From the sources 11: writing the fall of the Carolingian Empire or 888 and all that

 

As a follow-up to the previous post and to wrap up loose ends, lets answer two questions. Did people at the time think was going on and they feel like they were living through the end of the Carolingian era? And how do modern historians go about explaining the fall of the Carolingian Empire in 888?

Fortunately, we have quite a bit of contemporary comment on what went down in 888. Let’s focus on two accounts. The first one we’re going to look at is from a continuation of the Annals of Fulda, written at a monastery in Regensburg in Bavaria, in modern day Germany. It picked up where Rudolf of Fulda (one of the few Carolingian intellectuals known to have read Tacitus’ Annals and Germania) left off, and carried the story from Charles the Fat’s accession as king of East Francia in 882 through to that of Louis the Child in 900. The annalist, a monk at Regensburg, would have been quite well informed and broadly pro-Arnulf politically-speaking, since Bavaria was Arnulf’s principal support base for his coup. He would have also been writing in 889, and so his account is almost bang on contemporary to the events he wrote about. This is what he wrote:

At that time many kinglets (reguli) rose up in the kingdom of Arnulf’s cousin Charles [the Fat]. For Berengar [of Friuli], son of Eberhard, makes himself king in Italy. Rudolf, son of Conrad, determined to hold on Upper Burgundy to himself in the fashion of a king. Louis [of Provence], son of Boso, and Guy, son of Lambert, therefore decided to hold the Belgian parts of Gaul and also Provence like kings. Odo, son of Robert, usurped for his use the land up to the Loire River or the province of Aquitaine. Ramnulf [of Aquitaine] thereafter set himself up as king.

An eleventh century copy of the Annals of Fulda, written in the same Carolingian miniscule handwriting as the original. It is opened at the entry for 855, which describes the earthquake at Mainz. This version is housed at the Humanist Library of Selestat in Alsace, France. Photo Credit: By Alexandre Dulaunoy from Les Bulles, Chiny, Belgium - Manuscript du 11e siècle - Manuscript 11 century, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11779856

What’s very clear from this account is that the annalist was very aware of developments going across the erstwhile Carolingian Empire. He knew who all seven men claiming to be legitimate kings following the death of Charles the Fat were. And he also wanted to make it clear to the reader that he saw only one of them as actually being a legitimate king – Arnulf. The other six of them he refers to as reguli, a Latin word meaning petty kings or kinglets, which is a clear indication that he saw them as being men of lesser royalty compared to Arnulf. He also says that they emerged in Arnulf’s kingdom, which shows that he thought that Arnulf should have inherited all of the empire of his uncle, Charles the Fat. And the language he uses to describe how the other six kings took power in their respective regions further suggests that he saw them as usurpers who assumed the rule of their kingdoms illegally. Apart from the fact the annalist was living in East Francia and generally a supporter of its king, Arnulf, it seems that he held to what had once been the prevailing belief (and probably still was in East Francia) that only an adult male Carolingian could be a legitimate king. Arnulf was the only king in 888 for whom that applied, so as far as the annalist was concerned all the others were opportunistic usurpers and secessionist rebels. I imagine the people of Neustria, Aquitaine, Upper Burgundy, Provence and Italy would have seen it quite differently.

And then there’s our second contemporary commentator, Regino of Prum (842 – 915). Regino was the abbot of Prum, a Benedictine monastery then in East-Frankish controlled Lotharingia, now in Germany, near the Belgian border. Prum had enjoyed a special relationship with the Carolingians since before they even became Frankish kings – it was founded in 721 by none other than Bertrada the Elder, the great-grandmother of Charlemagne, and the Carolingian monarchs had been its principal patrons since Pippin the Short rebuilt the monastery in 762. Before Regino became abbot there, the abbey had been badly ravaged by Viking raids both in 882 and 892. He spent most of his life trying to rebuild and reconstitute the abbey’s estates, navigating Lotharingian factional disputes (Arnulf had installed his son Zwentibald as sub-king in Lotharingia and he wasn’t popular) and trying to reform the church in the archdiocese of Trier for his patron Archbishop Ratbod. In the first decade of the tenth century, Regino of Prum wrote a history of the world from the birth of Jesus Christ to the year 906 called the Chronicon. He dedicated the Chronicon to Bishop Adalbero of Augsburg (d.909) and may have intended for King Louis the Child to read, as Adalbero was close to him. Chronicon has a very pessimistic outlook – he finished writing it less than twenty years after the events of 888, and it seemed like things were getting worse. And it is to an extract from the Chronicon, famous among early medievalists, that we shall now turn:

After Charles [the Fat’s] death, the kingdoms which had obeyed his will, as if devoid of a legitimate heir, were loosened from their bodily structure into parts and now awaited no lord of hereditary descent, but each set out to create a king for itself from its own inner parts. The event roused many impulses towards war, not because Frankish princes, who in nobility, strength, and wisdom were able to rule kingdoms, were lacking, but because among themselves an equality of dignity, generosity, and power increased discord. No one surpassed the others that they considered it fitting to submit themselves to follow his rule. Indeed, Francia would have given rise to many princes fit to govern the kingdom had not fortune in the pursuit of power armed them for mutual destruction.

A parchment folio from a mid-twelfth century manuscript containing the Thegan the Astronomer's Life of Louis the Pious and Regino of Prum's Chronicon. By 1150, Carolingian miniscule was starting to evolve into the Gothic script of the late middle ages, and it clearly shows here.  The British Library, Egerton 810 f.94. Image in the Public Domain

What’s immediately striking about Regino’s account of 888 is just how eloquently written and full of rich imagery it is. I just love the metaphor of kingdoms spewing forth kings from their guts. Its also very bleak in its outlook – the Carolingian empire has been dismembered, new dynasties of kings seem to be springing up everywhere and the only thing that’s going stop them from endlessly multiplying is the fact that they’re ultimately going to go to war with each other and one by one they’ll be eliminated on the battlefield. We can only wonder what Regino of Prum would have made of the next millennium of Western European history. He might have seen it as confirmation of his vision, or indeed as even worse than he thought. But certainly, up to 1945, he’d have found no consolation in it. There really is a definite sense of the end of an era here – the rule of the Carolingian dynasty is over and now begins a chaotic free-for-all in which every man who thinks he’s got all the qualities of a good leader will make his bid to become the king of some region in the erstwhile Carolingian empire.

Both the Regensburg continuator of the Annals of Fulda and Regino of Prum’s words became particularly resonant to later historians in the twentieth century. The experience of the two World Wars had basically seemed like the apocalyptic conclusion to what had begun in 888. While nineteenth century French and German historians might have celebrated the breakup of the Carolingian Empire as marking birth of their own nations which they knew and loved, by the 1950s it was clear that this was only the recipe for bloodshed and catastrophe. Its notable how, since 1950, the city of Aachen has awarded the Karlspreis to those who have worked to promote European unification. And sure enough, Charlemagne was adopted as a kind of spiritual father to the European Economic Community, created at the Treaty of Rome in 1957 – the direct forerunner to today’s European Union. Indeed, the EEC before 1973 consisted of almost the same territories as the Carolingian Empire, namely France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, West Germany and Italy. The more the EEC/ EU has expanded, however, the less resonant Carolingian Empire becomes. You can fit the UK, Ireland, Denmark, Spain and Croatia into the story of Carolingian Europe. But it’s worth asking what exactly Charlemagne means to Finland, Latvia, Romania, Cyprus and Malta? Nonetheless, this provides us with all the necessary context for why the Carolingian Empire has attracted so much interest from historians post-WW2, firstly in France, Belgium, Germany and Austria and then from the 1970s increasingly in the UK, Canada and the USA.

Like with the fall of any empire, from the Western Roman Empire to the Soviet Union, historians of the Carolingian empire sort of divide into two camps but with a broad spectrum of opinion in between. At one end of the spectrum are those who see the Carolingian Empire as a doomed project from the start. On the other end, are those who see its fall as mostly down to accidents and the pressure of events. I’ve arranged their views thus – most pessimistic at the top, most optimistic at the bottom. So here they are:

1.       Blackpill doomer levels of pessimism – Heinrich Fichtenau. Fichtenau was an Austrian historian writing in 1949, so at a time when the memory of Nazism and WW2 were fresh in everyone’s heads. Fichtenau was thus all too aware of the horrors that European nation-states were capable of inflicting on each other and their own people, but he was fearful of the growing tendency towards seeing Charlemagne as a prophet of European unity the Carolingian Empire as some kind of Garden of Eden. In his view, the Carolingian Empire was never going to work because it was riven with all kinds of contradictions and instability from the word go. Moreover, the empire was just too big and complex for the primitive and ramshackle government technologies of the period, and its governing elite lacked any kind of civic spirit or sense of duty to the state other than through personal bonds with the king/ emperor. Thus, even in the time of Charlemagne, the writing was on the wall.

2.       Pretty damn pessimistic version 1 – Jan Dhondt. Dhondt was a Belgian historian writing almost at the same time as Fichtenau, and he shared his gloomy post-war European outlook. In Dhondt’s view, kings and aristocrats were inevitably locked in a zero-sum game. With the various dynastic struggles between different members of the Carolingian family and the initial divisions of the empire between the 840s and the 880s, kings had to give away lots of their royal lands (the fisc) to secure fleeting aristocratic support but once given away they couldn’t give them back. Eventually kings were left with very little land. Then during the politically vacuum created by the death of Charles the Fat, some of these aristocrats became kings themselves like Odo, Rudolf and Berengar. The others proceeded to grab as much land as they could and usurp what had formerly been royal prerogatives. Thus by 900, post-Carolingian kingdoms like West Francia were already starting to resemble a chessboard of semi-independent principalities.

3.       Pretty damn pessimistic version 2 – Georges Duby and Timothy Reuter. Building on similar themes to Dhondt, these two historians argued the Carolingian Empire was able to work in the eighth and early ninth centuries because the Carolingian kings were rich and their aristocratic followers not so much. Above all, the Frankish economy was very underdeveloped and agricultural productivity was at subsistence level, so aristocrats needed kings because they couldn’t go it alone. Moreover, Charlemagne’s wars of expansion meant that there were lands, booty and provincial governorships to be won for the aristocrats who fought in the royal armies. But then the Empire’s territorial expansion largely ceased after 804, which meant increased competition for patronage at court leading to factionalism and ultimately civil war when dynastic rivalries between rival Carolingians were thrown into the cocktail. and as the ninth century drew on some measure of economic growth began to happen and aristocrats started to increase their power in the localities at the expense of royal government and the free peasantry. Thus, the empire became increasingly an irrelevance as the aristocracy could be rich and powerful without it.

4.       Pretty damn pessimistic version 3 – Walther Kienast? Some historians have argued that it was ethnic separatism that brought down the Carolingian Empire, and that the reason why kings appeared in 888 in East Francia, Neustria, Aquitaine, Upper Burgundy, Provence and Italy was because these regions all saw themselves as their own distinct countries and national/ ethnic groups that no longer belonged as part of a single Frankish empire. Indeed, a few German historians have argued that in East Francia, the five “stem” duchies of Saxony, Franconia, Bavaria, Swabia and Lotharingia might have broken away and formed independent kingdoms after the death of Louis the Child and the weak rule of his successor Conrad I (r.911 – 918), but that process was reversed in the 920s by the canny policies of King Henry the Fowler (r.919 – 936).

5.       Greyish view 1 – Marc Bloch and Peter Heather. Marc Bloch back in 1939, and Peter Heather much more recently in 2013, have argued that the main culprits for the fall of the Carolingian Empire are the Vikings. They argue that the Viking invasions were so rapid and devastating that due to the slow nature of communications and the ramshackle nature of the Carolingian government and military system, all the regions had to basically turn inwards on themselves and go their own way if they were going to adequately defend themselves. Out of these defensive needs to stop the final waves of barbarian invaders came increased local aristocratic power, castles and mounted knights, resulting in feudalism, political fragmentation – RIP Carolingian Empire.

6.       Greyish view 2 – Matthew Innes. One of the most influential Carolingianists currently working in the Anglophone world, Matthew Innes has a much more subtle take on the fall of the Carolingian Empire than the ones we’ve previously explored. Basically, he argues that the Carolingian Empire basically consisted of a sea of different local networks of aristocratic landowners and churches which the Carolingians were able to bring together into something bigger through patronage, justice, war leadership and collective rituals. The Carolingians were able to offer these networks and their individual members wealth and power beyond what they could possibly imagine if they accepted their authority, but in turn the Carolingians couldn’t run their empire except through these networks and established local bigwigs. The end of military expansion was initially bad, because it meant more intense competition for royal patronage, with the losers no longer being able to simply move to the expanding frontier and start themselves anew. However, with the initial division of the Carolingian Empire into kingdoms the 840s, these networks could now be more tightly managed and successfully negotiated with than ever before. But then between 869 and 884 most of the different branches of the Carolingian family died off and Charles the Fat hoovered up all the kingdoms back into a unified Empire. The reconfigured system could no longer work anymore. All the different aristocratic factions would now have to negotiate with and compete with each other at a distant imperial court, after they’d spent more than a generation being used to more local kings who were more responsive to their interests. Thus, as soon as Charles the Fat bit the dust, the empire fragmented into six kingdoms, this time mostly under men who weren’t Carolingians, and the normal state of politics could resume again.

7.       Cautiously optimistic – Simon MacLean. Most recently, in the first ever in-depth major scholarly treatment of Charles the Fat’s reign, Simon MacLean has argued that the fall of the Carolingian Empire was not at all inevitable and that all previous modern historians’ views mentioned have been blinkered by hindsight. Instead, he argues that it was essentially down to Charles the Fat’s blunders as emperor, and then him dying without a legitimate male heir. Thus, without a credible Carolingian candidate to succeed to the empire, the aristocracy were left to their own devices and had no choice but to elect regional kings from amongst themselves. Thus, it was biological accident and nothing else that doomed the Carolingians.

Now I’m not going to pass an overall judgement on which of these views I agree with. But what I can say is any explanation for the causes of a historical event is incomplete unless it can fully account for the who, what, where and when as well as the why and how. No explanation of, say, the French Revolution is any good unless it can explain why it broke out in 1789 as opposed to earlier or later. If they fail to do that, then they’re really explanations of why that event should have happened. That’s not to say that long term causes don’t matter, but we shouldn’t become so zoomed out in our thinking that we miss what’s actually quite critical in the immediate context. I got that impression from marking lots of essays from my year 9 class (13 – 14-year-olds) on whether long term or short-term causes were more important in causing WW1. Many of them didn’t mention Franz Ferdinand, Sarajevo or the July Crisis of 1914 at all and pinned the outbreak of the Great War on the classic MAIN (militarism, alliances, imperialism and nationalism) acronym so well-known to UK school teachers. A lot of historians of the fall of the Carolingian Empire have fallen into a very similar trap.

But Regino of Prum, who wrote with a couple of decades of hindsight from 888, didn’t fall into that trap. Instead, if we look at the passage from his Chronicon carefully we’ll see that what he identified as critical was the death of Charles the Fat itself and the fact he had no legitimate adult male Carolingian to succeed him. Thus, according to Regino of Prum, the aristocracy of the different regions had to elect kings from amongst themselves because no candidate from the Carolingian dynasty was forthcoming. The Carolingian Empire then could not be reunified because none of these kings had anything to mark themselves out as special and uniquely qualified to rule, in the same way that being a member of the Carolingian dynasty had done. Each had all the personal qualities befitting of a good leader, but then so did all the others. Thus, because no king was more legitimate than the rest, the Carolingian Empire was to remain forever divided into separate kingdoms. Thus, in my view, and contrary to what most people tend to expect of a medieval chronicler, Regino of Prum actually produced a brilliant piece of historical analysis that has stood the test of time – notice the similarities between his and Simon MacLean’s views!

A late seventeenth century engraver imagines Regino of Prum. Photo Credit: By Nicolas de Larmessin III, Esme de Boulonais - Isaac Bullart. Académie Des Sciences Et Des Arts. Amsterdam: Elzevier, 1682., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83827429 

On this day in history 3: RIP Charles the Fat and the end of an era?

 

On 13^th January 888, the Carolingian emperor Charles the Fat breathed his last and died of a stroke. He had been the first Carolingian to have ruled over the whole of his great-grandfather Charlemagne’s empire since 840. But in November 887 a coup d’etat from his nephew, Arnulf of Carinthia, ousted the emperor from his powerbase in East Francia (Germany), after which his credibility and as a ruler and his physical health both rapidly deteriorated. To make matters worse, Charles had no son to succeed him. And after Charles, no one was able to put back the empire together again. The story of his life can appear thus: a long period in which nothing very much went on, then a momentous rise and then a crushing downfall in which all the good luck he previously had deserted from him. But what exactly happened? How did Charles rise and downfall both come about so quickly and unexpectedly? And why did the Carolingian Empire fall apart, this time irreversibly?

The seal of Emperor Charles the Fat, from Bayerisches Nationalmuseum Munich. Photo downloaded from Wikimedia Commons. Charles appears like a Roman Emperor with his laurel wreath, and has the trademark Carolingian look - short hair and a moustache. The seal is inscribed with the words Karolus Magnus ("Charles the Great"), and thus is consciously trying to portray Charles the Fat as a worthy successor to his great-grandfather. Whether he at all was, I leave that for you to decide.

The rise

Charles the Fat was born in 839 at Neudingen in the Black Forest. His father was Louis the German (806 – 876), the middle son of Emperor Louis the Pious (r.814 – 840). When Charles was only in his nappies (or should I really say, his swaddling clothes), civil war broke out between his father and uncles over the division of the empire. This went on for a few years but then at the Treaty of Verdun in August 843 they agreed on how to divide the empire between them. Louis got the territories east of the Rhine and north of the Alps – East Francia or, as we now call it, Germany.

King Louis the German reigned there until his death 33 years later with a great deal of success. East Francia was the least developed of the Frankish kingdoms and presented the greatest difficulties of travel and communications. The old Roman road network ended at the Rhine and Danube, and more than half of the kingdom was covered in dense forests. Yet Louis managed to rule the kingdom effectively with what was at once a firm grip and a light touch, and never faced any serious rebellions from his aristocracy. He was also probably the only ninth century (post-814) Carolingian monarch not to have failed in any of his patriarchal duties. Neither he nor his wives got caught up any sex scandals, he produced three healthy sons who survived to adulthood and he managed to keep those sons from running riot – any rebelliousness from them was headed-off successfully. In 865, Louis the German decided to establish his three sons as sub-kings over the three main divisions of his realm. His eldest son, Louis the Younger, was going to get Saxony (then the area of northern Germany between rivers Rhine, Elbe and Weser). His middle son, Carloman, was going to get Bavaria (bigger than the modern German state of Bavaria because it included what is now Austria as well). Meanwhile, the youngest, Charles the Fat, got Alemannia (modern day Baden-Wurttemberg and German-speaking Switzerland).

When Louis the German died in 876, his kingdom was divided between his three sons in this exact manner. Their uncle, Emperor Charles the Bald, tried to conquer East Francia for himself, but as we saw a week or soago, Louis the Younger thwarted his scheming uncle’s ambitions at the battle of Andernach. And after Charles the Bald’s death, Carloman crossed the Alps and became the new king of Italy. Charles the Bald’s son, Louis the Stammerer, lasted only two years in West Francia and when he died the kingdom was divided between his two sons, Louis III and Carloman. Louis the Stammerer also had a son from his second marriage, Charles the Simple, who was born a few months after his father’s untimely death at the age of only 32 on 10 April 879.

In May 879, it would have seemed like the Carolingian empire was going to remain divided for quite some time to come. Five cousins, all of them great-grandsons or great-great-grandsons of Charlemagne, now ruled in separate kingdoms. Much more ominous was that in October 879, Boso, the son-in-law of Charles the Bald and his former viceroy in Italy, was elected king in Provence by the local nobility. This was the first time a non-Carolingian (read: anyone who was not a male-line descendant of Charlemagne) had reigned anywhere between the Pyrenees, the North Sea and the Adriatic in more than a century. And this was also the first time a region had actually tried to secede, rather than just being apportioned to another member of the Carolingian family. Reunifying the Carolingian Empire would have thus seemed like an impossibility then.

Map of the Carolingian kingdoms as they would have looked c.880. From Wikimedia Commons. Apologies for the map being in Spanish. Territories in pink are Charles the Fat's, territories in green are Louis the Younger's, territories in purple are Louis III of West Francia's, territories in red are Carloman's and territories in orange are Boso's.

Yet if Carolingian political history in the ninth century teaches us anything, its that nothing is set in stone politically and that accidents and the pressure of events can be game-changing. Indeed, already in June 879, Charles’ brother Carloman abdicated as king of Italy and Bavaria due to ill-health, and so his kingdom was divided between his two brothers – Charles the Fat got Italy, and Louis the Younger got Bavaria. On 12^th February 881, Charles the Fat was crowned Emperor in Rome, which didn’t make any practical difference to his power but at least gave him symbolic prestige and technically made him the most senior Carolingian monarch. And on 20 January 882, Louis the Younger died. Charles the Fat was thus now the only Carolingian ruling anywhere east of the Rhine.

 Charles was by far the elder statesman compared to his West Frankish cousins. By working together, the West and East Frankish branches of the Carolingian family managed to crush the usurper, Boso of Provence – they didn’t defeat him completely, but by August 882 his kingdom had been reduced to nothing more than his principal stronghold of Vienne. From then on until his death in 887, Boso was essentially nothing more than a local count, all except one that called himself a king. The Vikings also raided up the Rhine in 882 – Alfred the Great had vanquished the Great Heathen Army in England at the battle of Ashdown in 878, so the Danish Vikings had moved their operations to the Continent. While the major cities of Aachen, Cologne and Trier were sacked by the Vikings, Charles was able to use shrewd diplomacy (and a good bit of bribery) to get the Viking leaders to accept Christianity and become his vassals. By 884, he was also able to secure peace on his eastern frontier with Sviatopluk, the ruler of the Great Moravian Empire. It was also in 884 that his West Frankish cousin, King Carloman, died, having outlived his elder brother by only two years and without any male heirs. Charles’ only competition from within the Carolingian family was a five-year-old boy, Charles the Simple. The West Frankish aristocracy knew who was the most sensible choice of candidate. On 12^th December 884, Charles the Fat was able to just waltz in and receive the West Frankish crown. Now the whole of Charlemagne’s Empire was finally reunited once again under one Carolingian ruler.

But did this situation last? Apparently not. Some might say that it was inevitable. Charles was in charge of the largest state Western Europe had known since the days of the Western Roman Empire, and indeed would ever see again except briefly under Napoleon and Hitler, in an age when information could only travel at the speed of a horse. And unlike the western Roman emperors of old, Charles lacked a large, salaried bureaucracy, a tax system or a standing army. And there were undoubtedly huge differences in language, culture and ethnicity between his subjects. Take the inhabitants of Saxony. Their great-grandparents had been pagans, they still had no roads, cities or written law and they spoke an early form of Low German. They therefore had precious little in common with the inhabitants of Italy or Aquitaine. Moreover, given how the Carolingian Empire had consisted of almost half a dozen kingdoms only five years ago, surely people would have wanted a local king who could be more responsive to their needs than an inevitably distant emperor?

But yet, as always, the Carolingians can surprise us. For the first three years that Charles the Fat ruled over an undivided empire, it looked like it was all going to work because Charles the Fat was very good at delegating power to trusted subordinates, as any successful Carolingian ruler had to. For example, in West Francia, the kingdom he was least present in, he entrusted the governance of the northern regions of the realm firstly to Hugh the Abbot and then to Count Odo of Paris as margraves (military governors) of Neustria, of the southwest (Aquitaine) to Margrave Bernard Hairy Paws and the southeast (Burgundy) to Margrave Richard the Justiciar. While they all came from established aristocratic families, these were men who owed their power and position, above all else, to Charles the Fat and the Carolingian state and could easily have been unmade if they rebelled or were seriously disloyal. And as Simon MacLean has shown, contrary to what some previous generations of historians have claimed, Odo, Bernard and Richard show no signs of attempting to secede or trying to rule as kings in all but name in their own regions – they always obeyed Charles’ instructions and relayed their decisions back to him.

The Fall

Rather, what did for Charles and the unity of the Carolingian Empire was what did for the hopes and dreams of most Carolingian monarchs in the second half of the ninth century – simple biology. Charles the Fat found himself in quite a similar situation to that which Henry VIII would find himself in 1527. Charles could not, for whatever reason, produce any children with his wife, Empress Richgard. He did, however, have an illegitimate son, Bernard (870 – 891), who he’d had with a concubine before his marriage. The obvious solution was divorce. series of Frankish legal precedents had meant that by the mid-ninth century, it was only possible if marital infidelity could be proven. Illegitimate children were also barred from Carolingian royal succession under normal circumstances. Charles the Fat could have changed the rules to make it possible for Bernard to inherit and he may have been planning to, as a few throwaway lines in Notker the Stammerer’s Deeds of Charlemagne (written in 886) suggest. However, he went for the nuclear option, and in 887 tried to divorce Richgard by accusing her of having an adulterous relationship with his chancellor, Bishop Liutward of Vercelli. But Richgard didn’t go the way of Anne Boleyn in 1536. Much like when his cousin King Lothar II of Lotharingia (d.869) tried doing the same back in 858 – 865 by accusing his infertile wife, Queen Theutberga, of incest with her brother, it all blew up in his face. It was at that moment that Charles’ nephew, Arnulf of Carinthia, the illegitimate son of Carloman of Bavaria, who had long been marginalised from politics, decided to pounce as his uncle proved himself incompetent. In November 887, Carloman launched a successful coup d’etat with the help of loyal east Bavarian marcher lords and the Moravians. All of Charles’ supporters among the East Frankish magnates quickly deserted him, the Alemannians being the last. At a royal assembly at Tribur, Arnulf declared Charles deposed and the East Frankish nobility elected him as their king, deciding to ignore the issue of his illegitimacy. Charles had no fight left in him as the 48-year-old’s health wasn’t in the best condition (he may have been elipeptic), and he died of a stroke less than two months later.

The aftermath

With Emperor Charles the Fat gone, what would become of the Empire? Arnulf’s illegitimate birth proved to not be a barrier to him being recognised by the East Frankish aristocracy as the legitimate ruling Carolingian monarch. But outside of East Francia, the governing elites weren’t ready to accept this East Frankish coup d’etat. There was one alternative claimant to the empire from the Carolingian family, Charles the Simple, but he was just an eight-year-old boy. Indeed, there were technically two. Count Herbert I of Vermandois (848 – 907) was a great-great-grandson of Charlemagne in the male-line. His branch of the Carolingian family, the so-called House of Vermandois, were the descendants of Pippin of Italy, Charlemagne’s second eldest son. Pippin’s son Bernard had been blinded for rebelling against his uncle Louis the Pious in 817, but Bernard’s son, Pippin, had been allowed to become count of Vermandois in the kingdom of West Francia when he came of age. But, as I’ve said before, no one ever talks about the Vermandois branch of the Carolingian family, and no one even considered them as candidates for kingship in 888, despite the fact that by the dynastic criteria they were supremely throne-worthy. Count Herbert I of Vermandois was not willing to put himself forward as a candidate for West Frankish king, perhaps because the memory of what happened to his grandfather seventy years earlier made him risk averse. But apart from Arnulf (representing the East Frankish branch of the Carolingian family), Charles the Simple (the West Frankish branch) and Herbert (the Vermandois branch), all other branches of the Carolingian family had since gone extinct by 888.

What happened was that each of the kingdoms within the Carolingian empire elected a candidate from within its own aristocracy. In Italy, the aristocracy elected Margrave Berengar of Friuli (845 – 924), from the Unruoching family, as their king. In Provence, the local elites made the young Louis the Blind (880 – 928), the son of Boso, their king. In Upper Burgundy, the area around the Jura Mountains and Lake Geneva in modern day eastern France and western Switzerland, Rudolf (859 – 912) from the House of Welf was elected king by the nobles and bishops there. In West Francia, the magnates north of the Loire elected Margrave Odo of Neustria (857 – 898), the hero who saved Paris from the Viking siege of 885 – 886, as their king – the Viking threat still remained strong there, so they needed a “strenuous warrior” in charge. But those in Aquitaine elected Count Ramnulf II of Poitiers (850 – 890) as their king. Meanwhile, Duke Guy of Spoleto firstly made a bid for the West Frankish throne, but was deterred by news of Odo’s coronation, before then wrestling with Berengar for the Italian throne.

Thus in 888, there were seven kings, or at least men who claimed to be kings, in the Carolingian Empire – more than there had ever been. And unlike on previous occasions when the empire had been divided into kingdoms, only one of their rulers was a Carolingian (a male-line descendant of Charlemagne) – Arnulf. Berengar, Guy and Louis did claim descent from Charlemagne, in Berengar’s case through his mother (a daughter of Louis the Pious), in Guy’s case through his great-grandmother (a daughter of Pippin of Italy) and in Louis’ case through his mother (a daughter of Charles the Bald). But Rudolf, Ramnulf and Odo had no Carolingian blood at all.

End of an era?

Was this, then, the end of an era? In some ways, it most certainly wasn’t. Carolingians continued to rule in East Francia (Germany) without a break until 911, when the royal line went extinct there with the death of Arnulf’s son, King Louis the Child. And in West Francia, after Odo’s death in 898, Charles the Simple finally got the throne he had been unfortunately passed over for on two occasions. Charles the Simple was deposed in 922 by Odo’s brother, Margrave Robert of Neustria (866 – 923), and locked away in a dungeon by his cousin, Herbert II of Vermandois, in 923. But Charles’ son Louis was invited back from exile in Anglo-Saxon England to become king in 936, and the Carolingians then continued to rule in West Francia all the way up to 987.

Also, and this is perhaps most important to stress, this wasn’t the moment when the nations of Western Europe sprung forth and agreed to go their separate ways. People living on both sides of the Rhine continued to identify as Franks until after 1000. And all of the kingdoms that emerged in 888 – West Francia, Aquitaine, Upper Burgundy, Provence, Italy and East Francia – were all based on political units that had either been created or endorsed by the Carolingians. None of them were the product of ethnic separatism. The kings did sometimes engage in meaningful forms of co-operation, and churchmen and intellectuals continued to move across kingdoms with ease in search of patronage and employment where they could get it. In many respects, Western Europe in the tenth century was still a Frankish world, even though the Carolingians no longer ruled over most of it.

But ultimately, I’d argue that 888 was still nonetheless the end of an era, for three reasons. The first is to state the obvious – the Carolingian Empire never came back. The imperial title continued to exist after 888 and was fought over by Arnulf, Louis the Blind, Guy of Spoleto and Berengar, but it basically meant nothing outside Italy and after 924 it was vacant. The Empire would be revived in the late tenth century by the Ottonians, the dynasty that succeeded the Carolingians in East Francia, after they conquered Italy in the 960s but it was territorially half the size of the realm of Charlemagne. Burgundy and Provence would not become part of the Empire (known from the late twelfth century as the Holy Roman Empire) until 1032. West Francia always remained independent from the German emperors, much to the gnashing of their teeth. And, as said before, no state in Europe would ever be as large as the Carolingian Empire until the incredibly short-lived empires of Napoleon and Hitler more than a thousand years later. The future of Western Europe was one of political fragmentation and inter-state competition, which would in due time give birth to overseas colonial expansion, the scientific, financial and industrial revolutions, constitutional democracy and the world wars.

The second reason is that it rewrote the rules for who could hold political power at the highest level. Ever since Pippin the Short and his sons were anointed by Pope Stephen II in 754, which we’ve talked about here before, it had been clearly established that only direct male-line descendants (his sons, their sons, their sons’ sons’ and so on) could rule as Frankish kings. This principle remained completely unchallenged until 879 with Boso of Provence, but outside of Provence his actions were seen as an illegal secessionist revolt and his fledgling independent kingdom was quickly crushed. But by 888, the goalposts had most definitely shifted, as only in East Francia did the magnates elect a Carolingian to be their king – in the other four or five kingdoms, they elected kings of less distinguished lineages. This is particularly striking in West Francia, where they elected Odo, whose family had only been established among the West Frankish aristocracy for one generation prior to him, when there were two Carolingian candidates they could have elected – Charles the Simple and Herbert of Vermandois. Its true that Charles the Simple was only a boy of eight, but that didn’t stop the seven-year-old Louis the Blind from being elected king of Provence in the same year. Clearly, family background and royal ancestry were no longer the supreme qualifiers for kingship. What exactly did make you a suitable candidate for the throne in all the different post-Carolingian kingdoms was, however, unclear and it would remain so for some time to come.

The third reason is that the tenth century, which followed shortly afterwards, has such a different feel to the Carolingian ninth century. This is true when it comes to both politics, intellectual life and the surviving source material. The Carolingian tradition, going back to Charlemagne himself, of kings issuing capitularies and other reforming legislation, had died in the 890s – Guy’s son and successor, King Lambert I of Italy, issued the last ever capitulary in 898. Tenth century kings did not legislate, whichever side of the river Rhine, Rhone, the Jura mountains or the Alps they ruled. In many ways, tenth century kingship on the Continent was a lot less ambitious than it was in the ninth century, essentially revolving around justice, ritual and warfare. Neither Otto the Great of East Francia (r.936 – 973) nor his West Frankish Carolingian contemporaries were interested in issuing new laws to reform government, society and morality like Charlemagne, Louis the Pious, Lothar, Louis II of Italy and Charles the Bald had been. This went hand in hand with changes in the theory and ideology of government and politics. To summarise it crudely, while some sense of kings upholding the common good of the kingdom remained, after 888 the idea that kings were responsible for the moral health and spiritual salvation of their subjects had fallen by the wayside. No tenth century king on the Continent would organise realm-wide collective penances for famines and military defeats like Charlemagne and Louis the Pious had done. And while a (diminished) number of intellectuals still strutted round the courts of West Frankish, East Frankish and Italian kings, they no longer advised kings on how to build a better world – no more Alcuin, no more Benedict of Aniane, no more Hrabanus Maurus, no more Agobard of Lyon, no more Sedulius Scottus and no more Hincmar. By contrast to the ninth century, the tenth feels a lot more like an age of tough realpolitik.

All of this impression of difference between the ninth and tenth centuries is reflected in, or indeed created by, the surviving source material. Take for example the Patrologia Latina, an anthology of all significant Christian Latin authors whose names we know from Tertullian (c.200 AD) to Pope Innocent III (d.1216), created between 1862 and 1865 by the French Catholic priest Jacques Paul Migne. The whole thing runs at 217 volumes (excluding indices). For the ninth century, Migne compiled together 30 volumes of works by Latin authors, the overwhelming majority of them writing in the Carolingian Empire. For the tenth century, however, he could only compile together 7 volumes. Given that the challenges of survival for ninth century texts are the same as for tenth century texts, this is a strong indication that there was much less intellectual activity in the tenth century than in the ninth, resulting from the change in political climate. Its also the case that by 900 all of the three major series of late Carolingian annals, The Annals of Saint Bertin, the Annals of Fulda  and the Annals of Saint Vaast had all ground to a halt. With the exception of the Annals of Flodoard, written between 919 and 966, the first half of the tenth century is almost a total vacuum when it comes to history-writing, which only began to revive itself from the 960s at the Ottonian court. The second half of the tenth century saw something of an intellectual revival, with lots of exciting stuff going on in mathematics, astronomy and the study of the Roman classics, but it was all largely divorced from a broader political programme. For example, when Otto III invited Gerbert of Aurillac, arguably the smartest man of the tenth century, to his court he wanted to see him demonstrate the mechanical pendulum clock he had invented, not give him advice about how to morally reform his empire. The Carolingian era really was a very distinctive, almost unique, moment in early medieval history, and 888 really did bring it to an end.

The beginning of a bold new era? Or just another geopolitical headache? Europe in the year 900. Looking at something like this can make it seem that Charles the Fat's reunification of the Carolingian Empire was just an insignificant blip, but hopefully this post has shown that it was more than that, and that the final breakup of the Carolingian Empire in 888 really meant something important.

From the sources 9: self-righteousness and hypocrisy in the eleventh century reformation Part 2

 

So we’re back where we left off. Why did the plan to kickstart the almost adolescent Guibert on his clerical career fall through? Well firstly, we need to understand how the initial job offer was made. Like most job offers, then and now, it was made after a vacancy had emerged in the institution, in this case the collegiate church at Clermont owned and controlled by Guibert’s brother’s feudal lord. But the circumstances in which the vacancy had emerged were nothing ordinary. Indeed, it had come about because a new revolutionary movement was starting to send shockwaves across Europe in the 1060s. But what was this revolution? Guibert, who had a good awareness of recent historical developments, gives us plenty of indication as to what this revolution was:

At that time, the Holy See had initiated a new attack against married clerics. Consequently, some zealots began railing against these clerics, claiming that they should either be deprived of ecclesiastical prebends or forced to abstain from priestly functions.

What Guibert is alluding to here is a revolution brewing all the way over in Rome (the Holy See), but one that nonetheless was sending none other than the papal revolution or the reformation of the eleventh century. Historians have traditionally called it the Gregorian reform movement – the latter term is misleading because, contrary to what earlier generations of scholars thought, pretty much all historians now would agree that it wasn’t all the brainchild of Pope Gregory VII (r.1073 – 1085). For starters, it had begun a generation before Gregory, in the time of his predecessors Leo IX (r.1049 – 1054), Nicholas II (r.1059 – 1061) and Alexander II (r.1061 – 1073). The exact roots of this revolution are incredibly murky and hard to determine, and there’s no agreement among historians as to why it came about, though its safe to say it didn’t come out of the blue. What we can say is that by c.1060, a clearly identifiable revolutionary movement, with its cockpit in Rome and its main hotbeds of support in France, the Low Countries, Western Germany and Northern and Central Italy, had emerged calling for the following:

1.       Strong, centralised papal leadership over a Latin Western church unified by law and religious practices.

2.       The end of secular control over churches and monasteries, and any lands or tithes attached to them, and the appointment of priests by lay men (lords and kings).

3.       A wholesale campaign against corruption within the clergy, aimed specifically at stamping out the four evils of simony (purchasing of church positions), nepotism, clerical marriage and pluralism (priests being responsible for multiple churches and getting revenues from them).

While not the mastermind behind the Eleventh Century Reformation, without a doubt one of the most fiery and determined revolutionary leaders in history - Hildebrand of Sovana (1015 - 1085), or as he became, Gregory VII. 

All of these three aims were highly interconnected. In the first half of the eleventh century, Western Christendom was essentially a patchwork of local churches, all with their own effective leadership and very different customs, especially when it came to church services (the liturgy). They essentially shared only the Latin language, a set of theological doctrines that hadn’t changed in almost 300 years and nominal allegiance to the pope in Rome. Peter Brown has aptly described Europe in the period 500 – 1050 as consisting of “micro-Christendoms.” The papal reform movement aimed to transform this into a tightly-run religious multi-national corporation, or to pick a different analogy a sort of medieval European Union. To this end, the church as a corporation needed complete control over all church buildings, lands and offices, and the clergy needed to be transformed from being essentially local community figures and civil servants to kings and princes, into a tightly organised and morally upright pan-European bureaucracy answerable first and foremost to the church as a corporation and its CEO, the pope.

The effects of this transformation can be clearly illustrated by a comparison, between Gregory the Great (r.590 – 604), arguably the most powerful and successful early medieval pope, and Innocent III (r.1198 – 1216), without a doubt the most powerful and successful pope of the high Middle Ages.

More than 850 of Gregory letters survive. This is a figure so voluminous that only a few figures in European history before the twelfth century, such as the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero, 835 of whose letters survive thanks to the heroic efforts of early medieval copyists, can come close to rivalling him for. Gregory’s letters are overwhelmingly addressed to recipients from Central Italy, the Bay of Naples and Sicily. Fewer than thirty of his letters were addressed to recipients in Merovingian Gaul, excluding those for Provence where the Pope owned agricultural estates. Fewer than ten were addressed to Visigothic Spain. Perhaps Gregory the Great’s most famous achievement was instigating the process of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity by sending St Augustine of Canterbury to the court of King Aethelbert of Kent. Yet most of the Anglo-Saxons were converted not by the Roman mission, but by Irish missions led by the likes of Saint Aidan. The result of this was that Anglo-Saxon England remained divided between Celtic and Roman Christian customs, which were profoundly different from each other until the Synod of Whitby in 664, in which the Roman method for calculating the date of Easter won out over the Celtic one, which was then followed by a plague that killed off most of the pro-Celtic bishops. Theodore of Tarsus, whom I’ve mentioned here before, came over to England in 668 and strictly reorganised the church under Roman lines, and from his time on Anglo-Saxon archbishops of Canterbury would collect their pallium (band of cloth symbolising their office) from Rome.

 Thus, the Pope had considerable leverage in Anglo-Saxon England, but very little anywhere else in early medieval Europe outside Italy. Pippin the Short might have deposed the last Merovingian king, Childeric III, with the sanction of Pope Zacharias and been anointed by his successor Stephen II. Charlemagne might have been crowned by Pope Leo III. Lothar I might have got Pope Gregory IV to be on his side for moral support in the Field of Lies in 833, where he and his brothers Pippin and Louis the German tried to depose their father, Emperor Louis the Pious. But papal authority in the Carolingian empire was mostly nominal. The Carolingians may have spread Roman customs for monasticism and the liturgy across their territories at the expense of pre-existing local ones, but they did this at their own accord, not that of the papacy, and the pope only exercised influence over the internal affairs of the Carolingian Empire when he was called in to do so i.e., Pope Nicholas I (r.855 – 867) in Lothar II’s messy attempt to divorce Queen Theutberga. Indeed, sometimes the papacy and the Carolingians resented each other and wanted to stay out of each other’s affairs completely, as was the case with Pope Paschal I (r.817 – 824), who basically wanted the Holy See to withdraw into its own and told Louis the Pious’ envoys in 823 to f*** off. And as Paschal I’s pet project, the Basilica of Santa Prassede in Rome shows, he really fancied himself as essentially the local ruler of the eternal city, unmatched throughout the Christian world in the number of ancient martyrs, saints and churches it could fit within its walls.

Pope Paschal I's ninth century mosaics at Santa Prassede, Rome. By Welleschik - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6853832

For Innocent III, 5,000 of his letters survive. These are addressed to an impressive range of recipients which are more evenly across the whole of Catholic Europe. To give just a particular kind of example, he sent letters addressed to ordinary men and women (not kings, queens or aristocrats) who wanted to separate from their spouses at Osney in Oxfordshire, Siponto in Southern Italy and in Spain and Austria. His activities as pope also included the following:

1.       At the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, he received delegates from Poland to Portugal and from the Arctic Circle to the Holy Land – until the First Lateran Council in 1123, church councils in the west tended to be only kingdom-wide or provincial affairs. There he made rulings, binding throughout the whole of Latin Christendom on a whole range of things. These included declaring that the universe was indeed created from nothing; banning the clergy from gambling and being drunk; exempting priests from taxation; determining how many degrees of kinship made a marriage incestuous; requiring Jews to wear special clothing to mark themselves out from Christians.

2.        Innocent III excommunicated King Philip Augustus of France for making an attempt at licenced bigamy when he couldn’t divorce his queen, Ingeborg of Denmark, and King John of England for refusing to accept his favourite candidate for Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton. He even forbade religious services from taking place in both kingdoms until their kings had reconciled with him.

3.       He acted as referee in the civil war in Germany from 1198 – 1208, made and unmade one German Emperor (Otto IV) and then made another (Frederick II).

4.       He launched two crusades to the Holy Land, one of which (the Fourth Crusade) he inadvertently sent off course to Constantinople after he excommunicated all the crusaders in 1202 for attacking the Catholic Croatian town of Zadar, and another against the Cathar heretics in Southern France.

5.       He approved the creation of the Franciscan and Dominican orders of friars.

6.       He annulled the Magna Carta for King John in 1215.

The following was also true of the church as an institution by 1215:

1.       It had a clearly defined, fairly uniform official hierarchy across Europe that had to answer first and foremost to the authority of the Pope – Pope, Cardinals, Legates, Bishops, Archdeacons, Deacons, Priests, Canons and Minor Orders.

2.       It directly owned 20% of all agricultural land in Europe, and could claim 10% of all legitimate incomes as tithes paid to priests and bishops (not to be appropriated by kings and lay aristocrats).

3.       It had a network of church courts all over Europe, with the Papal Curia in Rome being the highest of them all, in which priests could be tried for criminal offences separately from the rest of the population, and anyone could appeal to for dispute resolution over marriage, debt and a whole host of other things.

A near-contemporary fresco (1219) of Pope Innocent III, the Uber Pope of the Middle Ages

All of this would have been unthinkable until the later eleventh century. This might surprise us, because many of us are used to thinking of the Middle Ages as single epoch in the general setup of things largely stayed the same throughout. We’re also used to thinking of it as an age in which the Church was a concrete and all-powerful institution with iron control over all of Europe – almost like the Cold War era Eastern Bloc, but with popes and the inquisition being like a kind of Stasi. Of course, this popular view in the Anglo-American world is in itself is a misleading caricature, based on more than 500 years of anti-Catholic propaganda. But like all myths there is a kernel of truth in it. Yet that kernel of truth only applies to the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, when the Church really was this pan-European religious corporation under the supreme central leadership of the Pope. And the revolution going on in Guibert’s lifetime was the turning point that made this world possible. Without it figures like Innocent III, who really was quite the authoritarian and really did try to leave the stamp of his power across the whole of Europe, could not have existed.

Who made this possible? Political revolutions need leaders and visionaries and the papal revolution had them aplenty – Pope Leo IX, Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida (1015 – 1061), Cardinal-Bishop Peter Damian of Ostia (1007 – 1073), Pope Nicholas II, Pope Alexander II, Pope Gregory VII and Pope Urban II (r.1088 – 1099). Indeed, Gregory VII can be seen as something of a Vladimir Lenin figure in the Papal Revolution, and he divides opinion among historians as much as Lenin used to do, but now doesn’t so much.

But revolutions can’t succeed with these alone. They need provocateurs and shock troops. Provocateurs they certainly had in the form of Cardinals and Papal Legates (commissioners sent into different kingdoms), themselves innovations of the late 1050s and early 1060s. But who were their shock troops. Among their shock troops were the German nobles who rebelled against Emperor Henry IV during his struggle with Pope Gregory VII over who had control over the church in the German Empire in the 1070s. Also among them were the Norman barons and knights who conquered Anglo-Saxon England with William the Conqueror or who subdued Southern Italy with Robert Guiscard. The Normans fought at Hastings on 14 October 1066 under the papal banner, after William had gained Pope Alexander II’s support for the invasion on the promise he would reform the English church, helped by Gregory VII (then Archdeacon Hildebrand). The Norman Conquest of England in 1066 – 1071 was then followed by a programme of thoroughgoing reform and upheaval of the English church under William the Conqueror – I recently taught this to my Year 10 GCSE history class, focusing of course on the latter side of things. The Norman Conquest of Southern Italy meant bringing those lands back under the Pope’s remit to begin with, since they belonged either to the East Roman Empire or the Muslim Arab rulers of Sicily, and the Normans literally held their territories there as fiefs from the Pope.

The papal banner at Hastings as shown in the Bayeux Tapestry (c.1070)

But it wasn’t just elite warriors who were the pope’s shock troops. The eleventh century is basically the point in time at which we see popular politics and the crowd re-emerging clearly for the first time in the West since the days of the Western Roman Empire. We’ve seen signs that peasants in the Carolingian Empire were aware of politics and the law in the Carolingian Empire, but its in the eleventh century that we really start to see ordinary people getting politicised for the first time since antiquity. Relatively humble clerics, monks and preachers, the “zealots” of Guibert’s account, were able to capture huge audiences with their charismatic speeches and demonstrations. They could then whip up these crowds into a frenzy and use them as lynch mobs to go after priests deemed to be corrupt or pressure the authorities to reform the church.

This was the case from the beginning. The nominal start date of the papal revolution is the Council of Rheims in 1049, which Leo IX held despite not asking for King Henry I of France’s permission. For the Pope to hold a church council outside Central Italy without asking the permission of a monarch was unprecedented and unacceptable. The king angrily responded by holding a feudal levy at the same time as a council which a third of the French bishops and abbots attended, and Leo IX excommunicated them – no ninth or tenth century pope would have dared try and override the authority of a king like that. But what interests us is that at the council, Leo IX made all the French bishops and abbots who did attend swear on holy relics that they had not bought their offices – that they hadn’t committed simony, in other words. They had to do this in front of crowds of ordinary citizens of Rheims and peasants from the surrounding countryside, who had come to cheer on the reformers and pressure and intimidate the bishops and abbots who wouldn’t comply. From the beginning, the papal revolution was populist.

Quite the place to start a revolution, is it not? The Romanesque basilica of Saint Remigius at Rheims, which Leo IX consecrated before the council in 1049. I visited it in May and had a very good time there.

And it only got more so from there. In May 1057, an incendiary sermon preached when the relics of Saint Nazzarro were being moved from one church to another led to popular uprising in Milan – the Patarenes. This predominantly lower-class movement took over the city government of Milan from its archbishop, installed their own priests in the city churches in place of those they saw as corrupt and even lynched some of the priests who had bought their offices/ were married – there was revolutionary violence aplenty in the Patarene uprising, that any Jacobin or Bolshevik would give a nod of approval.

At Florence in 1068, an immense crowd of its citizens gathered to watch Peter, a Vallombrosan monk, walk through flames in support of his abbot, Giovanni Gualberto’s, campaign against simony and nepotism, in particular against the Bishop of Florence who had bought his office. He miraculously survived, the opposite of what happened to Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire on 17 December 2010 and literally ignited the Arab Spring, but this put kindling on papal revolution all the same.

Pope Gregory VII himself was all in favour of encouraging popular unrest against clerics who wouldn’t budge. Indeed, he himself said in one of his letters:

We have heard that certain of the bishops who dwell in your parts either condone or fail to take notice of the keeping of women by priests, deacons and sub-deacons. We charge you in no way to obey these bishops or follow their precepts …

… If they disregard our rulings, or rather those of the holy fathers, the people may in no wise receive their ministrations, so that those who are not corrected by the love of God and the honour of their office may be brought to their senses by the shame of the world and the reproof of the people.

Gregory VII was hardly a democrat. But he did hold the incredibly radical belief that if people in positions of authority were deeply corrupt and immoral, you were under no obligation to show respect or obey them in any way. This was exemplified in 1076 when he released all the German nobles from their oaths of loyalty to Henry IV of Germany, thus taking a sledgehammer to the traditional authority of kings and emperors. But here was appealing to a lesser sort of people, ordinary townspeople and peasants as well as aristocrats. And to encourage them to reject the authority of bishops who allowed the priests in their diocese to live in sin really was incredibly socially subversive, as well as theologically dubious – it did sound remarkably like the late Roman heresy of Donatism. This kind of thinking, that high-minded transformative ideas must trump respect for established order and authority, is the spirit that has, for better or worse, made the modern world. in many ways also, Gregory VII was being just like a Mao Zedong, a supreme leader  trying to build his own power by encouraging terror, unrest and general defiance of established elites in favour of high-minded revolutionary ideas. The parallels between the traditional Chinese elites and the centrality of kings and bishops to early medieval Western European social order, both of whose traditional power was challenged or even broken in this wave of extremism, are also tempting. Gregory VII was a truly dangerous man, and in the words of my former university tutor Conrad Leyser “a maniac.”

Indeed, we can see the truly subversive potential this had after Gregory VII’s death. In the opening decades of the twelfth century, around the time Guibert de Nogent was writing his autobiography, a blacksmith in Ghent in Flanders called Manasses led a crowd of his fellow citizens to expel a married priest from one of the city churches. He was an associate of Tanchelm of Antwerp, a critic of corrupt and unreformed clergy who was so extreme that he was accused of heresy, but was so popular that until some years before his death in 1115 no one dared arrest him and he actually served as the Count of Flanders’ envoy to the papal court. Another example of papal reformers who veered into heretical territory is the monk Henry of Lausanne, a super charismatic preacher who in 1116 led a successful popular revolt against the clergy of Le Mans and forced all the city’s prostitutes to marry all the unmarried men there. Henry of Lausanne encouraged people, as shown by his wildfire preaching campaigns in southern France, to reject infant baptism and the necessity of priests performing the sacraments for people to get into Heaven, ideas that prefigured the teachings of Protestant Reformers. Gregory VII would have been horrified by him, as indeed were orthodox Catholics at the time, but he was nonetheless part of the can of worms that Gregory VII had unleashed. Indeed, so much of the history of the high and late medieval church is all about the attempts to reign in the demons that the papal revolution, and Gregory VII in particular, had unleashed. It is also through this that we can trace a direct link between the two great reformations – the one in the eleventh century, and the one in the sixteenth.

This post might seem like an unnecessary tangent, given that we were supposed to be discussing Guibert, but I’m afraid it was necessary. Thanks for bearing with me, but for the next post we’ll zoom back into the juicy details, and see how the eleventh century reformation/ papal revolution played out at the grassroots level and how that affected young Guibert’s future.

Sources:

“A monk’s confession: the memoirs of Guibert de Nogent” edited and translated by Paul Archambault, University of Pennsylvania Press (1996)

Chris Wickham, “The inheritance of Rome: A history of Europe from 400 -1000”, Penguin (2009)

Robert Moore, “The first European Revolution, 970 - 1215”, Blackwell (2000)

“Selected letters of Pope Innocent III concerning England (1198 - 1216)”, edited and translated by C.R Cheney, Thomas Nelson (1953)

Edward the Confessor's foreign policy

 Happy new year everyone. I hope you've had a good 2021, in spite of the constantly evolving plague situation, and that much happiness and success awaits you in 2022, which will hopefully be less chaotic but we'll have to wait and see. I have to say that last year was a year in which I accomplished a lot - I got a Merit on my Master's Degree, I got my first regular paid job, I did a presentation on late Carolingian assembly politics in Richer of Rheims (an aspect of my Master's thesis) to the Cambridge graduate medieval seminar, I secured a PGCE place at Roehampton University to train as a secondary school history teacher and, of course, I accomplished what I'd been meaning to do for a very long time in starting a history blog. What 2022 shall bring for me, only time can tell. If the international situation permits it, I hope to go travelling in Europe in May and June for a big late Roman and early medieval tour (Rheims, Trier, Aachen, Cologne, Ravenna and Milan are all on the itinerary). I'm incredibly excited about it, and you can reasonably expect that many interesting blogposts (with lots of pretty pictures) will be generated from it in due course. 

I've been planning many exciting blogposts for this new year. The first of these, the one you are presently reading is the one on Edward the Confessor - the 956th anniversary of his death (5 January 1066) having been just a couple of days ago (I'm ever so timely, am I!). I'm not going to give a comprehensive treatment of his life and reign here. That would take far too long for a simple blogpost, and at any rate, if that's what you wanted, you'd be best advised to read Frank Barlow's excellent biography of the king in the Yale Monarchs series, or to the abbreviated version in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography which I shall be citing a lot here. Nor will I be telling the familiar, well-trodden story of the prelude to the Norman Conquest - that gets so much attention in UK historical media anyway, and I've already touched on that a bit here.

I don't this image needs much explanation

What I'm going to talk about today is about a specific aspect of Edward the Confessor's reign - his foreign policy. It is very well-known that Edward the Confessor had close connections to the Continent - his mother was Emma of Normandy, after all, and he spent more than a third of his life in exile there. Anyone who has studied this period in English history in depth will also know that his court had a very cosmopolitan feel to it. Edward the Confessor made a Norman monk, Robert of Jumieges, archbishop of Canterbury in 1044, appointed more than half a dozen foreigners to other vacant bishoprics and abbacies across the country, had a non-English cleric called Regenbald as his chancellor and made his French nephew, Ralph of Mantes, the earl of Hereford in 1047 (we'll come back to him later). And one of Edward the Confessor's greatest, most well-remembered achievements (to this day), was building Westminster Abbey (completed 28 December 1065) in the new Romanesque style that had been pioneered in the previous half century in France, northern Italy and western Germany - the "white mantle of churches" that the Burgundian chronicler Raoul Glaber had written about roughly thirty years before. But Edward the Confessor's connections to Normandy and his cosmopolitan court aside, its the  domestic side of his reign that gets the most attention. 

Now, as regards Edward's domestic rule, there's a lot of debate amongst historians to who was really in charge of the kingdom's internal affairs and what was the balance of power between the king and his aristocracy (above all, Earl Godwin and his family). The view among most scholars up until very recently was that Edward the Confessor's effective control over the kingdom internally was massively circumscribed by an "overmighty" nobility, which really amounted to the three magnate houses - the Godwinsons, the Leofricsons and the Siwardsons - that had risen to prominence under Cnut and his sons and had effectively monopolised appointments to almost all of the six or seven provincial earldoms. Robin Fleming argued in a seminal and very influential work "Kings and Lords in Conquest England" (1991), with a wealth of statistics backing her arguments, that the wealth and landed resources of the Godwin family, and to an even extent that of the three main magnate families combined, outstripped that of the king. Barlow himself in his ODNB article largely concurs with Fleming's view, and thus he sees Edward the Confessor as being in quite a compromised position when it came to controlling the kingdom's political elite and internal affairs.

Recently, this view of the balance of political power between king and aristocracy has been challenged by Stephen Baxter, one of the foremost experts on late Anglo-Saxon government and the Domesday Book at the moment (I was fortunate enough to attend a few of his seminars at Oxford back in 2019, which feels like a very long time ago), who in his article "1066 and Government" (2018), and in his academic output more generally, has made the case that Edward was actually by far the wealthiest landowner in the kingdom both in terms of the extent and real value of his estates. He was also able to draw on revenues from food rents, judicial fines and the land tax (geld) which the earls could not. And above all, as Baxter argues quite succintly, most of the lands the earls "owned" were, like with counts in the ninth century Carolingian Empire, were actually temporary, revocable grants attached to their office, not to their family property, and so it was more than possible to break the power of earls by confiscating their offices and the lands that went with it, as Edward himself actually showed time and again (see "1066 and Government", pp 138 - 140).  Still there's plenty of room for debate about the nature of pre-Conquest English royal power and government - these scholarly debates never settle, do they!/

But, what all historians can agree on is that Edward the Confessor was in control of the kingdom's external affairs, which is what concerns us here. We'll explore Edward's policies to both England's neighbours in Great Britain and on mainland Europe, though Normandy will be deliberately left out (it gets enough attention elsewhere).

Wales and Scotland 

In the Abingdon and Worcester versions (Manuscripts C and D) of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, an obituary poem for King Edward is provided in the annals for 1065. The first verse goes:

Here King Edward, lord of the English, 
sent a righteous soul to Christ.
a holy spirit into God's keeping.
Here in the world he lived for a while
in kingly splendour, skilful in counsel;
24-and-a-half
in number of years, a noble ruler,
distributed riches. Aethelred's son
ruler of heroes, greatly distinguished,
ruled Welsh and Scots and Britons too,
Angles and Saxons, combatant champions.
Cold sea waves thus encircle
all youthful men that loyally
obeyed Edward, princely king.

The poem thus portrays Edward as having been, in effect, the imperial overlord of all Great Britain, as some of his tenth century predecessors undoubtedly had been (more about that when I finally get round to doing my Athelstan post I've been meaning to do ever since he won the World Cup of Monarchs in November, I promise you!). But what was the real substance behind it?

At the beginning of Edward the Confessor's reign in 1042, it would seem that this wasn't the case at all. The kingdom of the Scots (also known as Alba) was completely independent, as were the three Welsh kingdoms of Deheubarth, Gwynedd and Powys. Cumbria and Westmorland were in a bit of a power vacuum, following the collapse of the Welsh-speaking kingdom of Strathclyde sometime after the battle of Carham in 1018, but the kings of Scots were slowly extending their power into the region. 

The first we hear of Anglo-Welsh relations in Edward the Confessor's reign is in 1046, when the Worcester manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports that Sweyn Godwinson (d.1052), earl of southwestern Mercia (Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire), made an alliance with Gruffydd ap Llewellyn (1010 - 1063), the king of Gwynedd and Powys, and together they invaded Deheubarth. Whether he did this on Edward's instruction, or out of his own initiative and the leeway given to him as a provincial governor (as that's basically what an Anglo-Saxon earl was) on a frontier region, we can't really know though the latter seems likely. Sweyn would disgrace himself later that year by kidnapping and raping the Abbess of Leominster, resulting in him being stripped of his earldom and exiled from the kingdom. Gruffydd ap Llewellyn's alliance with the English would prove to be a short-term arrangement for mutual convenience when he teamed up with some Irish Vikings from Dublin to raid England on 29 July 1049. Other than that, not much seems to have gone on for the first decade of Edward the Confessor's reign.

Things escalated when in 1053, Edward managed to get Rhys ap Rhydderch, the king of Deheubarth, assassinated, after Rhys had raided Westbury-on-Severn in Gloucestershire and slaughtered the garrison there a few months earlier. This created a power vacuum in South Wales, which Gruffydd ap Llewellyn was quick to exploit, and by 1055 Gruffydd had established himself as high king.

Now that Wales was politically unified under a charismatic leader, more border warfare was to ensue. In 1055, Edward the Confessor convened the Witan (royal assembly of all the prominent landowners in the realm) and by their collective judgement, Earl Aelfgar of East Anglia was dismissed from his earldom and outlawed. Our sources are in disagreement as to why this happened. Manuscript E (written at Canterbury) of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that Earl Aelfgar was exiled for being a "traitor." Manuscript D (Worcester) says he was exiled "almost without any fault" and Manuscript C (Abingdon) says that he was exiled "without any fault." What explains the dissonant accounts seems to be, as Stephen Baxter has argued in his article "MSC of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the politics of mid-eleventh century England", English Historical Review Volume CCXXII (2007), pp 1189 - 1127, that Manuscript E, which was written in Kent (part of Godwin's earldom), was written by a chronicler supportive of Earl Godwin and his family. Meanwhile, the other two manuscripts were written in southern Mercia by chroniclers who were more critical of the House of Godwin and their influence and more sympathetic to the house of Leofric (which Aelfgar was from), the difference between C and D being that the latter has a more court-centred outlook, reflecting the patronage of the leading courtier Bishop Ealdred of Worcester (future archbishop of York) in its production, whereas C is more provincial in its perspective. Thus D sort of sides with the royal court and the political community at large in the position they took, but sort of gives some sympathy to Aelfgar, whereas C is firmly opposed to it all. But anyway, Earl Aelfgar was indeed made an outlaw and he wasn't going to sit back and take it. Instead, he managed to enlist the support of King Gruffydd of Wales and the Irish Vikings in Dublin, the former providing him with an army and the latter with a fleet, and together they invaded England. Aelfgar and Gruffydd managed to defeat a royal army, led by the Confessor's nephew, Earl Ralph the Timid without a pitched battle, and the Welsh then pursued them and massacred them. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Manuscript C says the royal army fled "because they were on horse", and John of Worcester elaborated on that passage in the early twelfth century by saying that Earl Ralph ordered the English to fight on horseback "contrary to their custom", but Earl Ralph and his retinue of French knights got demoralised and started to flee, at which point the English fled too. Gruffydd and Aelfgar then proceeded to sack Hereford, badly damaging the brand new cathedral there. Another royal army, commanded by Harold Godwinson, assembled at Gloucester, and Harold had a defensive dyke built around the town. Earl Aelfgar decided to open negotiations and an agreement was made at Harold's manor of Holme Lacy in Herefordshire, whereby Earl Aelfgar was restored to his office as earl and his personal estates came back into his possession. 

In 1056, Hereford got a new bishop, Leofgar, a former chaplain of Harold Godwinson. Manuscripts C and D, with their Mercian focus, discuss his character, whereas Manuscript E gives him no attention whatsoever. Both C and D are highly disapproving of his character, regarding him as too worldly and secular. They describe how "he wore his moustaches during his priesthood until he was bishop" - this went against the Canon law of the Church, which prescribed that priests be clean-shaven and tonsured. More ambiguous in relation to canon law (and a highly common practice, at any rate) was when Bishop Leofgar, presumably acting on the king's orders:

Abandoned his chrism and cross, his spiritual weapons, after his ordination as bishop, and took up his spear and sword and went thus to the campaign against Gruffydd, the Welsh king, and they killed him there, and his priests with him, and the sheriff Aelfnoth and many good men with them; and the others fled away.

Manuscript C of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but interestingly not D, then recounts how what followed this inglorious defeat of the English army was that:

Earl Leofric [of Mercia] and Earl Harold [of Wessex] and Bishop Ealdred arrived and made reconciliation between them there, so that Gruffydd swore oaths that he would be a loyal and undeceiving under-king to King Edward.

This would seem to imply that Gruffydd, after receiving this embassy, most likely sent by King Edward himself, agreed to become a kind of English client-king. Gruffydd then married Ealdgyth, the daughter of Earl Aelfgar (who had succeeded his father, Leofric, as earl of Mercia), the following year and from what the Anglo-Saxon chronicle tells us, the Welsh border was generally peaceful after that. 

Yet, at the same time, Edward knew how dangerous this ruler of a unified Wales had been in the past, and so was determined to eliminate him once and for all. Once the one-time rebel Earl Aelfgar had died, and Edward had placated his son Edwin by giving him the office of earl of Mercia that had been held by his father and grandfather before him, he decided that war with Wales was on the cards and hostilities resumed in 1063. Manuscript E gives a very terse, brief account of the war, but D goes into a lot more detail (C has no annals for 1057 - 1064):

In this year Earl Harold went after midwinter from Gloucester [on instructions from King Edward, who was holding his court there] to Rhuddlan, which was Gruffydd's, and burnt down the manor, and his ships and all the equipment which belonged to them, and brought him to flight. And then towards the Rogation Days [26 - 28 of May] Harold went with ships to Bristol, round Wales, and that people made peace and gave hostages; and Tostig went against them with a land-army, and overran that land. But here in this same year, at harvest, at fifth August, King Gruffydd was killed by his own men, because of the struggle he was waging with Earl Harold. He was king over all the Welsh race, and his head was brought to Earl Harold, and Harold brought it to the king - and his ship's figurehead and the embellishment with it. And the King Edward entrusted that land to his [Gruffydd's] two brothers, Bleddyn and Rhiwallon; and they swore oaths and gave hostages to the king and to the earl that they would be undeceiving to him in all things, and everywhere ready [to serve] him on water and on land, and likewise to pay from that land what was formerly done before to the other king.

Thanks to a feat of strategic genius on the part of the Godwinson brothers, King Gruffydd had been defeated and killed without it coming to so much as a single pitched battle, the unified Welsh kingdom that Gruffydd had briefly managed to create was broken up again and the two brothers of Llewellyn had agreed to become full-blown tribute-paying client-kings to Edward the Confessor, thus reviving the quasi-imperial overlordship over Wales that Edward's tenth century predecessors from Athelstan to Edgar had had. No English king would win such an all-out, crushing victory campaigning in Wales until Edward I (for whom Edward the Confessor was his namesake) more than 200 years later, and even then in a much longer, more drawn out campaign. By the end of 1063, Edward had achieved all he could have set out to do with Wales - he had neutralised all threats from across the border, ended Welsh political unity and brought back English overlordship over Wales.

The sources are largely silent about Anglo-Scottish relations until the middle of Edward the Confessor's reign. At the time of Edward the Confessor's accession in 1042, Scotland was ruled by none other than ...

Yes, this guy was a real historical figure, and he lived in the eleventh century

Macbeth. Yes him. But the historical Macbeth doesn't seem to be the bloodstained tyrant plagued by his conscience and insecure about his legitimacy that William Shakespeare portrayed him as in his 1604 eponymous play. Nor does he seem to have encountered any witches or ghosts in his fifty-something years of life. Scotland in Macbeth's day was essentially a tribal federation - the king of Scots was essentially a high-king ruling over various mormaers (sub-kings), each of whom ruled a specific territory. Macbeth was the Mormaer of Moray (see the map of Scotland c.1040 below).

Now, the thing is, even by early medieval standards, our sources for Scottish history pre-1100 are very few and fragmentary indeed - no continuous chronicle of Scotland's medieval history survives prior to John of Fordun, writing in the 1360s. Thus there's a great deal of uncertainty about Macbeth's genealogy. We know his father was Finlay mac Ruadri. But before then we're much less certain, though Dauvit Broun in his article on Macbeth in the ODNB argues we have good reason to think that he was either the grandson or nephew of King Malcolm II of Scots (d.1034). Macbeth was married to Gruoch (the real life Lady Macbeth), who was probably the granddaughter of King Kenneth II (d.995). Now, Scotland in this period was not yet a hereditary monarchy. Instead, royal succession was governed by an ancient Gaelic system (also used in Ireland) of royal inheritance known as tanistry, whereby the king's successor would be elected from amongst his collateral relatives by the clan chieftains and other senior nobles. So Macbeth, as a collateral member of the royal house himself married to another collateral member of the royal house, actually had a decent claim to the throne. Indeed, and also demonstrative of how powerful and dominant the mormaers of Moray were within the kingdom of Scots/ Alba, Macbeth's father Finlay was mistaken by contemporary Irish annalists for the king of Scots himself. Perhaps it was natural that Macbeth came into conflict with King Duncan I of Scots (the King Duncan of Shakespeare's play). But rather than dishonourably stabbing him to death in his bedchamber - "is this a dagger I see before me? Let me clutch it" - Macbeth killed Duncan in pitched battle on 14 August 1040, and shortly afterwards was acclaimed king of Scots. 

As I said before, the sources are very scanty, so we know very little about what went on in Macbeth's reign. From what we can gather, his position was initially insecure - in 1045, King Duncan's father, Crinan, hereditary abbot of Dunkeld, rose up in rebellion to install his 14 year old grandson Malcolm Canmore (the Malcolm of Shakespeare's play) on the throne, but Macbeth defeated and killed him in battle. But by 1050, he seems to have managed to consolidate his rule and the kingdom seems to have been fairly secure and politically stable. It was in that year that he, like Cnut 23 years earlier, went on a pilgrimage to Rome, "scattering coins like seed" according to a contemporary account, and for an early medieval ruler, living as they did in an age before modern communications, to be able to travel more than 1,500 miles away from the kingdom without their noble subjects opportunistically rising up in rebellion or foreign kings deciding to invade really is no small political achievement. It also indicates that Macbeth had at least some kind of royal administration, however rudimentary, that could govern the kingdom and hold it altogether in his absence. And like Edward the Confessor, Macbeth seems to have had quite a cosmopolitan court - in 1052, two Norman knights entered his service.

When Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane ...

But this was not to last. Once Malcolm Canmore reached maturity, Edward the Confessor saw a window of opportunity to extend his influence into Scottish affairs. In 1054, Earl Siward of Northumbria (who does feature in Shakespeare's Macbeth) was sent north with an army and the royal fleet, Macbeth was defeated in battle at Dunsinane Hill on 27 July and put to flight, and Malcolm Canmore was installed as King Malcolm III of Scots. Macbeth was killed by Malcolm (not by Macduff) in 1057, and Macbeth's stepson Lulach was slain in 1058. Malcolm III did indeed attend Edward the Confessor's Christmas court at Gloucester in 1059, but, as Frank Barlow points out, on the whole he was not the subservient vassal that the obituary poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle would seem to imply - indeed, he began to devise plans to annex all the Northumbrian territories down to the River Tees - the modern day boundary between County Durham and North Yorkshire. So while Edward the Confessor had some success in throwing his weight around in Scotland's internal dynastic affairs, he didn't exactly achieve the imperial overlordship he managed in the end with Wales. Nor did he manage to guarantee that the kingdom's northern borders, which at this point were still very ill-defined and fluid, were secure from future Scottish incursions.

Denmark and Norway

If we cast our minds back to my Cnut post, we'll be reminded that England, Denmark and Norway were all part of a North Sea Empire, that then began to unravel after Cnut's death in 1035. Norway had been the first to break away, coming under the control of King Magnus the Good, the son of St Olaf (d.1028), the king of Norway whom Cnut had defeated and exiled. Meanwhile, Denmark, after Cnut's line became extinct in 1042, Sweyn Estridsson claimed the throne. Sweyn was the son of Ulf Thorgilsson, a Danish jarl (earl) who had acted acted as regent of Denmark in Cnut's absence. Ulf had a sister called Gytha Thorkelsdottir (997 - 1069), who was married to none other than Earl Godwin of Wessex. Sweyn's mother was Estrid, a daughter of King Sweyn I Forkbeard of Denmark. So Sweyn was a nephew of Earl Godwin on his father's side and of King Cnut on his mother's side. However, Magnus the Good promptly invaded Denmark in 1042 and seized the throne, sending Sweyn into exile.

Coin of Magnus the Good, minted between 1042 and 1047 at Lund in Denmark, based on a prototype of King Cnut's depicting the crowned king on the obverse side and a cross on the reverse

King Sweyn and King Edward seem to have gotten on well from the start - the Life of King Edward who rests at Westimster written in 1068 by a monk of the abbey of Saint Bertin in Flanders on the request of Edith, Edward's widowed queen, says that a "king of the Danes", attended Edward the Confessor's coronation in 1043, and that king being referred to is most likely to have been Sweyn in exile, although it could have been Magnus.

Magnus the Good wanted to restore the North Sea Empire of Cnut for himself. That ambition would not be complete without conquering England. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's annals for 1043 recount this unexpected turn of events happening:

The King was so counselled that he - and Earl Leofric and Earl Godwine and Earl Siward and their band - rode from Gloucester to Winchester on the Lady [Emma] by surprise, and robbed her of all the treasures which she owned, which were untold, because earlier she was very hard on the king her son, in that she did less for him than he wanted before he became king, and also afterwards; and they let her stay there inside afterwards.

In other words, Edward had just orchestrated a coup against his own mother, the twice-queen of England, twice-widowed Emma of Normandy. Why did he do this? The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle deliberately leaves it vague. However, the Translation of St Mildred, written in the 1090s by Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, a Flemish monk living in Norman England who was a prolific writer of Anglo-Saxon saints' lives, alleges that Emma had promised all her (clearly very extensive) treasure to King Magnus of Norway if he were to invade England. Simon Keynes in his ODNB article on Emma and Cat Jarman in an article for BBC history magazine, however, argue that a more likely explanation is that Edward wanted to assert his independence from his mother and prevent her from having an active political role, which she undoubtedly had under her second husband Cnut and Edward's half-brother Harthacnut. Emma then lived out the remaining decade of her life in relative obscurity at Winchester, where she and Cnut had built the new cathedral. 

The invasion threat from Magnus of Norway, however, was undoubtedly there. In 1045, Edward took the royal fleet down to Sandwich in Kent, and, according to Manuscript D of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and assembled "so great a raiding army that no one had ever seen a greater raiding-ship army in this land" in anticipation of Magnus' invasion. 

What Edward the Confessor feared was coming his way in 1045

In the end, the invasion did not materialise, as Magnus had to divert his attention to fighting off Sweyn Estridsson's attempts to take Denmark off him, which were receiving support from Magnus' own uncle, Harald Hardrada, who was making a bid for the Norwegian throne. In 1047, Sweyn II would request naval assistance from Edward the Confessor  - England's taxpayer-funded, standing fleet that had developed under the West Saxon and Anglo-Danish kings was highly desirable and the second most powerful man in the kingdom, Earl Godwin, was Sweyn's uncle - to help him in his war against King Magnus, but King Edward and the Witan refused, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, on the grounds that "it seemed unwise to everybody." King Magnus would die later that year, the kingdom of Denmark going to Sweyn II and the kingdom of Norway going to Harald Hardrada. Harald Hardrada saw Denmark as rightfully his, and he and Sweyn fought a long war for control of it between 1050 and 1064, which ended in Harald giving up his claims to Denmark in return for Sweyn's recognition of him as king of Norway. Edward the Confessor chose to stay out of it, and in 1051 abolished the Heregeld (army tax) that had been levied continuously to finance the royal armies since 1012, a decision that was undoubtedly popular with the political community, for in the words of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle "that tax oppressed the whole English nation for as long a period [39 years] as it is here written above; it always came before other taxes that were variously paid, and oppressed men in manifold ways." Thus Edward's foreign policy towards Scandinavia from 1047 on was eminently sensible. By not taking a side in the wars between Sweyn Estridsson and the kings of Norway over the Danish throne he ensured that neither could be a threat to England's security, and he avoided getting into costly wars that would make him unpopular with the political community and the people at large from the tax burden it would inevitably impose on them. 

Coin of Sweyn Estridsson, minted at Lund sometime between 1047 and 1076. The obverse depicts Sweyn (left) receiving a staff from an angel (right) - a motif borrowed from Byzantine coinage.

France, Flanders and the German Empire

As I said before, Edward the Confessor had many connections to mainland Europe. So its hardly surprising that he pursued close relations with the most immediate powers on the other side of the English Channel and on the southern shore of the North Sea. According to the The Life of King Edward, all the rulers of "Gaul" welcomed his accession in 1042 with congratulatory embassies, with King Henry III of Germany (and Burgundy and Italy) and King Henry I of France being explicitly mentioned. In fact, Henry III was Edward's brother-in-law - Edward's half-sister Gunhilda, the daughter of Cnut and Emma of Normandy, was the queen-consort of Germany. Henry I of France is erroneously referred to by the author of the Life of King Edward as being "another kinsman" of the Confessor.  

Emperor Henry III, holding the imperial insignia, attends the consecration of Stavelot abbey church on 5 June 1040, as depicted in a mid-eleventh century miniature

Edward does not seem to have had many active dealings with Henry I after that. While Henry I did have plenty of standing in the international community - in 1051, he would marry Anna of Kiev, the daughter of Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise of the Rus - his position within the kingdom was extremely weak. Henry I's father, king  King Robert the Pious (r.996 - 1031), had had a disastrous reign in which he spent 15 years fighting to assert royal authority in the the duchy of Burgundy, went through two divorces before contracting a highly unpopular marriage to Constance of Arles, experienced scares about heresy and ended on a sour note with the king fighting a civil war against two of his sons. This, combined with deeper shifts in the nature of political power in France (more about that another time), meant that Henry I decided that it was best for the monarchy to withdraw into the Ile de France - the area around Paris. The map below shows in light blue the extent of the area that Henry I had any real power over, and even there it was starting to get a little shaky as the barons and petty seigneurs of the Ile de France went gung ho with castle-building. Still, what was left of his royal authority meant he could at least appoint bishops to the powerful ecclesiastical lordships in purple on the map, which could guarantee a degree of loyalty and service from them. But with the great dukes and counts of the realm - who by now really were territorial princes in every sense of the word - he was almost a foreign power. And yet some historians still talk about Edward the Confessor being beset upon by an "overmighty" nobility - to Henry I of France, his situation would have seemed enviable. As a result, Edward the Confessor's foreign policy towards France would mainly focus on negotiating with the territorial princes closest to England - namely, the dukes of Normandy and counts of Flanders. 

Apologies for the map being in French - it really was the best I could find

While we might say that the middle decades of the eleventh century were the ultimate low point for French royal power and authority in the Middle Ages, the opposite was true of the French kingdom's eastern neighbour. The decade in which Edward the Confessor came to the throne of England, the 1040s, was arguably the high-watermark for the kings of Germany/ the kings of the Romans (as they were officially called)/ the western emperors. These king-emperors ruled over two kingdoms, Germany and Italy, and under Conrad II, the first king-emperor of the Salian dynasty and the father of Henry III, they had absorbed the kingdom of Burgundy (depicted in both the map above and the one below, highlighted in yellow there) into their empire in 1032 following the extinction of its dynasty of kings. To the east, the realms of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary were satellite states, and to a certain extent Denmark to the north was as well. Within the German kingdom, all the duchies except Saxony were held either by the king-emperor himself, by members of his immediate family or by his loyal appointees. And through the imperial church system, the emperor could nominate all the bishops in the empire and invest them with the ring and staff - the symbols of their office. He was also advocate of many of the monastic houses in Germany, meaning that he stood for them in legal disputes. Thus, the bishops and many of the abbots essentially held their lands from him, and could always be expected to furnish large numbers of troops for him on military campaigns, both from their own personal retinues and free tenants and from the knights the emperor had billeted on their lands. Bishops could also be assigned to govern counties when they fell vacant, and could be given royal lands, mints and castles to administer by the emperor. The German king-emperors may not have ruled in depth like the kings of England - they had no powers of national taxation, and the business of justice and keeping the peace in the localities was largely left to the dukes, counts and bishops and to local communities - but they were undoubtedly the most powerful rulers in the whole of Western and Central Europe at this time. And ideologically, they could claim to be the protectors of Christendom, responsible for both the bodies and souls within it, and to be the heirs of Otto the Great, Charlemagne and, ultimately, of the ancient Roman emperors. 

The kingdom of Germany/ the Western Empire in the period 1042 - 1066

Even so, as this is the eleventh century we're dealing with after all, life wasn't all sunshine and roses for the king-emperors, and indeed cracks were already starting to appear in the mighty edifice of the western empire. A key problem area was Lotharingia - the western frontier region that encompassed the modern-day Netherlands, Luxembourg, half of Belgium, the regions of Alsace and Lorraine in eastern France and parts of western Germany. As you may recall from my post on the treaty of Verdun, once upon a time Lotharingia had been its own kingdom. Since 939, the aristocracy of Lotharingia had decided firmly that they wanted to be part of the German kingdom. The Ottonian dynasty had divided it up into two separate duchies in 960s, Upper and Lower Lotharingia (depicted on the map), so that no magnate house could grow too powerful there. Lotharingia was, however, vulnerable to external threats. The last Carolingian kings of France had tried to reconquer it on various occasions in the tenth century, with limited success. And as royal power declined in France, the French territorial princes on Lotharingia's borders became a nuisance. Indeed, Emperor Conrad II had had to bring upper and lower Lotharingia together again to face the threat posed by Count Odo II of Blois-Champagne (his territories are shown in yellow in the map of France). After Odo had failed against Conrad in his bid for the Burgundian crown in 1032, Conrad decided to put Duke Gothelo of Lower Lotharingia (967 - 1044) in charge of Upper Lotharingia as well, reunifying the two duchies as a super-duchy, in 1033, anticipating that there would be an invasion from Odo, who really was looking to expand his territories at every conceivable opportunity. In 1037, when Emperor Conrad II was on the other side of the Alps sorting out Italian affairs, Odo decided to make a land grab on the Empire's western borders, but was defeated in battle by the forces of Duke Gothelo of Lotharingia at the battle of Bar-le-Duc and killed while attempting to retreat. However, when Duke Gothelo died in 1044, Conrad's successor, Henry III, appointed Gothelo's son, Godfrey the Bearded (997 - 1069), to the duchy of Upper Lotharingia, but denied him the duchy of Lower Lotharingia as he feared that a single super-duchy gave the duke too much power. Instead, he proposed that Godfrey's younger brother, Gothelo II, get the Duchy of Lower Lotharingia. Henry III also refused to give Godfrey the county of Verdun, which he saw as his rightful inheritance. Godfrey thus rebelled against his king and went about devastating Lower Lorraine, but he was defeated in battle, deposed as duke and imprisoned in the royal castle of Gibichenstein. In 1045, Godfrey was set free and the rebellion recommenced again. This time, Count Baldwin V of Flanders (d.1067), that other French territorial prince bordering on Lotharingia, whose predecessors had tried to nibble at it whenever the opportunity arose, decided to join forces with Godfrey. With the help of his allies, Godfrey managed to sack Verdun and destroy its cathedral. On 11 November 1048 at Thuin, Godfrey fell upon his replacement as Duke of Upper Lotharingia, Adalbert, and killed him in battle. King Henry III, now Emperor Henry III (he had received his imperial coronation at Rome in 1046), immediately responded by nominating the young Gerard of Chatenoy as duke in a royal assembly at Worms, but he really was losing control of the situation in Lotharingia at this point. He needed some kind of external help.

A seventeenth century image of Godfrey the Bearded in gloriously anachronistic attire (ancient Roman muscle cuirass mixed with sixteenth century plate armour - I love it)

And this is where Edward the Confessor comes in. Edward had his own interests in the Low Countries. As Frank Barlow points out in his ODNB article, he wanted to put pressure on the counts of Flanders because they allowed their territory to be used as a forward base for old-school Viking raiders to attack southern and eastern England - as late as 1048, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a band of Viking raiders had devastated the Isle of Wight and had attempted to do the same to the Isle of Thanet in Kent but were beaten back by the locals - and as a safe haven for English political exiles. For this, he could count on his two brothers-in-law, Count Eustace of Boulogne and Emperor Henry III. When the latter was coming into difficulty from none other than Baldwin of Flanders, acting in cahoots with Godfrey the Bearded, Emperor Henry III called on Edward the Confessor and King Sweyn to provide naval assistance. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in its annals for 1049, reports:

In this year the emperor [Henry III] gathered a countless army against Baldwin of Bruges [Count Baldwin V of Flanders], because he had broken down the palace at Nijmegen, and also caused him many other offences. The army which he had gathered was countless: there was the pope himself [Leo IX, a German by birth] and the patriarch and numerous other famous men from every nation. He also sent to King Edward, and asked him for support with ships so that he would not allow his [Baldwin's] escape by water. And then he [Edward] went to Sandwich, and there lay with a great raiding ship-army until the emperor had all that he wanted from Baldwin.

Baldwin of Flanders, facing a pincer movement from the Germans, the Danes and the English, and Godfrey the Bearded, whose campaigns in the Moselle region were being met with stiff resistance from Duke Gerard of Upper Lorraine, decided it was best for them give up at this point. Godfrey was not given back his duchy, but reconciled with the emperor anyway and agreed to help fund the rebuilding of the cathedral at Verdun. And Edward seems to have achieved one of his objectives - from 1050, Flanders stopped being a forward base for Viking raiders. The peace didn't last - Godfrey the Bearded rebelled against Henry III again in 1052 after Henry arrested and imprisoned his new wife, Beatrice of Bar, and Baldwin came to his assistance. Edward the Confessor did not get involved in any of it. Indeed in 1050, Edward the Confessor held a Witan in mid-Lent and, at the behest of the political community, agreed to disband nine out of the fourteen ships that made up England's standing navy and put the other five on a one year contract. This precipitated the abolition of the Heregeld (army tax) in 1051 we mentioned earlier, which drastically reduced England's capacity to get involved in overseas affairs. When in 1051 the entire House of Godwine was exiled from the kingdom, they took refuge in Flanders. Without his standing navy, England was not able to put any pressure on Count Baldwin V, who, along with Henry I of France, began to clamour for the Godwine family to be allowed to return. In the end, in 1052 the Godwine family made a forceful return with the help of foreign mercenaries, Flemish and Irish, and King Edward, not being able to countenance civil war, decided to reconcile with them and restore Godwin and Harold to the earldoms. So getting rid of the standing navy and the crown's ability to pay for a professional army (the Heregeld) was maybe not the best of idea in terms of England's ability to throw its weight around overseas. But at the same time, it was undoubtedly popular with the political community and enabled the kingdom to economically prosper with the king's subjects not being excessively burdened by direct taxation.

And good relations with the German king-emperors continued to be maintained. For the year 1054, Manuscript D of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports:

Bishop Ealdred [of Worcester] went across the sea to Cologne with a message from the king, and was there received with great honour by the emperor [Henry III]; and he lived there well-nigh a year, and both the bishop in Cologne [Hermann] and the emperor entertained him; and he allowed Bishop Leofwine [of Lichfield] to consecrate the minster at Evesham on 10 October.

What the purpose of the visit was, the Chronicle does not specify, but then for the year 1057 it reports:

Here in this year came the aetheling Edward, King Edmund's son, here to the land, and soon afterwards departed; and his body is buried in St Paul's minster in London.

John of Worcester, writing in the early twelfth century, said the Bishop Ealdred had been sent to the imperial court to petition Emperor Henry III to send messengers to Hungary to negotiate the return of Edward the exile, King Edward's nephew. Edward's marriage to Edith, the daughter of Earl Godwin, was childless - whether that was because, out of great piety, wanted to follow the Christian ideal of a chaste marriage, or for biological reasons, we'll never know for sure - and he needed a successor. Edward may or may not have promised to designate Duke William of Normandy as his successor when he visited England in 1051 following the banishment of the Godwine family, but our only sources for that are post-1066 propaganda, and there would have been more important matters to attend to - William's marriage to Matilda of Flanders, the daughter of Count Baldwin V, had drawn the ire of Emperor Henry III and Pope Leo IX, and Edward might have been trying to get William to put pressure on his father-in-law not to actively assist Earl Godwin and his family in trying to make their comeback, and also not to assist him should Flanders and the Empire go to war again. At any rate, if Edward did make a promise to William, it certainly wasn't a binding one. 

Meanwhile, if we cast our minds back to my Cnut post, Edward had an elder, half-brother called Edmund Ironside, who had briefly reigned as king in 1016. After Cnut's conquest of England, Edmund Ironside's son, Edward went to live in Germany and Hungary. He married a woman called Agatha, whose ethnicity is disputed - some think she was a German noblewoman, whereas others, noting the Greek name (suggesting close ties with the Eastern Roman Empire), think she was Hungarian or Russian. Edward the exile was the ideal candidate for Edward to designate as his successor - as his nephew and the son of a previous king, he was an aetheling (prince) of the royal house of Wessex who was likely to be accepted by the Witan when it came to the designated successor being elected as king. And sure enough, thanks to warm relations between England and the German Empire, Edward's return from Hungary to England was made possible. It was only thanks to a cruel stroke of fate that Edward the Confessor outlived his nephew. Edward the exile left two daughters, Margaret and Christina, and a six-year-old son, Edgar. As a result, when Edward the Confessor died in 1066, the now 15-year-old Edgar wasn't even considered for election, with the Witan promptly electing a much better established, much more politically and militarily experienced candidate who also happened to be in the right place at the right time, Harold Godwinson.

I don't think this image needs explaining either

Conclusion

The anonymous Flemish author of The Life of King Edward wrote of the late king's reign "a golden age shone for his English race, as after David's wars came Solomon and peace." And in fairness, I think he was right to draw such a comparison between Edward the Confessor and the Biblical king of Israel. Despite some difficulties here and there, King Edward had managed to bring Wales under English overlordship, pacify Scotland and introduce some measure of English influence there, keep England secure from all its external enemies, avoid costly entanglements overseas, maintain good relations with his most powerful neighbour (the German king-emperor) and allow his kingdom to prosper from peace and foreign trade. Above all, Edward's foreign policy testifies to his wisdom and skill as a ruler, and that Anglo-Saxon England was far from being an insular backwater as some historians used to presume. But its also worth noting from this Biblical allusion a certain kind of hindsight on the part of the Flemish monk (he was writing in 1068 after all) and prescience for what was still yet to come, as just like with the kingdom of Israel following the death of Solomon, political division, foreign invasion and war would befall England shortly after Edward the Confessor's death, all thanks to that one thing for which his foreign policy, though well crafted, ultimately didn't bear fruit - the succession.