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| A rather naturalistic depiction of Hercules from the Leiden Aratea (c.816 - 840), a Carolingian copy of an astronomical treatise by the Roman general (and father of Caligula) Germanicus Julius Caesar (15 BC - 19 AD), which is basically a Latin translation of the Phaenomena, a poem about the constellations by the 3rd century BC Greek poet Aratus. This manuscript was likely commissioned for and owned by the Emperor Louis the Pious himself. The Aratea is essentially a picture book, with the beautiful images of the constellations captioned by the relevant verses of the poem written in Rustic Capitals (see the right hand folio in the image), the deluxe handwriting of the ancient Romans which the Carolingians liked to use for Classical texts. For the Bible and religious works they used Carolingian miniscule, which forms the basis of the handwriting we use today. |
Hi everyone! Since its world poetry day, lets return to our old friend Theodulf of Orleans. Now, as you may remember from the post I did about him two months ago, as well as being a poet, courtier and bishop extraordinaire, he was a royal missus dominicus? But what the hell is a missus dominicus when it's at home? you might ask.
The role of the missus dominicus in Carolingian government can be described as something of a hybrid of circuit judge and superintendent. Their job was basically to hear cases that the local courts (placita/ malla publica) were unable to deliver a fair verdict on, ensure that provincial governors (counts, dukes and margraves) and their teams subordinate officials were behaving themselves and generally ensure that everything was running smoothly and that the king's policies were actually being implemented in the localities. Typically, in each provincial circuit, the missi dominci would consist of one cleric (a bishop or an abbot) and a lay nobleman, both of whom would not be landowners/ provincial office holders in their own circuits so as to prevent conflicts of interest. They start appearing as ad hoc commissions under Charlemagne the late 780s, but their work had become more regularised by the end of the eighth century. They thus came to provide an important link between centre and locality - by 800, Charlemagne's Empire stretched from the Elbe to Catalonia and from the North Sea to Tuscany, so there was only so much work a peripatetic imperial court or even Charlemagne's sons being set up as regional sub-kings (Louis in Aquitaine and Pepin in Italy) could do.
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| A modern artist's impression of a pair Missi Dominici going on tour in the provinces |
Theodulf of Orleans was indeed one of these missi dominici and as you might have gathered from the previous post, as a highly learned and energetic individual who commanded a lot of local power and respect (in the Loire valley area) and an enthusiastic supporter of Carolingian reform, he was the perfect fit for the job. Yet as we'll see in the poem, what he experienced in his activities, or at least claimed to have, as a royal missus he found sobering and darkened his outlook on the operation of the law and justice in the provinces and what is work as an agent of Carolingian reform could achieve. But, as we'll also see, there's a lot more to poem that kindles the historian's interest than that.
Theodulf and the antique vase
Too often I see that our judges relinquish the law to those
Who bribe them with gold, fine food and delicious drink.
Often I am keen to prevent those who wish to accept bribes
But there are many wishing to take, few willing to say no.
Great crowds in gathering after gathering sought us out,
Every age and every sex was represented there:
Small ones, old and young ones, fathers, unmarried women and men,
Elders, youths, old women, husbands, wives, and children.
Why do I hold back? These people immediately offered us gifts,
Thinking that if they gave, they would receive what they wanted in return.
They tried hard to smash our resistance with this assault,
So that our will would collapse before the intense pressure.
One of them promises me gems and a crystal
If I can get for him the lands belonging to another.
Another showed me a huge number of golden coins,
Some of which bore Arabic lettering,
Some, these silver, bearing Latin inscriptions;
All to help him obtain estates, fields, and houses.
In a hushed voice yet another whispered to my assistant,
That he should carry the following message to me:
"I possess a vase decorated with ancient figures.
Its metal is pure and it is heavy to hold.
On its sides are engraved the crimes of Cacus:
The skulls of men stuck on stakes and rotting flesh,
His rocks chained down and evidence of rapine and theft,
The fields coloured with the blood of men and cattle.
There Hercules in fury smashed the bones of Vulcan's son,
Who spits out his father's flame from his beastly jaw,
As Hercules knees him in the stomach and kicks his abdomen,
Shattering with his club the beast's smouldering face and throat.
There you can see the bulls emerging from the cave,
Afraid they might be dragged back again.
On the inner mouth of the vase, on a thin band,
Can be seen a series of small figures:
The Tirinthian infant [Hercules himself] slaying the two snakes,
And his ten labours shown in their proper sequence.
The outer surface of the vase, however, is well-worn from handling,
And a scene that once existed there is rubbed down.
There Alceus, the river Calydon, and the centaur Nessus,
Fight over the beauty of Deianira.
The poisonous robe laced with the blood of Nessus is depicted,
Along with the frightening fate of the wretched Lichas.
As well Antaeus is seen losing life in the arms of the powerful Hercules,
For he is prevented from touching the ground as he needed to.
This vase I shall bring to you my lord - for he was calling me his lord -
If he heeds my requests.
There are a great many people - mothers, fathers,
Children and youths of both sexes -
Whom my father and mother left behind as free,
And from that fact they remain free.
If I could falsify their records, the lord would own the ancient vase,
I would own those people and you would soon receive gifts."
Another said, "I own a rug dyed in a variety of colours,
Which I believe a wild Arab sent.
On it a young calf can be seen following its mother and a heifer trailing a bull.
The colours of the calf and heifer are alike, while those of the cow and the bull are the same.
You can see the beauty of the piece, and the artistic use of colour.
And how a small circle is artistically joined to larger ones.
I am involved in a dispute with another man over some nice cows,
On behalf of which I am ready to give suitable gifts:
A calf for the calves, a bull for the bulls,
One cow for the cows, and one ox for the oxen.
Another man promises to give me some beautiful cups,
If I grant that he need not hand over what another demands ...
Oh this foul plague [of bribery] which is found everywhere,
Oh this crime, this madness, this too savage habit.
Which lays claim to and evilly captures the whole world,
There is no one who does not give and no one who does not take bribes.
(Translation sourced from Paul Edward Dutton, Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader, University of Toronto Press, 2009, pp 100 - 102)
This highly intelligently crafted poem, rich and vivid in its imagery and full of emotion deserves much by way of literary analysis, but that is not what is going to be done here - while I very much prefer this kind of stuff to charters, I'm a historian not a literary scholar.
Theodulf gives us much insight into the kind of corrupt practices that the missi were confronted with in the localities in the time of Charlemagne. The man who tries to bribe Theodulf with the gold and silver coins, and the one mentioned in the previous two lines who tries to bribe him with the precious stones, seem to be trying to obtain a title deed to estates in the rightful possession of others that they have obtained illegally. The man who offers him the beautiful Arab rug depicting the four cows is trying to get Theodulf to give him a favourable judgement in a dispute he has with another free landed proprietor over the ownership of some cattle. And the man who tries to bribe Theodulf with the antique vase is hoping that Theodulf will forge some documents so that the erstwhile unfree men and women his parents manumitted will become slaves again.
Theodulf himself is completely horrified by these corrupt practices, which are very well attested in other Carolingian sources, and feels deep sympathy for those victimised by them. What Theodulf is describing is fairly quotidian, and are certainly far from being one of the worst examples of corruption encountered by a royal missus. A generation later, Wala (d.836), serving as a missus for Emperor Louis the Pious in Italy in the 820s, encountered an elaborate cover-up of the expropriation and murder of an aristocratic widow in which people at all levels of Italian society were implicated. Its precisely because of stuff like this that historians' assessments of the Carolingian reforms have been so mixed in the last hundred years - see Chris Wickham, "The Inheritance of Rome", pp 390 - 392 for a very even-handed view of the debate. On the one hand, we a high-minded and dynamic royal government that is clearly able to make its presence felt in the localities. On the other hand, we have pervasive corruption at all levels of society that requires the skeletal Carolingian state bureaucracy to bite off more than it can chew. future posts I'll hope to cover more about the Carolingian reforms - the evidence, when looked at as a whole, certainly permits a far more optimistic view of them, which is what historians have increasingly swung towards in the last 30 years, than does Theodulf's poem by itself.
Other significant details include the importance of written documents over memory and orality hinted at by the need to forge documents in order for the litigants to get favourable verdicts. Theodulf was of course a Missus Dominicus in Aquitaine and the Midi, where the Gallo-Roman legacy remained very strong and with it a very strong tradition of written law and archival and notarial culture among the law - written wills never disappeared here like they did in Gaul north of the Loire following the Frankish takeover at the end of the fifth century. Another thing that's interesting is the references to coinage, the gold coins being described as having Arabic lettering and the silver ones bearing Latin inscriptions. The golden coins are clearly gold mancuses imported from nearby Muslim al-Andalus, some of which made their way as far north as the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia (see below).
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| A Gold dinar with Arabic writing, bearing the name of King Offa of Mercia (757 - 796) |
Meanwhile, the Franks, since the failure of the sub-imperial gold coinage in the late seventh century and the currency reforms of Pepin the Short (r.741 - 768) only minted in silver (see below).
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| A silver denier of Charlemagne with a cross on the obverse and the Carolingian monogram on the inverse |
Gold coinage in eighth and ninth century Trans-Pyrenean Europe was thus a real prestige item that could only be acquired by contacts with the Muslim world, as Carolingian Aquitaine and indeed Anglo-Saxon Mercia both clearly had - there, here's your nice little dose of fashionable global history for you.
What I found most interesting about it, however, were the Classical elements, specifically the antique vase. Traditionally, scholars following the lead of Julius Schlosser in 1892 presumed that Theodulf was providing a straightforward description of an ancient Roman vase which has since been lost. However, Lawrence Nees in "Theodulf's mythical silver Hercules vase, Poetica Vanitas, and the Augustinian Critique of the Roman Heritage", Dumbarton Oaks Papers Volume 41 (1987), pp 443 - 451 argues against this. He points out that, for starters, Theodulf in the poem isn't actually describing an object that he can see with his own eyes. Rather he is describing an object that the slave master trying to sweet talk Theodulf's servant has described to him, and because Theodulf did not accept the bribe after the servant relayed the information on to him he never saw the object himself. He also demonstrates well that the descriptions of Hercules' encounters with Cacus and Nessus are not drawn from any extant Roman artwork but straight from Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses, and that what Theodulf was doing here fitted squarely into the poetic exercise of ecphrasis - describing an object or place (real or imagined) and extrapolating deeper meaning from it.
While I find Nees' arguments broadly convincing, I do think its overwhelmingly likely that Theodulf did have some interest in ancient Roman material culture. This is especially clear from the highly archaeological manner in which he describes it, such as mentioning how certain of its features are worn and erased by centuries of use, which strongly suggest that Theodulf had seen and handled a good few Roman antiquities in his time. And even if he had no real interest in them except as imaginary poetic devices, we know that other people in the Carolingian era did have an appreciation for them as physical objects which they used in their daily lives. See for example the "Cup of the Ptolemies" (see below), crafted from onyx in Alexandria sometime in the first century AD, which ended up in the possession of Charlemagne and his grandson Charles the Bald.
Concerning the broader meaning of this part of the poem, Nees argues that Theodulf's take on the labours of Hercules is far from celebratory. He points to how for all that the description of Cacus lair matches the one contained in Virgil's Aeneid, while the Roman poet portrays Hercules as a civiliser clearing the site in which the glorious city of Rome will one day flourish of a troublesome monster, Theodulf's Hercules comes across more like a thug driven by rage and a desire for violence. I think Nees goes a bit too far in claiming that Theodulf, like St Augustine before him, tries to cast a sympathetic light on Cacus - its clear from Theodulf's description that he thinks Cacus had been an absolute menace in the countryside of Latium, stealing cattle and terrorising innocent humans. And in describing Deianira, Theodulf emphasises how Hercules fights with Nessus out of lust for her beauty. And after the poisoned robe kills Hercules, there is of course no suggestion of his Apotheosis. Nees thus argues that Theodulf is using Hercules, a heroic figure yet one nonetheless, by his estimation anyway, driven by pride, lust and brutish impulses, as metaphor by which to attack pagan Roman culture as fundamentally inadequate, lacking as it did the higher truths of Christian revelation which would otherwise make people cast aside its flawed notions of heroism and virtue. He argues, fairly convincingly, that Theodulf was following in the tradition of St Augustine, who in his "City of God" (430) his extensive knowledge of pagan Roman literature and histories to turn the pagans own stories and symbols against them, which is what, as Nees sees it, Theodulf is doing with Hercules' exploits as recounted in Virgil and Ovid.
Here it is interesting to note that Theodulf most likely wrote this poem in 799, in the build-up to Charlemagne's coronation as Roman Emperor in the West on Christmas Day 800. Charlemagne had just rescued Pope Leo III from the Roman mob, and talks must have already begun about him whether or not the pope should repay him by granting him the imperial title - contrary to what Einhard in The Life of Charlemagne claims, the coronation in Old St Peter's Basilica was almost certainly not a surprise to the emperor. Perhaps he might have seen his royal master taking up the mantle of the Caesars as another poisoned cloak, and in writing this poem was trying to weigh in against Charlemagne's other advisors, such as Alcuin, who were more positive about the idea of Roman imperial revival. This is incredibly speculative on my part, but perhaps Theodulf, in placing this in a longer excursus on judicial corruption, was trying to give a warning to Charlemagne. That being that he should not lose sight of the fact that, first and foremost, he is a Christian king with a duty to uphold justice and good morals among his subjects and to eradicate corruption and oppression of the poor by the powerful. Taking up the glamorous yet tainted mantle of Roman Emperor, synonymous with the celebration of power and might (represented in the poem by Hercules), makes him potentially risk losing sight of that, and from there all kinds of trouble begins.
Theodulf may be a figure very mentally remote from us in certain respects. If Lawrence Nees is right to see him as a thinker in the Augustinian tradition, which would later be a huge influence on mainstream Protestant Christianity in both its Lutheran and Calvinist forms, then Theodulf obviously believed that people could not be truly moral without being blessed with the divine revelations of Yahweh (in the Old Testament/ Jesus Christ (in the New Testament). As Martin Luther, probably one the greatest and most famous Augustinians (in both the narrow and the broad sense) who ever lived, and John Calvin would argue 700 years after Theodulf, Socrates and Cicero were not exemplary figures (contra Erasmus) and would be burning for all eternity in the fires of Hell. Why? Because, as Augustine had argued back in the early fifth century, they, unlike Moses or St Paul, did not have God's revelation and grace and therefore could not be moral or be saved. Theodulf would have probably agreed, and I doubt that he, like Dante Alighieri (1265 - 1321), would have had Virgil guide him through Hell and Purgatory, let alone, like Peter Abelard (1079 - 1142), imagine the pagan poets and philosophers being taken up to Heaven, along with the Old Testament Prophets, by Christ in the Harrowing of Hell. Except among extreme Protestants in places like the US Bible Belt, this way of thinking would come across as profoundly disturbing to most Christians, let alone most people generally, today. It seems self-evident to most of us that people in all times, place and cultures are capable of being good and virtuous, and the idea that people can rightly to be condemned to eternal punishment and alienation from God simply for not knowing about him, indeed not being able to know about him, seems revolting to us. More than a generation after Theodulf, the heretic Gottschalk of Orbais (808 - 867) would anticipate the Protestant theologians of the sixteenth century in taking Augustinianism to its extreme. According to Gottschalk, not only are all non-Christians damned, but so are all but a small chosen group of Christians (God's elect), who have been destined to go to Heaven before they were even born on account of God being all-powerful and all-knowing. A brilliant book on this whole subject area is John Marenbon's "Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz" (2015) in which the author explores how medieval and early modern Christian thinkers grappled with the three thorny questions of whether pagans could provide valuable intellectual and moral wisdom to Christians, whether they could be virtuous and whether they could be saved without conversion, both in relation to Graeco-Roman antiquity and more contemporary encounters with Scandinavians, Mongols, Native Americans and Chinese. The story he tells is an incredibly erudite and complex one, and certainly not one of linear progression from medieval bigotry to early modern open-mindedness.
Yet at the same time, there are many ways in which Theodulf isn't actually that mentally removed from us secular liberal humanists in the twenty-first century at all. This is a man who, as is evident from the poem, believes in the rule of law and an honest and equitable judicial system, and despises official corruption and the oppression of the poor and vulnerable by the rich and powerful. Indeed he points to the invaluable contribution medieval Christianity made to shaping our western liberal values and how, while we like to see them (with some justification) as having their ultimate roots in Classical Greece and Rome, the pagan ancient world perhaps wasn't as amenable to them as we think and its contribution to them has been overstated. This is very much the argument pursued in Larry Siedentop's "Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism" (2016), one of the books I read in the summer before I applied to university, and more recently in Tom Holland's "Dominion" (2019) - Tom Holland is the creme de la creme of popular historians and I'm a huge fan of his "The Rest is History" podcast which he co-hosts with Dominic Sandbrook. See here the debate between Tom Holland and A.C Grayling on the subject of Christianity's contribution to Western values - its great good fun to watch, and in my opinion it was Tom Holland who carried home the day.
Indeed, late antique and early medieval history whom we expect to be completely removed from us mentally, but we actually find quite a lot of common ground with. John Chrysostom (347 - 407), one of the Church Fathers, denounced wife beaters, corrupt politicians and people who didn't show compassion for the poor. Caesarius of Arles (470 - 542) rejected the double standard, denouncing male promiscuity, drunkenness and loose morals. Jonas of Orleans (760 - 843) and Hincmar of Rheims (806 - 882) are all about denouncing corruption in church and state and aristocrats oppressing their social inferiors. Agobard of Lyons (779 - 840) even went so far as to attack the institution of slavery. This is a huge contrast to a lot of modern Christian moralists, who focus only on attacking women and the poor and neglecting the abuses committed by rich and powerful men, above all, the 45th President of the United States. There's no doubt that any early medieval Christian would have harboured beliefs we'd now consider highly distasteful, though frankly nothing one wouldn't also find in earlier or later periods. But that shouldn't conceal some aspects of their thought that are quite genuinely admirable and arguably formative to the moral universe in which we live in today.
I will return in future posts to the importance of the Carolingian age in shaping our ideas about power, accountability and good government. But as Theodulf is also demonstrative of, is its importance to shaping how we approach the past. For all that Theodulf might have been downbeat about the pagan ancient world, he was deeply fascinated by it and had studied its literature so extensively. And he clearly saw the Greek myths as invaluable cultural artefacts that imparted necessary moral lessons, even if the lessons he extrapolated from them weren't entirely the same as those that the Classical Roman poets and their readers would have done, and as many modern writers are now doing, especially in the recent trend towards feminist retellings of the Greek myths and explorations of their "subversive power." Yet he approached it nonetheless as a culture separated in time and in many other ways removed from his own. As Anthony Kaldellis points out in relation to how Theodulf's contemporaries in the East Roman world approached the same issues in "Byzantium Unbound" (2019) Chapter 3, this sense of critical distance from the classical culture is in fact precisely what is needed for classical studies to emerge. If you treat it as a living culture that you yourself continue to inhabit, its not classical studies, its just literary studies. Theodulf combines fascination with and serious stud of the literature and beliefs of the ancient world with an all too keen awareness that this is not his own culture, but rather one of a bygone age, that needs to be approached with care. Indeed, and here I'm deliberately being provocative and controversial, it might even be fair to say that he was one of the first ever Western European classicists, as opposed to participants in a living classical culture (as Desiderius of Cahors more than a a century and half before arguably still was, being the last participant in a continuous tradition of letter writing as an art going back to Cicero and Seneca). All in all, Theodulf is a reminder that for all that the Carolingians, and early medieval more generally, feel mentally remote from us, they played a critical role in shaping Western Civilisation and the world we live in today.
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