The political order of early medieval Alsace took shape in the seventh century with the emergence of monastery-based lordships and was transformed around the millennium, when monastic reformers began to insist, ultimately successfully, on ecclesiastical autonomy from lay control. When Pope Leo IX returned to Alsace in 1049 to bless altars, distribute relics and confirm the rights of reformed cloisters, he encountered – indeed he had himself grown up in – a world in which the relationship between monasteries and patrons was viewed fundamentally differently: whereas the identity of the lords of Dabo and Eguisheim was anchored to castles and to the advocacies of reformed monasteries, the consciousness of Leo's more distant Etichonid ancestors had been rooted in the monism of early medieval proprietary monasticism. As the institutional consciousness of early medieval monasteries was transformed by the pressure of reform, so too was the equation of lordly power and, by extension, Leo's memory of his own family's past.

In the early middle ages, the flexibility of, as well as the tension in, the networks of kings, patron families and monasteries ensured that the dominant order that emerged in seventh-century Alsace would be at once remarkably resilient and adaptable. The late Merovingian order was not a homeostatic balance of interests disrupted by a Carolingian coup, as some have argued, but rather a dynamic system which profoundly reordered the political landscape.