them what he thought fit, though this did not mean he would act arbitrarily. In a charter of Henry IV, this kind of decision was expressed by the phrase, ‘to give satisfaction for justice or for mercy’ (pro iustitia [vel] pro misericordia satisfacere).124 The third outcome was a peaceful settlement, just as could happen in a ‘private’ feud, which was reached between the two parties, without any submission. These three possibilities can be examined in turn. It is hard to provide a legal categorisation of the political process in this period, and perhaps harder still to give a political one! The introduction of a ‘judicial procedure’ signified, generally speaking, an intent to provide a more clear-cut way of doing things. In an extreme case, the ruler, through his control of the so-called palace-tribunal, could more or less impose a kind of consensual exclusion of one magnate from the political community and 121 122

123

124

See above, p. 362. For the events, see Steindorff, Heinrich III., vol. II, pp. 317–21. Conrad of Bavaria had fellowconspirators as early as 1053, depicted as foreshadowing a later phase of revolt: Annales Altahenses ad a. 1053, p. 49; see also ibid. p. 77 for Adalbert’s fellow-conspirators, and for those of Henry of Schweinfurt, Thietmar, Chronicon V, 33, p. 258 [trans. Warner, p. 227]. ‘Quasi-judicial’ because it is well known that the so-called ‘political’ trials of the eleventh century pose considerable problems of interpretation for legal historians. See F. Güterbock, Der Prozeß Heinrichs des Löwen (Berlin, 1909), pp. 199–202; H. Niese, ‘Zum Prozeß Heinrichs des Löwen’, ZRG, GA 34 (1913), pp. 197–212; H. Mitteis, ‘Politische Prozesse des früheren Mittelalters in Deutschland und Frankreich’, Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Klasse (1926/7), 3, pp. 23–42. The still-indispensable source-collection is O. Franklin, Das Reichshofgericht im Mittelalter, 1 (Weimar, 1867), and see also O. Franklin, ‘Das königliche Reichshofgericht in der Zeit von Heinrich I. bis Lothar von Sachsen’, Forschungen zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte 4 (1872), pp. 465–534. The recent collection, Die Urkundenregesten zur Tätigkeit des deutschen Königs- und Hofsgerichts bis 1451, vol. I: Die Zeit von Konrad I. bis Heinrich VI. 911–1197, ed. B. Diestelkamp and E. Rotter (Cologne, 1988), does not yield much for our period, because it is strongly documentbound. See now Althoff, ‘Königsherrschaft und Konfliktbewältigung’, pp. 280–8. MGH DD VI, Die Urkunden Heinrichs IV, ed. D. von Gladiss and A. Gawlik (Berlin and Hannover, 1941–78), D H IV 402, for Utrecht, 1 February 1089.


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at the same time draw in the other members of that community along with him, as his supporters in the dispute. Precisely for this reason, there was often a certain tension about whether things ought to be conducted in a generally trial-like way. There was a clear case of this in the proceedings against Margrave Gunzelin of Meissen in 1009.125 Here, Henry II had intervened in a feud between Gunzelin and his nephew, Count Hermann of Meissen, and tried to make it into his own feud. According to Thietmar, a string of indictments was brought against Gunzelin. When he then demanded that the assembled princes should pass judgement, they in effect hesitated to do so and instead recommended Gunzelin to give in. In the dispute between Conrad II and Adalbero, the princes were not immediately willing to let themselves be made into tools to serve Conrad’s purposes, and they appealed to the crown prince Henry. Conrad, however, expected a judgement ‘to order’, delivered as he liked it: ‘he had commanded the princes . . . that they should remove from A. his duchy and the march’ (principibus . . . quatinus ipsi A. ducatum suum et marcam iudicio abdicarent, preceperat).126 Later too, we find cases in which the king practically had to bully the assembled magnates into a judgement, as in the trial of Otto of Northeim, and perhaps also that of Conrad of Bavaria.127 As soon as there was a move to formal procedure and the declaration of judgement, however, any kind of free speech was obviously unthinkable: cuius placitum, eius iudicium (whoever held the court, also had the judgement). Hence many judgements were delivered in the absence of the accused.128 To appear before such a court could have seemed fairly pointless. It was a surprising exception when Gottfried of Lotharingia did present himself in such circumstances.129 To fail to present yourself was seen, not so much, in procedural terms, as contempt of court, but in political terms, as rebellion and high treason, in just the same way that simply not to appear at a royal assembly when you had received an invitation was a hostile act.130 What the ‘court’ had established was the declaration of a face-to-face 125 126 127 128

129 130

Thietmar, Chronicon VI, 54, pp. 340–2 [trans. Warner, pp. 274–5]. There is a good commentary by Leyser, Rule and Conflict, pp. 100–1. Die a¨ ltere Wormser Briefsammlung, no. 35, p. 50. On Otto, see Lange, ‘Grafen von Northeim’ (as above, n. 50), pp. 35–6; on Conrad, see the comments of Hermann of Reichenau, Chronicon, cited above, n. 114. Mitteis, ‘Politische Prozesse’, pp. 24–5. On Mitteis’s views on the interpretation of these cases as trials for contumacy, see now Althoff, ‘Königsherrschaft und Konfliktbewältigung’, p. 281 and n. 62. See above, n. 120. See for instance Lampert, Annales ad a. 1076, pp. 263, 264; Ekkehard, Chronica ad a. 1114, p. 310, 1115, p. 314, and 1124, p. 368; Annales Palidenses ad a. 1115, p. 129.

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relationship, which under the circumstances legitimised a feud not only against the ruler but also against his friends and supporters. This way of seeing things can perhaps produce some clarification. In the first place, it becomes clear why efforts to have disputes between the two last Salian rulers and their enemies settled by a court procedure so often foundered. Rarely did such efforts come to anything more than preliminary talks and discussions – for one simple reason: the modern idea of a tribunal which allowed people to speak freely was completely alien to the eleventh century. This is as true for the princely tribunals with their oppositional procedures as for the royal tribunal. Even when a meeting was agreed, there was frequent tension over the location and the programme, that is, in fact, over the question of which of the two sides controlled the tribunal. A typical example was the shifting in 1120 of a princely assembly at Fulda to a later date at Worms, thanks to the pressure of Henry V. He did not appear at Fulda; and so most of the Saxons went home, instead of appearing at Worms.131 A second thing that becomes understandable is the increasing use of charges of treason (reus maiestatis), and specifically that variant form in which the accused is alleged to have planned or sought the ruler’s death.132 This is what happened in the most significant political trials of the eleventh century, such as those of Thiemo Billung, Otto of Northeim and Ekbert of Meissen, and also in the revolt of 1055.133 Here was an accusation with which the ruler could easily force a condemnation. But in Henry V’s reign, this strategy seems never to have worked at all; and that was probably why Henry turned instead to arbitrary actions. Both in the case of the Count Palatine Siegfried in 1109 and in that of Adalbert of Mainz in 1112, it was asserted that they had conspired against the ruler’s life, but Henry V did not take it for granted that the accused would be condemned, nor did he initiate a series of legal moves against him, but he simply punished him, apparently by force of his royal authority.134 Comparable behaviour on Henry’s part can also be seen in other cases, such as that of Louis the 131 132

133

134

Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. VII, p. 148, n. 4. The earliest example I know of concerned two Saxon nobles under Conrad II in 1035: see Bresslau, Konrad II., vol. II, p. 135. Here the charge was expressly declared to be unfounded, and attributed to the intrigues of enemies. Something similar can probably be inferred in most of the cases discussed below. Whether the charge stuck or not depended on the ruler. For Thiemo, see Althoff, ‘Königsherrschaft und Konfliktbewältigung’, p. 282; for Gebhard and Conrad, see Annales Altahenses ad a. 1055, p. 51: ‘augustum vita simul et regno privare’; for Otto of Northeim, see Lange, ‘Grafen von Northeim’, pp. 31–2; for Ekbert, see MGH, DD H IV, ed. D. von Gladiss and P. Kehr (Hannover, 1941–78), no. 386, p. 402. Siegfried: Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. VI, p. 92 (there is an unjustified mention in the main text here of a ‘legal judgement’); Adalbert: ibid., pp. 279–82.


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Leaper, who submitted to Henry and made his peace with him only to be thrown into prison without any further legal proceedings, or that of Count Rainald of Bar, whom Henry threatened with being hanged under martial law.135 Actions like these certainly contributed to the atmospheric disturbances that made possible the forming of the great north-German coalition against Henry V in 1114–15. Actions like these attest a lack of consensus within the political community. Another form of conflict-settlement current in this period was the deditio. This was a surrender-ritual that required the rebel to appear before the ruler at a great assembly, or anyway at a time when the court consisted of more than just the imperial familia, hence was ‘public’, and throw himself to the ground before the ruler. Often, if not invariably, it was reported of rebels that they looked like penitents,136 clad in hairshirts and with bare feet, ‘as the royal honour required’.137 Such surrender to mercy or disgrace, that is, the deditio of the narrative sources,138 although at first glance it might look much more dangerous and risky than a legal process, was actually preferred to a formal trial at the beginning of our period. The reason was simple: the price that the ruler had to pay for the public recognition of his authority and the public humiliation of his enemy was largely to forego inflicting punishment with any lasting effects.139 Just as in war, it was possible to do what you wanted with a fortress and its garrison that you had captured by force, whereas surrender without a struggle nearly always secured good treatment (free passage, keeping weapons, and so forth), so it was also with rebellions. After a deditio, the ruler might at least take away the rebel’s imperial fiefs, but very often the rebel would be reinvested with them shortly afterwards. The punishments of imprisonment and exile which the ruler claimed the right to impose were often of very brief duration, as in the cases of Ernst, Conrad the Younger, Gottfried of Lotharingia, or Gebhard 135 136

137

138

139

Louis: ibid., pp. 277, 287; Rainald: ibid., pp. 279–82. Cf. the case of Godebald of Utrecht, above, p. 371. As in the cases of Henry of Schweinfurt, Thietmar, Chronicon VI, 2, p. 277 [trans. Warner, p. 238]; Poppo of Aquileia, see below, n. 166; Bratislav of Bohemia, below, n. 137; the Saxons in 1075, below, n. 152; and Lothar of Süpplingenburg in 1114, below, n. 156. Annales Altahenses ad a. 1041, p. 27: ‘procidit ille [Bratislav] ante consessum illorum discalciatus, ut poscebat honor regius’. Admittedly, this is the case of a man who certainly was a rebel but might be classed as a foreigner, but in general there was no hard and fast distinction between the treatment of rebellious magnates and the treatment of those who, according to Salian perceptions of the Reich, were dependent princes, such as the rulers of Poland and Hungary. A little collection of examples like that offered by Bresslau, Konrad II., vol. II, p. 80, n. 1, could easily be enlarged, as in A. Vogeler, Otto von Northeim in den Jahren 1070–1083, Göttingen dissertation (Minden, 1880), pp. 116–17. So, Althoff, ‘Königsherrschaft und Konfliktbewältigung’, pp. 276, 290.

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of Regensburg,140 although being set free and restored to the ruler’s good grace might cost the former rebel something in money or land.141 There were several reasons for these mild punishments. It is tempting, of course, to invoke the popular socio-biology fashionable these days and point to the gestures of submission displayed by wolves and apes when beaten in fights; and maybe species-specific survival reflexes of this kind actually did play a role in the eleventh-century scenarios I have been discussing. Probably more important, though, was the ruler’s perception of himself not so much as a gentleman but as vicarius Christi and the possibility open to him on such occasions of presenting himself as such. The use of rituals borrowed from the practice of penance (which were admittedly already becoming obsolete, up to a point, in the eleventh century) gave Henry II, Conrad II and Henry III the opportunity to imitate the heavenly Lord and put mercy before justice and reward repentance with forgiveness;142 and the loss of face suffered by the noble who submitted was perhaps made somewhat less painful by the ritualised form of the submission.143 Just as important were the circumstances in which such capitulations took place – circumstances which for the most part were not public, and which are often invisible to us: negotiations by internuncii (intermediaries) beforehand, the intercessions of influential members of the political elite at court, especially the queen or empress and the bishops, who often acted as mediators of peace and a compromise and then stood as guarantors to see that the terms of the compromise were carried out.144 A well-prepared deditio could seem the most obvious solution, the way out of an impasse, the best means of concluding a peace-settlement after a revolt. Two particularly revealing accounts in our sources bring this out very clearly. In his Chronicle under the year 917, Hermann of Reichenau describes how the Swabian magnates Erchanger and Berthold appeared at a meeting with King Conrad I to which they had gone ‘to surrender in hope of agreement’ (spe pactionis ad deditionem) and were executed on the spot: in other words, they had submitted in the expectation that a peaceful outcome would be 140

141 142 143 144

Bresslau, Konrad II., vol. I, pp. 219, 223; Althoff, ‘Königsherrschaft und Konfliktbewältigung’, p. 280 (on Ernst); Boshof, ‘Lothringen’, p. 85; Steindorff, Heinrich III., vol. II, pp. 323–4. Significantly, in the case of Henry of Schweinfurt, Henry II insisted ‘ut . . . ipsum autem, quamdiu voluisset, in custodia detineret’, Thietmar, Chronicon VI, 2, p. 277 [trans. Warner, p. 238]. Waitz, Verfassungsgeschichte VI, pp. 579, n. 4, 590, n. 4. On the representation of such proceedings in ideological terms as ‘noble vengeance’, see above, p. 372. Leyser, Rule and Conflict, pp. 98–102, puts strong emphasis on this aspect of ‘sacral kingship’. On all this, and on ‘controlled escalation’ in such conflicts, see Althoff, ‘Königsherrschaft und Konfliktbewältigung’.


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negotiated.145 Although Hermann’s story of this day of execution is not recorded elsewhere, his explanation of events cannot entirely be attributed to an acquaintance with contemporary sources that are no longer available to us. In fact what we have here is a fuller version, elaborated from the viewpoint of the Salian period, of the bald statement of the Annales Alamannici: ‘Erchanger, Berthold and Liutfrid were killed by a trick’ (Erchanger, Perahtolt et Liutfrid occiduntur dolose).146 This is how the treacherous execution of a rebel in the time of Henry III might well have been played out; and it actually chimes with a comparable expression of surprise at failure to observe the rules of the game in a report of Henry’s treatment of Beatrix of Tuscany in 1055: ‘Beatrix, who came to the emperor to surrender, was held [prisoner] because of the charge against her husband, despite the fact that [a pledge of] faith had been given.’147 A generation later, Lampert of Hersfeld wrote of Gottfried of Lotharingia that he had again taken up arms against Henry III because he had not improved his position by the intercession of princes nor by his own voluntary submission.148 Though Lampert confuses the context and chronology of Gottfried’s revolt,149 the way he mentions deditio as an obvious means to an end is still worth noting. The first years of Henry IV’s independent rule saw repeated use of this ritual. This kind of submission can probably be assumed at the end of Dedi’s revolt in 1069, because Lampert writes of a deditio in this context.150 In the cases of Otto of Northeim and Magnus Billung, who submitted to Henry IV at Whitsun 1071, the sources speak several times of a deditio.151 The mass submission of the Saxons at Speyer after they lost the battle of Homburg in 1075 which had been preceded by the deditio of one of the Saxon princes, made a particularly strong impression: they were without their weapons, with heads bowed and barefoot.152 Here, as in so much else, the Saxon revolt marked a great turning-point. After 1075, deditio was practised only 145 146 147

148 150 151 152

Hermann of Reichenau, Chronicon, p. 112. E. Dümmler, Geschichte des ostfränkischen Reiches, vol. III, 2nd edn (Leipzig, 1888), p. 611, offers more sources on this event. Annales Alamannici ad a. 916, MGH SS I, p. 56. Chronici Herimanni Continuatio ad a. 1055, MGH SS XIII, p. 730: ‘Beatrix imperatori ad deditionem veniens, causa mariti sui, quamquam data fide, tenetur.’ See also Lampert of Hersfeld, Annales ad a. 1055, p. 67: ‘Beatricen tamen quasi per deditionem acceptam secum abduxit.’ 149 Boshof, ‘Lothringen’. Lampert of Hersfeld, Annales ad a. 1046, p. 60. Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. I, p. 622; further sources are cited by Fenske, Adelsopposition, p. 36. Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. II, p. 70, n. 60. See also Lange, ‘Grafen von Northeim’, pp. 43–4. Carmen de bello Saxonico Book III, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH SRG (Hannover, 1889), lines 284–6. See for further sources that overwhelmingly speak in terms of deditio, Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. II, p. 534, and for the individual surrenders, pp. 512–13.

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seldom. Two charters of Henry IV can be read as implying that the young Margrave Ekbert of Meissen had submitted in this way.153 Towards the end of Henry IV’s reign, we hear of a deditio after the revolt of Henry of Limburg in 1101.154 Henry V may have received the deditio of Lothar of Süpplingenburg and Rudolf of Stade in 1112 (though the submission here very clearly has the character of a mediated, negotiated peace-settlement),155 so that he could stage, at his own wedding-feast, probably for the last time, a full deditio for Lothar of Süpplingenburg, with Lothar as penitent.156 In 1135, the end of the conflict between Lothar III and the two Staufer brothers Frederick and Conrad at Fulda, Bamberg and Mühlhausen was a last echo of a practice that could once have been termed almost normal.157 There were good reasons for the deditio’s progressive loss of significance, despite its brief revival in the reign of Henry V and the early years of Henry V. The so-called desacralisation of kingship hardly played any part in this. Right to the end, Henry IV and Henry V themselves had not wanted to acknowledge or accept this trend: indeed a peace-settlement with rebels in the traditional way would have been a good occasion to parade the unimpaired position of the king as vicarius Christi. Viewed from the Salians’ standpoint, a likelier explanation lies in the desacralisation of the submission-ritual itself. Henry’s own submission at Canossa was, in fact, less a remodelled public penance, of the kind practised already in the Carolingian period and again by Henry III,158 than a deditio. Henry IV stood before the gates of Canossa as a rebel brought low. For the accomplishment of a deditio, such mediator-figures as female associates and relatives of the royal family (Matilda of Tuscany, Adelaide of Turin) and higher clergy 153

154 155 156 157

158

MGH DD H IV, no. 386, 7 February 1086, for Utrecht: ‘Ekberto marchioni rebellionem . . . cum ad requirendam gratiam nostrum humiliates fuisset . . . indulsimus’; DD H IV, no. 402, 1 February 1089: ‘Nos . . . nullam vindicate vicem eirependimus, sed penitentem statim recepimus.’ Using penance to put all the rebels on the same level is another characteristic feature of deditio, as noted above. For the case of Ekbert, see now Althoff, ‘Königsherrschaft und Konfliktbewältigung’, pp. 284–5. Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. V, pp. 284–5. Ibid., vol. VI, p. 254. See also Fenske, Adelsopposition, p. 342, and Giese, Stamm der Sachsen, p. 187. Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. VI, pp. 285–7. W. Bernhardi, Jahrbücher des deutschen Reiches unter Lothar III (Leipzig, 1879), pp. 555, 562, 578. Particularly ‘Salian’ was Frederick’s submission at Fulda, nudis pedibus and with his kinswoman, the Empress Richenza, as intercessor. For precedents, admittedly in rather different circumstances, see H. Zimmermann, ‘Der Canossagang von 1077. Wirkungen und Wirklichkeit’, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz, Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, (1975), no. 5, pp. 163–5; R. Schieffer, ‘Von Mailand nach Canossa. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der christlichen Herrscherbuße von Theodosius dem Großen bis zu Heinrich IV’, DA 28 (1972), pp. 334–70, esp. pp. 352–5, on royal penances in the Carolingian period; and for the case of Henry III, Schnith, ‘Recht und Friede’ (as above, n. 56), pp. 40–4. [See further in this book, chapter 9, above.]


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(Anselm of Lucca, Henry’s godfather Hugh of Cluny) functioned now as intercessors for the king with the pope.159 If the conclusion was a compromise, as with any secular deditio, that meant not only a considerable loss of face for Henry IV: from now on the whole ritual was bound up with unpleasant associations. But still more important was a withering of trust. The management of deditio presupposed observing the rules of the game, so that people had confidence in the intercessors and still more in the ruler himself. Already under Henry III, there were signs of a rather different way of doing things. Gottfried of Lotharingia had first submitted, and then after he was set free he had had to give his son as a hostage,160 a method taken up again by Henry IV. Gottfried had been unable to re-establish peace by his deditio alone. The case of Beatrix of Tuscany has already given food for thought.161 Moreover, intercessors came to be seen as faulty goods. There seems to have been a retreat in the political significance of the queen in the second third of the eleventh century – whether for personal or institutional reasons is hard to determine. Agnes and Bertha, unlike Kunigunde and Gisela, do not appear in the exchanges between rulers and rebels. At the same time, and especially thanks to developments at court during Henry IV’s minority, the acceptability of bishops as effectively neutral mediators seems to have dwindled. Thus Adalbert of Bremen’s intercession for Otto of Northeim and Magnus Billung did not turn out happily.162 The trust that had already started crumbling because of such changes was further destroyed by Henry IV. This happened especially because of his tendency to treat deditio not as part of a universally understood peace-making process, but as a selfcondemnation with legal consequences. We hear of a ius deditionis, which changed the deditio from an act into a legal situation.163 Henry also treated the punishments involved here in a much more arbitrary way, or at any rate his conduct was perceived as arbitrary, and that can hardly be attributed only to the hatred of our sources, Lampert and Bruno. The royal idea of deditio was not accepted by the magnates, who regarded it as an inadmissible piece 159 160 162 163

See now Zimmermann, ‘Canossagang’, pp. 37–8, 134–6. 161 See above. Sigebert of Gembloux, Chronicon ad a. 1045, MGH SS VI, p. 358. For a changed understanding of the episcopal office, see above, pp. 369–70; for Adalbert’s mediation, see Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. II, p. 71, n. 60. See Henry IV’s argument in the case of Magnus Billung as reported by Lampert, Annales ad a. 1073, p. 149: ‘Ipsum et omnia quae ipsius essent iam pridem deditionis iure in potestatem regiam cessisse, nec eum obiecto quondam crimine adhuc ita purgatum, ut sui vel suarum rerum iure gentium traditionem ullam liberam haberet.’ For a similar argument in connexion with the Lüneburg, see Lampert, Annales, p. 160: Henry besieged the fortress ‘non aliam ob rationem, nisi quod omnia quae predicti ducis fuerant in potestatem regiam iure deditionis per Magnum filium eius venisse argumentabatur’.

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of kingly aggrandisement. This difference of opinion lay at the root of the controversy over the effects of the submission at Speyer.164 The magnates repeatedly brought forward the demand that the king should annul the deditio, that is, should annul the punishments that had followed it.165 The relatives and associates of those concerned, very significantly, compelled the freeing of these men in the 1070s and again in the 1110s.166 It is not surprising, in view of this lack of consensus and trust, that we can register an increasing number of negotiated peace-settlements from the second half of the eleventh century. In such cases, no deditio occurred, and judgements of the palace tribunal were implicitly omitted. In practice, negotiations were undertaken between equals. Earlier attempts to settle conflicts between ruler and magnates in this way had failed, as in the case of Ernst in 1027, or Gottfried in 1044–5. The new trend seems to have set in already in the 1070s, though we learn little about the details. Henry IV was able to win over a number of magnates from the opposition, and anything other than a deal voluntarily entered into by both sides could hardly be contemplated.167 The peace-settlement between Henry IV and the south-German princes in 1098 was reached in this way.168 In the case of Robert of Flanders, there was a very clear contrast between his treatment and that of his predecessor Baldwin in a similar situation nearly a century earlier. A peace-settlement was reached in both cases, but Baldwin had had to make a submission in 1007, whereas in 1103 this could no longer be required of Robert.169 The emergence of princes regarded as having equal rights at the end of the civil war was therefore nothing new, but only an extension of pre-existing political practice. As scholars have often noted, a sense of equal rights was expressed both in the form of the peace-settlement 164 165 166

167

168 169

See above, p. 383, and also Giese, Stamm der Sachsen, p. 161. Lampert, Annales, pp. 237, 262, 264. For Magnus Billung, see Lampert, Annales ad a. 1073, pp. 160–2, and for the forced liberations of 1076, ibid., pp. 266–8, 273–6. For Adalbert of Mainz, Louis the Leaper and Wiprecht of Groitzsch, see Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. VI, pp. 337–9, and vol. VII, pp. 24–5. Just how much importance earlier rulers attached to the secure custody of such subdued rebels is clear from the actions of Poppo of Aquileia when Aribert of Milan, who had been handed over to him for safe-keeping, escaped: ‘illo fugiente reus maiestatis [Poppo] effectus est, et ipse aufugit timidus. Postea vero, veniens discalciatus et laneis ad carnem tectus, gratiam impetravit imperatoris,’ Annales Altahenses ad a. 1037, p. 21. See the cases of the noble freemen [Edelfreien] Friedrich and Wilhelm: Bruno, Saxonicum Bellum cc. 16, 45, pp. 23–4, 44. More spectacular was Otto of Northeim’s change of heart in 1075, see Lange, ‘Grafen von Northeim’, pp. 56–7: Otto certainly took part in the mass-submission at Speyer, but he had clearly entered into negotiations on his own account with Henry IV beforehand. Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. V, pp. 22–3. Hirsch et al., Heinrich II., vol. II (as above, n. 2), p. 12; Meyer von Knonau, Heinrich IV., vol. VI, pp. 179–80, and vol. VII, p. 69, for the repetition of the peace-making, also without any deditio, under Henry V in 1107.


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between Henry V and the princes and in the way the princes functioned as ‘neutral’ intermediaries in the conflict (you could almost say: feud) between emperor and pope.170 In the period considered in this paper, much remained constant. In particular, the preparedness to use violence on the part of the members of the Reich’s elite did not diminish. But what did change was the position of the ruler. The restorative phase of Salian policy in the years between 1098 and 1114 shows this very clearly. Here, old methods were applied again, but they had originated in a culture of face-to-face politics which now existed only in fragments. What mattered was that the ruler could no longer function at the same time as player and as umpire, nor could he use the flexibility that that combination had permitted. Moreover, as we have been able to show here, Henry IV and Henry V lacked the power-base, and the acceptance, for a rather arbitrary way of operating. Only after the reestablishment of a certain basic consensus under Lothar III and Frederick I was there again a common game with common rules. But that of course is another story. 170

MGH Const. I, no. 106, p. 158.

chap t e r 20

The medieval German Sonderweg? The empire and its rulers in the high Middle Ages

As medievalists we all know, or think we know, that Germany Was Different.1 In most other European kingdoms, whether English, Scottish, French, Castilian, Aragonese, Portuguese, Sicilian, Neapolitan, Hungarian, Danish or Norwegian, a modernization paradigm seems to apply.2 The period between about 1100 and 1350 saw a Weberian transformation of rulership from a mixture of the charismatic and the patrimonial to the bureaucratic, if only incipiently so. It is not difficult to recite the litany of developments: hereditary rulership ensuring continuity (‘the king is dead, long live the king’);3 hierarchically organized appellate jurisdiction; officials paid at least in part on a salaried basis; institutions which had a fixed existence and often even a permanent physical location and were not wholly dependent on the whims or itinerancy of the ruler for the time being; institutionalized consultation between the ruler and his subjects about legislation and taxation; the 1

2

3

Adapted from the phrase ‘Spain is different’; for the role played by this in the historiography of medieval Spain, see F. Fernández-Armesto, ‘The Survival of a Notion of Reconquista in Late Tenthand Eleventh-Century León’, in Warriors and Churchmen in the High Middle Ages: Festschrift for Karl Leyser, ed T. Reuter (London, 1992), pp. 123–43, at pp. 123–5. For this term and the historiographical tradition it describes, see J. Given, State and Society in Medieval Europe: Gwynedd and Languedoc under Outside Rule (Ithaca NY, 1990), pp. 255–8. For particularly powerful expositions of the model, see J. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton NJ, 1970), and C. W. Hollister and J. W. Baldwin, ‘The Rise of Administrative Kingship: Henry I and Philip Augustus’, AHR 83 (1978), pp. 867–905. As so often, there has been a parallel but largely unrelated discussion in the German-speaking literature, conveniently summarized by N. Bulst, ´ Moderne’, in La Ville, la bourgeoisie et la genèse de l’Etat ‘La Ville, la bourgeoisie et la genèse de l’Etat Moderne (XIIe –XVIIIe siècles), ed. N. Bulst and J.-P. Genet (Paris, 1988), pp. 7–10; the same volume contains a good definition of the phenomena under discussion: J.-P. Genet, ‘Conclusion’, pp. 338–52, ¨ at pp. 338–9. See also the thoughtful remarks by P. Moraw, ‘Uber Entwicklungsunterschiede und Entwicklungsausgleich im deutschen und europäischen Mittelalter. Ein Versuch’, in Hochfinanz, Wirtschaftsräum, Innovation. Festschrift für Wolfgang von Stromer, ed. U. Bestmann, F. Irsigler and J. Schneider (Trier, 1987), II, pp. 583–621, esp. pp. 583–93. For reasons of space I have only touched briefly here on one of the most important aspects of the German Sonderweg, its elective kingship; for a short but incisive demolition of the view that this can only have been a drawback, see J. Gillingham, ‘Elective Kingship and the Unity of Medieval Germany’, German History 9 (1991), pp. 124–35.

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The medieval German Sonderweg?

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general acceptance of the doctrine that all authority derived ultimately from the king, for whom, in a later stage of development, an abstraction like the crown or the state could then be substituted. But the regnum Teutonicum failed to make the transition between Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, to use Perry Anderson’s terminology.4 Germany came to modernity late, differently or not at all, and can thus be said to have experienced a medieval Sonderweg. This term was originally coined to describe the course of German history after the Enlightenment and French Revolution, and pointed to the contrast between Germany’s political development and the gradual transition from autocracy to parliamentary democracy in England, France and the USA. Its implications vary: sometimes it is taken positively to mean that Germany developed in a manner appropriate to its own history; sometimes there is a sense of regret that the pattern found further west was not imitated.5 I am not here going to restate the implicit thesis of Geoffrey Barraclough’s classic study, The Origins of Modern Germany, that many of the origins of the supposed later Sonderweg are to be sought in the Sonderweg of the high Middle Ages.6 That is something which, if it could be demonstrated at all, would need a large book in which to do so, and is in any case open to the objection that the period from 1300 to 1800 is so long that a causality across it hardly seems possible.7 Nor on the other hand do I intend to practise a frivolous 4 5

6

7

These two books were both published in London, 1974. The concept also has political and legitimatory overtones which cannot be discussed here; see HansUlrich Wehler, Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit? Ein polemischer Essay zum ‘Historikerstreit’ (Munich, 1988), pp. 36–8 and n. 17 with further references, in particular to the work of Berendt Faulenbach, and Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge MA, 1988), pp. 102–20. G. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1947), p. ix (preface to first edition): ‘Factors deeply rooted in German history . . . constituted an iron framework . . . [the danger that too much concentration on recent German history] may blind . . . unless awareness of immediate causes and contemporary events is counterbalanced by a deeper understanding of the continuity of history and of its underlying currents . . . There has been a “German problem” since at any rate the beginning of the sixteenth century.’ The work was later translated into German by Friedrich Baethgen and given the still more explicit title Die mittelalterlichen Grundlagen des modernen Deutschlands. An objection very properly raised by the modernist T. Nipperdey, ‘1933 und die Kontinuität der deutschen Geschichte’, in Nachdenken u¨ ber die deutschen Geschichte (Munich, 1990; article first published 1978), pp. 229–30, following Ralph Dahrendorf ’s polemical phrase ‘Tacitean hypotheses’. However, though such long-distance explanations are generally rejected when dealing with the ‘industrial accidents’ of Wilhelminism and Hitler, it now seems to be increasingly fashionable to derive the federal structure of the modern Bundesrepublik from the territorialism of medieval Germany. See Nipperdey’s article in the same collection, ‘Der Föderalismus in der deutschen Geschichte’, pp. 71–131, at pp. 71–5; K. F. Werner, ‘Der fränkisch-französische Königs- und Lehnsstaat bei Heinrich Mitteis. Eine kritische Würdigung’, in Heinrich Mitteis nach hundert Jahren, ed. P. Landau, H. Nehlsen and D. Willoweit (Munich, 1991), pp. 23–46, at p. 46; and most recently the exhibition catalogue Das Reich der Salier 1024–1125 (Sigmaringen, 1992), p. 503.

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revisionism by trying to show that German kingship in the high Middle Ages was just like that practised elsewhere. My intention is simply to illuminate the nature of the German Sonderweg in the high Middle Ages more clearly. In order not to get caught in a tangle of unsubstantiated generalizations I shall take as the texts for my sermon episodes drawn from the 1150s, that is, the opening decade of the reign of Frederick Barbarossa. I shall use these as springboards to jump both forwards to look at further developments and backwards to look at beginnings. I shall also occasionally compare the Reich with the two contemporary kingdoms whose rulers had reigns of much the same length as that of Barbarossa – France under Louis VII and England under Henry II – and I shall finish by offering some general reflections on our conceptions of rulership. I begin with a thoroughly ruined Christmas. Around 20 December 1152 Nicholas bishop of Cambrai heard that Theoderic count of Flanders was making careful preparations to visit the imperial majesty to try to secure the dignitatis Cameracae potestatem, in other words comital rights over the city of Cambrai.8 The bishop was alarmed. Unlike the count, he was not ‘on good terms with money’, nor did the court teem with his relations. After taking counsel he followed after Theoderic, who by this time had already reached the court and been shown the honour of carrying Frederick’s sword before him at the Christmas celebrations. Theoderic had been granted what he desired by Frederick, and had left his kinsman Matthew, duke of Upper Lotharingia, to secure for him a royal mandate which would lead to the count’s being instantly obeyed wherever it was displayed. The scribe entrusted with writing the mandate – it is not clear whether this was a ‘private’ scribe or a member of the royal ‘chancery’9 – had taken a seat in the room of the archbishop of Trier to write it, when the bishop of Cambrai came in; the scribe revealed the contents of the mandate to him and then on the bishop’s advice made himself scarce. Nicholas’s reaction was to go to the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz and Trier and the bishop of Liège and ask them for their support on the grounds that under Frederick’s predecessor they had witnessed an earlier royal judgement in favour of the 8

9

For the following episode see Lambert of Watrelos, Annales Cameracenses, s.a. 1152, ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS XVI (Hannover, 1859), pp. 523–5. There is unfortunately no convenient survey of the complex relations between the bishops of Cambrai, their castellans and the counts of Flanders in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. F. Oppl, ‘Das kaiserliche Mandat im 12. Jahrhundert (1125–1190)’, Mitteilungen des Instituts für o¨sterreichische Geschichtsforschung 84 (1976), pp. 290–327, at pp. 313–14, appears to think that Lambert’s account implies the use of an Empfänger- or Gelegenheitsschreiber; but presumably even a ‘chancery’ scribe would have needed somewhere to work and might have been open to the kinds of pressure described.


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bishop.10 Nicholas stressed their importance for the just government of the kingdom: ‘Well I know that the reins of the whole of the regnum Teutonicum are to be held up by your prudence, enemies to be put down, friends to be guarded, and all enjoy peace by your favour.’11 The bishops accepted Nicholas’s argument that his iniuria was their iniuria, and agreed to keep silent until the mandate was to be read in the king’s presence and sealed. After the piece had been read through in public by the archbishop of Trier, but before it could be sealed, Nicholas asked politely if he too might read it, and having done so he declared theatrically that ‘the count of Flanders has demanded and received consecrated land from the king, against all right and justice’.12 At this point all the archbishops and bishops rose and declared that they would not suffer their colleague’s rights to be diminished; equally, the lay princes insisted that the gift made to Theoderic must be confirmed. The king quieted the assembly and ordered that a messenger should be sent to bring the count back. When he arrived, the king told him that the gift could not stand because the bishop had objected. The count, furious and backed by a large number of lay magnates, expressed his amazement at the king’s change of mind, and Barbarossa was scarcely able to quell the conflict; but in the end the episcopal party won the day. Nicholas then discovered that the count was ‘about to return home in anger’. He asked the count for a truce at least until the feast of St Remigius (11 September), but the count replied that he would sooner take the bishop’s head off his shoulders, were he not the Lord’s anointed, than grant him a truce. On hearing this Nicholas went to Barbarossa and asked him to obtain a truce for Nicholas from the count as a favour, a request which was again opposed by Matthew of Lotharingia and the other duces regni, who advised the count that he would never properly get what he wanted unless he quickly destroyed the bishop’s patria.13 Only with difficulty could Frederick procure 10

11

This appears to be a reference to Die Urkunden Konrads III. und seines Sohnes Heinrich [=DD K III], ed. F. Hausmann, MGH, Die Urkunden der deutschen Könige und Kaiser IX (Vienna, 1969), pp. 257–60, no. 143 (30 December 1145), essentially a restatement of the earlier no. 141 (pp. 254–6, October 1145). However, these diplomata do not record a judgement by the Hofgericht, and of the archbishops and bishops named by Lambert only Henry of Liège witnessed D K III, no. 143. One might be tempted to posit a lost placitum of Conrad III; but the diploma in which Frederick I confirmed Nicholas’s rights at the end of the dispute, Die Urkunden Friedrichs I. [= DD F I ], ed. H. Appelt et al., 5 vols., MGH, Die Urkunden . . . Kaiser X (Hannover, 1975–90), I, pp. 71–3, no. 43 (28 December 1152), is based on D K III, no. 143. It was witnessed by the archbishops of Cologne and Trier and by the bishop of Liège, but not by the archbishop of Mainz, and in view of his relations with Barbarossa – on which see H. Büttner, ‘Erzbischof Heinrich I. von Mainz und die Staufer (1142–53)’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 69 (1958), pp. 247–67, at pp. 265–6 – it is indeed unlikely that Henry of Mainz was present, in spite of Lambert’s claim. 12 Ibid., lines 23–4. 13 Ibid., lines 41–50. Annales Cameracenses, ed. Pertz, p. 524, lines 4–6.

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a truce until Whitsun for Nicholas. The story in effect ends here: there were no immediate hostilities back home, and indeed Nicholas went on a long pilgrimage the next year, which shows that the count of Flanders could give way more easily to the bishop of Cambrai on his home ground than in the floodlighting of an assembly.14 This episode, recounted in admirable detail by a contemporary chronicler from the region, must be allowed to dissolve slowly on the tongue in order to bring out the full flavour of the aristocratic or princely commonwealth which was the regnum Teutonicum, a flavour which, as I shall try to show, marked the east Frankish/German kingdom from its beginnings in the ninth century and was not simply a product of the supposed decline of royal power and authority in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. We may begin with honour and status. As we have seen, the dispute between Nicholas and Theoderic was about rights described in terms of status – the dignitatis Cameracae potestatem – and it could not be settled simply by a reference to the earlier judgement under Conrad III and the principle of the res iudicata. The bishops supported Nicholas because their honour was publicly pledged; the lay princes supported Theoderic for the same reason. Questions of law played little part. By comparison, accounts of disputes before the English king in the twelfth century show a different style of political discourse. Positions were justified by reference to law rather than to honour, as one can see from the Chronicle of Battle Abbey or from the various accounts of the Councils of Northampton and Clarendon.15 Within the Reich, honour was all-important. When Frederick returned from his first Italian expedition in 1155 he had to deal with a dispute between the count palatine of the Rhine and the archbishop of Mainz, who had disturbed the peace during his absence. He did so not by confiscations or dismissal from office but by ordering the count and ten of his complices to undergo the humiliation of carrying a dog publicly for a mile, a punishment recorded not infrequently for such offences.16 Even the res publica could be conceived in terms of collective honour: Nicholas’s argument that an 14

15

16

Ibid., s.a. 1153, pp. 525–9. Conflict did break out again on Nicholas’s return from his pilgrimage, but in Lambert’s account at least it had different origins, and ended with reconciliation and alliance between Nicholas and Theoderic. The Chronicle of Battle Abbey, ed. E. Searle (Oxford, 1980), pp. 145, 175–209 (though for an argument from rank and status, see p. 155). For the Councils of Clarendon and Northampton see the very full accounts in F. Barlow, Thomas Becket (London, 1986), pp. 88–116 and D. Knowles, Thomas Becket (London, 1970), pp. 77–100. Ottonis et Rahewini Gesta Friderici I. imperatoris, II, 46, 3rd edn by G. Waitz and B. von Simson, MGH SRG XLVI (Hannover, 1912), p. 154. See on this practice Bernd Schwenk, ‘Das Hundetragen. Ein Rechtsbrauch im Mittelalter’, HJ 110 (1990), pp. 289–308.


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offence against him was an offence against all was a common one in the Reich, one used for example by both Henry IV and his opponents in the civil war of the 1070s.17 Honour and status were public affairs, matters of face, and they were the main issues at assemblies. Indeed, Frederick’s main problem in the 1150s was to achieve a general pacification of the major families in the Reich after the querelles allemandes of the previous generation which would save the face of all the major magnates – Berthold of Zähringen, the Babenberger Henry, Henry the Lion, the bishops of Freising and Bremen – and this was evidently conceived of as a kind of gigantic family settlement.18 Much of the settlement was done by careful public adjustments of title and standing, as for example with the dukes of Zähringen and Austria;19 and it was done before an audience constantly prepared to mock. Otto of Freising’s comment on Frederick’s election that there were two families in the Reich, one of which produced kings (the Staufer) and the other great dukes (the Welfs) was not a piece of simple politological observation: it was a satirical deprecation of the Welfs’ claims to grandeur, as were his remarks on the titles of the dukes of Zähringen.20 These matters were far more important in contemporaries’ minds than any ideas of constitutional reform implicit in the creation of new duchies; the literary locus classicus for the politics of the Reich is the furious squabble in the Nibelungenlied between the two queens on the steps of the church over who should enter first.21 17

18

19

20

21

T. Reuter, ‘Unruhestiftung, Fehde, Rebellion, Widerstand. Gewalt und Frieden in der Politik der Salierzeit’, in Gesellschaftlicher und ideengeschichtlicher Wandel im Reich der Salier, ed. S. Weinfurter, Die Salier und das Reich, III (Sigmaringen, 1991), pp. 297–325, at p. 316, with n. 118 [in this book, chapter 19, above]. See Frederick’s own statement on the settlement of the Welf-Babenberger dispute, as reported by Otto of Freising, Gesta Friderici, II, 47, ed. Waitz and von Simson, p. 155: ‘Preponebat hoc princeps omnibus eventuum suorum successibus, si tam magnos sibique tam affines imperii sui principes sine sanguinis effusione in concordiam revocare posset’, and also the wording of the diploma which settled the dispute between Henry the Lion and Otto of Freising over the Isar-crossings at Munich and Unterföhring, DD F I, no. 158. T. Zotz, ‘Dux de Zaringen – dux Zaringiae. Zum zeitgenössischen Verständnis eines neuen Herzogtums im 12. Jahrhundert’, Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins 139 (1991), pp. 1–44, esp. ¨ pp. 23–9; H. Appelt, Privilegium Minus. Das staufische Kaisertum und die Babenberger in Osterreich (Vienna, 1973), pp. 32–54, esp. p. 42. Otto of Freising, Gesta Friderici, I, 7–9 (Zähringer), II, 2 (Welfs), ed. Waitz and von Simson, pp. 23– 6, 103. See the comments of G. Althoff, ‘Die Zähringerherrschaft im Urteil Ottos von Freising’, in Die Zähringer. Eine Tradition und ihre Erforschung, ed. K. Schmid, 2 vols. (Sigmaringen, 1986), I, pp. 43–58, at pp. 44–7. Nibelungenlied, fit XIV, trans. A. T. Hatto (Harmondsworth, 1965), pp. 111–18. For the adjustments of the 1150s as ‘constitutional reform’ see O. Freiherr von Dungern, ‘Constitutional Reorganization and Reform under the Hohenstaufen’, in Medieval Germany 911–1250, ed. G. Barraclough, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1938), II, pp. 203–34, and, with similar concepts but slightly more modern terminology, P. Munz, Frederick Barbarossa (London, 1969), pp. 92–183 (with a very questionable link

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The next thing to note is that Frederick, rather like the rulers in the Nibelungenlied, was passive, almost helpless during the dispute. He did not appeal to general legal principles, but waited for a decision to emerge, and even then he was not the sole arbiter of justice. The royal court appears in the twelfth century as a body barely subject to royal control or manipulation,22 not least because of the principle of judgement by peers: Swabians by Swabians; ministeriales by ministeriales.23 It was one of the chief gravamina against Henry V that he had side-stepped it, not that he had manipulated it;24 German rulers, unlike Angevins, were rarely in a position to sell or delay justice. This collective element in political justice may help to explain why the German rulers came only late and imperfectly to stand at the apex of a judicial hierarchy, and why the mechanism of appellate jurisdiction – a much more central element in the development of western European rulership than the position of the ruler at the pyramid of a feudal hierarchy, on which Mitteis and others have put so much stress – never played the same role in the Reich as it did further west.25 There were indeed people

22

23

24

25

between the changes north of the Alps and Barbarossa’s Italienpolitik, on which see below, pp. 407–8; K. Heinemeyer, ‘König und Reichsfürsten in der späten Salier- und frühen Stauferzeit’, Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte 122 (1986), pp. 1–41 provides a more sensible perspective, as do the other contributions to the same volume by Boshof, Krieger and Moraw). For questions of rank and status in the politics of an earlier period see H. Fichtenau, Lebensordnungen des 10. Jahrhunderts. Studien u¨ ber Denkart und Existenz im einstigen Karolingerreich, 2 vols. paginated as 1, Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, 30, I–II (Stuttgart, 1984), pp. 11–47 (trans. P. Geary, Living in the Tenth Century (Chicago, 1991), pp. 3–29). The classic study is H. Appelt, ‘Kaiserurkunde und Fürstensentenz unter Friedrich Barbarossa’, Mitteilungen des Instituts für o¨sterreichische Geschichtsforschung 71 (1963), pp. 33–47; see also O. Franklin, Das Reichshofgericht im Mittelalter, 3 books, in 2 vols. (Weimar, 1867–9; rpt Hildesheim, 1967), pp. 11–131. The collection Urkundenregesten zur Tätigkeit des deutschen Königs- und Hofgerichts bis 1451, 1: Die Zeit von Konrad I. bis Heinrich VI., ed. B. Diestelkamp and E. Rotter (Cologne, 1988), is unfortunately deeply flawed as a result of the editorial decision – hopelessly unrealistic for this period – to try to reconstruct what a register of the royal court might have looked like, had one been kept. As a result it omits numerous crucial and well-documented cases; the dispute between Nicholas and Theoderic, for example, is not included because the editors’ terms of reference did not allow them to use the Lambert passage and they failed to notice that D F I, no. 43 contains a reference to the judgement of the princes in its arenga! Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 23–34 and 51–9, has valuable remarks on the collective nature of royal justice, not just in the regnum Teutonicum. See e.g. D F I, no. 157 (Swabians by Swabians); Diestelkamp and Rotter, Urkundenregesten (as n. 22), Henry VI, no. 6 (ministeriales by ministeriales). I regret that I have mislaid a reference to women giving judgement in a case affecting a woman’s rights. The material is assembled in G. Meyer von Knonau, Jahrbücher des deutschen Reiches unter Heinrich IV. und Heinrich V., 7 vols. (Leipzig, 1890–1909), VI, pp. 92–3 (Count Palatine Siegfried), 262– 3 (Archbishop Adalbert of Mainz), 286–7 and 308–12 (Saxon princes). W. Giese, Der Stamm der Sachsen und das Reich im ottonischer und salischer Zeit (Wiesbaden, 1979), pp. 187–90, seems to me to underestimate the cumulative effect of the earlier incidents on the Saxon uprising of 1114–15. For the ‘feudal hierarchy’ see above all H. Mitteis, Lehnrecht und Staatsgewalt (Weimar, 1933) and The State in the High Middle Ages, trans. H. F. Orton, North-Holland Medieval Studies, 1 (Amsterdam,


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in the Reich who knew about such developments and saw their potential. Wibald, abbot of Stavelot, when faced by a dispute between two groups of his monastery’s ministeriales, seized the opportunity when one of the groups appealed to the royal court: he immediately suspended proceedings before his own court and wrote a report on the proceedings up to the point of the appeal for the superior court, thus conforming to up-to-date thinking on appellate jurisdiction.26 In the course of another dispute, over ownership of a ministerialis, he even procured two mandates from Frederick Barbarossa, one addressed to his opponent ordering him to set the ministerialis free against securities until the matter should have been judicially decided, and the other addressed to the bishop of Münster ordering him to try the matter.27 Judicial mandates of this kind were fully compatible with the advanced administrative practice of Angevin kingship or papal monarchy (the insistence on establishing the status quo ante before proceeding to judicial enquiry is very characteristic)28 but within the Reich they remained a rare exception. Even the right to appeal to the royal or imperial court was as much a matter for the grant of privilege as something embedded in a fundamental conception of royal authority.29 But what was really crucial was the absence in this period of systematic delegated jurisdiction. This was perhaps the most important element of modern governmental practice in the twelfth century: it enabled rulers to

26

27 28

29

1975), pp. 237–320, both of which are set thoughtfully in historiographical perspective by Werner, ‘Kritische Würdigung’. For the importance of appellate jurisdiction, for which feudal overlordship might be only one of a number of justifications, see F. L. Cheyette, ‘Custom, Case-Law and Medieval “Constitutionalism”: A Re-examination’, Political Science Quarterly 78 (1963), pp. 362–90, and ‘Suum cuique tribuere’, French Historical Studies 6 (1970), pp. 287–99. Ep. 81 (= Jaffé, pp. 180–2, no. 104); here and henceforth I cite Wibald’s letters by the number and, where appropriate, the text of the edition I am preparing for the MGH, with a bracketed reference to number and page in the standard edition by Philip Jaffé, Monumenta Corbeiensia, Bibliotheca rerum Germanicarum, 6 vols. (Berlin, 1864–9), I, pp. 76–607. Epp. 443 and 444 (= Jaffé, nos. 459 and 460, pp. 592–4; also edited as D F I, nos. 168 and 169). On the (pseudo-Isidorian) exceptio spolii in canon law see H. Fuhrmann, Einfluß und Verbreitung der pseudoisidorischen Fälschungen. Von ihrem Auftauchen bis in die neuere Zeit, 3 vols., Schriften der MGH XXIV (Stuttgart, 1972–4), I, pp. 42–3 and n. 87, III, pp. 986–7. The same principle is obviously at work in the writ of novel disseisin, whose underlying principles are elegantly summarized in W. L. Warren, The Governance of Norman and Angevin England, 1086–1272 (London, 1987), pp. 114–16; in view of earlier developments in papal government, it may be that English historians have tended to overstress Henry II’s innovation here. E. Pitz, ‘Zur Edition der Urkunden Konrads III.’, QFIAB 50 (1971), pp. 432–46, has some stimulating observations on the general techniques of government by rescript. See F. Battenberg, Die Gerichtsstandsprivilegien der deutschen Kaiser und Könige bis zum Jahre 1451, 2 vols. paginated as 1 (Cologne, 1983), pp. 3, n. 13, 10–11, 13–14, and nos. 2, 4–7, 11, 13–15. In the later Middle Ages the principle of ultimate judicial authority does seem to have been accepted, as privileges then on the whole excluded appeals to the imperial or other courts; but in the twelfth century (and in Italy earlier) most of them allowed such appeals.

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maintain supreme judicial authority while saving themselves the trouble, expense and risk of loss of face inherent in trying to reach decisions on matters they knew nothing about. Although O. Franklin claimed in his study of the Hofgericht that such delegations became frequent in the Reich at this time it is clear that in fact they did not. Delegated jurisdiction developed in the Reich only late, and then more as a means of delay and saving face than of combining ultimate royal authority with efficient decisionmaking.30 This was not a result of backwardness or specific hostility to the king; papal-delegated jurisdiction also took rather longer to catch on in the Reich than elsewhere. Such ideas simply did not fit easily into the German polity, because there was no clear hierarchy of jurisdictions, and because the crown was not seen as the sole source of legitimate authority. The king as judge was just one among many methods of conflict resolution, as may be seen from another episode of the 1150s. The two monasteries of Schaffhausen and St Blasien disputed certain rights over the mountain of Staufen, evidently a matter in which Staufer rulers might be expected to take a serious interest. A court decision under Conrad III awarded the rights to St Blasien; another under Frederick I awarded them to Schaffhausen without any reference to the earlier decision; at much the same time the monks of St Blasien drew up a fair copy of a confirmation of Conrad III’s decision which they evidently expected to be signed and sealed by the royal chancery, though they were to be disappointed. What finally settled this dispute? A commission of ecclesiastical arbitrators appointed by the two parties in 1164, which made no reference in its findings to the decisions of the royal court; but that offended no one.31 This is not a matter of royal weakness, but of what people wanted from kings. If we look at Barbarossa’s contemporaries, we can see Henry II producing the ‘origins of the common law’ in response to popular demand,32 or through the telescope of the Saint-Victor 30

31

32

For Franklin’s views see Reichshofgericht (as n. 22), II, 49–61; G. Buchda, ‘Delegation’, Handwörterbuch der Rechtsgeschichte I: Aachen-Haussuchung (Berlin, 1964), pp. 674–5, merely repeats Franklin. E. Schubert, ‘Probleme der Königsherrschaft im spätmittelaltlerlichen Reich. Das Beispiel Ruprechts von der Pfalz (1400–1410)’, in Das spätmittelalterliche Königtum im europäischen Vergleich, ed. R. Schneider, Vorträge und Forschungen, 32 (Sigmaringen, 1987), pp. 135–84, at pp. 148–51, is nearer the mark. D K III, no. 237 (St Blasien); D F I, no. 71 (Schaffhausen); D F I, no. 72 (St Blasien; on the origins of this unfinished diploma see Appelt’s preface to it in the MGH edition). The arbitration by the abbots of Lützel, Salem and Engelberg in 1164 was ed. C. B. A. Fickler, Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte Schwabens und der Ost-Schweiz (Mannheim, 1859), pp. 59–60, no. xxix. P. Brand, ‘Multis Vigiliis Excogitatum et inventum: Henry II and the creation of the English Common Law’, Haskins Society Journal 2 (1990), pp. 197–222; J. Gillingham, ‘Conquering Kings: Some TwelfthCentury Reflections on Henry II and Richard I’, in Warriors and Churchmen, ed. T. Reuter, pp. 163– 78, at pp. 164–71, offers good reasons for being sceptical about the active role often ascribed to Henry II in the judicial developments of his reign.


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letter collections see Louis VII being urged to intervene in areas where French rulers had long had nothing to say.33 Hardly anyone was interested in having Barbarossa behave like this, and so, like a sensible man, he did not try to do so. In the dispute between Nicholas and Theoderic, Frederick showed himself passive not only as a judge but also as a law-enforcer. We might have expected that his own honour and standing as a ruler would have been at stake once a decision had been reached, but not a bit of it. Theoderic threatened to challenge the decision by feud, but Frederick did not talk of justice and the king’s peace; rather, both he and Nicholas took for granted that he would be expected to mediate, and his success as a ruler depended on the fact that he could do so. I suspect that neither English rulers nor at least the later Capetians would have tolerated such a challenge to the authority of the royal court, at least on a good day, yet such behaviour was a feature of German politics from the ninth through to the fifteenth century. Thietmar of Merseburg has a splendid example from the early eleventh century: after a dispute before Henry II between Thietmar and the margraves of Meissen over forest rights had gone in Thietmar’s favour, Hermann of Meissen said openly in his brother’s hearing, ‘What we have done up to now was not done out of rashness, but because we hoped to have had some justice in the matter. Now, however, we shall leave off (nunc autem hoc omittamus).’ The sequel makes clear what the last sentence meant: it was not a renunciation of the claim, as Thietmar perhaps means to imply, but rather a declaration that as there was no justice to be had in the king’s court they would pursue their claim by feud.34 Frederick II’s Mainz Landfriede of 1235 also envisaged feud as a normal (and legitimate) response to denial of justice.35 The contrast with the role played by denial of justice within the appellate systems developed by English and French rulers and by the papacy in the high and late Middle Ages is very evident. The 33

34

35

On the links between Louis VII’s chancery and the Saint-Victor letter collections see F. Gasparri, ‘Manuscrit monastique ou registre de chancellerie? A propos d’un recueil e´pistolaire de l’abbaye de Saint-Victor’, Journal des Savants (1976), pp. 131–40 and ‘La Chancellerie du roi Louis VII et ses rapports avec le scriptorium de l’abbaye de Saint-Victor de Paris’, in Studi in onore di Giulio Battelli, 2 vols. (Rome, 1979), II, pp. 152–8. M. Pacaut, Louis VII et son royaume (Paris, 1964), pp. 77–90, 161–72, uses the material but ascribes too much weight to Louis’s own initiative. Die Chronik des Bischofs Thietmar von Merseburg, VIII, 20 and 21, ed. R. Holtzmann, MGH SRG, ns, IX (Berlin, 1935), pp. 516 and 518 (trans. D. Warner, Ottonian Germany (Manchester, 2000), pp. 375– 6). On the background to the dispute, which involved Thietmar’s forgery of royal diplomata, see K. J. Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony (London, 1979), pp. 101–2. Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum inde ab anno MCXCVIII usque ad annum MCCLXXII, ed. L. Weiland, MGH Const. II (Hannover, 1896), pp. 202–3, no. 196, c. 6 (although c. 4 is more rigorous).

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juridification of feud in the later Middle Ages so brilliantly described by Otto Brunner did not call such practices into existence; it merely codified and regulated them.36 Even Wibald, who was very much an exponent of the royal majesty, made as much of his opponents’ breaches of the rules as of the breach of the king’s peace when complaining to Barbarossa about an attack upon the burgers of Höxter (a town under Corvey’s lordship) by the advocates of Corvey, Widukind and Folkwin of Schwalenburg, while Wibald had been away at court and hence on royal service: ‘There were no enmities between us and them; indeed, when we recently parted from them with the kiss of peace not only did they make no complaint to us or anyone else about the aforementioned burghers but there was no suspicion of illwill between their men and ours.’ Wibald did not ask Frederick to punish this as a breach of the peace but to ‘avenge’ this action, which dishonoured not just Wibald and his monks but the king as well, and added that should he not do this not only would he, Wibald, ‘no longer be able to serve you and the kingdom’ (note the distinction) in spite of his desire to do so, but he would not even be able to ‘continue to live in the land of Saxony with honour’.37 Even for royalists, it was honour, not peace, which was at stake, and the royal court was merely the continuation of feud by other means. Henry II’s intervention – not his first – in the notorious feud between the Westfalian/Lower Lotharingian counts Balderich and Wichmann was described in very similar terms by Alpert of Metz: ‘Since each party had too many supporters for the king to favour one or the other in imposing a reconciliation’, Henry had to content himself with binding the two sides to keep the peace.38 When this later failed to work there was no suggestion that the king felt that his own authority had been called in question. Such a tendency to accept and regulate rather than eliminate feud was the product not of a loss of royal authority but of a different conception of royal authority. 36 37

38

¨ O. Brunner, Land und Herrschaft. Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Osterreichs im Mittelalter, 6th edn (Darmstadt, 1973; first published 1939), esp. pp. 1–110. Ep. 359 (= Jaffé, pp. 515–16, no. 384): ‘Nulli inter nos et ipsos inimici erant, sed, proxime cum ab eis in osculo pacis recesseramus, nullam umquam querimoniam vel nobis vel alicui super predictos burgenses fecerant nec alicuius mali suspicio inter ipsos et nostros habebatur . . . Provoluti ergo genibus vestre maiestatis . . . exoramus, ut, sicut decet principalem excellentiam, vindicare non differatis hanc insignem contumeliam, que vestram dignitatem non modica ex parte obscurat. Alioquin non solum vobis et regno servire . . . ultra non poterimus, sed etiam in terra Saxonie cum honore habitare non valebimus.’ For the background see F.-J. Jakobi, Wibald von Stablo und Corvey (1098–1158) (Münster, 1979), pp. 220–5, who seems to me, however, to take an overly optimistic view of the effectiveness of Frederick’s reaction in view of the later behaviour of the Schwalenburger. Alpertus Mettensis, De diversitate temporum, II, 4, ed. H. von Rij and A. S. Abulafia (Amsterdam, 1980), p. 48. I hope to deal with the Wichmann–Balderich feud at greater length elsewhere.


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Other elements not visible in the Nicholas–Theoderic episode also fit into the pattern. Consider the attitude towards taxation in the Reich. German history begins, more or less, with the murder of a tax-inspector: the revolt of the Austrasian aristocracy against Parthenius in the mid-sixth century is described in these terms by Gregory of Tours.39 The east Frankish Carolingians, the Ottonians and the Salians all lived off their own. As John Gillingham has pointed out, it was regarded as a dangerous sign of corrupting English influence in the case of both Henry V in 1114 and Otto IV a century later that they were said to be contemplating introducing general taxation.40 East Frankish and German rulers were equally chary about legislating. They did not codify law, and they were hesitant (and by contemporary standards distinctly amateurish) about issuing edicts north of the Alps. Barbarossa may have begun his career as king by issuing a Landfriede, a general peace, but nothing could be more revealing of the German polity than the fact that although this evidently dealt with specifically German conditions it has survived exclusively in the north Italian libri feudorum; the manuscript transmission of his later ‘legislation’ (as of earlier partial and general German Landfrieden) is equally unimpressive.41 A case has indeed been made out for privileges as a form of legislation.42 Yet privileges are highly deceptive. There was a time when the arengas of privileges were passed over rapidly in order to get to the supposed meat. Then Heinrich Fichtenau and others taught us to look at these as sources for current conceptions of royal authority and the nature of the polity.43 We may now almost have reached the stage where the arengas must be treated as much more substantial than the rest of the diploma, since they 39 40

41

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Gregory of Tours, Historiarum Libri Decem, III, 36, ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, MGH SRM, 2nd edn (Hannover, 1951), pp. 131–2. The Kingdom of Germany in the High Middle Ages, 900–1200, Historical Association Pamphlet G 77 (London, 1971), pp. 28–9; the whole pamphlet is a brilliant evocation of what I have here termed the ‘flavour’ of the German polity, to which I am much indebted. For the Landfriede of 1152 and its transmission see D F I, no. 25; the later ‘legislation’ is D F I, nos. 241, 774 and 988. On the manuscript tradition and diplomatic see the edition and Appelt’s remarks in D F I, vv. 8–10. For the transmission of these and earlier Landfrieden see also E. Wadle, ¨ ‘Frühe deutsche Landfrieden’, in Uberlieferung und Geltung normativer Texte des frühen und hohen Mittelalters, ed. H. Mordek (Sigmaringen, 1986), pp. 71–92. H. Krause, ‘Königtum und Rechtsordnung in der Zeit der sächsischen und salischen Kaiser’, ZRG, GA 83 (1965), pp. 1–98; note especially the technique observed by Krause (pp. 16–17, 19–22) whereby privileges give a definition of the liberties granted in them by reference to the liberties enjoyed by other groups or individuals. H. Fichtenau, Arenga. Spätantike und Mittelalter im Spiegel von Urkundenformeln, Mitteilung des Instituts für o¨ sterreichische Geschichte, Ergänzungsband 18 (Vienna, 1957); see also F. Hausmann and A. Gawlik, Arengenverzeichnis zu den Königs- und Kaiserurkunden von den Merowingern bis Heinrich VI., MGH Hilfsmittel IX (Munich, 1987), esp. pp. v–vi for the history of arenga research. See also Krause, ‘Königtum und Rechtsordnung’, pp. 96–7.

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at least tell us something of the reality of the ideas entertained in court circles, whereas the reality of the rights granted in privileges can by no means always be substantiated; a glance at the collection of Barbarossa’s diplomata shows how little both issuer and recipients were aware of the contents of diplomata which had already been issued, and further investigation reveals how lacking in resonance many royal privileges were.44 It is certainly no accident that the solemn diploma survived in the Reich much longer than it did elsewhere, but this is probably to be ascribed, not to its continuing use as a vehicle for ‘legislation’, however conceived, but rather to the appropriateness of this kind of document for a world still concerned primarily with rank and status: the medium was the message. The kind of polity all this implies is a loose one, with a king at its head but not dominating it. Its origins have generally been sought in the weakening of royal authority in the course of the Investiture Contest, but if we look behind the impressive theatricality of the theocratic rulership of the century and a half before 1073 we can find the roots of such practices in the heterogeneity of the east Frankish kingdom as it emerged in the ninth century, and in the political customs which developed there.45 The east Frankish-Ottonian Reich was from the start multi-regnal. Unlike earlier multi-regnal empires it did not have an acknowledged imperial people.46 And unlike contemporary and later multi-regnal empires (those of Cnut, or Boleslav Chrobry, or Henry II of England, for example) it was not simply a conglomeration of separately developing regna under a single ruler: though assemblies held in, say, Swabia or Bavaria always tended to be peopled by Swabians and Bavarians, this was never exclusively the case. From the start this enforced a different political style from that which prevailed further west; the existence of a polyethnic imperial elite with extensive contacts among its members but no explicit and generally acknowledged ranking rules meant that questions of status carried a considerable weight. As elsewhere, the court was where the ruler was; but it was not a cultural 44

45

46

Examples from Barbarossa’s early years: D F I, nos. 20, 54 and 157 reach three separate decisions in respect of the county of Chiavenna, with no reference to the earlier decisions; D F I, no. 31 confirms the castle of Crevacor to the bishop of Vercelli, while D F I, no. 47 confirms it to the lords of Bulgaro. D F I, no. 943 for Milan includes a revocation of all contrary privileges by whomsoever issued – obviously the chancery clerks had no notion of what these might have been. It might at first sight seem that the Ottonian Reich was rather different from its predecessor; see the illuminating discussion by H. Keller, ‘Zum Charakter der “Staatlichkeit” zwischen karolingischer Reichsreform und hoch-mittelalterlichem Herrschaftsausbau’, FMS 23 (1989), pp. 248–64. The differences become much smaller if Louis the German’s kingdom rather than the Christian empire of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious is taken as the point of comparison; here I would prefer the formulation of Moraw, ‘Entwicklungsunterschiede’, p. 587: ‘zu wenig altkarolingische Substanz’. I hope to return to this subject at greater length elsewhere. A point well made by Leyser, Rule and Conflict, pp. 109–12.


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and moral centre to the polity, even under Barbarossa.47 The court was normally conceived of more as the place where the ruler and his leading men were assembled together, as we found in the Nicholas–Theoderic episode; the king was only for limited periods and purposes an aloof being separate from all others. Even in the ninth century we find a highly developed tolerance for rebels and suspicion of rulers. Those who rebelled, as Karl Leyser and Gerd Althoff and I have shown, were not crushed.48 They preserved their honour by rebelling (that is, by not putting up with insults even from the ruler) and by coming to terms with the king afterwards in ways which saved everybody’s face; those rebels who were unlucky enough to be killed were mostly the victims of rival aristocrats, not of the royal wrath. And although a certain amount of pomp and circumstance in rulers was generally acceptable and indeed enjoyable, those who were thought to set themselves permanently apart from their followers or treat them inappropriately were viewed askance, as witness the critical remarks of the Annals of Fulda on Charles the Bald and Thietmar of Merseburg on Otto III, both of whom were thought to have gone too Greek,49 or Bruno of Merseburg on Henry IV’s disgraceful treatment of his magnates, whom he kept waiting all day while he played dice with his cronies,50 or the generally unfavourable response to what were seen as Henry V’s absolutist tendencies.51 It was a polity in which magnates knew their own importance: from the beginning of their charter activities we find them claiming to be what they were by the grace of God.52 None of this implied lack of political sophistication. 47

48

49 50 51 52

For a splendidly nominalist demolition of the notion of Staufer ‘court culture’ see P. Ganz, ‘Friedrich Barbarossa: Hof und Kultur’, in Friedrich Barbarossa. Handlungsspielräume und Wirkungswesen des staufischen Kaisers, ed. A. Haverkamp, Vorträge und Forschungen, 40 (Sigmaringen, 1992), pp. 623–50. Leyser, Rule and Conflict, pp. 92–4; G. Althoff, Verwandte, Freunde und Getreue (Darmstadt, 1990), pp. 155–80, distilling the conclusions drawn in his earlier articles; Reuter, ‘Unruhestiftung, Fehde, Rebellion, Widerstand’, passim. It should be noted, however, that the attitudes which in these studies have been documented largely for the tenth and eleventh centuries were already visible in the ninthcentury east Frankish kingdom, where only one rebel is known to have been executed, and he not by the king but by a group of aristocratic conspirators; see Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 893, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SRG VII (Hannover, 1891), p. 122 (trans. T. Reuter, The Annals of Fulda (Manchester, 1992), pp. 125–6), for the fate of Engelschalk, margrave in Pannonia. Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 876, ed. Kurze, p. 86; Thietmar, Chronicon, IV, 47, ed. Holtzmann, pp. 184 and 186 (trans. Warner, p. 185). Brunos Buch vom Sachsenkrieg, c. 23, ed. H.-E. Lohmann, MGH Deutsches Mittelalter II (Leipzig, 1937), p. 27. See n. 24, above. The beginnings are to be found in the tenth century with the dukes; see the lists of ducal charters in W. Kienast, Der Herzogstitel in Deutschland und Frankreich (9. bis 12. Jahrhundert) (Munich, 1968), pp. 408–33. However, the attribute was not yet the norm in the mid-twelfth century, as the letters from a number of different lay princes in Wibald’s collection demonstrate: often the attribute appears to be being consciously avoided in letters addressed to popes and prelates.

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The notion of the crown as an abstraction is found in the Reich at the end of the eleventh century, hence at least as early as, if not earlier than, anywhere else in Europe,53 and by Henry V’s time the magnates were capable of seeing themselves as collectively incorporating the Reich, and the king as someone who needed to have peace imposed on him.54 Both before and after that they were capable if necessary of holding assemblies of their own, without the king. Long before the so-called ‘younger estate of imperial princes’ had taken on coherent and legally defined shape the notion of a ‘prince’ as a part of the Reich was readily available, as can be seen in a letter of about 1150 from Louis of Thuringia to his brother Henry, rebuking him for not living in a way appropriate to his obligations as a prince and pillar of the kingdom and thus disgracing his family.55 The sheer weight of such political traditions and practices, once established, should not be underestimated, but additional explanations of this political style may be offered, beginning with the simple one of size. The regnum Teutonicum under Barbarossa was easily twice the size of the kingdom effectively ruled by Louis VII, while Henry II’s England or Normandy were hardly larger than a single German duchy. Given the techniques of government available in the high Middle Ages it is difficult to suppose that the Reich could have been ruled in a more intensive fashion for any length of time. What had enabled it to come and stay together was its position on the edge of a huge region stretching in an arc from Denmark down 53

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Clement III to the citizens of Mainz, citing a claim of Henry IV against Archbishop Ruthard of Mainz: ‘in dominum suum hostes quos potuit concitavit et coronae suae insidiator extitit’, Monumenta Moguntinensia, ed. P. Jaffé, Bibliotheca rerum Germanicarum, 3 (Berlin, 1866), p. 377, no. 32. This, and some of the examples cited in P. Classen, ‘Corona Imperii. Die Krone als Inbegriff des römisch-deutschen Reiches im 12. Jahrhundert’, in Ausgewählte Aufsäzte von Peter Classen, ed. J. Fleckenstein, Vorträge und Forschungen, 38 (Sigmaringen, 1983), pp. 503–14, are roughly contemporary with the earliest known French or English examples, for which see B. Schneidmüller, Nomen Patriae. Die Entstehung Frankreichs in der politisch–geographischen Terminologie (10.–13. Jahrhundert), Nationes, 7 (Sigmaringen, 1987), pp. 230–4 (earliest example from the 1090s) and A Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources: Fascicle II C, ed. R. E. Latham (London, 1981), p. 495 (England: earliest example 1103), respectively. Similarity in levels of development in this respect is confirmed by the roughly simultaneous emergence of the notion of inalienable crown lands; see H. Hoffmann, ‘Die Unveräusserlichkeit der Kronrechte im Mittelalter’, DA 20 (1964), pp. 389–474. Principum de restituenda pace consilium Wirceburgense, in Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum inde ab anno DCCCCXI usque ad annum MCXCVIII, ed. L. Weiland, MGH Const. I (Hannover, 1893), p. 158, no. 106. S. Weinfurter, ‘Reformidee und Königtum im spätsalischen Reich. ¨ Uberlegungen zu einer Neubewertung Kaiser Heinrichs V.’, in S. Weinfurter ed., Reformidee und Reformpolitik im spätsalisch-frühstaufischen Reich, Quellen und Abhandlungen zur mittelrheinischen Kirchengeschichte, 68 (Mainz, 1992), pp. 1–45, has pointed out that no one thought of deposing Henry V after his excommunication in 1112, by contrast with the situation in 1076–7. Die Reinhardsbrunner Briefsammlung, ed. F. Peeck, MGH Epp. sel. V (Weimar, 1952), p. 58, no. 63; Zotz, ‘Dux de Zaringen’, pp. 4–5, has a helpful discussion of the question of the letter’s authenticity in this context.


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to southern Italy which was by and large still less coherently organized.56 The Reich could sustain its loose structures because there were continuing opportunities offered by predatory warfare at home and abroad – opportunities by no means monopolized by the rulers, as the history of the Saxon and Bavarian marches shows57 – and because aristocratic lordship was also extensive rather than intensive. As these arrangements worked to the satisfaction of most people concerned, there was little pressure for change. In general I suspect it is an error to assume as a working maxim for the study of medieval government that we needs must love the highest when we see it: the insights of Ester Boserup and Marshall Sahlins about supposedly ‘primitive’ agriculture, namely that hunting and gathering or slash-and-burn offer maximum outputs for minimum inputs and are abandoned only when population density compels more labour- and resource-intensive forms of activity,58 are applicable, mutatis mutandis, to political structures. Nobody wants bureaucracies and the other tedious apparatus of modern government; they have them forced on them when the old extensive methods fail. And when this happens there are constraints laid down by the political technology available on the size of more tightly organized polities, just as people do not go straight from slash-and-burn agriculture to EEC-subsidized latifundia. Hence it was the magnates who were to turn to tighter forms of political organization, as it had been in west Francia two centuries earlier.59 Already in the twelfth century we find clear indications of a princely self-awareness which may be described as almost regal, and regal in a more ‘modern’ sense: Henry the Lion’s famous lion statue in Brunswick is untypical but nevertheless characteristic.60 Regality implies regna, and we do indeed find 56 57

58

59

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I have tried to show the importance of this ‘geopolitical’ position for the development of the Reich in my Germany in the Early Middle Ages, c. 800–1056 (London, 1991), esp. pp. 160–74, 253–74. It is mistaken to see even the Ottonians as directing eastward colonization, as Gerd Althoff will show in [‘Saxony and the Elbe Slavs in the tenth century’, NCMH, vol. III (1999), at pp. 267–92, esp. 279–88]; the initiative lay with the Saxon margraves, then as later. The same is true of the south-eastern frontier, where from the late tenth century it was the margraves of the ‘Ostreich’ (Austria) and of Carinthia who were active, rather than the dukes of Bavaria and Carinthia. E. Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure (London, 1965); M. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (London, 1974; first published 1972). See K. F. Werner, ‘Kingdom and Principality in Twelfth-Century France’, in The Medieval Nobility, ed. T. Reuter (Amsterdam, 1979), pp. 243–90 and J. Dunbabin, France in the Making, 843–1180 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 44–100. J. Fried, ‘Königsgedanken Heinrichs des Löwen’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 55 (1973), pp. 312– 51 and ‘“Das goldglänzende Buch”. Heinrich der Löwe, sein Evangeliar, sein Selbstverständnis. Bemerkungen zu einer Neuerscheinung’, Göttinger Gelehrte Anzeiger 242 (1990), pp. 34–79, has argued powerfully that Henry the Lion aspired to a kingship of his own.

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within principalities a hierarchical political organization reflecting that of the Reich. In a diploma for Bishop Ortlieb of Basel issued in 1154 Frederick I talks of giving assent to the ‘just requests of our well-beloved Ortlieb bishop of Basel and of the princes, clergy and people’, meaning the ‘subjects’ or magnates of the principality of Basel.61 Nicholas of Cambrai also ruled over a patria, as we have seen; when he returned from a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in the following year ‘he was received honourably and with great glory by all the magnates of the country’ and he proceeded to consult with them about the common good, much as a king might have done.62 Such patriae were of course not yet clearly defined territorial entities; they were incipient regna with the same mixture of the personal and the territorial which characterized the Reich itself.63 The difference was that their rulers’ practices resembled the developing ‘administrative kingship’ of the west much more than did those of the Staufer emperors. The phrases of a mandate addressed by Louis III of Thuringia to his villici on behalf of the nuns of Lippoldsberg in the 1180s sound very familiar to ears attuned to papal or Norman writs of the twelfth century. It begins, ‘I order you most firmly, as you wish to retain my goodwill’, and ends, ‘knowing that if you offend them contrary to this my precept in any way or exact anything from them you will incur my indignation and offence, and will have to pay for this without hope of recovery’.64 At the end of a long line of development which is not here our concern, most of the late medieval German principalities came to display the ‘lineages of the absolutist state’ just as much as Aragon or Castile or France or England: appellate jurisdiction, officials, residences, taxation, legislation, estates represented in parliaments and so forth; all that was missing 61

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63

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Significantly, such expressions often crop up in a context of control over coinage: for tensions between princes and their ‘subjects’ over this in the twelfth-century regnum Teutonicum see J. Barrow, ‘German Cathedrals and the Monetary Economy in the Twelfth Century’, JMH 16 (1990), pp. 13–38, and for parallels elsewhere in Europe T. N. Bisson, Conservation of Coinage: Monetary Exploitation and its Restraint in France, Catalonia, and Aragon (Oxford, 1979). Lambert of Watrelos, Annales Cameracenses, s.a. 1153, ed. Pertz, p. 525, lines 46–9: ‘ab omnibus patriae maioribus honorifice receptus est cum grandi gloria . . . post prandium in domo praesulis, cum simul clerici vel milites apud se de utilitatibus suis tripudiando tractarent . . .’. Here I differ somewhat from the views expressed by Benjamin Arnold in his valuable survey of Princes and Territories in Medieval Germany (Cambridge, 1991). I agree with him that territorialization has too often been seen as process or imperative rather than as an ex post facto description of what princes brought about; but it is not necessary to deny the existence of incipient territories in the twelfth century in order to hold this view. Codex Diplomaticus Saxoniae Regni, 2 vols. paginated as 1, ed. O. Posse and H. Ermisch (Leizpig, 1889), p. 357, no. 516.


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was coronation and unction.65 And there was a more or less unconscious acknowledgement of the kingly status of such rulers in the marriage practices of the royal families of Europe in the dynastic era between 1300 and 1800: the sons and daughters of German princes were not royal, but they were marriageable in a way that otherwise only members of royal families were. The regality of late medieval princes is epitomized in the prologue to the Chronicle of the Counts of the Mark, written in the mid-fourteenth century: it is a miniature mirror for princes, with all the advice which one might expect for a crowned ruler: the counts should protect widows, keep the roads safe, do justice without respect of persons, surround themselves with good counsellors, make sure that their officials are not oppressive and so forth. But this advice is addressed to the members of a not overly significant comital family in north-west Germany by one of its professional counsellors.66 Why, given such princely regality, was there no collective repetition of the transition from the Merovingians to the Carolingians, no attempt to bring nomen and potestas into harmony once more in order to preserve ordo? Leaving the special case of Bohemia aside, we have some reason to suppose that Henry the Lion thought of becoming king, and we know of a project to turn the duchy of Austria into a kingdom in the 1240s. But that, until the second half of the fifteenth century, is all.67 Why did the German princes not become kings, and why did the German kings not cease to be kings? One reason why princes did not seek to become kings may perhaps be found in Regino of Prüm’s comment on the succession to Charles III in 888: ‘Not that the Franks lacked princes with the nobility, courage and wisdom to rule over kingdoms; rather, the equality of ancestry, dignity and power enhanced the discord, for none was so outstanding that the others could submit to him without losing face.’68 It was precisely because the political community was so conscious of questions of rank, honour and status that there was a kind of mutual deterrence; no one wanted to risk a titles race. Quite apart from this, there would have 65

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Much of the voluminous German literature is summarized or noted in Arnold, Princes and Territories; the best survey of the period is undoubtedly P. Moraw, Von offener Verfassung zu gestalteter Verdichtung. Das Reich im späten Mittelalter, 1250 bis 1490, Propyläen Geschichte Deutschlands, 3 (Berlin, 1985). The colloquium Der deutsche Territorialstaat im 14. Jahrhundert, ed. H. Patze, Vorträge und Forschungen, 13, 2 vols. (Sigmaringen, 1970), is still the best access to the specialized problems. Die Chronik der Grafen von der Mark von Levold von Northof, ed. F. Zschaek, MGH SRG, ns, VI (Berlin, 1929; rpt 1984), pp. 3–13. See H. Hirsch, ‘Das Recht der Königserhebung durch Kaiser und Papst im hohen Mittelalter’, Festschrift E. Heymann (Weimar, 1940), pp. 209–49. On Henry the Lion see above, n. 60. Reginonis Prumiensis Chronicon cum continuatione Treverensi, s.a. 888, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SRG L (Hannover, 1890), p. 129, with echoes of Justin.

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been losers in such a race: imperial cities which derived some limited comfort and protection against local potentates from their direct links with the king; younger brothers who would have lost out in any transformation of a principality to a (presumably indivisible) kingdom; ecclesiastical princes who were inherently incapable of aspiring to kingship and lesser princes who would have found a king on their doorstep much less comfortable than a king who only showed up every few years, if at all.69 Besides this, the model of kingship immediately available (I shall return to the question of European comparisons later) exercised no magnetic attraction. A king was needed, in the fifteenth century as in the tenth, because so large a polity needed some overarching structures if it were to continue to exist at all, and it was in the interests of the princes themselves that it should. Kings were a principal source of legitimacy for other rulers, not least because they were also emperors, a rank which was of significance to the princes as well as its holders, as we shall see shortly. They symbolized the political community, in so far as this still existed; and they had certain residual powers not to be underestimated.70 What they did not fulfil was any need for kingship just round the corner. In the last resort, kings were not seen like that. The question now arises, why have we generally chosen to see them like that? Why have our expectations been different? It should be said first of all that our tendency to ruler-worship, which can lead even those historians not of a naturally authoritarian cast of mind into stressing the positive side of extremely unpleasant and arbitrary actions by medieval kings, is a product both of our own preconceptions and of the visibility of rulers in the sources. We tend, particularly in the simplifications necessary for textbooks and handbooks, to see kings (when Good, and especially when Strong71 ) as imposing their will on their political communities in a series of voluntaristic acts, as driving the machine; the failures were the ones who were too Weak to do this. This is a way of looking at things appropriate to people 69

70

71

For maps of the late medieval royal itinerary see Moraw, Von offener Verfassung, pp. 215, 223, 225, 227, 231, 250. P. Moraw, ‘Franken als königsnahe Landschaft des späten Mittelalters’, Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte 112 (1976), pp. 123–38, at 123–5, has a good discussion of the different kinds of region in relation to royal power. The nature and purpose of German kingship in the later Middle Ages, which is not here my theme, have been reviewed in two recent syntheses: K.-F. Krieger, ‘König, Reich und Reichsreform im Spätmittelalter’, Enzyklopädie Deutscher Geschichte, XIV (Munich, 1992), pp. 5–30 (summary of problem), 62–99 (current historiography), with extensive bibliography, and E. Schubert, Einführung in die Grundprobleme der deutschen Geschichte im Spätmittelalter (Darmstadt, 1992), pp. 196–232, esp. pp. 226–32. For the satirical terminology I am indebted, as are we all, to W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (Harmondsworth, 1960; originally published London, 1930), passim.


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whose ‘determining technology’ was the machine: rulers are the motors of history.72 But our determining technology is electronic; hence we think (or should think) not in terms of active and passive components, of pistons, cogs and wheels, but in terms of feedback loops and systems. Though it would clearly be foolish to exclude the personal element altogether, the reality was much nearer the idea that kingship was a social construct, the result of political market forces. Successful rulers were those who could offer a product for which there was sustained demand. Let me illustrate this point by turning from the regnum Teutonicum to the kingdom of Italy and the empire, where we can see the same ruler behaving in a different way in response to different demands (much as Henry II was a different sort of animal in Aquitaine). The emperorship held intermittently by east Frankish and German rulers after 875 – a much more important date than 800 in the definition of the meaning and content of western emperorship, incidentally – had meant a loose claim to hegemony in Europe, and the right and the duty to protect the papacy. It could not be exercised without rule over Italy, but it was not formally linked with the Italian kingdom. The Ottonians and early Salians seem at times to have allowed the kingdom to go its own way, at other times to have encouraged a gradual integration of the kingdom into their own transalpine realm, much as Lotharingia had been incorporated in the tenth century.73 It is often said that Barbarossa sought to restore imperial rights in Italy following their dissipation in the century following the death of Henry III in 1056, not least because these revenues were estimated at 30,000 talents (sc. pounds) annually.74 But the link between these rights and the imperial office was new, and what was proposed was no mere restoration; even making allowances for our ignorance, and for inflation and economic growth between the mid-eleventh and mid-twelfth centuries, it is clear that Henry III, say, had drawn nothing like these sums from Italy, and had not drawn the sums he did on the same basis as Barbarossa was proposing. Barbarossa’s Italienpolitik was a response to changed circumstances in Italy. Although both Italian and German patriotisms have tended for differing reasons to imply that Barbarossa was trying to impose his own will 72

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For the notion of a ‘determining technology’ see J. D. Bolter, Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age (Chapel Hill NC, 1984). The inherent limitations of ‘motor’ as metaphor have been well dealt with by E. P. Thompson, ‘The Poverty of Theory, or: An Orrery of Errors’, in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London, 1978), pp. 295–8. I have sketched some of this in Germany in the Early Middle Ages, pp. 268–73. The estimate of revenues is given by Rahewin, Gesta Friderici, IV, 9, ed. Waitz and von Simson, p. 240; it was not part of Frederick’s original account of his actions in Italy, ibid., pp. 1–5.

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on the peninsula, his intervention was long sustained by a substantial party within Italy itself. Partly this was a traditional move in Italian politics: to call Barbarossa in against Milan was structurally comparable with calling Otto I in against Berengar II.75 More importantly, it was a consequence of the ideological legitimation of the new structures of urban government; if you see yourself as being validated by Roman law, you can hardly reject the Roman legislator. Yet the Staufer failed, because in the last resort consciousness was determined by being. The governing elites of the north Italian cities, confronted with an actual Roman emperor, found that they could indeed dispense with him as a real presence, however ideologically necessary he might previously have appeared; the costs – political and legal, not financial – were too high.76 Conveniently, the undermining of the emperors’ ideological base began almost simultaneously with the change in imperial attitudes to Italy and Italy’s attitudes to the emperor. The scene at Besançon in 1157, when the papal legate, confronted with collective outrage at Hadrian IV’s use of the term beneficium, asked with feigned innocence: ‘From whom then does he hold the empire if not from the Lord Pope?’, is well known.77 But this was not a restatement of an age-old papal principle going back in essence to Gelasius, pace Walter Ullmann.78 Rather, it was almost the first explicit statement of a papal redefinition of imperial office which had been under way probably from the time of the traumatic episode of 1111. Still more significant is Rahewin’s gloss on the episode: ‘the strict interpretation of these words . . . was the more easily believed because they knew that some Romans rashly claimed that our kings had held the imperium over the City and the kingdom of Italy up to now as a gift from the popes’.79 In other words, just at the time when the German king/emperor was beginning to respond to Italian demands and hence to 75

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78 79

The technique was noted in an aphorism by Liudprand of Cremona, Antapodosis, I, 37, in Liudprandi Opera, ed. J. Becker, MGH SRG XLI (Hannover, 1915), p. 27: ‘quia semper Italienses geminis uti dominis volunt, quatinus alterum alterius terrore coherceant . . .’. See on all this A. Haverkamp, Herrschaftsformen der Frühstaufer in Reichsitalien, Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, 1, 2 vols. paginated as 1 (Stuttgart, 1970), pp. 37–44 (history and historiography), 85–101 (legal basis of the regalia), and A. Haverkamp, ‘Der Konstanzer Friede zwischen Kaiser und Lombardenbund (1183)’, in Kommunale Bündnisse Oberitaliens und Oberdeutschlands im Vergleich, ed. H. Maurer, Vorträge und Forschungen, 23 (Sigmaringen, 1987), pp. 11–44. Note that the ‘price’ was one of freedom of action. The Lombard cities were willing to pay Frederick money for the legitimization of their activities, as long as he did not interfere with them. Rahewin, Gesta Friderici, III, 10, ed. Waitz and von Simson, p. 177; the fullest recent study of the incident is W. Heinemeyer, ‘Beneficium – non feodum sed bonum factum. Der Streit auf dem Reichstag zu Besançon 1157’, Archiv für Diplomatik 15 (1969), pp. 155–236. ‘Pope Hadrian IV’ and ‘Cardinal Roland and Besançon’, reprinted as chapters III and IV in The Papacy and Political Ideas in the Middle Ages (London, 1976). Rahewin, Gesta Friderici, III, 10.


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face up to the contradictions behind those demands, his legitimacy south of the Alps was being called in question by a power itself capable of offering an alternative legitimacy. Faced with a declining demand for their services, the emperors could not prevail by will and force alone. All that was to be left in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries after the blood had dried was the imperial title itself, which was not without its functionality north of the Alps as a symbol of the regnum Teutonicum. This functionality was already evident in the twelfth century. The indignation expressed at Besançon was expressed by the German princes, not just by Barbarossa, who took care in the subsequent propaganda battle to stress the affront to the empire, not just to the emperor, in his public responses; there is a clear line running from Besançon through the thirteenth-century disputes to the declaration of Rhens nearly 200 years later.80 But if Italy should warn us not to see rulers as voluntaristic masters of their fate, we should also remember that contemporaries saw the strengths and weaknesses of rulers as the dynamic element in medieval politics just as we do, and were puzzled when the model did not work. This puzzlement is visible for example in the Chronica regia Coloniensis’s obituary on Conrad III: ‘He was a man of considerable military ability and, as befits a king, very high-minded; yet by some misfortune the polity began to decay under him.’81 Even in so conservative a polity as the Reich there were other mental models available for kingship than the ones I have so far chosen to stress. We have seen some of the realities of Barbarossa as judge; but Otto of Freising could depict him on his coronation day as a stern ruler, bound not by earthly ties but solely by the objective necessities of abstract justice – rulers could be seen like that as well.82 The dependence of the historiographers 80

81

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The claim had already been made by Henry IV in his response to Gregory VII in 1076, Die Briefe Heinrichs IV., ed. C. Erdmann, MGH Deutsches Mittelalter I (Leipzig, 1937), p. 14, no. 11. The propagandistic response to Besançon is in Gesta Friderici, III, 11 (Frederick’s encyclical) and 17 (response of the German bishops to Hadrian IV), ed. Waitz and von Simson, pp. 178–9 and 187–9. For later rejections by the princes of papal claims (implicit or explicit) to interfere in or judge German royal elections see the bibliographical references in Krieger, ‘König, Reich und Reichsreform’, p. 62. Chronica regia Coloniensis, s.a. 1152, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SRG XVIII (Hannover, 1880): ‘Erat tamen vir militari virtute strenuus et, quod regem decuit, valde animosus; sed quodam infortunio res publica sub eo labefactari ceperat.’ See K. Leyser, ‘Some Reflections on Twelfth-Century Kings and Kingship’, in Medieval Germany and its Neighbours, 900–1250 (London, 1982), pp. 241–67, at pp. 243–4, who acutely notes the similarities with the modern Strong/Good/Weak King conceptual framework (on which see above, at n. 71). Gesta Friderici, II, 3, ed. Waitz and von Simson, pp. 104–5: Frederick refused a request for forgiveness by ‘quidam de ministris eius, qui pro quibusdam excessibus gravibus a gratia sua adhuc privati’ saying, ‘non ex odio, sed iusticiae intuitu illum a gratia sua exclusum fuisse’. Otto was here probably pointing a contrast with the account of Conrad II’s coronation in Wipo, Gesta Chuonradi, c. 3, ed. H. Bresslau in Wiponis Opera, MGH SRG LXI (Hannover, 1915), pp. 20–3, who tells how the new ruler paused

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of the high Middle Ages on Cicero and Sallust and Suetonius as well as the patristic and early medieval historical classics meant that they talked about kingship using a common vocabulary, one which did not take into account the self-evident elements of the political culture which I have been trying to delineate. The same is true, incidentally, of coronation ordines, which resemble each other much more than did the polities in which they were used. Besides which, there were indeed elements of ‘administrative kingship’ visible in the Reich,83 not least because the rulers were almost always themselves members of this aristocratic commonwealth as princes in their own right, not just as kings.84 Kings also wished to consolidate and expand at the expense of others, and used their kingship quite ruthlessly to try to do so: the prince most favoured by any German ruler was himself, as Karl Leyser has recently demonstrated of Barbarossa.85 C. C. Bayley aroused some indignation among German scholars forty years ago with his cruel epigram: ‘Scratch a German emperor and you find a tribal chieftain’,86 but if one were to rephrase this as ‘scratch a German emperor and you find a dynastically minded magnate’ it would be hard to quarrel with. The narrative sources thus often mislead by using a public and royal (hence ‘state-centred’) vocabulary for the private and dynastic aspirations of rulers. Yet appearance might have become reality, as happened in a sense further west; in the last resort it was the deep structures and ancient traditions of the kingdom which were to prevail, but not for want of conceptual alternatives. Such alternatives were not just found in liturgy and literature; from the twelfth century at the latest people in the Reich were, as elsewhere in Europe,

83 84

85 86

to do justice to supplicants on his way to be crowned, and at his coronation forgave those who had done him injuries before he became king; Otto knew and used Wipo’s work. On the contrast see G. Althoff, ‘Königsherrschaft und Konfliktbewältigung im 10. und 11. Jahrhundert’, FMS 23 (1989), pp. 265–90, at p. 288. For Barbarossa’s capabilities in this respect see K. J. Leyser, ‘Friedrich Barbarossa: Hof und Land’, in Friedrich Barbarossa, ed. Haverkamp, pp. 519–30. Note the distinction between royal and dynastic lands (Reichsgut, Hausgut), on which see H. C. Faussner, ‘Die Verfügungsgewalt des deutschen Königs u¨ ber weltliches Reichsgut im Hochmittelalter’, DA 29 (1973), pp. 345–449 (with valuable insights, but over-systematized). For kings issuing themselves and their families privileges see e.g. D F I, no. 77 for Lorch (confirming the advocacy ‘inter descendentes de genere regis Cuonradi et Friderici ducis clarissimi’), which has a much-discussed precursor in Otto I’s first diploma for Quedlinburg: see K. Schmid, ‘Die Thronfolge Ottos des Grossen’, ZRG, GA 81 (1964), pp. 80–163, section III, ‘DOI.1’. ‘Frederick Barbarossa and the Hohenstaufen polity’, Viator 19 (1988), pp. 154–76, esp. pp. 175–6. C. C. Bayley, The Formation of the German College of Electors in the Mid-Thirteenth Century (Toronto, 1949), p. 105; for a typical reaction (‘neither particularly tasteful nor wholly accurate’) see the review by Heinrich Mitteis, reprinted in his Die Rechtsidee in der Geschichte (Weimar, 1957), p. 700.


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very much aware of what was happening in Other Countries, and did not necessarily take Mr Podsnap’s attitude to developments in foreign parts.87 They compared and drew contrasts, just as modern historians have done. But they were only imperfectly aware of the realities of Other Countries, and here too modern historians have been no different. Seen from a German perspective, the Norman, Angevin and Capetian rulers with whom German rulers have been implicitly or explicitly compared have looked more impressive, more authoritative, more centralizing, more in control of events than their German counterparts. Indeed, they have seemed more so than many French and English historians would now be willing to concede; at least some of the contrast between Germany and the west implicit in what has been said here may be more seeming than real. The German rulers were not alone in ruling over a polycentric realm, or in having to cooperate with their leading men; it is only because rulers elsewhere with hindsight seem to have been the drops around which the rain-clouds of the modern state could form that they have in anticipation been so readily invested with its qualities. In such matters the concerns of historians have been determined both by language and by historiographical traditions. This is particularly true of Germany. There might perfectly well be a German word Königschaft, but in fact there is not: there is only Königtum (to be translated either as ‘the crown’ or in certain contexts as ‘the ideological basis of royal rule’) and Königsherrschaft, ‘royal government’. Unlike ‘kingship’ (but like ‘royauté’?) the word has no overtones of style of rulership, nor have German historians been encouraged to consider this by what is still a strongly étatiste historiographical tradition.88 Yet it is not just German historians who need a greater willingness to consider medieval rulership and politics as style rather than institution: where are the studies of rebellion or of interaction at assemblies in the England, France and Spain of the high Middle Ages, for example? One of the benefits which a Europeanist historiography properly conceived 87

88

The point is well made by Leyser, ‘Some Reflections’, pp. 248–50. ‘Mr Podsnap’s world was not a very large world, morally; no, nor even geographically: seeing that although his business was sustained upon commerce with other countries, he considered other countries, with that important reservation, a mistake’ (Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend). For the historical and sociological background to this see F. K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community 1890–1933 (Cambridge MA, 1969) with the review by Jürgen Habermas, Minerva IX, 3 (1971), pp. 422–8, and more recently C. Simon, Staat und Geschichtswissenschaft in Deutschland und Frankreich, 1871–1914 (Berne, 1988) and F. K. Ringer, Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 257–65. There is a brief historiographical account in my Germany in the Early Middle Ages, pp. 8–13, and a fuller one in H. Keller, Zwischen regionaler Bedeutung und universalem Horizont. Deutschland im Zeitalter der Salier und Staufer 1024–1250 (Berlin, 1986), pp. 13–55.

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might bring us would be an ability to understand our own immediate history better through a deeper knowledge of the practical realities of other countries’ histories, not just of what are necessarily abstracted accounts of their institutional developments.89 Only when this has been done across all the frontiers represented at this conference will we be able to say just how far the modernization paradigm mentioned at the beginning is a valid measure of any country’s medieval kingship. 89

See Werner, ‘Kritische Würdigung’, on the problems involved.

chap t e r 21

Mandate, privilege, court judgement: techniques of rulership in the age of Frederick Barbarossa

The reflections that follow have grown out of my preoccupation with two sets of problems. First, I have been working for far too long on a new edition of the letter-collection of Wibald of Stablo, which as you will all know contains the major part of all surviving Staufer mandates as well a considerable number of papal mandates, and it therefore seems an obvious challenge to compare these two governmental systems and their methods.1 Second, not long ago, I tried to sketch for anglophone historians the basic features of the style of rulership in the twelfth-century regnum Teutonicum:2 now is the time to fill out that sketch a little further. What I am offering here is certainly not polished or complete. It is, rather, work in progress, which means that it is preliminary and has many gaps (I especially regret the omission of France and its high court) – but that can’t be helped when I am trying to tackle mandate, privilege and court judgement3 in only an hour. In my title, I have deliberately used the word ‘age’ rather than ‘reign’. As long ago as the 1920s and 1930s, leading German medievalists dealt with the period of Barbarossa in the framework of processes of modernisation that became evident in the twelfth century. To some extent, this was a new version of the old battle between historians of ‘Big Germany’ and those of ‘Small Germany’. At the same time, it was a debate that turned around certain specific and characteristic features of the ‘modern’ states of

1

2 3

[The author’s typescript of this paper, as written for a conference in Germany, had no notes. Those supplied here mostly consist of essential references, often culled from his working notes. Readers will find discussions of related material, and further references, in chapters 20 and 22. JLN] The edition of Wibald’s letter-collection which TR left unfinished has been completed by Martina Stratmann and will shortly be published by the MGH. Meanwhile, the old edition of P. Jaffé, Monumenta Corbeiensia, Bibliotheca rerum Germanicarum, 6 vols. (Berlin, 1864–9) is cited below. This paper is reprinted as chapter 20, above. ‘Court judgement’ was the term TR used in translating the title of this paper; but Hofgericht also has a different, institutional, meaning, and I translate it below in such cases as ‘the royal court of justice’, ‘the ruler’s judicial court’, or, for shorthand, ‘the high court’.

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Europe in this period: royal legislation; financial policy; policy on royal lands; the building of central government on the basis of a post-feudal bureaucracy; exploitation of feudal law for the ends of state power; putting writtenness and rationality at rulers’ disposal. On these criteria, the various historians, not surprisingly, awarded Barbarossa different marks, but by and large he was judged positively, especially for his allegedly successful efforts to construct a royal domain of Capetian type in the Alpine zone of southern Swabia, northern Burgundy and northern Lombardy, and also for his policy of using ministeriales. If his legislation left much to be desired, at least Barbarossa could be seen to have taken enough key initiatives to make him part of contemporary processes of modernisation. Thanks to our good fortune in now having the completed edition of Barbarossa’s charters, together with the Regesta and the Hofgerichtsregesten (Register of Judgements of the Royal Court), it is possible to study Barbarossa’s acta as witnesses to such processes (or to their absence), by measuring what we can call his chancery’s output against the output of other chanceries.4 I will briefly summarise some well-known facts. For the whole empire, just over a thousand royal documents survive from the period 1152 to 1190. For Barbarossa’s contemporary Henry II, some 4,500 documents, according to the most recent research, survive for the rather smaller Angevin empire;5 and for the papacy in the same time-frame, at least 10,000 documents survive from the whole of Europe.6 We should certainly assume considerable losses, yet there is a certain intuitive plausibility in treating these relative orders of magnitude as reflecting twelfth-century realities. Such comparisons do not take us very far, though. For the overwhelming 4

5

6

The editions referred to here are H. Appelt with R. M. Herkenrath, Die Urkunden Friedrichs I., 5 vols., MGH Urkunden X (Hannover and Vienna, 1975–90), with Einleitung, Verzeichnisse, in vol. V (1990), pp. 24–74, and B. Diestelkamp and E. Rotter, Urkundenregesten zur Tätigkeit des deutschen Königs- und Hofgerichte bis 1451, vol. I, Die Zeit von Konrad I. bis zur Heinrich VI., 911–1197 (Cologne, 1988). For TR’s criticisms of this register, see above, chapter 20, n. 22. References below to Barbarossa’s diplomas have been left in the text, as TR had them, cited as D[iplomata] F[rederici], with number in Appelt’s edition, vols. I–IV. Editions of the Angevin acta are under way under the editorship of Nicholas Vincent. See meanwhile J. C. Holt and R. Mortimer eds., Acta of Henry II and Richard I: Handlist of Documents Surviving in the Original (Gateshead, 1986), and N. Vincent ed., Acta of Henry II and Richard I: Part II, a Supplementary Handlist (Kew, 1996). See for a general and comparative discussion, M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1993). See P. Jaffé, S. Löwenfeld, F. Kaltenbrunner and P. Ewald eds., Regesta pontificum Romanorum, 2nd edn (Leipzig, 1885), vol. II. An ongoing series, Papsturkunden in Frankreich, eds. H. Meinert, J. Ramackers, D. Lohrmann and R. Grosse, 9 vols. (Berlin, 1932–), is now being complemented by the province-by-province editions of Gallia pontificia: repertoire et documents concernant les relations entre la papauté et les églises et monastères en France avant 1198, eds. B. de Vregille, R. Locatelli and G. Moyse, co-ordinated by D. Lohrmann (Göttingen, 1998–). Similar volumes are planned for the rest of Latin Christendom.

Mandate, privilege, court judgement

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majority of the material that survives originated not in the ruler’s own initiative but as a response to others’ requests. It is evidence, therefore, not only for the practice of government but also for what it meant in practice to be governed. We need a two-pronged approach, qualitative as well as quantitative, if we are to assess this balance of elements correctly. According to Appelt’s Introduction to the five-volume edition of Barbarossa’s acta, there is a total of 553 formal diplomas, 230 simpler charters, 102 mandates and 49 letters, as well as 100 variegated documents. Because I intended to confine myself in this paper at most to the regnum Teutonicum and the structurally very similar territories in the northern part of the kingdom of Burgundy, I wanted to construct some statistics of my own, but I abandoned the task because the categories are too fluid. Still, I can say that from my samples and preliminary findings, it is clear that the ratio of privilege to mandate is not essentially different in the area north of the Alps from that in Italy: about 5:1. With the French royal acta, the ratio is similar to that in Germany; and I have not yet worked through the material for Sicily, Spain or Flanders.7 But the situation is very different in English or papal documents of this period. The ratio in the papal case is fairly consistently 1:1. In the English documents, we have to take into account the fact that the formal privilege fell completely out of use in the eleventh century, and was replaced by the writ-charter, a kind of mandate of appointment or protection. The ratio of writ-charters to other writs resembles that of papal privileges to mandates.8 Even if we take into account the certainly very much higher chances of loss of mandates as compared with privileges (and that does not apply only to the regnum Teutonicum), the fact remains that the preferred documentary form of Barbarossa’s chancery was the privilege. Our first question has to be: what does that mean? From the formal point of view, privileges are legal acts. It was possible to do three things with a privilege: (i) confirm the recipient’s existing rights, (ii) grant or confirm new rights, (iii) record judicial or quasi-judicial judgements concerning the recipient’s rights (and this third category will concern us again presently when we turn to judgements made in the ruler’s court). The majority of Barbarossa’s privileges belong in the first category: they were confirmations of actual or alleged existing rights. Even privileges conferring new rights frequently did so in the context of confirming older ones, as in the case of D F 803 for Kremsmünster or D F 996 for Schaffhausen, 7 8

F. Gasparri, ‘La chancellerie du roi Louis VII et ses rapports avec le scriptorium de l’abbaye de Saint-Victor de Paris’, in Studi in onore di Giulio Battelli, 2 vols. (Rome, 1979), vol. II, pp. 152–8. R. C. van Caenegem, Royal Writs in England from the Conquest to Glanvill: Studies in the Early History of the Common Law, Publications of the Selden Society 77 (London, 1959); and see above, n. 5.

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to name only two examples. Such acts of gift and confirmation were often combined with a grant of protection. A reasonable assumption is that such a confirmation was viewed by whoever requested it as a means of protecting rights. By the same token, and whatever the source of those rights, by issuing a privilege the ruler so to speak took them under his own protection, made them his own. The privilege thus became a kind of credit-account, through which cheques could be drawn, as needed, on the fund of royal authority. From such a perspective, it becomes rather surprising that rulers’ privileges did not actually play a dominant role in the legal life of the period. First, they were never automatically cited in legal disputes over property, and if they were cited, it was seldom on their own, despite the fact that, according to the current consensus of legal historians, a ruler’s diploma was unassailable. Second, privileges were cited in no very consistent way when legal disputes came before the ruler’s judicial tribunal. Third, Barbarossa’s court and chancery found it difficult to deal with privileges that contradicted each other, and tended to circumvent such problems by silence or bending the facts. Fourth, Barbarossa never thought of the granting of privileges in a systematic way. Let me now give a few examples to illustrate these bald assertions. Barbarossa’s D 528 deals with the following case. In the absence of the plaintiff, the monastery of St Servatius at Maastricht, Count Ludwig of Loon had contrived to get a legal judgement in his own favour over the estate of Vlytingen, which belonged to the monastery. Maastricht possessed a forged diploma of Conrad III which concerned Vlytingen, but this document in fact played only a subordinate role in the complaint brought before Barbarossa’s court of justice: instead the count’s claims were first rebutted on formal and procedural grounds, and only then was the argument supported by the authority of Conrad III’s alleged diploma. Again, in the dispute between the monasteries of Schaffhausen and St Blasien over the possession of Staufen, we find cited: a diploma of Conrad III (D K III 237) in favour of St Blasien; Barbarossa’s privilege (D F 71) in favour of Schaffhausen, which makes no mention of Conrad’s diploma; a probably contemporary beneficiary’s draft-document (D F 72) never actually issued by Frederick, confirming earlier grants to St Blasien including D K III 237; and finally a ruling by three abbots from the year 1164, which says nothing at all about any rulers’ diplomas. The often-discussed dispute over the countship of Chiavenna throws interesting light on how contradictory privileges were dealt with.9 In 1152, 9

See above, chapter 20, p. 400, n. 44.


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despite claims lodged by the bishop of Como and a man named Henry of Orta, Barbarossa assigned the countship to the rectors of the city by a ruling of his judicial court. The grounds given for this decision were that the rectors had enjoyed undisturbed possession of the county for thirty years and that they could produce in their defence a diploma of Conrad III. In 1153, the case was reopened, and the decision of 1152 reversed: the bishop had been able to present older and better privileges, while ‘the men of Chiavenna were completely deficient in their privileges’ (D F 54). According to the new diploma, what had been drawn up in 1152 were only preliminary documents in which both parties had received confirmation of their rightful claims, and from this passage we can infer that the bishop of Como had also received a privilege in 1152. But the extant privilege of 1152, D F 54, is not presented as in any way provisional, and the most plausible interpretation is that what we have here is an attempt to defend an embarrassing situation. The objection raised by the rectors of Chiavenna, that the county was part of the duchy of Swabia, was explicitly dismissed in the privilege of 1153 as an irrelevance and a cause of procedural delay. Yet it was precisely this objection that became the basis for a third decision, probably in 1157, which again assigned the countship to the rectors. The documentation makes not the slightest reference to the preceding judgements, although that of 1153 had explicitly invoked the principle, ‘older right breaks younger right’. Absolutely no forethought was expressed about a possible attempt to reopen the case in the future, should the bishop be able to prove the validity of his ‘older’ privilege – something the bishop of Como did in fact try to do in the early thirteenth century. Similar circumstances seem to underlie the issue of two privileges for the see of Cambrai in 1182 and 1184 (D F 825 and 858). In the first one, Bishop Roger achieved the abolition of the commune of Cambrai. In the second, the commune’s existence was confirmed de facto, and the relationship between bishop and commune was regulated. The second document mentions the first only dismissively in the clause nos debitam operam ad honestam compositionem dederimus (‘we had given due effort to [making] a fair settlement’), which can hardly be seen as a correct description of the first decision; and, again, no forethought is given to any subsequent attempt to reuse the first diploma. As for the maintenance of privileges by the ruler, I would point to a passage of Lambert of Watrelos, where it is immediately clear that Count Theoderic of Flanders was entirely unwilling to recognise the privilege drawn up for the bishopric of Cambrai on the basis of an earlier court judgement; yet, although Theoderic obviously intended to contest the privilege with a feud, Barbarossa did not regard this as something that

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threatened his authority, but instead he sought to act as arbitrator between count and bishop.10 Barbarossa’s D 8, for the community of Meerssen, was equally ineffective against Gozwin of Heinsberg, and that was a dispute which was to have a long sequel especially in the form of papal mandates and judges delegate. The crucial point here is not that a privilege did not always or immediately prove effective – that goes for English and papal documents as well – but, rather, that contempt of a privilege did not normally result in the ruler’s presenting himself as affronted. Only from Burgundy in the 1180s have I found cases where the ruler seems to have thought that the violation of a privilege as such justified measures to secure restitution. It is easy to see that the privilege left much to be desired as an instrument for safeguarding the law in a case of dispute. Almost always, we are justified in harbouring doubts as to how far any particular privilege was effective – doubts that, unfortunately, given the state of current charter-editions, are hard to confirm or dispel, for such editions only very rarely give us any information about the afterlife of privileges. I cannot resist offering you the nicest example of this problem that I know of, even though it comes from another time and another place. An Old English mandate issued c. 1020 by King Cnut for the archbishopric of Canterbury opens with this declaration: ‘I inform you that the archbishop has spoken with me about the freedom of Christ Church Canterbury, [saying] that he now has less protection than formerly. I made him an offer that a new freedom (freols) should be drawn up in my name. He replied that he had freedoms enough if only they were good for anything.’11 Even in the case of forgeries, where it is most reasonable to suppose an intention to exploit them, we have far more forged documents than any direct or indirect evidence for their use. Remember that the date of production of a forged or interpolated document can usually be deduced only from the internal context or from genuine confirmations. It is striking how few cases we know of in which ownership rights were deviously acquired by a privilege containing an expanded enumeratio bonorum (list of properties), although such expansions would have been easy enough to insert and very hard to control. There is one such case in Wibald of Stablo’s letter-collection: it is a papal privilege; and here we find, significantly, that the expansion was exposed only by accident and not in the course of any attempt to put the privilege into practice. Nor is this a unique example. We possess, for instance, two early privileges of Barbarossa (D F 31 and 47) for 10 11

Lambert of Watrelos, Annales Cameracenses s.a. 1152, ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS XVI (Hannover, 1859), pp. 523–5. See further above, chapter 20, pp. 390–2. Freols should probably be translated as ‘a privilege of immunity’. For this passage and the writmandate, see F. Harmer, Anglo-Saxon Writs (2nd edn, Stamford, 1989), no. 26.


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Italian beneficiaries, which in part contradict each other, but there seems to be no other record of any practical consequences that ensued from this contradiction. In thinking about the privilege as a legal tool, we pay too little attention to its role in the repertoire of forms of political action. The most important element in the conceding of a privilege was the act of concession itself. This is very clear in Lambert of Watrelos’s story cited above: the handingover of the document usually had to follow in such a way that even the inspection of the content was reduced to something of a symbolic act. This explains, too, why privileges were most commonly mentioned when it was a matter of confirming them by a new document: they had, so to speak, their own sphere of application which could not impinge on other legal areas. Eckhard Müller-Mertens has recently stressed something else that arises from the significance of the act of concession: it is important to ask whether the would-be beneficiary travelled to the ruler to get his privilege, or did he wait until the ruler came to him?12 This is not just a question of how far the ruler’s authority extended in territorial terms. If I as a Swabian count or abbot, say, were to journey to Goslar to get a privilege, then the handing-over of the document would take place far outside the range of vision of my neighbours and potential opponents. That would matter less if you were considering the privilege only as legal tool; but if you want to think of it as a demonstration of closeness to the ruler as well, then visibility assumes key importance. The external form of the privilege confirms this point: it is a document of exceptional size, with a particularly elaborate script and an artistically designed lay-out; and precisely through its lavish consumption of parchment and sealing-wax, it makes visible in the very moment of its being handed over the immense wealth of the man issuing it. Questions as to whether the rights conferred in it could be exercised in practice or be maintained in the longer run, were, so far as I can see, of secondary importance, and in all cases, the answers were largely left to the recipient. Thus the privilege functioned as writtenness of more the magical than the pragmatic variety; its concession was an act that could almost be termed a ritual. In the thirteenth century, there was a move away from the principle that ‘older privileges take precedence over younger [i.e. more recent] ones’ and a transition towards general and specific cashing-in of older, alternative, rights connected with the granting of privileges. Of all this, however, nothing can be traced in the privileges of Barbarossa for beneficiaries north of the Alps (though there are isolated Italian instances). 12

E. Müller-Mertens, ‘Ottonian Government’, in T. Reuter ed., NCMH, vol. III, pp. 233–66.

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In the communities of the twelfth century, the privilege played an eversmaller role, although it retained some vestige of its old symbolic function. If rulers wanted to insert their own authority into a legal system, they preferred to do so not by committing to ‘unchallengeable’ writing certain assertions of facts whose effects could not, in fact, be controlled. Instead rulers worked with mandates. The essential distinction between privilege and mandate lies in the intentions of the parties involved. In the case of a privilege, it is first and foremost the recipient who has an interest in the issue of the document, for it is hard to imagine someone being privileged against their will. In the case of a mandate, on the other hand, the recipient or addressee was usually involved only passively. The active intention here is to be found with the issuing authority or with a third party, that is, whoever had requested the mandate (though it could sometimes happen that a requester managed to get a mandate issued for himself ). The person who issued the mandate, and the requester, could be concerned in a mandate in three possible ways. First, the issuer could impart a command or desire in a particular matter to an agent or powerholder on the spot. Second, the issuer could introduce a legal or natural person as the possessor of rights which had until that moment belonged to the issuing authority or which only that authority could confer by grace or judgement: at this point the mandate assumed, as it were, the function of the privilege. Third, a requester could use a mandate to initiate a legal process. The first of these categories has usually been very highly rated by historians, for reasons which are not entirely clear to me. It is obviously important to know how far the ‘central power’ can make its will effective on the spot; but whether this is made to happen by means of the written word or by an oral instruction seems of rather secondary importance unless writtenness is part of a system of supervision and control. While the overwhelming majority of Barbarossa’s mandates and letters fall into this first category, and though we have to take into account losses in this area due to the accidents of survival, it is clear that these instruments are being used ad hoc rather than systematically. This is evident not least from the fact that there was hardly a single fixed formula for such documents, except for such common Europe-wide greetings-formulae as gratiam suam et omne bonum or gratiam suam et bonam voluntatem, (‘[sending] his grace and all good wishes’; ‘. . . his grace and goodwill’) and the expression sub obtentu gratie nostre (‘as a condition of gaining our goodwill’) in the case of commands. It seems a permissible conclusion that such documents hardly belonged to any day-in, day-out governmental routine.


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The second type of use is more interesting from the standpoint of governmental technique. The classic case is the English writ-charter which, as noted above, up to a point assumed the function of a privilege, though leading in another direction. The writ-charter ordered a public installation of the recipient in his rights, and therefore was addressed to the sheriff or to the general community. Now it was the opinion of the great nineteenth-century diplomatist Theodor Sickel that from at least the Carolingian period, any privilege that conveyed new rights was accompanied by a command of installation, probably in written form.13 Perhaps we can recognise such a command in the account of Lambert of Watrelos cited above. We possess examples for this in D F 139 for Hilwartshausen, which is addressed to the community’s ministeriales and commands attention to D F 138, a diploma for the community probably issued at the same time. Other examples are D F 389 and 949–50 for the church of Geneva, flanking measures connected with court rulings in the form of privileges D F 388 and D F 933. A decision of the court tribunal could thus be communicated at the same time, as, for instance, in D F 661, for the clergy of the cathedral and city of Minden, which is addressed to the clergy, vassals and ministeriales of the cathedralchurch. But here too what we have is a beneficiary’s document. I need only quote Appelt’s comment in the introduction to his edition: ‘It is characteristic that at this period, obviously, no special formula was envisaged for the documentary record of court judgements.’14 Whoever wanted to have such a record could receive one, but any such request seems to have been quite exceptional. The most important twelfth-century development in governmental technique was without any doubt the third category of the mandate’s use, namely, to initiate a legal process whether explicitly or potentially: explicitly, when the mandate was addressed to judges delegate who would decide a case in the ruler’s name, or implicitly, when what was understood and used by everyone was no longer the privilege’s unassailability in principle, but the openness in principle to legal contestation of the ruler’s command in mandate-form. This development was the outcome of a long and very interesting process which is still in need of further research and clarification, but, at least in the fields of English and papal diplomatic, is visible in broad outline. The essential hallmark of this development was (I am simplifying here a good deal, especially as regards the differences between 13 14

T. Sickel, Acta Regum et Imperatorum Karolinorum digesta et enarrata. vol. I, Urkundenlehre (Vienna, 1867). Appelt, Die Urkunden Friedrichs I., vol. III (Hannover, 1985), p. 169.

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Roman-canonical procedure and English ‘action by writ’) that it originated in a response to rulers’ authority: authority which, while certainly theoretically well-grounded and to a large extent accepted, nevertheless could not be effectively imposed in this form in practice nor was it considered desirable in theory. Out of the straightforward command of a ruler grew a complicated process, in which such a command, even when it looked just the same from the standpoint of diplomatic form as the older mandate, now served only as the introduction to an ongoing legal process at local level. Such a use of the ruler’s mandate was known in the regnum Teutonicum too, not least because of the extension of papal jurisdiction, and Barbarossa’s chancery was obviously quite prepared to issue such documents. From Wibald’s Letterbook, for instance, we have two mandates issued in Wibald’s favour in a dispute with a ministerialis. One names the bishop of Münster as judge-delegate: he must first restore the status quo in return for sureties, and then provide a judicial decision for the case. The other is addressed to Wibald’s opponent and serves as an invitation to, and spelling-out of, the procedure.15 Similar cases occur in a charter for Archbishop Arnold of Cologne dating to 1155,16 or in Barbarossa’s mandate D F 680 to Ulrich of Aquileia of the year 1177, with the addition, characteristic of English and papal documents, that the dispute is to be settled in such a way ut querimonium nobis denuo proferre eum non oporteat (‘that it does not behove him [the judge delegate] to refer the dispute back to us again’). But such uses remained the exceptions in the twelfth-century regnum Teutonicum. We have only isolated indications of them, and these indications do not feature through the whole course of Barbarossa’s reign. Moreover, it is almost always a matter of the delegation of the office of judge, hence what we might think of as a spatial extension of the court judgement. Nor were there writs on the Anglo-Norman model, which a potential opponent could either come to terms on or contest before a court. Interesting in this context is D F 292 for Archbishop Eberhard of Salzburg. Barbarossa had delegated to Eberhard the case of a knight named Ulrich, but the other party to the dispute, the community of Chiemsee, came before him and gave a different account of the case which made the previous mandate invalid. There was obviously no attempt to argue out the case at local level on the principle of si preces veritate nituntur (‘if [the facts stated in] the pleas strive in truth [i.e. are confirmed as correct]’). Nor was any ruling ever given on how such cases should be tackled: there was was no ordo iudiciarius specific to 15

D F 168, 169.

16

Diestelkamp and Rotter, Urkundenregesten, no. 336.


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Germany, no Glanvill, no decretals, no decisions of the ruler’s court to settle the question. Such mandates ordering that justice be done presuppose a ruler wielding, and delegating, the power of judgement. But in the regnum Teutonicum such power was much more frequently exercised by the ruler himself acting not as judge, but as president of a quasi-judicial assembly. Imperii nostri nos ortatur auctoritas omnium regni fidelium controversias ad presentiam nostrum perlatas diligenti examinatione dirimere et, ne in posterum exinde oriatur contentio, congrua sentencia terminare (‘the authority of our rulership urges us to deal with the disputes of all the faithful men of our realm that have been brought to our presence with careful scrutiny and to settle them with a fitting sentence, lest any contention arise from them thereafter’), said Barbarossa in his charter for Como, D F 54. I am going to leave to one side the spectacular cases involving high politics, and concentrate my attention on the well-evidenced everyday: roughly a quarter to a third of all documents issued by Barbarossa to beneficiaries north of the Alps depend on ‘rulings of the high court of justice’. By comparison with England or the papacy, the ruler’s high court was more of a collective tribunal. Here the ruler held something like a presidency. It was always permissible for someone to bring a complaint against the ruler himself, although I find it hard to imagine that this could ever have happened against the ruler’s own will. Other office-holders also drew up documents in curia Regis (in the court of the king) about particular judgements or rulings. Procedure was opaque, to put it mildly, because the written form of rulings only seldom mentioned the grounds on which they had been reached; even the way that judgement-finders were selected is totally obscure, save for the fact that, according to a principle that can only be inferred, they had to be of the same rank as the plaintiff. The way in which the written word was used to record judgements had no fixed forms, and indeed a written record was not strictly necessary: we have a number of references to cases in which the judgement was apparently never committed to writing. But the most important point was that the summoning of the high court was largely an ad hoc business. It was in fact exceptional for controversiae to originate from rulings of any lower court. It comes as quite a surprise when we read in an exchange of letters between Wibald and the young Henry VI of a ministerialis of Stablo who lodged an appeal (appellatio) in the middle of judicial proceedings, whereupon Wibald transferred the dossier to the high court for a decision.17 17

See above, chapter 20, p. 395, n. 26.

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The ruler’s court of justice was thus very largely a court of first instance, by contrast to the ‘high courts’ of the popes and the English kings (although those too could operate on occasion as courts of first instance). But this was not the court you first thought of. Normally you waited until the ruler was in the vicinity before you thought of his judicial court – just as you did before thinking of getting a privilege. People were prepared to travel to Rome several times – ‘The bearer of this letter, E., has come five times into our presence’, wrote Eugenius III, tired and irritated by a case in which the resultant travel expenses must have cost several times more than the value of what was in dispute18 – or to seek out the king of England when that meant journeying from one end of his dominions to the other, in order to get a decision or a mandate. In the regnum Teutonicum such a thing happened seldom. Perhaps this had something to do with the rules of regional customary law: for instance, if Swabian judgement-finders were required for a judgement involving Swabians, you could not be sure of finding a qualified tribunal in, say, Saxony. Again, it may have had to do with the need for visibility that I have already mentioned in the context of privileges. Yet it was precisely in that connexion that, if Barbarossa’s court of justice really had been central for legal and political life, you would have expected the inevitable growth of that court’s business with the equivalent of judges delegate or itinerant justices with full jurisdictional powers. Now, Karl Leyser, in his last Reichenau paper, and Karl-Heinz Spieß at the most recent Reichenau conference, have both drawn attention to some cases instanced in the diplomas of Barbarossa where the ruler’s officers armed with full powers were sent out from the palace to conduct an inquisitio (judicial enquiry) on the spot and then either declare a decision or produce a report on the basis of which a decision could be made.19 It would be possible to add to those examples. These seem at first sight to work in a ‘modern’ way, yet on closer inspection it is evident that these procedures must also have been entirely ad hoc. Given the numbers of personnel at Barbarossa’s disposal, we certainly don’t need to ask ourselves if these examples are just the remaining tip of a now-vanished iceberg, for had that been so, the extant diplomas would have contained a higher proportion of 18 19

Jaffé et al. eds., Regesta, 9399. See below, chapter 22, p. 443, n. 41. K. Leyser, ‘Friedrich Barbarossa: Hof und Land’, in A. Haverkamp ed., Friedrich Barbarossa, Vorträge und Forschungen 40 (1992), pp. 519–30, cf. K. Leyser, ‘Frederick Barbarossa and the Hohenstaufen polity’, Viator 19 (1988), pp. 154–76, repr. in Leyser, Communications and Power in Medieval Europe, ed. T. Reuter, 2 vols. (London, 1994); K.-H. Spiess, ‘Kommunikationsformen im Hochadel und am Königshof im Spätmittelter’, in Formen und Funktionen o¨ffentlicher Kommunikation in Mittelalter, ed. G. Althoff, Vorträge und Forschungen 51 (Stuttgart, 2001), pp. 261–90.


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cases coming from a considerable distance. Most of the cases we know of were strictly comparable with a modern local hearing: the court process was briefly interrupted while selected officers informed themselves of the facts on the ground by means of a short journey. Barbarossa’s diploma for the priory of Meerssen (D F 8) can again be cited as an example: yes, it was issued at Paderborn, but the action underlying it took place at Aachen or Cologne, and so the nuntii (messengers) had to make little more than a couple of days’ ride.20 It is true that popes, Angevin kings and others were familiar with the technique of using itinerant representatives with full judicial and inquisitorial powers, but they never dreamed of employing such men on an everyday basis. Instead they were used as a court of supervision and surveillance, to deal with cases which had either been delayed beyond the legal limit by local courts, or not been successfully dealt with for some other reason; and they also functioned as a way of checking up on their own administration. As we have seen, the ruler’s judicial court was not conceived of as a court of last resort in any clear-cut way. When its summonses or rulings were treated with contempt or ignored, that was clearly not considered an issue of principle or something that required a merciless reaction. That is evident from the Meersen case just mentioned. Here the inquisition and the court-ruling were quite without effect and the case had a long and intractable afterlife. Barbarossa’s chancery, like other European chanceries, could certainly produce impressive sound-effects, but any real effects often failed to materialise. Let me cite Wibald again: iudiciorum . . . vocem intra paucissimos pagos vix posse audiri (‘the sound of judgements could hardly be heard even within a very few localities’), or Barbarossa himself: Si palatinus comes de Sumerseburc ad curiam venisset, correptiones et iudicii sentenciam pro iniuria, quam tue dilectioni infert, non subterfugisset (‘If the count palatine of Sommerschenburg had come to my court, he would not have been able to evade its corrections and its sentence of judgement for the injury done to Your Belovedness’).21 But the count palatine had not come, and so Barbarossa had to be content with sending him another mandate. Whether that was effective, we do not know; yet this episode may well have revealed once again that it was not only in cases involving high politics that people could ignore the judgement of the ruler’s court. The word subterfugere – ‘evade’ – cropped up so often in Barbarossa’s charters that it became virtually a technical term for such avoidance of judgement. 20

See above, p. .

21

Wibald, D F 8; D F 66.

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From the narrative sources as well as from the diplomas themselves, we can often see attempts on the part of those who took part in those judgements to reach solutions that preserved the honour and saved the face of all those involved, including the judgement-finders. On this point, I recommend, once again, a careful reading of Lambert of Watrelos: his account makes hardly any mention of legal questions, leaving all the more space, instead, for going into detail about the honour of the princes at Barbarossa’s court who had taken part in the sequence of decisions, contradictory as those were. Basic elements in the procedure of the royal court of justice were verbal chastisements, putting people in the pillory, so to speak: in the passage just quoted, even the count palatine of Sommerschenburg had to undergo not just ‘judgement’ but ‘correction’. In another diploma (D F 629), Barbarossa dealt with the case of a nobleman who had plundered the monastery of Beaupré, obviously to initiate a feud as a means of lawenforcement. Vocatus itaque venit ad nostrum audientiam, ubi cum verbis duris et contumeliosis increpatus et exacerbatus coram principibus curie, nos altiore communis pacis et dilectionis intuitu satis indulsimus illi (‘Having been summoned, he came to our hearing, where after he had been reviled and bitterly denounced with many harsh and angry words before the princes of the court, we were quite merciful to him, thanks to our higher regard for collective peace and love.’) There then followed the terms of a legal settlement. What is striking here is the concern to restore honour after acts of dishonouring, precisely in the same way that 200 years before, Otto I had restored to his good graces the dog-carrying retainers of Eberhard of Franconia and demonstrated this publicly with rich gifts.22 Part of this political culture of honour and face-saving was the fact that the ruler’s judicial court itself very often functioned in public transactions as, in effect, a court of settlement, a role often stressed in the prologues of documents: this was indeed suum cuique tribuere – ‘to give each his due’– but an important part of that ‘due’ was, to use modern German parlance, ‘ein gutes Feeling’, a sense of feeling good. In papal and English judicial practice too, what was often sought was evidently a compromise that was likely to work. The Reich’s alternative form of pressure in the background, was not feud and enmity but a strong lawfully conducted judicial process in the ruler’s court. I will draw the strands of my argument together. The privilege was something other than a pragmatic legal tool; the ruler’s mandate as part of an ordered legal process was certainly known in the regnum Teutonicum but 22

Widukind, Res gestae Saxonicae, ed. P. Hirsch and H.-E. Lohmann, MGH SRG LX (Hannover, 1935), II, 6, p. 72.


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was not particularly significant; as for the royal court of justice, it was not regarded as the apex of a hierarchy of courts, and only to a limited extent was its mode of operation judicial. Hence the political forms of procedure in the age of Barbarossa, as revealed to us in the documents considered above, seem to have been only peripherally touched by what historians have termed ‘modern’ trends. Now, it might be objected, perhaps, that the agents and techniques of government deployed by Barbarossa in Italy were generally much ‘more modern’: iudices (judges) whom Barbarossa found already in place and whose job it was to speak the law in the ruler’s name; legates whose activity imitated the style of papal government in representing the ruler, and whom we also meet in the kingdom of Burgundy and not in the regnum Teutonicum; podestàs confirmed in their posts by the emperor, empowered by imperial authority to rule over the cities in a role that was a mixture of town-counsellor and judge; the derivation of all public authority from the ruler theoretically grounded on the constitution Omnis.23 All this shows Barbarossa familiar with the techniques of a ‘modern’ regime, and the few bits and pieces of evidence might thus be thought sufficient to suggest a desire and a plan to introduce ‘modern’ techniques into the regnum Teutonicum. That objection, however, ignores two important features of medieval rulership. In the first place, we must never leave out of account the basic requirements of a regime that was, to use a slightly anachronistic term, a personal union. On his deathbed, Count Geoffrey of Anjou warned his son Henry, the later king of England, never to embark on any attempt to rule one territory according to the customs of another: his own experience was, he implied, that nothing good ever came out of such action.24 In fact the history of the Anglo-Norman/Angevin empire shows that the territories comprising it, despite a certain tendency towards institutional osmosis, all clung to their own political and institutional styles, and Henry II ruled differently in Aquitaine from how he ruled in England, just as Cnut in the eleventh century ruled in different ways in Scandinavia and in England. Moreover, the extent to which the old greater Frankish empire was ‘frankicised’ had its limits. You cannot automatically transfer conclusions 23

24

DD F 1 no. 238, MGH Urkunden (as n. 4 above), X (2), p. 30: ‘Omnis iurisdictio et omnis districtus apud principem est et omnes iudices a principe administrationem accipere debent . . .’ [I am grateful to Susan Reynolds, Magnus Ryan and Caroline Humfress for help in tracking down this reference.] Historia Gaufredi Ducis, in Chroniques des comtes d’Anjou, ed. L. Halphen and R. Poupardin (Paris, 1913), p. 224: ‘Terre vero sue et genti spiritu presago in posterum previdens, heredi suo interdixit ne Normannie vel Anglie consuetudines in consulatus sui terram vel e converso, varie vicissitudinis alternatione, permutaret.’

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from Italy to Germany. In the second place, we should not ignore the element of demand in high-medieval rulership. We tend to operate too easily on a model derived from the villains whom the hero confronts in James Bond stories: the villain’s recipe for success lies in silently constructing a power-base which then enables him at a suitable moment to take control of everything. Yet nowhere in the ‘developed’ Europe of the twelfth century do we find any real transition from a rather passive rulership, which rules reactively by means of grace and punishment, to an active, more properly monarchic, style of ruling, which gives shape to politics by issuing commands and wielding an omnipresent jurisdiction. These very ‘advanced’ techniques of government had their origin, amidst much trial and error, in reactions to demand. Recent research is now showing that this applies to the imposing structure of the common law under Henry II. It is true that we learn from Bracton that key elements of this structure were thought up in the course of many sleepless nights by Henry and his advisers.25 But the whole process of legal development shows quite clearly that these men were reacting to demand, and that the techniques they devised subsequently remained in use because those involved in their application wanted that to happen and took advantage of it. Something similar goes for the origins of papal jurisdiction – a subject on which unfortunately too little research has yet been done. The growth of the ruler’s authority which in theory was something everyone accepted was something that in practice everyone exploited: appellate jurisdiction presupposes, after all, that there are people who will lodge appeals. At the same time, the ruler exploited the system as a whole: grace, or disgrace, were increasingly taken as indicators that iustitia had or had not been made available. Neither pope nor English king was merely a passive component in the system – as it were, a rescript-issuing automaton.26 With some qualifications in the case of England, I would say that in the twelfth century, no such thing existed as a claim to justice that could be straightforwardly asserted in practice on the basis of a mandate or writ. You almost always had to wait for justice; you mostly had to pay quite a bit for it; and you had to be, or be on the way to being, persona grata with the regime, or you would have to wait a very long time and pay rather a lot. Nevertheless, this bureaucratic, routinised gratia had a different quality from the public handing-over of a diploma or the public pronouncement of a high-court 25 26

Bracton is here representing a later office tradition: John Gillingham kindly supplied this comment. See also chapter 20, p. 396, n. 32 As implied in E. Pitz, ‘Zur Edition der Urkunden Konrads III.’, QFIAB 50 (1971), pp. 432–46; E. Pitz, Papstreskript und Kaiserreskript im Mittelalter (Tübingen, 1971).


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ruling, though admittedly we should reckon, either way, with very high losses, through wear and tear and the sheer process of transmission, in the conversion of gratia into right and possession. If things were different in the regnum Teutonicum under Barbarossa, that was probably not because of any lack of vision or energy on the ruler’s part, but because any such development was in itself neither compatible with the ways things were, nor in fact desired. Here we have to do with a different kind of community and a different legal culture. First of all, there existed no hierarchies of the sort that were necessary to bring the political culture of dispute within the framework of legal process. In England there were shire courts available to promote such a development, and there was also the feudal jurisdiction of the magnates themselves. As for the papacy, its mandates likewise had as their context a clearly articulated hierarchy, though here a system of appeals allowed the pope, by virtue of his overriding authority, to go over the heads of the hierarchy at any time by appointing men of lesser rank as papal judges delegate. Such structures and ways of thinking were completely absent from the regnum Teutonicum. For the political class, episcopal jurisdiction in the form of diocesan synods could no longer fulfil the role of a substitute for secular jurisdiction, as it manifestly had, if in a sketchy way, in the Ottonian and early Salian Reich and elsewhere in post-Carolingian Europe. Comital jurisdiction was now too heterogeneous and too fragmented to form legal communities analogous to the ‘shire-communities’ of England, and anyway it hardly touched the members of the political class itself. And, so far as I can see, relations between lords and vassals in the twelfth-century regnum Teutonicum were scarcely brought within the framework of law, let alone brought under the jurisdiction of courts: anything corresponding to the court of an English honor-holder was simply non-existent (though lords had some kind of legal rights over their ministeriales). In short, there was no network of more or less homogeneous ranked courts which might have been used to bring politics within a legal framework; and, by the same token, there was no attempt worthy of the name to summon any such process into being by a voluntaristic act of the ruler’s will. This probably explains why concessions in the form of a writ-charter were rare: there was a lack of any institutionalised public at local level through which orders to install or protect could have been made effective. It is worth noting, too, that the papacy’s developing appellate jurisdiction made only slow and halting advances in the regnum Teutonicum. I have not counted, but I have the very strong impression that even among papal documents for German beneficiaries, right down to the end

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of the twelfth century, privileges predominated, just as they did in the case of imperial diplomas. Elsewhere, notably in England and Sicily, reactions against papal jurisdiction came from those who held rival jurisdictions, and, at least in the case of England, these reactions had, in the last resort, only limited success because the demand for papal judgement was so strong. In the regnum Teutonicum too, there were strong reactions, but these came not only from the ruler but from others as well; and despite Barbarossa’s problems with the reverberations of the fracas at Besançon, it is only very occasionally that we can see efforts on his part to limit papal jurisdiction in principle or to define its sphere of influence more sharply.27 Evidence pointing in the opposite direction comes almost exclusively from a string of mandates in favour of Hugh of Verden, and these should probably be ascribed to Hugh rather than to Barbarossa.28 For the most part, people showed themselves quite unconcerned about handling potential problems here: Conrad III cancelled the interdict at Quedlinburg;29 Barbarossa declared that he was obliged iuxta legum iustitia [sic] et canonum decreta pacem et iustitiam providere (‘to provide peace and justice according to the justness of the laws and the decrees of the canons’), and ordered both Wichmann of Magdeburg and Arnold of Trier to conduct a canonical trial.30 In neither case was any offence taken by the churchman who received these instructions. If you pick up a biography of Frederick Barbarossa, first apply the Ottoof-Freising Test. This is how it works: open the book precisely in the middle and note what subject is dealt with on this page. Halfway through the reign of Barbarossa would actually be 1171. If your author is still around 1160, they have probably not managed to liberate themselves from the perspective offered by Otto of Freising’s Gesta Friderici. This perspective is not really Otto’s own, though, so much as that of his interpreters. Otto’s work is too often read as a commentary on the years in which Barbarossa is supposed to have tried to push through a new policy: the cues here are honor imperii or ‘great design’. Well, the whole of Barbarossa’s reign is a key period in which the German Sonderweg (‘special way’) of the high and later Middle Ages was cemented more firmly. The political class of the regnum Teutonicum – including Barbarossa himself – remained orientated towards honour, facesaving, grace, feud and compromise-settlements, and it saw no reason to alter these ways of behaving, still less let them be recast as issues of jurisdiction. The letters and narrative sources of the later twelfth century provide the key to all this. We ought to read Otto of Freising’s work in the 27

See above, chapter 20, p. 408.

28

D F 758, 759.

29

D C III 217.

30

D F 568.


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same way as we do Thietmar of Merseburg’s: nearly every sentence yields information about the political culture of his age. But, in a less obvious way, so does the vast quantity of material set before us by Heinrich Appelt and his colleagues. If we study the documents with that expectation in mind, we might perhaps be able to say why the ways of behaving which I have described in this paper, but for which I have offered only structural explanations of a preliminary kind, continued in the Reich when elsewhere in Europe (although they could still be found there too), during the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, they were slowly driven out of practice not just by rulers, but by the other people who had a part in them.

chap t e r 22

All quiet except on the Western Front? The emergence of pre-modern forms of statehood in the central Middle Ages1 The relationship between this subject and the present writer is not a new one. About five years ago, I published a longer paper on a very closely related theme, the medieval German Sonderweg.2 So, in the following remarks, the content and argument of that earlier paper will for the most part be implicitly taken as read, except for when it is explicitly cited or corrected. But not only is the relationship between subject and writer not new: the subject itself is very old. The questions of why and – unfortunately less often asked, though no less crucial – how far the development of Germany in the central medieval period was or seemed to be different from what happened in the rest of Europe, and the related discussion over whether this ought, on the whole, to be assessed in negative or positive terms, are both almost as old as the professional study of medieval history in Germany. They have their roots in the reciprocal links between history as a subject and state development in Europe, and especially in the German-speaking lands, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.3 Then as now, it was a matter of making sense of a current situation, but the particular significance of medieval history for the German-speaking lands was fundamentally greater then than now. The Middle Ages in Germany nowadays, as elsewhere in Europe, is a far-away land, not just in chronological but in emotional terms: today people visit great exhibitions on medieval themes because of their exoticism, not because the history treated and illustrated in them still has any meaning for people’s actual lives. It was different in the nineteenth 1

2 3

The text is essentially that of the lecture as given, with many amplifications and reformulations evoked by the ensuing discussion. The notes have been kept to a minimum, with a deliberate but also unavoidable (given other work commitments at the time) predominance of works in English. [I have added one or two references to English translations. JLN] [Reprinted in this book, chapter 20, above.] For this development in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, see R. N. Soffer, Discipline and Power: The University, History, and the Making of an English Elite, 1870–1930 (Stanford CA, 1994); F. Ringer, Education and Society in Modern Europe (Bloomington IN, 1979); K. H. Jaransen, Students, Society and Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 1982).

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All quiet on the Western Front?

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century. The high-medieval period was the age of glory in the German past. The German Reich had once been the leading power in medieval Europe, a position of hegemony that was lost for centuries with the fall of the Hohenstaufen dynasty. This era was not only the object of admiring and nostalgic contemplation – Giesebrecht’s Kaiserzeit was a famous best-seller for the educated bourgeoisie of Wilhelmine Germany – but it also became urgent to explain the loss of this hegemony so that lessons could be drawn from history for contemporary politics. The explanation was supplied in various ways. In part, it was a matter of pointing out the rulers’ missed opportunities, for instance in the argument over whether the emperors’ Italian policies were or were not harmful for German history.4 In part it was a question of identifying counter-forces that proved to be obstacles to a more successful outcome. In the age of the Kulturkampf, and in the period before and after the First World War, the favourite culprits were the papacy and its allies,5 but blame was also laid on the egotistical conduct of the German princes.6 Such explanatory models presupposed, more or less implicitly, that the rulers of Germany, had they not been diverted by misconceived tasks or held back by internal enemies, would have aimed at a ‘normal’ or at least more tolerable development for the Reich. Anyone looking to follow the debate in the decades before the Second World War and through the successful depoliticisation of medieval history in the post-war period, will find it beautifully epitomised in an unexpected quarter: in a book published in two volumes by Geoffrey Barraclough in 1938, a book hardly known in Germany, in contrast to his later popularising synthesis of 1946.7 This earlier work aimed at making the fruits of the most up-to-date German research available to anglophone readers 4

5

6

7

H. Hostenkamp, Die mittelalterliche Kaiserpolitik in der deutschen Historiographie seit von Sybel und Ficker, Historische Studien 253 (Berlin, 1934); F. Schneider, Die neueren Anschauungen der deutschen Historiker u¨ ber die deutsche Kaiserpolitik des Mittelalters und die mit ihr verbundene Ostpolitik, 5th edn (Weimar, 1943) (first published 1934). Examples worth citing would be the basic argument and tone of H. Zatschek, Wibald von Stablo. Studien zur Geschichte der Reichskanzlei und der Reichspolitik unter den a¨ lteren Staufern, Mitteilungen des o¨ sterreichischen Instituts für Geschichtsforschung, Ergänzungsband 10 (1928), pp. 237–495, or the works of H. Hirsch, B. Schmeidler and others on the chancery of Henry IV. This argument was brought to a head in the long debate over Frederick I’s prostration at Chiavenna in 1176: see on the historiography, W. Hechberger, Staufer und Welfen 1125–1190, Passauer Historische Forschungen 10 (Cologne, 1996), pp. 310–13; B. Schneidmüller, Die Welfen: Herrschaft und Erinnerung (Stuttgart, 2000), pp. 225, 292–300. Medieval Germany, 911–1250, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1938); G. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany (Oxford, 1946, 2nd edn 1947), and translated into German by F. Baethgen as Die mittelalterlichen Grundlagen des modernen Deutschland, 2nd edn (Weimar, 1955).

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increasingly cut off linguistically from German medieval scholarship.8 Barraclough, a distinguished expert on the German-speaking medievalist scene of the inter-war period, offered in the first volume a splendid synthesis of the constitutional history of the imperial age, while in the second volume he offered translated articles by leading German-speaking medievalists of the 20s and 30s: Mayer, Schmeidler, Hirsch, von Dungern, Mitteis, Brackmann and others. Neither the selection of the authors nor the thrust of the editorial commentary were at all neutral: there were without any doubt other questions being asked at that time on medieval history, and there were other medievalists apart from this group, which though it certainly formed no clique had a general bias towards thinking in German national terms and with a concentration on the state. Yet this touch of one-sidedness is useful for us, because Barraclough’s selection strongly underlines the explanatory models and substantive emphases that dominated German medieval scholarship in the inter-war period. Among a whole series of frequently recurring arguments, I would highlight the following: – the importance of tightly organised territorial states for future political development, and especially the stress on a fundamental distinction between the ruler and everyone else. The territories in process of formation were of particular interest here, but so were the actual or supposed impulses to form such territories on the part of the Salian and Staufen emperors; – the positive and negative aspects of feudal relationships, which elsewhere in Europe could be made use of by rulers and their lawyers to make royal power more intensive, but which in Germany ultimately blocked any control by the ruler over the great office-holders. The classic example here is the contrast, repeatedly stressed by Mitteis and others, between the trial of Henry the Lion by Barbarossa on the one hand, and that of John of England by Philip Augustus on the other;9 8

9

‘It was rare to have to deal with a pupil unable to make use of French authorities, but those who were in a position to study the work of German historians were perhaps rarer still’, Barraclough, Medieval Germany I, p. v. For the estrangement between anglophone and German medieval scholarship since the First World War – an estrangement caused not only by the language divide – see P. Linehan, ‘The making of The Cambridge Medieval History’, Speculum 57 (1982), pp. 463–7, 493–4; T. Reuter, ‘Karl Leyser the historian’, in K. Leyser, Communications and Power in Medieval Europe: The Gregorian Revolution and Beyond, ed. Reuter (London, 1994), p. xv. H. Mitteis, ‘Politische Prozesse des früheren Mittelalters in Deutschland und Frankreich’, Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-hist. Klasse 5 (Heidelberg, 1927); H. Mitteis, Lehnrecht und Staatsgewalt (Weimar, 1933), pp. 290–301, 431–44. Fundamental on the historiographical development is S. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals (Oxford, 1994).


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– the particular characteristics of Germany’s constitutional development, not just in reference to the significance of land-clearance, forest rights, immunities and advocacies for the development of territorial states, but especially in the stress on the independent and ‘indigenous’ rights of a high nobility which in the last resort never thought of itself as exclusively acting with delegated power, as agents of the king;10 – the rise of new forms of state in the central Middle Ages, especially in the states founded by the Normans in England and in Sicily. Such considerations led to a one-sided concentration on the period between Henry IV (1053–1106) and Henry VI (1184–97) – with a glance ahead at Frederick II (1194–1250) and Henry (VII) (1222–42) – as the turning-point in the whole course of medieval German history. It is no accident for our theme, therefore, that historiographical discussion of the explicit comparison between developments in the West and in the German Reich very often hinged on the reign of Frederick Barbarossa; and in the following remarks I shall concern myself chiefly with the ‘long’ twelfth century between about 1070 and about 1220/30, since it was in this period, if ever, that the train was missed: if had been caught, then perhaps the retarding of the nation, and hence the coming too late of state-formation on a national basis, might have been averted.11 Such debates are not so much being taken further these days and replaced by new ones, as simply dropped. True, the old discussions have occasionally been pursued in the post-war period, as in the arguments of Barraclough, Munz and Bosl over whether Barbarossa tried, even if he ultimately failed, to modernise the Reich, or whether he overlooked what opportunities were in fact available.12 But on the whole, historians turned to other problems and other subjects. My impression is, further, that the period 1050–1250 has become less central in medievalists’ field of vision in recent decades than once was the case. Of course, scholars have not stopped working on it, often with sharpness and success; but a paradigm shift, of the sort demonstrable in the case of study of the Ottonian period or of the later Middle Ages, so far as I can see has not occurred. At the same time, in an age of constitutional patriotism and Europeanisation, the old questions have lost much of their 10 11 12

The classic work here is W. Schlesinger, Die Entstehung der Landesherrschaft, vol. I (Dresden, 1941). ¨ H. Plessner, Die verspätete Nation. Uber die politische Verführbarkeit bürgerlichen Geistes, 2nd edn (Stuttgart, 1959). G. Barraclough, ‘Frederick Barbarossa and the twelfth century’, in G. Barraclough, History in a Changing World (London, 1954), pp. 73–96; P. Munz, Frederick Barbarossa (London, 1969); K. Bosl, ‘Friedrich Barbarossa – Reaktionär oder Staatsmann’, Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte 43 (1978), pp. 93–116.

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earlier fascination. Paradoxically, this Europeanisation of horizons has not been accompanied by any new revival of comparative historical method. In current syntheses and general accounts the German history of the central Middle Ages is certainly presented in a European framework rather more than used to happen, while social, economic, religious and cultural developments are presented more automatically as parts of pan-European trends;13 but comparisons with political developments in the other parts of Europe – and it hardly matters here whether these might be given an apologetic or regretful slant – have become quite rare, and perhaps this has something to do with the fact that constitutional history in the old style has clearly gone out of fashion. Mitteis’s Der Staat des hohen Mittelalters is more listed in bibliographies and declared obligatory in lecture-courses than actually read and cited by scholars.14 For earlier generations, things were different. They asked questions that presupposed, as already noted, a central medieval ‘normal case’: the point of comparison might be, alternatively, the story of Capetian success, or the building by the Normans of new state-forms in the island kingdoms of England and Sicily.15 They assumed that in fact there occurred an unmistakeable West European trend in the course of the ‘long’ twelfth century. They believed that in most parts of Europe from the eleventh century on, there set in a development in the direction of the early modern state which had already advanced quite far in many areas by 1200. Nowadays, such a development is often placed rather later. The European Science Foundation-funded project directed by Jean-Philippe Genet on the Genèse de l’Etat Moderne, which led to the publication of several collections of conference papers between 1983 and 1996,16 did not ignore the central Middle Ages, but showed a far stronger interest in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is well known that the Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 13

14 15

16

See e.g. A. Haverkampf, Aufbruch und Gestaltung. Deutschland 1056–1273, Neue Deutsche Geschichte 2, 2nd edn (Munich, 1993) [English trans. by R. Mortimer and H. Braun as Medieval Germany, 1056– 1273 (Oxford, 1988)]; H. Furhmann, Deutschland im hohen Mittelalter, 3rd edn (Göttingen, 1993) [English trans. of original 1978 edn by T. Reuter as Germany in the High Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1986)]; H. Keller, Zwischen regionaler Begrenzung und universalem Horizont 1024–1250, Propyläen Geschichte Deutschlands 2 (Berlin, 1986). H. Mitteis, Der Staat des hohen Mittelalters (Weimar, 1940, 4th edn Munich, 1953) [English trans. by H. F. Orton as The State in the Middle Ages (Amsterdam, 1975)]. See especially the works of A. Brackmann, ‘Die Wandlungen der Staatsanschauungen im Zeitalter Kaiser Friedrichs I.’, HZ 145 (1932), pp. 1–18; ‘Die Ursachen der geistigen und politischen Wendung Europas im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert’, HZ 149 (1934), pp. 229–39; ‘Die mittelalterliche Ursprung des Nationalstaates’, Sitzungsberichte Berlin 13 (1936), pp. 128–39 [trans. in Barraclough, Medieval Germany II, pp. 281–99]. For bibliographical details, see J.-P. Genet ed., L’Etat moderne: genèse. Bilans et perspectives (Paris, 1990), pp. 308–18.


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treated the period 1300 to c. 1800 as a meaningful unit,17 straddling traditional period-divides, a period, we might say, of dynastic and early modern states, even, perhaps, a ‘long ancien régime’. None of that is an accident. The forerunners of modern states in the age of absolutism are much more readily and simply compared with the fore-forerunners in the late Middle Ages, because the evidential bases of the two periods are halfway similar. But that is at least partly an optical illusion. Granted, the pre-modern state certainly did not begin before the late Middle Ages to document its own existence accurately and completely; but it certainly did not begin to exist then, for the successful self-documentation that we historians find so useful presupposes a still earlier existence and a considerably earlier development. It is with that earlier development that the following pages will largely be concerned. What did this development consist of? I will first identify a string of characteristics on the lines of a Weberian ideal-type: territorially conceived, largely homogeneous, units of government; officials or quasi-officials in place of men holding office on a feudal basis; established residences with fixed seats of office operating as such even when the ruler was not in residence, and capitals; a hierarchisation of courts coupled with, in the end, a state monopoly of justice especially in the areas of criminal justice and judicial review; financing of state responsibilities increasingly on the basis of general taxation instead of from the private means of whoever was ruler at the time; last but not least, clearly defined rules of succession. The list is arbitrary, and should not be taken to imply a ranked order. As a whole, these and other traits form a recognisable complex. In what follows, I shall analyse them with a view to contemporary developments in the German Reich (note, at Reich-level) and in western and southern Europe. The overall conclusion will probably not be surprising: it has yielded a string of suspicious differences. Further questions arise. Is the level of comparison the correct one? Were the differences actually so suspicious? If so, can they be evaluated as indications of retarded development vis-à-vis the West? One of the hallmarks of the pre-modern state is the splitting up of the territory into several administrative units that are in principle homogeneous: for instance, the shires of the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman realm, visible already in the ninth and tenth centuries,18 or the substantially later bailliages of the Capetians (and already before them, of some of the other 17 18

Editor’s foreword, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 1 (1974), p. 1. For the process of formation, see J. Whybra, A Lost English County: Winchcombshire in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (Woodbridge, 1990); J. Campbell, The History of the English Shires (Matlock, 1998).

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French principalities), or the styla of the Norwegian-Icelandic kingdom.19 Up to a point, the bishoprics and parishes of the Church in the central Middle Ages can be considered analogous.20 But we must be careful to avoid exaggeration in this area. Many twelfth- and thirteenth-century kingdoms developed such administrative sub-units late and incompletely. Even in Capetian France, there were baillis long before one could speak of a network of bailliages.21 The homogeneity of such institutions is all too often assumed rather than demonstrated; many particular examples have their roots in earlier forms of organisation which were anything but homogeneous. That goes even for the English shires, which were in part new creations, in part further developments of former tribal regions or sub-kingdoms,22 just like the counties in the lands east of the Rhine which have caused so many fierce encounters between constitutional historians.23 Yet, despite all these qualifications, it is impossible to deny a considerable difference in this respect between the German Reich and western Europe. It is not only the tendency to a nominalistic approach among Germanspeaking medievalists that makes a comprehensive and generalising analysis of German counties in the central Middle Ages impossible, but rather the fact that, in Germany, county (or countship) was, is and must be an omnium-gatherum term for the most varied phenomena. Even were that not so, the feeling that countships and comital rights ought or had to be offices covering uniform spaces, and exercised as commissions from the king, was so underdeveloped that it is barely perceptible. Dukedoms and probably margravates were eventually to be considered as offices too in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but, again, viewed together, these did not form a net (however coarse-meshed as yet) of administrative units.24 The newer-type developments in the lands of the regnum Teutonicorum, such 19

20

21 22

23

24

F. Lot and R. Fawtier, Histoire des institutions françaises au moyen aˆ ge, II: Institutions royales (Paris, 1958), pp. 144–58; J. Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair (Princeton, 1980), pp. 100–3; J. W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus (Berkeley, 1986), pp. 125–55, 220–7; K. Helle, Norge blir en stat 1130–1319, 2nd edn (Copenhagen, 1974), pp. 206–11. See T. Reuter, ‘Ein Europa der Bischöfe. Das Zeitalter Burchards von Worms’, in W. Hartmann ed., Burchard von Worms und seine Zeit (Mainz, 2000), pp. 1–28; H.-J. Schmidt, Kirche, Staat, Nation. Raumgliederung der Kirche im mittelalterlichen Europa, Forschungen zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte 37 (Weimar, 1999). See Baldwin, Philip Augustus. Kent, Sussex, Essex and probably also Surrey were former small kingdoms (Kleinkönigreiche), like Northumberland; Worcester corresponds to the territory of the Hwicce, once subordinate to the Mercian kingdom. H. K. Schulze, Die Grafschaftsverfassung der Karolingerzeit in den Gebieten o¨stlich des Rheins (Berlin, 1973); M. Borgolte, Geschichte der Grafschaften Alemanniens in fränkischer Zeit (Sigmaringen, 1984); H. K. Schulze, ‘Grundprobleme der Grafschaftsverfassung’, Zeitschrift für württembergische Landesgeschichte 44 (1985), pp. 265–82. K. Leyser, ‘Frederick Barbarossa: court and country’, in Leyser, Communications and Power, p. 153.


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as, for instance, the areas administered by Landgrafs or later the imperial advocacies, were anything but homogeneous or comprehensive.25 In the context of units of administration we can also consider officeholding. At issue here are not the court-offices that give the impression of having been the same in all parts of Europe. Nor is the chancery of primary concern – Henry II of England had hardly any more notaries at his disposal than did Frederick Barbarossa.26 Nor is it a matter of precisely defined hierarchies of offices, for even in England and Sicily, for instance, there was more flexibility (or disorder, depending on your point of view) than earlier generations of historians assumed.27 Whoever still believes in the exceptional administrative skills of the Normans ought to take to heart the findings of Lewis Warren, according to whom England apparently went into crisis after the dying-off of the old administrative elite between 1080 and 1100 because no one any longer knew precisely how the system functioned.28 It was more a matter of the establishment of a ‘new class’, a schooled and well-educated cadre of royal officials, demonstrably present in England, in Sicily, in the papal chancery, and in northern France at the royal court but also in the bishoprics and principalities.29 In the German Reich, such phenomena can only be found, if at all, as tender shoots. The ministeriales existed first and foremost for warfare and the security of the regime, and only in the rarest of cases did any of them share the legal, financial and rhetorical training of western administrative officials.30 25

26

27 28 29

30

¨ T. Mayer, ‘Uber Entstehung und Bedeutung der a¨lteren deutschen Landgrafschaften’, in T. Mayer, Mittelalterliche Studien (Sigmaringen, 1958), pp. 187–201 (first published 1938); E. Schubert, König und Reich. Studien zur spätmittelalterlichen deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte, Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 63 (Göttingen, 1979), pp. 189–203. T. A. M. Bishop, Scriptores Regis (Oxford, 1961) showed that there were seldom more than two to three notaries working for Henry II at any one time; cf. H. Appelt, Die Urkunden Friedrichs I. Einleitung, Verzeichnisse, MGH Die Urkunden der deutschen Könige und Kaiser X, 5 (Vienna, 1990), pp. 24–74. T. Kölzer, ‘Magna imperialis curia. Die Zentralverwaltung im Königreich Sizilien unter Friedrich II.’, HJ 114 (1994), pp. 287–311, esp. 292–4. W. L. Warren, ‘The myth of Norman administrative efficiency’, TRHS 5th ser. 34 (1984), pp. 113–32. We still lack a comprehensive study of this ‘new class’: see R. W. Southern, ‘Ranulf Flambard’, in R.W. Southern, Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (Oxford, 1970), pp. 183–205; E. Bournazel, Le Gouvernement capétien au XIIe siècle (Paris, 1975), pp. 29–31; F. Barlow, Thomas Becket (London, 1986), pp. 29–34, 130–4. K. Bosl, Die Reichsministerialität der Salier und Staufer, Schriften der MGH X (Stuttgart, 1950), offers a quite exaggerated view of the educational level and capabilities of the ministeriales, and that is to be explained in terms of the interest at that time in signs of ‘modernity’ in the empire of the Salians and Staufer; cf. the more cool-headed views of B. Arnold, German Knighthood, 1050–1300 (Oxford, 1985), and T. Zotz, ‘Die Formierung der Ministerialität’, in S. Weinfurter ed., Die Salier und das Reich, III. Gesellschaftlicher und ideengeschichtlicher Wandel im Reich der Salier (Sigmaringen, 1991), pp. 3–50.

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European medieval scholarship has long concerned itself with the origins of capitals in our period.31 It should be stressed that the main concern here is not whether rulers themselves were sedentary or whether residences were built as symbols of state power. In the period before the French Revolution kings and emperors never quite abandoned a form of itinerant rulership: even a Philip II or a Louis XIV never stayed exclusively at the Escorial or Versailles. But at least as interesting from the point of view of political development is the tendency of the household that originally rode around with the king to root itself in a fixed place. This is to be seen earliest in England, and here it was probably a case of Norman and Angevin rulers making a virtue out of necessity, for they were very often not just away on their travels through England but not even in the country. We thus find from an early date that parts of the governmental machine were representing the ruler and achieving a measure of independence – ‘going out of court’, in the special terminology of English constitutional historians.32 A similar development in France came considerably later. Philip Augustus lost virtually his entire archive on the battlefield of Fréteval in 1194,33 presumably because the French king at the close of the twelfth century still carted it about with him; and only from about the middle of the thirteenth century can we talk about the official seat of a French state that transcended the person of the king (a ‘transpersonal Staat’). In this respect, the development in the regnum Teutonicum was certainly not especially fast but nor was it by any means entirely out of line with what was usual elsewhere in Europe. As scholars have often pointed out, a key role was undoubtedly played here by changes of dynasty in the early twelfth century, and again in the later thirteenth century, together with the struggle for the throne after Henry VI’s death in 1197.34 In the field of justice, several decisive changes occurred in Europe during the central medieval period. These were evident, at least in the royal entourage with its small circle of the truly powerful, where the king’s own interests were affected. As we shall see later, the forms of royal entourage 31

32

33 34

The classic studies remain those of C. Brühl, ‘Zum Hauptstadtproblem im frühen Mittelalter’, and ‘Remarques sur le notion de “capitale” et de “résidence” pendant le haut moyen aˆge’, in C. Brühl, Aus Mittelalter und Diplomatik. Gesammelte Aufsätze I. Studien zur Verfassungsgeschichte und Stadttopographie (Berlin, 1989), pp. 89–114 and 115–37. S. B. Chrimes, An Introduction to the Administrative History of Medieval England (Oxford, 1952), pp. 35–7, 71, 219–21; W. L. Warren, The Governance of Norman and Angevin England 1086–1272 (London, 1987), pp. 125–33. Baldwin, Philip Augustus, pp. 407–12. Particularly good on this point is P. Moraw, Von offener Verfassung zu gestalteter Verdichtung. Das Reich im späteren Mittelalter 1250 bis 1490, Propyläen Geschichte Deutschlands 3 (Berlin, 1985), pp. 169–75.


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involved in the king’s curia – that is, his court in the legal sense, in its special function as the first tribunal of judgement for the higher nobility – were amazingly similar right across Europe. But precisely in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries rulers also began to make effective in practice what had long since been their theoretically acknowledged role as guarantors of legal safeguards for all inhabitants of their territories. Four aspects can be identified here, of which the first three were intimately linked: supervision of other men’s administration of justice; the growing significance of appeals to the ruler; the growing use of delegated jurisdiction; and last but not least an intensification of the state’s role in the repression of crime. European rulers in the central Middle Ages acted with increasing frequency as final courts of appeal. The first in the field here were the English kings and, in a slightly different yet astonishingly similar way, the papacy.35 For them, this was not so much a matter of stressing the ultimate source of all jurisdiction in royal authority: Henry I and Henry II troubled themselves little over the legitimacy of other jurisdictions, in contrast to Henry II’s great-grandson Edward I.36 The same is true of the papacy: the right to review decisions of lower courts was scarcely based on the argument that those courts worked to a papal commission and by virtue of a papal delegation.37 Instead of such high-flown principles there was another, much simpler one: everyone who could not find his rights anywhere else could turn to the king or the pope. This principle can be found most clearly in England. An unsuccessful litigant could appeal his judge for ‘defect of justice’ (defectus iustitiae) before the king’s tribunal. The proceedings of Henry II against Becket began with precisely such a case.38 While litigants in English proceedings had to wait until the end of a trial before they could appeal to the king, it was well known that plaintiffs (and accused) had the right in Roman and canon-law trial procedures to appeal in practice at almost any point. Appeals were used not only in cases where the law had been bent or denied but also with increasing frequency in cases where the law had been violated. 35 36 37

38

See further, Reuter, ‘Sonderweg’, pp. 189–92 [this book, chapter 20]. D. W. Sutherland, Quo Warranto Proceedings in the Reign of Edward I, 1278–1294 (Oxford, 1963). The formula in partem sollicitudinis (having a share in responsibility) which played an important role in papal decretals, signified at least that the area of office of any particular bishop was limited (by contrast to the all-embracing and superior responsibility of the pope for Christendom as a whole). M. G. Cheney, ‘The litigation between John Marshall and Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1164: a pointer to the origins of novel disseisin?’, in J. A. Guy and H. G. Beale eds., Law and Social Change in British History (London, 1964), pp. 9–26; for the sources, see R. C. van Caeneghem ed., English Lawsuits from William I to Richard I, Publications of the Seldon Society 106–7, 2 vols. (London, 1990–1), II, no. 420, pp. 422–33.

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Appeal-cases cut two ways. The ruler, whether king or pope, had to be in a position to offer effective legal protection in the hearing itself and also in the carrying-out of the sentence. Neither the king’s court nor the consistory was well suited to that, and neither could have been prepared for the rising flood of appeals. They tried, especially in the first half of the twelfth century, to get a grip on the problem simply by decree. The plaintiff appeared and the ruler declared the law. The consequences are well known. Plaintiffs, unfortunately, are not always honest: suppressio veri, suggestio falsi (‘suppression of what was true’, ‘suggestion of what was false’) and just crude lying, became the order of the day, and starting from the centre such things were very hard to prove. Further, the available techniques of laying information and challenging it could not prevent a situation in which, in one and the same case, decisions and decrees could contradict each other.39 As a result, rulers began to do as ancient emperors had done, namely, to judge only on legal points. The establishment of the facts of a case and, as far as possible, the carrying-out of the sentence, were left to the plaintiffs and the authorities on the spot. More or less by accident, by trial and error, people stumbled on a technique of government that was effective and also cheap. The authority of rulers was maintained and even enhanced. In England, and in the Church, such exemplary judgements were collected and commented on, and it was this that actually impelled the spread of a culture of ruler-made law all the more effectively than the occasional issuing of edicts and legal codifications, whose manuscript-tradition is often very scanty.40 At the same time, the whole process was driven from below. The system was consolidated, and gained in popularity and range, under the pressure of litigants who were often quite humble, rather than through the repeated but energy-devouring operation of the ruler’s will. Those affected could meet opposition at the local level with the same techniques. Only occasionally did English kings or the papacy need to punish the disregarding

39

40

D. Lohrmann, ‘Papstprivileg und päpstliche Delegationsgerichtsbarkeit im nördlichen Frankreich zur Zeit der Kirchenreform’, in Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, eds. S. Kuttner and K. Pennington, Monumenta iuris canonici series C: Subsidia 7 (Vatican City, 1985), pp. 535–50, at 537–9, 546. The manuscript transmission of the assizes of Henry II is hardly any wider than the ‘lawgiving’ of ¨ Barbarossa: see E. Wädle, ‘Frühe deutsche Landfrieden’, in Uberlieferung und Geltung normativer Texte des frühen und hohen Mittelalters, Quellen und Forschungen zum Rechts in Mittelalter 4 (Sigmaringen, 1986), pp. 71–94, and J. C. Holt, ‘The assizes of Henry II: the texts’, in D. A. Bullough and R. L. Storey eds., The Study of Medieval Records: Essays in Honour of Kathleen Major (Oxford, 1971), pp. 85–106.


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of an official order – though that should not lead us to assume that such orders would normally have possessed any guaranteed effectiveness.41 The Reich was apparently unreceptive to such developments.42 It is true that we occasionally find there all the techniques of the new style of rulership: inquisition and other forms of neutral establishment of the facts of a case; delegated judges; conditional judgement in the form of a decision with the proviso that the facts be confirmed as correct (si preces veritate nituntur).43 But the number of judicial orders among the more than a thousand charters of Frederick Barbarossa is small; and that is not, or not only, an accident of transmission. If in the distant future the charters of Frederick II and Henry (VII) exist between the hard covers of modern editions, we shall be able to establish with apparent certainty that a similar picture is true for that later period as well. The ruler was simply not considered a source of law. The duty ius suum cuique tribuere (‘to assign to each his right’) was stressed in the prologues of the royal charters precisely in the twelfth century,44 but the distribution of rights was done through the customary means of granting privileges (and in the end we should never overrate the effectiveness of privileges in legal life, any more than that of mandates) and imposing settlements mediated by the ruler.45 We can observe something similar in the case of criminal justice. Already in the twelfth century, and to an increasing extent in the thirteenth, we note a tendency to punish offences as crimes against public order. The origins of this way of thinking are varied: in England it probably derived from the ferocious methods of the late Anglo-Saxon kings,46 whereas elsewhere it seems to stem from the ‘nationalised’ forms of the decrees of the Peace of God.47 The picture in Germany, or the German regions, is very varied, but in general the development, in this field too, seems have been slow and not supported ‘from above’. The transmission of the Peace-Ordinances of the German kings is extremely thin: the Landpeace of Barbarossa of 1152, for instance, survives exclusively in Italian manuscripts of the Lombard 41

42 43 44 45 46 47

‘Lator presentium E. iam quinquies ad nostram presentiam venit’ (‘E., the bearer of this letter, has already come into our presence five times’), was the despondent assertion of a mandate of Pope Eugenius III (J. 9399). On this aspect of the Reich’s political culture, see Reuter, ‘Sonderweg’ [this book, chapter 20]. Leyser, ‘Frederick Barbarossa’, assembles the relevant material on this. Examples in F. Hausmann and A. Gawlik, Arengenverzeichnis zu den Königs- und Kaiserurkunden von den Merowingern bis Heinrich VI., MGH Hilfsmittel IX (Munich, 1987, nos. 1245–6, 1252–6. Reuter, ‘Sonderweg’, pp. 186, 194–5 [this book, chapter 20]. See P. Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1999). T. N. Bisson, ‘The organised peace in southern France and Catalonia, ca. 1140–ca. 1223’, AHR 82 (1977), pp. 290–311.

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law and passes largely unmentioned in the narrative sources.48 The Mainz Landpeace of 1235 seems to represent the first serious attempt by a German ruler to regulate public order by law, and even in this case there is room for considerable doubt about effective implementation.49 Yet, here again, we should beware of comparing German reality at that period and what were only the demands or aspirations of other rulers; English kings certainly claimed a superior role as preserver of the peace, but they could only partially fulfil this role effectively.50 The kingdoms and empires of the earlier Middle Ages were fairly underdeveloped in the sphere of finance across Europe as a whole. For us, and probably for contemporaries too, the financial basis for the relatively modest tasks performed by rulers consisted not so much of the regular income from royal lands and fiscal rights like markets, mints and tolls, but rather of the profits of predatory war: plunder and tribute. These last played a large role in the Carolingian period, even if they did not exactly match the income from regular sources, and they were important too for the Ottonian and Salian rulers, and for the West Saxon/English kings; and the decline of royal power in the West Frankish kingdom in the tenth and eleventh centuries was closely connected with diminishing returns from such sources.51 Before the mid-eleventh century, calculable forms of income such as taxes or the profits of the exercise of justice played hardly any role. Taxes were taken almost only in exceptional situations, especially when it was a question of financing effective defence against external attackers or paying them a suitable amount to stay away. Again, England is an exception here, but in a quantitative rather than a qualitative sense. There, in the eleventh century, taxes were raised on an almost confiscatory scale, but mostly by Danish kings who so to speak continued plundering England by other means after their conquest. After the return of the Cerdicing dynasty in 1042, this taxation stopped, only to be restored by the new conqueror after 48 49

50

51

Wädle, ‘Landfrieden’, D F I, no. 25. H. Angermeier, ‘Landfriedenspolitik und Landfriedensgesetzgebung unter den Staufern’, in J. Fleckenstein ed., Probleme um Friedrich II., Vorträge und Forschungen 16 (Sigmaringen, 1974), pp. 167–86; H. Keller, Zwischen regionaler Begrenzung und universalem Horizont, Propyläen Geschichte Deutschlands 2 (Berlin, 1986), pp. 492–5. M. T. Clanchy, ‘Law, government and society in medieval England’, History 59 (1974), pp. 73–8, esp. 78; also T. Reuter, ‘Die Unsicherheit auf den Straßen im europäischen Früh- und Hochmittelalter. Täter, Opfer und ihre mittelalterlichen und modernen Betrachter’, in J. Fried ed., Träger und Instrumentarien des Friedens im Hohen und Späten Mittelalter, Vorträge und Forschungen 43 (Sigmaringen, 1996), pp. 169–201, esp. 171–7, 193–5 [translated as chapter 3, above]. [See chapter 13, above]; see too the largely justified objections of J. L. Nelson, The Frankish World, 750–950 (London, 1996), pp. xxviii–xxix, and P. Fouracre, ‘Frankish Gaul to 814’, in R. McKitterick ed., NCMH, vol. II (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 85–109, at 107.


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1066.52 Even the powerful rulers between Alfred and Edgar only seldom raised direct taxes, as far as we can tell: they preferred to concentrate on taking a cut of coinage revenue and imposing levies on inheritances.53 From the end of the eleventh century, the picture altered in most parts of Europe, slowly but steadily, and in a number of respects. First of all, those emergency taxes began to operate more automatically. In England after the Norman Conquest, geld was raised repeatedly at times of threatened invasion but no longer exclusively at such times.54 Second, the practice spread of exacting new ‘emergency’ taxes on particular occasions: the knighting of the king’s firstborn son, the marriage of his firstborn daughter, the ransoming of an imprisoned ruler.55 Third, certain practices were institutionalised and made fixed, such as the right to take spolia (movables belonging to a deceased prelate) exerted by the king over major churches,56 or the profits from the minting of coinage,57 or the commutation of military service to a kind of army-tax.58 Fourth, the profits of justice began to form a secure and major part of the king’s regular income; this applied both to justice as a royal monopoly and to the ruler’s overseeing of the exercise of justice by others. Fifth, all types of income were much more exactly counted and checked than they had been in the early Middle Ages, although we are still quite a long way from a prospective financial administration: it was still mostly a matter of keeping under control the diversion of income by intermediate authorities.59 By the end of the twelfth century, it had long been customary that the ruler should raise taxes in more or less voluntary negotiations with 52 53

54 55 56

57 58 59

M. K. Lawson, Cnut: The Danes in England in the Eleventh Century (London, 1994), pp. 189–92; J. A. Green, ‘The last century of English Danegeld’, EHR 96 (1981), pp. 141–58. The importance of the Anglo-Saxon renovatio monetae was stressed above all by J. Campbell, ‘Observations on English government from the tenth to the twelfth century’, TRHS 5th ser. 25 (1975), pp. 119–35, esp. 119–21, 124–5, 131; for heriots, see N. P. Brooks, ‘Arms, status and warfare in late Saxon England’, in D. Hill ed., Ethelred the Unready, British Archaeological Reports, British Series 58 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 81–104. Green, ‘The last century of English Danegeld’. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, pp. 312–14, 364–6, 471–2. F. Prochnow, Das Spolienrecht und die Testierfähigkeit der Geistlichen im Abendland bis zum 13. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1919); M. Howell, Regalian Right in Medieval England, University of London Historical Studies 9 (London, 1962); M. Pacaut, Frédéric Barberousse (Paris, 1967), English trans. Frederick Barbarossa (London, 1970). See especially T. N. Bisson, Conservation of Coinage: Monetary Exploitation and its Restraint in France, Catalonia, and Aragon (c. AD 1000–c. 1225 (Oxford, 1979). Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, pp. 362–3; T. N. Keefe, Feudal Assessments and the Political Community under Henry II and his Sons (Berkeley CA, 1983). See T. N. Bisson, ‘The “feudal revolution”’, P&P 142 (1994), pp. 5–42, esp. 34–9; this attitude is visible in the English financial administration of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as outstanding debt was entered year by year in the account-books (though such entries may have been inserted to put pressure on debtors).

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his ‘subjects’; but, first in Spain, then in the island-kingdoms of England and Sicily, and in France, and parts of eastern and northern Europe, it was now possible to make usable estimates of ‘normal’ royal income: according to contemporary reckonings, Louis VII disposed of about 19,000 livres parisis a year, Henry II of rather more from England and Normandy (the revenues of the much more loosely organised southern French lands could not, and cannot, be estimated with such precision).60 With the twelfth century we begin to have surviving materials which testify to the efforts of kings and other rulers to secure regular, checked and calculable incomes: first and foremost the English Pipe Rolls, which survive in isolated examples from the earlier twelfth century, and then in a continuous series from the reign of Henry II,61 but also from Catalonia and Flanders as well.62 In this respect, not only is the German Reich not coming along, it is not even in the running. Obviously this does not mean that Barbarossa or his sons and grandsons were poor fellows. Barbarossa was already in a position to pay armies for several years at a stretch, and we hear nothing about long-term difficulties in paying those troops.63 In the second half of his reign, moreover, he was able to use money to intervene very effectively to make a profit in inheritance cases and other property-transactions. The best-known case, though it is in no way unique, is his successful overbidding of his nephew Henry the Lion in the struggle for the inheritance of Welf VI.64 It is impossible to deny Barbarossa some deliberately planned actions in this field: he was a man with an ‘economic policy’, to quote the phrase of Ulf Dirlmeier, but also someone who was able to estimate the yield of a consistently pursued royal policy in Italy at the figure of 30,000 lb a year, or in all probability somewhat more.65 Nevertheless, the fact that we 60

61 62

63 64 65

J. F. Benton, ‘The revenue of Louis VII’, Speculum 42 (1947), pp. 84–91; A. Haverkamp, Herrschaftsformen der Frühstaufer in Reichsitalien, Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters I, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1970–1), pp. 699–714. For the Pipe Roll of the financial year 1129–30, see J. R. Green, The Government of Henry I (Cambridge, 1986). B. Lyon and A. E. Verhulst, Medieval Finance: A Comparison of Financial Institutions in Northwestern Europe (Providence RI, 1967); T. N. Bisson ed., Fiscal Accounts of Catalonia under the Early CountKings (1151–1213), 2 vols. (Berkeley CA, 1984). Essential reading here is H. Grundmann, ‘Rotten und Brabanzonen’, DA 5 (1942), pp. 419–92. Karl Leyser, ‘Frederick Barbarossa and the Hohenstaufen polity’, in Leyser, Communications and Power, pp. 115–42, at 130–5. U. Dirlmeier, ‘Friedrich Barbarossa – auch ein Wirtschaftspolitiker?’, in A. Haverkamp ed., Friedrich Barbarossa: Handlungsspielräume und Wirkungsweisen des staufischen Kaisers, Vorträge und Forschungen 40 (Sigmaringen, 1992), pp. 501–18; Haverkamp, Herrschaftsformen, pp. 701–2. The estimate of the income from Italy at 30,000 talents (= pounds) is given by Rahewin: Ottonis et Rahewini Gesta Friderici IV, 7, ed. G. Waitz and B. von Simson, MGH SRG XLVI, 3rd edn (Hannover, 1912), p. 240.


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know hardly any more about the income of Frederick Barbarossa than we do about the income of Otto I shows how unsystematically all this was managed. The Reich knew nothing of general taxes, and would not do so for a long time. Other sources of ‘state’ income, from mints or markets or from the profits of justice, either did not exist or were in the hands of others. German rulers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries lived largely off direct income from a mixture of dynastic and fiscal possessions (these were often hard to disentangle), some royal rights which elsewhere were playing an increasingly insignificant role, like the right to hospitality,66 and also certain innovations which had something in common with those in the West Frankish kingdom, for instance rights to spolia in major churches whose pastors had died.67 It was obviously enough, and perhaps this is precisely why we do not find traces of any drive to seek out other sources of income. From contemporaries’ standpoint, the arrangements for the succession to the throne were among the most striking peculiarities of the German Reich. Suger of St Denis and Otto of Freising were at one on this matter: the German Reich was an elective kingdom.68 On the advantages and disadvantages they disagreed: Suger stressed the importance of a regulated and predictable succession, stressing here again the problems resulting from the absence of an heir, while Otto described the princes’ right to elect as a privilege. In the view of today’s (and yesterday’s) historians, the elective character of the Reich was a – perhaps the – decisive disadvantage, hindering the realm’s development in the direction of modern statehood. Only exceptionally has a voice been raised against that view.69 Yet the advantages of hereditary kingship for continuous state development are certainly not clear-cut. There could be minorities, and sometimes weak or mad kings like Charles VI of France or Henry VI of England. There were minorities in France under Philip I, Philip II and Louis IX, in England under Henry III and Edward III. There were also various forms of partition of the kingdom: the splitting-up of a large composite realm, as sometimes 66 67 68

69

C. Brühl, Fodrum, Gistum, Servitium Regis, 2 vols. (Cologne, 1968), pp. 140–3; I. Seltmann, ‘Heinrich VI. Herrschaftspraxis und Umgebung’, Diss. Erlangen (1983), pp. 14–69. See above, n. 56. Suger, Historia Ludovici VII, ed. A. Molinier, Collection de textes pour server a` l’étude et l’enseignement de l’histoire 4 (Paris, 1887), pp. 148–9. Suger stresses the problems that arise from the lack of a male heir, using the example of Germany in 1125 and England in 1135. The elective character of the Reich gets mentioned by Otto, but it is not foregrounded, Gesta Friderici II, 1, p. 103: ‘nam id iuris Romani imperii apex, videlicet non per sanguinis propaginem descendere, sed per principum electionem reges creare, sibi tamquam ex singulari vendicat prerogativa’. Especially that of J. Gillingham, ‘Elective kingship and the unity of medieval Germany’, German History 9 (1991), pp. 124–35.

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occurred in England between 1066 and 1200,70 as well as apanages or similar models of provision for younger members of the ruling family.71 The more strongly the hereditary principle was applied, the likelier became successions of rulers who were complete strangers to the kingdom, as happened often enough between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, but this sort of succession was not smooth or tension-free, and occasionally it came about after a long period of war, so that security and predictability were by no means necessary outcomes of the application of a hereditary rule. But it needs to be borne in mind that the differences between Germany, France and England were by no means so dramatic as often presented: 1291 was the first time that an adult son of a just-deceased ruler was passed over for the succession in Germany, and even that event was no more than an aberration. The elective character of the Reich emerged only when there was no ‘normal’ heir. In such cases direct hereditary succession often failed too. England, for example, at first sight looks like a purely hereditary kingdom, and yet, quite apart from the peculiar circumstances that followed the death of Henry I, neither in 1100 nor in 1199 was the heir the man who actually had the best, or at least an indisputable, hereditary claim. In 1100, Robert Curthose ought to have succeeded William Rufus, and in 1199, Arthur of Brittany had at least as good a right as John Lackland – and that was exactly what led to his violent exclusion. The unbroken father–son succession of the Capetians between 987 and 1328 was by no means just a matter of luck: several rulers (Robert II, Philip I, Louis VII, Philip II) had to get divorced or risked a breach with the Church in order to secure a male successor. In the preceding discussion, some well-known phenomena have not been mentioned. The development of an association of people (Personenverband) into a territorially defined state (territorial Flächenstaat), for instance, has not featured in the analysis above.72 I certainly do not share the view of my colleague Susan Reynolds, that all states are basically territorial in nature, so that the idea of the ‘personal association’ (Personenverband) can therefore be represented as a historiographical construct.73 Such a view fails to explain satisfactorily quite a lot that went on in Europe in the earlier and central Middle Ages, such as the peculiar role played in the English state by Celtic 70 71 72 73

J. C. Holt, ‘Politics and property in early medieval England’, P&P 57 (1972), p. 18; J. Gillingham, ‘The Angevin empire’, in J. Gillingham, Richard Coeur de Lion (London, 1994), pp. 34–7. C. T. Wood, The French Apanages and the Capetian Monarchy, 1224–1328 (Cambridge MA, 1966). Cf. T. Mayer, ‘Die Ausbildung der Grundlagen des modernen deutschen Staates im hohen Mittelalter’, HZ 159 (1939), pp. 457–87. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, p. 26.


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princes or in the German state by Slav ones. Rather, we are not dealing here with a crude opposition or with a scale of development, but instead with Weberian ideal-types (and whether or not Theodor Mayer had read Weber can be left out of the discussion). The states of the early Middle Ages, and those of the late Middle Ages too, display elements of both ‘personal’ and ‘territorial’ ideal-types. It might be worth mentioning the so-called ‘military revolution’: the professionalisation and monetisation of warfare – features which were of greater significance not only for war itself but for the development of the states that engaged in war.74 The development of tax-systems and the growth of institutions representative of different social orders far from making their first appearance in the sixteenth century were considerably advanced as early as the twelfth. A social and structural history of European war in the central Middle Ages remains to be written, but here, too, one gets the impression that the connexions between warfare and statedevelopment in England and in France were considerably closer than in the Reich. In the above comparative analysis, some points were necessarily made in somewhat crude and simplified form. To an extent, this was working with smoke and mirrors; for our knowledge in many areas is neither secure nor comprehensive, and many developments probably did not unfold in contemporary reality in anything like such a linear or simple way as they have been represented here in schematic and synthesised form. Nevertheless, making all due allowances for such limitations, an indisputable conclusion has been reached: with regard to constitutional and administrative practice and also political culture, there were considerable differences between the German Reich and most parts of the rest of Europe. Further questions now arise. First, how do we deal with types of evidence that go against this conclusion? Second, have the right levels of comparison been chosen? Third, is it not equally possible to make convincing claims for significant shared features? In what follows, the first task will be to answer these three questions. Then a final attempt will be made to clarify the developmental differences. For a start, it needs to be stressed that these differences cannot be the result of lack of information. For the political and cultural elites, twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe was astonishingly unified and also permeable. Measured against the bulk of the population, international careers seem to have been made just as frequently then as in the late twentieth century. 74

G. Parker, The Military Revolution, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1988).

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Consider, for instance, the Norman Gerard la Pucelle, who was able to teach in Cologne,75 or the Hungarian Nicholas who made his career in England in Richard I’s reign,76 or the Englishman Gervase of Tilbury who served the archbishops of Rheims and Arles and the kings of England, Sicily and Germany; or think of the many mutual contacts between Sicily or Spain on the one hand, and northern France or England on the other.77 Despite the growing tendency of family structures to become more simplified, that is, to become more patrilineal, consciousness of more distant bonds of kinship remained very much alive, even across political frontiers: the mysterious kin-ties of an Octavian of Monticelli (the future Pope Victor IV (1159– 64)),78 an Otto Frangipani,79 or a Savaric of Bath,80 are cases in point. Such careers and kin-relationships, mostly known to us by accident, are probably the tip of an iceberg. People knew each other. People also met each other: at least in ecclesiastical circles, men learned to recognise each other at the papal court and at councils, and especially during common studies at the major schools.81 The secular sphere gave similar opportunities: we should not forget that in every European kingdom, the occasions preferred for receiving embassies were great assemblies, in so far as such gatherings took place.82 Anyone who travelled on diplomatic business became acquainted with the political practice of other kingdoms at precisely their most intensive moments, as the career and writings of Suger of St Denis show.83 Men also reflected on what they had learned, and they thought about what differentiated other peoples. The roots of the comparative approach 75 76 77 78 79 80

81

82

83

J. Fried, ‘Gerard Pucelle und Köln’, ZRG, RA 99 (1982), pp. 125–35. J. Laszlowsky, ‘Nicholays clericus: a Hungarian student at Oxford University in the twelfth century’, JMH 14 (1988), pp. 217–31. [See now the Introduction to Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor, ed. and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford, 2002).] P. F. Kehr, ‘Zur Geschichte Viktors IV.’, Neues Archiv 46 (1926), pp. 53–85; H. Schwarzmeier, ‘Zur Familie Viktors IV. in der Sabina’, QFIAB 48 (1968), pp. 64–79. Translatio S. Annonis c. 3, ed. R. Köpke, MGH SS XI, p. 516. Epistulae Cantuarienses, ed. W. Stubbs, Rolls Series 38/2 (London, 1865), no. 381, p. 356, a letter of Henry VI to the chapter of Canterbury mentioning his consanguineus Savaric: the relationship probably passed through Beatrix of Burgundy, but cannot be further specified. J. Ehlers, ‘Deutsche Scholaren in Frankreich während des 12. Jahrhunderts’, in J. Fried ed., Schule und Studium im sozialen Wandel des hohen und späten Mittelalters, Vorträge und Forschungen 30 (Sigmaringen, 1986), pp. 97–120. The northern French and southern English clerical friendshipcircles of the twelfth century were to a large extent rooted in shared studies in the great schools. For instance, the marriage of Barbarossa, Gesta Friderici III, 6–8, pp. 170–2, or the peace-conference of Venice, see the list of participants in the Historia Ducum Veneticorum, ed. H. Simonsfeld, MGH SS XIV, pp. 85–9. L. Grant, Abbot Suger of St-Denis: Church and State in Early Twelfth-Century France (London, 1998), pp. 85–122: participation/presence of Suger at the Councils of Guastalla (1106), Châlons (1107), Lateran (1112) and the electoral assembly after the death of Henry V (1125).


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exemplified in the present paper are themselves to be looked for as early as the twelfth century, as Karl Leyser impressively demonstrated.84 Then as now, people operated often enough with cultural stereotypes and crude prejudices, but often too on the basis of essentially sound and well-considered information about the state of developments in other lands. It began with ethnographies of frontier regions, by Adam of Bremen, Helmold of Bosau and Gerald of Wales.85 But it was not limited to the rather exotic parts of Europe, towards which people cast sideways glances with a view to hegemony. Consider, too, the scattered but well-informed remarks of Suger, mentioned above, on the political development of the German Reich; or Otto of Freising’s analyses of Hungarian and Italian politics;86 or the comparative assessments of different European kingdoms made by John of Salisbury, Gerald of Wales or Walter Map.87 It was Map who ascribed the following observations to Louis VII: Just as the resources of kings vary, so too the forms of the wealth are different. The riches of the king of the Indies consist of precious stones, lions and leopards and elephants; the Byzantine emperor and the Sicilian king glory in gold and silken garments [note here in passing the tendency to consider Sicily ‘oriental’], but they do not have men who know how to do anything else but talk, for they are unskilled at military matters; the Roman emperor, whom they call the ruler of the Germans, has men skilled in arms, and war-horses, not gold, not silk, not any other kind of ostentatious wealth – because Charlemagne, when he conquered that land [i.e. the Holy Land] from the Saracens, for the love of Christ gave everything except the fortresses and castles to his archbishops and bishops whom he installed in the cities once they had been converted. Your [i.e. Walter Map’s] lord, the king of England, lacks for nothing: he has men, horses, gold and silk, gems, fruits, wild beasts, and everything. But in France we have nothing but bread, wine, and joy!88 84 85 86 87 88

‘Some reflections on twelfth-century kings and kingship’, in K. Leyser, Medieval Germany and its Neighbours, 900–1250 (London, 1982), pp. 241–67, at 248–50. R. Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 1146–1223 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 157–210. For Suger, see above, nn. 68 and 83; for Otto, see Gesta Friderici I, 32, pp. 49–50 (Hungary), and II, 14, p. 116 (Italy). Examples in Leyser, ‘Reflections’; see also T. Reuter, ‘John of Salisbury and the Germans’, in M. Wilks ed., The World of John of Salisbury (Oxford, 1984), pp. 415–25. Walter Map, De nugis curialium V, 5, ed. M. R. James, new edn C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1983), p. 450: ‘Sicut diuerse sunt regum opes, ita multis distincte sunt uarietatibus. In lapidibus preciosis, lenibus et pardis et elephantis, diuicie regis Indorum; in auro pannisque sericis imperator Bizancius et rex Siculus gloriantur; sed homines non habent qui sciant aliud quam loqui; rebus enim bellicis inepti sunt. Imperator Romanus, quem dicunt Alemannorum, homines habet armis aptos et equos bellicose, non aurum, non sericum, non aliam opulenciam, Karolus enim magnus, cum terram illam a Sarracenis conquisisset, omnia preter municiones et castella pro Christo dedit archiepiscopis et episcopis, quos per ciuitates conuersas instituit. Dominus autem tuus, rex Anglie, cui nihil deest, homines, equos, aurum et sericum, gemmas, fructus, feras et omnia possidet. Nos in Francia nichil habemus nisi panem et uinum et gaudium.’

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On one level, this seems unusable: imprecise, historically inaccurate, clichéridden, and employing cultural stereotypes that are not thought through. On another level, this passage constitutes a typical bit of evidence for the capacity of political elites of Europe in the central Middle Ages to compare, and to reflect on differences in social practice and in basic assumptions. Equally, whether we want to speak in terms of delays or deficits or some other kind of developmental slow track, none of these can be explained by lack of information. The possibilities for political technologytransfers were available, if people had only wanted to make use of them. Someone might object, though, that I had chosen false units of comparison. The Reich in the high Middle Ages, it could be argued, was no kingdom in the ordinary sense. It is a geographically vast and politically extensive system, whereas the ‘advanced’ forms of political practice are to be found precisely in territories of smaller and more compact political format with a more unified political culture: England, Flanders, Normandy, Catalonia, or Sicily. It would follow that, if comparisons are wanted, then the comparative unit selected ought to be, not the Reich, but the German princely territories. The objection cannot be rejected out of hand, but it is not entirely convincing. For one thing, the princely territories of the German Reich before around 1250–1300 were to a large extent still in the making. For the period under consideration here, the princely territory is more of a construct and conceptual aid in the historiography than a historical reality.89 Second, the differences between the territories were considerable, even in their developed later-medieval form. There was no such thing as the ‘typical’ German territory. Third, in this period, the princes, who existed before there were territories, seldom controlled the governmental apparatus of a pre-modern state. Only exceptionally, if at all, are monopoly of the right to review justice, homogeneous administrative units, administrative offices, etc., to be found with the Welfs, Ludowings, Zähringer, Wittelsbachs, Babenbergers and the other dynasties in the period before c. 1250–1300. What confront us at a regional level in this period are extensive rather than intensive forms of political practice. The states of development reached in the territories just coming into being in high-medieval Germany are better compared with conditions in the underdeveloped regions of southern France: Toulouse and Gascony rather than Flanders or Normandy – for in France too there were 89

This is the argument of Benjamin Arnold, Princes and Territories in Medieval Germany (Cambridge, 1991). In my view, despite various disputable points of detail, this argument is still basically sound.


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considerable differences in stages of development, even at this essentially higher structural level.90 Another objection, much less often raised, is in my opinion much more serious. The emphasis on divergences of development leads to a marginalising of many significant shared characteristics that still existed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These did not operate only at the level of technologies of rulership. In spite of all the tendencies to fixed residences, we still encounter across the whole of Europe itinerant kings, princes and other rulers as the ever-moving central-points of their contemporary political communities. In most parts of Europe – France was long the biggest exception in this respect because of the lack of pulling power and kingdomwide range on the part of the early Capetians – great court-gatherings (and later, the early forms of parliaments) remained the points of political solidification. Twelfth- and thirteenth-century kingdoms existed as political communities – I will not say only at great court assemblies, but certainly in the fullest sense on those occasions.91 It was not just that the most important matters of public business were dealt with there: decisions about war and peace, the assignments of the most important secular and ecclesiastical officers, the announcement of important innovations (for example Assizes, common ‘sittings-together’). A considerable part of the time was spent on forms of self-representation specially designed to manifest and emphasise the community. The kingdom celebrated itself, in common liturgical feasts, in tournaments, in banquets, in reception of embassies: all of which should be seen not as preludes to the ‘real’ affairs of state but as affairs of state in themselves. Basically, large parts of the practice of European high politics were amazingly little changed since Carolingian times. Such neoCarolingian forms of organisation were almost universal, even in parts of Europe without a Carolingian past, or with only a near-forgotten one. We run the risk of regarding such pan-European shared characteristics as of merely second-rank importance. For on the basis of the historical development of our subject, as sketched at the beginning of this paper, we have got into the habit of considering as fundamental only institutional developments and ‘deep structures’. It may well be, so we tend to think, 90

91

F. Lot and R. Fawtier, Histoire des institutions françaises au moyen aˆ ge, 1: Institutions seigneuriales (Paris, 1958); K. F. Werner, ‘Königtum und Fürstentum im französischen 12. Jahrhundert’, in Probleme des 12. Jahrhunderts. Reichenau-Vorträge 1965–1967, Vorträge und Forschungen 12 (Konstanz, 1968), pp. 177–225. For what follows, see with more detail T. Reuter, ‘Assembly politics, 700–1200’, in P. Linehan and J. L. Nelson eds., The Medieval World (London, 2001), pp. 432–50 [above, chapter 11].

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that the political surface-happenings of the great assemblies, sittings of the royal court, festal coronations and the conduct of ‘international relations’, despite the differences observed by Walter Map,92 looked astonishingly similar right across Europe in the central Middle Ages. But, we assume, the differences behind the scenes were of far deeper importance. That kind of view is, as I have said, entirely understandable and explicable in terms of our discipline’s conceptual development. But it is far from certain that if we give pride of place to constitutional-historical changes, we really do justice to the aims and practice of twelfth-century political elites. For one thing, we have plenty of evidence that rulers did not follow the road to a modern ‘state’ in any consistent way. The word ‘state’ in this analysis really means no more than a convenient shorthand or cipher for the high-medieval political community; and we should be very cautious about assuming that rulers in the central Middle Ages could have consciously striven for the solidified and institutionalised ‘statehood’ which to us seems worth striving for a priori. Just how differently people thought about such things then is clearly revealed by the practice, still widespread in Europe, especially in empires but also in single kingdoms and lordships, of dividing up political entities and fiscal rights between all the heirs in quasi-patrimonial fashion.93 Suppose, as a kind of thought-game, we worked on the contrary assumption, that for the political classes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, including rulers, the essence of the kingdom was a publicly celebrated collectivity. Where the resources came from to keep the whole system working effectively was of secondary importance. A gentleman did not trouble himself about such things: he left them to servants and specialists. Viewed from that angle, there still existed a common European political culture. True, there were sentiments with national, or proto-national, tinges, but, although people occasionally found German visitors or German customs strange, there is very little to warrant the idea that Germans struck western Europeans as completely other. Such differences and divergences were noticed between Frenchmen, Englishmen, Spaniards and Italians as well.94 The few instances where Germans were perceived as seriously inferior in cultural terms occurred almost entirely in the context of polemics against German rulers as opponents of the monarchical papacy.95 Nevertheless, despite all these common traits, there remain considerable differences between the Reich and the West which still need some explanation. We can abandon some of the older explanatory models. There was 92 94

93 See above, n. 70. See above, n. 88. [For examples, and references, see chapter 3, above.]

95

Reuter, ‘John of Salisbury’.


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no conspiracy against the Reich: neither the princes nor the papacy were out to block, with every means at their disposal, a ‘normal’ development of Germany. The problems German rulers had to contend with were of the same order of magnitude as those of other European rulers. On the other hand, there was no shared starting-line: some bits of Norman state-building display an especially advanced character, yet actually these were not new creations at all but resulted from conquerors’ taking-over of existing features.96 The explanations we offer must not juxtapose entities that are quite simply incommensurable. An imperial advocate is not the same thing as a sheriff; territorial policy (which anyway is all too often the construct of modern historians) is not the same thing as state-building. There are distinctions to be made between whether a ruler issues a handful, or a few dozen, or hundreds of mandates a year. As historians, we should pay more attention to the costs of ‘progress’. We understand ‘tightening-up’, ‘intensification of government’ and other related metaphors as referring to something entirely positive. As a freedomloving and freedom-allied Englishman, I might have tried to trace back the high value placed on such ideas to the lurking remnants of a Wilhelmine outlook in the professional socialisation of German medievalists – were it not that I am well aware that such ideas play exactly the same role in the thinking of English medievalists. The Sicilian state under the Norman and Hohenstaufen kings is regarded with awe by medieval historians in the late twentieth century, despite all the inadequacies and inconsistencies which we emphasise more heavily than our predecessors did. For contemporaries, at least for those observing from a safe distance, the kingdom was a tyranny, in which no one dared move hand or foot without royal permission. The same goes for the ‘advanced’ government of the Angevin kings in England, who were increasingly seen as oppressive.97 Papal rulership over the Church, which of course did not depend on the direct application of force, was still perceived by many as quite unreasonably presumptuous: witness the numerous and not always unsuccessful acts of passive and active resistance to it in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.98 The medieval historian who 96 97 98

R. H. C. Davis, The Normans and their Myth (London, 1976). K. Leyser, ‘The emperor Frederick II’, in Leyser, Medieval Germany, pp. 269–76, at 274–6. Typical here are the near-contemporaneous attempts of Henry II of England and Frederick Barbarossa to permit appeals to Rome only after normal processes had been exhausted: this is not to be understood as an expression of lordly rivalry over jurisdiction, but can be paralleled in many contemporary complaints of ecclesiastical office-holders against frustratoriae appellationes: Gesta Friderici III, 16–17, pp. 185–6, 188; Constitutions of Clarendon c. 8, ed. D. Whitelock, M. Brett and C. N. L. Brooke, Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church, vol. I, part 2 (Oxford, 1981), p. 889.

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automatically assumes that a stronger and more powerful ruler can and should be evaluated as an unqualified blessing for his country ought to call to mind the message that God sent to the people of Israel via the prophet Samuel: Kings levy confiscatory levels of tax; they make war and use cannon-fodder to do so; they are immoral and arbitrary in helping themselves to their subjects’ womenfolk and wealth. Now you could object that it doesn’t matter whether the inhabitants of a kingdom were content, but only whether the development was progressive (a form of argument that NB would work equally well among members of a study-group on Das Kapital or with spokesmen for neo-liberal capitalism). Yet even here considerable doubts should be registered. We saw earlier the problems that a blindly interventionist kingship could occasion in the legal sphere; and in fact royal justice was in no way fairer, in no way better suited to resolve conflicts in the long run, than justice of other kinds. Centralising state-forms were more expensive, and often more wasteful too, in other ways. The states of the later Middle Ages in western Europe did not use their immense financial power to create better living conditions for all the inhabitants of their territories, but instead preferred to wage war and maintain imposing courts. That new concentrations of demand led in the end through economic and Keynesian multipliers to greater and more widespread well-being would first need to be proved: my view is, with John Gillingham’s, that polycentric state-forms have their advantages in this area.99 After the many counter-arguments, though, one further task remains. It is not only the German Sonderweg that needs to be explained. Viewed objectively, the rise of the London–Orleans–Dijon triangle as the cultural and political centre or metropolis of high- and late-medieval Europe is much more significant, and still more urgently in need of explanation.100 All the other regions of Europe, with the exception perhaps of the northItalian lowlands, were mere provinces in relation to this metropolitan zone, relatively backward in one way or another, or in several ways. In this respect, the German Reich was quite typical of Europe. But there was no ‘normal’ provincialism. As we have seen, much in this development was atypical. Among the reasons for this are some quite obvious ones. Perhaps the most 99 100

Gillingham, ‘Elective kingship’. For analyses and partial explanations of the phenomenon of the ‘Frenchification of Europe’ in the high Middle Ages, see R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London, 1953), and R. Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350 (London, 1993).


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obviously important is that the German Reich was exceptionally large, compared with other parts of Europe. The power-zone of the late-medieval French kings was approximately comparable with the German Reich of the Salian or Hohenstaufen period, but this only became so in the fourteenth century. Other large kingdoms, for instance the Angevin empire, were ‘composite’ or ‘multiple’ kingdoms, to use the technical terms of Anglophone historians of the early modern period.101 Obviously we also need to have an eye to varying points of departure. I suggested above that the technical-governmental leap forward of the English and Sicilian rulers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is to be explained less in terms of the genetically programmed capabilities of the Normans than through the unique combination of insular position, advanced starting-position and a conquest which created a tabula rasa for further political development. Even the French kings’ thirteenthcentury reconquista, partly through violence, of Normandy, Anjou and Toulouse, could not achieve anything even approximately similar. The latemedieval/early modern French kingdom, despite great efforts at ‘centralisation’, remained as it were a master of many households that differed a good deal in constitution and political culture. In a longer-term perspective, we must also take into account changes from late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages: the boundaries of Romania were still traceable centuries later, even if no longer visible.102 The final point to consider is the effects of material constraints on public and political development. Statehood in the high Middle Ages (and long after) was forced on by two things: warfare and the ruler’s absence.103 Obviously such pressures also operated in Germany too: Barbarossa was absent more than any previous German ruler. True, customary means of ruling were there – perhaps one should add: just as before. But whereas for an absent English king a substitute was needed in the fields of justice and of financial administration,104 when a German king was absent, all that people could do was wait till he came back. Changes and adaptations elsewhere were impelled in part from above, in part from below. But in the German 101 102

103 104

J. H. Elliott, ‘A Europe of composite monarchies’, P&P 137 (1992), pp. 48–71; M. Greengrass ed., Conquest and Coalescence: The Shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe (London, 1991). ¨ P. Moraw, ‘Uber Entwicklungunterschiede und Entwicklungsausgleich im deutschen und ¨ europäischen Mittelalter. Ein Versuch’, in P. Moraw, Uber König und Reich. Aufsätze zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte des späten Mittelalters, ed. R. C. Schwinges (Sigmaringen, 1995), pp. 293–320. On the ‘military revolution’, see above, n. 74. On the justiciar’s role, see F. West, The Justiciarship in England, 1066–1232 (Cambridge, 1966).

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Reich, things went on for a long time without any adaptation, and people acted on the (as yet unformulated) principle: ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ When that didn’t work any more, it was too late to adjust. The consequence was a lack of political competitiveness which would determine the course of German history (partially determined anyway by foreign interventions), right to the end of the dynastic era, and even beyond.

Index

Aachen: 96, 128, 137, 145, 343, 425 and the Carolingian political tradition: 274, 275, 278, 279 Carolingian royal chapel at: 141, 142 Charlemagne receives tribute at: 234 fiscal complex: 337 see also Charlemagne; Lotharingia Abodrites: 232 campaign against (892): 221 Adalbero, bishop of Augsburg: 225 Adalbero, duke of Carinthia: 202, 363, 372, 379 Adalbero, bishop of Laon: 228 Adalbero, bishop of Würtzburg: 371 Adalbero II, count of Ebersberg: 375 Adalbert Babenberger: 114 Adalbert, count of Ballenstedt: 364 Adalbert, archbishop of Bremen: 385 Adalbert of St Maximin, archbishop of Magdeburg: 340 continues Regino of Prüm’s Chronicon: 290 mission to the Russians: 276 Adalbert, archbishop of Mainz: 380 Adalbert, duke of Upper Lotharingia: 364 Adalbert, enemy of Thietmar of Merseburg: 323 Adalbold, bishop of Utrecht: 366 Adam of Bremen: 118, 140, 340, 451 Adela, wife of count Balderich: 142, 143, 355, 356 Adela, wife of Dedi of Lower Lusitania: 356 Adelaide, margravine of Turin: 384 Adhemar of Chabannes: 75, 227 adventus regis: 190, 201 Æthelred II ‘the Unready’, English king: 75, 290 Æthelstan, English king: victory at Brunanburh: 288 Agapetus II, pope: 349 Agilolfing family: dukes of Bavaria: 285 strained relations with Carolingians: 259 Agnes of Poitou, empress, wife of Henry III: 144, 299, 369, 385 Aibling: 227 Aimo, leader of a gang of robbers: 57

Airlie, Stuart: 224 Aistulf, Lombard king: 232, 242 Alan of Tewkesbury: 171, 172, 176 Albert, bishop of Liège: 66 Alemannia: see Swabia Alexander II, pope: 150, 151, 162 Alexander III, pope: 204 and the Becket dispute: 174, 176, 177, 180, 186 Alfonso II, king of Asturias: sends Charlemagne trophies after the capture of Lisbon: 240 Alfred, king of Wessex: 5, 15, 140, 280 ‘Alfredian’ charters: 297 and the dating of the Life of Alfred: 10–11 and taxation: 445 translation programme: 298 and the unification of England: 287 Alfred ‘the Ætheling’: 290 Algazi, Gadi: 115 Allstedt, Ottonian royal palace: 141, 142 Alpert of Metz: 146, 366, 367, 398 Alsace: 286 Althoff, Gerd: 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 130, 144, 178, 184, 203, 361 Alton: 48 Americas, discovery of: 22 Andernach, battle of (876): 234 Anderson, Benedict: 299 Anderson, Perry: 35, 389 Angevin empire: and capitals: 440 composite: 427, 457 exceptionally rich accounts of assemblies: 200 and France: 450 geographically mobile elite: 450 reactions against papal jurisdiction: 430 size of kingdom: 402 style of kingship: idea of ‘advanced government’: 455, 457 and the absence of the king: 457 and administrative practice: 186, 395 comparison with Germany: 390 itinerant representatives: 425

459

460

Index

Angevin empire: and capitals (cont.) judicial practice: 392, 394, 397, 423, 424, 426, 429, 430, 441, 442, 444 privileges and mandates: 415, 418, 421, 422 and succession: 290, 447 and taxation: 445, 446 use of ritual: 131 see also Anglo-Norman dynasty; England Anglo-Norman dynasty: and assemblies: 196, 200, 209 and capitals: 440 conquest: 15, 83, 85 found new form of state: 435, 436, 439 regional diversity: 427 and royal justice: 441, 442 and shires: 437 succession crises: 290 and taxation: 445, 446 writs: 422 see also England; Normans Anglo-Saxon England and assemblies: 196, 209 attitude to foreign customs: 144, 298–9 and charter witness-lists: 196 and the church: 346, 347, 348 and crime: 443 and economic growth: 304 and feudalism: 303, 308 influence of Carolingian state tradition: 280, 304 coinage: 280, 290 law-codes: 280, 292, 293 weights and measures: 280 and itinerant kingship: 295 ‘maximalist’ view of Old English state: 186–7, 286, 290, 292 monasteries: 346, 347 and regional power-bases: 288 regnal ethnicity and terminology: 297 and royal titulature: 297 smooth transitions through breaks in the political succession: 290 and sources: 294 state formation: and shires: 437 comparison with Ottonian Germany: 284–99 and unification: 296, 304 taxation: 444 unlikely target for the Franks: 265 see also bishops; charters; England; historiography; shires; Wessex Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: 12, 38, 42, 50, 287, 289, 290, 295 Anjou: 457 Annals of Fulda: 217, 223, 225, 248, 401

Mainz continuator: 224, 231 Regensburg continuator: 217, 219, 227 Anno, archbishop of Cologne: 162, 331, 333, 369 Anouilh, Jean: 167 Ansegis: 292 Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury: 66, 99, 181, 202 Anselm II, bishop of Lucca: 156, 385 Aosta, bishopric: 340 apanages (of Capetian kings’ sons): 285, 448 Appelt, Heinrich: 415, 421, 431 Aquitaine: 207, 227, 230, 249, 270, 299, 307, 427 see also Angevin empire Ariano: 205 Aribo, archbishop of Mainz: 372 aristocracy: see elite Arles: 450 army: fighting-men without land benefices: 237, 239, 266 vassals with land benefices: 238 warbands led by ecclesiastics: 238–9, 343, 344, 348 warbands led by lay elite: 239 geographical or ethnic names: 258 under the Merovingians: 257 recruitment of the Carolingian army: 243 and the general summons of free men: 245, 256, 257, 260, 262, in the capitularies: 256 and ‘Freienpolitik’: 262 small freeman unlikely to have been backbone of Carolingian army: 244–6 mobilisation of slaves and unfree: 246 for offensive or defensive warfare: 259 expense of military service: 244 rewards: 239 and the circulation of goods: 240, 266 ‘profit-and-loss’ assessment of warfare: 243, 266 difficulty of raising armies from the end of Charlemagne’s reign: 251 see also assemblies; bishops; Carolingian empire; elite; gift; liberi homines; plunder; tribute Arnold, bishop of Cologne: 422 Arnold, archbishop of Trier: 430 Arnold, bishop of Worms: 332 Arnulf of Carinthia, East Frankish king and emperor: 218, 219 his election as king: 297 hegemonial position: 248 concubines: 218 family relationship with the elder Conrad: 220 gifts of land to his wife Uota: 220, 221, 222

Index attacked indirectly by the accusation of adultery against his wife Uota: 225 illness: 225, 226–7 Italian campaign (896): 225, 226 requires swearing of an oath of loyalty: 225 insecure position: 225 given a dodgy drink at his imperial coronation: 228 see also Carolingian dynasty Arnulf, duke of Bavaria: 288 Arnulf, bishop of Halberstadt: 313, 363, 368 Arthur of Brittany: 448 Asselt, Vikings’ camp: 231 assemblies: 142, 143–4, 184, 185, 193–209, 381, 392 across Europe: 209–10, 454 and armies: 198 breaking up for consultations: 204 and capitularies: 196, 200 and charters: 195 and church councils: 201–2 and colloquium familiare: 185, 204 and constitutional history: 195 and crown-wearing: 196–7, 206 and the ‘Marchfield’: 197, 258 frequency: 195 general assemblies vs assemblies ‘by invitation’: 198 and the ‘feudal revolution’: 301 held by people other than kings: 198, 207, 402 and honour and status: 393 issues treated: 204 diplomacy: 205–6 legislation: 205 military campaigns: 204, 206 privileges for individual beneficiaries: 205 settlement of disputes: 206 and law-codes: 196 and narrative sources: 196, 200 participation: 198 period in which the concept applies: 194–5, 208–9 and the ‘public’ or political community: 207–8, 453 and regional ‘catchment areas’: 199, 207, 400 and ‘secret’ meetings: 184, 204 style of interaction: 199 as staged occasions: 201 terminology: 195 see also charters; church councils; historiography; privileges; ritual Asser: 11, 140 and the dating of the Life of Alfred: 11 Astronomer, biographer of Louis the Pious: 247

461

Attigny: 159 Attila: 121 Auden, W. H.: 3 Auer, L.: 344 Augsburg: 155, 164 bishopric: 331 Augustine of Hippo, Saint: 71, 168 Austrasia, Austrasians aristocracy: revolt against tax-inspector Parthenius: 399 complain about the peace between Sigebert and Guntramn: 235 magnate families divide the gains of Frankish conquest: 244 Austria: 289, 393, 405 Avars: 102 and the Franks attack by the Franks: 251, 252, 253, 263, 265, 266 Frankish missionary activity: 264 ruler’s hoard plundered by Frankish kings: 233, 236, 265 sacral nature of kingship: 233 Avranches, ‘concordat’ of: 187, 189 Azelin, son of Baldwin of Flanders: 333 Azelin, bishop of Hildesheim: 341 Baaken, G.: 322, 323 Babenberger family: 452 Bachrach, Bernard: 258 Bagehot, Walter: 127 baillages: 437, 438 Balderich, frontier commander, fails against Bulgar army (827): 253 Balderich, count: 142, 143, 355, 366, 367, 398 Baldwin of Flanders: 333, 386 Bali, kingdom of, and use of ritual: 131, 145, 294 Baluze, Etienne: 260 Bamberg: 384 bishopric: 331, 335, 336, 337 Bamberg Apocalypse: 93 Bamburgh: 287 Barcelona: 207 sacked by the Franks (801): 234 Bardo, bishop of Metz: 331 Barlow, Frank: 187, 189 Barraclough, Geoffrey: 6, 27, 29, 104, 389, 433, 435 Bartlett, Robert: 6, 29, 30, 36 Basel: 404 Basil II, Byzantine emperor: 136 Basques: pay tribute to Franks: 231 unreliable allies to the Franks: 265 at war with the Franks: 251 Battle, royal abbey of: 181

462

Index

Bavaria, Bavarians: 103, 104, 207, 222, 274, 285, 289, 364, 365, 400, 403 and Arnulf: 226, 297 attending Frankish assemblies: 199 bishops: 330, 341, 345 gains of Frankish conquest distributed among Austrasian magnate families: 244 participation in Frankish army: 259 revolt of 1055: 363 Bayley, C. C.: 410 Beatrix of Tuscany: 383, 385 Beaupré, abbey: 426 Becket, Thomas: 121, 168, 202 the Becket dispute: 167–90, 203, 204, 441 and problems of source criticism: 171 early career: 173 resigns the chancellorship: 173 at the Council of Northampton (1164): 199, 202, 206 his exile: 175 returns to England: 177 refuses to accept counsel: 185 see also Henry II of England; Louis VII; Northampton, Council of Bede: 87, 287, 298 Benedict V, pope: 164 Benedict VIII, pope: 340 Benedict IX, pope: 164 Benevento: Frankish expedition against (866): 245, 246 pays tribute to Franks: 232 at war with Franks: 251 Berengar I, king of Italy: 226 Berengar II, king of Italy: 286, 408 Bern: 51, 53 Bernard, king of Italy, rebellion of 817: 255 Bernardus filius Bernardi: 239 Bernard Billung: 162 Bernard of Clairvaux: 99 Bernard, count: 364 Bernard, margrave of the Nordmark: 369 Bernard, margrave of the Ostmark: 363 Bernard of Septimania: 224, 225, 239 Bertha of Turin, empress, wife of Henry IV: 385 Berthold of Reichenau: 156 Berthold, archbishop of Salzburg: 370 Berthold, Swabian magnate: 382, 383 Berthold of Zähringen: 46, 393 Besançon: 156 assembly at (1157): 202, 408, 409, 430 Beumann, H.: 130 Billung family: 316, 322, 323, 332, 343 bishoprics, as administrative units: 438 bishops, and aristocratic kin-groups: 331 comparison across Europe: 346

deposition: 335, 347 ‘desacralisation’ of the bishop: 369 as instruments of royal government: 325, 337 and servitia (large renders of food and drink): 338, 344, 345, 348 and duties of hospitality (gistum): 344, 345, 348 and the supply of troops: 343, 344, 348 as intellectuals: 345–6 relatives of the royal house: 332 rights of mint and market: 346 role as intermediaries in cases of deditio: 382, 384 situation not dissimilar to that of lay nobility: 334, 339 see also England, Anglo-Saxon; Italy; Ottonian dynasty; Salian dynasty; violence; West Francia Bismarck, Otto von: 147 Bisson, Thomas N.: 63, 72–3, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 85, 86, 114, 198, 201 Bloch, Marc: 20, 92, 114 Bloch, Maurice: 139 Bohemia, Bohemians: 232, 252, 260, 405 kings dominated by Ottonians: 289 Bois, Guy: 27, 82 Boleslaw I Chrobry, king of Poland: 400 boni homines: 301 Boniface, margrave of Tuscany: 60 Bonnassie, Pierre: 87 Boretius, Alfred: 260, 261 Bornscheuer, Lothar: 98 Boserup, Ester: 403 Boshof, Egon: 373 Bosl, Karl: 435 Bourdieu, Pierre: 119 Bournazel, Eric: 27 Brabant: 48 Brackmann, Albert: 434 Bracton, Henry de: 428 Brecht, Berthold: 71 Bremen, archbishopric: 334, 345, 393 Bretons: see Brittany Brioude: 241 Brittany, Bretons: 249 common political culture with the Franks: 247 Frankish campaigns against: 251, 252 leaders’ arms sent to Charlemagne: 234 rulers maintain clientele among immediate Frankish neighbours: 247 taken as slaves: 233 tribute to Frankish kings: 200, 231, 232, 242, 263 Brixen: 221, 223, 341 bishopric: 340

Index Brooke, Christopher: 90 Broszat, Martin: 35 Brown, E. A. R.: 19, 20 Brühl, Carlrichard: 11, 97, 196 Brunanburh, battle of (937): 288, 296 Brunner, Otto: 27, 29, 115, 258, 358, 398 Bruno, bishop of Augsburg: 369 Bruno, archbishop of Cologne: 333, 345 Bruno, leader of Ekbert of Meissen’s supporters: 364 Bruno, bishop of Merseburg: 401 Bruno the Saxon: 385 Bruno, bishop of Würzburg: 328, 333 Brunonid family: 341 Brunswick: 403 Buc, Philippe: 178, 229 Buchan, John: 16 Buganda, kingdom of, and use of ritual: 135 Bührer-Thierry, Geneviève: 224 Bulgars, at war with Franks: 251, 253 Burchard, bishop of Halberstadt: 336, 370 Burchard, bishop of Lausanne: 370 Burchard, duke of Swabia: 288 Burchard, Swabian count: 364 Burchard I, bishop of Worms: 340, 359 Burchard, relative of Uota?: 222 Burgundy, Burgundians: 7, 149, 305, 340, 414, 415, 418, 427 and the church: 346, 348 rulers dominated by Saxon kings: 274, 275 butter, as characteristic of northern Europe: 209 see also olive oil Byrhtferth of Ramsey: 11 Byzantine empire: 82, 300 embassies to: 275 imperialism and foreign policy: 247, 264 military clashes with the Franks: 251, 252 and ritual: 203 see also Italy Cadalus, schism of: 364 Cambrai: 138, 390 bishopric: 417 Campbell, James: 85, 132, 284, 291, 292, 294 Canossa: 147, 148, 156–7, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 384 layout of the fortress: 156 modern perception of Henry IV’s actions at: 147 as turning-point for medieval kingship: 148–9, 165 see also excommunication; Gregory VII; Henry IV; penance Canterbury, archbishopric, rights of: 176, 188, 418

463

Christ Church: 190, 418 Henry II’s penance at: 177, 189, 190 capellani, royal: under the Ottonians and Salians: 330, 344, 346 Capetian dynasty: 84, 208, 291 baillages: 437, 438 and the church: 345 and the end of Carolingian rule in West Francia (987): 270, 279 and the formation of the state: 436 power-zone: 453, 457 royal domain: 414 successions: 448 see also apanages capitularies: 292, 293, 341 Carinthia: 289 Carolingian dynasty: 102, 270, 271 political memorialisation: 272 political tradition: 271 and public penance: 384 seen as more advanced and civilised than the Merovingians: 245, 246 state tradition: 279, 292, 341, 421 ‘maximalist’ view on the basis of capitularies: 293 and public order: 301, 310 strained relations with Agilolfings: 259 style of kingship: 405 see also Carolingian empire; East Francia; hunting; kingship; lordship; Ottonian dynasty; queens; West Francia Carolingian empire: 11, 65, 94 before 800, army takes the field virtually every year: 252 fighting usually carried out in enemy territory: 252 from 800, shift to defensive posture: 252, 254, 261, 262 and the threat of invasion: 251 end of expansion: 251 as a conscious decision: 263 difficulties in raising armies: 255 distinction between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ expansion?: 263 difficulties of having a Christian empire?: 264 due to Byzantine-style foreign policy?: 264 fatal structural consequences: 266 fewer military opportunities entail fiercer internal competition: 266 and the protection of the papacy: 350 wealth obtained in Avar war: 265 see also army; assemblies; Carolingian dynasty; Francia; Franks; Italy; plunder; Saxons; tribute

464

Index

Catalonia: 8, 80, 81, 82, 87, 120, 305, 446, 452 Cellarius, Christopher: see Keller, Christopher Celts: 82 Cerdician family: 296, 444 Charlemagne, Frankish king and emperor: 48, 53, 63, 78, 86, 137, 226, 243, 245, 246, 265, 270, 289 and Aachen: 274 and the Avar expeditions: 234 collects antiquissima et barbarissima carmina: 247 his diet: 117 distribution of treasure: 236 and the divisio regni of 806: 254 and government: 280 imperial coronation: 262, 263, 265 legislating at assemblies: 205 mobilisation of armies: 251, 252, 255 and his ‘Freienpolitik’: 262 as model for later kings: 272–3, 279 canonisation as saint: 272, 279 linked with the crusades: 272, 451 and Ottonian histories: 277 Slavic word for ‘king’ (kral) based on his name: 273 his tomb opened by Otto III in 1000: 279 and twelfth-century French kings: 272, 279 under the French revolution: 280 political crisis after the death of leading members of the Frankish aristocracy: 266 and Pippin the Hunchback’s rebellion: 240 receiving and giving war trophies: 234, 240, 241 and the securing of borders: 254 and Spain: 249, 259, 260 his will: 236 see also Aachen; Carolingian dynasty; Carolingian empire Charles, king of Neustria, son of Charlemagne: campaigns against the Slavs: 252 Charles Martel, Frankish ruler: 252 see also Carolingian dynasty Charles the Bald, Frankish king and emperor: 80, 82, 249 annual gifts to vassals?: 237 and the assembly at Pˆıtres (864): 200 and bishops: 346, 349 collects thesauri on his Italian expedition (875): 234 criticised for setting himself apart from his followers: 401 and legislating at assemblies: 205 measures against the Vikings: 261 motives for trying to obtain the imperial title in 875: 249

receives trophies taken from the Vikings: 234 see also Carolingian dynasty Charles III the Fat, Frankish king: 74, 225 Carolingian kingdoms reunited under him: 248 dies of a stroke?: 227 succession: 405 and the Vikings: 231, 242 see also Carolingian dynasty Charles the Straightforward (or ‘the Simple’), West Frankish king (898–923): 226, 233 see also Carolingian dynasty Charles VI, king of France: 447 Charles the Good of Flanders: 227 Charles of Lorraine: 47, 138 charters, at church councils: 195 of donation: 315 and formulae: 321, 322 as a source for early medieval kingship: 275, 294, 295, 297, 321, 322 survival in different regions: 305, 306 and witness-lists: 195 Châtelet prison: 51 Chaudhuri, K. N.: 21, 25, 34 Chiavenna, countship: 416 Chiemsee: 422 Childebert, Frankish king: 257 Chilperic, Frankish king (561–84): 52, 53 China: T’ang: 135 and use of ritual: 203 Chur, bishopric: 340, 341 church, councils: 195, 201 putting in place wider norms of acceptable conduct in the absence of kings: 79–81 see also bishoprics; bishops; Ottonian dynasty; papacy; parish; Salian dynasty Cicero: 410 Cistercians, General Chapter: 69 Clarendon, council at palace of: 174, 181, 185, 186, 187, 188, 208, 392 clothing: 65–6, 144 crusaders’: 65 elite: 118 pilgrims’: 65 penitents’, sackcloth/hairshirt, with bare feet: 160, 170, 180, 381 worn by bishops: 160 worn by monks: 160 demanded by bishops of their enemies: 162 Clovis, Frankish king, and the vase of Soissons: 235 Cnut, English king: 140, 287, 290, 304, 400, 418 style of rule in England and Scandinavia: 427 Cobb, Richard: 13

Index Cologne: 93, 278, 371, 425, 450 archbishopric: 331, 333, 334, 341, 390 Como, bishopric: 417, 423 Conrad I, East Frankish king (d. 918): 219, 274, 297, 349, 382 Conrad II, king of Germany: 149, 202, 291, 319 and bishops: 331, 332, 369 and conflicts with / between aristocrats: 359, 363, 366, 369, 372, 379, 382 Conrad III: 392, 396, 409, 416, 417, 430 in conflict with Lothar III: 384 Conrad, duke of Bavaria: 369, 373, 376, 379 Conrad of Beichlingen: 60 Conrad, duke of Lotharingia, son-in-law of Otto I: 128 Conrad, duke of Luxemburg: 162 Conrad, archbishop of Mainz: 204 Conrad, bishop of Utrecht: 370 Conrad the Younger: 364, 381 Conradine family: 313 see also Uota Constance: 160 Constantine I, Roman emperor: 21, 157 Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos, Byzantine emperor: 135 Constantinople, fall of: 22 consuetudo: 77 coronation: see ordines Corsica, Frankish expedition against (825): 245, 246 Corvey, abbey: 93, 315, 319, 337, 340, 398 chronographer: 56 Cosmas of Prague: 209 Coterel gang: 55 court jesters: 133 Crescentius, Roman rebel against Otto III: 161 crime, highway robbery: 38–71, 357 and the circulation of stolen goods: 62 and the feeling of insecurity: 69–71 high-status robbers: 52, 55–60, 357; and toll-taking: 46, 49, 58, 59, 65, 71, 75; and feud: 58, 75–6; and simony: 46 measures against: 60–7 in the medieval vocabulary: 46–7 modern understanding of: 49–50 professional robbers: 52 robbers and hermits: 54 and ‘private’ justice: 301 and ‘public order’: 76, 310, 362, 365, 443 see also clothing; feud; feudalism; forest; kingship; latro; latrocinium; pilgrims; punishment; travel; violence; weapons Cromwell, Thomas: 189

465

crown, symbolic role in the transfer of power under the Ottonians: 290 see also assemblies; kingship crusaders, oath: 69 see also Charlemagne; clothing crusades: 272 Cumberland: 290 Cunigunde, empress, wife of Henry II of Germany: 291, 385 Dagobert I, Frankish king: 236 Danegeld: 249 Danes, and the Franks, share common political culture with the Franks: 247 Frankish failure on border: 245, 265 and Frankish missionary activity: 264 at war with Franks: 251 succession politics: 289 see also Vikings Daniel, prophecy of: 20 Dannenbauer, H.: 256, 322 Darwinism: 37 Davis, Natalie Zemon: 13 De Gaulle, Charles: 104 Dedi of Lower Lusitania, rebel against Henry IV: 160, 356, 364, 365, 383 deditio: 160, 165, 175, 190, 381 see also bishops; kingship; peace-making; women, royal defensio patriae: 245, 260, 261 Deotrich, priest: 220 Dhondt, J.: 76 Dhuoda: 314 Dien, A. E.: 32 Diepold, count: 369 Dietrich, margrave: 140 Dietrich of Katlenburg: 364 Dietrich I, bishop of Metz: 349, 351 Dietrich of Münster: 369 Dietrich, bishop of Naumburg-Zeitz: 370 Dietrich, count of Osterland: 363 Dijon: 456 Diocletian, Roman emperor: 21 diplomas: see privileges Dirlmeier, Ulf: 446 Dodico, lordship: 316 dog-carrying, as a punishment: 134, 135, 392, 426 Domesday Book: 7, 293 Dopsch, Alfons: 26 Dornberg, Ottonian royal palace: 141, 142 Dortmund: 128 Douzy, Council of: 238 Dover: 122 dress: see clothing Droysen, Gustav: 10

466

Index

Duby, Georges: 87, 115, 243, 245, 246 Dudo of St-Quentin: 44, 96 Dümmler, Ernst: 218, 224 Dungal: 242 Dungern, Otto von: 434 Durand, bishop of Liège: 331 Durham: 290 Durliat, Jean: 26 Eadhelm, abbot of Thetford: 16 Ealdred, archbishop of York: 57 Early Medieval Europe: 27 East Anglia: 15, 288, 289 East Francia: 83, 105 bishops: 349 comparison with West Francia: 248 and claim to hegemony in Europe: 407 less interventionist rulership than in rest of Frankish kingdoms: 280, 311, 342, 399 multi-regnal: 400 no longer ruled by Carolingians after 911: 270 only Frankish kingdom after 843 with opportunities for expansion: 248 under the Ottonians: 280 and the papacy: 350, 407 rulers’ financial resources: 399 see also Carolingian dynasty; Francia; Germany; Ottonian dynasty; Saxony; West Francia Eberhard of Franconia: 134, 139, 141, 426 Eberhard, archbishop of Salzburg: 422 Eberhard, count of Spanheim: 370 Eberhard, archbishop of Trier: 162 Eberhard, son of Ulrich of Ebersberg: 375 Eddington, Paul: 4 Edgar, king of Wessex: 45, 287, 289, 293, 304, 445 Edith, queen, wife of Otto I: 140 Edmund, English king: 287, 290 Edward the Elder, English king: 288 Edward the Confessor, English king: 57, 290 Edward I, king of England, and royal justice: 50, 68, 441 Edward III, king of England: 447 Edward, Anglo-Saxon accused of following Danish fashion: 144, 298 Edwin, English earl: 54 Egbert: 93 Egeno, latro?: 46 Egeno II, count of Conradsburg: 364 Egfrid: 239 Egilbert, bishop of Freising: 369 Einhard: 117, 137, 247, 251, 265, 272, 273, 277 Eirik Bloodaxe: 287 Ekbert II, margrave of Meissen: 364, 365, 370, 373, 380, 384

Ekkehard of Aura: 45 Ekkehard II, margrave of Meissen,: 363, 368 Ekkehard of St Gall: 124 Eliot, Thomas Stearns: 167 elite, lay: 96–9 changes in domination over time: 125–6 diet: 117 dress: 118 dumping of old and disabled members in monasteries: 116–17, 123 Frankish nobility main beneficiaries of distribution of plunder: 236 passing gifts on to their followings: 237–8 impact on the organisation of space: 118–19 internationality: 449 links of kinship across political frontiers: 450 origin myths: 120–1 physical markers: 116–17 place in the historiography: 94 relationships between members of: 90–1, 111–12 speech as a social marker: 119–20 unable to conceal or disguise high social status: 121–2 see also army; Germany; kingship; kinship; lordship; peasants; violence Ellinrat, Arnulf’s concubine: 219 Ellinrat, Arnulf’s daughter?: 219 Emma, wife of West Frankish king Lothar: accused of adultery and poisoning: 227–8 Emma, wife of Louis the German: dies of a stroke: 226 link to the Welf family: 220 Emo of Bloemhof: 67 encellulement: 72, 303 Engelbert, archbishop of Cologne: 65 Engels, Friedrich: 35 Engels, Odilo: 371 Engelschalk, count, abducts Arnulf’s daughter: 219 Engilmar, bishop of Passau: 220, 221 England, and constitutional history: 194 conversion of: 5 Elizabethan England: 134, 135 and the ‘feudal revolution’: 83, 85–6, 87 origins of the modern state: 5–6 shift from assemblies to proto-parliamentary system: 194 surviving court records: 40 twelfth-century attitude to Celtic peoples: 12 unified political culture: 452 see also Angevin empire; Anglo-Norman dynasty; Anglo-Saxon England

Index Erchanger, Swabian magnate: 382, 383 Erdmann, C.: 346 Erempert, Bavarian count: 225 Ergolding, royal estate: 225 Eric of Friuli, margrave, dies: 266 leads Avar expedition: 234 Erluin, bishop of Cambrai: 333 Ermold the Black: 234, 242, 252 Ernst, count, stepson of Conrad II: 319, 373, 375, 381, 386 Esch, Arnold: 51 Escorial: 440 Eskil, bishop of Lund: 59 ethnicity: 100–6 in the early middle ages: 102–4 in the high middle ages, relationship with modern states: 104 and high social and political status: 103–4 and historiography: different European historiographical traditions: 104–6 growth of the subject: 100 ideology: 106–7 ‘Vienna school’: 100, 103 methodological problems in the study of: 101–2 names as ethnic markers: 103 and nationality: 299 and race: 100, 101 state formation and the development of a regnal ethnicity: 296 ethnogenesis, Ethnogenese: 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106 Eucharist, at assemblies: 201 Eugenius III, pope: 424 ‘European history’, vagueness of the term: 28–30 European Science Foundation: 5, 27, 436 excommunication: 158 see also Gregory VII; Henry IV; penance; ritual exile: 182, 366 Fécamp: 58 Fermo: 153 feud: 207, 314, 322, 358, 362, 397, 426, 430 and royal authority: 398 as rule-bound process: 359, 365, 398 under the Salians: 356, 357 see peace-making; violence feudalism, dominance of French model: 80, 81–3 ‘feudal anarchy’: 73, 77 ‘feudal revolution’, ‘mutation féodale’: 72, 80, 81, 83, 86, 303, 305 feudal hierarchy: 394 historiography: 8–9, 19–20, 35

467

and ‘private’ justice: 301, 303 and source-materials: 307 use of the word: 20, 30, 32, 33, 37 see also fortifications; historiography; lordship; Peace of God movement; seigneurie banale; serfs; violence Fichtenau, Heinrich: 56, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 130, 141, 142, 245, 246, 297, 318, 399 Flanders: 207, 230, 415, 446, 452 Fleckenstein, Josef: 330, 333 Flodoard: 58 Fluchtburg: 84, 141, 143 Föhring, Carolingian royal estate: 221, 223 Folcuin of Schwalenburg: 398 Folmar of Trier: 66 Folville gang: 55 Forchheim: 164 forest: 53–4, 60–1 forgery: 25, 340, 418 formularies: 257 fortifications, and feudalism: 303, 305, 308, 321, 322 Fossier, Robert: 27 France, and assemblies: 453 and ‘centralisation’: 457 contacts with England: 450 style of kingship:compared to Germany: 390 and capitals: 440 and royal justice: 397, 413 and royal officials: 439 privilege to mandate ratio: 415 succession: 447 and taxation: 446 see also Capetian dynasty; Francia; West Francia Francia, Franks: 87, 140, 291 sharing a common political culture with their neighbours: 247 Frankish imperialism: 247, 265 and conquest: 252, 264 and tribute-taking: 264 Franks as Vikings: 247 ‘war-weary’ in the ninth century?: 255, 263 see also army; Carolingian dynasty; Carolingian empire; East Francia; plunder; tribute; West Francia Franco, bishop of Worms: 332 Franconia: 286, 289, 307, 314 bishops: 341, 344 Francus homo, Franci homines: see liberi homines Frankfurt, Carolingian royal chapel at: 141, 142 Franklin, O.: 396 Fredegar: 235, 246, 259 continuator: 242

468

Index

Frederick I Barbarossa, king of Germany, emperor: 60, 84, 173, 195, 202, 205, 208, 387, 390–2, 400, 402, 430 absences from Germany: 457 and bishops: 353 election: 393 and Hadrian IV: 409, 430 income: 446 and Italy: 407, 427 and the modernisation paradigm: 413, 427, 435 style of kingship: 390, 397, 401, 410, 429 chancery: 439 charters: 414, 443 mandates: 420, 422 privileges: 415, 416, 418 royal justice and the settlement of disputes: 392, 393, 394, 395, 396, 397, 398, 404, 409, 417, 422, 423, 424, 425, 427, 430, 434 see also Landpeace Frederick II, king of Germany, emperor: 148, 397, 435, 443 Frederick of Arnsberg: 370 Frederick, archbishop of Cologne: 370 Frederick of Goseck: 60 Frederick, archbishop of Mainz: 128, 336 Frederick of Putelendorf: 365 Frederick, cardinal, brother of Godfrey the Bearded: 373 Frederick II, duke of Swabia, in conflict with Lothar III: 384 Freising, bishopric: 221, 223, 341, 393 Fréteval: 186 Fréteval, battle of (1194): 440 Freytag, Hans-Joachim: 343 Fried, Johannes: 90, 112 friendship, political: 274, 275, 288 see also Henry I of Germany; kingship Frisia, Frisians: 289 benefices formerly held by Rorich tranferred to Gottfried: 231 hoards plundered by Frankish kings: 233 plunder taken from Vikings (885): 235 temple treasures plundered: 233 tribute to Franks: 231 Fry, Christopher: 167 Fuhrmann, Horst: 116 Fulda, abbey: 93, 199, 315, 337 as place of assembly: 380, 384 Galbert of Bruges: 227 Gallus Anonymus: 209 Gandersheim: 221

Ganshof, François-Louis: 255 Gascony: 452 and plundering for horses: 234 Gaul: see Francia Geary, Patrick: 91, 103, 120, 137 Gebhard III, bishop of Regensburg: 332, 369, 381 Gebhard IV, bishop of Regensburg: 370 Geertz, Clifford: 131, 145, 294 Gelasius: 408 Gelnhausen: 206 Genet, Jean-Philippe: 436 Geneva: 421 Geoffrey, count of Anjou: 124, 427 Georgi, W.: 285 Gerald, count: 239 Gerald of Wales: 451 Gerard of Augsburg: 141, 143 Gerard of Aurillac: 314 as pope Sylvester II: 349 Gerard, bishop of Cambrai: 78, 80, 81, 138, 333, 351, 369 Gerard II, bishop of Cambrai: 163 Gerard of Galera: 57 Gerard La Pucelle: 450 Gerhard, Dietrich: 27, 29 Germany and church policy under Ottonians and Salians: 325–54 and abbots: 330, 332, 336–7 grants of immunity: 342, 353 grants of land: 326, 337 grants of rights: 337 grants of whole counties: 339–42 Reichskirchensystem: 325, 348 and royal approval of episcopal elections: 328 and synods: 348 and claim to hegemony and Europe: 407 geographically mobile elite: 450 kingship and statehood: 411 and absence of the ruler: 457 administrative divisions, counties: 289, 438, and countships: 438; and troop-raising: 289, dukedoms: 438; margravates: 438 and capitals: 440 comparison with Anglo-Saxon England: 284–99 divisions of kingdom between kings’ sons: 286 and the elite, honour and status: 392, 426, 430, ‘kingly’ status of princes: 405–6; no opposition between imperial and regional aristocracies: 313; polyethnic imperial elite: 400

Index royal justice and style of rulership: 413–31, 443; privilege to mandate ratio: 415; collective element in political justice: 394, 423; no systematic delegated jurisdiction: 395–8; tolerance for rebels: 401 size of the kingdom: 402, 452, 457, of princely territories: 452 state formation beginning in the ninth century: 285; no common language: 297; as conglomeration of ethnically defined regions: 289; no development of a common identity: 296–7, 299 Sonderweg: 388, 429, 430, 432–58 sources of income: 446 and succession: 291, 447; excluding ‘foreigners’: 291 and the territorialisation of lordship: 339 ‘virtual statelessness’: 279, 280, 293, 310–13, 341; virtually no legislation north of the Alps: 399; and the surviving sources: 292 see also Frederick I Barbarossa; mandates; privileges and the papacy: 327, 349–50, 454 protection of the papacy: 407 and papal depositions: 349 shift from assemblies to proto-parliamentary system: 194 social and economic life under the Ottonians: 300 and the apparent lack of social conflict: 308, 323; gang warfare: 322 a booming economy?: 320 and the ‘feudal revolution’: 83–4, 87 relationships within the ‘political community’: 310; between ‘elite’ and ‘base’: 318; between different strata of the aristocracy: 313–15; between aristocracy and rural population: 315 and social change: 309 social differentiation among rural population: 316, 317 and the sources: 294, 316 see also bishops; East Francia; Ottonian dynasty; privileges; Salian dynasty; Saxony Gero, archbishop of Cologne: 334 Gero, archbishop of Magdeburg: 162, 369 Gero, margrave: 162, 368 Gerold of Bavaria: 266 Gertrude, Saxon margravine: 356 Gervase of Tillbury: 450 Giesebrecht, Wilhelm von: 147, 325, 433

469

gift, internal tribute exacted by Carolingian kings referred to as dona: 242 see also army; plunder; tribute Gilbert Foliot, bishop of Hereford, then of London: 171, 173, 183, 185 Gilbert of Mons: 43 Gillingham, John: 12, 399, 456 Ginzberg, Carlo: 112 Gisela, empress, wife of Conrad II: 375, 385 Giselbert of Lotharingia: 288 in rebellion against Otto I: 139 Glanvill, Ranulf de: 423 Glenville, Peter: 167 Godafrid, Danish king: 252 Godebold, bishop of Utrecht: 371 Godesberg, gift of land at: 221 Godfrey, archbishop of Milan: 151 Godfrey (Gottfried) the Bearded, duke of Lotharingia, margrave of Tuscany: 152, 162, 362, 364, 365, 373, 378, 379, 381, 383, 385, 386 Godfrey (Gottfried) IV, duke of Lower Lotharingia: 364 Görich, Knut: 279 Goslar: 14, 147, 345, 370, 419 ‘Gothic’: 21 Gottfried, Viking leader, marries Carolingian wife (Gisela): 231 Gozwin, count: 371 Gozwin, count of Heinsberg: 418 Graman, accused of poisoning Arnulf: 227 ‘Gregorian’, art: 93 revolution: 83 Gregory I the Great, pope: 298 Gregory V, pope: 349 Gregory VI, pope: 164 Gregory VII, pope: 46, 293, 328 and Henry IV: 153, 154, 297 no attempt to notify the imperial court of his election: 152 at Canossa: 147, 156, 157 and the German princes: 156 little initial contact with Saxons in revolt against Henry IV: 150 his need for a compromise: 163–4 use of intermediaries: 204 and lay investiture: 165–6 Gregory of Tours: 87, 235, 237, 239, 246, 399 Grenoble, bishopric: 340 Grierson, Philip: 246 Grundherrschaft: 88, 306 see also historiography Grundmann, Herbert: 56 Guibert of Nogent: 46 guilds: 67

470

Index

Gundechar, bishop of Eichstätt: 331, 335 Gunther, bishop of Bamberg: 369 Guntramn, Frankish king: 235 Gunzelin, margrave of Meissen: 319, 362, 379 Habermas, Jürgen: 133, 207 Hadrian IV, pope: 408 Hadumar of Genoa, killed in 806: 266 Haimerad, Saint: as ‘protest-saint’: 323 Hákon, King of Norway: 14 Halberstadt, bishopric: 334, 336 Haldór Laxness: 14 Hamburg, sacked by Horic: 235 bishopric: 345 Hamezo, ‘anti-bishop’ of Halberstadt: 370 Hampshire: 47 Hanawalt, Barbara: 56 Hansen, V.: 32 Hardacnut, English king: 290 Harold I, English king: 290 Hartkirchen: 220 Hartwig, count of Friesach: 363 Harzburg, castle-chapel destroyed by Saxons: 153, 355, 357 Hastings: 5 Hatto, archbishop of Mainz: 114, 221, 222, 225 good relations with Uota: 222, 223 Hauck, A.: 335 Helmbrecht: 62 Helmold of Bosau: 451 Heloise: 99 Hemuza, vassal of Henry of Walbeck: 313 Henry I, king of England: 10, 42, 70, 86, 148, 173 and royal justice: 441 succession: 448 Henry II, king of England: 16, 52, 53, 62, 99, 145, 148, 390, 400, 402, 427, 446 rule in Aquitaine: 407, 427 and assemblies: 195, 199, 205, 208 and Becket: 173–90, 441 at the Council of Northampton: 178, 202, 206 peace-agreements with pope Alexander III: 177 and penance: 177, 180, 189–90 chancery: 439 charters: 414 and ‘common law’: 396, 428 income: 446 rebellion led by his wife and sons: 189 and royal justice: 441 Henry III, king of England: 47, 447 dispute over his coronation: 177, 189 Henry VI, king of England: 447 Henry VIII, king of England: 189

Henry I ‘the Fowler’, king of Germany: 90, 96, 129, 141, 143, 286 attacks Slavs for tribute: 249 and bishops: 326, 337 breaks with Carolingian tradition: 280 refuses to be anointed: 274 and political ‘friendships’ with magnates: 274, 288 see also Ottonian dynasty Henry II, king of Germany, emperor: 74, 87, 98, 138, 170, 286, 291, 319, 343, 345, 359 and abbots: 337 and aristocratic conflicts: 357, 366, 367, 379, 397, 398 and bishops: 327, 328, 331, 335, 336, 337, 339, 340, 341, 344, 349, 352, 368 childless: 291 and conflicts with lay aristocrats: 373, 382 and penance: 159 see also bishops; violence, political Henry III, king of Germany, emperor: 144, 150, 226, 299, 364, 407 and bishops: 328, 331, 345, 369 and conflicts between lay aristocrats: 357, 369, 372 and conflicts with lay aristocrats: 373, 382, 383, 385 as crown prince: 379 establishes Henry IV as his successor: 376 intervention in papal affairs: 151, 164, 349 and penance: 159, 384 see also bishops; Salian dynasty; violence, political Henry IV, king of Germany, emperor: 46, 54, 84, 199, 205, 364, 435 and bishops: 153, 349, 352, 369, 370 and conflicts with lay aristocrats: 373, 374, 378, 385, 386, 387 criticised for his treatment of magnates: 401 and deditio: 160, 383, 384 and pope Gregory VII: 152, 155 excommunicated: 154, 374 tries to have Gregory excommunicated: 154, 349 at Canossa: 147–56, 159–66 made king: 376 minority: 151–2, 364, 369, 385 and the murder of count Sigehard of Burghausen: 356 regions under his control: 149 and the Saxons: 149–50, 152, 153, 154, 159, 188, 205, 355, 393 titulature: 297 use of intermediaries: 204 see also bishops; Salian dynasty; violence, political

Index Henry V, king of Germany, emperor: 45, 60, 74, 365 ‘absolutist tendencies’: 394, 401 and bishops: 352, 353, 370 and conflicts with lay aristocrats: 373, 374, 380, 384, 387 and deditio: 384 and taxation: 399 see also bishops; Salian dynasty; violence, political Henry VI, king of Germany, emperor: 14, 423, 435, 440 Henry (VII) of Germany: 435, 443 Henry, bishop of Augsburg: 369 Henry Babenberger: 393 Henry I, duke of Bavaria, in rebellion against his older brother Otto I: 139, 312 Henry, cardinal and papal legate: 59 Henry the Fat, count of Northeim and Frisia: 371 Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria: 206, 393, 403, 405, 434, 446 Henry I of Limburg: 384 Henry, count palatine of Lotharingia: 369 Henry of Orta: 417 Henry II the Quarrelsome, duke of Bavaria: 336 Henry Raspe II, count of Gudensberg Henry of Schweinfurt, margrave: 373 Henry of Walbeck: 313 Henry, bishop of Winchester: 175 Henry, bishop of Würzburg: 336 Herbert Losinga, bishop of Norwich: 163 Heribert, archbishop of Cologne: 291 Herimann, archbishop of Cologne: 328 Hermann, bishop of Bamberg: 153 Hermann Billung: 137, 140 Hermann, margrave of Meissen: 139, 362, 368, 379, 397 Hermann of Reichenau: 217, 225, 230, 373, 376, 382 Hermann of Salm: 365 Hermann I, duke of Swabia: 288 Hermann II, duke of Swabia: 286, 368 Hermann of Werl: 369 Herold, archbishop of Salzburg: 335, 350 Hersfeld: 315 Hessen: 332 Hezilo, bishop of Hildesheim: 336 Hibernicus Exul: 242 Hilary, bishop of Chichester: 171, 181 Hildebald, bishop of Worms: 332, 340 Hildegard, daughter of Louis the Younger: 221 Hildesheim: 162, 279 bishopric: 341, 345 Hildiward, bishop of Halberstadt: 334 Hilduin, abbot of Saint-Denis: 238

471

Hilmerad, Saint: 146 Hilwartshausen: 421 Hincmar, bishop of Laon: 238 Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims: 144, 197, 198, 200, 237, 238, 239, 242, 249, 273 Hirsch, H.: 434 historiography neglect of assemblies: 142, 143, 194 and the attribution of policy to either a ruler or his entourage: 269 and the central middle ages: 435–7 and the comparative approach: 6, 33–7, 130, 285, 300, 411, 436, 450 and constitutional or institutional history: 193, 438, 454 and conventional political history: 193 English: 6–7, 8, 9, 15, 88, 294 and editions of narrative texts: 12 and the ‘Manchester school’: 14 ‘maximalist’ view of state power: 7, 16, 294 perspective on crime: 40 preference for archival evidence: 9–10, 13, 47, 294 privileging discovery of ‘facts’ over original thinking: 13 and regional history: 15–16 and source criticism of narrative texts: 12 and the teaching of history: 6–7, 10, 13, 17, 23 ‘tradition’ vs ‘survival’ of sources: 10 see also England French: 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 26–7 the Annales school: 87 extension of French model to European dimensions: 80, 81 the mutation of the year 1000: 79, 81, 301, 305, 306 and regional history: 87–8 geographical determinism: 287 German: 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14–15, 88, 294 and charters: 295 on crime: 41 and the ‘feudal revolution’: 84; terminology: 307; Herrschaft: 306; Villikation: 316 and the ‘Freiburg school’: 305 and libri memoriales: 91 nominalist approach: 438 state development and the modernisation paradigm: 413, 432–5, 447; and constitutional history: 194, 284, 354, 435; and the development of ‘territorial’ states: 434; and feudal relationships: 434; and the Ottonians: 306 Reichskirchensystem: 325, 354 and the role of political ‘friendships’: 288

472

Index

historiography (cont.) Icelandic: 14 Indian: 31–2 Italian: 9, 12, 88 and the ‘feudal revolution’: 301, 306 internationality and national boundaries: 5, 7, 8 literary theory and the relationship between text and reality: 96–9 Marxist: 32, 34, 35–6, 37, 112 and medieval power relationships: 111–12 and the modernisation paradigm for the evolution of European states: 388, 413–14 ignoring the costs of ‘progress’: 455 and national narratives: 6–7, 14–15, 132 and the origins of modern European states: 5 and the projection of bourgeois conventions into medieval social practices: 218 and ritual: 129–30, 168–9 and social anthropology: 95–6 and sources: 294 different types in different regions: 7–8, 10, 86, 87 Spanish: 88 and the ‘feudal revolution’: 301 and unification processes: 296 see also elite; encellulement; ethnicity; European history; feudalism; Germany; incastellamento; microhistory; periodisation Hobsbawm, Eric: 55 Hodgson, Marshall G. S.: 36 Hohenaltheim: 349 Hohenstaufen: see Staufen Holy Lance, symbolic role in the transfer of power under the Ottonians: 290 Homburg, battle of (1075): 383 Honorius II, antipope then bishop of Parma: 162 Horic, Danish king: 235 Hötersleben, meeting of the Saxon aristocracy at (1073): 150 Housman, A. E.: 104 Hoyer of Mansfeld: 365 Höxter: 398 Hrodgaud, uprising in Lombardy (776): 244 Hugbert (D Arn. 143): 221 Hugh Capet: 122 Hugh, abbot of Cluny: 385 Hugh of Die, supporter of Gregory VII: 165 Hugh of Le Puiset: 46 Hugh of Lusignan: 314 Hugh, bishop of Nevers: 163 Hugh of Tours: 253 Hugh of Verden: 430

Hugo, son of Lothar II, fate of his followers after his rebellion and death (885): 239 Hugo of Lotharingia, allies himself with the Vikings: 247 Hungary, Hungarians, Magyars: 82, 90, 106, 121, 249, 277, 296, 319, 320, 340, 373, 451 kings dominated by Ottonians: 289 hunting: 140 Huxley, Aldous: 16 Hyacinth Bobo, cardinal and papal legate (pope Celestine III): 59 Ibbo, man fined for non-performance of military service: 257 Iceland: 70 immunities: 342, 353 incastellamento: 72, 118, 303 Ingelheim: 128, 278 intermediaries: see bishops; peace-making; peasants; women, royal International Medieval Bibliography database: 100 Investiture contest: 326, 369, 400 see also Gregory VII; kingship Irminsul, burnt, and temple treasures plundered (772): 233 Isabeau of Bavaria: 228 Isidore of Seville: 129 Islamic conquest: 121 Islamic states: 300 and use of ritual: 203 see also Spain Isolde: 114 Italy, Italians: and Frankish wars: 251, 252, 265 bishops: 335, 343, 346, 347, 348, 353 contrast with northern Europe: 209 corrupt character of highborn women (according to Liudprand of Cremona): 229 Carolingian sub-kings: 270 and feudalism: 303, 314 under Ottonians and Salians: 149, 150–1, 275, 278, 286, 293, 296, 327, 340, 343 no peasant rebellions: 125 under the Staufen: 407–9, 446, 451 mandates and privileges: 415, 418 see also bishops; Byzantine empire; Frederick I Barbarossa Jackman, Donald: 220 Jacquerie: 123 Jaspers, Karl: 36, 37 Jerusalem, crusade following fall of: 208 Jews, and slave ownership: 319 Joanna, daughter of Henry II of England: 208

Index Joel, twelfth-century aristocrat: 114 John XII, pope: 164, 275, 350 John XIII, pope: 350 John ‘Lackland’, king of England: 85, 434, 448 John of Gorze: 169 John Philagathos: 164 John, archbishop of Ravenna: 238 John of Salisbury: 99, 176, 185, 451 Johnson, D. G.: 32 Joscelin, abbot of Bury St Edmunds: 66 Judith, wife of Louis the Pious, accused of adultery: 228, 230 Kaiserswerth: 221, 345 Kalamazoo, international medieval conference at: 24 Kantorowicz, Ernst: 98, 128 Karlmann, father of Arnulf: 225 dies of a stroke: 226 Keller, Christoph: 21 Keller, Hagen: 132 Kent: 15, 287, 289 Kern, Fritz: 91, 358, 374, 375 Keynes, J. M.: 456 Kienast, Walther: 105 kingship, available source-material obscures rulers’ own consciousness: 281 and the Carolingian political tradition Christian rulership: 271 crowning and anointing: 271, 274 dynastic: 252 itinerant: 271, 295 kings set apart from the rest of political society: 271, 275 state-tradition: adapted by Ottonians: 279; appropriated by Anglo-Saxon kings: 280; not perceived as important in medieval times: 280 change in the position of the ruler under the Salians: 387 ‘desacralisation’, and the Investiture Contest: 369, 384, 400 and the ‘feudal revolution’: 301 itinerant rulership: 440, 453 and legitimation from the past: 281 and idea of continuity: 281 as social construct, in response to demand from political community: 269, 396, 406–7, 428, 442 statehood and the modernisation paradigm: 432–55, 458 and administrative units: 437–9 and capitals: 440 and criminal justice: 443–4 forced on by rulers’ absence: 457

473

and the ‘military revolution’: 449 and office-holding: 439 ‘personal’ and ‘territorial’ types of state: 448–9 and royal justice: 440–3; as final court of appeal: 441–3 and size of kingdom: 402, 452 and sources of income: 444–7; plunder and tribute: 444; profits of justice: 445; taxation: 444 and succession: 447–8; elective kingship: 447; hereditary kingship: 447; and the division of kingdoms: 447, 454 and vengeance, under Ottonians and Salians: 372 viewed by contemporaries: 409–11 see also Angevin empire; Anglo-Norman dynasty; Anglo-Saxon England; Carolingian dynasty; Carolingian empire; East Francia; elite; feudalism; France; Germany; historiography; Ottonian dynasty; peace-making; Salian dynasty; violence; West Francia kinship, beginnings of patrilineal family structure: 450 Kipling, Rudyard: 104, 123 kiss of peace: 177, 179, 182–3, 186, 188, 398 Knowles, David: 175, 189 Koblenz: 15 Koziol, Geoffrey: 95, 170, 178 Kremsmünster: 415 Kuhn, Thomas: 13 Kuno of Beichlingen: 365 Lambert of Watrelos: 417, 419, 421, 426 Lambton, A. K. S.: 32 Lampert of Hersfeld: 46, 156, 356, 363, 364, 383, 385 Lancashire: 290 Landelin, attacker of the archbishop of Tours (1075): 60 Landpeace (Landfriede): 360, 366, 367 of Frederick I Barbarossa: 399, 443 see also Mainz, Landpeace Latium: 82, 87 latro, latrones: 46, 48, 52, 56, 77 latrocinium: 49, 56 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel: 112 Lech, battle of: 136, 296, 312 Leeds, international medieval conference at: 24 Lemarignier, Jean-François: 84 Leo IX, pope: 163 Leon-Castille, and the ‘feudal revolution’: 83 Lesum, lordship: 316 Levillain, Léon: 258

474

Index

Leyser, Karl: 16, 89, 117, 130, 140, 178, 194, 198, 284, 294, 328, 410, 424, 451 liberi homines: military service: 245, 256, 260, 262 as liberi regis: 256, 322 l. h. pauperes: 245, 262, 267, 311 see also army libri memoriales: 90 see also memoria Liège: 371 bishopric: 390 Liemar, archbishop of Bremen: 334 Lietbert, bishop of Cambrai: 369 Lieu, S. N. C.: 32 Limoges: 279 Lincoln: 196 Lincolnshire: 290 Lippoldsberg: 404 Lisbon, captured by Alfonso II of Asturias (798): 241 literacy: 94, 95, 135 and reference to written records of ritual: 203 use of the written word, in judgements: 423 symbolic: 419 see also orality Liudolf of Swabia, son of Otto I: 128, 286 Liudolfing family: 284, 308, 320, 345 Liudprand of Cremona: 137, 169, 228, 275, 277, 290, 345 Liudward of Vercelli, and sexual misconduct: 224, 225 Liutfrid, executed under Conrad I: 383 Lollards: 115 Lombards, rulers’ hoards plundered by Frankish kings: 233 tribute to the Franks: 231 under the Merovingians: 263 Lombardy: 87, 414 and Hrodgaud’s uprising: 244 London: 64, 177, 456 diocese of: 183 lordship: 73 and the bipartite estate structure: 316–17, 320 and feudalism: 303 see also feudalism; fortifications Lorsch, abbey: 139, 219 Lothar I, Frankish king and emperor, son of Louis the Pious: 254, 260 Lothar, West Frankish king (941–986): 96 Lothar III (Lothar of Süpplingenburg), king of Germany, emperor: 366, 384, 387 and bishops: 353 Lotharingia: 106, 286, 289, 308, 322 bishops: 341, 343, 345, 355

importance of control over the region: 274, 278, 279, 286 incorporated into Germany: 407 only territory besides West Francia still ruled by Carolingians after 888: 270 as patria: 286 Louis the Pious, Frankish king and emperor: 78, 86, 238, 241, 247, 270, 285 and ‘Byzantine’ foreign policy: 264 Frankish expansion ends during his reign: 251, 253 fulfills the terms of Charlemagne’s will: 236 and government: 280 and legislating at assemblies: 205 and the mobilisation of armies: 246, 251, 255 and ‘Freienpolitik’: 262 and penance: 159, 267 and the securing of borders: 254 his sons send an embassy to the Danes: 235 and Spain: 234, 235, 249 see also Carolingian dynasty Louis the German: 219, 226, 241, 247, 249, 285 Bohemian leaders submit to him (845): 252 distributes the bulk of his treasure in alms: 236 and government: 280 negotiates with Horic: 235 his sons ally themselves with Rastiz: 247 see also Carolingian dynasty; kingship Louis the Younger, East Frankish king: 219, 221, 227 Louis the Child, East Frankish king: 218, 221, 222, 225, 230 his ‘demotion’ of his mother Uota: 222 family relationship with the elder Conrad: 220 Louis II, king of Italy: 196, 242 Louis IV, West Frankish king, restored to full kingship by Otto I: 278 Louis VI, king of France: 208 Louis VII, king of France: 205, 390, 397, 402, 448, 451 attempts to reconcile Henry II and Becket: 179, 182, 183, 184, 185 income: 446 meeting at Soissons (1155): 208 Louis VIII, king of France: 85 Louis IX, king of France: 447 Louis XIV, king of France: 440 Louis the Leaper, count of Thuringia: 380 Louis of Provence: 226 Louis, abbot of Saint-Denis, ransomed from Vikings (858): 249 Louis II, Landgrave of Thuringia: 365, 402 Louis III, Landgrave of Thuringia: 404 Loyn, Henry: 194 Ludowing family: 452

Index Ludwig, count of Loon: 416 Luxemburger family: 313, 332 revolt: 319 Maastricht: 416 MacFarlane, Alan: 112 Mâconnais: 82 Madagascar, kingdom of, and use of symbolism: 139 Magdeburg: 137, 202 archbishopric: 276, 333, 336, 350, 352 Magnou-Nortier, Elisabeth: 26 Magnus Billung: 160, 383, 385 Magyars: see Hungary Mainz: 128, 204, 296 archbishopric: 222, 336, 341, 392 council of (847): 229 Landpeace (1235): 49, 397, 444 Maiolus, abbot of Cluny: 59 Major, John: 5 mallus publicus: 301 mandates, as a form of royal legislation: 420–3, 428, 443 see also Frederick I Barbarossa; privileges Manegoldus, miles imperatori: 373 Mannheim, Karl: 106 Mantua: 163 Map, Walter: 451, 454 Margaret of Anjou: 228 Marmoutier, abbey: 114 Marx, Karl: 35, 37 Matfried of Orléans: 253 Mathilda, mother of Otto I: 128 Mathilda of Quedlinburg: 333 Mathilda, margravine of Tuscany: 156, 218, 384 Matthew, duke of Upper Lotharingia: 390, 391 Mayer, Theodor: 256, 295, 434, 449 Mayr-Harting, Henry: 90, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 136 Meerssen: 235, 260, 418, 425 Meginrat, Swabian hermit: 54 Meinwerk, bishop of Paderborn: 124, 142, 143–4, 340, 341, 342, 368 Meissen, bishopric: 329, 343 margraves of: 397 Menfö, battle (1044): 159 memoria: 80, 81, 153 see also libri memoriales Mercia: 15, 288, 289, 304 magnates attending West Saxon kings’ meetings near the Thames: 199, 296 tensions with Wessex: 287 Merovingian dynasty: 405 and ‘free’ Franks: 262

475

seen as less advanced and civilised than the Carolingians: 245, 246 see also Carolingian dynasty; Francia; Franks; plunder; tribute Merseburg: 129, 145, 279, 319 bishopric: 329, 336, 345 Ottonian royal palace at: 141, 143, 343 Metz: 319 bishopric: 331, 332 microhistory: 112 ‘middle ages’, ‘medieval’ and extra-European history: 31–3 as unified period: 23–4 and unique problems of source criticism: 24–5 use of the term: 20–1, 22–3, 30, 33, 37 see also historiography; periodisation Milan: 150, 153, 166, 408 Minden: 421 missi dominici: 260, 262, 341 Mistul, Abodrite prince: 140 Mitteis, Heinrich: 91, 394, 434, 436 Montmirail: 176, 179, 184, 185 Monumenta Germaniae Historica: 4, 22 Moore, R. I.: 37 Moravian empire (Great) and the Bohemians: 252 and the Franks: hoards plundered by Frankish kings: 233 plundered for horses: 234 tribute to the Franks: 232 rulers maintain clientele among immediate Frankish neighbours: 247 shares common political culture with the Franks: 247 Morcar, English earl: 54 Morgan, David: 32 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: 92 Mühlhausen: 384 Mukhia, Harbans: 32 Müller-Mertens, Eckhard: 295, 419 Munich: 4 Münster, bishopric: 395, 422 Munz, P.: 435 Murman, Breton leader: 242 Murray, Alexander (Sandy): 6, 42 Mussolini, Benito: 16 Nelson, Janet: 140 Nicholas I, pope: 238 Nicholas, bishop of Cambrai: 390–2, 397, 399, 401, 404 Nicholas of Munkathvera: 70 Nicholas Mystikos, patriarch of Constantinople: 102

476

Index

Nicholas, Hungarian with a career in England: 450 Nierstein: 222 Nijmegen: 362, 378 Nˆımes: 140 Nithard, bishop of Liège: 328 Nithard, cleric: 220 nobles: see elite Nominöe, Breton ruler: 248 tribute-payments to West Francia: 249 Normandy: 8, 38, 87, 207, 228, 402, 446, 452, 457 Normans, credited with exceptional administrative skills: 439, 457 kill count Robert (885): 239 new forms of state in kingdoms of England and Sicily: 435, 436, 455 see also Anglo-Norman dynasty; Sicily Northampton, Council of (1164): 121, 171, 174, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 190, 199, 202, 206, 208, 392 Northumberland: 290 Northumbria: 15, 87, 289, 304 Norwegian-Icelandic kingdom: 438 notaries: 346 Notker, bishop of Liège: 333 Notker the Stammerer: 137, 237, 273 Novalese: 279 oath of Beauvais: 78, 79, 80, 81–3 oath-helpers, men and women: 230 at Uota’s trial: 229–30 oaths, of loyalty, demanded by Arnulf: 225 and peace-making: 362, 366 see also oath-helpers; Peace of God movement, Oberlahnstein: 222 Oberndorf, gift of royal land at: 221 Octavian of Monticelli (pope Victor IV): 450 Odo, abbot of Cluny: 57, 314 Odo, West Frankish king (888–98): 140 Oexle, Otto Gerhard: 101 Offa, Mercian king: 241 Ohtric, capellanus, rejected for the bishopric of Magdeburg: 333 olive oil: as characteristic of southern Europe: 209 see also butter Oppenheim: 155 orality: 94, 95 and recorded speech in documents: 120 see also literacy Orderic Vitalis: 10, 87, 295 ordines, coronation: 311, 410 Orientalism: 12, 35 Orléans: 456 Ortenberg, V.: 285

Ortlieb, bishop of Basel: 404 Orwell, George: 16 Ostfalia: 315, 329 see also Westfalia ¨ Otting: 141, 142, 220, 227 Otto I, king of Germany, emperor: 95, 96, 128, 137, 139, 140, 146, 164, 202, 269, 277, 278, 286, 291, 295, 324, 345, 426 and bishops: 327, 330, 334, 336, 337, 339, 350, 352 and the Carolingian political tradition: 274, 275, 280, 288 crowned at Aachen: 278 and evidence for his own perception of his kingship: 275–6 through the prism of contemporary accounts: 275, of physical remains: 276 income: 447 intervenes in West Francia: 278 and Italy: 408 victory over the Magyars: 296 see also Lotharingia; Ottonian dynasty Otto II, king of Germany, emperor: 122, 286 and bishops: 339 Otto III, king of Germany, emperor: 96, 161, 164, 343, 345 and the appropriation of Carolingian tradition: 279 and bishops: 331, 333, 344 criticised for setting himself apart from his followers: 401 and the papacy: 349 and penance: 159 see also Ottonian dynasty Otto IV, emperor: 60, 67 and taxation: 399 Otto, brother of margrave William: 364 Otto Frangipani: 450 Otto of Freising: 393, 409, 430, 447, 451 Otto of Northeim: 153, 160, 162, 363, 364, 373, 379, 380, 383, 385 Otto of Wittelsbach: 202 Ottonian dynasty: 83, 270, 273 and assemblies: 196, 208 and bishops: 369, 429 and the Carolingian political tradition: 249, 273, 277, 278, 279 little knowledge of Carolingian history in sources: 135–7, 276, 290 and West Frankish Carolingians: 277, 278 and continuity in tradition of government and institutions: 279 dominance over kings of Elbe Slavs, Poles, Bohemians, Hungarians: 289

Index as dukes of Saxony: 273 hegemony: 248, 320 and itinerant kingship: 295, 343 rulers’ financial resources: 399 symbolisation of kingship: 128–46, 290 sacerdotal kingship: 327, 352 ‘Christocentric’ or ‘Christomimetic’: 93, 98, 135, 136 and conventions in the sources: 139–40 and iconography: 93, 327 and royal palaces: 141–2 and churches: 141, 142–3 and royal charters: 141, 142 and the non-elite: 145–6 common language of representation for rulers and non-rulers: 137–9 place in recent historiography: 435 titulature: 278, 296 see also assemblies; bishops; capellani; East Francia; Germany; historiography; hunting; Liudolfing family; ritual; Salian dynasty; Saxony Oxford Medieval Texts series: 12 Oxford, University of: 23 Paderborn: 425 bishopric: 339, 341, 345 pagus, pagenses: 84, 301 and Frankish armies: 258, 259 Pannonia: 260 devastated by Bulgars (827): 253 papacy, judicial practice: 423, 424, 426, 429, 441, 442 appelate jurisdiction: 397, 430 itinerant representatives: 425, 427 office-holders: 439 privileges and mandates: 413, 414, 415, 418, 421, 422 papal monarchy: 395, 454, 455 parish, as administrative unit: 438 Parkstein: 369 Parthenius, tax-inspector: 399 Paschasius Radbertus: 224 Patarini (Patarene) movement: 122, 150, 163 patricius Romanorum: 151, 154 pauperes: see liberi homines pauperes Pavia: 323 captured by Charlemagne (774): 236 Peace of God movement: 49, 58, 61, 63, 78, 302, 360, 371, 443 and oath-taking: 78–9 peace-making: 177 as end to feud: 190, 362

477

and intermediaries: 184, 185, 204, 382, 385, 387 involving rulers: 366, 374, 378, 386 introduction of a ‘judicial procedure’: 378–81 and charges of treason: 380 and ‘private’ justice: 301 problems: 185 types of meeting: 184 see also deditio; exile; kiss of peace; oaths; women, royal peasants, hierarchy: 123–4 relationship with lords through intermediaries: 124 represented as bestial in literature and visual representations: 121 resistance to domination by lords: 122–3, 125–6 see also Germany; serfs; slaves penance: 157–9 acts of contrition by rulers: 159–60 private: 158 Carolingian reformers’ attitude to: 158 originated in the British Isles: 158 public: 157, 381 and ritual: 382 see also clothing; deditio; excommunication; Henry II of England; Henry IV of Germany; ritual periodisation, medieval and modern: 20–2, 25–8 Pertz, Georg Heinrich: 260 Peter Damian: 54, 57 Petrarch: 20 Philip I, king of France: 46, 71, 447, 448 Philip II Augustus, king of France: 71, 434, 440, 447, 448 Philip II, king of Spain: 440 Piedmont: 150 Pierleoni, Hugo, papal legate: 187 Piers Plowman: 54 pilgrims: 58, 63, 65, 69 pilgrim-guides: 70 see also clothing Pipe Rolls: 446 Pippin III, Frankish king: 148 Italian campaigns: 266 Pippin of Aquitaine, allies himself with Vikings: 247 Pippin the Hunchback, son of Charlemagne leads Avar expedition: 234 revolts against his father (792): 48, 240 Pirenne, Henri: 26 Pˆıtres, assembly at (864): 200 Edict of: 261

478

Index

plunder: 444 arms and horses: 234 under the Carolingians: 232, 235 under the Merovingians: 235 and rulers’ hoards: 233 and slaves: 233, 243 and temple treasures: 233 and victuals: 232 see also army; slaves; tribute Pohl, Walter: 102, 103 Poland, Poles: kings dominated by Ottonians: 289 Poly, Jean-Pierre: 27 polyptychs: 315 Poppo, abbot of Stavelot: 144, 299 Powicke, F. M.: 9, 90 Prague: 93 Pribina, Moravian prince: 248 privileges, as a form of royal legislation: 399–400, 415–20, 426, 443 see also assemblies; Frederick I Barbarossa; mandates; papacy Prüm: 315 Public Record Office: 10 punishment: 52, 70, 153 by hanging: 48–9 see also dog-carrying; exile Purcell, Henry: 92 Quedlinburg: 202, 430 queens, honour and sexual purity: 224 position in Carolingian political discourse: 218 reduced political significance during eleventh century: 385 and regency: 223 see also women, royal Radulfus Glaber: 75 Rahewin: 408 raiding, punitive, under the Carolingians: 232, 252 taking of victuals mentioned in accounts of Viking raids: 232 not mentioned in accounts of Frankish raiding: 232 see also plunder; tributeys Rainald, count of Bar: 371, 381 Rainald of Dassel: 173, 202 Rapoto, count: 369 Rastiz, Moravian ruler: 247 Rather of Verona: 345 Ratold, Arnulf’s deputy in Italy, his mother Arnulf’s concubine: 219 Ray, Benjamin: 135 Raymond VII of Toulouse: 74

rebellion: see feud; peace-making; violence Regensburg: 217, 220, 223, 252, 356 as place of assembly: 199, 227, 240, 296 Regino of Prüm: 223, 224, 290, 405 Reich: see Germany; Ottonian dynasty; Salian dynasty Reichenau, conference: 221, 424 and Ottonian art: 90 Renan, Ernest: 103 Reuter, Timothy: English and German background: 4–5 and political history: 9 Reynolds, Susan: 6, 20, 101, 448 Rhaetia: 103 Rheims: 163, 450 Rhens: 409 Richard I the Lionheart, English king: 122, 197, 200, 450 Richard, bishop of Verdun: 162, 371 Richardis, wife of Charles the Fat, bedded by Liudward of Vercelli: 225, 230 Richer of Rheims: 70, 96, 97, 137, 171, 200 Rieckenberg, H. J.: 295 ritual, public: 95–6 at Canossa: 164 and onlookers: 183 and problems of source criticism: 171 and public assemblies: 184 and the staging of emotions: 178 staging vs spontaneity: 161, 165, 184, 202–3 and the symbolic ‘meta-language’ of medieval Europe: 169–70, 189 and the symbolisation of power: 127–46 see also adventus regis; assemblies; Ottonian dynasty; peace-making robbery: see crime Robert II, king of France: 448 and penance: 159 Robert, count, surprised and killed by Normans (885): 239 Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy: 74, 448 Robert of Flanders: 386 Robert of Knaresborough, English hermit: 54 Robert the Strong, presents trophies taken from the Vikings to Charles the Bald: 234 Robert, archbishop of Tours: 63 Roberts, Andrew: 4 Robin Hood: 54 Rockingham, Council of: 181 Rodulfus Glaber: 161 Roger, bishop of Cambrai: 417 Roger II of Sicily: 99 and assemblies: 205 Roger, archbishop of York: 177, 181, 182 Rohr, Ottonian royal palace: 141, 142

Index Roland, and the chansons de geste: 272 Roland of Arles, ransomed from the Vikings: 249 Rollo, duke of Normandy: 44 Romania: 29, 457 Romanos Lecapenos, Byzantine emperor: 136 Rome, and imperial coronations: 275, 370 see also travel Romuald, Saint: 54 Roncevaux: 265 Rorich, Viking leader: 231 Rösener, Werner: 317 Rothard, bishop of Cambrai: 333 Rouche, Michel: 105 Rudolf, king of Burgundy: 368 Rudolf I of Thuringia: 44, 70 Rudolf of Rheinfelden: 46, 164 Rudolf of Stade: 384 Rudopurc, accused of poisoning Arnulf: 227 Ruotger: 141, 143, 350, 351 Ruskin, John: 5 Russians, Ottonian attempt at conversion: 276 Ruthard, relative of Uota?: 222 Saalfeld, Ottonian royal palace: 141, 142 Sabean, David: 112 Säben: 221, 223 sagas, Icelandic and Norse: 94, 183 Icelandic family-sagas: 172 Sahlins, Marshall: 403 Said, Edward: 12, 35 St-Benoˆıt-sur-Loire: 237 St-Blasien, abbey: 396, 416 St-Denis, abbey: 257 and the Grandes Chroniques de France: 272 St-Emmeram, abbey: 220, 221, 222, 315 St-Gallen, abbey: 241 St-Servatius (Maastricht), abbey: 416 Salian dynasty: 457 and assemblies: 196 and bishops: 369, 429 church policy: 325–54 and the control of violence: 357 and the formation of a ‘territorial state’: 434 and the loss of consensus: 374, 380, 383, 384, 387 royal tombs destroyed by Saxons in 1074: 355 rulers’ financial resources: 399 and sacerdotal kingship: 327, 328, 352 see also bishops; kingship; Ottonian dynasty; violence, political Sallust: 312, 410 Salomon, Breton king: 249 Salz, peace of (803): 251 Salzburg: 204 Salzburg Annals (Great): 297

479

Santiago de Compostela: 404 Santifaller, L.: 337 Saracens: 58, 265, 266, 340 Sarnowsky, J.: 285 Savaric of Bath: 450 Saxony, Saxons: 8, 74, 83, 87, 136, 138, 141, 142–3, 153, 286, 289, 291, 292, 298, 307, 308, 314, 319, 320, 321, 322, 343, 356, 365, 366, 380, 398, 403, 424 bishops: 341, 345, 355, 368 conflicts between bishops and lay aristocrats: 368 conversion of: 264, 277 and the Franks Charlemagne’s legates killed (798): 266 incorporated into Frankish empire: 251, 252, 277 participation in Frankish army: 260 attending Frankish assemblies: 199 tribute to the Franks: 231; paid in cows (later horses): 231 taken as slaves: 233 war: 253, 272 fuller sources than for southern Germany: 313 heathens: 233 as patria: 261 and the ‘political community’: 310 rebellion of 1073: 149–50, 152, 153, 154, 159, 188, 205, 355, 364, 365, 374, 378, 383 sense of past and identity under the Ottonians: 277 in relation to the Franks: 277 in relation to the ‘Romans’: 278 imperial: 288 and social change: 309, 317 and social organisation: 312, 316, 318 see also Ottonian dynasty Scandinavia, Scandinavians: 82, 427 dearth of source material: 209 Schaffhausen, abbey: 396, 415, 416 Schieffer, Rudolf: 166 Schieffer, Theodor: 221 Schlesinger, W.: 329 Schmeidler, B.: 434 School Curriculum and Assessment Authority: 4 Schramm, Percy Ernst: 128, 129, 130, 162 Schreiner, Klaus: 178 Sclavinia, dearth of source material: 209 Scots, kings dominated by West Saxon kings: 289 Scott, James: 122, 123 Searle, Eleanor: 58 seigneurie: 303, 306 s. banale: 8, 76, 88, 302, 307 see also feudalism Seignobos, Charles: 10

480

Index

Seine: fortifications against Vikings: 200 Selbstverständnis: 88 Sellar, W. C.: 15 Senlac Hill: 4 Sens, papal curia at: 171, 174 Serbs: at war with Franks: 251, 266 serfs, condition of the free levelled with that of servi casati: 302, 308, 321–2 see also slaves Sergius IV, pope: 350 Shaw, George Bernard: 16 Shennan, Stephen: 101 shires: 437, 438 and troop-raising: 289 see also Wessex Sicily: 10, 415, 452 new form of state: 435, 436, 439, 446, 447, 455 geographically mobile elite: 450 reactions against papal jurisdiction: 430 and Spain: 450 see also Normans Sickel, Theodor: 421 Siegfrid, abbot of Gorze: 144, 299 Siegfrid, count palatine: 365, 373, 380 Siegfrid, Norse leader: 231 Sigebert, Frankish king: 235 Sigebert III, Frankish king: 236 Sigebert of Gembloux: 351 Sigehard, count of Burghausen, murdered: 356 slaves: 302, 317, 319 and the enslavement of Christians: 233 and the enslavement of ‘heathens’: 233 perception: 323 in Saxony: 312 slave-trade: 320 see also army; plunder; serfs; Slavs Slavs: 82, 265, 318 allied with the Danes: 251 Elbe Slavs, kings dominated by Ottonians: 289 and the Franks East Frankish army sent against a Slav tribe refusing to pay its tribute: 242 Frankish campaigns against: 252, 265 and Frankish missionary activity: 264 temple treasures plundered: 233 revolt of 983: 140, 320, 323 and slavery: 233, 249, 319 tribute to Henry I: 249 see also Abodrites; Bohemians Smyth, A. P.: 297 Snello, abbot of Kremsmünster: 221 Soffer, Reba: 6 Soissons: 208 story of the vase of: 235

Sommerschenburg, count palatine of: 425, 426 Sophia, sister of Otto III: 333 Sorbs: 232, 260 Southampton: 180 University of: 9 Southern, Richard: 6, 29, 90 Spain: 7, 82, 415 contrast with northern Europe: 209 mixed Frankish success on the border: 245, 246, 249, 265 shift from assemblies to proto-parliamentary system: 194 and Sicily: 450 and the slave-trade: 320 and taxation: 446 warfare between Franks and Muslims: 251 see also Charlemagne; Visigoths Speyer: 148, 153, 155, 160, 296, 331, 383, 386 Spiess, Karl-Heinz: 424 Spoleto: 153 international medieval conference at: 5 Springer, Matthias: 318 Stablo: 423 Stafford, Pauline: 225 statehood: see Angevin empire; Anglo-Norman dynasty; France; Frederick I; Germany; kingship Staufen dynasty: 393, 396, 404, 413, 434, 457 emperors, and the formation of a ‘territorial’ state: 434 in Sicily: 455 Staufen, mountain of: 396, 416 Stavelot, abbey: 336 Steiermark: 61 Stein, B.: 31 Stellinga revolt: 122, 321, 322 Stephen, English king: 51, 86, 173, 181, 196 Strasbourg: 146, 368 Suetonius: 410 Suger, abbot of St-Denis: 46, 447, 450, 451 Suidger of Mainz, villicus: 319 Svein, English king: 290 Swabia (Alemannia), Swabians: 139, 274, 286, 289, 314, 364, 400, 414, 419, 424 at Frankish assemblies: 199 bishops: 330, 341 duchy: 417 gains of conquest distributed among Austrasian magnate families: 244 main stamping-ground of Charles the Fat: 248 Swedes, and Frankish missionary activity: 264 see also Vikings Sylvester II, pope: see Gerard of Aurillac Sylvester III, pope: 164

Index Tachigowa, Micho: 32 Tacitus, description of German peoples: 103, 237, 239 Tarantaise, bishopric: 340 Tate, Nicholas: 4, 6 taxation: 399 see also tribute Tellenbach, Gerd: 148 Tennyson, Alfred, lord: 167 Thames: 199 Thasselgard, Italian count: 49 Thedald, archbishop of Milan: 153 Thegan: 247 Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury: 173 Theoderic, count of Flanders: 390–2, 397, 399, 401, 417 Thetford: 16 Theuderich, Frankish king: 235 Thiadric, slave: 312 Thiel, merchant guild at: 146 Thiemo Billung: 380 Thietloh of Worms: 221 Thietmar of Merseburg: 49, 74, 83, 87, 96, 98, 134, 139, 141, 143, 145, 146, 170, 171, 200, 286, 290, 291, 295, 313, 318, 319, 321, 322, 323, 327, 336, 351, 352, 365, 366, 367, 368, 374, 375, 376, 379, 397, 401, 431 Thietmar Billung: 162, 369 Thomas of Marle: 46 Thompson, E. P.: 125 Thuringia, Thuringians: 44, 70, 141, 142, 286, 289, 319 tribute to the Franks: 231 paid in pigs: 231 Toch, Michael: 115, 119, 120 Tostig, brother-in-law of Edward the Confessor: 57 Toubert, Pierre: 87 Toulouse: 452, 457 Tours: 183, 186 Tout, Thomas: 14 Transalbingia: 251 travel: 68 and accomodation on the road: 63–4, 65 to a court of justice: 424 dangers: 70, 75 protection of travellers: 63 to Rome: 58, 59, 66, 70, 424 see also crime; pilgrims Trent, bishopric: 340 Tribur: 155 tribute, exacting of: 444 annual or one-off payments: 232 under the Carolingians: 232 and expansion: 264

481

expected of Carolingian rulers: 231 and internal tribute: 241; linked with taxation: 242; paid by bishoprics: 241; paid by monasteries: 241 and the distribution of treasure under the Merovingians: 236 under the Carolingians: 236 beneficiaries: 234, 236, 244 from heathens: 264 as ‘institutionalised plunder’: 243 under the Merovingians: 231 under the Ottonians: 320 payment in gold or in kind: 231–2 tribute-taking raids: 252 see also army; gift; plunder; raiding Trier: 93, 160, 241 archbishopric: 345, 370, 390 Tuscany: 8, 150, 307 Ullmann, Walter: 408 Ulrich of Aquileia: 422 Ulrich, count of Ebersberg: 375 Ulrich, knight: 422 unction, adapted from Old Testament model: 271 see also kingship Unstrut, victory of Henry IV of Germany at: 153 Uota (Oda, Ota, Outa, Uta), queen accused at the same time as Arnulf’s alleged poisoners (Graman, Rudopurc): 230 a Conradine?: 220, 222, 223 her ‘demotion’ under the reign of her son Louis the Child: 222, 223 possessions: 220 queen or king’s wife?: 223 on trial for adultery: 217, 218, 222 see also Arnulf; oath-helpers Urban II, pope: 80, 82, 328 Utrecht: 371 Valenciennes: 67 vassals: see army Velden, estate in the Isengau: 220, 221, 223 Venice: 204 Verden: 319, 331, 332 Verdun: 248, 378 Verhulst, Adriaan: 86, 317 Versailles: 440 Victor IV, antipope: 180 Victorids, rulers of Rhatia: 103 Vikings: 265, 289 and appropriation of their plunder by victors: 235 bands used by Franks: 247

482

Index

Vikings (cont.) church-robbers, not the only ones in Francia: 234 fortifications against: 200 mobilisation against: 261 receive payments from Charles the Fat: 231 spontaneous resistance by the Frankish rural population: 246 trophies taken from them presented to Charles the Bald: 234 see also Danes; Scandinavia; Swedes violence: debate over role of, in historiography of the ‘feudal revolution’: 72–7, 79, 81, 85–6 and disputes over property rights: 76 elite domination: 113–14, 115–16 and the threat of violence: 114–15 and feud: 76–7, 115 fluid boundaries between ‘private’ feud and ‘public’ rebellion: 361, 364 and harrying: 85, 293 political, under the Salians: 355–87 between lay aristocrats: 361–7 between lay aristocrats and bishops: 367–71 between lay aristocrats and rulers: 372–87 contemporary views: 362; and ‘legitimate’ use of violence: 363, 374 and the idea of ‘public order’: 362, 365 in saints addressing lower orders: 116, 146 see also crime; deditio; Germany; kingship; peace-making; women Visigoths: 87 as founders of Spanish National Catholicism: 104 tribute to the Merovingians: 263 Vlytingen, estate: 416 Waitz, Georg: 258, 325, 357, 358 Walbeck: 376 Waleran, count of Meulan: 58 Wales, kings dominated by West Saxon kings: 289 Warburg: 316 Ward, Elizabeth: 224 Warin, collibertus: 114 Warmann, bishop of Constance: 331 Warner, David: 140 Warnstede: 365 Warren, Lewis: 187, 189, 194, 439 Warsaw conference on the origins of European nations (1968): 104 Wazo, bishop of Liège: 328, 331, 333, 369 weapons, prohibition of the carrying of: 64–5 Weber, Max: 35, 49, 51, 178, 316, 388, 437, 449 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich: 34 Weissenburg: 315

Welf II, count: 369 Welf V: 218 Welf VI: 446 Welf family: 220, 393, 452 Welfesholz, battle of: 374 Wenskus, Reinhard: 102 Werden: 315 Werner, archbishop of Magdeburg: 370 Werner, margrave, cousin of Thietmar of Merseburg: 319, 375 Werner, Karl-Ferdinand: 76, 207, 220, 255, 259 Wessex, West Saxons: 5, 15, 140, 287, 289, 290, 295 and assemblies: 199 rulers legislating at assemblies: 205 and the church: 347 dominance over Welsh and Scots kings: 289 hegemony over other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: 284, 288, 289, 296, 304 ‘shiring’ of incorporated lands: 289 historical writing in: 290 and neo-Carolingian forms of organisation: 304, 311 tensions with Mercia: 287 and troop-raising: 289 see also bishops; England, Anglo-Saxon Westfalia: 315 West Francia: 83, 86, 105, 230 Carolingian dynasty continues: 270 church councils: 195 comparison with East Francia: 248 external intervention in West Frankish politics: 278, 289 and feudalism: 303, 313 negative balance of payments: 249, 444 Ottonians in dominant position over West Frankish rulers: 274, 275 rulers and the church: 346, 347, 348, 349 and the papacy: 350 and hunting: 140 married to Ottonian women: 278 see also bishops; Capetian dynasty; Carolingian dynasty; Carolingian empire; East Francia; France; Francia; Lotharingia; Ottonian dynasty Westminster, assembly at (1176): 208 council of (1163): 173, 188, 199 statute of (1285): 50 Westmorland: 290 Wezel of Zollern, Swabian count: 364 Wibald, abbot of Stavelot: 395, 398, 413, 418, 422, 423, 425 Wichmann III, count: 375 Wichmann IV, count: 323, 355, 356, 366, 367, 398 Wichmann, archbishop of Magdeburg: 430

Index Wickham, Chris: 11, 83, 105 Wido, archbishop of Milan: 151 Wido, his widow: 228 Widonids, margraves of Brittany: 248 Widukind of Corvey: 89, 97, 128, 129, 137, 139, 143, 145, 146, 171, 200, 249, 275, 277, 290, 291, 295, 298, 310, 312, 313, 318, 319, 322, 323, 398 William the Conqueror: 4, 38, 85, 197, 290 William II Rufus, king of England: 200, 448 William II of Sicily: 208 William, son of Dhuoda: 314 William, count, killed by Adalbero of Carinthia: 363 William, margrave: 364 William, count of Angoulême: 227 William, duke of Aquitaine: 75, 314 William of Canterbury: 176 William of Eynsford: 188 William FitzStephen: 185 William Longchamps: 122 William, archbishop of Mainz: 349 William of Malmesbury: 12, 197 William of Poitiers: 38 William of St-Calais, bishop of Durham: 181 Willigis, archbishop of Mainz: 333 Williram, abbot of Ebersberg: 375 Winchester, statute of (1285): 61 Wipo: 49, 97, 372, 375

483

Wirgefühl: 298 witchcraft, and poisoning: 227–8 Wittelsbach family: 452 Wolen, free peasants of: 119 Wolfram, Herwig: 102, 103, 297 women, aristocratic, negative view of their involvement in political life: 356 royal, role of intercession in cases of deditio: 161, 382, 384 see also queens Woodstock, Council of (1163): 173, 179 Wormald, Patrick: 85, 132, 284, 286, 292, 298 Worms: 154, 155, 166, 199, 221, 296, 380 bishopric: 331, 332, 340, 341, 342 ‘concordat’ of: 348, 353 Worringen, battle of (1288): 47 Wulfstan of York: 45 Würzburg, bishopric: 331, 341 Yates, Dornford: 16 Yeatman, R. J.: 15 York, kingdom of: 288 Yorkshire: 290 Zähringen, dukes of: 393, 452 Zeitschrift für historische Forschung: 27, 436 Zeitz, bishopric: 329 Zwentibold of Lotharingia: 226, 241 his mother Arnulf’s concubine: 218

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