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

by Chris Wickham

  If we move later into the tenth century and remain in areas of powerful kingship, we continue to find families who, however ambitious, played by royal rules. In England, the families of Æthelstan ‘Half-king’ and Ælfhere are clear examples. In Saxony, there were many too; one was the counts of Walbeck west of Magdeburg, Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg’s family, thus well documented in his Chronicon. Liuthar I had died fighting Slavs for Henry I in 929, but his son Liuthar II (d. 964) had been involved in a conspiracy against Otto I in 941 in the context of the early 940s civil wars and lost all his lands; he regained them the following year, having paid a hefty fine in money and land, after which he endowed a church in Walbeck to atone for the plot. His sons divided the family patrimony, Siegfried (d. 991) becoming count of Walbeck (he was succeeded by his son Henry, Thietmar’s brother; both were in the entourage of the emperor Henry II). Siegfried’s brother Liuthar III (d. 1003), although not always close to the Ottonian court, became marquis of the Northern March in or after 985, and thus one of the major figures in Saxony in the aftermath of the Slav revolt of 983. In this guise he was one of the king-makers of Henry II in 1002; he supported Henry not least so as to sabotage the ambitions of his rival Ekkehard of Meissen, who had broken the engagement of his daughter Liudgard to Liuthar’s son Werner, and who had humiliated Werner in an assembly in 999 after Werner had abducted Liudgard (with her agreement). Werner married Liudgard after Ekkehard’s death in 1002, and inherited his father’s march a year later. But Werner was also an idiot; in 1009 he responded to machinations against him by Count Dedi at Henry’s court by killing Dedi, and lost his march, his benefices and the king’s favour. Werner instead plotted with Bolesław Chrobry of Poland in 1013, and only kept his properties by paying a large fine to Henry; in 1014 he abducted another woman, this time unwilling (Liudgard had died in 1012), and risked execution had he not died of wounds from the affray - to the huge distress of Dedi’s son Dietrich, who could thus not be avenged. We see the ambition, the feuding and the general bad behaviour of major aristocrats once again, notwithstanding Thietmar’s obvious partiality, but also that the whole sequence of events took place in a king-centred framework, just as the careers of Bernard Hairy-paws and his father had. Thietmar’s world, it can be added, was overwhelmingly a world of counts and marquises (and bishops); no smaller lords have any impact on his narratives. A basic Carolingian political infrastructure remained in place here at least into the 1010s, and indeed much later.

  Both the Guilhelmids and the counts of Walbeck had family lands as a basis on which to accumulate counties/marches and benefices. So did the Canossa in Italy, but with a slightly different result. Adalbert-Atto (d. 989) of Canossa, a castle in the Appennines above Reggio Emilia, was made count of Reggio, Modena and Mantua by Otto I in the 960s for his support against Berengar II. He used these comital positions, however, above all as a support for his further accumulation of lands, in outright property, or in lease or benefice from churches and monasteries, along the River Po in all these counties (and others), and also to a lesser extent in the Appennines. These lands were the basis of Canossan power for the next century, far more than the counties were. They were studded with castles, and the local rights which Adalbert-Atto, his son Tedald (d. c. 1010), and his grandson Boniface (d. 1052) held in them were as complete as any count had anywhere, whether or not the Canossa held the county they were in. This was a de-facto power that was substantially different from those of our earlier examples. Tedald added the county of Brescia to his father’s collection, but, when he called himself marquis, seems to be holding a title he had claimed for himself. The Canossa did not spurn Carolingian-style public power; when they were given the march of Tuscany by the emperor Conrad II in 1027, a strong political unit, they ran it with enthusiasm in a traditional Carolingian manner until the family died out in 1115. But in their Emilian heartland they ruled in a very different way, on the basis of their extensive landholding and their informal political powers over that land, powers which historians call ‘seigneurial’ (see below). After their initial rise under Otto I, they also needed royal patronage rather less; they tended to be loyal to the king/emperors, and were far from unhappy to receive benefits as a result, not least in 1027, but their careers were far less focused on royal favour, even though the king/emperors remained institutionally strong in Italy. They had become regional powers with whom the kings had to deal, and in the Po valley they did not strictly need their comital offices in order to maintain their power, by 1000 at the latest.

  The idea that a lay aristocrat might be powerful without being a count (or else a palatine official) was a novelty. Of course, one might not be a count at any given moment, as Bernard Hairy-paws was not for most of the first half of his career, but aristocrats systematically aspired to be one, to legitimate their status, and were thus inevitably tied into a royal patronage network. The Canossa did, of course, owe their rise to kings, and never after 962 lost comital or marchional office; they were not unrecognizable to ninth-century eyes. But their interests were different, all the same. They had parallels elsewhere, too. In the later tenth century, many families emerged, particularly in West Francia, who had the same focus on land, de-facto local power, and castles that the Canossa had, but operated on a far smaller scale. The lords of Uxelles were one such, in the county of Mâcon, once under the control of William the Pious but after the 920s in the hands of a local family of counts. The counts married, oddly, into the family of King Berengar II of Italy, whose male-line heirs thus controlled the Mâconnais into the eleventh century; but the first of these, Berengar II’s grandson Otto-William (d. 1026), was so intent on an ambitious politics that he stirred up regional opposition and weakened his local position notably. Josseran I (d. c. 990) owned the villa of Uxelles; his descendants held the castle there, presumably from the count of Mâcon, with a set of local comital rights, over justice and tolls for example; these became hereditary in his family, and they were backed up by the solid set of family properties in the same area. Between 1000 and 1030 or so, the counts lost their power over them. By the second quarter of the eleventh century, Bernard II (d. c. 1050), Josseran’s grandson, held a network of powers in the territory around Uxelles, based on his family land on the one hand and the privatized judicial powers associated with the castle on the other, and extending, eventually, to all sorts of military and customary dues owed by his tenants and landowning neighbours alike, which were largely invented by the Uxelles lords themselves. This was what the Canossa had in and around their own lands, and again we call it ‘seigneurial’; but this time the Uxelles seigneurie was only about 100 square kilometres, by no means all of it directly controlled by the family. The tiny scale of political units of this kind (there were a dozen or so in the county of Mâcon) marked a radical change from that described up to now. This was power constructed for the most part from the bottom up, as well. The lords of Uxelles will hardly have dealt with the king, who was only an external power in this area by 1000, but from then on they also hardly needed the count either, who was little more than another seigneurial lord, with lands and powers restricted to the area just west of Mâcon. Mâcon is justly famous, for it is one of the best-documented areas of tenth- and eleventh-century Europe, thanks to the thousands of charters of the monastery of Cluny (see below), and also to Georges Duby’s epoch-making regional study of 1953. But this pulverization of the structures of the county, and the takeover of all the public traditions of the state by private landholding families, has parallels across much of West Francia around 1000, and in later centuries could be found in other parts of Europe too.

  These very diverse aristocratic experiences have some basic elements in common. The first, entirely predictably in the early Middle Ages, is land: nobody could be a political player before 1000, even in a tiny area, without a locally substantial property, held either in full ownership or in long-term concessions from churches or kings. A feature of the Carolingian and post-Carolingian period is that more land came to be under
aristocratic control than before, and less was under the control of non-aristocrats. This change was particularly important in England, as we saw in Chapter 19, and was even more acute in Saxony, where Charlemagne’s conquest resulted in a rapid takeover of land previously under peasant ownership, by the kings themselves, by churches and monasteries, by incoming Frankish lords, and (perhaps most of all) by the surviving native Saxon aristocracy. The speed of this social change provoked the largest-scale peasants’ revolt in early medieval Europe, the Stellinga uprising of 841-2, during the Carolingian civil war, but this failed, and the new political powers continued to accumulate land. The newness of Saxon aristocratic power, and its close connection to royal protagonism, may well help to explain the solidity of the Ottonian political system in Saxony, as it certainly does for royal power in England. In Francia proper, and Italy too, the period 750-1000 also marks a steady increase in aristocratic wealth and power, at the expense of a surviving peasantry, thanks largely to the political opportunities for successful aristocrats under Charlemagne and his successors. As a result of this still ill-studied process, landowning peasantries are rather less visible in 1000 than in 750 throughout Francia and Italy, and in some places had disappeared altogether. We shall look at this issue again in the next chapter, but it is an essential backdrop to aristocratic affirmation at the political level; lords had more land to play with politically, and sometimes - as with the most successful monasteries, or the ‘imperial aristocracy’ - far more land. This was not affected by the growing regionalization of the aristocracy (outside England) after 850 or so; that process simply meant that lords increasingly used their lands as elements in a regional politics, as well as (or instead of) a kingdom-wide one.

  In the case of the lay aristocracy, this land could be then added to by honores: royal-confirmed offices, such as counties, and benefices. These were given by kings and could, for a long time, be taken away again. Werner of the Northern March is a case in point: he lost his offices and benefices in 1009, though he kept his properties. It is not that the king/ emperor could not confiscate his properties as well; this nearly happened in 1013, indeed. But under normal circumstances (that is, anything except treason, and sometimes even then) kings would leave aristocrats with their full property even when they fell out of favour and lost the rest. We have seen in previous chapters that aristocrats always sought to preserve counties and benefices for their sons, and very often succeeded, including under Charlemagne. But until that inheritance became a right, kings kept strategic control of this large sector of aristocratic wealth and power. In most of the post-Carolingian kingdoms before 1000, and also in England, such rights to automatic succession in counties/ ealdormanries and benefices only existed on political margins, such as, in England, Northumbria, or, in Italy, parts of the march of Spoleto in the far south or Piemonte in the north-west. The major exception to this was West Francia, where such rights were in effect extended to nearly every duke and count in the decades around 900, with catastrophic effects on royal power. When this ‘patrimonialization’ process occurred, of course, aristocracies hugely increased their practical control over wealth and local patronage powers, for they could now add ex-royal land and local political rights to their own properties, as long as they could keep control of them in the framework of local rivalries which were no longer moderated by kings.

  These collections of properties and rights in the hands of single families were heterogeneous, usually scattered (even if, as just noted, increasingly in a single region), and would be further scattered by property transfers at marriage and by partible inheritance among sons. (This was universal until past 1000, except that counties and benefices, until they were patrimonialized at least - and often later - could not be divided internally.) Families sought to give them some structure. One way was by founding a family monastery, a procedure already popular in the seventh century in Francia but steadily expanding after that; by the tenth century every aristocratic player had one, except the very smallest. Such monasteries were characteristically under full family ownership, very often with a family member as abbot (or abbess - many were nunneries in some parts of Europe, particularly Saxony); but effective family control could often be preserved through rights of patronage, even if the monastery was alienated away, as often happened, to bishops or larger (and more prestigious) monastic groupings, including if the monastery was ‘reformed’, as we shall see later. Ownership or patronage was characteristically shared between all family-members, a great advantage if families expanded demographically, for it represented a core of family-controlled power that was not divided; six men seem to have shared control of the Berardenghi family monastery of Fontebona in Tuscany in 1030, for example, and eleven by 1060. By then, it was the main thing keeping the family together.

  Castles were another resource, by the tenth century. The origins of the widespread use of fortified sites by aristocrats is still under debate. Fortifications were already common in the sixth century in some parts of Europe (such as Italy, divided geographically as it was), but these were for the most part public structures, controlled by kings and their officials, and they often included large areas inside the walls; they were fortified villages rather than élite residences. This practice slowly extended across all Europe, not least in the context of defence against Vikings and other frontier invaders, as with the urbes of both the tenth-century Saxons and their Slav opponents, or the burhs of tenth-century England. They are very visible also in the local wars of the Seine valley chronicled in Flodoard’s Annals in the 920s-960s, for control over them had devolved to counts and bishops, and they were much fought over. But this latter example by now poses the issue of whether aristocrats could put them up themselves. Charles the Bald certainly thought they might; in the Edict of Pîtres in 864 he banned all castella et firmitates built without his consent, because they were the foci for ‘many depredations and hindrances for their neighbours’, and he demanded that they be pulled down. Laws such as this seldom work, and Gerald of Aurillac had a castle in the late ninth century which was almost certainly private. But actually, both in archaeology and in documents, private castles were more a tenth-century phenomenon, and indeed expanded for the most part fairly slowly outside the political stratum represented by counts and bishops; for the lesser aristocracy, it was the eleventh century, not the tenth, that saw castles built widely. Major aristocrats by 950 or so nonetheless in most of continental Europe (though not England) had castles, often many in number, as points of reference for their counties and their properties. These were defences for local power (both legal and illegal), obviously; they were also centres of family cohesion, much as monasteries were. (In the eleventh century, when surnames developed, families would often come to be named after their principal castle.) Both were signs of a much less fluid political geography, for they tied aristocrats to single areas even more firmly than the steady regionalization of political interest did.

  Castles came to be the typical bases for seigneurial powers. This did not have to be immediate, but such powers did increasingly crystallize in the years around 1000 or shortly after, particularly in West Francia but also in much of Italy. Both comital families and lesser lords came to be able to dispose of a wide range of rights, on their own properties and over the properties of their neighbours, by now seen as private prerogatives: the obligation to do castle-guard or to billet and feed a military detachment; dues in return for being able to travel a road, or putting in at a river port, or attending a market; dues for being able to cut wood in a common woodland; compulsory cart service on given days of the year; compulsory use of a lord’s mill, with the attendant dues; or, above all, the profits of an increasingly privatized justice. This basket of rights (with different elements stressed in different places) is called the ‘seigneurie banale’, Georges Duby’s phrase, in much modern scholarship - ‘banale’ because many of these rights were once royal, making up much of what Carolingian sources call the king’s bannum. They had very diverse origins, all the
same; as in the case of the lords of Uxelles, the creation of a seigneurial lordship was very often the result of a creative bricolage of old and new powers over tenants and neighbours, established both by force and by agreement. In some areas of West Francia in the twelfth century and later, seigneurial rights came to be more profitable than taking rents; but that development had not begun yet in 1000.

  Castles and seigneurial rights are markers of a new attention to local dominance, beginning particularly after around 900 in the post-Carolingian lands, and steadily increasing, and becoming more localized still, after 950/1000. Aristocrats had, as we have seen in earlier chapters, previously sought identity and status above all through royal or at least ducal patronage. They needed land in order to have the wealth to play at that level, and to be able to afford the armed entourage that was equally essential for royal politics; but they did not need to be able to dominate their neighbours to have kingdom-level status, and they might anyway move around substantially in royal service. Increasingly, however, especially in the tenth century, attention to one’s local power-base was essential. If one did not pay attention to it, it might break up, as we shall see in a moment. But it was also the case that lords moved around rather less by now, so might find their local power-base more of an interesting long-term commitment; and the logic of castle-guard, and the intricacies of seigneurial powers and private law courts, pointed towards quite localized political initiatives. This did not happen everywhere. Notably, it did not happen in England, where tenth-century evidence even for the lesser aristocracy shows some strikingly wide and potentially changeable areas of interest, as with the family of Bishop Oswald of Worcester, who owned from Worcestershire to the Fens, or Ælfhelm Polga, whose will of the 980s shows him holding land from Essex to Huntingdonshire, without reference to any political centre at all, even a principal place of residence. But it happened across most of post-Carolingian Continental Europe, and also in some of the crystallizing Slav and Scandinavian polities, which were themselves still fairly small-scale.