In this paper, I do not use the terms of my title, ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, in their original, strict sense. Strictly speaking, the ‘base’ would mean the sum-total of all economic relations in the society of the Ottonian age, while ‘superstructure’ would mean the sum of all other social phenomena which ultimately depended on the ‘base’. Instead, I use the terms here as a convenient shorthand for the vast bulk of the population, on the one hand, and a tiny elite group, on the other. This shorthand has the advantage of acting as a constant reminder that the elite lived very largely off the (mostly agrarian) production of the other group. There are good reasons why these social and economic aspects of the Ottonian period are seldom acknowledged in modern scholarship: as we shall see, our secure knowledge of the ‘base’, that is, of the specifically Ottonian part in the economic and social development of the Reich in the early Middle Ages, is fairly small, and can hardly be expected to increase much. All the same, the relationship between base and superstructure remains interesting, problematic and neglected. The question of what this relationship was like looks all the more urgent when we consider the more recent historiography of the Ottonian period in a comparative European perspective. What were the broad lines of development in the European tenth century?