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

From the sources 4: Carolingian peasants and their conspiracy theories

 

Can we know what these dudes doing the reaping and wine-pressing in the foreground really believed in? We're back with the Utrecht Psalter (c.825) here

Today's big question: are conspiracy theories really a modern phenomenon?

The power of conspiracy theories today experienced first hand: a protest against the "Great Reset" I saw in Vienna on 28 May 2022

So, having looked at the polyptychs and seen how differentrural society could be in different regions of the Carolingian Empire, we’re going to return to the theme of peasant life in the early ninth century. Now, as illuminating as the polyptychs can be, there are some big draw backs. The first and most important one is that these are documents written for landlords by their agents who did the surveying. Everything they tell us is based on the questions the landlords told their agents to enquire into with each peasant household. So, they tell us what each peasant householder owed in rent/ tax/ tribute/ labour services (which tells us a lot about what they farmed and how much access they had to cash), their legal status (free or unfree), how many children and other dependents he (more rarely she) had under his roof and their names (sometimes ages as well as we saw with the Marseille polyptych). Occasionally they might give us some super-interesting incidental information i.e., peasant boys away at school in the Marseille polyptych. But those are the limits of what landlords and their agents were interested in – other aspects of peasant life just weren’t of interest to them and weren’t worth enquiring into and recording.

So, what other sources do we have for the lives of Carolingian peasants. Archaeology is obviously one of them but that can only tell us about the material side of things. But what about the more intimate, interior, human side of things. What did Carolingian peasants think about day to day – what were their opinions about what was going in the world, their attitudes, anxieties, fears, dreams and aspirations? What were their beliefs about the cosmos and how well did they match up with official Christian teaching on this? What were their relationships with their neighbours and other figures in their communities like? And what did they do for fun (and all the other stuff near the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs)?

Unfortunately, we cannot get ready answers to these questions. We have nothing like the diaries, memoirs and other personal writings we have for the working classes in the late Georgian and Victorian eras – after 1760, more than half of the adult population of Great Britain was functionally literate. Pigs will fly if a Carolingian equivalent of this early nineteenth century Yorkshire farmer’s diary that made a bit of a media sensation a few years ago is found. Nor do we even have the kind of resources that are available to historians of late medieval and early modern Europe. We don’t have anything like the inquisition trial testimonies for the village of Montaillou in Southern France from 1294 – 1324 that enabled Emmanuel Le Roy Laudrie in his eponymous 1975 classic to look at the heretical beliefs and community conflicts among the villagers there (as well as discovering that Mountaillou’s village priest Pierre Clergue, from a local family of rich peasants, was a serial-philanderer who seduced a married countess no less). It was similarly inquisition trial testimonies that enabled Carlo Ginzburg in The Cheese and the Worms (1976) to discover Menocchio the Miller (1533 – 1599), a freethinking peasant intellectual and avid bookworm from Friuli in Italy. Or the witchcraft trial records from Essex that allowed Keith Thomas and Alan MacFarlane to do similar stuff to Montaillou for Elizabethan and Jacobean England. God the eighth and ninth centuries really were the dark ages! Unlike the more enlightened folks of Renaissance Europe, the Carolingians didn’t have the inquisition and witch burnings, and modern historians are all the more worse off for it because persecution generates documents that we can read against the grain to find out about the lives of the persecuted. Thus, most historians would argue that microhistory – the use of a small set of really intimate, localised documentation to recover the perspectives of ordinary people in the past – is redundant for the Carolingian era or any time before about 1250. Charles West, a historian whose work I really admire, disagrees, and has recently produced a very illuminating study ‘Visions in a Ninth-Century Village: an Early Medieval Microhistory’, History Workshop Journal (2016). Using a very different piece of evidence, I’ll attempt a sort of early medieval microhistory myself.

First, let’s meet Agobard of Lyon (779 – 840). His origins are obscure – he may have Visigoth refugee from Islamic Spain, like his compatriot Theodulf of Orleans, whom we’ve met before, as suggested by a brief passage in the Annals of Lyon, but some scholars dispute this. He came bishop of Lyon in 814, though because the previous office-holder, Leidrad, was still alive and in retirement in monastery, Agobard wasn’t universally recognised as bishop until the Council of Aachen in 816. Thereafter, he gained something of a reputation as a controversialist. He offered scathing critiques of Louis the Pious’ policy of guaranteeing religious freedom for Jews in the Carolingian Empire, and wrote five polemics in the 820s against Jews and Judaism, in one of them calling Jews “the devil’s spawn.” He also rushed eagerly into theological controversies about the use of icons in churches and the nature of the Trinity (where have we seen them before!) and wrote tracts on those. He dismissed the practice of allowing accused felons to clear their innocence through trial by combat, enshrined in the law of the Burgundians (the local law in Lyon), as irrational. He even criticised Louis the Pious for not following his initial royal/ imperial succession policy of 817, and supported Louis’ eldest son, Lothar in rebellion against him in 830. And he wrote a tract against popular superstitions called On Hail and Thunder (815), and it is to that we shall now turn:

The first printed edition of Agobard of Lyon's works, including the treatise we'll be discussing here, produced in Paris in 1605

In these regions [Burgundy] almost everyone – nobles and common folk, city folk and country folk, the old and the young – believe that hail and thunder can be caused by the will of humans. For as soon as they have heard thunder or seen lightning, they say “the wind has been raised.” When asked why it is [called] a raised wind, some with shame, their consciences troubling them a little, others boldly, as is the way of the ignorant, answer that the wind was raised by the incantations of people who are called storm-makers [tempestarii]. Hence it is called a raised wind.

Whether it is true, as is popularly believed, should be verified by the authority of Holy Scripture. If, however, it is false, as we believe without doubt, it ought to be emphasised just how great the crime is of him who attributes to humans the work of God …

We have seen and heard of many overcome by such great madness and deranged by such great foolishness that they believe and claim that there is a certain region called Magonia [Magic Land] from which ships travel in the clouds. These ships, [so they believe], carry crops that were knocked down by hail and perished in storms back to that same region. Those cloud-sailors [are thought to] give a fee to the storm-makers and to take back grain and other crops. So blinded are some by this great and foolish belief that they believe that these things can [actually] be done.

We [once] saw many people gathered together in a crowd who were showing off four captives, three men and a woman, as though they had fallen out of some such ships. These people had been held for some time in chains. But at last, as I said, they were exhibited to that crowd of people in our presence as [criminals] fit to be stoned to death. Nevertheless, the truth did come out. After much argument, those who exhibited those captives were, as the Prophet says, “confused, just as the thief is confused when apprehended [Jeremiah 2:26].”

Because of this error, which in the area possess the minds of almost everyone, ought to be judged by reason, let us offer up the witness of Scripture through which the matter can be judged. After inspecting those witnesses, it will not be us, but truth itself that will overcome this stupid error and everyone who recognises the truth will denounce the instruments of error and say with the Apostle “no lie is of the truth [1 John 2:21].” What is not from the truth is especially not from God, and because it is not from God, he hears not its words …

If therefore the almighty God through the power of his arm whips the wicked with new waters, hail, and rains and whose hand it is impossible to flee, then those people who are entirely ignorant of God who believe that humans can do these things. For if people can send hail, then they can make it rain anywhere, for no one ever sees hail without rain. They could also protect themselves from their enemies, not only by the theft of crops, but also by taking away a life. For when it happens that the enemies of the storm-makers are in a road or field, they could kill them; they could send down an entire hail-storm down upon them in one mass and bury them. Some claim that they themselves know some storm-makers who can make a diffuse pattern of hail that is falling throughout a region fall instead in a heap upon a river or a useless forest or on a tub under which the storm-maker himself is hiding.

Often, we have heard it said by many, that they knew such things were certainly done in [specific] places, but we have never heard yet anyone claim that they themselves had seen these things. Once it was reported to me that someone said that he himself had heard such things. With great interest I myself set out to see him, and I did. But when I was speaking with him and encouraging him, with many prayers and entreaties, to say whether he had seen such things, I [nevertheless] pressed him with divine threats not to say anything unless it were true. Then he declared that what he said was indeed true and he named the person, the time, and place, but nevertheless confessed that he himself had not been present at that time …

… Terrified by the sound of thunder and by flashes of lightning, the faithful, although sinners, call for the intercession of the holy prophet, but not our half-faithful people. Who, as soon as they hear thunder or feel a light puff of wind, say that “the wind has been raised,” and then issue a curse: “Let that cursing tongue be parched. May the tongue that makes [this storm] now be cut off.” Tell me, I beg you, whom do you curse, a just person or a sinner? For a sinner, cannot, as you often say out of your own infidelity, raise up the wind, because he has no power, nor can he command evil angels …

Also in our times we sometimes see that, with the crops and grapes harvested, farmers cannot sow [the next crop] on account of the dryness of the land. Why do you not ask your storm-makers to send their raised winds to wet the land so that you might sow them then? But because you do not do that, nor did you ever see or hear of anyone doing it, listen to what the Lord himself, the creator of all things, the ruler, governor, arranger, and provider says to his blessed servant Job about things of this sort …

Look at the great works of God, the existence of which the blessed Job himself was not able to admire fully and loftily. If the Lord has a treasure-trove of hail that He alone sees, and which even the blessed Job never saw, where do the storm-makers discover what the blessed Job never found? Neither can we find it nor can anyone guess where it is. The Lord inquires of his faithful servant if he knows who gave a path to the most violent rains and a passage to the resounding thunder. Those against whom this is directed show themselves to be puny men, devoid of holiness, justice, and wisdom, lacking in faith and truth, hateful even to their neighbours. [Yet] they say that is by the storm-makers that violent winds, crashing thunder, and raised winds are made …

This stupidity is not the least part of this unfaithfulness, for it has now grown into such a great evil, that in many places there are wretched people who say indeed that they do not know how to send storms, but nevertheless know how to defend the inhabitants of a place against storms. They have determined how much of a crop they should be given and call this a regular tribute [canonicum]. There are many people who never freely give tithes to priests, nor give alms to widows, orphans, and other poor people. Though the importance of alms-giving is preached to them, is repeatedly read out and encouraged, they still do not give any. They pay the canonicum, however, voluntarily to their defenders, by whom they are protected from storms. And all of this is accomplished without any preaching, any admonishment, any exhortation, except by the seduction of the Devil …

A few years ago [that is, in 810] a certain foolish story spread. Since at that time cattle were dying off, people said that Duke Grimoald of Benevento had sent people with a dust which they were to spread on the fields, mountains, meadows, and wells and that it was because of the dust they spread that the cattle died. He did this [they say] because he was an enemy of our most Christian Emperor Charles. For this reason we heard and saw that many people were captured and killed. Most of them, with plaques attached, were cast into the river and drowned. And, what is truly remarkable, those captured gave testimony against themselves, admitting that they had such dust and had spread it. For so the Devil, by the secret and just judgement of God, having received power over them, was able to succeed over them that they gave false witness against themselves and died. Neither learning, nor torture, nor death itself deterred them from daring to give false witness against themselves. This story was so widely believed that there were very few to whom it seemed absurd. They did not rationally consider how such dust could be made, how it could only kill cattle and not other animals, how could it be carried and spread over such a vast territory by humans. Nor did they consider whether there were enough Beneventan men and women, old and young, to go out from their region in wheeled carts loaded with dust. Such is the great foolishness that oppresses the wretched world …

Source: "Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader (Second Edition)" edited by Paul Edward Dutton, Toronto University Press (2009), pp 220 - 223

Clearly there were some cultural parallels to these tempestarii in Sweden and they was some interest in them in the early modern period. An engraving from Olaus Magnus' A History of the Northern Peoples (1555). Indeed, learned early moderns were a lot less sceptical of this stuff than Agobard. In 1591, King James VI of Scotland had 70 people, including the midwife Agnes Sampson, the schoolmaster John Fian and Francis Stuart, 5th Earl of Bothwell, put on trial in North Berwick for trying to sink his ship on Halloween night 1590 as he sailed home from Copenhagen with his newlywed wife. Yet no one would suggest that James VI of Scotland and I of England was a rustic crypto-pagan.

Now in this source we two systems of thought/ mentalities at play. That of Agobard and that of the peasants. Sam Ottewill-Soulsby at the Historians’ Sketchpad has done a brilliant blogpost on Agobard’s mode of thinking and I don’t think I’ll do it more justice than he does, so rather than covering the same ground I highly recommend you read his blogpost. Instead, I’ll focus on the perspectives of these Burgundian countryfolks. First it must be said that we have absolutely no good reason, given the nature of the source, as a reform minded polemical treatise, to think Agobard made this all up. At the same time, we should bear in mind that this isn't written with the voices of these Burgundian peasants, and that Agobard may have ventriloquised them just as a lot of writers of saints' lives did when writing about the humble-born witnesses of miracles i.e., whether the miracle stories recorded in Gregory of Tours' Ten Books of Histories, Glory of the Confessors, Glory of the Martyrs and Lives of the Fathers can be used to create Merovingian microhistories, or simply reflect the preoccupations of their author and the ecclesiastical elite culture in sixth century Gaul to which he belonged, is debated.

Now a major undercurrent behind this, which should not be overlooked, is that life for a Carolingian peasant was, in a word, harsh. Their belief in these storm-making wizards and sky pirates is described by Agobard as appearing in the context of crop failure caused by bad weather. Likewise, the conspiracy theory about foreign agents spreading dust to kill cattle was provoked by a cattle plague (most likely an outbreak of rinderpest) in Burgundy in 810. Although Agobard doesn’t mention this, for perspective it is worth noting there had been three major famines in Francia in living memory – one in 779, another in 792 and another still in 805. The COVID-19 pandemic and this year’s extreme heatwave and drought have given us a small taste of something that a Carolingian peasant would have experienced all the time – feeling at the mercy of natural forces beyond your control. It is worth saying that there were some organised forms of relief available for the most vulnerable in the Carolingian empire. The statutes of Abbot Adalhard of Corbie (751 - 826) reveal the role of monasteries in providing food for the poor and needy through large scale charity, and some parish churches in Francia kept matricula, lists of needy people to be given assistance with daily living, a system perhaps not wholly dissimilar to the systems of parish poor relief in seventeenth century England. None of these are in evidence here and the churches in Burgundy seem to have been unremitting in their collection of tithes, hence why some of the wealthier members of the community seem to have turned away from tithe-payment and charity towards paying the canonicum (an evil twin of the tithe) to good wizards believed to be able to stop the tempestarii from destroying crops.

Sky pirates? You mean like these guys?

We are able to see a certain parallel between Carolingian peasants reacting to crop failure and cattle plagues and twenty-first century citizen’s reacting to COVID-19. This is the tendency to assign blame to something that’s not a part of the natural order of things as the authorities, be they clerics or scientists, would have them believe but instead blame them on malevolent human forces that we can combat using our own willpower and agency. Hence Agobard tells us of cases in which supposed sky pirates and Beneventan agents were lynched or narrowly saved from being so by his interventions as a result of these paranoid beliefs – where have we seen that kind of thing again? Of course we should apply some caution here before drawing parallels between Carolingian peasants and modern day conspiracy theorists. Modern day devotees of conspiracy theories, or as they would call themselves “sceptics” or “truth-seekers” mostly acquire knowledge of and develop belief in such theories through their dissemination in books, alternative media and on the internet, especially social media. Carolingian peasants, however, were overwhelmingly illiterate and lived in an age before print culture, rapid communications and modern mass media. Furthermore, modern conspiracy theories are often seen as a product of a culture of distrust in authority, which likely had no parallel in the Carolingian era. Thus, it might be possible to argue that these peasants were not dabbling in conspiracy theories at all. Instead, some might argue that with all this talk of weather magicians, what we’re seeing is ancient Indo-European folkloric beliefs, untouched by Christian teaching, in action. As this school of historical thought, which you can find most clearly expressed in Jean Delumeau’s “Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire” (1977), would have it, Agobard inveighing against here is inveighing against peasants who were “Christians in name only”, and that paganism had basically survived unscathed in the countryside. And its easy to find a few sources that appear to support this view. The Anglo-Saxon monk, missionary and church reformer St Boniface when he came to Francia in the time of Charles Martel was horrified at the pagan superstitions he found there, and in the 740s a church official in his service condemned, amongst other things, performing sacred rites to Mercury and Jupiter, auguries of the dung of horses and cattle, diviners and sorcerers, celebrating undetermined places as holy, offering sacrifices to saints and making idols out of dough and rags. And Rabanus Maurus (780 – 856), in a very similar fashion to Agobard, debunked the widely held popular belief (first attested by Pliny the Elder in the first century AD) that lunar eclipses were a result of monsters trying to gobble up the moon and could be stopped by throwing stones and javelins at them. What the true religious beliefs of Carolingian peasants generally were we can never truly know, not least because when we do get to hear about (certain aspects of) them it’s coming from hostile religious reformers like Boniface, Agobard and Rabanus. But there are plenty of problems with the view of medieval popular Christianity as essentially being a crypto-pagan folk religion, though that’s too big a topic in itself to go into here. It will suffice for now for me to point you to this excellent article by Dr Francis Young.

And we can find in Agobard’s text evidence to suggest that this wasn’t all the product of ancient and static beliefs, namely that the cattle plague was blamed of Prince Grimoald IV of Benevento – a Lombard principality in Southern Italy, which Charlemagne and the Franks were at war with at the time of the plague in 810. Beyond its obvious parallels with COVID-19 conspiracy theories – Americans and Chinese accusing each other of creating the pandemic with a bioweapon – it shows that Carolingian peasants were actually quite well aware of the affairs of the world beyond their village or home region. Indeed, it even shows that they had some interest in Frankish foreign policy – there’s a lot of good work by historians of early modern England about how rumour should be seen as a sign of political consciousness among the politically disenfranchised i.e. Ethan Shagan’s essay on rumour in the reign of Henry VIII in “The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500 – 1850” (2001), edited by Tim Harris. And it of course goes almost without saying that it shows that medieval peasants could be, by our standards, extremely xenophobic. We can see parallels in the treatment of these suspected Beneventan agents with the attacks on Flemings and Italians in London during the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt.

A denarius of Prince Grimoald IV of Benevento (assassinated in 817) from the British Museum Coin Collection

So perhaps its not the best approach to see the beliefs of these Burgundian peasants in light of static pagan mentalities but instead to see them as more dynamic and akin to modern conspiracy theories. This ties into one of the greatest meta-debates in early medieval history: should we see early medieval people as essentially people just like us but with swords, horses, parchment, very slow communications, poor healthcare and no electricity, or as these strange people completely remote from ourselves whose ways of thinking can only be understood on their own terms. Some, influenced by postmodernism, would go even further the other way and argue that the past is not simply “another country” (to give that much quoted phrase from LP Hartley’s “The Go-between”) but another planet and that we basically can’t really hope to understand why medieval people thought and acted the way they did at all. Both extremes of thinking can lead to us misunderstanding medieval people and falling back into old, condescending stereotypes of them as stupid, primitive or incapable of rational thinking. Agobard’s own thought very clearly disproves notions of medieval people being incapable of rational thinking, even if his kind of rationality is in many ways different from that of post-enlightenment thought and could sometimes be deployed for very disturbing purposes that marked him out as unusual at the time, like his diatribes against Judaism. Like with a lot of medieval people who seem to hold at once enlightened and unenlightened attitudes to us twenty-first century people, these were not contradictory but rather two sides of the same coin. And through comparisons between the beliefs of early medieval peasants and modern conspiracy theorists we can see that the twenty-first century is far from being a supremely rational age. Just take a look at one of the most influential, most dangerous (not to mention most unintentionally hilarious) conspiracy theorists of our times, Alex Jones. This man believes that the US government can create tornadoes and other natural disasters at will and is putting chemicals in the water that “turn the frickin’ frogs gay”, that Hillary Clinton is a sulphur-smelling demon in disguise who runs elite paedophile rings and that all the global elite are in thrall to these interdimensional elvesthey see when they take hallucinogenic drugs who promise them immortality ifthey enslave and exterminate the majority of humanity after creating a globaltotalitarian dictatorship. And this man is a highly successful multi-media pundit, has made millions of dollars and fuelled the rise of Donald Trump. We can only guess at what Agobard and other Carolingian intellectuals would make of the phenomenal influence of crackpot conspiracy theorists in the present.

Alex Jones just minding his business as usual