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

by Chris Wickham

  This was not the end of royal trouble, all the same. Adalbero (or Gerbert) could already in 985 write a brief ‘secret and anonymous letter’, probably to the archbishop’s Lotharingian kin, saying that ‘Lothar is king of Francia in name only; Hugh not in name, it is true, but in deed and fact’; this was 751 all over again, on the surface. But time had not stopped for the Robertines either. Hugh the Great’s power-base was in a block of around twenty counties stretching from Paris to Orléans and west to Angers: a substantial area of land by tenth-century West Frankish standards. But during Hugh Capet’s minority the formerly subordinate counts of the western half of this block, notably those of Angers and Blois, gained effective independence, and began to operate their own local and regional politics; Fulk Nerra of Anjou (that is, the territory of Angers; 987-1040) was famously insubordinate to Hugh Capet’s son Robert II (996-1031), and Odo II of Blois (995-1037) also took over Champagne around 1021, thus hemming the Robertine/Capetian heartland in from both sides at once. The already small geographical scale of the political and military operations described in Flodoard’s Annals in the 920s became, if possible, smaller still in the eleventh century. Royal traditions such as assembly and army-muster had even less force after 1000 than before. West Francia north of the Loire, an area much the size of Saxony, was by 1025 the terrain of six or seven effectively independent ‘principalities’, Brittany, Anjou, Normandy, Blois-Champagne, Flanders, with the kings in the middle and the archbishops of Reims on the edge. South of the Loire there were more again.

  The Merovingian-Carolingian system of counties was stronger in West Francia than in the East, and there were no strong traditions of ethnic difference, except in Brittany, which was finally absorbed into Frankish politics in the fragmented tenth century, and, by now, Normandy. The eastern model of the ethnic duchy had less force here. Each political unit that was larger than a single county, as all the small principalities north of the Loire were, was thus created, painstakingly, territory by territory, and could risk falling back into its constituent parts again, as the Robertine lands were doing by 987. In the south, too, the ‘Guilhelmid’ counts of the Auvergne (see Chapter 21) had accumulated a string of counties in eastern Aquitaine and called themselves ‘dukes of the Aquitainians’ by 900, but the west of Aquitaine, notably the counts of Poitiers, did not recognize their authority, and there was no real reason why they should; when in 927 the Auvergne dukes died out, the counts of Poitiers took the title, but could only exercise power in the Auvergne if they took it militarily, and so on. Actually, the Poitiers dukes were quite successful in this, and William IV (963-93) and William V (993- 1030) exercised, at times, wider authority than anyone north of the Loire by now. The regional church councils which preached against aristocratic violence and in favour of the ‘Peace of God’ in the last half of the century in Aquitaine were partly taken over by William V after 994 and turned, in effect, back into Carolingian-style large-scale assemblies, the only ones still in existence in West Francia by the end of the tenth century. But the core of William’s power and land was still Poitou, and elsewhere he had to gain the fidelity of counts and other local lords, by force or persuasion or ceremony. This was a fidelity that had constantly to be reinforced, as we can see in a surviving agreement of around 1025 between William and Hugh of Lusignan (a powerful lord in Poitou itself) which discusses in great detail the tense, prickly, and armed stand-offs between the two sides before settlement was reached. This was so everywhere. The counts of Flanders, the count/ dukes of Normandy, the counts of Anjou, the counts of Toulouse, the counts of Barcelona, all ruling collections of counties, some of them quite large, did manage to establish real and lasting hegemonies over the different powers in their principalities. Others, however, were at best intermittent overlords. And after 1000 or so there was a further involution in much of West Francia, when counties themselves began to break up into smaller lordships, each with their own localized political, military and judicial powers: all the political system of Charlemagne’s huge empire reduced to the scale of a few villages. This process, the so-called ‘feudal revolution’, will be looked at again later.

  The late twentieth-century hegemony of French history-writing over the central Middle Ages, which begin for these purposes around 1000 or a little before, has made the West Frankish experience seem the typical post-Carolingian development. As should be clear to readers of this chapter, it was not. Still less, as we shall see, was the ‘feudal revolution’ typical, for it only affected parts of West Francia itself. Everywhere, it is true, power was highly local, built up of lands, rights, armies and oaths of fidelity; and in Italy, too, and even in some of East Francia, it was more local in 1000 than 900. But in most places aristocratic status and identity was still tied up with being close to kings, or at least major regional powers such as the duke of Bavaria, the marquis of Tuscany or the count of Flanders. Even in Italy, although identities could be closely tied to city-territories, the institutional force of the kingdom remained, as an inheritance from the Lombard and Carolingian periods. And elements of a common political practice, also inherited from the Carolingians and only partly modified after 900, existed throughout the post-Carolingian lands, even in the West. Let us end this chapter by looking at how some of them worked.

  The tenth century gave less space to Carolingian-style political theology. There was some: Abbo of Fleury (d. 1004), in particular, could praise Carolingian legislation to Hugh Capet and Robert II; but he seems fairly isolated in his commitment. (The West Frankish kings around 1000 were also not the most suitable recipients of such ideas; but Abbo was also patronized in England, which was different, as we shall see in the next chapter.) Conversely, it would be wrong to conclude from this absence that the tenth century had moved away from the world of writing. The educational traditions of the ninth century had continued in Carolingian centres such as St. Gallen, Corvey and Reims, and indeed extended geographically, to remoter locations such as Gerbert’s Aurillac, and to the new south-east Saxon royal heartland, in Quedlinburg, Gandersheim, Magdeburg. Some of the literary results were striking: the rhymed prose of the Lotharingian Rather, bishop of Verona (d. 974), the heavy use of Sallust in the Saxon historian Widukind of Corvey (d. after 973), the knowledge (and pretentious use) of Greek in the Italian Liutprand bishop of Cremona (d. 972), and the Virgilian poetry and - most unusual of all - Terence-influenced play-writing of the Saxon Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim (d. 975). Hrotsvitha and her patron (Otto I’s niece) Abbess Gerberga show that the women of the Saxon aristocracy could be formidably educated. And all the people named in this paragraph, although undoubtedly trained in ecclesiastical milieux, had close court connections, usually but not only with the Ottonians.

  Translators are certainly more commonly referred to in tenth- than in ninth-century sources, even for kings and dukes. Otto I is sometimes thought not to have known Latin, for example, because Liutprand had to translate for him in Rome in 963. But it is more likely that Otto was simply avoiding giving away that he did not have full control of public rhetoric in Latin, as well as making the political point that he, the new ruler of Rome, was a Saxon-speaker. Hrotsvitha thought it worthwhile dedicating her verse Gesta Ottonis to him (and to his son Otto II, who was certainly educated), and it would be odd if he had patronized so many literary figures he could not understand at all. Furthermore, writing (in Latin) was as regular a means of political communication in the tenth century, alongside spoken messages, as it had been in the ninth and earlier, even outside Italy with its widespread lay literacy. Gerbert’s letter collection (probably a working collection, even if he subsequently edited it for publication) shows how dense a political correspondence could be in the 980s. Gerbert and the people he wrote for, Adalbero, Hugh Capet, Lothar’s wife Queen Emma, sent terse and practical messages to each other and to other significant political players, very frequently - as when Hugh, now king, writes in December 988 to the empress Theophanu about her health, promises peace, and proposes a diplomatic meeting in the ne
xt month, all in eight lines. It is likely enough that most aristocrats were no longer fully literate, and they certainly did not match the literary commitment common in the ninth century. All the same, this was not an ‘oral’ culture, as some more romantic historians have described it, except in so far as all cultures, including our own, are essentially oral. And, whether with writing or without it, some aspects of tenth-century government could be (by early medieval western standards) tightly organized and monitored. Berengar of Ivrea’s poll tax to pay off the Hungarians in 947 is one example. Another, perhaps more striking, is Otto III’s decision in 997 to defend an important Saxon border castle, the Arneburg, with four-week garrisons headed by important local aristocrats, who had to hand over to each other in relays; when a handover slipped up and the Slavs sacked the castle, the emperor demanded an accounting. Meissen was similarly garrisoned in the next decade. This represents systematic government, at least in Saxony, and it was experienced by the lay aristocracy too, not just their ecclesiastical brothers and sisters.

  Side by side with this daily communication, tenth-century polities maintained the large-scale public arena of political action of the Carolingian world. Assemblies were probably smaller in West Francia, whether for political or judicial purposes; indeed, judicial assemblies died out in much of the western kingdom by 1000 or so. The 987 assembly of magnates who elected Hugh Capet was called a curia by Richer, a ‘court’, a rather more restricted word than placitum, the large judicial assembly surviving in Italy, or than the universalis populi conventus, the ‘meeting of the whole people’, referred to often by Widukind for the East Frankish lands. Even in West Francia, though, the peace councils of William V of Aquitaine and others could sometimes revive the image of wider public participation; and elsewhere all the members of local or kingdom-wide political communities could meet together and become the audience for political acts, which had power simply because of the size of the audience.

  These acts could be very elaborate. Otto I’s coronation, already referred to, was one, potent with images of Carolingian legitimacy and supremacy. There was a stateliness about many of them, a rule boundedness, which has been influentially characterized by Gerd Althoff in his phrase Spielregeln, ‘the rules of the game’, rules which everyone in the community knew, and which held off open disagreement in public. This was all the more necessary because the single court hierarchy of the Carolingian world had, in reality, gone; there were by now far more players, whose relative position could no longer be established from above. Equality between kings was carefully choreographed, as when Otto I and Louis IV in 948 sat down at the synod of Ingelheim at the same moment, or as when kings met at the boundaries of kingdoms: Charles the Simple, for example, met Henry I in 921, each watched by their fideles, in a boat on the Rhine, to which they had each come in their own separate boats. In a parallel case, Rudolf of West Francia met Duke William II of Aquitaine at the River Loire in 924, when Rudolf was threatening war to get William’s submission to him as king. Messengers crossed by day to negotiate, then William crossed at night, got off his horse, and met the still-mounted king on foot, from whom he received the kiss of peace; this was the crucial element that began the submission process, involving a symbolic river-crossing and a posture of inferiority, but taking place in the dark, so less publicly visible (the negotiations must have largely been about that). Subjects regularly greeted their lords kneeling, or even prostrate on the ground (as also did kings, when kneeling or prostrating themselves before altars): particularly when asking for favours, but even in normal greeting, as with the story by Rodulf Glaber (d. 1047) of the unfaithful Heribert II of Vermandois receiving Charles the Simple’s kiss of peace while prostrate in 923. And when kings (or even, later, counts) came to cities there were regular adventus rituals of greeting, in a tradition surviving from the Roman empire and continuing to the modern period. Rome had by far the most elaborate ones, which signalled Rome’s own status, but all cities had their own, as when the cives fortiores, leading citizens, of Pavia came out to greet King Hugh ‘by custom’ in about 930, according to Liutprand, or when Louis IV was formally received at his accession in 936 at Laon and nearby cities, according to Richer. All of these latter accounts are literary reconstructions, but the imagery was a recognizable and a strong one. Rituals could also be used to humiliate. Prostration was particularly commonly used by people confessing crimes and seeking pardon; and kings could demand very specific public humiliations, like the dogs which the leading supporters of Duke Eberhard of the Franks had to carry publicly into Magdeburg in 937 after a minor revolt. This had Carolingian antecedents (under Louis II of Italy it would have been saddles), but as a sign of royal right, and of the subjection and penitence of the guilty, it must have had quite an effect.

  The point about elaborate systems of rules, conversely, is that they can be subverted to make points. Sometimes this is the work of the writer, as when Dudo of Saint-Quentin (d. c. 1020), the Norman chronicler, supposes that in 911 Rollo of Normandy’s follower, when kissing Charles the Simple’s foot to represent the formal submission of Rollo’s Vikings, pulled the foot up into the air to kiss it: Dudo here simply wants to convey Viking/Norman egalitarianism and disrespect. More complex was Duke Hermann Billung of Saxony’s decision in 968 to call an assembly in Otto I’s city of Magdeburg, where he was received by the archbishop, dined in the emperor’s place, and slept in his bed; or when Marquis Ekkehard of Meissen in 1002, who was seeking the throne after Otto III’s death, came to the electoral assembly at Werla, and, when he realized he had lost, commandeered a feast that had been laid on in the palace for Otto III’s sisters, and ate it himself with his allies. We rely on Thietmar of Merseburg for these stories, and he had his own agendas, inevitably, but his close relatives were anxious witnesses in each case. Hermann and Ekkehard were certainly making points: about the fact that the Ottonians were potentially replaceable (in Ekkehard’s case, certainly), and also (in Hermann’s case, more ambiguously) the critical comment that Otto I had been too long away in Italy, and the claim that the duke of Saxony himself had, or should have, considerable formal power. Watchers knew that these sorts of points were being made; Ekkehard was killed for it, and the archbishop of Magdeburg (though not, interestingly, Hermann) was heavily fined by an angry Otto I. As with the Carolingians, once again, public acts always had audiences, who needed to be persuaded of arguments, and who could be convinced by creative reworkings of the rituals they were familiar with. This in turn generated new rituals and public procedures, like the Peace of God councils: I have described these in terms of Carolingian antecedents, but they were also seen as collective religious responses and counters to aristocratic violence, organized locally (as was the violence), rather than necessarily as the product of traditional political hierarchies. As the tenth century moved into the eleventh, the readings of public acts by local political actors could change quite a lot, at least in the West Frankish lands.

  Rome was still one element of legitimization. It was still a pilgrimage centre and the location for imperial coronation, and most major political players found themselves there at one time or another. Popes, too, maintained some of their late Carolingian authority, at least in the field of law. Both John XV and Gregory V demanded the reversal of Arnulf of Reims’s deposition in 991, and got their way in the end (his enemy Gerbert himself, as Pope Silvester II, reconfirmed him in office in 999). Earlier, Agapitus II had at least initially demanded the same when Arnulf’s predecessor Hugh was deposed in 947; although he was persuaded to reverse his position in 949, his opinions mattered, and his agreement needed to be obtained. Not many bishops were actually deposed in this period, but they were politically important in every kingdom, and they answered to Rome in certain limited respects. Tenth-century popes were not usually protagonists; they were mostly in rather weak positions inside the city of Rome, and, rather than act, they reacted to requests, usually along the lines the powerful wanted. But if they were to make decisions on their own, against the
interests of the powerful - as over Arnulf of Reims, who had no significant support among the laity - it was hard to force them to change their minds, and the powerful might have to back down. The Latin church thus maintained the skeleton ‘international’ values and procedures that had begun in the Carolingian period.

  One respect in which political practice changed was that it became more dynastic. This was a recognizable Carolingian inheritance, too; the Carolingians themselves had a strong dynastic consciousness, and the families of the Reichsaristokratie were also conscious of their rights of inheritance to land, which included an expectation that sons would succeed fathers in office at least somewhere, as we saw in Chapter 16. In the tenth century, however, nine of the great Carolingian aristocratic families gained the royal title, at least for a time, and others doubtless thought they might join them; and many others gained practical autonomy in a duchy, march, or accumulation of counties, which they could expect to pass to their heirs in a regular way. They appropriated some of the public rituals described above; they also appropriated a much more direct sense of hereditary entitlement than aristocrats had had in the ninth century. The West Frankish kings could not intervene in ducal or comital succession at all, as noted earlier, and even the Ottonians did so only with some care, or in response to revolt - or else when magnates died without sons, when they could manipulate marriage alliances. As a result, it was possible for the first time to suppose that dukes or counts might inherit as children; and this was also true of kings (Otto III in the East, Lothar in the West), as it had not been in the ninth century. Queen-mothers reappeared as important and recognized political forces, as we have seen, and a less contested force than were some of the powerful queens of the century before. Women were sometimes powerful even when kings were adults: Otto III used his aunt Matilda of Quedlinburg (d. 999) as a regent in the north when he went to Italy in 998. And, interestingly, we begin to find quite a few active duchess-mothers and marquise-mothers as well: powerful dealers for their deceased husband’s families, like Bertha (d. 926), regent of Tuscany for her son Guy after 915, or Hadwig, widow of Hugh the Great, politically active in 956-60, or her daughter Beatrice, who ran Upper Lotharingia for a decade after her husband’s death in 978. It is interesting how little hostility is expressed towards these ruling women in most of our sources, even though our writers are full of patriarchal clichés about female fragility. The one exception is Liutprand of Cremona, a selective misogynist, who frequently explained female power as the result of sexual licence; but his targets were essentially Italian, and this can be linked to his desire to delegitimize all aspects of Italian independence. It may be that the weakening of the heavily moralized politics of the Carolingian period left female power less exposed to suspicion and censure, outside the work of Liutprand.