Using and Not Using the Past after the Carolingian Empire

c. 900–c.1050

Sarah Greer, Alice Hicklin, Stefan Esders, Sarah Greer, Alice Hicklin, Stefan Esders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429683039
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Using and Not Using the Past after the Carolingian Empire offers a new take on European history from c.900 to c.1050, examining the 'post-Carolingian' period in its own right and presenting it as a time of creative experimentation with new forms of authority and legitimacy.

In the late eighth century, the Frankish king Charlemagne put together a new empire. Less than a century later, that empire had collapsed. The story of Europe following the end of the Carolingian empire has often been presented as a tragedy: a time of turbulence and disintegration, out of which the new, recognisably medieval kingdoms of Europe emerged. This collection offers a different perspective. Taking a transnational approach, the authors contemplate the new social and political order that emerged in tenth- and eleventh-century Europe and examine how those shaping this new order saw themselves in relation to the past. Each chapter explores how the past was used creatively by actors in the regions of the former Carolingian Empire to search for political, legal and social legitimacy in a turbulent new political order.

Advancing the debates on the uses of the past in the early Middle Ages and prompting reconsideration of the narratives that have traditionally dominated modern writing on this period, Using and Not Using the Past after the Carolingian Empire is ideal for students and scholars of tenth- and eleventh-century European history.

1

INTRODUCTION

Sarah Greer and Alice Hicklin*

The vision of the figure of Charlemagne, who established an empire of almost a million square kilometres reaching from the frontiers of modern Hungary to the Atlantic, and from the English Channel to central Italy and Catalonia, has been a heady one for those who came after him. In the year 1000, the Roman Emperor Otto III returned to the German heartlands of his empire after a grand tour around his kingdom. He was finally drawn to a site laden with imperial significance: the Carolingian palace complex of Aachen, where the remains of his predecessor Charlemagne had been laid to rest in the cathedral after his death some 186 years earlier. Remarkably the exact location of the emperor’s body had been lost to posterity, and consequently Otto ordered that the ground of the cathedral should be ripped up, so that he could look upon the body of his great predecessor. The excavations eventually uncovered the site, and the emperor, accompanied by members of his imperial court, came face to face with his predecessor. According to contemporary reports, the body of Charlemagne was found sitting upright on a royal throne in a crypt below the cathedral, wearing a golden crown and holding a sceptre. Otto reverently removed relics from Charlemagne’s body – though all the sources disagree on exactly what these relics were – before reburying him with the greatest honour within the church.¹ This millennial unveiling of one emperor by another reverberated throughout the empire and beyond. What Otto specifically hoped to achieve or convey with his exhumation of Charlemagne is disputed, but its symbolism is nevertheless clear: almost 200 years after Charlemagne’s death, the lure of aligning his own empire with the memory of the first post-Roman western emperor brought Otto to Aachen and to the feet of Charlemagne. The Carolingian past, personified by its eponymous and most successful ruler, exerted a gravitational pull on those who came after.²

* The research for this chapter was funded by the ‘After Empire: Using and Not Using the Past in the Crisis of the Carolingian World, c.900–1050’ HERA project, receiving funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 649307.

The power of Charlemagne as a political symbol has endured. Remembered from the time of his death to the present day, Charlemagne is linked to a vision of a coherent political entity for the territories that once lay within his empire, and was celebrated on the 1,200th anniversary of his death in 2014 as the ‘father of Europe’, pater Europae.³ Earlier in the twentieth century, Charlemagne’s empire functioned as a point of reference – and perhaps inspiration – for the architects of the European Union as they embarked on the ambitious project of constructing a post-national, post-war Europe in the 1940s and 1950s.⁴ Even now, the yearly Charlemagne Prize in Aachen is awarded to those who have served the cause of European unity.⁵ Charlemagne’s conquests of different areas of Europe that had fractured politically with the collapse of Roman imperial power in the west in the fifth century have long fascinated historians, and these, along with the extensive administrative and ecclesiastic reform programmes begun in his reign and the remarkable flourishing of intellectual life at his court and those of his descendants, have been the subject of an immense body of scholarship.⁶

In contrast, European history after the middle ninth century was for many years often cast as the nadir to Charlemagne’s zenith, and as a period of decline preceding the seismic political and cultural changes brought about in the later eleventh century.⁷ The eventual fragmentation of the empire in the tenth century was seen as the tragic result of the failures of Charlemagne’s descendants, epitomized by the battle of Fontenoy in 841, when Charlemagne’s grandsons’ territorial disputes escalated into what is widely considered to be the bloodiest battle of the Carolingian era.⁸ Over the course of the ninth century the raids of Scandinavian warbands on the coasts and rivers of western Europe, Britain and Ireland destabilized existing power structures to a greater and greater extent, as on the Continent contemporaries lamented the inability of the later Carolingian rulers to assuage their suffering. Iberian and North African warbands drawn from the Islamic caliphates had a similarly transformative effect on the regions they targeted in the Mediterranean: churches were destroyed, outposts built, and alliances made. By the end of the ninth century Magyar raids on the eastern edges of the Carolingian Empire proved debilitating to marcher lords there and in northern Italy; these raids would grow in intensity until the middle of the tenth century. This narrative of Carolingian woes, crowned by the untimely deaths of a number of Carolingian princes, came to a head as the empire splintered into regional kingdoms – East Francia, Lombardy, Burgundy, Lotharingia, Provence, West Francia, and Catalonia – whose magnates famously – according to a contemporary chronicler – elected new kings ‘from their own guts’.⁹

The splintering of western Europe into different kingdoms meant that each territory charted its own trajectory of rulership over the following century and a half. East Francia saw the rise of a new Saxon dynasty, the Ottonians, who eventually conquered Lotharingia and Lombardy and claimed hegemony over the surrounding territories of Burgundy and Provence as well as principalities to the east of the Elbe. The new German-Italian Empire that was thus formed over the tenth century went on to be ruled by the Salians, an offshoot of the Ottonian family who had established themselves in the Middle Rhine region, from 1024 through the rest of the eleventh century. While Lombardy ended the tenth century as part of this empire, the immediate post-Carolingian period saw northern Italy riven by internal conflict over who should rule; competing Italian kings and their supporters battled for dominance, which opened the opportunity for external figures to repeatedly interfere in Italian affairs and eventually lay claim to the Italian throne. Southern Italy remained a febrile area for much of the period as well, held by the Byzantine emperors who faced challenges both from the Saxon Roman emperors and the Islamic caliphate, before the watershed change of the Norman Conquest of Sicily in the mid-eleventh century.

The West Frankish kingdom, on the other hand, cannot truly be described as ‘post-Carolingian’ until 987. In the century following the deposition and death of Charles the Fat, West Francia saw a legitimate line of Carolingian kings take the throne. However, their position was far from assured; several non-Carolingian kings were drawn from the Robertian/Capetian dynasty over the late ninth and tenth centuries and Carolingian kings needed to manoeuvre with increasing care around the claims of this family as well as other magnates to rule over large areas of the West Frankish kingdom. The Capetians eventually claimed the throne of West Francia definitively in 987, albeit in the face of considerable resistance from the last generation of Carolingian heirs. In contrast, Catalonia, which lay sandwiched between southern West Francia and the Islamic territory of al-Andalus on the periphery of the Carolingian Empire, had a very different experience as Carolingian and even Frankish power in the region dwindled. Local magnates, such as the counts of Barcelona, stepped forward to claim authority in the tenth-century power vacuum.

Another form of Carolingian periphery can be seen in Anglo-Saxon England; while it was never formally part of the Carolingian Empire, it was enmeshed in the institutional and personal networks of the Carolingian realm and retained close links with the Continent. The tenth century saw the successors of King Alfred in Wessex push back against the viking presence that had swept through the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the ninth century, claiming rulership over a newly created ‘English’ kingdom. The renewal of viking raids in the late tenth century, however, culminated in a second conquest in the early eleventh century and the accession of Scandinavian kings to the throne. Though the exiled son of Æthelred II, Edward the Confessor, eventually returned the line of Alfred to power, his death without issue ended the line, with the Norman Conquest following months later.

This explosion of new dynasties and territories that sprawled across the former empire and beyond its borders have long been the subject of fervent scrutiny. For earlier historians, influenced by the rise of nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe, the tenth century was the era commonly pinpointed for the origins of the countries that would later become modern nation-states. These origin narratives are prominent in Germany, France, and England, but are visible too in Poland, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Wales, Scotland, and beyond. Though each of these origin stories differ, the identification of the tenth century as the point of national genesis has nonetheless shaped the overall vision of this period. The long tenth century has thus been seen as a period of chaos and turbulence, from which, eventually, the founding figures of these new nations were able to bring order and stability, creating the structures that would underpin the more recognizable kingdoms of the later eleventh and twelfth centuries. In order for this kind of triumphalist national origin story to function, the tenth century must necessarily lie in the shadows, with its political order characterized as the debris resulting from the collapse of the Carolingian Empire.¹⁰ Fortunately, more recent approaches have moved away from these flawed accounts, recognizing instead the fluidity of this period and the resulting political experimentation. The creation of these new kingdoms is now seen in the light of the uncertainty and various experiments in rulership and government within the tenth century, rather than as part of an inevitable drive towards the nations of modernity.

Yet, while few would still subscribe wholeheartedly to these nationalist views, the legacy of these approaches endures in modern scholarship on the long tenth century. There remains a tendency to consider each territory individually and thus to push narratives of exceptionalism for each. As a result, systematic comparisons of the different regions of tenth- and eleventh-century Europe have been somewhat discouraged. Arguably, the current corpus of scholarship taken as a whole divides the kingdoms of the post-Carolingian Empire more sharply than those living in the tenth century did. Ironically, however, the tendency towards nationalistic scholarship has also encouraged us to view local phenomena as pan-European trends: the kingdoms and principalities of tenth- and eleventh-century Europe are thus at once homogeneous and exceptional.

If the Carolingian Empire is one book-end to the gloomy world of the long tenth century, then the other is provided by the apparently wholesale societal changes that shaped the later eleventh century. The new, ‘medieval’ order that characterized the twelfth century has cast a shadow that obscures almost entirely the preceding 150 years, turning them, as one commentator observed, into ‘a medieval Middle Ages’.¹¹ Again, the attention of scholars on individual territories has led to the development of different focal points and debates, which have occasionally been applied across all of Europe, despite their rather localized origins. In France, famously, the year 1000 has long been identified as a turning point between the post-Roman world of the Early Middle Ages and the world of the High Middle Ages,¹² a battleground for debates over whether a so-called ‘Feudal Revolution’ rapidly changed the nature of western European society.¹³ Georges Duby and those who followed him focused less attention on the collapse of the Carolingian Empire than on the new forms of lordship that rose up around the turn of the millennium, when local rulers began appropriating power from royal hands.¹⁴ The tenth century played an integral part in such discussions, being closely examined for evidence of when and where the seeds of this later social order were planted.¹⁵

In Germany, the long tenth century has been overshadowed by the Investiture Contest, a series of convulsions between secular and ecclesiastical powers at the highest level that reshaped kingly and papal authorities and their interactions and brought the ‘Early Middle Ages’ to their end.¹⁶ The transformation of the Church that began in earnest in the second half of the eleventh century from the impetus of Gregory VII (leading to them being referred to as the ‘Gregorian Reforms’) drew on ideas that had already taken root in monasteries throughout Europe in the tenth century. In the German Empire, however, the timing of this new reform movement in the later eleventh century offered an opportunity for those who were becoming increasingly frustrated with the Salian dynasty to legitimize new non-Salian rulers. The conjunction of this reform movement with a civil war in Saxony and the rise of several ‘anti-kings’ sparked a crisis which threatened the basis of the Salian emperors’ legitimacy; accordingly, the long tenth century is viewed as a prelude to this fundamental clash between secular and ecclesiastical rulers in the Empire.¹⁷

In Italy, the collapse of independent power in the long tenth century is seen as heralding the rise of the city-states of twelfth-century northern Italy. With the fragmentation of the Italian peninsula into different areas under the control of external forces, the resulting power vacuums created by absent rulers are thought to have allowed new polities to emerge which were defined by their local nature. This build-up of local, urban power is thus viewed in the light of a collapse of public order in Italy in the tenth century and then linked to the concurrent revival of Roman law in Italy in the later eleventh century and the emergence of a cadre of professional lawyers – with a resulting shift in the nature of Italian documentary culture.¹⁸ In Catalonia, again, the vision of a breakdown of public order in the late tenth/early eleventh century is implicated in ideas of an increasingly feudalized society;¹⁹ and in England, the tenth century’s successes were snuffed out by the Norman Conquest of 1066 and the radical restructuring of society which followed.²⁰ Whether the focus has been on the east or the west, northern Europe or the Mediterranean, looking at the tenth century as the prelude for what lay beyond it in the later eleventh century has led to the impression that the period stretching between 888 and 1050 presents little more than an interval between the lost order of the Carolingian era and the new, more recognizably ‘medieval’ order of the long twelfth century.

Important work has nevertheless begun to change our view. There has been a shift in favour of interpreting the period under consideration on the Continent on its own terms and with sensitivity to the interconnectedness of its regions. This scholarship, largely but not exclusively produced within the last thirty years, has shown the potential of the sources to shine light onto a period often shrouded in obscurity. From assessments of individual kings or dynasties to considerations of reform movements, monasticism, diplomacy or documentary culture, little by little the tenth and early eleventh centuries emerge from their reputation as the poor relation to what came before and after, showing themselves to be deserving of serious consideration in their own right.²¹

Across continental Europe, the scale and orientation of polities underwent a seismic shift: kingdoms shrank, principalities grew, and pow...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• 1. Introduction
• PART I: Past Narratives
• PART II: Inscribing Memories
• PART III: Recalling Communities
• Index