The Age of Charles Martel

Paul Fouracre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780582064768
• eBook ISBN: 9781317898481
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

First glorified as the Saviour of Christendom and then vilified as an enemy of the Church, Charles Martel's career has been written and rewritten from the time of his descendents. This important new study draws on strictly contemporary sources to assess his real achievements and offers new insights into a fascinating period.

Chapter One
The Merovingian Background

In the year 613 the Merovingian king, Clothar II, united all of the Frankish lands under his rule. A year later he issued an edict, the so-called Edict of Paris, in which he stressed his authority over all parts of Francia, but also pledged to respect the privileges and customs of the 'provinces'.¹ At the same time he convened a church council, also held in Paris, in which he addressed the church in similar terms.² Given that much of the Edict of Paris was concerned with the affairs of the clergy, there is considerable overlap between the texts of the Council and the Edict on matters such as the election of bishops, on disputes between clergy and bishops or on whether or not clergy should be judged in lay courts. Secular and ecclesiastical interests here converged on a single focus: the desire to uphold a divinely sanctioned social and religious order, with the intended result being that God would continue to ensure good fortune for Clothar's kingdom.

These documents would not have looked out of place in the Carolingian world in which kings, even victorious ones, likewise feared that unless they propitiated God their luck would soon begin to run out. In Carolingian legislation too there would be a convergence of ecclesiastical and secular interests, and just like the Edict of Paris, many Carolingian edicts or 'capitularies' would open with an exortation to respect the ancient canons of the church. But at one time historians went much further than this in seeing links between the Edict of Paris and the Carolingians, for they thought that provisions in the Edict actually made possible, or even caused, that development of non-royal power which led to the rise of the Carolingians, and in particular to the rise of Charles Martel, a non-royal leader who had supreme power. Let us follow this argument as a way into thinking about the nature of Frankish political culture which is the setting for the career of Charles Martel.

In 612 it must have seemed totally against the odds that the Neustrian king Clothar II would emerge as sole ruler of the Franks, He had been on the point of defeat by his cousin's children, Theuderic king of Burgundy and Theudebert king of Austrasia, but then Theuderic killed his brother Theudebert and then died himself just as he was on his way to finish off Clothar. In these circumstances, it is argued, Clothar was peculiarly dependent upon the support of his more powerful subjects, especially when it came to trying to rule the regions of Burgundy and Austrasia which had so suddenly and unexpectedly come under his sway. The Edict of Paris has been read in this context as Clothar's deal with the nobility. In return for their support, it is said, he guaranteed their privileges and, by agreeing that only local men should hold provincial power, he effectively resigned control over outlying areas and in these parts allowed the development of hereditary office holding. This move has been seen as a faux pas which had consequences unforeseen by the hapless Merovingians but all too familiar to modern connoisseurs of constitutional history. In these historians' view, any nobility worth its salt would snap up a golden opportunity such as this to gorge itself at the expense of royal resources and prerogatives. In this case, supposedly, the concession of regional privileges steadily bled the Merovingian kings of their wealth, power and prestige. Eventually, as the ninth-century writer Einhard put it, the Merovingians would have no more vigour, possessing only the empty title of king, their resources amounting to a single estate.³

According to Einhard, and to many a modern textbook, the ultimate beneficiaries of the Merovingians' retreat into the shadows were, of course, the family of Charles Martel. The Pippinids emerged in the course of the seventh century as the leaders of the nobility in Austrasia. They worked themselves into a position from which they could control the royal palace, and through the royal palace they exercised the king's powers, always in his name, but ever in their hands. Eventually, under Charles Martel they were kings in all but name, and in the time of Martel's son Pippin, they took the name as well, relegating the last Merovingian to a monastery, tonsured as a monk, or possibly even scalped. Now this story, which is one of the grandest narratives of early medieval political history, takes the partisan Carolingian viewpoint at face value. It is anachronistic in that it expects the Frankish nobility to have behaved as if reacting against a much more powerful monarchy (the Edict of Paris has even been termed the 'Magna Carta of the Frankish aristocracy'),⁴ and it tells us nothing about the culture of power which would help us understand how or why, or indeed if, the Carolingians were any more successful than their Merovingian predecessors.

To arrive at a more realistic understanding of the Merovingian background to Carolingian power, let us begin again with the observation that the Edict of Paris was essentially similar to later Carolingian legislation. One good reason for the similarity is that legislation in both periods drew on the same stock of Roman and Canon law. But another explanation is that in many respects the conditions in which rulers operated changed little over the whole period. This we can see with the very clause of the Edict which is supposed to have opened the floodgates to noble power. Clause twelve stated that no judge from one region or province should be appointed in any other region. This has often been taken to mean that judges, these typically being counts, should be chosen only from amongst local people, and since local government basically resided in the hands of the counts, the chief representatives of royal power in each area would now be local men, with local interests, but with little incentive to carry out orders sent out from the royal palace. The clause went on to say, however, that the reason that judges should be local men was that they should have hereditary property in the region in which they held office, so that if they acted unlawfully in taking away the property of others, they could have their own property taken in return.⁵ So, this measure was actually aimed at restraining and controlling local officials, not at giving them their head. It was a measure which may-have had Roman precedent, and certainly did have precedent in earlier Merovingian legislation put forward by Clothar's father, King Chilperic (d. 584).⁶ The provision would also be found in Carolingian legislation.

In each district the count was the figure chiefly responsible for the maintenance of law and order. The term 'district', from the Latin districtum, reflects this role. In classical Latin the term meant 'punishment', but in the Merovingian period districtum also came to mean the area in which an official exercised jurisdiction, that is, the area in which he had the right and duty to punish people. Punishment usually involved fining or distraining those with property. Those without property, and especially unfree people, could be punished by loss of life or limb, or, if they were free people who were too poor to pay fines, by enslavement. In both later-Merovingian and Carolingian Francia, the 'state' (meaning the collection of institutions and officials whose power was in theory derived from royal authority) was essentially²¹ Counts and other royal officials could only exercise powers for which there was a degree of consensus amongst those with property, and in practice this meant exercising powers which protected the latter group's wealth and status. Hence the vicious treatment of people of lesser status, and hence that legislation which allowed redress against officials who took property 'illegally'.

In documents which were concerned with property, that is, which recorded the transfer, gift or sale of land, or which recorded the settlement of disputes over land, we see what looks like an impressive level of bureaucratic competence. The legal machinery involved looks rather effective. But the appearance of efficiency may be misleading because the documents in question, which provide our evidence, were produced at the request of those who benefited from them and because here the involvement of royal officials, or even of the king himself, was actively sought by the beneficiaries. The evidence is thus one-sided, largely reflecting the successful use of what bureaucratic machinery there was. There were, however, few mechanisms to compel people to use bureaucratic and formal legal procedures if they were unwilling to do so, and alongside the machinery of royal government there were alternative customary and informal ways of maintaining order and privilege and of settling disputes. These measures relied on self-help, drew on networks of social support and need not have involved the officers of the king at all. Such customary procedures sometimes figure in narrative sources, but are rarely mentioned in formal documents.⁸ They could include the use of violence to protect honour or to take revenge for insult or injury. Furthermore, when it came to policing the countryside, the 'state' seems to have been largely ineffective against outlaws and brigands. It is significant here that in 864 when the ruler Charles the Bald legislated to bring such criminals to justice, he largely repeated the measures first announced in the Edict of Paris two and a half centuries earlier, namely, that it was the duty of the 'powerful' in the countryside to deliver notorious wrongdoers to court.⁹ In relation to law and order, not much had changed. Charlemagne too could do little more than plead with the powerful not to shelter criminals but to deliver them up for punishment. Charlemagne, in fact, is often said to have tackled the issue of law and order more effectively than any other Prankish ruler, but in his legislation too there is much about the principles of justice, but little about how criminals might actually be brought to book.¹⁰ This coexistence of law and custom in a world in which the ruler's power was practically rather limited, is the proper background to the 614 Edict of Paris, and rather than stress elements of very dubious constitutional significance it is more helpful to be aware of the deeper continuities in Frankish political culture.

The career of Charles Martel shows how even a successful leader could not break with custom nor invent new institutions in order to strengthen the machinery of government. But it also shows that social and political consensus might be manipulated to build up power on a personal basis. One avenue open to rulers was to invoke supernatural support for their power, as we saw in the Edict and in the Council of Paris where Clothar II called the church to order so that he might strengthen his authority over all of Francia. That leaders should increasingly stress this aspect was to rule in line with a growing sense of religious duty and piety throughout society. It is also true that ecclesiastical organisation had preserved the skeleton of late Roman provincial government, and this organisation could be used to support royal authority when rulers made it their priority to defend the faith. As we saw in the Introduction, Charles Martel would be compared to the biblical hero Joshua, and it is inconceivable that he could have built up his power without presenting himself as the foremost protector of the church and of the faithful. We should therefore include religion as another factor in that consensus which underpinned (as well as limited) the authority of rulers. Authority was in these terms as much a cultural phenomenon as it was the product of bureaucratic organisation and fiscal resources. Let us look at this in more detail to see how Francia under the Merovingians and Carolingians could have governing institutions which were in many ways weak but could be nevertheless a very large and successful kingdom, and one which exercised upon its neighbours a very strong pull towards cultural integration.

The roots of what one might term 'the Frankish system', that is, consensual rule over a very extensive territory, based on the protection of property and social status, lay on the one hand in the history and geography of the later Roman Empire, and on the other in the confederate nature of the Franks themselves. The Franks were a west German people who first appeared in the Rhineland area in the third century. In the course of the fourth and fifth centuries they developed their identity as troops who served the Roman authorities and in the process acquired a growing degree of control over north-east Gaul. When Roman authority collapsed throughout Gaul in the later fifth century, the Franks moved south and west as military rulers, and in the early sixth century they defeated first the Visigoths and then the Burgundians, which meant that they now controlled Gaul as far as the Pyrenees to the south. To the south-east their rule stretched into the southern Alps and Provence. At the same time they retained control over the Rhineland, and once they had defeated the Alamans and Thuringians, they extended their influence into central and southern Germany too. Thus by the mid-sixth century the Franks had influence over a massive swathe of territory which included the area of modern-day France and most of what would become Germany. It has even been argued that in this early period the Franks controlled southern England too, although for this there is only circumstantial evidence.¹¹ Apart from England, if indeed it really had been under Frankish control, no part of this massive territory would sucessfully break away from Frankish control for many centuries to come, nor would the Franks add much in the way of new lands to their empire until the time of Charlemagne.

One reason for the impressive stability of this huge bloc of territories was their fortunate strategic position. They lay outside the range of Byzantine intervention, and beyond the reach of the Arabs, the two groups who would destroy the Franks' Gothic neighbours in Italy and Spain. To the east, Saxons, Thuringians and Bavarians, the last two peoples under leaders appointed by the Franks, provided a buffer against Slavonic settlers and Asiatic invaders. Thus throughout the entire period of Frankish rule, that is, from the sixth to the tenth centuries, the existence of this massive political entity was never under serious threat from invaders. Nor was it ever seriously threatened by disintegration from within, that is to say, no one region ever broke away to form a separate non-Merovingian kingdom, even though civil wars and dynastic crises afforded plenty of opportunities to do this. It seems, therefore, that in this large area of Europe north of the Pyrenees and Alps, no satisfactory alternative to Frankish rule could be envisaged.

As we have seen, the Frankish rulers worked with the grain of social power by protecting property and preserving status and privilege. Leaders everywhere had something to gain from being part of a Frankish regime, and much to lose if other leaders could be mobilised against them. But a rather more subtle explanation of why leaders should have been willing to support Frankish rulers, be these Merovingians or Carolingians, is to be sought in the development of a common culture of power through which leaders from a variety of different ethnic backgrounds would acquire a Frankish identity, or at least seek to be part of a wider political community based on the Frankish court. This cultural phenomenon needs to be examined in more detail, as it is the key to understanding how Francia did not disintegrate but was actually welded together more firmly under the hammer blows of Charles Martel.

When the Franks occupied western and southern Gaul in the late fifth and early sixth centuries, they did little to disturb the power and privileges of the Gallo-Roman ruling elite. The latter had secured their status through the control of land and the exercise of public office, and increasingly they maintained it by holding the leading positions in the Cath...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Merovingian Background
• 2. The Rise of the Pippinids
• 3. Crisis, Survival and Victory, 715-724
• 4. Charles Martel and the Periphery: Relations with Aquitaine, Burgundy, Provence, and the Regions East of the Rhine
• 5. Francia under the Hammer
• 6. Mayor Without a King and King Without a Mayor
• Bibliography
• Genealogies
• Index