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

by Chris Wickham

  Aristocrats always wanted to leave all their power-bases - fully owned properties, benefices, rights over monasteries, counties - to their sons. This was only assured for their properties, but already in Charlemagne’s time a loyal aristocrat could assume that his son might well inherit his county. The county of Paris, for example, was probably held by a single family between the 750s and the 850s; kings restricted themselves to choosing which heir took it over. The sons of Louis the Pious actually moved counts around more than their father and grandfather had, but all the Carolingians recognized that the sons of counts should normally get a county somewhere, and as the geography of practical politics contracted it might well be that this might be in or near their father’s county or counties. The sons of counts sometimes actually feuded against men who were given their father’s counties, as happened on the Bavarian eastern frontier in 882-4, admittedly a marginal and somewhat wild area. The memory of former power lingered too; Odo of Paris got some of his father’s Loire counties back in 886, a full twenty years after his father’s death - and very usefully timed, given his takeover of the West Frankish throne in 888. This further aided the process of regionalization. Odo’s father Robert had moved without difficulty from the Rhineland to the Loire in the 840s, when long-distance career moves were still normal, but the ‘Welf’ move to Burgundy in 858 was more controversial, and after that such shifts were rare, or else resented as the irruptions of outsiders. (Perhaps only Boso, who moved from Lotharingia to the Rhône valley and Italy, is a counter-example, but he was a queen’s brother, and anyway a mould-breaker in other ways too.) When Charles the Fat inherited seven separate kingdoms, separate political power networks visibly continued to operate in most or all of them; by now, it would have taken a Charles Martel-style war to unify them, and Charles the Fat did not have time for that. They went their separate ways again in 888. These were, genuinely, long-term causes for the break-up of the empire. They did not make that break-up more likely, but they made it possible, once the Carolingians died off. By then, a sense of empire-wide identity was attached only to the Carolingian family (and, not to be underrated, its army-muster). But aristocratic networks were prepared for a new regionalized politics; which was fortunate, for it was this which faced them now.

  17

  Intellectuals and Politics

  Early in the morning in late January 828, Einhard met Hilduin of Saint-Denis sitting outside Louis the Pious’s bedchamber in Aachen, waiting for the emperor to get up. This was Hilduin’s job; as imperial arch-chaplain, he formally controlled access to Louis. But Einhard had come to see Hilduin. They chatted while looking out of the high window into the rest of the palace, perhaps the window which Notker in the 880s would claim that Charlemagne had built so that he could see what was going on everywhere (see above, Chapter 10). Einhard had a bone to pick with Hilduin, however.

  Hilduin had in 826 initiated a fashion for buying relics from Rome, acquiring the body of St Sebastian for one of his monasteries, Saint-Médard at Soissons. In 827 Einhard had imitated him, with the help of a professional thief and dealer, the Roman deacon Deusdona, and had sent his own notary Ratleig to steal the bodies of Sts Marcellinus and Peter from their tomb on the Via Labicana outside Rome and bring them north. After Ratleig crossed the Alps, he no longer had to hide them, and in a public procession, in front of crowds of bystanders, he brought them to central Germany, where most of Einhard’s properties were. He took them to their destined church in Einhard’s planned retirement home of Michelstadt in the Odenwald forest; but the saints did not like it there, and demanded in dreams that they be transferred to Einhard’s other church at Seligenstadt near Frankfurt, which Einhard duly arranged. Healing miracles began when he did, and had continued without a break, often in great numbers, up to when Einhard wrote his account of these events in late 830. But Hilduin’s servant Hunus, who had gone to Rome with Ratleig, had stolen from him some of St Marcellinus; and when Einhard met Hilduin the rumour had already spread that Hilduin had both bodies at Saint-Médard. The rumour was almost worse than the fact, for Einhard’s reputation and that of his own relics; Einhard had to get them back. Hilduin admitted he had Marcellinus, rather grudgingly (one must note that Einhard was writing this account after Hilduin’s fall from power in October 830). The relics were brought from Soissons to Aachen, and Einhard received them in April 828. There, they certainly reversed the rumours, for, in a sense thanks to Hilduin, Einhard’s relics were now in the centre of the empire; they were (Einhard says) met by crowds, and Louis and Queen Judith themselves visited them and gave them gifts. Miracles began again, and continued after Einhard rejoined both sets of relics at Seligenstadt at the end of the year. Einhard made the most of it; Marcellinus took a long route home to his fellow saint. Soon after Easter, as Einhard happily records, his friend the palace librarian Gerward was staying outside town, and was told the palace news: ‘At present the courtiers are mostly talking about the signs and miracles happening in Einhard’s house by means of the saints . . .’ It must have been one of the high points of his life.

  This account foregrounds the importance of the palace, the importance of public ritual, and the importance of intellectuals, in the Carolingian political world, for Einhard was the biographer of Charlemagne and had been a mainstay of court society for three decades by now, and Hilduin was no minor scholar: in 828 he had just painstakingly translated a Greek text, the works of St Dionysios (that is, St Denis), sent by the Byzantine emperor Michael II to Louis, into Latin. In this chapter we shall look at these three issues in turn, and then at some of their implications.

  The royal or imperial palace, whether at Aachen or elsewhere, was the core political centre of the Carolingian lands, a whirl of activity - and noise, as Paschasius Radbert’s Life of Adalard of Corbie complains. Every political actor had to go there when called, which in Einhard’s case was often, just as every victim seeking royal justice had to come there, to be interrogated by the arch-chaplain or the count of the palace to see if the king needed to get involved. As usual with the Carolingians, this was a Merovingian tradition writ large, and also systematized. Hincmar’s (or Adalard’s) On the Organization of the Palace can list the palace officials, headed by the arch-chaplain (in charge of church affairs) and the arch-chancellor (in charge of the writing office), in order, down to the hunters and the falconer, and there are consistent indications that this was a real hierarchy - although it could always be modified, as when Bernard of Septimania, as chamberlain in 829-30 (in charge of the palace commissariat under the queen, and fourth-ranking official, according to Hincmar/Adalard) was seen as ‘second to the king’ after Louis. Notker, although he never went to court, could imagine that the palace hierarchy was preserved in dining etiquette, with Charlemagne served by dukes, dukes served by counts and aristocrats, and so on down through court scholars, and greater and lesser palace officials. The court certainly had an ever-changing etiquette of behaviour, which no aspiring politician could risk not knowing. And it had an organized, explicit, patronage network. Hincmar/Adalard even supposed - certainly over-schematically - that officials were deliberately appointed from different regions, so that everyone could use a kinsman or at least someone from their locality to facilitate access to the palace. Notker imagined that, at the death of a bishop, all aspiring applicants put their names forward through those closest to the emperor. Einhard, although never (it seems) a palace official in a formal sense, routinely acted as a patron, and he is seen in his letters requesting the kings, either directly or through current office-holders, to approve the appointment of an archbishop or an abbot, or the renewal of a benefice, or simply to hear an appeal. This was a competitive and often unscrupulous world of favours, structured by court procedures.

  The palace was thus a worldly (and corrupt, and vicious) political hub. But it was also the moral centre of the empire, particularly once, after 780 or so, Charlemagne embraced the task of moral correctio. It was not chance that the senior Carolingian palace official handled
church affairs: these were the court’s special concern. Louis the Pious was a priest even more than he was a king, at least in that he promoted religious learning, according to one of his biographers. Charlemagne instituted penitential fasting at court, as we saw at the start of the last chapter, which he extended to the entire empire in 805 to combat a famine; Louis did the same in 823 in the face of dangerous portents. The seventh-century Irish tract On the Twelve Abuses of the World circulated very widely in Carolingian Europe, and Abuse 9, ‘the unjust king’, argues that if kings were oppressive and unjust, and if they did not defend the church, then famine, invasion and ruin would follow. A succession of ninth-century writers composed treatises for kings on just rule, culminating in Hincmar’s On the Person and Ministry of the King, and most of them quoted Abuse 9, alongside, at great length, the Old Testament. They held that the king should start with controlling himself and his own behaviour, before he could properly govern others, through law and its enforcement. The whole empire was at risk if he did not. The king/emperor could appoint his bishops (this right was never contested in the Carolingian period), but they, conversely, were responsible for policing the moral world, and that included royal actions, both private and public. Bishops often took this role very seriously, particularly in the crisis years of 829-34 and the civil war period of 840-43, when the public good was obviously threatened.

  The political and the moral roles of the palace did not have to be in contradiction. The secular and the spiritual could be seen to work in much the same way. Einhard regarded Sts Marcellinus and Peter as his spiritual patrons in just the same way as the emperors were his secular patrons, and his heartbreak over the death of his wife Imma in 836 was only worsened by the realization that his spiritual patrons had failed him, in not answering his prayers. Thus at moments of crisis the Carolingian world could lay itself open to moral panics. Given the high political profile of queens, the permanent ambiguity of female power and the new emphasis on personal morality, it is not surprising that many of these panics centred on queenly sexuality. Charlemagne’s daughters, who ran his palace in his last years, were accused of fornication in 814 (as was Charlemagne himself). Judith was accused of adultery with Bernard in 830, an accusation which recurs in every account of the period, favourable or hostile - it must have been a very high-profile charge - and which was theorized by Paschasius Radbert in the 850s as marking a total reversal of the right order of the world, a sign above all that Louis the Pious, who could not control his palace, was not fit to govern. Lothar II accused his wife Theutberga of sodomy and incest (see below); Charles the Fat his wife Richgard of adultery with, again, his principal counsellor, Bishop Liutward of Vercelli; Arnulf’s wife Uota was accused of adultery too. It would be wrong to see these accusations, doubtless all false except the first, as signs that the political role of queens was under threat: it was their high profile, not their weakness, that exposed them to criticism. The Merovingian tradition of powerful queen-mothers was less in evidence in the Carolingian period, for few rulers were children at their accession (there would be more of them in the late tenth century); but Carolingian queens were more prominent during their husbands’ lives than their Merovingian predecessors had been. Conversely, except when rulers themselves sought (perhaps unwisely) to use queenly impurity as an excuse for divorce, all these accusations had as their primary target, not the queen but the king/ emperor, whose capacities as a corrector of his people were thus cruelly exposed. Control, or the appearance of control, was necessary at all times.

  Both harmony and tension were mediated by elaborate rituals, whether regular (as with the ceremonial associated with assemblies or Easter celebrations), or specific to the occasion. Einhard when he first brought his saints to Seligenstadt prepared ‘those things that ritual stipulates for the reception of saints’ bodies’, and then performed two masses. When he got St Marcellinus back from Hilduin, the latter organized a choir to chant an antiphon; Einhard’s party then proceeded, chanting, to his own chapel, which attracted a large crowd; when he joined the bodies again in Seligenstadt, he again prepared the process carefully. According to his own account, that is, and this is important: for ritual was always a means of self-presentation (Einhard wanted to make sure that no one could doubt the saints were his and that they were properly treated), and different observers could read different things into it. One of the most elaborate secular rituals that expressed kingliness and royal order was regular hunting; it recurs with almost obsessive frequency in the annals of Louis the Pious’s reign, for example, especially after major events, and it is significant that Louis is said by Einhard to have gone hunting just after he had seen the latter’s relics in 828. It is interesting, then, that the Annals of Saint-Bertin do not mention hunts in 830-34; it is not that Louis did not hunt then (one of his biographers explicitly says he did in 831 and 834), but rather that a ritual of order did not seem appropriate to the annalist in a period of crisis, even though Louis was presumably himself trying to present 831, for example, as business as usual. Louis’s two penances, in 822 and 833, were particularly prone to be read in different ways. In 822 at Attigny he performed a voluntary penance whose orchestration he controlled, to cauterize the wound caused by the death of Bernard of Italy; but did this really end the matter? In 833 Bernard’s death was as fresh as ever in the indictment proposed by Lothar’s bishops; it is as if Attigny had not occurred. Paschasius Radbert, for his part, in his Life of Adalard, could not ignore Attigny, for it had brought Adalard back to court, but he contested how in control of the ritual Louis really was: ‘all contemplated his willingness and perceived his unwillingness.’ Louis had gone out on a limb in 822, probably with success at the time, but hindsight and hostility could see it as failure, and as leading directly to Louis’s deposition penance in 833. The latter, in an interesting reversal, was written up as voluntary by Louis’s enemies, but as forced and therefore invalid by his friends.

  Every major event in the Carolingian period, whether involving ritual or not, was written up by writers to make political points of this type; they either upheld or subverted the correct order of the empire. This means that it is, often enough, impossible to enter in detail into what ‘really’ happened. But what is abundantly clear is that the ninth century was a period in which the ceremonial terrain - the public sphere, one could say (the Carolingians used the word publicus extensively) - was particularly wide and important. It was terrain which had to be claimed by every political actor, even though he (or she) could not fully control the perceptions of the audience of each ritual act, given that it was the audience who would ultimately determine whether the act worked properly or not. There always had to be a process of negotiation. This is why, for example, Charles the Bald at the 876 Ponthion synod, which was largely devoted to ecclesiastical court cases, ended the proceedings with an elaborate procedure intended to make real to the Franks the fact that he was now the emperor: he wore Byzantine costume and a crown, as we saw in the previous chapter, then papal legates went to fetch Queen Richildis with her own crown, and then the same legates performed the closing liturgy. Did this work? Hincmar, who wrote this up for the Annals of Saint-Bertin, was greatly hostile to most of the decisions of the synod, but he was clearly impressed by the ritual: he was himself the writer of elaborate coronation rituals, and he could understand the internal structure and the roots of this one. The Fulda annalist, anyway opposed to Charles, and also writing in East Francia, where much less was known about the Byzantine empire, dismissed Charles’s ‘Greek customs’ in two lines; but it was men like Hincmar who were Charles’s intended audience, not the Frankish East, and for them this ritual had a considerable success.

  This large and moralized political arena was also populated by intellectuals, at least three generations of them after Charlemagne began to patronize them in the 780s. It is this group of (in nearly every case) men which really characterizes the Carolingian period as different from its predecessors; in other respects, the politico-cultural world o
f the sixth to early eighth centuries was still fully operative. The importance of intellectuals for the political practice of the ninth-century West was as great as or greater than it would ever be again in the Middle Ages, and the ninth century matched the French Revolution as a focus for collective intellectual political activity. This did not make political actors behave better, of course, but it greatly increased the range of the excuses and self-justifications for bad behaviour, which also mark out the period. To have had an education was, simply, enough for prominence. It is not that aristocrats did not sneer at the low-born, as with Louis the Pious’s biographer Thegan’s highly coloured hostility to Archbishop Ebbo of Reims for his servile birth (Thegan claims), or with Liutward of Vercelli, who was compared to the biblical villain Haman by one of the Fulda annalists; both ended their political careers in disgrace, too - Ebbo was one of the few people to face punishment for having supported Lothar in 833-4. Neither of these, all the same, was a major writer. Education and intelligence, however, linked Einhard and the poet and liturgist Walahfrid Strabo, whose backgrounds were relatively undistinguished, with genuine aristocrats such as Hraban Maur, Hincmar, or the theologian Gottschalk (d. c. 869: Walahfrid’s friend, but Hraban’s and Hincmar’s enemy), as well as, of course, incomers from England, Ireland or Spain, with no roots in the Frankish lands, from Alcuin and Theodulf at the start of the Carolingian period to the theologian John the Scot (d. c. 877) at the end.

  Part of this sense of collectivity derived from being educated together, at Aachen itself or Tours or Corbie or St. Gallen or Fulda (where Einhard, Hraban, Walahfrid and Gottschalk had all been trained) or any of two dozen other active centres. Much of it, however, was because such writers had a communality of knowledge, of the Bible, canon law, Virgil, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Isidore, Bede, and the rest of the Latin church fathers: they knew what they were each talking about. And they could assume that their peers did too; as we have seen, aristocrats had to be literate to be able to operate politically in this period. Hincmar could write highly erudite texts for Charles the Bald and expect him to pick up the allusions; Charles sought books on his own behalf as well, as when Lupus abbot of Ferrières (d. 862), one of his most loyal scholars, sent him a sermon of Augustine against perjury. Aristocrats had libraries; Marquis Everard of Friuli’s 863-4 will had bibles, biblical commentaries, several law books (including, probably, one Lupus had collected for him), works by Vegetius, Augustine and Isidore, several saints’ lives, two or three histories, and more. Most of these books were not ninth-century texts, but they attest to the same interests that our ninth-century writers demonstrably had. There was a common intellectual community, which extended a long way beyond the writers of the period.