The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: New Directions in Early Medieval Studies [Reprint ed.] 0754662543, 9780754662549

Table of contents :
List of Figures and Tables ix
List of Contributors xi
Foreword xvii
List of Abbreviations xix
The Early Middle Ages: Europe’s Long Morning / Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick 1
PART ONE
Discovering the Early Medieval Economy / Michael McCormick 13
1. Rethinking the Structure of the Early Medieval Economy / Chris Wickham 19
2. Strong Rulers – Weak Economy? Rome, the Carolingians and the Archaeology of Slavery in the First Millennium AD / Joachim Henning 33
3. The Beginnings of Hilltop Villages in Early Medieval Tuscany / Riccardo Francovich 55
4. Molecular Middle Ages: Early Medieval Economic History in the Twenty-First Century / Michael McCormick 83
5. The Early Medieval Economy: Data, Production, Exchange and Demand / Angeliki E. Laiou 99
PART TWO
Sounding Early Medieval Holiness / Michael McCormick 107
6. Latin Hagiography before the Ninth Century: A Synoptic View / Guy Philippart with Michel Trigalet 111
7. 'Donationes pro anima': Gift and Countergift in the Early Medieval Liturgy / Arnold Angenendt 131
8. The Early Medieval Transformation of Piety / Thomas Head 155
PART THREE
Representation and Reality in the Artistry of Early Medieval Literature / Michael McCormick 163
9. Observations on Early Medieval Weather in General, Bloody Rain in Particular / Paul Edward Dutton 167
10. The King Says No: On the Logic of Type-Scenes in Late Antique and Early Medieval Narrative / Joaquín Martínez Pizarro 181
11. Of Arms and the (Ger)man: Literary and Material Culture in the 'Waltharius' / Jan M. Ziolkowski 193
12. Representations and Reality in Early Medieval Literature / Danuta Shanzer 209
PART FOUR
Practices of Power in an Early Medieval Empire / Michael McCormick 219
13. Charlemagne and Empire / Janet L. Nelson 223
14. A Pattern for Power: Charlemagne’s Delegation of Judicial Responsibilities / Jennifer R. Davis 235
15. Practices of Property in the Carolingian Empire / Matthew J. Innes 247
16. The Cunning of Institutions / Stuart Airlie 267
PART FIVE
The Intellectuality of Early Medieval Art / Michael McCormick 275
17. Charlemagne’s Balcony: The 'Solarium' in Ninth-Century Narratives / Mayke de Jong 277
18. Image and Object: Christ’s Dual Nature and the Crisis of Early Medieval Art / Herbert L. Kessler 291
19. Matter and Meaning in the Carolingian World / Thomas F.X. Noble 321
Index 327

Citation preview

The Long Morning of Medieval Europe

To Paul Meyvaert Friend and Teacher

The Long Morning of Medieval Europe New Directions in Early Medieval Studies

Edited by Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick California Institute of Technology, USA and Harvard University, USA

First published 2008 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Jennifer r. davis and Michael McCormick 2008 Jennifer r. davis and Michael McCormick have asserted their moral rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The long morning of medieval europe : new directions in early medieval studies 1. Civilization, Medieval - Congresses 2. Christian art and symbolism – Medieval, 500–1500 – Congresses 3. Carolingians – Congresses 4. europe – Social conditions – To 1492 – Congresses 5. europe – economic conditions – To 1492 – Congresses 6. europe – Church history – 600–1500 – Congresses 7. europe – politics and government – 476–1492 – Congresses i. davis, Jennifer r. ii. McCormick, Michael 940.1’4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The long morning of medieval europe : new directions in early medieval studies / edited by Jennifer r. davis and Michael McCormick. p. cm. “This book emerged from ‘new directions 2: The early Middle ages today, a conference held at harvard university in october 2004” – foreword. includes index. iSBn 978–0–7546–6254–9 (alk. paper) 1. Civilization, Medieval – Study and teaching – Congresses. 2. Civilization, Medieval research – Congresses. 3. Middle ages – Study and teaching – Congresses. 4. Middle ages – research – Congresses. 5. europe – Civilization – Study and teaching – Congresses. 6. europe – history –To 476 – Study and teaching – Congresses. 7. europe – history – 476–1492 – Study and teaching – Congresses. i. davis, Jennifer r., 1975– ii. McCormick, Michael, 1951– CB353.L66 2007 940.1–dc22 ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-6254-9 (hbk)

2007022605

Contents List of Figures and Tables List of Contributors Foreword List of Abbreviations The Early Middle Ages: Europe’s Long Morning Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick

ix xi xvii xix 1

PART ONE Discovering the Early Medieval Economy Michael McCormick

13

1

Rethinking the Structure of the Early Medieval Economy Chris Wickham

19

2

Strong Rulers – Weak Economy? Rome, the Carolingians and the Archaeology of Slavery in the First Millennium AD Joachim Henning

33

3

The Beginnings of Hilltop Villages in Early Medieval Tuscany Riccardo Francovich†

55

4

Molecular Middle Ages: Early Medieval Economic History in the Twenty-First Century Michael McCormick

83

5 The Early Medieval Economy: Data, Production, Exchange and Demand Angeliki E. Laiou

99

PART TWO Sounding Early Medieval Holiness Michael McCormick 6

Latin Hagiography before the Ninth Century: A Synoptic View Guy Philippart with Michel Trigalet

107 111

The Long Morning of Medieval Europe

vi

7

Donationes pro anima: Gift and Countergift in the Early Medieval Liturgy Arnold Angenendt

131

8

The Early Medieval Transformation of Piety Thomas Head

155

PART THREE Representation and Reality in the Artistry of Early Medieval Literature Michael McCormick

163

9 Observations on Early Medieval Weather in General, Bloody Rain in Particular Paul Edward Dutton 167 10 The King Says No: On the Logic of Type-Scenes in Late Antique and Early Medieval Narrative Joaquín Martínez Pizarro

181

11

Of Arms and the (Ger)man: Literary and Material Culture in the Waltharius Jan M. Ziolkowski

193

12

Representations and Reality in Early Medieval Literature Danuta Shanzer

209

PART FOUR  Practices of Power in an Early Medieval Empire Michael McCormick

219

13 Charlemagne and Empire Janet L. Nelson  14 A Pattern for Power: Charlemagne’s Delegation of Judicial Responsibilities Jennifer R. Davis

235

15

Practices of Property in the Carolingian Empire Matthew J. Innes

247

16

The Cunning of Institutions Stuart Airlie

267

223

Contents

PART FIVE  The Intellectuality of Early Medieval Art Michael McCormick

vii

275

17

Charlemagne’s Balcony: The Solarium in Ninth-Century Narratives Mayke de Jong 277

18

Image and Object: Christ’s Dual Nature and the Crisis of Early Medieval Art Herbert L. Kessler

291

19

Matter and Meaning in the Carolingian World Thomas F.X. Noble

321

Index

327

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List of Figures and Tables Figures 2.1 Find map of Roman iron shackles. 2.2 Roman iron shackle contexts. 2.3 Post-Roman iron shackles. 2.4 Post-Roman iron shackle contexts. 2.5 Frequency of iron shackle finds 250 BC–1500 AD. 3.1a Extent of survey. 3.1b Dramatic change in land use. 3.2 Forty archaeologically investigated late antique sites. 3.3 Forty-one archaeologically investigated fortified sites (castelli). 3.4 The castello of Montarrenti. 3.5 Partially sunken huts (Grubenhaüser) from Poggibonsi.  3.6 Circular huts with timbered floor levels from Poggibonsi. 3.7 Elliptical huts with timbered floor levels from Poggibonsi. 3.8 The castello of Miranduolo. 18.1 Xanten, Stiftsarchiv, StiX H 19, 1734, p. 395. 18.2 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14000, cover. 18.3 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. nouv. acq. lat. 1203, fol. 126v. 18.4 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. nouv. acq. lat. 1203, fol. 3r. 18.5 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14000, fol. 6v. 18.6 Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Bibl. Fol. 23, fol. 116v. 18.7 Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS Y6, fol. 81v. 18.8 Boulogne, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 11, fol. 10. 18.9 London, British Library, MS Add. 49598, fol. 19v. 18.10 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14000, fol. 16r. 18.11 Würzburg University Library, M.p.th.q.4a. 18.12 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS lat. 817, fol. 13r. 18.13 Regensburg, abbey of St Emmeram, relief.

38 38 39 39 46 65 65 66 69 70 72 73 74 77 290 293 296 297 298 300 302 304 306 308 310 311 315

Tables 6.1 Basic classification of Passions and Lives. 6.2 Martyrs compared to confessors. 6.3 Geography of the shrines of Italian martyrs’ Passions. 6.4 Geography of Italian bishops’ Lives, from north to south.

117–18 118 123 123

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6.5 Greek Passions existing in multiple Latin versions or manuscripts earlier than 800. 7.1 The Abbess Theophanu’s memorial endowment.

126–7 144–5

Acknowledgements Figures 2.1–5 designed by Joachim Henning and the Institut für Archäologische Wissenschaften, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität. Figures 3.1–8, top: Riccardo Francovich and Area di Archeologia Medievale, Università di Siena; Figure 3.8 bottom: courtesy of Studio INKLINK, Area di Archeologia Medievale, Università di Siena. Figure 18.1 courtesy of the Kath. Propsteigemeinde St Viktor, Xanten, Germany; Figures 18.2, 18.5 and 18.10 courtesy of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Germany; Figures 18.3–4 and 18.12 courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France; Figure 18.6 courtesy of the Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart, Germany; Figure 18.7 courtesy of the Collections de la Bibliothèque municipale de Rouen, France; Figure 18.8 courtesy of the Bibliothèque municipale de Boulogne-sur-Mer, France; Figure 18.9 courtesy of the British Library, London, UK; Figure 18.10 courtesy of the University Library of Würzburg, Germany; Figure 18.13 courtesy of Hirmer Verlag, Munich, Germany.

List of Contributors Stuart Airlie’s research centers on Carolingian political and social structures. He is completing a book on how the Carolingians maintained their authority from Pippin III to Charles the Fat. He has authored articles on the early medieval aristocracy, Duke Tassilo of Bavaria, and the divorce case of Lothar II. Contact address: Dr Stuart Airlie Department of History (Medieval Area) University of Glasgow 10 University Gardens Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK [email protected] Arnold Angenendt is an expert in the history of religion and society. His publications have illuminated, among much else, the political connotations of baptism, Carolingian connections to the papacy, relic cults, the history of the liturgy, and early medieval missionaries. He has also written extensively on piety, and most recently on violence and tolerance in Christian history. Contact address: Professor Arnold Angenendt Historisches Seminar, Institut für Frühmittelalterforschung Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster Johannisstrasse 8–10 D–48143 Münster (Westfalen), Germany [email protected] Jennifer R. Davis works on the history of early medieval Europe. Her dissertation analyzed how Charlemagne and his court responded to the political problems they faced in re-unifying Europe for the first time since the fall of Rome. Her latest project investigates the economic roots of Carolingian power. Contact address: Dr Jennifer R. Davis California Institute of Technology Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences MC 101–40 Pasadena, CA 91107, USA [email protected]

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Paul Edward Dutton studies the history, Latin literature, and thought of the early Middle Ages, including books on dream interpretation, cultural clusters, the poetry of the First Bible of Charles the Bald, a palaeographical and codicological study of the autograph and manuscripts of Eriugena, and a critical edition of Bernard of Chartres’ commentary on Plato. His translations of Carolingian sources are widely used in the classroom. Contact address: Professor Paul Edward Dutton Department of Humanities Simon Fraser University 8888 University Drive Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6, Canada [email protected] At his untimely death in 2007, Professor Riccardo Francovich of the University of Siena was Italy’s leading medieval archaeologist and teacher of young archaeologists. His many publications, excavations and digital creations focused on the transformation of the Italian countryside in the Middle Ages as revealed by advanced archaeological research. Thomas Head specializes in hagiography, exemplified by his book on the cult of the saints in Orléans. He has also written on the Peace of God, Italian saints, and ritual. At present, he is completing a book tracing the development of the cult of saints in western Europe during late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Contact address: Professor Thomas Head Department of History, Hunter College City University of New York 695 Park Avenue New York, NY 10021, USA [email protected] Joachim Henning has directed numerous excavations in Germany, Bulgaria and the Baltic, among other places, highlighting the application of natural scientific methods to medieval material evidence. His studies have ranged across agricultural technology, slavery, the transformation of the post-Roman countryside, and the ring forts of central Europe. His current projects include early medieval fortifications in Moravia, the Carolingian fiscal estate at Snellegem, Belgium, and fifth-century Gaul. Contact address: Professor Joachim Henning Institut für Archäologische Wissenschaften Abt. III, Vor- und Frühgeschichte

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Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Grüneburgplatz 1 D–60323 Frankfurt am Main, Germany [email protected] Matthew J. Innes works on the cultural, social, and political history of the early Middle Ages, including books on the Middle Rhine Valley and its transformations from 400 to 1000, and on the social and political history of Europe in 300–900. His numerous publications draw on both documentary and narrative evidence to address questions such as uses of the past, orality and literacy, and property rights and their uses and abuses. He is currently engaged in a project on memory, property and power. Contact address: Professor Matthew J. Innes School of History, Classics and Archaeology Birkbeck College, University of London Malet Street London, WC1E 7HX, UK [email protected] Mayke de Jong’s scholarship emphasizes the religious history of the early Middle Ages. In addition to her book on the giving of children as oblates, she has published extensively on penance, monasticism and exegesis. Her new book, The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious, will appear in the fall of 2008. Contact address: Professor Mayke de Jong Department of History Utrecht University Drift 10 NL–3512 BS Utrecht, The Netherlands [email protected] Herbert L. Kessler has published widely in his field of medieval art history. His writings include studies of the synagogue of Dura Europos, the Tours Bibles, the Cotton Genesis, image theory, patronage, and church decoration in medieval Italy. His forthcoming book, Neither God nor Man. Words, Images, and the Medieval Anxiety about Art, treats the inter-relationship of pictures and tituli. Contact address: Professor Herbert L. Kessler Department of the History of Art Johns Hopkins University 3400 N. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218, USA

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[email protected] Angeliki E. Laiou researches Byzantine economic and social history, the Crusades, women and the family, and modern Greek history. Among other topics, she has written on peasant society in late Byzantium, sex and marriage, and Byzantine trade and manufacturing. Her most recent publications include the three-volume The Economic History of Byzantium, of which she was editor-inchief, and The Byzantine Economy, written with Cécile Morrisson. Contact address: Professor Angeliki E. Laiou Department of History, Robinson Hall Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138, USA [email protected] Joaquín Martínez Pizarro writes about early medieval literature, ranging from medieval Latin to Old Norse. His books have focused on the narrative art of the early Middle Ages, including the recent translation and commentary of Julian of Toledo’s Historia Wambae regis. He is presently examining representations of personal experience in the literature of fifth-century Gaul. Contact address: Professor Joaquín Martínez Pizarro English Department Stony Brook University (SUNY) Humanities Building Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA [email protected] Michael McCormick studies late antiquity, the early Middle Ages and Byzantium. He has written on the Palatine Virgil, triumphal rulership, medieval annals, and most recently, The Origins of the European Economy. His current work concentrates on the fall of Rome and the early Middle Ages though the lenses of archaeology and the natural sciences, climate change and biomolecular evidence. Contact address: Professor Michael McCormick Department of History, Robinson Hall Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138, USA c/o [email protected] Janet L. Nelson is a historian of the early Middle Ages, especially the Carolingian empire and Anglo-Saxon England. She has published widely on early medieval

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politics, women and gender, and ritual. She is currently undertaking a biography of Charlemagne and co-directing a prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England. Contact address: Professor Janet L. Nelson Department of History King’s College, University of London The Strand London, WC2R 2LS, UK [email protected] Thomas F.X. Noble specializes in early medieval and papal history. His writings include The Republic of St. Peter, on the origins of the temporal power of the papacy in the eighth and ninth centuries. Professor Noble’s new book, Images and the Carolingians: Tradition, Order, and Worship, which addresses art, theology and politics, is now in press. Contact address: Professor Thomas F.X. Noble The Medieval Institute University of Notre Dame 715 Hesburgh Library Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA [email protected] Guy Philippart studies the cult of saints and the transmission of hagiographical texts from the origins in the second century until the Renaissance. At the University of Namur, he created, with Dr Michel Trigalet, “Hagiographies”, an indispensable website for advanced hagiographical research. He is now editing the fifth volume of his international history of medieval hagiography and preparing a general study of hagiography in medieval culture. Contact address: Professor Guy Philippart Rue Dries 112 B-1200 Brussels, Belgium [email protected] Danuta Shanzer focuses on late antique and early medieval Latin. She has written on authors including Augustine and Alan of Lille via Gregory of Tours, illuminating topics ranging from humor to food to sex in medieval literature. She has also published a monograph on Martianus Capella, and co-translated select writings of Avitus of Vienne. Contact address: Professor Danuta Shanzer Department of the Classics The University of Illinois

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4080 Foreign Languages Building MC-174 707 S. Mathews Avenue Urbana, IL 61801, USA [email protected] Michel Trigalet has recently completed a study of the textual transmission of medieval Latin hagiography. He has developed a comprehensive database of Latin hagiographical literature, which has been published online, partly by the Society of the Bollandists with the title “Bibliotheca hagiographica manuscripta”, and partly by the University of Namur with the title “Hagiographies”. He is now archivist at the State Archives in Brussels, Belgium, and a member of the editorial board of the series Hagiologia: Studies on Western Sainthood. Contact address: Dr Michel Trigalet Archives générales du Royaume Rue de Ruysbroeck 2 B-1000 Brussels, Belgium [email protected] Chris Wickham’s scholarship examines many aspects of Italian social, legal and economic history, from the eighth to twelfth centuries, particularly in Tuscany and elsewhere in central Italy. His most recent book reinterprets the economic history of the Mediterranean in the early Middle Ages, 400–800, drawing on both documentary and archaeological evidence. He is currently working on the development of Rome in the central Middle Ages. Contact address: Professor Chris Wickham All Souls College University of Oxford Oxford, OX1 4AL, UK [email protected] Jan M. Ziolkowski is a specialist on the literature of the Latin Middle Ages. He has produced numerous analyses of medieval texts and authors, with a particular interest in the classical tradition and in folktales in Latin. He has also written on intellectual history, including his study of Alan of Lille’s Grammar of Sex, and his recent book on Latin fairy tales. Contact address: Professor Jan M. Ziolkowski Director, Dumbarton Oaks 1703 32nd Street, NW Washington, DC 20007, USA [email protected]

Foreword This book emerged from “New Directions 2: The Early Middle Ages Today”, a conference held at Harvard University in October 2004. That conference, and some of the copy-editing required to produce this book, were graciously supported by Harvard University’s Standing Committee on Medieval Studies, then chaired by one of the undersigned; his successor, Nicholas Watson, has our warm thanks for his continued support. For their help in organizing the conference, we are most grateful to the Coordinator of Medieval Studies, Wendy Lurie; Ms Rebecca Orr-Ostoyich; and Mrs Janet Hatch. Harvard graduate students Shirin Fozi, Beatrice Kitzinger, John F. Romano and Gregory A. Smith, and undergraduates Darryl Campbell and Huma Farid also helped greatly in different aspects of conference logistics. After the conference, the editors, who had jointly organized the conference, decided, somewhat to their own surprise, to turn the conference into this book. We have shared fully the responsibility for its conception and realization. We wrote the overall introduction, “The Early Middle Ages: Europe’s Long Morning” together; Michael McCormick wrote the introductions to Parts I–V, and translated the text of the contributions of Arnold Angenendt and Guy Philippart, while Jennifer Davis translated their footnotes. John Smedley has been very helpful in working with us to prepare this volume for the press. Giles Constable kindly supplied a reference from his own library when the resources of Widener Library failed us. After this book went to press, we were deeply saddened to learn of the untimely death of our admired friend and colleague Riccardo Francovich in a tragic accident while exploring one of those Tuscan hillsides he discusses in his chapter. Riccardo’s disappearance at the peak of his powers and beneficial influence is a grievous loss to the field of medieval studies, and to medieval archaeology in particular. We are honored to be able to include one of his final publications in this volume. Finally, it gives us great pleasure to dedicate this work to a wonderful medievalist and dear personal friend. By his gentle erudition and incomparable intellectual generosity, Paul Meyvaert has inspired, encouraged and helped generations of graduate students and professors working in the different Departments of Harvard University under the aegis of the Standing Committee on Medieval Studies. The dedication of this book is a small token of what we all owe to an early medievalist whose historical detective work has pioneered new directions in the discovery of medieval Europe’s long morning. J.R.D. M.McC. Cambridge, Massachusetts

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List of Abbreviations CC Cont. med. Deutsches Archiv EME FS MGH

NCMH PL SC Settimane SH Typologie

Corpus Christianorum, series latina (Turnhout, 1953–). Continuatio mediaeualis (Turnhout, 1971–). Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters (Marburg, Cologne, 1950–). Early Medieval Europe (Harlow, 1992–). Frühmittelalterliche Studien (Berlin, 1967–). Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Hanover, Berlin, etc.). AA Auctores antiquissimi (1877–1919). Capit. Capitularia regum Francorum, ed. Alfred Boretius and Victor Krause (2 vols, Hanover, 1883–97). Epist. Epistolae (1889–). LL Leges (1835–). Poet. Poetae Latini medii aevi (1881–). SRG Scriptores rerum Germanicarum (1839–). SRL Scriptores rerum Langobardicarum et Italicarum saeculi VI–IX (1878). SRM Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum (1884–1951). SS Scriptores (1826–). New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 2, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge, 1995). Patrologiae cursus completus … series … ecclesiae latinae, ed. J.P. Migne (Paris, 1844–64). Sources chrétiennes (Paris, 1941–). Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo (Spoleto, 1953–). Subsidia hagiographica (Brussels, 1886–). Typologie des sources du Moyen Age occidental (Louvain, Turnhout, 1972–).

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The Early Middle Ages: Europe’s Long Morning Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick

“The long morning”: Paul Dutton’s felicitous phrase captures well the exciting new vision emerging from ongoing research into the early Middle Ages. Increasingly scholars recognize here the age when, after the collapse of Rome, Europe set off in the new directions that led to high medieval and even modern civilization. From the grandest superstructures to minute details of country life, early medieval women and men wrought patterns that shaped the next thousand years of European history. Not even a generation ago, scholars located around the year 1000 a series of crucial new directions in the development of European civilization: the demographic upturn after the late Roman decline, the spread of new agricultural techniques and productivity, the beginning of medieval trading centers and circuits, to name only them. All have now been detected closer to 800, or even 700. These apparently precocious developments fit nicely next to those which have long been recognized as already underway in the early Middle Ages: the rise of the papacy and the imperial idea, the triumph of coenobitic monasticism on the Benedictine model, sacralized monarchy, the spread of a new, pan-European handwriting in the form of Carolingian minuscule, the rebirth of classicizing Latin, and the diffusion of a Romanizing liturgy and chant. Many features that distinguished the full flowering of medieval civilization in the eleventh and later centuries had in fact begun to develop two or three hundred years earlier than previously perceived. That forces us to rethink the place of the early Middle Ages in the long-term development of European civilization. Today the early Middle Ages appear not so much as a dark night after the fall of Rome, but as a long morning whose creative powers laid down the parameters and future directions of European economic, cultural and political development. It is to this new vision, and to the last twenty years of distinguished scholarship in Europe and North America which have produced it, that we pay tribute with this book’s title. Like the languages still spoken there, modern nation states such as England and France reach their roots into what had been until then the Roman soil of Britannia and Gallia. In that long morning of medieval civilization, the great and

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permanent linguistic frontier came to distinguish the worlds of Germanic- and Romance-speakers, not so far from the edge that separated eaters of butter and of olive oil. It was the monasteries, scribes and ambitious patrons of this age – no other – who found, copied and preserved virtually every word we know of the great world literature of ancient Latin. The telling statistic bears repeating. From the birth of Latin literature down to 800 AD, even counting every fragment, only 1800 manuscript books or scraps of books have been preserved. Many, perhaps most of them were copied in the eighth century. Flush with new-found – or, as Chapter 2 argues, newly extracted – wealth, ninth-century scribes in the Carolingian dominions alone used the skins of countless flocks and herds to produce another 9000 surviving manuscript books. And that does not include the works written in the British Isles and Spain. These 9000 books constitute a cultural monument which, as Chapter 4 observes, is also a biological one. That we can even think so synoptically owes much to the quiet labors of previous generations’ great specialists of early medieval manuscripts. For the rest of the medieval millennium, power would flow through the kingdoms, counties and duchies that early medieval people imagined and invented, often out of the rubble of Rome. So too the religious structures: Benedict’s monasticism, the obsession with Rome and the papacy, the ritual gestures and the very words performed down to the last century in village churches and great cathedrals across Europe and the Americas – all are creatures of this age. Alongside the ephemeral trading towns of the dawn of European commerce, places like Dorestad, Hamwic, Haithabu, Birka and Kaupang, archaeologists are uncovering others, newly founded or revived, whose names are as familiar as Dublin, London or Venice. Their open economies were expanding into scarcely suspected economic circuits that stretched from Scandinavia to beyond Baghdad

See Michael McCormick’s Introduction to Part Three in this volume. A pioneer here was Karl Hauck in his “Von einer spätantiken Randkultur zum karolingischen Europa”, FS, 1 (1967): 3–93. See also Karl Ferdinand Werner, “La genèse des duchés en France et en Allemagne”, in Nascità dell’Europa ed Europa carolingia: un’equazione da verificare, Settimane, 27 (2 vols, Spoleto, 1981), vol. 1, pp. 175–207, as well as the works in the series Transformation of the Roman World: for example, Hans-Werner Goetz, Jörg Jarnut, Walter Pohl and Sören Kaschke (eds), Regna and Gentes: The Relationship Between Late Antique and Early Medieval Peoples and Kingdoms in the Transformation of the Roman World, Transformation of the Roman World, 13 (Leiden, 2003).  See, for example, on Benedictine monasticism: Josef Semmler, “Reichsidee und kirchliche Gesetzgebung”, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 71 (1960): 37–65, and his numerous other contributions, cataloged in Mönchtum, Kirche, Herrschaft, 750–1000, ed. Dieter R. Bauer et al. (Sigmaringen, 1998), pp. 335–48. On the importance of religion in political life in general, see Eugen Ewig, “Zum christlichen Königsgedanken im Frühmittelalter”, in his Spätantikes und fränkisches Gallien: Gesammelte Schriften (1952–1973), Beihefte der Francia, 3 (2 vols, Munich, 1976), vol. 1, pp. 3–71, and his numerous other contributions collected therein; on the creation of ties between empire and papacy, see Peter Classen, Karl der Grosse, das Papsttum und Byzanz: die Begründung des karolingischen Kaisertums, Horst Fuhrmann and Claudia Märtl (eds), Beiträge zur Geschichte und Quellenkunde des Mittelalters, 9 (Sigmaringen, 1985); on ritual, see the references in the introduction to Part Four of this volume, note 3.  

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and laid the groundwork for the global reach of high medieval commerce. As this volume argues, even the population geography of the modern European countryside goes back to these centuries. Water mills and heavy swivel plows were then spreading across the acres reconquered from the retreating forests and helping to spawn the villages that still structure the landscape. Kings, the aristocracy and the law too took on lasting new features amidst this age’s complex politics. Medieval Europe’s emerging long morning bears little resemblance to the dim barbaric era, illiterate and closed in on its stagnating self, that once dominated even medievalists’ vision. In Europe, this period has proved a dynamic field of medieval investigation for a few decades, its growth scanned by the rise of important new journals, such as Frühmittelalterliche Studien (MünsterWestfalen, 1967) or Early Medieval Europe (Harlow, 1992). In North America, research change has come more slowly. Notwithstanding expert investigators of early medieval civilization in leading universities, quite literally from coast to coast, the field sometimes suffers still from a lingering disdain, perhaps connected with the ever-shrinking territory labeled as “Dark Ages”, the last redoubt of an obscurantist myth that once engulfed the entire millennium of European civilization after the fall of Rome. One reason the label lingers lies in a misperception that the evidence for the early Middle Ages is so poor as to hopelessly impoverish the investigation of its civilization. In fact, the quantity Joachim Henning (ed.), Post-Roman Towns, Trade and Settlement in Europe and Byzantium, Millennium Studies, 5 (2 vols, Berlin, 2007); Richard Hodges, Dark Age Economics: The Origins of Towns and Trade A.D. 500–1000, 2nd edn (London, 1989); Björn Ambrosiani (ed.), Birka Studies, 8 vols to date (Stockholm, 1992–2003). On the archaeology of towns generally, Martin Biddle, Approaches to Urban Archaeology (Edinburgh, 1988).  Among fundamental contributions to the debates on the early medieval countryside, see Adriaan Verhulst, Rural and Urban Aspects of Early Medieval Northwest Europe (Aldershot, 1992), and Jean-Pierre Devroey, Etudes sur le grand domaine carolingien (Aldershot, 1993), in addition to the works discussed in Part One of this volume.  Landmark works on early medieval aristocrats and/or royal power include: Gerd Tellenbach, Königtum und Stämme in der Werdezeit des deutschen Reiches (Weimar, 1939); Eduard Hlawitschka, Franken, Alemannen, Bayern und Burgunder in Oberitalien (774–962), Forschungen zur oberrheinischen Landesgeschichte, 8 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1960); Carlrichard Brühl, Fodrum, gistum, servitium regis. Studien zu den wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen des Königtums im Frankenreich und in den fränkischen Nachfolgestaaten Deutschland, Frankreich und Italien, Kölner historische Abhandlungen, 14 (2 vols, Cologne, 1968); Hagen Keller, Adelsherrschaft und städtische Gesellschaft in Oberitalien, 9.–12. Jh., Bibliothek des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom, 52 (Tübingen, 1979); Eckhard Müller-Mertens, Die Reichsstruktur im Spiegel der Herrschaftspraxis Ottos des Grossen (Berlin, 1980); Karl Schmid, Gebetsgedenken und adliges Selbstverständnis im Mittelalter, ed. Gerd Althoff and Dieter Geuenich (Sigmaringen, 1983); Michael Borgolte, Geschichte der Grafschaften Alemanniens in fränkischer Zeit, Vorträge und Forschungen, 31 (Sigmaringen, 1984); Herwig Wolfram, History of the Goths, trans. Thomas J. Dunlap (Berkeley, 1988); Jean Durliat, Les finances publiques de Dioclétien aux Carolingiens (284–889), Beihefte der Francia, 21 (Sigmaringen, 1990); Régine Le Jan, Famille et pouvoir dans le monde franc (VIIe–Xe siècle): essai d’anthropologie sociale (Paris, 1995), and Patrick Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1999).  See, for an example of the new vison, Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge, 1989). 

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of textual evidence available since the nineteenth century is abundant enough that few if any scholars have read it all. This is not to say that it is evenly distributed over time and literary genre, or that the writings of early medieval women and men lack challenges for the linguistic and interpretive skills of the inexperienced. Over the last few decades, nevertheless, scholars have grown more ingenious at devising penetrating new questions; more sensitive attention to our early medieval witnesses’ mental world has changed how we understand what they have to say. The level of investigation has deepened, and the probing grown more acute.10 The reasons behind the new vision are multiple, of course. In part, the very difficulty of studying this remote civilization has fanned scholars’ creative fires, challenging them to invent new ways of squeezing the rich surviving written record without stretching it. Remarkably, in recent years the volume of written source materials securely assigned to this age has ballooned. New written evidence comes from texts long published but misattributed or misdated, while others have never before seen print. From the fifth century we have new sermons and letters of St. Augustine; from the Roman, Germanic and Byzantine culture of North Africa, quite literally hundreds of unnoticed texts have now been identified; a digital detective’s astute flair has even uncovered a hundred short new texts of the Venerable Bede.11 A hundred or so new documents from Visigothic Spain, as well as ten thousand new charters have come from early medieval Catalonia to join the thousands of acts already known from the Middle Rhine, Bavaria, and St. Gall; from the folios of a famous ancient manuscript of Virgil hundreds of hitherto unknown glosses have emerged to  On early medieval Latin, see Dag Norberg, Au seuil du Moyen Age: études linguistiques, métriques et littéraires (2 vols, Padua, 1974–98); Bengt Löfstedt, Ausgewählte Aufsätze zur lateinischen Sprachgeschichte und Philologie, Walter Berschin (ed.) (Stuttgart, 2000).  Walter Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800) (Princeton, NJ, 1988) led the way here. Among studies of individual early medieval figures, see Jacques Fontaine, Isidore de Séville et la culture classique dans l’Espagne wisigothique, 2nd edn (3 vols, Paris, 1983); Alain Stoclet, Autour de Fulrad de Saint-Denis (v. 710–784) (Paris, 1993); and Donald A. Bullough, Alcuin: Achievement and Reputation, Education and Society in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 16 (Leiden, 2004). 10 Peter Godman, Poets and Emperors. Frankish Politics and Carolingian Poetry (Oxford, 1987); Matthias Becher, Eid und Herrschaft. Untersuchungen zum Herrscherethos Karls des Grossen, Vorträge und Forschungen, 39 (Sigmaringen, 1993); Martin Heinzelmann, Gregor von Tours (538–594): “Zehn Bücher Geschichte”: Historiographie und Gesellschaftskonzept im 6. Jahrhundert (Darmstadt, 1994); Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, NJ, 1994); Guy Halsall (ed.), Humour, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2002); and Ian Wood, “Misremembering the Burgundians”, in Walter Pohl (ed.), Die Suche nach den Ursprüngen: von der Bedeutung des frühen Mittelalters, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Denkschriften, 322 (Vienna, 2004), pp. 139–48. 11 Augustine, Vingt-six sermons au peuple d’Afrique, ed. François Dolbeau (Paris, 1996); Augustine, Lettres 1–29: nouvelle édition du texte critique, ed. Johannes Divjak (Paris, 1987); for newly identified North African texts, see Leslie Dossey, “Christians and Romans: Aspiration, Assimilation, and Conflict in the North African Countryside” (unpublished Ph.D thesis, Harvard University, 1998), pp. 366–78; for Bede see Paul Meyvaert, “Bede’s Capitula lectionum for the Old and New Testaments”, Revue bénédictine, 105 (1995): 348–80.

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document the Carolingian reception of the ancient epic.12 Systematic scrutiny of ancient archives has even turned up new capitularies of Charlemagne, and finally produced a reliable edition of the royal charters of the Merovingians.13 The list goes on, but the point should be clear. And this is but the beginning of the revolution worked by the passage from paper and ink to digital format, whose barely broached analytical capacities are already transforming our knowledge, including for so big and so traditional a set of sources as the lives of the saints, as Chapter 6 will show. However, even hundreds of new texts seem like small potatoes next to the extraordinary avalanche of new data from the soil and the sea. Medieval archaeology is today, first and foremost, early medieval archaeology. Since the path-breaking synthesis of Hodges and Whitehouse in 1983, historians have been on notice that a whole new world of early medieval material remains – pots, fences, forts, pollens, iron tools and slave collars, ships and the early medieval Europeans themselves – is opening up thickly documented new paths where before we saw only trackless deserts.14 So abundant are the materials that only computers can keep track of them. Nor do they merely add to the written sources. Once we analyze, classify, and understand the new material data, the inevitable result is to challenge the marvelous written sources bequeathed to us by early medieval men and women. Today’s historians have only begun to wrestle with the fact that the emergence of a whole new window on medieval realities will force them back to the texts, to test and sometimes strip from them interpretations accumulated over the last two centuries. In the light of archaeological results, the texts must be reanalyzed, and our conventional wisdom, rewritten. That process is already underway among early medievalists, as numerous chapters in Parts One, Three and Five of this volume show.15 Yet the discovery of new fields must not come at the expense of our tried and 12 Isabel Velázquez-Soriano (ed.), Documentos de época visigoda escritos en pizarra, siglos VI–VIII, Monumenta palaeographica Medii Aevi, Series Hispanica (2 vols, Turnhout, 2000); Michael McCormick, Five Hundred Unknown Glosses from the Palatine Virgil, Studi e testi, 343 (Vatican City, 1992); Pierre Bonnassie and Jordi Fernández-Cuadrench, “Les documents catalans des IXe-XIIe siècles: éditions récentes et publications en cours”, Le Moyen Age, 105 (1999): 149–53. 13 Hubert Mordek, “Unbekannte Texte zur karolingischen Gesetzgebung”, Deutsches Archiv, 42 (1986): 446–70; Hubert Mordek and Gerhard Schmitz, “Neue Kapitularien und Kapitulariensammlungen”, Deutsches Archiv, 43 (1987): 361–439; Die Urkunden der Merowinger, ed. Theo Kölzer, Martina Hartmann and Andrea Stieldorf, MGH Diplomata regum Francorum e stirpe Merovingica (2 vols, Hanover, 2001), and Kölzer’s articles: Theo Kölzer, Merowingerstudien, MGH Studien und Texte, 21 and 26 (2 vols, Hanover, 1998–99). 14 Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe: Archaeology and the Pirenne Thesis (London, 1983), which should be used in the extensively revised French edition: Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse, Mahomet, Charlemagne et les origines de l’Europe, trans. and ed. Cécile Morrisson, Jacques Lefort and Jean-Pierre Sodini (Paris, 1996). 15 In addition to which, see, for example, Patrick Périn, “The Origin of the Village in Early Medieval Gaul”, in Neil Christie (ed.), Landscapes of Change: Rural Evolutions in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 255–78; Heiko Steuer, “Überlegungen zum Stadtbegriff aus der Sicht der Archäologie des Mittelalters”, in Peter Johanek and Franz-Joseph Post (eds), Vielerlei Städte. Der Stadtbegriff (Cologne, 2004), pp. 31–51.

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true methods of close reading of the sources, as the chapters of Part Three indicate. When were the early Middle Ages? Few would contest that they began with the fall of Rome. But when was that? And where in space, and in the logic of systems? Economic, mental, social, biological, or political systems need not evolve in linear lockstep, much though we may suspect or impute dim webs among them. In space the chronology of collapse varies by regions, and by the markers that we accept as signifying the end of Roman civilization.16 Religion, for instance, was undeniably central to early medieval civilization, so the triumph of Christianity might urge an early date even in the Mediterranean, perhaps around 400.17 For political structures, the end of direct Roman political authority militates for various moments in the fifth century in the northwestern provinces of the Roman Empire, in Italy and North Africa. For the rest of the imperial provinces, the period from about the mid-sixth to mid-seventh century was decisive, as the Roman empire continued to be amputated into the Byzantine, to paraphrase Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, a tenth-century eastern heir of Augustus and Constantine the Great.18 From the point of view of economic structures, the answer varies also according to geography and sector of the economy.19 The modern nucleated settlements that replaced Rome’s dispersed rural settlement began at a time which is controversial, but falls within our period. Western Mediterranean long-distance trade and shipping witnessed a first, sharp contraction in volume in the fifth century. When the final spasms constricted there around 700, the eastern Mediterranean was not far behind, however much some low level of ecologically conditioned connectivity persisted.20 In sum, the fifth or sixth centuries are good starting points for today’s early Middle Ages in most of western Europe. When did they end? The easy answer is 1000, or at least the eleventh century. By then towns were growing smartly, new forms of art and culture were afoot, and feudalism was triumphing as a political and social force.21 Our chapters 16 Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford, 2005); Alexander Demandt, Die Spätantike. Römische Geschichte von Diocletian bis Justinian, 285–565 n. Chr. (Munich, 1989). 17 The debate over magic in the early medieval world is relevant here: Peter Brown, “Society and the Supernatural”, in his Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA, 1982), pp. 302–32; Valerie I.J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1991); Alexander Murray, “Missionaries and Magic in Dark-Age Europe”, Past and Present, 136 (1992): 186–205. 18 De administrando imperio 21.1, ed. Gyula Moravcsik and trans. Romilly J.H. Jenkins, Corpus fontium historiae Byzantinae, 1, 2nd edn (Washington, DC, 1967), p. 86.31–4. 19 See Chapters 1 and 5 in this volume. 20 Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea. A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000). 21 On the debated political transformations of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, see Thomas Bisson, “The Feudal Revolution”, Past and Present, 142 (1994): 6–42; with responses of Dominique Barthélemy and Stephen D. White, Past and Present, 152 (1996): 196–205 and 205– 23, respectively; responses of Timothy Reuter and Chris Wickham, Past and Present, 155 (1997): 177–95 and 196–208, respectively, and Bisson’s reply, pp. 208–25.

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in fact fall within the broad framework of the period from 400 to 1000, but reach back to the early days of Roman economic structures and forward to the religious transformations of the later Middle Ages. Echoing slow transformation and abrupt change, the studies in this book include close readings of particular moments such as Charlemagne’s empire or King Wamba’s triumph, as well as analyses of gradual shifts underlying economic systems or the perception of weather. So dynamic a field of investigation defies the compass of one volume. As Patrick Geary observed, research into the early Middle Ages has today grown so prolific that a comprehensive overview would require a multi-volume text authored by an army of early medievalists; they would have to specialize in everything from architecture to zooarchaeology. We chose to illustrate, very selectively, rather than attempt an encyclopaedia. The papers focus on part of western Europe, knowing full well that they leave largely untouched vast and dynamic areas of Europe whose transformations owed and brought so much to early medieval civilization: England, the “Celtic fringe,” Scandinavia, the emergent Slavlands.22 The Islamic and Byzantine frontiers too were important in this age, and fertile work is under way on early medieval Iberia.23 Rather, moreover, than impose an exclusive vision on a vibrant field whose very dynamism authors its complexity, we chose to approach a number of accomplished practitioners. We asked them to come to Harvard to discuss what they found most exciting and promising from their varied disciplinary perspectives. Those who could come proposed questions and issues that were wonderful in their variety. We The essays in Lars Jørgensen, Birgir Storgaard and Lone Gebauer Thomsen (eds), Sieg und Triumpf. Der Norden im Schatten des römischen Reiches (Copenhagen, 2003), conveniently introduce the emergence of pre-Viking Age Scandinavia; for an admirable synthesis of one aspect of Viking Age civilization, see Jesse L. Byock, Viking Age Iceland (London, 2001). In the Slavlands, archaeology is fundamental: see Joachim Henning and Alexander T. Ruttkay (eds), Frühmittelalterlicher Burgenbau in Mittel- und Osteuropa (Bonn, 1998); Przemysław Urbańczyk (ed.), Origins of Central Europe (Warsaw, 1997), surveys in English recent work; for Poland, see Andrzej Buko, Archeologia Polski wczesnośredniowiecznej. Odkrycia, hipotezy, interpretacje (Warsaw, 2005). Important recent work on Anglo-Saxon England includes Nicholas Brooks, Anglo-Saxon Myths: State and Church, 400–1066 (London, 2000); James Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State (London, 2000); Michael Lapidge, Anglo-Latin Literature, 600–899 (London, 1996). On the Celtic world, see, for example, Wendy Davies, Small Worlds: The Village Community in Early Medieval Brittany (London, 1988); Próinséas Ní Chatháin and Michael Richter (eds), Ireland and Europe in the Early Middle Ages: Texts and Transmission (Dublin, 2002), and the overview in Donnchadh Ó Corráin, “Ireland, Scotland and Wales, c. 700 to the Early Eleventh Century”, in NCMH, pp. 43–63. 23 On these frontiers, see, for example, Philippe Sénac, La frontière et les hommes (VIIe–XIIe siècle): le peuplement musulman au nord de l’Ebre et les débuts de la reconquête aragonaise (Paris, 2000), and Michael McCormick, “The Imperial Edge: Italo-Byzantine Identity, Movement and Integration, A.D. 650–950”, in Hélène Ahrweiler and Angeliki E. Laiou (eds), Studies on the Internal Diaspora of the Byzantine Empire (Washington, DC, 1998), pp. 17–52. For work on early medieval Iberia beyond the frontier, in addition to Chapter 10 in this volume, see, for example, Kimberly Diane Bowes and Michael Kulikowski (eds), Hispania in Late Antiquity: Current Perspectives (Leiden, 2005), and for archaeology, for example, the contributions collected in Josep María Gurt Esparraguera and Núria Tena (eds), V Reunió d’arqueologia cristiana hispànica: Cartagena, 16–19 d’abril de 1998 (Barcelona, 2000). 22

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were surprised at some of the themes that turned up, such as the weather, and at others that came up only rarely, for instance, gender.24 Even so, the volume offers a broad sampling of some of the most exciting new directions of early medieval research, including by authors who rarely publish in English. And, still more satisfying, across papers, comments and lengthy open discussions, a remarkable synergy emerged among participants, many of whom had never before met. The result is this book, a sampling of some very new ways that people are thinking about five great themes in early medieval studies. They form the five parts of this book: “Discovering the Early Medieval Economy”, “Sounding Early Medieval Holiness”, “Representation and Reality in the Artistry of Early Medieval Literature”, “Practices of Power in an Early Medieval Empire” and “The Intellectuality of Early Medieval Art”. Michael McCormick introduces each part with a brief essay indicating the broad lines of how research into each theme has developed to date, and where the papers are pointing future investigation. Accompanying essays conclude each part, highlighting and complementing the new approaches and the new questions raised by each thematic strand. Part One, “Discovering the Early Medieval Economy”, presents new interpretations, new tools, and new data about the production and distribution of wealth. Chris Wickham brings fundamental concepts of modern economics to bear on early medieval realities. His new view of the early medieval economy sketches its broad logic and organization across regional variation. Joachim Henning turns the old historical questions about why empires fail into new ones by using archaeology and texts to compare the nature of the production and distribution of wealth in the late Roman and early medieval countrysides. Slave labor, the much-touted great estate, technology, and economic performance fuel this essay in archaeological synthesis. Drawing on decades of excavation and field survey, Riccardo Francovich confronts the results with documentary records. The patterns that emerge challenge the conventional wisdom about how, and especially, when villages developed in early medieval Italy, and it is earlier than historians have hitherto supposed. New tools are essential for Michael McCormick’s recent investigations. Biomolecular archaeology opens up questions previously inconceivable outside of science fiction, from the sexual relations of the Anglo-Saxon invaders to the paths of the pathogens that struck the early medieval world, and the reader will find here a “humanist-friendly” introduction to the main methods and results of this entirely new approach to 24 A lively field in early medieval studies since the foundational work of Suzanne Fonay Wemple, Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister 500–900 (Philadelphia, PA, 1981). See also Julia M.H. Smith, “The Problem of Female Sanctity in Carolingian Europe c. 780–920”, Past and Present, 146 (1995): 3–37; Janet L. Nelson, “Women at the Court of Charlemagne: A Case of Monstrous Regiment?”, in her The Frankish World, 750–900 (London, 1996), pp. 223–42, and the essays collected in Leslie Brubaker and Julia M.H. Smith (eds), Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–900 (Cambridge, 2004). See also Chapter 8 in this volume on the importance of gender as a category of analysis.

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the early medieval economy. What the new interpretations, new data, and new tools mean for our understanding of the economy as a whole becomes clearer when examined by Angeliki Laiou in the comparative light of Byzantium. Part Two, “Sounding Early Medieval Holiness”, plumbs two different perspectives on early medieval piety. Guy Philippart and Michel Trigalet use their massive database of the manuscripts that preserved medieval hagiography to detect broad new patterns in the copying and composing of the literature of the saints in the early Middle Ages. The mental underpinnings of religious offerings of real property in the early Middle Ages, and beyond, emerge from Arnold Angenendt’s analysis of the long-term cultural trajectories that shaped this fundamental component of medieval religion, culture, and economy. Thomas Head deepens both perspectives by drawing in recent English-language research into hagiography and the anthropology of real property transactions in the early Middle Ages. In Part Three, “Representation and Reality in the Artistry of Early Medieval Literature”, literary approaches balance traditional strengths with new methods, as they take early medieval literary works with the seriousness they deserve. Heated debates over global warming have gotten Paul Edward Dutton thinking about discussions of the weather in early medieval literature. The responses of medieval men and women to weather illuminate their fears and joys, helping us to see their reality through its literary representation. Joaquín Martínez Pizarro trains the tools of literary criticism on an ambitious writer’s depiction of betrayal and confrontation in the high literary art of seventh-century Spain. He spotlights the sophistication with which early medieval writers manipulated and thereby developed literary conventions inherited from late antiquity. Combining literary criticism and philology with the archaeology of weapon finds and manuscript illumination allows Jan Ziolkowski to illuminate the Latin verse epic Waltharius and clarify the compositional tactics behind an early medieval adventure poem, while Danuta Shanzer’s erudite commentary on these papers throws into relief the classical and biblical background which continued to inform the literary art of the early Middle Ages. Part Four, “Practices of Power in an Early Medieval Empire”, highlights new directions in the study of the Carolingians. As Janet Nelson observes, connections and communication are crucial to understanding Charlemagne’s ungainly empire. Hostages shepherded across the landscape, oaths sworn by all, and the king’s multiple intrusions into the localities of the Carolingian realm tied together the far-flung regionalisms of the Frankish empire. Rather than bemoan the irregularity of the evidence for governance, Jennifer Davis searches out underlying patterns of political response in Charlemagne’s politics and approach to ruling. They reveal new details of how Charlemagne and his advisers actually exercised power and they sketch a new method for evaluating fragmented political evidence. The complex ways in which early medieval women and men used property to save their souls and to act out their familial and political ambitions form the theme of Matthew Innes’ study. As Stuart

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Airlie insists, future work will reach beyond uncovering new patterns in the evidence, old and new, to link such patterns to broader changes over time. Finally, Part Five, “The Intellectuality of Early Medieval Art”, studies from three different angles this most striking aspect of the artistic creation of the early Middle Ages. Today’s early medievalists are an interdisciplinary lot, and so it is not untypical that historian Mayke de Jong takes us on a novel tour of Carolingian architecture. She explores the meaning in ninth-century palaces of an expression for an architectural feature borrowed from the Bible. How early medieval artists grappled with the fundamental issue of the nature of God and its implications for visual art attracts Herbert Kessler. Early medieval artists manipulated color and techniques of representation in their quest to depict the divine in a powerfully evocative yet theologically respectful manner. As Thomas Noble observes, seeing was never simply a visual phenomenon; his concluding essay once again underscores the deeply intellectual underpinnings of early medieval people’s thinking about the art and architecture they created. In the long morning of the early Middle Ages, the peoples of western Europe rebuilt their societies on the surprisingly sturdy ruins of Rome’s culture and traditions. The framework of the edifices constructed then structures western Europe to this day. These essays illuminate both the transformations that marked this period, and the new directions which are defining its study. Rather than a dark age, what we discover in western Europe between 400 and 1000 AD is the long morning of an expanding and changing world. Where do twenty-first-century scholars go from here? New tools and methods highlighted in this volume open new possibilities for discovering the early medieval past. But they also require new skills. No single intellect can master the intricacies of all these disciplines as our expanding knowledge becomes more and more specialized, more and more diverse, yet more and more interconnected. This means that we in the humanities need to learn to collaborate better, with each other and with our colleagues in disciplines that are coming to be related fields, such as economics, certainly, but biology and computer science as well. The vision of the early Middle Ages conveyed by these studies shows us a vibrant, expanding Europe, illuminated by a rich and varied source base. Particularly in North America, we need to do better at sharing the new vision of the early Middle Ages with other scholars, including other medievalists. We hope that this book may mark one step in this new direction. Our understanding of the early Middle Ages has shifted in only the last generation or so from the “Dark Ages” to a long morning of rebirth, and of building the foundations of medieval and modern Europe. Still more unsuspected new directions await us.

PART one Discovering the Early Medieval Economy

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Part One

Discovering the Early Medieval Economy Michael McCormick

For the end of the ancient world and the character of medieval civilization, the economic history of the early Middle Ages has long loomed large. In Part One, the reader meets the latest new directions in our understanding of the early medieval economy, whose development now appears both much longer, and deeper, than even just a few years ago. This in turn implies that the extraordinary wealth that culminated in the civilization of high medieval Europe took centuries longer to build than previously recognized: the long morning of Europe’s economy was long indeed. Alfons Dopsch’s (1868–1953) powerful and optimistic argument contended that the early Middle Ages essentially continued the ancient economy without rupture, and his work has exercised deep influence, especially in the Germanspeaking lands. The basic continuity in agrarian organization, craft production, and trade that he advocated was accepted by Henri Pirenne (1862–1935) – with a critical modification. The great Belgian historian believed that economic organization remained essentially the same until the rise of Islam shattered Mediterranean unity around the time of Charlemagne, and destroyed what Pirenne took to be the main motor that powered economic development: longdistance trade. Around this debate, more recent contributions have challenged and often clarified the role of technological development in the countryside, the history and character of the great estate, demographic trends and settlement patterns, and the collapse and rebirth of trade.  Alfons Dopsch, Wirtschaftliche und soziale Grundlagen der europäischen Kulturentwicklung aus der Zeit von Cäsar bis auf Karl den Grossen (2 vols, Vienna, 1918–20), available in an abridged translation: Alfons Dopsch, The Economic and Social Foundations of European Civilization, trans. Marian Gertrude Beard and Nadine Marshall and ed. Erna Patzelt (New York, 1937); see also his Die Wirtschaftsentwicklung der Karolingerzeit, vornehmlich in Deutschland, 2nd edn (Weimar, 1922). Dopsch’s enduring impact is palpable in the terms of the investigation formulated by a major multi-year project: see Klaus Düwel (ed.), Untersuchungen zu Handel und Verkehr der vor- und frühgeschichtlichen Zeit in Mittel- und Nordeuropa, Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, Philologisch-Historische Klasse, 3. Folge, nos 143–4, 150, 156, 180, 183, 227 (6 vols, Göttingen, 1985–97).  Henri Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne, 3rd edn (Paris, 1937); Mohammed and Charlemagne, trans. Bernard Miall (New York, 1939).  The work of Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse marked a crucial step in the incorporation of archaeological evidence into a debate hitherto dominated by historians and

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For all the brilliance of its leading exponents, the resolution of the great debate seemed, in this one case, hampered by the relative scarcity of evidence, and by the contradictory conclusions deduced from what shafts of light radiated from the explicit records of the economy, which remained sporadic. Nevertheless, more rigorous scrutiny of the written sources began to change our understanding of the agrarian basis of the early medieval economy. From them Adriaan Verhulst rewrote the history of the great estate, arguing that far from dysfunctional dinosaur villas inherited from late Rome, the bipartite manors of the early Middle Ages were a dynamic new invention that spread out from the Frankish heartland between the Rhine and the Loire rivers. The next step was the observation that the intensified production of the new estate organization was at least in part geared to markets, rather than self-sufficiency. Georges Duby’s view of the early medieval countryside’s economic futility famously pinpointed the failure to invest the capital required to build numerous water mills and so boost the productivity of rural labor, otherwise wasted by the need to hand-grind cereals for the daily bread. But Dietrich Lohrmann’s meticulous re-examination of Duby’s written evidence, in the light, notably, of water tables and subsequent mill development in the Paris region, proved just the contrary: already by the 820s, mills had been built practically everywhere they were feasible. Archaeology is now discovering the mills themselves, and so deepening across Europe our knowledge of capital investment in the early medieval countryside. Another changing technology with profound implications for agrarian productivity, that of the plow, was made famous by Lynn White and others. It now looks very different as well. Joachim Henning’s archaeological investigations have shown that the original shift was actually to a more technologically advanced type of tool for working the soil and boosting food production. The spread of this swivel plow fused Roman technology and barbarian household organization into a new agrarian system, a new “logic of production”. It too began in the early Middle Ages, centuries earlier than the written evidence: see the Introduction to this volume, note 14.  Beginning with Adriaan Verhulst, “La genèse du régime domanial classique en France au haut moyen âge”, in Agricoltura e mondo rurale in Occidente nell’alto medioevo, Settimane, 13 (Spoleto, 1966), pp. 135–60. For his latest thinking on the subject, see Adriaan E. Verhulst, The Carolingian Economy (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 31–60, with further references. Pierre Toubert has updated his important contributions, especially on the market connection, in L’Europe dans sa première croissance: de Charlemagne à l’an mil (Paris, 2004), pp. 27–217; see further Chapter 1 in this volume.  Georges Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, trans. Cynthia Postan (Columbia, SC, 1976), pp. 16–17.  Dietrich Lohrmann, “Le moulin à eau dans le cadre de l’économie rurale de la Neustrie”, in Hartmut Atsma (ed.), La Neustrie: les pays au nord de la Loire de 650 à 850, Beihefte der Francia, 16 (Sigmaringen, 1989), pp. 367–404, with further work by Etienne Champion, Moulins et meuniers carolingiens dans les polyptyques entre Loire et Rhin (Paris, 1996) and Paola Galetti and Pierre Racine (eds), I mulini nell’Europa medievale (Bologna, 2003).  Horst Wolfgang Böhme, “Wassermühlen im frühen Mittelalter”, in Astrid Böhme (ed.), Die Regnersche Mühle in Bretzenheim. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Wassermühle, Bretzenheimer Beiträge zur Geschichte, 1 (Mainz, 1999), pp. 26–55.

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move away from the light Mediterranean scratch plow or ard had previously been dated. As these advances suggest, a whole new chapter has begun with the rise of medieval archaeology. The new field is delivering massive new data, especially from natural scientific approaches such as palaeobotany, archaeozoology, and various soil investigations. They cast intense light on the organization of food and craft production, even as settlement patterns ally with cemetery population studies to clarify demographic patterns in the countryside. The archaeology of interregional trade has made tremendous headway in the Mediterranean, at least down to c. 700, and as ceramic studies for the subsequent period advance and provide reliable chronological and geographical proxy indicators for the movement of other kinds of goods, we may expect further progress there too, as Angeliki Laiou shows. Around the North Sea, our knowledge has advanced further and faster, as the exchange systems and wares are emerging from the earth in often startling detail. The excavation of the nascent trading towns there and in the Baltic has revealed the circulation of goods symbolized by English, French and German export ceramics, Rhenish wine barrels, and woolen textiles of still uncertain archaeological provenance. And, as Joachim Henning reminds us in Chapter 2, those early towns made some of their money on the bodies of Europeans, from slave sales. The first rays of light have even begun to fall on the penetration of early medieval longer-distance trading circuits into the countryside.10 Finally, the last few years have spawned at least three big books which integrate new data and the new understandings of old data into broader views of the early medieval economy.11 Such syntheses are indispensable. All the data in the world will not take us toward what really happened if we fail to organize the new data into plausible economic systems. Even when such syntheses (including, of course, my own) will be shown to come up short against new and better evidence and understandings, they will have served us

Lynn White Jr, Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford, 1962), pp. 41–57; Joachim Henning, “Germanisch-romanische Agrarkontinuität und -diskontinuität im nordalpinen Kontinentaleuropa – Teile eines Systemwandels? Beobachtungen aus archäologischer Sicht”, in Dieter Hägermann, Wolfgang Haubrichs, and Jörg Jarnut with Claudia Giefers (eds), Akkulturation: Probleme einer germanisch-romanischen Kultursynthese in Spätantike und frühem Mittelalter, Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, 41 (Berlin, 2004), pp. 396–435, here pp. 405–17.  See the Introduction to this volume, page 5. 10 Ben Palmer, “The Hinterlands of Three Southern English Emporia: Some Common Themes”, in Tim Pestell and Katharina Ulmschneider (eds), Markets in Early Medieval Europe. Trading and “Productive” Sites, 650–850 (Macclesfield, 2003), pp. 48–60, and Christopher Loveluck and Dries Tys, “Coastal Societies, Exchange and Identity along the Channel and Southern North Sea Shores of Europe, AD 600–1000”, Journal of Maritime Archaeology, 1 (2006): 140–69. 11 In chronological order, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000); Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy. Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300–900 (Cambridge, 2001), and Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800 (Oxford, 2005). 

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well if their formulations and analyses are clear and cogent enough to spark better investigations and explanations. Part One starts with just such a synthesis: Chris Wickham’s bold analysis of the regional and inter-regional forces of supply and demand. Building on the new data from archaeology, he locates the driving force for growing economic complexity in elite demand, itself the reflection of increasing wealth extracted from the countryside, which, he argues, must be addressed on the level of internal regional development. His is a stimulating model for integrating old and new data into broader conceptual patterns, and is sure to spark rich discussion. We move then to the village level to analyze broad patterns of changing rural economic organization as they appear, notably, from the archaeology of slave shackles and rural implements in Gaul, and from house and settlement types in Tuscany. Joachim Henning’s ambitious archaeological and historical synthesis addresses directly Wickham’s crucial question of labor, productivity and wealth in the countryside, but from a different angle, as it investigates rural slave or servile labor and its productivity in a comparative light. Henning asks how slaves or servile peasants may have affected the economic performance of the western provinces of the late Roman Empire in competition with the barbarian newcomers, on one hand. On the other, he challenges the new understanding of the Carolingian bipartite estate by underscoring the ambiguous archaeological evidence on the economic performance of the Carolingian countryside under the impact of the Frankish aristocracy’s new manorial system. In Chapter 3, Riccardo Francovich examines aristocratic impact on the countryside from another angle. In Tuscany, the archaeological and historical evidence illuminates the passage from the late Roman pattern of dispersed settlement dominated by villas and isolated farms to the medieval (and modern) one of nucleated villages. Pierre Toubert’s brilliant historical research into the Italian archives of the ninth and tenth centuries had uncovered the crucial process of incastellamento, the building of castelli (castles, usually small).12 Since the castles sit amidst villages, the ruling elites and their castelli were until now thought to have played the crucial role in reorganizing the Italian countryside into its productive medieval and later pattern of nucleated villages, and launching the rise of the agrarian economy. Francovich’s survey, mapping and test excavations of central Italy reveal that most villages had come into being long before the archives begin to document them and the building of castles. If we put ourselves in the place of the peasants whose villages were already centuries old when the great men arrived to build castles in their midst, and to use those forts to dominate, to extract revenues from those same peasants, the whole process appears in a

Pierre Toubert, Les structures du Latium médiéval: le Latium méridional et la Sabine du IXe siècle à la fin du XIIe siècle, Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 221 (Rome, 1973), along with his useful overview of the question: Pierre Toubert, “Les destinées d’un thème historiographique: Castelli et peuplement dans l’Italie médiévale”, in his Histoire du haut moyen âge et de l’Italie médiévale (London, 1987), no. V. 12

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new light, and with it, again, the stages of the growth of the medieval economy across that very long morning of early medieval Europe. These new interpretations of the early medieval economy were made possible by the emergence of large amounts of new evidence from archaeology. The next chapter introduces the reader to a major source of radically new data that is just beginning to become available from the new field of biomolecular archaeology. Immense untapped testimony on the early medieval economy lies buried in the bones of the people who created it. What did the peasants eat on those early medieval manors, and how much? Where did they come from, where did they move to? How did they hold their tools? How did the changing early medieval economy shape their life experience? Whom did the Anglo-Saxon conquerors choose as their mates? My own essay introduces the reader to the molecular revolution’s first results in investigating such questions. Finally, Angeliki Laiou’s concluding reflections in Chapter 5 offer insight into the whole set of questions opened by Part One, inspired by the salutary parallel of Byzantine developments. The depth of perception that comes with a comparative view emphasizes the importance of discovering the still largely missing links between the crucial developments in the countryside and the market circuits of trade that have only begun to emerge from the soil and the neglected written sources. Where do we go from here? Archaeological investigation must continue to devise carefully considered survey, sampling and excavation strategies to develop more new data for these questions, particularly from biomolecular evidence. The exploration of specific manors on the ground must be a high priority. Historians, natural scientists and archaeologists must work together to expand exploitation and reflection on the archaeological materials, along the lines of what we already attempt in Part One. Historians and philologists will have to collaborate to locate hitherto unidentified economic data in the written sources, thanks notably to the growing ranks of online databanks of medieval texts. And we must all deepen our understanding of modern economic and anthropological thinking about the economics and cultural patterns of development, agrarian management and change, demography, craft production, markets and trade. This expansion “outward” of our sources of information should not come at the expense of new empirical evidence from “within”, that is, from better-documented late medieval and early modern Europe, for instance, about the crucial process of rational managerial decision-making in the countryside.13 That, for the first time, we are glimpsing the complexity of developments in the early medieval countryside incites us to allow for the possibility of differing developments in different areas and, especially, of much greater dynamism over time, of sharp and repeated upturns and downturns in different aspects of Europe’s economic life across that long morning of half the medieval millennium.14 The new data and insights oblige us to be ready and David Stone, Decision-making in Medieval Agriculture (Oxford, 2005). Michael McCormick, “Complexity, Chronology and Context in the Early Medieval Economy”, EME, 12 (2003): 307–23. 13 14

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willing to return to texts that historians have reckoned to have said (or refused to yield) their last word, and to challenge the interpretations of their words that have accrued since the nineteenth century, in the light of the new, independent and often uncomfortable data emerging from archaeology.

Chapter 1

Rethinking the Structure of the Early Medieval Economy Chris Wickham

The early medieval economy tends to be studied in two ways. The first, which one could call the “production model”, focuses on the organisation of agriculture, including the intensity of the exploitation of dependent peasants. The second, the “distribution model”, focuses on exchange, particularly the study of the best-documented goods imported into any given region, and of the routes of merchants. These are long-established interpretative traditions, which in the latter case has been given further impetus in recent decades by archaeological discoveries. They have curiously little structural linkage, however. It is not that they have none; Adriaan Verhulst’s last book, his excellent overview of current approaches to the Carolingian economy, certainly discusses both. But how they link together has not been properly theorised, even by Verhulst. In the case of the “production model”, one reason is that well thoughtout work on the subject is comparatively recent. It was only in the 1960s that Verhulst showed that early medieval estates in the West were not all bipartite, “manorial”, with a genealogy going back into the Roman Empire, but that instead manors were only common from the Carolingian period, and only in the Frankish royal heartland, from the Seine to the Rhine, extending east to southern Germany and southeast to northern Italy. It was not until the 1980s that scholars such as Jean-Pierre Devroey and Pierre Toubert began to take the next step, and came to recognise that the novel intensity of peasant exploitation on the major north Frankish manors, with high rents and directed labour, documented in that particular Carolingian obsession, the estate survey or polyptych, made little sense if the produce thus accruing to lords was not in

Adriaan Verhulst, The Carolingian Economy (Cambridge, 2002). Detailed empirical studies along the lines of this paper can be found in Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 153–302, 693–824. I am very grateful to Leslie Brubaker for critiquing the text.  Adriaan Verhulst, “La genèse du régime domanial classique en France au haut moyen âge”, Agricoltura e mondo rurale in Occidente nell’alto Medioevo, Settimane, 13 (Spoleto, 1966), pp. 135–60. 

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large part sold. This overthrew a predominant model of the twentieth century, going back to Karl Bücher in the 1890s, according to which manors – and the early medieval economy in general – were “closed” economies, self-sufficient, with little or no exchange. This closed-economy model had never convinced everyone (Alfons Dopsch, for example), but versions of it were predominant until very recently; although these could be anthropologically sophisticated (as with Georges Duby’s use of Marcel Mauss), they certainly did not help much to understand the relationship between production and distribution. But recent work on Carolingian estate production, although much more attentive to the possibility of sale, is rather less specific when it comes to the question of who buys. Carolingian estates are set into a generalised image of active exchange, especially of artisanal goods, expressed by the flowering of North Sea ports such as Dorestad, and eighth- and ninth-century northern Europe in general is thus regarded by many as the starting-point for the active exchange economy of the eleventh century and onwards, with the Vikings seen not as a barrier, but as a bridge to later developments, thanks to their interest in trade. But how estates fit into that exchange economy is less clear in this historiography. Unclear, too, is the nature of the Merovingian economy, now seen (and rightly, in my view) as pre-manorial, not to speak of the Italian, Spanish, south French and English productive systems, which fit less well into the upbeat readings of the north Frankish world. If these are discussed in this more recent work, it is above all in terms of the changing patterns of peasant subjection, with the issue of when ancient slavery turned into medieval serfdom at the front of many historians’ minds. The changing intensity of that subjection is indeed important (less so the slavery-serfdom issue, for classic plantation slavery is hardly visible after 200 AD, and classic serfdom hardly exists before 1000); but it is seldom in this period linked to exchange. The “distribution model”, too, was made substantially more sophisticated in the 1980s, when archaeological discoveries came more into the mainstream of debate, thanks in particular to the pioneering syntheses of Andrea Carandini and his school for late Rome and of Richard Hodges for the early Middle Ages. Historians when studying exchange had up to then been reduced to the very  Jean-Paul Devroey, Etudes sur le grand domaine carolingien (Aldershot, 1993); Pierre Toubert, Dalla terra ai castelli (Turin, 1995).  Giuseppe Petralia, “A proposito dell’immortalità di ‘Maometto e Carlomagno’”, Storica, 1 (1995): 37–87, and Olivier Bruand, Voyageurs et marchandises aux temps carolingiens (Brussels, 2002), pp. 16–38, give good historiographic accounts; Georges Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy. Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century, trans. Howard B. Clarke (London, 1974), especially ch. 3.  Italian analyses are particularly good here: for example, Dominico Vera, “Le forme del lavoro rurale”, Morfologie sociali e culturali in Europa fra tarda antichità e alto Medioevo, Settimane, 45 (Spoleto, 1998), pp. 293–342; Francesco Panero, Schiavi servi e villani nell’Italia medievale (Turin, 1999).  Andrea Carandini (ed.), Società romana e impero tardoantico 3 (Bari, 1986); Clementina Panella, “Merci e scambi nel Mediterraneo in età tardoantica”, in Andrea Carandini et al. (eds), Storia di Roma 3.2 (Turin, 1993), pp. 613–97; Richard Hodges, Dark Age Economics (London, 1982);

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restricted range of evidence referred to in written sources, which were usually luxuries, goods that are by definition marginal to economic systems (three out of the four commodities discussed by Henri Pirenne were luxuries, for example, the fourth being papyrus; Dietrich Claude, too, in his summa of documentary references to west Mediterranean trade, from 1985, was still dealing with luxury trade most of the time). Archaeologists could, by contrast, provide evidence about bulk, low-cost artisanal goods, the major element of all large-scale exchange economies, such as iron-work, ceramics, and, if excavation conditions were right, cloth and timber; as well as some commonly traded foodstuffs, wine and oil, thanks to amphorae. A narrative of the fall and rise of inter-regional, particularly maritime, exchange that is finally credible could thus be produced, with a western Mediterranean involution beginning already around 450 and complete by 700, and an eastern Mediterranean crisis in the seventh century; in the North Sea and the Baltic, too, it was archaeology which showed just how active exchange was between 700 and 850. Syntheses of exchange internal to regions are rather less common, with few exceptions (here I would single out Sonia Gutiérrez’s archaeological work on southeast Spain and Olivier Bruand’s documentary work on northern France), but the materials for them are by now largely available; I will come back to this. What happened in the Mediterranean after 700 is also less clear in the archaeological surveys, but here we now have Mike McCormick’s magisterial synthesis based on the documented routes of travellers, which shows that an upturn began around 780 and continued through the ninth century and beyond, linking to Francia and the north as well. These narratives are not, however, linked to production. Hodges did not discuss it much, apart from his work on the artisanal production of S. Vincenzo al Volturno. Claude never discussed it at all. McCormick does, but his five pages on estates, sharp as they are, are overwhelmed by the 800 pages on everything else. But surely the two models go together more tightly than that? They are both characterising major elements in the early medieval economy, and their linkage is all the more important now we see that economy in less primitivist terms than often in the past. It is on that link that I want to concentrate my attention. The first main point I want to make in this respect is that the main lines of economic “development” are internal to regions. (“Development” is a valueRichard Hodges and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe (London, 1983).  Henri Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne (Brussels, 1937); Dietrich Claude, Der Handel im westlichen Mittelmeer während des Frühmittelalters = Klaus Düwel et al. (eds), Untersuchungen zu Handel und Verkehr der vor- und frühgeschichtlichen Zeit in Mittel- und Nordeuropa, Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, Philologisch-Historische Klasse, 3. Folge, nos 143–4, 150, 156, 180, 183, 227 (6 vols, Göttingen, 1985–97), vol. 2.  Sonia Gutiérrez Lloret, La cora de Tudmīr de la antigüedad tardía al mundo islámico (Madrid, 1996); Bruand, Voyageurs; Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD 300–900 (Cambridge, 2001).  Richard Hodges, Light in the Dark Ages (London, 1997); McCormick, Origins, pp. 6–11.

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laden term; I will keep it in quotation marks, and will return to its implications shortly.) This was true in every period, including today, except in a tiny handful of regions whose economic complexity was determined by their commitment to external exchange – which in the whole of the late Roman Empire was only true of the heartland of North Africa, that is, modern Tunisia, and parts of the Syrian and Palestinian coast; there were no such regions in the medieval period anywhere until Flanders in the eleventh or twelfth century. An active inter-regional exchange system in bulk goods is a sign that individual regions have gained sufficient internal complexity that it is profitable and secure to take the risk of depending on another region for some (seldom all) of an essential commodity. This in the late empire was underpinned by the state’s own movement of goods to feed its capitals and provide for its frontier armies, hence the now well-known density of circulation in the late Roman Mediterranean. Such a fiscal movement did not exist there in the early Middle Ages, for even tax-raising states like the Byzantine empire and the caliphate were fiscally decentralised, except for in the century of ‘Abbāsid reunification, c. 780–900. By contrast, the revival of Mediterranean exchange, in the tenth or eleventh century and onwards (and of North Sea exchange perhaps two centuries earlier), was based on commercial demand, and depended entirely on the complexity of the internal economies of each of the regions participating in it; as a result, this long-distance movement of goods did not match Roman levels of activity until the late Middle Ages. The patterns, the density, of the movement of goods inside regions like the Rhineland, northern Italy, Tunisia, are thus more important for understanding “development” than is longer-distance exchange; so is the size of the regions, for a dense economic network that integrates only eastern Suffolk, say, is less complex than one covering the whole of eastern England. But what then causes this regional “development”? Here the key problem is demand for goods. In any society that does not depend on mass buyingpower, the people who determined the basic scale and patterns of demand were elites, the privately wealthy and the people who took the benefits from tax systems where these existed: that is to say, landowners and political leaders, including kings and bishops. Elites might not need most agricultural products, for they had their own land (I will come back to the point); but, if they were rich, it is they who might buy artisanal products on a large enough scale to encourage productive complexity – or from further away, thus encouraging exchange complexity, if products were seen as better there. (Note that elites were defined in material terms by luxuries, but these were by no means all they bought; they had to feed and clothe their entourages and dependants too, a far greater expense, and these certainly did not wear silk and eat off silver – that is, bulk goods needed to be bought for them.) If aristocrats did buy on this scale, then peasantries and the urban poor, too, might be able to find good-quality products, sometimes also from further away, but still at accessible prices, because the economies of scale, substantial production and exchange systems, had been created already. Often, goods for the lower end of the

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market outweighed in value those for aristocrats and their entourages; but elite consumption structured such systems all the same. Peasantries and the poor were not yet a sufficiently consistent, prosperous, market for economies of scale to exist just for them, particularly given the absence of sophisticated and responsive structures for the movement of goods. Early medieval exchange was not, then, for the most part self-sustaining, except possibly in the relationship between the large cities of the Levant and Egypt and their rural hinterlands; and even these cities essentially drew their wealth from the landowning elites who lived in them. Conversely, if elites were restricted in wealth, then the scale of their demand would be rather less, and elite identity might be simply marked by a few luxuries; the market for bulk goods would accordingly be much smaller, and would simplify. This must have been what happened, for example, in fifth-century Britain, where all the known industries of the later empire (the best-known are, as usual in archaeology, for ceramics) stopped abruptly between 400 and 450; so did urbanism; so did well-built rural aristocratic housing. By 500, Britons and Anglo-Saxons alike had very few artisanal goods that could not be produced inside a single village, often inside individual households, and the simplicity of the hand-made ceramics of the early Anglo-Saxons implies that even the pottery kiln had disappeared (simple pots can be fired without kilns). Only luxury metalwork and glasswork was more specialized, and there is no sign that this was the object of commercial exchange rather than the work of craftsmen directly dependent on kings and lords.10 This dramatic change is best seen as the result of a rapid decrease in elite wealth, as state structures vanished and aristocrats turned into small-scale local leaders, with less access to agrarian surplus. Britain is at an extreme here, but there were other regions in which we find moments of sharp productive simplification in the archaeological record, such as the coast of southeastern Spain after 650 or so, or inland Greece and the northern Balkans in the same period, in each of which localised hand-made ceramics become predominant in the archaeology for the first time;11 and there were many more where production and distribution became less complex, although still remaining relatively specialised. The paradox is that if elites were less wealthy in these regions, then they must have been taking less from the peasant majority, either because they took less from each individual peasant family or because they had fewer dependants to take surplus from, leaving more peasants without any landlord at all. Peasants as a whole had logically, therefore, to be better off than under the Roman Empire, because they could produce as much, if they wanted, but were giving less to landowners and rulers; but they 10 Compare A. Simon Esmonde-Cleary, The Ending of Roman Britain (London, 1989) with Christopher J. Arnold, An Archaeology of the Early Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, 2nd edn (London, 1997). 11 Gutiérrez, La cora; Ēlias Anagnōstakēs and Natalia Poulou-Papadēmētriou, “Ē prōtobyzantinē Messēnē (5os–7os aiōnas) kai problēmata tēs cheiropoiētēs keramikēs stēn Peloponnēso”, Symmeikta, 11 (1997): 229–322.

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had less access to well-made goods. In our period, in other words, elaborate production patterns and large-scale bulk exchange are above all the signs of exploitation and the resultant hierarchies of wealth. Indeed, if one wants to use the term “development” at all, this is what one is implicitly praising, and maybe “economic complexity” is a more appropriate, because more neutral, phrase. Having established that elite wealth is the essential motor of regional exchange complexity, however, we have then to look at productive relationships. Three questions seem to be important here. How far did the rich derive their wealth simply from the scale of their landowning, how much land did they have, and how widely was it spread? (The greater the geographical range, the more goods had to be moved even inside a single estate network, creating a more complex distribution pattern, which merchants could use too.) Or, how far did the rich, instead or as well, derive wealth from a more intensive exploitation of their dependent tenants? In principle, they might have also derived it from more intensive productive techniques; in the non-Mediterranean West, there are some signs of such intensification in the eighth and ninth centuries, such as infield manuring, the expansion of arable cultivation, or the spread of watermills – Joachim Henning’s paper in this volume clarifies matters here.12 But these seem to me to be less important for elite wealth than the weight of rent, and this would be so for some centuries to come too. Finally, how far did the rich derive wealth from access to the spoils of the tax system, where it still existed? In order to understand elite wealth, then, we have to look above all at the size and geographical spread of aristocratic estates (and those of the Church and of kings); at the intensity of exploitation as shown in references to rents and services; and at the scale of taxation, including any evidence we have of what it was spent on, and how much ended up in the hands of local elites. These each carry different implications for the social relationships between lords and peasants, and for the opportunities for the autonomy and the prosperity of different peasant strata. But all of them in economic terms contributed to the wealth of the rich, and thus their buying-power, and thus the possibility for a complex exchange system, and thus for a complex pattern of artisanal production, perhaps complex enough to supply a region of considerable size – if global elite wealth was great enough. The sources we might use to assess global wealth are mostly documentary; by contrast, those which give us most direct information about exchange complexity are mostly archaeological. Not all; it depends on the product. The evidence for the transport and exchange of grain is mostly documentary; so is that for textiles (though very wet and very dry sites preserve cloth, and loomweights are archaeologically common – traces of looms, too, have sometimes been found); so is that for slaves, as Mike McCormick definitively shows.13 The 12 Helena Hamerow, Early Medieval Settlements: The Archaeology of Rural Communities in Northwest Europe, 400–900 (Oxford, 2002); Etienne Champion, Moulins et meuniers carolingiens dans les polyptyques entre Loire et Rhin (Paris, 1996). See further Chapter 2 in this volume. 13 McCormick, Origins, pp. 733–77.

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most widespread artisanal product found on archaeological sites is certainly ceramics, and the origins of pots can also more easily be identified, through style and petrology, than is possible for the next most widespread products, iron and glass. Coinage is, of course, the type of find which can most easily be provenanced and dated, but it is a less immediate guide to bulk exchange systems than is pottery: in part because the role of the state in coin production and distribution is often very large; in part because only copper/bronze coins were low-value enough to be a plausible part of a bulk exchange system for most people, and most early medieval economies did not mint them (gold is obviously out of the question, and even a silver denarius must have had a fairly restricted role for most people; if the synod of Frankfurt of 794 is right to imply that a single denarius could buy 12 two-pound wheaten loaves, it was worth about $20 in today’s currency). One might want to argue about that; and Olivier Bruand, in particular, has done some very sensitive work on north French silver hoards in the ninth century, in which he shows that most mints then had a radius of under 100 km for most of their coins, but that those of the Seine valley had a regular radius going up to 200 km, and those of the Channel ports rather more – these are microregional differences that are probably good guides to the internal structures of the economy as a whole.14 Even the most economically complex region, it must be noted in passing, still had a preponderance of its goods produced or consumed very locally. Carolingian north Francia, which certainly had a complex economy, was unified by some large-scale and widely-spread ceramic productions, the wares of Badorf and nearby sites just outside Cologne, of La Londe near Rouen, of Mayen near Trier, as well as a thin film of coinage from far-off mints, but also had local ceramics (and coins) alongside these regional products in every area.15 Even local ceramics, in most of north Francia, were professionally made, however, a fact which adds to one’s sense of the complexity of the region, and which sets it off from some of the other regions of the West (Spain, for example16). When the published archaeology is dense enough, these sorts of counterpositions can become quite solidly based. Three decades ago, it never was dense enough, except perhaps in England; by now, the regions of the West where we cannot say anything about patterns of this kind are relatively few – Aquitaine is one, post-Byzantine Africa is another, Sicily is a third, Portugal a fourth, but in most cases we are better served quite close by, in Languedoc or Calabria. Ceramics stand for the bulk production of necessities, above all textiles, rather than being MGH LL 2, Capitularia regum Francorum, ed. Alfred Boretius, vol. 1 (Hanover, 1883), no. 28, c. 4, p. 74; Bruand, Voyageurs, pp. 155–84. 15 See, in general, Daniel Piton (ed.), La céramique du Vème au Xème siècle dans l’Europe du NordOuest, Nord-Ouest archéologie, numéro hors-série (Arras, 1993). 16 See Luís Caballero Zoreda et al. (eds), Cerámicas tardorromanas y altomedievales en la Península Ibérica (Madrid, 2003), especially Miguel Alba and Santiago Feijoo, “Pautas evolutivas de la cerámica común de Mérida en épocas visigoda y emiral”, pp. 483–504, and Sonia Pérez Alvarado et al., “Las primeras cerámicas de Marroquíes Bajos (Jaén) entre la Tardoantigüedad y el Islam”, pp. 389–410. 14

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the most essential artisanal product at any time; nor can we assume that the detail of the distribution of textiles and other goods exactly matched those of ceramics. In scale, however, both its production and its distribution probably did. Overall, the scale, professionalisation, and geographical range of ceramic production in my view tells us more about exchange complexity than anything else at our disposal. The economic model presented here is a fairly simple one: that in any given region during the early Middle Ages, elite wealth and exchange complexity were inescapably related, and that one is, other things being equal, a secure guide to the other. This is still an argument about bulk exchange; elites of course also had luxuries, but looking for luxuries will not help a global argument about exchange, as luxuries changed much less from simpler to more complex economies – seventh-century Suffolk was not economically complex, even though its ruler had the wealth of Sutton Hoo. I have been arguing this overall relationship theoretically; but I would also argue that it works empirically. Let us look briefly at northern Francia and northern Italy between 550 and 900 to make the point, these two areas (together with Egypt) having by far the best documentary evidence for the post-Roman world. I have just made brief reference to ninthcentury internal exchange in northern Francia, which could be very dense; there was a trade in foodstuffs, too, probably originating in the fact that the northern boundary for wine cultivation runs through the region, so that wine could easily be sold northwards, as in the case of the great Saint-Denis fair, as McCormick and Bruand have noted (Bruand plausibly proposes that wool from the Rhine delta was bought in exchange).17 Specialist vineyards seem to have been the earliest examples we have of demesnes, too, and the intensification of production characteristic of the manor may have begun here, developing into grain production as towns expanded and, perhaps above all, armies got larger.18 It needs to be stressed, however, that north Frankish exchange had always been relatively complex in our period. Argonne ware, an industrial late Roman grey sigillata fine ware, survived to nearly 600 with a substantial distribution area in the Seine and Meuse basins; Mayen ware, already mentioned, had existed without a break since the fourth century, and was always available from the middle Rhine down to the sea, in what was by 700 the widest range for any ceramic type north of the Aegean.19 There was always an exchange hierarchy in the Frankish world, that is to say, which integrated each of the great river basins of the North internally; in the Carolingian period, the rivers were steadily linked together into a wider network, but there was a strong basis for that linkage Bruand, Voyageurs, pp. 203–34, 242–4; McCormick, Origins, pp. 639–69, especially pp. 647–53. 18 For bibliography, see Wickham, Framing, pp. 285–92. 19 Didier Bayard, “La céramique dans le Nord de la Gaule à la fin de l’Antiquité (de la fin du IVème au VIème siècle)”, in Piton, La céramique, pp. 107–28; Mark Redknap, “Medieval Pottery Production at Mayen”, in David R.M. Gaimster et al. (eds), Zur Keramik des Mittelalters und der beginnenden Neuzeit im Rheinland, British Archaeological Reports, 1440 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 3–37. 17

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already under the Merovingians. It is also, however, the case that Frankish elites were particularly rich. The wealth of Merovingian and Carolingian kings is well known; but their aristocrats were also major landowners. The 16 wills of the Merovingian period after 550, which give near-complete extents of the testator’s landowning, show only three with less than ten estates (villae), two of these for the only women in the list acting alone (the discourse of aristocratic wealth is characteristically, as Janet Nelson has stressed, a very gendered one); conversely, four wills out of 16 list over 75 estates. And these could stretch very widely: they tended to have foci in one or two counties, but from there they could extend across most of a river basin, or sub-kingdom.20 They had the wealth to sustain large armed entourages (which could cause serious difficulties for Merovingian rulers) and also, partially as a result, the large-scale exchange systems just described. No survey of Carolingian aristocratic wealth exists, unfortunately,21 but no-one who follows the far-flung careers of the Rhineland Reichsaristokratie, the Guidones or the Rupertines or the Unruochings, could doubt that it had expanded still further, following the extension of royal authority (and also, as the capitularies imply, at the expense of surviving independent peasants22). Merovingian aristocratic landowning, and exchange, already linked together large river valleys; Carolingian aristocratic landowning, and exchange, linked together the entire region of northern Francia. Northern Italy was different, even though the region was much smaller. The huge scale of the great senatorial landowners, who possessed land from Italy to Africa, had largely vanished after the Gothic war, except for in Sicily, and nothing is heard of the latter after 700. Eighth-century Lombard and Byzantine aristocrats in the North, based above all in cities (which were larger than in Francia), were much more contained. If ten estates were close to the minimum for Frankish aristocrats, it was close to the maximum for north Italian ones, and between four and eight was normal: enough to live comfortably on, but not enough to sustain a private army, and, crucially, not enough to sustain an exchange system. Some dukes and some episcopal churches owned more, but, again, not that much more in most cases. And landowning was more geographically concentrated than in Francia, generally in a single city territory. Probably the only owners in Italy who could match great Frankish aristocrats such as Berthram of Le Mans (d. c. 620) were the rulers of the peninsula, the king, the pope, the dukes For will lists, see Wickham, Framing, p. 189, n. 96; for female wills, see Janet L. Nelson, “The Wary Widow”, in Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre (eds), Property and Power in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 82–113. 21 There are fewer Carolingian wills, particularly north of the Alps: Brigitte Kasten, “Erbrechtliche Verfügungen des 8. und 9. Jahrhunderts”, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Germanistische Abteilung, 107 (1990): 236–338. For some examples and global figures, see Jean-Pierre Devroey, Economie rurale et société dans l’Europe franque (VIe–IXe siècles), vol. 1 (Paris, 2003), pp. 267–96. 22 References in Eckhard Müller-Mertens, Karl der Grosse, Ludwig der Fromme, und die Freien (Berlin, 1963). For aristocratic spread, see Régine Le Jan, Famille et pouvoir dans le monde franc (VIIe–Xe siècle) (Paris, 1995), pp. 401–13. 20

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of Spoleto and Benevento; and no one could have come near the landowning of the Frankish kings themselves. Italy was urbanised, but its early medieval elites were poor by Roman or Frankish standards.23 This matches our evidence for exchange. Professional pottery production continued throughout the early Middle Ages, but its scale dropped considerably in the seventh century, and all we find for two centuries are highly localised common-ware and coarse-ware types, which only slowly began to regain a certain standardisation in the ninth century, a period in which imported wares from central Italy are also fitfully documented, in particular around Ravenna. The tiny number of Lombard coin finds from the eighth century, when mints are named on coins, is too small to add to this, but such finds at least back up such a localisation, and imported coin again only begins to survive in hoards in the ninth century. The only bulk commodity known by archaeologists to have been available across the region was cooking containers made of pietra ollare, soapstone mined in the Alps; one might add salt, following a handful of documentary citations, but salt distribution is the only exchange network to survive when all others fail, given its necessity for the human diet, and documents which stress the salt trade are in effect highlighting the absence of other goods.24 There were, of course, luxury imports, and Venice would soon be developing the slave trade, as McCormick has stressed, but in terms of an exchange system, northern Italy was a network of separate city territories and not much else when Charlemagne conquered it in 773–74. In the ninth century there was a little more regionallevel activity (and more sign of a regional-level aristocracy), but in my reading of the evidence the rise of the thriving cities of the central medieval Po plain was a tenth-century development, with only a few exceptions, and it began with the regularisation of city-country exchange and the development of local artisanal specialisation, not in any case, except Venice, international trade. This once again fits the characteristic localisation of the Italian aristocracy. The broad lines of early medieval economic “development” have been seen in a variety of different ways by historians: in terms of broad continuity, of fifth23 Chris Wickham, “Aristocratic Power in Eighth-Century Lombard Italy”, in Alexander C. Murray (ed.), After Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History (Toronto, 1998), pp. 152–70. 24 Gian Pietro Brogiolo and Sauro Gelichi, “La ceramica comune in Italia settentrionale tra IV e VII secolo”, in Lucia Saguì (ed.), Ceramica in Italia: VI–VII secolo (Florence, 1998), pp. 209–26; Sauro Gelichi and Francesca Sbarra, “La tavola di San Gerardo. Ceramica tra X e XI secolo nel nord Italia: importazioni e produzioni locali”, Rivista di archeologia, 27 (2003): 119–41; Antonio Alberti, “Produzione e commercializzazione della pietra ollare in Italia settentrionale tra tardoantico e altomedioevo”, in Sauro Gelichi (ed.), Io Congresso nazionale di archeologia medievale (Florence, 1997), pp. 335–9; Ermanno Arslan, “La circolazione monetaria (secoli V–VIII)”, in Riccardo Francovich and Ghislaine Noyé (eds), La storia dell’alto medioevo italiano (VI–X secolo) alla luce dell’archeologia (Florence, 1994), pp. 497–519, especially pp. 512–14 for coin-lists. For salt, Ludo M. Hartmann, Zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte Italiens im frühen Mittelalter. Analekten (Gotha, 1904), pp. 123–4, and Cesare Manaresi (ed.), I placiti del regnum Italiae (Rome, 1955), no. 56, pp. 193–8. More upbeat are Cinzio Violante, La società milanese nell’età precomunale (Bari, 1953), pp. 3–70; Chris Wickham, Early Medieval Italy (London, 1981), pp. 88–91; McCormick, Origins, pp. 630–38.

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century or seventh-century catastrophe, of ninth-century or eleventh-century revival, but for most historians the images of change are western Europe-wide, and often very teleological, leading as they appear to do to eventual western European hegemony. I would reject that teleology (well into the central Middle Ages, or indeed later, global economic dominance would have seemed more plausible if based on the banks of the Nile or the Yangtse, rather than the Rhine); but also, as the reader will have already gathered, I would prefer to focus on a set of regional histories, which often had very distinct rhythms as they became more complex or more simple in their hierarchies of wealth and overall economic structure. In Britain, elite wealth and economic complexity dropped precipitously in the fifth century, and only really began to revive in the eighth century on the east coast, and in the ninth in the Midlands and South. In Francia as a whole, the low point for wealth and exchange was again the fifth, but in most places it was not much of a dip, and by 600 Frankish aristocrats were the richest in Europe, and, as a class, went on getting richer – small wonder Charlemagne could conquer most of the Latin world in the late eighth century. In Spain, the fifth century saw a regionalisation in inland areas, but it was the eighth that saw an economic and political fragmentation, and also simplification, except probably in Arab-ruled Andalucía. In Italy, that process was above all a feature of the sixth century, and can be associated with the Gothic war; localisation was also, it must be added, more pronounced in the north than in the south, where elite wealth and regional-level exchange activity remained substantial throughout our period, although not as great as in Francia. In the North African heartland, finally, the economically most complex part of the western Roman Empire, the crisis was seventh-century, particularly after 650; the eighth century, ill documented though it is, shows a very localised and simple economy indeed, until an equally ill-documented late ninth- or tenthcentury revival. This is a very heterogeneous set of developments; all the same, it has some common features, for each region saw a moment of economic simplification, even if of different intensities, and even if staggered across the period 400– 700; each also saw a moment when the regional economy became more complex again, which in Francia was already in the sixth century, but in the western regions as a whole can be dated to the ninth. These rough dates fit the eastern Mediterranean too, for the Byzantine empire’s moment of economic simplification was 650–800, and so was it in the Levant, the heartland of the caliphate between 661 and 750, although that simplification was far less severe there; only in Egypt did the internal structures of the regional economy not really change at all. If we return to a Europe-wide – or, better, a Roman Empire-wide – level of explanation, I think we have to recognize that these initial dates each fit moments of political crisis and localisation; and, given that elite wealth was an essential motor of economic complexity, I think we have to conclude that the political crisis of the Roman world was not only not good for the coherence of fiscal structures (which elites also benefited from), but was also not good for

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aristocratic landowning, and aristocratic authority in general. Conversely, the ninth century was the first period in which political borders across almost all the former empire were essentially stable (Sicily is one exception; England at the end of the century is another), allowing for the recomposition of aristocratic landowning, which can be documented in one way or another almost everywhere, and in the southern and eastern Mediterranean, the recomposition of state systems as well. Foci for wealth increased in intensity and number as a result, and exchange followed on from that. This settling of aristocratic power, it must be noted, does not depend on the economic continuity of individual families or groups of families, as long as incoming or rising replacements replicated their wealth. Global aristocratic wealth can be stable even if an aristocracy is entirely replaced, as after the Norman conquest of England, which had no effect on English economic complexity. Generalisation at this level is dangerous, for the wider one attempts it, the more exceptions there are. One is Africa, whose crisis was partly political, but also partly derived from the region’s unusual dependence on a Mediterraneanwide exchange system, which was definitively ending in the seventh century; another is, eventually, Francia itself, which broke up into several pieces c. 900, even though its external boundaries remained, without global aristocratic wealth and exchange being affected. The aristocracy as a whole did not lose from that political crisis, but I would argue that this was because the Frankish aristocracy was itself rapidly changing in its internal structure, to the benefit of a lesser stratum, more interested in local domination and the targeted exploitation of their neighbours than their predecessors had been – as in eleventh-century England, global aristocratic wealth remained, even if in Francia the greater aristocracy lost ground.25 But, even taking these exceptions into account, I would argue that the correlations hold. The way political crisis affected elite wealth and dominance depended, essentially, on the way that wealth and dominance was itself structured, which varied very greatly from place to place. It is aristocratic wealth and thus demand that tie together the “production model” and the “distribution model” characterised at the start. So, if one follows how much land aristocrats had, how it was exploited, and how such people related to the structures of political power, one can come to understand the entire kaleidoscope of not only economic, but also political, change in the early Middle Ages. But my core point remains the economic one: to repeat, the complexity of exchange inside any given region throughout the early Middle Ages depended on the global wealth of that region’s elites. I am not fond of aristocrats, but one does not have to like them to recognize their importance. These basic causal relationships continued into the central Middle Ages, too. They lasted until exchange became Duby, Early Growth, especially pp. 172–80 for the seigneurie banale taking more wealth from the peasantry, and underpinning an upturn which he saw as post-dating 1000. The whole feudal revolution debate was focused on this, but economic change was not a major element in it. See, most recently, Eric Bournazel and Jean-Pierre Poly (eds), Les féodalités (Paris, 1998), with bibliography. 25

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self-fuelling, not dependent on aristocratic wealth and choices. Was that the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as would be argued by commercialization theorists of British and European economic history? The dating is entirely possible. But central and late medieval economic historians take aristocratic, great-landowner, demand for granted, simply because it never again goes away. I would propose, on the basis of having studied a period when such demand did go away in many areas and then came back, with the effects discussed in this chapter, that even in the late Middle Ages, and certainly in the central Middle Ages, elite demand was the underpinning which created a relatively high baseline, for the economic rises and falls which are then argued about in different ways by different schools of economic historians. This, however, is for experts in other periods to develop.

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Chapter 2

Strong Rulers – Weak Economy? Rome, the Carolingians and the Archaeology of Slavery in the First Millennium AD Joachim Henning

Rome did not die in a battle. Rome’s death lasted centuries. It survived for a thousand years in Byzantium, and Charlemagne attempted a rebirth in the eighth century. Curious though it may seem, important elements for understanding Rome’s decline emerge from an analysis of what happened, or more precisely, of what went wrong with Europe’s economy when powerful and, militarily, successful Frankish rulers tried to reinvent the Roman villa estate. Conversely, how the late antique agrarian economy fostered Rome’s downfall, at least in the West, illuminates the Carolingian situation. This essay will use archaeological data to explore comparatively the problem of productivity in the late Roman and Carolingian countrysides, focusing on the interplay of coercion, the logic of farming organization, and technology. Archaeology addresses this question by analyzing material remains of late Roman and early medieval times. Founded on natural sciences such as botany, soil micromorphology, zoology, chemistry and climatology, the results of settlement archaeology are particularly important. Nor can archaeologists ignore recent research based on written sources. We should not misconstrue a dense written record as the objectively illuminated reality of that time, and we underestimate the tight connection of medieval writing and power structures at our peril.

 For the late antique roots of the Carolingian estate, see Peter Sarris, “The Origins of the Manorial Economy: New Insights from Late Antiquity”, English Historical Review, 69 (2004): 279–311.  I am most grateful to Mike McCormick and the undergraduate and graduate students and colleagues of Harvard’s History Department for a semester of remarkable discussions of the early medieval written record, its relations to archaeological findings, and the advances of scientific archaeology. This unforgettable experience peaked in the New Directions conference and two interdisciplinary workshops I had the pleasure of organizing with Mike at Harvard in autumn 2005. I am especially grateful to Jennifer Davis and Mike for their patience with an archaeologist’s foibles.

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Writing was in the hands of the mighty. It is not therefore impossible that the eighth century’s sharp increase in documents such as polyptychs, donations or capitularies reflects the growing economic power of the Carolingian high nobility rather than a more productive organization of the whole society. Overlooking this simple insight, earlier work has sometimes tended to equate abundant charters and economic efficiency. In light of the scarce written evidence between 500 and 700 AD, we should be cautious about assuming an economic “awakening of the eighth century”, so long as we do not really know how economic (especially rural) organization worked in the first post-Roman centuries, that is before the Carolingian manor spread over Europe. In the light of archaeology, it could turn out that the establishment of the Carolingian villa, the bipartite estate or manor, was merely an awakening of power structures whose impact on the rural economy was more quantitative than qualitative. When evaluating the success or failure of modern organizations, it seems normal to begin with their economic efficiency and their ability to react flexibly to changing challenges. How can we consider the end of the “Roman empire as a business concern” or its “hostile takeover” by new social forces without such an economic perspective? Territorial conquest as it occurred in the late Roman West does not necessarily transform the economy. Yet the very principles of agriculture, the basic form of economic production of the pre-modern world, changed fundamentally in this period. Judging from the growing archaeological record, rural villae and servi, villas and slaves, survived in the Frankish heartland mostly as terms in the written records. In contrast, rural settlement patterns and social structures as they appear on the ground, for instance in cemeteries as well as in agricultural practices, indicate a broad new logic of organization. For more details, see Walter Pohl and Paul Herold (eds), Vom Nutzen des Schreibens, Denkschriften der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, 306 (Vienna, 2002) and Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1995).  Jean-Pierre Devroey, “The Economy”, in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The Early Middle Ages: Europe 400–1000 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 97–129, here p. 104.  Chris Wickham’s discussion of the “logic of the economic system” is most stimulating: Land and Power (London, 1994), pp. 77–98. For him, in the second century the slave mode of production declined, which, at its core, had consisted of the agricultural use of chattel slaves. The new system that unfolded in the second and third centuries would have consisted of: “the combination between a greater autonomy for what can now be called peasants, the dominance of an economic system based essentially on subsistence agriculture, and the end of effective intervention by landlords in the procedure of production ...” (p. 85). Wickham is skeptical that late or provincial villas can be associated with slavery (for example, p. 87: “Who is to say that every villa was a slave villa?”), but the archaeological finds presented in this paper suggest coerced labor in the late Roman countryside. From an archaeological perspective, I would hesitate to locate the crucial turning point in the second and third centuries inside the Roman Empire. I have argued that the new economic logic did indeed begin then, but outside the empire, and that it gradually expanded into former Roman territories in the fourth and fifth centuries: Joachim Henning, “Germanisch-romanische Agrarkontinuität und -diskontinuität im nordalpinen Kontinentaleuropa — Teile eines Systemwandels? Beobachtungen aus archäologischer Sicht”, in Dieter Hägermann, Wolfgang Haubrichs and Jörg Jarnut, with Claudia Giefers (eds), Akkulturation – Probleme einer germanisch-romanischen Kultursynthese in Spätantike und frühem Mittelalter, Ergänzungsbände zum 

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What are the reasons for this reorganization that had begun some hundred years before Clovis conquered Gaul? The nature of the reorganization itself may supply the answer. The shift from the classical Roman villa to the use of tenant labor in the late empire was an important step toward a new organization of the rural world. But was this change a complete turnaround, which solved the basic problem of earlier villa organization, namely how to increase the productivity of rural labor in an essentially exploitative system? The use of slave or dependent labor could be highly oppressive and required a combination of incentives and coercion. Roman agricultural writers had long discussed this problem with surprising frankness. Columella, for instance, advised winning over selected slaves to the owner’s side by intensive conversation and convincing them that their good work was indispensable for the whole villa community. Unfortunately, this approach probably worked mainly on slaves of rather limited intelligence. The other slaves – the critical ones for improving productivity, for example in the highly sophisticated vineyards – wound up doing their fieldwork in chains. Archaeological finds of Roman-era slave chains (see Figure 2.1) throw doubt on the idea that a shift to the self-managing colonus on late antique estates actually solved the problem of servile productivity. Although Rostovtzeff presented only those well-known first-century iron shackles from the villas around Pompeii, iron shackles and fetters are not confined to the first two Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, 41 (Berlin, 2004), pp. 396–435. On the other hand, Wickham’s description of the “new logic” seems an excellent starting point for defining the post-Roman economic system.  Columella, De re rustica 1.3 and 7–8. See also Andrea Carandini, “Columella’s Vineyard and the Rationality of the Roman Economy”, Opus, 2 (1983): 177–203.  Since 1990, I have identified over 400 iron slave or prisoner shackles from all over Europe, from the pre-Roman Iron Age through around 1500 AD. I am especially grateful to F. Hugh Thompson (d. 1995), who had independently begun collecting iron shackles from Roman and pre-Roman times, for a most generous exchange of archaeological data between 1991 and 1993. Due to technical problems and errors that arose in the posthumous publication of his The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Slavery (London, 2003) and in his late article “Iron Age and Roman Slave-Shackles”, Archaeological Journal, 150 (1993): 57–168, his typology and datings require revision in small but sometimes decisive details. My own study, which focused on post-Roman shackles (“Gefangenenfesseln im slawischen Siedlungsraum und der europäische Sklavenhandel im 6. bis 12. Jahrhundert”, Germania, 70 (1992): 403–26), probably arrived too late for him to fully exploit. Earlier (William H. Manning, Catalogue of the Romano-British Iron Tools, Fittings, and Weapons in the British Museum (London, 1985), pp. 61–4) as well as more recent efforts to classify Roman shackles (Ernst Künzl, “Schlösser und Fesseln”, in Ernst Künzl, Die Alamannenbeute aus dem Rhein bei Neupotz, Monographien des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums, 34 (4 vols, Mainz, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 365–78), either rely on too small a selection (Manning studies only Roman material from the UK) or seem too general (Künzl only distinguishes between two types, and misidentifies some objects, for example an animal chain from the iron hoard of Brović in Serbia; the objects from Mannersdorf in Austria are plow, animal and kitchen chains). My new, more detailed typology incorporates as many aspects as possible of Thompson’s classification and combines these with my organization of the post-Roman material collected in central and eastern Europe (Henning, “Gefangenenfesseln”). The full publication with classification and detailed dating of the abundant material is in preparation.

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centuries AD and their “plantation slavery”. When, in the later third century, Germanic invaders surprised and devastated the Roman farmhouses of the western provinces, the farms’ cellars were filled not only with iron tools, but also with slave chains (see Figure 2.2). Afterwards some buildings of such former villas experienced new and different uses. Rural populations occupied former villa sites, although some impressive building compounds, sometimes even palaces (which typically lacked production installations) still existed in the countryside.10 The period of the second Germanic wave of devastation of the mid-fourth to the early fifth century produced an archaeological picture of shackle finds that differs surprisingly little from earlier times.11 Coins assign the best-dated examples of such chains to the second half of the fourth century in a late Roman well on a Rhenish villa site, and in a Roman iron hoard uncovered in the Palatinate near a villa that might still have been functioning in the fourth century.12 The archaeological data from some 18 villa sites that mostly date from the earlier third through the fourth centuries is revealing. Even more shackles and related objects come from late antique vici (non-agrarian hamlets, small  Michael Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (Oxford, 1926), pl. 9.2.  Pedro Manuel Berges Soriano, “Las ruinas de ‘Els Munts’”, Información Arqueológica, 3 (1979): 81–7, here p. 84 (Altafulla, Spain: shackles with human bones from a Roman villa basement, destroyed in the second half of the third century); Rudolf Laur-Belart and Victorine von Gonzenbach, “Römische Zeit”, Jahrbuch der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft für Urgeschichte, 37 (1946): 66–86, here pp. 76f., pl. 10, fig. 2 (Jona, Switzerland: shackles from a cellar or secondary building of a Roman villa, late third century); Willem Caes, “De landbouw in Noord-Gallie: Een onderzoek naar de Gallo-Romeinse landbouwwerktuigen uit België” (unpublished licentiate thesis, Leuven University, 1984), catalogue (Jette, Belgium: shackles from a Roman villa cellar, with agricultural implements, destroyed in the third century). From a late Roman basement: Mark Reginald Hull, Roman Colchester, Society of Antiquaries Report, 20 (London, 1958), pp. 106–18, pl. 21. From an oil mill’s cellar belonging to a Roman villa, found with human bones in Milreu, distrito de Castel Branco, Portugal: I thank the excavator, Felix Teichner, for sharing this unpublished find from the second half of the third century. 10 The palace-like building of Bad Kreuznach (built around 250 AD) was transformed into a burgus, a fortified tower, in the fourth century: Ronald Knöchlein, “Die nachantike Nutzung der Bad Kreuznacher Palastvilla”, Mainzer Archäologische Zeitschrift, 2 (1995): 197–209; cf. too the large villa of Echternach: Jeannot Metzler, Johny Zimmer, and Lothar Bakker, “Die römische Villa von Echternach (Luxemburg) und die Anfänge der mittelalterlichen Grundherrschaft”, in Walter Janssen and Dietrich Lohrmann (eds), Villa-Curtis-Grangia (Munich, 1983), pp. 30–45, here p. 38, fig. 5. At Vieux-Rouen (Somme, France) – – archaeological investigation showed that the large second-century Roman villa was transformed into a palace without signs of farming installations in the fourth century. Further late Roman rural palaces: Bad Dürkheim (Rheinland-Pfalz; with a fourth-century burgus), Saint-Just-en-Chaussée (Oise, France), Blanzy-les-Fismes (Aisne, France), Mogorjelo (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Kostin brod (Bulgaria) and several cases around Trier (Konz, Leudersdorf, Nennig, Wittlich, and so on). 11 See especially the well-dated shackles from Epiais Rhus (France, fourth-century Roman villa context), Cologne (a well with late Roman material), Mainz (fourth-century building with a set of iron tools), Great Chesterfort (UK, late Roman iron hoard). 12 Respectively, at Bengel: Wolfgang Binsfeld, “Metallgerät aus einem römischen Brunnen”, in Römer-Illustrierte, 2 (Cologne, 1975), pp. 183f., and Helmut Bernhard, “Der spätrömische Depotfund von Lingenfeld”, Mitteilungen des Historischen Vereins der Pfalz, 79 (1981): 5–103.

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towns), fortifications, urban centers, and even burials (Figure 2.2).13 These late Roman iron manacles, shackles, and fetters illustrate that the Roman agricultural system continued to rely on physically coerced labor. Whether tenants or slaves dominated on late Roman villas, it is hard to deny that the countryside was organized by the elite and exploited for the aristocracy’s own benefit.14 The Codex Theodosianus, which indicates that iron shackles could also be used for coloni who fled from an estate, shows that independently of their legal status, agricultural workers were subjected to coercive force in order to make them work.15 To my knowledge, no late antique rural settlement structure in the territories under continuous Roman control compares to the distinctive rural structures documented in large numbers outside the imperial frontier and from post-Roman Gaul or, very exceptionally, in areas temporarily occupied by Germanic groups in the mid-fourth century.16 These settlements were surely true villages – that 13 Virton “Chateau Renard” (Belgium, shackles from a fourth-century fortification): documentation of the Service national des fouilles, Brussels. I am grateful to A. Cahen-Delhaye and C. Massart (Brussels) for these unpublished data. Tekić (“Treštanovačka gradina”, Požeškoslavonska županija, Croatia: a male skeleton with a riveted iron neck-ring without grave goods in a late fourth-century cemetery of which 140 graves, some with grave goods, have been excavated: Dubravka Sokač-Štimac, “Rimska nekropola na Treštanovačkoj gradini”, Požeški zbornik (Slavonska Požega), 4 (1974): 115–40, here p. 129, with fig. I would like to thank the excavator, Dubravka Sokač-Štimac, for her very detailed and partially unpublished information, as well as Dragan Božič, Ljubljana, for his linguistic help. 14 On the question of late Roman coloni, see Elio Lo Cascio (ed.), Terre, proprietari e contadini dell’impero romano: dall’affitto agrario al colonato tardoantico (Rome, 1997). I would like to thank J. Kyle Harper for his advice about late antique slavery. 15 Codex Theodosianus 5.17.1 (332 AD); see also Codex Justinianus 11.53.1 (371 AD), 11.51.1 (386 AD), 11.52.1 (392 AD). For the progressive conflation of slaves and coloni after the third century and the debate about any difference between them, see Klaus-Peter Johne, “Von der Kolonenwirtschaft zum Kolonat”, in Klaus-Peter Johne (ed.), Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft des Römischen Reiches im 3. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1993), pp. 64–99. 16 An early exception dated to the mid-fourth century comes from east of the Seine estuary, near Rouen. The publication of the first half of the excavated settlement area showed the reconstruction of an organized settlement consisting of multiple farmsteads separated by fences, thus a “true village”: Paul Van Ossel, “Die Gallo-Romanen als Nachfahren der römischen Provinzialbevölkerung”, in Alfried Wieczorek et al. (eds), Die Franken: Wegbereiter Europas (2 vols, Mainz, 1996), pp. 102–9, here p. 108, fig. 80. The complete settlement layout published five years later by Valérie Gonzalez, Pierre Ouzoulias and Paul Van Ossel, “Saint-Ouen-duBreuil”, Germania, 79 (2001): 43–61, here p. 46, fig. 3, no longer shows the fences. They are now assigned to the Gallo-Roman period and figure on a different map (ibid., p. 45, fig. 2). The intense historical debate in France about the rise of “true villages” has culminated in the model of a gradual “mutation” of Roman villas into “true villages”, a process which is thought to have been completed in the seventh and eighth century. In his forthcoming “De la ‘villa’ au village: Les prémices d’une mutation”, in Jean-Marie Yante and Anne-Marie Bultot-Verleysen (eds), Autour du “village”: Etablissements humains, finages et communautés rurales entre Seine et Rhin (Louvain-laNeuve, forthcoming), Van Ossel makes the case for the late development of “true villages” in the seventh century, without discussing Saint-Ouen-du-Breuil. My earlier skepticism about the site’s dating (Henning, “Agrarkontinuität”, p. 421) was ill-founded, for we now know that a coin hoard associated with the settlement must have been assembled between 345 and 350 AD and hidden some time thereafter. Since hoards are typically markers of destructive events, this find seems more

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Figure 2.1 Find map of Roman iron shackles.

Figure 2.2 Roman iron shackle contexts.

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Figure 2.3 Post-Roman iron shackles.

Figure 2.4 Post-Roman iron shackle contexts.

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is, composed of separated farmsteads with different buildings serving different domestic and dwelling functions. From the third to early fifth centuries, such “row settlements” can be observed only outside the limes, the Roman frontier.17 Late Roman rural structures, on the other hand, whether they occupied a former villa or belonged to a hillfort settlement, look unimpressively poor and lack any visible division into farmstead units separated by enclosures or fences.18 What Germanic finds occur on late Roman villa or rural settlement sites, as well as tombs with Germanic grave-goods inside Roman Gaul or the Rhineland, could reflect a gradual integration of barbarian populations into the late antique rural system. Although they came from areas with developed village structures, these newcomers seemingly were prevented from bringing their village economy onto the late Roman estates. We may deduce that they became either quasi coloni or landlords.19 With the exception of Ouen-du-Breuil, no Germanic or Roman settlement with that true village layout is known from inside the limes, whereas they are abundant outside it. And such true villages beyond the limes were not inhabited exclusively by Germanic peoples.20 Nevertheless, the only Roman territories which have provided convincing village layouts are those from which Roman troops and administration had been withdrawn, for instance the astonishingly early cases from Toxandria in the Low Countries, an early Frankish settlement area,21 or the agri decumates in southwestern Germany, from around 300. The archaeological evidence thus suggests that the new logic likely to be related to an unpeaceful end of the village after 350 AD than to its foundation, as Karl Heinz Lenz assumes in a way which is difficult for me to follow: “Germanische Siedlungen des 3. bis 5. Jahrhunderts n. Chr. in Gallien”, Berichte der Römisch-Germanischen Kommission, 86 (2005): 349–445. I am most grateful to Paul Van Ossel (Paris) and Karl Heinz Lenz (Frankfurt am Main) for generously making their unpublished studies available and for the stimulating discussions that followed. Both authors’ interpretations assume that Rome would have had to give permission for settlements of this type to be built. Another explanation, however, would be that Roman land was illegally occupied. This seems to me more probable in the light of written sources and that coin hoard: contemporaries clearly attest a series of “illegal” settlement events by Germanic tribes that started shortly before the middle of the fourth century in nearly all parts of inner Gaul, reaching almost to the Atlantic coast; Zosimus, Historia, 3.3.1; Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae, 16.2.1–7; Julian, Epistula ad Athenienses, 277Df, 279Af. As Libanius says (Oratio, 18.34), Germans had seized farmlands and plowed and harvested in many parts of Gaul. Starting in 355, Caesar Julian’s military campaign put a bloody end to this early, illegal attempt to replace the late-Roman agricultural system. Roman troops destroyed or confiscated the Germanic grain harvest in Gaul (Ammianus, 16.11.11; Libanius, Oratio, 18.52). The situation at Ouen-du-Breuil seems to me to fit this historical context perfectly. 17 Helena Hamerow, Early Medieval Settlements: The Archaeology of Rural Communities in Northwest Europe, 400–900 (Oxford, 2002), p. 55. 18 Paul Van Ossel, Etablissements ruraux de l’Antiquité tardive dans le nord de la Gaule, Gallia, Supplément, 51 (Paris 1992). 19 The case of Mienne-Marboué seems to indicate a landlord of Germanic origin: Michele Blanchard-Lemée, “La villa à mosaïques de Mienne-Marboué (Eure-et-Loire)”, Gallia, 39 (1981): 63–83. 20 According to Libanius, Oratio 18.34, the Germans brought inhabitants of Gaul to the right bank of the Rhine to work their fields, so it is no wonder Ammianus Marcellinus, 17.1.7, saw there rural buildings that resembled those of Gaul. 21 See Henning, “Agrarkontinuität”, p. 425, fig. 7.

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of family- and farmstead-based farming could not be fully realized within late antiquity’s social, fiscal, and legal structures. It needed lands where the Roman writ no longer ran.22 The archaeological evidence from Toxandria shows that such territories did not tumble back into prehistory once they left Roman administration. On the contrary, the village-system that now took root there displays unusual dynamism in applying advanced agricultural technology. That dynamism contrasts sharply with the rural landscapes Rome still controlled south of the new fortified limes running from Cologne to Bavai that now bounded Toxandria.23 There, Belgian archaeologists have recently disproven the myth that the heavy wheeled plow had spread across late Roman Gallia Belgica. The iron plow components found on villas or rural sites devastated by Germanic invaders in the later third or fourth century are unimpressive: all well-dated plowshares belong to the simple ard or stick-plow known in these areas since the pre-Roman Iron Age.24 As a new find from Aquitaine confirms, the situation extended across Gaul.25 With a few exceptions from territories where the imperial administration was already weak or nearly non-existent (for instance rural hillforts of the Moselle area or Middle Danube sites devastated by the Huns), advanced agricultural equipment, including the heavy wheeled plow and the true long scythe, occurs predominantly along the approaches to the late antique limes.26 The most impressive assembly of agricultural equipment comes from Osterburken, beyond the Rhine frontier, and has to be dated to the late fourth to fifth century.27 This data contradicts the often-stressed technological backwardness of small agricultural units of peasant farmsteads, their autarchy and limited ambition to produce a surplus. In fact, the significant quantity of late Roman ceramic imports found beyond the limes28 in such villages attests to exchange. In the late third and fourth centuries, the Roman army regularly attacked Germanic groups which had tried to settle in Gaul with their families, where we would expect them to have founded villages. Such subjugated groups were “resettled” to distant regions, often chained and sold to the local landowners: XII panegyrici latini 4 (8).9.1 and 6 (7).4.2. Such contacts with villa owners were perhaps not unconnected with reactions such as those of 366 AD when Germanic barbarians attacked and destroyed villas in Gaul: Ammianus Marcellinus, 27.2.2. 23 See Henning, “Agrarkontinuität”, p. 424, fig. 6. 24 Bérangère de Laveleye and Agnès Vokaer, “De Pline à Mageroy: Araire ou plaumoratum?”, in Philippe Mignot and Georges Raepsaet (eds), Le sol et l’araire dans l’Antiquité (Brussels, 1998), pp. 23–33. 25 Michel Feugère, “Outillage agricole et quincaillerie antique de Valentine”, in Michel Feugère and Mitja Gustin (eds), Iron, Blacksmiths and Tools (Montagnac, 2000), pp. 169–78. 26 See Henning, “Agrarkontinuität”, and Joachim Henning, “Zum Problem der Entwicklung materieller Produktivkräfte bei den germanischen Staatsbildungen”, Klio, 68 (1986): 128–38. 27 Joachim Henning, “Zur Datierung von Werkzeug- und Agrargerätefunden im germanischen Landnahmegebiet zwischen Rhein und oberer Donau”, Jahrbuch des RömischGermanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz, 32 (1985): 570–94. See also Henning, “Agrarkontinuität”, p. 400, fig. 1. 28 Bernd Kaschau, Die Drehscheibenkeramik aus den Plangrabungen 1967–1972, Der Runde Berg bei Urach, vol. 2 (Stuttgart, 1998). The same is true for “Germanic” villages west of the Rhine: Gonzalez, Ouzoulias and Van Ossel, “Saint-Ouen-du-Breuil”, pp. 49–51; Guy de Boe, “Un village 22

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This in turn indicates that “more eating or less working”29 was not the only option when peasant households produced a surplus. Without wishing to revive theories of climatic determinism for the fall of Rome we ought, nevertheless, to consider some recent results from dendroclimatology. Burghart Schmidt has developed a new method which interprets changing cycles of European-wide homogeneity of tree growth. It seems to indicate that in the long run Rome failed to react to a dramatic climatic change and its aftermath.30 In the decades around the middle of the third century, a first significant unfavorable shift occurred towards colder and dryer conditions. When such a situation recurs several years in a row, it seriously affects the food supply. I would not argue that this climate change caused the overall transformation. But it may help explain why serious attempts to resolve the problem of boosting productive labor on Roman estates only occurred after conditions changed: in the last centuries of antiquity, some first steps toward an agrarian organization different from the classical villa system attempted to respond to changing environmental circumstances even under the old Roman legal conditions. Decreasing crop yields and worsening conditions for animal husbandry connected with such climate change must have aggravated the problem of rural productivity inside the empire; at the same time, they must also have caused problems in the unconquered lands beyond the limes and encouraged development there. Attaching slave-like coloni to the arable land while continuing the ancient rhythms of agricultural work apparently failed to resolve the problems arising from more complicated ecological conditions and the increased human mobility they may have entailed. A solution that in the long run was to prove stable and superior to attempted adjustments inside the provinces came from outside; it nevertheless resulted from close contacts with the late Roman economy, including, especially, selective adaptation of elements of the Roman technology of production. Rural technological improvements, that is, changing the rural production cycles, a more intensive style of production of a sort typical for family-based farm units, and a spreading of agricultural risks over the whole year, combined with a broader social framework for human mobility to constitute the responses to these social and ecological changes. The eighth-century awakening is more closely related to the fall of Rome than may appear. First we have to observe unequivocally that the rural technological improvements we have just described continued to be used by post-Roman peasants, even in those households that powerful aristocrats subjugated to the germanique de la seconde moitié du IVe siècle à Neerharen-Rekem”, in Marcel Otte and Jacques Willems (eds), La civilisation mérovingienne dans le bassin mosan (Liège, 1986), pp. 101–10. 29 Wickham, Land and Power, p. 224. 30 Burghart Schmidt, Wolfgang Gruhle, Andreas Zimmermann, and Thomas Fischer, “Mögliche Schwankungen von Getreideerträgen. Befunde zur Rheinischen Linearbandkeramik und Römischen Kaiserzeit”, Archäologisches Korrespondenzblatt, 35 (2005): 301–16, here p. 306, fig. 6; Burghart Schmidt and Wolfgang Gruhle, “Niederschlagsschwankungen in Westeuropa während der letzten 8000 Jahre”, Archäologisches Korrespondenzblatt, 33 (2003): 281–300, here p. 293, fig. 9.

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bipartite estate which arose in Carolingian times. Although written sources of this period clearly testify to this, I prefer to emphasize the archaeological evidence. There is, for example, no doubt that, like many other technological improvements, the heavy wheeled plow that turned over the sod was used in early post-Roman times.31 This equipment was well suited to an important role in the three-field-rotation system. In fact, finds of seeds in the immediate postRoman fifth century signal a new spectrum of crops. That new crop complex, with its balance between winter and summer grains, fitted well into the cycles of the three-field system. It also made people more independent of the changing post-Roman climatic conditions, for the three-field system’s separate winter and summer crops spread agricultural risk over the whole year. At the latest, the turn to that new type of crop cultivation is clearly visible in Merovingian times, if not already during the Migration period, centuries before the Frankish version of the manorial system would be established.32 Moreover, it has often been stressed that the three-field system is typical of agriculture based on cooperating farmsteads of village communities,33 so the absence of older traces of this system in connection with Roman villas is not surprising. And the evidence

31 For technical details of the swivel plow and its appearance in the Roman West, see Henning, “Agrarkontinuität”, pp. 405–17. For iron parts of a wheeled swivel plow from the Middle Danube area, see Dragoljub Bojović, “Ostava rimskog poljoprivrenog alata iz sela Borović kod Obrenovca”, Godišnjak grada Beograda, 25 (1978): 185–96. 32 Joachim Henning, “Landwirtschaft der Franken”, in Wieczorek et al. (eds), Die Franken: Wegbereiter Europas, pp. 774–85; Joachim Henning, “Did the ‘Agricultural Revolution’ Go East with Carolingian Conquest?” Oxford Journal of Archaeology (forthcoming). 33 See Max Weber, Die römische Agrargeschichte in ihrer Bedeutung für das Staats- und Privatrecht (Stuttgart, 1891), re-edited by Horst Baier et al. as Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung 1: Schriften und Reden, vol. 2 (Tübingen, 1986), p. 297, on how the three-field rotation system was unimaginable for Roman villas: “… weil die Dreifelderwirtschaft … keine Wirtschaft eines Individuums, sondern einer Dorfgemeinschaft ist und mit dem Flurzwang untrennbar zusammenhängt”; for further references, see Wilhelm Schneider, Arbeiten zur alamannischen Frühgeschichte, vol. 14, Arbeiten zur Agrargeschichte, part 2 (Tübingen, 1987), s.v. “Dreifelderwirtschaft”, pp. 42–92. The debate has been whether the demesne’s fields were integrated into the cycles of exploitation of peasant fields (“Flurzwang”). This has been shown to be the case at Wissembourg and other estates. Even so, some have thought that big blocks of reserve fields existed separately from the village’s arable land: Gertrud Schröder-Lembke, “Nebenformen der alten Dreifelderwirtschaft in Deutschland”, in Agricoltura e mondo rurale in Occidente nell’alto medioevo, Settimane, 13 (Spoleto, 1966), pp. 285–306, here p. 288. Whether the three-field rotation system was first introduced on the demesne in the eighth century or on peasant land much earlier is “impossible to answer” from the written sources: Adriaan Verhulst, The Carolingian Economy (Cambridge, 2002), p. 62. Nevertheless, the older view of August Meitzen, Siedelung and Agarwesen der Westgermanen und Ostgermanen, der Kelten, Römer, Finnen und Slawen (3 vols, Berlin, 1895), vol. 2, p. 594, which assumed that the manor influenced the peasant communities, has found a certain echo in the historical literature. Palaeobotany is definitively resolving the debate by documenting the rise, from the fourth or fifth century, of a new crop system consisting of winter and summer cereals: Karl-Heinz Knörzer, “Über den Wandel der angebauten Körnerfrüchte und ihrer Unkrautvegetation auf einer niederrheinischen Lößfläche”, in Udelgard Körber-Grohne (ed.), Festschrift Maria Hopf (Cologne, 1979), pp. 147–63, here p. 156.

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for this system among Germanic tribes begins only once they had intensively adapted late Roman agricultural equipment. It is for now unclear whether the gap between the relatively good archaeological evidence for advanced agricultural iron implements from 500 to 700 AD34 and that of the late ninth to tenth centuries35 reflects a real decline in everyday use of such tools in the time of Charlemagne, but welldated finds of the eighth and early ninth centuries are still lacking. This could turn out to be only a problem of survival of evidence. The development of settlement structures in the eighth century seems more alarming, however. Large-scale excavations of Merovingian settlements in Germany and France have uncovered layouts of surprisingly large and strictly organized villages, consisting of clearly separated farmsteads.36 They are obviously the direct and prosperous successors of the village structures of the third to early fifth centuries known from northern Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark, and which shortly thereafter appeared in the former Roman territories, starting with Toxandria and southwestern Germany. This continuity of nearly half a millennium peaked in the seventh century when some farm owners among these village communities started to create their own separate cemeteries within their farmsteads. Their burials supply extraordinarily rich grave-goods such as have been found in Lauchheim (Baden-Württemberg).37 We now understand that such graves, which typify the upper stratum of Merovingian cemeteries in general, need not always reflect a manorial aristocracy. The buried persons were sometimes just wealthy peasants, living in a peasant society characterized by internal socio-economic differentiation. Social status may have played a role, but the bigger space of one of the farmsteads at Lauchheim also indicates a substantial difference in landed property. The same observation can be made in the Merovingian village of Kirchheim, near Munich. Examples like these leave no room for earlier romantic ideas of an egalitarian peasant society. This was a society that must have produced a surplus See Henning, “Agrarkontinuität”, p. 426, fig. 8. Karl Hielscher, “Fragen zu den Arbeitsgeräten der Bauern im Mittelalter”, Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte, 17 (1969): 6–43. 36 Vitry-en-Artois, Belgium: Etienne Louis, “A De-Romanized Landscape in Northern Gaul: The Scarpe Valley”, in William Bowden, Luke Lavan, and Carlos Machado (eds), Recent Research on the Late Antique Countryside (Leiden, 2004), pp. 479–503, here p. 495, fig. 7; Genlis, France: Isabelle Catteddu, “L’habitat mérovingien de Genlis”, in Claude Lorren and Patrick Périn (eds), L’habitat rural du haut Moyen Age (Rouen, 1995), pp. 185–92, here p. 186, pl. 1; Bussy-Saint-Georges, France: Natalie Buchez, “Un habitat du haut Moyen Age à Bussy-Saint-Georges”, in L’habitat rural, pp. 109–12, here p. 111, with fig.; Kirchheim: Rainer Christlein, “Kirchheim bei München”, Das Archäologische Jahr in Bayern 1980 (1981): 162–3. Farmsteads separated by fences but situated side-by-side are clearly attested even in limited excavations: Cristina Gonçalves, “Drancy (SeineSaint-Denis)”, in François Gentili, Anne Lefèvre and Nadine Mahé, (eds), L’habitat rural du haut Moyen Age, Supplément au Bulletin archéologique du Vexin français, 1 (Guiry-en-Vexin, 2003), pp. 56–63, here p. 57, fig. 1. 37 Ingo Stork, “Friedhof und Dorf, Herrenhof und Adelsgrab”, in Karlheinz Fuchs et al. (eds), Die Alamannen (Ulm, 1997), pp. 290–310. 34 35

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big enough to afford imports from around the Merovingian world, from the eastern Mediterranean, even from Africa and India.38 It was a society whose craft production occurred in central places associated with evidence of trade and exchange. Thanks to more than twenty iron hoards from the early post-Roman period (fifth–seventh centuries) and to a very large number of Merovingian burials that are well equipped with iron items, we have ample information about the widespread, everyday use of iron in post-Roman western Europe. In sharp contrast, however, to the Roman and late Roman situation, where iron shackles for humans came to light from almost every third iron hoard and from many, many settlement contexts, shackles drop nearly to zero in the early post-Roman period (see Figure 2.5). The only three finds come from outside the Merovingian realm.39 No doubt the slave trade continued in the post-Roman centuries and crossed the Continent, especially from the British isles to the south;40 some aspects of the slave-like treatment of rural serfs may have survived as well. Nevertheless, judging from the shackle finds, the situation must have changed fundamentally. Together with the disappearance of the villa and the swift rise to dominance of true villages in the Frankish heartlands, the surprising fall of western Europe’s “iron shackle curve” from late-Roman to Merovingian times (Figure 2.5) seems to signal a complete turnaround in the social organization of the rural world. The problem of productive labor on late Roman estates was apparently resolved in a simple but consequential way. An empire, its socio-economic fabric, and especially its legal system had to be destroyed and replaced by another one that was based upon a peasant society that (at least in the rural sphere) did not necessarily need iron shackles to function. I would go so far as to say that the new logic aimed to avoid as much as possible such means of organizing efficient agrarian production. We will return to this shortly. What about villages from c. 700 to 900? Archaeologically speaking, this period is again problematic, but not because of a lack of evidence. New excavations in France show that villages display a significant difference from earlier ones. Small numbers of sunken floor huts had formerly been used as secondary, non Carl Pause, “Überregionaler Güteraustausch und Wirtschaft bei den Thüringern der Merowingerzeit”, Zeitschrift für Archäologie des Mittelalters, 29 (2001): 7–30; Carl Pause, “Merowingerzeitliche Millefioriglasperlen”, Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn, 3 (1996): 63–5; Helmut Roth, “Zum Handel der Merowingerzeit aufgrund ausgewählter archäologischer Quellen”, in Der Handel des frühen Mittelalters, Klaus Düwel, Herbert Jahnkuhn, Harald Siems and Dieter Timpe (eds), Untersuchungen zu Handel und Verkehr der vor- und frühgeschichtlichen Zeit in Mittel- und Nordeuropa, vol. 3, Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, 3. Folge, 150 (Göttingen, 1985), pp. 162–91. 39 Aldaieta, Spain (sixth century): Horst Wolfgang Böhme, “Der Friedhof von Aldaieta in Kantabrien”, Acta Praehistorica et Archaeologica, 34 (2002): 135–50, here p. 148, fig. 9; Caričin grad (Iustiniana Prima): two shackle rings from the sixth-century level. I am grateful to Vujadin Ivanišević (Archaeological Institute, Belgrade) for making the unpublished pieces available; Lagore, Ireland (crannog): Thompson, “Slave-Shackles”, pp. 84–5, figs 29–30 (seventh century). 40 David Pelteret, “Slave Raiding and Slave Trading in Early England”, Anglo-Saxon England, 9 (1981): 99–114. 38

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Figure 2.5  Frequency of iron shackle finds 250 BC–1500 AD. residential domestic buildings. In the eighth century, their numbers increased significantly.41 Moreover, a dozen excavated rural settlements in the Frankish heartlands show that such simple huts began to receive stone ovens or heating facilities and so were adapted as dwellings, apparently indicating a growing number of ill-equipped inhabitants of rural sites.42 For French lands, according to Edith Peytremann, this is a new development unprecedented in the Germanic rural world of the third to the fifth centuries.43 After peaking in the eighth century, in the following century the new arrangement declined rapidly west of the Rhine. But to the east, it blossomed again, briefly, in the forecourts of

See the impressive examples from France: Nadine Béague-Tahon and Murielle GeorgesLeroy, “Deux habitats ruraux du haut Moyen Age en Champagne Crayeuse”, in L’habitat rural, pp. 175–83, here p. 181, fig. 8, p. 182, fig. 9. 42 Drancy: Gonçalves, “Drancy”, p. 60. Goudelancourt-les-Pierrepont, Mer, Saint-Dizier, Poses, Thieux, Tremblay, Saint-Gibrien, Ensisheim, Éply: Edith Peytremann, Archéologie de l’habitat rural dans le Nord de la France, vol. 1 (Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 2003), p. 276. 43 Ibid. 41

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royal Ottonian rural estates or palaces.44 Compared to the Merovingian period, traditional longhouses decreased in number while sunken floor huts increased, as can be seen west of the Rhine, for instance in the difference between the Merovingian and Carolingian phases at Speyer-Vogelsang.45 In a word, eighthand ninth-century peasants look rather poorer than their predecessors. Organized rural settlements on the earlier, true village model, seem to survive mainly outside the Carolingian heartland, for example in Saxony, Viking Denmark, and neighboring areas.46 Could this help explain why it took the Carolingians half a century to conquer Saxony, even as they subdued the fortified centers of Italy in a few months? Why Carolingian rulers had so little success against invaders first from Denmark, then from other Scandinavian areas? From the ninth century the invaders even settled northwest of Paris, and that area rapidly developed into Normandy, the strongest principality of the old Frankish West. One wonders whether Viking success resulted from a dramatically weakened western European rural world, a weakness which may have arisen from serious stresses caused by the establishment and spread of the powerful Carolingian bipartite estate. Could Carl Hammer be right when he sees Bavaria falling back into a world of rural slavery when the Frankish manorial system arrived there under the Carolingians?47 Much would speak for Michael McCormick’s opinion that Charlemagne had little more than human beings to offer for trade with the Arabs.48 Where did these enchained human wares come from? The occurrence of post-Roman iron shackles shows an interesting progression (Figure 2.5). After an all-time low under the Merovingians, the absolute number of shackle finds surges in Carolingian times (including in the Viking North), forming an impressive postRoman peak unparalleled down to 1500 AD. This peak seems to support a significant place for the slave trade in propelling the Carolingian economy. Surprisingly, however, with the exception of two pieces found in the Seine estuary near Rouen, the geographical distribution indicates that shackles are absent from the inner territories of the Carolingian empire (see Figure 2.3). Nevertheless it would not be surprising if shackles emerged from the river finds still awaiting analysis in French museums. The written sources seem to 44 Peter Donat, Gebesee: Klosterhof und königliche Reisestation des 10.–12. Jahrhunderts, Weimarer Monographien zur Ur- und Frühgeschichte, 34 (Stuttgart, 1999); Paul Grimm, Tilleda: Eine Königspfalz am Kyffhäuser 2, Schriften zur Ur- und Frühgeschichte, 40 (Berlin, 1990). 45 Helmut Bernhard, “Ausgrabungen in der frühmittelalterlichen Siedlung Speyer ‘Vogelsang’”, in Adriaan Van Doorselaer (ed.), De merovingische beschaving in de Scheldevallei (Kortrijk, 1981), pp. 223–38. 46 Saxony: Rolf Bärenfänger, “Vier Gehöfte des 9. Jahrhunderts aus Hesel, Lkr. Leer”, Nachrichten aus Niedersachsens Urgeschichte, 63 (1994): 39–72; Denmark: Anne Nissen Jaubert, “L’habitat rural au Danemark vers 200–1200”, in L’habitat rural, pp. 213–22. 47 Carl I. Hammer, A Large-scale Slave Society of the Early Middle Ages: Slaves and their Families in Early Medieval Bavaria (Aldershot, 2002). 48 Michael McCormick, “New Light on the ‘Dark Ages’”, Past and Present, 177 (2002): 17–54; Michael McCormick, The Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300–900 (Cambridge, 2001).

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imply slave transport through the Frankish lands, for the Church criticized it in so far as Christians could be affected.49 Iron shackles do occur outside the Frankish empire from Iceland to Ireland and England, through Scandinavia to the eastern Slavlands and Byzantium’s doorstep in southeastern Europe. The concentration of Roman shackle finds exactly in the territories that would become the heartlands of the Frankish empire contrasts dramatically with their absence there in post-Roman times, even as abundant Carolingian-era shackle finds cluster in a broad corona around continental western Europe. I think this reflects a fundamental change in the pattern of slavery and slave trade in post-Roman Europe. The slave trade had long been oriented towards the western provinces – Italy, Gaul, Spain – where rural exploitation of slaves was the backbone of intensive agriculture from the period of Roman conquest until late antiquity.50 But the logic of the post-Roman rural system developed in the opposite direction. There is no doubt, however, that in the same centuries when the Carolingian ruling elite intervened powerfully in the countryside to establish their estates, the European slave trade expanded anew. McCormick has shown that the Carolingians very probably were involved in that trade and capitalized on it, and that the Ottonians did the same.51 The absence of iron shackles in the Frankish heartlands shows however that the enslavement and selling abroad of the western European rural peasant population was exceptional. The slave extracting grounds were in fact the non- or semi-Christianized neighboring lands where Frankish armed forces, local chiefs or trade-loving Vikings were active in the slave-hunting business.52 It seems to me highly significant that Carolingian and Viking-age shackles in the Frankish periphery never occur in open, unfortified or predominantly rural settlements (see Figure 2.4). As a rule, they come from major fortified sites: ringforts (for example, Denmark’s famous Trelleborg, whose name means “slave castle”),53 Slavic ramparts (for example, Kniazha gora, “Princely hill” in the Ukraine), Irish crannogs (local aristocrats’ Charles Verlinden, “Problèmes d’histoire économique franque 1”, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 12 (1933): 1090–95; Waltraut Bleiber, Naturalwirtschaft und Ware-Geld-Beziehungen zwischen Somme und Loire während des 7. Jahrhunderts, Forschungen zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte, 27 (Berlin, 1981), pp. 73–5. 50 The situation in the eastern Roman Empire was different because the slave system, at least according to documentary sources, was more developed. However, we need to investigate the situation from written sources since findings of, for instance, shackles, in the east are very rare. For example, in Israel, no archaeological evidence of slavery has been found, although the Talmud mentions traders who arrived with 20,000 iron shackles in order to buy Jews: Samuel Krauss, Talmudische Archäologie, vol. 2 (Leipzig, 1911), p. 96. 51 Joachim Henning, “Neue Burgen im Osten”, in Achim Hubel and Bernd Schneidmüller (eds), Aufbruch ins zweite Jahrtausend (Ostfildern, 2004), pp. 151–81, here p. 176. 52 See the reflections on the origin of Carolingian-era slaves in Joachim Henning, “Slavery or Freedom? The Causes of Early Medieval Europe’s Economic Advancement”, EME, 12 (2003): 269–77, here p. 272; Michael McCormick, “Complexity, Chronology and Context in the Early Medieval Economy”, EME, 12 (2003): 307–23, here pp. 308–12. 53 Leszek Paweł Słupecki, “Jómsvikingalog, Jómsvikings, Jomsborg/Wolin and Danish Circular Strongholds”, in Przemysław Urbańczyk (ed.), The Neighbours of Poland in the 10th century (Warsaw, 2000), pp. 49–59, here pp. 54–5. 49

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man-made island settlements in lakes) and especially an impressive series of fortified early trading centers, some of which have been called proto-towns or just plain towns: Dublin, Winchester, Haithabu, Staré Mesto (the biggest center of ninth-century Moravia), Nitra (residence of the prince of eastern Moravia) and Preslav (the capital of the Bulgarian empire). Written sources attest the slaving background of some of these centers, which mushroomed in the Carolingian era and which archaeologists often prize as signs of an upturn of the rural economy in their hinterlands. To some extent that might well be true, although it remains to be proved. The slave trade, however, and its archaeologically well-proven markers, must be taken into account when explaining the sudden rise, brief flourishing, and mysterious disappearance of many of these trading places in post-Carolingian times. It could turn out that their early medieval trajectory peaks in unison with our iron shackle curve.54 Silver coins found around such trading places do not contradict this view.55 According to written sources silver regularly accompanied that business and facilitated far-reaching economic connections, for example to the Arab world. Silver coins flowed into the Carolingian lands, and were minted there as well. We cannot be sure that they testify exclusively and generally to a strong economy relying on increasingly efficient rural production. It is worth repeating that technologically speaking, all the known important post-Roman agricultural improvements had already been invented centuries before the Carolingians. We might rather suspect that the application of Carolingian power structures to the western European countryside triggered developments that were, in the short term, unfavorable to the inner texture of at least some peasant settlements within bipartite estates. This will have compromised their efficiency. As far as we can tell, a reinforcement of “normal” villages seems to occur no later than the tenth century, for example at La Grande Paroisse in the Paris basin.56 This is exactly the period when the lord’s reserve, the crucial element of bipartite 54 I would tend to agree with Frans Verhaeghe, with Christopher Loveluck and Joanna Story, “Urban Developments in the Age of Charlemagne”, in Joanna Story (ed.), Charlemagne: Empire and Society (Manchester, 2005), pp. 259–87, that “the importance of emporia in the range of urban settlement in the Carolingian period has been overstressed” (p. 269). 55 See Henning, “Neue Burgen”, pp. 173–81; Sebastian Brather, “Frühmittelalterliche Dirham-Schatzfunde in Europa”, Zeitschrift für Archäologie des Mittelalters, 23/24 (1997): 73–153, here pp. 182–6; Sebastian Brather, “Frühmittelalterliche Dirham-Schatz- und -Einzelfunde im südlichen Ostseeraum”, in Sebastian Brather, Christel Bücker, and Michael Hoeper (eds), Archäologie als Sozialgeschichte, Studia Honoraria, 9 (Rahden, 1999), pp. 179–97; and in England: Mark Blackburn, “‘Productive’ Sites and the Pattern of Coin Loss in England, 600–1180”, in Tim Pestell and Katharina Ulmschneider (eds), Markets in Early Medieval Europe. Trading and “Productive” Sites, 650–850 (Macclesfield, 2003), pp. 20–36, here p. 22, fig. 3.1; Michael Metcalf, “Variations in the Composition of the Currency at Different Places in England”, in Markets in Early Medieval Europe, pp. 37–47. 56 Michel Petit, “La Grande-Paroisse (Seine-et-Marne)”, in Michel Petit and Monique Depraetère (eds), L’Ile-de-France de Clovis à Hugues Capet (Paris, 1993), pp. 199–200; Michel Petit, “La Grande-Paroisse”, in Jean Cuisenier and Rémy Guadagnin (eds), Un village au temps de Charlemagne (Paris, 1988), pp. 147–9.

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manorial organization, which had flourished in Carolingian times, declines north of the Alps. Finally, let us look at exchange in the eighth century. Lately scholars have stressed the upturn of long-distance trade to the North and the establishment of trading places or proto-towns with increasing craft activities, as well as growing agricultural production around them. Even though many proto-towns may have owed some of their success to the slave trade, the growth of new centers cannot be denied. But they cluster on the Frankish borderlands, on the Atlantic and North Sea coast, the Baltic coast with Reric and the Elbe-Saale-frontier with its trading places such as Magdeburg and Erfurt described in Charlemagne’s capitulary of 805.57 They are even more prominent outside the Frankish empire, at places such as Haithabu in Denmark, or Frisia, Sweden, England, and Ireland. The archaeological evidence for significant town development in the Frankish heartlands, the homeland of the much-admired Carolingian manor, however, is still missing. The old Roman urban centers are now delivering more and more archaeological evidence that specialized craft production flourished in Merovingian times.58 Gregory of Tours’ sixth-century Paris was a living city with workshops and markets. Paris’s Musée Carnavalet is full of finds from that period, but offers nearly no items or structures from the eighth century. Frans Theuws has shown that, after lively Merovingian craft production in several Meuse valley towns, a hiatus ensued in the eighth century.59 The same holds for Cologne. According to recent excavations the center was not abandoned and ruralized in post-Roman times, as scholars had previously assumed.60 Instead, the Merovingian period saw flourishing craft production, including highly 57 MGH LL, 2, Capitularia regum Francorum, ed. Alfred Boretius, vol. 1 (Hanover, 1883), no. 44, c. 7, p. 123. 58 Cologne: Marcus Trier, “Köln im frühen Mittelalter”, in Joachim Henning (ed.) Europa im 10. Jahrhundert: Archäologie einer Aufbruchszeit (Mainz, 2002), pp. 301–10; Namur: Jean Plumier, “Namuco Fit: Namur mérovingien”, in XXe Journées internationales d’archéologie mérovingienne, Jean and Sophie Plumier-Torfs and Maude Régnard (eds), Bulletin de liaison, 23 (1999): 29–32; for further Roman settlements in the Meuse valley that were Merovingian production centers see Jean and Sophie Plumier-Torfs, Maude Régnard and Wim Dijkman (eds), Mosa Nostra: La Meuse mérovingienne de Verdun à Maastricht, Carnets du patrimoine, 28 (Namur, 1999); Mainz: Egon Wamers, Die frühmittelalterlichen Lesefunde aus der Löhrstrasse, Mainzer archäologische Schriften, 1 (Mainz, 1994), pp. 162–75, with well-attested Merovingian craft production; written sources: Stéphane Lebecq, “Les échanges dans la Gaule du nord au VIe siècle”, in Richard Hodges and William Bowden (eds), The Sixth Century: Production, Distribution and Demand, The Transformation of the Roman World, 3 (Leiden, 1989), pp. 185–202; for Merovingian craft production in Roman urban centers of Gaul (Paris, Geneva, Bonn, and so on), see Helmut Roth, Kunst und Handwerk im frühen Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1986), pp. 51–4; for ongoing urban functions see: S.T. Loseby, “Gregory’s Cities: Urban Functions in Sixth-century Gaul”, in Ian Wood (ed.), Franks and Alamanni in the Merovingian Period (San Marino, CA, 1998), pp. 239–84. 59 Frans Theuws, “Where is the Eighth Century in the Towns of the Meuse Valley?”, in Joachim Henning (ed.), Post-Roman Towns: Trade and Settlement in Europe and Byzantium, vol. 1 (Berlin, 2007), pp. 153–64. 60 Heiko Steuer, Die Franken in Köln (Cologne, 1980); Heiko Steuer, “Stadtarchäologie in Köln”, in Helmut Jäger (ed.) Stadtkernforschung, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für vergleichende Städtegeschichte in Münster, series A: Darstellungen, 27 (Cologne, 1987), pp. 61–102.

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specialized installations such as glass ovens.61 When production activities next picked up is still in dispute but it seems to be about the tenth century at the latest. According to Simon Loseby, Marseille was still a “great port” under the Merovingians, but declined in the eighth century under the Carolingians to a monastic site of local importance at most.62 It started to revive only in the tenth century. In the eighth century Venice may have been far from replacing that gateway to the eastern Mediterranean. It probably started its career as a port of the slave trade to the south, first under the auspices of the Carolingians and then on its own account – probably the reason it survived after Carolingian power declined. The tenth-century revival of so many of the old Roman centers is now a familiar phenomenon, at least in continental Europe.63 While specialized production declined in the old Roman centers in postMerovingian times, it moved in part to places that were better controlled by the aristocracy, as is particularly well documented for monasteries, paramount administrative centers of the estate system. Although specialized craft production in monasteries was not absolutely new – the Merovingian monastery of Saint Denis had had its workshops64 – archaeologically attested monastic workshops increase significantly in the eighth and ninth centuries. New discoveries of glass workshops from the abbeys of Lorsch, Fulda and Corvey in Germany, from San Vincenzo al Volturno in Italy, and from Barking abbey (England),65 Cologne’s Heumarkt area seems to show two main periods of production and trade. One is the layer underneath the market floor (dendrodated to 957 AD), which has yielded excellent Merovingian finds, whereas Carolingian and Ottonian finds came to light exclusively above the market paving. For details, see Helmut Roth and Marcus Trier, “Ausgewählte Funde des 4. bis 11. Jahrhunderts aus den Ausgrabungen auf dem Heumarkt”, Kölner Jahrbuch, 34 (2001): 759–91. Trier looks similar: Lukas Clemens, “Archäologische Beobachtungen zu frühmittelalterlichen Siedlungsstrukturen in Trier”, in Sabine Felgenhauer-Schmiedt, Alexandrine Eibner and Herbert Knittler (eds), Zwischen Römersiedlung und mittelalterlicher Stad, Beiträge zur Mittelalterarchäologie in Österreich, 17 (Vienna, 2001), pp. 43–66, here p. 45, fig. 2 (early Merovingian workshop activities: fibula mold), pp. 58–9 (written sources about Carolingian agricultural and vineyard activities in the town area), p. 60, fig. 18 (increasing activity in Ottonian times). 62 Simon T. Loseby, “Marseille and the Pirenne thesis, I”, in The Sixth Century, pp. 203–29; Simon T. Loseby, “Marseille and the Pirenne thesis, II”, in Inge Lyse Hansen and Chris Wickham (eds), The Long Eighth Century, The Transformation of the Roman World, 2 (Leiden, 2000), pp. 167–93. 63 Frans Verhaeghe, “Continuity and Change: Links between Medieval Towns and the Roman Substratum in Belgium”, in Rudof De Smet, Henri Melaerts and Cecilia Safrens (eds), Studia Varia Bruxellensia (Leuven, 1990), pp. 229–53. 64 See the Merovingian molds for casting fibulas: Patrick Périn, “Les moules de fondeurs de Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis)”, in Petit and Depraetère (eds), L’Ile-de-France, pp. 279–81. 65 Glass production in the imperial abbeys: Markus Sanke, Karl Hans Wedepohl, and Andreas Kronz, “Karolingerzeitliches Glas aus dem Kloster Lorsch”, Zeitschrift für Archäologie des Mittelalters, 30 (2002): 37–75; Abbey of Fulda: Thomas Kind, Karl Hans Wedepohl and Andreas Kronz, “Karolingerzeitliches Glas und verschiedene Handwerksindizien aus dem Kloster Fulda”, Zeitschrift für Archäologie des Mittelalters, 31 (2003): 61–93; Hans-Georg Stephan, Karl Hans Wedepohl and Gerald Harmann, “Mittelalterliches Glas aus dem Reichskloster und der Stadtwüstung Corvey”, Germania, 75 (1997): 673–715; Judy Stevenson, “Ninth-century Glassware Production at San Vincenzo al Volturno”, in Frans Verhaeghe (ed.), Material Culture in Medieval Europe (Zellik, 1997), pp. 125–36; Barking abbey: Julian Henderson, “Le verre de Dorestad?” 61

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of pottery workshops from the Heiligenberg monasteries (Germany) and from the abbey of St George in Baralle (France)66 as well as many other specialized craft works (comb production, bronze foundries, and so on) make clear that the Carolingian plan of Saint Gall’s workshops was anything but wishful thinking. Monastic substitutes for “normal” towns seem to mark a Carolingian detour in European town development that was dearly paid. These curious “monasterytowns” remained but an episode. Along with the bipartite estate system, they soon declined. The true towns which replaced them often revived sites with older Roman and Merovingian town traditions. If this all reflects the impact of the installation of the mighty Carolingian power structures of the bipartite estate system accompanied by an upturn of European slave trade, it looks rather like an accidental rebirth of Rome that was imposed on a formerly flourishing peasant society. So we would have to agree with Michael McCormick that Pirenne was both right and wrong. And this is my conclusion: Pirenne was probably right when he stressed that the eighth century brought a visible stagnation and sidetracked, if it did not set back, parts of Europe’s economy. The roots of that setback must lie in a problematic reorganization of the rural world which distorted the productive logic of smallunit agriculture and blocked its potential efficiency. Adriaan Verhulst once pointed out that the Capitulare de villis was likely closely connected to the famines of 792–93 and 805–6 AD.67 The Frankish king’s orders were anything but a wise handbook of agricultural knowledge. On the contrary, as Alfons Dopsch long ago maintained, the capitulary shows the bankruptcy of the bipartite manorial system. If this is right, Pirenne is also wrong: it was not Muhammad who was responsible, but Charlemagne. My impression is that, in the economy of early medieval Europe, places or periods with relatively weak power structures were more innovative and efficient so long as they had access to the most advanced technical improvements of late antiquity.68 This raises serious doubts about the currently dominant view, which suggests that strong or even centralized power structures were indispensable in boosting peasants’ small production units to greater productivity and efficiency. History seems nevertheless to have offered in Danièle Foy (ed.), Le verre de l’antiquité tardive et du haut moyen âge (Guiry-en-Vexin, 1996), pp. 51–5. 66 For pottery production at the Heiligenberg monasteries (Germany), see Peter Marzolff, “Die benediktinischen Bergklöster auf dem Heiligenberg bei Heidelberg”, Beiträge zur Mittelalterarchäologie in Österreich, 12 (1996): 129–45; for Baralle (France), see Alain Jaques, “Un atelier de production de céramiques au haut moyen âge à Baralle”, Gauheria, 31 (1994): 89–100; Alain Jaques‚ “Un four de potier du haut moyen âge à Baralle”, Revue du Nord, 58 (1976): 73–86. 67 Adriaan E. Verhulst, “Karolingische Agrarpolitik: Das Capitulare de Villis und die Hungersnöte von 792/93 und 805/06”, Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte, 13 (1965): 175–89. 68 For early reflections in that direction see: Joachim Henning, “Wirtschaftsarchäologie des Frühmittelalters und aktuelle Fragen der Geschichtswissenschaft”, Študijné zvesti Archeologického ústavu Slovenskej akadémie vied, 25 (1988): 41–6, here p. 44. Michael McCormick, “Um 808: Was der frühmittelalterliche König mit der Wirtschaft zu tun hatte”, in Bernhard Jussen (ed.), Die Macht des Königs: Herrschaft in Europa vom Frühmittelalter bis in die Neuzeit (Munich, 2005), pp. 55–71, makes the same point about merchants and relatively weak royal or state power structures.

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its own answer: Rome disappeared, and so too did its Carolingian rebirth. Other centralized power structures have disappeared recently, but peasant structures, self-managing and self-determined economies have continued to exist. The Carolingian villa was probably responsible for a really very long – I would say too long – eighth century, if not at all for a, literally, longue durée of the early Middle Ages.

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Chapter 3

The Beginnings of Hilltop Villages in Early Medieval Tuscany Riccardo Francovich†

Introduction In recent decades, reconstructions of early medieval settlement patterns based on estate records such as private charters have inclined historians to marginalize villages. Robert Fossier, for example, argued that village organization was absent before the eleventh century. Essentially, he reasoned that well-defined villages took shape only through a process of “cell-formation” (encellulement), featuring organized terroirs or lands, rural parishes, fixed fortifications and juridical features. Because the archaeological evidence for early medieval nucleated settlements could not be ignored, Fossier thought that the rural population concentrated in precarious “proto-villages”, which were a sort of “incomplete” village. In the 1970s and 1980s other rural historians pieced together pictures of early medieval Italian and “Mediterranean” contexts, which interpreted the documentary sources as evidence of a dispersed population caused by indomitable peasant individualism. They understood peasants to be deeply bonded to their landscapes and the vestigial settlement structures of the Roman period. Hence, the settlement pattern necessarily consisted of dispersed properties. Finally, and significantly, historians of northwestern Europe and of the Mediterranean accepted the concentration of such dispersed peasant sites. In this view, aristocrats created estate or manor centers (curtensi is the Italian term) by founding churches or settling uninhabited sites, supposedly from the This chapter results from our work within the Area di Archeologia Medievale at Siena University: surveys and excavations primarily in southern Tuscany. I am indebted to many collaborators and students, in particular to Marco Valenti and Roberto Farinelli. My habit of thinking in parallel with Richard Hodges, in a dialogue that has developed over twenty years, has inspired gratitude toward my friend that equals the intellectual stimulation that he provides.  Robert Fossier, “Villages et villageois”, in Villages et villageois au Moyen Age (Paris, 1992), pp. 207–14.  Pierre Toubert, Les structures du Latium médiéval: le Latium méridional et la Sabine du IXe siècle à la fin du XIIe siècle, Bibliothèque des Ecoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 221 (2 vols, Rome, 1973), pp. 449–93; Massimo Montanari, L’alimentazione contadina nell’alto medioevo (Naples, 1979), pp. 65–70. 

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late eighth to the eleventh centuries, and thus launched a process of centralized settlement aimed at controlling the peasantry. This position seems highly dependent on the structure and geography of the written sources. The marginal part played by archaeological evidence in much European historiography recurs in Elisabeth Zadora-Rio’s recent essay on the interpretative paradigms that historians of the French Middle Ages favor for the “medieval rural habitat”. Coherent and solid settlement models for France based on the archaeological evidence still lack acceptance. This compares unfavorably to the models proposed for the North Sea regions between the seventh and ninth centuries – that is to say areas with much poorer written documentation. Historians and archaeologists use transparently different assessments for characterizing a centralized early medieval settlement nucleus as a “village” during the Frankish period. The differences focus on definition rather than on the material evidence for the phenomenon. Excavations carried out in western Europe over the last forty years clearly indicate that in the early medieval countryside permanent populations were organized in nucleated settlements, both in the regions where Germanic settlement patterns prevailed and in those more influenced by the Roman tradition. Yet much historical research into legal and documentary sources still considers the archaeological evidence for nucleated settlements as proving that village settlements acquired a formalized identity only after the tenth century. But archaeology suggests that during the centuries that witnessed the growth of consolidated villages, even great estates were based in nucleated villages, not in manorial households scattered across the countryside. In 1962, Georges Duby described for France a model of early medieval settlement based on a centralized village. For the Italian countryside, advocates of the spread of a dispersed population and supporters of transient, mobile types  Elisabeth Zadora-Rio (ed.), Dossier: “L’habitat rural au Moyen Age”, Les nouvelles de l’archéologie, 92 (2003): 5–33.  Elisabeth Zadora-Rio, “Le village des historiens et le village des archéologues”, in Elisabeth Mornet (ed.), Campagnes médiévales: l’homme et son espace (Paris, 1995), pp. 145–53; with clarifications in Chris Wickham, “Le point de vue d’un historien. L’identité villageoise entre Seine et Rhin, 500–800”, in Autour du village. Etablissements humains, finages et communautés rurales entre Seine et Rhin (4e–13e siècles), online: .  Adriaan Verhulst, “Villages et villageois au Moyen Age”, in Villages et villageois au Moyen Age, pp. 9–13. In his classic review of the historiography of the great estates, Pierre Toubert underlined the emergence of “new problems that could not be grasped with a traditional approach based exclusively on the polyptychs, such as the genesis of the village in the Carolingian era in its links with domanial administration and in its consequences for the structure of fields.” Now in his Dalla terra ai castelli, ed. Giuseppe Sergi and trans. Ugo Gherner (Turin, 1995), pp. 115–55, in particular p. 120.  Concerning Duby’s idea that the centralized village spread in the ninth century, Andreolli and Montanari maintain that “this image, while it may be valid for the northern Europe to which Duby mainly refers, certainly cannot be applied to Italy”: Bruno Andreolli and Massimo Montanari, L’azienda curtense in Italia, Biblioteca di storia agraria medievale, 1 (Bologna, 1983), p. 200.

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of centralized settlement have sharply challenged this model. Notwithstanding the emerging archaeological data, most historians continue to describe villages and the centers of large estates as though they were different and separate in both socio-economic and settlement terms. They implicitly ignore the population features and the community identity of the manorial centers. These centers in fact constituted important rural agglomerations that were inhabited mainly by peasants, and not only by the independent allodial peasants – those who owned their own land – whose documentary trail appears most clearly in early medieval private records. Thus many medievalists seem to presume continuity between the villa of Varro’s day and that of Abbot Irmino, as though the Carolingian villa or curtis, as the documents call agrarian or manorial centers, derived directly from the Roman great estate. In reality the political, economic, and social disintegration of the Roman imperial order profoundly changed these agrarian structures, and gave rise to early medieval villages that emerged out of the transformation of ancient settlement systems.10 Numerous historians of early medieval Italy assume a dispersed rural population on the basis of exclusively archival evidence. These sources always post-date c. 650, are limited in number, unevenly distributed in time and space, and essentially ambiguous as a means of reconstructing settlement contexts. For instance, when in 1983 Andreolli and Montanari outlined the characteristics of settlement and the agrarian landscape, they concentrated on the management of the curtis in the context of property rights from the eighth to eleventh centuries.11 They recognized that their archival sources lent themselves above all to characterizing early medieval land ownership, socio-economic relationships and the forms of lordship over men. Moreover they emphasized that the bipartite estate or curtense management system – with its domanial reserve lands farmed by tenants living from estate tenures – did not imply any specific type of settlement or agrarian organization.12 They underlined, however, that they had gained the “impression” from the documents that a “farmstead”-type settlement model prevailed, in which the workers in a curtis corresponded to an “independent, compact working unit the individual status of which could be clearly identified”. They assumed that such a unit would necessarily have contiguous land, and they extended these generalizations into a model for the entire Italian peninsula.

Fossier, “Villages et villageois”, p. 208. Giovanni Tabacco, “Problemi di insediamento e di popolamento nell’alto medioevo”, Rivista storica italiana, 79 (1967): 67–110. 10 In 1998, Wickham asked, “how was it possible that the crisis of the [Roman] empire developed concomitantly with substantial continuity in the rural economy?”, before tackling the double impact of the crisis of the Roman system and the continuity of agrarian structures; Chris Wickham, “Economia altomedievale,” in Storia medievale (Rome, 1998), pp. 203–26, here pp. 204–5. 11 Andreolli and Montanari, L’azienda curtense, pp. 177–200. 12 Ibid., p. 180.  

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Emphasizing how many early medieval textual references could be interpreted as signs of dispersed population within a curtense or manorial system now appears unpersuasive. Similar uncertainty arises about claims that dispersed settlement was widespread, claims that also assert large estates and the curtense system, and assume that bipartite estates had been widespread in the preceding decades: “In Italy, in the eighth and ninth centuries, dispersal appears to be the prevalent settlement model”.13 From the 1950s scholars believed they could see evidence of widespread isolated dwellings in the early medieval countryside, and that small landowners, inhabitants of vici (“villages”, but see below for the semantics), were distinct from the farmers (massarii) they employed; the latter would often have lived not in a village, but on the farm they ran.14 Using mainly private acts from northern Italy, Andreolli and Montanari even hypothesized that centralized village settlements were mostly marginal in the eighth- and ninth-century Lombard and Byzantine areas. This picture conflicts with our new knowledge about the mountainous Apennine and Alpine regions, as well as much of Tuscany, not to mention the developing picture of Carolingian Europe and the Byzantine world.15 Earlier research into legal sources, for example, addressed rural community organizations by stressing a political-administrative and ecclesiastical-religious context that was based upon the village or on images of land use that are even more basic (vicus, casale, pagus, and so on). This approach drew mainly on late Roman or Roman-barbarian normative and narrative sources, and juridical documents.16 Even economic and social historians often referred to the early medieval village as a cell in an ecosystem into which the community fitted, in the context of systems of production that tended towards local self-sufficiency.17 “The confirmation of the possible coexistence of different settlement forms and of a notable local variety of situations … does not invalidate the impression that in early medieval Italy, until the end of the ninth century, by far the most prevalent model of land occupation was that of scattered settlement, which resulted in an extremely fragmented landscape, made up of small juxtaposed patches”; ibid., p. 180. 14 Gina Fasoli, “Aspetti di vita economica e sociale nell’Italia del secolo VII”, in Caratteri del secolo VII in Occidente, Settimane, 5 (Spoleto, 1958), pp. 103–59, here pp. 111–33. 15 Usefully, Andreolli and Montanari’s contribution to the settlement picture in “curtense” Italy proposes an unambiguous settlement model, which archaeologists can test. Other historians who have advocated widespread scattered population during the early Middle Ages have proceeded mostly by implication rather than explicit and coherent argument. 16 Fedor Schneider, Die Reichsverwaltung in Toscana von der Gründung des Langobardenreiches bis zum Ausgang der Staufer (568–1268), vol. 1 (Rome, 1914), pp. 182–3; Fedor Schneider, Le origini dei comuni rurali in Italia, ed. and trans. F. Barbolani di Montauto (Florence, 1980); Gian Piero Bognetti, Sulle origini dei communi rurali del medioevo (Pavia, 1927); Fasoli, “Aspetti di vita economica”; Giovanni Santini, I ‘communi di pieve’ nel medioevo italiano, Seminario giuridico della Università di Bologna, 36 (Milan, 1964), pp. 33–65, 546; Gian Piero Bognetti, “I beni comunali e l’organizzazione del villaggio nell’Italia Superiore fino al Mille”, Rivista storica italiana, 76 (1965): 469–99, here pp. 469–90; Adriano Cavanna, Fara, sala, arimannia nella storia di un vico longobardo (Milan, 1967), p. 546; Carlo Guido Mor, Problematica storica del comune montano nell’Italia settentrionale, in Storia e problemi della montagna italiana (Modena, 1972), pp. 15–19. 17 Vito Fumagalli, Città e campagna nell’Italia medievale (Bologna, 1985), pp. 22–3; Vito Fumagalli, “Ad Occidente, l’‘entità’ Europa nell’alto medioevo”, in Perry Anderson et al. (eds), 13

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Finally, investigators of early medieval ecclesiastical organization took the village as the fulcrum of rural territorial structures.18 This was specifically so for Tuscany19, because of the exceptional survival of judicial disputes between the bishops of Siena and of Arezzo over the tithes from parishes situated on the border between their territories.20 Today, however, many new excavations invite us to re-examine early medieval settlements, and indeed, to propose a new historical paradigm for interpreting the changing role of the village in the early Middle Ages. Toward New Settlement Models Approaches to early medieval settlement differ not only between historians and archaeologists, but also according to individuals’ training and the quality and type of sources used. Distinctions could also be drawn between historians or archaeologists who have exploited well-known models to develop interpretative paradigms, and others who have proceeded more descriptively. The best way to deepen our understanding of early medieval settlement is to construct and test interpretative paradigms, and modify them in the light of new knowledge. Archaeologists who are content to reduce the material data from their own fieldwork to theoretical models derived exclusively from written sources deprive themselves of essential tools for identifying contexts and strategies for future investigation. Tuscany has always been characterized by the coexistence of highly differentiated geographical and environmental contexts.21 Its sub-regions experienced divergent histories in the early Middle Ages,22 which created locally specific conditions that influenced the geography of the rural population. Nevertheless, the concomitant differences in early medieval settlement patterns Storia d’Europa (5 vols, Turin, 1993–), vol. 3, pp. 341–412, here pp. 377–9, repeats the same arguments, emphasizing the erosion of communal property by the large landowners of the eighth and ninth centuries. On the evidence of our first written documents, Chris Wickham, “Frontiere di villaggio in Toscana nel XII secolo”, in Jean-Michel Poisson (ed.), Castrum 4. Frontière et peuplement dans le monde méditerranéen au Moyen Age (Rome, 1992), pp. 239–51, here pp. 240–41, maintains that the village structure appeared to dominate in the Lombard world. For late antique and early medieval villages in western Europe see Philippe Contamine, Marc Bompaire, Stéphane Lebecq, and Jean-Luc Sarrazin, L’économie médiévale, 2nd edn (Paris, 1997), pp. 29–31; for the ninth-century village, Georges Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, trans. Cynthia Postan (Columbia, SC, 1976), pp. 6–7, remains useful. 18 Cinzio Violante, “Le strutture organizzative della cura d’anime nelle campagne dell’Italia centrosettentrionale”, in Cristianizzazione e organizzazione ecclesiastica delle campagne nell’alto medioevo, Settimane, 28 (2 vols, Spoleto, 1986), vol. 2, pp. 963–1158. 19 See, for example, the analysis of the act of October 746 regarding the church of San Pietro di Mosciano, near Lucca (Codice diplomatico longobardo, ed. Carlrichard Brühl, Fonti per la storia d’Italia 64–5 (3 vols, Rome, 1973–84), vol. 1, no. 86, pp. 252–4), in Guido Mengozzi, “Il comune rurale del territorio lombardo-tosco”, Studi senesi, 31 (1915): 265–320, here pp. 271–3. 20 See Violante, “Le strutture organizzative”, pp. 1019–57. 21 Giuliano Pinto, Campagne e paesaggi toscani del Medioevo (Florence, 2002), pp. 7–73. 22 See Chris Wickham, Comunità e clientele nella Toscana del XII secolo (Rome, 1995), pp. 232–3.

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deduced from surviving archival documents23 appear not to exist in the archaeological evidence: topographical surveys and excavations of rural sites have consistently yielded similar patterns across the different areas investigated. In fact, in Tuscany – as in most regions that archaeologists have extensively surveyed – data from the fifth to tenth centuries rule out an extensively dispersed population, while excavations have frequently uncovered inhabited hilltop centers whose population generally appears consistent and stable beginning already by the early Middle Ages.24 For some areas of Tuscany, signs of social identity based on a village territory have been hard to detect in private Carolingian and post-Carolingian documents. This has fostered the hypothesis that dispersed settlement was at times pervasive, not just in Lucca’s plain, where it makes sense in terms of close links to the city, but even in mountainous areas such as the Casentine Apennines and Mount Amiata.25 The hypothesis implies that archaeological survey should identify fairly commonly remains of isolated rural dwellings. But they have failed to materialize. Why should these surveys alone fail to identify dispersed settlement, when it emerges so clearly in surveys of other periods? Rather, the early medieval population’s “invisibility” is due either to the frequent location of early medieval nuclei in centers that continued until the late Middle Ages, or to their location on hilltops. The early medieval phases in fact can be verified through planned excavations or suspected in long-lived inhabited centers where their traces have been obliterated to the point of making them imperceptible in the absence of targeted archaeological investigation, for the sheer bulk of posteleventh-century stone structures obscures the fragile construction materials used from the sixth to the eleventh centuries. The historians’ vision of differing conditions across the early medieval countryside may rather reflect inconsistency in the written sources’ social and settlement terminology. Notaries formulated their terms to describe private contracts, and they may not help us understand the real population structures in so far as their wording reflects other mental categories.26 The Characteristics of a Rural Population in Hilltop Villages After the Roman communication and distribution systems collapsed, the rural population had to rely on itself to fulfill its basic needs. The dynamics that 23 For recent summaries on the settlement organization of the Tuscan countryside, based on written records, see Wickham, “Frontiere di villaggio”; and Riccardo Francovich and Maria Ginatempo, “Introduzione”, to their edited volume Castelli. Storia e archeologia del potere nella Toscana medievale (Florence, 2000), pp. 7–24. 24 Riccardo Francovich and Richard Hodges, Villa to Village (London, 2003), pp. 61–74; Marco Valenti, L’insediamento altomedievale delle campagne toscane (Florence, 2004). 25 Chris Wickham, “Documenti scritti e archeologia per una storia dell’incastellamento”, in Riccardo Francovich and Marco Milanese (eds), Lo scavo archeologico di Montarrenti (Florence, 1990), pp. 79–102; Wickham, Comunità e clientele; Chris Wickham, La montagna e la città (Turin, 1997). 26 See the examples in Wickham, “Frontiere di villaggio”, p. 241.

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shaped population patterns now differed completely from those that had characterized the ancient landscape. Rather than dispersing among the woods and uncultivated areas, the much reduced rural population soon aggregated into new settlements.27 After a disarticulated late antique phase, the new settlements often coalesced at the edges of previously utilized space. The sixth century’s socio-economic conditions and insecurity meant that once again a village organization suited the rural population’s subsistence needs.28 Furthermore, those needs reinforced the mental structures that bound the community to an inhabited center with a strong identity. Concentrating peasant dwellings in nuclei also created a suitable “biological mass” of at least 100 individuals, below which it would have been difficult for co-operation and specialization within the community to reach the critical threshold needed for a level of agricultural production adequate for survival. In an excessively small and isolated group, one shared bacterial infection could have sufficed to compromise a harvest. Villages – which also constituted the natural point of reference for Italy’s immigrant Germanic populations29 – offered a base for storing food and for producing, repairing, and exchanging tools and, not least, a context for preserving and transmitting inherited technical knowledge. That expertise was all the more valuable because each community was forced to be self-sufficient in nearly all areas of production. Collective activities also encouraged community life within these new centers: reaping, harvesting, hunting, and even rivalry with neighboring centers must have consolidated village bonds. But the dynamics of family relationships inside and outside the villages still await archaeological and anthropological investigation.30 The rural population was not limited to village communities. It must have included marginal elements: tramps, pilgrims, skilled foreign workers, perhaps even transhumant shepherds. However, the archaeological evidence leaves no doubt that the settlement backbone of the early Middle Ages consisted of villages of a significant size. Such places, in other words, were capable of satisfying most of their inhabitants’ needs in a world marked by extreme crisis in the cities, the economy, the transport infrastructure, and the political and administrative arrangements. Rural populations based their subsistence economy as much on harvesting, hunting, and breeding as on the traditional agrarian activities, whose role was changing compared to late antiquity. Archaeozoology shows a clear drop in 27 Riccardo Francovich, “Changing Structures of Settlements”, in Christina La Rocca (ed.), Short Oxford History of Italy: Italy in the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 2002), pp. 144–67; Francovich and Hodges, Villa to Village, pp. 61–74; Wickham, “Frontiere di villaggio”, pp. 240–41. 28 Francovich and Hodges, Villa to Village, pp. 31–74. 29 Paola Galetti, Abitare nel Medioevo. Forme e vicende dell’insediamento rurale nell’Italia altomedievale (Florence, 1997); Paola Galetti, Uomini e case nel Medioevo tra Occidente e Oriente (Bari, 2001); Stefano Gasparri, “Tra antichità e Medioevo: i modelli sociali ed economici dei popoli barbarici e il loro impatto con il mondo mediterraneo”, in Valerio Castronovo (ed.), Storia dell’economia mondiale (6 vols, Bari, 1996), vol. 1, pp. 317–34, here pp. 317–20, as well as Chapter 2 in this volume. 30 See Vito Fumagalli, Terra e società nell’Italia padana (Turin, 1976), p. 34.

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adult cattle bones, linked to the use of draught animals (for example, for plowing), and an increase in goats and pigs.31 The new centers occupied hilltop settlements that sometimes dated from the Bronze or Iron Ages and which had been substantially abandoned after Romanization. They moved close to permanent springs, next to which kitchen gardens were planted, and not far from the wooded mountains, where chestnuts and mixed woodland would have nourished man and beast whenever a seasonal shortage or military conflict threatened the cereal harvest.32 The importance of free grazing in the early medieval agrarian economy also fostered nucleated settlement among rural populations. Dwellings and their gardens were established with cultivated trees and shrubs in a sort of “oasis”, clearly separated by tall hedges from the semi-wild landscape. The hedges prevented herds and wild animals from damaging the crops and domestic animals. Thus a division emerged nearly everywhere between two types of cultivation which, in its rudimentary way, clearly separated two basic agrarian territories: land close to the village or infields, and outfields, outlying land exploited, apparently flexibly, for growing grain and as pasture and woodland. In this context, the village farmstead – that is to say the casa documented in archives dating from the mid-seventh century onwards – assured family management. This arrangement was individual rather than “individualistic”, and during fallow periods, it included the communal use of wasteland and fields situated outside the village’s cultivated belt.33 The archaeological documentation unequivocally paints a picture in which seventh- and eighth-century settlement was already nucleated (even if it still lacked internal social hierarchies) and situated, overwhelmingly, on hilltops. The Tuscan interior consists almost exclusively of hilly or mountainous land, whose shallow soil is often rather fragile. Here the possibility of cultivating the hillside’s lightest soil also encouraged the choice of hilltops for early medieval villages. Soil of this kind was neither dry nor at risk of flooding, and might be worked with hoes without demanding and expensive plowing. The general situation made it impractical to create and maintain irrigation systems for land affected by seasonal drought, or to drain land that regularly flooded.34 Therefore, away from the cities, peasants left plains as pasture, used bogs or marshes as such, avoided valley bottoms, and increasingly tended to grow higher-value crops (vegetable gardens, vineyards, olive trees, chestnuts, fruit trees, and so on) on the hilltops. Since these crops required more intensive labor and management, they attracted rural inhabitants nearby to maintain them. 31 Frank Salvadori, “Archeozoologia e Medioevo”, in Rosa Fiorillo and Paolo Peduto (eds), IIIo Congresso nazionale di archeologia medievale (Salerno, 2003), pp. 176–81, here pp. 180–81. 32 See Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo, “Cambios y transformaciones en el paisaje del Apenino toscano entre la Antigüedad Tardía y la Edad Media. El castaño”, Archeologia medievale, 25 (1998): 177–98; Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo, Sonia Gobbato, Lucia Giovannetti, and Claudio Sorrentino, “Storia e archeologia del castello di Gorfigliano”, Archeologia medievale, 27 (2000): 147–75. 33 Emilio Sereni, Storia del paesaggio agrario italiano (Bari, 1962), p. 335. 34 Toubert, Les structures du Latium médiéval, vol. 1, pp. 165–7 and 195–8.

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Villages often took root close to the upper limits of agricultural soil, halfway between the cultivated land in the valley, and the uncultivated land on the mountainside.35 The choice of hilltops was encouraged by the stability and resistance to erosion of the high rocky terraces compared with the instability of many chalky slopes, which made them prone to landslides and unsuitable for the peasants’ timber dwellings. Moreover, in an irregular mountainous relief, the different parcels of land attached to a village farm, that is to say the land linked to a casa, could be situated on two or more different slopes of the high ground below the settlement nucleus at the top. The differing microclimate of each slope limited the risk of bad harvests, so that the “dominant position of the inhabited centers and their central position in relation to most of the cultivated parcels” would provide the peasants with “a more coherent, regular and therefore less costly way of working on the piecemeal estate”.36 The intent to occupy places characterized, even symbolically, by a particular aptness for territorial control, sometimes linked with the opportunity to reuse pre-Roman fortified centers, must have encouraged the reoccupation of hilltops.37 Perhaps, centuries apart, similar reasons pushed culturally different rural populations to adopt partially overlapping settlement choices. That in no way implies that the Romanization of the countryside was an insignificant parenthesis. Such a process cannot be reduced to military considerations. A deeper explanation should consider the renewed centrality of hilltop villages, the thoroughgoing adoption of a new type of landscape management that effectively rejected the Roman system, and the initial shift’s enduring impact on the landscape of future centuries. These reasons undermine the historiographic insistence on defense.38 Moreover many northern Italian sites investigated by archaeologists as late antique and early medieval fortifications have turned out to be nothing more than hilltop peasant villages with modest fortifications, which, normally, lacked churches and public buildings.39 The Archaeological Evidence Tuscan archaeology paints a new picture of early medieval settlement structures. The evidence is becoming abundant enough to re-examine critically the image See Dino Gribaudi, “Sulle origini dei centri rurali di sommità”, Rivista geografica italiana, 58 (1951): 19–33 for Piedmont, and Toubert, Les structures du Latium médiéval, vol. 1, pp. 135–98, for Latium. 36 Gribaudi, “Sulle origini dei centri”, p. 27. 37 The cases of Tuscan fortifications, the castelli of Scarlino, Donoratico, Castel di Pietra and Montemassi, are emblematic in this respect: see below. 38 Sereni, Storia del paesaggio, p. 22; also Luisa Chiappa Mauri, “Popolazione, popolamento, sistemi culturali, spazi coltivati, aree boschive ed incolte”, in Giuliano Pinto, Carlo Poni and Ugo Tucci (eds), Storia dell’agricoltura italiana (Florence, 2002), pp. 23–57. 39 Aurora Cagnana, “Le strutture del castello”, in Tiziano Mannoni and Giovanni Murialdo (eds), S. Antonino: un insediamento fortificato nella Liguria bizantina (Bordighera, 2001), pp. 101–17. 35

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of rural society drawn from the written sources alone. A first archaeological approach has tackled the late Roman settlement crisis and productive organization. It has focused on the nature of the collapse of the villa system and detects the crisis’ consequences on settlement from a well-established strategy of field survey. A second approach has aimed at the date and the forms of settlement organization underlying the first phases of castelli, fortified establishments whose origins the traditional view has dated between the tenth and twelfth centuries. In fact, castelli constituted the key to rural settlement all the way up to the fourteenth century, when documents testify to over 1550 such settlements in Tuscany.40 The ceramics discovered by surveys illuminate the system of rural settlement up to the early seventh century. It is now clear that, within those survey areas, it is not possible to detect any significant surface archaeological evidence for subsequent early medieval settlement.41 Coverage of southern Tuscany is now extensive enough to be representative for the provinces of Siena and Grosseto (see Figure 3.1a). Surveying approximately 1979 km2 (23.8 per cent of those provinces, and 8.6 per cent of all of Tuscany) of the region has revealed 2521 first- to fourth-century settlement structures, and 201 sixth- to seventh-century structures (Figure 3.1b). This shows a severe population crisis. Between the first to third centuries, the period of highest population, and the seventh century, the evidence for settlement structures decreases twelvefold (Figure 3.2). Projecting this data onto the whole region would suggest dramatic changes in land use. From an average of one site per 1.27 km2 in the first and fourth centuries, the density drops to one site per 4 km2 in the fourth to sixth centuries and to one site per 10 km2 in the sixth and seventh centuries.42 In qualitative terms, “residual” forms of settlement, sometimes built on late Roman villas, characterized the sixth-century rural settlement network. The habitable structures were simple, one-room dwellings, made of stone or, more often, a perishable material, but with a tiled roof. Productive activities typically fit a self-sufficient economy. Evidence of a social or economic hierarchy is generally lacking; there are only rare and weak indications that people were being managed at all, for example, in the form of occasional rural churches. Overall, in the areas populated in late antiquity and their associated agrarian spaces, we gain an impression of ever more deserted ancient landscapes. The new results from excavations of castelli amply fill the large chronological gap from the mid-sixth to the seventh through the ninth centuries for which archaeological surveys have failed to document rural settlement structure. Francovich and Ginatempo (eds), Castelli. See the summary on Tuscany in Franco Cambi, Carlo Citter, Silvia Guideri and Marco Valenti, “Etruria, Tuscia, Toscana: la formazione dei paesaggi altomedievali”, in Riccardo Francovich and Ghislaine Noyé (eds), La storia dell’altomedioevo italiano (VI–X secolo) alla luce dell’archeologia (Florence, 1994), pp. 183–215. 42 The data is recorded in the LIAM information system (Dept of Archaeology, University of Siena) and has been analyzed by Valenti, L’insediamento altomedievale. 40 41

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Figure 3.1a Extent of survey: Tuscany covers 22,990 km2. Our investigations targeted the provinces of Siena and Grosseto, which extend over 8300 km2; fieldwalking covered 1979 km2, that is, 24 per cent of those provinces, and almost 9 per cent of all of Tuscany. Figure 3.1b  Dramatic change in land use: 2521 occupied sites, an average of one site per 1.27 km2 in the first to fourth centuries AD, drop to 506 sites, a density of one site per 4 km2 in the fourth to sixth centuries, and to only 201 sites, or one site per 10 km2, in the sixth to seventh centuries.

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Figure 3.2 Forty archaeologically investigated late antique sites.

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The eight different fortified settlements excavated and published by the Department of Medieval Archaeology of the University of Siena demonstrate this, and underscore that archaeology offers the sole viable strategy for reconstructing early medieval settlement.43 In Tuscany, approximately 37 castelli have been examined since 1975. Some 62 per cent have revealed significant early medieval phases.44 In the other 38 per cent the lack of evidence for this period may 43 See Marco Valenti (ed.), Poggio Imperiale e Poggibonsi (Siena), vol. 1 (Florence, 1996); Federico Cantini, Il castello di Montarrenti. Lo scavo archeologico (1982–1987) (Florence, 2003); Alessandra Nardini and Marco Valenti, “Il castello di Miranduolo (Chiusdino, SI). Campagne di scavo 2001–2002”, in Fiorillo and Peduto (eds), IIIo Congresso nazionale, pp. 487–95; Lorenzo Marasco, “Lo scavo della rocca di Scarlino (GR)” (Master’s thesis, Università degli Studi di Siena, 2003); Giovanna Bianchi (ed.), Il castello di Donoratico. I risultati delle prime campagne di scavo (2000–2002) (Florence, 2004); Giovanna Bianchi, (ed.), Campiglia. Un castello e il suo territorio (2 vols, Florence, 2003); Maddalena Belli, Daniele De Luca and Francesca Grassi, “Dal villaggio alla formazione del castello: il caso di Rocchette Pannocchieschi”, in IIIo Congresso nazionale, pp. 286–91; Francesco Cuteri, “Recenti indagini a Suvereto (LI)”, Rassegna di archeologia, 9 (1990): 431–64; Riccardo Belcari, Giovanna Bianchi, and Roberto Farinelli, “Il monastero di S. Pietro a Monteverdi. Indagini storicoarcheologiche preliminari sui siti di Badivecchia e Poggio della Badia”, in Riccardo Francovich and Sauro Gelichi (eds), Monasteri e castelli tra X e XII secolo (Florence, 2003), pp. 113–32. 44 Around Lucca: Montecastrese, see Fabio Redi, “Il castello di Montecastrese (Lucca)”, Archeologia medievale, 24 (1997): 225–32; Castagnori (an early medieval curtis documented in written sources), Giulio Ciampoltrini, “Castra e castelli nella valle del Serchio (VI–XI secolo)”, in Riccardo Francovich and Marco Valenti, (eds), La nascita dei castelli nell’Italia medievale (Poggibonsi, 1997), pp. 5–11; Gorfigliano: Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo (ed.), Archeologia e storia di un castello apuano (Florence, 2004), and Quirós Castillo, Gobbato, Giovannetti, and Sorrentino, “Storia e archeologia del castello di Gorfigliano”. Around Pistoia: Larciano (an early medieval villa documented in written sources), see Marco Milanese, Anna Patera and Enrico Pieri, Larciano (Rome, 1997); Montecatini Alto: Marco Milanese, Monica Baldassarri and Marco Bigini, “Ricerche sull’incastellamento nella Valdinievole orientale”, in Gelichi (ed.), Io Congresso nazionale, pp. 129–33; Pontito and Terrazzana: Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo, La Valdinievole nel medioevo (Pisa, 1999); Massa (an early medieval villa documented in written sources): Marco Milanese, M. Baldassarri, F. Andreazzoli et al., “Il territorio di Massa nel Medioevo (Massa e Cozzile, PT)”, in Gian Pietro Brogiolo (ed.), IIo Congresso nazionale di archeologia medievale (Florence, 2000), pp. 175–81. Around Florence: Poggio della Regina: Guido Vannini (ed.), Fortuna e declino di una società feudale valdarnese (Florence, 2002); Poggio Castello: Giuliano De Marinis, “Un piccolo castrum altomedievale presso Pomino in Val di Sieve”, Archeologia medievale, 6 (1979): 275-88; Montefiesole: Riccardo Francovich and Carlo Tronti, “Lo scavo del castello di Montefiesole”, in Peduto and Fiorillo (eds), IIIo Congresso nazionale, pp. 299-302. Around Livorno: Campiglia Marittima, see Bianchi (ed.), Campiglia. Un castello; Donoratico: Giovanna Bianchi, Il castello di Donoratico; Suvereto: Francesco Cuteri, “Recenti indagini a Suvereto (LI)”, Rassegna di archeologia, 9 (1990): 431–64. Around Pisa: Monte Castellare, see online only: ; Santa Maria a Monte: Fabio Redi, “Vicende insediative di S. Maria a Monte, dallo scavo alla rocca”, in Francovich and Valenti, La nascita dei castelli, pp. 121–6. Around Siena: Radicofani, see Carlo Avetta (ed.), La città fortificata di Radicofani (Siena, 1998); Montarrenti: Cantini, Il castello di Montarrenti; Poggibonsi: Valenti, Poggio Imperiale; Miranduolo: Nardini and Valenti, “Il castello di Miranduolo”. Around Grosseto: Selvena (an early medieval hamlet documented in written sources): Giovanna Bianchi, Anna Caprasecca, Riccardo Francovich et al., “La Roccaccia di Selvena (Castell’Azzara – GR): relazione preliminare delle indagini 1997–1998”, Archeologia medievale, 26 (1999): 139–49; Ansedonia: Michelle Hobart, “Cosa – Ansedonia (Orbetello in età medievale: da una città romana ad un insediamento medievale sparso)”, Archeologia medievale, 22 (1995): 569–83; Elizabeth Fentress, “Late Roman and Medieval Cosa I”, Papers of the British School at Rome, 69 (1991): 197–231; Elizabeth Fentress (ed.), Cosa V.

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reflect the limits of the archaeological investigations, undertaken in short seasons and without specialist supervision capable of documenting the delicate traces of the earliest occupation phases, not to mention rebuilding on the same site. In fact, the massive new masonry structures of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries often obliterated evidence of the earliest settlement. In sum, it now appears clear that the celebrated process of incastellamento which established fortifications and elite control, mostly concerned pre-existing, permanently occupied settlements, villages and curtes or manors, rather than newly founded settlements (see Figure 3.3). The archaeological evidence shows that incastellamento was established upon a network of pre-existing settlements, and that the organization of peasant labor was modeled on this pre-existing framework. The early Middle Ages, at least from the eighth century, did not witness population crisis; on the contrary precisely this phase consolidated the new settlement network of the countryside, upon which the network of castelli later was grafted, as for instance at Montarrenti (see Figure 3.4). In fact, the period from the sixth to the eighth centuries appears to be a crucial phase in the creation of concentrated rural populations, within which it is difficult, if not impossible, to discern archaeological data that points to social differentiation. One is readily led to think that the creation of these communities followed “peasant logic”, rather than aristocratic direction. Inside these villages the processes of creating the material settlement structures on an “urban” model paralleled the establishment of rural aristocracies, and started only in the mideighth century. Such processes can be detected in traces of the construction of defensive fortifications around the entire settlement or in the creation of more prestigious dwellings. Territorial signorie or lordships, in turn, began to foster a landowning elite in these centuries. The monumental stone castelli powerfully symbolized the new social, political, and economic role that the urban and rural lay and ecclesiastical aristocracies, with both large and small properties, were beginning to assume. A quarter-century of archaeological investigations into the early medieval phases of these settlements before they were transformed into castelli, has revealed why those phases were hard to detect, for the most common construction material in Tuscany was wood. Other perishable materials used were clay, straw and cane. The structures do not seem to have been built solely with posts, which were sometimes on the inside or on clay foundations; where the geomorphology allowed, caves sometimes served as dwellings. Generally, in central Italy,45 stone disappears from dwellings, only reappearing in villages An Intermittent Town (Ann Arbor, MI, 2003); Montemassi: Silvia Guideri and Roberto Parenti, Archeologia a Montemassi, un castello tra storia e storia dell’arte (Florence, 2000); also the unpublished excavations by the Area di Archeologia Medievale dell’Università di Siena; Scarlino: Marasco, “Lo scavo della Rocca di Scarlino”; Rocchette Pannocchieschi: Belli, De Luca, and Grassi, “Dal villaggio alla formazione del castello”. 45 In northern Italy, however, the use of wood as a building material continued to be prevalent. See Gian Pietro Brogiolo and Sauro Gelichi, La città nell’alto medioevo italiano (Rome, 1998), pp. 103–54.

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Figure 3.3  Forty-one archaeologically investigated fortified sites (castelli); 27 (66 per cent) have early medieval phases.

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Figure 3.4  Written sources document the castle of Montarrenti (upper photo) only from the mid-twelfth century. Excavations show that the settlement began with a group of huts between c. 650 and 750; it featured across the hillside small rectangular or oval, boat-shaped dwellings such as these (lower right; from Area 5000). Two defensive palisades fortified the lower and upper edges of the slope. The postholes visible (lower left photo) belong to the early palisade (near and under the stone wall) and to a granary. The palisade is thus older than the stone wall (which dates between c. 750 and 900); the stone wall circled the top of the hill, including the granary.

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toward the tenth and eleventh centuries.46 In central-northern Italy, the spread of such huts owed not so much to imported Germanic-type models as to the recovery of rural building traditions which allowed people to construct their homes themselves.47 At the same time, the know-how for building stone walls and working with mortar and stone vanished outside of a few specialized groups.48 Roofs made of straw, wood or stone replaced tile, confirming the disappearance of industrial production.49 Excavations have identified ten types of structures: dwellings, storage, barns, outbuildings, craft workshops, villa farms, fenced areas, roads, ditches and walls. They form four main groups, and change over time: partially sunken huts (Grubenhäuser); huts with timbering at floor level; huts with wall foundations; huts made of mixed materials. Built from the second half of the sixth century until the eighth, partially sunken huts are the oldest type (see Figure 3.5). From the mid-seventh century they coexisted with the most successful type, circular or rectangular structures with timbering at floor level, which continued until the tenth century (see Figure 3.6). These were joined from the mid-eighth century by elliptically shaped buildings (see Figure 3.7). From the tenth and eleventh centuries dwellings made of mixed materials and with stone foundations appear. Built of clay, reeds or plastered wickerwork, they were sometimes roofed with limestone slabs. Collaboration of archaeologists with palaeobotanists occasionally enables us to

46 Roberto Parenti, “Le tecniche costruittive delle abitazioni medievali”, in Francovich and Milanese (eds), Lo scavo archeologico di Montarrenti, pp. 57–78. At Carvico (Bergamo), a building dating between the ninth and eleventh centuries, situated next to the church of San Tomé, was built with walls incorporating load-bearing posts (Gian Pietro Brogiolo, “S. Tomé di Carvico. Bergamo. Scavi nella chiesa e nel terrapieno”, Notiziario soprintendenza archeologica della Lombardia, 5 (1985): 137–40); at Ponte Nepesino (unknown date) a dwelling had walls in undressed stone, used as a base for wooden piers: Sarah Philpot and Timothy W. Potter, “Lo scavo”, in Fiona Cameron, Gillian Clarke, R.P.J. Jackson et al., “Il castello di Ponte Nepesino e il confine settentrionale del Ducato di Roma”, Archeologia medievale 11 (1984): 63–147, here pp. 81–2. 47 In general, as well as Gian Pietro Brogiolo (ed.), Edilizia residenziale tra V e VII secolo, IV seminario sul tardoantico e sull’altomedioevo in Italia centrosettentrionale (Mantua, 1994), see also Brogiolo and Gelichi, La città nell’alto medioevo, pp. 103–54. 48 The self-sufficient organization of the eighth and ninth centuries did include workers who specialized in building stone walls. They seem to be the exception, although it is difficult to generalize. The most frequently quoted cases (the magister carpentarius, the magistro de ligno et lapide, the magistri ad muros et casas et buttes faciendum, and so on) were in fact attached to the large estates of the monasteries of Bobbio (the structure of the polyptych ordered by abbot Wala c. 834–36 is reminiscent of the Capitulare de villis) and of Santa Giulia at Brescia. See Paola Galetti, “La casa contadina nell’Italia padana dei secoli VIII–X”, in Riccardo Francovich (ed.), Archeologia e storia del Medioevo italiano, Studi NIS Archeologia, 3 (Roma, 1987), pp. 97–111 and Vito Fumagalli, “Introduzione del feudalesimo e sviluppo dell’economia curtense nell’Italia settentrionale”, in Structures féodales et féodalisme dans l’Occident méditerranéen (Xe–XIIIe siècles) (Rome, 1980), pp. 313–23, 324–5. 49 See Brogiolo, Edilizia residenziale, and Roberto Parenti, “Le tecniche costruttive fra VI e X secolo”, in La storia dell’altomedioevo italiano, pp. 479–96, especially pp. 487–9 with its detailed bibliography.

Figure 3.5 Partially sunken or dug-out huts (Grubenhaüser), the earliest type of housing, were built from the later sixth century until the end of the seventh century. Examples from Poggibonsi. In the reconstruction, the lower tips of the roof poles would almost have touched the ground.

Figure 3.6  Circular huts with timbered floor levels coexisted from the mid-seventh century with the partially sunken huts. Example from Poggibonsi.

Figure 3.7  Left and lower right: boat-shaped huts with timbered floor levels. Two mid-ninth-century examples are big (18 × 9 m), and resemble longhouses. The large stone in the middle of the left photo and in the close-up on the upper right has been interpreted as the base of a mill. The broken upper element was found nearby. Examples from Poggibonsi.

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discover rich details of the construction of huts and outbuildings, for example in a ninth-century building at Miranduolo.50 Elements in the Transformation of Villages from the Sixth to the Ninth Centuries Although archaeology shows that early medieval nucleated hilltop settlements arose with the dissolution of the ancient landscape, excavations are still insufficient for an exhaustive reconstruction of the landscapes.51 Generally, the late antique settlement network that emerged from the crisis of the fifth century broke up between the sixth century and the early seventh, and new wooden or insubstantial structures were sometimes built on the remains of the villae. These wooden structures can be interpreted as catalysts for the surviving communities or new immigrant populations.52 Some archaeological indicators show that around the mid-seventh century profound social changes affected the Tuscan countryside. The last pottery production disappeared that was still linked by morphology, technology and distribution networks to the ancient world.53 A progressive increase in rural churches ended Germanic-style burials.54 Yet it must be emphasized that rural churches did not play a central role in creating the social identity of a village. Data from successive centuries, topographical surveys and archival documentation indicate that the Church was more reluctant than the rural population to abandon the ancient landscapes. The building of stone religious buildings inside early medieval villages prior to the ninth and tenth centuries is not documented archaeologically, and our excavations enable us to exclude the earlier existence of wooden churches inside hilltop settlements. However, it is possible that some rural churches, in particular baptismal ones with closer links to bishoprics, began to figure as temporary meeting places for

The documentation can be seen on the website , under the heading “castello di Miranduolo”. 51 For a general picture, see Francovich, “Changing Structures of Settlement”, and the incisive pages of Valenti, L’insediamento altomedievale. See also Giulio Ciampoltrini and Paola Rendini, “L’agro cosano fra tardo antico e alto medioevo: segnalazioni e contributi”, Archeologia medievale, 15 (1988): 519–34; Giulio Ciampoltrini and Paola Rendini, “L’insediamento tardo antico nella villa Marittima di Torre Tagliata (Orbetello, GR)”, Archeologia medievale, 17 (1990): 625–32; Cynthia Mascione, Alle origini di Torrita di Siena. Un villaggio romano e tardoantico (Sinalunga, 2000). 52 Cambi et al., “Etruria, Tuscia, Toscana”; Marco Valenti, Carta archeologica della Provincia di Siena, vol. 1, Il Chianti senese (Siena, 1995); Marco Valenti, “La Toscana tra VI–IX secolo. Città e campagna tra fine dell’età tardoantica ed altomedioevo”, in Gian Pietro Brogiolo and Sauro Gelichi (eds), La fine delle ville romane, Documenti di Archeologia, 11 (Mantua, 1997), pp. 81–106; Marco Valenti, Carta archeologica della Provincia di Siena, vol. 3, La Valdelsa (Siena, 1999). 53 Riccardo Francovich and Marco Valenti, “La ceramica d’uso comune in Toscana tra V–X secolo”, in Gabrielle Démians d’Archimbaud (ed.), La céramique médiévale en Méditerranée (Aix-enProvence, 1997), pp. 129–37; Valenti, Carta archeologica, vol. 3. 54 Francovich, “Changing Structures of Settlement”. 50

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neighboring villagers.55 The founders of ecclesiastical establishments sometimes gave them endowments that were still linked to late antique properties. Thus these churches often clustered along the pre-existing road network – which normally avoided the marginal hilltops where the new villages had established themselves – and such sites rarely attracted the rural population. In the end, the villages usually managed to attract religious buildings, but only over a very long timescale, and generally in the context of a struggle between the Church and the signoria. In the mean time, the village communities, which had initially featured a socio-economically homogeneous population, progressively attracted rural elites. The latter fostered hierarchical settlement developments that are clearly visible in the archaeological record.56 During periods of economic and political difficulty many independent farmers had given their village farms up to a large landowner in order to obtain a lease on tributary land linked to a curtense or manorial center. Consequently, in the Carolingian period, the new powers associated with administering large estates and organizing territorial defense and control invested massively in the new centers of the rural economy and imposed themselves inside the villages. In this context, new buildings, storage facilities and structures concretized the local hegemony to which the new powers aspired, and started to occupy favored areas within the early medieval villages. This is probably the process we can observe at the eighth-century village of Miranduolo, which became a fortified site c. 850 (see Figure 3.8). It was precisely the rising representatives of the signoria who, from the ninth century, turned increasingly to founding and controlling the village church (or, to use the contemporary documentary terms, the curtis, villa or castrum church). They perceived them to be the key element for consolidating their own prestige. The efforts of the powerful, the potentes, to impose themselves upon village communities must have thrown a collective management system of land and a communal use of pastures and woods into crisis. Nevertheless, the identity of the early medieval village long survived substantially intact in much of the Tuscan countryside. In fact, between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries further settlement nucleation through incastellamento or the clearing of new lands promised by leading landlords or by the communes came about through processes that respected the ancient villages.

In Tuscany, information about early medieval and late medieval rural churches is limited, especially regarding their relationships with the nucleated settlement complexes: see the summaries in Philippe Pergola (ed.), Alle origini della parrocchia rurale (IV–VIII sec.) (Vatican City, 1999). For rural Tuscan churches documented from the mid-seventh century and their relationships with neighboring settlements, reconstructed through topographical and documentary research, see Riccardo Francovich, Christina Felici and Fabio Gabbrielli, “La Toscana”, in Gian Pietro Brogiolo (ed.), Le chiese rurali tra V e VI secolo in Italia settentrionale e nelle regioni limitrofe (in press). 56 Francovich, “Changing Structures of Settlement”; Francovich and Hodges, Villa to Village, pp. 61–105; Valenti, Carta archeologica, vol. 3. 55

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Figure 3.8  Miranduolo lies about 20 km south of Montarrenti. Written sources document the castello only from the early eleventh century. Excavations are uncovering uninterrupted occupation of the hill beginning in the eighth century (upper left). Circa 850, two great ditches and a palisade (arrowed) were constructed, enclosing most of the village (upper right). Bottom: an artist’s conception of the building of the palisade c. 850.

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Reinterpreting the Written Sources Given the quality of information emerging from archaeological research,57 it appears increasingly obvious that the reconstruction of early medieval settlement structures can be based only partially on written evidence which is fragmentary and geographically disparate.58 Even when the written sources run rich – two-thirds of the charters for this period come from Tuscan archives59 – by themselves they simply do not suffice for reconstructing contemporary settlement forms.60 But it is fruitful to read the written sources in the light of models elaborated from the archaeological evidence, reversing the historian’s proposition that the period from the late seventh and to the early tenth centuries should “still be read through the written sources”61 because of the slender archaeological information.62 Is the village-based settlement system which clearly emerges from the field archaeology compatible with the available early medieval texts? They call the basic unit of rural settlement a casa, that is to say a cluster of dwellings and plots of land, which represents a peasant concern run by a family.63 The texts do not specify how exactly these case relate to one another, so the texts do not allow us to establish whether these peasant homes were dispersed in the countryside or, in fact, grouped into villages.64 Moreover, it is very difficult to determine the settlement implications of the terms vicus, fundus, locus, casale or curtis, since their use is not always consistent in different texts and periods.65 In some cases, the Riccardo Francovich and Marco Valenti, “Cartografia archeologica, indagini sul campo ed informatizzazione”, in Riccardo Francovich and Mirinella Pasquinucci (eds), La carta archeologica della Toscana (Florence, 2001), pp. 81–114. 58 Regarding the irremediable scarcity of early medieval texts, Stefano Gasparri has emphasized that between 569 AD and the beginning of the eighth century, only nine archival texts survive from the kingdom of Italy in original or copy, to which eight texts on Byzantine Italy can be added, as well as a few chronicles and Rothari’s legislative collection: Stefano Gasparri, “Lo storico e le fonti”, in Clotilde Pontecorvo and Lydia Tornatore (eds), Storia e processi di conoscenza (Turin, 1983), pp. 109-57, here pp. 118–21. 59 Of 296 authentic documents edited in the first three volumes of Codice diplomatico longobardo, around two hundred come from Tuscan centers (slightly under 160 from the Archbishop of Lucca’s archive, approximately 20 from the monastery of San Salvatore on Monte Amiata, and some 30 from other ecclesiastical institutions). 60 See further Maria Ginatempo and Andrea Giorgi, “Le fonti documentarie per la storia degli insediamenti medievali in Toscana”, Archeologia medievale, 23 (1996): 7–52, and Francovich and Ginatempo (eds), Castelli. 61 Sandro Carocci, “Conclusioni”, in Etienne Hubert (ed.), Une région frontalière au Moyen Age. Les vallées du Turano et du Salto entre Sabine et Abruzzes, Collection de l’Ecole française de Rome, 263 (Rome, 2000), p. 426. 62 Ginatempo and Giorgi, “Le fonti documentarie”, pp. 7–13. 63 Paolo Cammarosano, Italia medievale. Struttura e geografia delle fonti scritte (Rome, 1991), p. 131. 64 Ginatempo and Giorgi, “Le fonti documentarie”. 65 For example, in reference to the eighth- and ninth-century Farfa acts which mention domus cultae, cellae, curticellae, curtes, casalia, Toubert, Les structures du Latium médiéval, observed: “it happens that, according to the documentary context, the same words signify diverse and sometimes even contradictory realities” (p. 456). 57

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words clearly seem interchangeable, while in others it seems more likely that their meaning varied over time, reflecting changes in the character of dwellings or in the perceptions of the individuals drawing up the documents. Without archaeological investigation,66 their meaning cannot be specified.67 In the Tuscan records, vicus68 regains its classical meaning, clearly referring to forms of villages, until it disappeared during the tenth century in favor of new words (villa, curtis, castellum). Thereafter, vicus survived only in place names. Despite this term’s clear link to ancient settlements, it would be erroneous to think that vici designate only late antique villages.69 Historians usually note the ambiguity of the term casale, which – along with curtis – can mean settlement or inheritance. Of course, we need to remember that someone might sometimes inherit a whole settlement (casale or curtis).70 On occasion, the term casale is linked with a village organization thought to be an alternative to great estates, and connected to the collective use of uncultivated areas,71 and in Byzantine Italy, to clearance initiatives.72 Thus, in eastern Tuscany, some scholars have interpreted the casale as a territorial division which could host a population that was to some degree nucleated.73 For southern Tuscany, on the other hand, the 66 Wickham maintains that the terms vicus, villa, casale and castrum cannot indicate whether settlements were concentrated, dispersed, or in between: see his observation in Ghislaine Noyé (ed.), Castrum 2. Structures de l’habitat et occupation du sol dans les pays méditerranéens: les méthodes et l’apport de l’archéologie extensive (Rome, 1988), Discussion, p. 215. 67 Riccardo Francovich, “L’incastellamento e prima dell’incastellamento”, in Miquel Barceló and Pierre Toubert (eds), L’incastellamento (Rome, 1998), pp. 13–20; Roberto Farinelli, “I castelli nei territori diocesani di Populonia-Massa e Roselle-Grosseto”, in Francovich and Ginatempo (eds), Castelli, pp. 141–203; Francovich and Ginatempo, “Introduzione”, Castelli, pp. 7–24. 68 Andrea Castagnetti, L’organizzazione del territorio rurale nel Medioevo (Bologna, 1982), here pp. 272f. 69 See, for example, the case of the vicus of Sant’Ansano, established with its eponymous church during the Lombard period on land claimed by the dioceses of Siena and Arezzo: Castagnetti, L’organizzazione del territorio, p. 273. 70 See the discussion in Vito Fumagalli, L’uomo e l’ambiente nel Medioevo (Bari, 1992), p. 77. Fumagalli, Terra e società, p. 29, understands ninth-century casalia as minor complexes of land belonging to the curtes – nucleated groups of farms lacking landowners’ rights – intended to colonize the woods for agriculture. For the different meaning historians attributed to the term casale in the eighth and ninth centuries, see Gianfranco Pasquali, “L’azienda curtense e l’economia rurale dei secoli VI–XI”, in Alfio Cortonesi, Gianfranco Pasquali and Gabriella Piccinni (eds), Uomini e campagne nell’Italia medievale (Bari, 2002), pp. 5–71, here pp. 45–6. For the meaning of curtes in Tuscan texts, see Farinelli, “I castelli nei territori”, pp. 161–6. For the ownership in the tenth century of entire villages situated in marginal areas of the territory of Lucca by members of the signoria who used the curtis to organize rural estates, see Bruno Andreolli, “La giustizia signorile nella Lucchesia dell’alto medioevo”, in Amleto Spicciani and Cinzio Violante (eds), La signoria rurale nel medioevo italiano (Pisa, 1998), pp. 139–56, here pp. 154–5. 71 Bruno Andreolli, “Proprietà signorili e lavoro contadino”, in Giuseppe Adani (ed.), Insediamenti rurali in Emilia romagna e Marche (Cinisello Balsamo, 1989), pp. 361–76, here pp. 362–3. 72 Ibid., p. 366; Castagnetti, L’organizzazione del territorio, pp. 225–47. 73 Delumeau and Wickham have insisted on this interpretation of casale: Jean Pierre Delumeau, Arezzo, espace et sociétés 715–1230 (Rome, 1996), pp. 118–21, and Wickham, La montagna e la città, pp. 186–7.

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texts’ casalia are frequently identified with settlement nuclei, usually on hilltops, and sometimes of small dimensions.74 The most thorough studies of settlement in early medieval Tuscan texts have come from Chris Wickham. He took into account the data and models arising from the early, incomplete archaeological investigations when he proposed interpretative paradigms differing from those that the most recent archaeology now suggests. In fact, he more than once raised the possibility of connecting territorial village organization on the one hand to a weak nucleation of settlement,75 and on the other, to the apparent weak identity of villages prior to the eleventh century.76 More specifically, concerning the distribution of population in the area of Monte Amiata in southern Tuscany, Wickham agreed with the views also expressed by Manuel Vachero Piñeiro regarding Valdorcia, and stated that neither the vici nor the casalia nor, initially, the castelli would have produced concentrated settlement until well into the twelfth century, since dispersed settlement dominated until then.77 Wickham’s arguments date back twenty years, before systematic archaeological investigation on Monte Amiata. Field surveys, research on surviving remains and systematic aerial photography undertaken in the last fifteen years challenge those conclusions.78 Here too, landscape archaeology has failed to detect early medieval dispersed settlements. It has, however, revealed the spread of nucleated villages, often on hilltops and not infrequently alongside religious buildings or settlements referred to in texts as curtes, vill(a)e or castelli. In this light, the limited settlement cohesion of the casalia and the vici situated on Monte Amiata’s western and eastern slopes merits reconsideration.79 Wickham’s evidence came from five rather late documents: one dates from 830, See also the brief outline in Elio Conti, La formazione della struttura agraria moderna nel contado fiorentino, vol. 1 (Rome, 1965), pp. 9–14. 75 Wickham, “Documenti scritti”; Chris Wickham, “Paesaggi sepolti: insediamento e incastellamento sull’Amiata, 750–1250”, in Mario Ascheri and Wilhelm Kurze (eds), L’Amiata nel Medioevo (Rome, 1989), pp. 101–37; Wickham, Comunità e clientele; Wickham, La montagna e la città. 76 Wickham, Comunità e clientele, p. 233; see his observation in Castrum 2, Discussion, p. 215. 77 Wickham, “Paesaggi sepolti”, pp. 110–11; Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro, “La distribuzione di uomini e delle terre nella Val d’Orcia nell’alto medioevo”, in Alfio Cortonesi (ed.), La Val d’Orcia nel medioevo e nei primi secoli dell’età moderna (Rome, 1990), pp. 11–32, here pp. 21–3. 78 Cambi et al., “Etruria, Tuscia, Toscana”; Riccardo Francovich, Carlo Citter, Floriano Cavanna et al., “Le grandi fasi dell’incastellamento”, in Mario Ascheri and Lucio Niccolai (eds), Gli Aldobrandeschi. La grande famiglia feudale della Maremma toscana (Arcidosso, 2002), pp. 40–46; for new elements from the territory of Monte Amiata, see Anna Caprasecca, “Fotointerpretazione del compressorio amiatino. Risorse archeologiche e insediamenti medioevali” (Master’s thesis, Università di Siena, 2002); Teresa Cavallo, “Paesaggi amiatini nel Medioevo: il caso di Casteldelpiano” (Master’s thesis, Università di Siena, 2003); Luca Giustarini, “Le ricerche storicoarcheologiche sul Castello di Selvena” (Master’s thesis, Università di Siena, 2003); Stella Menci, “I castelli del territorio comunale di Arcidosso (GR). Nascita e sviluppo dell’assetto insediativo medievale attraverso lo studio degli elevati e delle fonti d’archivio” (Master’s thesis, Università di Siena, 2004); Lucia Botarelli, Carta archeologica della Provincia di Siena, vol. 7, Radicofani (Siena, 2004). 79 Wickham, “Paesaggi sepolti”, pp. 110–15. 74

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and the others from the tenth century. In them the large estates had already become sufficiently powerful to break the links between the rustici (“peasants”) and their respective communities of origin.80 Moreover, only some of these texts show dwellings unambiguously outside the central nucleus of a village (for example, a mill in Comulo, in the hamlet of Plana, or a house to be built near the edge of the via Francigena), while nothing rules out that most of the references might refer in fact to peasant dwellings situated in nucleated villages. On the other hand, the absence of excavations in this area means that archaeology cannot contradict the transience of local community structures before the age of the castelli deduced from the written texts. It is worthwhile to reconsider the evidence about early medieval settlements in the monastic territory of San Salvatore, including of course the surviving documents relating to “settlement forms”, such as fundi, casalia, vici, curtes and castelli.81 This reassessment confirms that the terms vicus, fundus and casale appear in these written texts almost exclusively prior to the tenth century, when terms such as curtis or castello were extremely rare. By contrast, the terms curtis and castello increase from c. 950, as alternative settlement definitions decrease. References to vici are more frequent between the mid-eighth century and c. 900, and disappear in the tenth century, while references to casalia continue at the same level over the same period, and increase in percentage terms during the first half of the tenth century, before rapidly decreasing. Overall, the two settlement terms vici and casalia are frequently used interchangeably for the same place: 16 per cent of casalia are also called vicus, while 22 per cent of vici are also referred to as casale. The different terms thus appear to represent similar social and settlement situations. One factor shared by terms like vicus or casale is the number of instances between the eighth and twelfth centuries in which the same place-name is also associated with a church: approximately one out of ten. This clearly differentiates these settlements from the curtes or castelli, for which the percentage of links with churches is significantly higher. In particular, the frequent association of a church with a curtis appears to indicate that this term may designate not just a management element of a large estate, but also a fundamental component of the settlement system, suggesting a village profile not too dissimilar from that attributable to vici or castelli. The connection with ecclesiastical buildings also appears linked to the strategies of great landowners who used the establishment of a rural chapel to raise the hierarchical profile of the pre-existing nucleated settlements where the curtensi farmsteads came to be situated. Presoniano: Codex diplomaticus amiatinus, ed. Wilhelm Kurze (4 vols, Tübingen, 1974–2004), vol. 1, no. 108; Talassa: vol. 1, no. 178; Lamula: vol. 1, nos 174 and 194; Plana: vol. 1, nos 167 and 194. 81 The texts have been assessed quantitatively using the database “Atlante degli insediamenti medievali nominati nei documenti d’archivio” being prepared by the Area di Archeologia Medievale dell’Università di Siena, based in Grosseto. For our many Web-based materials, see: and . 80

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One final observation clarifies peasant dwellings mentioned in relation to a place simply referred to as “a place”, “a place called …”, or the like (locus, locus ubi dicitur). Comprehensive study of the Monte Amiata documents demonstrates that it would be misguided to conclude that such mentions indicate a peasant residence located in open countryside. In fact, more than 15 per cent of such references concern names of places otherwise identified as vicus, casale or curtis, which underscores that the documents often did not refer explicitly to the social or settlement structures to which rural buildings belonged. The historical argument ex silentio cannot be used to indicate a dispersed settlement pattern. The model that emerges from this review of the new archaeological data suggests a new direction, an early medieval population rooted in a diverse but solid village reality. That reality took shape centuries earlier than has been widely believed. Nor do the written sources necessarily contradict that picture. Demographically significant dispersed settlement still awaits archaeological and unambiguous documentary confirmation. Reconstructing the processes which transformed the countryside between late antiquity and the Middle Ages relies on assessments of written and material evidence that display differing patterns of survival and modern-day use. The interpretation of fragmentary evidence cannot neglect the invariable but different limits of both types of evidence, and it is important to acknowledge that only the archaeological evidence can produce substantive new data. Even so, that will only be possible and fruitful if we can devise strategies to preserve and interpret our ancient countrysides and the archaeological heritage they contain.

Chapter 4

Molecular Middle Ages: Early Medieval Economic History in the Twenty-First Century Michael McCormick

Early medieval economic history – and indeed, medieval history generally – seems poised to enter a revolutionary new era of discovery. As several of the preceding chapters underscore, new approaches to old data already are inspiring syntheses with a decidedly comparative bent. Even newer approaches are afoot. They promise immense and important new data that will allow us to rethink even the best syntheses. Their directions and kinds of evidence are so novel that some remains unpublished or controversial. Much comes from the natural sciences, and differs radically from the kind of evidence on which historians have until now learned their trade. Three decisive changes lead the way into this new era of historical analysis and understanding: the digital text, the rise of medieval archaeology, and the application of scientific, and particularly molecular, techniques to medieval material evidence. They offer new data on the economy in new domains, from communications to migrations and diseases. The revolution began when digital tools allowed us to explore electronically texts laboriously written by hand centuries ago. The new online text databases of medieval Latin and Greek sources enable new questions, and supply answers in seconds. They would allow even more if their search engines were more sophisticated. Still, every day the exhaustive surveys of word usage furnished by the online text databases dispel lexical and semantic ambiguities which hitherto obscured many key terms. They allow us to fail cheaply, to risk our precious time on uncertain but potentially rewarding questions. Just two decades ago, it would have been work for a lifetime to identify every mention of “plague”, “tolls” or “ship” in the hundreds of volumes of sermons or saints’ lives that one can now interrogate online in a few seconds. The electronic databases invite astute scholars to extract from oblivion hundreds of texts which have been hiding in plain sight, among the works falsely ascribed to Augustine, Origen, Chrysostom, or lesser figures. Thus knowledge of the textual tradition of the Latin Bible combined with electronic search engines allows the identification of



See introduction to Part One of this volume, note 11.

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over three hundred virtually unknown texts from late Roman Africa. Thanks to this sort of research, we hear again the anguished voice of an Arian preacher, as the Vandal kingdom of Carthage teetered on the eve of destruction. Recovery of the material past of the Middle Ages is accelerating. In recent decades, medieval archaeology has gone from a sub-branch of art history to full partner in historical investigation: shipwrecks, water mills, ceramics, the bones of animals eaten or beaten, seeds, the remains of medieval people themselves are emerging from the early medieval soil and sea. The new evidence illuminates a broad range of the medieval life experience that was profoundly anchored in the economic structures of the age. Archaeologists are learning to “read” an increasingly detailed set of traces, and detect in them historical change both on land and in the sea. On land, one need look no further than this volume for striking examples of archaeological detection of fundamental economic transformations such as incastellamento, and the less discussed decastellamento of the late Middle Ages, the processes of the rise and fall of country castles and their complex interplay with the changing economic and settlement patterns of central Italy in the course of the Middle Ages. Until now, we could only see the proliferation of nucleated settlements when the documents began to mention them in the context of the castles created in the tenth century, suggesting, probably misleadingly, that this was when nucleated villages began. From the bottom of the sea, a Byzantine shipwreck affords a snapshot of the eleventh-century trading world and calls out for comparison with earlier and later wrecks. The archaeological traces now being discovered on land and under the sea take many forms. Beyond the traditional typological classifications of artifacts, each wellrun excavation produces material remains suitable for analysis by the advanced methods of modern science. It is here that the biggest breakthroughs likely will lie. Those new material data will oblige historians, too, to acquire new skills, without losing the old ones. New collaborators provide the intellectual involvement and skills historians need for new ways of examining the past. With their help, historians can ask big questions, even at the risk of big failures in the early days of discovery. In fact, inaction would be the real failure, for it would mean missing opportunities whose existence we barely suspect. A first step into this future field of historical investigation will illustrate with some examples why scientific studies of early medieval material remains seem so  Leslie Dossey, “The Last Days of Vandal Africa: An Arian commentary on Job and its Historical Context”, Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 54 (2003): 60–138; cf. for her list of North African works, the Introduction to this volume, note 11.  See Chapter 3 in this volume. For decastellamento, see Riccardo Francovich and Maria Ginatempo, “Introduzione”, in Riccardo Francovich and Maria Ginatempo (eds), Castelli. Storia e archeologia del potere nella Toscana medievale (Florence, 2000), pp. 7–24, here pp. 19–20.  Frederick Van Doorninck Jr, “The Byzantine Ship at Serçe Lıman: An Example of SmallScale Maritime Commerce with Fatimid Syria in the Early Eleventh Century”, in Ruth Macrides (ed.), Travel in the Byzantine World. Papers from the Thirty-Fourth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 137–48.

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promising for economic history, notwithstanding the real challenges they entail. Examples of the new evidence could come from as far afield as the medieval metal-working pollution deposited in the glaciers of Greenland or in the lichen bogs of Switzerland, and how it appears to document the collapse of metal production in the seventh century, and its resurgence in the tenth. Or they could come from the traces that particular types of activities leave on bones, and the insights those traces offer into the occupational, dietary and exercise histories of long-dead human beings. This chapter concentrates on historical biology and the new biomolecular archaeology. Examples will come mostly from the early medieval period. We are what we eat, and the first function of any economy is to feed the population. From Roman Egypt’s grain shipments to the salt staple of medieval Venice, economic historians have long paid careful heed to food production and distribution. More recently, scholars have begun to search medieval texts and refuse dumps for what they tell about food consumption. Now new light is emerging from chemistry, microbiology and palaeobotany. At the broadest level of investigation, analysis of the ratios of stable isotopes in human bones reveals the relative predominance of vegetal, animal or marine foodstuffs in the diet of individuals and groups. One recent study of a Roman workingclass population from the port of Rome has turned up tantalizing isotopic indications that consumption of plant foods, meat and fish differed according to age and sex. Children and younger women seem to have eaten less meat and seafood, while older men and women consumed more, and probably more olive oil and wine also. A first effort to compare the early medieval diet of Italy with that of the end of the Middle Ages has uncovered a marked increase in

Sungmin Hong, Jean-Pierre Candelone, Clair C. Patterson and Claude F. Boutron, “Greenland Ice Evidence of Hemispheric Lead Pollution Two Millennia Ago by Greek and Roman Civilizations”, Science, 265 (1994): 1841–3; Sungmin Hong, Jean-Pierre Candelone, Clair C. Patterson and Claude F. Boutron, “History of Ancient Copper Smelting Pollution during Roman and Medieval Times Recorded in Greenland Ice”, Science, 272 (1996): 246–9; W. Shotyk, D. Weiss, P.G. Appleby et al., “History of Atmospheric Lead Deposition since 12,370 14C yr BP from a Peat Bog, Jura Mountains, Switzerland”, Science, 281 (1998): 1635–40.  See notes 29–30 below.  For textual approaches, see Massimo Montanari, “Gli animali e l’alimentazione umana”, in L’uomo di fronte al mondo animale nell’alto medioevo, Settimane, 31 (Spoleto, 1985), pp. 619–63. For archaeology as well, see Günther E. Thüry, Müll und Marmorsäulen. Siedlungshygiene in der römischen Antike (Mainz, 2001), and Pascale Ballet, Pierre Cordier, and Nadine Dieudonné-Glad (eds), La ville et ses déchets dans le monde romain: rebuts et recyclages (Montagnac, 2003). See also note 23 below.  For a brief explanation of the use of stable isotope values of carbon and nitrogen to detect marine v. animal v. plant consumption, see, for example, Clark Spencer Larsen, Skeletons in our Closet: Revealing our Past through Bioarchaeology (Princeton, NJ, 2000), pp. 37–41, and in general, Caroline Polet and Rosine Orban, Les dents et les ossements humains. Que mangeait-on au moyen âge? Typologie, 84 (Turnhout, 2001).  See Tracy L. Prowse, Henry P. Schwarcz, Shelley R. Saunders et al., “Isotopic Evidence for Age-related Variation in Diet from Isola Sacra, Italy”, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 128 (2005): 2–13. 

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the role of marine resources.10 Parasitologists are analyzing northern European fish and meat diets and cooking methods from microbiological evidence, the parasite eggs recovered from late medieval latrines. Particular parasites are specific to particular fish or mammals, and their eggs are almost indestructible. Paradoxically, the poor who boiled their meager food thereby killed such parasites, and so could enjoy better intestinal health. Richer townsfolk, on the other hand, ate the most pike and venison. They also liked it grilled, and for their culinary pleasure they paid a steep price in intestinal worms, as the parasite eggs recovered from their latrines testify.11 Finally, palaeobotanists have begun to detect diets from phytoliths still lodged in the teeth or deposited in the grave around the stomachs of early medieval people. Phytoliths are microscopic silica “fossils” of characteristic cells from the stems of plants, discovered by Darwin aboard HMS Beagle, but only recently explored by anthropologists and archaeologists. In burials at Tarragona, the phytoliths show, unsurprisingly, that cereals dominated the locals’ diets. But Tarragona also indicates, for the first time, a component of the early medieval Iberian diet that has hitherto been virtually impossible to detect: phytoliths record that these individuals ate leguminous plants, chenopods – a class of plants that includes spinach and sugar beets – and, apparently, sedges.12 As the medieval parasite eggs and phytoliths suggest, biological approaches open up paths of investigation that would have seemed inconceivable just a few years ago. DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is a crucial but controversial part of that biological advance. DNA, the genetic material of all living things, is relatively tough. Although over time it becomes denatured (fragmented into smaller segments of its constituent base pairs), under favorably cool and dry

See Michal Salamon, Alfredo Coppa, Michael McCormick, Mauro Rubini, Rita Vargiu and Noreen Tuross, “The Consilience of Historical and Isotopic Approaches in Reconstructing the Medieval Mediterranean Diet”, Journal of Archaeological Science (in press). 11 Françoise Bouchet, Stéphanie Harter and Matthieu Le Bailly, “Apport de la paléoparasitologie à la connaissance des pathologies infectieuses dans les sites médiévaux de Belgique et de France”, in René Noël, Isabelle Paquay, and Jean-Pierre Sosson (eds), Au-delà de l’écrit. Les hommes et leurs vécus matériels au moyen âge à la lumière des sciences et des techniques (Turnhout, 2003), pp. 99–108, here pp. 103–6. 12 Carles Lalueza Fox, Jordi Juan and Rosa M. Albert, “Phytolith Analysis on Dental Calculus, Enamel Surface, and Burial Soil: Information about Diet and Paleoenvironment”, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 101 (1996): 101–13. The legume, chenopod, and sedge phytoliths clustered in the soil recovered from the abdominal areas of the fourth- to sixth-century burials; further research is needed to explain why they did not stick to the dental calculus, and to rule out contamination from the soil or diagenetic processes. It may be that the unidentified sedge came from a non-food source, for example a bed of reeds laid at the bottom of the grave, though note the role of the sedge tiger nut, “chufa de Valencia”, in the modern Spanish diet. See, for example, Moshe Negbi, “A Sweetmeat Plant, a Perfume Plant and their Weedy Relatives: A Chapter in the History of Cyperus esculentus L. and C. rotundus L.”, Economic Botany, 46 (1992): 64–71. 10

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conditions, fragmented DNA can survive surprisingly well for thousands of years.13 This is not to say that the new molecular archaeology is devoid of challenges or controversy. Often the materials under study have been injured by time, or by unfavorable conditions of recovery or storage.14 Contamination is a serious issue. It arises from the very power of the procedure used to amplify (that is, multiply copies of) tiny quantities of nucleic acids, in order to obtain sufficient quantities for analysis. This procedure, PCR (polymerase chain reaction), generally multiplies not only the target DNA, but any other DNA lying around the laboratory, and the DNA of local life forms, including humans, is allpervasive in our environment. Thus careful design and controls are necessary to insure that the product of PCR – for instance, multiple copies of ancient human DNA – is not contaminated by adventitious copies of modern DNA, such as that of the lab personnel or excavators. Contamination is especially serious when working with ancient DNA because the initial number of surviving ancient molecules is usually much smaller than the modern ones in the same environment. In the last several years, nevertheless, some clear successes and more careful appraisal of materials and methods have fostered renewed optimism about overcoming contamination when working with ancient DNA. Even so, as recent experiments and controversies emphasize, caution is called for.15 Before turning to ancient DNA, we must not lose sight of the fact that modern DNA is easier to work with, and it too has much to teach us about the past. For instance, population genetics shed obvious light on migration history. Born from the effort to track the prehistoric spread of humans out of Africa, this kind of analysis has now reached the Middle Ages. In northern Europe, such investigations have linked Norwegians, or even a genetic signal from northwestern Norway, with the populations of Orkney and Ireland, colonized by the Vikings in the ninth and tenth centuries.16 Early progress in mapping the 13 See the very readable introduction of Martin Jones, The Molecule Hunt: Archaeology and the Search for Ancient DNA (London, 2001). 14 David E. MacHugh, Ceiridwen J. Edwards, Jillian F. Bailey et al., “The Extraction and Analysis of Ancient DNA from Bone and Teeth: A Survey of Current Methodologies”, Ancient Biomolecules, 3 (2000): 81–102. 15 The classic statement of the difficulties is Alan Cooper and Hendrik N. Poinar, “Ancient DNA: Do it Right or Not at All”, Science, 289 (2000): 1139. See the detailed and balanced discussion of Connie J. Kolman and Noreen Tuross, “Ancient DNA Analysis of Human Populations”, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 111 (2000): 5–23, and the optimistic assessment of Henry Nicholls, “Ancient DNA Comes of Age”, Public Library of Science Biology, 3 (2005): e56, online: . For a promising new approach, see Michal Salamon, Noreen Tuross, Baruch Arensburg and Steve Weiner, “Relatively Well Preserved DNA is Present in the Crystal Aggregates of Fossil Bones”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102 (2005): 13,783–8. 16 James F. Wilson, Deborah A. Weiss, Martin Richards et al., “Genetic Evidence for Different Male and Female Roles during Cultural Transitions in the British Isles”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 98 (2001): 4830–32, and following note; Kate A. O’Donnell, Charles O’Neill, Orna Tighe et al., “The Mutation Spectrum of

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modern geographic distribution of different sets of genes in England is yielding new insights into the Anglo-Saxon migration, and mathematical simulation has begun to refine and challenge our understanding of the early medieval population dynamics which may have been at play.17 In the Mediterranean, most work has concentrated on prehistoric movements, but the first studies have appeared of gene flows involving Sicily, the Balearic islands, and Anatolia, including in the Middle Ages.18 This early work is just a foretaste of what is to come, as more research unravels Europe’s genetic complexities and spurs us to compare the historical and archaeological migration record with the molecular one. Our innate narcissism as human beings should not obscure the economic importance of migrating animals and plants. The introduction of superior animals and crops was crucial in the growth of the medieval economy, yet it escapes almost entirely from the written record. What historian would not like to know the exact timing and location of one of the great medieval economic revolutions, the diffusion of the new plants and farming technologies of the Indian subcontinent? As they spread throughout the Islamic and Christian worlds, they brought spinach, rice, citrus fruits, and the hard wheat of pasta into the stomachs of medieval men and women. The texts allow us to see this phenomenon only in the broadest outline.19 But the genomes of modern plants and animals preserve clues which can be unlocked through the phylogenetic analysis of plant and animal DNA, as the recent investigation of a prehistoric plant transfer in the light of modern and ancient DNA has spectacularly demonstrated.20 Because mutations accumulate and are transmitted to each succeeding generation as the DNA reproduces over time, the accumulating mutations constitute a kind of trail; one can use biostatistical techniques to Hyperphenylalaninaemia in the Republic of Ireland: The Population History of the Irish Revisited”, European Journal of Human Genetics, 10 (2002): 530–38. 17 Michael E. Weale, Deborah A. Weiss, Rolf F. Jager et al., “Y Chromosome Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Mass Migration”, Molecular Biology and Evolution, 19 (2002): 1008–21; Cristian Capelli, Nicola Redhead, Julia K. Abernethy et al., “A Y Chromosome Census of the British Isles”, Current Biology, 13 (2003): 979–84, and Mark Thomas, Michael P.H. Stumpf and Heinrich Härke, “Evidence for an Apartheid-like Social Structure in Early Anglo-Saxon England”, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, series B, Biological Sciences, 273 (2006): 2651–7. 18 See, respectively, Paolo Francalacci, L. Morelli, P.A. Underhill et al., “Peopling of Three Mediterranean Islands (Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily) Inferred by Y-Chromosome Biallelic Variability”, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 121 (2003): 270–79, which seeks to uncover prehistoric patterns, but is also sensitive to historic developments; A. Picornell, L. Gómez-Barbeito, C. Tomàs et al., “Mitochondrial DNA HVRI Variation in Balearic Populations”, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 128 (2005): 119–30, and Giulietta Di Benedetto, Ayşe Ergüven, Michele Stenico et al., “DNA Diversity and Population Admixture in Anatolia”, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 115 (2001): 144–56. 19 The study of this crucial phenomenon seems to have been taken about as far as the limited written records allow by Andrew M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700–1100 (Cambridge, 1983). 20 David L. Erickson, Bruce D. Smith, Andrew C. Clarke et al., “An Asian Origin for a 10,000-year-old Domesticated Plant in the Americas”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102 (2005): 18,315–20.

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classify those mutations (“microevolution”) and to reconstruct a kind of genomic genealogy of an organism, much as one would establish the stemma of a text’s manuscript tradition. Indeed, those biostatistical techniques show promise also for unraveling medieval manuscript transmissions.21 In sum, as it has already done for neolithic life forms, we can expect that phylogenetic analysis will illuminate the medieval migration of plants, and also of animals.22 For early medieval man did not live by bread alone. Scattered studies have already illuminated corners of the transition from the Roman system of stockraising to the early medieval one in the western Mediterranean, and it seems revealing of broader economic changes. Early animal bone studies in Italy have suggested that a highly articulated system which produced animals specially suited to Roman cuisine changed to a much simpler system. In the early Middle Ages, one ate mainly the animals which one could no longer harness, milk or shear.23 Archaeozoologists are now addressing the history of cattle herds: whether the fall of Rome entailed a decline in the size of cattle, and how postRoman selective breeding created the beasts that fed, clothed, and carried the medieval economy.24 The bones’ contribution to the microhistory of medieval herds and poultry will be reinforced by their DNA, as it emerges from amplification by means of PCR and sequencing, the cost of which has dropped to an affordable level.25 The first efforts to ally microbiology to codicology have already begun. See the innovative studies of Matthew Spencer, Klaus Wachtel and Christopher J. Howe, “Representing Multiple Pathways of Textual Flow in the Greek Manuscripts of the Letter of James Using Reduced Median Methods”, Computers and the Humanities, 38 (2004): 1–14, and Heather F. Windram, Christopher J. Howe and Matthew Spencer, “The Identification of Exemplar Change in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue Using the Maximum Chi-Squared Method”, Literary and Linguistic Computing, 20 (2005): 189–204. 22 Daniel Zohary and Maria Hopf, Domestication of Plants in the Old World: The Origin and Spread of Cultivated Plants in West Asia, Europe, and the Nile Valley, 3rd edn (Oxford, 2000), p. 10, discusses briefly the method; the work is concerned principally with the origin and early domestication of plants. While it clarifies, for example, the probable subsaharan origin of sorghum, or the east Asian origin of rice, it sheds little light on their introduction into the Mediterranean: ibid., pp. 88–91. For pigs, much light can be expected, including for Roman and medieval swine, from Greger Larson’s ongoing investigation: see Greger Larson, Keith Dobney, Umberto Albarella et al., “Worldwide Phylogeography of Wild Boar Reveals Multiple Centers of Pig Domestication”, Science, 307 (2005): 1618–21. 23 A.C. King, “Mammiferi”, in Paul Arthur (ed.), Il complesso archeologico di Carminiello ai Mannesi, Napoli (Scavi 1983–1984) (Galatina, 1994), pp. 367–406, here pp. 379–84; Jean-Hervé Yvinec, “Alimentation carnée au début du moyen âge”, Anthropozoologica, numéro spécial (1988): 123–6; Bengt Wigh, Animal Husbandry in the Viking Age Town of Birka and its Hinterland, Birka Studies, 7 (Stockholm, 2001), detected an abrupt jump in the share of cattle in the meat consumption at Birka in the 850s, and suggested a possible connection with a climate shift. 24 For conversations on such investigations I am grateful to zooarchaeologists Terry O’Connor, at the University of York, and Fabienne Pigière, at the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium. 25 For instance, ancient DNA allowed the archaeologists to distinguish domesticated from wild geese in the bones excavated at the Anglo-Saxon wetlands village of Flixborough: Ian Barnes, J.P.W. Young and K.M. Dobney, “DNA-based Identification of Goose Species from Two 21

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Researchers at Cambridge University are seeking in the parchment of medieval manuscripts the DNA of the cattle whose hides supplied the folios. The idea is to see whether recoverable DNA survived the parchment production process, and if so, whether the genome corresponds to cattle of a particular region.26 An analogous Greek effort has recently got under way to recover and study the DNA of the sheep and goats that supplied the materials for Byzantine manuscripts.27 The method’s potential appears great. Archives and libraries hold hundreds of thousands of sheets of parchment. How many thousands of cattle and sheep bit the dust to make the manuscripts we still read? Since parchment appears to conserve recognizable segments of ancient DNA, those manuscript folios represent gigantic deposits of fossils from medieval stock-raising. Even more important, the original charters and even some literary manuscripts constitute precisely dated and localized fossils of medieval herds. At Lucca, for instance, the huge series of original charters starts early in the eighth century; parchment sheets are not infrequent finds in medieval Egypt, and how many surviving manuscripts were transcribed in Constantinople? It may be that the DNA preserved in the parchments will illuminate the genome of the herds that supplied the hides. The phylogenetic history of the herds of Tuscany, Egypt or Asia Minor would be the result. The possibilities for economic history are great, and transcend what might in the end appear as a happy by-product, the possibility to attribute manuscripts to certain centers by the DNA of their parchment.28 The mortal remains of people are among the most abundant yet least scrutinized archaeological remains to have survived from the Middle Ages. Beyond what they can reveal of diet and migration, they are loaded with evidence for the biomechanics of human activities, sometimes even down to specific occupations.29 Physical activity and stress from repeated gestures Archaeological Sites in Lincolnshire”, Journal of Archaeological Science, 27 (2000): 91–100, with clear consequences for our understanding of poultry raising and exploitation at the site. 26 Mentioned in Matthew Spencer and Christopher J. Howe, “Authenticity of Ancient DNA Results: A Statistical Approach”, American Journal of Human Genetics, 75 (2004): 240–50, here p. 240. I am grateful to Prof. Lïnne Mooney for alerting me to this work, and to Christopher Howe for discussing it with me. 27 N. Poulakakis, A. Tselikas, I. Bitsakis et al., “Ancient DNA and the Genetic Signature of Ancient Greek Manuscripts”, Journal of Archaeological Science, 34 (2007): 675–80. 28 Odile Loreille, Susanne Hummel, and Bernd Herrmann, “Multiplex in ancient DNA Studies: Application to Ancient Parchment Analysis”, Ancient Biomolecules, 3 (2001): 298–9. 29 For examples of such biomechanical studies of human remains, and the light they shed on general types and amounts of physical activity, see, from medieval York, Simon Mays, “A Biomechanical Study of Activity Patterns in a Medieval Human Skeletal Assemblage”, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 9 (1999): 68–73; from the late Roman frontier, M. Šlaus, N. PećinaŠlaus and H. Brkić, “Life Stress on the Roman Limes in Continental Croatia”, Homo: Journal of Comparative Human Biology, 54 (2004): 240–63, or the remarkable portraits of individual Romans and their activity regimes, from the well-exercised gentleman to the laborer who had suffered a major accident, via a soldier who spent much of his time on horseback, as deduced by Sarah Bisel and Jane Bisel, “Health and Nutrition at Herculaneum: An Examination of Human Skeletal

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leave on hard tissue subtle traces of wear and the use of specific muscles. The osteological study of these traces can clarify the organization of labor and even how tools were used. The first studies have shown fascinating results. For instance correlating statistical patterns of abrasions or fractures have led English researchers to suspect the presence of some medieval women in the labors of the field, or their exclusion from certain craft guilds.30 A similar approach has been applied to cattle bones from Asia Minor, and promises to clarify how the cattle were used for traction.31 These are first results, but they point to the potential. If we are what we eat, it is also true that we are, as it were, where we eat. The trace elements of stable isotopes preserved, for instance, in the enamel of an individual’s teeth illuminate more than just diet. Because the plants and animals one ingests absorb from the surrounding air and water geographically characteristic signatures of ratios of isotopes, tooth enamel seems to preserve the record of the places in which it was formed, that is, where one passed one’s childhood. This makes it possible to determine whether someone – or at least the bulk of someone’s food and water – came from the place where they were buried. If not, then one has identified a chemical record of someone’s migration. Although the chemical changes that archaeological bone undergoes over time raise significant challenges, isotopically based studies are beginning to throw new light on the many migrations that shaped early medieval history.32 The implications go beyond testing the archaeological interpretation of grave goods as ethnic markers. The first studies have begun to distinguish locally-raised individuals from outsiders in historical contexts of great import. For example, Remains”, in Wilhelmina Mary Feemster Jashemski and Frederick G. Meyer (eds), The Natural History of Pompeii (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 451–75, here pp. 460f., 470f., 468, respectively. For a pleasant introduction to osteoarchaeology, see Larsen, Skeletons in Our Closet. 30 Joanna R. Sofaer Derevenski, “Sex Differences in Activity-related Osseous Change in the Spine and the Gendered Division of Labor at Ensay and Wharram Percy, UK”, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 111 (2000): 333–54; A.L. Grauer and C.A. Roberts, “Paleoepidemiology, Healing and Possible Treatment of Trauma in the Medieval Cemetery Population of St. Helenon-the-Walls, York, England”, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 100 (1996): 531–44, here p. 539. 31 Bea De Cupere, An Lentacker, Wim Van Neer et al., “Osteological Evidence for the Draught Exploitation of Cattle: First Applications of a New Methodology”, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 10 (2000): 254–67. 32 Much of the pioneering work has focused on strontium isotopes in bone, as opposed to tooth enamel. However, recent work has indicated that post-mortem changes affect strontium isotope ratios in archaeological bone, and thereby distort its signal compared to enamel: Paul Budd, Janet Montgomery, Barbara Barreiro and Richard G. Thomas, “Differential Diagenesis of Strontium in Archaeological Human Dental Tissues”, Applied Geochemistry, 15 (2000): 687–94, and Mark A. Trickett, Paul Budd, Janet Montgomery and Jane Evans, “An Assessment of Solubility Profiling as a Decontamination Procedure for the 87Sr/86Sr Analysis of Archaeological Human Skeletal Tissue”, Applied Geochemistry, 18 (2003): 653–8. I am grateful to Matthew Collins and Noreen Tuross for these references. For a good discussion of the comparative advantages and potential of oxygen and strontium isotopes from early medieval people, see Paul Budd, Andrew Millard, Carolyn Chenery et al., “Investigating Population Movement by Stable Isotope Analysis: A Report from Britain”, Antiquity, 78 (2004): 127–41.

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a small test series run on an Anglian cemetery in Yorkshire used strontium isotopes in late fifth- to early seventh-century teeth to differentiate such groups even as it challenged some traditional archaeological markers of immigrants. Here, all certain males buried with weapons seem to be non-locals, and all small children have what look like local isotopic signatures.33 An investigation of 70 individuals buried in the fourth-century cemetery of a Roman frontier fort on the Danube also used strontium isotopes to single out the third of the adult male population – and more than half of the women – who came from beyond the frontier, mostly from the northeast area of modern-day Bavaria and from Bohemia, if the isotope ratios can be trusted. A few may have come into the Roman Empire as small children.34 On the molecular level, ancient DNA, or aDNA, illuminates directly the genomic background of long dead men and women. Combined with isotopic studies, it can offer powerful insights into migration and more. For instance, the exceptionally well-preserved tomb of a so-called late “Roman princess” discovered in 1999 in London invited laboratory investigation of this young woman’s physical remains. Although full publication is still forthcoming, isotopic indications seem in her case to compare well to her DNA. They indicate that she had moved to fourth-century Britain from the western Mediterranean; indeed, her DNA may have pinpointed the population group from which she stemmed.35 As analyses such as these are refined, and multiply, we may look forward to much new data, and therefore debate, on questions as great as the biological substrate of the barbarian migrations into the Roman Empire, or the forced migration of European slaves to the Mediterranean’s southern rim.36 Nevertheless, it is by the lost history of their suffering that the remains of early medieval people may offer the most compelling insights into their economy. Every passing day makes increasingly clear how deeply human health is anchored in our daily economic life: diet and food preparation, sanitation, Janet Montgomery, Jane A. Evans, Dominic Powlesland and Charlotte A. Roberts, “Continuity or Colonization in Anglo-Saxon England? Isotope Evidence for Mobility, Subsistence Practice, and Status at West Heslerton”, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 126 (2005): 123– 38. 34 M.M. Schweissing and G. Grupe, “Tracing Migration Events in Man and Cattle by Stable Strontium Isotope Analysis of Appositionally Grown Mineralized Tissue”, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 13 (2003): 96–103. Notwithstanding the confusing inconsistencies in their counts of individuals, the basic patterns seem clear for the tooth enamel. The authors draw attention to several points on which our understanding of the basic chemistry remains insufficient, and which could have implications for the reliability of some deductions from strontium isotopes. See also note 32 above. 35 Personal communication of Jenny Hall, Roman Curator, Museum of London, who has my warm thanks. See the preliminary publication: Liz Barham, “The Sarcophagus from Roman London: New Discoveries”, Minerva, 11 (2000): 38–41, and on the general situation, Bruno Barber and Jenny Hall, “Digging Up the People of Roman London: Interpreting Evidence from Roman London’s Cemeteries”, in Ian Haynes, Harvey Sheldon and Lesley Hannigan (eds), London under Ground: The Archaeology of a City (Oxford, 2000), pp. 102–20, here pp. 108–9. 36 On the latter, see Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300–900 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 752–75. 33

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communications systems and parasite ecology all contribute to shaping our medical destiny. It was no different for early medieval men and women. In this respect, two diseases seem particularly interesting for their economic implications: malaria and plague. Malaria sheds light on ecological change even as it affects the economy, for example by diminishing the working capacity of victims, or by driving inhabitants from regions affected by the infection. A new phase has opened in the debate about the presence and nature of malaria in the ancient and medieval Mediterranean. DNA taken from the remains of an unusual multiple burial of late Roman children in Italy seems to indicate that they had been struck by the extremely virulent form of malaria, Plasmodium falciparum.37 Establishing its presence in late Roman Italy was a crucial first step. Next scholars will have to map it, track its progression (or decline) in the medieval molecular data, and investigate the ecological changes that favored the progression, if progression there was. That data will have to be set next to the ancient and modern molecular evidence about the epidemiology of beta thalassemia. This genetically transmitted anemia is analogous to sickle-cell anemia, and its distribution correlates with high exposure to malaria.38 The two autonomous data sets should make it possible to gauge the economic and broader historical impact of malaria in specific places and specific times.39 Finally, the plague. Two massive pandemics bracket the Middle Ages. The Justinianic plague recurred in about seventeen waves between 541, in the reign of Justinian, and c. 750. The Black Death made a devastating appearance in 1347– 48; again, a series of recurring epidemics followed until the final paroxysm in 1722. The mortality connected with the first onslaught of both pandemics has been estimated at between a third and a half of the population, and it certainly provoked an immediate and brutal contraction in the respective economies.40 Robert Sallares, Malaria and Rome: A History of Malaria in Ancient Italy (Oxford, 2002). For a succinct overview, see Alfred Jay Bollet and Audrey K. Brown, “Anemia”, in Kenneth F. Kiple (ed.), The Cambridge Historical Dictionary of Disease (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 21–6, here pp. 22 and 26. For a recent clinical summary, see, for example, D. Rund and E. Rachmilewitz, “Beta-thalassemia”, New England Journal of Medicine, 353 (2005): 1135–46. In the early days of ancient DNA work, Dvora Filon, Marina Faerman, Patricia Smith and Ariella Oppenheim, “Sequence Analysis Reveals a Beta-thalassaemia Mutation in the DNA of Skeletal Remains from the Archaeological Site of Akhziv, Israel”, Nature Genetics, 9 (1995): 365–8, reported palaeopathological evidence of an early modern case, but no further work along this line seems to have been published. 39 For the convergence of the modern Italian epidemiology of beta-thalassemia and the Byzantine boundaries of seventh-century Italy, as well as some suggestions on its potential significance, see Michael McCormick, “The Imperial Edge: Italo-Byzantine Identity, Movement and Integration, A.D. 650–950”, in Hélène Ahrweiler and Angeliki E. Laiou (eds), Studies on the Internal Diaspora of the Byzantine Empire (Washington, DC, 1998), pp. 17–52. 40 In addition to the pioneering studies of Jean-Noël Biraben and Jacques Le Goff, “The Plague in the Early Middle Ages”, in Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (eds), Biology of Man in History (Baltimore, MD, 1975), pp. 48–80, and Lawrence I. Conrad, “The Plague in the Early Medieval Near East” (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1981), see, notably, Peter Sarris, “The Justinianic Plague: Origins and Effects”, Continuity and Change, 17 (2002): 169–82; Dionysios 37 38

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The parallels between the pandemics seem clear in the descriptions of symptoms and in the pattern of sea-borne transmission. During the Justinianic pandemic, the contagion struck first and hardest at the pressure points of an exchange economy built on sea transport: the ships which transported the grain of life to the cities of the sixth century now brought them death by plague.41 First and foremost, what was it? Second, if abundant surviving archives track the fourteenth-century pandemic adequately, it is unclear how far the early medieval pandemic reached. Even if it were limited to the Mediterranean, this would suffice to make it an economic fact of the first importance. But some claim from written sources that the pathogen reached the British Isles, and a reliable witness, Gregory of Tours, reports outbreaks as far north as the Moselle river valley, at Trier in western Germany.42 Resolving that question, or even mapping the first pandemic just in the Mediterranean, would yield new insight into the role the pandemic played in the end of the ancient economy. Bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis) is a bacterial disease of rodents, which, under certain conditions spills over and devastates human populations. Its retrospective diagnosis from contemporary symptomatic descriptions does not satisfy some, even if improved archaeology has now definitively ruined the old argument that there were no Roman rats, and too few medieval ones.43 For the Justinianic pandemic, detailed descriptions are in any case few and far between. Elaborate epidemiological models, possible at least for some episodes of the late medieval pandemic, do not satisfy others. Anthrax, some kind of Ebola-like hemorrhagic fever, or a simple inability to decide each have their champions.44 C. Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire, Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Monographs, 9 (Aldershot, 2004), and Lester K. Little (ed.), Plague and the End of Antiquity. The Pandemic of 541–750 (Cambridge, 2007). 41 Michael McCormick, “Bateaux de vie, bateaux de mort. Maladie, commerce, transports annonaires et le passage économique du Bas-Empire au moyen âge”, in Morfologie sociali e culturali in Europa fra tarda antichità e alto medioevo, Settimane, 45 (Spoleto, 1998), pp. 35–122, and Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence. 42 British Isles: J.R. Maddicott, “Plague in Seventh-century England”, Past and Present, 156 (1997): 7–54; for Ireland, Ann Dooley, “The Plague and its Consequences in Ireland”, in Little (ed.), Plague and the End of Antiquity, pp. 215–28. Both are based on written sources. Some mass graves have led one scholar to the same conclusion for Finland: Tapio Seger, “The Plague of Justinian and Other Scourges: An Analysis of the Anomalies in the Development of the Iron Age Population in Finland”, Fornvännen, 77 (1982): 191–7, while a Polish burial suggested a similar idea to Leonhard Franz, “Zur Bevölkerungsgeschichte des frühen Mittelalters”, Deutsches Archiv für Landes- und Volksforschung, 2 (1938): 404–16, a reference which I owe to the kindness of Joachim Henning. Trier: Gregory of Tours, Liber vitae patrum 17.4, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SRM 1.2 (Hanover, 1885, reprinted 1969), p. 281.13-22. 43 Michael McCormick, “Rats, Communications and Plague: Towards an Ecological History”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 34 (2003): 1–25. 44 Anthrax: Graham Twigg, The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal (London, 1984), and, with some hesitation, David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge, MA, 1997); viral hemorrhagic fever: Susan Scott and Christopher J. Duncan, Biology of Plagues. Evidence from Historical Populations (Cambridge, 2001); impossible to determine, but not bubonic plague: Samuel Kline Cohn, The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (London, 2002), p. 247. See, most recently, Graham Twigg, “The Black Death and DNA”,

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The fur has now been flying for some time about the authenticity, or not, of the recovery of aDNA of Yersinia pestis by French researchers, who affirm that they have recovered molecular traces of the contagion from the dental pulp of teeth from multiple victims excavated in multiple plague pits. Their DNA is said to reveal sequences which, among all living organisms, are unique to Y. pestis, the bacterium that causes bubonic plague.45 However, an English group that applied very stringent procedures was unable to replicate the French results in a study based on teeth from 66 individuals excavated in five plague pits different from the French team’s.46 The French lab has replied by advancing further cases of successful replication of plague DNA from other sites. They include the detection of Y. pestis in early medieval mass graves at Sens which, if it is confirmed, must stem from the Justinianic pandemic.47 Meanwhile, two German teams have independently reported further detections of Y. pestis. One, at Tübingen, experimented with an antigen-based approach on early modern victims.48 The other has published the successful extraction and sequencing of the DNA of Y. pestis from both a sixth-century multiple grave and from a late medieval mass grave in Bavaria.49 The molecular evidence in favor of Y. pestis as the pathogen seems to be accumulating for both pre-modern pandemics, the more so that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 3 (2003): 11; James Wood and Sharon DeWitte-Aviña, “Was the Black Death Yersinial Plague?” The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 3 (2003): 328, with the correction, James Wood and Sharon DeWitte-Aviña, “Was the Black Death Yersinial Plague?”, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 4 (2004): 485, and Didier Raoult and Michel Drancourt, “Cause of Black Death”, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 2 (2002): 459. 45 Michel Drancourt, Gérard Aboudharam, Michel Signoli et al., “Detection of 400-yearold Yersinia pestis DNA in Human Dental Pulp”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 95 (1998): 12,637–40; Didier Raoult, Gérard Aboudharam, Eric Crubé et al., “Molecular Identification by ‘suicide PCR’ of Yersinia pestis as the Agent of Medieval Black Death”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 97 (2000): 12,880–83; Michel Drancourt and Didier Raoult, “Molecular Insights into the History of Plague”, Microbes and Infection, 4 (2002): 105–9. 46 M. Thomas P. Gilbert, Ian Barnes, Matthew J. Collins et al., “Absence of Yersinia pestisspecific DNA in Human Teeth from Five European Excavations of Putative Plague Victims”, Microbiology (Reading, UK), 150 (2004): 341–54, with the French response, Michel Drancourt and Didier Raoult, “Molecular Detection of Yersinia pestis in Dental Pulp”, Microbiology (Reading, UK), 150 (2004): 263–4, and further comment by the English team, M. Thomas P. Gilbert et al., “Response to Drancourt and Raoult”, Microbiology (Reading, UK), 150 (2004): 264–5. 47 Michel Drancourt, Véronique Roux, La Vu Dang et al., “Genotyping, Orientalis-like Yersinia pestis, and Plague Pandemics”, Emerging Infectious Diseases, 10 (2004): 1585–92. They report radiocarbon dating in the range of the fifth-sixth centuries. 48 Carsten M. Pusch, Lila Rahalison, Nikolaus Bin et al., “Yersinial F1 Antigen and the Cause of Black Death”, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 4 (2004): 484–5. 49 See Christina Garrelt and Ingrid Wiechmann, “Detection of Yersinia pestis in Early and Late Medieval Bavarian Burials”, in Gisela Grupe and Joris Peters (eds), Decyphering Ancient Bones: The Research Potential of Bioarchaeological Collections, Documenta Archaeobiologiae, 1 (Rahden, 2003), pp. 247–54, and Ingrid Wiechmann and Gisela Grupe, “Detection of Yersinia pestis DNA in Two Early Medieval Skeletal Finds from Aschheim (Upper Bavaria, 6th century A.D.)”, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 126 (2005): 48–55.

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Even before the controversy erupted, it seemed imperative independently to test the French findings and expand the experiment to the early medieval pandemic. The first step will be to inventory archaeologically attested mass graves from the early medieval Mediterranean. Some unspecified subset of such mass burials must reflect the tremendous mortality which the written sources report. Although such graves have received little attention until now, their documented number is growing.50 I obtained funding and, with the help of generous colleagues, samples in order to attempt to replicate the French work with leading microbiologists in my own university. So far we have tested a small number of samples from graves of the late sixth and the late fifteenth centuries in two different laboratories of the Harvard University medical and dental schools. Results to date have been negative for the presence of the targeted sequences of Y. pestis.51 A more comprehensive series of tests is now under way in the university’s new, dedicated ancient DNA lab. What will we be able to conclude? That depends, of course, on what we find. If we find nothing from multiple samples from multiple sites, that will still not rule out Y. pestis (or anything else), although it would intensify the scrutiny of possible contamination in other labs. If we cannot identify DNA of Y. pestis from multiple samples from both pandemics, we can look for other plausible bacterial organisms. If we do find the DNA of Y. pestis, then the debate about the identity is over, for none of our labs has ever worked with Y. pestis, and there is no other source for its unique DNA. But a positive response would only be the beginning. The next step would be to expand testing to sites around the Mediterranean and western Europe, to determine which of the mass graves stem from that great early medieval pandemic. Indeed, it would be desirable to reach beyond the Mediterranean to antiquity’s Indian Ocean shipping routes, which linked late Roman merchants and Merovingian jewelers to mining and trading centers in southeast Asia, and also to eastern Africa.52 The aim would 50 When I began studying the problem in 2001, I was aware of four such graves. I hope to publish soon a provisional inventory, which will include at least 16 examples. 51 I am grateful to Dr Steven Hyman, the Provost of Harvard University, for a grant from the Provost’s Fund to test this kind of molecular approach with my colleagues Professors Thomas L. Benjamin and Floyd E. Dewhirst, of the Harvard Medical School and School of Dental Medicine respectively. 52 See, on this problem, Michael McCormick, “Toward a Molecular History of the Justinianic Pandemic”, in Little (ed.) Plague and the End of Antiquity, pp. 290–312; for stunning insights into the southeast Asian provenance of late antique garnets, see Susanne Greiff, “Naturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zur Frage der Rohsteinquellen für frühmittelalterlichen Almandingranatschmuck Rheinfränkischer Provenienz”, Jahrbuch des römisch-germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz, 45 (1998): 599–643; Uta von Freeden, “Das Ende engzelligen Cloisonnés und die Eroberung Südarabiens durch die Sasaniden, mit einem Beitrag von Ernst-Ludwig Richter unter Mitarbeit von Heide Härlin”, Germania, 78 (2000): 97–123, which results have now been confirmed and considerably deepened by Patrick Périn, Thomas Calligaro, Jean-Paul Poirot and Dominique Bagault, “Provenancing Merovingian Garnets by PIXE and μ-Raman Spectrometry”, in Joachim Henning (ed.), Post-Roman Towns, Trade and Settlement in Europe and Byzantium, vol. 1 (Berlin, 2007), pp. 69–75.

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be to track the path of the Justinianic contagion back toward its still uncertain Asian or African source. The molecular results would draw an infinitely more detailed and informative map than those made hitherto on the basis of the scarce written records. Eloquent though its testimony on the spread of a terrible pandemic would be, that map would yield insight no less precious into communication, shipping and trading networks at the end of antiquity. The challenges, costs and difficulties of this research, as of many other approaches described in this chapter, are great. But it is time to get started. Microbiology may well produce the most historical surprises in coming years, as it clarifies, at the molecular level, the lives and economic experience of medieval men and women. But the full meaning for the economy of what emerges from the labs will only be apparent when we view the new molecular data of plants, animals, coins, ceramics and people in the light of texts, excavations, surveys and shipwrecks, and vice versa. Population genetics and geographical mobility, the precious history of plants and animals and the economic systems they formed, as well as the untold story of human suffering from infectious disease and its myriad repercussions on the economy, demography and communications networks of the early Middle Ages: all stand poised on the threshold of a new era of discovery. Like the opportunities, the challenges of these new directions are real, and they are daunting. But they are not insurmountable. To exploit fully the methods of molecular archaeology now being invented, we historians will have to change our ways. We must do more than learn the tools and limitations of microbiology in the age of the genomic revolution. In order to cross this new threshold of discovery, we must learn from the organization of modern medical and biological research. We can rise to these new and extraordinary challenges only if we can go beyond exploiting the revolutionary findings of the molecular era, to emulating the sound methods of the men and women who are creating that era, inspired exactly by the sorts of complexity that emerge from this first sounding of the historical biology of the early medieval economy. From now on, we historians must attack the problem not as the solitary savants of our nineteenth-century historical tradition, but with the collegial teamwork of twenty-first-century science.

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Chapter 5

The Early Medieval Economy: Data, Production, Exchange and Demand Angeliki E. Laiou

The four contributions in this part deal with new approaches or new interpretations of the economic history of early medieval Europe. Mike McCormick (Chapter 4) lays out some of the benefits of using the possibilities offered by modern science for the investigation of problems that have long engaged the interest of historians: migrations of people, plants and animals, diet patterns, the identification of diseases and their travel through three continents. Molecular evidence, including DNA, seems to open vast areas of new research. Old questions of medieval social and economic history may find answers through the use of these new tools, while in turn the very existence of these tools and techniques may be expected to generate further topics of study. Since the scientific fields involved, biology, genetics, physics, move at a fast pace, the challenge for the younger generation of historians will be to master, or at least have a very close acquaintance with, ever-refined techniques, while at the same time acquiring firm foundations in the traditional tools, such as philology, archaeology and textual analysis. Riccardo Francovich (Chapter 3) and Joachim Henning (Chapter 2) place the early medieval village at the center not only of production, but also of decision-making, and even trade. They both challenge long-held views: in the first case, about the structuring of the countryside, and in the second, about the relative prosperity of the Merovingian and the Carolingian eras. In his discussion of early medieval Tuscan villages, Riccardo Francovich juxtaposes the rural settlements of the historians to the villages of the archaeologists, especially when the latter engage in excavations as opposed to surveys. In the debate regarding the relative merits of the two different archaeological schools, Francovich is firmly on the side of excavation. The archaeological results presented here would suggest that our conceptualization of the landscape of early medieval settlements should change. Nucleated settlements would be dominant, and would be dated much earlier than is usually thought; indeed, they would be the form into which rural settlements evolved after the decline of the Roman system. Furthermore, their formation would be the result of peasant decisions rather than of the process of incastellamento

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spearheaded by the elite. The existence of hilltop villages in Tuscany had already been observed, along with the fact that the area exhibits several different patterns of settlement. The question that arises here is whether the archaeological evidence from the Tuscan sites has a more general application, and thus effectively undermines the current concept of the dominance of dispersed settlement in early medieval western Europe, or whether it is simply a powerful example of the regional variations that have also been admitted by those who hold the “traditional” views. In either case, the villages discussed here bear an interesting outward similarity to the villages of Calabria, in Byzantine southern Italy, which were nucleated from very early on; but in the latter case it does not seem that the impulse came primarily from peasant action. Indeed, at that end of the peninsula, as in the Byzantine empire more generally, the state played an important role in structuring rural life, which centered around the nucleated village, the predominant form of rural settlement. Chapter 3 also raises an intriguing question of an economic nature. If it is true that, in the villages examined here, “productive activities … fit a self-sufficient economy”, what explains the observation that the villagers also increasingly turned to the cultivation of high-value crops? These are only valuable if there is trade, whether with other villages or with more concentrated centers of demand; and, of course, cereals of some sort are essential for the population. Is it a matter of chronology and development, so that an economy that begins as virtually self-sufficient becomes somewhat more diversified over time? Did some exchange exist, in which case the idea of the self-sufficiency of the village economy must be softened? Did chestnut flour take the place of cereals? The economic historian would be very interested in the answers, which, in a broader framework, are relevant to patterns of exchange and demand in all agricultural economies that are predominantly organized around villages, without strong structures of economic power or political authority. Similar questions arise from Joachim Henning’s contribution, one of whose central points is, indeed, that both technological innovation in agriculture and the circulation of goods were stronger in societies with a predominantly peasant organization of production (including, in his view, the Merovingian period) than in those with aristocratic control of production (the Frankish heartland in the Carolingian period). The first type of society and economy is described by Henning as belonging to “self-managing and self-determined economies” that are robust and have long-term survival potential. Other historians have discerned Chris Wickham, “The Development of Villages in the West, 300–900,” in Jacques Lefort, Cécile Morrisson and Jean-Pierre Sodini (eds), Les Villages dans l’Empire byzantin, IVe–XVe siècle (Paris, 2005), pp. 55–69, here p. 62.  Jean-Marie Martin and Ghislaine Noyé, “Les villages de l’Italie méridionale byzantine,” in Les Villages, pp. 149–64.  Angeliki E. Laiou, “The Byzantine Village (5th–14th century)”, in Les Villages, pp. 31–54, here 36f.  Chapter 3 in this volume, page 64.  Chapter 2 in this volume, page 53. 

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the spontaneous slow technological progress of which traditional societies are capable. Accumulated experience can lead to the introduction and adoption of new techniques, which can certainly occur within a village and in a peasant milieu, as well as on an estate, which has its own economic advantages: the possibility of a more rational use of resources, and more efficient deployment of labor. Thus, in the matter of production, a village economy can be efficient. The question of exchange, however, is more complex. Here it would be essential to know what the village-organized economies exported and where (that is, what the markets were), and who were the middlemen. These questions become more urgent in the matter of the organization of long-distance trade. The most intriguing question here is how low-level peasant demand, which of course may be significant in the aggregate, was translated into effective demand for imported luxury goods. The mechanisms through which this could happen will need to be identified. Other cardinal points of Henning’s chapter revolve around the idea that the Carolingian economy was a failure because it was an “accidental rebirth of Rome that was imposed on a formerly flourishing peasant society”. In the present context, a rebirth of Rome would mean a return to rural slavery. But whereas Henning’s very interesting analysis of iron shackles might show an increase in the slave trade outside the frontiers of the Carolingian empire, the same evidence equally shows, as Henning states, that the bipartite manor was not based on large-scale rural slavery. In its absence, further economic argumentation would be needed in order successfully to lay the burden of the inefficiencies of Roman slave agriculture onto non-slave coercion in the Carolingian economy. Chris Wickham’s interpretation (Chapter 1) of the economies of the early Middle Ages (550–c. 900) differs significantly from that of Henning. He makes the welcome point that historians’ decreasing dependence on primitivist models necessitates the investigation of linkages between production and distribution. Obviously, or perhaps not so obviously for some historians, that linkage lies in demand – in elite demand, in Wickham’s schema. His insistence on “internal” exchange is a welcome reminder of its importance in the growth of the  Karl Gunnar Persson, Pre-industrial Economic Growth. Social Organization and Technological Progress in Europe (Oxford, 1988), passim; see also the excellent analysis by Paul Millett, “Production to some Purpose?”, in David J. Mattingly and John Salmon (eds), Economies beyond Agriculture in the Classical World (London, 2001), pp. 17–48.  Chapter 2 in this volume, page 52.  Cf. the nuanced view of the status of cultivators held by Adriaan Verhulst, who has convincingly argued for a complex coexistence of various types of organization, even manorial organization, with free peasants, tenants and slaves: Adriaan Verhulst, The Carolingian Economy (Cambridge, 2002), ch. 3, pp. 31–60. For a powerful statement on the efficiencies of estates in the Carolingian period, one would still turn to Pierre Toubert, “La question domaniale” and “La part du grand domaine dans le décollage économique de l’Occident (VIIIe–Xe siècles)”, ch. 1 and 2 of his L’Europe dans sa première croissance. De Charlemagne à l’an mil (Paris, 2004).  According to Carlo Cipolla, mass demand is very limited in pre-modern societies, and therefore elite demand is all that counts. Carlo Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution: European

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medieval economy, a point that is not raised by either Henning or Francovich.10 Interestingly, Wickham credits the demand generated by early medieval elites with the role he had ascribed to the state in the Roman economy: the creation of economies of scale as well as that of distribution systems on which private (or smaller-scale) commerce was able to piggy-back.11 Northern Francia and northern Italy are used as testing grounds for his ideas. The correspondence he establishes between elite wealth and exchange is compelling. According to this interpretation, therefore, trade increased in the Carolingian period, especially in those areas in which the aristocracy was wealthy, that is, in the Frankish heartland. In theoretical terms, Wickham’s interpretation raises two important questions about economic growth in pre-industrial societies, and indeed also in developing societies: namely, the role of trade in stimulating production and growth, and the role of concentrated demand in this process. To the second question, his answer is unequivocal: elite demand is the horse that pulls the cart. Wickham’s contribution also makes perfectly clear how important archaeology is to any discussion of early medieval exchange. In that respect, one might bring in a supporting example from the Byzantine field, where new finds are beginning to accumulate, and offer some comparative insight into questions that will also arise for the early medieval West. It is noteworthy that recent archaeological evidence shows the situation in the difficult seventh to eighth centuries to have been quite different from what historians thought until now. Taking ceramics, as does Wickham, as a proxy for production and exchange, we find that the picture that they paint of the long Byzantine eighth century is more highly differentiated than it would have been just a few years ago. It has long been known that the glazing of ceramics, a technological innovation for Byzantium, dates to at least the early seventh century, with Constantinople as a center of production. What was not known, but emerges with growing clarity, is that this innovation spread to a number of centers in the course of the seventh and eighth centuries: Corinth, perhaps Samos, perhaps Anemourion, probably Amorion, where the production is attested in levels before 838, certainly Eleutherna, in Crete (late seventh century).12 In this latter case, the glazed ceramics are slip painted, yet another innovation. Good-quality painted but unglazed ceramics of red clay dating to the seventh and eighth centuries have been found in Constantinople, Society and Economy 1000–1700, trans. Christopher Woodall, 3rd edn (London, 1993), pp. 8–11, 30–31. 10 Wickham eschews the term “development”, preferring the word “complexity”, since he does not wish to employ the first term, with its positive connotations, to describe a situation in which “complexity” rests on the increased exploitation of the peasantry. Development economics, however, routinely distinguishes between economic growth and economic development, which includes a more equitable distribution of income and a better quality of life. 11 Chris Wickham, “Marx, Sherlock Holmes and Late Roman Commerce”, ch. 3 of his Land and Power (London, 1994), pp. 77-98, especially pp. 90–98. 12 For a longer list, see Anastasia Yangaki, La céramique des IVe–VIIIe siècles ap. J.-C. d’Eleutherna (Athens, 2005), pp. 131–3.

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Gortyna (Crete), Delphi, Demetrias, Athens, Thessalonike, Argos and Corinth. The ceramics of Gortyna are of local production, since both kilns and wasters have been found. The appearance of the ceramics in the other places may indicate trade in these good-quality, although not luxury, goods.13 Moreover, it seems that a new type of amphora became widespread; produced in a number of centers, it nevertheless exhibits considerable similarity of form. These discoveries must surely modify the conclusions reached on the basis of hand-produced ceramics in the Peloponnese, which had led historians (including Wickham) to the thought that there was sharp productive simplification in this period.14 Instead, one might speak of slow but sure technological innovations, as well as noting the circulation of products within the Byzantine empire. What is most probably true is that ceramic production became small-scale, perhaps with the exception of Constantinople and who knows what other cities, but in the aggregate was not negligible. That is a large topic that needs to be investigated thoroughly. The production of good-quality ceramics outside Constantinople, and their dissemination, invites further reflection both on the resources of the ruling elite and, more importantly, on the very notion that only elite demand is of importance for the circulation of goods. One might object that in this early period, only the military and the civil and ecclesiastical officials could afford good-quality pottery. But surely the amphorae were used for the import and export of food products on a small scale, presumably denoting a market larger than the elite. The cargo carried by the ship that sank off Yassi Ada shortly after 626 may have consisted of goods that originated from a relatively large number of producers/investors, each contributing a relatively small amount of the cargo.15 This peregrination into Byzantine waters is not meant to take us away from the discussion of the issues raised by Wickham’s chapter. On the contrary, it is meant to underline them. While there is, to my mind, no denying the importance of elite demand, especially for long-distance trade, small-scale production and distribution also play a role, which has to be further defined. In other words, I think that the next question to be raised will be that of the importance of slow and small steps in economic growth in the period under discussion: slow technological development, small-scale production, and small-scale demand which nevertheless was important in the aggregate. It is this last point that is both treacherous and tricky, and will doubtless be seen to have come at different 13 Natalia Poulou-Papadēmētriou, “Vyzantinē keramikē apo ton Ellēniko nēsiotiko chōro kai apo tēn Peloponnēso (7os–9os ai.): mia prōtē proseggisē”, in Eleōnora Kountoura-Galakē (ed.), Oi skoteinoi aiōnes tou Vyzantiou (7os–9os ai.) (Athens, 2001), pp. 231–66. 14 Chapter 1 in this volume, page 23, with reference to Ēlias Anagnostakēs and Natalia Poulou-Papadēmētriou, “Ē prōtovyzantinē Messēnē (5os–7os aiōnas) kai provlēmata tēs cheiropoiētēs keramikēs stēn Peloponnēso”, Symmeikta, 11 (1997): 229–322. 15 Angeliki E. Laiou, “Exchange and Trade, Seventh–twelfth Centuries”, in Angeliki E. Laiou (ed.), The Economic History of Byzantium from the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century (3 vols, Washington, DC, 2002), pp. 697–770, here p. 711; but see the alternative interpretation of Frederick Van Doorninck Jr, “Byzantine Shipwrecks”, in ibid., pp. 899–905, here p. 901.

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moments in the various medieval societies. The mechanics of the impact of small-scale individual demand on trade and on growth generally have still to be elaborated fully for the early medieval West as for Byzantium of the same period.

PART two Sounding Early Medieval Holiness

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Part Two

Sounding Early Medieval Holiness Michael McCormick

Much of the early medieval wealth discussed in Part One found its way into religious uses, from the animals skinned for the sheets of those surviving thousands of holy books to the villages and farms incorporated into great monastic or episcopal estates. Indeed, if where one puts one’s money truly indicates one’s values, it would be hard to overestimate the importance of religion in early medieval civilization. Conversion and new cultural heroes had set the tone at the outset. Early on, conflicting cultural models emblematized by Christian Rome and by pagan Sutton Hoo competed for seventh-century hearts and minds. Later, the Carolingian dynasty worked vigorously to Christianize the countryside of manors and villages, to revamp on Rome’s model the powercharged words and gestures of the holy rites which guaranteed the health, wealth and victory of Christian monarchs and people. Reforming the professional performers of those prayers, monks and clerics, precipitated consequences as varied as the rebirth of classical Latin as a dead language, and the distinctively ecclesiastical slant of so much early medieval high culture. But the new impulses did not end at the monastery gates, for they spilled over into the religiosity, and even literate aspirations, of lay men and women. A quantitative approach signals a new direction in the study of religious reading. Guy Philippart’s Belgian team has constructed a vast database, soon to be widely available online, about hagiography, the enormous early medieval literature specializing in the holy. Early medieval readers’ avid consumption of these edifying tales underscores the enduring impact of the extraordinary holy men and women imagined by late antiquity. By outlining the features – the copying, the collecting, the revising – of some 10,000 copies of hundreds of  See Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, 2nd edn (Berkeley, CA, 2000), and the very different approach to conversion in John Van Engen, “Christening the Romans”, Traditio, 52 (1997): 1–45; on cultural heroes, see Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity”, Journal of Roman Studies, 61 (1971): 80–101, and “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity, 1971–1997”, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 6 (1998): 353–76.  There is still no better place to start on Rome’s attraction for early medieval people than Wilhelm Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946), pp. 15–44; for the competing model, see Martin O.H. Carver, “Sutton Hoo in Context”, in Martin O.H. Carver (ed.), Sutton Hoo: A Seventh-Century Princely Burial Ground and its Context (London, 2005), pp. 489–503.

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memorials to the holy superheroes of early medieval civilization, Guy Philippart and Michel Trigalet (Chapter 6) produce qualitative insights into the changing cultural meanings of the literature of religious heroism in the early Middle Ages. The ability to manipulate in milliseconds so much data allows them to show us a forest where before we could scarcely distinguish the trees. We get glimmers of how early medieval reading publics collected, combined and organized their knowledge of the heroic origins of their faith. The geography and chronology of the literature of holiness are telling: copies of passions of ancient martyrs correlate with road systems used by early medieval pilgrims on the move. A few centuries after they had entered circulation in the south, the transport across the Alps of semi-serious romances about early Christian champions recast fiction as works of authentic history that would fire the pious imagination of Europeans and their daughter civilizations for a thousand years to come. From the very manuscripts which conveyed the fabulous stories of hagiographical fiction, Philippart’s computers sketch the spread across early medieval Europe of the imagined history of the early Church, and offer a powerful lesson in “reception history”, a reception that included, for example, considerably more early medieval translating and rewriting of Greek works than has hitherto been appreciated. If we may suspect that the public who read these Latin heroic tales was largely ecclesiastical – it is harder to gauge those who only heard them – we gain more direct insight into lay people’s beliefs and values from Arnold Angenendt’s analysis (Chapter 7) of the new meaning of the holy act of spiritual sacrifice. Central to the core beliefs of incarnation and redemption then being inculcated into early medieval men and women, this concept undergoes deep change within the new civilization. Angenendt tracks how the idea of spiritual sacrifice or offering – a point of honor for early Christians, since its very intellectuality distanced them from the gory slaughter of animals which was becoming less tasteful to thinking people of late antiquity – evolved into very physical gifts offered in connection with the spiritual sacrifice of the Christian Mass. He shows us how anticipated reciprocity fired gift-giving of real property, how sacrifice and offerings to the Church resonated deeply among wealthy and not so wealthy people of the early Middle Ages, procuring, they firmly believed, eternal benefits in exchange for the alienation of earthly wealth. The concrete offerings of spiritual sacrifice fueled important social developments within the ranks of the Church. Thus, the need for more Masses to discharge holy obligations entailed by landed spiritual offerings certainly contributed to the rising proportions of priests among monks and canons that scholars have detected in the second half of the early Middle Ages. That same need surely Pierre Chuvin, Chronique des derniers païens, 2nd edn (Paris, 1991), pp. 237–44; partial English translation: Pierre Chuvin, A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, trans. B.A. Archer (Cambridge, MA, 1990).  Otto Gerhard Oexle, Forschungen zu monastischen und geistlichen Gemeinschaften im westfränkischen Bereich, Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften, 31 (Munich, 1978), pp. 101–2. 

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explains also the architectural proliferation of chapels in great churches, to provide multiple altars for performing simultaneously the enormous numbers of Masses demanded by this mental, economic and religious system. Indeed, as Angenendt observes, the canonical requirement to document such gifts in writing may well have fostered the spread of the written act for private transactions in northern Gaul, and the shift toward greater literacy. Tariff penances and Mass stipends lie at the intersection of medieval legal instruments, piety and canon law, and it is there that Angenendt uncovers one of the most powerful cultural roots of the paradoxical development by which monks, exponents of a movement of coenobial poverty, became among the richest landowners in Europe. Thomas Head (Chapter 8) appraises these contributions to our deepening knowledge of early medieval religiosity. Not content to supplement their important findings with a discussion of related work afoot in the Englishspeaking world, he locates them in the twentieth-century intellectual traditions which shaped them, noting particularly the impact of anthropology. He too weaves stories from very different evidence which also give insight into what we might call the collective mental representations shared by many early medieval men and women. Those insights center on the uniquely creative way the early Middle Ages developed phenomena that stretch back to the very origins of Christianity, and that reach forward into the late medieval and even early modern period. The nexus of culture, economy, sin, redemption, death and eternal punishment fostered a mental world in which material wealth could be applied to finance prayers by professional holy men – even if they were a pale replica of the imaginary giants of the early Christian past – to obtain forgiveness in the hereafter. It layered more powerful social bonds between prominent families and the religious institutions to which they gave, and assisted the rise of the great monasteries in which so many copies of the epic Passions and Lives of the Fathers were copied and meditated on, and which produced so much of the great art of the early Middle Ages that forms the subject of Part Five. Perhaps most importantly, and indeed surprisingly, for the future of the early medieval past, these innovative studies derive new insights from the two sets of source materials which have been the most intensively scrutinized since the seventeenth century. The common theme is inter-disciplinarity in approaching how the early Middle Ages imagined the holy, an application of knowledge, insights and methods from one field to another. One study looks at legal documents with the eyes of a religious historian, and discovers the deep cultural grounding and resonance of clauses which had hitherto been ignored as mere legal formulas. Another pursues the centuries-old mission of the Bollandist fathers, to catalogue and organize the 14,000 Latin saints’ lives, but with the technology and questions of the twenty-first century, taking us far beyond the ancient “distinguishing of the true from the false”, the discrimen veri ac falsi which guided that mission for three hundred years. The third considers both approaches in the light of legal and religious anthropology. All three studies

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demonstrate that cross-disciplinary investigation need not – indeed, must not – abandon the traditional and consummate skills that medievalists have built up over the centuries. But those skills must be harnessed to new questions and new techniques, with the kind of creativity on display here. Last but not least, at a time of proliferating proprietary claims to the work of long-dead and still living scholars – and concomitant financial fees for using that work, whether in the form of exorbitant subscription costs or costly and restrictive licensing agreements – it is surely an encouraging sign for the future that Philippart’s innovative application of the Internet to our discipline is made available online, free, for any who wishes to use it. That is a sign of grace, in every sense of the word, for our early medieval future.

Chapter 6

Latin Hagiography before the Ninth Century: A Synoptic View Guy Philippart with Michel Trigalet

This chapter outlines some early results of a research program into the entire corpus of Latin hagiographical literature from c. 200 to 1500 AD. A quantitative approach to the complete corpus illuminates general features of Latin hagiographical production that do not emerge from traditional philological and historical investigations. Guy Philippart conceived and developed the project; Michel Trigalet is expanding and exploiting our database, which consists of information about the dates, geography and genre of hagiographical works. Beyond authors, works and saints, the database includes place names, manuscripts, libraries, copyists, addressees and translators of works. We anticipate treating roughly 10,000 hagiographical works, transmitted in 7000 manuscripts. The manuscripts are mostly Legendaries or collections of legendae, but some are libelli, booklets containing texts on a single saint. The manuscripts average ten hagiographical works each, and form an overall collection of some 70,000 items, involving 1500 authors, translators, patrons, addressees, 2300 place names and 3320 saints. We begin with some problems of historical analysis raised by our database, and follow with a quantitative overview, before turning to the largest – and At time of writing, Michel Trigalet was completing a doctoral dissertation based on the data discussed here, which derives from a research program at the University of Namur. These results and hypotheses illustrate the directions of this research, upon which Trigalet’s thesis will expand. For preliminary results for Latin hagiography of the eleventh century, see Guy Philippart and Michel Trigalet, “L’hagiographie latine du XIe siècle dans la longue durée”, in Michael W. Herren, Christopher J. McDonough and Ross G. Arthur (eds), Latin Culture in the Eleventh Century, Publications of the Journal of Medieval Latin, 5.2 (Turnhout, 2002), pp. 281–301, especially pp. 281–2. Trigalet regularly updates the database; cf. below, note 51. This chapter reflects the state of the database in 2002.  In their repertory of Latin hagiographical texts, Bibliotheca hagiographica latina antiquae et mediae aetatis, SH 6 (Brussels, 1898–1911) (hereafter BHL), the Bollandists distinguished 13,576 “literary units”, which overstates the number of separate works.  To use the traditional term which emerged from the liturgy, probably in the eleventh century, and meant “prescribed reading”, and later “reading”. See Guy Philippart, Légendiers latins et autres manuscrits hagiographiques, Typologie, 24–5 (Turnhout, 1977), and Guy Philippart, “Martirologi e leggendari”, in Lo spazio letterario del Medioevo, 1: Il Medioevo latino, 2: La circolazione del testo (2 vols, Rome, 1994), pp. 605–48. 

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least exploited – group of Latin hagiographical works, the Passions of martyrs. Historians have shunned them because most offer unreliable information about the age of persecution that they claim to describe. Nevertheless, when they are analyzed as a whole, fascinating new features emerge. We will conclude, briefly, with another neglected group of works, the eastern Lives of the Fathers. The Database: Critical Issues Each work is identified by its literary genre, date, place of composition, author, length, and so on. This paper will focus on genre, date and place of composition. As long as we keep it simple (for example, Lives, Passions, Miracles), “genre” is fairly straightforward. “Place” is too, provided we understand it broadly, in terms of region rather than a particular place. Chronology, however, is more problematic, particularly for martyrs’ Passions. They usually lack indicators more specific than the period between the date of the persecutor and the oldest surviving manuscript or the earliest unambiguous use of the Passion. Most martyrs’ Passions still lack a careful dating, notwithstanding the work done on this huge body of texts by pioneers such as Dufourcq, Franchi dei Cavalieri, Lanzoni or Delehaye. Even for the so-called “authentic” Acts of martyrs stemming from before Constantine’s conversion, scholarly deductions are not always compelling, notwithstanding the considerable progress made since Thierry Ruinart’s Acta primorum martyrum sincera et selecta of 1689. The dating of later Passions, particularly the “epic” Passions, is far more problematic, notwithstanding the resigned consensus of weary scholars. Allusions in the hagiographical panegyrics of Basil of Caesarea (d. 379), John Chrysostom (d. 407), Pope Damasus’ (d. 384) Epigrams or Prudentius’ poem Peristephanon (early For a list of Latin legendaries before the ninth century and of all Latin hagiographical manuscripts before the middle of the eighth century, see Guy Philippart, Légendiers latins, pp. 27–31. For the Greek texts and manuscripts, see Albert Ehrhard, Überlieferung und Bestand der hagiographischen und homiletischen Literatur der griechischen Kirche, 1, Die Überlieferung (Leipzig, 1937), pp. 54–253.  In approximately the same period that the literary genre of the Passions was born, the Greek novel poses similar problems. Secure reference points seem even rarer for the novels than for the Passions, as scholars hesitate to date not only individual novels, but even the genre itself. For the oldest novels, Erwin Rohde’s formerly authoritative opinion held that the genre began as early as around 200 AD, that Achilles Tatius wrote in the fifth century and Chariton in the sixth, which “populated a period of literary history particularly devoid of notable works” (Jean Sirinelli, Les enfants d’Alexandre. La littérature et la pensée grecques (334 av. J.-C.-519 ap. J.-C.) (Paris, 1993), p. 281). Thanks particularly to new manuscript discoveries, these authors have now been dated earlier. Chariton has moved to Tacitus’ time; Xenophon of Ephesus was his contemporary. Longus, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus lived c. 200. And from the second or the first century before Jesus Christ, we have fragments of the Novel of Ninos (ibid., p. 282). Further analogies with the Passions include rewrites (there are five Greek recensions of Pseudo-Callisthenes’ Alexander romance), localizing the novels (see the case of Alcephron, ibid., pp. 391–2), and contemporary writers’ low opinion of the genre.  On the typology of the Passions, see Hippolyte Delehaye, Les Passions des martyrs et les genres littéraires, SH 13b, 2nd edn (Brussels, 1966). 

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fifth century) prove that at least some of the Passions existed by the fourth century. Early manuscripts show that most of the surviving epic Passions were copied before 800 AD. We suspect that many already existed by around 600, which is in fact the conventional wisdom about the Passions from Rome. Nevertheless, Hermann Josef Frede prudently refrained from dating many Passions in his invaluable catalogue of all early Latin Christian texts. Even commonly accepted composition dates have been challenged. For instance, the Passio Domnini, traditionally assigned to the sixth century, now seems plausibly dated to the 840s.10 Eligius Dekkers’ dual dating of the Passio Adventoris, Octavii, et Solutoris to “after the fifth century, or very late (twelfth century?)” only underscores the uncertainty.11 To address this critical issue, we need to assemble as much evidence as possible and experiment with new ways of dating as much as possible of the huge body of Passions. Innovative research into the Passions’ language is the way forward.12 For now, however, we still lack the means of distinguishing fine chronological layers within the totality of Passions, so we will concentrate on the early hagiographical material as a whole. Thinking quantitatively raises other critical issues. Should we, for instance, count rewritings of earlier texts as autonomous works? Hagiographical texts, particularly anonymous ones, are notoriously unstable. This is not because scribes were capricious or incompetent, but because of the well-documented medieval fondness for revising and updating texts.13 We need to be clear about what we are counting, and whether the difference between a base text (what French scholars call the hypotexte) and its rewrite (French hypertexte) suffices to rank the rewrite as a separate text. That is easy with the Lives of St Martin written after Sulpicius Severus. But minor and anonymous rewrites pose serious problems, particularly the pre- and proto-Carolingian versions of Passions, which have so far attracted little attention. Numerous though they seem to be, they still await elementary critical examination, classification into some kind of family tree, and dating.

Ibid., pp. 224–5. Ibid.  Kirchenschriftsteller. Verzeichnis und Sigel, Hermann Josef Frede (ed.), 3rd edn; Hermann Josef Frede (ed.), Aktualisierungsheft 1984 and Aktualisierungsheft 1988; Roger Gryson (ed.), Aktualisierungsheft 2004, Vetus Latina. Die Reste der altlateinischen Bibel 1.1–4 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1981–2004). 10 Guy Philippart and Michel Trigalet, “Légendes hagiographiques des provinces de Parme et de Plaisance: circulation des textes et voies de communication”, in Roberto Greci (ed.), Itinerari medievali e identità europea (Bologna, 1999), pp. 249–312, here pp. 282–300. 11 Eligius Dekkers, Clavis patrum latinorum (hereafter, Clavis), CC, 3rd edn (Turnhout, 1995), p. 702; cf. Hippolyte Delehaye’s despairing comment in his Etude sur le légendier romain, SH 23 (Brussels, 1936), p. 14. 12 See the forthcoming Ph.D dissertation of Caroline Philippart de Foy (University of Nice “Sophia-Antipolis”). 13 Monique Goullet has just published a remarkable book on this subject: Ecriture et réécriture hagiographiques, Hagiologia, 4 (Turnhout, 2005).  

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The dossier of the martyr Christopher illustrates the problems of dating and rewrites. Simplifying somewhat, 24 distinct Passions survive, of which three display slightly different versions, or recensions. Only six of the 24 are relatively well dated: three stem from the tenth century, one from the thirteenth, and two from the fifteenth. Two more survive in manuscripts written before 800, and so are at least that old. But others could be that old, for instance the nine Passions attested by at least one manuscript written before 1100. To decide, we would need good critical editions. But 14 of the 24 Passions have not even been published. Survival rate is important. Does it make sense to evaluate quantitatively what survives without gauging how much has been lost? Was much lost, and was loss random? The concept of “texts at high risk”, that is, texts which did not circulate widely, proves helpful. The fewer copies of a text once existed, the higher the risk that the text would disappear. “Best sellers” had the highest survival rate. Many works in our databank are attested today by only one or even no surviving manuscript. Sometimes the whole set of texts dedicated to a particular saint (what hagiographers call the saint’s “dossier”) was at high risk. Most hagiographical works were intended for and circulated exclusively in local communities that were not pilgrimage shrines; pilgrimage fostered the “export” of texts. This means that text loss is not random: it affects first and foremost “local” works. The surviving body of texts is therefore not representative of what once existed. Estimating the number and distribution of losses over time and space is an essential part of our project. We have already identified some indicators, but more work is required to establish well-reasoned estimates. Evidence We used various research instruments to assemble critical data about the texts.14 Here we will concentrate on evidence for the existence of some form of particular hagiographical texts before 800. We started by analyzing the contents of all surviving manuscripts written before 800, most of which date from the second half of the eighth century. Our hunch was that they would yield texts that had escaped earlier research, and in fact we identified some forty new Passion texts. Next, we hypothesized that works in ninth-century manuscripts might well be older than 800. To date we have studied 358 works in such manuscripts. 70 per cent turn out to have already been identified among works earlier than 800, about 10 per cent were composed in the ninth century, and around 20 per cent still lack a secure date. It is a good bet that most of that 20 per cent also date from before 800. A manuscript incontrovertibly proves that a work existed at a given date, at least in so far as we can trust the palaeographers’ dating of its script. Other evidence comes in half-a-dozen more delicate forms. Although that evidence 14 See, in particular, Dekkers, Clavis; Frede, Kirchenschriftsteller, and the bibliographies of various dictionaries of Christian and medieval Latin.

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documents that a text about a saint existed, it does not indicate the work’s exact form. 1. Testimony about hagiographical readings. Augustine’s Confessions (8.14),

2.

3.

4.

5.

for instance, famously report that, in a pious Christian home at Trier, Ponticianus saw a Latin translation of the Life of St Anthony of the Desert attributed to St Athanasius (d. 371).15 Evidence about library holdings and ownership of hagiographical books. Thus Madalveus, bishop of Verdun (d. c. 776), is supposed to have taken some of his predecessors’ “Deeds” (gesta) with him in order to reinforce his Church’s claims to properties in southern Gaul. According to our early tenth-century informant, Bertharius, that explains how Verdun hagiography reached those regions.16 Narrative iconography – images that make sense only by reference to a narrative text. Narrative images earlier than 800 occur as far afield as Scotland, where the Ruthwell Cross clearly depicts an episode from the Life of Anthony.17 Texts sometimes document the existence of lost images which echoed hagiographical texts. Basil of Caesarea (d. 379) knew some such text when he suggested that the martyr Barlaam (d. c. 304) be depicted holding in his hand the burning incense his tormentors had placed there.18 Fictitious or not, Prudentius’ Peristephanon (Hymn 9) repeats a description of St Cassian’s martyrdom, from a sacristan who had explained an image of it to him at Imola.19 The image made no sense without that commentary derived from some text. Canonical or other prescriptive texts. The best-known is the Pseudo-Gelasian decretum (decree), which specialists attribute to early sixth-century southern Gaul. It testifies to a number of hagiographical texts circulating there, and we will return to it below. Abridgements, poetic versions, rewritings and citations. When hagiographers borrow from their predecessors, they reveal the hagiographical library of their time. For instance, hymns expand our limited knowledge of the circulation of hagiographical texts in Visigothic Spain. Eugenius of

Sancti Augustini Confessiones, ed. Lucas Verheijen, CC 27 (1981), pp. 121–2. “Gesta praedictorum pontificum nostrorum secum ferebat, ut per illorum merita illas res liberius possidere quivisset”; Gesta episcoporum Virdunensium 12, ed. Georg Pertz, MGH SS 4 (Hanover, 1841), p. 44. Louis Duchesne, Fastes épiscopaux de l’ancienne Gaule, 2nd edn (3 vols, Paris, 1915), vol. 3, p. 67, n. 1, thinks that here the term gesta indicates charters; however, historical works could also serve as property titles. 17 See Paul Meyvaert, “A New Perspective on the Ruthwell Cross”, in Brendan Cassidy (ed.), The Ruthwell Cross (Princeton, NJ, 2001), pp. 95–166. 18 See Aline Rousselle, “Sources iconographiques perdues: les premières images des martyrs”, Cassiodorus, 2 (1996): 215–30, here p. 223. There is no Latin dossier of Barlaam. 19 Aurelii Prudentii Clementis Carmina, ed. Maurice P. Cunningham, CC 126 (1966), pp. 325–9. See too Prudentius’ Hymn 11 (ibid., pp. 370–78), as discussed by Rousselle, “Sources iconographiques”, p. 223. 15 16

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Toledo’s (d. 657) compositions show he had to have seen the Passions of Adrian and Natalicia, of Hippolytus, and Leocadia (Clavis 1242–4), while Hildefonsus of Toledo (d. 667) must have read a passion of Cosmas and Damian (Clavis 1254).20 But the most outstanding witnesses to the spread of hagiographical literature in the West before 800 are the well-studied Aldhelm (d. 709) and Bede (d. 735).21 6. Evidence about local cults. Although abundant, this sort of evidence requires careful evaluation. It would be imprudent to assume that the presence of relics or even the existence of a cult proves the presence of a hagiographical work about that saint. That will nevertheless have been more likely when special feast days honored such relics, for instance, the four relics mentioned in a charter which Charles the Bald issued for the monastery of Saint-Denis in September 862.22 Its reference to St Cucuphat is highly significant given how few manuscripts of his Passion have survived. Geographic and Typological Features of the Corpus So counting the hagiographical texts written before 800 is complicated, and requires considerable spadework. Nevertheless, we think that we are approaching a satisfactory estimate. A first maximum number comes from the surviving hagiographical “dossiers” which could conceivably include works written before 800, that is, the dossiers of saints who lived before 800. That would be 2132 out of the total of 3320 files, almost two-thirds (64.2 per cent) of the total surviving hagiographical dossiers. Obviously, however, we should only include dossiers that contain works unambiguously dated before 800. Today that comes to 541 works from 450 saints’ dossiers.23 Classifying the 450 dossiers by literary types and geography offers some additional insights for which dates are only of secondary importance. Geographically, we can distinguish seven fairly homogenous groups of differing size. These are the saints of Latin Africa, the Danube and western Clemens Blume (ed.), Hymnodia Gotica, Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi, 27 (Leipzig, 1897), pp. 122–4 (Adrian), 183–4 (Hippolytus), 213 (Leocadia), 148–9 (Cosmas). 21 Michael Lapidge and Rosalind Love, “The Latin Hagiography of England and Wales (600–1550)”, in Guy Philippart (ed.), Hagiographies. International History of the Latin and Vernacular Hagiographical Literature in the West from its Origins to 1550, Corpus Christianorum, Hagiographies, 3 (4 vols, Turnhout, 1994–), vol. 3, pp. 203–325, especially pp. 209–15. 22 Recueil des actes de Charles II le Chauve, ed. Georges Tessier (3 vols, Paris, 1943–55), vol. 2, p. 63. 23 In the rich dossier Vitae patrum (BHL 6524–47), we have counted as a single “work” each of the collections or comparable groups of texts, such as the Historia monachorum in Aegypto, the Vitae patrum of Gregory of Tours, or Gregory the Great’s Dialogues, even though these works concern dozens of “holy people”. On the other hand, the dossier on Martin of Tours alone (BHL 5610–66) contains at least four “works” from before 800, by Sulpicius Severus, Paulinus, Gregory of Tours and Fortunatus. Debatable though they may be, such decisions have scarcely affected the order of magnitude of the results. 20

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Balkans, the Iberian peninsula, Italy, Romance-language Gaul, the Germanicspeaking Continent, and the British Isles and Brittany. Typologically, we used two criteria. Literary genre separates the texts into five pragmatically defined groups: Passions, here designating accounts of martyrdoms from the great persecutions, including that of Julian the Apostate, but excluding the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles; Lives, which comprise all other texts except for three special groups: the Lives and Sayings of the Fathers (Vitae et apophthegmata patrum); the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles and other New Testament saints; and finally, a few histories of relics, such as those of the True Cross or the head of St John the Baptist. Our second criterion considers whether the Latin texts are translations. A first approach classifies the texts by the geography of Passions and Lives and the three special groups (see Table 6.1). This table invites three basic observations. Time-wise, the most ancient group comes from Roman Africa, where Latin hagiography was born and long confined. Illyria-Pannonia and Spain started producing texts perhaps only from the early fourth century. There is nothing for Italy and Rome before Constantine. Italian production seems to surge thereafter, since many texts have been attributed to the fifth century. Although the earliest hagiography in Gaul comes from the late fourth century, works of the seventh and eighth century far outweigh the earlier period. Spain is similar: the majority of Iberian texts seem to date from the seventh century. For the Germanic lands, the British Isles and Brittany, production begins only in the seventh century. Table 6.1  Basic classification of Passions and Lives. Geography/Special groups

No.

%

Italy

147

32.67

Gaul

137

30.44

Translations from Greek (Italy?)

64

14.22

Ireland, Britain and Brittany

26

5.78

Latin Africa

24

5.33

Iberian peninsula

23

5.11

Germanic-speaking Continent

10

2.22

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Table 6.1 (cont.) Latin apocryphal acts of the New Testament

10

2.22

Danube, western Balkans

8

1.78

Lives and Sayings of the Fathers

1

0.22

450

100

Totals

A second observation confirms basic hagiographical wisdom: right to the end of the Middle Ages, Italy and Gaul would remain Europe’s greatest hagiographical regions. Multiple factors explain this: their demographic weight, their many monastic and clerical institutions, the political and economic purposes which their hagiographical literature served, and a kind of “snowball” effect – that is, the tendency of authors competitively to imitate their forebears in creating the medieval literary and liturgical tradition. Finally, roughly the same number of works survive from Italy and Gaul, if we exclude translations from Greek. Nevertheless, they differ significantly in the status of their hagiographical heroes and literary genres: the ratios of martyrs to confessors are practically inverse, as Table 6.2 shows. Although the absolute numbers would change if all of the translations came from Italy, the ratio of martyrs and confessors would not.24 Table 6.2  Martyrs compared to confessors. Region

Martyrs

Confessors

Totals

Italy

109

38

147

Gaul

27

110

137

Literary Status and the Significance of the Passions Looking beyond the bald numbers, this approach sheds light on the literary and cultural status of epic Passions between c. 500 and 800. Reading the texts themselves reveals a qualitative difference between the literary worlds of Italy and Gaul. Gaul’s hagiography essentially concerns great founder bishops who were the pillars of the Frankish order. Italian hagiography, on the other hand, lionizes socially diverse lay and ecclesiastical martyrs who were anything 24 Martyrs compared to confessors (including translations): Gaul, 27 martyrs v. 110 confessors; Italy, 165 v. 54.

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but emblems of some political regime. Gaul’s sacred history is political and ecclesiastical, with a strong “national” resonance, while that of Italy lacks political or “national” ambition; unlike that of Gaul, Italian hagiography does not glorify a powerful Church characterized by tense relations with lay political power. Its martyrs’ hagiography likely stemmed from writers who were more or less free agents. These talented or industrious novelists’ epic creations likely aimed to promote the narrow interests of local shrines whose endowments could always be improved, and to please pilgrims who had come to venerate their tombs. Secondly, the epic Passions, at the outset – almost certainly the fourth century – seem to have been considered a kind of novelistic literature.25 Modern scholars have looked on these works as popular vulgarizations of acta martyrum sincera, of the authentic acts of the martyrs. That is to mistake their true literary character, for they are more accurately viewed in the tradition of the Greek novel. Like the novels, Passions aimed at a relatively cultivated audience which enjoyed the picturesque, the prodigies and even scenes of cruelty, as well as fictitious speeches that sounded impressively theological or philosophical. Popular though it has been reckoned, some interpretations of the Greek novel point in the same direction. According to the recent editors of the surviving fragmentary novels, they were intended for cultivated readers who relished romantic adventures and gallant stories, but who knew enough philosophy and rhetoric to savor their subtleties. The expensive manuscripts that preserve the novels clearly signal their readers’ higher social status.26 Thirdly, Rome’s ecclesiastical authorities often considered the Passions not merely as literary works, but as dangerous fiction. Although he admired the martyrs themselves, Pseudo-Gelasius (Clavis 167627), who is a good witness to the Roman tradition, denounced the “Acts of the Martyrs” and “Apocryphal Acts of the New Testament” for a double defect: they were ridiculous and they smacked of heresy. Pope Gregory the Great’s opinion was more complicated. When, in 598, Eulogius of Alexandria asked him for the Roman set of “deeds of the saints” (gesta sanctorum), he claimed to have only one small codex, or volume.28 Yet he could scarcely have been unaware of the countless gesta emanating from the shrines of his own city. His evasive response suggests that he was deliberately

Thus already Delehaye: “The Roman Passions are literary, not historical documents” (Delehaye, Etude sur le légendier romain, p. 14); “They are novels” (p. 20). Although he frequently criticized their literary poverty, he also thought some scenes showed a picturesque quality. 26 See Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments, Susan A. Stephens and John J. Winkler (eds) (Princeton, NJ, 1995). 27 Ernst von Dobschütz, Das Decretum Gelasianum de libris recipiendis et non recipiendis, Texte und Untersuchungen, 38 (Leipzig, 1912). 28 See Philippart, Les légendiers latins, p. 29. No one accepts Dufourcq’s argument that Gregory authored the oldest Latin passionary (see ibid.). 25

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ignoring the epic Passions. In fact he rarely, if ever, cites them.29 However, he did not necessarily condemn them. Gregory would hardly have failed to criticize them had he judged them harmful for the faithful. This attitude recalls other literary figures of late antiquity who certainly read worldly novels, but avoided discussing them in their own works.30 I suspect that Gregory tolerated the Passions for their apologetic impact.31 Ambiguous though it might have been in some respects, this martyrial literature served the Church and its triumphs. Rather than supplying moral or social models for the faithful, the Passions narrate the sacred history of the community of believers, in much the same way as the apostolic author of Hebrews (Hebr. 11) when he rehearsed the list of Old Testament heroes whose epic stories recall those of the martyrs. Like the Bible, the Passions depict the heroic exploits of a bygone era with a freedom encouraged by their distance from the events.32 Later ecclesiastical authorities would do likewise: “As the most blessed pope Leo decreed, he [Anselm of Lucca (d. 1086)] did not accept all the apocryphal works for the office in church; nor did he reject them entirely, however, for reading in private, at table, or in assembly after meals”, wrote Anselm’s biographer. “The Church allows many things which it does not approve”, states a treatise “On the Apocryphal Works”, preserved in a fifteenth-century manuscript.33 Besides, “it is pious and easy to believe that which edifies and redounds to the glory of God”, to quote a thirteenth-century tale.34

29 See Grégoire le Grand, Dialogues 1, ed. Adalbert de Vogüé, SC 251 (Paris, 1978), pp. 112–13; Barbara Rosenwein, “In gestis emendatioribus: Gregory the Great and the Gesta martyrum”, in Sylvain Gouguenheim et al. (eds), Retour aux sources. Textes, études et documents d’histoire médiévale offerts à Michel Parisse (Paris, 2004), pp. 843–8. Interested by the hagiography of “perfect and experienced men” from his own time and homeland (see Dialogi, prol. 7-8, ed. and trans. Adalbert de Vogüé, Grégoire le Grand, Dialogues 2, SC 260 (Paris, 1979), pp. 14–16), who offered models for Italy’s monastic communities, Gregory drew his inspiration from the Eastern Vitae patrum, whose Latin translations multiplied in the sixth century, as well as from the hagiographical literature of Gaul. 30 “No one discusses the novel in any ancient text,” notes Jean Sirinelli (Les enfants, p. 282), who judges that pagan fiction “appearing under the guise of history” could excite among virtuous pagans disapproval analogous to that of Christian authorities toward the epic Passions. In a letter probably of 363, Emperor Julian warns the pagan priests against “amorous subjects” borrowed from history: letter 89, ed. Joseph Bidez, L’empereur Julien. Œuvres complètes 1.2 (Paris, 1924), p. 169.6–11. 31 After all, in his Dialogues, he himself has perplexed modern commentators by telling stories judged “childish” today. For the state of the question, see Marc Van Uytfanghe, “Eschatologie des Dialogues grégoriens”, in Gregorio Magno nel XIV Centenario della morte, Atti dei Convegni Lincei, 209 (Rome, 2004), pp. 257–79, here pp. 259–60. 32 Guy Philippart, “L’hagiographie, histoire sainte des amis de Dieu”, in Philippart (ed.), Hagiographies, vol. 4 (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 13–40. 33 Guy Philippart, “L’édition médiévale des légendiers dans le cadre d’une hagio­graphie générale”, in Hans Bekker-Nielsen, Peter Foote, Jørgen Højgaard Jørgensen and Tore Nyberg (eds), Hagiography and Medieval Literature (Odense, 1981), pp. 127–58, here pp. 157–8. 34 Cited by Giuseppe Gatto, “Le voyage au paradis. La christianisation des traditions folkloriques au Moyen Age”, Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations, 34 (1979): 929–42, here p. 942, n. 55.

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In any event, Baudouin de Gaiffier demonstrated convincingly that the Passions of the martyrs were long banished from the public readings of the liturgy at Rome. Although they might have been read in one or another shrine at Rome, they enjoyed no canonical or liturgical recognition before the late eighth century. Notwithstanding Pope Theodore’s (642–49) renewal of the cult of the martyrs, de Gaiffier concludes that the reading of their Passions in St Peter’s basilica began only under Hadrian I (772–95), and then with some reservations.35 Although Italy reckoned the Passions suspect and even dangerous, Gaul appears to have welcomed them warmly. Gaulish opposition to the PseudoGelasian decree started with canon law. A late eighth-century canonical collection and the Gallic revision of the Roman liturgical order Ordo XIV (on the readings for the liturgical office), blunted the decree’s application. The hagiographers themselves resisted. One wrote an anti-Gelasian prologue that would later reappear in various hagiographical works, explicitly attacking those who wished to eliminate the Gesta of the martyrs: “I indict you who judge that these [Gesta] should be abolished among the apocryphal literature.” Other prologues developed similar ideas.36 The poet Prudentius’ visit to a southern Italian shrine gives us a sense of what it might have been like to listen to the reading of a Passion in some ancient shrine or to hear a preacher describing the local martyr’s exploits. Coming from Spain c. 400, Prudentius stopped in Imola on his way to Rome. In the church he saw but could not understand an image of a man covered with tiny wounds. So he asked the sacristan, who told Prudentius the story of St Cassian. Because he confessed his Christian faith, Cassian’s infuriated students stabbed the martyr to death with their writing styluses. The sacristan ended by inviting Prudentius to pray to Cassian “who hears with favor every prayer, and fulfils those that he finds acceptable”. Prudentius did as he was told. He poured out his hopes and fears to the saint and the poet’s wishes were granted: “I was heard. I visited Rome, and found all things turned out happily. I returned home and now proclaim the praise of Cassian.”37 A hagiographical cult had already taken shape. Whether or not Prudentius invented the scene, we detect here an early instance of the pattern at martyrs’ shrines, sheltered from the decrees of higher ecclesiastical authorities. Very early on, small-time literary figures had written up epic tales inspired by the fiction of their time. We can easily imagine pilgrims heading home from Rome and the sanctuaries of the Via Romea, the Roman pilgrims’ way, loaded not only with relics, but also with hagiographical booklets.

Baudouin de Gaiffier, “La lecture des Passions des martyrs à Rome avant le IXe siècle”, Analecta bollandiana, 87 (1969): 63–78. 36 Pre-eminently, see de Gaiffier, “La lecture des Passions”, and his “Un prologue hostile au Décret de Gélase?”, Analecta bollandiana, 82 (1964): 341–53. 37 Peristephanon 9.97–8 and 105–6, p. 329. 35

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Many pilgrims likely came from cultivated backgrounds. If they carried home the martyrs’ texts, it was because they could read them or listen to them read aloud. Removing the gesta from their native soil raised their status.38 Intended for an audience of devout pilgrims who wanted nothing better than to believe in the glorious marvels of bygone days, this “laughable and dangerous literature”, now underwent a decisive change: by leaving Italy, Passions became works of realistic history.39 Rome and its martyrs were long ago and far away, where the marvelous was possible and believable. We grasp a little better why Frankish writers complained more than others about the lack of miracles in their own time, for they were comparing their impoverished age not only to New Testament times, but also to the heroic, fantastic age depicted by these minor Roman novelists. In sum, the Pseudo-Gelasian decree tells us more about the disturbing success of the martyrs’ Passions in the sixth century than about the Church’s effective control over this literature. Was it really pilgrims who went down to Rome to visit the martyrs’ shrines and carried Italy’s Latin Passions across the Alps where they could colonize northern Europe? Much like Prudentius at Imola, the northern pilgrims would have found in the various shrines obliging locals willing to sell them some relics and booklets containing the epic Passions of their patron saints. The geography of the Passions and of the shrines from which they stem supports this reconstruction (see Table 6.3): virtually all of the Passions come from shrines in Latium or along the roads running from Rome to the Alps. Of the 108 martyrs or groups of martyrs whose Passions are preserved, more than 61 per cent are from Latium, the region of Rome itself; another 32 per cent of the Passions concern the martyrs of shrines situated on the Via Romea. From beyond Rome, to the south, almost nothing remains: a mere 6 or 7 per cent of the surviving Passions. What is more, the few “successful” saints of the south like Agatha or Lucia almost certainly owed that success to the presence of their relics and shrines at Rome, rather than to northerners’ visits to southern shrines. In fact, that also holds true for the saints of Illyria and Spain.

In Gaul, these Passions were likely read as a sort of Christian foundation epic, and seemed to belong more to the general history of Christianity than to the particular stories of some distant shrine. In Italy, particularly in Rome, they probably stood out more strongly as manifestos of specific shrines. 39 Delehaye also develops the idea of a change in “status” of the Passions, but he ascribes this to the progressive degradation of early medieval culture: “Little by little, as the level of culture declined, the true character of Roman hagiographical literature ceased generally to be understood, and these works of the imagination moved imperceptibly into the ranks of historical texts” (Etude sur le légendier romain, p. 187). 38

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Table 6.3  Geography of the shrines of Italian martyrs’ Passions. Region, from north to south

No. of Passions

Friuli, the Veneto, Emilia

10

Liguria, Piedmont, Lombardy

10

Tuscany, Umbria, Abruzzo

15

Latium

66

Campania, Sicily, Sardinia

7

Total

108

One might object that few Passions from southern Italy found their way into northerners’ baggage because few were written there. However, if we consider the total hagiographical corpus of Lives of saintly bishops, which are less dependent on pilgrimage shrines and whose spread followed a different pattern, southern Italy is not at all under-represented. On the contrary, for Italian bishops alone, more than a third of the dossiers come from Italy south of Rome (see Table 6.4). Table 6.4  Geography of Italian bishops’ Lives, from north to south. Region, from north to south

No.

Lombardy

3

Tuscany (2), Umbria (3), Abruzzo (1)

6

Trent (1), the Veneto (1), Emilia (7)

9

Latium

3

Campania (6), Molise (1), Apulia (1)

8

Total

29

The medieval “publication” of hagiography, particularly of the Passions, reinforces this interpretation. It took significant resources, in both wealth and texts, to assemble in one volume the raw material of many Passions. That investment implies respect for these texts and serious motivation. Although potential compilers in Rome or Italy may have had the wherewithal, with the possible exception of Greek monasteries (see below), they lacked both motivation and the necessary respect for these texts. It made little sense for one shrine to promote the cult of its neighboring rivals for the pilgrim trade.

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Moreover, since the Passions were excluded from public readings in church, there was no reason to invent legendaries, that is, collections of hagiographical texts, especially Passions, intended for public readings. In the northern countries, on the contrary, church officials took seriously this minor literature scattered about in the form of booklets. There patrons existed who wanted to see the little novels that they mistook for serious history brought together in one volume, often supplemented with the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, which were equally denigrated at Rome. In this way medieval legendaries were born. A comprehensive survey of hagiographical manuscripts strengthens this explanation, for the earliest manuscripts of legendaries stem from the eighth century, and they all come from north of the Alps. They proliferated there in the ninth century, when they were still extremely rare in Italy, from which a mere handful survive today. One northern legendary looks very much like the matrix of medieval hagiographical publication. At least seven copies of this legendary have so far come to light from the ninth and the tenth centuries, and all seem to stem from the Carolingian heartland.40 Such substantial “publishing” ventures assured the posthumous literary triumph of our minor “heretical and laughable” writers of the early Middle Ages. In fact, they transformed the Passions into a major cultural phenomenon of Christendom. Soon the flow of cultural exchanges between Italy and Gaul would shift. If in the very early Middle Ages the Franks spread the relics and hagiographical booklets of Italy northward, the northern legendaries of epic Passions would, when they did not colonize Italy outright, soon serve as models for an Italy which was converted late to the liturgical reading of the Passions. Impressive though the hefty physical format of Italian legendaries might be, they remained comparatively slender in content, at least compared to the legendaries circulating north of the Alps.41 Nor did the story stop there. Thirteenth-century Italian hagiographical production, in the form of the Golden Legend, the Legenda aurea, was the indirect heir of the old legendaries. This latest avatar of the early medieval legendaries would conquer all of western Europe and nourish the imaginations of preachers and artists for generations to come.42 The success of the Passions is clear as early as the fourth century. Their authors were probably professionals working for the shrines who produced works of opulent fiction and rather unreliable theology. But they did make Christians feel good about their faith by creating a past cast in heroically epic tints. Italian church officials were not indifferent to the powerful apologetic appeal of these works, so they tolerated them even though they kept them out 40 See François Dolbeau, “Le passionnaire de Fulda. Une source méconnue des Acta Sanctorum”, Francia, 9 (1981 [1982]): 515–30. 41 See Philippart, Les légendiers latins, p. 36. 42 The studies and edition of Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, Legenda Aurea (Florence, 1998), and the annotated French translation, Jacques de Voragine, La Légende dorée, trans. under the direction of Alain Boureau (Paris, 2004), are important steps forward.

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of the liturgy. Northern pilgrims who admired the martyrs’ shrines of Rome went home loaded with relics and booklets about their heroes. Far from the realities of Rome, the novels about martyrdom came to be considered works of history and so changed in their literary status. Northern liturgists collected them into great legendaries and, within a generation or so, they were being imitated in Italy itself. Eastern Passions Our quantitatively inspired appraisal of early medieval hagiography also offers precious insights into Passions translated from Greek. They too enjoyed remarkable popularity. The database allows us to estimate their numbers in the eighth century, which may or may not reflect their importance in the preceding centuries. At first blush, the body of Greek Passions translated into Latin before 800 seems, in the eighth-century West, to have been proportionately more popular than the home-grown literature. Of the 56 Passions that we have identified as translated from the Greek, 31 (55 per cent) occur in manuscripts older than the ninth century. The much more numerous Passions originally written in Latin seem relatively less popular. Of the 204 we have counted, only 28 (7 per cent) appear in that same set of manuscripts copied before 800. There are two ways of explaining this difference. Too few manuscripts might survive to give significant results: the loss of even one collection might be enough to distort the order of magnitude, and the resulting numbers would not accurately reflect reality. On the other hand, it is not inconceivable that even with the potential loss of a collection or two, the present state of the corpus accurately reflects eighth-century reality. If the latter hypothesis were correct, this might suggest that the Passions translated from Greek were assembled into legendaries even before the Latin Passions. This could conceivably have happened in one or more of the Greek monasteries that dominated the coenobitic scene in early medieval Rome.43 From Rome they could have traveled north not in the form of individual booklets, as we have argued for the Latin Passions, but already in the form of hagiographical collections. Delehaye assumed that the Latin translations of Greek texts preserved in the hagiographical collection of an eighth-century manuscript in Munich (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4554) stemmed “from a Greek menologion44 in which the Passions of the saints of Asia Minor, Egypt, and of Moesia were 43 See Jean-Marie Sansterre, Les moines grecs et orientaux à Rome aux époques byzantine et carolingienne, vol. 2, Mémoires de la classe des lettres de l’Académie royale de Belgique, coll. in-8o, 2nd series, 66 (2 vols, Brussels, 1983). 44 A menologion is a common type of Byzantine collection of hagiographical texts organized month by month, according to the saints’ feast days. See Jacques Noret, “Ménologes, synaxaires, ménées”, Analecta bollandiana, 86 (1968): 21–4.

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arranged in calendar order”.45 More probably, the Munich collection compiles various translations made in Rome of scattered Greek Passions, rather than translating an earlier menologion, since no equivalent Greek collection has yet emerged. The systematic study of the early Latin translations of Greek and other eastern Passions should resolve this problem. Unfortunately, although the inventory of these works is already well advanced, most still lack the critical editions which are indispensable for the close textual study that could detect whether the translations stem from the same workshop. A second question concerns the centers of hagiographical rewriting before 800. Many of the Passions translated from the Greek exist in two or three different versions earlier than the ninth century. Table 6.5 lists these translations as well as three Passions attested by more than one pre-800 manuscript.46 Table 6.5  Greek Passions existing in multiple Latin versions or manuscripts earlier than 800.

Passion

BHL No. Form A

Form B

Form C

Passio Babylae

889

890

891

Passio Christophori

1766

1768?

Passio Ciryci

1803b

1805

Passio Cypriani et Iustinae

2047

2048b

Passio Cyrilli ep. Cretensis

2069

2070

Passio Eleutherii et Anthiae

2451

2451a

Passio Euphemiae

2708

2709 (2 mss)

Crucis Inventio

4169

4171

45 Hippolyte Delehaye, “Les Martyrs d’Egypte”, Analecta bollandiana, 40 (1922): 5–154, especially pp. 124–5. Albert Siegmund criticized this hypothesis in Die Überlieferung der griechischen christlichen Literatur in der lateinischen Kirche bis zum zwölften Jahrhundert (Munich-Pasing, 1949), pp. 204–8. 46 We include these since different manuscripts identified by the same BHL number could actually represent different recensions, given that many catalog descriptions are unreliable, especially those published before Henricus Fros, Bibliotheca hagiographica latina antiquae et mediae aetatis. Novum Supplementum, SH 70 (Brussels, 1986).

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Table 6.5 (cont.) Passio Iuliani et Basilissae

4529 (2 mss)

Passio Potiti pueri

6908 (2 mss)

Passio Theodosiae

8090 (3 mss)

Are the texts cataloged as BHL 889–4171 different translations? Or simply different rewrites of the same early translation? Conceivably, the first translations, possibly the work of Italian Greek-speakers, were written in a poor Latin; once they circulated more widely, more demanding readers may have felt a need to improve them, particularly north of the Alps.47 In any case, there is no mistaking the surprisingly intense literary activity afoot before the ninth century, whether we are looking at multiple translations or multiple rewrites of single translations. Clearly, this phenomenon and the broader insights it offers into the cultural development of the early Middle Ages will require detailed study of this substantial body of neglected texts.48 The Eastern “Lives of the Fathers” (Vitae patrum) The Passions should not eclipse another neglected body of hagiographical texts, the “Lives of the Fathers” (Vitae patrum). From the late fourth century, these influential works proliferated in many changing forms across Christendom. The Eastern Lives of the Fathers inspired Gregory of Tours and Gregory the Great to compose their own collections spotlighting Western saints, the Vitae patrum and the Dialogues, respectively. The Eastern Lives’ early popularity is clear from the many pre-ninth-century manuscripts. The original models were translated and adapted into Latin mainly in the fifth and sixth centuries. Among these were Rufinus’ History of the Monks (Historia monachorum), written in 404 AD (BHL 6524; Clavis 198p); the enigmatic Admonitions of the Holy Fathers Bede states that he had done so with an unsatisfactory Latin translation of the Life and Passion of St Anastasius: Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum 5.24, ed. Bertram Colgrave and Roger A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), pp. 568–71. On translations from the Greek and rewrites, see Monique Goullet, Écriture, pp. 141–7. 48 Nor were the earliest influences a one-way street, as illustrated, for instance, by a fifthcentury manuscript of the Syriac translation of a Greek Passion of St Agnes, itself derived from a Latin text: Delehaye, Les Passions et les genres littéraires, p. 224. The inventory and analysis of translations from the Latin will be greatly facilitated by our database, in which François De Vriendt has correlated each Latin text of the BHL to the corresponding Greek text identified in François Halkin, Bibliotheca hagiographica graeca, SH 8a, 3rd edn (Brussels, 1957); François Halkin, Auctarium, SH 47 (Brussels, 1969). 47

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(Commonitiones sanctorum patrum; BHL 6531m), the original Greek text of which might come from Egypt, while the Latin translation could go back to the early sixth century; the Words of the Elders (Verba seniorum; BHL 6531) which Paschasius of Duma dedicated to Martin of Braga, perhaps in the 550s; the Sayings of the Fathers (Apophthegmata patrum; BHL 6527–8, 6529) which were translated at Rome, apparently by the future popes Pelagius I (556–61) and John III (561–74). There may well be other works out there that await study and reliable datings, for instance Pseudo-Rufinus’ collection of Words of the Elders (BHL 6525). Woven of anecdotes and wise sayings, these collections were revised, abbreviated, expanded and adapted. The early manuscripts show that new versions circulated alongside the original collections. While some collections have clear Greek equivalents, others appear to have been compiled in the West, for instance, supposedly, the Admonitions of the Fathers.49 But to identify the sources and the editorial methods of pre-Carolingian or early Carolingian workshops will require good critical editions. With few exceptions, they are still lacking for the most widely circulating works, for example, the Sayings of the Fathers by Pelagius I and by John III.50 The cultural niche that the Lives of the Fathers occupied in the Latin West was quite distinct from that of the Passions. Unlike the latter, the Lives of the Fathers were not connected to the liturgy, relic cults, shrines, or miraculous happenings. Concretely, they circulated in fat bookish volumes bound for monastic libraries and the only place they really were useful was in monastic hands. Unlike the Passions, these are no basic tools of Christian apologetic. Rather, at least in principle, they are “mirrors of the perfect monk”. With their picturesque or scary anecdotes, their solemn, practical or enigmatic utterances, they fed the piety, the knowledge, and the imagination of the monastic world as it struggled to emulate distant and idealized models of holiness. Even inventorying their manuscripts, quotations, or allusions would not fully gauge their influence. That would require a comparative analysis of the models supplied by the Vitae patrum with those developed by the new and original Western works of hagiography. It would be rewarding to explore whether the vocabulary of the Lives of the Fathers penetrated Western hagiography and spirituality, and if so, how exactly, and to what extent. That would illuminate the cultural status and function of the Lives of the Fathers. It is not inconceivable that monks and nuns savored the emotions provoked by reading the Vitae patrum, elevating them to some kind of dream world without ever drawing from them models for real life. The great Lives of the bishops and abbots of Gaul have dominated historical research down to the twenty-first century. Theirs is a territorial and political hagiography. The Passions and the Lives of the Fathers are different. They take us to the very heart of the sacred history and the edifying literature of holiness that was the common inheritance of all Christendom. They played a significant See Guy Philippart, “Vitae Patrum. Trois travaux récents sur d’anciennes traductions latines”, Analecta bollandiana, 92 (1974): 353–65, here p. 357. 50 The situation has barely improved in thirty years, partly because the task is so immense. 49

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role in the culture of the centuries before the Carolingians, and they are capable of revealing hidden traits of that culture. What we have tried to do here is to use the new perspectives that emerge from considering Latin hagiography as a whole to draw out some possibilities and hypotheses about cultural phenomena of the early Middle Ages: the functional difference between the hagiographical literatures of Italy and of Gaul; the attitude of ecclesiastical officials toward the Passions; how the cultural status of the Passions changed when they were introduced into Gaul; the significance of translations from the Greek; and the existence before the ninth century of veritable workshops for rewriting earlier hagiographical texts, especially translated ones. We hope to have at least hinted at some of the long-term consequences for Western civilization of the hagiographical creativity of the early Middle Ages. For exploring this vast new field of investigation, the publication of our databank should offer a powerful new tool.51

51 Preliminary materials from the database are available online at . The full database should be available in 2008.

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Chapter 7

Donationes pro anima: Gift and Countergift in the Early Medieval Liturgy Arnold Angenendt

Sacrificial Offering in the History of Religion and Christianity To understand the medieval interpretations and practices of sacrificial gift or offering, we must approach them from the perspective of social as well as religious history. An authoritative handbook declares that the phenomenon known as “sacrificial offering” appears in nearly all religions, and the concept of “sacrificial offering” therefore has a central significance in a typology and theory of religious acts; a sacrificial offering can be understood as “a complex of ritual procedures which comprise at least one act of ritual renunciation of a material object”. It singles out: the ritual enactment, performed in legitimate fashion most often by the head of a household or specialized priests; the place of sacrifice, whether in the home or in public, in a temple; the sacrificial object, animal, human, food, clothing, tool, weapon or whatever; and finally, the ritual instruments, such as altars, death instrument, fire, water or oil. Sacrificial offering, moreover, must be situated in the process of the development of religion. However much modern religious studies seek to eliminate the evolutionary tendencies favored by nineteenth-century scholarship, they cannot avoid recognizing “that, although nearly all religions have it, sacrificial ritual does not possess the same significance in all historical situations”. As examples of such change, they cite criticism of sacrifices by Old Testament prophets and Greek philosophers, as well as voices from India and Near Eastern wisdom literature. There, “Man’s inner disposition and righteous way of life is viewed as more important than offering sacrifices and external form.” Building on the Old Testament, the New Testament spiritualized sacrifice: “Christ’s death was expounded as a surrender of self for mankind”, in keeping Hubert Seiwert, “Opfer”, in Hubert Cancik et al. (eds), Handbuch religionswissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe, vol. 4 (Stuttgart, 1998), pp. 268–84, here pp. 268 and 269.  Ibid., pp. 275f.  Ibid., p. 283.  Ibid.; Marco Frenschkowski and Lutz Röhrich, “Opfer”, in Kurt Ranke and Hermann Bausinger et al. (eds), Enzyklopädie des Märchens: Handwörterbuch zur historischen und vergleichenden Erzählforschung, 10.1 (Berlin, 2002), cols 281–306. 

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with a general trend in the New Testament to “apply the concept of sacrificial offering in the ethical sense”. “The true sacrificial offering which pleases God consists in the offering of one’s own body [that is, life]”, understood as “a way of life pleasing to God”. Early Christians continued this understanding. They understood their sacrificial offerings as thanksgiving for redemption and sharing in Jesus Christ. Christian sacrifice required intellectual and spiritual self surrender: “offer your bodies [that is, yourselves] as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (logike latreia; Rom. 12:1). According to Jungmann, the early Christian one “is an intellectual sacrifice which is filled with spirit; as such it not only proceeds from an expression of thanksgiving to God: it is itself almost exclusively thanksgiving and homage to God”. The emphasis on spiritual offering consciously belittled material offering. The Christian conception expanded beyond the social action emphasized by the Old Testament prophets “to care for widows and orphans” (cf. Isa. 1:23; Ps. 145:9). In the end, however, the charitable gifts which were indispensable for the Eucharist as for social action possessed no cult value: “Offering was a formless act without ritual shape and without cult resonance.” Subsequently, this offering was increasingly interpreted as “sacrifice”, and ultimately, the idea of sacrificial offering was projected back onto the general understanding of the Eucharist. In this way, what was once a purely technical act of offering bread and wine acquired the value of a reciprocal transaction: someone who gives something can expect a countergift. What had begun primarily as an immaterial, spiritual surrender (of self) became a material offering which now created a spiritual reward: someone who offered an earthly gift received in return a heavenly countergift. Thus, from late antiquity on, cultic regard for material gifts grew, especially for the bread and wine needed for the Mass, but also for other gifts: “The concept of offering now included all the products of a rural economy, and all sorts of objects useful to the church and the household.” In the Middle Ages, the ancient religious conception of reciprocal sacrifice increasingly dominated: bread and wine were brought in offering and then transformed into the blood and body of Jesus Christ and offered up to God, who then granted his grace. It overlaid the idea of self sacrifice, which nevertheless was not completely lost, for it recurs in some pregnant formulations of dogma. For instance, Ambrosius Autpertus (d. 784) observed “our gift is prayer, and our altar is the heart”,10 and goes on to ask: “What could be more precious for our Creator Seiwert, “Opfer”, p. 271. Josef A. Jungmann, Das eucharistische Hochgebet (Würzburg, 1954), p. 35.  Rupert Berger, Die Wendung “offerre pro” in der römischen Liturgie (Münster, 1965), p. 48.  Josef A. Jungmann, Missarum Sollemnia (2 vols, Vienna, 1958), vol. 2, p. 19.  Bernhard Jussen, “Religious Discourses of the Gift in the Middle Ages: Semantic Evidences (Second to Twelfth Centuries)”, in Gadi Algazi, Valentin Groebner and Bernhard Jussen (eds), Negotiating the Gift: Pre-modern Figurations of Exchange (Göttingen, 2003), pp. 173–92. 10 Ambrosius Autpertus, Libellus de conflictu uitiorum atque uirtutum 9, in Ambrosii Autperti opera, ed. Robert Weber, CC Cont. med. 27B (1979), p. 916. 



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than our soul? Our gifts (dona) perhaps? When the soul is filthy inside, will another external gift please Him?”11 Heiric of Auxerre (d. 875) defined it thus: “Spiritually, our altar that stands in God’s temple, that is in the hearts of the elect, is understood as faith; the gift that is brought to the altar of the Lord is love, charity, teaching, psalmody, obedience, prayer, mercy, and whatever we offer devoutly to God.”12 Peter Damiani (d. 1072) clearly demanded the sacrificial offering of self: “to offer ourselves” (nosmetipsos offerre).13 In late medieval piety, this once again became the general assumption. For example Thomas à Kempis (d. 1471), who dedicated the fourth book of his Imitation of Christ to the sacrament of communion, aimed entirely at an emotional merging with Jesus. The voice of his beloved Christ responded: “But what else should I require of you, except that you strive from the bottom of your heart to surrender yourself to me. I care not for whatever you give me outside of yourself, for I do not seek your gifts: I want you yourself.”14 In a nutshell, medieval people were quite capable of citing the formulations of spiritual and intellectual sacrifice, yet still fell back on the “earlier” forms of sacrifice. This change in practice epitomizes our problem. From the New Testament onward, Christian sacrificial offering was understood as a logikē latreia (Rom. 12:1), as spiritual or intellectual worship or sacrifice, that is, as sacrificing one’s self as a witness to the Word of God, and for the care of the poor. In the Middle Ages, the material component came to the fore and, understood entirely as reciprocity, brought with it the expectation of a countergift from God. So it developed in and beyond the Mass, in that a maximum number of spiritual gifts were purchased in a reciprocating transaction. Pro remedio animae: “For the Remedy of the Soul” We begin with a document that offers gifts in considerable number, the famous last will and testament of Bishop Berthramn of Le Mans, dated 27 March 616. It contains many individual foundation acts pro anima, “for the sake of the soul”, whose phrasing varies, “for the remedy of my soul”, or “for the recompense of our soul”.15 To this end, Berthramn’s name should be commemorated (pro Ambrosius Autpertus, Sermo de cupiditate 16, in Ambrosii Autperti opera, p. 980. Heiric of Auxerre, Homilia 2.25, in Homiliae per circulum anni, ed. Richard Quadri and Roland Demeulenaere, CC Cont. med. 116B (1994), p. 232. 13 Petrus Damiani, letter 177, ed. Kurt Reindel, MGH Die Briefe der Deutschen Kaiserzeit 4.4 (Munich, 1993), p. 286. 14 Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Christi 4, ed. Michael J. Pohl, in Opera Omnia, vol. 2 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1903), p. 112. 15 The original was lost in the French Revolution. See the protocol and dispositio, nos 4 and 32, and the eschatocol, Margarete Weidemann (ed.), Das Testament des Bischofs Berthramn von Le Mans vom 27. März 616, Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum Monographien, 9 (Mainz, 1986): “pro animae meae remedium; pro animae meae remedio; pro mercede animae nostrae; pro animae meae remedium”; pp. 7, 11, 25, 47. 11 12

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commemoratione nominis mei),16 and it would be inscribed in the “Book of Life”, whence it would be spoken aloud (ut nomen meum in libro vitae recitetur).17 He hoped for the remission of his sins (pro mea vel quantitate relaxandi peccata).18 In addition to liturgical commemoration, alms for the poor and lighting of the church passed for meritworthy: “on my commemoration, let there be a distribution to the poor either in clothing or gold”.19 Moreover, Berthramn freed Roman and barbarian slaves, who were placed under the Church’s protection with all their heirs and possessions: “I command that they be free with all their possessions … [and that they should] have the protection [defensio] of the holy basilica.”20 Those whose freedom Bishop Berthramn had purchased received a charter to that effect.21 Friends and freed slaves should attend his anniversary service, for which they would receive a “consolation” (solacium).22 The clergy got a special reward.23 There is also a division into three portions: the first for Berthramn’s successor as bishop, the second for his basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, and the third for the poor.24 Finally, church furnishings (ornatum sanctae aecclesiae)25 were included, along with the expense for lighting (luminaria).26 Not least, there were provisions for the tomb and its services. The bishop wished to be buried in the church of Saints Peter and Paul27 with a dignified funeral.28 His nephew Sigehelm, accompanied by wife and children, was supposed to visit the tomb several times a year, care for poor people there, and be entertained by the abbot.29 All told, the bishop arranged for an impressive number of financial endowments and spiritual services. But there were still no direct instructions for anniversary masses, although Berthramn requested the commemoration of his name in the liturgy. The unusually detailed will of Bishop Berthramn shows, in the first place, prayer and charity, the ancient and traditional works of penance and merit. In early medieval gifts “for the soul”, pro anima, these works would multiply endlessly. Yet scholars have failed to note the distinctiveness of the donation charters because the succinct formula pro anima has attracted little attention. Ibid., no. 38, p. 29. Ibid., no. 18, p. 18. 18 Ibid., no. 48, p. 35. 19 Ibid., no. 4, p. 11: “quando fuerit mea commemoratio, pauperibus aut in vestimentum aut in aurum erogetur”. 20 Ibid., no. 67, p. 44: “ingenuos esse iubeo cum omni peculiari eorum …; defensionem sanctae basilicae … habere”. 21 Ibid., nos 67 and 69, pp. 44, 46: “epistolas eis feci et ipsi in integra ingenuitate perdurent”. 22 Ibid., no. 65, p. 43: “cum dies commemorationis meae evenerit, semper inibi adesse debeant”. 23 Ibid., no. 4, p. 11: “sive alimonia canonicorum vel pauperum”. 24 Ibid., no. 39, p. 30. 25 Ibid., no. 38, p. 29. 26 Ibid., no. 4, p. 11. 27 Ibid., no. 50, p. 36: “corpusculum meum desidero sepelire”. 28 Ibid., no. 66, p. 44: “dignanter sepeliant”. 29 Ibid., no. 66, p. 43. 16 17

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The characteristic words pro salute or pro remedio animae pass for mere churchly formula. In reality, however, donations pro anima deeply impacted the economy no less than the liturgy of the entire Middle Ages. Back in 1977, Philippe Jobert observed the novel, if not to say revolutionary, character of this charter. In sum, his thesis is that “on a first approximation, the donation pro anima or pro remedio animae can be defined as generosity with property on behalf of a church or monastery, so that the clergy/religious pray for the donor’s soul”.30 Jobert especially challenged the idea that this was mere stereotype: “the development and spread of the donation to redeem the soul followed from the Christian conception that almsgiving eliminates sin”.31 It is surprising that the donations never mention a material countergift; rather, they request salvation (salus) and reward (merces).32 As proof that alms redeemed sin and augured eternal life, Jobert cites many passages from the Bible and Church Fathers, the gist of which would recur in the charters. He also observes that in the Romanized south, such charters occur before the seventh century; from c. 650 they spread northward, into further Burgundy, Neustria, Alemannia, and even toward Frisia, presumably because of missionary activity.33 These important observations can be deepened. Strikingly, the crest of charter attestations appears not in the Romanized south which was so accustomed to the ancient culture of literacy, but in the much less literate north. Jobert mentions in passing a penitential’s passage about gifts of land. Here he was very much on the right path.34 Sacrificial Offering and Tariff Penance The context for donations in the penitentials is the system of tariff penance that developed in Ireland, and which Columban the Younger (d. 597) brought to the continent, with lasting consequences. As normal penances the new penitential books now imposed precisely defined periods of fasting.35 Such a fast could be commuted (commutatio), or even replaced. Commuting consisted in substituting other penitential acts for the fast. Reciting or chanting Psalms, often in combination with genuflections, was one favorite replacement for fasting. For instance, a day of fasting could be replaced by 50 Psalms with genuflections, or 70 Psalms without genuflecting. 300 Psalms with genuflections equaled a weeklong fast or 420 without genuflecting, while a month came to 1200 Psalms with Philippe Jobert, La notion de donation: convergences, 630–750, Publications de l’Université de Dijon, 49 (Paris 1977), p. 205. 31 Ibid., p. 139. 32 Ibid., pp. 134f. 33 Ibid., pp. 116–23. 34 Ibid., pp. 202f. 35 Hubertus Lutterbach, “Die Fastenbusse im Mittelalter”, in Klaus Schreiner (ed.), Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter. Politisch-soziale Kontexte, visuelle Praxis, körperliche Ausdrucksformen (Munich, 2002), pp. 399–437. 30

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genuflections or 1680 without, a rate that made its way into many penitentials.36 Alongside commutations, there were also buyouts (redemptiones), in which one redeemed one’s penance so that another person performed the penance on one’s behalf. Because laypeople generally were unable to say the psalter, they were offered the possibility of a replacement: they could ask monks or priests to perform the penance for them. As candidates for these substitution penances, the penitentials name “the righteous man” (iustus).37 Such a “righteous man” had to be capable of assuming, as it were, surplus penitential works, something that best suited clerics or monks. In fact, one source states that he should be “a righteous priest or even a true monk who lives according to the Rule”.38 This substitute could claim something in exchange for the penance: “If someone cannot fulfill what we have stated about the Psalms, he should find a righteous man who can perform it [the Psalm prayer] for him, and he redeems that with his money or his labor.”39 Cyrille Vogel first correctly analyzed this substitution system. As he summed it up: “the substitute was usually a cleric or a monk” who had “to be remunerated for his services, which turned substitution atonement into a revenue stream for churches and monasteries”.40 This leads us to the landed endowments for churches and monasteries. As the penitentials explicitly observed, the alms which were recommended as penance could be given in three forms: as a gift upon the altar (super altare Dei), for the redemption of captives (pro redemptione captivorum), and as distributions to the poor (pro pauperibus).41 Vogel applies this triple formula “to captives, church treasure and ecclesiastics, and the poor”.42 Although the continuing impact of the early Christian penance of charitable works is clear, the penitentials quantify the effect of these works. For instance, the ancient Christian social act of manumission was converted into a tariff penance of lessened penitential fasting. So the manumission of seven female slaves (ancillae) made up for a homicide. When blood was shed in an act of Cyrille Vogel, Les “libri paenitentiales”, Typologie, 27 (Turnhout, 1978), pp. 47f. Cyrille Vogel, “Composition légale et commutations dans le système de la pénitence tarifée”, Revue de droit canonique, 9 (1959): 1–38, here pp. 34–7. 38 Cited in ibid., p. 37. 39 Poenitentiale Remense, 15, §47 (18), ed. Franz Bernd Asbach, Das Poenitentiale Remense und der sogen. Excarpsus Cummeani (Regensburg, 1975), p. 77 (Appendix): “Et qui istis implere aut non vult aut non potest et reliqua, sicut in penitentiale scriptum est, et qui de psalmis hoc, quod superius diximus, implere non potest elegat iustum qui pro illo hoc impleat et de suo praetio aut labore hoc redimat.” 40 Vogel, “Composition légale”, p. 37. 41 Poenitentiale Oxoniense 2.1, in Paenitentialia minora Franciae et Italiae saeculi VIII–IX, ed. Raymond Kottje, Ludger Körntgen and Ulrike Spengler-Reffgen, CC 156 (1994), p. 191: “pro redemptionem captiuorum siue super sanctum altare siue pauperibus christianis erogare debeat”; Poenitentiale Merseburgense 148, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm Hermann Wasserschleben, Die Bussordnungen der abendländischen Kirche (1851, reprinted Graz, 1958), p. 406; Poenitentiale Pseudo-Ecgberti 4.60, ed. Wasserschleben, Die Bussordnungen, p. 341; Regino of Prüm, De synodalibus causis et disciplinis ecclesiasticis 2.446, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm Hermann Wasserschleben, Reginonis abbatis Prumiensis libri duo (Leipzig, 1840), p. 390; Burchard of Worms, Decretorum liber 19.22, PL 140, col. 983. 42 Vogel, “Composition légale”, pp. 28f. 36 37

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violence but did not flow all the way to the ground, a wealthy person could atone with half the price of seven female slaves; a poor person could do so with the price of only one female slave.43 Three slaves of each gender atoned for an intentional homicide; for one intentional homicide in a quarrel, four slaves of each gender atoned; for an accidental homicide, two of each,44 and for the homicide of a child, 12 female slaves sufficed for atonement.45 Penitential fasts could also be converted to cash: one fast day equaled 1d.; seven weeks came to 20s., 10s. or 3s. (240d., 120d. or 36d.) according to one’s wealth. For three years, the conversion was 26s. (312d.) for the first year, 20s. (240d.) for the second, and 18s. (216d.) for the third year, that is, 64s. or 768d. for three years.46 Such compensations for spiritual services are also attested outside the penitentials. A collection of letter formulas from Reichenau contains for instance a letter from a member of the imperial entourage announcing a money transfer to arrange for his liturgical commemoration. Because of its good reputation, he had visited the abbey and commended himself to the prayers of the abbot and the community; now he was sending 30 silver shillings, so that his memoria would be commemorated in eager prayer.47 Around 790, Alcuin wrote to an Anglo-Saxon friend: “To the brothers I have sent 50 pieces of silver [sicli] as alms from King Charles – I ask you to pray for him – and 50 from my alms; to the brothers in the east … 30 silver pieces from the king’s alms, 30 from mine; 20 from the alms of the father of the family of Areide, and 20 from me; for each hermit, three pieces of purest silver. They should all pray for me and for my lord, King Charles.”48 Ultimately, land could also be given to the Church in return for spiritual services. Such gifts were recommended to well-off penitents in two closely connected penitential books that appeared in the Carolingian heartland in the second quarter of the eighth century, the Excarpsus Cummeani and the Rheims Penitential (Poenitentiale Remense). The exceptionally widely diffused Excarpsus Cummeani (28 manuscripts)49 “clearly appeared already in the archetype of a version of the Vetus Gallica from around 740”.50 As Mordek has shown, the Vetus Gallica is the oldest systematic collection of church canons of Gaul. Originating in Lyon c. 600, it traveled to St Columban’s monastery of Luxeuil and then to the abbey of Corbie, where the “Corbie Redaction” was compiled under Abbot 43 Cyrille Vogel, “Composition légale et commutations dans le système de la pénitence tarifée”, Revue de droit canonique, 8 (1958): 289–318, here pp. 302–4. 44 Ibid., pp. 289–318, pp. 308f. 45 Vogel, “Composition légale”, p. 9. 46 Ibid., pp. 25f. 47 Formulae Augienses 100.21, ed. Karl Zeumer, MGH Formulae Merovingici et Karolini Aevi (Hanover, 1886), p. 374: “vestri vestrorumque conmendarem oracionibus”. 48 Alcuin, letter 7, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH Epist. 4 (Berlin, 1895), p. 32. 49 Rob Meens, Het tripartite boeteboek. Overlevering en betekenis van vroegmiddeleeuwse biechtvoorschriften, Middeleeuwse studies en bronnen, 41 (Hilversum, 1994), pp. 509f. 50 Hubert Mordek, Kirchenrecht und Reform im Frankenreich. Die Collectio Vetus Gallica, Beiträge zur Geschichte und Quellenkunde des Mittelalters, 1 (Berlin, 1975), p. 198.

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Grimo in the 740s.51 The Excarpsus Cummeani probably developed in connection with the new version of the Collectio Vetus Gallica compiled at Corbie c. 740.52 The content of the Rheims Penitential overlaps substantially with the Excarpsus, which suggests in turn its link with the Vetus Gallica and Corbie. We can assume that we have the Excarpsus Cummeani and the Rheims Penitential “in the form in which they left Corbie”.53 Alongside the less broadly transmitted Rheims Penitential, the Excarpsus belongs “to the most frequently copied and oldest early medieval penitentials”.54 Our provision about land gifts occurs in both penitentials. The Excarpsus and Rheims state: “He should convey money from land as alms to the churches of God.”55 In 721, an early act combined spiritual services with a gift of land to Willibrord (d. 731), archbishop of Utrecht and abbot of Echternach: “I give and wish to give forever [this property] for the profit of prayers and Masses, eternally for me and mine.”56 The aristocracy supported the Hiberno-Frankish monastic movement launched by Columban the Younger, which advocated the new Irish penitential system. This only strengthened the link between gifts of land and the penitentials. Furthermore, the geographic spread of the penitentials and land gifts overlapped in the heartland of the Carolingian empire. The fact that the manuscript transmission links both penitentials to the Collectio Vetus Gallica is, moreover, significant for the charter evidence. The Collectio treats in some detail both Church property and offerings,57 specifying, for instance, that: “For all things which the faithful might offer [obtulerint] to the diocesan churches [parochiis] in the form of lands [in terris], vineyards, slaves or personal property, let the decrees of the ancient canons be observed, that they all are in the bishop’s power.”58 It required that the property transaction be documented in writing, with a formal convention (convenentia) with the subscription (subscriptio) of the parties, and especially, with the bishop’s approval (permissio) and subscription. Similarly, every cleric should “prepare a document” (scripturam) if he purchased something.59

Ibid., pp. 86–94. Ludger Körntgen, “Der Excarpsus Cummeani, ein Bussbuch aus Corbie?”, in Oliver Münsch and Thomas Zotz (eds), Scientia veritatis. Festschrift für Hubert Mordek (Ostfildern, 2004), pp. 59–75, here p. 66. 53 Ibid., pp. 63f. 54 Ibid., p. 59. 55 Excarpsus Cummeani 2311; Liber Sacramentorum Augustodunensis nos 2036–2371, ed. Odilo Heiming, CC 159B (1984), pp. 286–314, here p. 309: “argentus de terra ecclesiis Dei conferat in elymosia”; Poenitentiale Remense, preface, in Appendix, p. 13: “argentum de terra ecclesiis Dei conferat in elymosinam”. 56 Echternach act no. 31, ed. Camillus Wampach, Geschichte der Grundherrschaft Echternach im Frühmittelalter, 1.2, Quellenband (Luxemburg, 1930), pp. 72–5, from p. 75: “dono donatum esse perhennis temporibus volo, pro orationem lucro vel missarum sollempniis celebrandis”. 57 Mordek, Kirchenrecht und Reform, pp. 27f. 58 Collectio Vetus Gallica 32.4, in Mordek, Kirchenrecht und Reform, p. 463. 59 Collectio Vetus Gallica 35.1; 35.3; 35.8, pp. 468, 469, 473. 51 52

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So the most popular penitential, the Excarpsus Cummeani, as well as the Rheims Penitential, recommended gifts of land. Moreover, the closely linked canonical collection Vetus Gallica insisted on documenting with a charter all transactions involving Church property. This suggests that the pro anima donations recorded by charters arose from the traditional recourse to writing in Church administration, reinforced by the new system of penance with its gifts of land. Surprisingly, the survival, or rather revival, of charter documentation occurred precisely in northern Gaul, in those areas which were the most barbarized and had lost their culture of writing. By preparing charters for the donations they received, early medieval ecclesiastics ensured the transmission of the custom of written documentation for the rest of the Middle Ages. In effect, the survival of “private” charters was due primarily to land donations to churches. When, c. 900, Regino of Prüm emphasized the careful preservation of charter documentation, he was following a well-trodden path in specifying a penalty “if any ecclesiastic should dare to destroy charters or royal diplomas, or to hand them over to opponents”.60 Penitential Masses Masses for the remission of sins are of particular significance for our theme of sacrificial offerings. Since, in celebrating the Mass, the priest liturgically commemorated the body and blood of Christ which were offered on the cross to atone for the sins of mankind, the sacrifice of the Mass was considered the quintessential expiatory offering for the remission of sins. Votive Masses came to target specific sins which were explicitly mentioned in their celebration. For instance, the Bobbio Missal which was written shortly after 700,61 has a Mass formula titled “Votive Mass” (MISSA UOTIUA) which stated: “We offer this oblation specially for Thy servant N. for his sins.”62 For each sinner for whom it was offered, each individual offering of the Mass expiated a specific quantity of sins, and reduced commensurately the penance that had to be performed. The penitentials calculated the exact number of Masses that had to be celebrated to reduce penances and penitential fast days: one Mass replaced 7 or even 12 fast days; 10 Masses, four months, 20 Masses, seven or nine months; 30 Masses, an 60 Regino of Prüm, De synodalibus causis 1.365, p. 169: “Si quis cartas vel praecepta regia supprimere aut adversariis tradere ausus fuerit. Si quis vero de clericis documenta, quibus ecclesiae possessio firmatur, aut supprimere aut negare aut adversariis fortasse tradere damnabili et punienda obstinatione praesumserit, quidquid per absentiam documentorum damni ecclesiae illatum est, de propriis facultatibus reddat et communione privetur. Hi autem, qui in damno ecclesiae instrumenta sanctae ecclesiae impie sollicitati a traditoribus susceperunt, pari sententia feriantur.” 61 Rob Meens, “Reforming the Clergy: A Context for the Use of the Bobbio Penitential”, in Yitzhak Hen and Rob Meens (eds), The Bobbio Missal: Liturgy and Religious Culture in Merovingian Gaul (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 154–67. 62 Bobbio Missal, 422, ed. Elias A. Lowe, The Bobbio Missal: A Gallican Mass-book, Henry Bradshaw Society, 58 (London, 1920), p. 125.

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entire year.63 Immediately overvalued for their efficacity, such penitential Masses became widespread. Just like intercessory prayer, these Masses had their price, as the penitentials expressly state and even enumerate. The sacramentaries (collections of prayer formulas for the performance of the Mass) go so far as to feature tables of conversion rates. Thus, the Sacramentary of Rheinau, written between 795 and 800, lists: “For one shilling, 100 Psalms or three Masses; for one ounce, 150 Psalms or three Masses; for six ounces, five psalters and three Masses; for one pound, twelve psalters and twelve Masses.” Converting these rates yields: 1s. equals 12d. or 150 Psalms or three Masses; six ounces equals 120d. or 900 Psalms or three Masses (more correctly, 18 Masses); one pound equals 240d., that is, 1800 Psalms or 12 Masses (correctly, 36).64 Based on the exchange rate that one Mass equaled 50 Psalms equaled 6d., penitents paid a pretty price. By way of comparison, a manuscript of 30 folios cost 60d., a wool-bearing sheep, 15d., and a pig, 4d.65 The mid-eighth-century Merseburg Penitential allowed a priest to say as many Masses as people requested, up to seven a (work) day; nevertheless on feast days, if demand required, he could say more than twenty.66 Great monasteries were capable of celebrating thousands of Masses. One example from many: in the case of a nobleman’s decease, the abbot of the Sainte Trinité monastery of Vendôme bound his abbey to celebrate 1000 Masses and enter the deceased into its martyrology, its calendar of liturgical anniversaries. To that end, a donation had been made in advance.67 Demand for the unerringly efficacious Mass was soon immense. A Mass celebrated for the penitent’s intention guaranteed atonement, even when he or she did not attend the service. Of course, this also provoked criticism, not so much of the exchange system itself, but of how monasteries handled it. The Council of Paris (829) criticized clerics and lay people for avoiding the penances assigned by bishops or their priests and seeking them from monasteries, even though monk priests were forbidden to hear confessions.68 Regino of Prüm’s Vogel, Les “libri paenitentiales”, pp. 54f. Sacramentarium Rhenaugiense no. 1370b, in Sacramentarium Rhenaugiense. Handschrift Rh 30 der Zentralbibliothek Zürich, ed. Anton Hänggi and Alfons Schönherr, Spicilegium Friburgense, 15 (Fribourg, 1970), p. 281: “Pro I solido C psalmus (!) aut III missas; Pro I untia CL psalmus (!) aut III missas; Pro VI untias V psalterios et missas III; Pro I libra XII psalterios et XII missas”. Compare Arnold Angenendt, “Missa specialis. Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Entstehung der Privatmessen”, FS, 17 (1983): 153-221, here pp. 167–75. 65 David Ganz, “Temptabat et scribere. Vom Schreiben in der Karolingerzeit”, in Rudolf Schieffer (ed.), Schriftkultur und Reichsverwaltung unter den Karolingern (Opladen, 1996), pp. 13–33, here p. 22. 66 Poenitentiale Merseburgense 48, in Paenitentialia minora Franciae et Italiae, p. 138. 67 Cartulaire de l’abbaye cardinale de la Trinité de Vendôme, no. 123 (AD 1059), ed. Charles Métais, vol. 1 (Paris, 1893), p. 223: “abbas mille missas cantari pro eo; scripsimus in Martyrologio nostro”. 68 Concilium Parisiense a. 829, ed. Albert Werminghoff, MGH Concilia 2.2 (Hanover, 1908), p. 640: “Nec etiam illud videtur nobis congruum, ut clerici et laici, episcoporum et presbyterorum canonicorum iudicia declinantes, monasteria monachorum expetant, ut ibi monachis sacerdotibus 63

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critique was even more precise: no one should celebrate the Mass alone, that is, without faithful attending to respond to the prayers. This dangerous abuse should be eliminated, especially in monasteries. 69 Mass Stipends Just as a contribution was needed for the living expenses of priests and monks who performed acts of penance on behalf of others, so too for celebrating the Mass. Thus developed the Mass stipend. The historical background can now be sketched fairly clearly. The point of departure was the evaluation of spiritual services as it was carried out by bishops from late antiquity onward. Thus a list survives from late seventh-century Auxerre which presumes fees for the services performed in the cathedral, and threatens reduced payments for tardiness.70 Another list, from eighth-century Metz, shows the exact amounts the bishop paid for individual services. For instance, for reading the Passion on Palm Sunday, a deacon received one mancosus (an Arab gold coin) or two silver shillings from the bishop’s treasury, while the subdeacon for his reading and the cantor for his singing each received a shilling.71 This kind of compensation gave rise to a new practice which had weighty consequences: obtaining private spiritual services, particularly private Masses, in exchange for money. The innovation seemed natural. On days without liturgy, that is, a dies privatus, as opposed to a dies ferialis, the clergy had no official duties and accordingly received no stipend from the bishop. This created an opening for “private” stipends: the faithful paid a certain sum and, on their days without liturgical obligations, the clergy performed in exchange the appropriate religious services, especially the Mass.72 The penitentials took advantage of stipend payments. As we have already seen, they recommended that monks and priests be approached for help in lessening penances by saying Psalms or the Mass. The Mass needed recompense no less than the vicarious penance-reducing Psalms. It took the form of “gifts upon the altar” which the penitentials mention alongside the performance of prayers and good works. It has been argued that these altar gifts were “not a payment outside of the framework of the celebration of the Mass in connection with the liturgy, but a donation laid by the penitent himself on the altar”, which confessionem peccatorum suorum faciant, praesertim cum eisdem sacerdotibus monachis id facere fas non sit, exceptis his dumtaxat, qui sub monastico ordine secum in monasteriis degunt.” 69 Regino of Prüm, De synodalibus causis 1.193, p. 99: ‘‘Quapropter haec periculosa superstitio maxime a monasteriis monachorum exterminanda est”. 70 Synodus Autissiodorensis, a. 692-696, in Concilia Galliae a. 511–a. 695, ed. Charles de Clercq, CC 148A (1963), pp. 324–6. 71 Michel Andrieu, “Règlement d’Angilramne de Metz (768–791) fixant les honoraires de quelques fonctions liturgiques”, Revue des sciences religieuses, 10 (1930): 349–69, here p. 352. 72 Rolf Busch is preparing a new study on the origin of the private Mass: Missa privata. Beobachtungen zum frühmittelalterlichen Verständnis einer unsachgemässen Bezeichnung.

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need not have taken the form of cash.73 Yet one has to ask whether and how this altar gift contributed to the celebration of the Mass. Were these gifts upon the altar offerings during the Mass or were they stipend payments in advance for the celebration of the Mass? The answer requires another look at the penitentials. From them, Vogel worked out the earliest tables of Mass stipends: 30d. for one Mass, 1s. for two Masses, three ounces for seven Masses, £1 for 12 Masses, 100 gold solidi for 120 Masses.74 The hired priest vicariously produced for the penitent the benefit of the Mass by reducing his penance. The cash offerings for celebrating such Masses were obviously “outside the Mass”. They were made in advance, before the Mass, and at first had nothing to with the liturgical offering of the gifts within the celebration of the Mass. Indeed, these gifts had to be made outside the Mass, since penitents for grave sins were excluded from the Offertory of the Mass.75 Consequently, only gifts conveyed outside the Mass could be accepted as a stipend by the celebrant, for which he chanted the Mass. The priest probably also had to make the usual offertory gifts on behalf of the sinner; to that extent, there remained a secondary connection between the Mass stipend paid in advance and the gifts of the Mass itself. Characteristically, an early formulation of this exchange of penitential help for celebration of the Mass occurs in a prayer in the Bobbio Missal.76 This text would find its way into many sacramentaries and agreements establishing prayer brotherhoods.77 A version from a ninth-century sacramentary makes the procedure and intention particularly clear: Be mindful, Lord, of the entire Christian people and of [those] who have commended themselves to my prayers and who have confessed their trespasses to me, and to whom I have granted a reduction of their [penance] of food and drink, not out of my own presumption, but according to Your mercy, and whose alms I have accepted in exchange, and who have offered their property to the holy Church as a sacrificial gift for their souls as for [the souls] of the living and the dead, and who are recorded in this book, and for all those whose names You, God, know.78

As the reader will recognize, the basis here is the new penitential system introduced by the Irish, with its private confession, vicarious penances, and Mass celebrants to whom the petitioners offered alms and property. That the penitential reconciliation was supposed to work even for the dead whose names Ludger Körntgen, Studien zu den Quellen der frühmittelalterlichen Bussbücher, Quellen und Forschungen zum Recht im Mittelalter, 7 (Sigmaringen, 1993), p. 156. 74 Vogel, “Composition légale”, p. 31. 75 Angenendt, “Missa specialis”, pp. 158–63. 76 Bobbio Missal no. 438, p. 130. 77 Arnold Angenendt, “Pro vivis et defunctis. Histoire et influence d’une oraison de messe”, in Sylvain Gouguenheim et al. (eds), Retour aux sources. Textes, études et documents d’histoire médiévale offerts à Michel Parisse (Paris, 2004), pp. 563–71. 78 Sacramentarium Gregorianum no. 3100, ed. Jean Deshusses, Le Sacramentaire grégorien. Ses principales formes d’après les plus anciens manuscrits, vol. 2, Spicilegium Friburgense, 24 (Fribourg, 1979), p. 241. 73

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were recorded in a Liber memorialis, a liturgical memorial book, guaranteed its success over the centuries. The consequence for the clergy was that, beyond the income from official offerings, they drew additional “private” revenue from celebrating special Masses. That revenue was manifestly not insignificant. In a charter from Saint Gall dated 772, one priest already counted among his wealth “whatever I have acquired for my Masses and prayers”.79 In his Rule for Canons, Chrodegang of Metz (d. 766) first spelled out how a religious community or its individual members were supposed to accept and perform Masses that were commissioned from them. If someone wanted to make a gift of alms to a particular priest for a Mass, a confession, an illness, or for a relative, that priest could accept and freely dispose of it. However, when the donor wished to make such a gift to all the priests of a community of canons on the same or similar conditions, the gift went as a whole to them all. The community would then carry out the appropriate psalmody or Masses according to the bishop’s instructions. Nevertheless Chrodegang imposed a limit on individual priests’s accepting alms for services, since one person would be overwhelmed if he tried to bear alone the heavy burden of penitent sinners, whereas many priests could obtain God’s mercy for sins more easily than even the most zealous individual. Each should fear for his own conscience, which was all the more reason not to assume for others’ sins a burden beyond one’s own capacity.80 This represents a fundamental step: giving money for a Mass. Payment was made for a spiritual service, in which the celebrant assumed the responsibility for the eucharistic offerings, the bread and the wine for the consecration. In the subsequent period, precisely calculated price lists emerged. A remarkable document supplies the most precise sums: the “will” of Abbess Theophanu (d. 1058) of the imperial convent of Essen. It foresees payments of 69s. and 4434d., for a total of 5262d., part of which had already been paid, packed in individual purses which had been sorted into the individual compartments of a cabinet. They remunerated a surfeit of spiritual services to fulfill a memoria, a memorial obligation. A recent tabulation yields the overview shown in Table 7.1.

79 Hermann Wartmann (ed.), Urkundenbuch der Abtei St. Gallen (700-840) (Zürich, 1863), no. 68, p. 67: “quicquid … pro missas et oracionis meas adquisi”. 80 Regula Chrodegangi no. 32, ed. Wilhelm Schmitz, Sancti Chrodegangi Regula canonicorum (Hanover, 1889), p. 23.

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Table 7.1  The Abbess Theophanu’s memorial endowment. 1. In the testamentary memorial endowment: On the day of decease: To twelve priests: For the poor: Second day: For the poor: Third day: For the poor: Fourth–seventh days: For the poor: (2s. per day) Eighth day: For the poor: Subsequently, every octave until the thirtieth: For the poor: 3 × 30d. Daily: For the poor: 3d. until the thirtieth day (that is, 29 times) Thirtieth day: For the poor: Outsiders/pilgrims Thirty priests Every thirtieth day thereafter: Eleven Masses @ 12d. Eleven alms distributions @ 18d. Within the cycle of 30 days: Daily Masses: 11 × 29 × 3d. Daily alms: 11 × 29 × 3d. Anniversary: Masses: 100 poor people Other days: Three women

30s. 5s. 2s. 5s. 8s. 30d. 90d. 87d. 5s. 5s. 30d. 132d. 198d. 957d. 957d. 30d. 500d. 3s.

Subtotals

3011d. and 63s.

Total

= 3767d.

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2. An addendum includes: Every thirty days for one year: the convent of Essen, 12 × 46d. = 552d.; the convent of Rellinghausen, 12 × 29d. = 348d.; the convent of Gerresheim 12 × 34d. = 408d.; additionally at Gerresheim on the anniversary, 34d., for lighting 6s. and 1d.; three octaves, each 5d. = 15d.; every thirtieth day, 5d. = 60d.; to various establishments, for lighting= 5d. Subtotal 1423d. and 6s. Grand total endowment

4434d. and 69s. (= 5262d.)

Source: Torsten Fremer, Äbtissin Theophanu und das Stift Essen (Bottrop, 2002), pp. 120ff.

This memorial endowment is “the longest written testimony to the history of the Ottonian abbess” and, “by its scope and its spiritual dimension, unique for its time”. Yet it was no “perpetual endowment”, for its many stipulations were to have been fulfilled within one year.81 In canonical terms, it was a single stipend for a multiplicity of Masses and other penitential acts, rather than a foundation for annually recurring Masses. Long-term Stipends for Monasteries When a particular penance required vicariously celebrated Masses, individual money payments sufficed. But what happened when the Mass was to be celebrated annually? That required a capital investment with annual returns. This, however, was foreign to early medieval civilization, which prohibited interest payments as usurious. Other, non-monetary forms of endowments developed that produced annual revenues which would be available each year to pay for Masses and other ecclesiastical intercessions. Typically, such endowments consisted of land, including farms and the families which exploited them. In this way monasteries obtained yearly revenues which assured the financing of annually recurring liturgical services. But there were other ways of creating an endowment with annual incomes – for instance, as we shall see, the little-noticed manumission of male or female slaves (servi or ancillae). From the perspective of the monastic movement’s original intentions, it seems quite unthinkable that early medieval monasteries would own vast landed property. Although real estate had long been conveyed to the Church, it was usually given to a bishop to hold in trust for the congregation, and especially for the poor.82 The Hiberno-Frankish monastic movement won for Torsten Fremer, Äbtissin Theophanu und das Stift Essen (Bottrop, 2002), pp. 111 and 130. Peter Landau, “Kirchengut”, in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, Gerhard Krause and Gerhard Müller (eds), vol. 18 (Berlin, 1989), pp. 560–75, here pp. 561–4. 81 82

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itself new conditions. The patronage of the Parisian court of King Chlothar II (d. 629) and of his aristocratic followers83 fostered the novel legal devices of immunity and exemption. By granting immunity, the king renounced his legal and fiscal rights, while exemption meant the local bishop renounced his rights to consecrate monastic personnel as well as to offerings due him.84 Eugen Ewig has distinguished “total” from “partial” exemptions. With the former, the bishop gave up practically all of his rights over the monks and abbey, and could act only upon invitation. Under partial exemption, the local bishop kept disciplinary oversight and, especially, consecration rights.85 A totally exempt abbey could ordain monks as priests as it saw fit. Moreover, despite its exceptional significance, scholars have scarcely noted until now that such an abbey could accept and keep for itself all offerings which came its way. The oldest surviving privilege of total exemption was granted to the abbey of Rebais in 637; beyond big gifts of property, it guaranteed, in addition, sacrificial offerings, namely everything that “has been or will be conveyed, including whatever is offered upon the altar”.86 These guaranteed offerings were regular components of total exemptions, as the formula for such legal documents preserved in the Marculf formulary collection confirms: “that which … will be conveyed or offered upon the altar” (hoc quod … transmissum aut in altario offertum fuerit); in addition, it specified gifts connected with the liturgy, “whether in sacred books or any other valuable which pertains to the adornment of the divine liturgy”.87 These altar gifts were an innovation for monasteries, in so far as earlier monasteries had generally been lay communities which did not regularly celebrate daily Mass in the monastery, and so could receive no sacrificial offerings. Only from the late Merovingian period did monks increasingly take holy orders, particularly as priests.88 The increasing priestly ordinations in the monasteries converged with the Irish penitentials’ recommendation of (real) property exchanges for performing penances, including celebrating Masses. This lent the right to accept sacrificial offerings a new significance and fostered the Middle Friedrich Prinz, Frühes Mönchtum im Frankenreich (Munich, 1988), pp. 121–51. Eugen Ewig, “Beobachtungen zu den Klosterprivilegien des 7. und frühen 8. Jahrhunderts”, in his Spätantikes und Fränkisches Gallien, Beihefte der Francia, 3 (2 vols, Munich, 1979), vol. 2, pp. 411–26; Pius Engelbert, “Bischöfe und Klöster im Frühmittelalter”, Römische Quartalschrift für christliche Altertumskunde, 97 (2002): 161–93; Barbara H. Rosenwein, Negotiating Space. Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1999), pp. 25–114. 85 Ewig, “Beobachtungen zu den Klosterprivilegien”. 86 Eugen Ewig, “Das Formular von Rebais und die Bischofsprivilegien der Merowingerzeit”, in his Spätantikes und Fränkisches Gallien, vol. 2, pp. 456–84, here p. 463. 87 Formulae Marculfi 1.1, MGH Formulae Merowingici et Karolini aevi, p. 40: “quod ad Deum timentibus hominebus transmissum aut in altario offertum fuerit, aut sacris voluminebus vel quibuscumque speciebus, quod ad ornatum divini cultus pertinet, ad presens conlata vel deinceps conlatura fuerint”. 88 Otto Nussbaum, Kloster, Priestermönch und Privatmesse. Ihr Verhältnis im Westen von den Anfängen bis zum hohen Mittelalter, Theophaneia, 14 (Bonn, 1961), pp. 65–132; Angelus A. Häussling, Mönchskonvent und Eucharistiefeier, Liturgiewissenschaftliche Quellen und Forschungen, 58 (Münster, 1973), pp. 150–59; specific examples can be found in Otto G. Oexle, Forschungen zu monastischen und geistlichen Gemeinschaften im westfränkischen Bereich (Munich, 1978), pp. 101–3, pp. 110f. 83 84

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Ages’ most effective system of gift and countergift, a system which made the monasteries into the greatest landholders of their time.89 For example, the monastery of Saint Gall has preserved roughly 800 parchment charters down to the tenth century; some 600 give land pro remedio animae;90 the abbey of Lorsch, near the Rhine, preserved the summaries of 3600 acts, mostly land conveyances before 900 AD.91 Fulda trumps them all with its enormous charter registers.92 The records accurately reflect the extraordinary extent of these houses’ landed properties. They made these monasteries into political powerhouses, allowing their abbots to become political players of the first rank. Another way of creating annual endowments was manumission in return for an annual census, a payment in recognition of the freedperson’s legal status. Right from the beginning, to reduce penance the penitentials recommended manumission as an act of social welfare. It also proved possible to use this method to create a long-term endowment entailing annual income. An owner freed unfree dependents and transferred them to the patron saint of a monastery. Just as for land conveyances, a charter was drawn up or at least an entry was recorded in the house’s memorial book. In recognition of their new patron, each year the freed persons had to deposit a payment on the altar of their new master, the saint, and to do so for the salvation of the soul of the master who had manumitted them. For the manumitted, this was a highly significant step toward freedom, while for the abbey, it meant an annual income. For this practice, the Liber Memorialis of the convent of Remiremont, on the western slope of the Vosges mountains, offers exceptional testimony. The memorial book covers over a century, from 816 to 925. Alongside liturgical texts and columns filled with the names of commemorated individuals figure numerous records of traditiones, of conveyances of male and female unfree persons (servi and ancillae), as tributaries to Remiremont’s patron saint, Peter. Males had to make payments of 2d. or two pounds of wax, and females half that, that is, 1d. or one pound of wax. One example: “With his mother’s approval, the layman Grimbald conveyed to St. Peter for the remedy of their souls the female servant named Giroldis, with her son Ratzo, with the obligation to make a Emile Lesne, Histoire de la propriété ecclésiastique en France (6 vols, Lille, 1910–43), vol. 6, pp. 310–20; Dieter Hägermann, “Der Abt als Grundherr. Kloster und Wirtschaft im frühen Mittelalter”, in Friedrich Prinz (ed.), Herrschaft und Kirche. Beiträge zur Entstehung und Wirkungsweise episkopaler und monastischer Organisationsformen (Stuttgart, 1988), pp. 345–85. 90 Michael Borgolte, “Gedenkstiftungen in St. Galler Urkunden”, in Karl Schmid and Joachim Wollasch (eds), Memoria. Der geschichtliche Zeugniswert des liturgischen Gedenkens im Mittelalter (Munich, 1984), pp. 578–602. 91 Franz Staab, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Reichsabtei Lorsch (8. bis 12. Jahrhundert)”, in Gandolf Keil and Paul Schnitzer (eds), Das Lorscher Arzneibuch und die frühmittelalterliche Medizin (Lorsch, 1991), pp. 253–84. 92 Franz Staab, “Die Grundherrschaft Fulda und ihre Stifter bis zur Mitte des 9. Jahrhunderts”, in Winfried Böhne (ed.), Hrabanus Maurus und seine Schule (Fulda, 1980), pp. 48–63; Walter Heinemeyer, “Zum frühmittelalterlichen Urkundenwesen des Klosters Fulda”, in Reinhard Härtel (ed.), Geschichte und ihre Quellen. Festschrift für Friedrich Hausmann zum 70. Geburtstag (Graz, 1987), pp. 403–16. 89

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payment in recognition of their judicial status each year on the feast of St. Peter, i.e. one penny for the woman and two pennies for the male.”93 Future research should develop methods of estimating the annual revenues such transactions entailed. The approximately one thousand such conveyances of persons in the Remiremont memorial book indicate not insignificant revenues, especially since the tributary status was inherited. The Spiritual Countergift For all these tangible gifts, the monastic countergift was penitential observance. The ancient triad of prayer, fasting, and alms now took the form of psalmody, Masses, and charitable distributions to the poor. The growing troop of monks who were also priests allowed the monasteries to meet the challenge of these penances and multiply the required intercessions and Masses. Early testimony to such an exchange comes in 751 from a “prayer clause” 94 in a charter established by Pippin III, then still mayor of the palace, for the abbey of St Denis. It mentions the monks’s explicit engagement (“as they have promised us”, sicut nobis promiserunt) to perform in return for the donation a certain number of prayers, Masses, and charitable distributions: 95 “so that it will please them [the monks] the more, to pray unceasingly, day and night, and to beseech God’s mercy for us, for our sons, and for the state of the Frankish kingdom and, as they have promised us, to recite our name every day in the Mass as well as in their special intercessory prayers at the tomb of Saint Dionysius”.96 The monasteries received donations (of land), and in return recompensed the donors with spiritual countergifts, with prayers and Masses. The performance was guaranteed, and included the sacrificial offerings required for every Mass: the monks brought the eucharistic gifts of bread and wine to the altar on behalf of the persons for whose intention the Mass was celebrated. The donors did not even have to be present to receive certain spiritual benefit from the Mass. It is worth noting, moreover, that acts of penance which, in addition to altar gifts, had once included personal acts of charity toward the poor and captives, gravitated increasingly toward religious communities. The communities now discharged the material obligations, the welfare distributions, as well as the

Liber Memorialis von Remiremont 13v, III, ed. Eduard Hlawitschka, Karl Schmid, and Gerd Tellenbach, MGH Libri memoriales 1 (Munich, 1981), p. 26. 94 Eugen Ewig, “Die Gebetsklausel für König und Reich in den merowingischen Königsurkunden”, in Norbert Kamp and Joachim Wollasch (eds), Tradition als historische Kraft (Berlin, 1982), pp. 87–99. 95 Arnold Angenendt, “Cartam offerre super altare: Zur Liturgisierung von Rechtsvorgängen”, FS, 36 (2002): 133–58. 96 Albert Bruckner and Robert Marichal (eds.), Chartae latinae antiquiores, vol. 15 (Zürich, 1986), p. 4, no. 595. 93

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spiritual intercessions of psalmody and Masses. Every monastery was regularly feeding poor people, as Joachim Wollasch’s research has underscored.97 From the tenth century on, legal procedure regulated whether and how a monastery guaranteed a share in its spiritual benefactions. Donors conveyed properties to monasteries, and the latter reciprocated by assuring for the former spiritual penitential exercises on behalf of both the living and the dead. The formal transaction occurred in the chapter house: the suppliant addressed the abbot with a request for association (societas) and benefit (beneficium), and the granting of it occurred in the sight of the community’s chapter-book which contained the monastic Rule.98 From the perspective of the granting house, societas represented, according to Wollasch, “community with it [nostra societas], in which it allowed others to participate, for whose salvation [ad salutem anime] it prayed vicariously, sang Psalms, celebrated Masses, and made offerings”.99 This exchange system developed most fully at Cluny: spiritual counter-offerings occupied two leading officials of the monastery, as well as the monastic priests with their individual Masses,100 not to mention offices of up to 215 Psalms.101 In order to participate in these spiritual rewards, the Customary of Bernard (c. 1085), prescribed the following procedure: There are some communities of monks as well as clerics who have our association and brotherhood [societatem et fraternitatem] such that if a report of a death among them comes to us, or among us goes to them, an office and a Mass are celebrated, followed by the octave with offices and Masses. There are also many faithful, both poor and rich, who, when they have been introduced into our chapter-house, receive our brotherhood, after having previously pleaded for it from the lord abbot or prior, either in person or through the hosteler, which brotherhood is given to them with the book, and approved, such that they have a part and communion [partem et communionem] in all the benefits which occur not only here among us, but also in all our establishments, in the form of prayers, alms, and other good deeds. As long as they are alive, for them as for all our benefactors [a specified number of additional prayers in the office and Masses] should be said. After their decease … [further prayers] should be said. Moreover, we will specially commemorate them thrice a year, namely at the beginning of Lent, after the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, and after All Saints, namely by means of the office, the general Mass, and the octave with offices and Masses. Furthermore, for thirty days a gratification should be given as alms in the same fashion that it is given for one of the brothers who has died outside of the abbey. The only respect in which their commemoration should be 97 Joachim Wollasch, “Toten- und Armensorge”, in Karl Schmid (ed.), Gedächtnis, das Gemeinschaft stiftet (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1985), pp. 9–38. 98 Decreta Lanfranci 108; in David Knowles (ed.), Corpus consuetudinum monasticarum, 3 (Siegburg, 1967), p. 93: “per librum regulae sumat monasterii societatem”. 99 Joachim Wollasch, “Das Projekt ‘Societas et Fraternitas’”, in Dieter Geuenich and Otto G. Oexle (eds), Memoria in der Gesellschaft des Mittelalters (Göttingen, 1994), pp. 11–31, here pp. 17f. 100 Häussling, Mönchskonvent und Eucharistiefeier, pp. 35–40. 101 Philibert Schmitz, “La liturgie de Cluny”, in Spiritualità cluniacense, Convegni del Centro di studi sulla spiritualità medievale, 2 (Todi, 1960), pp. 85–99.

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less than for a brother who has died outside the abbey is that the individual priests do not sing Masses for them.102

Cluny’s donation charters reflect this exchange. The religious communities had to give their countergifts for the donations: “We, the monks of Cluny, in view of the receipt of the aforesaid donation … grant to these people [the donors] … part and communion in all good works that are realized in Cluny and its dependencies in the form of Masses, Psalms, prayers and all liturgical services; we grant also forever one poor person, whom we will clothe, shoe, and feed.”103 The conclusion is clear: monasteries accomplished both spiritual intercession, that is psalmody and Masses, as well as material expiation, that is, charitable acts.104 Even manumissions occurred under the abbey’s aegis, in so far as unfree persons were conveyed to the protection of the monastic patron saint, and so became free.105 A contract of confraternitas marked these exchanges. Critical Reaction: Simoniacal Sale of Spiritual Benefits Vast monastic properties obviously conflicted with the demands of the movement for apostolic poverty that arose in the eleventh century. Moreover, that landed wealth contradicted the manner laid down by God himself for the distribution of spiritual benefits, since the system of endowments served to buy them, and that was simony. And so the great age of the Benedictines drew to a close.106 The new orders that were then developing all tried to free themselves from the exchange system that had peaked in Cluny. The Cistercians, who considered themselves reformed Benedictines, soon criticized the exchange of prayers for donations, and disapproved of endowments for Masses, confessions and burials: “To confession, Holy Communion, and burial, we admit no outsiders except for guests and our day workers, should they die in the monastery. We also accept no offerings for our conventual Masses, except on the feast of the Purification of the Virgin.”107 Consequently, the Cistercians reduced the daily prayer performance from Cluny’s 200 Psalms to the original Benedictine 102 Bernardus, Ordo Cluniacensis 1.26, in Vetus disciplina monastica, ed. Marquard Herrgott (1726, reprinted Siegburg, 1999), p. 200. 103 For the texts I have used the data bank of the charters of Cluny and the abbreviations prepared by the international research group of the Universities of Dijon and Münster (Centre Georges Chevrier and the Institut für Frühmittelalterforschung). For the text, see Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Cluny, ed. Auguste Bernard and Alexandre Bruel (6 vols, Paris, 1876–1903, reprinted Frankfurt, 1974); the quote is from charter BB no. 2112, pp. 299–300. 104 Wollasch, “Toten- und Armensorge”, pp. 9–38. 105 Arnold Angenendt, Heilige und Reliquien (Munich, 1997), pp. 193–7. 106 John Van Engen, “The ‘Crisis of Cenobitism’ Reconsidered: Benedictine Monasticism in the Years 1050–1150”, Speculum, 61 (1986): 269–304, here pp. 276f. 107 Instituta generalis capituli apud Cistercium 27, ed. Hildegard Brem and Alberich Martin Altermatt, Einmütig in der Liebe. Die frühesten Quellentexte von Cîteaux, Quellen and Studien zur Zisterzienserliteratur, 1 (Langwaden, 1998), p. 136.

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standard of 37.108 This ran counter to Cluny’s commemorative system, which the Cistercians actually qualified as simoniacal.109 But they went further than rejecting the “holy exchange” of prayer for land by excluding all income from outside work or rights of lordship over others. As monks, they wished to labor with their own hands; their abbots should not behave like secular lords.110 That new and admirable beginning, however, began to waver soon after the death of its most illustrious exponent, Bernard of Clairvaux. The other new orders also deserve a look. The Praemonstratensians targeted private proprietary churches for reform. But they did not want to own them in order to get their revenues: rather, they wanted to exercise pastoral care in them. This new departure too did not survive long, and Cluny’s approach won out among them.111 The Carthusians rejected endowments decisively and definitively. They strictly refused landed property, wishing “to own nothing beyond the cloister location, no fields, no vineyards, no gardens, no churches, cemeteries, sacrificial offerings, or tithes”.112 The Customs of 1127 are categorical: no names were to be entered into their martyrology, no anniversary commemorations, no special meals for monks following the celebration of Masses for the deceased.113 Stephen of Muret (d. 1124), the founder of the order of Grandmont, levied the sharpest criticism. His basic demand sounds Franciscan avant la lettre, in that there was “no other Rule than the Gospel”.114 The monastic rule formulated after his death, around the middle of the Alberich Martin Altermatt, “Die erste Liturgiereform von Cîteaux (ca. 1099–1133)”, Rottenburger Jahrbuch für Kirchengeschichte, 4 (1985): 119–48. 109 Joachim Wollasch, “Neue Quellen zur Geschichte der Cistercienser”, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 84 (1973): 188–232. 110 Klaus Schreiner, “Zisterziensisches Mönchtum und soziale Umwelt: Wirtschaftlicher und sozialer Strukturwandel in hoch- und spätmittelalterlichen Zisterzienserkonventen”, in Kaspar Elm (ed.), Die Zisterzienser. Ordensleben zwischen Ideal und Wirklichkeit, Ergänzungsband (Cologne, 1982), pp. 79–135; Georges Despy, “Les richesses de la terre: Cîteaux et Prémontré devant l’économie de profit aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles”, in Jean Préaux (ed.), Problèmes d’histoire du christianisme, vol. 5 (Brussels, 1974–75), pp. 58–80, here pp. 58–72. 111 Despy, “Les richesses de la terre”, pp. 72–9. 112 Guigo, Consuetudines Cartusiae 41.1 in Coutumes de Chartreuse, ed. Maurice Laporte, SC 313 (rev. edn, Paris, 2001), p. 244: “statuimus, quatinus loci huius habitatores extra suae terminos heremi nichil omnino possideant. Id est non agros, non vineas, non ortos, non ecclesias, non cimitteria, non oblationes, non decimas, et quaecumque huiusmodi”. 113 Ibid., 41.4, p. 244: “Nomen vero cuiusquam in suo non scribent martyrologio, nec cuiusquam anniversarium ex more facient. Audivimus enim quod non probamus, plerosque totiens splendide convivari, missasque facere paratos, quotiens aliqui pro suis eis voluerint exhibere defunctis. Quae consuetudo, et abstinentiam tollit, et venales facit orationes, dum quotus pastuum numerus, totus est et missarum. Nec ullum ibi vel ieiunandi certum vel obsecrandi constat propositum, ubi non de devotione facientis, sed de pascentis potius pendet arbitrio.” 114 Liber de doctrina, in Scriptores ordinis Grandimontensis, ed. Jean Becquet, CC Cont. med. 8 (1968), p. 5: “Non est alia regula nisi euangelium Christi.” Gert Melville, “In solitudine ac paupertate. Stephans von Muret Evangelium vor Franz von Assisi”, in Gert Melville and Annette Kehnel (eds), In proposito paupertatis. Studien zum Armutsverständnis bei den mittelalterlichen Bettelorden, Vita regularis. Ordnungen und Deutungen religiosen Lebens im Mittelalter, 13 (Münster, 2001), pp. 7–30. 108

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twelfth century, reads like a reckoning with the Cluniacs, as indeed with the Cistercians. On principle, estate ownership was prohibited.115 Liturgical services on behalf of the dead were also forbidden: “You may not in any way accept the octave, the thirty-day, the annual, or any payment whatsoever offered to you for a commemorative Mass.”116 Furthermore, no penitential judgments could be granted to any person who did not belong to the monastery.117 Especially, no gifts of churches were to be accepted.118 The traditional system of prayer associations was rejected: “Let there … be no confraternities among us”,119 for “you may not dare to say Psalms or any other liturgical office for money”.120 Nevertheless, should people come to the monastery and wish to make an endowment of land revenues, it could be accepted. However, if a controversy were to arise, particularly with the founder’s heirs, the gift should be given up without struggle or legal contest.121 Also, no documents should be established with a view to avoiding court cases.122 The Life of the order’s founder buttresses the prohibition of confraternities with a theological reference to simony: “You must avoid selling the divine liturgy. For that is a hireling’s work [mercenarius; cf. John 8:12], to pray when something is given and to stop praying when nothing is given.”123 All of these provisions point at Cluny. But the Grandmontine criticism aimed equally at the Cistercians’ huge farms and fat cattle herds, for they rejected owning cattle no less than estates or churches. “You should not own any big meadows suitable for pasturing cattle, for should you have cattle, they might break into other people’s meadows, and there would be a great outcry from your neighbors, ‘Oh if only these hermits had never come!’”124 Finally, it warned against any form of greed in commercial transactions or exchanges, and so instructed: “We order that you sell more cheaply than you have bought, and what you buy, to pay more for it, so that you always avoid cheating.”125 Regula venerabilis viri Stephani Muretensis 4-26, in Scriptores ordinis Grandimontensis, pp. 71–82; Regula 4, p. 71: “De terris non habendis.” 116 Ibid., Regula 5, p. 73: “Itaque septenarium, tricenarium, annuale, uel quodlibet pretium pro missa nominatim uobis oblatum, nullatenus accipiatis.” 117 Ibid., p. 73: “Nec etiam iudicia paenitentiae uiris exterioribus iniungere praesumatis.” 118 Ibid., p. 73: “Si quis autem ecclesias uobis dare uoluerit, nullatenus accipiatis.” 119 Ibid., Regula 20, p. 80: “Comessationes, quas populus confraternitates uocant, nullo pacto faciant apud nos.” 120 Ibid., p. 80: “nec psalmos dicere, nec aliud diuinum officium propter pecuniam celebrare praesumatis”. 121 Ibid., Regula 23, p. 81: “quod si facere noluerit, ne repetatis, id est cum eo iudicio minime contendatis”. 122 Ibid., Regula 24, p. 82: “De chartis causa placitandi non habendis.” 123 Conclusio vitae Stephani Muretensis 9, in Scriptores ordinis Grandimontensis, p. 324: “sed absit a nobis diuinum uendere officium! Opus est enim mercenarii tunc orare cum aliquid datur, et a precibus cessare cum nihil datur.” 124 Regula 6, p. 74: “Cumque spatiosa pascua pascendis pecudibus idonea minime possideatis, si bestias haberetis, aliena pascua forsitan occuparent, essetque magnus clamor uicinorum, dicentium: Vtinam isti heremitae numquam aduenissent.” 125 Ibid., Regula 16, p. 79: “Verumtamen annonam, uel quodlibet aliud propter expensam uestram a uobis comparatum, si carius potestis uendere quam emistis.” 115

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In short: “we prohibit [the possession] of churches, estates, cattle, incomes and also begging”.126 The last and most radical step was taken by Francis of Assisi (d. 1226). More than to live poorly, he wanted to inform poverty with new meaning, so that he could become betrothed to poverty through his lifestyle.127 All previous religious orders allowed communal property, but not Francis: “The brothers should acquire nothing, neither house, nor place, nor any other thing.”128 He especially belittled money: “He cursed money more than any other thing”; “the brothers should flee it like the devil incarnate”; it should be “equated with dung”, it was “stinking filth”.129 How to live up to this engendered the conflict over poverty in the Francis movement. A solution was finally found when the apostolic see declared itself the supreme owner of all possessions and revenues used by the Franciscans, but left their use and administration to the order. Conclusion The rise of the apostolic poverty movement and the criticism of monastic landowning brought an abrupt end to the great period of Benedictine monasticism, of both the Cluniac and the Gorze obediences.130 Yet we should not consider the monasteries’ accumulation of properties merely as stemming from greed and love of the good life. For acts of atonement, which had originally comprised individuals’ personal action to help the poor and captives, now fell in any case to various religious communities. The monasteries performed both spiritual intercession, the psalmody and Masses, and the concrete expiatory gifts, the social action of charity. Furthermore, manumissions accomplished for the salvation of the soul played an essential role in the disappearance of slavery in the early Middle Ages.131 Above all we cannot forget the cultural achievements. In the townless society of the early Middle Ages, the monasteries’ properties allowed them to realize extraordinary cultural achievements that would have been impossible without the great endowments. Just to produce one Carolingian Bible required the hides of 200 animals! What we know of early medieval art and high culture is almost exclusively monastic in origin. Indeed, even later scholarship lived from donations. Thus many Bibles which the school of St Victor used in its important contributions to the theological renewal of the twelfth century stemmed from Ibid., Regula 9, p. 75: “eo quod ecclesias, terras, bestias, redditus, et etiam quaestum uobis interdicimus”. 127 Helmut Feld, Franziskus von Assisi und seine Bewegung (Darmstadt, 1994), pp. 189–94. 128 Francis of Assisi, Regula bullata 6, ed. Lothar Hardick and Engelbert Grau, Die Schriften des heiligen Franziskus von Assisi (Werl in Westfalen, 1984), p. 169. 129 Thomas of Celano, Vita secunda 2.35f, ed. Engelbert Grau, Leben und Wunder des heiligen Franziskus von Assisi, Franziskanische Quellenschriften, 5 (Werl in Westfalen, 1964), pp. 289, 290. 130 Van Engen, “The ‘Crisis of Cenobitism’”, pp. 276f. 131 Stephane Lebecq, “Sklaverei”, in Lexikon des Mittelalters, 7 (Munich, 1995), cols 1977–80. 126

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donations for the salvation of souls.132 Much of what survives of the early medieval cultural achievement ranks as a world cultural legacy, and much indeed of that arose from the exchange of material gift and spiritual countergift.

132 Matthias M. Tischler, “Die Auftraggeber, Vorbesitzer und Schenker der Bibeln von SaintVictor”, in Rainer Berndt (ed.), Schrift, Schreiber, Schenker: Studien zur Abtei Sankt Viktor in Paris und den Viktorinern, Corpus Victorinum, Instrumenta, 1 (Berlin, 2005), pp. 27–74; I would like to thank the author and editor for allowing me to see the article in advance of publication.

Chapter 8

The Early Medieval Transformation of Piety Thomas Head

In early medieval Europe, there was a vibrant piety based on the idea that holy people could intercede with God on the part of ordinary Christians. The chapters in Part Two consider two of the most important strains of that piety: hagiography and intercessory prayer. The authors cast their nets widely, and seek to suggest “new directions” by the collation of data. Guy Philippart and Michel Trigalet (Chapter 6) have introduced us to one of the online databases which they and their colleagues at the Notre-Dame de Namur University, in collaboration with the Société des Bollandistes, have been compiling over the past two decades. They are in the process of collating the catalogues of hagiographic literature published by the Bollandists – most notably the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina – with data from “various research instruments” and ongoing research. Although this database is not yet available, several useful ones are already online, including one which provides approximate dates of composition for the works cataloged in the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina and one for the contents of legendaries, which are liturgical manuscripts containing readings for the celebration of saints’ feast days. The high quality of these databases inspires confidence in the more expansive project discussed here. One minor weakness shared by both chapters in Part Two is the relative lack of attention to Anglophone scholarship; I have therefore consciously chosen to highlight such works in my comments.  The Société des Bollandistes, or Bollandists, are a group of Jesuit scholars dedicated to the edition and study of hagiographic texts. The Bollandists maintain a superb website concerning their varied scholarly endeavors: “Christian Hagiography”, . One of their most important publications is the Bibliotheca hagiographica latina antiquae et mediae aetatis, SH 6 and 12 (2 vols, Brussels, 1898–1901, reprinted 1949), now with a Novum Supplementum, ed. Henri Fros, SH 70 (Brussels, 1986).  See Chapter 6 in this volume, page 114.  The available databases, as well as descriptions of the entire project, are to be found at: “Hagiographies”, . A related set of volumes is in the process of publication: Guy Philippart (ed.), Hagiographies. International History of the Latin and Vernacular Hagiographical Literature in the West from its Origins to 1550, Corpus Christianorum Hagiographies, 1–4 (4 vols, Turnhout, 1994–). 

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Philippart and Trigalet seek to suggest ways in which the database might be used, as well as the sort of critical questions a researcher must consider in using it. As they frequently remind us, this is a work in progress, in which the collection of the data itself suggests new problems for research. One of the great advantages of an Internet database is that it can, if well maintained, always remain a work in progress, incorporating the results of new scholarship. For example, one important genre discussed by Philippart and Trigalet is the gesta of the Roman martyrs, yet these texts have until recently remained bereft of good editions and reliable critical study, in large part because their “historical” value was long dismissed by scholars. Thus Philippart and Trigalet have had difficulty in supplying specific dates to these texts. By happy coincidence, a group of scholars led by Kate Cooper and based at the University of Manchester are currently compiling a database on these texts which will help provide accurate dates for them. The web-based nature of the databases in Namur and Manchester will allow regular updating through cross-reference in a manner not possible in printed reference works. One of the most important conclusions of Philippart and Trigalet, based on their study of legendaries through the database, is that the year 800 roughly marks a transition to a period in which hagiography would be copied and transmitted in new ways. Indeed, the legendary itself is largely a Carolingian invention. This fits well with the work of other scholars. Paul Fouracre has shown how Carolingian attempts to regulate the cult of the saints, as in the canons of the synod of Frankfurt in 794, were designed to suppress certain forms of Merovingian sanctity which might provide sacral power to rival noble families, and to support the forms of sanctity amenable to their own claims to sacral authority. I have demonstrated how Carolingian legislation, in particular the synod of Mainz in 813, led to the composition of a large number of new hagiographic works designed to authorize the cults of the officially promoted saints, while other cults, lacking contemporary textual authority, quickly fell into oblivion. Julia Smith has discussed how radically Carolingian hagiographers altered Merovingian ideas about female sanctity. Felice Lifshitz, in analyzing the development of martyrologies, has noted how the synods of Aachen in See Chapter 6, page 119, particularly note 25. A description of the project and entry to the current version of the databases may be found at: “The Roman Martyrs Project”, . The early results of the group’s research may be found in published form in articles collected in an issue of EME, 9 (2000). See particularly, on the problematic dating of these sources, Clare Pilsworth, “Dating the Gesta Martyrum: A Manuscript-based Approach”, EME, 9 (2000): 309–24.  Paul Fouracre, “The Origins of the Carolingian Attempt to Regulate the Cult of the Saints”, in James Howard-Johnston and Paul Hayward (eds), The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 1999), pp. 143–65, particularly pp. 147–9 and 161–3.  Thomas Head, Hagiography and the Cult of Saints: The Diocese of Orléans, 800–1200 (Cambridge, 1990), particularly pp. 1–9 and 20–57.  Julia M.H. Smith, “The Problem of Female Sanctity in Carolingian Europe c. 780–920”, Past and Present, 146 (1995): 3–37.  

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816 and 817 fixed their use in the Frankish liturgy, and thus promoted the composition of many new martyrologies in the ninth century.10 In short, the Carolingian religious reform and its legislation were an attempt to transform the practice of the cult of saints and the hagiography which authorized that practice, informing not only what new hagiography would be composed, but what traditional hagiography would be copied, and thus survive. The choice of definitions and parameters is necessary for a searchable database, but inherently causes some problems. While recognizing that no perfect answer is possible, I would like to note three problems in this regard. First, with regard to the definition of a text, the authors seem to shrug off the radical implications of the use of the language of hypotexte and hypertexte. The scholars who originated this terminology, most importantly Monique Goullet, seem to suggest that virtually every manuscript copy incarnates an individual text. While admirably combining information about manuscript copies, the authors seem to have used a far more traditional definition of “text” in setting the parameters of the database.11 Second, and more importantly, the authors accept the guidelines of the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina as to who is, and is not, a saint. This is an understandable decision, but its implications must be considered. The Latin sanctus (sancta) is a richly ambivalent term, sometimes used as an adjective denoting holiness, other times as an honorific or title denoting an official “saint” worthy of public veneration. Here is one instance where English, being a child of both Romance and Germanic languages, is better able to express the varied meanings of medieval sources than most European languages. To put matters simply, the general adjective “holy” comes from Germanic roots, while the title “saint” is of Romance origin. These ambiguities pose problems. Philippart and Trigalet suggest that defining the Dialogues of Gregory the Great as a single text does not affect the “order of magnitude of the results” on the differences between Italy and Gaul.12 Gregory, however, described a piety completely at odds with the traditional Italian piety focused on ancient martyrs, emphasizing instead the holiness of contemporary ascetics. The fact that his subjects were generally not, except for Benedict of Nursia, included in the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina allows them to be registered as “holy men”, not “saints”, and so they do not figure within the parameters of the Namur database. Third, and most importantly, the authors have omitted gender as a parameter within the database. Two decades of hagiographic scholarship have pointed to the important differences between the hagiography of male saints and that of female saints in the early medieval period (as well, of

10 Felice Lifshitz, The Name of the Saint: The Martyrology of Jerome and Access to the Sacred in Francia, 627–827 (Notre Dame, IN, 2006), particularly pp. 117–32. 11 See Chapter 6 in this volume, pp. 113–14 and 116, particularly note 23. For a critique of the theoretical approach of Monique Goullet and other scholars, see my review in Speculum, 80 (2005): 1288–91. 12 See Chapter 6, note 23.

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course, as beyond).13 A useful comparison is the electronic version of the Acta Sanctorum produced by Chadwyck-Healey, which provides gender as one of the searchable categories.14 Arnold Angenendt (Chapter 7) offers a synthesis of scholarship on gifts given to ecclesiastical institutions in exchange for intercessory prayer – in Masses or the monastic office – offered by clerics or monks on behalf of the donors. He correctly emphasizes the importance of taking the topoi of early medieval charters and wills – such as the phrases pro salute or pro remedio animae – both seriously and literally. He argues that Western Christianity practiced a distinctive form of the spiritual economy during the early Middle Ages (considered here in its broadest sense, from roughly the fifth through the early twelfth century), that is, one characterized by the exchange of gifts. This differed radically from early Christian ideals which denigrated material offerings and encouraged sacrifice of a personal and spiritual nature. Angenendt’s theory of change is deeply rooted in the traditions of the history of the liturgy and of Religionsgeschichte. An interesting alternative interpretation has been offered by Megan McLaughlin, who describes a slow process of the “reification” of prayer between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. She also usefully reminds us that, although there was a great increase over the course of the early Middle Ages in the “amount of prayer performed ‘for the dead’”, that increase “never broke the connection between that prayer and the rest of the liturgy”, and so should be studied in a wider context.15 According to Angenendt, this piety survived in largely the same form from the ninth through the eleventh centuries. Then, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the new monastic orders (or “white monks”) and the mendicants transformed the early medieval spiritual economy by rejecting, in various ways, the acceptance of large endowments by religious orders. Here Angenendt provides a provocative twist to Lester Little’s argument that the shift in the spiritual economy of the middle ages was from gift-giving to one based on “poverty and the profit economy”. For Little, the mendicants were the major agents of a change which occurred definitively only in the thirteenth century.16 Qualifying both theses, recent studies have suggested that traditional

13 For a few examples (in chronological order), see JoAnn McNamara, “A Legacy of Miracles: Hagiography and Nunneries in Merovingian Gaul”, in Julius Kirschner and Suzanne Wemple (eds), Women of the Medieval World (Oxford, 1985), pp. 36–52; Janet L. Nelson, “Les femmes et l’évangélisation”, Revue du Nord, 68 (1986): 471–85, here pp. 480–81; Kate Cooper, “The Martyr, the Matrona and the Bishop: The Matron Lucina and the Politics of Martyr Cult in Fifth- and Sixth-century Rome”, EME, 8 (1999): 297–317; David Brakke, “The Lady Appears: Materializations of ‘Woman’ in Early Monastic Literature”, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 33 (2003): 387–402. 14 Acta Sanctorum Database (Alexandria, VA, 1999–). 15 Megan McLaughlin, Consorting with Saints: Prayer for the Dead in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, NY, 1994), pp. 67–79 (quotation on p. 79). 16 Lester Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1978).

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communities of “black monks” not only adapted to, but also helped to form, the new economic practices of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.17 An intellectual presence hovers over Angenendt’s contribution, never specifically named: Marcel Mauss. The French sociologist’s brilliant essay of 1925 – The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies – has informed, directly or indirectly, all further discussions of gift and countergift. Significantly, Mauss himself drew heavily on evidence from medieval Europe. He began his essay with an extended quotation from the Hâvamâl, a part of the Old Norse Elder Edda, and then commented: “In Scandinavian civilization, and in a good number of others, exchanges and contracts take place in the form of presents; in theory these are voluntary, in reality they are given and reciprocated obligatorily.”18 The works of Stephen White and Barbara Rosenwein stand out as medievalist studies informed by the Maussian tradition.19 Both showed quite clearly that gifts by land-holders to monastic communities were indeed gifts in the sense intended by Mauss, but they were not, or at least not usually, complete alienations of right by the donor over the property in question. This is a manifestation of what anthropologists studying modern agrarian societies have come to call “keepingwhile-giving”.20 One of the reasons for such ambiguity was the difference or even incompatibility of the gift and countergift: families donated real property in exchange for the intercession which monks and their patron saints provided in the court of heaven. This ambiguity, observable in so many forms of early medieval transactions, may temper Angenendt’s statement that “a maximum of spiritual gifts were purchased in a reciprocating transaction”.21 Rosenwein has provided a suggestive alternate reading of how reciprocal relations functioned in the spiritual economy of the early Middle Ages. She identified donations pro anima as being not the gift, but the countergift, because God was the original donor of property and salvation. Donors to Cluny and other religious institutions were rendering back to God a recompense for gifts originating in divine grace. As she writes, “the donation pro anima” was not “a gift in return for prayers”, but rather “expresses the salvific effects of charity”.22 These reciprocal relationships were certainly not simple purchases of spiritual gifts, as Angenendt at times suggests. Richard Keyser, “La transformation de l’échange des dons pieux: Montier-la-Celle, Champagne, 1100–1350”, Revue historique, 305 (2003): 793–816, and Robert Berkhofer, Day of Reckoning: Power and Accountability in Medieval France (Philadelphia, PA, 2004). 18 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Wilfred D. Halls (New York, 1990), p. 3. 19 Stephen White, Custom, Kinship, and Gifts to Saints. The “Laudatio Parentum” in Western France, 1050–1150 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), and Barbara Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property, 909–1049 (Ithaca, NY, 1989). 20 See, most importantly, Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-WhileGiving (Berkeley, CA, 1992). 21 See Chapter 7 in this volume, p. 133. 22 Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of St. Peter, pp. 136–41, quotation at n. 89, where she discusses some of the works cited and used by Angenendt in Chapter 7. 17

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The vibrant piety of intercession in early medieval Europe encompassed hagiography, pilgrimage to the shrines of saints’ relics, the liturgical use of legendaries and martyrologies, donations pro anima to ecclesiastical institutions, memorial masses and books, to name only its most significant components. The legislation of the Carolingian ecclesiastical reform in the decades around the year 800 redefined that piety (or at least attempted to do so). Describing this piety and its transformation is one of the “new directions” which will be explored by early medievalists for decades to come.

PART three Representation and Reality in the Artistry of Early Medieval Literature

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Part Three

Representation and Reality in the Artistry of Early Medieval Literature Michael McCormick

The religiosity of the early Middle Ages extended beyond admiring ancient heroes and beyond aristocrats’ fervent efforts to imbricate the wealth of the peasant farmsteads they controlled in a vast exchange network of prayer, spiritual power, and redemption. That religiosity centered, of course, on ancient ideals and right ritual. It also centered on the Book. Even today, the huge and heterogenous contents of the sixty-some texts that comprise the Christian Bible is an imposing, even forbidding, congeries of disparate works whose original languages, contexts and literal contents reach from the dawn of Near Eastern civilization to the apex of the Roman Empire, and reflect all of it. Even an educated citizen of our twenty-first-century global civilization needs sophisticated reference tools and thorough annotation to make sense of a text which is often anything but limpid, and which assumes intimate familiarity with Middle Eastern and Mediterranean civilizations that were, in time and space, more remote from the early Middle Ages than we are from Charlemagne. Viewed from the forests and fields of early medieval Europe, written in a language which fewer and fewer people could speak, and fewer still read and write, that Book posed an awesome challenge to the resourcefulness of early medieval Europeans. The challenge was not diminished by the power with which they invested its contents, and which they even concretized in its physical embodiment, as the spectacularly bejeweled gold bindings of early medieval Gospel books or the fine gold or silver lettering of display copies show. To understand that Book, early medieval thinkers turned to the Fathers of the Church, especially to Jerome. But one does not have to read far in Jerome to realize that understanding the explanations of this extraordinary late Roman scholar, sophisticated down to his fingertips, requires a thorough grasp of Latin, and indeed, familiarity with the whole classical canon of erudition. And so the early Middle Ages needed learning, for their souls hung on it. This learning of the early Middle Ages was one of the first aspects of the civilization to attract modern scholarly attention. At the outset, the interest bore mostly on the ways in which early medieval scholars copied, edited, and thereby

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preserved the works of earlier ages, classical and Christian Latin antiquities. The recognition that they represented the indispensable link in the survival of the classics goes far to explain the intensive paleographical study that has so clarified the production and circulation of manuscript copies of ancient and more recent works. This study built on the remarkable foundation Ludwig Traube (1861–1907) laid down in his short but immensely productive life’s work, for it was continued and extended by his students, and their students. On this sturdy foundation, great scholars such as Elias Avery Lowe (1879–1969) and Bernhard Bischoff (1906–1991) discovered and recovered for us the centers, handwritings, authors and libraries of this age. As the scholarly advances of the twentieth century have made the material conditions of the transmission and creation of knowledge ever clearer, the present generation of scholars turns increasingly from the transmission to the content of early medieval works. Paul Edward Dutton (Chapter 9) exemplifies this new approach by studying a theme that, to pure positivists, might seem to conjure up all that is lamentable about medieval civilization. In Dutton’s hands, early medieval alarm at “bloody rain” teaches us much about the sensitivities, anxieties and dilemmas of a mentality whose exquisitely literary treatises and profound religiosity recognized a deeply potent set of meanings in the natural world. And of course, what the Bible had to say on the subject underpinned early medieval efforts to wrestle with those strange atmospheric phenomena. At the meeting out of which this volume emerged, I asked aloud a question to which the answer, early in the twentieth century, had seemed scornfully and obviously negative: “Was there any medieval Latin literature worth reading?”  See, for example, M.L.W. Laistner, Thought and Letters in Western Europe, A.D. 500 to 900, 2nd edn (Ithaca, NY, 1957); for a standard account of the early medieval schools, see Pierre Riché, Education and Culture in the Barbarian West, trans. John J. Contreni (Columbia, SC, 1976).  Although there is nothing that Traube wrote that one cannot read with profit, see especially Ludwig Traube, Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen (3 vols, Munich, 1909), and Textgeschichte der Regula S. Benedicti, Abhandlungen der Königlich-Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-philologische und historische Klasse, 25.2, 2nd edn (Munich, 1910), which uncovers the broad lines of the overall transmission of ancient Latin literature through the manuscript tradition of the Rule of St Benedict.  See especially Elias A. Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores: A Palaeographical Guide to Latin Manuscripts prior to the Ninth Century (12 vols, Oxford, 1934–72), which drew great advantage from the collaboration of Bernhard Bischoff, and Elias A. Lowe, Palaeographical Papers, 1907–1965 (Oxford, 1972). See Bernhard Bischoff, Die südostdeutschen Schreibschulen und Bibliotheken in der Karolingerzeit (2 vols, Wiesbaden, 1960–80), Mittelalterliche Studien. Ausgewählte Aufsätze (3 vols, Stuttgart, 1966–81), and his posthumous Katalog der festlandischen Handschriften des neunten Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden, 1998), on which see the valuable comments of Hartmut Hoffmann, “Bernhard Bischoff und die Paläographie des 9. Jahrhunderts”, Deutsches Archiv, 55 (1999): 549–90, as well as his own important contribution to the mapping of early medieval manuscript production: Schreibschulen des 10. und des 11. Jahrhunderts im Südwesten des Deutschen Reichs, MGH Schriften, 53 (2 vols, Hanover, 2004). A selection of Bischoff ’s articles is available in English: Bernhard Bischoff, Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne, trans. Michael M. Gorman (Cambridge, 1994). Fundamental contributions continue to be made to this aspect of early medieval studies. See, for example, John J. Contreni, The Cathedral School of Laon from 850 to 930: Its Manuscripts and Masters, Münchener Beiträge zur Mediävistik und Renaissance-Forschung, 29 (Munich, 1978).

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In fact, the rise of Romantic nationalism in the nineteenth century had already discovered the vernacular power of the early medieval masterpiece of Beowulf, whose poetry still rewards the efforts of a Nobel laureate. Around the Second World War, the brilliant literary criticism of Ernst Robert Curtius (1886–1956) developed a then shocking thesis. In a deeply influential book, Curtius argued that the intensely crafted rhetoric of the ancient world had taken on new and dynamic life in the literary creations of the Latin Middle Ages, and that this medieval Latin literature lay at the origins of European literature in general. It was no accident that in the final chapter of his masterpiece, this translator of T.S. Eliot quotes Dante, Goethe, Shakespeare and Wordsworth alongside the Merovingian poet Venantius Fortunatus. At the same time, another exceptional critic, Erich Auerbach (1892–1957), dared to place literary analysis of the sixthcentury Frankish historian Gregory of Tours on the same footing as that of Homer in his own masterpiece, Mimesis. Auerbach’s next major work devoted the lion’s share of its critical acumen to our period. Such studies laid the groundwork for the approaches exemplified in our time, and in this volume. Today’s historians increasingly follow Walter Goffart’s example. Taking seriously the literary ambitions and conceits of the historical and scholarly writers of the early Middle Ages is an important step toward understanding more fully the complex testimony they offer on a complicated age, and the result is rich in insight. Joaquín Martínez Pizarro (Chapter 10) has brought this new literary sensitivity to bear on some of the most remarkable historians of the period, adding names like Notker the Stammerer, Agnellus of Ravenna, and now, in this contribution, Julian of Toledo to the roster of serious literary artists. Martínez Pizarro’s analysis of the seventh-century Spaniard’s intricate composition of high art prose – a Latin prose without equal in his time, except perhaps in the patriarchal palace of the bishop of Rome – probes the life and afterlife of a late antique literary conceit with roots that reached back into the Bible. Jan Ziolkowski (Chapter 11) takes us into the crafting of Latin epic in the early Middle Ages. A high-spirited adventure tale, The Poem of Walter presents a world of story-telling, romance and combat of hostages, Huns and heroes. Ziolkowski discovers the weave of a complex tapestry of allusion to Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, trans. Seamus Heaney (New York, 2000). Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1963), originally published in 1948 by the same publisher, A. Francke of Bern, who had brought out Auerbach’s masterpiece two years before.  Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask, new edn (Princeton, NJ, 2003), with contributions by Edward Said and Jan M. Ziolkowski, originally published in 1946, and Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Mannheim, new edn (Princeton, NJ, 1993), with an introduction and bibliography by Jan M. Ziolkowski.  Walter Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800) (Princeton, NJ, 1988); see now his Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire (Philadelphia, PA, 2006).  Joaquín Martínez Pizarro, A Rhetoric of the Scene: Dramatic Narrative in the Early Middle Ages (Toronto, 1989), and Writing Ravenna: The Liber Pontificalis of Andreas Agnellus (Ann Arbor, MI, 1995).  

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ancient and earlier medieval hexametric models, needed in any case for accurate observance of meter, and sharp-eyed observation of contemporary killing gear. Archaeology aids in distinguishing the two, and his English versions give the reader a real flavor of the work. To conclude this excursion into the literary art and mentality of the early Middle Ages, Danuta Shanzer (Chapter 12) considers each scholar’s contribution in the light of the great discussion of representation and reality launched by Curtius and Auerbach. Like the other chapters in Part Three, her romp through classical, late antique and early medieval Latin literature – including, of course, the Latin Bible – is all about the literariness, and the reality, of the early Middle Ages. Once again, the future of the early medieval past looks exciting and it looks open. These scholars are among the first to sound the truly literary merits of the works they analyze, and surely the first to do so in English. By their philological mastery of that complex beast – more accurately, a menagerie of diverse beasts – that is early medieval Latin, and by their inventive approaches, they show the way to exploring the literature of this young civilization as literature. Although these chapters touch already on hagiography, there are surely diamonds to be discovered in the hundreds of early medieval saints’ lives mustered by Philippart’s project and awaiting study. The same is true in spades of the more avowedly literary works of poetry, learned letters and historical writing surviving from the fifth to the eleventh century, in their hundreds.

Chapter 9

Observations on Early Medieval Weather in General, Bloody Rain in Particular Paul Edward Dutton

In the West, as part of a rich inheritance of distant and elemental theologies, we have always had a tendency to feel guilty about natural calamities, to feel that we somehow cause them; in short, that we get the punishing weather we deserve. The first subjectivity for us to acknowledge, then, as we approach medieval weather is our own, for our very interest in past weather is colored by present preoccupations. But the Middle Ages does have something important to contribute to the historian’s understanding of weather, both in a determination of what medieval weather was actually like and its material effects (though we need to bear in mind that despite its 1200-year length, the Middle Ages still represents a relatively short space of time in climatological terms), and of how and why medieval men and women responded to and characterized the weather they experienced. In pursuit of those goals, I offer here a few preliminary observations on medieval weather and a small case study. Medieval weather studies have been carried out as often by palaeoclimatologists as by medievalists and historians, and that may have led us to neglect weather See Hubert H. Lamb, The Changing Climate: Selected Papers (London, 1966); Hubert H. Lamb, Climate: Present, Past, and Future (2 vols, London, 1972–77); Hubert H. Lamb, Climatic History and the Future (London, 1977); Hubert H. Lamb, Weather, Climate, and Human Affairs (London, 1988); Hubert H. Lamb, Climate, History, and the Modern World, 2nd edn (London, 1995). See also Rüdiger Glaser, Klimageschichte Mitteleuropas: 1000 Jahre Wetter, Klima, Katastrophen (Darmstadt, 2001).  But see Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Histoire et climat”, Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations, 14 (1959): 3–34; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Le climat des XIe et XVIe siècles, séries comparées”, Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations, 20 (1965): 899–922; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Pour une histoire de l’environnement: la part du climat”, Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations, 25 (1970): 1459–70; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Histoire du climat depuis l’an mil (Paris, 1967), and a revised version, trans. Barbara Bray, as Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of the Climate since the Year 1000 (London, 1971, reprinted New York, 1988); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Histoire humaine et comparée du climat, vol. 1: Canicules et glaciers (XIIIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris, 2004); Pierre Alexandre, Le climat au Moyen Age en Belgique et dans les régions voisines (Rhénanie, Nord de la France) (Louvain, 1976); Pierre Alexandre, Le climat en Europe au Moyen Age: contribution à l’histoire des variations climatiques de 1000 à 1425, Recherches de l’histoire et de sciences sociales, 24 (Paris, 1987); Le temps qu’il fait au Moyen Age, Claude Thomasset and Joëlle Ducos (eds), Cultures et civilisations médiévales, 15 (Paris, 1998); Joëlle Ducos, Le météorologie en français au Moyen Age (XIIIe–XIVe siècles), Sciences, techniques et civilisations du Moyen Age à l’aube des Lumières, 2 (Paris, 1998). 

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as a cultural and historical experience, one that was “peopled” and “lived”. Rising or falling seasonal temperatures, heavy rainfalls and flooding, droughts and long winters in the Middle Ages should matter to us not just as physical events, but as weather conditions that touched the lives of particular medieval men and women and that may have had a critical impact upon their short- and long-term economic fortunes, and indeed upon their very view of the world. And not all weather conditions are equal, for societies, by their very natures, are more vulnerable to some than others. Early medieval communities, for instance, most often clung to the natural clearings, transport and available water supplied by rivers and streams running through the valleys and flood plains of Europe, but that also made them vulnerable to excessive rain, sudden floods and spring runoffs. How the issues that surround medieval weather can and should be framed as historical problems will require considerable reflection and refinement by medievalists, but let me begin with one essential distinction: “weather” is human, but “climate” is not necessarily so. Weather, in other words, is the atmosphere in contact with us, and exists when we engage it physically and think about it. “Climate” refers to the greater physical nature of the atmosphere, which exists without us and whose patterns and physical characteristics, even for pre-human times, scientists can ascertain by various means. Indeed, should the human race disappear, the earth would continue to have a climate, but it would, by this definition, have no weather. If “climate” is ahistorical and ahuman, “weather” is properly historical and stubbornly subjective, since it involves humans in time thinking about it and how it affects their lives. By reversing the process, we can, by studying “their weather”, also study them, their preoccupations, economic and social concerns, and cosmological and religious ideas. To study the weather is to study the human. It would be a mistake for us to assume that weather is a collective experience, for in the early Middle Ages a drought on one side of the Seine might not have

For a corrective, see Vladimir Janković, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650–1820 (Manchester, 2000).  See Paul Edward Dutton, Charlemagne’s Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age (New York, 2004), pp. 169–88, 264–72; also Aryan F.V. van Engelen, J. Buisman and F. Ijnsen, “A Millennium of Weather, Winds, and Water in the Low Countries”, in Philip D. Jones, Astrid E.J. Ogilvie, Trevor D. Davies and Keith R. Briffa (eds), History and Climate: Memories of the Future? (New York, 2001), pp. 101–17; Marina V. Shabalova and Aryan F.V. Van Engelen, “Evaluation of a Reconstruction of Winter and Summer Temperatures in the Low Countries, AD 764–1998”, Climatic Change, 58 (2003): 219–42.  See the studies in Alluvial Archaeology in Europe: Proceedings of the Alluvial Archaeology of North-west Europe and Mediteranian [sic], 18–19 December 2000, Leeds, UK, ed Andy J. Howard, Mark G. Macklin and David G. Passmore (Lisse, 2003), particularly Joëlle Burnhouf, Nathalie Carcaud, M. Garcin et. al, “Fluvial Metamorphosis of the River Loire during the Holocene”, pp. 163–71, and Kazimierz Klimek, “Sediment Transfer and Storage Linked to Neolithic and Early Medieval Soil Erosion in the Upper Odra Basin, Southern Poland”, pp. 251–9. 

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greatly affected the other, and the relative slowness, limitations and infrequency of travel and communications often worked to isolate the weather as a largely local phenomenon. Nor did everyone necessarily want the same weather or want it all the time. The sailor may have wanted moderately windy but relatively calm seas, while the farmer wanted some combination of timely rain, frost-free springs and sunny summer days, and the king and his soldiers wanted plentiful grass in the late spring to graze their horses as they set out on campaign. All weather, both the good and bad, is relative, both from the perspective of those who experienced it and of those contemporaries who commented on it. We need to appreciate that those who reported on weather in the past were not neutral observers, just as we are not. Observation is so governed by the observer and the act of observation that we often learn more about the watcher than the watched. For intellectual and cultural historians, weather reports are a relatively unexamined territory, a treasure trove of human thinking about what it meant to live in particular worlds at particular times. Even a cultural history of weather and of its various subjectivities (dependent, as we are, on all the limitations and strengths of the documentary and narrative record) cannot neglect the physical readings of past weather that can be determined by various methods. And an increasingly sophisticated scientific analysis of the record of the material past, as highlighted here by Michael McCormick in Chapter 4, has already begun to tell us more about the physical nature of medieval weather. Some co-ordination and fine tuning of the temporal and geographical scales used by palaeoclimatologists and medievalists will need to be achieved, but the goal and promise of this research should be to bring together the physical facts and human experience of pre-modern weather.10 Whether older conclusions about early medieval weather will stand or fall remains to be seen. In the view of climatologists such as H.H. Lamb, the weather of the ninth century was slightly colder, wetter and stormier than  Memoratorium de exercitu in Gallia occidentali praeparando (807), MGH LL 2, Capit. 1, no. 48, preface, p. 134.25–6. The distinction in this case may be more regional than local. See also Fritz Curschmann, Hungersnöte im Mittelalter, Leipziger Studien aus dem Gebiet der Geschichte, 61 (Leipzig, 1900, reprinted 1970), p. 92.  See Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300–900 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 123–569.  See W.T. Bell and A.E.J. Ogilvie, “Weather Compilations as a Source of Data for the Reconstruction of European Climate during the Medieval Period”, Climatic Change, 1 (1978): 331–53. See also the essays in European Climate Reconstructed from Documentary Data: Methods and Results, ed. Burkhard Frenzel, Christian Pfister and Birgit Gläser, in Paläoklimaforschung, Palaeoclimate Research, 7 (Stuttgart, 1992), particularly Ioannis Telelis and Evangelos Chrysos, “The Byzantine Sources as Documentary Evidence for the Reconstruction of Historical Climate”, pp. 17–31.  See Neville Brown, History and Climate Change: A Eurocentric Perspective (London, 2001), pp. 310–20. 10 A workshop, “Climate Change and History in the First Millennium”, sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was organized by Michael McCormick, Joachim Henning and Noreen Tuross on 11 November 2005 at Harvard University.

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that of preceding centuries,11 but it led to the warmer weather of the eleventh and twelfth centuries12 and to the little ice age that began in the late fourteenth century.13 Our narrative evidence, however, may be skewed, since slowly expanding and locally concentrated populations complained more vociferously about the weather because their economic (primarily agricultural) success was vulnerable to certain kinds of weather conditions. The Carolingian peoples, for instance, dreaded and so recorded hailstorms because of their heavy dependence upon wheat crops, a crop vulnerable at certain points in its growth cycle to the particular damage that hail can do. In a subsistence agricultural economy, the loss of a central food source was a critical concern.14 The dendrochronological evidence for northern Europe does not seem to support the thesis that growing conditions were sharply worse in the ninth century,15 but again the human factor needs always to be weighed in the historian’s use of hard data of the sort that climatologists supply. One also ought to be skeptical of simple climatic explanations for the dynamism of the Northmen, raids of the Magyars, the conquest of England, and other dramatic historical events.16 If weather conditions have been contributing causes for important historical changes, how often have they been the primary ones? On the cultural-historical side, the evidence of early medieval interest in the weather is ample, and we need to pay attention to those things that preoccupy 11 See Christian Pfister, Jürg Luterbacher, Gabriela Schwarz-Zanetti and Milène Wegmann, “Winter Air Temperature Variations in Western Europe during the Early and High Middle Ages (AD 750–1300)”, The Holocene, 8 (September 1998): 535–52; Lamb, Climate: Past, Present and Future, vol. 2, p. 426; Richard Hodges, Dark Age Economics (London, 1982), p. 139; Wendy Davies, Small Worlds: The Village Community in Early Medieval Brittany (Berkeley, CA, 1988), p. 33. For objective indications of summer storminess and heavier July–August precipitation, see Hubert H. Lamb, “The Early Medieval Warm Epoch and its Sequel”, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 1 (1965): 21–2 and fig. 1. 12 See The Medieval Warm Period, ed. Malcolm K. Hughes and Henry F. Diaz, special issue of Climatic Change, 26 (1994). 13 See Jean M. Grove, Little Ice Ages: Ancient and Modern, Routledge Studies in Physical Geography and Environment, 5, 2nd edn (London, 2004), a revised edition of The Little Ice Age (London, 1988). 14 See Dutton, Charlemagne’s Mustache, pp. 178–80, and the response to this point by Brown, Climate and History, p. 124. 15 See the tables in Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine, pp. 386–8, and Justin Schove, “Droughts of the Dark Ages and Tree-rings (A.D. 714–835)”, Weather, 10 (1955): 368–71. On the science of dendrochronology and its limitations, see Keith R. Briffa, “Annual Climate Variability in the Holocene: Interpreting the Message of Ancient Trees”, Quaternary Science Reviews, 19 (1999): 87–105; Keith R. Briffa, “Large-scale Temperature Inferences from Tree Rings: A Review”, Global and Planetary Change, 40 (2004): 11–26; Burghart Schmidt and Wolfgang Gruhle, “Tree-ring Growth-homogeneity, Applied to Climate Analysis”, in Detlef Gronenborn (ed.), Klimaveränderung und Kulturwandel in neolithischen Gesellschaften Mitteleuropas, 6700–2200 v. Chr. (Mainz, 2005), pp. 17–26. 16 See Brown, History and Climate Change, pp. 125–32; Lamb, Climate, History, and the Modern World, pp. 162–8; Robert Claiborne, Climate, Man and History (New York, 1970), pp. 348–64; Helge Salvesen, “The Climate as a Factor of Historical Causation”, in European Climate Reconstructed from Documentary Data, pp. 219–33.

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an age. For the Carolingians alone the record is thick, but I shall leave aside a survey of that material for another occasion. Let us turn from these generalities to examine a specific case study, that of the famous bloody rain of the early Middle Ages, for that red rain has something to tell us about what early medieval men and women thought about the weather they experienced and how their ideas changed over time. It may also reveal something about our own thoughts about medieval weather reporters, and, perhaps, even about the Middle Ages itself. Strange things were believed to fall from the sky in the early Middle Ages. Cooked wheat, barley and beans were supposed to have dropped like rain from the Italian sky in 722.17 A century later, an exotic grain fell on Gascony and samples of it were carried to the emperor Louis the Pious. This fruit was said to have been smaller than wheat, but not as round as peas.18 Showers of fish, snakes, stones and ash were also reported in the early Middle Ages.19 And rocks on occasion were said to have come hurtling down from on high, sometimes with hail, sometimes without.20 There were also reports of some fairly large items dropping upon medieval Europe. Outside Lyons c. 815, four people were said to have fallen from a cloud ship and were almost stoned to death by the people who captured them.21 In late June 824, an enormous slab of ice 15 feet long, 7 feet wide and 2 feet thick dropped on Autun, and this in an age before jet airliners could be blamed.22 But the most persistent and interesting of these heavenly deposits was the bloody rain of the Middle Ages. An examination of this red rain may have something to teach us not only about the workings of the early medieval mind, but also about the modern mind when confronted with the medieval. Let us deal with ours first. Along with other modern readers of early medieval texts, I had once simply assumed that medieval men and women blindly reported, or even invented, these strange reports, and that was worrisome, for the credulity of, or outright fabrication by, medieval chroniclers would seem to undermine the confidence we might invest in the written sources of medieval history upon which we depend. Can the annalist or chronicler who reports the outcome of a battle and the death of a king in one line and a rain of frogs and a shower of blood in the next be trusted? 17 Annales Xantenses supplement for 722, ed. Bernhard von Simson, in Annales Xantenses et Annales Vedastini (hereafter Ann. Xant. and Ann. Ved.), MGH SRG (Hanover, 1909), p. 37. 18 Astronomer, Vita Hludowici imperatoris 42, ed. Ernst Tremp, MGH SRG 64 (Hanover, 1995), p. 450. 19 Gregory of Tours, Historiae 9.5, ed. Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm Levison, MGH SRM 1 (Hanover, 1951), p. 360; Ann. Xant., supplementum, a. 744, a. 867, pp. 37, 25. 20 Annales regni Francorum (hereafter Ann. regni Franc.), a. 823, ed. Friedrich Kurze, MGH SRG (Hanover, 1895), p. 163. 21 Agobard of Lyons, Liber contra insulsam uulgi opinionem de grandine et tonitruis 1, ed. Lieven Van Acker, in Agobardi Lugdunensis Opera Omnia, CC Cont. med. 52 (1981), pp. 3–4. See Dutton, Charlemagne’s Mustache, pp. 169–88. 22 Ann. regni Franc., a. 824, pp. 166–7.

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I would now argue that he can, or rather, that a report of bloody rain or some other strange phenomenon should not automatically be rejected and its reporter dismissed as gullible for accepting and disseminating extravagant rumors, or as fraudulent for committing acts of gross invention. For I am now convinced that “bloody rain” did occasionally fall on medieval Europe. In fact, it did not just fall on medieval Europe, but had fallen on the ancient world, and continues to fall on Europe even today. Livy, Pliny, Petronius, Cassius Dio and many other ancients had reported red and bloody rains,23 though Cicero argued forcefully for a strictly natural source. He doubted reports of bloody rain, rivers running red with blood, and sweating statues, for all such things have material explanations. And he observed that reports of strange phenomena were widely believed and even fabricated during times of war, but were rare during times of peace.24 Red rain continues to fall on Europe today. On 1 July 1968, such rain fell on southern England; when tested, it proved to be precipitation mixed with a fine reddish sand that had been lifted from the Sahara Desert and carried 1600 miles (2600 km) north by powerful southerly winds.25 It is estimated that about three times a year, matter from Africa still drops on England today.26 In 1992, the people living near Mannheim in Germany feared that the red dust that had fallen on their cars had come from a nearby drug factory, which had had some recent explosions, but it too proved to be Saharan sand.27 Southern Europe has long been subject to Siroccos, or southeast and southwest winds that blow forth from Saharan Africa, Libya and Egypt toward the northern Mediterranean basin. In consequence Italy, Spain and southern France have probably always received more deposits from African winds than northern 23 See Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.788; Livy, 24.10.7, 34.35.6, 39.46.5, 39.56.6, 40.19.2, 42.20.5, 43.13.5; Pliny, Historia naturalis 2.57.147; Petronius, Satyricon 122.140–43; Cassius Dio, Historia Romana 51.17.4, 61.35.1. See John S.P. Tatlock, “Some Medieval Cases of Blood-Rain”, Classical Philology, 9 (1914): 442–7. I also had the benefit of consulting the appendix to Max Nelson’s 2003 conference paper “It’s Raining Men! The Tradition of Blood Rains in Late Antiquity”. See also the commentary of Danuta Shanzer in Chapter 12 of this volume for other examples. 24 Cicero, De diuinatione 2.58. See also 1.98. 25 C.G. Ehrenberg rejected the Saharan sand hypothesis for red rain: see Tatlock, “Some Mediaeval Cases”, p. 443; Christian G. Ehrenberg, “Passatstaub und Blutregen: ein grosses organisches unsichtbares Wirken und Leben in der Atmosphäre”, Physikalische Abhandlungen der königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 32 (1847): 269–460, here p. 270. But see now Saharan Dust: Mobilization, Transport, Deposition, ed. Christer Morales (Chichester, 1979); Desert Dust: Origin, Characteristics, and Effect on Man, ed. Troy L. Péwé, The Geological Society of America: Special Paper 186 (Boulder, CO, 1981); Lars G. Franzen, Mervi Hjelmros, Per Kålberg et. al., “The Saharan Dust Episode of South and Central Europe, and Northern Scandinavia, March 1991”, Weather, 50 (1995): 313–18. 26 Paul Simons, Weird Weather (Boston, MA, 1996), pp. 18–19. This rain mixed with sand can cause other freak effects, since if it falls on snow and is associated with warm air, the sand can attract heat and melt the snow, thus leading to rapid runoff and flooding. 27 Information supplied by Rebecca L.R. Garber, who was resident in the area at the time. The people of Mannheim apparently did not recognize that there was sand in this rain, since it was extremely fine.

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Europe, which may explain why bloody rain seems to have struck the south so often, but was deemed extraordinary when it fell in the north or when described by northern Europeans. Said the annalist of Fulda for 873: “It is reported that in Italy in the district of Brescia blood rained from the heavens for three days and three nights.”28 Still, there are a variety of other possible physical explanations for these colorful rains. In 1608, the great polymath Peiresc investigated one such case in France and became convinced that the red droppings came from the molt of butterflies that was shed in early summer.29 One can imagine still other organic explanations involving volcanic ash, red soils, rust and other reddish substances,30 but I would suggest that what should matter to us is the particular attention or peculiar subjectivity that led medieval men and women to regard red rain as special – indeed, not as water at all. “And blood flowed from the heavens and covered the earth”, said annalists of the year 786.31 The modern historian need not share the common medieval conclusion that this was a rain of blood, but we need to try to understand a world that sometimes thought that it was. For if we can in many cases accept the factuality of the red rain itself, we can move to the more interesting questions of why medieval people thought that it was blood that was falling, what they thought that meant, and whether their thoughts about red rain changed over the course of the early Middle Ages. The seeming frequency of bloody rain in the historical record is understandable, on one level, as a product of medieval historiography itself, which tended to telescope events.32 Annalists and chroniclers forced European activity that had occurred over many months and across vast territories into single small, often indiscriminate entries, so that red rain may stand out as frequently reported and geographically ubiquitous even if it occurred infrequently, and was highly localized when it did. A principle of historical selectivity was at work that tended to exaggerate in the record those things that annalists and chroniclers themselves found particularly strange or symbolically significant; thus, red rain was frequently reported precisely because it was rare and remarkable. Moreover, the average medieval man or woman may have been more alert to changes and oddities in the natural world than most of us are today, both because they were Annales Fuldenses (hereafter Ann. Fuld.), a. 873, ed. Friedrich Kurze, MGH SRG (Hanover, 1891), p. 80. 29 See Pierre Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility & Gentility. Being the Life of the Renowned Nicolaus Claudius Fabricius Lord of Peiresk, trans. William Rand (London, 1657), pp. 123–5, and Peter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT, 2000), pp. 29–30. 30 See Waldo L. McAtee, “Showers of Organic Matter”, Monthly Weather Review, 45 (1917): 217–24; Ehrenberg, “Passatstaub und Blutregen”, pp. 270, 437–8. The red rain that fell sporadically on the Kerala district of southwestern India from 25 July to 23 September 2001 would seem to be an example of red rain caused not by sand, but by an as yet unidentified biological source. 31 Annales Weissemburgenses and Annales Lamberti a.786, ed. Georg H. Pertz, MGH SS 3 (Hanover, 1839), p. 38. 32 See Michael McCormick, Les annales du haut Moyen Age, Typologie, 14 (Turnhout, 1975). 28

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less removed from the natural world than we are, and because it meant more to them both in economic and symbolic terms. Farmers kept careful watch on weather because, in a subsistence agricultural economy, even a small change in the weather could have a large impact on survival. Medieval men and women were also convinced of the theophanic capacity of natural history, that is, that the physical world contained material manifestations of God’s presence, the very secrets of his divine plan.33 Thus, when hail and stones fell on Francia in 823 and other bizarre events occurred, the emperor commanded prayers, fasts and alms, for he had concluded that some “great future disaster for the human race was most surely portended” by these prodigies.34 Annalists often bundled together reports of strange natural events according to the organizational and categorical needs of their narratives, but also because they believed that these isolated physical happenings might constitute a single string of evidence revealing the workings of the divine mind and what it intended for the world at large. Hence, it should not be surprising that medieval men and women were interested in things that fell from the sky. Their cosmology led them to believe that the aerial and etherial spheres were closer to the divine, both to Christ and to his intermediating ministers, the angels, and therefore that the lower air might communicate important messages to humans. The least subtle of these heavenly communications were the false writings, or pseudographia, that were said to have fallen from heaven in order to lead people into error. Charlemagne outlawed these heavenly droppings in his capitularies.35 Though not as blatant and direct as letters from heaven, meteorological phenomena belonged to a set of atmospheric messages that needed collection, decoding and dissemination.36 Moreover, blood was always a medieval show-stopper, since it not only called up common images of blood sport and bloody war, but also the transcendent image of the blood that flowed from Christ’s body after it was pierced by Longinus’ lance and the like spilling of the martyrs’ blood. When Charlemagne heard in 804 that the blood of Christ had been discovered in Mantua, he asked Pope Leo III to investigate it personally as soon as possible.37 And when the reliquary that housed Einhard’s beloved martyrs, Marcellinus and Peter, began to drip with a bloody fluid, he knew at once that this was a precious sign, though he was not entirely sure what it meant. He analyzed the substance and learned that it tasted salty like tears, possessed the thickness of water, but had the color Rom. 1:20: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead.” See John Michael Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church (Oxford, 1983), p. 41. 34 Astronomer, Vita Hludowici imperatoris 37, p. 422. 35 Admonitio generalis (789), in Capit. 1, no. 25, c. 78, p. 60. See Robert Priebsch, Letter from Heaven on the Observance of the Lord’s Day (Oxford, 1936), and W.R. Jones, “The Heavenly Letter in Medieval England”, Medievalia et Humanistica, 6 (1975): 162–78. 36 See Dutton, Charlemagne’s Mustache, pp. 93–4. 37 Ann. regni Franc., a. 804, p. 119. 33

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of true blood.38 His was a world alert to color symbolism, and things red were worth reporting, even if their immediate meaning was uncertain.39 Thus, an annalist reported without comment that a slave woman had been ironing a shirt in 862 that became progressively more stained with blood as she ironed.40 Medieval observers and chroniclers were reluctant to allow strange events to pass unrecorded, since their meaning might later prove to have a connection with some great cosmic or historical event. In the great fabric of the universe, a single slipped stitch might disclose the beginnings of the great unraveling that the faithful had come to expect. The divine word itself warned that after the seventh seal was broken, the first of seven angels would blow the first of seven trumpets, and hail mixed with blood would fall upon the earth (Rev. 8:7). God himself had turned the waters of Egypt to blood in order to punish Pharaoh for his obduracy (Exod. 7:14–24). And Lactantius, recalling Revelation 6:12, said that at the end of time the moon would be washed with unending blood.41 Blood red was a portentous color that spoke to a gray and anxious age.42 When medieval men and women looked into the sky, especially at dusk, and saw red shapes, they were tempted to believe that those were portents of war.43 Medieval men and women often thought they saw armies at war in the night sky, bloody battle lines and columns on the march.44 In 827, outside Saragossa in Spain, the campaigning Franks saw “frightful rays at night, glowing red with human gore and blazing with the brightness of fire”, which they soon understood to be a sign of the defeat they were about to suffer.45 Red skies needed watching, for “the shape of something like a clot of blood in the high heavens” might signal the death of a king, as it did Louis the Pious’ in 840.46 Einhard, Translatio et miracula sanctorum Marcellini et Petri 1.10, ed. Georg Waitz, MGH SS 15.1 (Hanover, 1888), p. 244. 39 See Christel Meier and Rudolf Suntrup, “Zum Lexikon der Farbenbedeutungen im Mittelalter: Einführung zu Gegenstand und Methoden sowie Probeartikel aus dem Farbenbereich ‘Rot’”, FS, 21 (1987): 390–478; Herbert L. Kessler, “‘Hoc Visibile Imaginatum Figurat Illud Invisibile Verum’: Imagining God in Pictures of Christ”, in Giselle de Nie, Karl F. Morrison and Marco Mostert (eds), Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 297–302. 40 Annales Bertiniani (hereafter Ann. Bert.), a. 862, ed. Félix Grat, Jeanne Vielliard and Suzanne Clémencet, Annales de Saint‑Bertin (Paris, 1964), p. 92. 41 Lactantius, Divine Institutes 7.16.9, ed. Samuel Brandt, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 19 (Vienna, 1890), p. 636. 42 The late fifth-century chronicler Hydatius had millennial concerns and reported a number of incidents of bloody rain: see The “Chronicle” of Hydatius and the “Consularia Constantinopolitana”, ed. and trans. Richard W. Burgess (Oxford, 1993), pp. 100, 114, 120. In one case, Hydatius reported that cut flesh (carnes concise) had fallen with the rain on Gallaecia: p. 114. 43 Paul the Deacon, Historia Langobardorum 4.15, ed. Ludwig Bethmann and Georg Waitz, MGH SRL (Hanover, 1878), p. 121. 44 Ann. Fuld., a. 870, p. 71; Ann. Bert., a. 859 and 839, pp. 81, 28. And see the examples given by Pliny, Historia naturalis 2.57.148. 45 Astronomer, Vita Hludowici imperatoris 41, p. 440. See also Ann. regni Franc., a. 827, p. 173. 46 Ann. Fuld., a. 840, p. 30. 38

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Moreover, most medieval men and women did not doubt that the weather was God’s work. The Lord had spoken to Job out of a storm, and he claimed credit for the storehouse of snow, the treasury of hail, the parting of the winds, the path that thunder and lightning followed, rain, hoarfrost and dew. He was the very father of what fell from the sky (Job 38:22–9). Agobard, in his attack on the widespread belief in weather wizards, had stoutly maintained God’s complete control of the weather, and had marshaled scriptural citations to reinforce his case. A decade later, he and two other churchmen wondered who was so foolish as to doubt that God with visible and invisible blows struck humans for their own good, enlightenment and conversion. His messages were sent not only through humans and spirits, but also through beasts and the smallest living creatures such as frogs and flies, gnats and locusts (see Exod. 8 and 10).47 And who was so stupid as not to know that he sent these punishments “not only through living things, but also through the inanimate, as by means of hail, floods, rain, and drought”?48 The ever original Eriugena would have dissented, since for him, “Thunder as well as lightning, heavy downpours, rain, snow, ice, and various blasts of wind arise from no other source than earthly and watery vapors.”49 But he may have been largely alone. When the red actually fell from the sky in the form of ruddy rain or even reddened snow,50 many medieval observers were worried and watchful. They assumed that they occupied a richly symbolic universe in which things existed not simply in and of themselves, but also as signs of something else. Theirs was, however, far from being an intellectually static age, and a slow but discernible movement in the prevailing assumptions about the nature and meaning of bloody rain can be traced, one that leads from symbolism to physics, from “why” bloody rain fell to “what” red rain was. Gregory of Tours had reported that in 582, “real blood had rained from a cloud” on Paris and had so soaked people with gore that they had shed their clothes in horror.51 Gregory grouped the event with other remarkable happenings of that year, including the appearance of a comet, a marvelous bolt of light that had shone upon Soissons, and an epidemic of boils and tumors, but he stopped short of explaining the relationship between these unusual events or their relevance to Merovingian history. As he said at the start of his Histories: “events keep occurring, some of them good, some of them evil”.52 And he was determined to record everything he thought might be significant, even if he was

Agobard, letter 12, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH Epist. 5 (Berlin, 1898–99), p. 206.29–33. Agobard, letter 12, p. 206.33–4. See Exod. 9:13–35. 49 Eriugena, Periphyseon 2, ed. Edouard Jeauneau, Iohannis Scotti seu Eriugenae Periphyseon: Liber secundus, CC Cont. med. 162 (1997), p. 33.741–3; also edited in PL 122, col. 550A (text ed. J. Floss). 50 For a case of bloody snow, see Ann. Fuld., a. 860, p. 54. 51 Gregory of Tours, Historiae 6.14, p. 258. 52 Ibid., preface, p. 31. 47 48

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unsure what that significance might prove to be. He trusted that in the fullness of time, the meaning of the possibly portentous would be revealed.53 Two centuries later, Alcuin made just such a connection with bloody rain when pondering the attack of the Northmen on Lindisfarne in 793: In fact, signs of that trouble had preceded it, some through extraordinary events, others through unusual behavior. What did the rain of blood mean that we saw during Lent in the city of York at the church of Saint Peter, the prince of apostles, which is the principal church of the entire kingdom? That rain fell threateningly on a clear day from the peak of the roof on the north side of the church? How can it not be thought that a penalty [to be paid] in blood was descending from the north upon [our] people? Indeed, it can be seen that this event began with [the rain of blood] that recently fell upon the house of God.54

The York incident was one that Alcuin himself had seen, probably during March, shortly before he returned to the Continent and to Charlemagne’s court.55 Thinking about it later, he realized that this rain of blood had been one of several portents announcing the attack on Lindisfarne, though just why God had allowed or even sent the Northmen to sack one of his most important monasteries continued to confound him. Agnellus of Ravenna, distraught over the troubled history of his Church in the 840s, had little doubt as he bundled together a set of portentous events that he thought had prefigured the death of Emperor Louis the Pious, the coming of civil war, and the disastrous reign of Archbishop George. In his list of dire signs, he reported that it had rained blood on his city when a church was being dedicated.56 His use of red rain was selective and packaged together with other portents, all indicators of the disastrous times he lived through or the worse ones yet to come. In June 1027, a red rain fell on Aquitaine, and in this case a revealing set of responses survives. Duke William V (the Wise) wrote to King Robert II (the Pious) of France that three days before the Feast of John the Baptist, a rain of blood had fallen upon the maritime parts of Aquitaine. This bloody liquid was so potent that it could not be washed from flesh, clothes or stone, though it could be removed from wood. William asked the king to seek an explanation for this portent from the wise men of his kingdom. King Robert not only sent out inquiries, but specified that he wanted his learned advisers to determine from various histories whether this kind of thing had ever happened before, and what had transpired as a result. Moreover, he asked his wise men to supply him 53 Ibid., 6.34, p. 274; Gregory notes that the death of King Chilperic’s son was the meaning of the bright light that shone forth from a cloud that he had reported earlier, but had not there explained: Historiae 6.33, p. 274. 54 Alcuin, letter 16, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH Epist. 4 (Berlin, 1895), p. 43.16–21. 55 See Donald A. Bullough, Alcuin: Achievement and Reputation, Education and Society in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 16 (Leiden, 2004), p. 410 and n. 250. 56 Agnellus, Liber Pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis 172, ed. Oswald Holder-Egger, MGH SRL (Hanover, 1878), p. 389.

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with references and texts.57 Behind William’s appeal and the king’s investigation there may have been unstated millennial worries, for this instance of bloody rain fell close to the approaching, if fuzzy, fault line of a thousand years since the crucifixion. But the king, in his quest for earlier and therefore not worldending examples of bloody rain, may also have wished to dampen any explicit apocalyptic reading of the event.58 Gauzlin, the archbishop of Bourges and former abbot of Fleury, informed the king that blood always portended the sword, either in the form of a civil or international war, and he supplied texts from ancient and early medieval histories. His selection of sources was neither extensive nor particularly well analyzed, but he hit his stride when he left his ancient authorities and attempted to analyze the reported incident in symbolic terms. His was an attempt at a hermeneutical reading of the natural world. He was convinced, for instance, that the stained stone stood for the Church, which was sure to undergo some trial in the near future, and that the stained flesh and clothes represented humans and their physical bodies. By the wood that could be washed, however, he understood the salvific wood of the Cross and the wood of Noah’s ark. He thought that this wood signified divine mercy. Thus, as the wood could be cleansed of blood, so Christians might receive the purifying mercy of God through penance and charity.59 Fulbert, the bishop of Chartres, also answered the king’s letter, but somewhat differently. He noted that Livy, Valerius and Orosius had all reported rains of blood, but he chose to supply only Gregory of Tours’ account of the strange marvels of 582.60 He too assumed that a rain of blood portended some coming public disaster. Like Gauzlin, he finished by analyzing the recent incident in symbolic terms. The stone, he said, signified the impious; the flesh, fornicators; and the wood, being neither hard like stone nor soft like flesh, stood for those who were neither impious nor fornicators. When the calamity of war or disease predicted by the blood finally fell upon the people, he thought, those who had remained hard or soft would perish in their own blood, but those in between might be delivered from the dangers of death by God’s secret judgment. Thus, Gauzlin and Fulbert both arrived, through a symbolic reading of events and texts, at similar understandings of the need for penance, but their See The Letters and Poems of Fulbert of Chartres, ed. and trans. Frederick Behrends (Oxford, 1976), appendix B, no. 2, pp. 274–5. See Richard W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London, 1953), p. 87; Heinrich Fichtenau, Living in the Tenth Century: Mentalities and the Social Order, trans. Patrick J. Geary (Chicago, IL, 1991), p. 319; Karl Ferdinand Werner, “Gott, Herrscher und Historiograph: der Geschichtsschreiber als Interpret des Wirkens Gottes in der Welt und Ratgeber der Könige (4. bis 12. Jahrhundert)”, in Ernst-Dieter Hehl, Hubertus Seibert, and Franz Staab (eds), Deus qui mutat tempora: Menschen und Institutionen im Wandel des Mittelalters (Sigmaringen, 1987), pp. 1–31, here pp. 28–30. 58 See Johannes Fried, “Endzeiterwartung um die Jahrtausendwende”, Deutsches Archiv, 45 (1989): 381–473, here pp. 381–4; Richard Landes, Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034 (Cambridge, MA, 1995), pp. 178–9. 59 For Gauzlin’s letter, see Letters and Poems of Fulbert, appendix B, no. 3, pp. 275–7. 60 Fulbert, letter 125, in Letters and Poems of Fulbert, pp. 224–6. 57

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specific interpretations differed, since for Gauzlin the stained stone was the Church itself, and for Fulbert it represented the impious. They both shared the general notion that the flesh stood for man’s physical being, but Fulbert neglected entirely the stained cloth and treated the washable wood as the middle way of penance and reform. Both shared, in other words, the conviction that a rain of blood signified war and the onset of some unspecified disaster, and that the only real remedy was penance and Christian reform, but they traveled different and, in some respects, divergent paths to arrive at the same conclusion. They declined to treat the red rain on its own terms, but fitted it into their ideas about a physical world pregnant with spiritual and symbolic meaning. But the story does not end there. A century later, William of Conches, the great grammarian and natural philosopher, took his turn at explaining bloody rain. Around 1125, as a young and daring master, he wrote a textbook called the Philosophia in which he tried to treat all of known nature in one small book. He posited that rain was entirely a physical phenomenon, and laid out a medieval explanation for evaporation and condensation. He observed, moreover, that wind played a crucial role in lifting waters and vapors into the air, and claimed that on occasion the wind even lifted up objects such as tadpoles, frogs and fish, and then, to the amazement of simple folk, sent them tumbling down. He also knew that those who were ignorant of natural explanations for things thought that it occasionally rained blood. What they did not know, he wrote, was that when rain became too condensed and heated, it turned thick and red in the manner of blood.61 William may have missed the mark in his final analysis of the physics of red rain, but he had come very close to a reasonable explanation, since if he knew that powerful winds could lift up frogs and also knew that red rain was not bloody, he was only one inference and close empirical observation away from solving some part of the physics of bloody rain. Prevailing medieval assumptions about what red rain was and signified had moved in six centuries from being a mysterious sign of divine displeasure in the hands of Gregory of Tours and Alcuin, to a historical commonplace and symbolical cipher in the reading of two early eleventh-century bishops, and finally, to the purely physical phenomenon posited by William of Conches. There had always been an intermittent line of dissenters who denied the idea of a supernatural rain. Cicero in antiquity, Eriugena in the ninth century and William of Conches in the early twelfth all insisted on treating weather in natural terms, but theirs was but a counterpoint to a set of dominant assumptions. Yet something may have changed, since if Eriugena had been relatively alone in his strict naturalism when it came to the weather, William belonged to a movement. Not only was he at the forefront of what Peter Brown has called the great twelfth-century achievement of granting “to the cosmos a life of its own”,62 but 61 William of Conches, Philosophia 3.6–7, PL 172, col. 77A–C. William later treated the topic in a similar way in Dragmaticon 5.3.2–3, ed. Italo Ronca, Guillelmi de Conchis Dragmaticon philosophiae, CC Cont. med. 152 (1997), p. 144. 62 Peter Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA, 1982), p. 325.

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his Philosophia was a popular text throughout Europe.63 The students who spilled out from the cathedral schools with new ideas about the natural world may have been less likely to accept the claims for bloody rain that had been popularly assumed for so long and that would continue despite their new analysis of the physics of red rain. In the early medieval reading of bloody rain, we may, I think, spy something of the shifting thought of the early Middle Ages itself, and none of it was, to my mind, unsophisticated or the product of pure invention. Early medieval men and women saw what their world and their times encouraged them to see. I wonder if we do any better today with our own uncertain signs, with mysterious crop circles and the strange things some of us still see in the night sky. We often see exactly what we expect or hope to see, and what our social and intellectual worlds predispose us to see. What had changed for William was the world around him. In the long morning of the early Middle Ages, new directions were being found. Weather, I would suggest, is one of the places for us to look as we study various phases of the medieval mind and its slowly shifting engagement with the natural world. It may well be that by the time we reach William of Conches and his kind, the early Middle Ages was coming to a close, at least at its intellectual edge. If so, his new thinking and the rapidly spreading popularity of his style of reasoning (even before the full influx of Aristotelian texts had washed over Europe) about bloody rain in particular and the natural world in general might signal the effective passing of one age and the commencement of another. Bloody rain was but one of a series of ideas on the move. We would do well to watch the watchers of early medieval weather, for what they saw and reported was not just the weather of the day, but their own physical, cultural and intellectual engagement with a changing world.

63 See the list of manuscripts: André Vernet, “Un remaniement de la Philosophia de Guillaume de Conches”, in his Etudes médiévales (Paris, 1981), pp. 143–55, 660–63.

Chapter 10

The King Says No: On the Logic of Type-Scenes in Late Antique and Early Medieval Narrative Joaquín Martínez Pizarro

The narrative literature of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages is highly stereotyped, a quality that rarely meets with appreciation, suggesting as it does formulaic triteness and historical unreliability. I wish to approach it here with a measure of optimism, focusing on the possibilities some of these stereotypes can open for narrators, as well as on the critical moves they require on the part of literary scholars and historians. The literature of the period, through its references and even more through its assumptions, offers a window into the reality of the times, though not an undistorting one. Although the formulaic and schematic elements so conspicuous in it can be blamed for much of this distortion, they are not only of intrinsic interest as a range of available forms, but can on occasion provide insights into the world that generated them. Literary stereotypes are not repeated ad infinitum in a rigid form, but are constantly adapted, elaborated, transformed, and the reasons for these mutations are sometimes to be found in the realities the stereotypes are called to describe and in the functions of the text in its own time. Where, by good luck, we happen to know something about the circumstances in which a work was produced, the author’s manipulation of patterns and formulas may prove extremely revealing. In the repertory of prefabricated materials and traditional forms available to late antique and early medieval narrators, type-scenes are of fundamental importance. They are units of dramatic action stylized along conventional lines, and in this sense can be usefully distinguished from the more familiar topoi, most of which involve description rather than narrative, though a few, such as modesty formulas, are more accurately characterized as pure rhetorical gestures. Type-scenes are ideologically charged. In antiquity, as in the later Middle Ages, scenes stylized according to familiar rituals, such as for instance the Homeric xenia, or scenes of hospitality, or the arming of the knight in medieval romances, may be said to reflect the ideological assumptions of the narrative as a whole. Where ideology is not entirely settled and agreed upon, however,

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the scenes that convey it cannot be treated as reaffirmations of what everybody knows: they are therefore usually more central, because more problematic, and receive greater dramatic emphasis. This is the case with two closely related typescenes characteristic of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. In the first a bishop, priest or other representative of the spiritual power visits a secular ruler to rebuke him for his moral failings. The formula, which Jacques Fontaine refers to as le prophète chez le roi (“the prophet in the king’s house”), can be traced back to the many confrontations between Jewish rulers and holy men in the historical books of the Old Testament. A second, closely analogous type-scene involves the intervention of a bishop or saint before the representatives of secular authority to bring about the liberation of captives. Although just as schematic as le prophète chez le roi, this scene cannot be derived from a literary model, but reflects a well-documented activity of bishops in real life. Ideologically, the two type-scenes are easily distinguishable, however compatible. In the former, the ruler himself is urged to change, the entire dramatic action taking place between the representative of regnum and that of sacerdotium, whereas the latter introduces a third party on whose behalf the bishop is pleading, whether they are present or not. The dramatic forms of the two, however, have several important points in common: 1. Access achieved. The ruler sees the man of God arrive. Although access is

denied at first, the ruler is forced, often by supernatural means, to receive the unwelcome visitor. This element is presented from the point of view of the ruler. 2. Ceremonial confrontation. The conflict of wills is staged around a point of ceremony or protocol. Will the king get up to greet the bishop? Will he meet him at the palace door? If he offers him a cup, will the bishop drink from it? This element can be realized in a great variety of ways. 3. Statement of success. Towards the end of the episode, the narrator introduces a statement to the effect that the bishop or saint, the man of God, was granted everything he asked for. This element is perhaps more necessary and logical in liberations of captives, or in related scenes where a churchman pleads on behalf of fellow citizens threatened by a military figure, but it is also present in many instances of le prophète chez le roi.

 Sulpice Sévère, Vie de Saint Martin, 3, ed. Jacques Fontaine, SC 135 (3 vols, Paris, 1967), pp. 913–46, esp. p. 916, n. 3.  See František Graus, “Die Gewalt bei den Anfängen des Feudalismus und die ‘Gefangenenbefreiungen’ der merowingischen Hagiographie”, Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 1 (1961): 61–156, and William Klingshirn, “Charity and Power: Caesarius of Arles and the Ransoming of Captives in Sub-Roman Gaul”, Journal of Roman Studies, 75 (1985): 183–203.  A characteristically acute discussion of scenes of this general type can be found in Pierre Courcelle, “Histoire ou cliché hagiographique? Trois dîners chez le roi wisigoth d’Aquitaine”, published as appendix VII to Courcelle’s Histoire littéraire des grandes invasions germaniques, 3rd edn (Paris, 1964), pp. 339–47.

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All three elements can be found fully developed in the Dialogues of Sulpicius Severus, a work of the very early fifth century in which the miracles of Martin of Tours are compared to those of his Egyptian and Palestinian contemporaries. I will go briefly over three episodes, paying special attention to the third element: the statement of success. In Dialogues 2.5, we are told that Martin wished to see Valentinian I. It is not made clear what he was planning to ask for, so the episode could belong to either type. In any case, Valentinian did not want to hear what Martin had to say, and his wife was a militant Arian, so the saint was kept away from the palace. Martin prayed and fasted, in sackcloth and ashes, and on the seventh day an angel told him to go to the palace, where the gates flew open before him. The emperor, furious, was unwilling to rise to greet him until his throne, catching fire, forced him to do so. And then, Sulpicius writes: “Nor did he await Martin’s demands, but granted everything before it was requested.” Dialogues 3.4 is a clear instance of the liberation of captives. The brutal Count Avitianus arrives in Tours leading a crowd of wretched prisoners in chains. That night he is twice warned in his dreams that the holy man is at the door of his residence, but the sleepy servants he sends to check whether this is so tell him without looking that there is no one there. A further warning forces Avitianus himself to come to the door, where he finds Martin waiting to plead for the captives. The story so far combines the motif of access – in that because of the hour and the lazy underlings, Martin is prevented from seeing the count – and the ceremonial point, in that this imperial functionary, described in a later episode as “that beast that fed upon human blood and the deaths of unfortunates”, comes to the door himself in the manner of a servant. Martin’s success is expressed in Avitianus’ own words: “Why have you done this to me, lord? You need say nothing: I know what you desire. I see what you request.” The captives are set free immediately. My last example from this work, Dialogues 3.11–13, sticks less closely to the formula than the first two, and is therefore more revealing. Martin travels to Trier to persuade the usurper Maximus to cease his persecution of the Spanish Priscillianists. The anti-Priscillianist bishops who surround Maximus fear Martin and his influence, and persuade the ruler to send city officials to bar his way, “unless he would declare that he had come in a peaceful frame of mind towards the bishops in the city”. The saint manages to get through, without supernatural assistance. He then has a series of highly political and inconclusive discussions with Maximus as to the rights and wrongs of the Priscillianist Sulpicii Severi libri qui supersunt, ed. C. von Halm, Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 1 (Vienna, 1866), p. 187: “nec expectatis Martini precibus prius omnia praestitit quam rogaretur”.  Ibid., 3.8, p. 205: “illa bestia, quae humano sanguine et infelicium mortibus alebatur”.  Ibid., p. 202: “quid, inquit, mihi hoc, domine, fecisti? nihil te loqui necesse est: scio quid desideres, uideo quid requiras”.  Ibid., p. 209: “... nisi se cum pace episcoporum ibi consistentium adfore fateretur”. 

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controversy. Martin wants Maximus to recall officers and troops he has recently sent to Spain, but the usurper will only do so if Martin takes communion with his bishops. Here Sulpicius inverts the usual order of ceremonial point and statement of success. First, Martin makes his request, and “with no delay, Maximus grants everything”. In return, the saint takes communion with fellow bishops of whom he deeply disapproves. On his way back to Tours, he is rebuked by an angel because of this compromise, and the narrator recalls that in later years Martin himself would point out that he had been punished for it by the weakening of his miraculous powers. In the light of this dubious quid pro quo, which is fully exposed in the narrative, and of the fact that Maximus’ anti-Priscillianist measures were at that point largely irreversible, the statement that Martin got everything he asked for starts to sound remarkably slippery and hollow, but it is also part of a formula that is by now highly resistant to reality. Once these scenic types are established in the narrative repertory, and generally familiar in form and meaning, it becomes possible to refer to them briefly, without producing the full scene, or obliquely, by alluding to their models. So Gregory of Tours, in his Liber Vitae Patrum (LVP) 5, shows Abbot Portianus visiting the camp of King Theuderic to plead for the common people of the Auvergne. Prevented from seeing the ruler, who is sleeping, he performs in his absence a spectacular miracle, at which Theuderic comes running from his tent and we learn that Portianus ut voluit, sic recepit (“obtained whatever he requested”).10 Elsewhere in the same work, LVP 1, Saint Lupicinus, appearing before the Burgundian king Chilperic I at Geneva, faces the ruler, who has been forced to rise before him by the uncanny quaking of his throne, and is said to stand before him sicut quondam Jacob coram Pharaone (“just as once Jacob [stood]

Ibid., p. 211: “nec mora, Maximus indulget omnia”. Versions of this type-scene are widely scattered in saints’ lives and chronicles. The late fifth-century life of Germanus of Auxerre by Constantius of Lyon describes an encounter between the saint and Goar, king of the Alans. It takes place in Brittany, where Germanus must beg the king to stop plundering the region. Goar is on horseback on the road, rather than at home, but the meeting ends with a statement that “they discussed not how what the king wanted might be effected, but how what the priest requested might be fulfilled” (tractaturque, qualiter non quod rex voluerat, sed quod sacerdos petierat conpleretur); Vita Germani, ed. Wilhelm Levison, MGH SRM 7 (Hanover, 1919), p. 272. An incident in the biography of the mid-eighth-century Pope Zacharias in the Liber pontificalis stays closer to type. The pope is reclaiming Roman cities taken by the Lombards, and meets King Liutprand at the city of Terni in the duchy of Spoleto. The king first sends an envoy, and then comes himself to meet the pontiff: “By the grace of the Holy Ghost he obtained all things he asked him for” (omnia quaecumque ab eo petiit per gratia Spiritus sancti obtinuit); Liber Pontificalis, ed. Louis Duchesne, vol. 3 with corr. by Cyrille Vogel, Bibliothèque des Ecoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 3 (3 vols, Paris, 1955–57), vol. 1, pp. 427–8. A great enthusiast of this type-scene was Agnellus, the ninth-century historian of Ravenna, who uses it seven times in his Liber pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis, cf. the discussion in Joaquín Martínez Pizarro, Writing Ravenna: The Liber pontificalis of Andreas Agnellus (Ann Arbor, MI, 1995), pp. 41–2. 10 Gregorii episcopi Turonensis miracula et opera minora, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SRM 1.2 (Hanover, 1885, reprinted 1969), p. 229.  

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before Pharaoh”).11 Even more obliquely, the Visigothic King Sisebut, in his passio of Desiderius of Vienne, describes the saint rebuking Theuderic II and Brunhild by saying, to quote the recent translation of A.T. Fear, that he “blew forth the trumpet blast in the manner of the prophets”.12 This reference to the prophetic typology of the episode identifies the roles played by Desiderius and his royal opponents, even though in this instance the holy man’s mission is not crowned with success.13 Having looked at these various textual manifestations of the two typescenes, I will now focus on what seems to me a remarkably devious and adroit manipulation of the scheme, which can only be understood by contrast and comparison with traditional representations of the liberation of captives. In addition, I will attempt to explain departures from the conventional formula by relating them to extra-literary factors, in particular the context in which the text was composed and the personality and career of its author. The Historia Wambae regis of Julian of Toledo, a work in prose written between 673 and 675, describes the accession of Wamba, one of the few rulers of Visigothic Spain to have been actually elected, and his victory over a separatist insurrection in Visigothic Gaul or Gallia, today’s Languedoc-Roussillon.14 The rebellion, started by the local nobility, had been co-opted by the dux Paul, the military commander originally sent by Wamba to put it down. Julian of Toledo uses a range of literary forms to represent this episode, some of which, such as invective (insultatio), cannot be called narrative. But the core of the Historia remains his epicized and classicizing account of the events, modeled on the Sallustian monographs and displaying Ibid., p. 217. A third instance of the formula in the LVP, the confrontation between Bishop Nicetius of the Treveri and the sacrilegious King Theudebert (17.2) hews even less closely to the standard type, in that the recalcitrant ruler yields only in part and for a short period to the saint’s entreaties: “and so it was that, at the bishop’s words, the king became more gentle” (Unde factum est, ut, sacerdote orante, rex mitior fieret ...); ibid., pp. 279–80. The rather high frequency of the type-scene in the LVP may be explained by the exceptional character of this work in Gregory’s hagiographic production: here he concentrates on the lives of saints, rather than on posthumous miracles. 12 Lives of the Visigothic Fathers, trans. Andrew T. Fear, Translated Texts for Historians, 26 (Liverpool, 1997), p. 9. Cf. Vita vel passio sancti Desiderii a Sisebuto rege composita, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SRM 3 (Hanover, 1896), p. 635: “more nempe prophetico clangore tubae personuit”. 13 Sisebut wrote to show the wickedness of the Merovingian rulers, so a display of royal deference to the saint was out of the question; cf. Jacques Fontaine, “King Sisebut’s Vita Desiderii and the Political Function of Visigothic Hagiography”, in Edward James (ed.), Visigothic Spain: New Approaches (Oxford, 1980), pp. 93–129. Also, the king liked to exhibit his literary and scriptural learning, and an allusion to the typology of the scene may have seemed more impressive than a narrative rendering. 14 Historia Wambae regis auctore Iuliano episcopo toletano, ed. Wilhelm Levison, MGH SRM 5 (Hanover, 1910). On the political ideology of this work, see Suzanne Teillet, Des Goths à la nation gothique. Les origines de l’idée de nation en Occident du Ve au VIIe siècle (Paris, 1984), pp. 585–636, and Mayke de Jong, “Adding Insult to Injury: Julian of Toledo and his Historia Wambae”, in Peter Heather (ed.), The Visigoths from the Migration Period to the Seventh Century: An Anthropological Perspective, Studies in Historical Archaeoethnology, 4 (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 373–89. Joaquín Martínez Pizarro, The Story of Wamba: Julian of Toledo’s Historia Wambae regis (Washington, DC, 2005), offers an annotated translation of the text, with historical and literary commentary. 11

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at every turn topics and devices derived from late antique panegyric literature in prose and verse. Chapters 21–2 of this narrative start out from the point of view of the losers in the conflict: Paul and his Spanish and Gallic followers. Nîmes, their last bastion, has been taken by Wamba’s troops, and the rebel forces are forced to withdraw into the castrum arenarum, the Roman amphitheater of the city. This is clearly the end, and the leaders of the rebellion prepare for capture, judgment, and very likely death. Argebadus, bishop of Narbonne, sets out to beg Wamba’s clemency for the defeated. Julian does not make clear why the bishop is among them, and this will become a source of uncertainty about the meaning of the scene. The phrase “by common decision” (communi consilio) leaves it unclear whether the rebels prompted the bishop to speak on their behalf. Argebadus, in any case, did not take up the standard episcopal role as the voice of compassion on his own initiative. Four miles from the city, he sees the king approaching at the head of his army, on horseback, and he crouches before him in the dust to beg forgiveness. The reader will recognize elements of the type-scenes I have outlined, but they are turned upside down, and so is their meaning. Access is thematized: Wamba approaches the last stronghold of the rebellion, the one fortress that remains closed to him, and having come to it, he will have its occupants dragged out to face him. It is not the ruler who sits behind these walls and sees the holy man coming, or hears of him, but the rebels and the bishop who will speak for them occupy that position, and the threatening and radiant figure they see coming towards them is that of Wamba. The charisma of kingship, which Julian of Toledo has already built up with accounts of Wamba’s unction and enthronement in the capital, is made even more powerful in this scene by the fact that, absent from the action since Chapter 11, given that he took no part in the fighting, the ruler is now reappearing at the moment of victory. By this inversion of the type-scene, Argebadus is placed in the role of the king who must arise, or even come to the door to meet the visiting holy man. The gesture by which he humiliates himself, prone in the dust before the mounted king, contrasts starkly and very pointedly with the various gestures with which bishops usually uphold the precedence, or at least the equal dignity, of sacerdotium in these confrontations with the secular power. There is a reason for this selfabasement. Argebadus begins his plea for mercy with a full acknowledgment that the rebels are guilty of treason and have broken their solemn oaths to the ruler. This admission, too, contrasts sharply with the range of arguments used in type-scenes of liberation of captives, in which the guilt or innocence of the captives is never an issue. But the inversion of roles has put the king in the right, making him the injured party, and thus rendered the admission necessary. To make clear that he too has “entrails of compassion”, Wamba matches Argebadus’ tears with tears of his own, and has the bishop raised from the ground. He does not, however, dismount, so that the different standing of the two figures remains marked and the ceremonial point can be said to be carefully

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negotiated. What follows is out of the ordinary, because Argebadus makes two successive requests and receives two different answers. To his initial plea for mercy, Wamba replies that no one will be executed, though the guilty will not go unpunished. Then, angered suddenly by the continued pleading of the bishop, who now asks that no punishment at all be imposed, he rebukes him for his escalating demands and, after granting him alone total immunity, refuses to do as much for Paul and his men. The king then rides on, still fired by indignation and eager to make his entrance into the conquered city. The bishop is left in tears by the side of the road. That, at least, is the impression left by the scene: the king says no angrily, and puts the bishop in his place for presuming on his indulgence. In this sense, then, Julian makes the scene work by contradicting expectations created by the type-scene of liberation. But it only takes a second reading and some awareness of the Visigothic laws on treason and rebellion that were in force at the time to realize that this refusal, so temperamental and final-sounding, is completely hollow, since Wamba has already made a huge concession, the largest that his enemies could have expected. King Chindasvind, who had much to fear from Visigothic expatriates in the Frankish realms, had given a law against refugi sive insulentes, fugitives and insubordinate subjects who might plot against the king and his government; the law, preserved in his son Reccesvind’s Forum Iudicum, foresaw only death or blinding as penalties for such a crime, and refused all appeals on behalf of those found guilty.15 Canon 1 of the Seventh Council of Toledo, held under Chindasvind in 646, taking up this matter of De refugis atque perfidis clericis sive laicis (“On fugitives and traitors, whether clerics or laymen”), decreed the excommunication of such traitors, and ended by admonishing the ruler never to omit this penalty without the full approval of his bishops.16 When in 653 Reccesvind asked the Eighth Council of Toledo for permission to mitigate these strictures, clearly trying to obtain some leeway to negotiate with the expatriate nobility, the bishops reacted with an endless theological debate which, while it ended giving the king what he wanted, also reminded him of the seriousness of the crime from the bishops’ point of view.17 Now, Paul and his accomplices had committed an aggravated form of this crime, openly seeking to overthrow Wamba, and bringing into Gallia foreign troops, Frankish and Aquitainian, to help them in the attempt. The new bishops who had replaced those loyal to Wamba had themselves been consecrated by Frankish bishops brought into Visigothic territory for that purpose. So when Wamba replies to Argebadus’ first demand by granting him the lives of all the surviving rebels, he is being remarkably generous, which in itself calls for explanation. The second demand, that there should be no punishment at all, is so excessive, shows such Leges Visigothorum 2.1.8, ed. Karl Zeumer, MGH LL 1 (Hanover, 1902), pp. 53–8. On this law, see P.D. King, Law and Society in the Visigothic Kingdom (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 40–43. 16 Concilios visigóticos e hispano-romanos, ed. and trans. José Vives (Barcelona, 1963), pp. 249–53. 17 Ibid., pp. 268–77. This is Canon 2 in the Council Acts. 15

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complete disregard for the realities of the rebellion and the laws of the realm, that I suspect it was never made, and that Julian invented it precisely to allow Wamba to say no and to display a harsh, punitive attitude that he was not really able to adopt at the time. The king has in fact said yes, as kings usually do to bishops, in literature at least; he has acted as we would expect him to act. But the text goes further, to demonstrate that he can also say no. Wamba, as the Historia makes clear from the beginning, was one of the earliest European kings to be anointed at his accession, and perhaps the first. He was elected by acclamation of the palace nobility, and the rest of the Visigothic nobles were given time to confirm their acceptance of the new ruler and swear their oaths of loyalty to him. The rebellion in Gallia, which started less than one year after his coming to power, violated these oaths and the laws of the kingdom. And yet we know that the leaders of the rebellion, if they did not go scot-free, suffered only decalvation (which in Spain at the time was not a scalping), the humiliation of being paraded on camel-back when the king returned in triumph to Toledo, and the confiscation of their property, most of which was returned to them in 683, three years after the deposition of Wamba, by the Thirteenth Council of Toledo.18 Their presence at court ten years after the rebellion and the evidence of their influence on the council suggest very strongly that back in 673 the king, newly elected and backed by no dynastic network, was simply not powerful enough to have members of the nobility executed, however guilty. To rule Spain, with its difficult northern border, he needed the troops and private armies that only the nobility could mobilize.19 But this powerlessness, even in the moment of victory, must have been deeply resented by him and could not be openly acknowledged: hence Julian’s invention of the second, implausible demand and of Wamba’s violent refusal. The constraints upon Wamba’s ambition did not last long, and it is likely that his military success in Gallia helped bring them to an end. Evidence for this is a law given in Toledo in November 673, that is to say almost immediately upon the king’s return to the urbs regia, the royal city. The law is a comprehensive statement on the military obligations of Wamba’s subjects, imposing harsh penalties on those who would not fulfill them, and even on the clergy, who had never had such duties before.20 Wamba, who passed very few laws in the eight years of his rule, is here openly defiant, wresting from the nobility their chief bargaining chip, and challenging the ecclesiastical hierarchy, who had often sided with the nobles against the throne at the councils of Toledo. It is also significant that during his reign Wamba never summoned a national council, Ibid., pp. 415–16. Wamba’s dependence on the nobility and his struggle from early on to overturn it are visible already in his staging of the victory at Nîmes and the trial of the traitors that followed immediately; cf. the discussion in Michael McCormick, Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Early Medieval West (Cambridge, 1986), p. 315. 20 Leges Visigothorum 9.2.8, pp. 370–73. It is followed by lex 9.2.9, the “softened” revision of the law by Wamba’s successor Erwig, who deleted all references to military obligations of the clergy. 18 19

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giving the Church no opportunity to express reservations or criticism.21 I would argue that the defiant mood of this moment in Toledo, most likely between 673 and 675, while the king was building successfully on the centralized power accumulated by his predecessors Chindasvind and Reccesvind, serves to define the background against which the Historia was composed. In particular, it provides the reason why Julian manipulated the confrontation between king and bishop to make it sound as if Wamba were fully in control, when in fact he was letting his enemies get away with almost symbolic punishments. The fact was known in Toledo and had to be admitted, but the addition of an immoderate, most likely imaginary demand on the bishop’s part, followed by a sharp royal rebuff, allowed the king to save face and to project an attitude more in line with his growing self-assurance. The role of Bishop Argebadus raises a number of questions. In his plea, he includes himself among the traitors who have broken their oaths to Wamba, even though the Historia has told us previously that Argebadus was in fact loyal, and attempted vainly to close off the road to Narbonne to the rebel forces.22 Nevertheless he says “we sinned” and “we defiled the faith we had promised you”. E.A. Thompson was led to conjecture that after initial loyalty to the king, Argebadus had fallen in with the rebels.23 It is also possible to see his self-inclusion here as a gesture of solidarity with the defeated men in whose name he is speaking. This might also explain why, though rejecting the bishop’s heightened demands, Wamba offers total immunity to him. But it is possible to take the matter less literally. As a narrative device, the type-scene used here serves to confirm that the ruler has viscera misericordiae (“entrails of compassion”), and also that he stands in a proper relation of deference to the wishes of the Church, of sacerdotium. The device here has been manipulated to hide the fact that the king was in no position to say no to this request for mercy and that the rebels are alive and well at the time of writing. The matter would have been settled in Gallia, and is therefore conveniently dramatized as an encounter between the victorious Wamba and the metropolitan bishop of that province, whether he interceded for the rebels in person or not. We may wonder what the bishop of Narbonne is doing in Nîmes, where the scene takes place, but the Historia has already established that Aregius, the bishop of Nîmes, loyal to Wamba, had been deposed and handed to the Franks by the rebels, and

21 See Marc Reydellet, La royauté dans la littérature latine de Sidoine Apollinaire à Isidore de Séville (Rome, 1981), p. 524, n. 68, confirming the older conclusion of Aloysius K. Ziegler, Church and State in Visigothic Spain (Washington DC, 1930), p. 112, as to Toledo 8 (653), the last national council to be held – under Reccesvind – until the deposition of Wamba seventeen years later: “In this council the church sided with the palatines against royal tyranny.” But Reccesvind and Wamba had learned their lesson. 22 Historia Wambae regis 7, p. 506: “Quod vir vitae venerabilis et sollicitudine salvandae plebis idoneus Argebadus, cathedrae Narbonensis antistes, subtilissima quorundam relatione comperiens, utpote tyranno aditum illi civitatis intercludere nisus est.” 23 E.A. Thompson, The Goths in Spain (Oxford, 1969), p. 220.

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replaced by one of their creatures, so the incumbent at the time of Wamba’s victory could not have been brought in to elicit royal compassion.24 Starting from literary considerations, we have moved to more uncertain issues of historical reconstruction. The figure of Julian of Toledo, author of the Historia, may allow us to end on a less conjectural note. In 673, he was a man of little power, a young priest taking his first steps at the Visigothic court, yet in January 680, only six years later, he would be consecrated bishop of Toledo and thus placed at the apex of the Spanish ecclesiastical hierarchy. Among his tools at the start of this impressive career, Julian had vast learning, easily comparable to that of Isidore of Seville, and literary powers well beyond those of the encyclopedist. The Historia must have been composed in the middle years of the decade; later, with mounting tension between Wamba and the nobility, the events of the rebellion would have lost relevance, and after the deposition of Wamba in 680, it would have made no sense at all to commemorate them.25 And yet in this very early work, his only venture into historiography, Julian writes an elegant classicizing Latin that is quite unmatched in seventh-century Europe and draws upon classical and late antique models that find no echoes elsewhere at the time and that he never uses again. This extravagant showpiece at the beginning of his rise to power and influence was by no means excessive, for Julian, as a second-generation Christian, the son of converted Jews, carried an immense handicap in the country with the harshest anti-Jewish legislation in western Europe.26 The Historia, then, is a demonstration of what he has to offer; it is composed with a Toledan audience in mind, and tailored to the 24 Historia Wambae regis 6, p. 505: “His igitur criminis caput, dum per diversos ignem suae infidelitatis accenderet, Nemausensis urbis episcopum beatae vitae Aregium ad perfidiae notam trahere nitebatur. Quem casto ore constantique corde repugnantem suis consiliis cernens, et ordinis et loci dignitate pribatum, pondere vinculorum onustum, in Franciae finibus Francorum manibus tradidit inludendum.” 25 The deposition itself may well have been a bloodless palace coup made possible by a passing indisposition of the king that allowed his most powerful vassals at court to administer to him the sacrament of penance, making him unfit to rule. Julian will have played a leading role in this intrigue, as well as in the election and accession of Wamba’s successor Erwig. The best analysis of the evidence is Suzanne Teillet, “La déposition de Wamba. Un coup d’état au VIIe siècle”, in Louis Holtz and Jean-Claude Fredouille (eds), De Tertullien aux mozarabes. Mélanges offerts à Jacques Fontaine (3 vols, Paris, 1992), vol. 2, pp. 99–113. The tension that had accumulated before then between Wamba, the nobility and the clergy is well documented in the acts of Toledo 12 (681), almost certainly the work of Julian (see Vives, Concilios, pp. 330–410). Setting aside the reverent language reserved for rulers, the acts denounce and cancel a number of Wamba’s initiatives, and in doing so refer to the former king’s “unjust commands” (iniustis Wambae principis iussionibus), his “frivolity of mind” (consilio levitatis), and the “arrogant and scandalous abuse” involved in his innovations (tam insolenti huismodi disturpationis); ibid., p. 390. 26 Crónica mozárabe de 754, ed. José Eduardo López Pereira (Zaragoza, 1980), p. 56: “In cuius tempore iam Iulianus episcopus, ex traduce Iudaeorum ut flores rosarum de inter uepres spinarum productus, omnibus mundi partibus in doctrinam Xpi manet preclarus, qui etiam a parentibus Xpianis progenitus splendide in omne prudentia Toleto manet edoctus, ubi et postmodum in episcopio exititit decoratus.” On this subject, see also the remarks of Jocelyn Hillgarth in Sancti Iuliani toletanae sedis episcopi opera, ed. Jocelyn Hillgarth, vol. 1, CC 115 (1976), p. viii.

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perceived needs of the royal image as far as this audience is concerned.27 The discrepancy between the seriousness of the charges against the rebels and the mildness of the penalties handed down against them in remote Gallia must have seemed glaring at court, for all the ritual humiliation of the defeated traitors on Wamba’s triumphal return to the capital. The encounter between the king and Bishop Argebadus in the Historia is part of an exercise in damage control, offered by Julian at a time when the king’s star was already rising but when a brilliant stroke of publicity could still prove very useful. But instead of replaying a familiar stereotype, Julian stands it on its head, making a yes sound like a no, and by withholding the expected unconditional surrender of ruler to bishop, puts Wamba in the role to which he aspires and which his policies, after 673, will turn into a reality. I have been arguing that the study of narrative stereotypes can be of considerable value to the literary student of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, as well as to the historian of those periods. The literary scholar will be interested to find out that the encounter of bishop and ruler, so cunningly manipulated by Julian, is the only type-scene in the Historia that can be traced back to hagiography. It stands out against the more classical and secular derivation of the rest of the piece, and for an excellent reason. In our period, the Historia is that rare commodity, a purely political narrative. Its protagonists are Wamba and the usurper Paul, embodiments of the state and of high treason respectively. The schemes that serve to represent the conflict between them are available in the historical monographs of Sallust and the imperial panegyrics of late antiquity, though early medieval historiography made little use of them. Ecclesiastics in the Historia appear only in supporting roles, to display a greater or lesser degree of fidelity to the ruler. Hence the single, conspicuous borrowing from the lives of holy bishops. The historian, on the other hand, will find such schemes a valuable instrument in the critique of narrative sources, where they may help him to establish the evidentiary value of a given text. Beyond that function, however, type-scenes and other narrative formulas constitute priceless documents of the political and historical imagination, and thus a crucial chapter in the history of mentalities. Given, for instance, the strong tendency of historians to regard the Spanish state and Church as a monolithic unit in the long century between the conversion of the Visigoths and the Arab conquest,28 Julian’s handy subversion of the scheme designed to illustrate church–state collaboration suggests that some serious reservations are in order.29 If they do not necessarily reflect what 27 That Julian did not accompany the king on his campaign but stayed behind in the capital is made likely by his implausible account of the army’s itinerary through the Tarraconensis and Gallia; cf. Dionisio Pérez Sánchez, El ejército en la sociedad visigoda (Salamanca, 1989), p. 152. 28 This opinion will not survive the most cursory reading of the seventh-century council acts. 29 On the subject of the literary and schematic representation of church–state relations, see Joaquín Martínez Pizarro, “Images of Church and State: From Sulpicius Severus to Notker Balbulus”, Journal of Medieval Latin, 4 (1994): 25–38.

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really happened, stereotyped representations preserve feelings, reactions, a whole range of strategies that made it possible for writers of diverse leanings to cope with the flow of events and accommodate facts to the ideologies of their age. The record of these forms awaits the careful scrutiny of historical scholarship.

Chapter 11

Of Arms and the (Ger)man: Literary and Material Culture in the Waltharius Jan M. Ziolkowski

The nature of the literary process is that texts refer to past texts, or (to adhere to the metaphor underlying the word “text”) that texts are woven from strands of preceding texts. In no tradition is such literariness more intense than in Latin, and in no sector of the Latin tradition than in dactylic hexameters. Yet it has also long been apparent that the language in which texts are composed results not solely from responses of individual authors to their predecessors, but also from negotiations within societies over the meanings of words and the objects, entities and concepts they represent. Accordingly, the appreciation of any text requires at a minimum attending to its settings in language and literary tradition. Yet examining historical and material evidence in tandem with literary evidence can greatly enrich our understanding of both texts and contexts. In this case, I will explore the armor that features in the ninth- or tenth-century Latin Waltharius (“Poem of Walter”), in 1456 dactylic hexameters (incipit “Tertia pars orbis fratres Europa uocatur”). Both the authorship and dating of the poem remain contested. The earliest manuscript fragment has been dated around 975. The three chief hypotheses about the time of composition place it variously in the early ninth, late ninth and early tenth century (c. 925–30). Several ideas have been advanced about the authorship, if the poem is not anonymous. To present the five main ones in chronological order, one would ascribe the Waltharius to Ermoldus Nigellus, in which case it would have been composed shortly after 844. Another would attribute it to the Gerald who is mentioned in the 22-line preface and who wrote it for Erchambald, bishop of Eichstätt (d. 912). A third would credit the authorship to the Gerald of the preface but would regard the addressee as having been Erchambald, bishop of Strasbourg (965–91?). The fourth, advanced by Jacob Grimm in the editio princeps of 1838, sees the author as having been  See Jan M. Ziolkowski, “Text and Textuality, Medieval and Modern”, in Der Unfeste Text. Perspektiven auf einen literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Leitbegriff, ed. Barbara Sabel and André Bucher (Würzburg, 2001), pp. 109–31.  The standard edition is MGH, Poet. 6.1, ed. Karl Strecker (Weimar, 1951), pp. 1–85. For battlefield tactics and morale in the Waltharius, see Bernard S. Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare: Prelude to Empire (Philadelphia, PA, 2001), pp. 82, 96, 132–4, 151, 164, 196–200.

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Ekkehard I of St Gall (900–73), known to have written a “life of Waltharius the strong-armed”. Last, and least probably, one codex (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS lat. 8488) identifies the author as having been “Tifrid the Fat, Bishop of Notown”. Whatever its date and whoever its author, the Waltharius deploys language and conventions not only from both Classical Latin and Christian Latin epics, but also from oral traditional epic in Germanic vernaculars and from so-called real life to relate a tale that takes place hundreds of years earlier, during the movement of barbarian peoples (the Völkerwanderung) in the days of Attila the Hun. The narrative action in the poem divides into three sections. The first (1–418) recounts the subjugation by the Huns of three Germanic peoples, the Franks, Burgundians and Aquitainians; the martial feats of Walter of Aquitaine in Hunland with his fellow hostage and friend, the Frank Hagen; and Walter’s escape from there with another fellow hostage, his betrothed Hiltgunt of Burgundy. The central section (419–1061) recounts nine combats between Walter and various Frankish warriors, directed by their king, Gunther (for whom Hagen had been a substitute hostage), to take possession of the treasure the Aquitanian reappropriated from Attila. The poem reaches its crisis in the final section (1062–452), when Walter and Hagen are compelled to combat each other as Gunther himself enters the fray. Although Hagen saves Gunther’s life twice, the three wound each other gravely. After the battle, the warriors have their wounds bound, drink wine, and engage in a flyting. Arms, Arm Rings and Armor The salience of arms in the Latin epic tradition would be hard to overestimate. After all, the foundational epic introduces the word for arms even before its hero: “Of arms and the man I sing” (Vergil, Aeneid, 1.1). Arms figure no less prominently in the Waltharius. Military equipment comes into play repeatedly in the medieval poem. Indeed, arms stand out as the pre-eminent characteristic of both peoples and individuals. Thus the first traits of the victorious Pannonians singled out at the beginning are boldness and arms (6), while shortcomings in arms and courage mark the Franks as being inferior and submissive (20). When the title character confides to his fellow hostage and betrothed Hiltgund his scheme for escaping, he stipulates first that she should filch for him from Attila’s storehouse a particular helmet and byrnie (263–5). As a great warrior, Walter understandably elicits an arms-related epithet (787) which flags him as equaling the Huns in martial prowess and surpassing the Franks. Not surprisingly, he soon overcomes yet another of his Frankish opponents, Hadawart, even though the poet underscores that both are outstanding for courage and arms (824). The poet never states outright that technological superiority in arms or armor can trump the martial prowess of individuals, but he does laud the advantages of All English translations are mine.



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weaponry. His preoccupation with arms and armor may even have informed the names that he selected for peripheral characters in his poem, since a few build upon Germanic terms for weapons. Examples include Helmnod “Helmet Crisis” (982, 1008), Gerwitus “Broad Spear” (914, 935: ger means “spear”, wit “broad”), and Randolf “Shield Wolf ” (962: rand, commonly designated “shield”). Furthermore, items not directly related to arms and armor were connected with them by supposed etymologies. In particular, armilla, the Latin for the arm ring that was a stock payment and reward for the services of warriors to lords, was construed as a derivative of arma. The family relationship among arms, armor and booty won by arms is asserted understatedly in the Waltharius, 1191–4: The young man draws near to strip the dead of their arms And armor, leaving tunics and the rest: He took away from them only arm rings, belts with buckles, and swords, As well as cuirasses together with helmets.

These arm rings are a repeated fact of life in the poem, closely associated with armor. Thus, in the episode already noted (263–6), Walter directs Hiltgunt to steal from the Huns first a helmet and cuirass, and then arm rings (266). Or, when Walter is threatened by the Franks, he volunteers a hundred arm rings of red gold, an offer he later doubles. Compare 613–14, “I will send along a hundred arm rings made, to be sure, of red gold, so as to honor the name of king”, with 662–3, “Look, I am paying for passage; I send along to the king two hundred arm rings”. Eventually, Walter proposes to fill Hagen’s shield boss with red gold (1263), presumably arm rings. After Gunther’s greed prompts him to spurn these offers, he loses all the retainers who accompanied him except for Hagen, and neither Gunther himself, nor Hagen nor Walter escapes without mutilation. In sum, the poet, interjecting a succinct observation that pinpoints the rings as the source of all the bloodshed and injury, implies that the mutual dependence of arma and armillae can lead to death and destruction (1404): “In this way, in this way, did they share the arm rings of the Huns.” The Arming of the Warrior (Walter) In the early Middle Ages, the standard paraphernalia of a warrior, although fairly consistent across time and space, none the less varied according to social class or wealth, technological developments and ethnic or regional habits. Usual For example, see 1357–9. On Helmnod, see Jan M. Ziolkowski, “Fighting Words: Wordplay and Swordplay in the Waltharius”, in Karin E. Olsen, Antonina Harbus and Tette Hofstra (eds), Germanic Texts and Latin Models: Medieval Reconstructions, Mediaevalia Groningana n.s. 2, Germania Latina, 4 (Leuven, 2001), pp. 29–51. Randolf dies after his sword becomes lodged in Walter’s shield and he is unable to remove it: so much for the “shield wolf ”.  Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX, 19.31.16, ed. Wallace M. Lindsay (2 vols, Oxford, 1911).  

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armor for a horse-mounted warrior (as set forth in the late eighth century) was shield, lance, sword and short sword, while for a fully equipped infantryman it was shield, lance, sword, knife, bow and quiver. The bare minimum for a combatant on foot comprised shield and spear. As Walter and his fiancée ready themselves to flee from Attila’s court so that they can return to Aquitaine and Burgundy, the poet furnishes a comprehensive inventory of his hero’s arms and armor (333–40): And he, wearing a cuirass like a giant, Put on his head a red-crested helmet And surrounds his enormous calves with golden greaves And girded his left thigh with a two-edged sword And his right with another, according to Pannonian custom; But this one has a cutting edge only on one side. Then, taking a spear in his right hand and a shield in his left, He began anxiously to leave the hated land.

This description belongs to the standard “arming of the warrior”, a staple of medieval literature as of epic literature in many traditions. This kind of moment in a narrative of late antiquity or the Middle Ages used to be called, sometimes imprecisely, a topos, but is now styled more convincingly a type-scene, and Joaquín Martínez Pizarro (Chapter 10) demonstrates that in the hands of a skillful author, what could be a hollow stereotype can instead be stood on its head to produce new meaning and art. In this case, the “arming of the warrior” forms almost an overture to the principal forms of armor and arms in the poem. It sets forth a vertiginous mix of conventional elements from Germanic oral and Latin literary tradition, of the poet’s own ethnographic beliefs, and of the realities of armor in his day. The central portion of the passage is concerned with Walter’s two cutting weapons, namely the two-edged sword on his left thigh and the single-bladed one on his right. The poet presents this style of arming as being Pannonian, an adjective he uses interchangeably with Avar to designate the Huns. Although the poet terms the sword an ensis, the weapon in question is clearly not the early Roman stabbing sword that had been called a gladius, but rather the early medieval two-edged cutting weapon often called a spatha.10 Towards the end of the poem, this main sword of Walter’s shatters, whereupon he resorts to the single-bladed one. Then the poet reveals, with an internal cross-reference that can only be called “pointed”, that the blade is a halfsword (1390–91): “with his  Vincent Van Oeteren, Armes et armures au Moyen Age. Etude à travers les œuvres d’art, Mémoires du Cercle historique et folklorique de Braine-le-Château, de Tubize et des régions voisines, 7 (Braine-le-Château, 1996), p. 19.  Michael J. Swanton, The Spearheads of the Anglo-Saxon Settlements (London, 1973), p. 3.  Derek Brewer, “The Arming of the Warrior in European Literature and Chaucer”, in Edward Vasta and Zacharias P. Thundy (eds), Chaucerian Problems and Perspectives: Essays Presented to Paul E. Beichner, C.S.C. (Notre Dame, IN, 1979), pp. 221–43. 10 Guy Halsall, Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West, 450–900 (London, 2003), p. 164.

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intact hand he drew at once the halfsword, with which we recalled that he had girded his right side”. When Hagen derides Walter for having lost his right hand in battle, he observes that henceforth Walter will have to violate tribal practice by girding his weapon on his right thigh (1429–30). Unfortunately, we cannot glean whether the gens at issue is the Huns, Franks (for whom Hagen could be speaking) or Aquitanians (Walter’s own tribe), but the fact remains that the poet here displays real or pseudo-ethnographic knowledge. Another feature of the description worth mentioning is that the halfsword (often called a short sword, or sax) was passing out of use during Charlemagne’s time.11 The poet was obviously familiar with this sword, but at the same time it had become too unusual a weapon for him to present a typical Frank as bearing it; instead, it is a Hunnified Aquitainian who girds himself with such a halfsword. Wearing the semispatha on the left may have made particular sense for the Huns, either in real life or the poet’s imagining, because of their horseriding. The passage that describes Walter’s panoply happens to be bracketed between items of defensive gear, with byrnie, helmet and greaves at the beginning, and shield at the end. This chiasmus was not necessarily intentional, but nevertheless it reflects the stress that was placed, in literature and reality, upon defensive equipment. Although swords had a mystique, greater changes in design occurred with byrnies and shields, upon which I will now train my sights, in each case paying close attention to the terminology. Some of the most important words are notoriously complicated and ambiguous, even in prose. The problems increase when the text under analysis is in Latin dactylic hexameters, since many words and phrases – almost like fixed epithets in oral traditional poetry – had been commonplace in certain metrical positions since antiquity. Sometimes these elements may have carried associations of the ancient past, but in other cases they may have been vested with new meanings on the basis of new realities in the poet’s world. To complicate matters further, some words could not readily be accommodated in poetry, either because they were vernacular words for which poets preferred to use classical Latin equivalents (brunia never appears in the Waltharius, although it was a common word for “byrnie” in Medieval Latin prose) or because their sequence of syllable lengths made them impossible to use in quantitative meters.

11 Simon Coupland, “Carolingian Arms and Armor in the Ninth Century”, Viator, 21 (1990): 29–50, here pp. 30 and 42 (“all but obsolete by the early ninth century”).

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Shields The most basic (and least expensive) defensive equipment of a warrior in the early Middle Ages was the shield.12 The importance of this device in the Waltharius is most evident in the combat between the Frank Hadawart and Aquitanian Walter. Indeed, the duel commences when Hadawart petitions King Gunther for permission to be the next to seek for himself Walter’s shield (781). Although Hadawart refers first to his opponent’s byrnie, he soon demands that Walter surrender by “lay[ing] down [his] shield” (790–94 and 798): “O serpent, versed in deceits and knowing deception (Accustomed to conceal your limbs with a scaly covering And gathered like a snake into one coil, You avoid so many weapons without the slightest graze of a wound And you make a mockery of poison arrows) … Hear my advice: put down your painted shield.”

In response, Walter delivers a panegyric of his buckler (805–17), the first of his possessions he is determined to preserve: But the warrior, not at all frightened, delivered these words in reply: “About the rest I keep silent; my concern is to defend my shield. Believe me, I am indebted to it for good services. It was accustomed often to interpose itself against my enemies And it endured wounds in place of mine. You see today how beneficial it is to me; if it were absent, Perhaps you would not be speaking with Walter. O right hand, take care with all your might to drive away the foe, So that he may not take from you the bulwark of the wall! Left hand, may you be zealous to hold fast to the grip-bar of the boss, And encircle fingers affixed with glue around its ivory. Do not set down here the weight that you have carried Over such expanses of road, from the high seats of the Avars!”

This praise personifies the shield as an active agent, almost as a retainer who offers himself up to safeguard his lord. Walter speculates that without his shield he would not be alive, and he apostrophizes his right and left hands to protect it and to hold fast to its ivory handle. In Walter’s address to his hands, he refers to his shield as the “bulwark of the wall” (813). This phraseology may rest ultimately upon an expression equivalent to the Old English “shield wall” (scildweall), as attested in Beowulf 3118, “scōc ofer scildweall”, in whatever vernacular poetic tradition was familiar to the Latin

12 For a concise discussion of what is known about shields from late antiquity through 900, see Halsall, Warfare and Society, pp. 167–8.

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poet.13 The metaphoric pairing in the Waltharius rings a change upon couplings of nouns with the genitive of a word for shield, to which the poet resorts three times later (munimen clipei, 968, 1005; obstamine scuti 974). Both phrases appear to be unique. The intrinsic connection of shield with protection and covering was well known. Walter is described on two occasions as defending himself beneath the covering of the shield. Once the poet enlists the phrase sub tegmine (901) without even naming the shield, since in context “under a covering” can signify nothing but a shield.14 Much later, he shows Walter warding off a blow “with the covering of his shield at a slant” (1291).15 These usages can be related to the equivalency drawn in glosses between Latin tegumenta and Old High German scilti.16 Classical Latin had various terms to denote several different forms of shields. Thus clipeus or clipeum designated the round Homeric or hoplite shield, usually of bronze, while parma pertained to the small and usually round shield of cavalry and light infantry.17 Pelta was a light, often crescent-shaped shield.18 In contrast, scutum or scutus, in its strict sense, was an oblong wooden shield used by heavy infantry.19 In the Waltharius (and often in the Aeneid) the same words functioned indifferentiably.20 Similarly, glosses in Old High German and English translate them simply as “shield” and “buckler”.21 In older Germanic languages, the special meanings of words such as pelta had to be spelled out or (in linguistic parlance) marked; otherwise pelta designated “shield”, rather than “half shield” or “little shield”.22 In the early Middle Ages, shields were round. Although in the late tenth century they became almond-shaped,23 only circular ones are mentioned in the 13 Friedrich Klaeber (ed.), Beowulf, and the Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd edn (Boston, MA, 1941), p. 117. 14 The phrase is used frequently in this metrical position: see Poetria Nova: A CD-ROM of Latin Medieval Poetry (650–1250 A.D.), with a Gateway to Classical and Late Antiquity Texts, by Paolo Mastandrea and Luigi Tessarolo (Florence, 2001). 15 This phrase is also a line ending in Flodoard of Rheims (894–966), De triumphis Christi apud Italiam 14.15.169, in PL 135, col. 866D. 16 Dagmar Hüpper-Dröge, Schild und Speer. Waffen und ihre Bezeichnungen im frühen Mittelalter, Europäische Hochschulschriften Series 1, Deutsche Sprache und Literatur, 645 (Frankfurt am Main, 1983), p. 208. 17 On the former, see Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. Peter G.W. Glare (Oxford, 1982), s.v. clipeus 1, p. 337 (as well as Vergil, Aeneid 7.639 and 11.10). On the latter, see Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. parma, p. 1298 (and Aeneid 11.619). 18 Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. pelta, p. 1321. 19 Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. scutum a, p. 1714. Scutum was also used transfiguratively to mean “a source of safety, shield, defence” (Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. scutum d). 20 The entry “scudo” in Enciclopedia virgiliana, ed. Francesco della Corte (6 vols in 5, Rome, 1984–91), vol. 4, pp. 737–8, avers that Vergil did not distinguish between clipeus and scutum. In contrast, Nicholas Horsfall suggests that Vergil sometimes differentiated between clipeus and parma: see Virgil, “Aeneid” 11: A Commentary, Mnemosyne Supplementum, 244 (Leiden, 2003), p. 353 (comment on 11.619). 21 Hüpper-Dröge, Schild und Speer, pp. 209, 213, 268–9 and 285. 22 Ibid., pp. 213 and 228. 23 Van Oeteren, Armes et armures, p. 26.

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Waltharius. This circumstance explains why orbis can serve as a synonym for “shield”.24 Shields were constructed mainly of wood, which had long been the case among Germanic peoples. In fact, the wooden origins of shields were embedded etymologically in all the main Germanic words for shield (Gothic skildus, Old English scield, Old Frisian skeld and skild, Old Saxon sculd, Old High German scilt and Old Icelandic skjöldr), since the etymon for shield derives from the Indo-European root for “cutting” and refers literally to “a split piece of wood”.25 At least among Germanic peoples, shields were conventionally made from the linden, or lime tree, hence a common term for shield was a name for the wood of this tree.26 The type of tree from which shields were made is not often identified in Latin epic, perhaps because the adjective for lindenwood in Latin was too much of a mouthful or meterful, but more likely because a different wood (namely, willow) was used in Italy.27 Contrast spears, the ashwood material for the spear-shaft of which is oft cited in both Latin and Germanic.28 The climate of northern Europe being as intermittently wet as it is, very few complete wooden shield boards have endured. (They would survive better in either the constant dryness of deserts or constant damp of peat bogs or underwater sites.) Usually only metal rims, iron bosses and metal grips are still extant. These metal components occupied privileged places in vernacular terminology for shields, in which the metal edge (rand) could stand for the whole shield.29 Fortunately, the size, shape and manufacture of shield boards was consistent enough to allow the use of comparative evidence from elsewhere as well as from artistic and textual sources. This wood was first layered, as can be seen in the actual boards (nearly a meter in diameter) from the mid-third

For instance, in 905 Walter is described as hiding his sword beneath his shield. On the vocabulary in older Germanic languages, see Jan de Vries, Altnordisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2nd edn (Leiden, 1977), s.v., skjöldr, p. 496, and Sigmund Feist, Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der Gotischen Sprache, 3rd edn (Leiden, 1939), s.v. skildus, p. 432. On the Indo-European root, see Calvert Watkins, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 2nd edn (Boston, MA, 2000), s.v. (s)kel-1 5 “to cut”, p. 77. 26 On the use of linden or lime tree, see Hüpper-Dröge, Schild und Speer, pp. 280–83. On the use of the Old High German linta, Old Saxon lind(e) and Old English lind as terms for shield, see Hüpper-Dröge, Schild und Speer, p. 280. 27 The prosodic cumbersomeness is apparent immediately in the adjective for lindenwood: tiliagineus, -a, -um. On willow, see (uniquely) Vergil, Aeneid 7.632–3. 28 Of the many classical examples, note Ovid, Metamorphoses 5.9, and Statius, Thebaid 7.716–17. In the Waltharius, Gunther hurls an ashwood spear (1295: cf. 186). On Old English æsć and its compounds, see May Lansfield Keller, The Anglo-Saxon Weapon Names Treated Archæologically and Etymologically. First Part: Antiquarian Investigation, Anglistische Forschungen, 15 (Heidelberg, 1906), p. 128. In Old English, the metonymic name for a soldier was æscborn or æscberend. 29 Hüpper-Dröge, Schild und Speer, p. 251, “umbonibus rantbogun”, and Keller, Anglo-Saxon Weapon Names, p. 15, on the use of the Old English randbeag to designate the iron umbo or boss of a shield. As mentioned earlier, the name Randolf “Shield Wolf ” in Waltharius 962 incorporates the same element. 24 25

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century which were found in Syria at the Dura-Europos site.30 Thus the layering touched upon in the Latin epic tradition, as for example in the three- and sevenply shields in the Waltharius (668 and 733), is not a mere topos, even if in the latter instance the poet alludes specifically to Vergil (Aeneid 12.925) and the subsequent Latin epic tradition.31 This layered wood was covered in leather.32 In both hexameter epics and reality, the usual leather was probably bullhide (776). The poet of the Waltharius describes how this leathern covering can hold together a shield even when the wood has ruptured (1035). Finally, the surface of the shield was often painted, presumably around the metal boss (798).33 The shield most commonly used among the Carolingians tended to measure roughly 80 cm across.34 Walter’s may have been larger, since he is said to have leaned on it for support when dozing (501–2). Although he is likely to have been shorter than his modern counterparts, Walter is described as having been a giant. No matter what his height, it is hard to comprehend how a person who was not a contortionist could have gotten much sleep hunched over a shield of even a meter in size from top to bottom. The inference that the shield is more than a meter wide, rim to rim, is supported when the poet reveals that in a pinch, Walter can sleep not just leaning on it, but actually lying atop it (1176). This information hints that we are to imagine a large shield, as employed by the late Roman army and the Germanic tribes which succeeded it; such a shield offered protection, not from head to toe, but from below the helmet to the knees, and was sufficiently large to serve as a platform for carrying the dead or wounded.35 As has been mentioned, the shields in the Waltharius have a metal boss at the center. Once, a boss is identified as being sufficiently hard (772) to shatter a spear. A boss is itself fractured only once (995), by a trident, evidently the heaviest gauge of hurling weapons (but likelier to have been a figment of the poet’s imagination than a weapon that was actually used in his day). So important was the boss that by synecdoche, the Latin for it can be substituted for the shield as a whole.36 (The frequency of this substitution explains the evolution of the word “buckler”, which comes from the Old French boucle, signifying a “boss on a shield.”) Boucle and “buckle” are verbal monuments to the improvements in arms that must have been achieved in the early Middle Ages. They derive from bucca, a The Dura-Europos shields are oval with a central boss: see Michael C. Bishop and Jon C.N. Coulston, Roman Military Equipment from the Punic Wars to the Fall of Rome (London, 1993), pp. 149–51. 31 Compare Ovid, Amores 1.77 and Metamorphoses 13.2; Valerius Flaccus 6.367; and Statius, Thebaid 7.310. 32 Coupland, “Carolingian Arms”, p. 37. 33 Charles H. Ashdown, Armour and Weapons in the Middle Ages (London, 1925), pp. 13–14. 34 Van Oeteren, Armes et armures, p. 20, and Coupland, “Carolingian Arms”, p. 36. 35 Helen Nicholson, Medieval Warfare: Theory and Practice of War in Europe, 300–1500 (New York, 2004), p. 106. 36 On umbo as “buckler”, see Hüpper-Dröge, Schild und Speer, pp. 268–9 and 285. 30

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Latin word that referred to the cheeks, especially when puffed out; the mouth, or comparable cavities.37 Evidently, the buckle originated as a mechanism for fastening and unfastening helmets: it was a cheekstrap, analogous to the chinstrap on protective helmets today. Although the buckler is unquestionably related to the buckle in its formation, it seems impossible to determine whether it is so called because the boards on early medieval shields were secured by a buckle-like mechanism, or whether the buckler acquired its name because it contained a deep, mouth-like cavity on the side facing its wearer. Let us delve into that hollow. A key term in the Waltharius is umbo, which can refer to either “boss” alone or “shield” as a whole.38 The boss was conical, with a concavity inside. Across the hollow on the interior ran a shaft that enabled it to be held by the hand. In the tenth century, the single solid rod for holding was replaced by two flexible leather straps in the upper part.39 Such straps are not described in the Waltharius, but the grip-bar is described in unusual detail. It is made of ivory (815), and shaped so that even after Walter’s hand has been severed, he can hold it by his stump (1389). More important than the interior of the shield was the exterior, where the cone came to a sharp point that could be used as a weapon.40 Modern taxonomies tend to divide objects into weapons and armor. In at least one of them, shields are included among weapons, since they were not completely defensive.41 In the early Middle Ages, the best defense may have been a good offense. The shields in the Waltharius require the interpreter to toe a careful line between what can be reconstructed of a physical reality and its literary presentation. In this sense, shields merit the same sort of analysis that Paul Edward Dutton develops in Chapter 9 in his observations on bloody rain in the early Middle Ages. Furthermore, shields are only one group of arms and armor that both require such examination and, in the process, themselves provide evidence to deepen our understandings of other objects and other texts. Byrnies After the shield, the second line of defense was body armor, for those who could afford it. The main form kept the upper body safe, as suggested by corselet, which is essentially the Old French diminutive of “body”.42 The word has been Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. bucca 1, 2, 4, p. 244. A case in point would be 674 (which links with parma in 680). In 814, umbo refers to both “boss” and “shield”. The synecdoche of boss for shield is already in the Aeneid (7.633 and 9.810). 39 Van Oeteren, Armes et armures, p. 27, and Coupland, “Carolingian Arms”, p. 38. 40 Van Oeteren, Armes et armures, p. 20, and Coupland, “Carolingian Arms”, p. 38. 41 Van Oeteren, Armes et armures, p. 20. 42 Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. Charles T. Onions (Oxford, 1969), s.v. corslet, “garment, spec. defensive armour, covering the body”, p. 218. (O)F corselet, dim. of cors, “body”. 37 38

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used more recently for “a light corset with few or no stays”.43 Long before pointed brass cones became fashionable chestgear, terms that had originally pertained to body armor were transferred to haute couture, and especially to lingerie. The most memorable such transference is the case of the Old French designation for “armor for the arm, arm guard”, whence the modern-day brassiere.44 Such dainties are, of course, put in the armoire. The relationship between armor and garments worn under armor is not a peculiarity of modern times, but in fact goes back to the Middle Ages. The byrnie was closely related to the tunica. Walter slays one foe by hurling a spear that sunders the latter’s shield and pierces his tunic (776–7). This tunic is probably a leather jacket rather than a metal covering. By analogy, the English “cuirass” derives ultimately from the Latin corium (“hide, skin”).45 Similarly, lorica was often regarded as a derivative of lorum (“leather-strap, thong”).46 Fitting with this assumption is the fact that in the earlier-mentioned passage in which arma, armorum habitus and armillae are grouped together, the poet takes pains to point out that Walter leaves aside the tunicas et cetera (1192) to concentrate instead only on items that are, or at least contain, metal (such as arm rings, belts with buckles, and swords).47 The poet may assume that except when he specifies that warriors had byrnies, we are to accept that they wore only leathern chestguards. Alternatively, even those with byrnies may have also worn leather or heavy fabric jackets beneath to protect themselves from chafing. Earlier in the poem when tunica is used, it suggests a leather jacket overlaid with at least one and perhaps two metal layers. Walter directs Hiltgunt to steal from Attila’s treasures a few items, including not only helmet and arm rings, but also “three-layer tunica, the lorica bearing the mark of smiths”.48 The poet’s description adopts phraseology from Virgil.49 More important, it confirms that when (to view the word linguistically) tunica is unmarked, it connotes a garment without metal, and that it must be specified with additional information to refer to a garment with metal. Contrarily, other words for “byrnie” in Latin and the vernaculars may have assumed the presence of metal. Thus Beowulf ’s byrnie

American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, ed. William Morris (New York, 1969), s.v. “corselet” 2, p. 300. 44 Ibid., s.v. “brassière, brassiere”, p. 161: “French brassière, from Old French braciere, armor for the arm, arm guard, from bras arm”. 45 Onions, ed., Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, s.v. cuirass, p. 234: “armour for the body orig. of leather”, deriving ultimately from Latin corium “hide, skin”. 46 The Oxford Latin Dictionary, p. 1044, lists the etymology as uncertain. 47 Belts were part of military equipment during the Carolingian period, since swords or scabbards were worn attached to the belt by straps, loops or other fittings: see Coupland, “Carolingian Arms”, p. 46. 48 263–4, “tunicamque trilicem– / assero loricam fabrorum insigne ferentem”. Kratz places a comma after tunicamque, D’Angelo, more convincingly, a dash after trilicem. 49 Aeneid 3.467: cf. 7.639. 43

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is said to be “Weland’s work”, which by implicating the smith Weland in its construction, must be metal.50 In battle, Roman legionaries did not use the solid bronze breastplates of Homeric literature. Rather, they wore Gallic mail shirts, and especially in the half millennium after Christ, laminated cuirasses. But Roman military leaders, and for dress occasions, even soldiers such as the Praetorian Guard, wore the so-called muscle cuirass.51 This cuirass, comprising a breastplate and a backplate that were fastened at the sides, remains in Virgil’s Aeneid (as lorica in 7.640 and 11.692, thorax in 11.9), and would also have been known in the early Middle Ages from portrayals in late antique manuscripts that were copied and adapted by Carolingian illuminators.52 Furthermore, illuminations of Prudentius’ Psychomachia show this type of byrnie, which was not used by Carolingian warriors.53 A single reference to such a solid bronze breastplate may be buried in the Waltharius: Walter is said to trust alone “in [his] sword and bronze byrnie” (1016). For practical use, Roman soldiers in western Europe had worn three forms of byrnie. Most of them were true cuirasses, comprising small plates of iron fastened to a jerkin of leather or fabric.54 The plates in this scale armor were four-cornered pieces of metal that were bound together or laid overlapping.55 Virgil uses the phrase aënis … squamis to convey the scale-like nature of the bronze plates.56 From the Roman “scaled cuirass” (lorica squamata) descended medieval scale-mail, in which plates of metal, a few centimeters long, rounded at the bottom in the shape of a scale, were attached to a garment and overlaid to increase protection from blows.57 Scale armor of the simplest type is occasionally pictured in illuminated manuscripts.58 Alongside visual evidence, See “Welandes geweorc” in Beowulf 406 and 455. If the use of “byrnum werede” in Beowulf 2529 as a general term for warriors assumes that the byrnies are metal, then it would indicate that metal ones were fairly widespread then, but even so they are still treated as being precious: see Keller, Anglo-Saxon Weapon Names, p. 102. 51 For the fullest information, see Henry Russell Robinson, The Armour of Imperial Rome (New York, 1975), pp. 147–52. 52 Enciclopedia virgiliana, s.v. “corazza”, vol. 1, p. 885, asserts that Vergil would have known the type of byrnie composed of two metal plates modeled in the shape of the body and joined at the sides and shoulders. 53 Van Oeteren, Armes et armures, p. 16. 54 Robinson, Armour of Imperial Rome, pp. 153–61. I omit from consideration lamellar armor, which was not widely used in Roman Europe (see Robinson, Armour of Imperial Rome, pp. 162–3), but which has been found at Merovingian sites (Halsall, Warfare and Society, p. 169). 55 Bishop and Coulston, Roman Military Equipment, p. 85, and Keller, Anglo-Saxon Weapon Names, p. 93. 56 Aeneid 9.707–8, 11.487–8, and 11.770–71 (contrast 7.633 and 7.639). Servius, on Aeneid 11.704, is mistaken in thinking of chainmail. 57 Van Oeteren, Armes et armures, p. 17, and Ashdown, Armour and Weapons in the Middle Ages, p. 12. 58 For example, in the Stuttgart Psalter (Saint-Germain, France, 820–30: Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. Bibl. Fol. 23, fol. 158v) and the Psalterium Aureum (St Gall, last third of ninth century: St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 22, fol. 22): see Keller, Anglo-Saxon Weapon Names, p. 98. Alongside the scales, ranks of circles are juxtaposed. Argument continues 50

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Icelandic sagas furnish verbal descriptions of byrnies. Of these, one main type was spanga-brynja, which was plates of metal (“spangles”) sewn overlapping each other like scales on a leather coat.59 Evidently, this was none other than the fishscale byrnie. This scale-mail was either an innovation of western Germanic peoples, or at least an appropriation and adaptation from late Roman armor that they made distinctively their own.60 The origins and spread of scale-mail may be traced linguistically. The Latin brunia is a borrowing from the Old High German brunna.61 From either German or Latin derive words in Romance languages such as Old French broigne and Old Occitan bronha. In another direction geographically and linguistically, Old Church Slavonic bronja, from which comes modern Russian bronja, is also a derivative. The fate of the Old High German word suggests that these other ethnic groups and geographic regions came to be familiar with the byrnie as a result of contacts with Germanic peoples. Scale-mail appears not to have become widespread until the late eighth and ninth century. At that point, capitularies routinely refer to it.62 These references prove that under the Carolingians more warriors possessed such armor than had been the case earlier.63 Within the Carolingian economy, these byrnies were fiercely controlled: capitularies emphasize that they should not be sold to traders and not outside the empire, with particular reference to Slavs, Avars or Norsemen.64 The reason for the ban and for the desire of outsiders to obtain the byrnies might be self-evident: they were the bullet-proof vests of their times, and they conferred a wartime advantage that Franks were loath to relinquish. Alternatively, Frankish concern about the selling of such items (and also swords) may have arisen more from a desire to regulate trade in valuable items than to prohibit commerce in dangerous ones. Whatever the motivations, the embargo may have worked no better than do most economic embargoes in our own day, over whether these differences are solely an artistic convention or reflect different technologies: see Van Oeteren, Armes et armures, p. 24. 59 See John Morris, “Ring-mail”, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 33 (1934): 194–204, here 198–9. 60 My arguments for the existence and importance of scale-mail lead me to different conclusions from those of Coupland, “Carolingian Arms”, pp. 39–41 and 50. 61 An alternative form in Old High German is brunia. Elsewhere in older Germanic languages, the word is attested in Gothic brunjo, Old Icelandic brynia and Old English brynige and byrne, all of them feminine. 62 Van Oeteren, Armes et armures, p. 17, and R. Ewart Oakeshott, Archaeology of Weapons: Arms and Armour from Prehistory to the Age of Chivalry (London, 1960), p. 165. 63 A capitulary of Charlemagne (805 AD) required that those who owned 12 manses should wear to the host a fish-scale or mail corselet (brunia): see MGH LL 2, Capit. 1, no. 44, c. 6, p. 123.10–12. Compare Ansegis (c. 770–833), abbot of Fontanelle, Collectio capitularium, 3 Kapitulatio 74.5, ed. Gerhard Schmitz, Die Kapitulariensammlung des Ansegis, MGH LL 2, Capit. n.s. 1 (Hanover, 1996), 3.5, p. 572.6–8. 64 Capit. 1, no. 20, c. 20, p. 51.15 (779 AD): “De brunias, ut nullus foris nostro regno vendere praesumat”; Capit. 1, no. 40, c. 7, p. 115.29 (from 803 AD), Capit. 1, no. 44, c. 7, p. 123.13 and 18–19; Capit. 2, no. 273, c. 25, p. 321.2–4, 7–9 and 14–18 (from 864 AD). Compare Ansegis, 3.6, p. 573.3, and 3.75, pp. 607.9–608.1, and appendix 2.5, p. 671.5.

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since before the tenth century the kind of mail-shirt imported into England was precisely the Carolingian fish-scale corselet. Then again, the injunctions may not have been violated; it is possible that the mail-shirts reached their English possessors through gift exchanges between English and French ruling houses, which were sometimes linked by marriage alliances. The poet of the Waltharius details that the Franks who confront Walter wear scale byrnies (482), and Hadawart accuses Walter himself of hiding within this kind of covering (791). These two mentions may bring home the novelty of the scale byrnie, and the newness and value of the armor may explain why Walter is so set on taking back a German(ic)-made byrnie from the Hunnish treasury. It is both prized heirloom and military advantage. A second kind of byrnie that appears in both literature and art is the ringmail corselet. Rarer and far more expensive than scale-mail, ring-mail also goes back to Roman times, but there is a gap between the last Roman finds and the earliest medieval ones.65 A bog find from the third century is a ring-byrnie that comprises 20,000 rings and that would have required roughly a year of work by a single smith to produce.66 This trove is exceptional, and no more mail is found in Scandinavia until c. 900.67 Riveted, interwoven ring-mail byrnies may well have become treasured possessions as early as the mid-tenth century in Denmark, but initially they are not in graves because they were too precious. In the early Middle Ages, mail shirts, even though they became less costly in the tenth century, were worn only by the wealthiest, and were prized family possessions.68 Such highstatus items are rare archaeologically because they were passed on rather than inhumed with their initial owners.69 Even when mail-shirts were deposited in the ground or mound, the soggy climate has taken its toll. With a poignancy akin to the smile of the Cheshire cat, only rust stains remain of the mail-shirt that was buried with the Anglian king at Sutton Hoo in the seventh century. Ringmail surfaces in greater quantities from the tenth century, as lighter and more cost-effective rings became available.70 But only one, made of wrought iron, survives from before 1200, and its date is contested.71 Manuscript illuminations do not fill the gap, since artists had difficulty in representing this armor. When rings are depicted, they look to be sewn on cloth or leather. Yet literary evidence

On Roman mail (lorica hamata), see Robinson, Armour of Imperial Rome, pp. 164–73. Morris, “Ring-mail”, p. 194 and fig. 2, between pp. 196 and 197. 67 Ibid., p. 204. 68 Anne Pedersen, “Scandinavian Weaponry in the Tenth Century: The Example of Denmark”, in David Nicolle (ed.), A Companion to Medieval Arms and Armour (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 25–35, here p. 33. 69 Heinrich Härke, “The Circulation of Weapons in Anglo-Saxon Society”, in Frans Theuws and Janet L. Nelson (eds), Rituals of Power: From Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, Transformation of the Roman World, 8 (Leiden, 2000), pp. 377–99, here pp. 394–5. 70 Van Oeteren, Armes et armures, p. 24. 71 Now in Prague cathedral, it is said to have belonged to St Weneceslas (or Václav, in Czech), martyred in 935. 65 66

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refers clearly to unsupported ring- or chain-mail.72 In the Waltharius, matters are uncertain: the ring-mail of Patavrid is called a “hooked cuirass” (911). In other contexts, this term has been interpreted as a shirt-like net of metal rings finely woven into each other.73 Worn either under or over a doublet, it extended to the hips or even further down, often with short sleeves.74 To complicate matters, though the phrasing lorica hamata is not Virgilian, wordings very similar to it appear twice in the Aeneid (3.467 and 5.259–60). The third kind of body armor was the laminated cuirass, made of laminations (or segments) of iron.75 It is now designated as metal-strip armor or as the lorica segmentata, but the Latin term is not classical. This form of lorica came into common use only in the first century AD. Although it has become emblematic of the Roman soldier in modern artistic representations, it seems to have been less known in the Middle Ages, partly because it was not described in the canonical classical Latin epics. Where are we left at the end of the Waltharius? In the serio-comic debacle, only two of the 13 Franks who confronted Walter still stand – and even they do not truly stand, since one has lost a leg and the other an eye, lips and six teeth. Walter himself lives, but minus his right hand. Still, they are not dead, and they owe their lives to the quality of their armor. By no accident, they have suffered wounds only where not swaddled in byrnies and helmets. Latin riddlers in Anglo-Saxon England have been faulted for writing less knowledgeably about swords and other martial matters than did their vernacular confreres.76 The poet of the Waltharius, despite his thorough grasp of Latin epic tradition, belongs in an altogether different category, as a cognoscente of arms and armor of his day, of those of the past, and of literature both Latin and vernacular. Extratextual evidence from material culture underpins the notion that he portrayed some contemporary armaments accurately, and that he was also familiar with arms and armor from long bygone times, perhaps because the most elaborate metalwork was prized for generations. Yet despite the evident expertise of the poet, the descriptions of armor in the Waltharius do not offer by themselves the data we need to clinch an early tenth-century, mid ninth, or early ninth-century dating. The most detailed study of Carolingian arms and armor concluded that Carolingian ivories and manuscript illuminations offer more helpful guidance to armaments of the ninth century than had been appreciated.77 Now it seems 72 Keller, Anglo-Saxon Weapon Names, pp. 99 (with reference to the Hildebrandslied) and 101, and Morris, “Ring-mail”, pp. 198–9 and 202–3 (referring to Beowulf and the Battle of Maldon). 73 In the Waltharius, the rings have been tempered in an unspecified fashion. 74 The synonym lorica serta is in listings in Günter Siebel, “Harnisch und Helm in den epischen Dichtungen des 12. Jahrhunderts bis zu Hartmanns ‘Erek’” (Ph.D dissertation, University of Hamburg, 1969), p. 20, and Keller, Anglo-Saxon Weapon Names, p. 94. 75 Robinson, Armour of Imperial Rome, pp. 174–89. 76 Hilda Ellis Davidson, The Sword in Anglo-Saxon England: Its Archaeology and Literature (Oxford, 1962), pp. 156–7. 77 Coupland, “Carolingian Arms”, p. 50.

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that literature, at least in the case of the Waltharius, should be brought into consideration, since the picture that it presents is consistent with what historical texts, representational arts, and archaeology have suggested. The catch is, of course, that the relevance of the Waltharius depends upon that very dating, which this one investigation cannot claim to have resolved. Yet by triangulating between language and literature, history and material culture, more clues to the date will be found. Further investigation of other objects in the poem may help to fix once and for all the approximate time of composition. Even if such results should remain forever elusive, a closer attention to the Waltharius would round out our picture not only of the poet’s imaginative, literary world but also of the real, material world that engaged his eyes and his thoughts. In the circular process that the mediation between the past and the present has always required, such investigation can in turn enrich our understanding of all these areas, and specifically of the poem itself. Since the poet took pains to show his command of both literary tradition and real-life armaments, we owe it to him to do the same ourselves, especially now when the sciences and humanities seem positioned to enrich each other as never before.

Chapter 12

Representations and Reality in Early Medieval Literature Danuta Shanzer

All three chapters in Part Three, in different ways, are negotiating the Auerbachian problem of representation and reality: climate v. weather, type-scene v. fact, history v. hagiography, epic fashion-fantasy conventions v. working weaponry. The medieval Latin is just a medium, but one that must be known in detail and studied in context, something all three do with mastery. Dutton (Chapter 9) and Ziolkowski (Chapter 11) bow in the direction of science and quantification (emergent “new directions”), while Pizarro (Chapter 10) is unrepentant. All aim to bridge disciplinary domains. Weather is often marginal (and marginalized), serving as punctuation in chronicles. While climate is objective, “weather” is subjective. Things dropped from the sky – not the bombs or Coke bottles familiar to moderns, but grain, books, frogs and so-called “bloody rain”. This is not fiction, but fact. Dutton, however, concentrates on the theophanic side – what divine activity did it portend? Why did medievals think it was blood? Because it was a familiar red-colored liquid? Why not red wine, a significant substance transformed into blood in the Eucharist? Just because it had been blood for the ancients? That simply displaces the question. Perhaps when red liquid fell, their taste-buds revealed that it was not wine? Or perhaps in their mindset, good things don’t fall out of the sky. For pagans, blood shed (of whatever type) is always bad; the same went for Christians, unless it belonged to Christ or the martyrs. Or perhaps it is just a question of color terminology? Unlike English, with its neat neutral primaries red, yellow and blue, Latin had a more complicated color terminology. Romans could not speak of “red rain” as we can. Instead, under the heading “red” appear some 22 options. All have different meanings and connotations. The two that most concern us are cruentus (“gory”) and sanguineus (“bloody”). It is alive as both in one of our best contemporary detective fiction writers. See Michael Dibdin, Blood Rain: An Aurelio Zen Mystery, 1st US edn (New York, 1999).  Jacques André, Etude sur les termes de couleur dans la langue latine (Paris, 1949), pp. 75–122, cites 22 different terms, ranging from burrus to testaceus.  The former, however, is “shed blood”, that is, “gore”. 

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Antiquity shows similar subjective interpretation of the weather. A great bore of Southern Italy, Ganymede in Petronius’ Cena, carries on about the poor harvest: “Nobody thinks the heaven’s the heaven, nobody gives a toss about Jove: maidens used to go barefooted with loose hair and clean mind to ask Jupiter for rain – and immediately it rained buckets! Everyone came home wet as mice. Now we’re not religious….” Weather could also be a metaphor for imperial wrath, as in Tacitus’ Annales (11.31). While cuckolded Claudius at Ostia weighed Messalina’s fate, at Rome, at her final orgy, one Vettius Valens friskily climbed a tree. When asked what he saw, he replied: “A terrible storm from Ostia.” Both he and his mistress would shortly be executed. Coincidence? Portent? Tacitus invites speculation. Rome had augurs and augural disciplines. Prodigies were matters of official record, and regularly cited by historians. But there were also rationalizing voices, such as Cicero’s. He cites news of rains or rivers of blood and sweating statues, but notes that no philosopher would ever have believed it: blood or sweat could only come from a body. Cicero knew that in war, things appear more important, and – more significantly – if one is afraid, one believes more readily and people make things up with greater impunity. Stress creates a credulous audience for fabrications. But did the picture change with Christianity? The many paganisms were never religions of the book. But suppose one regularly read in an authoritative, divine text about a vivid past where bread came from heaven?10 Where something like frost that one greeted as Man hu? (“What is this?”) fed one in the wilderness for forty years?11 Where the voice from the whirlwind had devastatingly questioned Job: “Who is the father of rain or who engendered the drops of dew”?12 Where Jesus talked about “red sky at night”?13 And what of the future, the time when the whole moon would become like blood,14 when hail and fire would rain down mixed with blood,15 and when the sea would turn to blood?16 Surely such precedents made one even more prone to read the book of heaven? Not just curiosity, but learning and piety would have been conducive.

Petronius, Satyricon 44.3–45.1, author’s translation. Annales 11.35.6 and Apocolocyntosis. 13.4.  Franz Luterbacher, Der Prodigienglaube und Prodigienstil der Römer (Burgdorf, 1904), p. 6.  Livy 24.10: Romae in foro boario sanguine pluvisse; 34.45: in foro … sanguinis guttae visae sunt; 39.46: sanguine per biduum pluvisset; cf. also 56, 40.19, 42.20.  Cicero, De Divinatione 2.27.58–9.  Although there were famous literary topoi, such as Iliad 16.459. 10 Exod. 16:13–14. 11 Exod. 16:14 and Exod. 16:35. 12 Job 38:28. 13 Matt. 16:2. 14 Apoc. 6:12. 15 Apoc. 8:7. 16 Apoc. 8:8. 



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During the transition to the early Middle Ages, late antique pagans watched and recorded prodigies. Ammianus still pays attention to them.17 The mysterious Julius Obsequens compiled a Liber Prodigiorum, possibly in the late fourth century.18 But the augural and fulgural disciplines were unacceptable to Christians.19 In 408, while Rome quailed before Alaric, Etruscan experts in thunder and lightning came to drive out the barbarians.20 Their rites, however, needed to be performed publicly, and even the tolerant Pope Innocent would not go that far. The analogous pagan rite of supplicatio is familiar.21 But what of its relationship to the Rogations instituted by Mamertus at Vienne?22 Sidonius called the latter “a yawn”, and made a nice joke about conflicting interests in rival prayers for dry weather and rain.23 Did the bishop become the new augur?24 Or did the historian take over that role? Gregory of Tours could have been both! Can we look ahead to the rest of the Middle Ages and see when bloody rain is recorded? Only when there is other trouble? Or also “out of a blue sky”? Dutton’s Chapter 9 ends on a high point with William of Conches. Is this a linear development? Is there no one later who treats bloody rain in the same way as did Gregory of Tours or the eleventh-century bishops? Could fear be constant and cyclical, and rationalism occasional for most of the Middle Ages? Dutton’s invitation to look in the margins for the answer to a problem in the center is both intriguing and liberating. Pizarro starts Chapter 10 with a type-scene, and broadens into a literary analysis of Julian of Toledo’s Historia Wambae Regis, and to political conclusions about the revolt. A type-scene is a predictable narrative sequence of events, a “script”, identified from common features in multiple sources. Pizarro identifies two related type-scenes: “the prophet before the king”, asking for his reform,25 and “the bishop before the ruler”, interceding for captives. The first can always

Ammianus Marcellinus 21.1.7–14 and 30.5.15–19. Peter Lebrecht Schmidt, “Iulius Obsequens und das Problem der Livius-Epitome: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der lateinischen Prodigienliteratur”, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur: Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, no. 5 (Mainz, 1968), p. 232. 19 And for that reason would linger on in veiled form only in the odd corner, such as Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii 9.896, ed. James Willis (Leipzig, 1983), p. 341.2–8, for the fulgural discipline with Lucio Cristante, Martiani Capellae De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, Liber IX, Medioevo e umanesimo, 64 (Padova, 1987), pp. 200–201. A late official usage was 363 AD: Ammianus Marcellinus 23.5.12–13. 20 Zosimus, Historia nova 5.41.1, ed. Ludwig Mendelssohn (Leipzig, 1887), pp. 269–70. 21 Georg Wissowa, “Supplicationes”, in Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Wissenschaften, 2nd series, 7th Halbband (Stuttgart, 1931), pp. 942–51. 22 Sidonius Apollinaris, letters 5.14 and 7.1, ed. Christian Lütjohann, MGH AA 8 (Hanover, 1887), pp. 87–8 and 103–4, respectively. 23 Letter 5.14, pp. 87–8. 24 See Avitus of Vienne, Homilia 6, ed. Rudolf Peiper, MGH AA 6.2 (Berlin, 1883), pp. 108–12, on Rogations; cf. Danuta R. Shanzer and Ian N. Wood, Avitus of Vienne. Letters and Selected Prose, Translated Texts for Historians, 38 (Liverpool, 2002), pp. 381–8. 25 See also, for example, Vita Columbani 1.18, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SRM 4 (Hanover, 1892), p. 86. 17 18

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be scripted according to biblical literary models;26 the second arises from reality. Bishops ransomed captives.27 Pizarro concentrates on the second type, and derives it from Sulpicius Severus’ Dialogues, specifically episodes involving Martin and various rulers. Further examples from Gregory of Tours, holy men interceding with rulers, show how by the sixth century the pattern emerged in a few quick supernatural brushstrokes: ut voluit, sic recepit. The default was established. The methodology, to compare type-scenes and then show deviations, is right. Authors use type-scenes by moving from unmarked to marked and exciting comment. But methodological problems arise. For the rhetorical equivalent of the type-scene, the collection of topoi that constitute the menu-script for a certain type of speech, we have prescriptive rhetorical manuals.28 The modern scholar, however, detects the type-scene by using a process that can become circular, particularly when scenes may overlap and variants be mis-ascribed. Are all the relevant types in front of us? Pizarro works from obviously supernatural scenes in Sulpicius Severus. But two scripts must be distinguished: a biblical-hagiographical prophet before a king, and a historical bishop engaged in his work. It is often difficult to draw firm boundaries on that long literary continuum from hagiography to history. But one can usually crudely classify a given text. In this case, it is worth remembering that ransoming can occur in a factual sentence,29 in documents,30 and also in historical-hagiographical texts that avoid the supernatural.31 One could cite Epiphanius’ embassy to Gundobad, in his Life by Ennodius of Pavia, Vita Epifani. There, while Theoderic had promised the “miracle” (“The ransom for the Italian captives will be the sight of you”),32 before success can be achieved, the saint has to go to his lodging (Vita Epifani 165), funds have to be raised, and a marriage arranged.33 One

See Jacques Fontaine, “Une clé littéraire de la ‘Vita Martini’ de Sulpice Sévère: la typologie prophétique”, in Mélanges Christine Mohrmann (Utrecht, 1963), pp. 46–50. Also Jacques Fontaine, Sulpice Sévère: Vie de Saint Martin, SC 135 (3 vols, Paris, 1969), vol. 3, p. 916, esp. n. 2, which lists Nathan before David (2 Kings 12), Elijah before Ahab (3 Kings 18 and 20), Isaiah before Hezekiah (Isa. 37), and so on. 27 For more on this, see Avitus, letters 10, 12 and 35, pp. 44, 45–6 and 65, with trans. in Shanzer and Wood, Avitus of Vienne. Letters and Selected Prose, pp. 350–56; František Graus, “Die Gewalt bei den Anfängen des Feudalismus und die ‘Gefangenenbefreiungen’ der Merowingischer Hagiographie”, Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 1 (1961): 61–156, here p. 92, especially n. 24. 28 For example, Nigel Guy Wilson and Donald A. Russell, Menander Rhetor (Oxford, 1981). 29 Vita Heptadii, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SRM 3 (Hanover, 1896), pp. 186–94, here 190. See Vita Heptadii 12 and 13, pp. 190–91, for longer but undramatized paragraphs. 30 As in Avitus, Epp. 10, 12 and 35, pp. 44, 45–6 and 65. 31 Danuta R. Shanzer, “Two Clocks and a Wedding: Theodoric’s Diplomatic Relations with the Burgundians”, Romanobarbarica, 14 (1998): 225–58, and Shanzer and Wood, Avitus of Vienne, pp. 349–56. 32 Cf. Vita Epifani 141, ed. Friedrich Vogel, MGH AA 7 (Hanover, 1885), pp. 101–2; from local sources: Syagria and Avitus. 33 Shanzer, “Two Clocks and a Wedding”, pp. 225–58. 26

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should perhaps separate examples with supernatural persuasion from the ones where assent is given to purely mortal forces.34 Martin before Emperor Maximus is very much a historical35 narrative: the saint also had petitions for Narses and Leucadius.36 Severus, if he wished to write pure hagiography, could have focused on the request for clemency for the Spanish Priscillianists. For the latter episode can be read as cautionary tale about compromise. Note how Martin equivocates when required to enter cum pace episcoporum (“with the consent/permission of the bishops”). He comes cum pace Christi (“with the permission/peace of Christ”). It also involves compromise over the Eucharist, that is, over Eucharistic commensalism with the hostile bishops.37 Saint Paul (1 Cor. 11:27) had famously noted the consequence of taking the Eucharist unworthily. Martin was punished with a diminution of his power to exorcise. Thus one could see here less a bungled “king grants favor to bishop” story than a private story (Martin kept it under wraps) about compromise and consequences. Does setting (as opposed to dramatis personae) matter? If so, there is a closer comparandum in Constantius’ Vita Germani. The saint goes out to meet the armed King Goar and his army. First, he pours forth a supplicatory prayer. Then he chastises Goar when he disagrees, and finally, grabs his reins and stops the whole army himself. The king exhibits admiration instead of anger.38 History and hagiography co-exist in the same texts; but each has its respective topoi, and it is possible to distinguish them. I would prefer to compare the scene in the Historia to essentially historical models that appear in hagiography rather than to purely hagiographical scenes.39 Instead of “holy man beards wicked king in his own city/palace/tent”, we have “bishop goes to meet conquering king on the road to entreat for mercy for his rebellious constituency”. In the crucial passage, Argebadus meets Wamba at the fourth milestone outside Narbonne to supplicate him for mercy. Here there are two scripts. First, Argebadus sets his own positive biblical script for the encounter from the very outset. His opening words, “Alas, we have sinned against heaven and before you, most holy king, and we are not worthy that the approach of Your Piety meet us,” directly echo the plea of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15:18. This script looks for reconciliation with forgiving paternal authority. What Wamba says the first time can be read as an invitation to speculate about what falls within the letter of his promise, and what dire consequences it might entail. One can explore various emphases, for example: “I shall not destroy these lives with the sword, I shall not shed anyone’s blood today, nor shall I For example, Epiphanius’ mission from Nepos to Euric in Vita Epifani 85, pp. 94–5. Fontaine, Sulpice Sévère: Vie de Saint Martin, p. 913, agrees about historicity. 36 Dial. 3.11. 37 Cf. Vita Epifani 90, p. 95. 38 Paraphrasing Vita Germani 6.28; Constance de Lyon, Vie de Saint Germain d’Auxerre, ed. René Borius, SC 112 (Paris, 1965), pp. 174–6. 39 Julian did not feel particularly happy about the supernatural – angels, for instance. Historia Wambae regis 23, ed. Wilhelm Levison, MGH SRM 5 (Hanover, 1910), pp. 519–20. 34 35

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ever extinguish life, although the offense of such men must not go unpunished.” The tricolon is a veiled threat. The bishop saw this, and tried to argue for a more positive “no loss from revenge”. The king is impatient. Does he renege on his previous promise, or just clarify it? “Do not now impose more and more conditions on me, since it is enough that I have granted you your life. Let it suffice that I spare you alone completely. For the rest, I promise nothing ….”40 The word to watch is “completely” (ex toto). The bishop alone gets a complete pardon. The others do not. Their fate will fit within the sinister terms of Wamba’s promise. Ultimately, Pizarro’s topic is reality and representation. Topoi and typescenes, “how things were meant to be on that sort of occasion”, take on such a life of their own that a wide chasm opens up between them and the reality they describe. They can conceal their opposites (that is, be complete lies) or cover anything between that and a reality precisely like the scene, particularly when the scene follows a ritual or social script. Authors sometimes show us how to interpret type-scenes by juxtaposing other examples in their text. Sometimes they invoke an external intertext. Pizarro cleverly suggests that the defective or skewed type-scene, the type-scene that is clearly and intentionally not true to type, offers us a crack into which to insert the interpretative chisel. When a virtuous king utters what turns out to be an ineffective “no”, we need to think. Was the punishment inflicted on the rebels according to the Historia forceful, painful and effective, as our ritualists suggest?41 Or is Pizarro right – that Julian is spinning the event, and that Wamba was in no position to punish the rebels effectively? Are we dealing with a commissioned work, representing Wamba’s point of view (Hillgarth),42 or with quite the opposite of a panegyric, namely history? All real barbarians slept in their armor. Consider the words of King Euric to the bishop sent to him as an ambassador by Theoderic: “Though the breastplate barely leaves my chest, and a brazen circle constantly encloses my hand, and the protection of an iron [sword] guards my side, I have come upon a man who can defeat me by his speech, armed, though I am.”43 The manner, if not the matter, should sound familiar after Ziolkowski’s Chapter 11. Whether we like it or not, humanistic scholarship is a textually transmitted disease. Computers can get us there faster and allow us to collect more material in less time, but they cannot tell us what the text says. Attention to texts means Historia Wambae 22, p. 519. Mayke De Jong, “Adding Insult to Injury: Julian of Toledo and his Historia Wambae”, in Peter Heather (ed.), The Visigoths from the Migration Period to the Seventh Century: An Ethnographic Perspective, Studies in Historical Archaeoethnology, 4 (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY, 1999), pp. 373–402, and Michael McCormick, Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Early Medieval West (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 302–17. 42 Sancti Iuliani toletanae sedis episcopi opera, ed. Jocelyn Hillgarth, vol. 1, CCL 115 (1976), p. viii. 43 Vita Epifani 90, p. 95. 40 41

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attention to language, and attention to language means attention to words, and in this case, to classes of words. Chapter 11 aspires to shed light on the Waltharius, its author and its historical context. It starts from the fact that authors consciously or unconsciously (in ways that can be self-revelatory) parade their technical and terminological expertise, be it nautical, as in Homer (Od. 5.244–61), Acts (27:13ff.) or Patrick O’Brian, or military, byrnies, and so on. The critic must puzzle over whether such agglomerations of terminology are novelistic or inadvertent, whether they are driven by genre, the quest for realism, or compulsion. Ziolkowski bravely oscillates between the Waltharius and the objects described therein. Armillae are exchanged. Heroes are armed. Weapons signal ethnic difference. Shields are prized, matter, take on a life of their own. The Waltharius poet did not use the Classical Latin shield terminology strictly. Umbo is used by synecdoche.44 Then the second line of defense, the body-armor: tunica, lorica, lorica squamata, “scale-mail”, a type of armor specifically mentioned in the Waltharius (482), and finally lorica hamata, “ring-mail”, rare before the twelfth century. The Latin dactylic hexameter is highly formulaic. It imitates ancient models – hence anachronism; its vocabulary is constrained by the exigencies of prosody – hence choriambs are out, and circumlocution is in. Yet at the same time, the hexameter was used to describe battles that were datable and had historical contexts. Sometimes it even described contemporary events. Ziolkowski’s tour of arms and armor in the Waltharius shows us that the author was interested in arms and armor; that the weapons have dramatic and thematic significance; that some material about weapons is not just inherited epic formula, but possibly authentic allusion to early medieval equipment. Scientific methods require control groups and parallel studies from dated materials. Should we examine weapons and regalia in other epics? The Aeneid? The Psychomachia? Claudian? The Anticlaudianus? Are these different epic poets’ treatments of weapons markedly different? And what of the Waltharius poet and more pregnant or symbolic weapons? The ekphrasis of a shield45 or Pallas’ fatal belt?46 Does his failure to use weapons as symbols and crucial plotmechanisms as did the great epic poets condemn him as a clunky Germanic weapons wonk?

44 Whether or not the usage is a synecdoche or not can matter: how much gold is Hagen to get at Waltharius 1263? 45 Aen. 8.625ff. 46 Aen. 12.941–2.

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PART four Practices of Power in an Early Medieval Empire

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Part Four

Practices of Power in an Early Medieval Empire Michael McCormick

The history of political power in the early Middle Ages began as a nineteenthcentury constitutional investigation, searching for the medieval roots of the institutions that then made Europe Europe: nations, monarchies, nobles, representative assemblies, towns and powerful Churches. The spell cast by constitutional historians such as Fustel de Coulanges (1830–1889), Maitland (1850–1906) and Waitz (1813–1886) combined with the contemporary expansion of bureaucratic nation-states to provoke admiration of late medieval protobureaucracies. This was sometimes matched by consternation at the “failure” of early medieval societies to generate neat organizational schemas of vertically integrated, obedient, salaried officials, thought to reflect the realities of a “more evolved” Roman Empire and later European states. The enduring achievement of the Belgian institutional historian François-Louis Ganshof (1895–1980) marks one culmination of this scholarly development, and his findings about how the Frankish kingdoms were organized, or not, constitute the indispensable reference point for even the most novel investigations. The present generation recognizes its deep indebtedness to his work. At the same time, today’s early medievalists have moved beyond the conceptual framework and assumptions that governed earlier research. They recognize that the ability to create a civil service more or less comparable to that of nineteenth-century nation states is perhaps not the most apt criterion for evaluating the performance of an eighthcentury king.

 Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions politiques de l’ancienne France (6 vols, Paris, 1908); Frederic William Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England (Cambridge, 1907); Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, 2nd edn (2 vols, Cambridge, 1911); Georg Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, 4th edn (9 vols, 1876–96; reprinted Graz, 1953–55).  See, among his many studies, those translated into English and collected in FrançoisLouis Ganshof, The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy, trans. Janet Sondheimer (Ithaca, NY, 1971), and François-Louis Ganshof, Frankish Institutions under Charlemagne, trans. Bryce Lyon and Mary Lyon (Providence, 1968), as well as François-Louis Ganshof, Feudalism, trans. Philip Grierson, 3rd edn (New York, 1964).

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On one hand, ritual, its symbolism and its social process have contributed importantly to our understanding of early medieval political life and its enduring impact on Europe over the long haul. On the other, the increasing impact of cultural anthropology, direct or indirect, has sparked interest in the lived patterns of power as they have emerged from renewed scrutiny not only of the laws, charters, dispute settlements and administrative orders of the royal centers, but especially of the numerous records and even the literary monuments of favored areas of western Europe. This anthropological turn has proved quite fertile, as chapters in several parts of this volume suggest. Part Four develops these newer approaches from the top to the localities, from Charlemagne and the mental impact of his empire on his representatives, through an oft-noted yet little understood pattern of judicial competence. It reaches into local circles, and how they competed for imperial attention and for the wealth and local clout it could bring, a clout grounded, literally, in local land control – villages and estates – in property and its attendant expectations, and in ties to the royal center. These studies aim not to reconstitute or demolish some abstract constitutional and institutional structure, but to illuminate political society and governance through the practices of power in that inexhaustibly fertile zone of investigation, the Carolingian empire. Janet Nelson begins in Chapter 13 with the enormous physical, social and mental distances that segregated the welter of lands in Charlemagne’s empire, distances that burdened but did not block communications. A remarkable document spotlights a singularly neglected phenomenon: the institution of hostages. Surely preserved in an original prepared by or for one of the participants in that meeting at Mainz in spring 805 or 806, the hostage list invites focus on the “local outsourcing of a central task” of rulership, and suggests the extent to which the task of running an empire had been internalized by the twenty-some grandees entrusted with these presumably young Saxons. The In one sense, this development began with Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, “The ‘King’s Advent’ and the Enigmatic Panels in the Doors of Santa Sabina”, in Selected Studies (Locust Valley, NY, 1965), pp. 37–75 (originally published in 1944); Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship, University of California Publications in History, 33 (Berkeley, CA, 1946); Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ, 1957). To cite only these examples, further contributions to the early medieval theme came from Michael McCormick, Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Early Medieval West, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1990); Gerd Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt, 1997); Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton, NJ, 2001), and Gerd Althoff, Die Macht der Rituale: Symbolik und Herrschaft im Mittelalter (Darmstadt, 2003).  A few examples from the many fertile contributions: Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre (eds), The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1992); Heinrich Fichtenau, Living in the Tenth Century: Mentalities and Social Orders, trans. Patrick J. Geary (Chicago, IL, 1991), and Matthew Innes, State and Society in the Early Middle Ages: The Middle Rhine Valley, 400–1000, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th series, 47 (Cambridge, 2000).  A neglect soon to be remedied by Adam Kosto’s forthcoming monograph on the subject. 

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subtle insight allows us to see one of the mechanisms of practicing power, the way in which the short-lived material empire of Charlemagne was giving rise to a far more powerful and long-lived phenomenon: an empire of the mind. This empire of the mind stands as an unavoidable part of the early Middle Age’s legacy to the next millennium of European history, for the effort to restore, equal or surpass Charlemagne’s extraordinary achievement has inspired and bedeviled European political and military history down to this very day. In Chapter 14, Jennifer Davis attacks the problem of earlier critiques of Charlemagne’s governance head-on, by asking whether indeed a system lurked behind the lack of system in how Charlemagne governed his vast realm. Recent work has contributed splendidly to illuminating royal power from the perspective of the periphery, but she forcefully reminds us that the core counts too. One can only make sense of the decisions taken and implemented in the empire of the mind by looking attentively, and with new eyes, on what the center of power wanted. That center of power was a great source of wealth, in the form of property or office, for the elites who were co-opted into its service. In Chapter 15, Matthew Innes explores among them the practices of property and claims to it in the mid-ninth century. From a very different perspective, his moral economy of property strikingly complements Angenendt’s story of the embeddedness of landed wealth in the mentality of the age. By complexifying common-sense notions of property, Innes uncovers “an aristocratic discourse of moral claim and family history” emanating from individuals whose vertical connections to the king ramified into multiple horizontal links to figures in the countryside where those individuals’ properties and their social webs ran so thick. The discourse permeates the written expressions of this social group, from work-a-day charters to the polished œuvre of an Einhard, or the more rough-hewn ruminations of a Dhuoda. In Chapter 16, Stuart Airlie articulates the new directions these studies mark in investigating early medieval practices of power, and measures the distance covered since Ganshof. Communications and networks, even a systems approach, beckon. Airlie sketches a promising path forward, involving two connected itineraries: more comparative approaches, and bringing into dialogue the multiple national traditions of studying early medieval politics and documents. The ways British, American, Belgian, French, German or Italian historians approach, interrogate and use the same records, Airlie rightly observes, is sometimes surprisingly different. Understanding these differences enriches the investigations of all, without homogenizing research strategies and questions. More comparisons will bring out what is distinctive in various elements of the story of early medieval political power: parallels can be drawn among the diverse regions of the Carolingian empire, to be sure, but also across empires (Airlie as well Innes, not to mention, in Part One, Henning in Chapter 2, derive inspiration from the late Roman experience), and across time, particularly with the post-Carolingian world of the tenth century. But the path forward will also require us to pair idealized aristocratic discourses about

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the “moral economy of property” with the more somber realities of life and death on those properties as they are beginning to emerge from archaeological investigation of those nobles’ aims to dominate the peasants, not least from the chapters in Part One of this volume.

See Chapters 2 and 3 in this volume. For two admirable early efforts to analyze and depict the Carolingian countryside, see Jean Cuisenier and Rémy Guadagnin (eds), Un Village au temps de Charlemagne: moines et paysans de l’abbaye de Saint-Denis, du VIIe siècle à l’an mil (Paris, 1988), and Willy Groenman-Van Waateringe and Louise H. van Wijngaarden-Bakker, Farm Life in a Carolingian Village (Assen, 1987), even though the archaeology in both is now dated. For a recent survey, see Helena Hamerow, Early Medieval Settlements: The Archaeology of Rural Communities in Northwest Europe, 400–900 (Oxford, 2002), and for some idea of what can emerge, Isabelle Catteddu (ed.), Les habitats carolingiens de Montours et La Chapelle-Saint-Aubert (Ille-et-Vilaine), Documents d’archéologie française, 89 (Paris, 2001). 

Chapter 13

Charlemagne and Empire Janet L. Nelson

Oceans of ink have been spilled (and I have contributed my own tea-cupful) on efforts to understand the origins and meaning of the imperial title conferred on Charlemagne on Christmas Day 800. In this short chapter, I am not going to address empire in that sense. Instead, I want to consider how Charlemagne’s far-extended regime actually operated in its mature phase by asking very directly how those within it were reached, affected, got at. Many great scholars have looked at these questions, yet what I hope to signpost are, in a sense, new directions. Charlemagne’s empire was created under the sign of renewal; and over the last twenty years its modern historiography has been, and is being, renewed as scholars young and not-so-young in the New World and the Old, with more or less attention to theory, reframe old questions of government in new terms of power and meaning. What Georges Duby called une chefferie de village étendue aux limites de l’univers needed to evolve new modes of communication if it was to get its work done for it, hence, if people in it were to feel themselves, regularly if intermittently, touched by, and participants in, the regime. First, briefly, we can think about scale. Wendy Davies, using the charters of the monastery of Redon, has offered ninth-century east Brittany as a micromodel: a cluster of chefferies de village, or as she calls them, “village communities”. The contemporary term in those parts was plebs/plebes. Villages on the ground perhaps only meant much as an assemblage when they became parts of Redon’s lordship. Yet each functioned within a social and political landscape. Distances between village centres were mostly in the range of 6 or 7 km, so the plebs normally covered some 10–15 km². Davies suggested that this was comparable to the size of an English hundred. She was able to show how people moved about on  I want to thank the organisers of the Harvard Conference and editors of this volume, Mike McCormick and Jenny Davis, for much inspiration, and for patience far beyond the call of duty.  See Rudolf Schieffer, “Die Einheit des Karolingerreiches als praktisches Problem und als theoretische Forderung”, in Werner Maleczek (ed.), Fragen der politischen Integration im mittelalterlichen Europa, Vorträge und Forschungen, 63 (Sigmaringen, 2005), pp. 33–47, especially pp. 40–42.  Georges Duby, Des sociétés médiévales, Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France, prononcée le 4 décembre 1970 (Paris, 1971), p. 23: “a village-chiefdom extended to the limits of the universe”.  Wendy Davies, Small Worlds: The Village Community in Early Medieval Brittany (London, 1988), p. 65. Davies suggests “usually in the order of 40–50 km2”.

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public business within different ranges for different roles: as witnesses, 10 km maximum. Most never travelled on such business beyond their plebs, therefore, though a significant minority travelled between two or three plebes, that is, across 20 km – a morning’s walk. People acting as sureties (fideiussores) and oath-helpers mostly operated within an equally restricted range. Only a tiny minority (2–6 per cent) of the plebs, that is, only the well-off peasants, might go 30 km or more. The people who travelled further were extremely few: monastic administrators, notables or minor aristocrats. Records of the seventeenth century show people of similar sorts travelling similar distances. Like east Brittany, other Carolingian small worlds can be viewed, thanks to relatively dense charter material and some fine research: southwest Alemannia, in light of the charters of St Gall; west Bavaria, in light of the Freising archive; the Rhineland, courtesy of the documents preserved at Lorsch and Fulda; or even Istria, thanks to just one exceptionally rich document. (It is worth mentioning that all of us scholars of this and the past two generations stand – I borrow a medieval image – as dwarfs on the shoulders of scholar-giants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: that is the incremental nature of our craft.) The charters do not only show spatial movement, they suggest what made men move. A health warning on the above would indicate an evidentiary bias towards legal activity. I want to look at a document which is less fancy than even the simplest charter: it is simply a list, the Indiculus obsidum Saxonum Moguntiam deducendorum (“List of Saxon Hostages to be Brought to Mainz”). After long neglect, the Mainz hostage list has been the object of thoughtful commentary in a very interesting recent paper by Adam Kosto.10 But that paper’s subject was a much broader discussion of hostage-taking. My focus today is narrow. Yet I hope to show that the Indiculus, fortuitously true to its name, points in new directions. It survives in an early ninth-century manuscript.11 Each hostage is identified by his father’s name as well as his own, and each is said to be being “held” by Michael Borgolte, Geschichte der Grafschaften Alemanniens in fränkischer Zeit (Sigmaringen, 1984); Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge, 1989).  Wilhelm Störmer, Adelsgruppen in früh- und hochmittelalterlichen Bayern (Munich, 1972); Warren Brown, Unjust Seizure: Conflict, Interest and Authority in an Early Medieval Society (Ithaca, NY, 2001).  Franz Staab, Untersuchungen zur Gesellschaft am Mittelrhein in der Karolingerzeit (Wiesbaden, 1974); Matthew Innes, State and Society in the Early Middle Ages: The Middle Rhine Valley, 400–1000, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th series, 47 (Cambridge, 2000).  Cesare Manaresi (ed.), I Placiti del regnum Italiae (Rome, 1955), no. 17, pp. 48–55; Stefan Esders, “Regionale Selbstbehauptung zwischen Byzanz und dem Frankenreich. Die Inquisition der Rechtsgewohnheiten Istriens durch die Sendboten Karls des Grossen und Pippins von Italien”, in Stefan Esders and Thomas Scharff (eds), Eid und Wahrheitssuche. Studien zu rechtlichen Befragungspraktiken in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit (Frankfurt, 1999), pp. 49–112.  MGH LL 2, Capit. 1, no. 115, pp. 233–4. See the appendix to this chapter for an English translation of the text. 10 Adam Kosto, “Hostages in the Carolingian World (714–840)”, EME, 11 (2002): 123–47, here pp. 142–4. 11 I am very grateful to my friend and colleague David Ganz for his expert advice here. See also below. 

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a named minder. It has long been suspected, but now Michael Borgolte has shown beyond doubt (with only the tiniest bit of circular argument involved), that nearly all the lay magnates named in the Mainz list as hostage-minders can be identified certainly or probably as Alamans: Count Ansbert,12 Richoin (Rihwin), future count of Thurgau,13 Waning (I) count of Nibelgau,14 Geremann (Karamann) count of Bertholdsbaar,15 Unroc, a close adviser of Charlemagne, whose connections with Alemannia perhaps came through his wife,16 Lantfred (Lantfrid), later count of Klettgau,17 Ripoin (Rifoin), count of Nibelgau,18 Count Audrac (Otger),19 Birtilo (Pirihtilo), count in Bertholdsbaar,20 Vulfald (Wolfolt), count in Alaholfsbaar,21 Torro,22 Bertald (II), count in Bertoldsbaar,23 Walah,24 Wichard,25 Sciltung,26 Einhart,27 Ruadhar (Ruachar), count in Bertoldsbaar,28 and Reccho.29 Two other men without comital title and unidentifiable, Ado and Erivald, are said in the list itself to be de Alamania, or Alamannus. Two bishops and one abbot are also named, all holding office in Alamannia: Aino/Agino/Egino, bishop of Constance,30 Sinbert, bishop of Augsburg,31 and Abbot Waldo of

Borgolte, Die Grafen, p. 55. Ibid., pp. 206–9, especially p. 207. Two hostages had been assigned to him. 14 Ibid., p. 276. 15 Ibid., pp. 157–9. 16 Ibid., pp. 271–2, and for his nephew, count of Hegau, pp. 46–8. 17 Ibid., pp. 175–6. 18 Ibid., p. 205. 19 Ibid., p. 65. Here the argument that this count is Alaman derives mainly from his presence in the Indiculus, and is therefore just a shade circular; but Borgolte points to an “Otger” who appears c. 814 in the St Gall Liber Memorialis; Paul Piper (ed.), MGH Libri Confraternitatum Sancti Galli, Augiensis, Fabariensis (Berlin, 1884), p. 20, cols 32, 22. 20 Ibid., pp. 195–9. His successor was Karamann: see note 15 above. 21 Ibid., pp. 297–8. Six hostages had been assigned to him. 22 No identification suggested. 23 Ibid., pp. 71–5, here p. 74. 24 Is this Wala, Charlemagne’s cousin? See Lorenz Weinrich, Wala. Graf, Mönch und Rebell. Die Biographie eines Karolingers (Lübeck, 1963), pp. 18–19. 25 No identification suggested, but cf. Borgolte, Die Grafen, p. 224 (under Ruadbert (II)) for a mid-ninth century Alaman of this name. 26 No identification suggested. 27 Was this Einhard? Note that he is first attested as a trusted counselor at this time, Annales regni Francorum a. 806, ed. Friedrich Kurze, MGH SRG (Hanover, 1895), p. 121, when he took the Divisio document (that is, the division of the empire’s realms between Charlemagne’s sons) to Pope Leo III for confirmation. See further page 226 below for the significance of this text. For Einhard’s Maingau origin, see Paul E. Dutton, Charlemagne’s Courtier: The Complete Einhard (Peterborough, ON, 1998), pp. xi, 8, 43. 28 Borgolte, Die Grafen, pp. 210–15, here p. 211. 29 No identification suggested, but for other Alamans of this name later in the ninth century, see Borgolte, Die Grafen, pp. 67, 264. Section III of the list gets scrappy, and contains three of the four unidentified minders. 30 Three, possibly four, hostages are assigned to him (there seems to be a gap in the first line). Note that his name is spelled three different ways in sections 1, 2 and 3. 31 Two hostages are assigned to him. 12 13

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Reichenau.32 You get the Alamannic picture. At Mainz, to “receive” the Saxons, were to be Bishop Heito of Basel33 and Count Hitto.34 The clinching details, and the dating – 805/806 – add up to a monument of German prosopographical scholarship. David Ganz assigns to Reichenau the book-hand in which the list is written. Among the Saxon hostages are 10 from Westfalia, 15 from Eastfalia and 12 from Angraria. Helpfully, the list says: Sunt in summa XXXVII (“There are in total 37”). These have been distributed among 24 minders. The list ends: Isti veniant ad Mogontiam media quadragesima (“These are to come to Mainz in the middle of Lent”). Easter in 806 was on 12 April, mid-Lent about 22 March. In 805, Easter fell later still, on 20 April, and mid-Lent was about 30 March. I am inclined to plump for 805, on the grounds that 804 seems to have seen the end of Saxon resistance, and in 805, when Charlemagne sent three armies under his son Charles against the Wends, one consisted of Saxons.35 The year 805 thus marked something of a turning-point. But was the bringing of the hostages to Mainz a sign that they were to be released, a sign that Saxony was finally subdued, that Saxons were now to be trusted to gain the benefits of fighting on the eastern frontier, and that now, as Einhard put it, “Saxons and Franks were united and made into one people”?36 This is only one possible scenario. In 806, in the Divisio regnorum, planning for a future division of the empire among his three sons, Charlemagne revealed not only other plans for hostages who possibly were Saxons, but the existence of hostages from other regions within the empire as well: there is every sign that he foresaw the system’s continuance. Clause 13 of the Divisio says: “as for hostages given as credentiae [“sureties”, “pledges”] and sent by us to various places to be watched over: it is our will that the king in whose kingdom they are should not allow them to return to their homeland without the consent of his brother from whose kingdom they’ve If Waldo abbas is the same man as the Waldo without title, two hostages were assigned to

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him.

33 Heito was a former Reichenau monk, bishop of Basel from some date between 791 and, probably, 805; he attested Charlemagne’s will in 811, and was sent as an envoy to Constantinople in 811–12. The name-forms Heito, Haito, Haido, Hetto, Hitto were all applied to this man. See Philippe Depreux, Prosopographie de l’entourage de Louis le Pieux (781–840) (Sigmaringen, 1997), pp. 234–5. 34 Is this Hatto, Charlemagne’s ostiarius? Hubert Mordek, “Eine exemplarischer Rechtsstreit”, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung, 83 (1997): 86–112, reprinted in Mordek, Studien zur fränkischen Herrschergesetzgebung (Frankfurt, 2000), pp. 279–305, here pp. 282, n. 13, 297 (text), identifies the ostiarius with the Hatto who witnessed Charlemagne’s will, and with “Count Hatto” still active in 841: this would make the hostage-list his earliest appearance, and one of a new group (cf. Einhard); contra, Innes, State and Society, p. 207. If Hitto could be identified with Innes’s “Count Hatto” in the Mainz region, the last of 22 attesters of a Fulda charter in 802 (see Innes, State and Society, pp. 124–6), he would be one of an old guard. 35 Chronicon Moissiacense a. 805, ed. Georg H. Pertz, MGH SS 1 (Hanover, 1826), p. 308. MidLent in 806 would be too late for “Einhartus” to be identified as Einhard, who had presumably set off for Rome with the Divisio document straight after the assembly of Thionville, in early February (the text was approved on Friday 6 February): see note 27 above. 36 Einhard, Vita Karoli 7, ed. Oswald Holder-Egger, MGH SRG (Hanover, 1911), p. 10.

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been removed”.37 I think this implies that hostages were a general currency of high value within the empire, that Charlemagne had always controlled their movements closely, that he meant to carry on so doing, and that he intended his successors to do so as well. Imagine, then, thirty-odd Saxons and some twenty Alaman proceres, with retinues, making their way north to Mainz in late March. Some were travelling far from home. From the Thurgau to Mainz by the likeliest route is nearly 400 km, and from Augsburg to Mainz well over 300 km across country. The Reichenau contingent, and the counts from western Alamannia (that is, the southwestern region of Germany, later known as Swabia) might have travelled down the Rhine by boat. All these “sons of …” were presumably boys or young men whose fathers’ submission had been urgently sought at the time of the original hostage-taking. By 805, some of them were maybe lads grown hoary in honourable captivity. They had been distributed mainly through aristocratic estates, some to ecclesiastical estates, and perhaps also to the estates of two of Charlemagne’s close counsellors – Wala with lands in media Francia (middle Francia, or the Middle Kingdom), Einhard with inherited lands near Mainz or in Franconia: these may be last-minute add-ons. It looks as if most of the top men in Alamannia had received their share of hostage-minding. The document itself has an Alamannic tinge. It may have been Abbot Waldo’s personal, locally made copy of a kind of standard list emanating from Aachen, and that standard list in turn might have depended on updates coming in from the various parts of Alamannia. Waldo’s role perhaps included getting copies made of a document sent or brought from Aachen: local outsourcing of a central task. Maybe Bishop Heito, a former Reichenau monk, was given the job of sending out the lists to the minders. He must certainly have had his own copy as a tick-off register, if the system was to work at all. To be awarded the job of minder was a mixed blessing. The word deducendi (“have to be led”), a gerundive “mustdo”, is the modern editor’s title, but the text’s subjunctives (isti veniant, recipiat episcopus; “these are to come”, “the bishop is to receive”) have imperative force. To require the hostages to be presented by a fixed date was a way of finding out how well the job had been done. Communication, and an element of regular checking-up, were crucial at each stage. The Mainz list opens a little window on a much bigger system of service which was hardly unique to Alamannia. Before and after 805, Charlemagne practiced hostage-holding extensively. The capitulary De villis (“On royal estates”), c. 12, shows him assigning hostages to royal estate managers, some of whom were apparently liable to offload their responsibilities, and at the same time acquire assets for themselves in terms of local patronage or networking, by commending “their” hostages to others.38 Hostage-minding could be burdensome: it also carried potential benefits. If marriage between populi Capit. 1, no. 45, c. 13, p. 129. Capit. 1, no. 32, c. 12, p. 84. Kosto, “Hostages”, pp. 127, 137–8, 146–7, briefly but tellingly indicates the diverse kinds of social and political relations involved in hostage-minding. 37 38

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was a customary way of making alliances between aristocratic groups (Divisio Regnorum, c. 12), why not also was bringing up a young Saxon or whatever on your lands or in your household (Divisio, c. 13 – the juxtaposition of these two capitula – chapter headings – is not fortuitous).39 The nutritor–nutritus (“nurturer– nurtured”) bond could be strong and enduring.40 As for the Saxon hostages, given time, they would be rather thoroughly Christianised (the more so if in the hands of a bishop or abbot), they would acquire contacts that might come in handy later for both parties involved as well as for the ruler, and they would learn at the very least to speak with a different accent.41 In context, the Mainz list suggests how the system could promote acculturation and alliance within the imperial elite across generations, and helps, not just in a small way, to explain why the Saxon wars had a relatively happy ending. At the same time, it shows the ruler hand in glove with provincial elites, distributing potential benefits widely. Credentiae could be more than sureties: living pledges of trust between Charlemagne and his proceres, living agents of future networking. Hostages were one form of the bonding of hearts that Augustine had rightly diagnosed as essential to bodies politic and social.42 I focus in the rest of this chapter on another type of bond and another incentive to travel, inherent in the practice of witnessing at inquiries, and in the generalised swearing of oaths. That Charlemagne did not invent witnessing on oath is clear from the report of Vernarius, missus (literally, “envoy”) in Provence in 780, about an inquiry (inquisitio) with sworn testimony from “pagenses (“locals”) who ought to be knowledgeable”.43 A report on a placitum (“legal assembly”) held by missi at Rižana in 804 shows the procedure working in a recently-incorporated region, Istria: 172 homines capitanei (“leading men”, “captains”) chosen by the missi from each civitas (“town”) and castellum (“fortress”) were “made to swear on the gospels and the relics of saints that they would tell the truth about all they knew about everything on which we made enquiry of them”.44 As a footnote on feedback, another little connexion can be observed here. One of the Istrians’ most anguished complaints – because of this, they said, “we are in great oppression and grief ” – was that Duke John “took our horses to the assembly and gave them to Charlemagne as his gifts”. The very next year, in the Capitulary of Thionville, Charlemagne ordered as “something to make known Capit. 1, no. 45, c. 12, 13, pp. 129. That between Einhard and Charlemagne is the most salient example: Vita Karoli, preface, pp. 1–2. 41 Identifying former Saxon hostages among ninth-century churchmen or Church patrons would be the other piece of the diptych: I have not yet got very far (this being a new direction for me), but there are possible leads which I hope to pursue in what remains of relevant Saxon ecclesiastical archives: see Christopher Carroll, “The Bishoprics of Saxony in the First Century after Christianization”, EME, 8 (1999): 219–46. 42 See the references given in Janet L. Nelson, The Frankish World (London, 1996), p. 162, nn. 42–5. 43 Joseph H. Albanes and Ulysse Chevalier, Gallia christiana novissima, vol. 2 (Marseilles, 1899), no. 41, cols 33–4. See further Nelson, The Frankish World, p. 67. 44 See references in note 8 above. 39 40

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to all”, “That whoever presents horses as gifts to the king shall have his own name written on each of them” (Ut quicumque in dona regia caballos praesentaverit, in unumquemque suum nomen scriptum habeat).45 Name-labels are among the most useful of the uses of literacy. Other connexions were made at Thionville in the final days of 805.46 Capitula issued about oaths and perjury show administrators engaged in joinedup thinking about oaths of fidelity and the oaths sworn by witnesses. Fidelity was to be sworn on oath only to the emperor or to a man’s own lord. Anyone who presumed to make a conspiracy with an oath would be judged on three criteria: if any wickedness has ensued, the perpetrators are to be executed, and those who helped them are to be flogged, each by another, and to have their noses slit, each by another; but when no wickedness has ensued, they are to be flogged, one by another, as above, and to have their hair sheared one by another. If the conspiracy was made per dextras [that is, by striking hands rather than by oath-swearing], if those involved were free men, they are to swear with suitable oath-helpers that they did not do this for an evil purpose, and … if they are unfree [servi], they are to be flogged. So that perjuries may be guarded against, witnesses are not to be admitted to oaths until they have been investigated, and if they cannot otherwise be [properly] investigated, they are to be separated from each other and interrogated individually [singulariter].47

Oath-helpers and impartial witnesses who swore on oath to tell the truth were normally to be chosen de ipso pago (“from within the pagus [county]”), “unless the case has to be conducted longius extra comitatum [‘far beyond the county’]”.48 A capitulary of King Pippin of Italy drew directly on this to prescribe that when impartial witnesses were needed, “such men are to be chosen as have good repute among those of the same county” (tales eligantur qui testimonium bonum habeant inter suos pagenses), and “testimonies are to be [given] separately from each other, as the law commands” (testimonia ab invicem separentur, sicut lex iubet).49 A little over a decade later, in 825, the co-emperor Lothar and his advisers at an assembly at Olonna near Pavia grasped the principle of individuality and shifted it from witnesses’ oaths to the generalised oath of fidelity: “all oathswearers are to swear singly” (iuratores omnes singillatim iurent).50 Into a manuscript including that capitulary, a later ninth-century hand inserted a folio containing simply “a list of those who have sworn the oath of fidelity” (Indiculus eorum qui sacramentum fidelitatis iuraverunt). Two gastalds, plus 172 men (including two 45 Capit. 1, no. 67 (?805), c. 5, p. 144: “Hoc a nobis praeceptum est omnibus cognitum facere.” 46 Ibid., no. 44, c. 9, 10, 11, p. 124. 47 Ibid., no. 44, c. 10, p. 124. 48 Ibid., no. 44, c. 11, p. 124. 49 Ibid., no. 102 (c. 806/10), c.12, p. 210. See François Bougard, La justice dans le royaume d’Italie de la fin du VIIIe siècle au début du XIe siècle (Rome, 1995), pp. 226–7. 50 Capit. 1, no. 165 (May 825), c. 8, p. 331.

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scabini [“local judicial authorities”, Fr. échevin] and three notaries) had sworn, presumably singillatim (“each individually”), and had their names recorded.51 This was no show of hands. The individualising of the solemn commitment must have been time-consuming, but like a degree-ceremony, it must have been individually moving and memorable. Mobilising people’s memories, and their sense of self, was a true act of state. Where did it all start? Ganshof saw the revolutionary year as 789, when Charlemagne first decreed oaths for “all” aged 12 and over. All? Well, “the whole generality of the people … who had been coming to local assemblies” (cunctas [sic] generalitas populi … qui ad placita venissent): the assembly-attending community.52 Missi and counts made oath-swearing happen at the familiar places in which placita had always been held: well-established meeting sites within the pagus, or out in more rural settings: “And let those missi take away with them in a list the names and number of those who have sworn; and the counts likewise from their individual hundreds”. In Ganshof ’s view, Charlemagne’s intent in requiring such oaths was to make up for a bureaucratic deficit, and like other similar Carolingian efforts, it was inevitably doomed to failure. I see instead a richly promising project, rooted in fundamentals of Frankish governmental practice but at the same time moving in a new direction. In 789, the general oath had been a defensive response to revolt and betrayal. Infideles homines (“unfaithful or disloyal men”), when interrogated in the aftermath of the revolt of 786, had said in their own defense “that they had not sworn fidelity to him [Charlemagne]” (quod fidelitatem ei non iurasset).53 In 802, the purpose of the oath was very much more positive, assertive and demanding: “that it is to be communicated to all publicly, so that each one of them can understand the size and scale of what is being required in this oath, and not, as many have been thinking up to now, that it was only about faithfulness as regards the emperor’s life”.54 The oath was to have in principle a universal reach, but the bottom line was each individual man’s own undertaking, a personal covenant: “That each should strive in his own person to keep himself fully in the service of God according to God’s command and according to his own 51 Ibid., no. 181, pp. 377-8; Corteolona, near Pavia, ?May 825. Note the recurrence of the figure 172. 52 Capit. 1, no. 25, c. 4, p. 67. Apparently everyone was to come armed, so imagine an event resonant with the champing of horses, the clanking of swords, shields and lances. It was a setting for ceremony evoking one of the major purposes of an assembly: a summoning of the host. For 789 as the date, see the cogent arguments of Matthias Becher, Eid und Herrschaft. Untersuchungen zum Herrscherethos Karls des Grossen (Sigmaringen, 1993), pp. 78–85. The association with assembly attendance makes it redundant to specify that the regulations apply only to men, not women. 53 Capit. 1, no. 25, prologue, p. 66. 54 Ibid., no. 33 (802), c. 2, 3, p. 92: “ut omnes traderetur publice qualiter unusquisque intellegere posset quam magna in isto sacramento et quam multa conprehensa sunt, non, ut multi usque nunc extimaverunt, tantum fidelitate domno imperatori usque in vita ipsius, et ne aliquem inimicum in suum regnum causa inimicitiae inducat, et ne alicui infidelitate illius consentient aut retaciat …”.

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sponsio [‘solemn promise’].”55 Susan Reynolds may be right to say this “could not have created a personal bond between the subject and king, or have been meant to do so”.56 The obligations were to the emperor, but the sponsio created by the oath was a pledge to God. The obligations involved could neither be delegated nor passed upwards: “The lord emperor himself cannot provide the guidance and discipline necessary on the part of each one individually” (Ipse domnus imperator non omnibus singulariter necessariam potest exhibere curam et disciplinam). Each man had to apply that “guidance and discipline” on himself and for himself. If this was imperial, it was also participatory. Its effectiveness would depend on generalised willingness to assume personal responsibility, practice self-discipline. Charlemagne was expecting this of each one of a wide constituency of local notables, law-worthy men, and men capable of fighting pro patria. I detect an echo of this same message in another of Charlemagne’s late capitularies, directed to a more restricted audience of counsellors. It is the agenda – and this gerundive too is meaningful – for a meeting of counts, bishops and abbots in 811: “It is our will to address each of them individually” (Volumus … singulariter illos alloqui); and “Investigation must be made into ourselves, whether we are really Christians. This can very easily be discerned by considering our way of life and conduct, if we are willing to discuss our conversatio [‘way of life or conduct’] conscientiously in front of each other.” A monastic model has shifted its register: the conversatio of elite men has become a public priority, and therefore, following Charlemagne’s wider agenda, an individual concern.57 Soon after this, a collection of sermons was written in Bavaria for an audience including laymen.58 The preacher was to inveigh against bribery and litigiousness, to summon people to do justice, to demand judges to do good. One sermon is entitled de periculo principum.59 The author’s model, Isidore’s Sententiae, had written about the dangers of kings, not regional or local leaders, and about the “bond of faith”. The preacher adapts this to a wider audience of lay aristocrats, wielders of potestas (“power”) in general:

Ibid., no. 33, c. 3, p. 92. Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford, 1994), p. 89. 57 Capit. 1, no. 71, c. 1, 9, p. 161: “et singulariter illos alloqui”, “… si diligenter conversationem coram discutere voluerimus”. 58 The collection, which was reconstructed by Jean Paul Bouhot, “Un sermonnaire carolingien”, Revue d’histoire des textes, 4 (1974): 181–223, and Georges Folliet, “Deux nouveaux témoins du sermonnaire carolingien récemment reconstitué”, Revue des études augustiniennes, 23 (1977): 155–98, is edited for the first time from MS Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek, M.p.th. q.15 and MS Udine, Biblioteca arcivescovile, 4, by James McCune in “Carolingian Sermonaries from Bavaria” (Ph.D thesis, University of London, 2005). I am very grateful to James for invaluable commentary on this collection. For the wider context, see Thomas M. Buck, Admonitio und Praedicatio. Zur religiös-pastoralen Dimension von Kapitularien und kapitulariennahen Texten (507–814), Freiburger Beiträge zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte Studien und Texte, 9 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1997). 59 The sermon is 2.51 in the Würzburg MS (see note 58 above) at fols 199v–200r. 55 56

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Sub religionis disciplina saeculi potestates subiectae sunt; et quamvis culmine honoris sint praediti, vinculo tamen sponsionis quem Deo fecerunt tenentur adstricti, ut fidem Christi suis verbis et operibus praedicent. [The powers of this world are subject to the discipline of religion, and although they are endowed with the distinction of an office, they are nevertheless to be bound by the bond of the solemn promise which they made to God, so that they may “preach” the Faith of Christ in their words and deeds.]60

This sounds to me like a clear echo of the sponsio of the 802 Capitulary, and the sermon, like other contemporary ones, seems designed for delivery to an assembly audience. Here were new directions. Court ideology was being redesigned to reach placita in the provinces. Diffused through Charlemagne’s preferred media of oath-takings and sermons, the internalizing of discipline was on the way to becoming the agenda of a Christian elite empire-wide. The individually-expressed priorities of younger generations of lay people (Einhard, Nithard, Dhuoda, Eberhard) indicate that Charlemagne’s agenda, like dye in cloth, had taken, or become absorbed, in human material collectively. Charlemagne’s government would persist as an empire of the mind.61

The sermon’s sources are Isidore, Sententiae 3.50.5–6 and 51.1–3. The compiler has changed his Isidorean source in the following, highly significant places: l. 2, fidei has been replaced by sponsionis; l. 3, legibus has been replaced by verbis et operibus; l. 6, reges has been replaced by principes; ll. 7, 8, principem has been replaced by rectorem; l. 11, regni has been replaced by honoris. 61 For Charlemagne’s message, see Janet L. Nelson, “Was Charlemagne’s Court a Courtly Society?”, in Catherine Cubitt (ed.), Court Culture in the Early Middle Ages, Studies in the Early Middle Ages, 3 (Turnhout, 2003), pp. 39–57. For striking instances of lay absorption on the part of the four aristocrats listed, see the contributions of David Ganz (“Einhardus peccator”, pp. 37–50), Stuart Airlie (“The World, the Text and the Carolingian: Royal, Aristocratic and Masculine Identities in Nithard’s Histories”, pp. 51–76), Janet L. Nelson (“Dhuoda”, pp. 106– 20) and Paul J.E. Kershaw (“Eberhard of Friuli, a Carolingian Lay Intellectual”, pp. 77–105) in Patrick Wormald and Janet L. Nelson (eds), Lay Intellectuals in the Earlier Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2007). 60

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Appendix: List of Saxon Hostages to be Brought to Mainz62 Date: ?805 Of the Westfalians Bishop Haito and Count Hitto are to receive these: Leodac son of Bodolon Adalrad son of Marcrad whom Bishop Aino has held. Odo son of Emmo whom Count Ansbert has held. Ervin son of Rano whom Richoin has held. Crailinc son of Thetmaer whom Richoin has held. Gerimfrid son of Egloin whom bishop Egeno has held. Aicharh son of Fredred whom Ado from Alamannia has held. Theodoar son of Audrad whom Count Waning has held. Baldric son of Rotger whom Count Gereman has held. Adalgaud son of Suigaut whom Count Unroc has held. Of the Ostfalians Gerard son of Macco whom Bishop Sinbert has held. Hisi son of Brunard whom Bishop Agino has held. The son of Maingis whom Lantfred has held. Titbald son of Sigibald whom Count Ripoin has held. Vulfer son of Sieri whom Count Audrac has held. Hernald son of Suithard whom Abbot Waldo has held. Eriward son of Herigild whom the Alaman Erivald has held. Fredeger son of Ermamenar whom Birtilo has held. The son of Macco whom Count Vulfald has held. Dodo son of Attost whom Torro has held. Sidugath son of Benninc whom Count Bertald has held. Ricohard son of Unvan whom Count Bertold has held. Fredegar son of Wichar whom Walah has held. Alabern son of Tuto whom Vulvald has held. Of the Angrarians Bun son of Theotaker whom Wichart has held. Altbert son of Wilbern whom Bishop Sindbert has held. Hetti son of Megi whom Sciltung has held. Hadamar son of Sigimar and Hitto son of Fridileih and Brunher son of Liuther whom Wolfolt has held. Ditmann son of Osmann whom Waldo has held. Capit. 1, no. 115, pp. 233–4.

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Fridamund son of Warmunt whom Einhart has held and Macrinus son of Megitod. Ruadhart son of Danctag whom Ruadhar has held. Hadabern son of Witrad whom Reccho has held. Wolfurich son of Eorich whom Bishop Egino has held. There are in total 37. These are to come to Mainz in the middle of Lent.

Chapter 14

A Pattern for Power: Charlemagne’s Delegation of Judicial Responsibilities Jennifer R. Davis

Early in 802, Charlemagne issued the most far-reaching statement of governmental principles produced during his reign. One of the changes introduced by the Capitulare missorum generale (“General Capitulary of the Missi”) was a new understanding of the oath of loyalty all male subjects over the age of 12 had to swear to the king. Unlike previous oaths, the capitulary explained, the revised oath sworn to Charlemagne in his new role as emperor would ask far more of the swearers. The new oath foresaw a deep involvement of every subject in the joint project of living a Christian life. The reach of this understanding of loyalty to the king can hardly be overstated. Scholars have long debated how much the provisions set out in the capitularies were implemented in the localities of the far-flung Carolingian  I would like to thank the commentator on my panel, Patrick Geary, and the audience at the conference, especially Chris Wickham and Angeliki Laiou, for useful suggestions. I would also like to thank Michael McCormick and Rosamond McKitterick for reading and commenting on this chapter.  MGH LL 2, Capit. 1, no. 33, pp. 91–9. Capitularies of Charlemagne will be cited by number and page number in the Boretius edition, unless otherwise noted. On the scope of this capitulary, see François-Louis Ganshof, “Charlemagne’s Programme of Imperial Government”, in his The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy, trans. Janet Sondheimer (London, 1971), pp. 55–85, especially p. 56.  Capit. 1, no. 33, c. 2, p. 92. The king and his advisers reiterated the need to re-swear, or to swear for the first time, in, among others, Capit. 1, no. 34, c. 1, p. 100 and no. 46, c. 2, p. 131, with the added command to swear to the king’s succession arrangements of 806. Even at the end of the reign, the king was still mandating missi (royal agents, literally, those sent by the king) to make sure the oath of loyalty was sworn and to explain to the population what the oath required, as in Capit. 1, no. 80, c. 13, p. 177, dated to 811 by Hubert Mordek: Bibliotheca capitularium regum Francorum manuscripta. Überlieferung und Traditionszusammenhang der fränkischen Herrschererlasse, MGH Hilfsmittel, 15 (Munich, 1995), p. 1089. See further Chapter 13 in this volume on the import of the oath.  Capit. 1, no. 33, c. 2, p. 92.  Ibid., c. 3, p. 92 and c. 40, pp. 98-9; Matthias Becher, Eid und Herrschaft. Untersuchungen zum Herrscherethos Karls des Grossen, Vorträge und Forschungen, 39 (Sigmaringen, 1993), pp. 202–3, 210–11.  On the new ideas in the oath of 802 and some of the political factors underlying them, see Becher, Eid und Herrschaft, especially pp. 201–11.

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empire. Illustrious historians, such as François-Louis Ganshof, have downplayed Charlemagne’s ability to execute his policies, claiming “little of this programme was realised”. In fact, the new oath does provide a test case in which we can see implementation in action. One obligation of loyalty on which the new oath insisted was the duty to avoid perjury and to testify truthfully in court. In a case heard at Freising later in 802, the witnesses were explicitly told that they must tell the truth because of the oath they had just sworn to Charlemagne.10 While this incident is of great moment to the historian of royal governance, it also raises serious interpretative challenges. The essential problem is how to generalize from one unambiguous episode. We of course do have other evidence to bring to bear on the problem, for further sources hint at the use of the oath.11 But how do we combine this evidence to reach an overall evaluation of how Charlemagne and his advisers ruled and to what that rule amounted? A different approach can shed some new light on the persistent analytical issues inherent in studying Charlemagne. My method is to look for recurrent patterns that suggest broader principles of rulership that underlie and unify the fragmentary pieces of evidence for governance. These patterns of rulership (which we can trace over time and in different types of sources) help elucidate the overall approach to rule adopted by Charlemagne and his advisers. We can then use the patterns to provide an outline within which to situate the information we do have on specific plans or ideas, and to reveal the basic assumptions with which the king and his advisers confronted the challenges of rule. In order to illustrate this methodology, I would like to consider how we can On the problem of early medieval law and its implementation, see Patrick Wormald, “Giving God and King Their Due: Conflict and its Regulation in the Early English State”, in La Giustizia nell’alto medioevo (secoli IX–XI), Settimane, 44 (Spoleto, 1997), pp. 549–83, especially pp. 549–50, and for the capitularies, Hubert Mordek, “Karolingische Kapitularien”, in his Studien zur fränkischen Herrschergesetzgebung (Frankfurt, 2000), pp. 55–80, here pp. 74–9.  Ganshof, “Charlemagne’s Programme”, p. 70.  After the capitulary announces that the new oath is more inclusive than the previous oath of fidelity sworn to the king, it goes on to list several duties associated with fidelity to the king. The second of these is the need to avoid perjury (Capit. 1, no. 33, c. 4, p. 92 and again c. 36, p. 98), which is reinforced by another chapter on the necessity of assuring justice (ibid., c. 9, p. 93). 10 Die Traditionen des Hochstifts Freising, ed. Theodor Bitterauf, Quellen und Erörterungen zur bayerischen und deutschen Geschichte, neue Folge 4 (Munich, 1905, reprinted 1967), no. 186, pp. 178–9: “Tunc praedicti missi dominici Arn archiepiscopus, et Aduluuinus episcopus, atque Orendil judex ipsos homines qui hoc testificaverunt in medium vocaverunt et per sacramentum fidelitatis quem domno Karolo magno imperatori ipso praesente anno iuraverunt adtestati sunt eos, ut omnimodis absque ulla fraude vel ingenio ita ut veracissime de ipsa causa scirent ita in palam adnuntiarent.” 11 Becher, Eid und Herrschaft, p. 16. The Annales Guelferbytani and the Annals of St Amand include references to swearing the oath, for 801 and 802 respectively: Annales Guelferbytani, ed. Georg H. Pertz, MGH SS 1 (Hanover, 1826), p. 45 and Annales Sancti Amandi, MGH SS 1, p. 14. At least one other dispute settlement record alludes to the oath: Hermann Wartmann (ed.), Urkundenbuch der Abtei Sanct Gallen, Theil 1, 700–840 (Zurich, 1863), no. 187, p. 177. For an example of capitulary legislation reflected in legal practice from a rather different context, see Janet L. Nelson, “Dispute Settlement in Carolingian West Francia”, in Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre (eds), The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 45–64, here p. 63. 

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discover patterns of rulership by looking at royal legislation on judicial roles. This one example of judicial delegation sheds valuable light on a deeper pattern for Charlemagne’s power – namely, how Charles the Great and his advisers preferred to undertake the same task in more than one way simultaneously. By the time Charles became king, it had long been generally accepted that a Christian ruler was responsible for justice.12 One of the primary ways Charlemagne sought to fulfill this royal duty was through the legislation on justice presented in his capitularies.13 The capitularies touch on a plethora of judicial topics, ranging from perjury to care for the poor and weak to cases that should be referred to the king.14 The ultimate goal of such efforts, the capitularies tell us, was the salvation of the Christian people.15 This judicial work was thus of the utmost importance. The king and his advisers signaled that importance in the capitularies by addressing a variety of judicial topics in law, placing chapters on justice at the beginning or end of many capitularies, and by devoting so much space and attention to this topic in the capitularies as a whole.16 Yet, for the judicial “system”17 to function as the king and his advisers See, for example, Rosamond McKitterick, “Perceptions of Justice in Western Europe in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries”, in La Giustizia nell’alto medioevo (secoli IX–XI), pp. 1075–102, especially pp. 1075–80. 13 Just about every capitulary touches on justice in some form. For example, on judicial procedures: Capit. 1, no. 52, c. 3, p. 139; ibid., no. 61, c. 1, p. 148; ibid., no. 62, c. 28, p. 151, among many others. Certainly, there were other ways in which Charlemagne involved himself in justice, including hearing cases of dispute, presiding over Church councils, and so on. But the giving of capitularies concerning justice was the most sustained and extensive royal effort to intervene in judicial matters during Charlemagne’s reign. 14 To give one example of each topic – on perjury: ibid., no. 35, c. 39, p. 104; on care for the poor: ibid., no. 59, c. 1, p. 146; on cases to be referred to the king: ibid., no. 77, c. 2, 12, p. 171; on Charlemagne as the highest judge, see also Régine Le Jan, “Justice royale et pratiques sociales dans le royaume franc au IXe siècle”, in La Giustizia nell’alto medioevo (secoli IX–XI), pp. 47–85, here p. 58. 15 Capit. 1, no. 22, introduction, pp. 53–4, c. 60, p. 57, and c. 82, pp. 61–2; ibid., no. 33, c. 14, p. 94, c. 17, pp. 94–5, c. 27, p. 96, c. 40, pp. 98–9; ibid., no. 60, c. 4, p. 147; ibid., no. 85, introduction, c. 2, pp. 183–4; ibid., no. 103, p. 212, lines 8–9; the entire Missi cuiusdam admonitio, ibid., no. 121, pp. 239–40; Caroli Magni capitulare ecclesiasticum, c. 43, p. 989 (ed. Mordek, Bibliotheca, Anhang 1, no. 12). 16 Notes 13 and 14 above indicate the range of judicial interests. Capit. 1, no. 33, c. 1, pp. 91–2, provides one example of placing these matters at the start or end of capitularies (the point about placement of chapters is of course more relevant for capitularies produced at court, rather than capitularies created out of assembly discussions, though both are possible contexts for the compilation of capitularies). The extent of Charlemagne’s interest in justice is also evident in comparison to the much more limited legislation on justice issued by the Merovingians, which is surveyed in Karl Kroeschell, “Recht und Gericht in den merowingischen ‘Kapitularien’”, in La Giustizia nell’alto medioevo (secoli V–VIII), Settimane, 42 (Spoleto, 1995), pp. 737–65, here pp. 748–61, and Ingrid Woll, Untersuchungen zu Überlieferung und Eigenart der merowingischen Kapitularien, Freiburger Beiträge zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte, 6 (Frankfurt, 1995), pp. 76–86. Kroeschell and Woll do not argue for a limited interest in justice for the Merovingians, but their work, in my opinion, makes clear the contrast with the Carolingians, and Charlemagne in particular. 17 By the use of the word “system”, I do not mean to imply that the Carolingian judicial framework approximated the legal bureaucracies of the modern state. However, as I will argue 12

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wanted it to do required implementation by royal officials.18 Indeed, the clear apportioning of judicial roles to royal agents would seem to be a prerequisite for fulfilling the goals set out in the capitularies.19 What were the judicial officials at work in Charlemagne’s realm supposed to do? The primary judicial officials in the Carolingian empire were the count, bishop and missus.20 We can examine the legislation on their respective judicial functions as a way of seeing how these agents were meant to carry out the royal duty to ensure justice, at least in the idealistic terms of normative law.21 The vision of justice presented in Carolingian legislation depends on the cooperation of all royal agents, from judges up to the supervising missi, to ensure justice and religious ideals of concord and harmony: the capitularies tell us that counts, judges and bishops “should consent together to do justice”.22 The basic division of tasks is, at first glance at least, quite straightforward. A primary duty of a royal count was to administer justice locally.23 The responsibilities inherent in this job are spelled out in the capitularies, and include not going hunting when one was meant to be holding court, judging justly without changing the law, and knowing which law to apply to which case.24 In theory at least, the job here, there is a method to the seeming madness of the arrangement of judicial matters in the capitularies. 18 As royal legislation put it, all must do their part because the king could not attend to everything alone; Capit. 1, no. 33, c. 3, p. 92. 19 Jürgen Hannig has argued that we must investigate the missi through how they actually worked in a region and not through a “categorical listing of general/usual missatical functions”; Jürgen Hannig, “Zentrale Kontrolle und regionale Machtbalance. Beobachtungen zum System der karolingischen Königsboten am Beispiel des Mittelrheingebietes”, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 66 (1984): 1–46, here p. 6; see also Jürgen Hannig, “Zur Funktion der karolingischen ‘missi dominici’ in Bayern und in den südöstlichen Grenzgebieten”, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Germanistische Abteilung, 101 (1984): 256–300, here p. 261. This view privileges analysis of local documents at the expense of royal normative documents. Hannig is correct that we must understand how missi worked in reality, not just in legal, normative sources. I would argue, however, that while this is a useful corrective to some of the older literature, we must not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Local practice is important, but so too is understanding the king’s will. 20 Janet L. Nelson, “Kingship and Royal Government”, in NCMH, pp. 383–430, here pp. 410–14; Karl Ferdinand Werner, “Missus-marchio-comes: entre l’administration centrale et l’administration locale de l’empire carolingien”, in Werner Paravicini and Karl Ferdinand Werner (eds), Histoire comparée de l’administration (IVe–XVIIIe siècles), Beihefte der Francia, 9 (Munich, 1980), pp. 191–239, here pp. 191–7. 21 On normative law, see Patrick Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1999), here pp. 50–51. However, Ganshof rightly observed that the capitularies are often administrative, rather than strictly normative: François-Louis Ganshof, “The Institutional Framework of the Frankish Monarchy: A Survey of its General Characteristics”, in his The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy, pp. 86–110, here p. 102. 22 Capit. 1, no. 78, c. 10, p. 174, my translation. The requirement for concord and harmony among royal officials in general, rather than specifically judicial, terms is a constant refrain in the capitularies. Examples include: Capit. 1, no. 22, c. 62, p. 58; Capit. 1, no. 34, c. 18a, p. 101; Capit. 1, no. 62, c. 4, p. 150. 23 See the survey of comital judicial duties in Ganshof, “The Institutional Framework of the Frankish Monarchy”, p. 91; Nelson, “Kingship and Royal Government”, pp. 410–11. 24 To give a few examples: Capit. 1, no. 23, c. 17, p. 63, requires counts to hear the cases of orphans or those with guardians first, and not to go hunting instead of holding court (see a

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of the missus was to supervise the performance by counts and other officials of their duties.25 Abbots, bishops, and any other men who refused to attend the missus’ assembly should be forced to come, and if they still refused, the case was referred to the king.26 Bishops also had an essential role to play in the Carolingian judicial system, especially in hearing the cases of clerics. The synod of Frankfurt, for example, requires bishops to provide justice in their own dioceses, and to refer any problems they could not resolve to the court of the metropolitan.27 But when one pushes beyond the summary job descriptions, matters quickly become more opaque. A few examples can illuminate this point. The missi had a supervisory authority lacking in counts; if the missi were in a region, they took precedence over other judicial officials.28 As one capitulary tells us, the missi should hold four circuit courts with the assistance of the counts each year, and the rest of the counts’ own court sessions would be arranged around the missatical schedule.29 However, while the missi were there to check on the counts and report dereliction of duty back to the king, they were simultaneously working together with the counts of the region.30 Two further points add to this picture of both oversight and co-operation. First, the capitularies suggest that the missi also had their own courts without the counts’ participation.31 Second, some judicial questions (such as sentencing a free man to death) were not reserved for count or missus, but could be treated in either court, which could imply their

similar prohibition in ibid., no. 49, c. 1, p. 135); ibid., no. 57, c. 4, p. 144, orders counts and their vicars to judge justly and not to change the law; and finally the king orders that counts and judges must know the law (in this case the Germanic national law) by which they should live in ibid., no. 35, c. 48, p. 104. 25 The legislation on missatical supervision of other officials is extensive; an example is found in ibid., no. 34, c. 19, p. 101 and repeated in ibid., no. 35, c. 59, p. 104; see also ibid., no. 20, c. 21, p. 51 and ibid., no. 85, c. 2, p. 184 on judicial supervision in particular; and on the role of the missi in general terms, see Werner, “Missus-marchio-comes”, p. 195. 26 Capit. 1, no. 58, c. 5, p. 145. On this unusual capitulary, see Janet L. Nelson, “The Voice of Charlemagne”, in Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser (eds), Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages. Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-Harting (Oxford, 2001), pp. 76–88, here p. 80. 27 Capit. 1, no. 28, c. 6, pp. 74–5. 28 Nelson, “Kingship and Royal Government”, p. 413. 29 Capit. 1, no. 80, c. 8, p. 177. The actual frequency of court sessions is rather less clear than this one example suggests (see Francis Estey, “The Scabini and the Local Courts”, Speculum, 26 (1951): 119–29, here p. 120), although the structuring of the schedule around the missi is evident (see also c. 12, p. 177 of the same capitulary). Another example of the supervisory authority of the missi is Capit. 1, no. 44, c. 12, p. 124. 30 Report dereliction of duty: ibid., no. 35, c. 59, p. 104; working together: ibid., no. 80, c. 8, p. 177. 31 For example, legislation which requires missi to choose their own scabini, notaries, and advocates implies a separate missatical court system: ibid., no. 40, c. 3, p. 115. The legislation does not preclude, however, the missi sharing such officials with the counts at times; see further note 36 below. The injunctions that the missi check on counts, among others, of course also would require the missi to act independently; for instance, ibid., no. 34, cc. 18a and 19, p. 101.

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simultaneous existence.32 If the missi were not present, there was no problem, but if the missi were there, it is unclear whether all matters pertaining to both officials were treated by just the missi, or by missi and count together, or perhaps even by the count alone. The capitularies thus create uncertainty over how both courts were to coexist. Rather than solely operate as supervisors, the missi clearly replicated some of the counts’ judicial functions.33 One would think that being the king’s eyes and ears locally would be responsibility enough, but instead, the missi were additionally taking on, sometimes alone, sometimes with the counts, local roles performed by the counts. Of course, the missi frequently were already themselves counts in their own missatica,34 which makes it even more difficult to draw hard and fast lines between the judicial tasks assigned to different officials. Several other features of the Carolingian judicial framework, as it is set out in the capitularies, further exacerbate the lack of clarity in the distinctions between missatical and comital justice. The first problem is that the counts and missi were far from being the only judicial officials at work in the Carolingian lands.35 We also see centenarii, iudices and vicarii (that is, vice-counts, judges and vicars) holding court themselves, albeit often as agents of the local count or the royal missus.36 Furthermore, justice was carried out with the co-operation of advocates (standing in, admittedly inconsistently, for ecclesiastical leaders) On sentencing a free man to death: ibid., no. 80, c. 4, p. 176. Another example is cases about property or liberty: ibid., no. 64, c. 3, p. 153. See also Le Jan, “Justice royale”, pp. 61, 73–4, for some useful examples of matters that could be treated by count, missus, or both. 33 The missi appear clearly as supervisors in the missatical letter of command sent to several counts: Capitula a missis dominicis ad comites directa, Capit. 1, no. 85, pp. 183–4. On this text, see Wilhelm Eckhardt, Die Kapitulariensammlung Bischof Ghaerbalds von Lüttich, Germanenrechte neue Folge, Deutschrechtliches Archiv, 5 (Göttingen, 1955), pp. 33–7. On replication of function, see also Le Jan, “Justice royale”, p. 57. 34 At least from 802 on; Ganshof, “Charlemagne’s Programme”, p. 56. One example is Count Stephen of Paris, who was a missus in 802, as signaled in the Capitularia missorum specialia, Capit. 1, no. 34, introduction, version a, p. 100; and who also read out the Capitulare legibus addendum (ibid., no. 39, pp. 111–14) to his people, according to one manuscript heading (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 4995, f. 19v; see Mordek, Bibliotheca, p. 551). Some scholars question the extent to which a dramatic change occurred in 802: Jürgen Hannig, “Pauperiores vassi de infra palatio? Zur Entstehung der karolingischen Königsbotenorganisation”, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 91 (1983): 309–74, especially pp. 309–13, 373–4. 35 Werner, “Missus-marchio-comes”, pp. 225–7. 36 Lesser agents holding court: for instance, Capit. 1, no. 80, c. 4, p. 176; ibid., no. 39, c. 4, p. 113; ibid., no. 102, c. 14, p. 210, for centenarii, iudices and vicarii, respectively. On lesser agents acting on behalf of counts and missi: this point is made for centenarii in the Caroli Magni capitulare generale, c. 20, p. 992 (ed. Mordek, Bibliotheca, Anhang 1, no. 13). For iudices working with counts see, for example, Capit. 1, no. 35, c. 48, p. 104; for vicars, see ibid., no. 57, c. 4, p. 144. See also the comments of Nelson, “Dispute Settlement”, p. 55. The subordination of all of these secondary judicial agents is evident in the missi’s ability to evaluate and, when necessary, replace such agents: “Ut iudices, advocati, praepositi, centenarii, scabinii, quales meliores inveniri possunt et Deum timentes, constituantur ad sua ministeria exercenda”; Capit. 1, no. 61, c. 11, p. 149; see also ibid., no. 44, c. 12, p. 124. In practice, the missi might have co-operated with the counts in the choosing and disciplining of such officials; Estey, “The Scabini”, p. 122. And those agents employed by the counts themselves should be chosen by the count together with the people (Capit. 1, no. 62, c. 22, 32

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and scabini (local judicial agents).37 These supplemental judicial agents present a similar case to that of the counts versus the missi.38 In general terms, the centenarii, vicarii, scabini, advocati and iudices were subordinate to the counts and missi, yet they also seem to fulfill some of the same basic judicial functions.39 The capitularies make the overall terms of the hierarchical relationship clear, but they leave the general principles, if there were any, which determined who actually did what on a daily basis much more undefined than modern treatises on Carolingian administration might suggest.40 The second issue concerns the other main player in local administration of justice, namely the bishop. First of all, the bishop was meant to deal with all cases involving clerics.41 We may suspect, however, that the capitularies insist on such episcopal competence because many clerics preferred secular justice.42 In any case, episcopal jurisdiction was never absolute. If nothing else, the king himself could intervene even in matters that should have begun in an ecclesiastical setting.43 The king also claimed a right to hear cases involving bishops as parties.44 Episcopal judicial roles, and indeed the judicial roles of counts and missi as well, were all subject to royal interference, especially in cases where the parties otherwise refused to accept judgment.45 Moreover, the lack of clarity in Carolingian legislation about the role the episcopate should play in any p. 151); the mechanism by which the agents were chosen by counts and people and then evaluated by the missi is again unclear, and structured only by the expectation of co-operation. 37 For advocates, Capit. 1, no. 33, c. 13, p. 93, and for scabini, ibid., no. 41, c. 8, p. 118. 38 Many figures served as judges, most of whom had other duties as well: Harald Siems, “Bestechliche und ungerechte Richter in frühmittelalterlichen Rechtsquellen”, in La Giustizia nell’alto medioevo (secoli V–VIII), pp. 509–63, here pp. 511–12. 39 In addition to the references above, Capit. 1, no. 33, c. 25, p. 96, illustrates the basic co-operation in judicial tasks, in this case for counts and centenarii. Note here too the possibility that centenarii may have lower officials to help them in their duties. The roles of officials like the centenarii as sort of mini-counts was clear already to Heinrich Brunner, for example in his discussion of centenarii and vicarii: Heinrich Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, ed. Claudius Freiherr von Schwerin (2 vols, Munich, 1906–28), vol. 2, pp. 234–41. 40 For traditional views of Carolingian administration, see François-Louis Ganshof, Frankish Institutions under Charlemagne, ed. and trans. Bryce Lyon and Mary Lyon (Providence, RI, 1968), especially pp. 26–34 and pp. 73–86. Even though Ganshof is aware of some overlapping of tasks (p. 29), the need for co-operation (p. 29), and the likelihood that not all the rules were followed as written (p. 82), he still presents the administrative profile of the Carolingian empire in more regular and ordered terms than the evidence, in my opinion, warrants. See also Matthew Innes, State and Society in the Early Middle Ages. The Middle Rhine Valley, 400–1000, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th series, 47 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 5–9. 41 Capit. 1, no. 22, c. 28 and c. 38, p. 56. 42 And clerics are indeed explicitly reminded that they must be judged by an ecclesiastic court, not a secular one, for instance in ibid., no. 35, c. 17, p. 103. 43 For example, ibid., no. 28, c. 6, pp. 74–5. 44 For instance, ibid., no. 80, c. 2, p. 176; Capit. 1, no. 58, c. 5, p. 145. 45 For royal interference in secular justice, see ibid., no. 40, c. 4, p. 115 and comments of Le Jan, “Justice royale”, p. 58. And on the strengthening of royal oversight over bad judges see Siems, “Bestechliche und ungerechte Richter”, especially pp. 555–9. On parties refusing to accept judgment: Capit. 1, no. 20, c. 22, p. 51, to give just one example. See also Ganshof, “Charlemagne’s Programme”, pp. 64–5.

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worldly matters further limits episcopal jurisdiction.46 Bishops were necessary in Carolingian justice, and indeed in Carolingian society generally,47 because the administrative system depended on their participation. However, this episcopal secular involvement existed in uneasy tension with a desire to remove the holy from the stain of secular interactions.48 The conflict between this need to isolate bishops from secular business which could detract from their spiritual purpose and their vital role in governance was never resolved.49 This is evident in the use of bishops themselves as missi. Even bishops qua bishops, though, were expected to participate in giving justice to lay people, for example when they judged counts and lesser judicial officials who were accused of mistreating the poor.50 These episcopal responsibilities result in further shared judicial functions with counts and missi.51 A final point about bishops is the emphasis on co-operation. As we have seen, the capitularies insisted on harmony among all royal agents and indeed among all Christian people.52 As with the counts and missi, how this co-operation was to work in practice was largely left unclear. In cases where a dispute arose between a cleric and a layman, the bishop and count should give justice together.53 What happened if they disagreed is not addressed.54 This may be the point, of course, since such disharmony would disrupt the entire Carolingian administrative system. None the less, the capitularies constantly reiterate the necessity of cooperation in many ways. Bishops may have been largely responsible for their clerics, but they shared this task of supervision with the royal missi, some of whom were secular aristocrats.55 This is combined with a certain amount of For example, Capit. 1, no. 71, c. 5, p. 161. Werner, “Missus-marchio-comes”, pp. 197–204. 48 See, for example, Capit. 1, no. 102, c. 3, p. 209. 49 For a later example of this persistent problem see Mayke de Jong, “Power and Humility in Carolingian Society: The Public Penance of Louis the Pious”, EME, 1 (1992): 29–52, especially pp. 39–43. Hartmann argues that Charlemagne expected more and more from his bishops as judges, at least as judges of religious crime (such as incest), over the course of his reign: Wilfried Hartmann, “Der Bischof als Richter. Zum geistlichen Gericht über kriminelle Vergehen von Laien im früheren Mittelalter”, Römische historische Mitteilungen, 28 (1986): 103–24, here p. 109. However, this can be seen as more an intensification of governance than a policy shift. 50 On justice for lay people see, for example, Capit. 1, no. 33, c. 14, p. 94; on judging officials who mistreat the poor: ibid., no. 78, c. 22, p. 174. 51 Werner, “Missus-marchio-comes”, pp. 201–2; Nelson, “Kingship and Royal Government”, p. 414. 52 A few examples are given in note 22 above. Such references resound with religious overtones; for instance, Caroli Magni capitulare generale, c. 2, p. 990 (ed. Mordek, Bibliotheca, Anhang 1, text no. 13): “Ut comites et iudices omnesque populi obȩdientes sint episcopis suis ad christianitatem suam et ad sanam doctrinam ad omnemque iusticiam, sicut christianis decet; et episcopi et clerici omnes comitibus sint consentientes ad iusticiam.” 53 Capit. 1, no. 28, c. 30, p. 77. 54 The closest the capitularies come to giving a sense of regulating judicial precedence is in the suggestion that counts might be summoned to an episcopal hearing (ibid., no. 28, c. 6, pp. 74–5), or the precedence over other royal servants assigned to the missi. 55 Ibid., no. 84, c. 10, p. 183; ibid., no. 89, c. 6, p. 189. 46 47

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episcopal supervision by the missi.56 One capitulary tells us that “Bishops should stand with counts and counts with bishops, so that each is able to fully carry out their ministry/office [ministerium].”57 A pleasant ideal, perhaps, but hardly a useful blueprint for who should do what when. A further capitulary which requires that all people, counts and judges included, should obey the bishop, and that all together should consent to justice might be a bit clearer on mutual obligations, but still leaves the respective spheres of influence ill defined.58 The bishops, as seen in capitulary legislation, share certain judicial functions with counts and missi, and who actually does what is left obscure. To the extent that there was any effort to regulate judicial roles, royal officials were constantly told both to undertake tasks that overlap with the tasks assigned to others, and to co-operate.59 My contention is not that different officials essentially did the same thing or that office was irrelevant, but that the very conception of official roles involved overlapping functions. The judicial system of the Carolingians thus depended on shared judicial responsibility, which the king and his advisers attempted to regulate by evoking an ideal of concord and harmony. The capitularies devote copious attention to both the necessity of providing justice and how this justice is to be provided. Yet, the definitions of official judicial roles that we have seen consistently result in a sort of repetitive apportioning of tasks.60 The capitularies expect different royal officials to perform overlapping judicial roles, and offer little information on what happens when the overlapping Ibid., no. 104, c. 5, p. 214. Ibid., no. 69, c. 4, p. 158, my translation. See also ibid., no. 102, c. 5, pp. 209–10. 58 Ibid., no. 78, c. 10, p. 174; see also c. 9, p. 174 on concord among bishops, counts, clerics, monks, and the entire population. 59 Hannig argues too for a lack of differentiation between missatical roles and other offices, for “flexibility” and inefficiency in the conception of the office of the missus (Hannig, “Zur Funktion der ‘missi dominici’”, pp. 271–2, 275–7 and especially 298–9; Hannig, “Zentrale Kontrolle”, p. 36), but he does so in the course of an argument that the missatical role was primarily an add-on to other offices in the struggle for influence of local noble families and a co-opting of existing local power structures. Hannig suggests that we can understand power either as it was acted out locally or as it was arranged centrally, and he argues for the former. In my view, both local and royal factors shaped the exercise of power and conduct of office during Charlemagne’s reign. 60 Philippe Depreux’s study of the function of the count of the palace under Louis the Pious suggests that this official also shared his judicial roles with a variety of other people, with no firm distinctions between the competencies of separate officials: Philippe Depreux, “Le rôle du comte du Palais à la lumière des sources relatives au règne de l’empereur Louis le Pieux (814–840)”, FS, 34 (2000): 94–111, especially p. 111. Of course, as Depreux himself has reminded us, the reign of Louis cannot simply be assumed to display the same judicial features as that of Charlemagne. For instance, Philippe Depreux, “L’absence de jugement datant du règne de Louis le Pieux. L’expression d’un mode de gouvernement reposant plus systématiquement sur le recours aux missi?”, Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest, 108 (2001): 7–20. None the less, it would be useful to investigate the office of the count of the palace under Charlemagne along the lines suggested by Depreux. Furthermore, Louis the Pious made an effort to regulate comital and missatical placita (Capit. 1, no. 141, c. 25, p. 291), but we do not have evidence for such precise regulations under Charlemagne (see further note 29 above). Future research should address comparisons between the administrative structures of Charlemagne and Louis, which, while similar, did not coincide precisely. 56 57

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roles conflict. This lack of clean lines between the respective roles of various judicial authorities creates an overlapping of competencies, a kind of intentional redundancy, with more than one type of royal agent, or indeed the king himself, potentially involved in the same judicial situation. It is not that every case would stimulate undefined roles, but that the judicial framework of Charlemagne’s reign makes such overlapping and confusion possible. The king and his advisers aimed, at least in the normative law, to fulfill the strong desire to ensure justice by asking different officials to do the same things as their fellow officials and by relying on their mutual co-operation to resolve any difficulties. While we do not have space here to investigate the playing out of this vision in nonnormative sources, these too reflect a similar redundancy, which I would consider intentional, in the use of officials.61 An easy answer why the capitularies leave incompletely defined the judicial competencies we have looked at is that the Carolingian judicial “system” was itself incompletely defined, if not to say disorganized and often unclear. The capitularies, which were meant to lay out how the system was supposed to function, were not a single, coherent legal production, but an agglomeration of legal decisions and exhortations that emerged over time, with attendant repetitions and even contradictions.62 The capitularies as a group offer us a view of a great work-in-progress, which naturally leaves some matters apparently muddled.63 Yet, as a collection of texts, the capitularies are not in fact an incoherent mass of laws.64 Indeed, the capitularies reiterate clear ideas and themes throughout, whatever the differing circumstances of their application. Moreover, this issue of judicial overlapping is consistent enough throughout the capitularies that it calls out for explanation, rather than dismissal as an accident or juridical incompetence. There were, in fact, some advantages to this judicial overlapping. First, it provided great flexibility of approach: a judicial framework in which many responses were possible could best confront a variety of situations. This expediently recognized power realities, namely that officials in the localities had their own local power bases and were often far from royal control and oversight. Flexibility built into the judicial framework could enable the royal court to take advantage of such differing local power constellations, by allowing the same case to be handled differently depending on circumstance. Moreover, this technique of rule is a clever way of delegating power while still maintaining overall royal control. Such an overlapping of judicial functions left so many people with I address this issue in my Ph.D. dissertation, “Patterns of Power: Charlemagne and the Invention of Medieval Rulership” (Harvard University, 2007), ch. 2. 62 Mordek, “Karolingische Kapitularien”, pp. 61–5, 70. 63 François-Louis Ganshof, Recherches sur les capitulaires (Paris, 1958), pp. 72–4. 64 Christina Pössel’s recent study, “Authors and Recipients of Carolingian Capitularies, 779–829”, in Richard Corradini, Rob Meens, Christina Pössel and Philip Shaw (eds), Texts and Identities in the Early Middle Ages, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophischhistorische Klasse, Denkschriften, 344 (Vienna, 2006), pp. 253–74, focusing on those who received capitularies, opens up new avenues to understanding the coherence of the capitularies. 61

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judicial roles that it was virtually inevitable that local claimants would address one or several of the possible judicial authorities based on where they thought they would find the most agreeable response.65 Differing circumstances and relationships would effectively guarantee that different people would bring their cases to different courts.66 In this way, it is not so much the case that Carolingian governance was non-institutional, but that the institutions which existed were constantly reshaped by personal relationships. Similarly, since office in and of itself did not have strictly defined judicial powers attached to it, matters could play out differently when a new official was installed. Overlapping delegation prevented too much power from centralizing in any hands other than the king’s.67 What we can see in this overlapping of judicial function is not merely a certain amount of legal confusion, or the reflection of a legal system in flux (though both exist), but a coherent effort to take account of local power realities, make best use of these (as indeed any early medieval king had to do), and simultaneously protect a certain amount of royal authority.68 This was a matter of expediency, of benefiting from the situation Charlemagne and his advisers found themselves in, but the pragmatic expediency does not detract from a structure and purpose within the seemingly perplexing legislation on the giving of justice. Rather than assigning strictly defined tasks to certain officials, Charlemagne preferred to use his legislation to share the same responsibilities among many people at once. The tendency to pursue the same ends, in this case giving justice, in many ways simultaneously both makes use of local powers and subordinates them to a level of central control. This chapter has focused on the example of judicial function, but the same tendency to approach tasks in many ways at once is evident in numerous other aspects of Charlemagne’s political behavior, including the sponsorship of several versions of royal histories, a balancing of identity politics in the disparate Carolingian lands, and the pursuit of the same political aims in a variety of legal contexts. So many different kinds of sources – ranging from the legal texts employed here to letters, annals, and poetry – demonstrate the consistency of this approach to rulership across various areas of the Frankish empire’s political Loosely defined judicial competence also makes sense in a world where office was not entirely coincident with geography, particularly for counts: Innes, State and Society, pp. 119–20; Nelson, “Kingship and Royal Government”, pp. 411–12; Ulrich Nonn, “Probleme der frühmittelalterlichen Grafschaftsverfassung am Beispiel des Rhein-Mosel-Raums”, Jahrbuch für westdeutsche Landesgeschichte, 17 (1991): 29–41. 66 For an example of how local circumstances could influence how justice was pursued, see Chapter 15 in this volume. 67 For instance, one can observe this phenomenon in the case of the multiple offices held by Arn of Salzburg. Because his power depended on several offices as well as on his personal status in Bavaria and with Charlemagne, his power could not have been passed on; it did not cohere to any one office, but to a combination of offices and personal circumstances (compare the interpretation in Warren Brown, Unjust Seizure: Conflict, Interest, and Authority in an Early Medieval Society [Ithaca, NY, 2001], pp. 120–23). 68 On the constant renegotiation of power between king and localities, see Innes, State and Society, pp. 10–12, 252–4, 259–63. 65

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life that it can be considered a fundamental pattern of Charlemagne’s approach to the tasks of ruling. Is it too much to imagine that Charlemagne’s tendency to attack in a pincer motion, with two or more armies advancing from different directions, finds an echo in the king’s preference to approach the same judicial tasks from more than one angle at once?69 Rather than choosing one way to deal with a problem, Charlemagne and his advisers tended to deploy several overlapping solutions at once. If one official overstepped his bounds, he could be contained by others. If one approach did not work, there was already another one in place. This may not have been the most efficient approach to governance, but it left ample room for creativity, adaptation, personal dynamics and flexibility. Behind the often chaotic governmental practice evident in Carolingian sources, we can discover sustained and coherent patterns of rulership. Identifying such trends in how the king and his advisers approached problems of governance enables us to evaluate not just the discreet pieces of evidence for rule, but also broader themes of Charlemagne’s political practice. This methodology allows for a more complete understanding of Carolingian rulership, by helping us look at it systematically and systemically despite the lack of systematic evidence. It is only by searching out such overarching tendencies in the approach to rule, such patterns for power, that we can illuminate the deeper considerations that shaped Charlemagne’s and his advisers’ exercise of power.

As he did famously in the invasion of Italy in 773, which is described in the Royal Frankish Annals for that year; Friedrich Kurze (ed.), Annales regni Francorum, MGH SRG (Hanover, 1895), p. 36. See also Bernard S. Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare: Prelude to Empire (Philadelphia, PA, 2001), p. 193; Jean François Verbruggen, “L’armée et la stratégie de Charlemagne”, in Wolfgang Braunfels (ed.), Karl der Grosse. Lebenswerk und Nachleben (5 vols, Düsseldorf, 1965–69), here vol. 1: Persönlichkeit und Geschichte, ed. Helmut Beumann (Düsseldorf, 1965), pp. 420–36, here pp. 433–5. 69

Chapter 15

Practices of Property in the Carolingian Empire Matthew J. Innes

It might seem contrary to discuss rights over land in a volume devoted to new approaches. After all, land law and estate management, the analysis of charters and polyptychs, have long been central concerns of early medieval scholarship. And an insistent investigation of the relationship between land and power in the early medieval west has inspired the most successful recent attempts at theorising. But, although the centrality of land – or, better, control over land and labour so as to allow exploitation of the agrarian surplus – within early medieval societies may now be a commonplace, the mechanics of that control are little discussed and less understood. Early medieval law in general, and property law in particular, are not the subjects of any dedicated discussion in any of the spate of recent handbooks and syntheses. As a result, property rights are taken as self-evident; documents that transfer an individual’s rights or possessions at a named place are taken as simply reflecting real, manifest control, expressing a prior, common-sense, fact of ownership. Yet we know that our expectations of “absolute property” or “exclusive ownership” are not historical constants, but products of nineteenth-century social and legal change. Those studies of land-gifts to monasteries inspired by Barbara Rosenwein’s wonderful delineation of the social meaning of Cluny’s property have recreated a world of sometimes diffuse, often overlapping rights over land that articulated the relationships between those individuals and groups with interests in that land. None the less, we remain relatively ignorant about  See now Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400– 800 (Oxford, 2005).  The best discussion is that of the late Patrick Wormald, The Making of English Law from Alfred to the Twelfth Century, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 30–92; La Giustizia nell’alto medioevo (secoli V–VIII), Settimane, 42 (Spoleto, 1995), and La Giustizia nell’alto medioevo (secoli IX–XI), Settimane, 44 (Spoleto, 1997) give a good overview of the range of approaches currently being practised.  See, for example, Rosa Congost, “Property Rights and Historical Analysis: What Rights? Whose History?”, Past and Present, 181 (2003): 73–106.  Barbara Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of St Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny’s Property, 909–1049 (Ithaca, NY, 1989), and see, for example, Warren Brown, Unjust Seizure: Conflict, Interest and Authority in an Early Medieval Society (Ithaca, NY, 2001); Hans Hummer, Politics and Power in Early Medieval Europe: Alsace and the Frankish Realm 600–1000 (Cambridge, 2006); Marios

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how the “gift economy” revolving around ecclesiastical institutions related to practices of holding and transferring land amongst the property-owning class as a whole. Similarly, analyses of disputes and their processing – the other major historiographical strand in early medieval social history – have tended to take the objects being disputed – property rights in land – as given. The lack of attention to the mechanisms by which property rights were created and exercised in our period is no accident; it rests on deep historiographical foundations. Perhaps most imposing is Ernst Levy’s work on the “vulgarization” of late Roman property law, which allowed a generation of early medievalists to see actual control of land increasingly equated with legal right over that land. This has been reinforced by the headlong attack on descriptions of early medieval societies as “feudal” – in the tenurial sense of being based on the conditional holding of land in return for service – mounted by Susan Reynolds. It is now widely accepted that the property rights of early medieval landowners, although fuzzy in their legal conceptualisation and inconsistent in their linguistic expression, were ultimately rooted in physical control and accepted local knowledge; as a result, they have not been subjected to concerted investigation. This dominant view of early medieval landed property, stressing the hegemony of “full ownership” rooted in the “common sense” of local opinion, ultimately rests on the application of broadly functionalist models of “custom” to early medieval history. But anthropologists have refined their understanding of custom, seeing it as a legitimating ideology, not a manifestation of an organic consensus, and medievalists are now stressing the contingency and contestedness of claims about publica fama (“public repute”). We should avoid an extreme position, which would see consensus and custom as merely rhetorical artefacts used instrumentally by those elites who controlled the written record; to be Costambeys, Power and Patronage in Early Medieval Italy: Local Society, Italian Politics and the Abbey of Farfa (Cambridge, 2007).  See further Chapter 7 in this volume on gifts to monasteries.  See now Warren Brown and Piotr Górecki (eds), Conflict in Medieval Europe: Changing Perspectives on Society and Culture (London, 2003), especially the editors’ introduction.  Ernst Levy, West Roman Vulgar Law: The Law of Property (Philadelphia, PA, 1951), is the most influential text, widely received as a progressive work even though written in an abstracted and formal tradition of legal history; for its reception by those creating a very different historiography, see, for example, Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre (eds), The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1986). But Levy’s reconstruction is now being critiqued: Peter Garnsey and Caroline Humfress, The Evolution of the Late Antique World (Cambridge, 2001), ch. 4, pp. 52–82.  Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reconsidered (London, 1994).  See the reviews of Reynolds by Frederic L. Cheyette, Speculum, 71 (1996): 998–1006, and Paul R. Hyams, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 27 (1997): 655–62, both available online at the Internet Medieval Sourcebook, ; cf. the extensive case studies cited in note 4 above, and note Hyams’ review of Brown, The Medieval Review ID 02.09.41, ; and for the late antique end, Matthew Innes, “Land, Freedom and the Making of the Medieval West”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th Series, 16 (2006): 39–73.

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effective, after all, claims about long-standing rights or common knowledge needed to be plausible. But we should also learn that we cannot see custom as a cohesive and restraining force.10 In the early medieval west, the notion of “law” was most commonly invoked by property holders asserting or defending their rights.11 To assume that their experience of “rights” roughly corresponds to our common-sense notions of “full ownership” or “absolute property” is to assume too much; “rights” here cannot be subsumed to the abstract reifications encouraged by the development of professionally articulated legal regimes in the later medieval and early modern periods, but should be seen as plausible rather than absolute claims, causes worthy of debate. This legal culture did not distinguish on a conceptual level between different kinds of right, or make abstract distinctions between classes of claim, but sought to give each their due in a calculus of status embedded in personal relationships. To understand what property rights meant in such a culture, we need to locate and listen to the voices of individuals seeking to defend their rights. What follows aims to demonstrate the necessity of thinking about practices of property – the social meanings of property rights in land, and the mechanisms by which these rights were exercised and transferred – among the Carolingian elite, if we are to understand Carolingian society and politics. It presents a series of microcosms – or, better, postcards – from across the ninth-century Carolingian world, based on caches of tractable sources that show us property rights in practice. *** Our first postcard takes the form of an urgent tract of charged advice in the crucial act of the Carolingian drama in the early 840s, written by Dhuoda for her son William, placed at Charles the Bald’s court as a guarantee of his father’s continued loyalty.12 Again and again Dhuoda emphasises the dangers around William and the insecurity of worldly position: all is ultimately derived from God, and so all can ultimately be revoked if William’s actions cease to please God. This is not the world of entrenched aristocracies whose local interests 10 From a vast bibliography, see Sally Falk Moore, Social Facts and Fabrications: “Customary” Law on Mount Kilamanjaro 1880–1980 (Cambridge, 1986); Chris Wickham, “Gossip and Resistance among the Medieval Peasantry”, Past and Present, 160 (1998): 3–24, and Thelma Fenster and Danial Lord Smail (eds), Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY, 2002). Recent controversy has centered on the interested nature of projections of political consensus, and has not yet run its course. 11 Gerhard Köbler, Das Recht im frühen Mittelalter. Untersuchungen zu Herkunft und Inhalt frühmittelalterlichen Rechtsbegriffe im deutschen Sprachgebiet (Cologne, 1971), and see now Matthew Innes, “What was ‘Law’ in the Carolingian Empire?”, in Per Anderson, Mia Münster-Swendson and Helle Vogt (eds), Law before Gratian (Copenhagen, 2007). 12 My translation, based on M. Thiébaux (ed. and trans.), Dhuoda: Handbook for Her Warrior Son (Cambridge, 1998); the secondary bibliography is huge, but Joachim Wollasch, “Eine adlige Familie der früheren Mittelalter. Ihr Selbstverständnis und ihre Wirklichkeit”, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 39 (1957): 150–88, remains crucial.

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brought kings to their knees, so familiar from textbook accounts. It is a world of rapid and bewildering social mobility, both upwards and downwards, for which the Christian morality of the Carolingian renaissance provided both an explanation and a remedy. Dhuoda maps out a series of reciprocal obligations, whereby to enjoy the fruits of a noble life in this world William must offer prayer on behalf of the souls of those ancestors (parentes) “who have bequeathed their possessions in lawful inheritance” in the hope that “you, as one of the living, may enjoy that property in a long and happy lifetime”.13 Inheritance of property – and Dhuoda’s language is unambiguously that of proprietas (“property”) and possession – is not a matter of the automatic operation of an abstract set of rules, of “formal law”.14 Reminding William that “although the Scripture says, ‘A stranger luxuriates in another’s goods’, it is not strangers who possess this legacy … it is in the charge of your lord and father, Bernard”, Dhuoda goes on to present prayer for those who had contributed to this family legacy as a means of asserting a claim to act, in due turn, as its keeper. Bernard looms large in this moral economy of memory, prayer and property, but it is God who determines its ultimate disposition: thus Dhuoda advises William to pray in the hope that “through the clemency of almighty God, your father decides in advance that you shall receive a portion”, and on occasion Bernard’s “possession of this legacy” comes close to being presented as stewardship conditioned by obligations to heirs.15 These obligations legitimated the dispensation of earthly possessions in terms of God’s will, and linked the enjoyment of earthly wealth to the use of that wealth to please God and so save one’s soul. Dhuoda could thus worry about the very secular threats surrounding Bernard’s position in spiritual terms: William is asked to redouble his prayer on account of the “many urgent duties [occupationes]” distracting his father.16 The force of these worries is borne out by the specific claims Dhuoda makes about William’s ancestors. Dhuoda gives William a famous list of eight ancestors – four grandparents and four aunts and uncles – whom he is to commemorate in prayer. Before we read this as a passive and norm-driven account of family structure, we should reflect that at least two of the eight met sticky ends in the political crisis of 834, one executed for infidelity, the other tried as a witch and drowned in a barrel. Praying for the good of the souls of other ancestors named by Dhuoda was similarly making a loaded statement about the recent past. Reflecting on another uncle who had been blinded by his opponents in 830 but still lived, Dhuoda drew a moral: Dhuoda 8.14, ed. Thiébaux, pp. 204–5, and see Patrick Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1994), pp. 77–94, here pp. 78–81. 14 Drawing on Stephen D. White’s ultimately Weberian model: “Inheritances and Legal Arguments in Western France, 1050–1150”, Traditio, 43 (1987): 55–103, and also his Custom, Kinship and Gifts to Saints (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), especially pp. 76–80. 15 Dhuoda 8.14, ed. Thiébaux, pp. 204–5. 16 Ibid. 13

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“other members of your lineage [genealogia] are still living in this world, thanks to God: they depend wholly on Him who created them .... When a member of your kin [stirps] passes on, which happens only through God’s power and on the day he ordains ....”. Finally, she made a coded defence of the conduct of her kin through the topsy-turvy politics of the 830s: “Keep faith and keep it throughout your whole life, with body and mind. Never let disloyalty against your lord arise or grow in your heart ... But I do not think that that will be the case with you or your companions-in-arms. Such behaviour never appeared or existed among your ancestors [progenitores], they say; it does not exist at present, and never will in the future.” The very real and present dangers faced by those involved, like William, in ninth-century court politics meant that the transmission of power from generation to generation was never straightforward or agreed; commemorating one’s ancestors was here a means of justifying their actions both to an omnipotent God and to a watching public.17 It would be wrong to dismiss the language of this devotional tract. Clearly, there were other discourses within which the disposition of property within Dhuoda’s family could be presented, not least the bald Latin legalism familiar from Carolingian charters. But we cannot assume that this constituted a hegemonic discourse, setting the parameters to which the likes of Dhuoda might offer a pious and essentially passive gloss. Carolingian lawsuits, after all, could identify a multiplicity of potential legal arguments of diverse sources and different weights, some indeed invested with very significant cultural and social force, factoring into an outcome ultimately determined by the relationships between the individuals involved and the exigencies of the context in which they interacted.18 This shift from formal law to substantive legalism is immediately apparent in the development of the will. By the ninth century, the Roman law templates which structured Merovingian wills had given way to a new form of agreement which embedded precisely those notions rehearsed by Dhuoda, about the obligations of receipts of a bequest to perform good works for the souls of the giver, at the heart of the drama of inheritance. Those receiving legacies did so conditionally on their making specified gifts for the good of the testator’s soul, as beneficiaries became “alms-givers” implicated in a series of radically personalised and moralised exchanges. Inheritance was now an explicitly moral and commemorative act rooted in reciprocal obligations between individuals, not the vertical application of a set of impersonal rules.19 17 Dhuoda 10.5–6, ed. Thiébaux, pp. 226–31, and 3.5, p. 95; see Matthew Innes, “Keeping it in the Family: Women and Aristocratic Memory c. 700–1200”, in Elisabeth van Houts (ed.), Medieval Memories: Men, Women and the Past 700–1300 (London, 2001), pp. 17-35, here pp. 17–23. 18 See Innes, “What was ‘Law’?”, drawing on the theoretical framework developed by White and the penetrating analyses of the past generation of scholarship in the dispute-settlement tradition. 19 The literature is vast, and I hope to return to the development of the eleimosina agreement elsewhere; but the critical case study is Brigitte Kasten, “Erbrechtliche Verfügungen des 8. and 9. Jahrhunderts”, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Germanistische Abteilung, 107 (1990): 236–338.

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Discourses of this type, essentially inter-personal and based on the assessment of moral worth, might be applied to public office as well as property rights. On occasion, indeed, Dhuoda left open the possibility of discussing honores (“offices and land grants”) in these terms: “I think that if you conduct yourself towards God with worthy submission, the loving One will for this reason raise up fragile dignities [dignitates] for your benefit.”20 Such ambiguities cluster in Dhuoda’s discussion of William’s relationship to his now-dead paternal uncle Theodoric. Theodoric had stood godfather to William at his baptism, and had invested his godson with arms when he entered his adult life, going on to act as nutritor (“nourisher”) and amator (“one who loves him”). William was given instructions on the need to care for Theodoric’s soul, and reminded that “when he left you in this world as if you were his little firstborn son, he bequeathed everything [cuncta] to our lord and master, so that you might benefit in every way”. When we add the knowledge from Nithard that William was granted honores in Burgundy – and that had been Theodoric’s – when he was placed at Charles the Bald’s court, we understand the force of Dhuoda’s advice.21 Dhuoda was not here attempting to subsume the land-grants and offices that made up honores into private property, but acknowledging that the logic of moral worth and personal dues provided a powerful argument for royal ears. After all, the very ambiguity of the official terminology of honores turned on a linkage of office to status and the relativities and moral imperatives of interpersonal ties. In a world where to be granted office was, literally, to be honoured, and to have it taken away was to be correspondingly dishonoured, recurrent struggles about the disposition of office were inevitably implicated in debates about individual and family reputation. Office was different from property, yes, but it carried with it a similar web of claims, stories and relationships. What is more, to hold office was to exercise a ministerium (“ministry”) for which one was responsible to God, and so office, like property, was tied into a moral economy of soulsaving prayer. This, not the alleged but never empirically demonstrated rise of the aristocracy or appropriation of local office into private property, is the key to understanding the conflagrations that impress even the most cursory reader of ninth-century historiography. To explore this web of claims and stories further, it is necessary to turn to the documentary evidence, and investigate how relationships which were defined at the imperial court in “vertical” terms of the granting of office and property were made effective in the localities through “horizontal” bonds of community and kinship. *** As it happens, we can say a little more about the social world of uncle Theodoric. A dossier associated with the estate of Perrecy allows a glimpse Dhuoda 8.14, ed. Thiébaux, pp. 204–5. Dhuoda 8.15, ed. Thiébaux pp. 206–7, and see Nithard, Histories 3.2, ed. and trans. Philippe Lauer, Histoire des fils de Louis le Pieux (Paris, 1926), pp. 82–4. 20 21

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of Theodoric presiding, as count, at public courts in Autun and its hinterland. These documents survive copied into the cartulary of the abbey of Fleury, because the monks acquired Perrecy itself by 885.22 They fall into two distinct groups. The first half-dozen documents record pleas held in 815–20, all of which establish the unfree status of named individuals, who are thus confirmed as part of the Perrecy property, then held as a benefice by Count Nibelung and then Count Hildebrand. The remaining documents are a series of royal gifts and court hearings concerned with establishing Count Eccard of Macon’s title to the Perrecy estate, and rounded off by Eccard’s will and further pleas effecting his bequest of Perrecy to Fleury. The contents of the Perrecy dossier provide invaluable insights into the changing forms and patterns of patronage in land over the course of two centuries. The documents themselves are the result of intense competition for this plum estate, with cycles of dispute that deserve extended discussion conditioned by changing political contexts and turning on conflicting views of rights at Perrecy. The claims and counter-claims encouraged by Perrecy’s convoluted history are most vividly recorded in an incomplete record of a hearing held before two missi dominici at the villa of Mont late in the reign of Charles the Bald.23 In this case, Bishop Wulfad of Bourges claimed that Perrecy belonged to the patrimony of his see, producing two charters from the time of the unmistakably Merovingian but further unspecified Childeric and Chilperic supporting Bourges’ rights. Wulfad went on to claim he could document Perrecy’s being granted out as a precarium (“precarial tenure”) by Pippin to Count Nibelung in return for an annual payment on the feast of St Mary, his cathedral’s patron saint. Eccard in turn produced a charter of Louis the Pious granting him Perrecy, and a notitia (“notice”) of a judgment made in a placitum (“plea”) of Charles the Bald’s recovering res (“properties”) that belonged to the Perrecy estate. These two accounts were not the end of the story: further layers of complexity and competing narratives are suggested by the cryptic sworn testimonies of different groups of witnesses called to testify before the court, indicating webs of competing and intersecting tales about Perrecy supporting different claims. At Perrecy, we can see a range of layers of property rights separating the ultimate holder of title from those who actually exercised power on the ground. This is reflected in the vocabulary of the charters, which is quite precise: in the documents from 815–20, those counts exercising property rights in their Maurice Prou and Alexandre Vidier (eds), Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Saint-Benoît-surLoire (2 vols, Paris, 1900–12), nos 10–13, 16–17, 20–21, 24–8 and 30, on which see Kasten, “Erbrechtliche Verfügungen”; Janet L. Nelson, “Dispute Settlement in Carolingian West Francia”, in The Settlement of Disputes, pp. 45–64, here pp. 53–6, and my discussion in “Documents, Dossiers and Disputes in the Frankish World”, in Warren Brown, Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes and Adam Kosto (eds), Archives and Documents of the Early Medieval Laity (forthcoming). 23 Prou and Vidier, Recueil, no. 24, and see Nelson, “Dispute Settlement”, pp. 53–5, with translation at p. 53 and Latin text at pp. 247–8. This document is not dated, but on internal evidence, concerns events that took place between 866 and 875. 22

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benefice at Perrecy are always referred to as “benefiting from”, “having” or “holding” the villa, and the villa itself is described neutrally as an object (res), never in more legally charged terms of possession or property. In the documents recording the gift of Perrecy first by Pippin of Aquitaine then by Louis the Pious to Eccard in 836 and 839, on the other hand, every effort is made to emphasize the exhaustiveness and totality of the rights which are being transferred precisely so as to exclude those who might claim some other form of right in the Perrecy complex. Carolingian legal terminology does here have a level of precision and specificity. Some of the witnesses in the Mont case, for example, chose their words carefully in order to distinguish between those immediately “holding” the estate and higher-level rights: thus Leutald and Jacob, who had invited Wulfad’s intervention, testify that “we have seen that Eccard held that villa”, but distinguish “holding” from the claim of “belonging” to Bourges; Guntfrid swore similarly. This was a society where ultimate rights over property – what we might denote by the shorthand “owning” – were divorced from the actual “holding” of an estate, that is the actual management of land and labour. Unravelling rights at Perrecy involved interpreting the relationships between different parties with interests in that land. Although charters such as those produced by Bishop Wulfad and Count Eccard had their value as records of those relationships and their implications, rights in this land were performed through public ritual. Thus the final testimony at Mont recounted that Nibelung and Hildebrand had held the villa until its gift to Eccard “without any census or any vestitura or any mark of dominium”. In other words, that Eccard had “full” rights over the property was proven by the absence of any of those public ceremonies which would have acknowledged, and made visible, the rights of another party: no token payments or rents acknowledging the ultimate rights of a saint or king (census), nor any rituals transferring possessory rights (vestitura), nor indeed “any mark of dominium [“ownership”]” had been seen or heard. These overlapping rights and the public rituals through which they were made visible mattered because the figures who were actually exercising power at Perrecy were neither kings nor those favoured aristocrats “benefiting” or “honoured” by royal patronage, but men with resolutely local horizons. The earliest slice is eloquent on the effective control of Fredelus, vicedominus (“vicelord” or “vice-master”) of Perrecy and advocate of Hildebrand. In several charters, it is Fredelus who is the actor, not his master Hildebrand, and Perrecy is referred to as being in Fredelus’, or Fredelus’ and Hildebrand’s, benefice. So too, in the resolution of the various pleas brought by Fredelus, it was not Count Theodoric, but his deputy Blitgar who was the central figure. At this level, then, of county society, we have strong continuity beneath the comings and goings of imperial aristocracy. Effectively managing county society like Blitgar, or exercising the rights centred on Perrecy like Fredelus, involved becoming implicated in a complex web of kinship and interest. Whilst we cannot see what negotiation went on behind the scenes and how the various seniores who had

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“ins” into the interlocking networks within the Autunois influenced matters, the court hearings turned on collective testimony made at this local level. These procedures resolved competing claims about Perrecy not by the crossexamination of juristic arguments within a single overarching framework of stated legal principles, but by posing a fact-based question about Perrecy’s past. So the Mont case was not solved in terms of comparing the evidence which might validate the conflicting claims of Eccard and Bourges, although that evidence was produced, but by procuring oaths; similarly, the cases of 815–20 reduced complex issues of personal status and the extent of the rights attached to Perrecy to oath-swearing by witnesses. Such procedures ultimately allowed public courts to function as organs for the maintenance of consensus amongst local landowners and voicepieces for county opinion. This process should not be seen as organic: claims and reservations could be nursed for decades, indeed generations, and consensus needed periodic re-negotiation. But through their collective performance of a legally charged fact, these rituals created a form of “public knowledge” which explained and legitimated the title of the winning party through acknowledging the basis of their narrative of the estate’s history.24 We get some hint of how links were forged between the “county set” and the stars of court politics in Eccard’s will: we have a vast range of individuals who receive bequests, overlapping circles of kin and followers tied to Eccard as a power-broker between court and county, but also with hopes of rising and fears of falling thanks to the patronage the likes of Eccard could give. It is precisely through such brokers that Carolingian politics worked: a system of counting kinship which focused on bilateral breadth created a huge array of potential connections, and as an individual like Eccard rose into a position of potency, with the possibility of distributing local patronage, and acting as a connection to the world of the court, so a coalition of those with claims of family or friendship coalesced.25 Eccard’s will itself vividly shows the kind of ties, reciprocal, gift-based, expressed through mutually reinforcing vocabularies of lordship, friendship and kinship which radiated out from such a figure into the locality. That some distant kin were able to hold onto Perrecy until their own death, over a decade after Eccard’s, likewise points to the potency of public opinion formed amongst this group. Tellingly, those who hung on to Perrecy seem excluded from the will, but were able to gain acceptance for their claim to a share of Eccard’s possessions and thus hang on to Perrecy “as if it were inheritance”. 24 For the notion of legally charged facts, see John Hudson, “Court Cases and Legal Arguments in England, 1066–1166”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th Series, 10 (2000): 91–116. 25 For relations between the imperial aristocracy and secondary elites, the foundational study was Karl Ferdinand Werner, “Untersuchungen zur Frühzeit des französischen Fürstentums (9.–10. Jahrhundert.)”, Die Welt als Geschichte, 18 (1958): 256–89, 19 (1959): 146–93; 20 (1960): 87–119; more recently, see Régine [Hennebicque]-Le Jan, Famille et pouvoir dans le monde franc (VIIe– Xe siècle) (Paris, 1995).

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The disputes which reverberated around Perrecy thus very clearly demonstrate the primacy of local “horizontal” bonds, even in a society dominated by vast tracts of royal land worked by dependent peasants. The insecurity of aristocratic families like Dhuoda’s clearly in part rested on the vibrancy of local opinion, and the need to nurture it. When Dhuoda, like so many Carolingian moralists and legislators, played on the duties of the powerful to the poor she was at least in part thinking of the need to service such networks and provide for family, friends and followers whose aid might one day prove vital: the rhetoric of the obligation of the potentes (“powerful”) to pauperes (“the poor”) was thus a rhetoric of solidarity between kin in a world of potentially dizzying social mobility. Royal patronage in the forms of grants of rights in property (and, we might add, thinking about Wulfad of Bourges’ evidence at Mont, the closely related and structurally similar rights of the Church) here structured the interaction between the imperial aristocracy and their local followers. Men like Fredelus, or the beneficiaries of Eccard’s will, were tied into a hierarchy as they exercised power that was defined in terms of royal or ecclesiastical rights over property, which were in turn devolved to ambitious aristocrats who thus found an entry-point into the localities. Property rights here were far more complex, multi-layered and socially mediated than our common-sense understanding of “absolute” or “exclusive ownership” would allow. *** Let us move from Perrecy to the settlements of Rankweil and Schlins and their immediate vicinity, high in the Rhaetian Alps. Here a series of 27 originals survive from a dossier documenting the property dealings of one Folkwine between 817 and 825, part of a remarkable seam of over fifty deeds documenting this mountain valley in the ninth century.26 Folkwine’s run of acquisitions were roughly evenly split between gifts solicited and gladly received, and purchases. These documents relate far more directly to the exploitation of the land than the Perrecy archive: they deal with sales or gifts of small-holdings, whose boundary clauses confirm a picture of jostling and interleaved patterns of agrarian cultivation in a distinctive landscape.27 The Rhaetian evidence thus allows us to examine how issues of power, property and community were resolved in a different social context. As at Perrecy, there was a very important political context for this cluster of surviving documentation. Rankweil lay in the diocese of Chur, effectively an episcopal “principality” until Charlemagne intervened in 806, creating the office 26 See Peter Erhart and Julia Kleindienst (eds), Urkundenlandschaft Rätien (Vienna, 2004), for an edition with facsimiles and analysis. The classic discussion remains Heinrich Fichtenau, Das Urkundenwesen in Österreich vom 8. bis zum frühen 13. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1971), pp. 38–53. 27 For patterns of landholding in the Folkwine material, see Katherine Bullimore, “Folkwine of Rankweil: The World of a Carolingian Local Official”, EME, 13 (2005): 43–77; for the broader context of Rhaetian society, see Reinhold Kaiser, Churrätien im frühen Mittelalter (Basle, 1998).

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of count from a substantial portion of the bishop’s prerogatives and holdings. To safeguard the strategically important Alpine passes, this countship was given to an outsider dependent on Carolingian backing, Hunfrid. The activities of Hunfrid and his followers and successors were the subject of repeated complaints from Bishop Tello of Chur in the 820s and 830s, complaints which effectively contested the political settlement imposed by Charlemagne; in the new political context of conflict within the Carolingian family latent tensions between bishop and count burst into the open as each party sought rival Carolingian patrons. Folkwine’s career was intimately related to this conflict: prosopographical research has established beyond reasonable doubt that he was an incomer, owing his position to Hunfrid, serving as a local official (a Schultheiss), and based at a comital residence in Rankweil itself.28 It was, of course, possible to describe social and political networks in this area in “vertical” terms of a descending hierarchy of office. Fragments of a register of royal rights within the diocese of Chur dating from close to the period of Folkwine’s activity survive in an early modern transcription; they begin with a detailed account, down to the number of hens due from each settlement each year, of those rights associated with each ministry (ministerium), allowing us to see exactly what Folkwine might claim.29 At Perrecy, the “vertical” discourse most easily recoverable was one of property, although the activities of the viscount Blitgar strongly suggested a parallel discourse centring on office. The Chur register actually shows how even office might easily be partially reducible into property rights, and certainly made concrete and visible in terms of those rights, for whilst men like Folkwine clearly exercised judicial and other “governmental” functions as part of their ministerium, in the register specific rights to hold specific portions of property, or to take specific dues from specific places, were listed; the bannus, or right of command, so beloved of constitutional historians is conspicuously absent. A ministerium could thus be delineated in the most concrete of terms: the right to “hold” named units of land, to exact a royal payment (census regis) of stated gifts in kind, to demand an “honest horse” when called to go on campaign. Against this background, the contents of the Folkwine dossier make for interesting reading. They document this official, functioning as a linkman between the world of the imperial aristocracy and the villagers of Rankweil and its surrounds, and building up a landed estate in the process.30 Above 28 The relevant documents are most easily available in Elisabeth Mayer-Marthaler and Franz Perret (eds), Bündner Urkundenbuch, vol. 1 (Chur, 1955), there being no more modern edition of the relevant episcopal documents and the diplomata of Louis the Pious. Discussion: Michael Borgolte, Geschichte der Grafschaften Alemanniens in fränkischer Zeit, Vorträge und Forschungen, 31 (Sigmaringen, 1984), pp. 224–34; Karl Schmid, “Von Hunfrid zu Burkard. Bemerkungen zur rätischen Geschichte aus der Sicht von Gedenkbucheinträgen”, in Ursus Brunold and Lothar Deplazes (eds), Geschichte und Kultur Churrätiens. Festschrift I. Müller (Disentis, 1986), pp. 181–209. 29 Edited in Bündner Urkundenbuch, appendix, pp. 375–94. 30 I have an extended discussion of the sociology of exchange in the Folkwine dossier in preparation.

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all, they demonstrate one of the ground rules of Carolingian politics: that in order to exercise office effectively, one needed the land and connections that created social purchase. The ability of Folkwine to implicate himself within the networks which defined status and community around Rankweil is eloquently articulated by the series of gifts he received; his role as a patron who could link Rankweilers to the outside world is graphically shown in the series of gifts which play on Folkwine’s “good merits” and “good offices” as reasons for giving. In fact, the rich evidence of witness lists and boundary clauses would allow us, if space permitted, to paint a very detailed picture of local politics. We can clearly detect factions and hierarchies amongst local landowners, some, but not all, of whom appear as close associates of Folkwine, making donations and appearing at his side; in other words, here is a complex, conflict-riven community into which Folkwine makes an entrance. A connection between Folkwine’s property dealings and his office is clear from the documents, notably gifts of land justified with reference to the mulctum (“fine”) owed to Folkwine, and the legal suit which Folkwine was bringing. Folkwine’s activities, and particularly the 21 acquisitions of 820–21, contain a high proportion of purchases of land. Not that they rested on a “land market” in our sense: any attempt to correlate stated areas and values of land with the prices paid by Folkwine fails. The form in which prices are stated in the charters provides an explanation: whilst land values can be specified in a variety of measures, and purchase prices on occasion expressed in terms of coin, the vast majority of Folkwine’s payments are described in terms of stated weights – often very large weights – of iron. This is no mere scribal fancy, for the Chur register tells us that amongst the various rights pertaining to Folkwine’s ministerium was a census which was partially paid in iron, and the right to a sixth part of the iron worked at a particular site. This rush to acquire iron from Folkwine coincides with the mobilisation of armies recruited in “Saxony, east Francia and Alemannia as well as Bavaria and Italy”, and their passage to campaign against the “rebel” Liudewit in Lower Pannonia.31 Folkwine, through his ministerium, played a central role in the distribution of wealth in the Rankweil area, receiving as he did significant gifts in kind, a large volume of which, judging from the charters, found its way back into local pockets as purchase prices and counter-gifts. And whilst from the charters alone we might assume that Folkwine was primarily a recipient of land, the register of his ministerium provides crucial evidence for the granting out of often tiny plots of royal land as benefices to the local gentry, some of them already familiar figures from the witness lists to Folkwine’s activity. Here, even on the most local of levels, royal rights and royal land mattered, and local office played a central role in community dynamics precisely because it was My thanks to Eric Goldberg for pointing this out to me. For Liudewit’s revolt, see the detailed accounts in the Royal Frankish Annals, s.a. 818–21, ed. Friedrich Kurze, MGH SRG (Hanover, 1895), pp. 149–54; the entry for 820 in particular points to the context for Folkwine’s activities. Julia Kleinschmidt also makes the link between iron exploitation, local office and the sales: see Urkundenlandschaft Rätien, p. 42. 31

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office and it could only function through redistribution, not simple command or jurisdiction. *** Finally, let us move to the Carolingians’ own backyard: the middle Rhine and upper Main valleys in the 820s and 830s, dominated by the palace complexes at Ingelheim and Frankfurt, the associated churches, hunting reserves and royal estates, and the concentrated interests of the greatest families of the empire, neighbours, cousins, counsellors and agents of kings. Here, thanks to Einhard’s letters and the charter and polyptych evidence, we can avoid being too dazzled by the bright lights of the court, and discern the contours of rural society.32 Of Einhard’s sixty-odd surviving letters, which cover everything from the dry details of estate management to urgent matters of high politics, approaching a half are petitions, and around a quarter are petitions made on behalf of kinsman, neighbours and clients regarding rights over land. They lead us into a world of relatively clear and formal norms about inter-personal clientage and lordship of which the reader of the charter evidence alone would be wholly ignorant. Take the case of Gundhart, for example, who appears as a charter witness and property holder in a handful of charters from the 820s: from Einhard we learn that he is also the “man” of Abbot Hraban of Fulda, and engaged in a feud with a local count, and we see Einhard intercede for him with his lord to remove him from imminent danger at his enemy’s hands.33 Gundhart’s case is typical, in that lordship here was not exclusive or closed, but a formal tie between individuals that interacted with and was mediated by ties of kinship, sociability and neighbourhood. Einhard could thus eloquently rehearse the logic of vertical but reciprocal social ties: “I doubt not that you remember how you committed yourself and yours to me, and since your own will decreed that it be so, it is my duty in turn, whenever opportunity arises, to give you and yours worthy support in every way so far as I know how and have the ability.”34 But such ties were important not in creating sealed and stable systems of automatic Charters: primarily Karl Glöckner (ed.), Codex Laureshamensis (3 vols, Darmstadt, 1929–36), Ernst F.J. Dronke (ed.), Codex diplomaticus Fuldensis (Kassel, 1850), updated to 802 by Edmund Stengel (ed.), Urkundenbuch des Klosters Fulda (2 vols, Marburg, 1913–58). Polyptych: Codex Laureshamensis, 3671–5. Einhard’s letters, ed. Karl Hampe, MGH Epist. 5 (Berlin, 1898–99), pp. 105–45, trans. Paul E. Dutton, Charlemagne’s Courtier: The Complete Einhard (Peterborough, ON, 1997), whose numbering I use below. On royal estates and aristocratic interests, see Michael Gockel, Karolingische Königshöfe am Mittelrhein (Göttingen, 1970); on social institutions, see Franz Staab, Untersuchungen zur Gesellschaft am Mittelrhein in der Karolingerzeit (Wiesbaden, 1975); for an attempted sociology, see Matthew Innes, State and Society in the Early Middle Ages: The Middle Rhine Valley 400–1000, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th series, 47 (Cambridge, 2000). 33 Dronke (ed.), Codex diplomaticus Fuldensis, 423–6, 435, and Einhard, letter 41, pp. 151–2 (ed. Hampe, letter 14, p. 117); see Innes, State and Society, pp. 129–30, 146–7, and Chris Wickham, “Rural Society in Carolingian Europe”, in NCMH, pp. 510–37, here pp. 531–2. 34 Einhard, letter 58, p. 159 (ed. Hampe, letter 62, p. 142). 32

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support, but in tying individuals into extensive and overlapping networks which could mobilise aid, intercession and opinion: hence Einhard could plead to a friend, “in as much as N. has long served me devotedly and faithfully, I ask your dear self, so far as it can be done, to deign to spare him in the matter of that compensation for which he is in debt to you by law, that I may find him useful for my service and you may justly find me ever more ready and eager to do your bidding”.35 It is, of course, no accident that in these letters we see Einhard – career courtier and close friend and correspondent of the opinion-formers of the Carolingian world – acting as intercessor. As we saw with Eccard at Perrecy, it was around individuals who had access to court that webs of patronage thickened and affinities crystallized. Indeed, Einhard’s devotion and promotion of the cults of Marcellinus and Peter at his foundation of Seligenstadt was an attempt to create a locus of supernatural intercession which not only paralleled Einhard’s career as a courtier, but also ensured that, even when political unrest and a personal conversio (“religious conversion”) absented him from regular attendance at court, he could still offer that advice and aid on which his whole career had been based. Just like the angels and demons who proffered political advice recorded in Einhard’s account of the translation of the relics of Marcellinus and Peter to Seligenstadt, the local men and women for whom Einhard petitioned understood that he could get things done. And, just as angels and demons followed the proper form of the Carolingian court, making political recommendations in proper capitulary form in good eloquent Latin, so in Einhard’s petitioning letters there is a very clear, correct etiquette. Forms of address articulate a clearly set hierarchy, with honorifics descending from distant Roman precedent – illustrious, excellent, magnificent – carefully patterned.36 These letters overwhelmingly concern the fate of royal or ecclesiastical land, held in benefice (a broad and non-technical term here, incorporating some tenures we would characterise as precarial grants). Time and again, we hear of fears about the hostility of pointedly anonymous advisers, rumours that benefices are to be redistributed, fears that a new bishop or a new king will chose to disturb the disposition of property; at several points, Einhard, painfully aware of the repeated capitulary injunctions against the holding of benefices in more than one kingdom and from more than one king, tries to negotiate contorted compromises. Arguments are carefully chosen. The two themes on which Einhard works countless variations are the economic necessity of continuing to hold the benefice for its current recipient, and the loyal service Letter 62, p. 161 (ed. Hampe, letter 65, p. 141). Josef Fleckenstein, “Einhard, seine Gründung und sein Vermächtnis im Seligenstadt”, in Karl Hauck (ed.), Das Einhardkreuz (Göttingen, 1974), pp. 96–121; on Einhard’s conversio, see Julia M.H. Smith, “Einhard: The Sinner and the Saints”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th Series, 13 (2003) pp. 55–77; Translatio: ed. Georg Waitz, MGH SS 15.1 (Hanover, 1887), pp. 238–64, and trans. Dutton, Charlemagne’s Courtier, pp. 69–130. 35 36

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they have exhibited in the past. Whilst the legislation of the period thunders on the need to protect the poor as a generality, through Einhard we have the rare opportunity of making the acquaintance of individual paupers, here almost always impoverished clerics and indigent cousins, local landholders with connections, but also in dire danger of slipping into the ranks of the peasantry if they lose their tiny benefice.37 On such occasions, we read lengthy testimonials as to good character and unblemished service: “he is a good and discreet man and of good repute among his neighbours”.38 Here we are recognizably slipping into those long genealogies of family claims and character we met in Dhuoda and heard underpinning sworn testimony and legal argument about Perrecy. The norms about the holding of royal and ecclesiastical land in benefice revealed by these letters were practices of royal service, connected with the distribution of (often but not always stray or tiny) parcels of royal or ecclesiastical land: we hear neither of Einhard, nor of other lay landowners, granting benefices from their own estates, but instead see Einhard interceding on behalf of his followers and friends to procure grants of benefices from kings, bishops, and abbots.39 On occasion, such grants were necessary to allow families to deal with changing household needs dictated by the life cycle or to prevent individuals slipping out of the broad-based elite of local landowners “of good repute”. Benefices also provided an entry point into royal service – and here it is the everyday running of messages, escorting travellers, not military service that looms large – and the chance of further honour, and so further honores. On many – indeed, most – occasions, kings must have had little idea of the niceties of who held 12 manses in the Durbachgau, but were simply reacting to persuasive petitioners: Einhard himself doesn’t miss the opportunity to petition for vacant benefices to be passed onto his men, for whose loyalty and good character he can vouch. Inheritance of family land, not the granting of benefices, was the basic tenurial form in this society, as so demonstrated by the rich charter evidence from Lorsch and Fulda.40 The forms of lordship we see in Einhard’s letters are essentially formal pacts of interpersonal patronage, which are not implicated in the web of property law and land tenure. Lordship, that is, was not here constituted by land grant, although property gifts might be given, in a variety of ways, as a demonstration of favour or a reward for service. Indeed, the holding of royal or ecclesiastical land as benefices, however tiny, was a central practice of vital importance to local landowners. In fact, Einhard and his like derived their position precisely from their ability to put the right words in the right places, not only to protect inherited land and ensure its proper devolution, See, for example, letter 48, p. 153 (ed. Hampe, letter 30, p. 124). Letter 27, p. 141 (ed. Hampe, letter 28, pp. 123–4). 39 Norms about benefices are discussed by Brigitte Kasten, “Aspekte des Lehnswesens in Einhards Briefen”, in Hermann Schefers (ed.), Einhard. Studien zu Leben und Werk (Darmstadt, 1997), pp. 247–67. 40 Innes, State and Society, especially pp. 51–94. 37 38

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but also, and vitally, to procure benefices for their clients. In other words, the loose but defined structures of lordship over people we see here functioned not as a rival to the official hierarchies of “governmental” action, nor as a buttress to a swaying edifice of royal power; rather, they radiated “horizontally” outwards from those individuals with “vertical” connections to the world of kings, networks which connected local communities to court elites. *** The four postcards we have received – and we could easily find more – make an attractive brochure advertising the manifold charms of the diverse landscapes and divergent regions of the Carolingian world. In a twenty-first-century European community which prides itself on acting as a “Europe of the regions”, regionalism as a phenomenon in early medieval Europe is beginning to receive the attention it deserves; with time and space, a proper comparison between the jostling smallholders of the Alps, the tenurial hierarchies of Burgundy, the complex systems of patronage of the Rhineland, could be attempted.41 But in the current discussion, we should emphasise some characteristics shared, not because Carolingian society can be compressed into a single all-encompassing model, but because aristocratic wives in Septimania, estate managers in Burgundy, local officials in the Alps and retired courtiers in central Germany all sought to connect with the same source of reward and respect: the court. In fact, there are striking similarities between the argumentative structures of charter testimony, Dhuoda’s maternal prayers and Einhard’s measured petitions. Is there here a glimpse of an aristocratic discourse of moral claim and family history, rooted in a particular legal structure, but permeating high cultural artefacts such as Einhard’s hagiography and Dhuoda’s manual? Thanks to the dominance of models of custom and vulgarisation, Carolingian property law is often presented as being a matter of loose, supposedly common-sensical, notions of ownership, where forms of title that did not involve manifest possession were problematical, and what mattered was actual control. The evidence we have discussed, however, evokes a legal culture that cannot be reduced to a legitimizing superstructure articulating raw social fact. It shows vigorous argument and counter-argument, derived from a multiplicity of sources, some to our eyes extra-legal; as a result, similar arguments might just as easily be applied to office, or to grants of royal or ecclesiastical land, as to inheritances within families. These arguments ultimately rested on stories about individual estates, even individual land parcels; the resolution of competing stories in the courts created a dominant narrative about a particular place. In fact, the arguments and anecdotes that articulated claims and expectations

41 Regionalism is indeed a Leitmotif of recent syntheses such as Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, and Julia M.H. Smith, Europe after Rome (Oxford, 2005).

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about rights in property also remembered and rehearsed social relationships between people. Our discussion has kept running up against a time-honoured debate: the nature of the early medieval state. After all, in each of our four postcards, issues about the relationship amongst kings, churches, and aristocrats determined the texture of our material, and were worked out in debate about overlapping rights in royal or ecclesiastical land. The concerns that frame our four postcards are rooted in a heightened insistence on royal control over the devolution of what we might term “public” land: at Perrecy and Rankweil, this took the form of royal acquisition and distribution of ecclesiastical property, whilst in Einhard’s Rhine and Main valleys, royal control over fiscal estates was far more sharply articulated under the Carolingians than it had been under the Merovingians. Like the other successor states of the post-Roman West, the Merovingian kingdom had been held together by royal gifts of land, gifts which created mutual relationships and were thus subject to ongoing negotiation. Carolingian practice, with its insistence on the layering of rights in benefices and honours, altered long-established practices of giving and receiving land, just as Carolingian legislation designed to render gifts made to judges or priests more easily legible redefined networks of influence around local officials. This insistence is what marks out the practices of property we have investigated as distinctively Carolingian. The distribution of “public land” was vital to the exercise of power in the localities, as court elites needed to be able to deliver royal land to their kinsman and clients to cement their position. But their claims might be easily disappointed, and the experience of the giving and taking away of royal and ecclesiastical land blurred with the experience of the granting of and dismissal from office. Both land and office were honores, and office brought with it land held in ministerium, according to the same norms governing the holding of other royal land; patterns of patronage here overlapped and interacted. The nature of Carolingian government remains a matter of intense controversy. Debate has become unhelpfully polarised as those historians anxious to avoid a “shadow” history of “missing” administrative institutions, who have sought to understand the mechanisms through which kings impinged on the localities, have been all too often – and misleadingly – labelled as “minimalists” seeking to write off royal power, or even “primitivists” cutting Carolingian kings down to the size of Polynesian chiefs.42 Name-calling is probably inevitable if debate centres on conflicting answers to similar questions asked of the same canonical sources.43 But the discourses and documents produced by royal courts can be complemented by other sources, excluded from the canon by nineteenth-century editorial and historiographical agendas, which show us local The terminology of “shadow histories” is that of Karl Leyser, “Ottonian Government”, English Historical Review, 96 (1981): 721–53. 43 Although one feature of recent research is a dramatic paradigm change altering our understanding of the narrative sources, and slowly beginning to affect attitudes towards other genres of source material such as capitularies and diplomata. 42

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societies with their own rhythms and processes, but in a constant if not always harmonious dialogue with the demands and wishes of their rulers: documents of practice can help us explain not only what Carolingian government did, but how it did it. Charters may be “well known”44 as sources for local history and prosopography, but they have been only intermittently and imperfectly used in canonical historiographies of administration and politics, with cartularies little more than magicians’ hats out of which decontextualised examples of administrative or political practice might be pulled. By examining the experience of power in the localities through the charter material, it is possible to avoid the reification of the state inherent in minimalist–maximialist debate, which reads the products of the court through nineteenth-century spectacles, and then moves into a cycle of assertion and counter-assertion about “success” and “failure” which can find no traction in the evidence, and so is ultimately doomed to raise academic temperatures without furthering historical understanding. The potential of such an approach is clear from our postcards. For make no mistake, whilst none of them sketches a dedicated infrastructure of administrative competencies reaching down into Alpine villages and Burgundian estates, they do talk, loudly and insistently, of the demands of kings and their agents. Those Rhaetian landowners transferring smallholdings to the outsider foisted on them by a new count living off what they still believed was Church land knew this, whether they were buying into the new order, buying off the threat of expropriation for non-performance of public dues, or buying up the necessary equipment for a dangerous military venture in central Europe; so too did Einhard’s clients, whether asking him to intervene with count and lord in respect of demands for military service, to secure a fair hearing, or to adjust the public dues demanded of them. Dhuoda, reflecting on the dizzying insecurity of her husband’s and son’s positions and the sticky fates of their kin, and the gentry of the Autunois watching counts come and go with confusing and disruptive regularity would likewise have agreed. To dismiss a view of the Carolingian empire which starts from the experience of power as “minimalist” is to ignore their eloquent pleas and worried prayers. To claim a monopoly on historical understanding for traditional administrative and institutional historiographies is to dismiss these hopes and fears. Not only do such historiographies flatten the unique structures and compromises of the Carolingian world, they also conjure a set of governmental norms rooted in classical modernity into anachronistic norms against which Carolingian practice can be judged, and they thus ultimately only allow us to explain change over time in terms of the failure of ninthcentury rulers to behave as nineteenth-century observers believed they ought. Worse, in dismissing the experience of power as a valid object of analysis, they subject the human agents who determined the limits of early medieval stateformation to deafening condescension. 44 As Alexander C. Murray notes in his review of Innes, State and Society, American Historical Review, 107 (2001): 923–4.

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If we place our four postcards alongside others we might receive, from other early medieval agrarian empires, what is striking is how much, and how directly, our Carolingian correspondents talk of property rights in land. As in all pre-modern polities, their experience of central power is mediated through local agents, and the personal relationships and interests of those agents, but here their position and their petitions were not expressed in the language of fiscality or bureaucracy. In the later Roman Empire, where comparable clusters of evidence survive they clearly show civilian and military office and its adjuncts in terms of fiscal exaction and legal privilege as central to the interface between provincial elites and the imperial court. In the other successor states of the early medieval world, this dialogue continued in modified forms. In Byzantium, even after the development of the system of themes, the relationship amongst landed elites, local communities and the state was articulated through a vocabulary of fiscal obligation directly descended from the Roman past; in the Caliphate, debate centred on the allocation of tax revenue in the form of the ‘aṭā’ paid to all Muslims listed in the dīwān and the rights of the Caliph over ṣawāfī lands notionally belonging to the entire Muslim community.45 In our Carolingian evidence, public dues are collected and military service performed, but they are not understood in terms of a generalised cadastration or regular process of assessment, but in terms of specific duties and obligations tied to property in land, which were negotiated through cycles of gift-exchange rooted in land. But – and this is the crucial point – those property rights in land were not a simple social fact. Court elites directly engaged in royal service – Dhuoda’s kin, Einhard’s friends, the masters of the Schultheiss Folkwine at Rankweil, the advocate and estate-manager Fredelus at Perrecy, or the viscount Blitgar at Autun – did not simply control land or monopolise office through straightforward delegation, brute domination or manifest ownership. Rather, they were busy, mobile, often distant figures, reliant on the good offices of local agents on the ground. Dependant on both continued royal favour and local support, they were able once in a while to ignore the former or coerce the latter, but ultimately needed to deliver public dues to kings to ensure continued favour, and royal patronage to clients to ensure continued support. It was through a culture of power in which argument and anecdote, claim and compromise, were publicly debated and enacted that their control of land and labour was converted into legitimate public position. In a classic paper published a quarter of a century ago, Karl Ferdinand Werner taught us to understand Carolingian government in terms of the strength of For the late Roman evidence, see graphically Harold Idris Bell et al., The Abinnaeus Archive (Oxford, 1963); for Byzantium, see, for example, John Haldon, “Military Service, Military Lands and the Status of Soldiers: Current Problems and Interpretations”, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 47 (1993): 1–67; for the Caliphate, see Hugh Kennedy, “Military Pay and the Economy of the Early Islamic State”, Historical Research, 188 (2002); 155–69, and Hugh Kennedy, “Central Government and Provincial Elites in the Early Abbasid Caliphate”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 44 (1981): 26–38. 45

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the connections between locality and court.46 More recently, Stuart Airlie has argued that whilst royal agents “were not a bureaucracy in the modern sense of the term”, “royal service itself was an infrastructure, or at least an institution in perpetual process through performance”47. Social practices surrounding royal property played a central role in articulating this infrastructure, and in connecting local landowners to the hierarchy of those actually in royal service. In the localities, the vertical hierarchy of royal service flattened out into more horizontal connections with those figures who provided a gateway into the world of the court. Articulated in terms of kinship and favour, the giving and receiving of property was central to these networks of influence. These scatterings of family, friends and neighbours radiated around the local representatives of court elites like iron filings around a magnet. The existence of these constellations does not demonstrate the failure of Carolingian government. Rather, in an agrarian empire like this, they are an index of success: local landowners were pulled into alignment with the force-field of the royal court. Structurally, it was above all through the granting out of royal and ecclesiastical land that these elites were tied into the political system; ideologically, the project of portraying political power in terms of a descending hierarchy drew on the experience of receiving land “in ministry”, or through being “honoured” or “benefited”. When we debate the nature of Carolingian government, we should remember those local landowners who rewarded Folkwine’s “good merits and good offices” with gifts of land, and those who sought Einhard’s testimony as to their loyal service and good name. It is through their actions and hopes that we see the limits and potential of Carolingian state-formation.

Karl Ferdinand Werner, “Missus-marchio-comes: entre l’administration centrale et l’administration locale de l’empire carolingien”, in Werner Paravicini and Karl Ferdinand Werner (eds), Histoire comparée de l’administration (IVe–XVIIIe siècles), Beihefte der Francia, 9 (Munich, 1980), pp. 191–239. 47 Quote from “The Historiography of Elites in Gaul”, available online at , but the critical discussion is his “The Aristocracy in the Service of the State in the Carolingian Period”, in Stuart Airlie, Walter Pohl and Helmut Reimitz (eds), Staat und Staatlichkeit im frühen Mittelalter, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Denkschriften, 334 (Vienna, 2006), pp. 93–111. 46

Chapter 16

The Cunning of Institutions Stuart Airlie

Charlemagne and his empire continue to magnetise the attention of historians much as the mysterious tomb of the old emperor drew the young Otto III to it in Aachen in 1000. But current historians do not seek to uncover a frozen monumental figure; rather, they explore a dynamic world which seems able to sustain a remarkable variety of types of study. Something of that variety is on view in the three studies in Part Four. While they share certain common features of approach, they should not be seen as uniform in their startingpoint or conclusions. We need not seek to follow the great Jacob Burckhardt in pursuing the chimera of “a complete and consistent whole” in the cultures that we study. There is little point in summarising these studies here; Jennifer Davis, Matthew Innes and Janet Nelson are their own best exponents. But one might note how vividly they demonstrate how far the study of governance and society in this period has moved away from the assumptions that governed the approach of a scholar such as F.-L. Ganshof. This older approach searched the Carolingian evidence in quest of “a unitary polity run via the routine delegation of royal power through administrative institutions”. Here, however, Janet Nelson and Matthew Innes demonstrate that the existence of “small worlds” of tightly woven local networks not only does not cancel out the existence of larger “governmental” structures, but reveals how early medieval governments actually worked. All three studies, and here they do point firmly in new directions, are methodologically self-conscious and while, rightly focusing on historical detail and specificity, set out to look for “broader principles of rulership that underlie  Knut Görich, “Otto III. öffnet das Karlsgrab in Aachen”, in Gerd Althoff and Ernst Schubert (eds), Herrschaftsrepräsentation im Ottonischen Sachsen (Sigmaringen, 1998), pp. 381–430; on the ups and downs of Charlemagne’s image, see Max Kerner, “Mythos Karl der Grosse”, in Karl der Grosse und Europa. Symposium (Frankfurt, 2004), pp. 87–100.  Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. Samuel G.C. Middlemore (London, 1965), p. 217  Matthew Innes, State and Society in the Early Middle Ages: The Middle Rhine Valley 400–1000, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th series, 47 (Cambridge, 2000), p. 6, and see pp. 4–12; see also Chapter 14 in this volume, note 40, and for further explicit contrast with older institutional studies, Janet L. Nelson, “The Voice of Charlemagne”, in Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser (eds), Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-Harting (Oxford, 2001), pp. 76–88.

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and unify the fragmentary pieces of evidence for governance”, in Jennifer Davis’s words. Such an approach may run the risk of evoking a Burckhardttype Zeitgeist or of courting circularity, i.e. simply seeing what we are looking for, but these contributions avoid this by scrupulous sifting of the evidence, and above all, by accepting the contradictions and problems revealed by that evidence. We should note, however, that these chapters, in common with other work on Carolingian governance and culture, take quite an “optimistic” view of their subject. This should not harden into a new orthodoxy, and the serious reservations of the late Patrick Wormald over the role of the written word in Carolingian justice deserve close attention, not least because they are founded in a nuanced understanding of the dangerously general term “Carolingian”, a point to which we shall return. In all three chapters, communications matter much. Nelson (Chapter 13) rightly focuses our attention, not just on “spatial movement”, but on “what made men move”. Her study of the 805 list of Saxon hostages explores a world of active social networks, but does not lose sight of the “imperative force” of that text’s language. Amidst the horizontal networks, there was a vertical hierarchy of authority, the “elements of regular checking-up” of which clearly mark the existence of a supervising and commanding centre. Historians have to carry out such checks, too. If commands issued from the centre were systematically ignored, that centre dissolved. Thus, Jennifer Davis dutifully confirms in Chapter 14 that Charlemagne’s commandments of 802 on oaths can be seen to be enforced in Bavaria, and she also refers to the celebrated case of Count Stephen of Paris, whose local broadcasting of centrally composed additions to Lex Salica in 803 has earned him the approval of historians as much as he doubtless earned that of Charlemagne.  But such checking-up cannot rely on the all too often fragmentary nature of anecdotal evidence. What really count are the overall patterns and structures. We must also be historically aware of the problems of communication and of the nature of communications in pre-modern societies. As Peter Brown has stressed, maintaining the late Roman “imperial system involved a perpetual battle with distance” but the imperial government also had to deal with the fact that regions were “crisscrossed by a web of contacts”. Far from jamming such signals, the government had to learn to receive them and to work with existing networks. Similarly, Innes in Chapter 15 shows what Einhard’s letters can be made to reveal about a world of friendship networks, alongside steelier bonds Patrick Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 29–92.  See Chapter 13 in this volume; see also Janet L. Nelson, Charlemagne and the Paradoxes of Power: The Reuter Lecture 2005 (Southampton, 2006), where she stresses, however, that the centre could not be loftily detached from existing networks.  See Chapter 14; Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge, 1989), p. 30; Matthew Innes, “Charlemagne’s Government”, in Joanna Story (ed.), Charlemagne. Empire and Society (Manchester, 2005), pp. 71–89, here p. 80.  Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity (Madison, WI, 1992), p. 10, p. 47. 

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of clientage and lordship, but he also reminds us that the centre was itself very dependent on such networks: “kings must have had little idea of the niceties of who held 12 manses in the Durbachgau, but were simply reacting to persuasive petitions”. Further, within such systems individual failures and breakdowns of communication are less important to the historian than the continuing existence of the system itself. Again, Brown offers illumination from the late Roman world. In assessing the impact of speeches and letters to officials from the fourth-century orator Libanius of Antioch, he notes that “High officials frequently ignored Libanius’ requests. … [But] what mattered was the cumulative impression of ‘conductivity’ conveyed by this correspondence.” To turn to the mid-ninth century and to encounter, for example, Abbot Lupus of Ferrières fretting about changes to the royal itinerary leaving him in the dark as to the king’s whereabouts is not to encounter a world bedevilled by poor communications. If anything, Lupus had too many potential sources of information. Writing to Abbot Wulfad for information on the king’s movements, he refers to an earlier announcement on the itinerary, to a rumour that it had been changed, to Wulfad as a reliable source of information, and to the unreliability of ordinary messengers. Elsewhere, he refers to the royal palace, the conceptual centre of the realm, as a clearing-house for information and rumour. What is striking here is not that Lupus was missing some information, but that there were so many ways of getting it, and that he wanted it. Here the individual glitch actually reveals the existence of a functioning system. But the historian must also learn to distinguish glitch from system failure. When the emperor Arnulf deliberately withheld details of his itinerary in 897 this was a clear sign that Carolingian kingship was in serious trouble.10 A shuddering breakdown such as this is a sharp reminder that systems are finite; they have limits. That is to say, they are distinctive. Systems of communication and governance in the Carolingian world can be better understood, and their distinctiveness more fully grasped, if they are the subject of comparison. This can take many forms. For example, the different elements of the Carolingian world ought to be compared with each other, geographically and chronologically. Charlemagne’s reign is the focus for Jennifer Davis and Janet Nelson, while Matthew Innes ranges more widely, but he also highlights the importance of specific chronological contexts such as the new fluid and polycentric world of multiple sources of royal patronage of the 830s and after. Ibid., pp. 46–7. Servati Lupi Epistulae, ed. Peter K. Marshall (Leipzig, 1984), no. 121, p. 114 and no. 31, pp. 41–2. On documents and communication, see Rudolf Schieffer (ed.), Schriftkultur und Reichsverwaltung unter den Karolingern (Opladen, 1996), and for stimulating general perspectives, Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300–900 (Cambridge, 2001). 10 Stuart Airlie, “Talking Heads: Assemblies in Early Medieval Germany”, in Paul S. Barnwell and Marco Mostert (eds), Political Assemblies in the Earlier Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2003), pp. 29–46, here p. 41.  

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Carolingian rulers were not all the same, and their world was no monolith. The term “Carolingian”, itself essentially a term of art used much more by modern historians than by people of the eighth and ninth centuries, thus covers a multitude of different situations, and we should be careful not to let it impose a misleading homogeneity on the fluid contexts of our studies. For the term “Carolingian” to retain its value, it has to be problematised, or at least not be taken for granted. To some extent, general social theories of distinctiveness and power such as those of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault can be helpful here, for example in helping us to understand how hard Carolingian rulers had to work to make their authority look natural.11 But more traditional forms of historical comparison also help. Here one might reflect on the scale of the late Roman Empire as a point of comparison, whether on the anecdotal level of points of fact such as, for example, the number of bureaucrats that staffed that empire (20,000?), or on what we might learn from Christopher Kelly’s recent study of bureaucratic structures, consciousness and corruption in a “pre-industrial superstate” that was also “a highly personal world in which the successful exercise of power significantly depended on ‘clout’ and connections”.12 Perhaps more urgently, we should try and see this period in a longer chronological perspective. What was distinctive about what we might call the high Carolingian period, from the reign of Charlemagne to the death of Charles the Bald, can be seen more clearly if we look at what came after it. Such a perspective also enables us to grasp better the distinctive contours of tenthcentury polities and the social and political changes associated with l’an mil. As the late Tim Reuter observed, too many assertions about upheaval in the later period ultimately depend on a “generalized Carolingian past”.13 Insecurely based comparisons can thus obscure both parts being compared, but longer perspectives do help us grasp detail better.14 Here some recent work on justice in west Francia in the tenth and eleventh centuries, work that is thematically relevant to our three studies, can be illuminating. In a balanced and nuanced survey of the administration of justice around the year 1000, Michel Parisse warns against a schematic view of an effectively centralised Carolingian world being followed by blanket Capetian decline. Instead, he paints a picture of slow evolution of institutions Stuart Airlie, “Les élites en 888 et après, ou comment pense-t-on la crise carolingienne”, in François Bougard, Laurent Feller, and Régine Le Jan (eds), Les Elites au haut Moyen Age. Crises et renouvellements (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 425–37. 12 Walter Pohl, “The Politics of Change. Reflections on the Transformation of the Roman World”, in Walter Pohl and Max Diesenberger (eds), Integration und Herrschaft (Vienna, 2002), pp. 275–88, here p. 281; Christopher Kelly, Ruling the Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2004), p. 3. 13 Timothy Reuter, “Debate: The ‘Feudal Revolution’”, Past and Present, 155 (1997): 177–95, here p. 193. 14 Chris Wickham, Problems in Doing Comparative History. The Reuter Lecture 2004 (Southampton, 2005), offers valuable reflections. 11

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and detects a still functioning Carolingian system of justice in the mid-tenthcentury Lyonnais. This becomes more credible when we juxtapose it with the new studies of the Carolingian systems on offer here, namely Jennifer Davis’s picture of overlapping judicial functions and Matthew Innes’s and Janet Nelson’s “small worlds”.15 Similarly, Ghislain Brunel’s recent dynamic picture of Capetian justice echoes elements to be found in our studies. This can be seen not only in the broadly similar thematic and source concerns, but also at the level of detail in, for example, its call for more study of the role of the palace as site of justice and its noting of the importance of request for prayers as a sign of community.16 Of course, studies such as those by Parisse and Brunel are not arguing that nothing changed between the high Carolingian era and the early Capetian period. Historians study change, and even evidence for continuity should not be seen as evidence for lack of change. The point of comparison is to compare, and not to flatten out the landscape. Comparative history is difficult, not least because few of us may be confident enough of our expertise in one field, let alone in two or more. There is also the problem of differing historiographical approaches. The work of Parisse and Brunel stems from a very French context of the study of charters and institutions that differs from the study of east Francia. More could and should be done here, not to homogenise such historiographies, but to put them in touch with one another. Co-operative projects and teamwork, as well as the developing of contacts among scholars in different traditions and specialisms, are essential here. In this sense, the ripples from the New Directions conference will continue to spread. The history of the political and social culture of the Carolingian empire is too important to be left to Carolingianists alone.

Michel Parisse, “Cadres judiciaires vers l’an mil”, in La Justice en l’an mil, Collection Histoire de la justice, 15 (Paris, 2003), pp. 15–26. 16 Ghislain Brunel, “La justice du roi de France vers l’an mil”, in La justice en l’an mil, pp. 27–52, here pp. 37–8 and pp. 40–41; her remarks on counts of the palace and regions should be compared with Philippe Depreux, “Le rôle du comte du Palais à la lumière des sources relatives au règne de l’empereur Louis le Pieux”, FS, 34 (2000): 94–111, here p. 97 and pp. 110–11. On prayer, see Chapter 15 in this volume, and on palaces, see Chapter 17 in this volume. 15

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PART five The Intellectuality of Early Medieval Art

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Part Five

The Intellectuality of Early Medieval Art Michael McCormick

Coming from an age of skyscrapers, it is hard for us to imagine the impact of the vaulting new stone structures of the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries in a world of low wooden houses. Yet the cupola of Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen is the earliest surviving arching vault of its type raised north of the Alps, and the highest until the age of the Gothic cathedrals. The multiplying monuments tell their own tale about Part One’s accumulating wealth over the long morning of early medieval Europe. The chapters that follow offer close analyses of the meanings of some of the time’s most prestigious material creations: the places of power where the politics of Part Four were acted out, and in which the rituals and readings discussed in Part Two were performed. And of course, the wealth that created these palaces and magnificent images had been produced and collected from the villages of Part One. Often of stone, with glass windows and lead roofs, the magnificent royal palaces and chapels, raised or restored by the resurgent monarchs of the early Middle Ages, surely imposed themselves on the imaginations of men and women more accustomed to humble wooden or wattle and daub structures, the longhouses, sheds and “sunken feature houses” (sheds built over shallow pits) that we know from excavation and Chapter 3. So too in this world, books were worth a fortune, and images of any sort, in books or on walls, were rare indeed in the life of more than just peasants. The seductive power of the graven image was charged with danger, and not only because the triumphant rival civilization of Islam had banned them, and a battered but still prestigious Byzantium had followed suit. The warriors and missionaries of the Frankish empire had encountered, and destroyed, the idols of their pagan neighbors first-hand. Mayke de Jong (Chapter 17) and Herbert Kessler (Chapter 18) document and decipher the exceptional erudition of the early medieval writers, thinkers and artists who described or created these new monuments of un-aging intellect. And like the investigators of the early medieval literary art in Part Three, they Helmut Maintz, Sanierung des Dachstuhls über dem Oktogon, Karlsverein-Dombauverein, Schriftenreihe, 6 (Aachen, 2003), p. 12.  Michael McCormick, “Textes, images et iconoclasme dans le cadre des relations entre Byzance et l’Occident carolingien”, in Testo e immagine nell’alto medioevo, Settimane, 41 (Spoleto, 1994), pp. 95–162, here pp. 105–6. 

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do so in a way that offers a gage of historical authenticity and a tribute to the early medieval creators who described great buildings or made the images: by taking seriously the way early medieval people understood and reflected on what they were depicting and how they were doing it. Both discover keys to unlock the meaning of architectural features or subtle images by reaching beyond the historians who described them, or the image itself as painted, to quite different works which at first glance might seem to have little to do with the objects at hand. Nothing could be further from the truth. The biblical exegesis of Carolingian intellectuals – once again the Book – allows a new understanding of the elevated galleries which figure so prominently in what we can perceive of royal palaces of the early Middle Ages. So too the refined theological response to the challenge – indeed, the danger – of images, and their subtle Christological implications: the very success of early medieval art and its descendants makes it easy to forget that the rebirth of religious art in the early Middle Ages occurred in a world in which images of the divinity were contested and contestable. Kessler’s approach clarifies the thinking behind early medieval figural representations of Christ, down to the choice of colors or materials to adorn the page of the splendid books created then and bequeathed to future generations as exemplary offerings to the divinity, and to art, offerings financed, we may well believe, by the sacrificial gifts we discovered in Part Two. Thomas Noble concludes Part Five with an exploration of how buildings and images could “mean”, and how they mattered in this age, in the light of the findings of de Jong and Kessler. Naturally for the specialist of the early medieval papacy and image theology, the analogous structures in papal Rome have their story to tell in this regard, as do the feverish treaties on images and their veneration that emerged from the leading minds of the eighth and ninth centuries. But what all three chapters drive home is the extreme intellectualizing bent of the early medieval reaction to works of art. Whether in three or two dimensions, such creations were thought about, intensely, and discussed, in the light of the most authoritative doctrinal works then available. The erudition of early medieval scholars that Part Three presented was at work here too. By discovering these learned discussions, and using them to view how early medieval people constructed and contested the meanings of these new material realities, Part Five takes us closer to grasping the intellect in these early medieval monuments, and suggests how much more there is to discover.

Chapter 17

Charlemagne’s Balcony: The Solarium in Ninth-Century Narratives Mayke de Jong

Solarium In the 880s, Notker Balbulus wrote about a ruler whom he had never met, and a palace he had never visited: Charlemagne’s Aachen. In his Gesta Karoli, composed for Charles’s great-grandson Charles the Fat, Notker praised the thoroughness of the construction of Aachen’s church, as well as of the royal residence and the houses (mansiones) of the men of different rank attached to the palace. The very clever Charles had them built in such a way that the king himself, through the railings of his solarium, could observe all the secret activities of everyone who came and went, without them realizing it. Since the houses of the palace dignitaries were built on stilts, the king’s gaze even reached into the dwellings of their vassals and servants who lived underneath. This passage has fascinated modern historians. To some, Notker’s vignette shows how Charlemagne, after having made Aachen the more or less permanent center of an empire, was in a position to shape his courtiers into a self-conscious elite. Even if the story is apocryphal, it still gives a good idea of the lively center Aachen had become, full of visiting magnates and their retinues. To others, Notker’s image of the always  Notker Balbulus, Gesta Karoli 1.30, ed. Hans Haefele, MGH SRG n.s. 12 (Hanover, 1959), p. 41: “… sicut adhuc probat non solum basilica divina, sed et humana apud Aquisgrani et mansiones omnium cuiusdam dignitatis hominum, quae ita circa palatium peritissimi Karoli eius dispositione constructae sunt, ut ipse per cancellos solarii sui cuncta posset videre, quaecumque ab intrantibus et exeuntibus quasi latenter fierent. Sed et ita omnia procerum habitacula a terra erant in sublime suspensa, ut sub eis non solum militum milites et eorum servitores, sed omne genus hominum ab iniuriis imbrium vel nivium, gelu vel caumatis possent defendi et nequaquam tamen ab oculis acutissimi Karoli valerent abscondi. Cuius edificii descriptionem ego inclusus absolutis cancellariis vestris relinquens, ad iudicium dei, quod circa illud factum est, explicandum revertor.” On Notker’s Gesta, see Matthew Innes, “Memory, Orality and Literacy in an Early Medieval Society”, Past and Present, 158 (1998): 3–36; on Charles the Fat and Notker, see Simon McLean, Kingship and Politics in the Late Ninth Century: Charles the Fat and the End of the Carolingian Empire (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 199–230.  Janet L. Nelson, “Aachen as a Place of Power”, in Mayke de Jong, Frans Theuws and Carine van Rhijn (eds), Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages, Transformation of the Roman World, 6 (Leiden, 2001), pp. 217–42, here pp. 223–4.

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vigilant king anticipates Foucault’s Panopticon; this was a ruler whose palace was a place of education and discipline. In this chapter, I will explore the expression solarium and its ninth-century connotations as a way to discover different contexts for a better understanding of Notker’s observation. My search includes a range of different and often contradictory evidence, beginning with architectural history and ending with exegesis. The pursuit of the expression solarium and its synonyms takes one straight into a world in which prominent religious centers – royal monasteries and canonical communities – constituted an integral part of the topography of royal power. Hence the attention of monks such as Notker was drawn to the court: what happened around the king, when, and why? Yet this is only half of the story, for religious communities represented resources of sanctity and prayer that were considered indispensable for the stability of the realm (stabilitas regni). Within the royal topography, the great abbeys that enjoyed the king’s protection were a center of gravity in their own right, claiming the attention of the ruler, who would dictate new “reform” – that is, redress the balance between openness to the outside world on the one hand, and ascetic seclusion on the other. Notker’s Charlemagne inspected a community that was much more open and flexible than a monastic one, but it was all the same a place of discipline. As the monk Hildemar of Corbie/Civate (c. 845) expressed it, the king’s household was “the school of human service” (scola humani servitii), as opposed to the monastic “school of the service of the Lord” (scola dominici servitii). There is a  Stuart Airlie, “The Palace of Memory: The Carolingian Court as a Political Centre”, in Sarah Rees Jones, Richard Marks and Alastair Minnes (eds), Courts and Regions in Medieval Europe (York, 2000), pp. 1–20, here p. 5. In a similar vein, with regard to monastic discipline, see Albrecht Diem, Das monastische Experiment. Die Rolle der Keuschheit bei der Entstehung des westlichen Klosterwesens, Vita regularis. Ordnungen und Deutungen religiosen Lebens im Mittelalter, 24 (Münster, 2005), pp. 1–25.  Matthew Innes, “‘A Place of Discipline’: Carolingian Courts and Aristocratic Youth”, in Catherine Cubitt (ed.), Court Culture in the Early Middle Ages, Studies in the Early Middle Ages, 3 (Turnhout, 2003), pp. 59–76, here p. 71.  Matthew Innes, “Kings, Monks and Patrons: Political Identities and the Abbey of Lorsch”, in Régine Le Jan (ed.), La royauté et les élites dans l’Europe carolingienne (Lille, 1998), pp. 310–24; Mayke de Jong, “Internal Cloisters: The Case of Ekkehard’s Casus sancti Galli”, in Helmut Reimitz and Walter Pohl (eds), Grenze und Differenz im frühen Mittelalter, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, 1 (Vienna, 2000), pp. 209–21; on strategies of connecting regions and individuals to the ruler, see Chapter 13 in this volume.  Mayke de Jong, “Carolingian Monasticism: The Power of Prayer”, in NCMH, pp. 622– 53; Mayke de Jong, “Sacrum palatium et ecclesia. L’autorité religieuse royale sous les Carolingiens (790–840)”, Annales. Histoire, sciences sociales, 58 (2003): 1243–69. On Carolingian protection (tuitio) of monastic space, see Barbara Rosenwein, Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1999), pp. 99–114.  Hildemar of Corbie/Civate, Expositio in regulam sancti Benedicti, prologue, ed. R. Mittermüller, in Vita et regula ss. p. Benedicti una cum expositione regulae a Hildemaro tradita, part 3 (Regensburg, 1880), p. 66: “In scola etenim humani servitii militant homines regi et discunt genera bellorum et genera venationum et omnia, quae ad honestatem cultus saeculi attinet, et intuentur qualicumque oculo illi aliquid, ob quod tollerant mala omnia, id est famem, tribulationem et caetera his similia.” Hildemar, educated in Corbie, dictated this commentary c. 845 to his pupils in the monastery

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lot of the responsible abbot in this Charlemagne who observed the goings-on in his court without being seen, but Notker envisaged similar behavior on Charles’ part during military campaigns: without anyone recognizing him, the unceasingly vigilant emperor secretly inspected the camp and missed nothing. Good abbots needed to be watchful, as did kings, to the point of waking frequently during the night; Fredegar underlined this with regard to King Dagobert I, and so did Einhard concerning the great Charles. Notker made his remarks about the solarium in a chapter devoted to Charlemagne’s building projects: not only the great bridge in Mainz, but also the upkeep and construction of local churches, for which anyone with a public office worked tirelessly, and then there was the palace at Aachen, as the culmination of Charles’ lofty building program, but also as evidence of his effective control of all those holding royal benefices. Here he observed their every movement, peering per cancellos solarii sui. Translators have understood these words differently, ranging from “through the windows of his private apartments” to “the railings of his balcony”.10 Derived from sol (“sun”), the solarium was certainly a construction situated on the upper story – a balcony or gallery, possibly roofed, or alternatively, a sun-room. Even if Notker did not see Aachen’s solarium with his own eyes, this was a structure with which he was familiar, and thought suitable for a ruler. Exploring the varying contexts of this word is my main strategy to get closer to the meaning that Notker and his audience may have attached to Charlemagne’s solarium. This implies some reflection on its physical appearance, but what concerns me most is the importance of what I have called, tongue in cheek, “Charlemagne’s balcony” for Carolingian representations of legitimate royal authority. A solarium, as we shall see, was not an entirely exclusive royal attribute, but all the same, it seems to have been an integral feature of Carolingian royal dwellings, be they palaces or villae. It was a place of royal sociability, a location to which only the inner circle of the court was admitted, a symbol of royal authority, high up in the palace, a physical structure to which moral interpretations were attached, and finally, but not unimportantly, an element in an ongoing discourse about

of San Pietro al Monte in Civate, overlooking Lake Como; Mayke de Jong, “Growing Up in a Carolingian Monastery: Magister Hildemar and his Oblates”, Journal of Medieval History, 9 (1983): 99–128.  Notker, Gesta Karoli 2.3, p. 52; cf. Innes, “A Place of Discipline”, pp. 71–2.  Fredegarius, Chronicon 4.58, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SRM 2 (Hanover, 1888), pp. 149–50; Einhard, Vita Karoli, 24, ed. Oswald Holder-Egger, MGH SRG (Hanover, 1911), p. 29. 10 “Söller”: Notker, Gesta Karoli, trans. Reinhard Rau, Quellen zur karolingischen Reichsgeschichte (3 vols, Darmstadt, 1992), vol. 3, p. 367; “the windows of his apartment” (Nelson, “Aachen as a Place of Power”, p. 223); “through the windows of his private apartment” (Einhard and Notker the Stammerer: Two Lives of Charlemagne, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 128). Falkenstein reserves judgment: Ludwig Falkenstein, Der “Lateran” der karolingischen Pfalz zu Aachen (Cologne, 1966), p. 47.

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distinction achieved through access to the ruler.11 The solarium also figured in contemporary biblical commentary, for it was here that King David spotted the fair Bathsheba washing herself. Aachen First of all, let us consider the palace in Aachen, where Charles resided frequently after the winter of 794/95, and semi-permanently from 800 until his death. Within a larger network of palaces, villae and royal monasteries, the new palace in Aachen had become a real nexus – a place of power, as Janet Nelson has expressed it.12 The coherence of the ideology transmitted by such impressive buildings may have been overstated, but contemporaries surely did invest Aachen and the other great palaces with meaning – albeit in an eclectic fashion.13 Just like the biblical palace of Solomon, with which Notker compared Aachen, this was a bipolar palace, with a “temple” and a royal residence – that is, the church devoted to the virgin Mary in the south, and the aula regis (“royal hall”) in the north.14 Traditionally, Charles’s solarium has been situated on the south side of the regia, as part of the private quarters of the king that were presumably located on an upper story, but it has been recently suggested that the king resided in a two-story building that intersected the stone gallery (porticus) connecting the church and regia.15 This is an attractive idea, for it situates the ruler halfway between the church and the aula regis, as a link between both poles of the palace complex. But the problem is that any solid archaeological evidence is missing. One has to rely entirely on written sources and intelligent speculation. Regardless of whether one situates the royal quarters on the south 11 The observation on the importance of access to the ruler as a persistent theme within the texts I assembled I owe to Rosamond McKitterick, who kindly read and commented upon the penultimate version of this chapter. 12 Nelson, “Aachen as a Place of Power”. 13 Ross Samson, “Carolingian Palaces and the Poverty of Ideology”, in Martin Locock (ed.), Meaningful Architecture: Social Interpretations of Buildings (Aldershot, 1995), pp. 99–131. I share the author’s misgivings about viewing Carolingian palaces as the expression of a coherent ideology, but to my mind he tends to go overboard in the other direction; on the meaning attached to the Carolingian palaces by contemporaries, see Airlie, “Palace of Memory”. 14 Notker, Gesta Karoli 1.27, p. 38, on the buildings, “quę cesar augustus imperator Karolus apud Aquasgrani iuxta sapientissimi Salemonis exemplum Deo vel sibi vel omnibus episcopis, abbatibus, comitibus et cunctis de toto orbe venientibus hospitibus mirifice construxit …”. On bipolar palaces, see Josiane Barbier, “Le sacré dans le palais franc”, in Michel Kaplan (ed.), Le sacré et son inscription dans l’espace à Byzance et en Occident. Etudes comparées, Byzantina Sorbonensia, 18 (Paris, 2001), pp 27–41. 15 For the present consensus, see Matthias Untermann, “Opere mirabili constructa. Die Aachener ‘Residenz’ Karls des Grossen”, in Christoph Stiegemann and Matthias Wemhoff (eds), 799. Karl der Grosse und Papst Leo III. in Paderborn. Kunst und Kultur der Karolingerzeit, Beiträge zum Katalog der Ausstellung (3 vols, Paderborn, 1999), vol. 3, pp. 152–64; for the alternative view, see Cord Meckseper, “Das ‘Tor- und Gerichtsgebaüde’ der Pfalz Karls des Grossen in Aachen”, in Michael Jansen and Klaus Winands (eds), Architektur und Kunst im Abendland: Festschrift zur Vollendung des 65. Lebensjahres von Günter Urban (Rome, 1992), pp. 105–13.

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side of the aula regis or in this building intersecting the gallery, not a trace has been found of the solarium, of the houses (mansiones) of the courtiers, or of other buildings for royal women, distinguished guests and officials, servants and horses. Recent overviews of the topography of Aachen fully admit to this basic ignorance.16 If we follow Notker, for the time being, it should be noted that he distinguishes between the basilica divina – St Mary’s church – and the basilica humana, that is, the regia (“royal residence”). It is in the latter, presumably, that he situates Charlemagne surveying the activities of his courtiers. According to Notker, the basilica divina had its own solarium quod ambit aedem basilicae (“solarium which surrounds the building of the basilica”), from which diplomats from Baghdad looked down on the clergy and the army.17 This must have been the upper gallery with its bronze railings which still exists, called a deambulatorium by Widukind in the context of Otto’s royal inauguration in 936.18 With regard to churches, solarium and deambulatorium could be used as synonyms. This was where Bishop Aldric of Le Mans housed a collection of relics and an altar, surely not something to be attempted outdoors in the climate of northern France.19 On the other hand, the “deambulatorium scilicet solarium, built very beautifully, with bronze railings” added by Pope Hadrian to a “tower adorned with wondrous beauty” and serving as living quarters must have been on the outside of this structure. In order to make this clear, the author of the Liber Pontificalis used the expression scilicet solarium (“that is, a solarium”).20 This small dossier reveals some overlap between the ambulatory and the solarium, with the common feature that both were a kind of circular balcony or gallery, be it as part of a church or of a prestigious secular building. Yet solarium could also mean a room situated high up, with good light: Adalhard of Corbie’s monastic customs mention the scriptores solarii, presumably those who copied manuscripts in a well-lit scriptorium situated on the top floor, and

Ludwig Falkenstein, “Charlemagne et Aix-la-Chapelle”, Byzantion, 61 (1991): 231–89; Untermann, “Opere mirabili constructa”, pp. 161–2; Uwe Lobbedey, “Carolingian Royal Palaces: The State of Research from an Architectural Historian’s Viewpoint”, in Cubitt (ed.), Court Culture, pp. 129–54. Uwe Lobbedey has pointed out, moreover, that whereas Roman audience chambers were located on the ground floor, medieval ones came to be situated on the upper story. Carolingian palace architecture represents a transitional phase, in which both models might pertain. In other words, we cannot start from any clear assumptions as to the location of the ruler’s quarters. 17 Notker, Gesta Karoli 2.8, p. 59. 18 Widukind, Res gestae Saxonicae, ed. Paul Hirsch, MGH SRG 60 (Hanover, 1935), p. 65: “… nam erat deambulatoria infra supraque in illa basilica in rotundum facta …”. 19 Gesta Aldrici ep. Cenomannensis, ed. Georg Waitz, MGH SS 15 (Hanover, 1887), p. 312.1– 2. 20 The Lives of the Eighth-century Popes (Liber Pontificalis), trans. Raymond Davis, Translated Texts for Historians, 13 (Liverpool, 1992), p. 151; Liber Pontificalis, ed. Louis Duchesne, vol. 3 with corr. by Cyrille Vogel, Bibliothèque des Ecoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 3 (3 vols, Paris, 1955–57), vol. 1, p. 503. 16

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certainly roofed.21 It may be significant that all the authors just mentioned who possessed solaria or wrote about them were connected, in one way or another, with the Carolingian court. Aldric of Le Mans grew up in Charlemagne’s court; Adalhard was a member of the Carolingian family; Hadrian’s building activities were partly subsidized by Charles. These were circles in which solaria were apparently prestigious structures. Bishoprics and Royal Villae The same holds true for the two bishops now to be discussed, Leidrad of Lyon and Frothar of Toul. Judging by Leidrad’s report to Charles, written shortly before the latter’s death, the solarium was an indispensable part of a royal residence.22 Leidrad told his sacer et constans imperator (“sacred and constant emperor”) that he had rebuilt a house near the episcopal residence, doubling its size and adding a solarium: “I have had these works carried out so your majesty, if you visit our diocese, can be welcomed in this abode.” Charlemagne is not recorded as having visited Lyon, but solaria continued to be desired by Carolingian rulers. Bishop Frothar of Toul, overburdened by the supervision of royal building activity, referred to the fact that Louis the Pious, when he stayed in Gondreville, had ordered him to “build a solarium on the front side of this palace, from where he could proceed to the chapel”.23 The only way to make sense of this is by imagining a church right next to the royal residence, and a ruler stepping from his private quarters onto an upper gallery (solarium) that was directly connected with a similar structure inside the church – an upper ambulatory from which Louis could follow the divine office and Mass. Gondreville, near Toul, was one of the over 150 palaces that dotted the empire, but even more numerous in the Carolingian royal landscape were the ruler’s many villae.24 According to a capitulary from 810 describing a number of these more humble royal residences in northern Francia, Annappes (near Lille) featured “a royal residence built from the best stone, with three rooms; the entire house is surrounded by solaria, with eleven heated rooms”. This 21 Consuetudines Corbeienses, ed. Josef Semmler, Corpus consuetudinum monasticarum, vol. 1 (Siegburg, 1963), p. 415. For additional references to solarium as “upper room, loft” or “veranda, gallery”, see Johan Frederik Niermeyer, Mediae Latinitatis lexicon minus (Leiden, 1993), s.v. solarium, p. 976. 22 Leidrad of Lyon, Epistola ad Carolum no. 30, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH Epist. 4 (Berlin, 1895), pp. 542–4; for a more recent edition, see Alfred Coville, Recherches sur l’histoire de Lyon du Vme siècle au IXme siècle (450–800) (Paris, 1928), pp. 283–96, who dates the letter to 809–12. On the solarium in Italian episcopal palaces of the late ninth and early tenth centuries, see Maureen C. Miller, The Bishop’s Palace: Architecture and Authority in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 2003), pp. 69–72, 77–8. 23 Frothar of Toul, Epistolae, no. 13 (828–9), ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH Epist. 5 (Berlin, 1898–99), p. 282; Michel Parisse, La correspondence d’un évêque carolingien. Frothaire de Toul (ca. 813–847) (Paris, 1998), pp. 111–14. 24 Cf. Airlie, “The Palace of Memory”; Samson, “Carolingian Palaces”, pp. 106–12.

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sounds like an outside gallery, partly partitioned off and covered by a roof, so the rooms in question could be heated.25 With one exception, all the more modest villae in this document had their solaria, either attached to a camera or, in one instance, on top of two entrance gates to an inner courtyard. Solaria were worth mentioning as representative structures, but unlike the main buildings, of which it is explicitly stated that they were constructed of stone, the solaria in and around Annappes, not specified this way, must have made of wood. The same held true of the solarium in the royal villa of Flamersheim, where King Louis the German rested in 870 when he traveled west for negotiations with his brother Charles the Bald. This structure collapsed, so the king got hurt, according to the brief report of the Annals of Fulda.26 Regino of Prüm (d. 915) elaborated, however. When the king retired to his solarium, together with a numerous entourage, it suddenly collapsed, for the beams were old and rotten. The king was seriously wounded, and everyone thought he was dead, but he got up, reassuring all and sundry that nothing was wrong.27 Regino stressed Louis’s unimpaired strength, and also the fact that this collapsing solarium was a matter of rotten wood, rather than of God’s judgment. This is reminiscent of the celebrated incident of the collapsing wooden gallery (porticus) in the palace in Aachen in 817, which also gave rise to a flurry of anxious speculation and reassuring counter-interpretations. With the burnt-down bridge across the Rhine at Mainz, Einhard included the collapse of the Aachen porticus among the many portents that preceded Charlemagne’s death; he must have thought this incident of 817 sufficiently shocking and close to Charlemagne’s death to be suitable for this purpose.28 The sudden caving-in of buildings closely associated with the ruler caused anxiety: what did this mean, within God’s overall scheme? When Regino recalled the death of Louis the Younger’s infant son in 879, qualifying it as “dishonorable”, he referred to the boy’s fall from the palace window, and possibly also to the Carolingian dynasty’s future fall from legitimacy.29 As everyone knows, pride comes before the fall. Authoritative authors such as Gregory the Great and Gregory of Tours both situated the literal downfall of haughty clerics from various solaria. In one case this was a balcony,30 in the other a roof terrace on the city walls of Angers, with an external staircase leading 25 Brevium exempla ad describendas res ecclesiasticales et fiscales, in MGH LL 2, Capit. 1, no. 128, pp. 254–6. 26 Annales Fuldenses, a. 870, ed. Friedrich Kurze, MGH SRG (Hanover, 1890), p. 71. 27 Regino of Prüm, Chronicon, a. 870, ed. Friedrich Kurze, MGH SRG (Hanover, 1890), pp. 118–19. 28 Einhard, Vita Karoli 32, p. 36; Annales regni Francorum, a. 817, ed. Friedrich Kurze, MGH SRG (Hanover, 1895), p. 146. For some reflections on the connection between architecture and social order within a monastic context, see De Jong, “Internal Cloisters”. I accept the chronological difficulties, but for the time being, Einhard’s “telescoping” is my best way of explaining them. 29 Regino, Chronicon, a. 882, pp. 118–19: “… idem puerulus de fenestra palacii cecidit et confractis cervicibus statim expiravit; quae non tantum inmatura quam inhonesta mors non solum regi et reginae, verum etiam omni domo regiae maximum luctum ingessit”. 30 Gregory the Great, Dialogi 2.8, ed. Adalbert de Vogüé, Grégoire le Grand, Dialogues, SC 260 (Paris, 1979), p. 165.

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down.31 The solarium was a suitable scene on which to stage the come-uppance of self-important clerics. Pride and the solarium were also on Regino’s mind, I suspect, which was why it was so important to clarify that the Flamersheim incident was, in the end, merely a matter of rotten beams. Yet in the course of his explanation, Regino also informs us that the king ascended the solarium followed by “a multitude”. It was a place where the privileged followed their ruler for high-level and restricted decision-making. According to the Annals of Fulda, Louis rested on his solarium, but once Regino elaborates, it becomes clear that the inner circle was meant to be present during the king’s relaxation. Their collective weight, and the rotten beams, caused the solarium to crack. Aachen’s High Window and Palace Hierarchy Aachen’s solarium, wherever it was located, was made of more sturdy material – at least if one follows Notker, who has Charlemagne peer through its cancelli (“metal railings”). Two royal biographers, Einhard and the so-called Astronomer, provide some tempting information with regard to its location, without ever using the word solarium. It is in these texts that the issue of access to the ruler comes to the fore. Einhard had a house (mansio) in Aachen, close to the palace. Here he ventured – early in the morning, for it was the custom of the court to rise early – to search out the Archchaplain Hilduin, with whom he had differences to settle concerning the control of Roman relics: He was sitting before the doors of the royal bedchamber [cubiculum] waiting for the ruler to get up. After greeting him in the usual way, I asked him to get up and go to a certain window, from which one could look into the lower parts of the palace [de qua ad inferiora palatii prospectus erat]. Standing side by side while leaning on the window, we spoke with great wonder of the translation of the martyrs Peter and Marcellinus and also about the miracle revealed by the stream of blood with which, as I recorded, the reliquary sweated for seven days.32 31 Gregory of Tours, Decem libri historiarum 10.14, ed. Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm Levison, MGH SRM 1.1 (Hanover, 1951), pp. 500–501. 32 Einhard, Translatio Marcellini et Petri 2.1, ed. Georg Waitz, MGH SS 15.1 (Hanover, 1887), p. 243: “Transactis admodum paucis postquam ad comitatem veneram diebus, ego secundum consuetudinem aulicorum maturius surgens, primo mane palatium petii. Ibi cum ingressus Hildoinum, cuius libro superiore mentionem feci, ante fores regii cubiculi sedentem et egressum principis opperientem invenissem, ex more salutatum surgere atque ad quandam fenestram, de qua in inferiora palatii prospectus erat, mecum accedere rogavi. Ad quam pariter stando incumbentes, de translatione sanctorum martyrum Marcelli et Petri necnon et de miraculo quod in fluxu cruoris, quo loculum eorum septem diebus sudasse commemoravi, ostensum est, mirando luta sumus locuti.” I followed the translation in Paul E. Dutton, Charlemagne’s Courtier: The Complete Einhard (Toronto, 1998), p. 83. On Carolingians and Roman relics, see Julia M.H Smith, “Old Saints, New Cults: Roman Relics in Carolingian Francia”, in Julia M.H. Smith (ed.), Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West: Essays in Honour of Donald A. Bullough (Leiden, 2000), pp. 317–39; on Einhard and the translation of Marcellinus and Peter, see Julia M.H. Smith, “Einhard: The Sinner and the Saints”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 13 (2003): 55–78.

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This reveals a courtly life with shades of monastic order – the court, a place of discipline, rises early – but also a court dominated by great power-brokers who would be always surrounded by others claiming their attention, and who controlled access to the ruler. If one wished to speak privately to the likes of Hilduin, one did so at the crack of dawn. Einhard knew unerringly where to find him: directly outside the emperor’s cubiculum. A bedchamber, indeed, for this is where the ruler slept, but it was in secreto cubiculo that learned bishops and abbots instructed their best pupils. This was not a “private” place, but one that was secluded and exclusive, and very public all the same, for everyone was conscious of who went there and who did not.33 As for quandam fenestram, de qua ad inferiora palatii prospectus erat, this was not just any old window. Hilduin and Einhard stood there side by side, but also, emphatically, as equals, the other meaning of pariter, gazing down into the palace from a high vantage point that was, first of all, that of the ruler if he wished to inspect his court. The image of these two men discussing weighty matters (Roman martyrs!) and looking down on the palace was a forceful statement on Einhard’s part. This was how he wished to portray his position within Aachen’s hierarchy toward the end of the 820s – as the equal of Hilduin, who was then at the pinnacle of his might. One finds an equally conscious self-portrayal by a high-ranking courtier in the Astronomer’s Life of Louis, written shortly after the emperor Louis’s death. In the famous passage from which this anonymous author derived his nickname, he related the momentous sighting of Halley’s comet in 837, together with his emperor. Right before retiring to bed, Louis summoned his Astronomer to discuss the meaning of this heavenly portent. The Astronomer hesitated, but Louis did not countenance his evasiveness: “Go to the meniana belonging to this house and tell us what you see!”, the emperor commanded. In the end, it was Louis himself who came up with the answer the Astronomer could not bring himself to give. As they both knew, this comet spelled change in the realm and the death of a ruler.34 Quite clearly, the scene the Astronomer recalled occurred directly outside Louis’s quarters, with the emperor ready for bed and 33 Mayke de Jong, “From Scolastici to Scioli: Alcuin and the Formation of an Intellectual Elite”, in Luuk Houwen and Alasdair McDonald (eds), Alcuin of York, Germania Latina, 3 (Groningen, 1998), pp. 45–56, here pp. 48–9. For the biblical secretum cubiculum, see Judith 8:5 – a place that is secluded and exclusive, but also public. Some authors, such as Fulgentius of Ruspe, called Judith’s secretum cubiculum a solarium: Fulgentius of Ruspe, Epistolae no. 2, c. 29, in Opera, ed. Jean Fraipont, CC 91 (1968), p. 207, l. 381. According to Hraban Maur’s commentary on Judith, the cubiculum stands for Christian discipline countering disorder and lust: Hrabanus Maurus, Expositio in librum Judith, PL 109, col. 560C. On Carolingian images of the biblical Judith, see Mayke de Jong, “Brideshows Revisited. Praise, Slander and Exegesis in the Reign of the Empress Judith”, in Leslie Brubaker and Julia M.H. Smith (eds), Gender and the Transformation of the Roman World (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 257–77. 34 Astronomus, Vita Hludowici imperatoris 58, ed. Ernst Tremp, MGH SRG 64 (Hanover, 1995), pp. 518–22. The crucial sentence is: “Perge, inquid, in meniana huic domui contigua, et nobis quae perspexeris nuntia.” Tremp (p. 523) translates this as “balcony”, and explains that this is some kind of solarium, with reference to Notker’s Gesta and the above-mentioned letter from Frothar of Toul to Hilduin.

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asking his Astronomer to step out. In his unpublished translation, which I have used gratefully over the past years, Tom Noble resolutely renders this as “Go out to the balcony adjoining this house”, with Notker’s solarium in mind, and Noble is right – for the solarium, whether it is a balcony, a covered gallery or a room, is connected to “this house” in which the emperor slept. Rather than getting literal-minded about windows or railings, one should retain the idea that both Einhard and the Astronomer depicted themselves as having access to what was both the core and the pinnacle of the palace – a place that was secluded and exclusive, but also sufficiently public to help determine the palace hierarchy. This place was adjacent to the emperor’s bedroom, in a part of the palace where private royal bodies and the body politic met.35 Apart from this, the rightful place of the king was the highest one possible, as was highlighted by Ermold the Black’s panegyrical poem for Louis the Pious, written not long after Easter 826, when the Danish king, his wife and his son were baptized in Mainz and feasted in Ingelheim. When the Danish party arrived by boat in the palace of Ingelheim, “pious Caesar [Louis] spotted them from his highest vantage point”.36 There, regardless whether one were a local courtier or a visiting prince, and regardless whether this “high place” was called a solarium or not, one might expect to see the king, observing what he needed to observe. Solarium and Exegesis

Some solid information about the physical shape of the ninth-century solarium comes, unexpectedly, from biblical commentary. In his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Paschasius Radbertus, a monk from Corbie (d. 859), reveals his interest in what he called “the architecture of Palestine”. Solomon’s temple, for example, had a flat roof surrounded by cancelli (“railings”), saving the doctores who preached from this vantage point from suddenly falling off.37 Paschasius also explained that David, pacing his solarium, is the “type” of the Redeemer. Yes indeed, this is a solarium, for David, according to the Psalmist, pitched his tent in the sun (Ps. 19:4). Solarium comes from sol also because it is situated, higher than other houses, close to the sun. Then Paschasius specifies that “unlike us”, the Jewish people did not have a roof over their solaria, as is clear from the story of Absalom. Before he violated his father’s concubines, his servants pitched a tent 35 Stuart Airlie, “Private Bodies and the Body Politic in the Divorce Case of Lothar II”, Past and Present, 161 (1998): 3–38. 36 Ermoldus Nigellus, Carmen in honorem Hludowici pii, ed. Edmond Faral, Poème sur Louis le Pieux et Épîtres au roi Pépin (Paris, 1964), p. 166.2175. 37 Paschasius Radbertus, Expositio in Matheo 3, ed. Beda Paulus, CC Cont. med. 56 (1984), p. 251.553–6: “Porro in Palestina consuetudo est architecturae quod et in templo Salomonis fuisse probatur ut desuper per totum plana habeatur atque in gyro iuxta quod lex precepit cancelli deambulatorii ne forte aliquis inde labatur incautus … Inter quos nimirum sedes doctorum super pinnam templi erigebatur ut exinde quasi in eminentiori positus loco doctor ad populum loqueretur.”

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over David’s solarium.38 Paschasius took some trouble to explain to his audience that David’s solarium was different from the one they were familiar with: it was a roof terrace, not the roofed construction his audience was used to. He needed to do some explaining, for in Latin Scripture the solarium figures repeatedly, always in the sense of a roof terrace. Here Joshua’s spies were hidden, under a pile of flax (Josh. 2:6), here Samuel and Saul spoke to each other (I Sam. 9:25–6), and here Absalom possessed his father’s harem (II Sam. 16:22). But the best-known text, commented on time and again, is that of King David, getting up from his bed and pacing his solarium, from which he observed Bathsheba bathing (II Sam. 11:2). Commenting on the meaning of solarium, Isidore of Seville stressed its etymological connection with sol, but then he immediately referred to “a place such as the one where David saw Bathsheba wash herself ”.39 Alternatively, for Bede, the solarium derived its name from the fact that it was close to the sun, catching its first rays, a figure of the human heart detaching itself from earthly turmoil, striving to be close to the sun of justice.40 Predictably, exegetical interpretations of the David and Bathsheba passage tended to be positive ones. In his Moralia in Job, Gregory the Great associated David’s solarium with Psalm 19:4, about the heavens singing the glory of God: “In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun.”41 Paschasius’ spiritual explanation of David’s meeting with Bathsheba was a reaffirmation of the triumph of allegorical exegesis over its literal counterpart: “What else is David, leading Bathsheba to him, than the Lawgiver who unites himself by spiritual intellect to the carnal people’s familiar law?”42 Hraban, in a commentary first offered to Hilduin in 829, and then to Louis the Pious in 832, cited Isidore, and claimed he would like to dwell on David’s sin as briefly as possibly, but further on, in a comment of his own he added: “Thus this David sinned grievously and scandalously, a sin which God was to chastise by means of the prophet [Nathan] and he himself [David] was to wash off by penance.”43 The spiritual Paschasius Radbertus, Expositio in Matheo, 1, p. 56.1642–52: “David itaque in solario deambulans, typum exprimit redemptoris. Bene autem in solario, quia in sole posuit tabernaculum suum. Solarium quippe non ab eo tantum nomen accepit, quod ad similitudinem terrae solum habeat sed etiam ab eo quod eminentius caeteris domibus in sole sit positum. Nam et Judaica plebs non sicut nos tectum super solaria habet, quod in Absalon facto Scriptura demonstrat dicens cum ingrederetur ad concubinas patris sui, quod ministri ejus super solarium illi tabernaculum tetendissent [2 Reg. 16:22]. Unde et videntibus cunctis, sicut Scriptura testatur, ad easdem concubinas ingredi potuit. Quid autem est David Bersabeae ad se perducere? Nisi datorem legis carnali populo legem coniunctum spiritali sibi intellectu sociare.” 39 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae sive origines, 15.3.12, ed. Wallace M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1911). 40 Beda Venerabilis, Allegorica expositio in Samuelem, 2.9.23–6, ed. David Hurst, CC 119 (1962), pp. 84–5.668–724. 41 Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob 3.28.55, ed. Marcus Adriaen, CC 143 (1979), p. 148. 21–2: “Cuius autem Dauid in solarium deambulans typum tenet nisi eius de quo scriptum est: in sole posuit tabernaculum suum?” 42 See note 38 above. 43 Hrabanus Maurus, Commentaria in libros IV regum, PL 109, col. 98D. See on Hraban’s exegesis for kings and queens, Mayke de Jong, “The Empire as Ecclesia: Hrabanus Maurus and 38

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meaning of solarium, according to Hraban, was that of the ecclesia washing off her sins on the roof, purifying herself from the filth of the world. In short, this was Bathsheba transformed into the ecclesia, for most commentators also not only situated David on his solarium, but also discussed how Bathsheba lingered on hers when the king spotted her. Thus spiritual exegesis most often divested David’s solarium of its sinful associations, or else it stressed the efficacy of the king’s penance.44 Meanwhile, solaria – biblical or Carolingian – remained closely associated with the procreative but ambiguous power exuding from the royal private quarters, regardless of whether this was a roof terrace or a room with Hilduin on the other side of the door. Once the royal palace had become the hub of a morally defined polity, and this is what it became in the first half of the ninth century, the royal bedroom and the procreation that went on there – legitimate or not legitimate? – was a potential Achilles heel for the ruler. Yet in 830, when these explosive connotations were fully exploited for the first time, it was the Empress Judith who bore the brunt of the slander. She had to purify herself by an oath, before Louis the Pious solemnly re-admitted his wife to his bed.45 Did they pass through the solarium on their way to the imperial bedchamber? Were they followed by many eyes as they did so? We do not know, but just as Notker did, we can use our informed imagination. Conclusion: A Solarium in the Mind After this circumnavigation, the precise shape and location of Aachen’s solarium remains elusive. My best guess would be that it was a sun-room high up in the palace, with an outer loggia that was also covered. Solaria were often part of buildings associated with the ruler and those who wished it known that they had access to him. This was not an expression bandied about very often, but if it cropped up, it had royal connotations. Regardless of whether the solarium figured in a secular or ecclesiastical context, it was part of seriously prestigious edifices that were recognizable as such by contemporaries. Biblical Historia for Rulers”, in Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes (eds), The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 191–226; Mayke de Jong, “Exegesis for an Empress”, in Esther Cohen and Mayke de Jong (eds), Medieval Transformations. Texts, Power and Gifts in Context (Leiden, 2001), pp. 69–100. For an excellent recent introduction to Carolingian exegesis, see Celia Chazelle and Burton Van Name Edwards (eds), The Study of the Bible in the Carolingian Era, Medieval Church Studies, 3 (Turnhout, 2003). 44 On Charlemagne as David, see Mary Garrison, “The Social World of Alcuin. Nicknames in York and at the Carolingian Court”, in Houwen and McDonald (eds), Alcuin of York, pp. 59–79. On the humble and penitent ruler in iconography, see Robert Deshmann, “The Exalted Servant: The Ruler Theology of the Prayerbook of Charles the Bald”, Viator, 11 (1980): 385–417. I shall publish a more extensive assessment of the theme of David and Nathan in my forthcoming book The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious (Cambridge University Press, 2008). 45 Astronomer, Vita Hludowici, 46, p. 464. On the political significance of adulterous queens, see Geneviève Bührer-Thierry, “La reine adultère”, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 35 (1992): 299– 312; Airlie, “Private Bodies”; de Jong, “Brideshows Revisited”.

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The question whether buildings adorned with solaria were properly “ecclesiastical” or “secular” should not exercise architectural historians too much. In ninth-century narratives about the solarium, this was not a distinction that mattered; the essence of a solarium was its altitude, both physically and socially. Paschasius Radbertus knew perfectly well that biblical solaria looked different from those of his own time: the latter were covered, the former were not. Whoever wished to follow his exegesis had to know this, otherwise the biblical text and its commentary would become confusing. What mattered was that this was a place high up, where kings – then and now – retired, for a variety of reasons. Those sufficiently privileged to have access to this secluded place proudly advertised the fact. Einhard and the Astronomer inserted themselves in their own narratives in order to make it clear that they were at home in the palace, and could enter the highest places and spaces. For Notker, Aachen’s architecture both reflected and shaped an ideal social order, structured according to a spatial hierarchy. The magnates lived high up, in mansiones built literally on top of the dwellings of their vassals and servants, but highest of all was the solarium of a king who was eagle-eyed, like David. For this “high place”, close to the sun, must have evoked powerful biblical associations: David’s solarium, and the cancelli of Solomon’s temple. The semantic field of the ninth-century solarium, as we have seen, includes secular and religious structures, but most of all buildings for the use of kings and their inner circle, where religious and secular connotations tended to coincide. This was a world in which kings, queens and emperors defined their royal office in terms of their basic duty, “the salvation of the Christian people”. For this reason, Carolingian rulers, to begin with Charlemagne, commissioned and read biblical commentary. By the time Notker wrote, the solarium had become one of the other real hallmarks of Christian kingship. In the mind of the learned Notker – and in that of a fair part of his audience, I would surmise – neither the solarium nor its cancelli were neutral terms for describing a piece of architecture. These expressions were reminiscent of David’s solarium or the cancelli of Solomon’s temple, and therefore underlined the biblically founded legitimacy of Carolingian kingship. If such physical structures, heavily invested with meaning, collapsed – be it a solarium or a porticus – pertinent questions needed to be asked about royal authority: past, present and future.

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Figure 18.1  Xanten, Stiftsarchiv, StiX H 19, 1734, p. 395.

Chapter 18

Image and Object: Christ’s Dual Nature and the Crisis of Early Medieval Art Herbert L. Kessler

Toward the end of the first millennium, Volkmar, the archbishop of Cologne (965–69), completed the gold antependium that his predecessor Bruno (953–65) had commissioned for the altar of the church of St Victor in Xanten. Destroyed during the French Revolution but well described in 1734 by the abbey’s historian Friedrich Jakob Pels, who also reproduced it in a schematic drawing (Xanten, Stiftsarchiv, StiX H 19, 1734, p. 395; see Figure 18.1), the relief featured the enthroned Christ surrounded by a mandorla inscribed with the distich: The material and this image show things doubly, The image renders the form of a man, the gold signifies his divinity.

These verses attest to a belief that the inextricable expression of the portrait in luminous metal evokes the mystery of Christ’s dual nature, an aspect of the figured relief that would have been reinforced by its association with an altar on which the sacraments are offered. In so doing, they assert an essential feature of early medieval art that, because of the dominance in scholarship of literary theory, was often ignored toward the end of the second millennium, namely that the effect and effectiveness of art depended as much on the materials in which I wish to thank the anonymous readers of drafts of this chapter for numerous suggestions for improvement.  Stephan Beissel, Die Bauführung des Mittelalters. Studie über die Kirche des hl. Victor zu Xanten (Osnabrück, 1889), pp. 41 and passim; Franz-Xaver Kraus, Die christlichen Inschriften der Rheinlande (2 vols, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1894), vol. 2, pp. 297–8; Ingo Runde, Xanten im frühen und hohen Mittelalter (Cologne, 2003), pp. 327–8 and passim.  “Res et imago duas fert ista notatque figuras, / Effigiatus homo, Deus est signatus in auro.”  The text proffered by Mark on the antependium, “Cavete a fermento scribarum et pharisaeorum” (5:16), bears on the Eucharist; as understood by Ambrose and others, it asserts the mysterious amalgam of matter and spirit in Christ and in the sanctified bread and wine: cf. his Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam 7.190, ed. Marcus Adriaen, CC 14 (1957), p. 280. Some of the Hebrew prophecies also relate to the theme of the altar, setting up a secondary opposition between the actual presence of God in the “body and blood” of Christ and the images that figure him. 

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images were rendered as on the iconography. The emphasis on the interplay between res et imago (“material and image”) on the Xanten altar is a culmination of the dramatic transformation of art in the wake of Carolingian responses to Byzantine iconoclasm. As this chapter will attempt to show, debates beginning at the end of the eighth century over the capacity of material images to engage spiritual issues not only resulted in the invention of new iconographies, but also engendered diverse attempts to animate the very substance of art and to generate dynamic processes for apprehending them. The blending of white and gold into more basic materials, the patent display of how art transforms pigments and even stone into images, and the eliciting of viewer engagement were among the devices deployed to create pictures that do not simply imitate Christ’s physical appearance, but engage his dual nature. While the Xanten antependium has contemporary counterparts, for example in the Arca Santa in Léon, the composition and conception seem to have been based on Carolingian sources. The altar Charles the Bald gave to St Denis and the altar of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan offer typological parallels; and the cover of the Codex Aureus of St Emmeram of 870 (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14000, cover; see Figure 18.2) provides a striking visual counterpart for the enthroned Christ displaying an open book and flanked by the four evangelists within a cruciform frame set with cabochons and pearls. The confidence expressed in the titulus that material representations are capable of evoking Christ’s divinity, moreover, goes back to a particular Carolingian theory that emerged in the decades c. 800. Carolingian critics of sacred art such as Theodulf of Orleans had maintained that, because material images appealed exclusively to the eyes of the body, they could not engage divine aspects; hence, pictures of Christ risked the “shipwreck” of Arianism because they separated the visible Son from the ineffable Father with whom he is cosubstantial.10 While conceding that pictures “might remind one of things that have happened, such things that are understood by reason and expressed in words can be expressed not by painters but by writers through verbal forms”,11 Theodulf insisted therefore that “to contemplate Christ who is the power and the wisdom of God requires not the corporeal vision we have in common with  A new direction is signaled by Elizabeth Sears and Thelma K. Thomas (eds), Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object (Ann Arbor, MI, 2002).  The Art of Medieval Spain A.D. 500–1200 (New York, 1993), pp. 259–60.  Cf. Sumner McKnight Crosby, The Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis from its Beginning to the Death of Suger, 475–1151, ed. and completed Paula Z. Blum (New Haven, CT, 1987), pp. 36–7.  Carlo Capponi (ed.), L’altare d’oro di Sant’Ambrogio (Milan, 1996); Cynthia Hahn, “Narrative on the Golden Altar of San’Ambrogio in Milan: Presentation and Reception”, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 53 (1999): 167–87.  Otto K. Werckmeister, Der Deckel des Codex Aureus von St. Emmeram (Baden Baden, 1963). 10 Opus Caroli regis contra synodum (Libri Carolini) 4.13, ed. Ann Freeman and Paul Meyvaert, MGH Concilia, vol. 2, suppl. 1 (Hanover, 1998), p. 516. 11 Opus Caroli 3.23, pp. 446–7; trans. Caecilia Weyer-Davis, Early Medieval Art (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971), p. 103.

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Figure 18.2  Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14000, cover.

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irrational animals but rather spiritual sight is needed”.12 Tellingly, he or another redactor of the Libri Carolini quoted the anti-Adoptionist Pelagian Credo, with its explicit declaration that Christ is the only begotten and true Son of God, equal to the Father and of one substance with him.13 In his response to Theodulf, Pope Hadrian I (772–95) accepted the claim that images could represent only Christ’s visible nature; but in what was to become the accepted theory, he maintained that a faithful viewer could propel her or his thoughts beyond the physical object and transform the looking at a material representation into an elevating contemplation. Art was capable of doing that precisely by engaging Christ’s dual nature: by a spiritual force our mind is carried up through the visible face to the invisible majesty of divinity through the contemplation of the image depicted in human form, which the son of God deigned to assume for our salvation.14

A short time later, Pope Paschal I (817–24) made much the same point in this letter to the iconoclastic Byzantine Emperor Leo V: In what way would we be able to preserve the double, distinct nature of Christ, if we do not wish to represent it according to the human nature by means of which he submitted to the Passion? In fact, we venerate the holy image of Christ on this account, that, being the indivisible one Son, and one sole person, when we represent the flesh, by virtue of his ineffable and indescribable divinity which lacks material extension, it is a sacred thing to represent and venerate his image.15

Pictures, such authorities as these maintained, attract the bodily senses by their beauty and material splendor; then, because they recapitulate the mysterious amalgam of matter and spirit in Christ himself, they enable a mental contemplation of God. Paschal put it this way: The word expresses the movements of the mind, is it not also recognized that the image is a mental representation? Is the mind not the most beautiful part of the soul, just as the eye is of the body?16

Opus Caroli 2.22, pp. 275–6. Opus Caroli 3.1, pp. 336–40. 14 Letters of Pope Hadrian, letter 2, ed. Karl Hampe, MGH Epist. 5 (Berlin, 1898–99), p. 56; David Appleby, “Instruction and Inspiration through Images in the Carolingian Period”, in John J. Contreni and Santa Casciani (eds), Word, Image, Number (Turnhout, 2002), pp. 85–111. 15 As in Alia Englen, “La difesa delle immagini intrapresa dalla chiesa di Roma nel IX secolo”, in Alia Englen (ed.), Caelius I. Santa Maria in Domnica, San Tommaso in Formis e il Clivus Scauri (Rome, 2003), pp. 257–84, here p. 268. Cf. Erik Thunø, “Decus suus splendet ceu Phoebus in orbe”, in Bernd Janowski and Nino Zchomelidse (eds), Die Sichtbarkeit des Unsichtbaren (Stuttgart, 2003), pp. 147–64, and Erik Thunø, “Materializing the Invisible in Early Medieval Art”, in Giselle de Nie, Karl Morrison, and Marco Mostert (eds), Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 13 (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 265–89. 16 Englen, “La difesa delle immagini”, p. 272. 12

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Even before the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 had provoked the debate about material images incorporated in the Libri Carolini and Hadrian’s response, verses in the Godescalc Evangeliary (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. nouv. acq. lat. 1203, fol. 126v; see Figure 18.3) asserted the capacity of physical matter to provide a channel between humankind and God. The dedication of the originary work of Carolingian art, produced for Charlemagne himself in 781–83, likens the “golden words painted on purple pages” in the Evangeliary to the “Thunderer’s shining kingdoms of the starry heavens” through which the faithful gain access to “the entrance rooms of the light-beaming kingdom … and climbing above the steep constellations of the heavenly heights gathers us in the inner sanctum of the king of heavens for ever”.17 As on the Xanten antependium, light playing off precious gold signals the divine presence that, in this instance, elevates not a figure of Christ, but the inscribed purple-stained animal skin that stands for his humanity;18 framed like a picture, moreover, “the precepts of God adorned with the color of roses” represent the WordMade-Flesh.19 The same themes are incorporated in the depiction at the start of the codex (fol. 3r; see Figure 18.4). Sandwiched between portraits of the four evangelists and a picture of the Fountain of Life, an exceptionally human Savior is portrayed enthroned within a walled garden, looking straight out and blessing, and with right foot protruding into the reading space. Set in parallel to the ground filled with flowers and cutting through the paradisiacal garden, a purple-red band at the level of Christ’s head is inscribed with the epithet IHS XPS in gold letters animated with abstract ornament. How different the ideas and images in the Godescalc Evangeliary are from those expressed by Theodulf, who a decade later not only rejected the efficacy of pictures of Christ, but also specifically disparaged the capacity of earthly pigments to render the sacred. Commenting on a depiction of the Flight into Egypt, for instance, the author of the Libri Carolini questioned whether the Virgin’s sanctity could be distinguished from the totally mundane nature of the donkey on which she rides, since the two were rendered in the same material by the same artificer.20 A comparison of the Christ page in the Godescalc Evangeliary with the Majestas Domini in the Codex Aureus of St Emmeram (fol. 6v; see Figure 18.5) exposes the transformation of picture-making following the Carolingian image debates. Herbert L. Kessler, “‘Hoc visibile imaginatum figurat illud invisibile verum’: Imagining God in Pictures of Christ”, in Seeing the Invisible, pp. 293–328. I thank Paul E. Dutton for improving on my translation. 18 Wilhelm Koehler, Die karolingischen Miniaturen (6 vols, Berlin, 1958), vol. 2, pp. 22–8; Beat Brenk, “Schriftlichkeit und Bildlichkeit in der Hofschule Karls d. Gr.”, in Testo e immagine nell’alto medioevo, Settimane, 41 (Spoleto, 1994), pp. 631–82; Lieselotte E. Saurma-Jeltsch, “Das Bild in der Worttheologie Karls des Grossen” in Rainer Berndt (ed.), Das Frankfurter Konzil von 794 (Mainz, 1997), pp. 635–75; Bruno Reudenbach, Das Godescalc-Evangelistar (Frankfurt, 1998). 19 MGH Poet. 1, ed. Ernst Dümmler (Berlin, 1881), pp. 94–5; Brenk, “Schriftlichkeit und Bildlichkeit”; Ulrich Ernst, “Farbe und Schrift im Mittelalter unter Berücksichtigung antiker Grundlagen und neuzeitlicher Rezeptionsformen”, in Testo e immagine, pp. 343–414; Reudenbach, Godescalc-Evangelistar. 20 Opus Caroli 4.21, p. 540. 17

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Figure 18.3  Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. nouv. acq. lat. 1203, fol. 126v.

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Figure 18.4  Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. nouv. acq. lat. 1203, fol. 3r.

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Figure 18.5  Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14000, fol. 6v.

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The later depiction suppresses virtually every descriptive element that had been meticulously revived in the earliest Carolingian painting – the ground plane, heavy throne and garden wall, for instance – which provide Christ with a worldly ambience. These are replaced by a complex play between words and figures, geometrical schemata, and even references to music, all focused on the Majestic God who occupies the very center of the page, itself a portal into the celestial realm indicated by the deep blue firmament behind him. Christ’s dual nature is indicated in the portrait by swirling gold highlights that dematerialize his outer garment and by the globe-throne enclosing his lower limbs and mandorla around his upper body, forming a figure-eight mandorla, a Carolingian invention designed to symbolize the inter-workings of heaven and earth.21 Framing the picture, verses attributed to John Scotus Eriugena assert the essential equality of material representations and prophetic words as instruments of spiritual elevation:22 The ranks of the saints arranged in four-fold order, as pictured in the various representations, behold great joys. Now the present page shows with ornate splendor those things which the eight leading saints shout from pious lips.23

The physical attractiveness of the pagina praesens, the titulus suggests, conveys aspects of the ineffable Divinity just as Scripture does, an idea that the verse inscribed in Christ’s mandorla condenses in two lines: Christ, the life of men, the greatest glory of the heavens, balances the four-cornered world with its wondrous intervals.24

The equating of the image of Christ with sacred Scripture and, in turn, the meditation on pictures with the capacity of a spiritual reading of the holy words had been realized during the interim between the Godescalc Evangeliary and Codex Aureus in a miniature glossing the words of Psalm 103(104):2, “You have spread out the heavens like an animal skin” in the Stuttgart Psalter (Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Bibl. Fol. 23, fol. 116v; see Figure 18.6). 25 21 Cf. Bianca Kühnel, The End of Time in the Order of Things (Regensburg, 2003); Steffen Bogen and Felix Thürlemann, “Jenseits der Opposition von Text und Bild”, in Alexander Patschovsky (ed.), Die Bildwelt der Diagramme Joachims von Fiore (Ostfildern, 2003), pp. 1–22; Herbert L. Kessler, “Images of Christ and Communication with God”, in Communicare e significare nell’alto Medioevo, Settimane, 52 (Spoleto, 2005), pp. 293–328. 22 Edouard Jeauneau, “De l’art comme mystagogie”, in Yves Christe (ed.), De l’art comme mystagogie. Iconographie du jugement dernier et des fins dernières à l’époque gothique (Geneva, 1996), pp. 1–8. 23 Edouard Jeauneau and Paul E. Dutton, “The Verses of the ‘Codex Aureus’ of SaintEmmeram”, Studi Medievali, 3rd series, 24 (1983): 75–120; translation based on that of Michael Herren, Iohannis Scotti Erivgenae Carmina (Dublin, 1993), pp. 130–31. 24 Herren, Carmina, p. 130. 25 Der Stuttgarter Bilderpsalter. Bibl. Fol. 23 Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart (Stuttgart, 1965), p. 125.

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Figure 18.6  Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Bibl. Fol. 23, fol. 116v.

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A rare instance in medieval art of Christ depicted from the back, the miniature represents the Lord holding out the veil of the firmament, the physical sky that separates this world from the next, colored blue, violet and white. A marginal note leaves no doubt of the figure’s identity – “Here Christ our Lord spreads out the heavens like an animal skin”26 – and the painting itself plays effectively on the relationship between the Savior and the accompanying text from Hebrew Scripture. Christ’s body occupies the same plane as the skin-firmament, as in the Godescalc Evangeliary, thereby equating the “Word-Made-Flesh” with the vellum on which sacred writ is inscribed, and here, simultaneously, with the membrane dividing the physical and spiritual realms. Moreover, barely touching the ground, Christ’s feet penetrate the frame to lead the viewer from the “carnal” Old Testament text upward toward the image of heaven, the right foot carefully turned outward to provide an access point for those still walking in the Lord’s footsteps on earth. At the same time, Christ’s averted visage asserts the limits of carnal seeing, and hence of art itself; a kind of behind-the-scenes Majestas Domini, the depiction reminds the faithful that gazing at the Lord’s face is promised only at the end of time, and then solely to the blessed. Material images can provide a spiritual reading of the text that brings the reader/viewer directly into the anagogical process, but it can never complete the spiritual seeing. The miniature in the Stuttgart Psalter is a precursor of a conceit developed in later Carolingian depictions of the Ascension of Christ27 and fully realized in Anglo-Saxon and Ottonian representations of the “disappearing Christ”, that became steadily popular after that. The early eleventh-century Sacramentary of Robert of Jumièges (Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS Y6, fol. 81v; see Figure 18.7) is one of the oldest surviving witnesses to the iconography.28 Representing only Christ’s feet and lower torso as the Son returns to his heavenly Father, the picture engages the Augustinian argument that Christ had had to vanish from their physical sight for the Apostles to contemplate his divine nature: You see, they were fixated on the man, and unable to think of him as God. The time they would think of him as God would be if the man were removed from their sight; this would cut short the familiarity they had acquired with him and the flesh, and so they would learn at least through his absence in the flesh to think about his divinity.29 “Ubi extendit caelum sicut pellem Christus Dominus noster.” Kessler, “Images of Christ”, pp. 1130–32. 28 Henry A. Wilson (ed.), The Missal of Robert of Jumièges (London 1896); Elżbieta Temple, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts 900–1066 (London, 1966), pp. 89–91; J.J.G. Alexander, “Some Aesthetic Principles in the Use of Colour in Anglo-Saxon Art”, Anglo-Saxon England, 4 (1975): 145–54; Robert Deshman, “Another Look at the Disappearing Christ”, Art Bulletin, 79 (1997): 518–46; and Kessler, “Images of Christ”. 29 Sermo 264, PL 38, col. 1214; trans. Edmund Hill, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, part 3, vol. 7 (New Rochelle, NY, 1993), p. 229. 26 27

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Figure 18.7  Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS Y6, fol. 81v.

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By depicting Christ in the process of disappearing from the world, the imagery engages the viewer in the apostolic experience of converting carnal perception into spiritual contemplation, as an accompanying prayer also does: Grant, we beseech you, omnipotent God, that we who believe that your begotten Son, our redeemer, ascended into heaven on this day, may we also mentally live among the heavenly beings through him.30

In the Stuttgart Psalter and Sacramentary of Robert of Jumièges, the play between looking at earthly forms and meditating on the celestial truths figured through them depends not only on the unusual iconography, but also on the manipulation of the artistic means themselves. In the one, streaks of purple paint in the field surrounding Christ evoke the indeterminate forms of clouds or smoke and draw the viewer into the very process through which vellum and pigment are transformed into holy images; in this way, pictorial elements provide an analogue to the reciprocal relationship between spirit and flesh in Christ’s person. In the other, the conjuring up of the firmament and clouds is more precise, and it is their hue that establishes the metamorphic effect. Created by mixing red and white pigments, the pink that dominates the depiction symbolizes both the fusion of flesh (red) and divinity (white) and the transformation of the world at dawn and dust at the moments Christ entered the world and left earth to return to his Father’s side.31 Working in St Bertin at the end of the tenth century, the Anglo-Saxon illuminator of the Boulogne Gospels (Boulogne, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 11, fol. 10; see Figure 18.8) had already applied iconographic and transformative artistic devices to suggest Christ’s two natures in a depiction of the Majestas Domini.32 In this miniature, Christ dominates the picture field, in every sense becoming the painted page itself. The globe-footstool drops below the frame; the mandorla filled with yellow light streaked with red penetrates the upper boundary, and the book on the Lord’s knee – brilliant gold inscribed “liber vitae” – is turned toward the reader of the “book of life” that the picture prefaces. Bearing the crown and nimbus and flanked by the alpha and omega, moreover, the celestial ruler is framed by a circle representing the firmament, occupied by the sun, moon and stars and a verse from Jeremiah 23: “Do I not fill heaven and earth?” The free-flowing lines that enliven this barrier separating heaven from earth can be reasonably identified as clouds in the terrestrial firmament, as Robert Deshman has proposed,33 but not the wriggling threads in the corners of the page, which are to be understood as signs of the process of inspiriting Missal of Robert of Jumièges, p. 114 and pl. 9. Cf. Kessler, “‘Hoc visibile imaginatum’”. 32 Temple, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, pp. 66–7; Robert Deshman (ed.), Benedictional of Aethelwold (Princeton, NJ, 1995), pp. 96–7. 33 Deshman, Benedictional. Cf. Joseph Imorde, “Die Wolke als Medium”, in David Ganz and Thomas Lentes (eds), Ästhetik des Unsichtbaren (Berlin, 2004), pp. 170–96. 30 31

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Figure 18.8  Boulogne, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 11, fol. 10.

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matter. Divorced from any specific referent in the world, the painting conjures up the divine spirit itself that “fills heaven and earth”. In a brilliant and revolutionary study, Deshman demonstrated that a principal source of the Boulogne Majestas was the Benedictional of Aethelwold (London, British Library, MS Add. 49598) painted at Winchester in 971–84, and he revealed how the Benedictional was a veritable mill in which the grain of earlier sources – primarily Carolingian ones – was converted into the fine flour of Anglo-Saxon theological illustration. For example, Deshman showed that cloud-like forms of the sort found in the Stuttgart Psalter were introduced in many miniatures of the Benedictional to express the mysterious mingling of matter and spirit, and from there passed to the Missal of Robert of Jumièges, Boulogne Gospels and other paintings. In the Benedictional’s representations of the Annunciation and Trinity, moreover, these are rendered in pink to index Christ’s dual nature in accord with the trope of light mixing with red flesh first articulated in the Godescalc Evangeliary dedication.34 In others, they are more varied in tone and even less attached to earthly forms. Thus the background in the portrait of John the Evangelist (fol. 19v; see Figure 18.9) introduces gold and white ribbons to activate visually the layered bands of pink, blue and green paint. Here the general allusion to clouds certainly realizes the belief that, unlike the three “terrestrial” evangelists, John had risen beyond the firmament, where, as the prayer accompanying the miniature puts it, he had perceived “the divinity of our Redeemer”.35 The theme of John’s celestial nature had been particularly popular in Carolingian exegesis and art. For instance, it is realized in the Weingarten Gospels produced at Tours c. 830 (Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. HB II, 40), which portrays a Christ-like John against a pink, ethereal ground (fol. 146v), and it is developed more literally in the Codex Aureus of St Emmeram (fol. 97r) by a green field filled with stars behind John’s throne as well as in the titulus, which credits the Evangelist for having penetrated the sacred mysteries, surpassing any kind of reading through his holy labor, to discover: How the eternal God made flesh was born of a virgin. And because you search beyond the stars on wings of words, The image of the eagle, which flies through the ether, attends you.36

Reinforcing the iconographic peculiarities that emphasize John’s spiritual qualities – his spoken rather than written message, for instance, and the Holy Kessler, “‘Hoc visibile imaginatum’”. Cf. Meyer Schapiro, “Two Romanesque Drawings in Auxerre and Some Iconographic Problems”, in Dorothy Miner (ed.), Studies in Art and Literature for Belle Da Costa Greene (Princeton, NJ, 1952), pp. 331–49 (reprinted in Meyer Schapiro, Romanesque Art (New York, 1977), pp. 306–27); Herbert L. Kessler, “Facies bibliothecae revelata”, in Testo e immagine, pp. 533–94 (reprinted in Herbert L. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art (Philadelphia, PA, 2000), pp. 179–86); Jeffrey Hamburger, St. John the Divine (Berkeley, CA, 2002). 36 Herren, Carmina, pp. 132–3. 34 35

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Figure 18.9  London, British Library, MS Add. 49598, fol. 19v.

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Spirit’s trumpeting through the eagle’s horn37 – the nearly abstract background of the John miniature in the Benedictional draws on Carolingian models to express the sublimation of physical matter through God’s entering the world. Pictures such as this one affirm the Evangelist John’s most famous declaration that the invisible God described in Scripture had assumed flesh and was seen; in so doing, they functioned, to use Eriugena’s words, as “sacred signs of the heavenly home”.38 Perhaps intended to suggest the “atria” of the heavenly kingdom referred to in the dedication verse, the wall behind the enthroned Lord in the Godescalc Evangeliary (Figure 18.4) introduces another theme common in early medieval art. Vibrating with light falling on its stone blocks and crenellations, the zigzag barrier demonstrates that even the humblest and most impermeable of all matter is susceptible to spiritual elevation.39 Stone architecture is also a feature of the evangelist portraits in the Codex Aureus of St. Emmeram, in the depiction of Matthew (fol. 16r; see Figure 18.10), for example, where masonry towers are depicted as blocks transformed by light, part of an elaborated demonstration of art’s capacity to transform physical substances into spiritual contemplations, that includes the fictive gems, golden plants against roiling layers of pigment, spiraling vines, and three-dimensional meanders. Moreover, in a precocious instance of dissemblance, panels of fictive porphyry beneath the feet of each evangelist provide fields of meditation; 40 the white and light-reflecting gold flecks inflect the hardest of all earthly substances, perhaps realizing Eriugena’s own attitude that “an example from the humblest order of nature, a stone, just as a piece of wood, is for me light”.41 Capturing the mystery of the incarnate God recorded in the Gospels, the animated depictions of stone recall the passage at the very end of the exactly contemporary account of the monk Bernard’s journey to the Holy Land, when – back in Gaul – the Frankish pilgrim recalls Gethsemane, where Christ had walked and had suffered, and where, he reports, he had seen “squared marble stones of such refinement that on them Jeauneau and Dutton, “The Verses of the ‘Codex Aureus’”; Deshman, Benedictional, pp. 109–14. 38 Herren, Carmina, pp. 72–3; cf. Jeauneau, “L’art comme mystagogie”, p. 7. 39 The frontispiece of the Gospels of Saint-Médard de Soissons, produced in Charlemagne’s orbit a generation later (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS lat. 8850, fol. 1v), is likewise a study of light playing on stone, in this case specifically in reference to the heavenly Jerusalem. Emanating from the Lamb of God, light creates gradients of pink bands in the stone apsidal arch as it enters the celestial realm and then dissolves in the assertively three-dimensional gold walls of the heavenly city occupied by the four evangelist symbols. The whole is supported by an empty stone structure revealed behind a curtain, surely the tabernacle, transformed by washes of light into a shimmering, almost transparent building that seems actually to undulate; cf. Koehler, Die karolingischen Miniaturen, vol. 2, pp. 70–82; Herbert L. Kessler, “Rome’s Place Between Judaea and Francia in Carolingian Art”, in Roma fra oriente e occidente, Settimane, 49 (Spoleto, 2002), pp. 695–718 and Kessler, “‘Hoc visibile imaginatum’”, p. 299. 40 Cf. Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico. Dissemblance et figuration (Paris, 1990). 41 Expositiones in ierarchiam coelestem 1.107-8, ed. Jeanne Barbet, CC Cont. med. 31 (1975), p. 4. 37

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Figure 18.10  Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14000, fol. 16r.

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one could catch sight of all the things a person might possibly wish to see as if on a mirror”.42 Like the concluding paragraph of Bernard’s elaborately detailed Itinerarium, the imitation stone panels beneath the seated evangelists in the Codex Aureus thus exemplify the rhetorical principle of brevitas, collapsing and concentrating themes elsewhere copiously presented in the highly ornamented depictions and accompanying texts.43 More than a century later, the theme of divine light entering the physical world condensed the meaning of the Annunciation on a detached miniature from the workshop of the so-called Master of the Registrum Gregorii in Würzburg (Universitätsbibliothek, M.p.th.q.4a; see Figure 18.11).44 In a precursor of the trope of sunlight passing through glass that became popular in later depictions of the subject,45 the facade of the temple/church behind Mary is pictured as a rectangular panel, surely the lapis angularis of Ephesians 2:20, here filled with layers of white and blue pigment that re-enact in paint the spiritual metamorphosis of human flesh being realized in the figures below.46 The Nativity in the St Gereon Sacramentary, a slightly later Cologneschool manuscript in Paris (Bibliothèque Nationale, MS lat. 817, fol. 13r; see Figure 18.12), uses words and transformed stone even more abstractly.47 The titulus refutes one of the arguments found in the Libri Carolini, namely that pictures and sculpture “made-by-human-hands” are in no way like the lions and oxen that had once adorned Solomon’s temple because, in contrast to the divinely ordained Temple props, they could not be scrutinized to reveal sacred mysteries.48 Instead, echoing Pope Paschal’s assertion that, like words, pictures “express the movements of the mind”, the verses inscribed in gold on stained parchment facing the miniature exhort the viewer to discover the true meaning of a rather conventional composition by subjecting the pictorial representation to a kind of exegesis that will reveal the meaning of the incarnation:

42 Itinera Hierosolymitana, ed. Titus Tobler and Augustus Molinier (2 vols, Geneva 1879–85), vol. 1.2, pp. 309–20; trans. Paul E. Dutton, in Carolingian Civilization, 2nd edn (Peterborough, ON, 2004), pp. 472–504. Cf. Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300–900 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 134–8 and passim. 43 On brevity, cf. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge, 1990) and The Craft of Thought (Cambridge, 1998). I thank Prof. Carruthers for discussing this question with me. 44 Vor dem Jahr 1000. Abendländische Buchkunst zur Zeit der Kaiserin Theophanu (Cologne, 1991), pp. 150–51. 45 Cf. Millard Meiss, “Light as Form and Symbol in Some Fifteenth-Century Paintings”, Art Bulletin, 27 (1945): 175–81; Andrew Breeze, “The Blessed Virgin and the Sunbeam through Glass”, Celtica, 23 (1999): 19–29. 46 Cf. Horst Wenzel, “Die Verkündigung an Maria”, in Claudia Opitz et. al. (eds), Maria in der Welt: Marienverehrung im Kontext der Sozialgeschichte 10.–18. Jahrhundert (Zurich, 1993), pp. 23–52. 47 Peter Bloch and Hermann Schnitzler, Die ottonische Kölner Malerschule (2 vols, Düsseldorf, 1967), pp. 44–53 and passim; Henry Mayr-Harting, Ottonian Book Illumination. An Historical Study (2 vols, London, 1991), vol. 2, pp. 117–23. 48 Opus Caroli 2.9, p. 253.

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Figure 18.11  University Library of Würzburg, Germany, M.p.th.q.4a.

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Figure 18.12  Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS lat. 817, fol. 13r.

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This material picture demands diligent scrutiny from the eye of the human mind, exemplifying in itself, through the humble birth of his incarnation, how he who lives immortal and timeless in heaven, sought out the mortals of the world as a mortal himself.49

Even a materiale inspectivum made by a painter, the framed caption asserts, if examined carefully with an eye to its meaning, can yield sacred secrets because it engages “the eye of the human mind” in the contemplation of Christ’s dual nature. The light above the heads of the two angels triggers the process of discerning the “immortal timelessness in the mortal world”. Like the walls in the Godescalc Evangeliary and the transformed pediment in the Würzburg Annunciation, the architecture at the top of the miniature stands for the earthly realm penetrated by divine illumination that falls onto the architecture filling the upper left; moreover, the white pigment flowing freely at the right not only represents the sacred light, but also suggests the process by which art itself destabilizes bodily perception. Although here, too, an allusion to the lapis angularis may have been intended, with which Christ was frequently identified,50 the gray field describes nothing precisely identifiable in the physical world; a tinge of pink suggests that it is simply a demonstration of the metamorphosis of matter through the “workings of divine grace” in the incarnation. Read together with the opposing caption, the picture provokes the viewer of the miniature to meditate on the meaning of the event pictured in it – like Bernard’s recollection of the polished stones of Gethsemane, the mysterious backdrop of the Nativity provided a stage in the process of contemplating the man-God. In all of these works, the danger that material representations might lower the minds of viewers and even lead to idolatry, which had so concerned Theodulf and other skeptics,51 was effectively counter-balanced by visual assertions that, just as Christ is himself a mysterious amalgam of matter and spirit, so too images of his human nature can be elevated by the manipulation of their physical substances. In most, the effect was enhanced by the use of actual luminous materials, particularly gold or gems, which were regarded as “living stones” and hence, themselves, instrumental in the process of spiritualizing elevation. Thus the mid-eleventh-century author of the Liber translationis Dionysii Areopagitae understood the cover of the Codex Aureus (Figure 18.2) as an image of the Heavenly Jerusalem and the figure of Christ at its center as both the cornerstone that holds the celestial city together and the sun that illuminates it.52 Gold and (fictive) gems are lavishly deployed inside the book, as well. Matthew (Figure 18.10) and the other evangelists occupy thrones set with pearls and other Bloch and Schnitzler, Die ottonische Kölner Malerschule, vol. 1, pl. 86; trans. Mayr-Harting, Ottonian Book Illumination, vol. 2, p. 117. 50 For the various meanings applied to the biblical expression, cf. Peter Low, “You Who Once Were Far Off ”, Art Bulletin, 85 (2003): 469–89. 51 See note 10 above. 52 Liber translationis Dionysii Areopagitae, ed. Georg H. Pertz, MGH SS 11 (Hanover, 1854), p. 370. 49

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precious stones; and the gold used throughout not only elevates the images, but also animates the other more earthly materials. The alternating painted and gold leaves of the frames and the gilt letters on the purple bands of vellum, however, like the gold highlights on Christ’s garments or gold flecks on the stone fields, continually move the perception between the world of matter and the celestial realm, especially as the pages are turned. Gems adorned the Xanten golden altar (Figure 18.1) too, and texts once borne by Matthew and John expanded on the theme of light: So let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven. (Matt. 5:16).

and But he that does truth, comes to the light, that his works may be made manifest, because they are done in God. (John 3:21).

The text Christ himself proffered on the book he held in his left hand, a free version of Isaiah 32:11, may also have triggered consideration of the problem of seeing God in works of art. Unique in depictions of the Majestas Domini, “Accingite lumbos super ubera vestra” may have been chosen because of the role it played in discussions of chastity from the fifth century on, for example, in the chapter on fornication in Isidore’s Sententiae. Indeed, the fact that the designer of the Xanten antependium had this very interpretation in mind is indicated by the use of ubera vestra, a slight variant on the Vulgate passage found also in Isidore.53 Isidore understood the biblical injunction to “gird your loins, mourn for your breasts” not only as a command for modesty, but also as evidence that the human heart in the upper torso is capable of controlling passions located beneath the waist. And he moved from a discussion of fornication and chastity to a consideration of mediation, in that context making an argument that is also relevant to the antependium: He is not able to receive spiritually pleasant things who has not first controlled his cupidity. They are not able to contemplate God who favor the desires of this world. Nor can he, whose eyes are shaded with dust, be able to perceive high things.54

Isidore worried that physical beauty might be a distraction leading to idolatry, which he regards to be “spiritual fornication”.55 By evoking this Isidoran concept, the quotation on Christ’s book, like other inscriptions on the Xanten “Accingite lumbos uestros super ubera uestra”; Sententiae 39.14, ed. Pierre Cazier, CC 111 (1998), p. 173; Vulgate: “accingite lumbos vestros. Super ubera plangite.” 54 Sententiae, 41.1–2, p. 180. 55 “Fornicatio carnis adulterium est, fornicatio animi seruitus idolorum est”; Sententiae, 39.18, p. 174. Isidore’s reading had a long history; it was paraphrased in a work ascribed to Theodulf of Orleans (Fragmenta sermonum; PL 105, col. 673) and incorporated into monastic texts. 53

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antependium, engaged the central polemic of image theory to confound this very danger inherent in material images, namely that they lead inevitably to carnal satisfaction rather than spiritual elevation.56 Placed in Christ’s own hands, it conveys the same principle expressed in other pictures discussed above, namely that the material attraction of pictures engages the bodily senses, but by engendering the movements of the mind as Pope Paschal had envisioned, it can also set in motion something akin to the spiritual vision needed to contemplate the invisible Deity. About a century after the Xanten antependium, at the moment the cover of the Codex Aureus was being interpreted anagogically in the Translatio and, indeed, in the very monastery where the manuscript was then kept, Christ was depicted once again in much the same manner (Regensburg, abbey of St Emmeram, see Figure 18.13).57 Although similarities suggest that the new relief may actually derive from the treasured Carolingian cover, Christ proffers a different text,58 is here bearded, and sits on a throne before the portal to heaven rather than on the celestial globe against a starry background. Most important, he is rendered in stone, which inserts him literally into the building he adorns, and thus unmistakably identifies him with the lapis angularis of Ephesians 2:20–21: Jesus Christ himself is the foundation stone. The whole building is bonded together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you too are being built with all the rest into a spiritual dwelling for God.

The implication of the biblical passage that, in Christ, the physical temple on earth is bonded to its celestial archetype is made explicit in the titulus that frames the relief: Since Christ is called a rock on account of his firm majesty, it is fitting enough that his image be in stone.59

These words on one of the earliest surviving monumental sculptures in the material of idols betray anxiety about the use of stone actually to depict Christ. They also suggest that even the humblest of materials can be elevated by Christ’s divine glory (numen), a point underscored by the positioning of key words on either side of Christ’s face, P(RO) NUMINE XPC on the left and ILLIUS IN SAXO on the right. Counterparts to the sol iusticiae and lapis angularis 56 The passage from Luke 6:31, “Treat others as you would like them to treat you”, is so common that its intended meaning or meanings here are impossible to pinpoint; perhaps it was simply meant to introduce the notion of reciprocity. 57 Rainer Budde, Deutsche Romanische Skulptur 1050–1250 (Munich, 1979), p. 25. Cf. Thomas Raff, Die Sprache der Materialien (Munich, 1994), and Thomas Raff, “Ornatus materialis domus Dei”, in Herbert Beck and Kerstin Hengevoss-Dürkop (eds), Studien zur Geschichte der europäischen Skulptur im 12./13. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1994), pp. 1–16; Calvin B. Kendall, The Allegory of the Church. Romanesque Portals and their Verse Inscriptions (Toronto, 1998), pp. 260–61 and passim. 58 “Spes ego sum vitae cunctis sperantibus in me”; Kendall, Allegory, p. 261. 59 Ibid., pp. 260–61.

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Figure 18.13  Regensburg, abbey of St Emmeram, relief.

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of the contemporary Translatio, the words serve an elevating function in their very insertion; they are, in some sense, a concession to critics of art such as Theodulf who maintained that the mystery of pictures could only be invested in accompanying words.60 Although the Carolingian debates seemed generally to have resolved the crisis of art in the Latin West, the issue of how material images functioned remained at issue well into the second millennium. At the Council of Arras in 1025, for instance, Gerard of Cambrai still had to defend art against heretics. In much the same way his predecessors had, he cited the brazen serpent that Moses erected in the desert, which had long been used to justify physical signs of faith. He likened it to the image of Christ on the cross, but in a manner typical of his age, he emphasized the capacity of such physical signs to engender a dynamic process of contemplation: For the wooden stock [of the cross] is not to be adored, but the mind of the inner man is to be aroused through that visible image, on which the passion and death of Christ [which he] assumed for us is inscribed as if on the membrane of the heart, so that everyone might recognize in himself how much he owes his Redeemer … Images [of saints] are permitted in the sacred church, not so they might be adored by humankind, but so that we might be excited interiorly through them to the contemplation of the workings of divine grace.61

At the end of the century, moreover, material instruments still evoked negative reactions and defensive responses. For example, in the last quarter of the century, a priest named Alberic desecrated a cross at Fougières with human feces;62 and perhaps in reaction to the episode, Baudri of Bourgueil composed a number of tituli that, like the inscription on the Regensburg relief, explicitly asserted the dual nature of crosses, Crucifixions and other depictions of Christ, and hence their sacred character.63 A good example is a distich he wrote, probably for a Majestas Domini: The image that you see figured here is certainly of him who is man and God, But it is not the image of God, but of the man.64

Cf. Opus Caroli, 4.16, p. 529. PL 142, col. 1306. Cf. Erik Van Mingroot, “Acta synodi attrebatensis (1025): Problèmes de critique de provenance”, Studia Gratiana, 20 (1976): 201–29; Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York, 2002), pp. 83–7 and passim; Conrad Rudolph, “La resistenza all’arte nell’Occidente”, in Enrico Castelnuovo and Giuseppe Sergi (eds), Arti e storia nel Medioevo (4 vols, Turin, 2004), vol. 3, pp. 49–84. 62 Narratio de Alberico presbytero et ejus sceleribus, ed. Edmond Martène and Ursin Durand, Veterum scriptorum et monumentorum historicorum, dogmaticorum, moralium amplissima collectio (9 vols, Paris, 1724), vol. 1, cols 253–5; Jeffrey B. Russell, Dissent and Reform in the Early Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA, 1965), pp. 113–14. 63 Arwed Arnulf, Versus ad picturas. Studien zur Titulusdichtung als Quellengattung der Kunstgeschichte von der Antike bis zum Hochmittlelalter (Munich, 1997). 64 Arnulf, Versus ad picturas, p. 285. 60 61

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Half a century later, Bernard of Clairvaux and Abbot Suger of St Denis respectively recapitulated many of the same arguments against and in favor of material depictions.65 Suger had the defense of them actually inscribed on the gilt doors of St Denis: Bright is the noble work; but, being nobly bright, the work Should brighten the minds, so that they may travel, through the true lights, To the True Light where Christ is the true door. In what manner it be inherent in this world the golden door defines: The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material And, in seeing this light, is resurrected from its former submersion.66

Moreover, painters and sculptors continued to manipulate materials to suggest the two natures of Christ; c. 1100, for example, the frescoists of the Michael Chapel at Reichenau inserted vitreous gems and gold bosses to elevate Christ’s aureole and nimbus in the painted plaster.67 And in an act of great consequence, Suger constructed complicated imagery – much of it derived from Carolingian models – directly from the luminous material itself. In his stained glass windows, the abbot of St Denis fully integrated the dual aspects of art that, in the Xanten golden altar, had still remained separated.68 His famous anagogical window, for instance, includes a roundel that fully reconciles the arguments of early image debates. The representation of the Crucified Christ inserted into the enigmatic quadrige Aminadab displaying the Jewish vasa sacra long cited to justify Christian images attracts the “diligent scrutiny from the eye” and excites the minds of the viewers, leading them toward God the Father figured behind the veil. The material itself, moreover, the dark blue glass that Suger called materia saphirorum, advances the anagogical process initiated by the arcane symbols and figures. With the sheer physical beauty of real gems, it attracts the senses with pure sensation; and like Christ himself represented in his dual nature in the image, it “urges us onward from the material to the immaterial”, as Suger hoped it would.69 Conrad Rudolph, Artistic Change at St-Denis. Abbot Suger’s Program and the Early Twelfthcentury Controversy over Art (Princeton, NJ, 1990), and Conrad Rudolph, The “Things of Greater Importance”: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude Toward Art (Philadelphia, PA, 1990). 66 Erwin Panofsky, Abbot Suger: On the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures (Princeton, NJ, 1946), pp. 46–9. 67 Josef and Konrad Hecht, Die frühmittlelalterliche Wandmalerei des Bodenseegebietes (2 vols, Sigmaringen, 1979), vol. 1, pp. 127–41; Dörthe Jakobs, St. Georg in Reichenau-Oberzell (Stuttgart, 1999), pp. 203–15 and 509–23. 68 Herbert L. Kessler, “The Function of Vitrum Vestitum and the Use of Materia Saphirorum in Suger’s St.-Denis”, in Jérôme Baschet and Jean-Claude Schmitt (eds), L’image: Fonctions et usages des images dans l’occident médiéval (Paris, 1996), pp. 179–203 (reprinted in Spiritual Seeing, pp. 190–205); Jean-Claude Bonne, “Pensée de l’art et pensée théologique dans les écrits de Suger”, in Charles Descamps (ed.) Artistes et philosophes: Educateurs? (Paris, 1994), pp. 13–50. 69 Panofsky, Abbot Suger, pp. 74–5. 65

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The response to the crisis of art at the close of the early Middle Ages thus engendered consequential experiments with compositions and themes, and more important, with media themselves, color, pigments and heterogeneous constructions all invested in Christ’s dual nature. To be sure, early Christian artists had also struggled with representing Christ’s divinity. The mosaicists who adorned the apse of Saints Cosmas and Damian in Rome (526–30), for example, had not only clad the floating Christ entirely in gold and had rendered the world transformed by his presence in the blood red clouds, but they had also referred to the medium’s role: God’s residence radiates brilliantly in shining materials; the precious light of the faith in it glows even more.70

In part, perhaps, because these earlier mosaics engaged issues of immediate concern to them, Carolingian patrons in Rome – including Hadrian’s successor Leo III (795–816) and Paschal himself – revived and even built on the early Christian experiments.71 Painters in northern Europe went further still, interpreting the creation of images in the materials of art as recapitulating Christ’s incarnation and inventing various devices that transformed the very foundations of artistic expression into truly medieval forms. They based their art on the old argument that, because Christ had been seen, he could be rendered in earthly materials and skilled workmanship, purple-stained vellum, gold relief, even carved stone; but they also accepted the responsibility of activating the minds of viewers in a way that moved them beyond the attraction of beautiful forms to engender what Pope Hadrian had understood as “a spiritual force [through which] the mind is carried up through the visible face to the invisible majesty of divinity”. They accomplished this in diverse ways. In the St Gereon Gospels and Regensburg relief, they set the visual images in oscillation with words that refer directly to the material and that, in their form and content, suggest a relationship to the two natures of Christ. In the St Gereon Gospels, as also in the Stuttgart Psalter, Codex Aureus of St Emmeram, Boulogne Gospels and Benedictional of Aethelwold, they made patent the processes by which they transformed pigments – earthly matter itself – into sacred representations that provoke the necessary anagogical movement, so that the acts of imaging, and, in turn, imagining, subvert the material object. In the Stuttgart Psalter and Sacramentary of Robert of Jumièges, they obscured the face of Christ to remind viewers that the human Christ they are allowed to see in pictures is incomplete, and to engage mind and memory in contemplating the ineffable divinity. And in the Godescalc Evangeliary and Codex Aureus, as later at the Xanten antependium and Reichenau, they deployed actual light flashing off metallic surfaces to signify the divine power animating the carnal depictions. Cf. Vitaliano Tiberia, Il restauro del mosaico della Basilica dei Santi Cosma e Damiano a Roma (Todi, 1991). 71 Thunø, “Decus suus splendet”, and Thunø, “Materializing the Invisible”. 70

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By the end of the early Middle Ages, these and other devices had largely replaced conventions serving art’s traditional purpose of describing things in this world to serve the new goal of generating spiritual processes intended to avoid the vicious descent into idolatry that, because of art’s essentially mundane character, Theodulf thought was inevitable.72 Requiring the scrutinizing of the physical object and not just the “image” in it, this new art demands a kind of scholarship that engages more than iconographic analysis and notions of visuality to explore not only what a picture means or how it is perceived, but also what it does and what cognitive mechanisms it generates.73 Specifically, the direction new research takes should lead to an understanding of how the very puzzling-out of the relationship between res and imago in works of the early Middle Ages succeeded in eliciting intellectual, kinetic and emotional responses in faithful viewers, responses that were deemed akin to the contemplation of the relationships of Christ’s human nature to his divinity, that lay at the very heart of Christian doctrine, and that made art possible and, indeed, necessary.74

“… subditarum sibi plebium mentes ab spiritalibus ad carnalia, ab invisibilibus ad visibilia, a veritate ad imaginem, a corpore ad umbram, ab spiritu vivificante ad litteram mortificantem, ab spiritu adoptionis ad spiritum timoris denuo redire conpellat”; Opus Caroli 1.20, p. 196. John Scotus Eriugena argued the contrary: Super ierarchiam coelestem (Barbet, p. 54). Cf. Jeauneau, “L’art comme mystagogie”, p. 6. 73 Important recent work on perception includes: Jeffrey Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York, 1998); Robert Nelson (ed.) Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2000); Moshe Barasch, Blindness (New York, 2001); Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York, 2002). 74 Proper attention is now being given to the material of art. For recent literature, cf. Herbert L. Kessler, Seeing Medieval Art (Peterborough, ON, 2004); Christiane Kruse, Wozu Menschen malen (Munich, 2003); Lentes, Ästhetik des Unsichtbaren; and Jeffrey Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (eds), The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ, 2006). 72

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Chapter 19

Matter and Meaning in the Carolingian World Thomas F.X. Noble

Mayke de Jong (Chapter 17) and Herbert Kessler (Chapter 18) present puzzles involving sight. De Jong explores a feature of Charlemagne’s palace at Aachen, his “balcony”. She reflects on what this balcony was, where it was located, what meanings it possessed in the Carolingian period, and what it might mean to modern scholars. Kessler addresses a “crisis” in early medieval art involving figural representations of Christ, the God-man, and the kinds of truth conveyed by representations. What links these two chapters is their authors’ sensitivity to the ways in which material things could communicate meaning, destabilize existing ideas, and reveal creativity. What was Charlemagne’s “balcony”? To de Jong’s impressive assemblage of evidence I would add just a few details and observations. Solarium, the word de Jong principally associates with balcony, is often a synonym for gallery or ambulatory. In some cases, those “balconies” were internal structures, but more often they were external. Where external “balconies” are concerned, they might be covered or not. Annappes seems to have had a covered, segmented balcony, and the “writers on the balcony” to whom Adalhard referred must have had a roof over their heads. Paschasius Radbertus says “the Jews did not have roofs on their solaria as we do”. In Rome, Pope Hadrian I (772–95) built a structure adjacent to the Lateran patriarchal palace which had “a gallery, that is to say, a solarium”. The Liber Pontificalis adds a few more details: “… and he built likewise a distinguished new tower of amazing beauty adjacent to the portico which goes down to the bath, where he had a gallery, or solarium, with beautiful bronze railings built”. Pope Leo III built another one: “He newly restored from the foundations the portico [macronam] of this very Lateran patriarchal palace, which stretched from the square [campo] right out beyond the statues of the apostles … and likewise fixed the roofs and the solarium from the bottom to the top”. Leo IV had to repair this solarium because it “had gotten very  Liber Pontificalis (hereafter LP), ed. Louis Duchesne, vol. 3 with corrections by Cyrille Vogel, Bibliothèque des Ecoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 3 (3 vols, Paris, 1955–57), vol. 1, p. 503.  LP, vol. 2, pp. 28–9. Macrona is a rare Byzantine Greek loan word meaning “portico”.

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old” and “its beams were cracking”. In the first case, I think we have a gallery or open-air deck that was on top of the portico or else a gallery or solarium of some kind that was associated with the bath. In the latter case, I am not sure if the solarium is on top of the portico, or if these are two different structures. In both cases, I believe that we are dealing with an open-air deck. Gregory of Tours mentions a solarium which I take to be a roof-deck. He relates the story of the senator Injuriosus from the Auvergne whose young wife suffered various terrors, including a fear of going up on the solarium, because from there she could envision Christ above the stars. Notker twice talks about Charlemagne’s viewing his courtyard. In one passage (Gesta Karoli 1.30), Charles peers out per cancellos solarii (“through the railings of the solarium”) to observe the activities around his courtyard, and in the other (Gesta Karoli 1.6), Charlemagne watches per cancellos palatii (“through the railings of the palace”) as a pompous young bishop leapt onto his horse. Hadrian’s solarium had bronze railings. A gallery, whether interior or exterior, would normally have balustrades or railings over which, rather than through which, one would look. A balcony is a more defined, self-contained space, but one might think of one as a segment of a gallery. Einhard’s encounter with Hilduin provides further details. First, Einhard’s Translation of Marcellinus and Peter permits us to situate the meeting in winter. The relics of Marcellinus and Peter were translated in October of 827 and installed on 18 January 828. According to Einhard’s Translation, he returned to Aachen “quite a few days” after that installation. Even a south-facing gallery would, at Aachen’s latitude, be uncomfortably cold for half the year or more so I envision an enclosed room, sheltered from the winter’s cold. Second, Einhard knew the palace well; he may have had a hand in designing it. He does not name the space in which he met Hilduin, saying only that it was outside the doors of the royal/ imperial bedchamber. It may be telling that he invited Hilduin to join him at a window (ad quandam fenestram). From that window, they could see the activities in the courtyard below. Another text discussed by de Jong complicates matters. The Astronomer reports how Louis told him to go out and view what we know to have been Halley’s Comet. Louis told him: “Go out on the balcony adjoining this house.” Why did the Astronomer not say solarium? It does not make sense for Louis to have ordered the Astronomer to “go out on the walls”. Perhaps solarium was not a common word. Ibid., p. 108. Gregory of Tours, Decem libri historiae 1.47, ed. Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm Levison, MGH SRM 1.1 (Hanover, 1951), pp. 30–31.  Annales regni Francorum, a. 827, ed. Friedrich Kurze, MGH SRG (Hanover, 1895), p. 174.  Translatio, 1.14–15, ed. Georg Waitz, MGH SS 15.1 (Hanover, 1887), p. 245.  Paolo Maffei, La comète de Halley (Paris, 1984), pp. 229–35.  Astronomer says “Perge in menania huic domui contigua”: see Chapter 17 in this volume, note 34. Meniana has often been taken as a mistake for moenia, “walls”. Moenianum and maenianum were homonyms. The former was discussed by Isidore (Etymologiae sive origines 15.3.11, ed. Wallace M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1911)) as meaning solarium, and he adds “Haec est solaria, quia patent soli.”  

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I suggest that the south side of the aula regia (“royal hall”) at Aachen had an external gallery with railings or balustrades. Only from that vantage point would it have been possible to view the courtyard and the southern sky through which Halley’s Comet passed. Louis probably told the Astronomer to go out and view the comet from the same spot where his father, and probably he himself, looked over the courtyard. This gallery had a roof and railings. Such a gallery could be referred to as a solarium. I have a hunch that one passed from the gallery, or “balcony,” into an anteroom before the bedchamber, the cubiculum. That anteroom is where Einhard met Hilduin, where various courtiers habitually awaited Charlemagne’s rising, where Einhard and Hilduin looked out a window, not over a railing. This accords well with de Jong’s “sun-room high up in the palace with an outer loggia that was also covered”. The gallery perhaps adjoined at a right angle the long north–south portico that connected the aula and chapel. We should care about the “balcony” because architecture conveys meaning. Carolingians were close observers of portents. Collapsing structures might portend the end of the regime. One of Einhard’s portents was the collapse of the portico that joined chapel and palace at Aachen. In 817, again at Aachen, and in 870, at Flamersheim, a fallen portico and a collapsed solarium prompted authors to insist that moisture and rotten timbers caused disasters. Such protests make sense only if the writers assumed ominous assertions to the contrary. Architecture permits historical and cultural allusions. As Richard Krautheimer demonstrated, one building can quote or allude to another.10 The aula regia at Aachen is a “quotation” of the aula Constantiniana (“Constantine’s audience hall”) in Trier. As a centrally planned church, the capella regia (“royal chapel”) might quote San Vitale in Ravenna, the Lateran baptistery, or even the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. But Notker reminds us that its associations were with Solomon (Gesta 1.27), who built a Temple. Nothing suggests that the chapel at Aachen looked anything like Solomon’s Temple, but it is legitimate to posit an iconographic identity between them. Third, architecture can suggest different human relationships. Rulers could be sociable in specific spaces – think of Louis the German and the “multitude” who took a tumble with him. Einhard tells us that from time to time Charlemagne swam with up to a hundred people. Rulers could be solitary and austere: Charlemagne watched his courtyard quasi latenter (“as if secretely”). Was he discreet or furtive? Einhard reveals a great deal in associating himself with Hilduin outside the king’s bedroom, to which Einhard, Vita Karoli 32, ed. Oswald Holder-Egger, MGH SRG (Hanover, 1911), pp. 36–7; Annales regni Francorum, a. 817, p. 146: “cum et fragili materia esset aedificata et tunc iam marcida et putrefacta”; Astronomer, Vita Hludowici imperatoris 28, ed. Ernst Tremp, MGH SRG 64 (Hanover, 1995), p. 374: “carię senioque confecta et humectatione continua putrefacta”; Regino of Prüm, Chronicon, a. 870, ed. Friedrich Kurze, MGH SRG (Hanover, 1890), p. 101: “quod nimia vetustate erat putredine resolutum, trabibus fractis corruit”. Regino appears to have copied LP, vol. 2, p. 108: “nimia vetustate … fractis travibus”. 10 Richard Krautheimer, “Introduction to an ‘Iconography of Medieval Architecture’”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 5 (1942): 1–33. 

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access was anticipated. Not everyone entered that space, or had any reasonable hope of doing so. Buildings can compete. Charlemagne, Pope Leo III and their contemporaries in Constantinople engaged in a kind of ordeal by triclinium.11 Whole complexes could compete with each other: there was a kind of battle of capitals among Aachen, Rome, Constantinople and Baghdad. Buildings talk, and they speak known languages. In turning to Kessler’s Chapter 18, we enter an old, sometimes acrimonious debate. As Christian art accommodated itself to the idea of depicting Jesus, two responses ensued: utter horror because such representations violated the second commandment, or slightly nervous approbation based on the fact that Jesus Christ had appeared as a man and could therefore be depicted like any other man. Leaving aside extremists who considered all images to be idols or who imagined at least some images to be ontologically holy, we are left with a broad zone of tension set in vibration by the unique metaphysical reality of the God-man. John of Damascus first realized that an image of Christ revealed more than His human nature because that nature did not exist apart from its embodiment in the single being, Jesus Christ.12 Images necessarily revealed something of Christ’s divinity. John’s cautious approbation may be contrasted with hostility or indifference on the part of other writers. Kessler provides several quotations from Theodulf of Orléans to illustrate the former, and a quotation from Augustine’s Sermon 264 as an example of the latter. At the end of the eighth century, great art was being created and great objections were being voiced. Here Kessler finds a crisis. Theodulf was no friend of figural representations of Christ, but he was not hostile to representations per se: We do not speak against images for the memory of past deeds and the beauty of churches, since we know that they were thus made by Moses and Solomon, although as type figures, but we reject their [the Byzantines’] most insolent or rather most

Irving Lavin, “The House of the Lord: Aspects of the Role of Palace Triclinia in the Architecture of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages”, Art Bulletin, 44 (1962): 1–27; Hans Belting, “Die beiden Palastaulen Leos III. im Lateran und die Entstehung einer päpstlichen Programmkunst”, FS, 12 (1978): 55–83; Paolo Verzone, “La distruzione dei palazzi imperiali di Roma e la restaurazione del palazzo lateranense nel IX secolo nei rapporti con quello di Costantinopoli”, in Rome e l’età carolingia (Rome, 1976), pp. 40–47; Thomas F. X. Noble, “Topography, Celebration, and Power: The Making of Papal Rome in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries”, in Mayke de Jong, Frans Theuws and Carine van Rhijn (eds), Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages, Transformation of the Roman World, 6 (Leiden, 2001), pp. 45–91, especially p. 68 with n. 76. 12 Thomas F.X. Noble, “John Damascene and the Iconoclastic Controversy”, in Thomas F.X. Noble and John J. Contreni (eds), Religion, Culture and Society in the Early Middle Ages: Studies in Honor of Richard E. Sullivan (Kalamazoo, MI, 1987), pp. 95–116. 11

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superstitious adoration, which we cannot discover ever to have been instituted by the patriarchs, prophets, apostles, or apostolic men.13

Theodulf believed that images were attended by real dangers. They threatened to draw the viewer from spirit to matter, from the invisible to the visible, from the living spirit to the dead letter. This was an old position in a longrunning argument that all manufacta (“man-made objects”) are incommensurate with transcendent deity or saintly virtus (“power”), and owes something to the minimalist views of Augustine, whose influence on the Carolingians was pervasive. Augustine regarded images as inevitable, and as unobjectionable, as long as they were not invested with either reality or meaning which they could not bear.14 Several scholars have tried to ascertain whether discussions of art in the early Carolingian period had any concrete impact on actual works of art.15 This is where Kessler makes an important, original contribution. He offers a series of reflections on the res, the actual matter of certain kinds of images, and he looks at particular kinds of representations, in an attempt to show that artists elaborated brilliant solutions to the thorny problem of revealing, in an image, the two natures of Christ. Kessler draws attention to particular substances, gold or gems, for example; or to specific colors, most often pink; or to that most insubstantial of all substances, light. By deftly interpreting the pictures themselves, and then by coupling them with their accompanying texts, he demonstrates convincingly that artists intended for painted images to figure Christ’s humanity, while gold, say, represented His divinity. He then traces this phenomenon down to the eleventh century, demonstrating the enduring appeal of the Carolingian solution. Kessler’s exploration of the iconography of around a dozen works of art is methodologically traditional, but interpretatively original. I conclude with Kessler’s remark that “the Carolingian statements seemed generally to have resolved the crisis of art in the Latin West”. “Crisis” does not seem to me to be quite the right word, and I have a quibble with “resolution”. Kessler introduces his crisis by mentioning the opposed views of Theodulf of Orléans, on the one hand, and of Popes Hadrian I and Paschal I, and of Opus Caroli regis contra synodum 1.19, ed. Ann Freeman and Paul Meyvaert, MGH Concilia, vol. 2, suppl. 1 (Hanover, 1998), p. 254. 14 For the basic Augustinian passages and their Carolingian echoes, see Thomas F.X. Noble, “The Vocabulary of Vision and Worship in the Early Carolingian Period”, in Giselle de Nie, Karl F. Morrison and Marco Mostert (eds), Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 13 (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 217–21. 15 Paul Meyvaert, “The Meaning of Theodulf ’s Apse Mosaic at Germigny-des-Prés”, Gesta, 40 (2001), 125–39. Maria Andoloro, “Il Liber Pontificalis et la questione delle immagini da Sergio I a Adriano I”, in Roma e l’età carolingia, pp. 69–77; Florentine Mütherich, “I Libri Carolini e la miniatura Carolingia”, in Ovidio Capitani (ed.), Culto cristiano politica imperiale carolingia, Convegni del Centro di studi sulla spiritualità medievale, 13 (Todi, 1979), pp. 281–301; Henry Mayr-Harting, “Charlemagne as a Patron of Art”, in Diana Wood (ed.), The Church and the Arts, Studies in Church History, 28 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 43–77. 13

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Johannes Scottus Eriugena, on the other. One can add, in Theodulf ’s camp, Claudius of Turin16 and Agobard of Lyon.17 With the popes and John, one may align Jonas of Orléans,18 Dungal Scottus19 and Walahfrid Strabo.20 The lengthy acta of the Paris colloquy of 825 come down on several sides of the issue!21 There was a lively discussion. Theodulf ’s position did not prevail. What is more, the production of art neither ceased nor shifted wholly onto a new path. What Kessler shows convincingly is the inventiveness of artists, and their active participation in debates that much existing scholarship would lead one to believe were pursued only in written texts. This makes less for a crisis than for a spectacular display of erudition and creative tension. “Resolution” normally means “settled”. What was settled? Kessler cites cases post-dating the resolution that reveal both sides of the old debate. Carolingian solutions, in both word and image, may be said to have prevailed only in the sense that they sharpened both sides of the issue and bequeathed their formulations to posterity. That, perhaps, is the real Carolingian achievement. They forged for the Latin West a solid vocabulary and a durable framework for discussing art, and for making various kinds of art that communicated subtle and multiple messages.

Claudius of Turin, Epistolae, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH Epist. 4 (Berlin, 1895), pp. 590–613. 17 Agobard of Lyon, De picturis et imaginibus, ed. Lieven van Acker, Agobardi Lugdunensis Opera omnia, CC Cont. med. 52 (1981), pp. 151–81. 18 Jonas of Orléans, De cultu imaginum, PL 106, cols 305B–388A. 19 Responsa contra Claudium: A Controversy on Holy Images. A New Edition, ed. Paolo Zanna (Florence, 2002). 20 Walafrid Strabo, Walafrid Strabo’s Libellus de exordiis et incrementis quarundam in observationibus ecclesiasticis rerum: A Translation and Liturgical Commentary, 8, ed. and trans. Alice L. Harting-Correa, Mittellateinische Studien und Texte, 19 (Leiden, 1996), pp. 172–80. 21 MGH Concilia 2.2, ed. Albert Werminghoff (Hanover, 1906), pp. 473–551. 16

Index Aachen, 227, 267, 279–81, 283–6, 288–9, 321–4 chapel, 277, 280–81, 323 cupola, 275 portico (wooden gallery), 283, 323 Synods of (816 and 817), 156–7 ‘Abbāsid caliphate, 22, 265; see also Arabs, Islam, Muhammad, Umayyad caliphate abbots, 128, 147, 149, 151, 228, 231, 239, 261, 279, 285 Abruzzo, 123 Absalom, 7, 286–7 Acta Sanctorum, 158 Acts of the Apostles, 117, 124 Apocryphal, 117 Acts of Martyrs, 112, 119, 122 Adalhard of Corbie, 281–2, 321 Admonitions of the Holy Fathers, 127–8 Ado, 225, 233 Adoptionism, 294 advocates, 240–41, 254, 265 Aegean, 26 aerial photography, 80 Africa, 45, 96, 97, 116, 172; see also North Africa, Sahara Desert winds, 172 Agatha, St, 122 Agnellus of Ravenna, 165, 177, 184 n. 9 Agnes, St, 127 n. 48 Agobard archbishop of Lyon, 171 n. 21, 176, 326 Agri decumates, 40 agriculture, 34, 41, 43, 48–9, 52, 57, 61–2, 88, 100, 170; see also estates, farms, fields arable, 24 management, 17 organization, 13, 19, 33 productivity, 1, 14 risks, 42 slave, 101 subsistence, 61, 170, 174 surplus, 23, 41–2, 44, 247 techniques, 1, 34 three-field rotation, 43

Aino (Agino, Egino) bishop of Constance, 225, 233–4 Alans, 184 n. 9 Alaric, 211 Alcuin, 137, 177, 179 Aldhelm, 116 Aldric of Le Mans, 281–2 Alemannia, Alemannians 135, 224–7, 233, 258 alms, 133–53 passim, 159, 174, 178, 251 Alps, 28, 50, 58, 108, 122, 124, 127, 262, 264, 275 passes, 257 Rhaetian, 256 altars, 109, 131–3, 136, 141–2, 146–8, 281, 291–2, 313, 317 Ambrosius Autpertus, 132 Ammianus Marcellinus, 211 Amorion, 102 amphorae, 21, 103 anagogical process, 301, 314, 317 Anastasius, St, 127 n. 47 Anatolia, 88 Andalucía, 29 Anemourion, 102 angels, 174–5, 183–4, 213 n. 39, 260, 312 Angers, 283 Anglo-Saxons, 8, 17, 23, 88, 92, 137, 207; see also Britain, England, migration art, 301, 303, 305 animals, 84, 88–9, 97, 99, 107–8, 131, 153; see also insects breeding, 61, 89 cattle, 62, 89, 90–91, 152–3 traction, 91 chains, 35 n. 7 draught, 62 fish, 85–6, 171, 179 flocks and herds, 2, 62, 89–90, 152 frogs, 171, 176, 179, 209 goats, 62, 90 hens, 257 horses, 90 n. 29, 169, 184 n. 9, 186, 196–7, 228–9, 230 n. 52, 257, 281, 322 husbandry, 42 pigs, 62, 89 n. 22, 140

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sheep, 90, 140 snakes, 171 wild, 62 Annappes, 282–3, 321 Annunciation, 305, 309 anointing, 188; see also unction Ansbert, 225, 233 Anselm of Lucca, 120 antependium, 291–2, 295, 313–14, 318 Anthony, St, Life of, 115 anthrax, 94 Apennines, 58, 60 Apocrypha, 117–21, 124 Apulia, 123 Aquitaine, 25, 41, 177, 187, 194, 196–8 Arabs, 29, 47, 49, 141, 191; see also ‘Abbāsid caliphate, Islam, Muhammad, Umayyad caliphate archaeology, 5, 14–21, 23–5, 33–84 passim, 99–100, 102, 166, 206–7, 222, 280 biomolecular, 8, 17, 85 excavation, 8, 15–17, 21, 44–84 passim, 95, 97, 99, 275 field surveys, 8, 17, 64–5, 80, 97, 99 finds, 9, 25–8, 35, 40–41, 44–8, 50, 102, 206 seeds, 43 tools, 16, 99 weapons, 9, 200, 206 grave goods, 37 n. 13, 40, 44, 91 sampling, 17 settlement, 33 zooarchaeology, 7, 15, 61, 89 architecture, 7, 10, 109, 277–89, 307, 312, 321–4 cancelli, 279, 284, 286, 289, 321–3 solaria, 277–89, 321–3 triclinium, 324 archives, 5, 16, 57, 60, 62, 78, 90, 94, 224, 256, 275 Aregius bishop of Nîmes, 189 Arezzo, 59 Argebadus bishop of Narbonne, 186–7, 189, 191, 213 Argos, 103 Arians, Arianism, 84, 183, 292 Aristotle, 180 aristocracy (elite), 3, 16, 22–55 passim, 68, 76, 100–103, 138, 140, 146, 156, 163, 188, 219–66 passim, 277; see also lords Byzantine, 27 Lombard, 27 rural, 76 arm rings (armillae), 194–5, 203, 215 armor, 193–208

arm guard (brassiere), 203 body armor, 202–3, 207, 215 late Roman, 205 army, 22, 26, 48, 62–3, 103, 182, 186, 188, 191 n. 27, 194, 204, 206, 213, 215, 221, 246, 264–5, 279, 281 arming, 181, 195–7 private, 27, 188 Roman, 41 n. 22, 201, 204, 207 service, 261, 264–5 Arn archbishop of Salzburg, 245 n. 67 Arnulf, 269 Arras, Council of (1025), 316 art, 6, 10, 275–6, 291–319 passim, 321, 324–6; see also Anglo-Saxons, Ottonians Ascension of Christ, 301 ash, 171, 183 volcanic, 173 Asia, 96–7 Asia Minor, 90–91, 125 assemblies, 219, 228–30, 232, 239 Astronomer, 284–6, 289, 322–3 Athanasius, St, 115 Athens, 103 Atlantic, 50 Attila the Hun, 194, 196, 203 Audrac (Otger), 225, 233 Auerbach, Erich, 165–6, 209 Augsburg, 227 augurs, 210–11 Augustine, St, 4, 83, 228, 301, 324–5; see also letters, sermons Confessions, 115 Augustus, 6 Autun, 171, 253, 255, 264–5 Auvergne, 184, 322 Auxerre, 141 Avars, 196, 198, 205; see also Pannonians Avitianus, 183 Baden-Württemberg, 44 Baghdad, 2, 281, 324 Balearic islands, 88 Balkans, 23, 116–18 Baltic, 15, 21, 50; see also towns, trade bannus, 257 barbarians, 16, 40, 58, 92, 211, 214; see also migration, Völkerwanderung household organization, 14 slaves, 134 Barking abbey, 51 Barlaam, St, 115 Basil of Caesarea, St, 112, 115 Bathsheba, 280, 287–8 Battle of Maldon, 207 n. 72

Index Baudri of Bourgueil, 316 Bavai, 41 Bavaria, 47, 92, 95, 224, 231, 245 n. 67, 258, 268 charters, 4 Bede the Venerable, 4, 116, 127 n. 47, 287 belts with buckles, 195, 203 Benedict of Nursia, 2, 157, 164 n. 2; see also monasticism benefice, 253–4, 258, 260–61, 263, 266, 279 Benevento, 28 Beowulf, 165, 198, 203–4, 207 n. 72 Bernard of Clairvaux, 151, 317 Bernard the Monk, 307, 309, 312 Bernard of Septimania, 250 Bertald II, 225, 233 Berthramn of Le Mans, 27, 133–4 Bertin, Saint, 303 Beta thalassemia, 93 Bible, 10, 83, 120, 122, 131–3, 135, 153, 163–6, 182, 212–13, 250, 280, 287, 289, 299, 301, 307, 313–14 exegesis, 276, 278, 280, 286–9, 299, 301, 305, 309 biology, 2, 6, 10, 85, 92, 97, 99 biomechanics, 90 biostatistics, 88, 89 microbiology, 85, 89, 97 Birka, 2, 89 n. 23 Birtilo (Pirihtilo), 225, 233 Bischoff, Bernhard, 164 bishops, 238–43, 260–61 Black Death, 93–6; see also plague blinding, 187, 250 Blitgar, 254, 257, 265 blood, 132, 139, 164, 172–9, 183, 209–10, 284, 318 bloodshed, 136, 195, 213 rain, 164, 167, 171–80, 202, 209, 211 Bobbio, 71 n. 48 Bobbio Missal, 139, 142 Bohemia, 92 Bollandists, 109, 111 n. 2, 155 bones, 17, 36 n. 9, 85, 89–90 animal, 84, 89 cattle 62, 91 evidence for labor, 91 books, 107, 134, 142, 146, 160, 209, 275–6, 292, 303 Gospel books, 163 booty, 195 botany, 33 palaeobotany, 15, 43 n. 33, 85, 86 Boulogne, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 11, 303–5, 318 boundary clauses, 256, 258

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Bourdieu, Pierre, 270 Bourges, 253–6 bow, 196 breastplate, 204, 214 Brescia, 71 n. 48, 173 bribery, 231 Britain, 1, 2, 23, 29, 45, 92, 94, 117; see also Anglo-Saxons, England Brittany, 117, 184 n. 9, 223–4 bronze, 199, 204, 322 foundries, 52 Bronze Age, 62 Brown, Peter, 179, 268–9 Brunhild, 185 Bruno archbishop of Cologne, 291 buckler, 198–9, 201–2 boucle, 201 buildings, 36, 40, 46, 58–82 passim, 275–6, 277, 279–80, 282–3, 288–9, 302–3, 314, 323–4; see also stone, wood barns, 71 boat-shaped, 70, 74 Grubenhäuser, 71–3 huts, 46, 71, 73, 75 isolated, 60 longhouses, 47, 74, 275 materials, 68, 71 outbuildings, 71, 75 oval, 70 posts, 68 public, 63 rural, 60, 71 sheds, 275 storage, 71, 76 sunken floor huts, 45, 47, 71–3, 275 timber, 63 traditions, 71 Bulgarian empire, 49 Burckhardt, Jacob, 267–8 bureaucracy, bureaucrats, 219, 230, 237 n. 17, 265–6, 270 Burgundy, Burgundians, 135, 184, 194, 196, 252, 262, 264 byrnie, 194, 197–8, 202–7, 215 Byzantium, 6, 9, 17, 22, 29, 33, 48, 58, 100, 102–4, 265, 275, 324; see also Constantinople, iconoclasm aristocracy, 27 frontiers, 7, 93 n. 39 Italy, 78 n. 58, 79 manuscripts, 90 North Africa, 4 shipwreck, 84 southern Italy, 100 themes, 265

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Calabria, 25, 100 Campania, 123 canons (clerics), 108, 143, 278; see also clerics canons (rulings of the church), 108–9, 115, 121, 137–9, 145, 156, 187; see also Vetus Gallica cantors, 141 Capetians, 270–71 capitals, 22, 49, 186, 191, 324 capitularies, 27, 34, 174, 205, 229, 231, 260, 263 n. 43, 282 additions to the Salic Law, 268 Capitulare missorum generale, 232, 235, 268 Capitulare de villis, 52, 71 n. 48, 227 Charlemagne, 5, 50, 174, 224–32, 235–46, 268 Divisio regnorum, 226, 228 Indiculus eorum qui sacramentum fidelitatis iuraverunt, 229–30 Thionville, 50, 205 n. 63, 228–9 captives, 136, 148, 153, 182–3, 185–6, 211–12, 227 Carolingian miniscule, 1 Carolingians, 9–10, 16, 19–27 passim, 33–4, 47–60 passim, 76, 99–102, 107, 124, 128, 137–8, 153, 156–7, 160, 170–71, 201, 204–6, 220–99 passim, 301, 305, 307, 314, 316–18, 321, 323, 325–6 Carolingian Renaissance, 250 Carthage, 84 cartularies, 253, 264 casa, 62–3, 78 casale, 58, 78–82 Cassian, St, 115, 121 Cassius Dio, 172 castelli, 16, 64, 67–70, 77, 79–81, 228 stone, 68 Catalonia, 4 cavalry, 199; see also army Celts, 7 cemeteries, 15, 34, 37, 38 fig. 2.2, 39 fig. 2.4, 44–5, 75, 86, 91–3, 94 n. 42, 96, 134, 150–51, 206 census, 254, 257–8 centenarii (vice-counts), 240–41 ceramics, 15, 21, 23, 25–6, 28, 41, 52, 64, 84, 97, 102–3 Argonne ware, 26 Badorf ware, 25 coarse-ware, 28 distribution, 75, 103 export, 15 geographical range, 26 glazing, 102 hand-made, 23

import, 41 Mayen ware, 25–6 morphology, 75 petrology, 25 pots, 5 production, 52, 75, 103 sigillata fine ware, 26 slip, 102 technology, 75 ceremony, 182–4, 186, 230 n. 52, 254 charity, see alms Charlemagne, 13, 28–9, 33, 44, 47, 52, 137, 163, 174, 197, 220–89 passim, 295, 307 n. 39, 321–4 advisers of, 9, 236–7, 244–6, 295 buildings, 279–80 capitularies, 5, 50, 174, 224–32, 235–46, 268 court of, 177, 277, 282 empire of, 1, 7, 9, 47, 220–21, 223, 235, 267 Charles the Bald, 116, 249, 252–3, 270, 283, 292 Charles the Fat, 277 Charles the Younger, 226 charters, 4, 34, 55, 58, 60, 78–9, 90, 115 n. 16, 116, 134–5, 138–9, 143, 147–8, 150, 152, 158, 220–21, 223–4, 226 n. 34, 247, 251, 253–4, 256, 258–9, 261–2, 264, 271; see also Bavaria, Saint Gall, Rhine Catalan, 4 Merovingian, 5 royal, 5, 116, 139, 148, 253 Childeric, 253 children, 85, 91–3, 134, 137, 157 Chilperic (attribution unclear), 253 Chilperic I, 177 n. 53, 184 Chindasvind, 187, 189 Chlothar II, 146 Christopher, St, 169 Chrodegang of Metz, 143 Chur, 256–8 Church of the Holy Sepulcher, 323 churches baptismal, 75 cathedrals, 2, 141 Gothic, 275 episcopal, 27, 75, 138 proprietary, 151 rural, 64, 75, 81 stone, 75 village, 2, 76 wooden, 75 Cicero, 172, 179, 210

Index Claudian, 215 Claudius, 210 Claudius of Turin, 326 clerics, 107, 118, 136, 138, 140, 149, 158, 187, 239, 241–2, 243 n. 58, 261, 283–4 clientage, 259, 261–5, 269 climate, 42–3, 89 n. 23, 167–70, 200, 206, 209, 281; see also weather microclimate, 63 climatology, 33, 42, 167, 169, 170 Clovis, 35 Cluny, 149–53, 159, 247 codicology, 89 coercion, 33, 35, 101 coins, 36, 49, 97, 137, 140–42, 148, 258 bronze, 25 denarius, 25 hoards, 25, 28, 35 n. 7, 36, 37 n. 16, 40 n. 16, 45 Lombard, 28 mancosus, 141 mints, 25, 28, 49 Cologne, 25, 36 n. 11, 41, 50, 51 n. 61 Cologne school, 309 coloni, 35, 37, 40, 42 color, 10, 173–5, 209, 276, 318, 325 blue, 299, 301, 305, 309, 317 gray, 312 green, 305 pink, 303, 305, 307 n. 39, 312, 325 purple, 295, 301, 303, 313, 318 red, 171–3, 175–7, 179–80, 209–10, 303, 305, 318 symbolism, 175 terminology, 209 white, 292, 301, 303, 305, 307, 309, 312 yellow, 303 Columban the Younger, 135, 137–8 Columella, 35 combs, 52 comets, 176 Halley’s, 285, 322–3 commemoration, 133–4, 137, 139, 143–5, 147, 149, 151–2, 250–51 commercialism, commercialization, 31, 122–3, 152 communications, 9, 60, 83, 93, 97, 150, 169, 220–21, 223, 227, 268–9 communion, 133, 184 commutation, 135–6 confession, 140, 142–3, 150 confessors, 118 confraternitas, 150, 152; see also prayer consensus, 248, 255 Constantine I, 6, 112, 117

331

Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, 6 Constantinople, 90, 102–3, 226 n. 33, 324 Constantius of Lyon, 184 n. 9, 213 construction materials, 60, 68 contracts, 60, 150, 159 conventions (artistic and literary), 9, 181, 185, 191, 196, 205 n. 49, 209, 319 conversion, 107, 112, 176, 190–91, 260 copyists, 111; see also scribes Corbie, 137–8, 286; see also penitentials Corinth, 102–3 corruption, 270 Corvey, 51 Cosmas and Damian, Sts church, 318 Passion, 116 councils, 237 n. 13; see also Aachen, Arras, Frankfurt, Mainz, Nicaea, Paris, Toledo counselors, 225 n. 27, 227, 231, 259 count of the palace, 243 n. 60, 271 n. 16 counts, 227, 230–31, 238–43, 257, 259, 264 courts, 152, 236, 238–40, 243, 245 circuit courts, 239 of the metropolitan, 239 public, 253, 255 crafts, 20–26, 50–52 guilds, 91 production, 13, 15, 17, 45, 50–52 workshops, 71 craftsmen, 23, 28 crannogs, 45 n. 39, 48 creeds, 294 Crete, 102–3 crops, 43, 62, 88, 100, 170 yields, 42 Crucifixion, 178, 316 Cucuphat, St, 116 cuirass, 195–6, 203–4, 207 curtensi, curtis, 55, 57–8, 68, 76, 78–82 system, 57–8 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 165–6 custom, 139, 228, 248–9, 262 Customary of Bernard, 149 Dagobert I, 279 Damasus, Pope, 112 Dante, 165 Danube, 41, 92, 116, 118 “Dark Ages”, 3, 10 David, 212 n. 26, 280, 286–9 deacons, 141 death penalty, 239, 240 n. 32 decalvation, 188 Delehaye, Hippolyte, 112, 125

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Delphi, 103 Demetrias, 103 demography, 17, 64, 82, 97, 118; see also population population geography, 3 trends, 13, 15 upturn, 1 demons, 260 dendrochronology, 51 n. 61, 170 dendroclimatology, 42 Denis, Saint, 51, 116, 148, 292, 317 fair, 26 Denmark, Danes, 44, 47–8, 50, 206, 286; see also Vikings Desiderius bishop of Vienne, 185 Dhuoda, 221, 232, 249–52, 256, 261–2, 264–5 diet, 14–15, 17, 21, 25–6, 28, 42, 61, 85–6, 89–92, 99, 103, 131, 142, 170 beans, 171 bread, 14, 132, 143, 148, 291 n. 4; see also Eucharist butter, 2 cereals, 14, 24, 26, 40 n. 16, 43, 85–6, 94, 100, 171, 209 wheat, 25, 88, 170–71 chestnuts, 62, 100 citrus fruits, 88 fish and seafood, 85–6 fruit trees, 62 meat, 85–6, 89 n. 23 oil, 2, 21, 36 n. 9, 85, 131 olive trees, 62 peas, 171 rice, 88, 89 n. 22 salt, 28, 85 sorghum, 89 n. 22 spinach, 86, 88 Dionysius, St, 148 disease, 8, 83, 93–7, 99, 143, 178 bacterial infection, 61 boils, 176 infectious, 97 pandemics, 93–7 tumors, 176 disputes, 59, 152, 220, 236 n. 11, 237 n. 13, 242, 248, 253, 256 DNA, 86–93, 99 ancient, 87–96 contamination, 87, 96 Dopsch, Alfons, 13, 20, 52 Dorestad, 2, 20 Dublin, 2, 49 Duby, Georges, 14, 20, 56, 223 dukes, 27

Dungal Scottus, 326 Dura-Europos, 201 Easter, 286 Eberhard, 232 Eccard, 253–6, 260 Echternach, 36 n. 10, 138 economy, 1, 6–10, 13–104 passim, 109, 118, 135, 168, 170, 174, 205, 260; see also exchange agricultural (rural), 14, 16, 19, 33–4, 40, 49, 62, 76, 100–101, 132, 170, 174 circuits, 2 closed, 20 demand, 16, 22–3, 30–31, 99–104 distribution, 8, 19–31, 60, 75, 101–3 embargo, 205 gift, 247–8 late medieval, 31, 159 Merovingian, 20 moral, 221, 250, 252 open, 2 production, 8, 19, 20 profit, 158 records, 14, 17, 21 Roman, 7, 13, 16, 22, 29, 33–53 passim, 60, 94, 102 of scale, 22–3, 102 spiritual, 158–9 subsistence, 34 n. 5, 61, 170, 174 wealth, 2, 8, 13, 16, 22–31 passim, 44, 102, 107–9, 123, 137, 143, 150, 163, 195, 206, 220–21, 250, 258, 275 Edda, Elder, 159 Egino, see Aino Egypt, 23, 26, 29, 85, 90, 125, 128, 172, 175, 183 Einhard, 174, 221, 225–7, 228 n. 40, 232, 259–66, 268, 279, 283–6, 289, 322–3; see also letters, Sts Marcellinus and Peter, Seligenstadt Ekkehard I of Saint Gall, 194 Elbe, 50 Eleutherna, 102 Eliot, T.S., 165 Emilia, 123 empire, 8, 221, 265; see also Byzantium, Carolingians, Rome Bulgarian, 49 Byzantine, 22, 29, 100, 103 Carolingian, 7, 9, 47–8, 50, 101, 138, 205, 219–71 passim, 275, 277, 282, 288, 322 failure of, 8 imperial idea, 1

Index Roman, 6, 16, 19, 22–3, 29–30, 34–5, 38, 41–2, 45, 47, 48 n. 50, 52, 57–8, 60, 62–3, 92–3, 96, 134, 163, 219, 221, 263, 265, 268–70 ties to papacy, 2 n. 3 emporia, 49 n. 54 encellulement, 55 England, 1, 7, 20, 22, 25, 30, 48, 50–51, 88, 170, 172, 206–7; see also Anglo-Saxons, Britain, Midlands, Suffolk ceramics, 15 Norman conquest, 30, 170 Old English, 198–200, 205 n. 61 Ennodius of Pavia, 212 epic, 9, 185, 194, 196, 200–201, 209, 215 Latin tradition, 5, 194, 201, 207 Epiphanius, 212, 213 n. 34 Erchambald bishop of Eichstätt, 193 Erchambald bishop of Strasbourg, 193 Erfurt, 50 Erivald, 225, 233 Ermoldus Nigelleus, 193, 286 erosion, 63 Erwig, 188 n. 20, 190 n. 25 Essen (convent of), 143–5 estates, 19–21, 24, 48, 57–8, 76, 81, 101, 107, 220, 227, 254, 261–2, 264; see also agriculture, farms, fields bipartite, 14, 16, 19, 34, 43, 47, 49, 52, 57–8, 101 Carolingian, 20 50 centers, 55, 57, 76 demesne, 26, 43 n. 33 fiscal, 47, 259, 263 great estate, 8, 13–14, 56–7, 59 late antique, 35, 40, 42, 45, 57 managers, management, 227, 247, 259, 262, 265 manors, 14, 16–17, 19–20, 26, 34, 43–4, 47, 50, 52, 55–8, 68, 76, 101, 107 production, 20 records, 55 reserve, 43 n. 33, 49, 57 surveys (polyptychs), 19, 34, 56 n. 6, 71 n. 48, 247, 259 villa(e), 14, 16, 27, 33–7, 38 fig. 2.2, 40–43, 45, 53, 57, 64, 66, 67 n. 44, 71, 75–6, 79, 253–4, 279–80, 282–3 Etruscans, 211 Eucharist, 132, 143, 148, 209, 213, 291 n. 4 Eugenius of Toledo, 115–16 Euric, 213 n. 34, 214 Excarpsus Cummeani, 137–9; see also penitentials exchange, 15, 19–30, 41, 45, 50, 94, 100–102 bulk, 24–6

333

internal, 26, 101 inter-regional, 21–2 regional, 24, 29 excommunication, 187 exemption, 146 family (kinship), 23, 41–2, 61–2, 78, 221, 250–52, 254–7, 259, 261–6 famine, 52 Farfa, 78 n. 65 farms, farmers, 16, 33, 36, 37 n. 16, 40–44, 57–8, 62–3, 71, 76, 79 n. 70, 88, 107, 145, 152, 163, 169, 174; see also agriculture, estates, fields fasting, 135–7, 139, 148, 174, 183 feast days, 116, 125 n. 44, 140, 148–9, 150, 155, 177, 253 feasting, 286 fences, 5, 37 n. 16, 40, 44 n. 36, 71 feud, 259 feudalism, 6, 30 n. 25, 248 fields, 40 n. 20, 43 n. 33, 56 n. 6, 62, 151, 163; see also agriculture, estates, farms, vineyards Finland, 94 n. 42 Flamersheim, 283–4, 323 Flanders, 22 Fleury, 178, 253 flyting, 194 Folkwine, 256–8, 265–6 forest (woodland), 3, 61–2, 76, 79 n. 70, 163 formulae, 137, 146; see also Marculf forts, fortifications, 5, 16, 36 n. 10, 37, 39, 41, 47–9, 55, 63–4, 66–70, 76, 92, 186, 228 hillfort, 40–41 ringforts, 48 Forum Iudicum, 187 Foucault, Michel, 270, 278 Fougières, 316 France, 1, 20–21, 25, 44–6, 52, 56, 172–3, 177, 206, 281; see also Gaul ceramics, 15 Old French, 201–203, 205; see also Romance languages Francia, 21, 25–7, 29–30, 102, 174, 227, 282 east, 258, 271 west, 270 Francis, St, 153 Franconia, 227 Frankfurt, 259 Synod of (794), 25, 156, 239 Franks, 9, 14, 16, 19–20, 26–30, 33–4, 40, 43, 45–8, 50, 52, 100, 102, 118, 122, 124, 138, 145, 148, 157, 175, 187, 189,

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194–5, 197–8, 205–7, 219, 226, 230, 245, 275; see also Gaul, Merovingians Fredegar, 279 Fredelus, 254, 256, 265 freedom, 134, 147, 240 n. 32, 253, 255; see also slavery Freising, 224, 236 friendship, 134, 255–6, 260–61, 265–6, 268 Frisia, 50, 135 Old Frisian, 200 Friuli, 123 frontiers, 2, 7, 41, 50, 101, 226 armies, 22 Roman (limes), 37, 40–42, 90 n. 29, 92 Frothar of Toul, 282 fugitives, 187 Fulbert bishop of Chartres, 178–9 Fulda, 51, 147, 224, 226 n. 34, 259, 261 Annals of, 173, 283–4 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis, 219 Gaiffier, Baudouin de, 121 Gall, Saint charters, 4, 143, 147, 224 Liber memorialis, 225 n. 19 plan, 52 Stiftsbibliothek, MS 22, 204 n. 58 Ganshof, François-Louis, 219, 221, 230, 236, 241 n. 40, 267 Ganymede, 210 gardens, 62, 151, 295, 299 Gascony, 171 gastalds, 229 Gaul, 16, 35, 37, 41, 48, 109, 115, 117–19, 121, 122 n. 38, 124, 128–9, 137, 139, 157, 204, 307; see also France, Franks, Merovingians Gallia Belgica, 41 Gallia (Visigothic), 185–89, 191 Roman, 1, 40, 50 n. 58 Gauzlin archbishop of Bourges, 178–9 gems, 307, 312–13, 317, 325 cabochons, 292 garnets, 96 n. 52 pearls, 292, 312 gender, 8, 27, 136–7, 145, 147, 156–8; see also women genetics, 86–90, 93, 97, 99 Geneva, 184 genre, 4, 111–12, 117–18, 156, 215 genuflection, 135–6 George archbishop of Ravenna, 177 George in Baralle, Saint 52 Gerald (possible author of the Waltharius), 193

Gerard of Cambrai, 316 Geremann (Karamann), 225, 233 Germans, Germany, 4, 19, 37, 40, 44, 46, 51–2, 56, 61, 71, 94, 117, 172, 194, 200, 205–6, 215, 227, 262 burials, 75 ceramics, 15 finds, 40 grave-goods, 40 invaders, 36, 41 language, 2, 117, 157, 194–6, 199–200; see also England, Frisia, Iceland, Saxony Gothic, 200, 205 n. 61 Old High German, 199–200, 205 law, 239 n. 24 tribes, 40 n. 16, 44, 201 Germanus of Auxerre, 184 n. 9 Gerresheim, 145 gesta, 115, 119, 121–2, 156 Gethsemane, 307, 312 gift, 108–9, 131–54, 158–9, 228–9, 247–8, 251, 254–8, 261, 266, 276 countergift, 131–54, 159, 258 exchange, 158, 206, 265 royal, 253, 263 glaciers, 85 glass, 23, 25, 51, 309, 317 windows, 275, 317 Goar, 184 n. 9, 213 Goethe, 165 gold, 25, 134, 141–2, 163, 195–6, 215 n. 44, 291–2, 295, 299, 303, 305, 307, 309, 312–13, 317–18, 325 Golden Legend, 124 Gondreville, 282 goods, 15, 19–28, 100, 103 artisanal, 20–23 bulk, 21–2 long-distance movement of, 22 luxury, 20, 22–3, 26, 28, 101, 103 Gortyna, 103 Gothic war, 27, 29 granary, 70 Grande Paroisse, La, 49 Grandmont, 151–3 grazing, 62, 169 greaves, 196–7 Greece, 23 Greek, 83, 108, 112 notes 4 and 5, 117–19, 123, 125–9, 131, 321 n. 2 Greenland, 85 Gregory I, Pope, 119–20, 157, 283, 322 Dialogues, 116 n. 23, 127, 157 Moralia in Job, 287 Gregory bishop of Tours, 50, 94, 165, 178–9,

Index 211–12, 283, 322 Histories, 176, 177 n. 53 Vitae patrum, 116 n. 23, 127, 184, 185 n. 11 Grimm, Jacob, 193 Grimo abbot of Corbie, 137–8 Grosseto, 64–5, 67 n. 44 Guidones, 27 guilds, 91 Gundobad, 212 Gunther (Frankish king in the Waltharius), 194–5, 198, 200 n. 28 Hadawart (character in the Waltharius), 194, 198, 206 Hadrian I, Pope, 121, 281–2, 294–5, 318, 321–2, 325–6 Hagen (character in the Waltharius), 194–5, 197, 215 n. 44 hagiography, 9, 107–8, 111–29, 152, 155–7, 160, 166, 185 n. 11, 191, 209, 212–13, 262; see also manuscripts, saints Haithabu, 2, 49, 50 Halley’s comet, see comets Hamwic, 2 harvest, 40 n. 16, 61–3, 210 Hâvamâl, 159 health, 86, 92, 107; see also disease Heiligenberg monasteries, 52 Heiric of Auxerre, 133 Heito bishop of Basel, 226–7, 233 helmets, 194–7, 201–3, 207 heresy, 119, 124, 316; see also Adoptionism, Arians, Pelagianism, Priscillianism hermits, 137, 152 Hildebrand, 253–4 Hildebrandslied, 207 n. 72 Hildefonsus of Toledo, 116 Hiltgunt (character in the Waltharius), 194–6, 203 Hildemar of Corbie/Civitate, 278 Hilduin, 284–5, 287–8, 322–3 historiography, 20, 56, 173, 190–91, 223, 245, 248, 252, 264 Hitto, 226, 233 hoes, 62 Holy Land, 307 Homer, 165, 204, 215 Homeric xenia, 181 homicide, 136–7 honores, 252, 254, 261, 263, 266 hospitality, 181 hostages, 9, 165, 194, 220, 224–8, 233–4, 268 household, 23, 56, 131–2, 228, 261 barbarian, 14

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peasant, 42 royal, 278 housing, see buildings Hrabanus Maurus, 259, 285 n. 33, 287–8 Hunfrid, 257 Huns, 41, 165, 194–7, 206; see also Attila the Hun, Illyria, Pannonians hunting, 61, 238, 259 hypertexte, hypotexte, 113, 157 Iberia, 7, 86, 117 ice, 171, 176 Ice Age, 170 Iceland, 48 Old Icelandic, 200, 205 n. 61 Icelandic sagas, 205 iconoclasm, 292, 294 iconography, 115, 288 n. 44, 292, 301, 303, 305, 319, 323, 325 identity politics, 245 ideology, 181–2, 192, 232, 248, 266, 280 Illyria (Illyria-Pannonia), 117, 122 images, 115, 121, 275–6, 291–319 passim, 324–6 immunity, 146 Imola, 115, 121–2 incarnation, 108, 309, 312, 318 incastellamento, 16, 68, 76, 84, 99 India, 45, 88, 131 Indian Ocean, 96 Indiculus obsidum Saxonum Moguntiam deducendorum, 224–8, 233–4, 268 industry, 23, 71 infantry, 196, 199; see also army Ingelheim, 259, 286 inheritance, 79, 250–51, 255, 261–2 insects flies, 176 gnats, 176 locusts, 176 intercession, 145, 148–50, 153, 155, 158–60, 260 interest (usury), 145 invective, 185 Ireland, 48, 50, 87, 94 n. 42, 117, 135, 138, 142, 145–6; see also crannogs Irmino, 57 iron, 21, 25, 45, 204, 206–7, 214, 258 hoards, 35 n. 7, 36, 45 plows, 41, 43 n. 31 shield bosses, 200 slave implements (chains, fetters, manacles, neck rings, rivets, shackles), 35, 37–9, 45–9, 101 tools, 5, 36, 44

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Iron Age, 35 n. 7, 41, 62 irrigation, 62 Isidore of Seville, 190, 231, 287, 313, 322 n. 8 Islam, 13, 88, 265, 275; see also ‘Abbāsid caliphate, Arabs, Muhammad, Umayyad caliphate isotopes, 85, 91 stable, 85, 91 strontium, 91 n. 32, 92 Israel, 48 n. 50 Istria, 224, 228 Italy, 6, 8, 16, 20, 27–9, 47–8, 51, 55, 57–8, 61, 63, 68, 78 n. 58, 79, 84–5, 89, 93, 117–19, 121–7, 129, 157, 171–3, 200, 212, 246 n. 69, 258, 282 n. 22; see also Rome, empire archives, 16 Byzantine, 58, 78 n. 58, 79 countryside, 16, 56 Lombard, 58 northern, 19, 22, 26–8, 58, 71, 102 southern, 100, 121, 123, 210 ivory, 198, 202 Jerome, St, 163 Jerusalem, 307 n. 39, 312 Jews, 48 n. 50, 182, 190, 286, 317, 321 anti-Jewish legislation, 190 Job, 176, 210 John duke of Istria, 228 John III, Pope, 128 John the Baptist, St, 117, 177 John Chrysostom, 83, 112 John of Damasus, 324, 326 John the Evangelist, 305, 307, 313 John Scot Eriugena, 176, 179, 299, 307, 319 n. 72, 326 Jonas of Orléans, 326 Joshua, 287 judges (iudices), 231, 238, 240–41, 243, 263 Judith, Empress, 288 Julian the Apostate, 40 n. 16, 117, 120 n. 30 Julian of Toledo, 165, 185–92, 211–14 Historia Wambae regis, 185–92, 211–14 Julius Obsequens, 211 justice, judicial practice, 220, 231, 235–46, 268, 270–71, 287 judicial authority, 244 judicial system, 237, 244 jurisdiction, 241–2, 259 Justinian, 93 Kaupang, 2 kilns, 23, 103 Kirchheim, 44

Kniazha gora, 48 knives, 196 labor, 16, 62, 91, 101, 136, 151, 247, 254, 265 coerced, 34 n. 5, 37 dependent, 35 directed, 19 peasant, 68 productive, 42, 45 rural, 14, 16, 35 slave, 8, 16, 35 tenant, 35 women, 91 Lactantius, 175 lances, 174, 196, 230 n. 52 land, 22, 30, 41–2, 55, 57–8, 62–5, 76, 78, 79 n. 70, 84, 220, 227–8, 247–8 clearance, 76 grants, 133–54 passim, 247, 252, 261–3 ownership, 22–4, 27–8, 30–31, 34 n. 5, 40–41, 58, 59 n. 17, 76, 81, 109, 136, 138–9, 145, 147, 151–3, 247–66 sales, 256 slides, 63 landscape, 41, 55, 57–8, 61–4, 68, 75, 80, 99, 223, 256, 262, 282 bogs, 62, 85, 200 clearings, 76, 168 desert, 200 flood plains, 168 grass, 169 rivers and streams, 26–7, 168 Languedoc, 25 Languedoc-Roussillon, 185 Lantfred (Lantfrid), 225, 233 lapis angularis, 309, 312, 314 Lateran, 321, 323 Latin, 9, 83, 107–29 passim, 157, 163–6, 190, 193–203, 205, 207, 209, 215, 251, 260 ancient, 2, 164, 194, 199 Christian, 194 Classicizing, 1 Latium, 122–3 law, legislation, 3, 41–2, 45, 56, 58, 78 n. 58, 109, 146, 156–7, 160, 187–8, 220, 229, 231, 235–46 passim, 247, 249–51, 262; see also capitularies formal, 250–51 land, 247 legal privilege, 265 legal suit, 258 legalism, 251 normative, 238, 244 property, 247–8, 261–2 late Roman, 248

Index vulgarization of, 248, 262 Roman, 251 lawsuits, 251 lease, 76 leather, 201–6 bullhide, 201 legendaries, 111, 124–5, 155–6, 160 Leidrad archbishop of Lyon, 282 Lent, 149, 177, 226, 234 Leo III, Pope, 174, 318, 321, 324 Leo IV, Pope, 321 Leo V, Emperor, 294 Léon, Arca Sancta, 292 letters, 137, 166, 177–8, 245 St Augustine, 4 Einhard, 259–61, 268 Libanius, 269 Lupus of Ferrières, 269 Pope Paschal I, 294 Leucadius, 213 Levant, 23, 29 Levy, Ernst, 248 Libanius of Antioch, 40 notes 16 and 20, 269; see also letters Liber memorialis, 143, 147, 160, 225 n. 19; see also Gall, Saint Remiremont, 147–8 Liber pontificalis, 184 n. 9, 281, 321 Liber translationis Dionysii Areopagitae, 312, 314, 316 libraries, 90, 111, 115, 128, 164 Libri Carolini (Opus Caroli regis), 294–5, 309 Libya, 172 Liguria, 123 Lindisfarne, 177 literacy, 109, 135, 229 liturgy, 1, 118, 121, 124–5, 128, 134–5, 137, 139–43, 145–7, 150, 152, 155, 157–8, 160 Liudewit, 258 Liutprand, 184 n. 9 Lives of the Fathers (and Sayings of the Fathers), 109, 117–8 eastern, 112, 127–8 Livy, 172, 178 Loire, 14 Lombardy, Lombards, 27–8, 58, 123, 184 n. 9; see also Italy, Rome Londe, La, 25 London, 2 British Library, MS Add. 49598, 305–7, 318 Roman burial, 92 Longinus, 174 looms, 24

337

lords (and lordship), 19, 23–4, 57, 68, 151, 195, 198, 223, 229, 250–52, 254–5, 259, 261–2, 264, 269; see also aristocracy lorica, 203–4, 207, 215 Lorsch, 51, 147, 224, 261 Lothar I, 229 Louis the German, 283–4, 323 Louis the Pious, 171, 175, 177, 243 n. 60, 253–4, 282, 285–8, 322–3 Louis the Younger, 283 Low Countries, 40 Lowe, Elias Avery, 164 Lucca, 60, 78 n. 59, 79 n. 70, 90 Lucia, St, 122 Lupicinus, St, 184 Lupus of Ferrières, 269; see also letters Luxeuil, 137 luxury goods, 21, 23, 28, 101, 103 Lyon, 137, 171, 271 Madalveus bishop of Verdun, 115 Magdeburg, 50 magic, 6 n. 17 Magyars, 170 mail, 204–5; see also armor, cuirass, lorica chainmail, 207 corselet, 202–3, 205 n. 63, 206 fish-scale byrnies, 205–6 lamellar, 204 n. 54 mail shirts, 204, 206 Gallic, 204 ring-mail, 206–7, 215 scale mail, 204–6, 215 Main valley, 259, 263 Mainz, 36 n. 11, 50 n. 58, 220, 224–8, 233–4, 286 bridge at, 279, 283 Synod of (813), 156 Maitland, Frederic William, 219 Majestas Domini, 295, 301, 303, 305, 313, 316 malaria, 93; see also disease Mamertus of Vienne, 211 mandorla, 291, 299, 303 manors, see estates manses, 205 n. 63, 261, 269 Mantua, 174 manuscripts, 2, 9, 89–90, 107–8, 137–8, 140, 155, 157, 164, 193, 224, 226, 229, 281; see also Byzantium, and specific manuscripts listed by city hagiography, 9, 108, 111–28 passim illumination, 9, 204, 206, 207, 291–319 Virgil, 4 marble, 307

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Marculf, formulae of, 146 markets, 14, 17, 50, 51 n. 61, 101 marriage, 206, 212, 227 Marseille, 51 marshes, 62 Martin of Braga, 128 Martin of Tours, St, 183–4, 212–13 Lives of, 113, 116 n. 23 martyrologies, 140, 151, 156–7, 160 martyrs, 108, 112–26 passim, 156–7, 174, 209, 284–5 masses, 108–9, 132–53 passim, 158, 160, 282 anniversary, 134, 145 penitential, 139–40 private, 141 stipends, 109, 141–8 votive, 139 Master of the Registrum Gregorii, 309 Matthew, 307, 312, 313 Gospel of, 286 Mauss, Marcel, 20, 159 Maximus, 183–4, 213 Mayen, see ceramics Mediterranean, 13, 21, 30, 55, 88, 93–4, 96, 163, 172 crisis, 21 eastern, 6, 21, 29–30, 45, 51 exchange, 22 late Roman, 22 plow, 15 shipping, 6 southern, 30, 92 trade, 6, 15, 21 western, 6, 21, 89, 92 menologion, 125–6 mentality, 4, 6, 164, 166, 191, 221 merchants, 24, 52 n. 68, 96 routes, 19 Merovingians, 27, 43–5, 47, 50–52, 96, 99–100, 146, 156, 165, 176, 185 n. 13, 204 n. 54, 237 n. 16, 251, 253, 263; see also Franks, Gaul Messalina, 210 metal, 23, 85, 200–201, 203–5, 207, 284, 291, 318; see also architecture (cancelli), coins, gold, iron, silver meter, 166, 200 choriambs, 215 dactylic hexameters, 193, 197, 201, 215 Metz, 141 Meuse, 26, 50 Middle East, 163 Midlands, 29 migration, 83, 99 Anglo-Saxon, 88

animals, 88–9, 99 barbarian, 92 plants, 88–9, 99 Migration Age, 43 Milan, Sant’Ambrogio, 292 millenarianism, 175 n. 42, 178 mills, 74, 81; see also water mills oil, 36 n. 9 miracles, 112, 122, 128, 183–4, 212, 284 Miranduolo, 67 n. 44, 75–7 missi dominici, 228, 230, 235–43, 253 missatica, 240 missionaries, 135, 275 Molise, 123 monasticism, 2, 51–2, 107–9, 118, 135–7, 140–41, 145–53, 158–9, 231, 243 n. 58, 247, 278, 285; see also Cluny and entries for individual monasteries administrators, 224 Benedictine, 1, 2, 150, 153, 157, 159 Carthusian, 151 Cistercian, 150–52, 158 customs, 281 Franciscan, 151, 153 Gorze, 153 Grandmont, 151–2 Greek, 123, 125 mendicants, 158 orders, 158 Praemonstratensian, 151 Rule, 136, 149, 151, 164 n. 2 scriptoria, 281 Mont (villa of), 253–6 Montarrenti, 67 notes 43 and 44, 68, 70, 77 Moravia, 49 mortar, 71 Moselle, 41, 94 Moses, 316, 324 Mount Amiata, 60, 78 n. 58, 80, 82 Muhammad, 52; see also ‘Abbāsid caliphate, Arabs, Islam, Umayyad caliphate mulctum, 258 Munich, 44 Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4554, 125–6 Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14000, 292–3, 295, 298, 299, 305–9, 312, 314, 318 Narbonne, 189, 213 Narses, 213 Nathan, 212 n. 26, 287 Nationalism, nations, 1, 165, 219 Nativity, 309, 312 Netherlands, The, 44

Index Neustria, 135 Nibelung, 253–4 Nicaea, Second Council of, 295 Nicetius bishop of the Treveri, 185 n. 11 Nile, 29 Nîmes, 186, 188 n. 19, 189 Roman amphitheater, 186 Nithard, 232, 252 Nitra, 49 Noah’s Ark, 178 Normandy, 47 North Africa, 6, 22, 29–30; see also Africa, Byzantium Byzantine, 4 Germanic, 4 post-Byzantine, 25 Roman, 4, 6, 84, 116–17 North Sea, 15, 21, 50, 56 exchange, 22 ports, 20 trading towns, 15; see also towns, trade Norway, 87 notaries, 60, 230, 239 n. 31 notitia, 253 Notker the Stammerer (Notker Balbulus), 165, 277–81, 284, 286, 288–9, 322–3 Gesta Karoli, 277, 322–3 novels, 112 n. 5, 119–20, 122, 124–5 oath-helpers, 224, 229 oaths, 9, 186, 188–9, 228–36, 255, 268, 288 Offertory of the Mass, 142 office, 221, 225, 232, 243, 245, 252, 256–9, 262–3, 265, 279 ecclesiastical, 120, 149, 282 liturgical, 121, 152 monastic, 158 royal, 289 officials, 103, 257, 262–3, 269, 281 city, 183 civil, 103, 265 ecclesiastical, 103, 124, 129 judicial, 238–46 monastic, 149 royal, 238–46 salaried, 219 Old Church Slavonic, 205 Olonna, 229 oral tradition, 194, 196–7 Origen, 83 Orkney Islands, 87 Orosius, 178 Osterburken, 41 Ostia, 210

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Otto I, 281 Otto III, 267 Ottonians, 47, 48, 51 n. 61; see also Otto I, Otto III art, 301 Ouen-du-Breuil, 37 n. 16, 40 ovens, 46, 51 Ovid, 172 n. 23, 200 n. 28, 201 n. 31 paganism, 107, 120 n. 30, 209–11, 275 pagus, 58, 229–30 palaces, 10, 36, 47, 182–3, 213, 259, 269, 271, 275–6, 279–86, 288–9, 321–4 palaeobotany, 15, 43 n. 33, 85 palaeography, 114, 164, 226 Palatinate, 36 Palestine, 22, 183, 286 palisades, 70, 77 panegyric, 112, 186, 191, 198, 214, 286 Pannonia, Pannonians, 194, 196, 258; see also Huns, Illyria papacy, 1–2, 27, 165, 276; see also Rome and entries for individual popes papyrus, 21 parasites, 86, 93 parchment, 90, 147, 301, 303, 309, 313, 318 Paris, 47, 49–50, 146, 176 BN, MS lat. 817, 309, 311, 318 BN, MS lat. 4995, 240 n. 34 BN, MS lat. 8488, 194 BN, MS lat. 8850, 307 n. 39 BN, MS. nouv. acq. lat. 1203, 295–7, 299, 301, 305, 307, 312, 318 Council of (825), 140 Council of (829), 326 Musée Carnavalet, 50 region, 14 parishes, 55, 59 Paschal I, Pope, 294, 309, 314, 318, 325–6; see also letters Paschasius of Duma, 128 Paschasius Radbertus, 286–7, 289, 321 Passions, 108–9, 112–29 passim, 185 pastoral care, 151 pasture, 62, 76, 152 pathogens, 8, 94–5; see also disease patrons, patronage 2, 111, 124, 146, 227, 253–8, 260–63, 265, 269, 318 Paul (Visigothic dux), 185–7, 191 Paul, St, 149, 213 Pavia, 229 PCR, 87, 89 peasants, 16–17, 22–4, 27, 34 n. 5, 41–9 passim, 52–3, 55–7, 62–3, 68, 78, 81–2, 99–100, 102 n. 10, 163, 222, 224, 261,

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275 allodial, 57 demand, 101 dependent, 19, 256 exploitation, 19 individualism, 55 logic, 68 servile, 16 subjection, 20 Peiresc, 173 Pelagianism, 294 Pelagius I, Pope, 128 Peloponnese, 103 penance, 109, 134–52 passim, 178–9, 190 n. 25, 287–8 penitentials, 135–52 passim; see also Excarpsus Cummeani Merseburg Penitential, 140 Rheims Penitential, 137–9 Corbie Redaction, 137–8 Peristephanon, 112, 115 perjury, 229, 236–7 Perrecy, 252–7, 260–61, 263, 265 Peter, St, 121, 147–9, 177 Peter Damian, 133 Peter and Marcellinus, Sts, 174, 260, 284, 322; see also Einhard, Seligenstadt Petronius, 172, 210 Pharaoh, 175, 185 philology, 9, 17, 99, 111, 166 philosophy, 119, 131, 179–80, 210 phylogenetics, 88–90 phytoliths, 86 Piedmont, 123 pietra ollare (soapstone), 28 piety, 9, 128, 133, 155–60, 210 pigments, 292, 295, 303, 307, 309, 312, 318 pilgrims, pilgrimage, 61, 108, 114, 119, 121–3, 125, 144, 160, 307 shrines, 114, 123 Pippin of Aquitaine, 254 Pippin of Italy, 229 Pippin III, 148, 253 Pirenne, Henri, 13, 21, 52 placita, 228, 230, 232, 243 n. 60, 253 plague, 83, 93–6; see also disease, Yersinia pestis plants, 85–6, 88–9, 91, 97, 99; see also migration Pliny, 172 plow, 14, 62 ard, 15, 41 chains, 35 n. 7 heavy wheeled, 41, 43 shares, 41 swivel, 3, 14, 43 n. 31

Po, 28 Poggibonsi, 67 n. 44, 72–4 Poland, 7 n. 22, 94 n. 42 pollen, 5 pollution, 85 polyptychs, see estates (surveys) Pompeii, 35 poor, poverty, 22–3, 86, 109, 133–4, 136–7, 144–5, 148–50, 153, 158, 237, 242, 256, 261 apostolic, 150, 153 population, 15, 56, 79–80, 82, 85, 88; see also demography crisis, 64, 68 dispersed, 55, 56–8, 60 genetics, 87, 97 geography, 3 immigrant, 61, 75 patterns, 61 rural, 36, 55, 57, 59–63, 68, 75–6 Portianus, Abbot, 184 ports, 20, 51, 85 Channel, 25 Portugal, 25, 36 n. 9 posts, 68 load-bearing, 71 n. 46 postholes, 70 poultry, 89, 90 n. 25 Praetorian Guard, 204 prayer, 107, 109, 121, 132–8, 140–43, 148–52, 155, 158–9, 163, 174, 183, 211, 213, 250, 252, 262, 264, 271, 278, 303, 305 prayer brotherhoods, 142, 150, 152 preaching, 84, 121, 124, 231–2, 286; see also sermons precarium, 253, 260 Preslav, 49 priests, 108, 131, 136, 139–44, 146, 148–50, 182, 263 Priscillianism, 183–4, 213 prisoners, 35 n. 7, 183 production, 1, 14, 16, 19–31, 33–5, 42, 45, 49–52, 58, 61, 99–103 artisanal, 21, 24 centers, 50 n. 58, 102 estate, 20 industrial, 71 installations, 36 logic, 14 model, 19, 30 patterns, 24 small-scale, 103 system, 20, 64 techniques, 24, 42 prophète chez le roi, le, 182, 211

Index Provence, 228 Prudentius, 112, 115, 121–2, 204 Psychomachia, 204, 215 psalmody, 133, 143, 148–50, 153 Psalms, 135–6, 140–41, 149–50, 152, 286–7, 299 Pseudo-Gelasius, 115, 119, 121–2 purchases, 256, 258 Purification of the Virgin, 150 quiver, 196 Rankweil, 256–8, 263, 265 rats, 94 Ravenna, 28 San Vitale, 323 reaping, 61 Rebais (abbey of), 146 rebellion, 185–91, 211, 213–14, 230, 258; see also treason Reccesvind, 187, 189 Reccho, 225, 234 redemption, 108–9, 132, 163 Redon, 223–4 Regensburg, abbey of St Emmeram, relief, 314–16, 318 Regino of Prüm, 139–41, 283–4 regionalism, 9, 29, 221, 231, 238 n. 19, 262 Reichenau, 137, 226–7 Michael chapel frescoes, 317–18 relics, 116–17, 121–2, 124–5, 128, 160, 228, 260, 281, 284, 322 rents, 19, 24, 254 representative assemblies, 219 Reric, 50 Revelation, 175 Rhaetia, 256, 264 rhetoric, 119, 165, 212, 309 gestures, 181 manual, 212 Rhine, 14, 19, 29, 41, 46–7, 147, 227, 263, 283 delta, 26 land, 22, 27, 40, 224, 262 Middle, 26, 259 charters, 4 villas, 36 wine barrels, 15 Richoin (Rihwin), 225, 233 Ripoin (Rifoin), 225, 233 ritual, 2, 131–2, 163, 181, 191, 214, 220, 254–5, 275 Rižana, 228 roads, 71, 108, 122; see also via Francigena and via Romea network, 76

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Robert II, 177–8 Robert of Jumièges, see Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS Y6 Rogations, 211 Romance, 165, 181 Romance languages, 2, 117, 157, 205; see also Old French Rome, 2, 14, 20, 28, 33, 40, 45, 47–8, 50–52, 55, 85, 89, 92, 99, 101, 107, 113, 117, 119–26, 128, 206, 210–11, 221, 270, 318, 321, 324; see also empire, Gaul, Italy, North Africa countryside, 8 culture, 10, 33 fall of, 1–3, 6, 33, 42, 53, 89 northwestern provinces, 6 papal, 276 princess, 92 production, 42 Romanization, 62–3 traditions, 10, 52, 56, 119 villas, 33, 35–7, 40, 43, 64; see also estates (villa) western provinces, 16 Roman empire, 6, 16, 19, 22–3, 29–30, 34–5, 38, 41–2, 45, 47, 48 n. 50, 52, 57–8, 60, 62–3, 92–3, 96, 134, 163, 219, 221, 263, 265, 268–70 eastern, 48 n. 50 economy of, 7, 42, 102 provinces, 6 roofs, 71–2, 279, 282–3, 286–8, 321–3 lead, 275 limestone slabs, 71 stone, 71 straw, 71 tile, 64, 71 wood, 71 Rostovtzeff, Michael, 35–6 Rothari, 78 n. 58 Rouen, 25, 37 n. 16, 47 Bibliothèque municipale, MS Y6, 301–3, 305, 318 Ruadhar (Ruachar), 225, 234 Rufinus, 127 Pseudo-Rufinus, 128 Rupertines, 27 Ruthwell Cross, 115 Saale, 50 sacramentaries, 140, 142; see also Paris, BN, MS lat. 817, Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale MS, Y6 Sacramentary of Rheinau, 140 sacraments, 133, 190 n. 25, 291

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sacrifice, 108, 131–53, 158 animals, 108, 131 object, 131 spiritual, 108, 131–53 passim, 158 Sahara Desert, 172; see also Africa saints, 111–19 passim, 155–60, 182–5, 254, 299, 316; see also hagiography, relics and entries for individual saints cult, 9, 156–7 dossiers, 114, 116 feast days, 155 patron, 122, 147, 150, 159, 253 Sallust, 185, 191 salt, see diet salvation, 135, 147, 149, 153–4, 159, 237, 289, 294 Salvatore, San, 78 n. 58, 81 Samos, 102 Samuel, 287 Saragossa, 175 Sardinia, 123 Saul, 287 Saxony, Saxons, 47, 220, 224, 226–8, 233–4, 258, 268 Old Saxon, 200 scabini, 230, 239 n. 31, 240–41 Scandinavia, 2, 7, 47–8, 159, 206; see also Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Vikings Schlins, 256 schools cathedral, 180 school masters, 179 Victor, Saint, 153 Schultheiss, 257, 265 science (natural), 15, 17, 33, 83–4, 99; see also biology, botany, climate, palaeobotany, soil, zoology Sciltung, 225, 233 Scotland, 115 scribes, 2, 113, 281; see also copyists scythe, 41 sedges, 86 n. 12 seeds, 43, 84 Seine, 19, 25–6, 37 n. 16, 47, 168 Seligenstadt, 260; see also Einhard, Sts Peter and Marcellinus Sens, 95 Septimania, 262 serfs, serfdom, 20, 45; see also peasants sermons, 83, 231–2; see also Augustine, preaching servi, 34, 145, 147, 229; see also peasants, serfs, slavery settlement, 37, 40, 44, 49, 54–82 passim, 256–7; see also estates, peasants

crisis, 64 dispersed, 6, 16, 55, 58, 60, 80, 82, 100 Germanic, 40 hillfort, 40 hilltop, 60, 62, 75, 80, 100 nucleated, 6, 16, 55–6, 62–3, 75–6, 80–81, 84, 99 organization, 57, 64 patterns of, 13, 15, 34, 55–6, 59, 84, 100 Roman, 40, 64 rural, 6, 40, 46–8, 64, 78, 99–100 types, 16 Shakespeare, 165 shepherds, 61 shields, 195–203, 215, 230 n. 52 almond-shaped, 199 boards, 200–201 boss, 195, 198, 200–202 clipeus, clipeum, 199 Homeric, 199 Hoplite, 199 parma, 199 pelta (crescent-shaped; sometimes half shield or little shield), 199 rand, 200 round, 199–200 scutum, scutus (oblong, wooden), 199 umbo, 202, 215 ships, 5, 83, 94, 169, 227, 286 shipping, 6, 96–7; see also Mediterranean shipwreck, 84, 97, 103; see also Yassi Ada shrines, 114, 119, 121–5, 128, 160; see also pilgrimage Sicily, 25, 27, 30, 88, 123 Sidonius Apollinaris, 211 Siena, 59, 64–5, 67, 79 n. 69 signorie, 68, 76, 79 n. 70 silver, 22, 25, 49, 137, 141, 163; see also coins, metal simony, 150–52 sin, 109, 134–5, 139, 142–3, 189, 213, 287–8 Sinbert bishop of Augsburg, 225, 233 Siroccos, 172; see also Africa, Sahara Desert Sisebut, 185 skeletons, 37 n. 13, 38 fig. 2.2; see also cemeteries slaves, slavery, 16, 20, 24, 33–54 passim, 92, 101, 134, 136–8, 145, 153, 175 chains, 35-6; see also iron collars, 5; see also iron labor, 8, 16 manumission, 136, 145, 147, 150, 153 plantation, 20, 36 rural, 16, 47–8, 101 sales, 15

Index shackles, 16, 35, 37; see also iron trade, 28, 45, 47–52, 101 Slavs, 205; see also Old Church Slavonic Slavic ramparts, 48 Slavlands, 7, 48 Wends, 226 soil, 5, 14–15, 17, 62–3, 84 micromorphology, 33 red, 173 Soissons, 176, 307 n. 39 Solomon, 280, 286, 289, 309, 323–4 Spain, 2, 7, 9, 20, 25, 29, 36 n. 9, 45 n. 39, 48, 86, 117, 121–2, 172, 175, 181–92 passim, 213 documents, 4 southeastern, 21, 23 Visigothic, 4, 115, 181–92 passim spears, 195–6, 200–201, 203 Speyer-Voselgang, 47 Spoleto, 28, 184 n. 9 Staré Mesto, 49 Statius, 200 n. 28, 201 n. 31 Stephen of Muret, 151 Stephen of Paris, Count, 240 n. 34, 268 stone, 64, 68, 71, 75, 275, 280, 282–3, 292, 307, 312–4, 318 foundations, 71 ovens, 46 roofs, 71 structures, 60 walls, 70–71 Stuttgart Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. Bibl. Fol. 23, 204 n. 58, 299–301, 303, 305, 318 Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. HB II, 305 styli, 121 subdeacons, 141 Suffolk, 22, 26 Suger of Saint Denis, Abbot, 317 Sulpicius Severus, 113, 116 n. 23, 183–4, 212–13 Dialogues, 183–4, 212 sureties (credentiae, fideiussores), 224, 226, 228 Sutton Hoo, 26, 107, 206 Swabia, 227 Sweden, 50 Switzerland, 36 n. 9, 85 swords, 195–7, 200 n. 24, 203–5, 207, 214, 230 n. 52 ensis, 196 gladius (stabbing sword), 196 halfsword (short sword, sax), 196–7 semispatha, 197

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short sword, 196 single-bladed, 196 spatha, 196 two-edged, 196 Syria, 22, 201 Syriac, 127 n. 48 systems approach, 221 Tacitus, 210 Talmud, 48 n. 50 tariff penance, 109, 135–6 Tarragona, 86 tax, taxation 22, 24, 265 technology, 8, 14, 33, 41–2, 61, 75, 88, 194, 205 n. 58, 215 agricultural, 14, 41–2, 100 development, 13, 42–3, 49, 52, 100–103, 195 Roman, 14, 42, 52 teeth, 86, 91–2, 95 Tello bishop of Chur, 257 tenants, 24, 35, 37, 57, 101 n. 8 Terni, 184 n. 9 textiles (cloth, clothing), 15, 21, 24–6, 131, 134, 176–9, 204, 206 silk, 22 wool, 15 Theoderic, 214 Theodore, Pope, 121 Theodoric, Count, 252–4 Theodulf of Orléans, 292–5, 312, 316, 319, 324–6 theology, 10, 119, 124, 152–3, 187, 276, 305; see also Bible (exegesis), images Theophanu abbess of Essen, 143–5 Thessalonike, 103 Theudebert, 185 n. 11 Theuderic I, 184 Theuderic II, 185 Thomas à Kempis, 133 Thurgau, 225, 227 timber, see wood tithes, 59, 151 Toledo, 188–90 Eighth Council of, 187 Seventh Council of, 187 Thirteenth Council of, 188 tolls, 83 tools, 5, 14, 17, 36, 44, 61, 91, 131; see also iron topoi, 158, 181, 196, 201, 210 n. 9, 212–14; see also type-scenes Torro, 225, 233 Toubert, Pierre, 16, 19, 56 n. 6 Tours, 183–4, 305 towns, 2, 3 n. 4, 6, 15, 26, 39 fig. 2.4, 49–50,

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52, 61, 219, 228; see also trade, urbanism and entries for individual towns proto-towns, 49–50 small, 36–7 Toxandria, 40–41, 44 trade, 13, 17, 20–21, 26, 28, 45, 47–52, 84, 99–104, 205; see also slaves (trade) centers, 1, 49, 50, 96 circuits, 15, 17, 97 collapse of, 13 inter-regional, 15 international, 28 long-distance, 6, 13, 15, 50, 101, 103 rebirth of, 13 towns, 2, 15 tramps, 61 translation (translators), 108, 111, 115, 117–18, 120 n. 29, 125–9 transportation, 61, 168 Traube, Ludwig, 164 travel, travelers, 21, 169, 224, 227, 261 treason, 186–8, 191; see also rebellion treasure, 136, 194, 203, 206 Trelleborg, 48 Trier, 25, 36 n. 10, 51 n. 61, 94, 115, 183 Aula Constantiniana, 323 Trinité of Vendôme, 140 Trinity, 305 True Cross, 117 tunics, 195, 203, 215 Tunisia, 22 Tuscany, 16, 55–82 passim, 90, 99–100, 123 type-scenes, 181–92 passim, 196, 209, 211–12, 214 Ukraine, 48 Umbria, 123 Umayyad caliphate, 29; see also ‘Abbāsid caliphate, Arabs, Islam, Muhammad unction, 186; see also anointing Unroc, 225, 233 Unruochings, 27 urbanism, 23, 28, 68 urban centers, 37, 50 Valentinian I, 183 Valerius Flaccus, 178, 201 n. 31 Vandals, 84 Varro, 57 vellum, see parchment Venantius Fortunatus, 165 Veneto, 123 Venice, 2, 28, 51, 85 Verdun, 115 Verhulst, Adriaan, 14, 19, 52, 101 n. 8

Vernarius (missus of Charlemagne), 228 Vettius Valens, 210 Vetus Gallica, 137–9; see also canons (rulings of the church) via Francigena, 81 via Romea, 121–2 vicarii (vicars), 239 n. 24, 240–41 Victor, Saint 153–4 Vikings, 7 n. 22, 20, 47–8, 87, 170, 177; see also Scandinavia villages, 3, 8, 16, 23, 37, 40–41, 43–5, 47, 49, 55–82 passim, 84, 99–101, 107, 220, 223, 257, 264, 275 communities, 43, 61, 76, 223 layout, 40 nucleated, 16, 56, 81, 100 organization, 55, 61, 79–80 plebs/plebes, 223–4 proto-villages, 55 structures, 40, 44, 59 n. 17, 62 system, 41 vici, 36, 58, 78–9, 80–82 Vincenzo al Volturno, San, 21, 51 vineyards, 26, 35, 51 n. 61, 62, 138, 151; see also fields, wine violence, 137 Virgil, 199 n. 20, 203 Aeneid, 194, 199 n. 17, 200 n. 27, 201, 204, 207, 215 manuscripts, 4 Visigoths, 187; see also Spain (Visigothic) Vogel, Cyrille, 136, 142 Völkerwanderung, 194 Volkmar archbishop of Cologne, 291 Vosges, 147 Vulfald (Wolfolt), 225, 233 Waitz, Georg, 219 Wala, 71 n. 48, 225, 227, 233 Walahfrid Strabo, 326 Waldo of Reichenau, Abbot, 225–7, 233 Waltharius, 165, 193–208 passim, 215 Wamba, 7, 181–92 passim, 211, 213–14 Waning I , 225, 233 wares, see goods wasteland, 62 water mills, 3, 14, 24, 84 water tables, 14 wealth, see economy weapons, 9, 92, 131, 194–208, 209, 215; see also archaeology (finds), armor, army weather, 7–9, 161–80 passim, 209–11; see also climate drought, 62, 168, 176 flooding, 62, 168, 176

Index frost, 169, 176 global warming, 9 hail, hailstorms, 170–71, 174, 176, 210 lightning, 176, 211 rain, 161–80 passim, 210–11 snow, 176 storms, 169, 176 thunder, 176, 211 wind, 169, 172, 176, 179 wells, 36, 38 fig. 2.2 Weneccslas (Václav), St, 206 n. 71 Werner, Karl Ferdinand, 265–6 Wichard (Wichart), 225, 233 Widukind, 281 William (son of Bernard and Dhuoda), 249–52 William V of Aquitaine, Duke, 177–8 William of Conches, 179–80, 211 Philosophia, 179–80 Willibrord, 138 wills, 27, 133–4, 143–5, 158, 226 n. 33, 251, 253, 255–6 Winchester, 49, 305 wine, 15, 21, 26, 85, 132, 143, 148, 194, 209, 291 n. 4; see also vineyards witches, 250 witnesses, 224, 228–9, 236, 253–5, 259 witness lists, 258

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women,1, 4–5, 9, 27, 85, 88, 91–3, 97, 107–9, 144, 167–8, 171, 173–6, 180, 230 n. 52, 260, 275, 281; see also gender, labor wood, 21, 68, 71, 75, 177–9, 199–201, 275, 283, 307, 316 ashwood, 200 linden (lime tree), 200 willow, 200 wooden structures, 75 Words of the Elders, 128 Wordsworth, William, 165 workshops, 51–2, 71, 309 Wulfad bishop of Bourges, 253–4, 256 Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek, M.p.th.q.4a, 309–10, 312 Xanten, Saint Victor in, 291 Stiftsarchiv, StiX H 19, 1734, 290–92, 295, 313–14, 317–18 Yangtse, 29 Yassi Ada, 103 Yersinia pestis, 94–6; see also plague York, 90 n. 29, 177 Zacharias, Pope, 184 n. 9 zoology, 7, 15, 33, 61, 89; see also zooarchaeology