No even remotely economical rewrite could produce a credible counterfactual: we would need to do nothing less than to change the entire history of the late antique Arabian peninsula, and perhaps even its social structures, to obtain a different outcome. From this perspective, the “Arab option” of imperial restoration in Europe was never even on the table.
THE NINTH CENTURY: THE CAROLINGIAN EMPIRE
As neither the eastern half of the Roman state nor the most formidable foreign power of the period, the Umayyad caliphate, had succeeded in restoring hegemonic empire in Europe, the only remaining option was empire-building from within the formerly Roman regions of Europe that had been taken over by Germanic successor regimes. However, suitable candidates were in short supply: the Vandal and Ostrogothic kingdoms had fallen first to the East Romans and then to the Arabs and Lombards, respectively, while the Arabs and their Berber allies had supplanted Visigothic rule in the Iberian peninsula. The Lombard kings struggled to maintain a unified state in Italy. England, geographically peripheral and politically fragmented, was never a serious contender.
This leaves the Frankish kingdom in what used to be Roman Gaul. By the end of the fifth century, the Franks had seized northern Gaul, much of the Rhineland, and a slice of central Germany north of the Main. During the following generation, they also wrested Aquitaine from the Visigoths and subdued the Swabians in the Upper Rhine and Danube region and the Burgundians in southeastern Gaul.
Yet despite this rapid and ostensibly promising growth spurt, Frankish expansion subsequently largely stalled for about two centuries. Among the reasons for this were periodic divisions of the realm between the sons of deceased Merovingian kings, which commenced in 511 and reliably triggered internal conflict that took precedence over further conquests: the incorporation of Burgundy in the early 530s, the last major addition to the kingdom, was also the only one engineered by a fraternal royal coalition.37
Over the course of multiple partitions in the second half of the sixth and the first half of the seventh century, Francia came to be increasingly formally divided into three subkingdoms: Austrasia (in Germany and northeastern Gaul), Neustria (in central and eastern Gaul), and Aquitaine (in southwestern Gaul). Eventually, Aquitaine as well as the Duchies of Bavaria and Thuringia drifted out of the orbit of effective Merovingian power. In the two principal Frankish subkingdoms, meanwhile, royal authority was steadily eroded by aristocratic autonomy and the ascent of the kings’ mayors as the actual political leaders.
Beginning in the late seventh century, centralizing measures finally began to reclaim some of the lost ground, albeit only haltingly and interrupted by renewed strife and division: even after the mayor of Austrasia had gained control over much of Francia in 687 and marginalized the Merovingian lineage, the mayoral succession in turn mimicked earlier royal practices by spawning civil war (in 714 to 718) and two further partitions (in 741 and 768). These setbacks obstructed state (re-)formation: internal consolidation and external conquest turned out to be feasible only under unified leadership.
This accounts for the four documented spurts of activity from 687 to 714 (under Pepin, who scored victories against Frisians and Alemanni), from 718 to 741 (under Charles Martel, who confronted invading Arabs and Berbers as well as Frisians, Saxons, and Bavarians), from 751 to 768 (under another Pepin, the Short, the first Carolingian to claim the kingship, who entered into an alliance with the papacy and intervened on its behalf against the Lombards in Italy), and most strikingly from 772 to 814, under Charlemagne.
This fourth and longest phase of unity produced the most ambitious advances: Frankish forces subjugated the Saxons between the lower Rhine and the Elbe, annexed the central and eastern Alps and the adjacent Danube basin, shattered the confederation of Pannonia’s Avars, compelled various Slavic groups between the Elbe and the Oder and in Pannonia to accept tributary obligations, campaigned south of the Pyrenees, and, most important, overcame Lombard resistance in northern and central Italy. The last of these accomplishments enabled Charlemagne to share control over the Duchy of Rome and parts of the northern Italian peninsula with the papacy and offer it protection. In return, in 800 Pope Leo III crowned him emperor (imperator), the first ruler in what had been the western half of the Roman empire to bear this title after a 320-year hiatus (figure 5.4).
At that point, Charlemagne claimed suzerainty over up to one-third of the people who then lived in the territories that had once been held by Rome, and perhaps closer to 40 percent of the total population of Europe. Serious state-level competitors were rare, limited in the first place to the Lombard principality of Beneventum in southern Italy and the emirate of Cordoba in Spain. At somewhat greater remove, the Roman possessions in Sicily and the southern and eastern Balkans, the Bulgars in the lower Danube basin, and assorted smallish kingdoms across the Channel in Britain rounded off this modest tableau. The Frankish empire exceeded all these polities in terms of people and territory. Only the eastern Roman empire approached it in manpower, and even though it was more cohesively organized, it was still struggling to recover from its near demise at the hands of the Arabs. Moreover, a cordon sanitaire from the Lombards to the Serbs separated it from the Frankish domains.
FIGURE 5.4 The Carolingian empire, c. 800 CE.
In theory, the geopolitical landscape favored Frankish expansion into other parts of Europe that had previously been ruled by Rome. The Umayyad emirate in Spain was brittle and internally fragmented, and in the mid-ninth century the Duchy of Beneventum split in two. England, while requiring a naval assault, was divided among seven major and several smaller kingdoms and statelets, and Wales was similarly disunited. None of these regions was particularly well equipped to withstand determined intervention of the kind that had brought down the Saxons, the Lombard kingdom of Pavia, or the Avar confederation. Further potential targets beckoned in Denmark, which was beginning to coalesce into a more unified realm, and in Slavic Central Europe and the western Balkans.
Thus, given the spatial and demographic heft of the Carolingian empire at the beginning of the ninth century, the pace of its expansion during the preceding decades, and the serious shortcomings of its main competitors in Europe, we might reasonably expect Charlemagne’s immediate successors (the emperor himself passed away in 814 at the ripe old age of seventy-two) to have been in a strong position to continue the reunification of what had once been Roman Europe and to add substance to the title of Roman emperor—and, perhaps, even to lay the foundations for more durable unity along the lines of the Roman model.
What happened was exactly the opposite. In keeping with Frankish custom reaching back three centuries, Charlemagne had made arrangements for dividing his kingdom among three sons (for the Franks, Lombards, and Aquitaine). After two of them predeceased him, the remaining one, Louis the Pious, inherited an effectively unified kingdom. Yet just three years into his reign he likewise arranged for another tripartite division among his sons, one of whom also became his co-emperor. Frontier wars in Germany, Pannonia, and Spain in the late 810s and the 820s accomplished little and were abandoned when Louis’s attempt to accommodate a fourth son in the allocation of territories triggered civil war. Most of the 830s was taken up by open warfare between the emperor and his various sons and nobles, accompanied by multiple short-lived divisions of the realm; Louis himself was deposed for a year.38
His death in 840 unleashed even more intense fighting among his three surviving sons. They soon carved up the empire into three effectively separate kingdoms—West Francia (the basis for what became France), Middle Francia (or “Lotharingia,” an elongated and diverse domain that stretched from the Low Countries and Burgundy to Northern Italy), and East Francia (the core of future Germany). This step not only fatally compromised the integrity of the empire but ushered in four decades of complex internal conflicts and renewed partitions, one of which briefly splintered Middle Francia into three separate kingdoms. A more durable settlement was reached in 870 and helped stabilize the geograph
ical boundaries of West and East Francia and Italy. When abdications and inheritance put Charles the Fat in charge of all these kingdoms, this fortuitous restoration lasted only three years (884–887) and coincided with dramatic Viking incursions that delegitimated his position (figure 5.5).
FIGURE 5.5 Carolingian partitions, 843–888 CE.
Upon Charles’s death, nobles in each of the three major kingdom elected their own rulers. The kingdom of Italy subsequently descended into more than seventy years of persistent instability and infighting until it was finally reclaimed by the rulers of East Francia. As we will see in the next section, the kings of East Francia had to contend with serious challenges to their authority. Even those, however, paled in comparison to the near-terminal decline of centralized power in West Francia, where the regions outside the old Frankish heartlands in the northeast came to be divided among powerful duchies. Viking conquests were formally acknowledged in 911 when they were granted rights to Normandy. Their now-vacant position as fearsome marauders was at once filled by the Magyars, who conducted raids throughout the first half of the tenth century.
By the end of that century, the effective power of the kings was confined to a sliver of land around Paris: nobles had carved up most of West Francia among themselves, marginalizing their nominal rulers. In the eleventh century, these duchies and counties themselves decomposed into smaller lordships. Any prospect of further expansion and empire-building that might have been had by then long evaporated: West Francia’s—or France’s—capacity for projecting power beyond its borders approached zero.39
This outcome was not in any meaningful way contingent in the sense that it could have been averted if particular events—successions, wars, and so on—had turned out differently. Rather, it was the product of deeply rooted structural conditions. One of them, specific to the Frankish experience, was the time-honored practice of dividing the realm among a king’s sons. Because this tendency was particularly pronounced in times of relative strength, it effectively acted as a built-in—almost homeostatic—constraint on durable state formation.40
As noted, only periods of unity sustained expansion and consolidation. In this respect, one might consider Charlemagne’s efflorescence the rare product of unusually good luck. His brother and rival king Carloman died after only three years of corule, opening up the path to an exceptionally long spell of one-man rule—Charlemagne’s longevity was almost twice the average life span of the other eight Carolingian monarchs (all of whom appear to have died of natural causes), seventy-two compared to thirty-eight and a half years. The Frankish apogee under Charlemagne was the exception that proved the rule.
But even more powerful processes were steadily eroding state capabilities: the loss of centralized fiscal extraction and redistribution that made it harder for rulers to manage their senior followers, raise armies, and lay claim to the surplus produced by the working population, and the concurrent ascent of increasingly autonomous aristocrats who came to control material resources as well as military assets in ways that hollowed out royal power and ultimately the state itself. These developments took place not only among the Franks but in much of post-Roman Europe: they are crucial to our understanding of why large-scale empire proved so much more resilient in other parts of the Old World than in Europe, and will be discussed in more detail in chapter 7.41
For now, a brief outline is enough to assess the longer-term prospects of Frankish empire-building. The fall of Rome boosted the militarization of the elite. Rulership was legitimated by martial prowess, and the elimination of civilian career options beyond the church narrowed the composition of the ruling class: post-Roman Germanic and provincial elites primarily self-identified as warriors.42
Creeping defiscalization accompanied this shift. Although the Franks initially maintained elements of the Roman taxation system, land became the principal reward for service to the king. With few exceptions, direct taxes were phased out during the seventh century, and rulers relied on income from their royal land as well as tolls, fines, and booty. Over time, their estates, though still very extensive, were diminished by land grants to nobles, who likewise depended on land rents instead of delegated powers to tax.43
In the same period, the evolution of warriors into a landowning class that formally owed military service was completed. As land (rather than proceeds from land) was granted to nobles outright, they in turn made grants to their military followers and sought to obtain additional land from the king to compensate for these transfers, all of which were de facto regarded as permanent.
The formation of an entrenched military class, the allocation of quasi-hereditary land to its members, and the decline of centralized revenue collection and disbursement greatly narrowed the scope for the exercise of coercive power by the ruler and his patrimonial agents. The center no longer had direct control over the enforcement of service obligations: it fell to local estate owners to mobilize soldiers and present them to royal campaigns. Vertical ties of command and dependence developed, whereby nobles acted as intermediaries in raising and leading military forces. This simultaneously empowered the elite and served to downgrade the standing of less affluent free men, rendering military service more socially selective and detaching it ever further from direct royal control.44
In the eighth century, Frankish armies consisted of nobles and their retainers, who had grown in number as cumulative land grants and a more general economic recovery had boosted the fortunes of an increasingly assertive ruling class. This affected the scope of mobilization: nobles reluctant to commit their men to war could substitute fines for levies. As a result, additional incentives were required to ensure compliance with traditional service obligations. To an even greater extent than before, Frankish kings relied on military success to inspire loyalty. Expansionist wars that generated tangible rewards in the form of land and booty were the most reliable means of attracting aristocratic support.45
This opportunistic approach helps explain the successes of Charles Martel, Pepin the Short, and Charlemagne, who were able to marshal dedicated armies in exchange for material benefits: conquests produced “unmatched patronage opportunities for the Carolingian family, with a host of new counties, duchies, and royal lands to be given out” in Aquitaine, Catalonia, Saxony, Bavaria, and especially Italy. This kind of expansion also created a degree of social mobility that stabilized royal rule. However, as service became contingent on profit, war abated as soon as the Franks ran out of lucrative targets. This slowdown was already visible in Charlemagne’s final years, when his campaigns against the Danes proved both unprofitable and unpopular. Falling income from plunder rapidly depleted the royal treasury.46
Meanwhile, the ample windfalls from the Carolingian expansion had empowered the nobility even further, turning them into a class of magnates who were able openly to resist royal orders and deploy their own resources to compete with their rulers or play off members of the royal lineage against one another. This kind of factional conflict was made particularly attractive by the fact that it allowed for “internal redistribution of wealth as an alternative to external expansion”: war-making turned inward, as it were, undermining the state. Moreover, Charlemagne’s reign witnessed efforts to demarcate Franks from other (often arbitrarily defined) ethnic groups within the empire, which were placed in a subordinate position. This in turn obstructed the formation a unified ruling class and precipitated resurgent regionalization.47
Taken together, these dynamics go a long way in accounting for the persistent divisions and conflicts that rocked the Frankish empire after Charlemagne’s demise. Negotiation with powerbrokers replaced royal command, and by the end of the ninth century, top magnates had assumed quasi-regal status.48
Although the Frankish emperors did not go down without a fight, the system proved too resistant to change. In his later years, Charlemagne showed growing concern over the service obligations of his vassals, seeking to impel them by specifying their duties and imposing fines. He may even have tried
to raise an army drawn from the entire landowning class and commanded by royal officers, but without success. Later Charles the Bald also failed when he attempted to bypass lordly mediation by raising forces against the Viking threat and to assess noble and clerical estates. Instead, during the ninth century, military service came to be redefined as an aristocratic prerogative that replaced the previous service obligations of free men. In the tenth century, military men of lower status who had risen in the magnates’ employ established their own powers over an increasingly dependent peasantry, a process that intensified the effective fragmentation of coercive capacity within the realm.49
In the end, genuine reform was well beyond the reach of individual rulers: power rested with dukes, counts, and bishops, and while substantial military operations remained feasible when all relevant parties consented to them, the bar for ensuring this consent kept rising as growing revenue from larger and richer estates guaranteed a steady flow of nonmilitary income that allowed elites to disengage from the royal court.50
Internal fragmentation and attendant weaknesses were by no means limited to the Frankish dominion, even if its relative longevity allowed them to be taken to their logical extremes. Every single one of the Germanic successor polities was fairly brittle, buffeted by leadership struggles and elite autonomy: the Merovingians and Carolingians were merely the most fortunate in that they—unlike Vandals, Ostrogoths, Burgundians, Thuringians, and Visigoths—did not succumb to determined external challengers. Government was fairly minimal and interpersonal relationships ruled supreme, which allowed for quick shifts in loyalty and territorial configuration. Even Charlemagne’s reach remained rather limited: good intentions, however widely advertised, were hard to put into practice, and his royal agents (missi), who were supposed to monitor local powerholders, were not particularly effective.51
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