The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

by Chris Wickham

  The tenth century thus saw Mediterranean trade reach the complexity that North Sea trade already had in the eighth and ninth (see Chapter 9), and indeed surpass it. Egypt’s agricultural wealth and productive complexity lay at the heart of it. Even after Italian fleets had partially taken over the role of middlemen, including for the Arab world, by 1100, Egypt was still the hub of this exchange, as well as being the nodal point for luxury goods coming in from the Indian Ocean; it was arguably the motor that ran the entire medieval trade cycle. What happened in the tenth century was that the economies of other Mediterranean regions began to be, in some sectors at least, as complex as that of Egypt, so that relations of mutual economic dependence became more reliable, less risky, solid enough to be built on. This was the basis of the exchange of bulk goods in every period of history.

  All the same, we must end this account by repeating a point already made earlier: in every part of the Mediterranean, the most important exchange systems were inside, not between, regions. City-country exchange, and micro-regional agricultural and artisanal specializations, lay at the heart of this, not the wharves of Venice or Almería, Tunis or Antalya, Palermo or Alexandria. Nor are we looking at self-sustaining exchange processes here; however active the merchants of Fustat and Venice were, these would not develop for many centuries. Internal economic development essentially depended on the force of internal demand, and thus on the wealth of élites, and thus on the extraction of surplus from the peasantry. These increased in the ninth and tenth centuries, in the Mediterranean as in northern Europe, creating a more complex and colourful environment, and some artisanal products (like cloth) that could be cheap enough to be bought in villages; but they are nonetheless signs of exploitation as well as dynamism. We shall come back to this issue in the north European context in Chapter 22, where there is more evidence for its effect on the peasant majority.

  PART IV

  The Carolingian and Post-Carolingian West, 750-1000

  16

  The Carolingian Century, 751-887

  In one of the few non-diplomatic letters of Charlemagne (768-814) that has survived, the king wrote to his wife Queen Fastrada in 791. Charles relates that his son, Fastrada’s stepson Pippin king of Italy (781-810), has told him of a victory against the Avars of what is now Hungary, and lists the bishops, dukes, counts and vassals who performed particularly well in the war. (The letter omits their names, unfortunately; it only survives as a model for future writers.) The text then lists the religious litanies that Charlemagne and his court performed for three days, probably immediately after the news of the victory, including a prohibition on eating meat or drinking wine, which however people could buy out of with a graduated payment according to wealth. Charles asks Fastrada to take advice about performing similar litanies, and ends with an injunction to send him more regular communications.

  The tone of most of this text is hardly intimate; it reads like a ruler communicating with a high-ranking subordinate, which a queen indeed was. There is no reason to think that it tells us much about the personal relationship between the couple. But in its mixture of military action and religious ritual it reflects what else we know of the tone of early Carolingian politics. It also shows that Charlemagne, even when not actively campaigning (he was probably forty-three in 791, fairly old for campaigns, though he did lead armies for another decade and more), received and expected up-to-date and detailed information from his generals: this information-exchange was a regular part of the political structures of the Carolingian century. The Merovingians had such information, but, as far as we can see, less systematically; it is also significant that this letter has survived when equivalent Merovingian letters have not. It has survived by chance, but in the context of a vast increase in surviving information about the political process in Francia, which reaches its height in the 830s-840s. It is also unlikely that the Merovingians articulated politics through as much penitential ritual as this. Charlemagne was not unusually pious (he was rather earthy, and loved jokes, songs, sex, hunting and swimming, and roast meat - less so drinking, it is claimed), but he introduced an ecclesiastical and moralizing edge to political practice which lasted throughout the Carolingian century and beyond, and which had many ramifications, as we shall see in this chapter and the next.

  When Charles Martel (717-41) took over the office of maior of the Frankish kingdoms by force in the civil war of 715-19 (see above, Chapter 5), he re-established the practice of annual summer campaigning that had been intermittent at best for over seventy years. Between 720 and 804 there were only, probably, eight years without a campaign, and in some years there were two or three. Charles fought on all his borders, reabsorbing Provence and blocking Arab advances from Spain as he did so, taking over Frisia, and re-establishing Frankish hegemony in Alsace and Aquitaine. Most important, however, was the total authority he established in the Frankish heartland, thanks to this military aggregation, and to its success - Charles never lost a war. The Merovingian kings were only puppets by now, and the lay aristocracy and the episcopate both followed Charles; he overthrew any potential rivals without qualms or (apparently) difficulties. This continued under his sons Pippin III (741-68) and Carloman I (741-7) - they divided the mayor-ship just as the Merovingians had divided the kingship, until Carloman resigned his office, apparently willingly, and went to Rome, becoming a monk at the monastery of Monte Cassino. So did the annual campaigns, which included the subjection of Alemannia in the bloody battle of Canstatt in 746, extended to Italy in 754-6, and continued with the full reconquest of Aquitaine in a sequence of invasions in 759-69.

  In his last years, after 737, Charles Martel ruled without a king. Facing revolts, Pippin and Carloman re-established one, Childeric III, in 743. Nonetheless, after Carloman retired, in the context of disturbances caused by family rivals, Pippin wrote to Pope Zacharias (741-52), to ask (in the words of the official Royal Frankish Annals, written some forty years later) ‘whether it was good or not that the kings in Francia at that time had no royal power’. Zacharias correctly replied ‘that it was better to call him king who had the royal power than the one who did not’, and Pippin took the throne in 751, the first Carolingian king. Childeric was tonsured - that is, had his Merovingian royal hair removed - and imprisoned in a monastery. (The Carolingians henceforth wore short hair and moustaches.) Later Carolingian sources of course depict this as a straightforward succession, buttressed by concord and ceremonial, including the agreement of the Frankish magnates and a formal anointing by Boniface archbishop of Mainz. Pippin was indeed the first Frankish king to be anointed; although this followed Visigothic practice in the late seventh century (and also the traditions of the Old Testament), the innovation clearly shows the need to make the Carolingians special, through a new set of ecclesiastical rituals. But in reality this was a coup, and it presented immediate problems of royal legitimacy. Pippin was able to reinforce the rituals of 751 when the new pope Stephen II (752-7) came north to the Seine valley in 753-4, the first time a pope had ever travelled north of the Alps, to ask for help against the Lombards; Stephen re-anointed him king, and Pippin duly invaded Italy, twice. The fact is that king and pope needed each other, the pope to gain protection against attack, the king to gain legitimate authority; for the Carolingians, although the strongest aristocratic family in Francia by far since the 680s, were not royal until two successive popes - importantly, an external, non-Frankish, moral power - said they were. The two processes went together. Pippin and Carloman were already more concerned than Charles Martel had been with church reform, and called at least four church councils in 742-7, the first since the 670s; this intensified after 751, under the aegis of Chrodegang bishop of Metz (d. 766), a leading adviser of Pippin. In 765 Pippin also introduced compulsory tithes to the church, which dramatically increased the wealth of the episcopal hierarchy everywhere in Francia. The help the church gave Pippin in 751 was already paying off, on a substantial scale.

  This was the pattern Charlemagne inherited in 768, t
ogether with his brother Carloman II (768-71): the two got on badly, and Carloman’s early death was perhaps not unplanned. Charles Magnus, ‘the Great’, was initially called this to distinguish him from his own son Charles, but already in the ninth century the adjective began to be used to mark his especial charisma, and he is one of the few people in history to find their epithet absorbed into their own name, ‘Charlemagne’ in modern French and English. One of the early signs of this charisma was the fact that two exceptionally forceful rulers, Charles Martel and Pippin III, became reduced to predecessors, and are hard to see clearly in our later eighth-century sources. Charlemagne followed Pippin’s political path, but across his long reign transformed it, transforming the parameters of European politics as he did so, for a longer period - three centuries at least, arguably - than any other single early medieval ruler.

  The first element in this was simply war, which certainly continued the practice of the previous two generations, but greatly extended it. Four areas stand out in Charlemagne’s wars. The first is Saxony, Francia’s northern neighbour, and location of border wars for over two centuries. Saxony was pagan; it was also not a single polity, but rather a collection of small tribal territories which met in a single annual assembly and fought in larger or smaller groupings according to choice and need. Charlemagne from 772 onwards set out to conquer it. He started, programmatically, by sacking the major Saxon cult-site, the Irminsul, and taking home a rich booty, but it took him over thirty years to complete his task (in 804; there was also a period of peace, when Charlemagne thought he had won, in 785-93). Saxony was hard to conquer precisely because it was disunited, and it was the theatre of considerable violence, not least for the 4,500 Saxon prisoners massacred in 782 after a Frankish defeat. The conquest was by 780 associated with a conscious process of Christianization; this was one of the few conversion processes openly brought about by force in our period. More important perhaps, Frankish conquest resulted in a social revolution, in which members of the Saxon aristocracy were given for the first time landowning rights over their free neighbours, alongside Frankish incomers and a newly endowed Saxon church system. Saxony remained marginal to Carolingian politics, but the wealth of that aristocracy developed further, and it would be the basis for tenth-century kingship itself in East Francia, as we shall see in Chapter 18.

  The second area was Lombard Italy, and it was an easier task. In 773 Charlemagne was asked for his help by Pope Hadrian I (772-95), just as Pippin had been; this time he went the whole way, and annexed the Lombard kingdom in 773-4 in an unusual summer and winter war. Conquering Italy was a controversial decision (several of Charlemagne’s advisers, including his mother Bertrada and his cousin Adalard, were against it), but it turned out to be straightforward once the Lombard capital, Pavia, fell, for the kingdom was sufficiently centralized for resistance to cease almost completely. Again, wealth flowed north to Charlemagne’s treasury. Italy was, however, not absorbed into the Frankish lands in the way Saxony would be (and Alemannia and Aquitaine had already been). Charlemagne took the title of ‘king of the Franks and Lombards’, reflecting the fact that Italy remained conceptually separate, and Pavia remained a separate political centre, the only one in the Carolingian kingdom; after 781 a subordinate king returned to Italy, Charlemagne’s son Pippin. Lombard Italy would nevertheless be a source, not only of wealth, but also of governmental expertise, for Francia. As noted in Chapter 6, only the duchy of Benevento remained independent; in the face of Frankish power its duke, Arichis II, took the title of prince in 774.

  Of the old areas of Merovingian rule, the last one still to remain autonomous was Bavaria. Duke Tassilo III (748-88) had begun as a protégé of Pippin III, his mother’s brother, to whom he swore an oath of fidelity in 757 at adulthood; but he stopped participating in Pippin’s wars in 763, and ran an independent politics for two decades; he was particularly close to the last Lombard king, Desiderius. After 781 Charlemagne sought to rein him in, and he threatened invasion in 787. Tassilo’s aristocracy persuaded him to capitulate, and he became Charlemagne’s vassal, or sworn follower. This was not enough, however, and in 788 he was victim of a show trial for disloyalty. A tribunal of Franks, Bavarians, Lombards and Saxons, a rarely invoked image of multi-ethnic cooperation, condemned him to death. Charlemagne then commuted this sentence to forced penance and he was, like Childeric in 751, tonsured and confined in a monastery. The trial of Tassilo in itself marks the Carolingians as different from their predecessors. It has been noticed by historians that, whereas the Merovingians killed those who lost royal favour, the Carolingians often simply imprisoned them, and confiscated their land. This is an exaggeration; the Carolingians often did kill opponents, or else blinded them (following both Visigothic and Byzantine practice: cf. above, Chapter 11). But the ritual of a legal condemnation to death, followed by the ‘milder’ sentence of blinding or imprisonment, did become rather more common, and the deaths by slow torture of the sixth and seventh centuries virtually disappeared. Imprisonment did not always work (people escaped), and death might well then follow, but these changes do show a growing belief that a show of legal process and an elaborate ritual of political exclusion were good ways to marginalize opponents, and that killing was not always necessary. They fit in with other Carolingian changes, as we shall see. In the meantime, Bavaria and the Bavarian aristocracy (who survived almost without exception, apart from the ruling Agilolfings) were absorbed directly into the Frankish political system.

  The absorption of Bavaria brought Carolingian borders eastward to the lands of the Avars, and Avar wars began in 791. Avar power was by now far less great than it had been in the early seventh century, but the wealth of the Avar khagan remained enormous. In 795-6 three armies were sent eastwards to the Avar royal residence, the Ring, located somewhere on the Hungarian plain. The sack of the Ring produced booty on such an immense scale that it enriched the Carolingians and their magnates (including the pope) for a generation - Einhard said in his Life of Charlemagne that ‘no one can recall any war . . . that left them richer or better stocked with resources’. The Avars were not conquered, but they soon disappeared, their place taken by newer Sclavenian polities, who remained on the Frankish/Bavarian borderlands (see Chapter 20 for the term Sclavenian).

  By 804 the lands ruled by Charlemagne were half again as large as in 768, and over twice the size of those ruled by Charles Martel at his death. Nearly all borders were further away than in 768, even that of Spain, where northern Catalonia had been taken from the Arabs in 785 and 801. This was a fairly thin strip, however, and Charlemagne’s bolder attack on Zaragoza in 778 led to one of the few military setbacks of the reign, the attack on the retreating Frankish rearguard by the Basques at Roncesvalles in the western Pyrenees. The Carolingians had new neighbours now, the Danes, the Arabs, the Beneventans, and half a continent of Sclavenian tribes from the Baltic to the Adriatic. Few of these gave rich pickings, and they were mostly fairly far away. Expansion stopped as a result. Carolingian military activity largely became one of policing, and extracting tribute from, their still independent neighbours, for a generation. It has been plausibly argued that this had bad consequences for the Franks, for their aristocracies now had to aggrandize inside, not outside, the Frankish kingdoms; kings themselves had greater difficulties as a result. But this too was a generation away in 804, and had other roots as well. Charlemagne’s last decade was one of relative peace, and unheard-of prosperity for the ruling élite of Francia by early medieval standards.

  It is worth insisting a little more on the roots of this prosperity. Charlemagne had conquered new territories, and seized, not only extensive booty, but the royal treasure of two peoples, the Lombards and the Avars: essential resources for royal generosity in gift-giving, to aristocrats and to foreign rulers, which the Carolingians needed as much as their predecessors. He also now controlled the royal land of Italy and the ducal land of Aquitaine and Bavaria, and the confiscated land of rebels across the whole of Saxony and (to a lesser ext
ent) elsewhere; and also a network of new offices, counties, abbacies and bishoprics, to add to those in the Frankish heartland. (Over all Charlemagne’s lands, there were some 600 counties and 180 dioceses.) All of these could be given out to his supporters as honores, ‘honours’, as both royal land and offices were called. So could the extensive lands of churches and monasteries, which all the Carolingians disposed of without many qualms when they needed. Royal wealth was thus the wealth of aristocrats as well, as long as such men were in the king’s favour. The lands and offices were revocable; Charlemagne gave few permanent landed gifts, preferring to distribute royal and church land as temporary cessions, beneficia or ‘benefices’. Aristocrats hoped to keep these and pass them to their sons, but had to remain committed to the king, faithfully attending court, in order to do so. And there was so much wealth around in these decades that Charlemagne could attract whom he liked to his court, including poets and intellectuals from outside Francia, and endow them as he chose. The self-confidence of the Frankish élite became sufficiently great that it was by the 790s possible for writers to describe them as in effect the new chosen people in succession to the Jews; Old Testament imagery was standard in Carolingian political programmes, and Charlemagne was commonly called David by court intellectuals. Hence or otherwise, it may be added that the Carolingians were notably tolerant of Jews, and Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious (814-40) in particular protected them, to the great distress of writers like Agobard archbishop of Lyon (d. 840), who came from ex-Visigothic Spain, and had inherited the anti-Semitism of late Visigothic political culture. In less religious imagery, Einhard preserves for us with some smugness a Byzantine proverb, ‘[if] you have a Frank as your friend, [then] he is not your neighbour’, which he actually cites in Greek; the Franks were proud of their greed and aggrandisement, and regarded it as a proof of their virtue.