by Simon Winder
CHAPTER TWO
The split inheritance » Margraves, landgraves, dukes and counts » Imperial grandeur and decay » Boulogne boy makes good » The Cistercians
The split inheritance
In 2015 an amazingly beautiful Gospel was put up for auction. It is not an elaborate book and is clearly designed for use rather than ostentation. There are some two hundred pages of immaculately written text with some letters in red or green ink. It was created either in Metz or a monastery in Alsace before 835. It had a picturesque fate as one of the many books stolen by the great (in his way) nineteenth-century book thief Guglielmo Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja, who used his position as Inspector of French Libraries to purloin, cut up and sell medieval manuscripts to fund an enjoyable lifestyle. His antics have caused bibliographic mayhem ever since. The Gospel seems to have been lifted from a Dominican monastery, although it may have had further adventures since the French Revolution and was sold intact at Sotheby’s in 1859. In 2015 it was sold for three million dollars.
The Gospel is thought to have belonged to Teutberga, one of the great wronged women of the ninth century and someone who stands at the heart of the story of Lotharingia. As mentioned at the beginning of the comparatively cheap book you are currently reading, Lotharingia (initially known as Middle Francia) emerged from the manoeuvres of Charlemagne’s grandsons. We probably have more grounds for regretting the fall of the old empire than its inhabitants did. Historians love large political units because they seem more glamorous, but there is no reason to think that an individual living under the control of a firm-but-fair local lord would have had a better or worse time. In any event, after the Treaty of Verdun of 843 had created West Francia (under Charles the Bald), Middle Francia (under Lothair I) and East Francia (under Louis the German) this proved a permanent if highly unstable set of boundaries until Napoleon scooped the pool some centuries later.
Middle Francia immediately fell into difficulties. Lothair I was the eldest of the three brothers and had once hoped to maintain the old empire whole. In his frantic efforts to ward off his siblings he had even roped in the much contested group called the Stellingabund – the descendants of forcibly converted Saxons, whose rebellion (ferociously put down by Louis the German) based in Speyer was perhaps the last gasp of a memory of paganism in the west. As usual, the records are annoyingly unclear. The damage done by the civil war was made far worse by Viking raids in the north and Saracen ones in the south. Following the Treaty of Verdun, Lothair ruled just Middle Francia, racing back and forth trying to deal both with these predators and with further internal rebellions. When he died the southern reaches of his kingdom (Provence and northern Italy) were split off and disappear from this story, except for the leitmotif of the imperial relationship with the Pope, and the intermittent and generally ruinous attempts by various later emperors to impose themselves on the almost unbelievably annoying and ornery Italian city states.
Lothair’s son, Lothair II, took over the new, smaller Middle Francia and it has been known ever since as Lotharingia after him. Teutberga was married to Lothair II (a political match insisted on by his father) and when she was not reading her attractive Gospels she was in the terrible position of not providing an heir, for reasons we have no knowledge of. As a result the new Lothair spent his entire reign twisting and turning to dispose of Teutberga in favour of his mistress Waldrada. There was simply no basis for anybody to agree to this – it was illegal and an annulment would besmirch the Church from the Pope down. His uncles in West Francia and East Francia expressed cheerful concern, both knowing that a childless dead Lothair would offer interesting possibilities for their own expansion. Lothair called his court together, accused Teutberga of every sexual wrongdoing possible and subjected her to trial by ordeal. A stone was put at the bottom of a pot of boiling water and her champion had to pluck it out – if his cooked hand festered then she was guilty. In scenes of operatic excitement (and with Lothair presumably quite confident about what boiling water would do to a hand) the queen’s champion plucked out the stone and his hand was unmarked. What would anyone give to have been in that strongly smelling throng of courtly onlookers and join in the general gasp of surprise and consternation! Lothair’s reign never really recovered – God had shown his accusations to be lies and Teutberga was faultless. There then followed a series of threats and invasions, helped by his friendly East Francian uncle, Louis the German, who played his cards brilliantly – pretending to be shocked by Lothair’s predicament while helping him to burn his bridges with everybody else. Ultimately Lothair went to Rome to appeal to the new Pope (the old one having in a total rage excommunicated all the members of the Rhineland church hierarchy who had taken Lothair’s side) but died of fever on the way back. Teutberga then withdrew to a convent in Metz, presumably with her Gospels.
Teutberga’s terrible situation raised two issues which would dog Western Europe for centuries. The attempts by the Pope to impose his authority on the divorce marked a major ramping up in his power and prestige and were the origin of the endless, violent disputes between future emperors and popes which, thank goodness, fall outside the scope of this book. Lothair did have a child with Waldrada, Hugh, and he was passed over as Lothair’s successor because he was illegitimate – a distinction which had not on the whole been important before. Hugh had a rackety and mean-minded career ahead of him, conniving and murdering until he ended up blinded by Charles the Fat and imprisoned in the abbey of Prüm, where his dad was buried.
With Lothair’s death his uncles moved in and split Lotharingia between them, Louis the German taking the lion’s share. A further fix was made at the Treaty of Ribemont in 880 between their heirs. This was in every way the primal act – most of Lotharingia, from what became Holland down to Burgundy, became attached to East Francia, which would stabilize as the Holy Roman Empire. But cutting up the cake in such a clumsy way made it quite plausible for the ruler of West Francia, the future France, to see rich crumbs and bits of icing that he might nonetheless reach for. Some of the borders established at Ribemont had astonishing longevity. The line of the Scheldt River in Flanders meant that French sovereignty would exist to the west and Imperial sovereignty to the east, a distinction that drove mad many generations of would-be conquerors and which hog-tied the theoretically powerful Counts of Flanders just as much as it did their rich but perennially disloyal and tiresome cities of Bruges and Ghent.
Ribemont also enshrined the incredibly headachy issue of the different Burgundies, with Lower Burgundy falling to the entertainingly named Boso, nephew to the unhappy Teutberga. One historian has counted fifteen different entities over the centuries called ‘Burgundy’ – post-Ribemont there were four: Boso’s Upper Burgundy, based around Lake Geneva and Lake Neuchâtel and taking in a bit of what is now Alpine northern Italy; Lower Burgundy, which was essentially a giant version of Provence; the Duchy of Burgundy, which was linked to West Francia (with its principal town of Dijon); and the County of Burgundy (a bigger version of the future Franche-Comté – the ‘free county’ – with its principal town of Dole), which was Imperial territory. In practical terms it is only the distinction between the Duchy and the County that will plague readers until chapter six.
The authority issues made particularly vivid by Lothair would become key to Lotharingia’s future. The emerging French state would prove able, albeit with innumerable setbacks, to impose its will on most of the counties and duchies of West Francia. The Holy Roman Empire (East Francia) never achieved this. Lotharingia’s landscape was a mass of special requirements, legal loopholes and oddities. Neither West nor East Francia were ever aiming to create a unified state of a kind we flatter ourselves we live in today, but over the long term, as the western kingdom came to focus on Paris, there was a logic to trying to subordinate as many surrounding territories as feasible to the royal will.
The eastern empire was structured differently, with no chief city. The Emperor wandered from palace to palace and different territories made diffe
rent arrangements depending on the ebb and flow of emergencies and personalities. One striking little feature of Xanten today, for example, is that it still has a walled section in its centre called ‘The Immunity’, in which the town’s clerical rulers organized their own business and were not answerable to the Imperial authorities. These immunities were scattered everywhere, honeycombing jurisdictions and creating a parallel ecclesiastical world secular rulers could not do much about – from small monasteries to entire territories along the Rhine, such as the Archbishoprics of Trier (ruler of towns such as Koblenz) and Cologne. Just to wrap this issue up once and for all, in the following centuries special cities were able to do deals with the Emperor to buy themselves out – in return for specific commitments of money and troops they could become Free Imperial Cities. In Lotharingia these were places which took over responsibility for their own legal systems, such as Colmar and Mulhouse, or which managed to wriggle out from ecclesiastical control, such as Basle and Strasbourg.
The result of all this was a map which looked like a jigsaw a dog had tried to swallow and then thrown up. It has nothing in common with the evenly smoothed systems of England or the United States. In both these countries a ‘county’ was a very simple local administrative unit, albeit with seemingly eccentric boundaries in many English cases. But within Lotharingia ‘county’ could mean something ranging from the very grand (the County of Holland; the County of the Mark) to a soggy dot (the County of Bentheim) and being count in these places could either be a very serious role or a bit of a joke. Dukedoms were more senior in the hierarchy, but did not necessarily imply more significant territories: the Duke of Bar (on the border with France) or of Fürstenburg (in the Black Forest) had many fewer resources than the major counts.
But that is probably enough obscurantism for one section – the book can return to the western exclaves of the Duke of Württemberg later on. Sticking to the post-Treaty of Ribemont world of 880, this was the last partition of what was still recognizably Charlemagne’s inheritance. It enshrined Lotharingia – Middle Francia – as a huge zone which both the French king and German king could equally lay dynastic claim to. The treaty was signed by Louis III for West Francia and Louis III for East Francia, respectively great-great-grandson and great-grandson of Charlemagne, each named after Charlemagne’s first successor Louis I ‘the Pious’. Each twist and turn over the coming centuries, as the digits piled up after each further French Louis, would generate much of Western history.
Margraves, landgraves, dukes and counts
It is hard to count the wars that irrupt over the centuries across the ragged line which divided the Empire and France. To describe them all would be numbing to write about and worse to read – specific occasions are well worth discussing, but the general ins and outs of every kingdom, dukedom and county are not. It seems a bit more interesting to think more broadly about the specific tensions that created such a world.
Both France and the Empire had different variants on the same issues of who should be in charge and who should do as they were told. This fluctuation was in itself enough repeatedly to cause mayhem. We have to make a huge effort to take old maps as seriously as new, and not to think of the old ones as mere proto-versions of the more rational current ones. I will try not to make this point again, but Europe’s values, behaviour and ideology in the period 1914–45 make it impossible for us to be patronizing about any earlier period’s bloodthirstiness, quests for revenge, irrationality. Alternatively, as it sinks into the popular conscience more clearly, the basis on which Europeans maintained their own later overseas empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries makes it equally difficult for us to tut-tut about earlier attitudes within Europe towards peasants or non-Christians or any specific group of people who were destroyed because they were in the way.
We still all agree to shudder at the thought of the Mongols, but we have ourselves managed to invade whole continents, kill most of the inhabitants and then entirely repopulate them, to a degree which the Mongols could only dream of. The spread of Christianity eastwards across Europe was achieved over hundreds of years and was achieved by vast resources being drained from France and the Empire. We all instinctively when looking at maps of Otto the Great, the Teutonic Knights and so on follow their route from left to right, putting our brains and sensibilities in their baggage trains, but it is just as interesting an exercise to think of oneself as on the receiving end and see it all from the viewpoint of one of the vanquished. I don’t mean this in a particularly hand-wringing way – as a species we seem to value fighting almost as much as we enjoy eating – but there is a tiresome historical narrative where both the writer and the reader mentally become best friends with whoever winds up winning. There is also nationalism of a kind which is patently silly. English enthusiasm for the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo is still valid as we still palpably live in a post-Waterloo world, however many twists and turns since. But there must have been a point at which we rightly became merely mildly interested about, say, the Battle of Agincourt, particularly as we choose to know nothing at all about, say, the Battles of Formigny and Castillon, which threw the English out of France.
As discussed earlier, Charlemagne’s inheritors had in West Francia and East Francia created two opposing blocs and in Lotharingia an intermediate bloc linked to East Francia. But Lotharingia was always festooned in legalistic special pleading of a kind that gladdened the hearts of acquisition-minded rulers in West Francia. All the rulers, both large and small, had an equal, increasingly ancient sense of legitimacy. All were potentially distractable by forces outside the bounds of the old Empire (Spain, England, Poland, Italy) but all were keen to gain advantages against each other. At some points Lotharingia appears to be held underwater so long that it must surely drown, but then it bobs up again and ruins everyone’s plans. Luxembourg’s continuing existence in the twenty-first century as effectively a dynastic and territorial coelacanth is a simply astonishing instance of Lotharingian persistence. So many proud conquerors have held Luxembourg’s huge fortress system: but they all, every one, went home.
The principal job of each community across Europe has always been to feed itself successfully and provide security for its inhabitants. In the indeterminate past it was worked out that associations of such communities did this more effectively. Even at the heart of the so-called Dark Ages these networks were so sophisticated that they were breathing in materials from many hundreds of miles away and breathing out their own products. The Treasury of Maastricht includes extraordinarily ancient pieces of cloth from ‘Dark Age’ Central Asia, Byzantium and Egypt, surviving because they had once wrapped saints’ relics. These are pretty and sophisticated in ways which are a confusing reminder that large parts of the world were not ‘Dark’ at that time, including Maastricht. Sometimes long-distance trade would be interrupted – by raiders, floods, some switch in technology or a forced or otherwise change in allegiance – or trade would go up or down according to the amounts of money in circulation. But it was always elaborate, requiring cooperation, security and broader forces of credit than those of just one isolated town.
The problem has always been the seemingly simple but in practice super-vexed issue of who should most benefit from any specific association. Everybody always assumes that the disappearance of the Roman Empire was a universal disaster, but it could be that for many communities, no longer having to shell out huge taxes and contribute to legions, palaces and the high life in Italy was a fair deal. A great plus must have been no longer having to pretend to like the horrible Roman fermented ‘fish sauce’. Experts always claim that the empty clay fish sauce pots that litter the bottom of the Rhine can be dated to show there was a point when trade within the Empire seized up, but it seems just as likely that as soon as the last stern-faced legionary left, the locals joyfully chucked the whole lot off the docks.
In the post-Roman centuries the downward drift in the economy and occasional total erasures by Goths, Saracens, etc. were obviousl
y regrettable, but sufficiently spaced out to be lived with. Many towns from Ghent down to Basle and Konstanz show no sign of ever being unoccupied – they just seem to have kept going, no more nor less vividly for their inhabitants, but invisibly to us through the lack of surviving records. One unhelpful side effect of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century obsession with the Roman Empire was that archaeologists tended – trembling with anticipation and imagining the clatter of chariots across the forum of downtown Noviomagus (Nijmegen) – to chuck away every building layer between the present and the excitement of getting at some Roman heating system or floor mosaic (featuring a dolphin – as usual), with the result that many centuries of dense Frankish and medieval history ended up as landfill without anybody noticing.
Much of the early medieval economy was devoted to the process of staying alive, but that has always been true in almost all of human history in almost all places, with a simple circulation between those who made ploughs and those who used them, or those who churned butter and those who owned chickens. It is amazing the speed at which economies become complicated, even in a fairly small town, and so the need for coins as a symbol of equivalent value. And then, with equal rapidity, some form of external authority is required to guarantee the purity of those coins over longer distances.