Germany in the Early Middle Ages c. 800-1056

Timothy Reuter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138147621
• eBook ISBN: 9781317872382
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte des Mittelalters

The first volume chronologically in a new multi-volume History of Germany, Timothy Reuter's book is the first full-scale survey to appear in English for nearly fifty years of this formative period of German history -- the period in which Germany itself, and many of its internal divisions and characteristics, were created and defined. Filling an important gap, the book is itself a formidable scholarly achievement.

CHAPTER ONE

Medieval Germany: sources and historiography

To write a history of Germany from the Carolingian period to the mid-eleventh century is of course to beg the question of whether there was such a thing at the time. This book will try, among other things, to suggest some answers, but will not start by offering any. The difficulty should in any case not be exaggerated, any more than one would criticise the title of Sir Frank Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England by saying that England only existed for – at most – only the last 150 years of the period covered. There is no theoretical difficulty in dealing with the origins and history of the east Frankish kingdom and of its successor, the Ottoman and Salian empire; whether these entities can properly be called Germany will emerge from the discussion. One should not in any case overemphasize the nation, either as a unit of historical being or as a unit of historical consciousness. The inhabitants of “Germany” in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries might on occasions see themselves as Franci orientales or Germans (i.e. not Italians or western Franks), but they might also in other contexts see themselves as Saxons (or members of some other ethnic grouping) or as Christians (i.e. not pagan Hungarians or Vikings), and there were other forms of group consciousness, some of which had far deeper roots in objective reality: free (i.e. not a slave), noble (i.e. not a nobody), clerical (i.e. not a layman). The reason why we generally write about and study the past on more or less national lines is not that the surviving remains of the past force themselves on our attention in this way, but rather that the political and social organization of scholarship has led them to be interpreted in this way. There is medieval German history because there have been and are modern German historians. An account of the sources for the history of the lands around the Rhine, the Elbe and the Danube will help to show what kinds of history can and cannot be written. But it cannot sensibly be separated from an account of the historians who have used these sources, which will show what kind of history has been written. For it is no longer true, if it ever was, that the historian reaches an understanding of the past primarily through a reading of the sources, undisturbed by knowledge of the secondary literature. After more than a hundred and fifty years of professional, academic history-writing there can be few areas of the past where such an attitude of intellectual virginity is sensible or even possible, and certainly the early middle ages are not among them. Here there is little which has not been chewed over thoroughly by several generations of historians, and to discuss the sources alone without looking at what has been made of them is not very helpful. We may, however, begin with the sources themselves.

Germany, or east Francia, had its own historians in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, men who recorded, sometimes in brief notes, sometimes in fuller and more continuous narrative, the doings of kings, nobles and bishops. Characteristic for the eighth and ninth centuries was the organization of such writings as annals, that is, recording the events of each year in a separate entry of anything from a shorthand sentence to several paragraphs in length. The history of the Frankish empire up to 830 was recorded in the so-called Royal Frankish Annals, a text which has evident connections with the Carolingian court but cannot be said to have been written at royal orders. The so-called Annals of Fulda had a similar function and status for the east Frankish kingdom up to 888. These were in reality written not in Fulda but by a Mainz cleric, who drew on earlier works, some now lost, for his account up to the end of the 860s, and then wrote contemporaneously with events from 869 to 887. From 882 to 901 a separate continuation was being written in Bavaria, perhaps in Regensburg. A Lotharingian monk, Regino of Prum, wrote a disjointed world chronicle at the end of the ninth century, which is a valuable account of east Frankish affairs from about 880 until 908. After that there is a gap; substantial works of history were not produced again in eastern Francia until the 960s, when the wealth and fame of Otto I inspired a number of authors. Widukind, a monk of Corvey related to the Saxon royal house, wrote a history of the Saxons up to his own time; an Italian bishop, Liutprand of Cremona, composed several works which are particularly valuable for the information they give on Italian and Greek affairs; and the monk Adalbert of St Maximin, later to become the first archbishop of Magdeburg, wrote an annalistic continuation of Regino’s chronicle which extended from 907 to 967. After that, historical writing became more plentiful. Annals were once again composed on a substantial scale – at Quedlinburg and Hersfeld, for example. Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg, writing in the first two decades of the eleventh century, wrote a chronicle which for the earlier period drew on Widukind’s work but amplified it with other traditions and anecdotes; as he comes nearer his own time the work turns into what can only be described as the memoirs of a Saxon aristocrat, a source of value far beyond the mere information it provides about the flow of political events. Both Henry II and Conrad II had contemporary biographies, by Bishop Adalbold of Utrecht (most of whose work has been lost) and by the royal chaplain Wipo respectively, and their reigns and those of Henry III were fully covered by a number of annalists, notably Hermann the Lame, a monk of the Reichenau, as well as anonymous writers in Altaich, Mainz, Bamberg, Hersfeld and elsewhere.

From the late tenth century onwards we also have the Gesta kept for many bishoprics and monasteries: sometimes brief, sometimes full accounts of their church and the bishops or abbots in charge. Besides such forms of writing which can obviously be seen as historical there also survive a large number of saints’ lives and of collections of the miracles worked by saints at their shrines. This kind of literature is much more varied. Some saints’ lives were very historical in their approach, and can be described simply as the biographies of holy men; others concentrated much more on the saints’ holiness and virtues, and say little or nothing beyond conventional phrases about their heroes’ biography or the world in which they lived. The information all these writers provide can be supplemented and in some cases corrected from that given by minor sets of annals, but the small number of really full historical writings provides a crucial skeleton for our understanding because they alone offer not only “facts” about who did what but also attempt to put them into some kind of coherent sequence. We shall see later what other kinds of evaluation such sources lend themselves to.

A quite different kind of source is that represented by charters, using the word loosely to refer to any kind of written record of a legal transaction made by or for one of the parties to it. Rulers issued charters (normally known as diplomata) to their followers, lay and ecclesiastical, to confirm the latter’s title to possession or to grant privileges or property. These have survived in fair, though not in enormous numbers: we have about 170 genuine ones for the first ruler of east Francia, Louis the German, and about 380 for the reign of the last ruler covered in this book, Henry III. These were solemn documents, often beginning with a preamble (arenga) setting out in terms of general principle the reasons for making the grant, proceeding to list the grants or titles, and ending with threats of penalty for those who should violate the conditions of the diploma. They generally finish with a dating clause, saying where and when they were issued, and with a reference to a confirmation by the royal seal. What are misleadingly known as private charters, meaning charters issued by anyone who was not a king, an emperor or a pope, followed more varied patterns. They were not in this period sealed, often not dated, and frequently had no arenga; what they did normally have was a list of witnesses to the transaction they recorded, and often their main purpose seems to have been to record the names of these witnesses so that these could testify to the transaction – the value of the private charter as testimony in itself was limited.

The context of charters and diplomat a is law, but the sources available for the law in the period covered by this book are very patchy. The law of the church was extensively recorded: the older law, consisting of the canons of councils, the decrees issued by popes, and relevant and authoritative quotations from the church fathers, survived in collections, and it was added to regularly by church councils, which met in the late eighth and ninth centuries with great frequency and in the tenth and eleventh century not infrequently. The contribution of the popes to new church law was in this period insignificant. As far as secular law goes, there are codifications for the laws of all the major Germanic ethnic groupings – Bavarians, Alemans, Saxons, Franks, Thuringians, Frisians. The codifications were, in the form we have them, almost all made in the eighth century, though they often record much older law. They are, however, far from complete (in the sense that there must have been law on all sorts of matters, in particular on property-holding and inheritance, which they hardly cover); and it is not easy to show that they were put to practical use, that Saxon law in the early eleventh century still had anything much to do with Lex Saxonum. The earlier Carolingian rulers issued orders which were a mixture of new legislation and administrative regulation, called capitularies, but as we shall see, there was virtually no capitulary legislation in the lands east of the Rhine. Legal texts are indispensable sources, but their gaps, their silences and their tendency to anachronism and fossiliza-tion make them very difficult to interpret.

Standing somewhere between charters and narrative sources are the surviving letters of the period. These resemble narrative sources in their range and their frequent references to specific events, but charters in their greater degree of objectivity; they were not normally intended to interpret the present or recent past to subsequent generations, as historical writing proper was. Perhaps 200 isolated letters have survived from the area and period with which we are concerned here. More valuable than such documents, which, because we have no reply and sometimes not even a certain indication of who sent or received them, are often contextless, is the much smaller number of letter collections. Only Einhard’s has survived from ninth-century east Francia; from the Ottoman and Salian Reich we have those associated with Rather of Verona, Froumond of Tegernsee, Gerbert of Rheims, Petrus Damiani, Abbot Bern of the Reichenau and the cathedral school at Worms, to name the most important. Letters in letter collections usually help to explain one another’s content, so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts considered as a number of separate letters. Letters often shade off into treatises or pamphlets (as with Rather and Damiani); letter form could be used for very different purposes, including dedicatory prefaces or theological tractates. By the nature of things letter writing was very much a minority, intellectual taste; there were “business” letters, but hardly any have survived. Other forms of literary activity, such as the writing of poetry (mostly in Latin, though there is a small corpus of vernacular poems from the ninth and tenth centuries), were still more minority activities.

It should not be supposed that the written word offers the only kind of source available for the reconstruction of the early medieval German past. Books and scripts can also be considered as artefacts, and in some cases as works of art as well. Most of the painting of the period survives in book illustrations; there is only a handful of surviving wall-paintings, and these are mostly incomplete, though we know that both the greater churches and the palaces of kings and bishops were decorated in this way; the church of St George on the Reichenau with its complete set of Ottoman wall-paintings gives an idea of how they might have looked. Crosses, copes and other liturgical objects, together with shrines and reliquaries, the containers used for preserving and honouring the relics of saints, formed a further opportunity for craftsmen to work in ivory and precious metals. A few churches have survived from this period, though almost all were either monastic churches or cathedrals and hence untypically large, and almost all have been heavily rebuilt in the following centuries. Comparatively few artefacts have survived outside this sacred context: virtually no secular buildings – for many royal palaces we do not even have a ground plan; and no implements apart from a few weapons and the fragments of pottery and other tools recovered by excavation. We owe most of our knowledge of what the world of the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries looked like to manuscript paintings and drawings; and the relationship between such depictions and past reality is much more complex than that posed by photography.

The sources just listed and the kinds of information they offer have not all been treated with equal respect from the beginnings of the scientific study of history in the late eighteenth century. The emphases of nineteenth-century medieval scholarship lay on getting the facts right and making the sources available in order to do so. The opening of archives and the major state libraries in the nineteenth century made a flood of new source-material available, and much of the attention of nineteenth-century scholars was devoted to sifting and ordering this and fitting it into the context of what was already known. The edition of texts was given a powerful impulse from classical philology: Karl Lachmann and others in the first half of the nineteenth century developed techniques for working back as reliably as possible from a large number of surviving manuscripts of a text, some of whichmight be many copies removed from the original and all of which would inevitably contain copyists’ errors, to recover the author’s original text. In the process manuscripts which were mere copies of other manuscripts could be discarded for the purposes of textual reconstruction. These methods were applied – not always wholeheartedly – to the edition of the texts for above all the narrative history of the middle ages: annals, chronicles, saints’ lives. A related technique was applied to the content of these texts: later writers who merely copied or abridged earlier annals or chroniclers were discarded as having no independent value when it came to weighing up evidence. There were also new developments in the treatment of charters (private records of property transactions) and of royal diplomata (documents issued by rulers which granted privileges or confirmed possessions). These documents had legal force and so were unusually subject to forgery and interpolation in the middle ages and afterwards (later forgeries often having the purpose of supporting bogus genealogies rather than legal claims). The new methods made it possible to determine whether or not such a document was genuine, and if it was not, the extent to which it had made use of genuine material. It was characteristic of nineteenth-century German scholarship that the results of this work should have been summarized in scholarly guides, by Wattenbach and Potthast for the narrative sources, by BreGlau and others for the diplomatic ones.¹ By the time of the outbreak of the First World War the narrative sources for German medieval history in the early and high middle ages had largely been edited; editions of the royal charters were well on the way to completion, and other sources such as letters, private charters, saints’ lives and necrologies were also being worked through. Not only had these sources been edited, the individual scholar could make use of comprehensive guides to them and to summaries of them, such as the Regesta Imperii (a calendar of royal movements and actions which became the model for numerous Regesta for bishoprics and secular princes published by regional record societies) or the Jahrbiicher der deutschen Geschichte (“Annals of German History”), which reconstructed as accurately and in as much detail as possible the histoire evenementielle of the Reich from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries.²

It is one thing to edit and analyse sources; it is another to make use of them to write history. The conceptual apparatus used for the writing of the political and ecclesiastical history of the middle ages was thin. Although Ranke’s maxim that “each age is equally close to God” – meaning that it should be studied from the standpoint of its own beliefs and priorities and not from ours – was in theory a widely accepted premiss, there was also a tendency – often unconscious – to posit a timeless homo politicus, with unchanging forms of action: the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries were populated in such writing by “statesmen” practising far-sighted “policies”, but also aware of realities and capable of Realpolitik, even of Macchiavellianism in order to achieve their aims. Anachronisms of this kind are of course common enough today, but they were far more common, and much less likely to be questioned, in the nineteenth century. Besides this, much historical writing of the nineteenth century was implicitly or explicitly political in its premisses and intentions. The movement towards German unification had been, at least in its early stages, one dominated more by intellectuals than by politicians; not for nothing was the constitutional assembly in Frankfurt in 1848 known as a “professors’ club”, and a number of prominent historians of the nineteenth century, including such men as Waitz and Mommsen, had a secondary role as politician, though none was of the first rank. The period covered in this book was one of great interest; the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries were, after all, the period in which Germany had seemingly been united under powerful rulers who exercised de facto if not de jure hegemony in Europe. The Kaiser zeit was an inspiration for the present, as can still be seen today in Henry III’s palace at Goslar, restored at the time of the founding of the new German empire. Historical wall-paintings depict significant scenes in medieval German history; the climax is provided by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa blinking from his cave in the Kyffhauser at the new Emperor William I and his court and assuring himself that all is well. The Kaiserzeit was also the period in which the “retarded national development” of Germany, the German Sonderweg (“special development”, mostly with negative overtones), might be said to have begun, and there was considerable debate about whether the medieval emperors ought to have used so much of their resources on conquering and holding Italy rather than on a policy of expansion eastwards. Confessional differences also played a role; the Goslar wall-paintings include a number of the most famous scenes in the relations between emperors and popes, and when Bismarck said in the course of the conflict with the Catholic church that “we will not go to Canossa” (referring to the submission of Henry IV to Gregory VII in 1077) the allusion was clear to all.

Much of the development of nineteenth-century German historical writing was thus determined by the political history of the period, by the circumstances of German unification and by the nature of the polycentric polity which the new unified state only partially replaced. The decentralized nature of pre-1871 Germany meant that there were far more universities than in Great Britain or France. Many of the smaller states had their own university or universities, and history was established early as an academic discipline. There were at least twenty professors of medieval history by 1900. There was a comparable spread of archives and archivists, and of societies for the publication of historical records which had state backing; in English terms, it is as if every county record society of the nineteenth century had had royal patronage and money to go with it. It was a difference of kind as well as of degree. Landesgeschichte cannot be translated as “local” or even “regional” history, because a German Land was not simply a geographical unit but a historically evolved territory, evoking consciousness and loyalties. But in spite of this seeming decentralization, professors and other academic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of maps and genealogical tables
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1 Medieval Germany: sources and historiography
• Part 1 Carolingian Germany
• Part 2 The kingdom refounded, 882–983
• Part 3 The Ancien Régime, 983–1056
• Further reading and bibliography
• Chronological table
• Index