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

by Chris Wickham

  Gerbert’s career had serious setbacks, but the favour of the great always set him right again. If one reads his letters, they show an assured dealer, playing a complex political game for himself and Adalbero, and, later, for himself alone. It is true that he was consistent, in his support of the Ottonian king/emperors (even though he was in West Francia at the time) and also, increasingly, of Hugh Capet. All the same, he sailed so close to the wind in his dealings that one constantly might expect, if one did not know how his career would end, that he would come unstuck: a man with no social background, entirely reliant on patronage, playing high politics in a period of switchback political shifts, and made an archbishop in dubious circumstances - such a situation destroyed Ebbo of Reims in the 830s, as we saw in Chapter 17, and Gerbert was incredibly lucky not to fall too. What saved him was his scholarship: Gerbert was always welcome as a court intellectual. He wrote letters asking for manuscripts (particularly of mathematical works, and of Cicero) as systematically as Lupus of Ferrières had done a hundred and fifty years before. His skills ensured that he could and did travel with ease across every part of the old Carolingian empire. Gerbert is an illustration that many aspects of the ninth-century political and intellectual practice described in the last chapter had by no means gone away a century later.

  But there are differences. One was in the fate of the Carolingian programme. Even second-level intellectuals like Lupus had been able to lecture kings on their moral duties in the ninth century; but, when Otto III wrote to invite Gerbert to be his tutor, Gerbert replied, not with moral advice, but with an enthusiastic evocation of the mathematics he could teach him. (The Saxon historian Thietmar bishop of Merseburg, d. 1018, remembered him for the astronomical clock he built for Otto at Magdeburg.) None of his letters admonish the great; they give information, make practical suggestions, ask for favours. The Ottonians, although in many ways as ambitious as the Carolingians (Thietmar compared Otto to Charlemagne), did not inherit their moralized politics, except to an extent with Henry II after 1002; they barely even issued any laws. The rhetorical frame of ruling had changed. And so had its scale. Among non-royal political operators, Adalbero and Gerbert were by now rare in their interest in more than one kingdom (Reims was near a boundary, and Adalbero had close kin in Lotharingia). Historians certainly were not interested; Flodoard and Richer, the tenth-century West Frankish historians, recount almost nothing of East Francia or Italy, and in the East the Saxon historians Widukind and Thietmar similarly only chronicle East Frankish affairs, adding Italy, somewhat perfunctorily, when Otto I conquered it in 962. The only exception was Liutprand of Cremona (d. 972), the historian of Italy, who paid attention to East (but not West) Frankish politics because he was writing for Otto I, in exile in Frankfurt.

  The future countries of Italy, France and Germany were diverging, then. This was not complete, as Gerbert shows. Otto I, too, as we shall see, not only took over Italy, but was a player in West Frankish politics as well, without it seeming inappropriate. And the separate concepts ‘France’ and ‘Germany’ did not yet exist; nor even, except occasionally, did ‘West’ and ‘East’ Francia, the terminology historians currently use; both were normally just Francia, or Francia et Saxonia in the case of the eastern kingdom, to reflect the Saxon origins and political base of the Ottonians. (‘France’ is of course simply the French for Francia; by contrast in the German lands, the Frankish heartland was only one region among the old ethnic territories of Saxony, Alemannia, Bavaria, and so a new inclusive name eventually appeared, the regnum Teutonicum, though not until the eleventh century.) But the lack of interest of the historians reflects a slow cultural separation. For Flodoard and Richer, Francia was ‘really’ (northern) France; the East Franks were Transrhenenses, from over the Rhine, or else the inhabitants of Germania , the old Roman geographical term. For Widukind, similarly, West Francia was Gallia, proto-French the Gallica lingua, and Francia was seen as ‘really’ being in the East. When Thietmar says that ‘rule by foreigners is the greatest punishment’, he certainly would have included the West Franks. The political history of these three regions will have to be discussed separately as a result. But the procedures of political practice had not diverged very greatly, all the same, and in the last section of the chapter I shall discuss these for all the post-Carolingian regions, seen as a whole.

  East Francia was easily the most powerful of the successor states. This was not because of its infrastructure. It was heavily forested, particularly in the centre and south, and its communications were dependent on rivers: for centuries, the only practicable north-south route, except for single and expert travellers, was the Rhine corridor in the far west of the kingdom, which was also the main ex-Roman region, with roads and East Francia’s major cities, Cologne and Mainz. Saxony and Bavaria were a month’s travel apart, and had little to do with each other; rulers based in one tended to leave the other alone. But the regional political system created by Louis the German largely survived the troubles of the decades around 900, and could still be used by the Ottonians, and indeed for another century or more on from them.

  Arnulf of Carinthia (887-99), who seized power from his uncle Charles the Fat, ruled from Bavaria. He was clearly the senior ruler of his time in all the Carolingian lands; he was the lord of Rudolf I king of Burgundy (888-912) and Berengar I of Italy (888-924), and had perhaps even been offered the throne of West Francia in 888. In 894-6 he took Italy briefly and made himself emperor. But he had a stroke in 896 and soon died; and his young son and successor Louis the Child (900-911), the last eastern Carolingian, never made much impression. The years 896-911 saw a power-vacuum in the eastern kingdom. It was filled by new regional rulers, called dukes: of Bavaria (in particular the ‘Liutpolding’ Arnulf, duke 907-37), of Alemannia (now increasingly called Swabia: in particular Burchard I, d. 911), of Saxony (in particular the ‘Liudolfing’ Otto, d. 912), of Lotharingia (at least after 903, under the ‘Conradine’ Gebhard, d. 910), and even of the East Frankish heartland, which seems to have crystallized as a duchy under Gebhard’s nephew Conrad around 906. Bavaria and Swabia had been Carolingian kingdoms with their own local political structures (and an autonomous political past), and it is relatively easy to see, particularly in Bavaria, how it was possible for a local ruler to move from being a duke in Bavaria to being duke of the region; Arnulf ran Bavarian-wide assemblies and armies, appointed his own bishops, and even briefly called himself king, in 918. Saxony was harder, for it had never been a unified autonomous region, and Duke Otto’s father and brother Liudolf (d. 866) and Brun (d. 880) had, although each were called dux, only a frontier command; but that command involved successful wars against Sclavenians or Slavs and a military machine, and Otto by his death had come to be more or less in full control of Saxony, which he passed on to his son Henry. Lotharingia and the Frankish heartland took longer still, for these were core Carolingian territories and still contained the largest concentrations of royal lands, around Aachen and Mainz respectively; but it is a sign of the power of the duchy as a political concept that they too had more or less hegemonic dukes by Louis the Child’s death. The Frank Conrad, ruler of the most ‘royal’ duchy, was a natural successor to Louis, as Conrad I (911-18), but he failed to gain the respect from his ducal ex-peers that he hoped for, in particular Henry of Saxony and Arnulf of Bavaria; he also lost Lotharingia to the West Frankish king Charles the Simple (898-923). When he died, the magnates of Francia et Saxonia chose Henry of Saxony as the new king (Henry I, 919-36), possibly even at Conrad’s suggestion, and certainly with the agreement of Conrad’s brother and heir, Eberhard duke of the Franks (d. 939). The Swabians and Bavarians were, however, absent.

  East Francia at this point could have been easily divided into (at least) three, as it had been in 876; the two southern duchies had their own traditions, after all, and a Saxon king was far away - and was also not Frankish, so not obviously more ‘royal’ than a Swabian or a Bavarian. Henry proceeded with care; he was probably not anointed king, so as not t
o claim too much authority, and he established pacts of ‘friendship’, implicitly of quasi-equality, with the other dukes. They were prepared to make them, however, and Henry also established momentum by retaking Lotharingia in the 920s. Saxon armies were, furthermore, active against Slavs, and above all against the Magyars or Hungarians, a semi-nomadic people who had overthrown Moravian power in the decade after 894 and established themselves in what is now Hungary. The latter were very effective raiders across much of central Europe and Italy in the early tenth century, and Henry achieved considerable status (not least in Bavaria, on the front line of their attacks) by defeating them in 933 and quietening them for two decades. Henry’s supremacy was also, like Arnulf’s, recognized in Burgundy (though not Italy). When he was succeeded by his son Otto I in 936, Otto could choreograph an election and coronation in Aachen itself, with a very formal anointing by the archbishop of Mainz, and a banquet in which all four dukes, plus the king’s deputy (a rege secundus) in his home duchy of Saxony, served him dinner, the clearest sign of subjection.

  Otto when he inherited the throne had brothers, for the first time in the eastern kingdom since the 870s (and the last until 1190); Henry had excluded them from succession, in a deliberate departure from Carolingian norms. In 939-41 two of them, Thankmar and Henry, revolted, fortunately (for Otto) not at the same time, and found considerable support both from other dukes and from inside Saxony itself; only Hermann of Swabia (926-48), a Conradine put in by Henry I, was consistently loyal to the king. But Otto won the wars, and was able to remove dukes everywhere; in the Frankish heartland, he abolished the title after Eberhard’s death in battle against him and Hermann, and ruled it directly himself. Otto consistently chose his dukes from now on. They were almost all from the ducal families that had already emerged, which did not give him a wide range of choice; the Ottonians, unlike the Carolingians, could not create a new Reichsaristokratie on any scale. But often Otto chose his own relatives, his now-reconciled brother Henry in Bavaria (947-55), his son Liudolf in Swabia (948-53), his youngest brother Brun, archbishop of Cologne, in Lotharingia (954-65), before going back to more local families.

  Liudolf revolted in 953-4 as well. But his revolt, although widely supported, was subverted by the last great Hungarian invasion, which Otto destroyed on the Lechfeld outside Augsburg, on the Swabian border, in 955. After that, Otto’s hegemony was unquestioned. It extended to West Francia, as already shown by the synod of Ingelheim in 948, in which King Louis IV (936-54) brought his grievances against Duke Hugh the Great (d. 956) to Otto’s own assembly, to be judged by the East Frankish king and the papal legate. Otto was also able to extend himself to Italy, first in 951-2, when his overlordship was recognized by Berengar II (950-62), then in 961-2, when he annexed the Italian kingdom and was crowned emperor. Otto was strong enough to spend most of the rest of his reign in Italy, and was, in the last two decades of his life, by far the most powerful ruler of the tenth century - Thietmar was not wrong to make the Charlemagne comparison. Otto’s political structure was strong enough to survive the relatively lacklustre reign of his son Otto II (973-83), who was unsuccessful in his wider forays, outside Paris in 978, and, most disastrously, when he was defeated by the Arabs in 982 in the far south of Italy, near Crotone; and the long royal minority of the three-year-old Otto III (983-1002). The younger Ottos, however, had Otto II’s mother Adelaide (d. 999) and wife Theophanu (d. 991) to look after them: tough queens-regent in the Merovingian mould, and themselves proof of the now-established centrality of the Liudolfing/Ottonian family as East Frankish kings. At Otto III’s death without children the magnates of the eastern kingdom hesitated between Hermann II of Swabia and Ekkehard, marquis of the Saxon march of Meissen, but without much difficulty in the end they plumped for Henry IV of Bavaria (Henry II, 1002-24), who was Otto I’s brother’s grandson and Otto III’s male-line heir. There was no doubt at any of these royal accessions that East Francia was a single political system, which by now included Italy as well.

  How this system actually worked is more of a problem. The Merovingian and Carolingian assumption that assemblies were the key moments of political aggregation was certainly maintained, and indeed heavily stressed: the new Saxon royal centres of Magdeburg and Quedlinburg attracted aristocrats and bishops from all over the kingdom at the big Easter feasts. Royal diplomas show that the legitimacy of royal grants of land and rights were important throughout the kingdom, too. But Ottonian local control was more mediated than it had been under their predecessors. The king/emperors chose the dukes, but the dukes of the two southern duchies controlled all the ex-royal land of Swabia and Bavaria; indeed, Otto I’s son Liudolf when he succeeded Hermann in Swabia had to be married to Hermann’s daughter Ida, in order to succeed, ‘with the duchy, to all his property’, as Widukind put it, implying that if Hermann had had sons, Liudolf might have been a duke with little land. Inside duchies, assemblies, army-muster and justice were all under ducal control; there had never been many royal missi in Carolingian East Francia, and the court chaplains the Ottonians sometimes sent out were very ad-hoc representatives. Kings chose bishops too, often from the court chaplains; an episcopal presence in the royal entourage was important, and they could also carry royal interest back into their duchies. But they, too, tended to be from local families, except for the key archbishops of Cologne and Mainz. The best the kings could do was to undermine ducal power, sometimes by dividing duchies (Carinthia was carved off from Bavaria in 976, Lotharingia was split into Upper and Lower from the late 950s) and, often, by encouraging the autonomous interests of both bishops and other local magnates, especially through grants of judicial immunity. In the end, the default Ottonian political practice in the outlying duchies, and also in Italy, was simply to divide and rule. This, plus assembly ceremonial and frequent royal presence - for the Ottonians moved around a lot, far more than the Carolingians had, and could be found in most places except Bavaria - was a large part of Ottonian government, outside Saxony at least.

  All the same, the Ottonians had major strengths, too: in their royal land, in the still-surviving Carolingian heartland regions around Aachen and Mainz-Frankfurt, to which they added their own family heartland in the south of Saxony, between Hildesheim and Merseburg; in their powers of patronage, to benefices, duchies, bishoprics, which, as with the Carolingians, kept their courts essential locations for the distribution of political power; in the silver-mines providentially discovered in their Saxon heartland around Goslar about 970, which funded the kings for two centuries; and, above all, in their large army. The core of the latter was Saxon, and it was honed on the eastern marches, which under Henry I and Otto I had become tightly organized military territories aimed at eastward aggression. The Slavs of the Elbe-Oder lands (roughly the East Germany of 1945-90) were largely subjected, and they and their eastern neighbours paid tribute; the Saxon aristocracy gained massively from this, which helped the loyalty of most of them, but the king/ emperor kept control of the whole process. (Dukes of Saxony developed again in the tenth century, once the Liudolfings/Ottonians had become kings, but they were essentially based in the eastern marches, and did not yet displace direct royal power.) The core Saxon army was supplemented by units from everywhere else in the East Frankish kingdom when the Ottonians fought elsewhere, drawn largely from church lands, as is seen in the Indiculus Loricatorum, a rare administrative document from the tenth century, an army-list for the reinforcements called for by Otto II in southern Italy in 981. The Ottonians never lost control of army-service from the whole kingdom. Even the great Slav revolt of 983, after Otto’s Italian defeat, which drove the Saxons out of much of the land beyond the Elbe and held off their advance for a century, did not break the Ottonian grip on the army and on the Saxon frontier. All this made possible Ottonian supremacy, despite the relative simplicity of the political structures in much of their realm, and it showed no sign of slipping in 1000.