Forgery and Memory at the End of the First Millennium

Levi Roach

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691217864, 9780691181660
• eBook ISBN: 9780691217871
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

An in-depth exploration of documentary forgery at the turn of the first millennium

Forgery and Memory at the End of the First Millennium takes a fresh look at documentary forgery and historical memory in the Middle Ages. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, religious houses across Europe began falsifying texts to improve local documentary records on an unprecedented scale. As Levi Roach illustrates, the resulting wave of forgery signaled major shifts in society and political culture, shifts which would lay the foundations for the European ancien régime.

Spanning documentary traditions across France, England, Germany and northern Italy, Roach examines five sets of falsified texts to demonstrate how forged records produced in this period gave voice to new collective identities within and beyond the Church. Above all, he indicates how this fad for falsification points to new attitudes toward past and present—a developing fascination with the signs of antiquity. These conclusions revise traditional master narratives about the development of antiquarianism in the modern era, showing that medieval forgers were every bit as sophisticated as their Renaissance successors. Medieval forgers were simply interested in different subjects—the history of the Church and their local realms, rather than the literary world of classical antiquity.

A comparative history of falsified records at a crucial turning point in the Middle Ages, Forgery and Memory at the End of the First Millennium offers valuable insights into how institutions and individuals rewrote and reimagined the past.

CHAPTER ONE

Forgery in the Chancery? Bishop Anno at Worms

WHEN ANNO WAS appointed bishop of Worms in 950, it came as a mixed blessing. Anno was an ambitious young churchman, who had cut his teeth as abbot of the monastery of St Maurice in Magdeburg, the prize foundation (and future resting-place) of the East Frankish (German) ruler Otto I (936–73). As a bishopric, Worms came as a promotion, and Anno was one of a small but significant number of abbots to make the leap into the episcopate in these years. He was something of a prelate in the old mould in this regard. Until recently, it had been common to recruit bishops from the ranks of the realm’s leading abbots. Under Otto, however, cathedral schools were now preferred, becoming the main training grounds for bishops—and the leading educational establishments full stop.¹

If Anno was an old-school bishop, Worms itself was a decidedly old-fashioned kind of town. It had been an important administrative centre in the Roman Empire and later came to be a favoured residence of the great Frankish ruler Charlemagne (768–814). The royal palace fell victim to fire in 790, initiating something of a decline; but the city remained a significant regional centre.² These were not idle considerations. In an era in which antiquity was strongly equated with authority, a vaunted history was an essential part of episcopal identity. Yet age was not the only thing going for Worms. The bishopric overlooked the Rhine, that great ancient and medieval thoroughfare; and it also lay in the heart of the East Frankish wine district. This placed the city in an unusually good position to tap into the growing trade of these years.³ Worms was similarly well placed on overland routes, straddling the Roman road west to Metz and Reims and lying near the start of the old Bergstraße (mountain road), which ran north–south along this section of the Rhine. Partly as a consequence, the surrounding region—the so-called Rhine-Main district (Rhein-Main-Gebiet)—was one of the royal heartlands, an area in which the Ottonian rulers spent more time than anywhere else save their East Saxon homelands.⁴

MAP 1. The bishopric of Worms, c. 970

But for all these advantages, Worms was a decidedly small and poor bishopric. Its territory was tightly bounded by its neighbours at Mainz, Würzburg, and Speyer, forming a narrow, sickle-shaped strip running from southern Rheinland-Pfalz (Rhineland-Palatinate) through to northern Baden-Württemberg in modern Germany (Map 1). The only smaller see within the realm was the missionary bishopric of Merseburg, first established in 968 and dissolved barely a decade later (981) on account of its poverty.⁵ Yet size was only half of the problem. Worms’s neighbours were home to important imperial abbeys—Lorsch for Mainz, Weißenburg for Speyer and Fulda for Würzburg—which, if exploited judiciously, might bring additional wealth and lustre to the see. Worms had nothing of the sort. To make matters worse, Lorsch itself lay just 16.5 km (10 miles) east of the city, far closer to Worms than to Mainz. This made the abbey—one of the realm’s wealthiest—a competitor rather than an ally. The greatest challenge, however, came from within the city of Worms itself. This was home to one of the kingdom’s leading noble families, the future Salian dynasty, which vied with the bishop for local power and influence.

With problems came possibilities, however. Worms may not have been the most exalted post, but it offered plenty of potential. As diocesan bishop, Anno could expect to work alongside the archbishop of Mainz, one of the realm’s leading prelates. And as noted, the city was in a good position to take advantage of the economic upturn of these years. Royal policies also played into Anno’s hands. His bishopric lay on the road and river routes south from the Rhine-Main district to Swabia and thence to Italy, so Anno might expect to benefit from the king’s growing interest in the Apennine peninsula. The kingdom of Italy had been something of a hot potato in recent years, passing from hand to hand with dizzying speed. Anyone with the requisite clout and connections might claim the throne—as had Hugh of Provence in 924. Otto I’s interest in the region was piqued by Hugh’s death in 947. And when Hugh’s son Lothar passed away unexpectedly in late 950, he was ready to pounce.⁶ Worms figured prominently in Otto’s plans, and Anno’s appointment at this juncture is no coincidence; a strategic see was being entrusted to a close royal associate. Indeed, it was in Worms that Otto appointed his eldest son Liudolf to the similarly strategic duchy of Swabia, probably on the same occasion as Anno’s election. And while initial efforts to secure Italy proved abortive, the city came into its own in the 960s, when developments in the south once again invited East Frankish intervention. It was here that Otto I now had his second son, Otto (II), elected co-ruler in 961—Liudolf having died in 957, pursuing his own fortune in Italy—and it was here, too, that Otto would be received by his family upon returning north as emperor in 965.⁷ Worms had gone from being a backwater to a showplace of empire in the space of less than two decades.

Anno knew how to make the most of these opportunities. He had received his education at St Maximin, just outside Trier, one of the kingdom’s leading monasteries. St Maximin owed its influence to the popularity of the new brand of reformed monasticism it represented. This placed a premium on institutional independence and obedience to the Rule of Saint Benedict—the monastic regulations originally drawn up by Benedict of Nursia (d. 547) for his monastery at Monte Cassino—as manifested above all in the right of monks to choose their own abbot. As important as its spiritual credentials, however, were the abbey’s connections to regional and national elites. Otto I’s father, Henry I (919–36), had helped initiate the monastery’s reform in 934 alongside the local duke Giselbert (d. 939); and three years later the newly crowned Otto I chose to populate his foundation at Magdeburg with monks from the centre, foremost amongst these Anno.⁸ Under Anno, the new monastery on the Elbe went from strength to strength, receiving thirteen royal grants in as many years (almost twice as many as any other religious house). Yet it is not just the number of privileges which impresses. Most of these documents were drafted by the monks of St Maurice, revealing the trust placed in Anno and the brothers.⁹

Anno’s background now came in handy. He may have hailed from the Middle Rhine, and St Maximin held important rights in the region, so Anno came to Worms with a sense of the lay of the land.¹⁰ As noted, the city hosted a number of important gatherings in Anno’s early years. And as bishop, he was active at a number of key junctures in Otto I’s reign, attending synods at Mainz (950), Augsburg (952) and Ingelheim (972), participating in the emperor’s third Italian expedition (969–70), and securing the appointment of Giselher—a sometime Magdeburg student—as bishop of the new see of Merseburg in 971. Indeed, Anno maintained close contacts with his former associates at St Maurice, which in 968 had been raised to the status of an archbishopric, petitioning privileges for the centre and undertaking the translation of a valuable blood relic from Italy to the monastery in 971.¹¹

Under Anno, Worms itself acquired a number of important rights. In 953, he received the final third on tolls at Ladenburg, an important market commanding the approaches to the lower Neckar, about 32 km (20 miles) upstream from the city (Map 1).¹² Three years later followed forest rights in Neunkirchen, just north-west of Anno’s see, where since 937 the bishop had possessed a dependent church.¹³ There is something of a lull thereafter. It has been suggested that Anno was involved in the uprising led by Conrad the Red—the local count of Worms—and Otto I’s son Liudolf at this point (953–54). If so, this would explain the silence. Whatever the case, Anno was not sidelined for long. By November 965, he was in a position to obtain confirmation of the bishopric’s immunity, in a document which extends these rights to dependent churches at Ladenburg and Wimpfen, to the south and east. This was an important act. As noted in the Introduction, immunity was closely tied to institutional identity. And such rights had been a particular concern at St Maximin, where the monks were keen to prevent domination by their secular and ecclesiastical neighbours (not least, the local archbishop of Trier). It may, therefore, be that the long arm of monastic reform is at work here. (Worms had not otherwise had these rights confirmed since the ninth century.) Thankfully, for our purposes, the charter survives as a single sheet, and this displays all the hallmarks of authenticity (Illustration 1.1). It is laid out according to contemporary conventions, with parchment wider than it is tall and elongated script in the first line and last lines. The seal is clearly authentic and takes the correct form for November 965; and to its right is the distinctive ‘beehive’ recognition sign, which is common in East Frankish diplomas until the late 960s.

1.1 Otto I confirms Anno’s immunity: Darmstadt, HStA A2 255/3, © HStA

This act also points toward a close bond between ruler, bishop and religio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps, Tables and Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Style and Citations
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction: Forgery and Memory in an Age of Iron
• Chapter 1. Forgery in the Chancery? Bishop Anno at Worms
• Chapter 2. Forging Episcopal Identity: Pilgrim at Passau
• Chapter 3. Forging Liberty: Abingdon and Æthelred
• Chapter 4. Forging Exemption: Fleury from Abbo to William
• Chapter 5. True Lies: Leo of Vercelli and the Struggle for Piedmont
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Index of Royal and Papal Charters