Walter Pohl

Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300-800

W. Pohl: Telling the Difference: Signs of Ethnic Identity E. Chrysos: Ethnic Names and Territorial Names J. Jarnut: Nomen et Gens P. Heather: Disappearing and Reappearing Tribes D. Claude: Remarks to the relationship between Visigoths and Hispano-Romans in the 7th Century J. Liebeschuetz: Citizen Status and Law in the Roman Empire and the Visigothic Kingdom G. Ripoll: The Arrival of the Visigoths in Hispania: Population Problems and Process of Acculturation B. Pohl-Resl: Legal Practice and Ethnic Identity in Lombard Italy M. Kazanski: Le royaume de Vinitharius: Le recit de Jordanes et les donnees archeologiques J. Arce: Hydatius and the Camels of Gallaecia P. Heather: Theoderic Augustus: Myth and Reality in Cassidoruss Variae D. Harrison: Political Rhetoric and Political Ideology in Lombard Italy M. Hardt: Royal Treasures and Representation in the Early Middle Ages M. Schmauder: Imperial Distinction or Barbaric Imitation? The Kaiserfibeln

History in fragments: Montecassino’s politics of memory

Most of what we know about the history of the Lombard principalities of southern Italy was preserved by the monks of Montecassino. Their perception of past and present from the ninth to the early eleventh century can be studied in three manuscripts that contain a variety of short texts with abundant corrections and marginal notes – a construction kit for the social memory of a monastic community that was never turned into a coherent narrative. Through examining these sometimes disparate fragments, we get a rare glimpse at the practices of writing in an early medieval monastery, and can begin to understand which texts mattered and why.

Ostarrîchi Revisited: The 1946 Anniversary, the Millennium, and the Medieval Roots of Austrian Identity

In 1996, Austria will celebrate its millennium. As in many other cases, the chronological justifications for the anniversary are open to question. Austria has never been “founded,” and certainly not one thousand years ago; its independence is the result of a process that took centuries and cannot be symbolized by a date like July 4 in the United States. Austrias national holiday, October 26, marks the date in 1955 when the Austrian parliament voted permanent neutrality and the last of the Allied occupation troops left the country. Nobody, it is true, would doubt that Austrias history stretches back considerably before 1955, 1945 (the foundation of the Second Republic), 1918 (the birth of the First), or even 1804 (when the Habsburg emperor Francis I declared himself emperor of Austria after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire). Nothing comparable happened in 996. In a charter dated November 1, 996, Emperor Otto III granted some land at Neuhofen, in the west of the modern province of Lower Austria, to the bishop of Freising. Even the exact date of the charter—whose original has survived—has not always been accepted, for the seal it carries was Henry IIs, whose reign began in 1002. Recently, some scholars have even tried to prove, although not very successfully, that it was a forgery.

Comparing Communities—The Limits of Typology

Across the disciplines, communities and identities are usually classified into general categories, such as ethnic, tribal, territorial, civic, religious or political communities/identities. This may be useful in many instances to structure the field and highlight certain distinctive features. But, as this contribution will argue, such typologies do not provide a sound basis for comparison. This holds true both for intercultural and for interdisciplinary comparison. For instance, religion was configured rather differently in ancient Rome, late Antique Christianity and early Islam, and each of them differed fundamentally from our modern concept of religion (as opposed to a secular sphere). The same applies to ethnicity. Likewise, historians and social anthropologists (and even specific schools within the disciplines) operate with often rather differently configured concepts in this area. In fact, most actual communities are framed by more than one “vision of community”; they are rarely only ethnic, religious or political. Their shared frames of reference can be compared: for instance, ancestral lineages, supernatural origins, sacred places, shared history, tribal solidarities, legal practices, exchange networks or outside perceptions. Such frames of references of course overlap and typically create more than one level of identification. This contribution will take the example of the new peoples and powers that emerged after the end of the Roman Empire in the West (such as Goths, Franks and Anglo-Saxons). What shaped these communities, and how did ethnic, territorial, religious and political identifiers interact in the process?

The Discursive Construction of “Migrants and Migration”

Many debates on migration explicitly or implicitly rely on historical arguments, and on an often derogatory language of migration that already began to take shape in classical antiquity. For instance, metaphors of fluidity are a familiar part of it; migrants first trickle in, then turn into streams and at last flood a peaceful country and drown it in a mayhem of general destruction. The historical disciplines have done much in recent decades to deconstruct these old, ideologically-charged images. But the general public has not yet taken much notice. Many media still hammer in the old stereotypes. Debates about migrants today thus rely on a long history of the discourse of migration, which was shaped by many successive generations of intellectuals and politicians who tried to make sense of the past for the needs of the present. The first section of the paper explores the role of the so-called migration period from the 4th to the 7th century in the shaping of European perceptions of migration in general. The second section discusses current political uses of stereotypes and rhetorical tools related to immigrants by European right-wing parties.

Genealogy: A Comparative Perspective from the Early Medieval West

Genealogies and similar forms of structuring descent were widely diffused in recorded history; indeed, they offered one basic “perceptual grid” for shaping the past, legitimizing the present and preparing for the future.2 Yet they did not carry the same weight, or have the same meaning in different historical contexts. The present article addresses the question how much they mattered in early medieval continental Europe, where and when. It will briefly reassess the evidence from the mid-6th to the mid-9th century. Taken together, the following examples provide impressive traces of genealogical thinking; they could be (and often have been) taken as tips of an iceberg, and interpreted as written traces of detailed genealogical knowledge and its oral transmission among the “Germanic” elites of the post-Roman kingdoms. I will argue that we need to be more precise and also acknowledge the limits of genealogical thinking and of its social impact: perhaps there was no single iceberg? Among the elites, noble descent may have mattered, but it rarely needed to be specified, and it seems that actual genealogical knowledge seldom stretched back more than three or four generations.3 Royal succession was usually represented by king lists rather than royal pedigrees. Strikingly, neither of these have been transmitted from the Merovingians’ more than 250 years of rule. Genealogies gradually become more prominent in our evidence from the Carolingian period; but it seems that the emerging Merovingian and Carolingian pedigrees were not based on pre-conceived oral genealogical knowledge ultimately written down, but were experimentally created and expanded on the basis of written documents in ecclesiastic institutions. Comparison between genealogical thinking in the post-classical West and in Early Islamic Arabia make it possible to step back from old certainties, and assessing remarkable differences beneath certain evident similarities.

Identità etniche e cristianesimi tra tarda antichità e alto medioevo

Il contributo rilegge l’etnicita romano-barbarica come costruzione culturale fondata in parte sulla rilettura e sulla riappropriazione di modelli biblici intesi come strumenti fondanti e autorevoli. Lo studio tenta di capovolgere il paradigma tradizionale secondo cui l’etnicita sarebbe un portato prettamente “barbarico”, in opposizione all’universalismo cristiano-romano. Seguendo questo modello, la storia europea e spesso stata rappresentata come un conflitto tra principi universali e nazionali. Secondo l’A. il ruolo politico dell’etnicita nell’Europa latina non va considerato, almeno in una certa misura, come un’importazione barbarica. Lungi dal rappresentare un’antitesi alla chiesa universale, l’etnicita assume il suo ruolo politico decisivo proprio attraverso il cristianesimo e, piu in particolare, attraverso la ripresa e l’adattamento di taluni modelli di auto-definizione etnica presenti nei testi biblici.

Narratives of Origin and Migration in Early Medieval Europe: Problems of Interpretation

This contribution concentrates on the origin narratives of the post-Roman peoples and kingdoms in Latin Europe between c. 500 and 1000, including some observations on the elaborate production of origin stories in the later Middle Ages. It thus addresses a period in which a durable multiplicity of polities with ethnic designations emerged in Europe and was anchored in the mental maps of (at least) the political elites through a set of foundational narratives. Most of these new peoples—Goths, Longobards, Franks, Anglo-Saxons and others—prided themselves in their distant origins, be it from Scandinavia or Troy. Their origin narratives are based on a common stock of mythical points of reference, developed in classical mythology and ethnography and complemented by other motifs and memories. Christianity transformed the frame but not necessarily the elements of the narrative. The wide-ranging comparison to other ethnic and tribal origin stories, as exemplified in this issue, sheds better light on the specificities of the Latin European tradition of ‘origines gentium’, the origins of peoples. The result is that we should look at these texts as essentially hybrid products of cultural encounters in which formerly subaltern peoples developed new identities as a ruling minority in former Roman provinces.

Editorial: Narratives of Ethnic Origins: Eurasian Perspectives

Origin myths of Eurasian peoples have long been a topic for literary and mythological studies. Furthermore, they often served as key texts in nationalist historiographies. There was a surge in scholarly interest around the middle of the twentieth century, when nationalist, irrationalist, mythographic and structuralist concerns with these texts prompted lively debates and great syntheses. The late twentieth-century critique of national myths and postmodern deconstructivism have largely disqualified these origin stories as historical sources. Indeed, most of them tell us less about actual origins than previous generations of scholars had assumed. However, they are valuable indicators of how these origins were perceived at specific points in time and space and what they may have meant for the respective communities. Instead of looking for one ‘authentic’ and primeval myth later diluted in the course of its transmission, what still needs considerable research is the way in which rewritings, competing variants and new syntheses reflect contemporary interests. This process in which narratives and meanings were gradually transformed has continued in modern scholarship. Recent research on cultural memory and on the ‘uses of the past’ provides us with a good methodological basis for a comparative historical analysis of a set of relevant texts. The contributions to this issue explore the construction and significance of different types of medieval ‘ethnic’ and ‘tribal’ origin narratives from several exemplary Eurasian contexts: Early Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, the ancient Turks in the Central Asian steppes, South Arabia and Tibet. Some deal with Origines gentium, the origins of peoples

Erich Zöllner als Pionier der Frühmittelalterforschung

Erich Zöllner einen „Pionier“ zu nennen, ist nicht nur eine rhetorische Verneigung vor einem verdienten Gelehrten. Die kritische Erforschung der Entwicklung von Völkern im Frühmittelalter in Wien begann mit Erich Zöllner – und mit seinem Buch „Die politische Stellung der Völker im Frankenreich“1. Das Manuskript wurde zur Unzeit abgeschlossen: im Jahr 1940. „Ungunst der Zeit“, wie er später schrieb, hatte zur Folge, dass das Werk des damals erst 24-jährigen Zöllner zehn Jahre auf die Drucklegung warten musste2. Zöllner nahm die Herausforderung durch das „Völkische“ an (anders als Heinrich Fichtenau, der das belastete Thema mied und den ethnischen Verhältnissen im Frankenreich in seinem Meisterwerk über das „Karolingische Imperium“ wenig Raum gab3). Er reagierte darauf in der ihm eigenen Art: behutsam abwägend und dennoch entschieden, wo es nottat. „Der Standort des Betrachters bedingt die Blickrichtung und damit das Bild selbst“, so schrieb Zöllner. Er hielt sich kaum damit auf, sich vom „biologisch begründeten Nationalismus schärfster Form“ der letzten Zeit zu distanzieren4. Eher versuchte er, der weltanschaulichen Zuspitzung historischer Probleme selbst die Grundlage zu entziehen. Die Debatte um den Anteil von Germanen oder Romanen am Aufbau des fränkischen Staates lehnte er elegant in ihrer „mehr wuchtigen als richtigen Einseitigkeit“ ab5. Der Akzent des Buches liegt auf dem Frankenreich als Vielvölkerstaat und auf einer genauen und quellennahen Untersuchung der jeweils spezifischen Beziehungen der Völker zum Reich. Ein ausführlicher Forschungsüberblick am Beginn des Buches zeigt Zöllners Stärke bei der knappen Zusammenfassung des Forschungsstandes und beim leidenschaftslosen Überblick über Stärken und Schwächen der unterschiedlichen Positionen, die er in ihrem welthistorischen Kontext skizziert: ein selbst-