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

by Chris Wickham

  There has been a historiographical war between historians who stress the Visigothic (or Catholic) side of the Asturian kingdom and those who stress its de-Romanized (or tribal) nature. Both views are valid, however. It is fair to see the kings, at least from Alfonso II onwards, as strikingly ambitious, given the material they had to work with. And, although the peasant basis of their kingdom was strong at the start, it weakened fast. King Aurelio (768-74) quelled a peasant revolt, somewhere in the Asturias, which must show some shift in power relations. Galicia was already a region with a relatively visible aristocracy in the ninth century, and, in the tenth, aristocrats there operated a landed politics just like that of their peers north of the Pyrenees, as with the church foundations and family manipulations of Ilduara (d. c. 960), an influential aristocratic widow from Lugo, who built the monastery of Celanova and put her son Bishop Rosendo (d. c. 980) in as its first abbot. In southern León and Castile, aristocratic power was newer; it largely derived from royal cessions of land and rights to magnates or seniores - and to monasteries - over the heads of the peasantry, including rights to local tributes which often turned into rents, as in ninth-century England; it also derived from the increased local influence of the richest and most militarized peasant stratum, which could soon turn into local dominance. Lesser aristocrats (infanzones), coming from the entourages of greater magnates or from families of rich peasant milites, or both, gained in the eleventh century a hereditary right to privilege over their non-aristocratic neighbours. The villages of the Duero had to be subjected, and sometimes resisted; they often maintained unusually coherent identities well into the central Middle Ages, for that matter. But already by the eleventh century the kingdom of León-Castile had a powerful and many-levelled aristocracy, based on rights of landownership, and also holding down roles in local government for the kings: it was ready to draw the maximum benefit possible from the weakened kingdoms of al-Andalus.

  The shift to a landowning and office-holding aristocratic hierarchy, largely completed in the tenth century, thus brought the kingdom still more closely into line with the post-Carolingian world; in this respect, too, León-Castile followed, a century later, some of the developments we saw in Chapter 19 for England. But in Christian Spain the borrowings of governmental structures and political hierarchies were not from external powers, Francia or al-Andalus, as were those of the developing states of the rest of this chapter; they were largely from the Visigothic past, which had not been wholly forgotten.

  The political and social systems described in this chapter covered half of Europe, and were very diverse. The Sclavenian/Slav lands were particularly extensive, and only a near-total lack of documentary or narrative detail about their affairs until very late in our period justifies treating them so summarily. Overall, however, there are common trends in all the societies described here. Kings and princes were in every region more ambitious around 1000 than they had been around 750: they often ruled wider areas, or at least were aiming at wider hegemonies, and sometimes had more elaborate structures to underpin that rule as well; they were often more relevant to local societies, too, thus ruling more deeply as well as more widely. The differences in our evidence from polity to polity sometimes stress one element in this, sometimes another. So in northern Spain there was a tendency for aristocrats to root themselves as locally powerful landowners, which has English parallels. This process was less complete in the Celtic, or Scandinavian, or Slav lands, where aristocrat-peasant relationships were more often those of patron and client, or tribute-taker and -payer, or both, until after our period ends. This was a real difference, although it may seem more acute because our documentation for landowning is far better for Spain (and England) than for elsewhere; it is quite possible, for example, that in a region like Bohemia aristocrats were already becoming landowners too in the tenth century, as not long afterwards they certainly would. We cannot tell in this case, for our sources are as yet inadequate; but we certainly have signs that this was so for Croatia, another Frankish borderland. Overall, however, the trend to wider and deeper political power seems to have been based on two sorts of developments. The first was the development of aristocratic power, and therefore of the possibility of hierarchies of political dependence extending from kings and princes down into the localities. The second was the development of techniques of rule and of control, usually (except in Spain and Ireland) borrowed from neighbouring powers: more specialized royal officials, a more complex and more top-down judicial system, the ability to demand military service from the population, the ability to exploit manpower to build fortifications of different types, and, in newly Christianized areas, the development of tighter official hierarchies of the church. We have seen some sign of each of these in different regions, although it would take another book to tease out the fragmentary evidence for their development as a whole.

  Broadly, the more of these developments a ruler had access to, the more stable his power was, and the more ambitious he (in Rus, once, she) could be. Political aggregation was perhaps greatest in Rus, and also, in a smaller compass, Bulgaria, Denmark and Asturias-León; it was beginning, however, to crystallize in Croatia, Bohemia, Poland and maybe Norway by the end of our period as well, in a less stable and more contested way, and also (the obscurest of all) in Scotland. In Wales and Ireland, however, and also Sweden, royal ambition did not yet have an adequate infrastructural development behind it, and the expansion of kingdoms promoted instability more than solid bases for government (this was partly true of Bohemia and Poland as well); and in some places, on the Baltic coast or in Iceland (as also sometimes in Norway) such expansion was successfully resisted for some time. These represent different paths to increased political power, which was not inevitable anywhere - and also, of course, not necessarily desirable, at least if one was part of the peasant majority, for whom stronger government universally meant tighter control and more exploitation.

  It is, all the same, despite these differences, striking how general the move to increased political power was across this wide swathe of Europe in the second half of our period. In 400 strong and stable political systems stopped at the Rhine-Danube border of the Roman empire. In 750, too, they hardly extended further, except in the parts of central and southern Germany under Frankish hegemony; and in the Balkans and in Britain they had actually retreated. But in 1000 recognizable polities had crystallized in most places in Europe, west of the Volga and south of the Finnic-speaking hunter-gatherer zone of the far north: weaker than the Roman empire, certainly, but with a certain staying power - half the modern European countries, indeed, and most of the larger ones, can trace themselves, however misleadingly, back to the kingdoms and principalities that existed by then. Such a widespread development must, surely, have at least some common root? One important feature of the period after 750 is that the most powerful political systems in Europe, Francia and Byzantium, regained their stability and began to expand; they were both threats to their immediate neighbours, who would have to become stronger or else succumb, and also models, for all the techniques of government just mentioned were more developed there. England used Francia as a model, and by the tenth century it was itself both a threat and a model to its Celtic neighbours; Denmark crystallized in response to Frankish pressures and influences, and by 1000 it too was both a threat and a model, inside Scandinavia. The Khazar hegemony in the Ukrainian steppes had a similar effect on Rus. The patterns of more powerful rule thus finally leapt over the Rhine-Danube line and moved steadily outwards, north, west and east. This development was not simple, and had other roots as well; it was also not continuous, as the history of (for example) Denmark shows. But it underpinned more local developments, and gave them a continent-wide coherence which would, eventually, last.

  21

  Aristocrats between the Carolingian and the ‘Feudal’ Worlds

  In 967, the Saxon aristocrat Wichmann Billung was caught unawares by the Bohemian allies of his enemy Prince Mieszko of the Poles. Wichmann was fighting
against his uncle Duke Hermann of Saxony at the time, on behalf of smaller Slav tribes, the Wagri and the Abodrites. Mieszko had converted to Christianity the previous year and was allied to Hermann and Otto I; Wichmann, like his father, had never forgiven Hermann for gaining the most prominence inside the family, thanks to the king/emperors, and had raised what was in effect a feud against him. Wichmann tried to flee the Slav attack but was surrounded, and fought till he was exhausted. The Slav leaders found out who he was and offered him a safe conduct. But Wichmann, ‘not forgetting his former nobility and virtue’ (as Widukind says, quoting Sallust), refused to ‘give his hand’, that is, surrender, to social inferiors, and asked them to send for Mieszko so that he could hand over his weapons to the prince himself. They agreed, but, while waiting, all continued to fight, since, of course, Wichmann had not put down his weapons; Wichmann was killed.

  This insistence on social hierarchy even in such an extreme situation may well seem to us absurd, but it would have been taken for granted in the ninth and tenth centuries. Widukind himself, who rejoiced in Wichmann’s death, could not avoid writing it up heroically. Aristocrats did indeed feel themselves to be totally different from the ordinary free strata of society. We can see this even in Abbot Odo of Cluny’s Life of Gerald of Aurillac (d. 909), the first saint’s life of a lay aristocrat, written around 930. Odo’s Gerald was so virtuous that he broke all the rules of lay society, thus allowing Odo to picture someone as a saint who was a rich local lord, perhaps (not certainly) a count, and who never took religious orders. Some of these rules are thus implicitly laid out. Gerald never wore silk or gold; he did not take gifts from the poor before he helped them, and he allowed them to sit in his presence. He hated drunkenness and would not come drunk to judging in the law court. He would not let his men plunder the countryside when engaging in local wars, and he insisted on buying cherries from a peasant rather than taking them. When he met his fugitive dependant in another region, while journeying to Rome, and discovered that the latter was passing for a man of wealth and status, Gerald did not betray his origin - this was particularly remarkable in Odo’s eyes (‘who but Gerald would have done this?’). He was saved from sleeping with the daughter of one of his unfree dependants by a miracle; Odo comments at length on his chastity, thus marvellously preserved, but makes no remark about Gerald’s casual command to the girl’s mother to have her ready when he came, a standard lord’s prerogative. Gerald’s wars against his neighbours were always defensive, and therefore counted as protection of the poor (he banned not only plunder but also ambushes); he only undertook to participate in ‘the right of armed force’ at all because his entourage were indignant that ‘a great man might suffer violence from persons of low degree who lay waste his property’, and he never ever sought revenge.

  These and many other parallel acts, and also plenty of miracles, made Gerald a saint, in Odo’s narrative at least; and that narrative in turn had sufficient resonance with its 930s audience to contribute to a successful cult of Gerald - his own Aurillac monastery of Saint-Pierre was dedicated to him by the middle of the century, and Saint-Géraud became a pilgrimage centre, to Gerbert’s great benefit, as we saw in Chapter 18. The norms of small-scale aristocratic behaviour thus become clear, as practised by men who were not saints, whether they date to the later decades of the ninth century with Gerald or to the years around 930 with Odo (who was himself from a similar lesser aristocratic background, a generation later, and, like Gerald, was a protégé of Duke William the Pious of Aquitaine). The normality of small local wars; the practical rights of the military strata to take whatever they liked from the peasantry; the assumption that aristocrats would often get angry (and drunk) and be violent to other people; the harsh and self-righteous policing of social boundaries, between unfree and free, unmilitary free and aristocratic, poor and rich: these were the aristocratic values assumed (and, to be fair, criticized) by Odo of Cluny, and they were lived by social élites throughout the Carolingian and post-Carolingian period, as also, with only minor modifications, both before and after.

  Aristocratic bad behaviour was thus not born with the ‘feudal revolution’ of the eleventh century (see below). But nor do these almost timeless norms really clash with what else we know about aristocrats, as seen in previous chapters, such as their generalized attachment (and even loyalty) to kings and other major political figures, or their religiosity, or even their absorption of the values of Carolingian education and correctio. This chapter aims to look at aristocratic practices from their own standpoint, not from those of rulers and writers, in so far as that is possible given our sources, and to see what they meant to their practitioners, in the varying environments of western Europe after 750 or so. I shall start with a set of four brief case studies, to set out how different families reacted to the political changes of the period in different parts of Europe. We shall then look at three interlocking themes, the structures of local power, dependence, and then, returning to these accounts of Wichmann and Gerald, aristocratic values.

  The ‘Guilhelmids’ were a family from Burgundy who may have been distant relations of the Pippinids; they gained importance under Charlemagne and were part of his Reichsaristokratie. William of Gellone (d. 812) was the first really prominent family member; he was sent south, to rule Toulouse and Septimania, in the 790s, and founded the monastery of Gellone in the latter region, near modern Montpellier, where he retired as a monk in 806. His son Bernard of Septimania (d. 844) was count of (among other places) Barcelona in the 820s before coming to Louis the Pious’s court as his controversial chamberlain in 829-30 (see Chapter 16); Bernard’s wife Dhuoda (d. c. 843), as we have also seen, wrote her Handbook for their son William in 841-3, the masterpiece of Carolingian lay piety, stressing regular prayer, a temperate conduct, and unequivocal loyalty to Bernard, to the Guilhelmid family as a whole, and to Charles the Bald as king. However that might be, the least one could say of the Guilhelmids was that they were equivocal; Bernard played a very ambiguous role in the civil wars of the 840s, and was executed for treason by Charles in 844; William, who was at least loyal, but to Pippin the Younger not Charles, was killed for that five years later. The family was notably unpopular in these years; Bernard’s brother Gozhelm was executed and his sister Gerberga drowned as a witch by the emperor Lothar in 834.

  It is hard to think of a more dramatic and even shameful political failure in this period than that of the Guilhelmids, for all Dhuoda’s values. But the family did not disappear from its original Burgundian heartland. Bernard’s younger son Bernard (d. 886), called ‘Hairy-paws’ (i.e. ‘foxy’) in one source, was count of Autun in Burgundy in the early 860s, and in 864, for unclear reasons, he tried to assassinate either Robert the Strong or Charles the Bald himself; he lost most of his honores at once, and Autun two years later. His family land still remained, all the same, and by 872 he was back in Charles’s court, killing opponents but also accumulating honores again, probably already including the county of the Auvergne, centre of his future power, which he held until his death. In 878 he picked up many of the honores of the rebel Bernard of Gothia, including the March of Gothia (Septimania) again; he became the guardian of the new West Frankish king Louis III himself in 879. When he died, he ruled a string of counties from the Loire to the Pyrenees, most of which were inherited directly by his son William the Pious (d. 918), who called himself duke of Aquitaine. William behaved for thirty years as an autonomous regional power in eastern Aquitaine, running court cases in the manner of a king as much as that of a count, and seeking to detach the loyalty of royal vassals (including Gerald of Aurillac) from the king and attach it to himself. The family died out in 927 at the death of his two nephews, successive dukes of Aquitaine after him, but up to then we can see all the ingredients of the creative opportunism of an ‘imperial aristocratic’ family: operating by Carolingian rules until the 880s, and autonomously thereafter. It is notable that, despite the family’s spectacular eclipse in the 840s, it was still a natural choice for pa
tronage a generation later; family claims to royal interest died hard. It is also notable that Bernard Hairy-paws reconstructed his power in exactly the areas, stretching southwards from his family lands, that his father and grandfather had dealt in; this was by royal gift, but it indicates the durability of family political aspirations. Into the 920s, also, even though the Guilhelmids were by now independent players, they still operated a Carolingian-style political system, using county-based structures such as law courts, and also the control of royal abbacies (William the Pious was given the major Auvergne monastery of Brioude by King Odo in 893). The long string of their counties, 600 kilometres from north to south but seldom more than 150 east to west, also made most sense in a Carolingian political system, and William had local troubles at the end of his life; successor powers in these areas were more compact.