The court crystallized in two further ways in the 790s. The first is that in the years 794-6 Charlemagne founded his own capital, at Aachen in the heart of Pippinid northern Austrasia, and across the next decades he and his son Louis endowed it with ambitious buildings, one of which, the cathedral-scale palace chapel, still survives. As Charlemagne grew older, he spent more and more time here (it was close to the Ardennes forest, one of the best royal hunting reserves), and it became a stable political and administrative focus for the first time in Frankish history. Kings still moved around, taking their court with them, but two generations of courtiers came to see Aachen as a natural backdrop for politics. The second is that in 800 Charlemagne obtained a new title, emperor, in a ceremony in Rome, in which he was anointed (again) by the pope. The importance of this title should not be exaggerated; it was only honorific. But Charlemagne was proud of it, and was keen to get recognition of it by the Byzantine (as one might say, the ‘real’) emperors, which he achieved in 812 after menacing the still-Byzantine enclave of Venice. Imperial imagery began to infuse Carolingian legislation after 800 as well. The truth is, though, that already by the late 780s, thanks to his military successes, Charlemagne had achieved a western European-wide dominance, and a near unanimity of support from his subjects, a political centrality, that is to say, that no one had matched in those lands since the Roman emperor Valentinian I. Even the strongest Merovingians, Clovis or Dagobert, did not rule as widely or enjoy such long-lasting success. Charles Martel’s military machine, and the luck of four almost unbroken generations of single rulers (for Charlemagne’s sons, between whom he fully intended to divide his lands, all predeceased him except Louis), were the basis of this success, but Charlemagne’s charisma capped it. The question would then be what he would do with it.
It cannot be denied that Charlemagne - and his advisers, but animated beyond doubt by the king himself - had a conscious and ambitious political project. In the widest sense, it was one of ‘reform’ (renovatio), or, a much commoner word, ‘correction’ (correctio), of the inner life as well as the external acts of lay and ecclesiastical subjects alike. It is very clear in one of Charles’s relatively early legislative acts, the General Admonition of 789. In this widely circulated text, the king re-enacted canons from church councils to provide a template for the proper activity of clerics, but also instructed the laity in the necessity of concord, justice, the avoidance of perjury, the avoidance of hatred, and, overall, the necessity of the preaching of the Christian faith. These were keynotes of the moral reform programme of the Carolingian period. They were matched by a systematic education programme, which was (as was the General Admonition) largely the work of the most influential intellectual of the first generation of the Carolingian reform project, the Northumbrian Alcuin (d. 804). Alcuin was at Charlemagne’s court for most of the period 786 to 796, and then continued teaching in one of the several monasteries Charlemagne gave him, Saint-Martin in Tours. As the king said in an open letter of the 780s or 790s, also written by Alcuin, good behaviour and spiritual understanding were impossible without a literary education, for ‘knowing comes before doing’, and even the Bible was full of figures of speech which had to be decoded. The Carolingians promoted basic literacy, but expected more, especially from leading clerics and aristocrats: a proper understanding of the Bible and of theology, without which a path in the Carolingian political world could not properly be walked.
The successes and failures of this project have been very intensively discussed; but that there were successes is not at issue. The whole of the Carolingian élite cared about theology, or had to pretend they did. Already in 794 an assembly of bishops and magnates at Frankfurt could devote much of its time to discussing heresies, Adoptionism and the Byzantine rejection of Iconoclasm (the Franks had greater sympathy with the Iconoclasts), for the first time in the West in two centuries. By the 830s and 840s, the whole political process, including coups and civil wars, could be seen in theological terms. By then, there were two dozen or more political actors who were also active writers, participating in what were often pamphlet wars about the theology of political practice. Some of them were lay aristocrats, including Dhuoda (d. c. 843), wife of the sometime royal chamberlain Bernard of Septimania (d. 844), who wrote a handbook on correct behaviour for her son, suffused with biblical imagery and citing an array of church fathers, which were evidently available to her in Uzès, far in the south of the Frankish lands. This will all be discussed in the next chapter, but it marks the Carolingian period out.
Exactly why this project developed is rather harder to understand. Many of its roots are obvious. The Carolingians had to identify with the church, for it was the church that gave them legitimacy as a ruling family; the coup of 751 was still in living memory at the time of the General Admonition. The church councils, which had become commoner again after the 740s, and which continued without a break thereafter, were a natural source of moralizing enactments, many of them absorbed into royal legislation already under Pippin III. Frankish self-confidence led to Old Testament parallels, as we have seen, and also to Roman parallels, thus encouraging people to look back to the fourth to sixth centuries, when correct belief was a burning political issue (see above, Chapter 3). Although the Merovingian period was not an age of explicit ideological programmes in Francia, seventh-century Visigothic Spain had been, showing that an overtly moralized politics already had potential roots in early medieval western soil; and Theodulf bishop of Orléans (d. c. 826), the major theologian of Charlemagne’s reign, was of Visigothic origins. (It must be said, however, that the Franks, if they borrowed from the Visigoths, did not borrow the Gothic zeal for religious exclusion, as we have already seen.) Once Alcuin, Theodulf, Paul the Deacon from Lombard Italy, the Franks Angilbert of Saint-Riquier and Einhard, and others, combined in Charlemagne’s court in the 780s and 790s, a critical mass of intellectual debate and competitive writing ensued, enough to expand and continue for another three generations. But it is hard not to see a plan at the back of this. It was Charlemagne who invited these intellectuals, and gave them such big gifts that they stayed in or near the court for decades. Programmatic legislation, too, although not, of course, composed by him, went out in his name, and was new. The successes of the 770s (particularly in Italy) seem already to have persuaded the king that he was special, and that he had a mission, not just to rule the Franks and their neighbours, but to save their souls. He may have been educated to this in the already more ecclesiastical political environment of Pippin’s reign - however incompletely; Charlemagne could appreciate poetry and theology, but he never fully learned to write. All the same, it seems to have been his own choice. Charlemagne thus matches Justinian as an innovator in moral-political practice (although he had a better sense of humour than Justinian; his son Louis, famous for not smiling, was a better parallel there). The fascination with him that has resulted in such a dense historiography, unbroken across the centuries but if possible even more elaborate now, is not entirely unjustified.
All kinds of legislation were commoner under Charlemagne. Royal assemblies produced capitularia, ‘chapter-collections’ or ‘capitularies’. These varied in their formality (some were official written texts; some seem to have survived only because participants took private notes of their content); they also varied in their aim, for some were guidelines for local representatives, some were one-off enactments, but others were systematic additions to existing law, Frankish or Lombard. But there were many of them; the standard capitulary edition has eighty-five from the reign of Charlemagne alone, plus some enactments that survive in more fragmentary form. Some of the impetus for this must have come from Italy, for they start in the late 770s, and are matched in frequency earlier than that only by the Lombard laws of Liutprand; church council legislation, which partly overlaps with capitulary legislation (as with the General Admonition, and the 794 synod of Frankfurt), was another model. Charlemagne also reissued the Lex Salica in a new edition, which was widely copied in the
ninth century, and made laws for newly conquered peoples such as the Saxons. Not all capitularies were widely copied, it is worth stressing; many survive in only a single manuscript. When Ansegis, abbot of Saint-Wandrille on the Seine, went looking for capitularies to turn into a rearranged collection to present to Louis the Pious in 827, he only found (or used) twenty-nine of them, and only one (the General Admonition) from before 803. As in the Roman empire before the Theodosian Code, it was hard to be sure what laws had been passed, even though the Carolingians, Roman-style, regarded ignorance of the law as no excuse. But some were very carefully circulated, such as the capitulary adding to Salic law of 803, which survives in fifty-three manuscripts (Ansegis used it, too), one of which states that Stephen count of Paris had his copy of it read in a public assembly there, and local political leaders signed their names on it. Such a mixture of oral publication and formal subscription was probably common for the major enactments. The capitulary ‘habit’ continued under Louis the Pious, at least up to 830, and then in West Francia and Italy until the late ninth century; in East Francia, too, the acts of church councils continued to be recorded. In the ninth century, informal capitulary collections begin to be commoner as well, particularly but not only in Italy; they seem to have been intended for use in court. None of them were ‘complete’ sets (capitularies tended, after all, to be repetitive), but they do attest to a recognition that a wide range of new law now existed, and that it was useful to be informed about it.
These laws, and the other sources for Charlemagne’s reign such as annals and letter collections, show that the government of the Carolingian lands was essentially based on old foundations, but that these were fairly carefully reshaped as required. The network of public assemblies that were crucial for the Merovingians and the Lombards remained crucial in the Carolingian period. Royal assemblies were held just before the campaigning season every year and were the points of reference for army muster as well; kings could call smaller or larger assemblies later in the year, too, to prepare policy for the next year or if there was urgent business. Major political figures, lay and ecclesiastical, attended regularly. These were venues for genuine discussion, not just royal instructions; Hincmar archbishop of Reims (d. 882) in his 882 treatise On the Organization of the Palace (which itself drew on Adalard of Corbie’s lost text of c. 812 with the same title) indeed tells us that kings did not attend all assembly discussions, but instead stood outside glad-handing - and Hincmar was one of the major advisers of King Charles the Bald (840-77), as Adalard had been for his cousin Charlemagne, so whichever wrote this would have known. Early in Charles the Bald’s reign, during the preparation for the civil war of 841-2, Charles’s follower and cousin Nithard (d. 845) records in his contemporary history how Charles’s May 841 assembly argued about which way the king and his army should march; Charles went with the minority, not the majority, view - wrongly, in fact, Nithard said - but, either way, he had the benefit of hearing real argument. Even without that argument, participation in assemblies, and in the rituals normal in all of them, powerfully reinforced a sense of collective participation in public affairs.
These national assemblies were matched in every county by local assemblies, placita, meeting two or three times a year under the count’s presidency, in which local élites were brought into the same public network; these heard reports of national deliberation (Count Stephen’s Paris gathering of 803 was one such), and decided on court cases. The Carolingians regularized these assemblies, too, for example determining that local judicial experts should be called scabini everywhere, which by the early ninth century they were indeed coming to be, from the English Channel to Italy. It was also county assemblies that administered the taking of oaths to the king, another older tradition systematized in this period. Charlemagne instituted these in 789 after regional revolts in Hesse and Thuringia in 785-6; in 793 he had them repeated after a second revolt, by his disinherited eldest son Pippin in 792, since some of the rebels said they had not sworn in 789, perhaps because they were too young (not that this did them much good; Charlemagne had them killed). These were the only revolts in Francia in his reign, and they seem to have been fairly small-scale, but the king’s response was to make formal oaths more systematic. Every free man over the age of twelve had to swear, and their names had to be recorded by counts and missi; in 802 these obligations were further extended, as oath-swearers had to swear a much more detailed oath to the emperor. Oaths mattered in this world; oath-breakers were perjurors, and risked damnation, not just secular penalties - dispossession, mutilation and sometimes death. They could be dangerous: Charlemagne banned oaths of association made to anyone except the king and one lord, and in 806 enacted that men who did so should beat each other and cut off each other’s hair (or, in extreme cases, slit their noses). Oaths to the king further added to the intensity of ritual at even the most remote assembly, and to the local presence of royal authority.
The Carolingian empire was huge, larger than any subsequent state in Europe has ever been except for brief years at the height of the power of Napoleon and Hitler, and also extremely diverse, stretching as it did from the half-converted and roadless lands of Saxony to the old urban societies of Provence and Italy. How it could all be controlled, without the elaborate fiscal and administrative system of the Roman empire or the caliphate, was an almost impossible challenge. Assembly politics was one part of it; so was army muster; and the palace, the court of the king or emperor, whether at Aachen or elsewhere, was furthermore a magnet for the ambitious in every period, as they came to seek justice, gifts or preferment. Kings did not just give gifts; they received them too, the ‘annual gifts’ of horses and the like presented at each general assembly. These gifts seem to have had a military edge to them, and were probably associated with the fact that soldiers on campaign had to bring their equipment and three months’ provisions with them, not a small investment. Rather than a proto-tax system, which cannot be identified in the Carolingian period (kings were not short of resources even without taxation, until late in the ninth century), this was another element in the gift-exchange of political participation. Palaces were also the focus of a particularly large amount of collective and increasingly moralized ritual, as we shall see further in the next chapter; the other elements of Carolingian political aggregation had clear roots in the Merovingian period, but this was largely new. But kings did not move around the whole of the empire, except when on campaign; Charlemagne, Louis and Louis’s sons seldom strayed out of the three great ‘royal landscapes’, of the Seine valley, the Middle Rhine valley, and between them the core block of royal and ex-Pippinid estates around Aachen. Not every local leader ever went there; the kings had to reach them too.
One way they did so was by strategically placing their most trusted aristocrats. Counts tended to be from long-standing local élites, except after conquests, as in Alemannia after Canstatt, or in Italy in the early ninth century; so did bishops. But beside these local élites, and interlocking - and intermarrying - with them, there were also greater families, those of the Reichsaristokratie, the ‘imperial aristocracy’, as Gerd Tellenbach called them in 1939. He and his successors identified between forty and fifty such families, who could be found in any part of the empire, and whose members could move around (or be moved around) with some facility. Most of them were from the old Pippinid heartlands of Austrasia, extending southwards into the Middle Rhine and northern Burgundy, though they could come from anywhere except Italy. Very few if any of these families were newly created; but the Carolingians could make favoured members of them rich and powerful beyond any previous imagining, even though Merovingian aristocrats could already be pretty rich, as we saw in Chapter 5. A well-known example of these is the ‘Widonid’ family (as we call them - surnames did not yet exist), originating in the Middle Rhine and Moselle valleys; they seem in the eighth century to be linked to Milo of Trier (see Chapter 8) and to an important church in Mainz. Under Louis the Pious and his sons, they are found simultaneously
in the far west of modern France and in the duchy of Spoleto in the central Appennines of Italy, running the frontier marches facing Brittany and Benevento respectively, while keeping their Rhineland links, where they controlled the major monastery of Hornbach. They did not follow a simple family political line (in the crisis of 833-4, which set Louis the Pious against his sons, Guy count of Vannes fought a battle for Louis against his brother Lambert marquis of the Breton march, fighting for Louis’s son Lothar, and was killed), and they could be unscrupulous about establishing themselves locally, as in distant Spoleto, where they ran a largely autonomous politics. All the same, they were loyal to Carolingian ideals, including Carolingian unity - Guy III of Spoleto (d. 895), after Carolingian power ended in 887, tried to make himself king in both West Francia and Italy, and was actually crowned emperor in 891. Without that unity, the geographical range of their power would have ceased to exist, and, indeed, did cease, for the family is not attested after the 890s outside the Rhineland (though there it remained important: the Salian dynasty of German kings was probably descended from it). Kings relied on families such as this a great deal, but the reverse is true too; in many respects the Carolingian empire was an immense oligarchy, and, given the rooted local power of aristocracies both large and small, it had to be. The point will be explored further later.
The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 Page 49
