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

by Chris Wickham

  The detail of papal authority vis-à-vis the Franks fluctuated. Over- all, the Carolingians did not care what the popes thought, any more than the Merovingians had done, as long as they maintained their legitimization of Carolingian power, which was not in doubt. Papal hostility to Iconoclasm, for example, had no effect whatsoever over the Alps. And the Franks could easily look down on Roman intrigue, given that they did not understand its complexity. (Admittedly, sometimes they were right, as in the gothic events of Christmas 896, when the corpse of Pope Formosus (891-6) was dug up by his enemy and successor Stephen VI and put on trial; but that horrified the Romans, too - Stephen did not survive another year. Normally, Roman violence to losers had its own stately logic.) But the intensity of the Carolingian theoretical debates of the second quarter of the ninth century, and the perpetual pacing of church politics through appeals to episcopal councils, gave the popes a new prominence as the final court of appeal in the Latin church. Nicholas I in particular found that his judgement was sought, for example over episcopal depositions, or in marriage cases (as we shall see in a moment), and also over theological issues - Gottschalk appealed to him after Tusey for example, though Nicholas died before he heard the case. In return, Nicholas, in his conflicts with the Byzantines over the legitimacy of Patriarch Photios and the conversion of Bulgaria (above, Chapter 13), which were international problems specific to Rome, given its continuing links with the eastern patriarchates, sought and obtained the support of Hincmar and other Frankish bishops, who even wrote treatises for him. Nicholas used the legal superiority of the papal office to considerable effect, in a Carolingian world attuned to such issues. His successors did not, however, at least not so effectively. John VIII sought to make emperors after the death of Louis II in 875 (he would have liked to persuade them to fight Arabs in the south of Italy), but choosing them, as opposed to crowning them, was out of his control. When the Carolingian project receded at the end of the century, the international standing of the papacy lost force again, even if the pope’s legal powers remained.

  All these different trends converged in the great querelle over Lothar II’s divorce from Theutberga, in 857-69. This ought to have been simple. Lothar had married Theutberga, from the prominent aristocratic family of the ‘Bosonids’, in 855 but soon turned against her and sought in 857 to return to his former partner Waldrada, with whom he had had a son, Hugh. Marriage law was tightening up in the ninth century, however; Charlemagne could put away a wife, but Lothar had to have reasons. He came up with the claim that Theutberga had had anal sex with her brother Hubert, had become pregnant as a result (impossibly, of course; his supporters invoked witchcraft), and had aborted the foetus: incest, sodomy and infanticide all at once. Theutberga proved her innocence in an ordeal in 858, but Lothar staged a show trial at a council in Aachen in 860, where she was forced to confess her guilt and retire to a monastery. This was carefully ratified at a synod in 862, in which Waldrada was proclaimed queen; papal legates agreed at Metz the following year, where Theutberga confessed again; Lothar’s two senior archbishops, Gunther of Cologne and Theutgaud of Trier, then took the case to Rome for final ratification in 863. But Nicholas I refused to support them; in a coup de théâtre, he annulled the synod of Metz, demanded that Lothar take Theutberga back, and deposed the two archbishops themselves. Lothar never got his marriage dissolved, and died of fever in 869 in Italy, where he and his brother Louis II of Italy were trying to ‘persuade’ Nicholas’s perhaps more pliable successor Hadrian II (867-72) to change the judgement.

  The malignly inventive humiliation Lothar and his advisers devised for Theutberga was so extreme that it is hard not to be pleased at its failure. That apart, however, the case had important implications. First, it involved realpolitik: if Lothar had no legitimate male heir, other Carolingians would take over Lotharingia, and indeed in 869-70 his uncles Charles the Bald and Louis the German did just that. Unsurprisingly, the latter supported Theutberga; Charles took her and her brother in, and Hincmar, as his major theorist, wrote a long tract in her favour, whereas Lotharingian bishops wrote tracts against her. But, once again, there were issues of principle: of the inviolability of marriage; of the finality of a successful ordeal (Hincmar and Nicholas thought the case should have stopped in 858); of the disaster for the body politic if a queen confessed such misdeeds (Lothar’s supporter Adventius bishop of Metz argued that Theutberga’s confession alone was enough to disbar her as queen); of the disaster for the body politic if a king was weak enough to get into this kind of marriage difficulty in the first place; and of the rights of the pope as supreme judge in the West. Except the last, these were all issues that had been explicit or implicit in Carolingian theorizing in recent decades, and, as in the 830s crisis, or as with Amalarius, it was the theoretical issues which were at the front of the debate. And this time, it was theory which won; Nicholas I had no axe to grind over who should succeed in Lotharingia, but his violent condemnation of Lothar (who, he correctly said, had misused two women, not one), his synod and his archbishops, could not, in the political environment of the 860s, be got around. No one in Francia had expected this; Nicholas was genuinely trying to exert a real authority over at least the sectors of Frankish politics which came into an ecclesiastical remit, and this, as we have seen, was a lot. Gunther of Cologne was outraged, and we have the text of his rejection of Nicholas’s ‘abusive sentence . . . delivered against us without justice or reason and against the canonical laws’. Hincmar had no sympathy with Gunther, but when Nicholas followed this up in 865 with disrespectful letters to Charles and Louis and also, in a separate case, reversed the deposition of a bishop of Soissons by senior Frankish prelates including Hincmar, the tone of his account changes substantially too. But the Frankish élite were too committed to correct legal procedure by now, so, when an obstinate pope stuck to legal decisions which the Franks themselves had asked for, they were stuck too. At least until the pope died, for Nicholas was unique in this period; Hadrian II totally failed to prevent Charles and Louis from taking over Lotharingia, and retreated over the appeal of another deposed bishop, Hincmar of Laon, in 871-2. But in the meantime a theoretical debate had caused the eclipse of a kingdom.

  The three major political systems of the ninth century, Francia, Byzantium and the caliphate, all had an intellectualized politics in one form or another, and it is worth looking at them comparatively for a moment. The fact that they were roughly simultaneous seems to me to be chance; nothing links together the military success and sense of ecclesiastical mission of Charlemagne, the stabilization of the reduced Byzantine empire in the eighth century which allowed for the revival of writing in the capital by 800 or so, and the fiscal centralization which funded Baghdad and the enormous intellectual activity of the ‘Abbasid period. All the same, their contemporaneity at least makes it harder to see each of them as unique, as historians often do. Medieval governments characteristically saw themselves as legitimized by their superior religious moralism (governments still do); and strong governments, as all three of these were, could develop a considerable density of moral and intellectual initiatives. But they were by no means identical, for all that; their differences are, indeed, more interesting than their similarities.

  In Byzantium, an educated ruling class steadily developed across the ninth and tenth centuries. This class was very largely a secular élite; Byzantine education, and some ninth-century institutional reform as well (notably in the field of law), were aimed at reviving Graeco-Roman traditions, which included the assumption that the men who ran the state should have a developed literary culture. But that culture had a strong religious element by now; and this in turn was linked to the religious importance of the emperor as the focus of Orthodoxy and as the centre-point of elaborate political rituals. We saw in Chapter 13 that the Byzantines did not have the political and moral urgency that can be seen in Carolingian correctio. That urgency perhaps in part came from the relatively recent roots of the Carolingian project. The Byzantines knew that they
had a millennium of imperial power behind them, over half of it Christian, and that its revival ought to be enough, given Roman success in the past; but Frankish religious self-esteem was new in the late eighth century, and very much bound up with Charlemagne’s belief in his own uniqueness and Louis the Pious’s sense of his personal moral task. The Byzantine state was also, of course, more solid than the Frankish one, and education and literary culture could build up slowly over several centuries, unlike the three-generation history of the Carolingian experiment. If the Byzantines felt less need of urgency, given that they were, in their own minds, simply rediscovering their Roman past, they were not necessarily wrong in that.

  The ‘Abbasids were, in a general way, as convinced of their central role in human religious salvation as either of the other two; but the way it worked in the caliphate was different. The religious centrality of the caliph himself was slipping after 750 (above, Chapter 14); only the mihna of 833-47, introduced by al-Ma’mun, sought to reinstate it, without success. The absence of a specialized priesthood in Islam meant that the interpreters of the Muslim religion, who effectively became its sole guardians by 850, were much more loosely defined as an educated class, the ‘ulam’. Education trained one for statecraft, in the ninth- century caliphate as in ninth-century Byzantium, in the increasingly elaborate traditions of adab, but it also, often simultaneously, trained one for religious authority. On the other hand, no formal hierarchy personified that authority in Islam; it was religious knowledge and philosophical rhetorical skill that established one as a religious leader, not one’s appointment as emperor, patriarch/pope, bishop or abbot. The result was a plurality of voices, which at its best was highly stimulating, but which seldom moved the state in any particular direction after 847. Indeed, the caliphs and other political leaders were largely cut out of moralized politics from then on, except in the Fatimid caliphate; as a result, although education, including religious education, was a core training both for a political career and for religious prominence, it did not produce the equivalent of the political intellectuals of the Carolingian court, simply because attendance on rulers, and involvement in their policies, was not so essential for moralists. There were certainly some politically powerful intellectuals in the Islamic world; one thinks of Nizam al-Mulk (d. 1092), vizir to the Seljuk Turks and an important theorist of government; men like him match Photios in Byzantium, and, of course, Alcuin and Hincmar in Francia. But political power was not part and parcel of being a Muslim intellectual; it was simply the most remunerative career path. Moral reform did not proceed through the state, as it did in Byzantium, given the emperor’s religious centrality, and as it did in the West. Arab political ceremonial - as elaborate as that of Constantinople - had less of a religious charge, and was less systematically written up than either in Byzantium or in Francia.

  The solidity of the Byzantine and Arab political systems (in each case derived from a complex tax structure, absent in the West), reinforced in the Arab case by a steady separation between the caliphal and post-caliphal political system and the question of religious salvation, thus gave plenty of space to the idea that education was a passport to political prominence; but it did not produce the conclusion that a specifically religious education for the élite was essential for the survival of the state, or that the task of the state was in large part the salvation of the community of the realm. This marks the originality of the Carolingian project. The Carolingian state was, for over a hundred years, very successful indeed, and so confident of itself that the task of salvation seemed actually possible. The network of intellectuals that surrounded three generations of Carolingian rulers existed precisely for this purpose. So did the public space of political ritual, which, although simpler than in the East, was at least as charged with meaning, watched and analysed as in Byzantium, and at key moments (as in 833-4, to name only one obvious case) was perhaps even more so. All major political moments were theorized, moralized, in ninth-century Francia, often with competing interpretations. There was space in Francia for the pure political intellectual, men who were important in the state, heard in its councils just because of their knowledge and intelligence, even though they never had an administrative role in it, like Einhard or Lupus of Ferrières, in a way that was rare if not unknown in Byzantium or the Arab world; and there were, for a time, many more Hilduins or Hincmars, men who held official positions but who also had a political or moral programme, than there were Photioses or Nizam al-Mulks.

  If one looks at the Carolingian reform programme from the standpoint of the early medieval West, it can sometimes seem stately: as the product of the most successful political regime in Latin Europe between 400 and 1200 (at the earliest), it does not seem surprising that it had as much self-confidence and as dense a cultural activity as it did. If one looks at that same programme from the standpoint of contemporary Constantinople or Baghdad, then it seems over-anxious, hyperactive, shallow in its roots, and - of course - temporary. Essentially, given the underlying structural weakness of all western medieval polities, this latter is true. (The over-anxiousness is also forgivable; it must have been hard to have God as attentive an audience to one’s every action as the Carolingians believed.) But it is still interesting, indeed striking, that the Carolingians achieved so much. In the moralization of Frankish politics, in the education of at least two generations of lay aristocrats, as also in the increasing systematization of government, the Carolingians had an effect: different from the Byzantines or the Arabs, but an effect all the same.

  The Carolingian project receded in the 880s, even before the fall of Charles the Fat in 887. Hincmar, who died in 882, was the last political leader really to be committed to theory, just as Charles the Bald was probably the last king who really wanted to read it. The latter may be the crucial point. Tenth-century Frankish bishops presided over reform councils, but they were mostly local, and less connected to royal politics, except occasionally in late tenth-century Germany; education (and manuscript copying) continued in monasteries and cathedral schools, but it did not have an effect on political decisions after the 870s. The ecclesiastical world did not change so much, that is to say; but the political context changed substantially. The optimism and confidence of the Carolingian century, the sense that what Frankish politicians decided mattered to God, was what kept the reform project going; and the failure of the dynasty in the years 877-87, followed by a much less ideologized politics in the non-Carolingian successor states, pushed reform onto the local stage of episcopal pastoral activity.

  Successful political systems could nonetheless return to parts of the Carolingian programme. The early eleventh century in Germany, and also the late tenth century in England, both saw partial revivals of moral reform imagery as part of high politics. The programme, that is to say, was there waiting to be used, even if the smaller polities of the future could not re-establish the critical mass of competitive writing which marks the middle decades of the ninth century; that would need a new environment, the towns and the money economy of the twelfth century, in order to return. And the political presupposition that kings and bishops were in partnership, with kings choosing bishops but bishops having the right to ‘correct’ kings, all in the aid of both effective and moral rule, and prosperity in both this world and the next, continued to be axiomatic in western politics, at least as an aspiration, until the late eleventh century at the earliest, and in many respects for a long time later. This presupposition was pushed centre stage by the Carolingians, and it had a long legacy.

  18

  The Tenth-century Successor States

  Gerbert of Aurillac, arguably the leading intellectual of the tenth-century West, had a remarkable career. He was born around 940 to, as it seems, a non-noble family, and educated in his home-town monastery of Saint-Géraud at Aurillac, a regional pilgrimage centre but isolated in the mountains of south-central France. Around 967 he was talent-spotted by Count Borrell of Barcelona, and trained in Catalonia for some years; he accompanied Borrell
to Rome around 970 and moved on to the entourage of Pope John XIII and the emperor Otto I (936-73) as a teacher, of mathematics, astronomy, logic and rhetoric - basic elements in the central medieval curriculum. In this role he moved to Reims in 972, and was for two decades both a renowned teacher and the private secretary to Archbishop Adalbero. The only break here was in 982-4, when he impressed the emperor Otto II (973-83) with his philosophical and debating skills, according to his pupil the historian Richer, our source for most of this, and was made abbot of Bobbio in Italy; at Bobbio, however, Gerbert offended vested interests, and he had to flee back to Reims at Otto II’s death. From then on, as his letters, surviving as a collection for the years 983-97, show, he was an active political dealer, both on behalf of his patron Adalbero and independently. He operated in support of the infant Otto III (983-1002) and his mother the queen-regent Theophanu in East Francia and Italy, and also Duke Hugh Capet of West Francia, the main rival to the West Frankish king Lothar (954-86). Adalbero and, secondarily, Gerbert facilitated Hugh Capet’s non-hereditary succession as king of West Francia (987- 96). After Adalbero’s death in 989, Gerbert might have expected the archbishopric, but Hugh chose Arnulf, King Lothar’s illegitimate son, largely to undermine support for Lothar’s brother Charles, duke of Lower Lotharingia (d. 991), who was fighting for the throne. This was a miscalculation; Arnulf almost at once handed Reims to Charles. When he captured Charles and Arnulf in 990, Hugh deposed the latter for treachery in a synod at Saint-Basle-de-Verzy, organized by Gerbert, who now succeeded him as archbishop (991-7). But Hugh had not consulted Pope John XV, who objected to the deposition. The West Frankish bishops argued that it was canonical, but pressure built up on Gerbert, and after Hugh’s death he left Reims for Saxony and the court of Otto III. Here he became the still-young emperor’s tutor in 997, and was promoted away from Reims: to the archbishopric of Ravenna, and then, in 999, to the papacy itself. He died in 1003 as Pope Silvester II.