Marios Costambeys

Documentary culture and the laity in the early Middle Ages

Book synopsis: Many more documents survive from the early Middle Ages than from the Roman Empire. Although ecclesiastical archives may account for the dramatic increase in the number of surviving documents, this new investigation reveals the scale and spread of documentary culture beyond the Church. The contributors explore the nature of the surviving documentation without preconceptions to show that we cannot infer changing documentary practices from patterns of survival. Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages – from North Africa, Egypt, Italy, Francia and Spain to Anglo-Saxon England – people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, landowners or tenants, farmers or royal functionaries, needed, used and kept documents. The story of documentary culture in the early medieval world emerges not as one of its capture by the Church, but rather of a response adopted by those who needed documents, as they reacted to a changing legal, social and institutional landscape.

The Legacy of Theoderic.

In the penultimate sentence of his Historia Romana , Paul the Deacon inscribes a solid full-stop to his brief sketch of Ostrogothic Italy: having killed Totila, the eunuch Narses, he says, ‘universamque Italiam ad reipublicae iura reduxit’. Although the phrase reipublicae iura exemplifies the studied ambiguity with which Paul delighted to tantalize his readers, the whole statement can be understood as a judgement on Theoderics regime that many modern historians of Late Antiquity have shared. Whatever innovations the Ostrogoths had attempted, in the end they came to nothing: Theoderic and his short-lived successors made no lasting imprint, leaving few identifiable traces even in archaeology.

Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages: Figures and tables

Book synopsis: Many more documents survive from the early Middle Ages than from the Roman Empire. Although ecclesiastical archives may account for the dramatic increase in the number of surviving documents, this new investigation reveals the scale and spread of documentary culture beyond the Church. The contributors explore the nature of the surviving documentation without preconceptions to show that we cannot infer changing documentary practices from patterns of survival. Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages – from North Africa, Egypt, Italy, Francia and Spain to Anglo-Saxon England – people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, landowners or tenants, farmers or royal functionaries, needed, used and kept documents. The story of documentary culture in the early medieval world emerges not as one of its capture by the Church, but rather of a response adopted by those who needed documents, as they reacted to a changing legal, social and institutional landscape.

Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages: Index

Book synopsis: Many more documents survive from the early Middle Ages than from the Roman Empire. Although ecclesiastical archives may account for the dramatic increase in the number of surviving documents, this new investigation reveals the scale and spread of documentary culture beyond the Church. The contributors explore the nature of the surviving documentation without preconceptions to show that we cannot infer changing documentary practices from patterns of survival. Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages – from North Africa, Egypt, Italy, Francia and Spain to Anglo-Saxon England – people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, landowners or tenants, farmers or royal functionaries, needed, used and kept documents. The story of documentary culture in the early medieval world emerges not as one of its capture by the Church, but rather of a response adopted by those who needed documents, as they reacted to a changing legal, social and institutional landscape.

Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages: Abbreviations

Book synopsis: Many more documents survive from the early Middle Ages than from the Roman Empire. Although ecclesiastical archives may account for the dramatic increase in the number of surviving documents, this new investigation reveals the scale and spread of documentary culture beyond the Church. The contributors explore the nature of the surviving documentation without preconceptions to show that we cannot infer changing documentary practices from patterns of survival. Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages – from North Africa, Egypt, Italy, Francia and Spain to Anglo-Saxon England – people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, landowners or tenants, farmers or royal functionaries, needed, used and kept documents. The story of documentary culture in the early medieval world emerges not as one of its capture by the Church, but rather of a response adopted by those who needed documents, as they reacted to a changing legal, social and institutional landscape.

Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages: Contributors

Book synopsis: Many more documents survive from the early Middle Ages than from the Roman Empire. Although ecclesiastical archives may account for the dramatic increase in the number of surviving documents, this new investigation reveals the scale and spread of documentary culture beyond the Church. The contributors explore the nature of the surviving documentation without preconceptions to show that we cannot infer changing documentary practices from patterns of survival. Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages – from North Africa, Egypt, Italy, Francia and Spain to Anglo-Saxon England – people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, landowners or tenants, farmers or royal functionaries, needed, used and kept documents. The story of documentary culture in the early medieval world emerges not as one of its capture by the Church, but rather of a response adopted by those who needed documents, as they reacted to a changing legal, social and institutional landscape.

Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages: Frontmatter

Book synopsis: Many more documents survive from the early Middle Ages than from the Roman Empire. Although ecclesiastical archives may account for the dramatic increase in the number of surviving documents, this new investigation reveals the scale and spread of documentary culture beyond the Church. The contributors explore the nature of the surviving documentation without preconceptions to show that we cannot infer changing documentary practices from patterns of survival. Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages – from North Africa, Egypt, Italy, Francia and Spain to Anglo-Saxon England – people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, landowners or tenants, farmers or royal functionaries, needed, used and kept documents. The story of documentary culture in the early medieval world emerges not as one of its capture by the Church, but rather of a response adopted by those who needed documents, as they reacted to a changing legal, social and institutional landscape.

The Carolingian World: The creation of Carolingian kingship to 800

Replacing the ruling dynasty We began Chapter 1 with the elevation of the Carolingian Pippin, generally known as Pippin III, or Pippin ‘the Short’, to the kingship of the Franks. Almost everything about this event is uncertain. The best evidence for Pippins accession comes from his charters – the single-sheet documents through which legal business like property transactions were habitually enacted. A charter of 20 June 751 was issued in the name of ‘the illustrious man Pippin, mayor of the palace’. By the time of another court case on 1 March 752, Pippin was styled ‘king of the Franks’ ( rex francorum ). At some point between these dates, therefore, Pippin had replaced Childeric III, last king of the Merovingian family that had ruled the Franks for over 250 years. That Pippin and his brother Carloman, jointly mayors of the palace (the most senior non-royal office in the Frankish kingdom) had themselves established Childeric as king just four years earlier gives some indication of the strong position from which Pippin could launch this bid for the throne. But the precise mechanics of the takeover are entirely unknown. Although our texts are often difficult to date precisely, the strongest likelihood is that, the charters apart, all our Frankish sources for the events of 751 were written after 768, when Pippin died and his sons succeeded to the kingship. In other words, these texts probably formed part of a deliberate and retrospective attempt to establish the ease and propriety of Pippins succession in order to make that of his sons (who were, after all, not Merovingians but children of a usurper) seem routine. A cluster of texts containing one or other version of a narrative about Pippins acquisition of the kingship were written in a context in which the Carolingians were already dominant. The most famous rendition of the story is that of Einhard in his Vita Karoli (Life of Charlemagne), probably written around 817, who claims that by 751 the Merovingian family ‘had in fact been without any vitality for a long time and had demonstrated that there was not any worth in it except the empty name of king’. But Einhard was simply echoing the various sets of annals compiled in the last years of the eighth, and first decades of the ninth, century. The most influential, and probably the earliest, of these are the so-called Annales regni francorum (Royal Frankish Annals), according to which legates (they are named as Bishop Burchard of Wurzburg and Fulrad the chaplain) were sent to Rome to gain Pope Zachariass sanction for the replacement of Childeric III with Pippin. This the pope duly gave, commenting, in the words of the annalist, that ‘it was better to call him king who actually possessed royal power’. Pippin was therefore anointed king (the annalist says that this was performed by the renowned English missionary Boniface) and Childeric III was tonsured and sent to a monastery. Reports along these lines also appear, with less detail, in the Continuations to the Chronicle of Fredegar, and in a text known as the Clausula de unctione Pippini regis (the clause on the anointing of King Pippin). Each of these has periodically been dated as roughly contemporary with the events of 751, but the argument for a later date is stronger in both cases: the Continuations were most likely added to the Chronicle of Fredegar in the period 768–86, while the Clausula looks certain to have been written in the ninth century. Their composition after the kingship had been passed successfully to a second generation of Carolingians makes it highly unlikely that they could have presented an objective record of 751, even if one could be recalled. Moreover, their partisanship looks all the more striking if we compare them to texts written in Rome, which are the only ones, apart from the charters, that may be roughly contemporary. Despite the growing general interest of papal biographers in the papacys contacts with Francia, the Life of Pope Zacharias, part of the collection of papal biographies known as the Liber pontificalis , breaks off its narrative in 749, while the collection of letters between the popes and the Carolingians, the Codex Carolinus , includes no letter between 747 and 753. It may be that the Roman authors placed no great importance on Pippins elevation; alternatively, these apparent oversights may point to a deliberate attempt to restrict or manipulate the memory of 751. Either way, the silence from Rome casts doubt on the later version of events contained in Frankish sources, and in particular on the notion that Pippins seizure of the kingship was sanctioned beforehand by the pope.

The Carolingian World: Sustaining the Carolingian empire: politics and government, 840–888

Introduction: fraternal rivalry, 840–843 The deposition of Louis the Pious in 833 was neither, we have seen, the definitive disaster of the emperors own reign nor of the Carolingian empire writ large. Still, the Frankish political community was unmistakably shocked. The main protagonists harboured anxieties about what they had done: in a letter of 847, the emperor Lothar reflected almost disbelievingly on that time of conflict between him and his brothers as ‘the work of the Devil through his agents’. But even the traumas of the early 830s were eclipsed in the Frankish psyche by the three years of bloody civil war which followed the death of Louis the Pious in 840. Once again, his sons were at the heart of the matter. A loose alliance of Charles the Bald and Louis the German teamed up against Lothar and Pippin II of Aquitaine (the three kings’ nephew who was hoping to dislodge Charles from the south-west and claim the kingdom of his father Pippin I, who had died in 838). As their armies ceaselessly roamed the empire in a game of armed chess whose top prize was control of the Carolingian heartlands in the north, a long series of armed stand-offs and skirmishes peaked at the bloody battle of Fontenoy in June 841. (See Map 14 for places mentioned in this chapter.) A man called Engelbert, who fought on Lothars side, later wrote a poem lamenting the extreme violence and horrifying implications of the battle: ‘No slaughter was ever worse on any field of war…This battle is not worthy of praise, not fit to be sung.’ Major pitched battles were rare in the early medieval period precisely because so much could hinge on their outcome; and recent history, even the dark days of the early 830s, provided few examples of noble Franks drawing swords in earnest against their comrades. The Franks were thus stunned by the loss of aristocratic life at Fontenoy. Four decades later in a work written for the emperor Charles the Fat, Notker of St Gallen recoiled from even mentioning the name of the battle, so horrified was he that Christian blood had been spilled by Louis the German, Charless father. A few years before that, Pope John VIII had taunted the same Louis by reminding him of the ‘still-damp fields of Fontenoy that he soaked with human blood in his youth’. All four Carolingians survived the fighting and in this sense the battle was not decisive. However, victory for Charles and Louis gave them the edge and effectively undermined Lothars prospects of winning the war as a whole. His forays into the western strongholds of Charles, and those of Louis in the east, became less and less convincing and he was forced to negotiate. The final seal was set on the truce in summer 843 by the famous Treaty of Verdun. This carefully planned division split the empire into three vertical strips, with Charles receiving the western portion, Lothar the middle, and Louis the eastern – Pippin II, like Pippin the Hunchback and Bernard of Italy before him, was airbrushed out of the family picture.

The Carolingian World: Belief and culture

In the first two chapters we have made regular references to the Christian character of the Frankish court, which acted as a powerful patron associated with the founding of monasteries, the patronage of holy men and intellectuals, and the production and standardisation of religious texts. Well before the end of the eighth century, where we left Charlemagne demanding comprehensive oaths of loyalty from his elite male subjects, and indeed before the anointing of 753–4, kingship itself was conceived as an office with religious responsibilities. Christianity was part of the very identity of elite Franks, who increasingly came to see themselves as a people chosen by God, and thus to define themselves in distinction to the non- and imperfectly Christian peoples that surrounded them. These ideologies played a part in the Franks’ justifications to each other and to themselves of their conquests. As victorious Carolingian armies withdrew they were often – as we have seen – replaced by missionaries, charged with winning the hearts and souls of the conquered, and with establishing their obedience to the Frankish Church (and, therefore, empire). Even if we find it to be outlandish or distasteful, we should not be surprised that Frankish kings thought themselves to have a moral responsibility to save the souls of those under their dominion, nor should we write this off as moral posturing designed to justify territorial expansion – after all, given the long decades of virtually unblemished military success, how could they not believe they were doing Gods work? These themes represent central aspects of Carolingian politics and society which have been touched on earlier in this book, but which take centre stage in this chapter – here we hope to explain the mentalities and intellectual attitudes that informed the actions of those involved in the high politics of the previous chapter. Yet placing Carolingian Christianity under the spotlight complicates matters more than one might expect. The closer we look at the concepts of religion, paganism, the Church, and Christianity itself, as they operated in early medieval Europe, the more they start to fall apart under our gaze. By placing Carolingian Christianity in a broad context, the chapter is therefore intended to shake the foundations of some commonly held modern assumptions about the early Middle Ages, as well as to offer some reorientation. The discussion is divided into three main sections: the problem of Christianisation; the problem of sin; and the role in society of Christian kingship and learning. But to understand the place of these phenomena in eighth- and ninth-century Europe, we must first define our terms of reference, and ask what we mean when we talk about paganism, Christianity and the Church. We can begin exploring these questions by visiting the Carolingian court itself.