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Preface
- Edoardo Manarini
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- Struggles for Power in the Kingdom of Italy
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 27 April 2022
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- 26 January 2022, pp 19-20
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Summary
This book offers us the history of one family as a microcosm of huge changes in Western European society between the ninth and twelfth centuries. This was a period in which the broadly post-Roman world of Late Antiquity gave way to a distinctively medieval landscape dominated by lords, castles, an ever-more tightly controlled peasantry and the growing power of aristocratic families and other elites. Historians have long debated the nature and chronology of these changes: did they happen slowly? suddenly? violently? Some even doubt that they happened at all in the ways traditionally understood. Italian historians have made vital contributions to the debates surrounding the centuries separating Charlemagne from Frederick Barbarossa, the Carolingian Empire from the communes, but the works of scholars such as Cinzio Violante and Giovanni Tabacco were rarely translated into English. For a variety of reasons (and of course with some notable exceptions), anglophone historiography of the period has traditionally been conducted within paradigms constructed from French (rather than German or Italian) building blocks. While Italian history and its modern historiography are hardly unknown, they are not nearly as familiar to anglophone students of the period as they ought to be. This is particularly the case in light of the rich collections of documentary evidence that survive from south of the Alps in greater numbers than most other parts of Europe in the same period, and which have the potential to cast light on all manner of issues in social, economic and political history. Meticulous analysis of these documents forms the bedrock of the arguments presented in this book, along with careful dissection of the fascinating narrative sources. The book builds on and responds to the work of Violante, Tabacco and other prolific and influential twentieth-century historians; but it also represents a burgeoning renewal of interest in early and central medieval Italy in the hands of a new generation of Italian scholars over the last few decades. The so-called ‘Hucpoldings’ are unusual in several ways – not least the extensive traces members of the family left in the surviving sources across several regions and several centuries, as they sought to accommodate their status to the often bewildering succession of Frankish, German and Italian rulers who fought to control the kingdom of Italy.
THE EDICT OF PÎTRES, CAROLINGIAN DEFENCE AGAINST THE VIKINGS, AND THE ORIGINS OF THE MEDIEVAL CASTLE
- Simon MacLean
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- Transactions of the Royal Historical Society / Volume 30 / December 2020
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- 11 November 2020, pp. 29-54
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- December 2020
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The castle was one of the most characteristic features of the western European landscape in the Middle Ages, dominating social and political order from the eleventh century onwards. The origins of the castle are generally assigned to the ninth and tenth centuries, and the standard story begins with the defensive fortifications established against the Vikings during the reign of the West Frankish king Charles the Bald (843–77). In this article I argue that there are serious problems with this origin story, by re-evaluating some of the key sources on which it rests – particularly the Edict of Pîtres (864). I seek to demonstrate that my analysis of this source has important implications for how we think about the relationship between fortifications and the state in the Carolingian Empire; and by extension the evolution of the castle in north-western Europe between the ninth and twelfth centuries.
Contributors
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- By Nic Beech, Chris Bilton, Alan Bradshaw, Stephen Broad, Shiona Chillas, Martin Cloonan, Kevina Cody, Christine Coupland, Stephen Cummings, Ann Cunliffe, Chris Cusack, Jane Donald, Martin Dowling, Michael Downes, Celia Duffy, Charlotte Gilmore, Lance Green, Gail Greig, Elizabeth Gulledge, Chris Hackley, Martin John Henry, Paul Hibbert, Casper Hoedemaekers, R. M. Hubbert, John Hunt, Peter Keenan, Nod Knowles, Gretchen Larsen, Johnny Lynch, Raymond MacDonald, Robert MacIntosh, Katy MacKintosh, Donald MacLean, Katy J. Mason, Alan McCusker-Thompson, Lloyd Meredith, Louise Mitchell, Davide Nicolini, Daragh O’Reilly, Jill O’Sullivan, Cliff Oswick, Marco Panagopoulos, Jim Prime, Jenny Reeve, Simon Rose, Michael Saren, David Sims, Ian Smith, Duglas T. Stewart, Chris Stout, Dimitrinka Stoyanova Russell, Antonio Strati, Ben Talbot Dunn:, Robyn Thomas, Lori Watson, Simon Webb, Richard Wigley, Sierk Ybema, Matthew Young, Carlo Zanotti
- Edited by Nic Beech, University of Dundee, Charlotte Gilmore, University of Edinburgh
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- Organising Music
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- 05 January 2015
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- 05 February 2015, pp xii-xxviii
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Overcoming PerfectionismRoz Shafran, Sarah Egan and Tracey Wade London: Robinson Publishing, 2010. pp. 308, £10.99 (pb). ISBN: 978-1845297428
- Stephane MacLean, Simon B. Sherry
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- Journal:
- Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy / Volume 41 / Issue 3 / May 2013
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- 18 March 2013, pp. 377-379
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- May 2013
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The children and grandchildren of Charlemagne
- Marios Costambeys, University of Liverpool, Matthew Innes, Birkbeck College, University of London, Simon MacLean, University of St Andrews, Scotland
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- The Carolingian World
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- 05 June 2014
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- 12 May 2011, pp xxi-xxi
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5 - Villages and villagers, land and landowners
- Marios Costambeys, University of Liverpool, Matthew Innes, Birkbeck College, University of London, Simon MacLean, University of St Andrews, Scotland
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- The Carolingian World
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- 05 June 2014
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- 12 May 2011, pp 223-270
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Summary
Introduction: interpreting Carolingian society
Afraid of meeting ‘dog-headed men’ on his travels in Scandinavia, the missionary Rimbert, some time in the middle of the ninth century, was moved to enquire of Abbot Ratramnus of Corbie whether such monstrous perversions of humanity had souls that could be saved. Ratramnus – a theological authority whose monastery had long-standing links with the Frankish mission in the north – replied that all the available information on contemporary Scandinavian societies pointed to familiar patterns of agrarian life: did not the Danes and Swedes follow laws, live in villages, farm the land, domesticate animals and indeed wear clothes similar to the Franks’? They therefore had souls; Rimbert's job was to save them for the true, Christian, God. Ratramnus's exchange with Rimbert belongs in a long tradition of Roman and Frankish ethnographic fantasies about their northern neighbours which were intended to assert the normality of home society by vividly defining distant and not-so-distant neighbours as ‘others’. But rather than identifying, as was customary, monstrous peoples as agents of God's wrath or actors in Biblical prophecies, here Ratramnus described the familiarity of the way of life of rural Scandinavia, regardless of the shape of its inhabitants’ heads. These rural communities resembled those whose labours sustained Ratramnus and his monks in Francia, and so were ripe for conversion under the aegis of a Christian empire.
As so often, in imagining others distant from home Ratramnus and Rimbert reveal social assumptions that would have been much harder to voice in a discussion of their own society. Indeed, direct commentary on the structure of Frankish society by the spokespeople of the ruling elites of Church and court is rare. When such commentary did occur, it was theological in nature and ecclesiological in aim, designed to explicate the proper harmonious relationship between the different orders that made up Christian society. The first decades of the ninth century saw a series of attempts to apply to Carolingian society the theory of ‘three orders of man’ developed by Augustine and elaborated by other late antique churchmen. At Aachen in 802, for example, the three orders of clergy, laity and monks were each encouraged to meditate on their roles, as reflected in authoritative texts from canon law, secular law and the monastic rule. A few decades later the monastic scholar Heiric of Auxerre, influenced by classical texts, inaugurated what was to become the dominant social theory of the Middle Ages by classifying society as made up of those who fight, those who pray and those who work. Fascinating though it is, such theorising is primarily a part of intellectual history: early medieval social theories do not aim at the kind of understanding sought by modern historians.
7 - Exchange and trade: the Carolingian economy
- Marios Costambeys, University of Liverpool, Matthew Innes, Birkbeck College, University of London, Simon MacLean, University of St Andrews, Scotland
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- The Carolingian World
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- 05 June 2014
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- 12 May 2011, pp 324-378
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Introduction: interpreting the carolingian economy
Around 890, a team of scholars at the court of the Anglo-Saxon king Alfred the Great undertook the translation of the fifth-century Latin world history of Orosius into the written version of their vernacular Old English language. Orosius's work, with its story of barbarian invasions and Christian triumph, had an obvious message for readers in Viking-age England, and Alfred's team translated freely: as a result, when they came across Orosius's lengthy geographical descriptions of Europe, they updated his very classical picture of northern and eastern Europe to reflect contemporary realities. The detailed account of the different peoples and groupings of the Baltic and southern Scandinavia led into a series of digressions, recounting the tales told to King Alfred by two travellers in the north, Ohthere and Wulfstan. Ohthere claimed to Alfred that ‘he lived the furthest north of all Northmen’, and gave an account of his exploration around the modern Norwegian coast as far as Lapland and the White Sea. Ohthere's accounts of various groupings of Beormas, Cwenas, Finnas and Norðmanna distinguish them not in terms of ethnic origin but in terms of their land and their economy. The lands of the Finnas, for example, were described as ‘waste’, that is lacking agriculture, animal husbandry or permanent settlement: they were seasonal hunters, in contrast to the Beormas, whose territory was ‘fully settled’.
But the scribe recording Ohthere's tale-telling was not solely interested in ethnographic and geographical detail: he focussed also on wealth and its exchange. Hence the almost palpable interest of the audience as they heard an account of riches rooted not in property rights over land and labour, but in control of livestock, some tame but most wild, and the collection of tribute: Ohthere told how he was ‘a very rich man in those objects which their riches consist of, that is wild deer…he was among the first men of his land, but he had not more than twenty cattle, twenty sheep and twenty pigs, and little that he ploughed with horses’. The wealth of Ohthere's people, we are told, lay ‘mostly in the tribute (gafol) that the Finnas pay them’, which was carefully graded, with each different rank among the Finnas making specific gifts of animal skins, bird feathers and whale bones. These were destined to be exchanged, for Ohthere's account of his wealth and his relations with the neighbouring peoples naturally flowed into an account of a voyage down the Norwegian coast to the trading town (port) of Kaupang, and thence to Hedeby at the base of the Jutland peninsula, the nodal point of the trading routes of southern Scandinavia. From Ohthere's account of the trip to Hedeby, the scribe moved seamlessly on to an analogous account of the voyage of Wulfstan east from Hedeby to Truso, a major centre for exchange in the Baltic. Wulfstan's observation of the coastline and islands of the Baltic is enlivened by discussion of the customs of the peoples he encountered: the drinking habits, funeral rites and magical abilities of the Este.
Frontmatter
- Marios Costambeys, University of Liverpool, Matthew Innes, Birkbeck College, University of London, Simon MacLean, University of St Andrews, Scotland
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- The Carolingian World
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2 - The creation of Carolingian kingship to 800
- Marios Costambeys, University of Liverpool, Matthew Innes, Birkbeck College, University of London, Simon MacLean, University of St Andrews, Scotland
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- The Carolingian World
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- 12 May 2011, pp 31-79
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Summary
Replacing the ruling dynasty
We began Chapter 1 with the elevation of the Carolingian Pippin, generally known as Pippin III, or Pippin ‘the Short’, to the kingship of the Franks. Almost everything about this event is uncertain. The best evidence for Pippin's accession comes from his charters – the single-sheet documents through which legal business like property transactions were habitually enacted. A charter of 20 June 751 was issued in the name of ‘the illustrious man Pippin, mayor of the palace’. By the time of another court case on 1 March 752, Pippin was styled ‘king of the Franks’ (rex francorum). At some point between these dates, therefore, Pippin had replaced Childeric III, last king of the Merovingian family that had ruled the Franks for over 250 years. That Pippin and his brother Carloman, jointly mayors of the palace (the most senior non-royal office in the Frankish kingdom) had themselves established Childeric as king just four years earlier gives some indication of the strong position from which Pippin could launch this bid for the throne. But the precise mechanics of the takeover are entirely unknown. Although our texts are often difficult to date precisely, the strongest likelihood is that, the charters apart, all our Frankish sources for the events of 751 were written after 768, when Pippin died and his sons succeeded to the kingship. In other words, these texts probably formed part of a deliberate and retrospective attempt to establish the ease and propriety of Pippin's succession in order to make that of his sons (who were, after all, not Merovingians but children of a usurper) seem routine.
A cluster of texts containing one or other version of a narrative about Pippin's acquisition of the kingship were written in a context in which the Carolingians were already dominant. The most famous rendition of the story is that of Einhard in his Vita Karoli (Life of Charlemagne), probably written around 817, who claims that by 751 the Merovingian family ‘had in fact been without any vitality for a long time and had demonstrated that there was not any worth in it except the empty name of king’. But Einhard was simply echoing the various sets of annals compiled in the last years of the eighth, and first decades of the ninth, century. The most influential, and probably the earliest, of these are the so-called Annales regni francorum (Royal Frankish Annals), according to which legates (they are named as Bishop Burchard of Würzburg and Fulrad the chaplain) were sent to Rome to gain Pope Zacharias's sanction for the replacement of Childeric III with Pippin. This the pope duly gave, commenting, in the words of the annalist, that ‘it was better to call him king who actually possessed royal power’. Pippin was therefore anointed king (the annalist says that this was performed by the renowned English missionary Boniface) and Childeric III was tonsured and sent to a monastery. Reports along these lines also appear, with less detail, in the Continuations to the Chronicle of Fredegar, and in a text known as the Clausula de unctione Pippini regis (the clause on the anointing of King Pippin). Each of these has periodically been dated as roughly contemporary with the events of 751, but the argument for a later date is stronger in both cases: the Continuations were most likely added to the Chronicle of Fredegar in the period 768–86, while the Clausula looks certain to have been written in the ninth century. Their composition after the kingship had been passed successfully to a second generation of Carolingians makes it highly unlikely that they could have presented an objective record of 751, even if one could be recalled. Moreover, their partisanship looks all the more striking if we compare them to texts written in Rome, which are the only ones, apart from the charters, that may be roughly contemporary. Despite the growing general interest of papal biographers in the papacy's contacts with Francia, the Life of Pope Zacharias, part of the collection of papal biographies known as the Liber pontificalis, breaks off its narrative in 749, while the collection of letters between the popes and the Carolingians, the Codex Carolinus, includes no letter between 747 and 753. It may be that the Roman authors placed no great importance on Pippin's elevation; alternatively, these apparent oversights may point to a deliberate attempt to restrict or manipulate the memory of 751. Either way, the silence from Rome casts doubt on the later version of events contained in Frankish sources, and in particular on the notion that Pippin's seizure of the kingship was sanctioned beforehand by the pope.
The Carolingian family (simplified)
- Marios Costambeys, University of Liverpool, Matthew Innes, Birkbeck College, University of London, Simon MacLean, University of St Andrews, Scotland
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- The Carolingian World
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- 05 June 2014
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- 12 May 2011, pp xx-xx
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1 - Introduction
- Marios Costambeys, University of Liverpool, Matthew Innes, Birkbeck College, University of London, Simon MacLean, University of St Andrews, Scotland
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- The Carolingian World
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- 12 May 2011, pp 1-30
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Summary
The dawn of the carolingian age
Late in the year 753, Pippin, king of the Franks, heard news that the pope had left Rome and was coming to visit him. This journey – the first time a pope had ever crossed the Alps – presented the king with both a problem and an opportunity. On the one hand, he may have known that what Pope Stephen II wanted was military protection, with all the risk and expense that that entailed, against an opponent in Italy, the king of the Lombards, whose predecessor had been Pippin's own godfather. On the other hand, the pope was just the kind of politically neutral and prestigious figure from whom Pippin could seek endorsement for the radical move he had made two years earlier, when he had usurped the throne of the Franks from the Merovingian dynasty that had held it for the previous two and a half centuries.
Neither Pippin nor Stephen quite appeciated the impact that their actions that winter would have but, in a process that typifies the problems faced by historians of this period, political significance was quickly heaped onto their meeting and within a few years the circumstances surrounding it were being intensively rewritten. Thus Stephen II's biographer, a clerk in the papal bureaucracy, reports that Pippin sent his young son Charles to meet the pope 100 miles from his destination and to escort him to the king, who knelt in homage before him. A Frankish source, on the other hand, has the pope and his attendant clergy kneeling before the king. Other Frankish sources assert that Pippin had already sought the approval of Stephen's predecessor for his usurpation; a claim apparently unknown to papal writers. It was certainly true that each could help the other. Frankish and papal sources concur that the pope anointed Pippin and his family. Pippin then secured the approval of the Frankish aristocracy and despatched campaigns in successive years which forced the Lombard king Aistulf to sue for peace. Returning home, Stephen reinforced his attachment to the Franks by granting buildings near St Peter's in Rome to the Parisian monastery of St Denis, the Frankish royal saint under whose auspices he had secured his alliance with Pippin.
4 - Inventing the Carolingian empire: politics and government, 800–840
- Marios Costambeys, University of Liverpool, Matthew Innes, Birkbeck College, University of London, Simon MacLean, University of St Andrews, Scotland
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- The Carolingian World
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- 05 June 2014
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- 12 May 2011, pp 154-222
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Summary
Introduction
Very early in the year 814, having endured a winter of fevers and pains in his side, Charlemagne took to his deathbed. Abstaining from food, as he was accustomed to do when sick, the sixty-five-year-old ruler tried to fight off his illness armed with ‘nothing more than an occasional drink’. A week later, on 28 January at 9 o'clock in the morning, he died. Charlemagne's friend and biographer Einhard tells us that without delay, the emperor's body was washed and prepared for burial. Later that same day he was placed in a late antique imperial sarcophagus obtained from Italy and interred under the west entrance of the church in his principal palace at Aachen while all present wept. To judge by a lavish lament written shortly afterwards by a monk from the Italian monastery of Bobbio, their tears were shared by mourners across the empire: ‘Francia has endured awful wounds / But never has suffered such great sorrow as now / Alas for miserable me.’
The hyperbole used to describe his people's grief should probably be taken with a pinch of salt, and serves as an index of how quickly after his death Charlemagne passed into the realms of mythical greatness. Nonetheless, people taking stock of his final achievements in the immediate aftermath of his death would probably have been inclined to dwell on three major landmarks. One was Charlemagne's most famous act, his coronation as emperor on Christmas Day 800 in Rome. This resonant event seems in retrospect to represent the high-point of his reign, setting the seal on the territory he had acquired, reinforcing his alliance with the papacy and opening a new imperial epoch in European history. Another was the winding down of the wars of expansion in the early years of the ninth century, drawing to a successful close the annual cycles of war and aggression that had characterised Frankish politics since the age of Charles Martel. Thirdly and finally, shortly before his final illness Charlemagne bequeathed the Frankish empire, secured, stabilised and ennobled by the lustre of Rome, to his last surviving son Louis (‘the Pious’) with the consent of all the leading men.
Contents
- Marios Costambeys, University of Liverpool, Matthew Innes, Birkbeck College, University of London, Simon MacLean, University of St Andrews, Scotland
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- The Carolingian World
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- 05 June 2014
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- 12 May 2011, pp vii-viii
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Bibliography
- Marios Costambeys, University of Liverpool, Matthew Innes, Birkbeck College, University of London, Simon MacLean, University of St Andrews, Scotland
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- The Carolingian World
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- 05 June 2014
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- 12 May 2011, pp 436-494
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Acknowledgements
- Marios Costambeys, University of Liverpool, Matthew Innes, Birkbeck College, University of London, Simon MacLean, University of St Andrews, Scotland
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- The Carolingian World
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- 12 May 2011, pp xiii-xiv
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The Carolingian World
- Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes, Simon MacLean
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- 05 June 2014
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- 12 May 2011
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At its height, the Carolingian empire spanned a million square kilometres of western Europe - from the English Channel to central Italy and northern Spain, and from the Atlantic to the fringes of modern Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. As the largest political unit for centuries, the empire dominated the region and left an enduring legacy for European culture. This comprehensive survey traces this great empire's history, from its origins around 700, with the rise to dominance of the Carolingian dynasty, through its expansion by ruthless military conquest and political manoeuvring in the eighth century, to the struggle to hold the empire together in the ninth. It places the complex political narrative in context, giving equal consideration to vital themes such as beliefs, peasant society, aristocratic culture and the economy. Accessibly written and authoritative, this book offers distinctive perspectives on a formative period in European history.
6 - Elite society
- Marios Costambeys, University of Liverpool, Matthew Innes, Birkbeck College, University of London, Simon MacLean, University of St Andrews, Scotland
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- The Carolingian World
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- 05 June 2014
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- 12 May 2011, pp 271-323
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Summary
Introduction
We saw in the previous chapter that it is possible to say a surprising amount about the nature and dynamics of peasant life and rural society in the Carolingian age. Yet social class is relative, and it is not possible to study the poor and the powerless without discussing their relationship with the social elite. This is especially so when dealing with a world where power depended ultimately on control over land (see Map 8), and where much of what we know about the lower orders comes to us in texts written by and for members of a landed aristocracy. Although they made up only a very small percentage of the population, wealthy aristocrats’ ability to leave a lasting mark on the written record means that they loom disproportionately large in our sources. Yet their impact on contemporary politics and society was also disproportionate, meaning that the study of elite society opens up to us a wide window onto various important aspects of the Carolingian world.
While the existence of an elite grouping that we can call aristocratic is clear from even the most perfunctory reading of the Carolingian sources, attempts to understand the workings of aristocratic society and the nature of aristocratic power have consistently proved controversial. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, historical research concentrated on the formal identification of this elite, focussing on questions of its origins, continuity, and definition, and as a result anxiously debating the appropriateness or not of the terminology of ‘nobility’ and ‘aristocracy’. Such scholarship privileged certain questions: what was the relationship between early medieval elites and their predecessors, the ruling classes of the Roman empire and its barbarian neighbours? What effect did the rise and then fall of the Carolingians have on the great families of the Frankish world? To what extent did these families form a closed, separate caste, possessing a special legal status and even rights to rule which were in origin independent of kings? And to what extent did they survive the demise of the Carolingians with their social position intact? These issues made sense in a Europe where the fabric of the ancien régime, with its formal structures of noble privilege, was still fresh in the memory.
Illustrations
- Marios Costambeys, University of Liverpool, Matthew Innes, Birkbeck College, University of London, Simon MacLean, University of St Andrews, Scotland
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- The Carolingian World
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3 - Belief and culture
- Marios Costambeys, University of Liverpool, Matthew Innes, Birkbeck College, University of London, Simon MacLean, University of St Andrews, Scotland
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Summary
In the first two chapters we have made regular references to the Christian character of the Frankish court, which acted as a powerful patron associated with the founding of monasteries, the patronage of holy men and intellectuals, and the production and standardisation of religious texts. Well before the end of the eighth century, where we left Charlemagne demanding comprehensive oaths of loyalty from his elite male subjects, and indeed before the anointing of 753–4, kingship itself was conceived as an office with religious responsibilities. Christianity was part of the very identity of elite Franks, who increasingly came to see themselves as a people chosen by God, and thus to define themselves in distinction to the non- and imperfectly Christian peoples that surrounded them. These ideologies played a part in the Franks’ justifications to each other and to themselves of their conquests. As victorious Carolingian armies withdrew they were often – as we have seen – replaced by missionaries, charged with winning the hearts and souls of the conquered, and with establishing their obedience to the Frankish Church (and, therefore, empire). Even if we find it to be outlandish or distasteful, we should not be surprised that Frankish kings thought themselves to have a moral responsibility to save the souls of those under their dominion, nor should we write this off as moral posturing designed to justify territorial expansion – after all, given the long decades of virtually unblemished military success, how could they not believe they were doing God's work? These themes represent central aspects of Carolingian politics and society which have been touched on earlier in this book, but which take centre stage in this chapter – here we hope to explain the mentalities and intellectual attitudes that informed the actions of those involved in the high politics of the previous chapter.
Yet placing Carolingian Christianity under the spotlight complicates matters more than one might expect. The closer we look at the concepts of religion, paganism, the Church, and Christianity itself, as they operated in early medieval Europe, the more they start to fall apart under our gaze. By placing Carolingian Christianity in a broad context, the chapter is therefore intended to shake the foundations of some commonly held modern assumptions about the early Middle Ages, as well as to offer some reorientation. The discussion is divided into three main sections: the problem of Christianisation; the problem of sin; and the role in society of Christian kingship and learning. But to understand the place of these phenomena in eighth- and ninth-century Europe, we must first define our terms of reference, and ask what we mean when we talk about paganism, Christianity and the Church. We can begin exploring these questions by visiting the Carolingian court itself.
Map 1 - Europe (relief)
- Marios Costambeys, University of Liverpool, Matthew Innes, Birkbeck College, University of London, Simon MacLean, University of St Andrews, Scotland
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- The Carolingian World
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