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

by Chris Wickham

  The kingdom of Italy, the Italian peninsula stretching down to Rome, was the opposite to East Francia, an institutionally coherent polity whose kings were weak. It still had its capital at Pavia, the location of the royal court and an increasingly active centre of judicial expertise. Italian court-case records are elaborate and relatively homogeneous until late in the eleventh century, and appeals to Pavia were normal. Most such court records are of county-based judicial assemblies, which were thrice-yearly public meetings headed by counts or royal missi (who continued to exist in Italy, though the office was by now a local one), usually held inside Italy’s strong network of cities: this had parallels with the assembly politics of East Francia, but was much more localized, much more regular, and also explicitly judicial; such assemblies were full of semi-expert lay iudices, judges, who were generally literate, as well as lay notaries. Italian revenues from tolls and royal lands were also more systematic and larger-scale than in Germany, away from the Saxon frontier at least, particularly in the royal heartlands of what are now called Lombardy and Emilia, around the capital. Italy was worth conquering in 962, in the same way as it had been in 773-4.

  This institutional coherence coincided with a much more regionalized politics. The aristocracy of the eighth-century Lombard kingdom had been local, and modest in its wealth. The Carolingians introduced Franks from the great northern aristocratic families, who owned more widely, such as the ‘Widonids’ in the southern duchy of Spoleto and the ‘Suppon ids’ (kin to Louis II’s queen Angilberga), as we saw in Chapter 16. But these families failed in the early tenth century, or else localized themselves, or else both, as with the ‘Bonifacian’ counts of Lucca, a family from Bavaria first documented in Italy in 812, who became entirely regionally focused, as marquises of Tuscany for the period 846 to 931, after which they were overthrown and died out. After an early Carolingian period in which incomers monopolized almost all secular offices, Lombard families re-emerged in the later ninth century and onwards, who might gain lands and offices on a substantial scale, as with the Aldobrandeschi in southern Tuscany, protégés of Lothar I and Louis II, or the Canossa in eastern Emilia, protégés of Hugh and Otto I (see Chapter 21); but these, too, usually had major interests only in three or four contiguous counties, and most of the aristocratic players of the tenth century had interests in only one. Italy outside the royal heartland was divided into duchies or marches as was East Francia: Friuli in the north-east, Spoleto in the south, Tuscany in the centre, Ivrea and then Turin in the north-west (the first two of these had Lombard antecedents, the others were Carolingian or post-Carolingian). These had semi-autonomous political structures and armies, as did their analogues north of the Alps. But the particular point about Italy was that the solidity of the majority of counties, usually coterminous with the local bishopric and centred on a city where most local political players lived, meant that secular and ecclesiastical aristocracies could very easily focus on single city-territories as their major points of reference, bypassing even the marches. In the tenth century, not only Friuli and Tuscany, but their constituent elements, such as Verona, Padua, or Pisa - and, in the royal heartland, Parma, Bergamo, Milan - began to have their separate histories. They were institutionally connected to Pavia, but city-focused identities and political rivalries mattered rather more. These localized territories were more coherent than in most of East Francia, and were for the most part less dominated by single families than in West Francia. They therefore absorbed more of the political interests of local powers, and kings and even marquises intervened in them very largely from the outside. Beyond the city network, only Tuscany survived as a fully coherent regional territory into the eleventh century.

  This was the backdrop for the political shifts of the tenth century. Berengar marquis of Friuli was the first to make himself king after Charles the Fat was overthrown; he faced no less than five rivals in his thirty-five-year reign, Guy and Lambert of Spoleto (889-95; 891-8), Arnulf from the north, as we have seen, and later Louis III king of Provence (900-905), and Rudolf II king of Burgundy (922-6). Berengar I survived the early deaths of the first three and blinded the fourth; between 905 and 922 he enjoyed the widest and most uncontested power of any king of his time. But he was not actually very popular outside his own power-base in north-east Italy (all his rivals except Arnulf were actively supported in the north-west; Tuscany usually remained neutral); nor was he a great military leader (he lost battles to the Hungarians, and, later, to Rudolf of Burgundy). He initiated in the 900s a trend to local structures of defence, concentrated on cities, or else on privately owned fortifications, to which he often gave judicial immunities. Guy and Louis III, and then Berengar, also granted comital rights inside the walls of cities to bishops, thus breaking up comital jurisdiction further. This should be seen as Berengar exercising a well-structured and largely successful political protagonism, to reward support both inside and outside his heartland; but it also strengthened the trends to localization already referred to. There is little sign under Berengar I of either a Carolingian programmatic politics or the ceremonial royal assemblies of the Carolingian and Ottonian systems north of the Alps. Even the verse panegyric on Berengar from around 915 (an atypical but not unique text; both Charlemagne and Otto I had them) makes no reference to such initiatives. Berengar ended badly, when his Hungarian mercenaries stirred up a new revolt and Rudolf’s invasion, the Hungarians then sacked Pavia, and in 924 Berengar was, unusually for the period, murdered.

  The Italian magnates were still looking for an effective ruler, and in 925 they tried Hugh, count of Arles, who ruled energetically for two decades, 926-47. Hugh, who had no local power-base, operated from the royal heartland around Pavia, and sought systematically to control the marches by choosing their rulers. In this respect he operated in almost exactly the same way as his younger contemporary Otto I: he moved established families around (more than Otto did, in fact), and appointed his own kin, as with his brother Boso and illegitimate son Hubert, successive marquises of Tuscany (931-69). He also relied greatly on a network of bishops, whether his relatives or from more local families, who had considerable powers (as with his son Boso, bishop of Piacenza, who was also arch-chancellor in Pavia). Again, we lack much evidence for a more public, assembly-based politics (except in the field of law), although this might be expected to have been normal at least in Pavia. Our main narrative source for Hugh, Liutprand of Cremona, systematically disregarded the standard markers of royal legitimacy when he discussed the Italian kings, faithful protégé as he was of Otto I, but clear signs of royal ceremony, or political aggregation around Hugh, are absent in our other evidence as well. We gain the sense that Hugh remained an outsider to the local political preoccupations of the Italians, and he fell too, in the end, when the exiled Berengar marquis of Ivrea invaded with an East Frankish army in 945 and Hugh found himself with no supporters. Berengar II ruled under the hegemony of Otto I after 951, and was easily removed in 962.

  A political system which has both wealth and institutional coherence, but whose rulers are relatively marginal politically and have little military support, is both attractive and easy to conquer, as Rudolf, Hugh, Berengar II and Otto I found in turn. It is arguable, though, that Ottonian rule by now suited Italy best. Otto I and Otto III spent some time in Italy, nine and five years respectively, but kings were present in the kingdom itself for less than a third of the period 962-1000, and in the eleventh century the figure dropped precipitously. The Ottonians promoted episcopal immunities where counts were strong, and appointed and endowed counts where bishops were strong: an ad-hoc procedure aimed at reducing local power-bases, as beyond the Alps. They did not do much else; they imported no new families. The strength of their armies, when they were present in the country, made explicit opposition rare, although Otto III had considerable trouble in Rome, which he tried to make his political base in 998-1001, in a romantic and largely rhetorical attempt at a renovatio of the Roman empire. But most of the time they were absent, and the l
ocal politics of the Italian bishops and urban aristocracies could continue with little external interference, linked together essentially by the Pavia-focused network of judicial assemblies and also by the regular seeking of diplomas granting lands and rights from the king/emperors beyond the Alps. This was a pattern which would persist until the civil wars of the 1080s-1090s forced Italian city communities to think about ruling themselves; on the other hand, the coherence of city territories was, after 1000, itself eroded by the crystallization of even smaller lordships with autonomous political rights (see below, Chapter 21).

  Otto I and III intervened directly in Roman politics, and all three Ottos also sought to intervene south of Rome. The independent principality of Benevento had held Charlemagne off, but in 849, after a ten-year civil war, it divided into two, Benevento and Salerno, and Capua split off from Salerno by the 860s. These three principalities then variously combined, fought each other, and fought the small ex-Byzantine city-states in the same area, Naples, Amalfi and Gaeta, for two centuries. They were not very internally coherent as polities, and already in the mid-tenth century they were dividing into smaller lordships, with the exception of Salerno. They were also militarily weak: Louis II had already sought to dominate them in the 860s-870s, though he failed; the Byzantines had also, more definitively, annexed the southern portions of Salerno and, in particular, of Benevento in the 880s-890s. The southern principalities thus looked like possible new conquests to the Ottonians, and, if they did not become so, it was only because they were so far away from the main Ottonian power-bases, and because Otto II’s 982 defeat was so traumatic.

  Conversely, however, inside southern Italy, the independent principality under its own ruling dynasty was the unchallenged political model. This is doubtless why Rome, under four generations of the Theophylact family (c. 904-63), moved in the direction of the dynastic pattern as well. It was one strong enough even to tolerate an independent female ruler, Marozia senatrix et patricia (c. 925-32), one of a small handful in the tenth century (the others, discussed later, were in Mercia and Rus); her son Alberic (932-54), who overthrew her, called himself princeps, prince, in clear imitation of the princes just to the south. These rulers chose their bishops - that is, the popes - just as the princes of Capua-Benevento and Salerno did, and also just as the Ottonians did in the north. Alberic drew back from the pattern, however, when he was not only succeeded by his son Octavian (954-63/4), but persuaded the Roman aristocracy to elect the latter pope, which they did, as John XII, in 956. Rome’s traditions and papal-orientated bureaucracy made an episcopal leader more appropriate in the long term than a princely leader. But this brought renewed instability, after John’s overthrow by Otto I, as rival families supported rival pontiffs across the rest of the century. Otto I and III only exacerbated this in their own high-handed, violent and temporary interventions. But although the king/emperors could and did give up on the south of Italy, they could not give up on Rome, where they needed to be crowned emperor. Otto III tried to solve Roman faction-fighting by choosing non-Italian popes (including Gerbert), for the first time since the mid-eighth century. This failed, but it would be imitated by Henry III in the 1040s, with unpredictable future effects.

  West Francia was easily the least successful of the post-Carolingian kingdoms. Even the shadowy kingdom of Burgundy in the Rhone valley managed an essential durability (except in the south, ravaged by Arabs) and also dynastic continuity, between 888 and its absorption into the East Frankish kingdom/empire in 1032. West Francia, however, combined the personalized kingship of the Ottonian East with the political instability of early tenth-century Italy - a fatal mixture. Already by the 940s the kings of the West had hardly any authority, and for the next hundred and fifty years they hardly gained any more.

  In 888 the ‘Robertine’ Odo of Paris took the throne of West Francia (888-98). The only surviving western Carolingian, Charles the Simple, was a child, and an adult was needed to confront the Vikings. In 889 Odo held substantial assemblies, and counts and bishops from as far south as Barcelona and Nîmes came to them; but his non-Carolingian blood did not help his authority south of the Loire, in Aquitaine and elsewhere, and by 893 lack of success against the Vikings allowed Archbishop Fulk of Reims (d. 900) to get away with setting Charles as king against him. Civil war followed; Odo and Charles made peace in 897, and Charles was recognized as Odo’s heir, in return for Odo’s brother Robert being recognized as in sole control of the family counties and monasteries between the Seine and the Loire and around Paris. When Charles succeeded as king (898-923), he was thus cut out of a large section of the traditional royal lands in the Paris region. The counts of Vermandois, Heribert I (d. c. 905) and his son Heribert II (d. 943) - themselves distant Carolingians, for the former was grandson of Bernard of Italy - had occupied most of the royal properties in the Oise valley north of Paris, too; Charles was left with Laon to the north-east as a political base, extending to Reims whenever he could. It is not surprising that he spent the 910s trying to make good his control of Lotharingia, for the royal properties around Aachen would have increased his wealth and political influence dramatically. But he did not have the full support of the West Frankish aristocracy for this enterprise, and they also seem to have resented his Lotharingian advisers. In 920 ‘almost all the counts of [West] Francia’ revolted, as Flodoard of Reims put it, and in 922 they made Robert king against him. Robert was killed in battle the next year, but the Franks would not take Charles back, and chose instead Rudolf duke of Burgundy, Robert’s brother-in-law (923-36). Charles was captured by Heribert II of Vermandois, and died in prison in 929.

  Charles was not an entirely useless king. His Lotharingian adventure was at least a sensible strategy, even if a desperate one. He also had the vision to deal with the Vikings of the Seine by recognizing them and settling their leader Rollo as count of Rouen in 911. The Vikings (Nortmanni in Latin) of the Seine more or less respected their side of the deal, and held off future attacks; they settled down and soon began to behave in ways analogous to other Frankish magnates, and ‘Normandy’, though prone to civil war, remained fairly firmly in the hands of its count/duke. But Charles had several insurmountable problems. One was that he had very little land in West Francia as a whole; in the two decades preceding 898 the counts and dukes of both the north and the south had occupied most of it for their own purposes, except in the Paris heartland region, which Robert and Heribert divided with him. The second was that he and his successors had no power to choose counts and dukes, unlike the kings of East Francia and Italy; no tenth-century West Frankish king had any significant effect on the succession of a major county or duchy, unless its ruler died without heirs. This power had been lost only recently, for Charles the Fat exercised it in the 880s, but it had now gone, with the consequence that the territorial chequerboard of West Frankish politics was strategically uncontrollable except by war; only some of the bishops and abbots of the north, notably the major regional power of Reims, could usually be chosen by the king. The third was that the magnates of West Francia were themselves regionalized; already in 898 Robert, Heribert I, Baldwin II count of Flanders, Fulk of Reims, Richard the Justiciar duke of Burgundy, William the Pious duke of eastern Aquitaine and Odo count of Toulouse had interests that were restricted to the counties they controlled and their immediate neighbours, and not to the kingdom as a whole. This was quite like the East Frankish or Italian situation, and it was Charles the Simple’s task to establish the political centrality of his assemblies, as Henry of Saxony would do. But he had not the landed resources to do it, and his attempts to create them were unsupported.

  King Rudolf in 923 at least had a new landed base, in the duchy of Burgundy, and was strong there. But he also largely remained there; Flodoard’s Annals describe him as having to be ‘summoned’ to the West Frankish heartland, not that far away, by Heribert of Vermandois or Robert’s son Hugh the Great (d. 956), when he was needed to fight wars. At his death in 936, Hugh recalled Charles’s son Louis IV from e
xile in England to rule. Louis had effectively no land or power at all, and strove constantly, but without success, to establish himself independently of Hugh, who had become ‘duke of the [West] Franks’ in 936. Hugh even imprisoned him in 945-6, an action which brought Otto I more firmly onto the scene, and resulted in Louis’s appearance at Ingelheim in 948 to seek Otto’s judgement against Hugh. (Hugh was excommunicated for it later in the year, but paid no notice, although he did make peace with Louis in 950.) Louis died in 954, leaving a thirteen-year-old son, Lothar (954-86), as king; Lothar’s mother Gerberga was regent for several years. But Hugh’s death in 956 gave the king respite, as his own eldest son Hugh Capet was only eleven. Gerberga and Hugh Capet’s mother Hadwig were sisters; they were also sisters of Otto I, whose authority in the West was at its height in these years; it was exercised through their brother Brun of Cologne, who is often found in West Francia in the next decade, and who orchestrated the confirmation of the title of duke on Hugh Capet in 960. Lothar as he grew up fell out not only with Hugh Capet but with Otto I and Otto II, fighting a war with the latter in 978-80, like that of sixty years earlier, in an attempt to regain Lotharingia. But his greater protagonism was based on no greater strength on the ground. When his son Louis V died young in 987, Archbishop Adalbero of Reims argued successfully for Hugh Capet’s succession, as we have seen. The running sore of Carolin gian-Robertine rivalry was ended when Charles of Lotharingia was captured in 990, and male-line ‘Capetians’ then ruled West Francia/ France without any significant break until 1792, a record unsurpassed, as far as I know, in all history, except in Japan.