The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

by Chris Wickham

  Not all royal dependants in the provinces were from great families like this. The Carolingians made considerable use of royal vassals, not all of whom were rich, but all of whom had particularly close ceremonial ties to the kings, in rituals of personalized oath-swearing and homage. These could be local men, called to the palace and the army, or else aristocrats, both rich and middling, brought in from outside; either way, they are invoked in legislation as the sort of men kings could particularly rely on. (Aristocrats had, and relied on, their own vassals as well.) Vassalage was the lineal successor of the personal fidelity of the Merovingian world and of Lombard Italy; what was new about it was once again that vassals might be moved around. It is this movement of men, of families, which marks the early Carolingians out from their predecessors.

  The kings also, systematically, sent representatives to the provinces. These representatives, missi, were the king’s eyes and ears. They had Merovingian and especially Lombard antecedents too, but Charlemagne regularized them, and the Frankish heartland was in 802 divided into missatica, territories in which pairs of missi, a count and a bishop, regularly toured, to hear appeals against local counts and others. Italy and most of the other conquered lands had missi of their own. Missi were not often outsiders to their territory - local archbishops were popular missi, for example - but they again owed loyalty and responsibility directly to the king, to whom they were expected regularly to report, in writing if necessary. We have some of the court cases in which they held local officials to account, such as the 804 case at Rizana in Istria in which three missi heard the complaints of 172 local leaders against Duke John of Istria’s trampling of local customs; John apologized, and the customs seem to have been restored. It would be wrong to see missi and their territories as fully institutionalized, but kings certainly regarded them as normal until late in the ninth century, except, it seems, in East Francia. And we certainly have chance-surviving evidence of regular written communication, to the provinces and back again, whether through people called missi or other officials, such as the instruction from Hetti archbishop of Trier (as missus) to the bishop of Toul in 817 telling him to mobilize against the revolt of King Bernard of Italy, that very day; or the letters Louis the Pious sent in 832 to tell two vassals to stand by as messengers in case his missus or his count needed to send a message to the emperor; or the demand made by Charles the Bald to his churchmen in 845 for systematic information about his monasteries, which Abbot Lupus of Ferrières sought actively to fulfil; or the lists of men who swore fidelity to Charles the Bald at Reims in 854, attached to a copy of a capitulary by Archbishop Hincmar, who was probably himself the local missus. Men must have been moving around the entire time, looking for the king/emperor, or sometimes, the queen (this was not straightforward, for they moved about too), and informing them; Hincmar indeed supposes in On the Organization of the Palace that receiving them was a major royal task. (Aristocrats and bishops had their own communications networks, to keep abreast of politics, which presumably filled the roads still more.) Without this presumption of regular and detailed communication, again not new but greatly extended, running the empire would not have been possible.

  Did this complex network of instructions and accountability actually work? There are two views. One is that the complexity and flexibility of the Carolingian administration was self-supporting. The kings and their advisers were constantly innovating and retouching, and could move quickly; Louis the Pious’s muster against Bernard in 817, for example, was so fast that it caught the rebel entirely by surprise. The ‘system’ of the capitulary legislation or of Hincmar’s On the Organization of the Palace was more flexible in reality, and that was a strength, for it could be moulded to fit the diversity of the provinces. And the centrality of the royal court (or, after 840, courts) remained undiminished, as all political leaders or would-be leaders continued to circle around kings into the 880s, imbibing as they did the elaborately moralized programme of Carolingian correctio; there is good evidence for aristocratic literacy and even book-buying, which backs this argument up. This was further extended into the provinces thanks to the network of rich royal monasteries, from Corbie in modern northern France to St. Gallen and Reichenau in modern southern Germany and on into Italy, and the even denser network of cathedral communities, many of which had extensive libraries, and trained intellectuals who could and did debate about theology and politics until the end of the ninth century, with effects on political practice in some cases.

  The other view is that this was all a sham. The aristocracy, secular and ecclesiastical alike, were corrupt and out for themselves, from top to bottom. Theodulf of Orléans wrote a poem around 800 against (among other things) judicial corruption, which would have been incomprehensible to the people of his south French missaticum, given the degree to which litigants apparently pressed gifts on him; many of the abuses missi are recorded as correcting were in fact the oppressive acts of other missi; Adalard of Corbie’s younger brother Wala (d. 836), when a missus for Italy in the 820s, uncovered an elaborate cover-up of the expropriation and later murder of a widow which stretched from top to bottom in the Italian kingdom; Matfrid count of Orléans, one of the major court figures of the 820s, was criticized in about 827 by Agobard of Lyon for providing ‘a wall’ between the emperor and criminals, ‘to protect them from correctio’; there are plenty of other examples of aristocratic bad behaviour from the period, which was in fact also marked by a notable oppression of the poor, as capitularies themselves tell us. As for the imperial project, it was already disintegrating in the 830s and was only fully maintained after that by Charles the Bald and his adviser Hincmar; most other Carolingians soon moved towards the rougher realpolitik of the tenth century. In any case, the ambition of Carolingian reform legislation betrayed its hopeless naivety, and its constant repetition betrayed its failure. (Maybe this was a good thing, Michael Wallace-Hadrill thought, writing in an otherwise sympathetic account: ‘had [Hincmar’s programme] worked out, Carolingian society would have been a police-state.’) The Carolingians were unusual only in their rhetoric, and in their military success, which petered out in the ninth century, leaving the empire open to civil war and demoralizing (because unremunerative) defence against external attack.

  The interest of the Carolingian period lies in the fact that both of these views are largely accurate. Aristocrats are always violent, corrupt and greedy, but they were at least aware of the ideology of public responsibility in this period, and presumably - sometimes, as with Dhuoda, demonstrably - linked it to their desire for personal salvation after death, which they certainly always also possessed. The state was ramshackle and far too large for the governmental technologies of the period, but it is, all the same, constantly striking how often it makes its presence felt even in resolutely local document collections. Throughout the ninth century, we have examples of peasants appealing to public courts against their lords, in Italy, Francia, Septimania (modern Languedoc), over personal status, rent levels or seized lands; they almost always lost, but the fact that they bothered to do so at all, in a political system so obviously run by the aristocracy, implies that they knew the system could at least sometimes work as it was supposed to, and such cases are much rarer later. There was a constant dialectic between the state, with its immense patronage powers, and local societies, throughout almost the whole empire (royal power fell back only at the edges, like eastern Bavaria, Spoleto or Catalonia). Local powers had to pay attention to kings, and accept their political guidelines, including whatever ideological programmes they had, not least because kings were also dangerous, and by no means did all the things their own programmes enjoined. We shall explore these contradictions, and their ironies, further in this chapter and the next.

  Charlemagne died in 814, and Louis the Pious, who had been crowned emperor by his father the year before, immediately marched north to Aachen from his sub-kingdom in Aquitaine to take over. He represented himself as a new broom, and summarily expelled his sisters, led by Berth
a, from the palace, where they had been acting as a sort of collective queen for their father since his last wife died in 800. The imagery of Louis’s early years stresses his moralism, as opposed to the sexual licence of his father’s reign; Charlemagne had had a string of mistresses up to his death, and his daughters, whom he would not allow to marry, had lovers too - Bertha’s was the court scholar Angilbert, by whom she was the mother of the historian Nithard. Louis’s own sex life, once he became an adult, was in fact as far as we know restricted to the marriage bed, unlike most male Carolingians, but his criticism of the sexual immorality of the palace (the ideal moral centre of the polity, thus very vulnerable to such criticism, as we shall see in the next chapter) was a standard part of ninth-century political rhetoric, and would be applied back to Louis’s own court in the 830s. Louis was committed to monastic reform, and his first substantial political initiative was two reform councils at Aachen in 816-17, which revised the Rule of Benedict of Nursia and extended it to all the monasteries of the empire. In 817 he also set out how the empire would be divided at his death between his three sons, which excluded from the succession Bernard, son of his brother Pippin, who was already king of Italy (812-17); Bernard unsurprisingly revolted, with the support of not a few Frankish magnates (including Theodulf of Orléans), but, as we have seen, failed. He was tried in 818 and condemned to death, but, following the common Carolingian pattern, this sentence was commuted to blinding, from which however he died anyway.

  After 818, Louis understandably had little opposition for some time, and the next decade can be seen as the apogee of Carolingian self-confidence. Wars were small-scale by now, and the emperor’s attention was focused on an elaborate and complex court politics in Aachen, marked by regular embassies from different neighbours, another dense set of capitularies (many of them collected by Ansegis in 827), and an administrative reordering under the arch-chancellor Helisachar (814-30), who had come with Louis from Aquitaine, and the arch-chaplain Hilduin, abbot of Saint-Denis and four other monasteries (819-30). The emperor’s control of court ritual was marked above all by his decision in the 822 general assembly at Attigny to perform a public penance for the death of Bernard, imitating Theodosius I’s penance of 390, according to one of his biographers. At the same time, he called back the (male) relatives he had exiled from court, notably his cousins and possible rivals Adalard and Wala; Carolingian family reconciliation was to be complete.

  The calm of the 820s was, however, broken abruptly in 829-30. Court factions were crystallizing around, on the one side, Louis’s oldest son Lothar (817-55), already emperor (since 824) but with a political remit confined to Italy, and, on the other, Louis’s second wife Judith and her family. In 828 Lothar’s father-in-law Hugh count of Tours and his associate Matfrid of Orléans had lost their offices. In 829 Bernard of Septimania, count of Barcelona, was brought in as chamberlain, an office traditionally very close to the queen, and was for a few months regarded as ‘second to the king’; he was (for unclear reasons) a highly controversial figure, however, and by 830 was accused of adultery with Judith. Lothar gained the support of his brothers Pippin king of Aquitaine (817-38) and Louis king of Bavaria (817-76) to set in motion in April 830 a quiet coup, significantly also supported by the old guard of the court, Helisachar, Hilduin and Wala. Bernard fled and Judith was temporarily exiled, until Louis the Pious regained control in October and brought Judith (but not Bernard) back. In 833 tensions rose again, and much the same occurred; this time, the emperor Louis marched with an army to meet Lothar and his brothers, who were joined by Pope Gregory IV, in Alsace. At the meeting-point, later called the ‘Field of Lies’, Louis’s army melted away, joining Lothar, and Louis was deposed in favour of Lothar. This time his public penance was not voluntary; the best he could do was refuse to take monastic vows when he was confined in Saint-Denis. But, as in 830, Lothar and his brothers fell out - Lothar, like his father, was too clearly committed to being the dominant Carolingian - and Louis was restored in 834. He was ceremonially re-crowned at Metz in 835, and re-established himself, confining Lothar to Italy again, though Louis did not take violent revenge on any of Lothar’s supporters (they merely lost their lands and offices north of the Alps, and some of them, such as Hilduin, soon got them back). Louis then remained in control until his death in 840.

  The events of 830-34 certainly greatly disrupted the balances of imperial government and the patronage networks of the Carolingian lands. They have also been typically seen until very recently as a sign of imminent Carolingian breakdown, perhaps fuelled by aristocratic hostility, and also as a sign of the weakness of Louis ‘the Pious’ himself. Louis was not, however, either pliable or accommodating, any more than his sons were - hence, indeed, the fact that the uprising occurred twice; and aristocratic reactions to the crisis show alarm rather than any sense of a new opportunity. Einhard (d. 840), by now in retirement in his monastery of Seligenstadt near Frankfurt, although a supporter of Louis (he preserved in his letter collection a very rude letter to Lothar, written in 830), prudently fell ill during both crisis moments, but then was worried that this might be taken the wrong way by the kings, and wrote to friends at court to ask them to ensure that his loyalty was recognized, by Louis the Pious, but also by Louis of Bavaria (whose power-base was close to Seligenstadt), and even by Lothar; one letter to a dependant in 833 asks him to give the ‘customary gifts’ to the temporarily victorious Lothar, and to report back on how Lothar received them. Einhard was, thanks to his long-standing palace connections, a major local patron and political intermediary, and it is clear in his letters of these years how much mediation would need to be done in a period of sharp political swings, for the kings could and did remove the benefices of the less than fully loyal. So Einhard in late 833 wrote to a friend asking him to intercede with Lothar for a certain Frumold, who had been given a benefice near Geneva by Charlemagne but was too ill to travel to court and commend himself to the new ruler (Geneva was a long way from Seligenstadt; Einhard’s patronage stretched widely); or again, around the same time, to another courtier who might, he hoped, persuade Lothar to let an aristocrat and his brother hold benefices jointly in the kingdoms of both Lothar and Louis of Bavaria. That Einhard kept these letters indicates that they were normal, and also, perhaps, successful: his younger contemporary the poet Walahfrid Strabo (d. 849) wrote a prologue to Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne noting rather wryly how well the author had kept ‘a certain remarkable and divinely inspired distance’ from the crises of Louis’s reign. This was unlike Walahfrid himself, in fact, who was exiled from his monastery of Reichenau by Louis of Bavaria in 839-42; Walahfrid is thus doubly a witness to how hard it was to avoid trouble in the 830s. This was not a crisis period which magnates would easily seek to exploit.

  It is probably best to see the crises of the 830s as a product of two underlying problems, a struggle between court factions, and the normal tensions any ruling Carolingian had with adult sons itching to succeed. This confluence was only exacerbated by arguments over theology and political ethics, and the more mundane fact that Judith gave Louis a fourth son, Charles, in 823, who would have to be fitted somewhere into the partitioned empire (he was given Alemannia in 829, a politically tangential area, but in a significant year - Nithard later thought that this was the excuse for Lothar’s first rebellion). It has at least to be said that Louis’s father Charlemagne managed his sons better, and so did Louis’s own sons: Lothar, Louis and Charles each weathered the rivalries of their adult sons without ever losing the initiative. Misjudgements in the crucial years around 830 seem to have marred Louis the Pious’s standard toughness. After Louis’s death in 840, however, it is not hard to see how his heirs fell into civil war. Pippin of Aquitaine had died in 838, allowing Louis to substitute Charles as his heir in the western part of the empire (at the expense of Pippin’s son Pippin the Younger), which ought to have made things easier; but Charles ‘the Bald’ and Louis ‘the German’, as historians from now on call them, were not at all incline
d to let Lothar have the leading role which he regarded as his right. It was because of this that civil war ensued in 841-2. A bloody but inconclusive battle at Fontenoy in 841 scared the Frankish magnates, however - another sign that they were by no means ready to exploit crisis - and Lothar, driven out of Aachen in 842, agreed peace; the empire was divided again, rather carefully, at the Treaty of Verdun in 843. Charles took West Francia (including Aquitaine), Louis East Francia (including Bavaria, Alemannia and Saxony), Lothar the lands around Aachen, Burgundy, Provence and Italy. The Frankish heartland, where royal estates were thickest, was divided neatly into three; each brother got one of the ‘royal landscapes’, and was in addition assigned the outlying kingdom in which he was strongest. The fact that the division looks idiotic on a map, much as Merovingian divisions often had, underlines the extent to which all three brothers still saw the empire as a common project; it perhaps also shows that none of the parties really thought it would be permanent. It was permanent, however. The only major exception was the lands around Aachen, named Lotharingia after Lothar’s son Lothar II (855-69) who inherited them, which were divided between Charles and Louis at Lothar II’s death. (Aachen became marginalized after that, as a borderland; in the tenth century Lotharingia was absorbed into East Francia.) Verdun should not be overstated as a dividing point all the same. We know that West Francia eventually became ‘France’, East Francia became ‘Germany’, but contemporaries did not, and the imagery of a single Francia under several rulers survived until after 1000, as we shall see in Chapter 18.