Getting acquainted with Adhemar of Chabannes, in which I also discover an eleventh century monk's take on the Trojan war

Yesterday, I started on a project I'd been resolved to do for a good few months now. After I translated, as part of my undergraduate thesis, the "Carmen ad Robertum Regem (Poem to King Robert the Pious)" by Bishop Adalbero of Laon (c.940 - 1031) - at once, one of the most satisfying and most frustrating things I've ever done in my life so far - I felt I had a mission to help make French history between the late ninth and mid-eleventh centuries more accessible by translating important sources that have never been translated into English before. I don't want to oversell my abilities as a medieval Latinist - despite both my parents being classicists, I never took a GCSE (14 - 16) or A level (16 - 18) in Latin, though I think I've just about compensated for that by subsequently going on a Latin course at UCL and doing medieval Latin as a component of my masters' degree. Instead, I simply figured that someone's got to do it, so it might as well be me. And I figured who could not be better to start off with than Adhemar of Chabannes. After all, a quick look on the website of the brilliant After Empire Project showed that there's no existing English translation of Adhemar's Historia Francorum. That someone hadn't already gotten onto this decades before me sincerely surprised me. He's pretty much the only vaguely contemporary narrative history we have that covers the history of Aquitaine (roughly a quarter of the French kingdom at that time) from 930 to 1028 in any significant level of detail. And he covers a lot of things that historians working on post-Carolingian/ post-millennial France (and western Europe more generally) are interested in, such as the four highly interlinked issues of church reform, the emergence of popular religious enthusiasm, the Peace of God movement and the first significant reappearances of heresy in the West since the sixth century. Robert Moore, whose (now classic) interpretative synthesis the "First European Revolution, c.970 - 1215" (2000) has become a staple on undergraduate reading lists for papers covering Western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, regularly uses Adhemar to support his arguments on all these issues in chapter 3 of the book. A quick glance at Adhemar's wikipedia page shows that he has had two scholarly monographs in book-form written about him in the last thirty years. And he's even made it into the creme de la creme of popular history - both Tom Holland's (no, not Spiderman) "Millennium" (2009) and Robert Moore's own dramatically titled (with fairly obvious political allusions) "The War on Heresy" (2012). So by the standards of any eleventh century French author, Adhemar of Chabannes is not obscure, so the fact he hasn't merited an English translation of his works is somewhat puzzling, given that English translations of medieval Latin primary sources generally are in high demand in universities for fairly obvious reasons (the decline of the study of classical languages in UK secondary schools). But those of you who haven't spent much time in eleventh century France may be wondering - who the hell is this guy anyway?

A bit of a colourful chap 

(Above) a drawing done in Adhemar's own hand 

For a medieval chronicler who lived a thousand years ago, we actually know a fair amount about Adhemar of Chabannes. He was born in 988, a year after the death of the last Carolingian king of West Francia and the accession of Hugh Capet (whose direct, male-line descendants would rule France for the next eight centuries), at the village of Chabannes in central-south-western France to what seems to have been a well-to-do family. He received his education as a novice monk at the Abbey of Saint-Martial de Limoges, where he was taught by his uncle Roger of Chabannes, who served as the abbey's music director from 1010 to 1025. Adhemar had a pretty interesting career after that. No doubt influenced by his uncle, he became a musical pioneer and, according to music historian James Grier, he made significant steps towards the development of modern musical literacy by developing a form of notation that used accurate heighting to present relative pitch information - while it still required the reader to already know the melody, the result was transformative (see James Grier "The Musical World of a Medieval Monk: Adhemar of Chabannes in Eleventh Century Aquitaine", Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp 325 - 326). Indeed you can see it in practice in Adhemar's own autograph hand from one of the hymns he composed ( see below, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, lat 909 fol. 151r-154r). He also wrote the Historia Francorum - a history of the Franks from their earliest origins to 1028 - which I am, of course, translating.

Adhemar's career also had a somewhat darker side to it. He embraced the developing tale that St Martial, the first Christian bishop of Limoges who initiated the conversion of Aquitaine, was actually born almost three centuries earlier, making him one of Jesus' original apostles. Knowing that the documentation for this was scanty at best, Adhemar decided to add to the evidence for Martial's "apostolicity" by forging a hagiography (saintly biography) of Martial, which he tried to present as having been written by Aurelian, the priest converted by the saint who succeeded him as bishop. He also composed an apostolic mass for Saint Martial, which the Bishop of Limoges and the Abbot of Saint-Martial had performed on 3 August 1029. However, a monk from Lombardy called Benedict of Chiusa sensed that something was amiss, and denounced the "Life of Martial" as a provincial forgery and the new liturgy as offensive to God. Adhemar's response was to splash-out even more on the forgeries, fabricating a church council of 1031 and a papal letter. This was a massive success - though doubted elsewhere, Martial's apostolicity became well-established in Aquitaine and it was only in 1920s that the Life of St Martial, the church council of 1031 and the papal letter were definitively proved to be forgeries by the Benedictine monk and historian Louis Saltet. At some other occasion, I will discuss the business of medieval forgery at greater length - its fascinating and crucially important for medievalists, especially those working (like I do) on the eighth to twelfth centuries, to understand. Perhaps to clear his conscience, Adhemar of Chabannes went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1034, where he died.

Adhemar the ancient historian

Adhemar begins his History of the Franks with, perhaps surprisingly for some, the Trojan war. Below is my translation of the first chapter (all faults with it are my own)

The beginning of the Frankish kingdom or rather the origin of that people, came forth from war. Indeed, it was in Asia, stronghold of the Trojans. There, there was a city that was called Troy, where Aeneas ruled. The Trojans were a brave and strong race of warriors, and they renewed wars excessively – restlessly exhorting themselves through their struggles, they went around conquering the lands that encircled them. However, the kings of the Greeks roused themselves to action and fought against Aeneas with an army, losing a great many men against him. Thither many of the Trojan people fell to the ground, and so Aeneas fled and hid himself away in the city of Troy. The Greeks fought against that city for ten years. Indeed, when the city had fallen, the tyrant Aeneas fled to Italy to contract peoples for fighting. Others also from amongst the princes, namely Priam and Antenor, boarded onto ships with the twelve thousand soldiers that were left of the Trojan army and departed from Troy, and they came all the way to the banks of the river Don. Having entered into the sea of Azov, they sailed and came through to the ends of Pannonia, adjoining the sea of Azov, and began to build a city. According to their memorial, they called it Sicambria, and they lived there for many years and greatly multiplied in population.

Adhemar's rather brief account of the siege of Troy obviously bears little relation to Homer's version of the events. The Iliad and the Odyssey were almost completely inaccessible to scholars in the Latin west until very late in the Middle Ages. Medieval scholars plenty about the Trojan war but they got their knowledge of it from works written in Latin like Virgil's Aeneid, the 1070-line "Ilias Latina" by the first century AD Roman senator Publius Baebius Italicus and the (pseudo)history purported to be written by at the time of the war itself by Dares Phrygius, a Trojan priest of Hephaestus (I must read Frederic Clark's brand new monograph on it someday). But Adhemar doesn't seem to be directly engaging with those authorities. Instead, as Adhemar's modern editor Jules Chavanon has pointed out, Adhemar looked to more recent sources than those to research his material early chapters of his histories, namely the seventh century chronicle of Fredegar and its continuation and the Liber Historiae Francorum, written in 727 by an anonymous layman (see Adhemar de Chabannes, "Chronique", edited by Jules Chavanon, Collection de textes pour servir a la etude et la enseignement de l'histoire, Paris, 1897, p xii). These sources also gave a similar account of the Trojan origins of the Franks. When exactly this legend of Trojan origins developed for the Franks developed is unknown, but it was certainly widespread under the later Merovingian kings in the seventh and early eighth centuries. The attractions it would have had at the time are fairly straightforward - it gave the Franks a venerable history and lineage, and as those who are familiar with Virgil will instantly deduce, it established their kinship with the Romans and by extension will have given them legitimate claims to a share in their former territories and their glorious legacy. Such legends were promoted as official history by the French monarchy and were still widely believed in the early modern period. Dissenting voices were not welcome - in 1714, the learned Nicolas Freret was arrested and imprisoned in the Bastille for claiming that the Franks were in fact Germans (see George Huppert, "The Trojan Franks and their Critics", Studies in the Renaissance Volume 12, 1965, p 227). Only with the French revolution of 1789 - 1794, when it became politically convenient to argue instead that the French royal family and aristocracy were the descendants of Germanic invaders who had imposed their alien and barbaric ways on civilised Gallo-Romans (the ancestors of the French people), was the myth of Trojan origins definitively abandoned.