From the sources 14: conquest, conversion and what it meant to be a Christian in the eighth century

One version of Carolingian Christianity. The obverse side of Harrach ditpych, made as an ivory book cover for a gospel book by the so-called "Court School of Charlemagne" c.800. At the top we can see the four evangelists, on the middle right the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, the middle left the Nativity, the botton right the Crucifixion and the bottom left Mary and Mary Magdelene visiting Jesus' tomb and finding it empty. So very focused on the Bible and the core of the Christian story in the gospels, fitting the profoundly religious ethos of Charlemagne's court. The reverse side (below) was carved in Visigothic Spain or Lombard Italy sometime between 700 and 750. It shows the apostles Peter and Paul, important symbols of the Institutional church. Photo credit: yours truly.

A very different side of early medieval Christianity is shown in this stone carving from the Cologne region in Western Germany. We don't know the date of it - it could have been made any time between 600 and 1050. We have no idea who made it either, but they were certainly much lower in social standing and prestige than the court of Charlemagne, hence the much cruder artistry. It shows Christ as a charismatic, superhero-like figure, taming the beasts during his 40 days in the wilderness. 

One of Charlemagne's greatest and most controversial achievements has got to the conquest of Saxony. Some of you might be asking, where's that? 

Basically, if we were to divide modern Germany into quarters, Saxony in the eighth century would very roughly correspond to the top left quarter. Indeed, for those of you who know your Cold War history, eighth century Saxony almost (but not exactly) corresponds to the British Zone of Occupation from 8th May 1945 - 1st January 1947. It was also the ancestral homeland of the Angles and Saxons who came over to Britain in the fifth century. 

An early twentieth century map of Old Saxony. Credit: By Gustav Droysen - General Historical Hand Atlas, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2465783. Compare to the map of the British Occupation Zone in post-WW2 Germany (below).

Credit: By User:52 Pickup - Based on map data of the IEG-Maps project (Andreas Kunz, B. Johnen and Joachim Robert Moeschl: University of Mainz) - www.ieg-maps.uni-mainz.de., CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4951565

This was a heavily forested region of Northern Germany that had never known Roman rule. It had no cities or roads. And it knew very little of "government." The Continental Saxons had no kings or written laws. They were basically lots of different independent tribes who, so far as we can tell, all spoke Old Low German. Each tribe was ruled by an ealdorman, who had the power to raze the villages of anyone who opposed his authority though we know little else about them. The Saxon social hierarchy was divided into three groups - the nobles (edhilingi), free peasants (frilingi) and slaves (lazzi).  In times of great external threat, they would all come together under the leadership of temporary war-leaders that are called duces in the Latin sources. The instinctive English translation of this word is "dukes", but that is misleading. Representatives from all the Saxon tribes and all three castes met in annual assemblies at a place called Marklo, where they confirmed their unwritten tribal customary laws, settled disputes and made decisions about whether or  to go to war. So while the Continental Saxons were generally quite primitive, they didn't lack political organisation altogether either. And most importantly of all, they were Germanic pagans, who worshipped Odin, Thor, Tyr, Frey, Freyja and a whole host of more local deities. 

Here are the Merseburg charms, a short list of spells and prayers written in Old High German verse from pre-Christian Saxony preserved on a flyleaf a ninth century sacramentary, inserted there by a monk of the monastery of Fulda sometime before 1000 AD. It was discovered at Merseburg Cathedral Library in 1841 by Georg Waitz, a titan of medieval academic history, and was studied extensively by Jakob Grimm of Brothers Grimm's Fairy Tales fame. This is one of the very few pieces of evidence, written or material, we have for what the religion of the Pagan Continental Saxons actually was like. It raises so many questions as well. Why would a Saxon monk include vernacular pagan charms, no doubt ones recited by his ancestors, in a book of hymns and rituals written in Latin for use in Christian church services? Credit: By Unknown scribe - https://archive.thulb.uni-jena.de/korax/rsc/viewer/Korax_derivate_00002549/VDS_Ms%20Cod%20I%20136_088.tif, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78257477

Why was it such a big achievement for Charlemagne to conquer Saxony? Its not hard to see the answer. There was no central government to negotiate surrender with, no capital to lay siege to and no head of state to kill or take prisoner. The contrast here with Charlemagne's conquest of the Lombard kingdom in Italy in 774 or the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 couldn't be more obvious. Basically, as the primary sources make incredibly clear, the conquest couldn't succeed until every last Saxon tribe, indeed every last free Saxon male, submitted to Charlemagne. The lack of roads and cities it even more difficult, to the point the Franks had to try and create the infrastructure (fortified towns, canals etc) from scratch in order to conquer Saxony. 

What's more, it was totally unprecedented. The Romans had completely given up trying to conquer Germany in 17 AD, setting the frontier at the strategic chokepoints provided by the rivers Rhine and Danube. Contrary to German nationalist mythmaking, this was not because of Arminius (a.k.a Hermann the German) butchering Varus and the Roman legions at the Teutoburger Wald. Indeed, Augustus' grandson Germanicus Julius Caesar had led expeditions to avenge Varus and punish the Germanic tribes in 15 AD. However, the more time Germanicus spent in Germania, the more he realised that the conquest simply wasn't worth it. Compared to Gaul or even southern Britain, Germany was just too poor and underdeveloped and its people were just too resistant to the idea of Roman rule, so that it would be a lot of hassle for too little gain.

The Merovingians (481 - 751) had managed to bring much of central and southern Germany into their Frankish kingdom, and slowly Christianise it with the help of Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries. But with Saxony, the most they were ever able to do was, every couple of generations, defeat the Saxons decisively in battle, ravage as much of their territory as they could and force them to pay tribute in herds of cattle. Meanwhile, the Saxons regularly raided over the rivers Main and Rhine into Frankish territory and sometimes took sides in internal political struggles in the Frankish kingdom. Thus when the Carolingians took over, it seemed politically advisable to neutralise the Saxon threat. Moreover, an important part of the Carolingians' image as kings involved them being enthusiastic defenders and promoters of Christianity, and by the mid-eighth century peaceful attempts at converting northern Germany were getting nowhere. Charlemagne needed to take a different approach to the Saxons from his Merovingian predecessors, or even from his grandfather and father - namely wholesale systematic conquest. 

As I said earlier, and this was something that Charlemagne's biographer Einhard and every historian after him remarked on, the task wasn't easy. The conquest of Saxony took 32 years (772 - 804) as a result of constant rebellion, truce-breaking and resistance to Christianisation on the part of the Saxons. Charlemagne had to respond to this with severe brutality. The most infamous incident was at Verden in 782 where the Frankish sources say that 4,500 Saxon prisoners of war were slaughtered at Charlemagne's orders. Einhard also claims that Charlemagne deported ten thousand rebels from Saxony and forced them to live elsewhere in Gaul and Germany. Its perhaps no surprise that the Saxon wars have provoked a lot of unease in modern times. The massacre at Verden would definitely be considered a war crime today, and certainly reveals a dark, ruthless streak to Charlemagne's leadership. He had of course shown such a streak on a few other occasions. Let's not forget this was the very same Frankish king who divorced his first wife (the Lombard princess Desiderata) then waged war against her father, defeated and humiliated him. He also may or may not have murdered his nephews, Richard III style. Yet I think anyone who claims the conquest of Saxony amounts to a "genocide" is taking it too far. Much like with the comparable case of Oliver Cromwell at Drogheda and Wexford in 1649 (I recently taught this to my Year 8s), some perspective is needed. As Charlemagne saw it, he was punishing oath-breakers, not exterminating an inferior race. Indeed, much of the Saxon nobility converted and became part of the post-conquest ruling class, and the Carolingians allowed the Saxon language and tribal customary laws to survive. And the Merseburg Charms I showed you earlier show the process of Christianisation was in truth a lot more complex than conversion at the point of a sword (more about that later). 

It has also made German nationalists question whether they should see Charlemagne as a German national hero. Notably, the Nazi Party in their early days in the power condemned Charlemagne as a French imperialist under the influence of  who heartlessly slaughtered the racially pure Aryan Saxons. Indeed, at a Nazi rally in 1934, 4,500 torches were lit in memory of the Saxons slain in Verden, and 4,500 memorial stones were erected for them as well. The pro-Nazi playwright and pseudoarchaeologist Edmund Kiss imagined Charlemagne torturing the Saxon war-leader Widukind into converting to Christianity by having blonde haired, blue-eyed Saxon maidens raped by dusky Jews and Moors. As always, these sauerkraut-flavoured fascists with a passion for ancient Hindu symbols and goose-stepping made monstrous distortions of German history to further their own genocidal white supremacist ideology. 

The Sachsenhain: the Nazi memorial to the Saxons slain by Charlemagne in 782. Its truly disturbing to think that the massacre of 4,500 Germanic warriors more than a thousand years earlier was seen by Hitler's supporters as an act of inhuman cruelty, but when they went on to engage in the industrial mass-murder of millions of Jews, communists, homosexuals, disabled people, Slavs etc less than a decade later it was seen as the right course of actiom.

The consequences of the Conquest of Saxony were huge. Within three generations of the conquest, the Saxons had been completely converted to Christianity and a network of bishoprics and monasteries had been established all over the region. The Saxon aristocracy had become much wealthier and more powerful, and gained much more landowning rights vis a vis the free peasantry. Then in the tenth century, the Carolingians were replaced in the lands east of the Rhine by a new dynasty of kings and emperors who themselves hailed from Saxony and claimed descent in the maternal line from Widukind himself - the Ottonians (919 - 1024). And in the High and Late Middle Ages, Saxony was part of the heartlands of Western Christendom, producing missionaries, Teutonic crusader knights and Hanseatic merchants. Finally in the sixteenth century, it would give birth to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

Other than through violence, how was this transformation achieved? Fortunately for us, like with a lot of other events in Carolingian history, the conquest and Christianisation of Saxony has generated quite a lot of primary sources by early medieval standards. The one that follows is a Capitulary (royal legislative directive) that Charlemagne issued for the Saxon territories. The date is uncertain. Traditionally it has been dated to 785, when Widukind submitted to Charlemagne and accepted baptism, resulting in a seven year lull in hostilities between Franks and Saxons. But recently, Yitzchak Hen, Robert Flierman and Ingrid Rembold have suggested that it was more likely written a decade later, in 794 or 795. 

The dating does make a significant difference. If it was written in 785, then it would have come from a victorious Frankish king, still in his prime, confidently asserting his authority over the conquered Saxons. But if it was written in 794 or 795, then it would have come from a stressed-out, middle-aged ruler who had just been through the fourth (and last) great crisis in his reign. In 792, Charlemagne's own eldest son, Pippin the Hunchback (768 - 811), had plotted with a group of Frankish nobles to assassinate him and usurp the throne. The conspiracy was foiled, and most of the conspirators were executed, though Charlemagne was merciful to his own son - he had him tonsured and imprisoned in a monastery instead. In the same year, the Saxons revolted, Gaul was hit by a devastating famine, Arabs and Slavs invaded the southern and eastern frontiers and war had begun with Avar Khaganate in Hungary. To add to this, a new heresy called Adoptionism was spreading into the Pyrenees from Spain. Charlemagne therefore needed to make a statement about his authority and what direction the regime was going to go now. This he did at the Council of Frankfurt in 794, where Charlemagne condemned both Adoptionism and the worship of images supported by the Greek Church as heresies, fixed grain prices and reformed the coinage. All of this basically showed that he was a good orthodox Christian king who cared for the physical and spiritual welfare of his people. He then embarked on his final military campaign in Saxony. 

Its in this context that I think Charlemagne's Capitulary for the Saxon Territories makes the most sense. It would made a good muscular statement of his power and authority as a Christian ruler in a time of crisis/ post-crisis. We've seen other examples of how Carolingian rulers used legislation to this effect, such as the Edict of Pitres (864) issued by Charlemagne's grandson, Charles the Bald. We might not have to go as far as the late Patrick Wormald in seeing most early medieval royal law-making as really being an exercise in propaganda. But there is some merit in this kind of view, considering that there's always a gap between what the law says and what society does. That gap was going to be even bigger in the Carolingian Empire, which possessed only a skeletal government bureaucracy and lacked standing armies, police forces or even professional lawyers and judges (north of the Alps anyway). And Wormald was undoubtedly right to think that laws, first and foremost, reflect the mindsets of the people who make them.

The Capitulary for the Saxon Territories basically lays out the laws by which Saxony will be governed once it is conquered. It prescribes the death penalty for 11 different crimes and transgressions, probably more than any other single legislative act in early medieval history, that some historians have called it the "Terror Capitulary." But what makes the Capitulary so interesting to me, is that it tells us so much about what being a Christian meant to Charlemagne and his advisers as they made one final push to convert the pagan Saxons. 

(All of the following source quotations are taken from Paul Edward Dutton, Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader (Second Edition), Toronto University Press (2009), pp 66 - 69)

Chapter 4: If anyone, out of contempt for Christianity, shall have despised the holy Lenten fast and shall have eaten flesh, let him be punished by death. But nevertheless, let it be taken into consideration by a priest, lest by chance anyone from necessity has been led to eat flesh. 

Chapter 6: If anyone deceived by the Devil shall have believed, after the manner of the pagans, that any man or woman is a witch and eats men, and on this account shall have burned the person, or shall have given the person's flesh for others to eat, or shall have eaten it himself, let him be punished by a capital sentence.

Chapter 8: If anyone of the race of Saxons hereafter concealed among them shall have wished to hide himself unbaptised, and shall have scorned to come to baptism and shall have wished to remain a pagan, let him be punished by death. 

Chapter 9: If anyone shall have sacrificed a man to the devil, and after the manner of the pagans shall have presented himself as a victim to the demons, let him be punished by death.

Chapter 15: Concerning the lesser chapters all have consented. To each church let the parishioners present a house and two mansi of land. And for each one hundred and twenty men, noble and free, and likewise liti, let them give to the same church a man-servant and a maid-servant.

Chapter 16: And this has been pleasing, Christ being propituous, that whencesoever any receipts shall have come into the treasury, either for the breach of peace or for any penalty of any kind, and in all income pertaining to the king, a tithe shall be rendered to the churches and priests.

Chapter 17: Likewise, in accordance with the mandate of God, we command that all shall give a tithe of their property and labour to the churches and priests; let the nobles as well as the free men, and likewise the liti, according to that which God shall have given to each Christian, return a part to God.

Chapter 18: That on the Lord's day no meetings and public judicial assemblages shall be held, unless perchance in a case of great necessity or when war compels it, but all shall go to church to hear the word of God, and shall be free for prayers and good works. Likewise, also on special festivals they shall devote themselves to God and to the services of the church and shall refrain from secular assemblies. 

Chapter 19: Likewise, it has been pleasing to insert in these decrees that all infants shall be baptised within a year; and we have decreed this, that if anyone shall have despised to bring his infant to baptism within the course of a year, without the advice or permission of the priest, if he is a noble he shall pay 120 solidi to the treasury, if a freeman 60, if a litus 30.

Chapter 21: If any man should have made a vow at springs or trees or groves, or shall have made any offering after the manner of the heathen and shall have taken a repast in honour of the demons, if he shall be a noble [he shall pay] 60 solidi, if a free man 30, if a litus 15. If, indeed, they have not the means of paying at once, they shall be given into the service of the church until the solidi are paid.

Chapter 22: We command that the bodies of Saxon Christians shall be carried to the church cemeteries and not to the mounds of the pagans.

Chapter 23: We have ordered that diviners and soothsayers shall be handed over to the churches and priests. 

From these chapters from the Capitulary I've shared with you we can see the following patterns in what made one a Christian, according to Carolingians:

1. Baptism is absolutely essential to making someone a Christian, and therefore everyone over the age of 1 year old must be baptised or face consequences.
2. Christians must fast during Lent, attend Church on Sundays and celebrate Christian holy days by not working or attending any kind of public meeting other than religious services. 
3. Christians do not make human sacrifices, pray in sacred groves or bodies of water, burn witches or consult fortune-tellers - these superstitions make you a relapsed pagan in need of punishment.
4. Christians must be buried in churchyards. 
5. Christians must live in a parish community and provide for their local priest, including by compulsory payment of the tithe.

All the ways in which it defines being a Christian are either through external acts i.e. getting baptised, going to Church on Sunday, fasting in Lent etc, or negative i.e. not making human sacrifices. Nowhere in the legislation does it talk about what Christian ideas and teachings the Saxons should know, other than they shouldn't be believing in certain pagan superstitions like polytheism, nature worship cannibalistic witches or fortune-telling. The bit about witches is worth re-iterating since it corrects the misconception that early medieval Christians burned witches - on the contrary, they saw witch-burning as a pagan superstition be outlawed! In these senses, being a Christian in eighth century Saxony was very different to being a Christian in twenty-first century Britain. If you asked someone nowadays what makes someone a Christian, the first things they would talk about would be believing that Jesus is God and following the teachings of the Bible. And its well known in the modern West that there are plenty of people who are baptised, have church weddings and funerals, attend the occasional Sunday service and celebrate Christmas and Easter, but do not consider themselves Christians because they don't "believe" in Christianity. 

A lot of this apparent weirdness can be attributed to the fact that this a piece of government legislation was issued in a region that was still in the process of being converted to Christianity. Certainly, no one in eighth century Gaul, Italy or Anglo-Saxon England, regions where everyone had "converted" to Christianity by 700, was concerned about human sacrifices. But there were lots of condemnations of "pagan" customs and superstitions i.e. the Anglo-Saxon monk and missionary Saint Boniface complained in the 740s that people were celebrating the New Year in the "pagan fashion" by singing, dancing and feasting outside St Peter's Basilica in Rome. We've also seen before how Agobard of Lyon condemned belief in weather magic, popular among the Burgundian peasantry, as unchristian. Boniface and Agobard were of course extreme puritans by the standards of the day and the people they were condemning would have likely seen nothing "pagan" about their own activities. But it does go to show that even in the areas that were already long since converted, Christianity was still being defined, and it was very much the Carolingian dynasty's mission to make sure everyone was following "correct" Christianity.

Its also in the period 700 - 900 that in Gaul, Italy and Anglo-Saxon England we get lots of legislation mandating infant baptism and observing Christian fasts and holy days. Carolingian Saxony was, however, unusual in making church attendance compulsory. The King of Mercia and his bishops at the Council of Clovesho in 747 simply said that all people should be allowed to attend church on Sundays. Likewise, the Capitulary for the Saxon Territories, is unusual in legally enforcing Christian burial for all. While most churches elsewhere in western Europe had graveyards by 900, there was no legal requirement that worshippers be buried in them. That was the decision of individuals and their families. Most Frankish and Anglo-Saxon bishops only required their flocks to receive communion bread and wine three times a year. Its also in this period that the practice of confessing your sins to a priest, originating in sixth century Ireland, became widespread and mandatory across Western Europe. Meanwhile, Frankish and Anglo-Saxon churchmen were prescribing religious penances for all kinds of crimes and misdemeanours, and were getting creative with all kinds of public religious rituas. Finally, it was in this period that a parish system was being established - most villages in Gaul and Italy had a local church, though Germany and Anglo-Saxon England lagged behind.

So in many ways the Capitulary for the Saxon Territories reflects the general flavour of eighth century Christianity for most ordinary lay people. It was all about what you did in public and how you belonged to and participated in a community through various festivals, rituals and obligations. But what you actually believed deep inside didn't come into it very much.

Oh, and as a final bonus, here is a link to Charlemagne's own verified descendant, Christopher Lee, singing in a death metal band about the massacre at Verden in 782.   

Most of you will know that Christopher Lee over the course of his very long theatrical career played a vampire, a Bond villain, a wizard, a Sith Lord and a dentist. But a blessed few know that he played Charlemagne too. 

References:

Paul Edward Dutton, Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader (Second Edition), Toronto University Press (2009), pp 66 - 69

Patrick Wormald, Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West, Hambledon Continuum (1998)

Paul Fouracre, Frankish Gaul to 814, in Rosamond McKitterick (ed), The New Cambridge Medieval History Volume 2: 700 - 900, Cambridge University Press (2008), pp 85 - 109

Julia Smith, Religion and Lay Society, in Rosamond McKitterick (ed), The New Cambridge Medieval History Volume 2: 700 - 900, Cambridge University Press (2008), pp 654 - 678

Ingrid Rembold, 'Quasi  una  gens: Saxony and the Frankish world,c. 772–888', History Compass 15 (2018), pp 1 - 14 

Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, Two Lives of Charlemagne, edited and translated by David Ganz, Penguin Classics (2008)

On this day in history 2: the coronation of Charlemagne and Merry Christmas

Tomorrow is Christmas Day so, as well as being the anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ, it will also be the 1222nd anniversary of the coronation of Charlemagne. The Royal Frankish Annals, written very soon after the event, tell us what happened:

“On the most Holy day of Christmas, when the king rose in prayer in front of the shrine of the blessed apostle Peter, to take part in the Mass, pope Leo raised a crown on his head and he was hailed by the whole Roman people: to the august Charles, crowned by God, the Great and peaceful Emperor of the Romans, life and victory! After the acclamations the pope addressed him in the manner of the old emperors. The name of Patricius was now abandoned and he was called emperor of the Romans.”

But why did this event happen, and why was it significant. Let’s take a look.

First things first, a short potted history of relations between the papacy and the Franks. Before the eighth century, the Franks and the papacy had very little to do with each other. Pope Gregory the Great (r.590 - 604), arguably the most proactive pope of the early Middle Ages, only addressed 30 of his more than 800 surviving letters to Frankish Gaul. The popes’ horizons mostly consisted of Italy and the East, where the enjoyed ongoing yet often very fraught relations with the Roman emperors in Constantinople, whom the popes in Rome were politically the subjects of. Meanwhile, the Lombards, a Germanic people, were building a powerful centralised state in Northern Italy which threatened the areas of the Peninsula remaining under Roman imperial control and the city of Rome itself. And from the 680s, there was a movement from within the city of Rome itself to break free of Roman imperial control and establish a ”Republic of St Peter.”

Things got really nasty in relations between Rome and the city of Constantinople when the Pope got into a nasty little spat with the Roman emperor, Leo IV the Isaurian (nope, not a type of dinosaur, a person from the wild Midwest of what is now Turkey) over whether it was ok to worship images of saints. Leo ended up confiscating all of the lands the papacy owned in southern Italy and Sicily, as well as depriving it of jurisdiction over the churches in southern Italy, Sicily, Ravenna, Venice, Istria and Dalmatia and giving them to Constantinople instead. The popes were livid, and from then on basically dropped the Roman emperors as their protectors and went essentially independent.

But the Lombards were closing in all the same, and the papacy needed a new protector. The pope found one in none other than our old friend, who I’ve written a fair few things about, Charles Martel. You see, Charles was a super successful Frankish statesman and general who had ruled as the prime minister of the Frankish kingdom for almost two decades, ended the civil wars there, fought successful campaigns against the pagan Saxons over the Rhine, defeated and converted the pagan Frisians in the Netherlands and beaten the Muslim Arab invaders of Gaul at Tours in 732 and at the river Berre in 737. Now he looked like the perfect candidate to headhunt as the papacy’s new protector. So the Pope sent envoys to Charles Martel with gifts and was like “yo, how’s it going man? Wanna help me out against these Lombards whenever I need it in return for some nice gifts and moral support.” And Charles Martel was like “sure thing, homie.”

Now Charles Martel died in 741 and his sons, Pippin the Short and Carloman, became joint prime ministers. Carloman found it all a bit too overwhelming - he literally butchered almost the entire tribal nobility of Alemannia (southwest Germany) at a massive show trial at Cannstadt in 746 after they rebelled - so he was like “man, all this politics and war is incredibly depressing. I can’t cope with this anymore. Need a change of scene to something quieter, more mellow.” so he went down to Rome in 747, met the pope and became a hermit at Monte Soracte. Pippin was this left in sole charge of the Frankish kingdom. But Pippin continued to be faced with rebellions across the Frankish kingdom, and realised that if he wanted his authority to be respected by all he needed to take over from the Merovingians, who by now were constitutional figureheads even more so than Charles III is now. But how was he going to do it. The Merovingian kings had ruled the Franks unchallenged for more than 250 years - longer than the USA has been around as of today. So how was he going to avoid coming across like an upstart parvenu. The answer was he needed to phone a family friend - none other than the Pope himself. So in 749, he sent the bishop of Wurzburg on an embassy to Rome, and the pope gave him the green light to overthrow the Merovingians, supposedly saying “it’s better to have a king that had real power than one without.” Thus in 751, Pippin deposed the last Merovingian king, Childeric III, in one of the most successful, bloodless coups d‘etat in history. He was elected king by the Frankish nobility at Soissons and then anointed - a relatively new royal ritual that had just reached Frankish Gaul from Ireland and Visigothic Spain, but a powerful way of demonstrating that his royal authority came from God.

But that wasn’t enough. Three years later, Pippin was feeling really anxious. He was a usurper, the last Merovingian king and his son still lived in a monastic jail cell, and many Frankish nobles were now thinking - “if Pippin can have a pop at taking the throne for himself, why can’t we? What really makes him special and unique compared to us? Nothing.” And as it happened the Pope was in trouble as well. The Lombard king Aistulf had conquered the last major outpost of the Roman Empire on the north Italian mainland, Ravenna, in 751, and was now threatening Rome itself. This in 754, Pope Stephen II came north to Gaul, the first pope ever to travel north of the Alps, and in a special ceremony he reanointed Pippin the Short, to bolster his sacred royal authority. But he also did the same to Pippin’s sons, Charles (the future Charlemagne) and Carloman. And to put Pippin’s anxieties to rest once and for all, he made the Frankish nobility swear an oath not to elect any king ever again, except from Pippin’s male descendants.

But now Pippin had to honour his part of the bargain. In 754 - 757, he led campaigns into Italy to bring the Lombard king Aistulf to heel, making him promise to never bother the papacy again. The papacy itself received Latium and the Romagna in central Italy as its own sovereign territories - the 750s are the true birth of the Papal States.

Pippin died in 768, and was succeeded by Charlemagne and Carloman. Carloman died in 771, leaving Charlemagne in sole charge of the Frankish kingdom. The Lombards began to threaten Rome again and the pope was like “Charlemagne, my good friend. I’ve done so many favours for you, like anointing you when you were only six years old. Now come give me a hand against those bloody Lombards, who can’t honour a simple agreement if their lives depended on it.”

So Charlemagne invaded the Lombard kingdom in 774 and after laying siege to the capital Pavia, managed to conquer the highly centralised Lombard kingdom in a matter of months and took the Lombard king Desiderius and his family prisoner. The Pope showed his gratitude to Charlemagne by making him a patrician of Rome. Charlemagne and Pope Hadrian III were pretty good pals and in the Pope’s epitaph, possibly written by Charlemagne’s Anglo-Saxon adviser Alcuin, Charlemagne is described as having basically viewed the pope as a second father.

By the late 790s, things were looking absolutely splendid for Charlemagne. He now had an empire that stretched from the roadless, still mostly pagan Saxony covered with thick forests to the ancient cities of Italy and from the Atlantic to the Elbe. He had just founded a splendid new capital in the Old Roman spa town of Aachen, which one of his court poets claimed was a new Rome with its own forum and senate - some pardonable literary exaggeration thete. Another court poet claimed that Charlemagne’s recent destruction of the Avar Khaganate in 795 - 796 meant that he had surpassed the achievements of Julius Caesar and the pagan Romans because he, unlike them was backed by Christ. Charlemagne’s courtiers nicknamed him king David, after the Biblical hero. and his court was a centre of learning and culture to rival that of Solomon’s. And in 789, Charlemagne had issued the general admonitions, a lengthy administrative document distributed across the whole kingdom which aimed to reform government to make it more centralised and efficient, tackle corruption and injustice, increase education and literacy and build a better, more moral society. So it seemed right, amidst all this euphoria, that Charlemagne make an ambitious statement about his achievements.

Now in 799 that opportunity came. The pope was now Leo III, a man of non-noble background whose father may have been an Arab. The mafiosi aristocracy of Rome and Latium didn’t like that they had an outsider in charge - they wanted someone from the in-group. So they sent a lynch mob of Roman citizens who ambushed the pope when he was on a procession from the Lateran palace to the church of St Lawrence, threw him off his horse, gouged out his eyes and cut off his tongue before leaving him naked on the streets to bleed to death. The Duke of Spoleto rescued Pope Leo, who then fled north to seek Charlemagne’s help. Charlemagne was busy for the time being, but in August 800 he came down to give his friend the Pope a hand and teach those unruly Italians a lesson.

Charlemagne arrived at Rome at the head of a massive Frankish army on 24 November and had a triumphal procession in the city to Old St Peter’s with Pope Leo. In early December, Charlemagne convened a judicial assembly in Rome and held an inquest into what had happened last year. The citizens of Rome accused the pope of various crimes. But no witnesses came forward, so Pope Leo himself was like “very well then, let the Lord Jesus Christ and St Peter be my witnesses.” He ascended to the pulpit and put his hand on the gospel, St Peter intervened on his behalf and everyone then agreed the Pope was innocent.

The Pope was now completely in debt to God, St Peter and to Charlemagne. So what was he going to do? How was he going to say thank you and truly repay Charlemagne. Given that Charlemagne was the divinely anointed king of the Franks and Lombards, Patrician of the Romans and the most powerful ruler Western Europe had ever known since the Western Roman Emperors whose empire consisted of all six original member states of the EU plus a few other territories as well, there was only one thing he could really give him now. The Roman imperial title. So on 25 December 800, when Charlemagne went to St Peter’s Basilica to put the mass in Christmas, the Pope gathered together the Roman people, plonked the imperial diadem on Charlemagne’s head and proclaimed him the first Western Roman Empire in more than 320 years in front of a cheering crowd. And, as they say, the rest is history.

But hang on a minute. We need to consider some important questions. Was this really a holiday surprise? What were its implications? And how did the still Roman emperors in Constantinople feel about this, given they weren’t consulted about it?

Einhard, Charlemagne’s faithful friend and biographer, readily provides the answers to two of those questions.

“He said that he would not have entered the church that day, even though it was a great feast day, if he had known in advance of the pope’s plan … the Roman emperors were angry about it. He overcame their opposition through his greatness of spirit, which was without doubt far greater than theirs, by often sending ambassadors to them by calling them his brothers in his letters.”

So Einhard claims that Charlemagne was completely taken by surprise about it all. But was he really? Some would suspect that Einhard was just trying to make his dear old friend, the emperor, look modest. When we look more broadly, we can see that Charlemagne didn’t loathe grandeur and ceremony. This was the king, after all, who was nicknamed “David” by Ovid courtiers, who was called “the father of Europe” by the author of an epic poem imitating the style of Virgil’s Aeneid in his lifetime, built a splendid palace in the ancient Roman style at Aachen and who got absolutely hyped when the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, the most powerful ruler west of China, recognised him as an equal by sending him an elephant called Abdul Abbas in 802. The imperial title may have been a surprise Christmas present, but I don’t see any evidence to really suggest that Charlemagne objected to it - on the contrary I think he saw it as literally his crowning personal achievement.

But as Einhard absolutely correctly hints at, the Roman emperors in Constantinople were not happy with it at all. In their view, the pope had shunned them as the latest incident in their ongoing diplomatic row by giving what was not his to give to a Germanic “barbarian” ruler. The pope tried to justify what he had done by saying that there was no Roman emperor so the position was vacant. That was because at the time the Roman Empire was ruled by Irene of Athens who had taken over from her deposed and blinded son Constantine VI (there really is an awful lot of blinding in this period) in 797 - the first woman to rule

in her own right in Roman history, and not the last (more reigning Roman empresses would follow in the eleventh century). Indeed, there was talk of Charlemagne marrying Irene and unifying the two empires. But in 802 Irene was deposed and the new emperor, a Roman general called Nikephoros, was not happy either and so from then until 812 Charlemagne and Nikephoros entered a kind of Cold War in which Charlemagne attacked the Republic of Venice, by now basically independent but still legally part of the Roman Empire. Einhard lightly glosses over this. But in the end, Charlemagne and Emperor Michael I came to a diplomatic agreement to peace and mutual recognition in 813. Still, relations between West and East were soured thereafter. It’s notable that Einhard correctly called Michael and Nikephoros the emperors of the Romans. Later Carolingian writers would call the Romans “the Greeks” instead, a highly insulting term, just like modern historians now erroneously call them the Byzantines - a wholly anachronistic term. Meanwhile, the Romans continued to view the Franks with classically Roman disdain as Barbarian upstarts. The exchange between Charlemagne’s great-grandson, the Emperor Louis II, and Emperor Basil I in 871 makes for fun reading, as both claimed to be the real Roman emperor and called the other a Greek/ German impostor. Many more exchanges like this would come over the centuries, as western and eastern emperors claimed exclusive rights to the ancient Roman legacy - honestly, why couldn’t they have just agreed to share it?

But it’s clear that Charlemagne getting the imperial title didn’t mean he ruled over a new state or that he ruled different. He continued his zeal for centralisation of government, moral reform and promoting education and classical Roman artistic and literary revival, but this has already begun no later than the 780s. And in 806, when Charlemagne drew up a succession plan for his three adult sons, the empire was to be divided equally between the three of them and there was no mention of the imperial title. It was only because only one son, Louis the Pious, outlived his father that the imperial title was able to be passed to future generations and wasn’t just Charlemagne’s personal trophy.

But the popes this meant a big deal. Pope Leo III, before his death in 816, built many additions to the Lateran Palace, and in its great hall he created some amazing mosaics in the apses. Like most art and architecture from the early Middle Ages, they sadly do not survive today, but are mentioned in the ninth century book of the Popes and we have detailed accounts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and some early eighteenth century drawings of them. One of the mosaics shows Charlemagne and the Pope as equals standing below St Peter, and the inscription reads “blessed St Peter, give Pope Leo life and Emperor Charles victory.” Thus it would seem that the Pope saw him and Charlemagne as equals, both deriving their authority from God and protected by St Peter. But given that the Pope was the successor to St Peter, would that mean that the emperor was subject to the pope. Given that the Carolingian emperors were massively more powerful than the popes and de facto led the church in Western Europe, the poles weren’t going to challenge their authority or subordinate them to them. But after the papal revolution of the eleventh century, when the popes became much more powerful, many popes would demand subjection from the German emperors. Indeed, Pope Innocent III, the Uber-Pope of the Middle Ages, would claim he could make whoever he wanted emperor at will, and did so on multiple occasions in the opening decades of the thirteenth century during the great Welf-Hohenstaufen civil war, in which the pope backed both sides at different points. Thus, the memory of the coronation of Charlemagne was not treasured after the Reformation, and even more so in nineteenth century Germany when Otto Von Bismarck was trying to destroy the power of the Catholic Church in the southern regions of the German empire like Bavaria with his kulturkampf - the literal origin of the term culture war. This German historians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made a big deal of Einhard’s comments, claiming that Charlemagne was a true Germanic king who was reluctant to become a Roman emperor because knew all too well that it was just an evil clerical conspiracy to subordinate the state to the church, which the Prussian monarchy was now working so hard to undo in its newly acquired empire.

early eighteenth century drawings of the ninth century Lateran palace mosaics, just before they were demolished, adapted from Paul Edward Dutton (ed), “Carolingian civilisation: a reader”, University of Toronto Press (2009)

Post-WW2, views of the coronation of Charlemagne have been a lot more positive, as a fusion of three integral elements to modern Europe - the Roman, the Germanic and the Christian. Indeed, Charlemagne’s empire has been seen as a forerunner to the EU, which had the Charlemagne prize for promoting European unity to this day.

Finally, Merry Christmas to one and all!

The nativity scene is depicted on the ivory book cover to the Lorsch Gospels (c.800), contemporary to Charlemagne's coronation and most likely by either one of the artists at Charlemagne's court or by the workshops at the royal monastery of Lorsch - a real masterpiece of Carolingian art, showing both the classical Roman artistic inheritance as well as many distinctively Carolingian stylistic features.

On this day in history 1: Carloman the short-lived and why Charlemagne and Richard III might have one more thing in common than you think?

So today I'm taking a break from my series on Guibert de Nogent to return to some Carolingian content, this time bringing royal politics back to into view again.

On this day in 771 died Carloman, king of the Franks. He had reigned for only three years.

Carloman was born on 28 June 751. His father was Pippin the Short (714 - 768). A few months before Carloman's birth, Pippin the Short, then the Mayor of the Palace (prime minister) of the Frankish kingdom, led a swift, bloodless and successful coup d'etat against the last Merovingian king Childeric III, deposing and imprisoning him and his son in a monastery. Pippin the Short was then elected king by the Frankish magnates and crowned at Soissons. The Royal Frankish Annals, written early in the ninth century, claim that Pippin was crowned by the great Anglo-Saxon missionary Saint Boniface, but Boniface's own letters and the other contemporary sources for his life do not mention that he did.

Certainly, contrary to how most of the early ninth century sources - the Royal Frankish Annals, the Earlier Annals of Metz and Einhard's "Life of Charlemagne" - present it, the position of the Carolingians was actually quite precarious after they usurped the throne from the Merovingians. You see, the Merovingians had been in charge ever since Clovis (466 - 511) had eliminated all the other Frankish petty kings and conquered what remained of Roman Gaul and the Visigothic kingdom of Aquitaine. They had thus been in charge of all of what would later become France for a period longer than the United States has been existence as of today. While all historians would agree that for at least a generation before Pippin's coup d'etat, the Merovingian kings had wielded no effective political power, this was still an earth-shattering event. And Pippin had undoubtedly set a dangerous precedent. If he could usurp the throne, then why couldn't any other Frankish aristocrat do the same - with the Merovingians gone, the throne was basically an open goal. Long term readers of this blog will know that I've written about this at greater length before.

Carloman was thus from only the second generation of Carolingian monarchs, but unlike his elder brother Charlemagne, born in either 742 or 748, he was actually born into royalty.

When Carloman was only three, an extroardinary event happened. In 754 Pope Stephen II came to visit Gaul, the first time a pope had ever travelled north of the Alps on an official visit. At the church of Saint Denis near Paris, Pope Stephen II had Pippin the Short reanointed as king and granted him the title of "Patrician of the Romans." He then gave that title to the two young sons of the Frankish king, and had both of them anointed as Pippin's successors as well. As the "Short Chapter on the Anointing of Pippin" (written in 767) recounts, Stephen then made all the Frankish nobles assembled there swear on pain of excommunication never to elect a king again unless he was a male-line descendant of Pippin the Short. This text really highlights just how precarious the position of the first Carolingian monarchs really was, and the importance of their alliance with the papacy.

We otherwise know very little of Carloman's early life and upbringing. He would have certainly been taught how to ride, hunt, fight with weapons and conduct himself around court, as would befit a highborn Frank, as well as receiving instruction in the doctrines of the Christian faith. Given that Pippin himself had been educated by the monks of Saint Denis, it is very likely that Carloman was literate in the sense he could read Latin. But whether he could write is less certain - his brother Charlemagne, according to his biographer Einhard, tried to learn how to write late in life and never quite succeeded. Carloman was present at the assembly in 757 in which Duke Tassilo III of Bavaria swore an oath of vassalage to Pippin. But other than that, his childhood and adolescence, like that of most early medieval rulers, receives scant attention from the sources and so we know almost nothing about it.

In August 768, Pippin the Short died and his sons Charlemagne and Carloman were both anointed and crowned as kings of the Franks as per his succession plan. The kingdom was also split into halves between them, so as to defuse fraternal rivalry. The following year, Charlemagne led a successful campaign against the rebellious Gallo-Romans of Aquitaine and defeated and captured their last semi-independent duke, Hunoald II, with the help of Duke Lupus of Gascony. Carloman promised to lead his troops in support of this campaign, but never showed up. Charlemagne was not at all impressed by this.

A nineteenth century map of the division of the Frankish kingdom in 768. Territories in yellow are Charlemagne's, territories in pink are Carloman's.

By 770, it was abundantly clear that the two brothers hated each other. What was exactly at fault for this is debated. Historians generally agree that Charlemagne was the favourite son of their mother, Bertrada. Bertrada managed to broker an alliance between Charlemagne and Duke Tassilo III of Bavaria, and she arranged a marriage between him and Desiderata, the daughter of the Lombard king Desiderius. This meant than Carloman's kingdom was now encircled by a triple alliance. However, in 771 Charlemagne divorced Desiderata so he could marry Hildegard of Vinzgouw (his favourite queen) instead. Desiderata escaped to Carloman's kingdom and brokered an alliance between Carloman and Desiderius instead. It even seemed likely that Carloman was going to join forces with Desiderius and attack the Lombards' long-standing enemy, the papacy. This escalated the situation almost to the point of war between the two brothers.

A silver coin (Denier) of King Carloman

Yet on 4 December 771, Carloman suddenly died, apparently of a nosebleed (the same cause of death traditionally attributed to Attila the Hun), at the royal villa of Samoucy. While it was almost certainly a natural death, not an assassination, Charlemagne was able to quickly annex his brother's kingdom - Carloman's chief advisers, Adalhard and Abbot Fulrad of Saint Denis, soon went over to his brother. Carloman's wife, Queen Gerberga, fled with her two sons and the faithful Count Autchar to the Lombard court at Pavia. The Lombard king Desiderius then insisted that Charlemagne allow his two nephews to be crowned as co-kings of the Franks with him. Charlemagne then brokered an alliance with the pope, and in 773 - 774 he invaded and rapidly conquered the highly centralised Lombard kingdom after taking control of the capital, Pavia, and imprisoning Desiderius and his family.

Carloman's sons are mentioned in the papal correspondance with the Carolingian court in 774. But they vanish from history immediately after. How? Traditionally, its thought that the boys were tonsured and sent to a monastery - the Carolingians, unlike their Merovingian predecessors, generally refrained from murdering their rivals. But twenty-first century historians are more sceptical. If the boys had indeed been sent to a monastery, then as happened with Childeric III in 751 or indeed with Duke Tassilo of Bavaria after Charlemagne deposed him in a show trial in 788, they would have likely been remembered by the monastery they were sent for centuries to come or even become local saints. Therefore, foul play is suspected. Jennifer Davis in "Charlemagne's Practice of Empire" (2012) says outright that Charlemagne had his nephews murdered. Janet Nelson in "King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne" (2018) says that the accusation is not proven, but maintains that there is a high possibility that Charlemagne was indeed guilty of kin-slaying.

There is indeed some tentative and tenuous evidence to suggest he was guilty, besides the obvious fact that the boys after 774 simply vanish from history.

Clause 37 of the capitulary of the Missi, a lengthy piece of legislation concerning the administration of justice in the Carolingian Empire which Charlemagne issued in 802, reads:

That those who shall have been guilty of patricide or fratricide, or who shall have killed a maternal or paternal uncle or any other relative, and shall have been unwilling to obey and consent to the judgement of the bishops, priests and other judges, our missi and counts, for the safety of their own souls and in order to bring about a just judgement, shall be kept in custody that they may not infect other people until they are led into our presence; and from their own property in the meantime they will have nothing.

This indicates that Charlemagne himself, and Frankish society generally, saw the killing of one's own blood relatives as a heinous crime. At the same time, that doesn't mean he didn't do it, and some might even attempt a crude psychoanalytical reading and use this as evidence of the Frankish king, now emperor's guilty conscience for what happened almost thirty years ago.

Four years later, when Charlemagne drew up a plan for the division of the empire between his three surviving sons (Charles, Pippin and Louis) in 806, he include the following clause:

Concerning our grandsons, the sons of our aforesaid sons, already born or who shall be born hereafter, we command that none of our sons, for any reason whatsoever, shall cause any of our grandsons who has been accused before him to be put to death or mutilated or blinded or forcibly tonsured without a just trial or examination. We desire that [these grandsons] be honoured by their fathers and uncles and that they be obedient to them in proper subjection, as is fitting of a familial relationship.

Could Charlemagne, now repentant for what he had done to his nephews, have been trying to warn his sons not to do the same to theirs for fear of the wrath of the Lord? That might be overanalysing it, but its possible.

There's also this question that remains unanswered. If Charlemagne really did murder his nephews, how would our views of the "Father of Europe" change? Its tempting to make comparisons with Richard III of England, who has long been infamous for what happened to the Princes in the Tower. But whereas Richard III had recently seen attempts to rehabilitate him, and for the last century has had a devoted fan-club on both sides of the Atlantic who maintain that he was the greatest King that England never knew it had and that Shakespeare had it all wrong.

Monstrous hunchback who usurped the throne and murdered his nephews, or a good king who cared about justice and the welfare of the common man and never did anything wrong? Richard III's reputation is so controversial today

But for Charlemagne, long celebrated as a heroic figure, it would be a shift in the other direction towards a more jaundiced view. I think its fair to say that Charlemagne could be ruthless when he chose to, like most people who have held supreme political power in any age. He was after all, lets not forget, the king who massacred 4500 Saxon prisoners of war at Verden in 785 and pursued a policy of conversions at the point of a sword, forced migration and draconian punishments for relapsing into old superstitions in order to subject the pagan Saxons to Frankish rule and the Christian faith. Nor did he himself follow Christian moral strictures to the letter - he had four wives and several concubines, from whom he had more than half a dozen illegitimate children. At the same time, he was undoubtedly a king and emperor who cared about uprightness and accountability of his government officials and the welfare of his people, and sponsored a great educational and cultural revival which we continue to benefit from to this day - without the Carolingian Renaissance, most of the Roman classics would no longer be with us today! So I think its still possible to say that while Charlemagne wasn't a saint we can still celebrate him as a great ruler. I must be frank (no pun intended here) and disclose that I am indeed something of a Charlemagne fanboy, though I try to be as scholarly and objective about it as possible. Meanwhile, poor Carloman has and shall remain largely forgotten except among academic early medievalist circles. History does not take kindly to short-lived rulers who go out in a manner neither glorious nor dignified, as will no doubt become abundantly clear when histories of British politics post-June 2016 start being written.

I guess we can wonder though as to how history would have been different had Carloman lived longer. Would the Carolingian Empire, at least in the form that we know it, have come about? Perhaps Carloman and Desiderius would have successfully resisted Charlemagne's attempts to conquer the southern realms. And how would Charlemagne's kingship have been different had he not ruled over a unified Frankish realm and definitely not murdered his nephews. A letter of Cathwulf, an Anglo-Saxon monk and scholar (Joanna Story thinks he was Charlemagne and Carloman's private tutor), to Charlemagne in 775 is perhaps indicative of this. Unfortunately the letter is untranslated and I can't have it to hand to translate for you because it hasn't been published since 1885 - and in a German edition to boot. But from the summaries I have been able to access elsewhere, Cathwulf recounts the events of the past 25 years in his letter and tells Charlemagne that there are eight pillars of a just king and that Charlemagne has "few firm pillars to stand on." This letter may well have had a huge impact on Charlemagne as three years later he and Hildegard named their son Louis, which is really a variant on the name Clovis, the first great king of the Merovingian dynasty, a clear acknowledgement that the Carolingians needed to bolster their legitimacy by linking themselves to the previous dynasty they had usurped. And in the 780s, Charlemagne's kingship became a lot more moralising and preoccupied with justice and reforming the governance of the Frankish kingdom, culminating in the General Admonition of 789 - the program statement/ manifesto for the Carolingian Renaissance if there ever was one! It would definitely be too reductive to suggest that the hypothetical guilt for the equally hypothetical killing of his nephews, and Cathwulf's firm letter that followed, was what caused Charlemagne to begin the Carolingian renaissance. I think that, truth be told, Charlemagne's heart was mostly in the right place and that he genuinely believed in promoting education, church reform, governmental accountability and other good causes. But the quest for greater legitimacy really does lie at the heart of most of Carolingian politics. Furthermore, other great periods of cultural and intellectual accomplishment have followed dubious seizures of power and dynastic intrigue, be it Ptolemaic Egypt, Augustan Rome, Abbasid Baghdad, Ming China, Medici Florence or Tudor England.

The original manuscript of Cathwulf's letter

One year blogoversary

 And so here we are. This blog has reached its first-year anniversary. And what a ride it has been. It has gone well beyond what I initially envisioned for this blog. Initially, I’d envisioned it as mostly somewhere for random thoughts and musings about the early middle ages I kept getting all the time (even in the shower, believe it or not), but never wrote down somewhere. But once it actually got going, it ended up becoming properly educational, and encouraged me to read more into certain topics I hadn’t really explored in much detail before. And I’m pleased to see that it has a lot more enthusiastic readership than I expected, though I do think I need to work harder to grow the community of readers – a Facebook page and, though this does make me grimace, a Twitter account may need to be set up sometime in the immediate future. Thank you so much to all of you for your support, whether you’re one of my long-time readers or this is the first post on this blog you’ve read.

I have also thought about some other necessary changes to this blog. The age of monster articles, what the Guardian would call “the long read,” are over. As a rule, going forward, no blogpost can exceed 1500 words in length. If its too long for you to read while you’re having your morning coffee, when you’re on the bus/ train to and from work or when you’re doing some internet browsing before bed, then really it’s a load of self-indulgent time-wasting on my part, lets be honest. I’ll also make it a commitment to release content more regularly. Until now there have been that there have been some periods of really intense blogging activity, followed by lengthy caesuras, much like the activity of many an early medieval chancery. But now its time to go full Angevin England mode and commit to a regular and predictable output, just like the calendars of the pipe rolls, close rolls and patent rolls but a lot less bureaucratic. I shall aim to release one every Monday morning at 7 am, though that may have to sometimes be every other Monday morning – I am starting a PGCE programme to train as a secondary school history teacher next month, after all. All subsequent posts will also be placed into one of five categories: from the sources; theory time; book review; controversies; first hand encounters with the medieval past. All of this I should have done a long time ago, but I was spurred into action after a computer glitch resulting from faulty Wi-Fi destroyed the first draft of this post, which I had spent two days working on – you can imagine how upset I was. I hope you’ll like these changes. But now let’s get on to some exciting special content.

Beowulf and the Merovingians

I’m sure you, my readers, are familiar with Beowulf. Ever since it was first translated into Modern English and published in 1815, it’s been recognised as one of the great foundational texts of English Literature. Historians now would generally see it as an invaluable source for Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian kingship, warrior masculinity and how early medieval Christians in Northern Europe approached their pre-Christian past. It’s a shame that nothing like it exists from the Frankish world, where I work on. Einhard tells us that Charlemagne “ordered that the very old German songs, in which the deeds and wars of ancient kings were celebrated, should be written down and preserved.” but posterity has handed down none of these Old Frankish epics to us in the present, with no small consequences for how differently historians view elite culture in Francia and Anglo-Saxon England.

Now, the plot of Beowulf should be familiar to many of my readers anyway but (spoiler alert) the eponymous hero, after succeeding his cousin Hygelac as king of the Geats (a people living in southwestern Sweden), dies fighting a dragon at the end. His faithful warrior companion, Wiglaf, then makes an ominous speech at Beowulf’s funeral. Here is an extract from it:

Now must our people look for time of war, as soon as afar to Frisian and to Frank the king’s fall is revealed. Bitter was the feud decreed against the Hugas (Franks), when Hygelac came sailing with his raiding fleet to Frisian land. There the Hetware in battle assailed him, and valiantly with overwhelming strength achieved that the warrior should lay him down: he fell amid the host, not one fair thing did that lord to his good men give. From us hath been ever since the favour of the Merovingian lord withheld.

(“Beowulf”, translated and with a commentary by J.R.R Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien, Harper Collins, 2014, lines 2446 – 2555, p 98)

Now in terms of being a source for the political history (in the traditional sense) of Scandinavia and the North Sea in the age of the barbarian great migrations, Beowulf is highly suspect. While most scholars would agree that it is at least partially based on authentic folk memories and oral histories of what was going on in Northern Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries, collective memory, like individual memory, can be very unreliable, with various things getting distorted, omitted or invented over time – anyone who has done family history research will likely be aware of this. But in the case of Hygelac’s disastrous proto-Viking raid on Frisia/ Frankish Gaul, we do have an independent primary source to verify it. Let’s turn to someone who is very much a friend of this blog, none other than Gregory of Tours:

The next thing which happened was that the Danes sent a fleet under their King Chlochilaich and invaded Gaul from the sea. They came ashore, laid waste to one of the regions ruled by Theuderic and captured some of the inhabitants. They loaded their ships with what they had stolen or seized, and then they set sail for home. Their king remained on the shore, waiting until the boats had gained the open sea, when he planned to go on board. When Theuderic heard that his land had been invaded by foreigners, he sent his son Theudebert to those parts with a powerful army and all the necessary equipment. The Danish king was killed, the enemy fleet was beaten in a naval battle and all the booty was brought back on shore once more.

(“The History of the Franks” by Gregory of Tours, edited and translated by Lewis Thorpe, Penguin Classics, 1974, III.3 pp 165 – 166)

Chlochilaich sounds like a very mangled rendering of Hygelac, and he’s mentioned as a king of the Danes, not the Geats. But otherwise, its exactly what is described in Wiglaf’s funeral oration for Beowulf. Since we know, from the events that come immediately before and after this passage in Gregory of Tours’ histories, that Hygelac’s raid must have taken place c.521, that means that the poem is set in the first third of the sixth century. Beowulf is therefore meant to be a contemporary of Boethius, St Benedict of Nursia, Clovis, Justinian and Theodora and, if he existed, King Arthur.

And just as this incident didn’t go forgotten in Anglo-Saxon England, the Franks remembered it as well. The Book of the History of the Franks of 727 describes it almost identically to Gregory of Tours, who was the source its anonymous author used, but unlike in Gregory’s account, Hygelac is rendered Cothelac and he’s referred to as a rex Gotorum – literally, king of the Goths. And of course, we can rely on Adhemar of Chabannes, writing in the early eleventh century, to remember it – he remembered almost every significant episode in Frankish history:

(Original Latin) In illo tempore Dani cum rege suo, nomine Cothelaico, cum navali hoste per altum mare Gallias petunt, devastantes et captivantes omnia, et, plenis navibus de captivis, altum mare intrant, rege eorum ad litus maris residante. Quod cum Theodorico nunciatum fuisset, Theodebertum filium suum cum magnum exercitu in illis partibus direxit. Qui, consecutus eos, pugnavit cum eis cede magna atque prostravit, regem eorum interfecit, predam tulit et in terram suam restituit.

(“Chronique” by Adhemar of Chabannes, edited by Jules Chavanon, 1897, p 23)

(My translation): At that time, the Danes with their king, called Hygelac, with a host of ships made for Gaul through the North Sea, devastating everything and taking everyone captive, and, with ships full of captives, entered the North Sea, with their king residing by the shore. When that was announced to Theuderic, he ordered his son Theudebert to go to those parts with a large army. Theudebert, having pursued the Danes, fought with them and after great losses brought them to heel, killed their king, carried away the plunder and restored it to his land.

Notably, Adhemar, like Gregory before him, refers to Hygelac as a king of the Danes, rather than a king of the Goths like the “Book of the History of the Franks”, thus indicating he consulted Gregory’s work. This goes against Jules Chavanon’s claim that, in the first fifty-one chapters of his Chronicle, Adhemar just copied the “Book of the History of the Franks” almost verbatim and inserted a few additions. He was much too good a historian for that!

Even in the late middle ages, the defeat of Hygelac's raid was still remembered. Here it is depicted in the Tours manuscript of the Grand Chroniques de France, illustrated between 1455 and 1460 by the great French Renaissance painter Jean Fouquet. 

Now the account of Hygelac’s raid, specifically the mentioning of the Merovingians, has a bearing on an important scholarly debate. When was Beowulf composed? Since its author, if its ever appropriate to attribute a traditional epic to the work of a single author (Classicists will recognise this problem for the Iliad and the Odyssey), is anonymous, we can’t date it according to when they lived. Old English vernacular literature begins to appear in the final third of the seventh century, when the poet Caedmon wrote down his Hymn of Creation under the patronage Abbess Hilda of Whitby (d.684). But Beowulf survives in only one manuscript dating from either the last quarter of the tenth century or the first quarter of the eleventh century. Thus, as a notorious conference of academic Anglo-Saxonists in 1981 known as the “Scandal in Toronto” hammered home, scholars have a whole range of different estimates for the date of the composition of Beowulf, with c.685 at one end and c.1000 at the other.

The first folio of Beowulf in the Southwick Codex (c.1000), the one manuscript in which the poem survives.

Tom Shippey, a respected scholar of Old English literature and the leading academic expert on J.R.R Tolkien, is in the very early date (c.685 – 750) for Beowulf camp. In 2007, reviving an argument made all the way back in 1849, he suggested that that the mentioning of the Merovingians in Wiglaf’s speech indicates that Beowulf couldn’t have been written any later than 750. His reasoning for this is that, after Pippin the Short deposed the last Merovingian king, Childeric III, in 751, the new dynasty, the Carolingians, gave their predecessors damnatio memoriae treatment – like the ancient Roman emperors for whom that term was originally applied, they were vanished from the official histories.

Now Shippey’s argument was thoroughly criticised in a follow-up article that year by Walter Goffart. Goffart argued that the Carolingians did not give the previous dynasty damnatio memoriae treatment, and copies of the “Book of the History of the Franks” were present in Anglo-Saxon England. Goffart himself believes, for his own reasons, that Beowulf could not have been written any earlier than 923. Now, with regard to the whole damnatio memoriae thing I’m on Goffart’s side. While Carolingian historians, like the anonymous author of the Early Annals of Metz or Einhard in The Life of Charlemagne, did their best to portray the last Merovingian kings as lazy, degenerate and foolish, whose loss of real power to their mayors of the palace followed their eventual deposition was inevitable, they didn’t try to erase them from history at all. And in the 860s, Archbishop Wulfaldus of Bourges used Merovingian charters issued in the names of kings Childebert and Chilperic in a court case against Count Eccehard of Macon over ownership of the manor of Perrecy. Would King Charles the Bald’s judges have led that fly if it was no longer politically correct to speak of the Merovingians anymore? And, to state the obvious, England, while undoubtedly part of the wider Carolingian world, was never ruled by the Carolingians. So Shippey’s argument fails. But that doesn’t mean I agree with Goffart’s proposals for the dating of Beowulf either. And as someone with next to no knowledge of Old English philology, I can’t really take a position on the debate. But scholarly opinion, following the publication of Leonard Niedorf’s seminal The Dating of Beowulf: A Reconsideration (2014), is starting to gravitate towards the earliest date range.

 

Tolkien and the Carolingians

Since with the discussion of Beowulf we’ve ventured in the scholarly territory where J.R.R Tolkien was undisputed master (at least within the confines of Oxford) back in the day, where are the Carolingians to be found in Middle Earth? The northern early Middle Ages are there in abundance – the languages and place names of Middle Earth are modelled on Old English, Old Norse and Old Welsh, and many of the races that populate it are taken straight from Norse mythology (even the orcs, Tolkien’s trademark creation, get their name from an Old English word meaning hobgoblin or demon). Indeed, the Lord of the Rings is very consciously written to be like an Anglo-Saxon epic, and in many ways deviates from the literary conventions of the modern novel – fans like myself appreciate this, but other readers find it frustrating that more weight is given to lengthy descriptions of the exterior world over interior drama. But there doesn’t seem to be any place for the Carolingians in Tolkien’s majestic creation.

Or is there indeed? Concerning the hobbits (Tolkien’s other trademark creation and the only race that doesn’t have their provenance in Germanic folklore), some of them do have Frankish names – Pippin, Meriadoc, Fredegar, Adelard, Drogo, Dudo, Odo, Wilibald etc. But this is most likely intended for purely ironic effect. The Hobbits are famously idle, peaceable folks who just want eat and be left alone, while the Franks are famously vigorous, warlike and expansionist – can you imagine someone saying, to paraphrase a Byzantine proverb given by Einhard in The Life of Charlemagne, “have a hobbit as your friend, not as your neighbour”?

But there’s more. At the time Frodo, Sam, Pippin and Merry leave the Shire, the kingdom of Gondor is ruled by stewards, as it has been for 969 years since their branch of the royal house of Elendil died out – Aragorn is from the northern (Arnor) branch. The evolution of the office of the steward sounds remarkably identical to that of the mayors of the palace in the Merovingian realm. They started off as simple palace officials, responsible for managing the king’s household and doing the business of government during the king’s absence/ a royal minority. But gradually they assumed more and more de facto control of the executive, were able to make their office hereditary (in the Merovingian realm by the Pippinids/ Carolingians, in Gondor by the House of Hurin) and then after the royal line apparently terminated, ruled without a king – compare the Carolingians’ puny four years to the House of Hurin’s 969. But its here the comparison ends. After Charles Martel’s death in 741, the Carolingians found the last surviving Merovingian, Childeric III (what relation he was to his predecessor, Theuderic IV, we’ll never actually know) and made him king before deposing him in 751 due to his apparent uselessness. Meanwhile, the Stewards of Gondor soldier on until the one true king, Aragorn finally turns up. And in The Return of the King, Gandalf tells Pippin that Boromir once asked his father, Denethor, how long it would be until the stewards could make themselves kings. The penultimate steward of Gondor then replied “a few years, maybe, in other places of less royalty … in Gondor, ten thousand years would not suffice.” Perhaps Tolkien, who famously had a profound dislike of anything French, intended that as a bitchslap to the Carolingians and the Franks/ French for being less patient with their kings than the Gondorians.

 

"Francia has no king. Francia needs no king." So might Charles Martel have said in 740. But his son, Pippin the Short, evidently disagreed.

Did Charlemagne have a beard?

Certainly, its been artistic convention since the late middle ages to portray him with one. Albrecht Durer’s very famous 1512 portrait of the king of the Franks/ emperor in the west portrays him with a beard that wouldn’t look out of place on one of Tolkien’s wizards, and that’s kind of set the gold standard for artistic portrayals of Charlemagne since. But is it actually true to the historical record?

Definitely bearded here. The coronation of Charlemagne in 800 from the Saint Denis Manuscript of the Grand Chroniques de France (c.1325 - 1350)

The very famous Charlemagne reliquary bust (1349) at Aachen, photographed by me. Will do a post about this. There's more than first meets the eye.

The Frankish emperor depicted here in an French book of hours from the early fifteenth century, British Library MS Harley 2952 folio 62v

Panel painting of Charlemagne from the Aachen cathedral treasury dating to 1470, photographed by me. In the late middle ages, they had to invent coats of arms for all the historical figures who lived before heraldry came into being in the twelfth century. So they gave Charlemagne a coat of arms that was half the German eagle, half the French fleur de lys to reflect his status as a forefather to both the French and the Germans.

Durer's portrait of Charlemagne - absolutely majestic, but anachronistic on so many levels.

We have a famous physical description of Charlemagne from Einhard:

His body was large and strong. He was tall, but not unduly so, since his height was six times the length of his own foot. The top of his head was round, his eyes were large and lively, his nose was a little larger than average, he had fine white hair and a cheerful and attractive face. So, standing or sitting his presence was greatly increased in authority and dignity. His neck seemed short and thick and his stomach seemed to project, but the symmetry of the other parts hid those flaws. His pace was firm and the whole bearing of his body powerful. Indeed, his voice was clear but, given his size, not as strong as might have been expected. His health was good until four years before he died, when he suffered from constant fevers. Towards the end he would limp on one foot. Even then, he trusted his own judgement more than the advice of his doctors, whom he almost hated, since they urged him to stop eating roast meat, which he liked, and to start eating boiled meats.

(“Two Lives of Charlemagne” by Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, translated with an introduction and notes by David Ganz, Penguin Classics, 2008, p 34)

Now, as I remember well from doing “The Transformation of the Ancient World, 370 – 900” with Conrad Leyser in my first year at Oxford, this is a classic extract that tutors in early medieval history give their students to teach them source criticism. You see, while Einhard is obviously a close friend of Charlemagne who knew him well, he has very consciously modelled his biography of Charlemagne on Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars, and at various points in this passage he directly quotes the ancient Roman author. Thus, you do have to ask: how much of this is the real Charlemagne, and how much of this is Einhard trying to present him as a deified Roman emperor? However, on closer examination you realise that he’s quoting Suetonius’ biographies of half a dozen different emperors, which suggests that Einhard is not attempting a comparison between Charlemagne and, say, Augustus, and that actually he is talking about the real Charlemagne and has simply lifted the quotes from Suetonius that fit Charlemagne’s description, so he can be true to fact whilst also showing off his Classical learning. But, more to the point, there is no mention of a beard here!

For contemporary written descriptions of the emperor’s physical appearance, that is all we have got. But we do have three artistic depictions from the time. The first are coins minted with Charlemagne’s image after his coronation as emperor in 800. The second is a tenth century copy of a ninth century manuscript illumination that depicts Charlemagne with one of his sons, Pippin of Italy, and a scribe. The third is an equestrian statue, which I saw in the Louvre when I visited it in May this year, dating between 800 and 875 that may be of Charlemagne or his grandson, Charles the Bald. There is a common pattern between all of them – Charlemagne is clean-shaven with short hair and a moustache. If we combine these with Einhard’s account, the overwhelming likelihood is that Charlemagne did not have a beard.

And indeed, if we look at other surviving artistic depictions of Carolingian rulers from the ninth century, we’ll see the same pattern yet again – they’re all clean-shaven with short hair and moustaches. What is the reason for this?

Paul Edward Dutton, a North America-based Carolingianist scholar, has an interesting theory for this. He argues that the Carolingians groomed themselves in such a matter in order to present themselves as a clean break from the previous dynasty, the Merovingians, who famously sported luxurious long hair and beards. Indeed, the Merovingians would be known to posterity as “the long-haired kings.” The whole long hair and beards vs short hair and moustaches may well therefore have been part of the Carolingians’ propaganda drive to present themselves as vigorous and morally upstanding in contrast to their lazy and degenerate predecessors. But that leaves another question unanswered – why did artists from the later Middle Ages onwards feel the need to depict Charlemagne with a beard? I cannot even begin to speculate about that.

At least by the late nineteenth century they got it right! The mosaics from the upper camera of Aachen cathedral depict Charlemagne with short hair and a moustache - clearly the prosperous bourgeoisie of Wilhelmine Germany who funded this had read their Einhard. Photograph by yours truly.