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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, Merry Christmas to one and all!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A silver coin (Denier) of King Carloman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The original manuscript of Cathwulf's letter

From the sources 2: well, how did you become a king, then? Or 751 and all that

 As a kind of natural follow-up to my series about Charles Martel, lets talk about his son, Pippin the Short. Immediately after Charles Martel’s death in 741, the mayoral succession was disputed between Charles’ three sons – Pippin, Carloman (both sons from Charles’ first wife, Rotrude of Hesbaye) and Grifo (the son of Charles’ second wife or concubine, depending on who you ask, Swanahild of Bavaria). Pippin and Carloman quickly agreed to divide the administration of the Frankish kingdom between them and become joint mayors. They also agreed to install Childeric III (the last surviving adult male Merovingian) as king, after four years of the throne being vacant, to give their diarchy some legitimacy and hold it together. They then teamed up against their illegitimate half-brother, Grifo, besieged him in the citadel of Laon and then imprisoned him in a monastery. However, in 747 Grifo escaped and successfully courted the support of his maternal uncle, Duke Odilo of Bavaria. When Odilo died the following year, Grifo tried to take the duchy of Bavaria for himself but Pippin the Short led a successful campaign there and installed Odilo’s seven-year-old son, Tassilo, as duke. Grifo, however, would remain a troublemaker until his death in 753. Meanwhile, Carloman, after executing almost all of the ancient Alemannic tribal nobility in a mass show trial for treason at Cannstatt in 746, which finally pacified the persistently rebellious client realm of Alemannia and brought it under direct Frankish rule, decided to leave secular politics altogether in 747. He went down to Italy on a pilgrimage to Rome, became a hermit at Monte Soratte and then a monk at Monte Cassino. Whether it was the result of a genuine crisis of conscience/ conversion to the religious life or just doing his brother a huge favour, we shall never really know. Now Pippin the Short was sole prime minister and de facto ruler of the Frankish kingdom, but was still feeling somewhat insecure about his position. Being a mayor of the palace, indeed having the office monopolised by his family (the Carolingians), simply wasn’t sufficient anymore. He needed to take that next step which, as we said in a previous post, Tolkien’s stewards of Gondor never dared to make …

Now, as I’ve said in previous posts, while even by the reckoning of the most revisionist historians, the Merovingian kings after 720 were just constitutional figureheads with no political power, they did maintain one trump card until the very end – dynastic loyalty. After Clovis had eliminated all the rival Frankish petty kings at the beginning of the sixth century, the Franks within a couple of decades came to accept the idea that all their kings had to be male-line Merovingians. Thus Gundovald, a late sixth century pretender to the throne backed by the Eastern Roman Empire, had to claim to be the son of King Clothar I and an unnamed concubine. In 656, Grimoald, Pippin the Short’s maternal great-great-great uncle and a mayor of the palace, had exiled the child Merovingian king, Dagobert II, to Ireland and installed his own son on the throne, but that had ended badly for them – Merovingian loyalism was too strong. And when in 737 Theuderic IV died, apparently childless, Charles Martel did not claim the vacant throne for himself, but instead simply carried on as de facto ruler of the kingdom without a king Gondorian style. But Pippin had an ace up his sleeve – the alliance his father had established with the papacy a decade earlier. The Royal Frankish Annals tell us what happened next:

750

Burchard, the bishop of Wurzburg, and the chaplain Fulrad were sent to Pope Zacharias to ask him whether it was good that at that time there were kings in Francia who had no royal power. Pope Zacharias informed Pepin that it was better for him who [really] had the royal power to be called king than the one who remained without [effective] royal power. By means of his apostolic authority, so that order might not be cast into confusion, he decreed that Pepin should be made king.

751

Pepin was, according to the custom of the Franks, chosen king and was anointed by the hand of Archbishop Boniface of blessed memory and was lifted up to the kingship of the Franks in the city of Soissons. Childeric, who was falsely called king, was tonsured and sent to a monastery.

754

With holy oil Pope Stephen confirmed Pepin as king and joined with him as kings his two sons, the Lord Charles [Charlemagne] and Carloman. The archbishop, Lord Boniface, preaching the word of the lord in Frisia was martyred.

(Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader, edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton, University of Toronto Press, 2009, p 12)

Miniature of Pippin the Short from the Anonymous Chronicle of the Emperors (c.1112 - 1114), Corpus Christi College MS 373, folio 14

Now in terms of sketching out the events in chronological order, there is nothing wrong with the Annals – they’re doing what they say on the tin. But because they are annals – brief accounts of the events that took place each year – they also leave much to be desired. They give no account of the causes, motivations or rationale behind the events they tersely describe. Indeed, some of the details of the events they are very vague on. By what “custom of the Franks” was Pippin made king? Nor do they give us a sense of the novelty of it all. The anointing of Pippin as king of the Franks, while it did derive inspiration from the anointing of Solomon in the Old Testament (mentioned in Handel’s Zadok the Priest, played at every British coronation since 1727), had no precedent in Frankish kingship. And why was he anointed twice, the second time with his young sons as well? And of course, the Royal Frankish Annals are written from a pro-Carolingian perspective, though that is the problem with all our sources on Frankish history post-720. Some reading against the grain is therefore essential.

A miniature of the anointing of Solomon by Zadok the Priest from a mid-fourteenth century French manuscript, Royal 17 E VII folio 147v 

Let’s see what another source, possibly written closer in time to the events than the Royal Frankish Annals by a few decades, has to say – namely the so-called Conclusion about the anointing of Pippin, added at the end of an eighth century copy of Gregory of Tours’ Book of Miracles.

If, reader, you wish to know when this little book was written and issued in precious praise of the holy martyrs, you will find that it was in the year of the Lord’s incarnation 767, in the time of the most happy, serene and catholic Pepin, king of the Franks and patrician of the Romans, son of the late Prince Charles [Martel] of blessed memory, in the sixteenth year of his most happy reign in the name of God, indiction five, and in the thirteenth year of his sons, kings of the same Franks, Charles [Charlemagne] and Carloman, who were consecrated kings with holy chrism by the hands of the most blessed lord Pope Stephen of holy memory together with their father, the most glorious lord King Pepin, by the providence of God and by the intercession of the holy apostles Peter and Paul.

This most prosperous lord and pious King Pepin had, three years previously, been raised to the throne of the kingdom by the authority and commandment of the lord Pope Zacharias of holy memory, and by unction with the holy chrism at the hands of the blessed priests of Gaul, and election by all the Franks. Afterwards he was anointed and blessed as king and patrician in the name of the holy Trinity together with his sons Charles and Carloman on the same day by the hands of Pope Stephen, in the church of the blessed martyrs Denis, Rusticus and Eleutherius, where, as is well known, the venerable Fulrad is archpriest and abbot. Now, in this very church of the blessed martyrs, on the same day, the venerable pontiff blessed with the grace of the sevenfold Spirit the most noble and devout and most assiduous devotee of the holy martyrs Bertrada, wife of the most prosperous king, clad in her robes. At the same time he strengthened the Frankish princes in grace with the blessing of the holy Spirit and bound all, on pain of interdict and excommunication, never to presume in future to elect a king begotten by any men other than those whom the bounty of God has seen fit to raise up and has decided to confirm and consecrate by the intercession of the holy apostles through the hands of their vicar, the most blessed pontiff.

We have inserted these things briefly, dear reader, on the very last page of this little book so that they may become known by common report to our descendants in subsequent pages.

(Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader, edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton, University of Toronto Press, 2009, pp 13 - 14)

From this source, things start to become clearer. The first anointing in 751, which followed the election of Pippin as king by the Frankish nobility, was clearly done to establish that he was the legitimate ruler in the eyes of God, just as the kings of the Israelites, who were also anointed, had undoubtedly been. While individual Merovingian kings were sometimes seen as having been favoured by God, or were likened to Biblical figures, divine backing was not an essential component of what made a Merovingian king legitimate or not. But the Carolingians made it one in 751, and their precedent was widely followed ever since. The anointing has been an essential step in constituting a new British monarch since the tenth century, when the West Saxon kings of England consciously adopted it from Carolingian precedent, and is to this day still technically meant to symbolise how the monarch derives their right to rule directly from God. Indeed, the anointing was deemed too sensitive to be aired on live television when the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 was being filmed.

The coronation portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. Pippin the Short's legacy was still alive and well in the coronation of his 30x great-granddaughter just over 1200 years after his own.

As for why it was necessary to anoint Pippin a second time, and to anoint his sons as well, despite the fact they weren’t going to rule the Frankish kingdom for some time, the source provides us with some clues. The source says that Pope Stephen made the Frankish magnates “on pain of interdict and excommunication” swear that they would not elect another ruler except male-line Carolingians. He also made it explicit to them that this is so because only male-line Carolingians have God’s approval, manifested in the anointing of Pippin and his sons by the Pope, Christ’s servant and the successor of the Apostle Saint Peter, to become rulers of the Franks. From this, it is clear that Pippin was worried that the events of 751 actually set a dangerous precedent to the Frankish nobility. Pippin would have suspected that some of the Frankish magnates were thinking “if Pippin can do it, who’s to say that one of us can’t have a pop at it either. After all, what was he before he became king and who put him in charge?” Therefore, Pippin needed a second ceremony to say “get in line you cheeky buggers. Us Carolingians are special. God and his servant on earth, the Pope, say so. From now on you can have me and my descendants as your kings, and if you try to have it otherwise you risk exclusion from the church and your immortal soul burning for eternity in hell.”

And this isn’t the only source which suggests that there was some unease immediately after Pippin became king in 751. Notker the Stammerer, writing in 886 under Pippin’s great-great grandson Emperor Charles the Fat, tells us the following story about Pippin:

When he found out that the nobles of his army were accustomed in secret to speak contemptuously of him, he ordered one day a bull, terrible in size, to be brought out, and then a most savage lion to be set loose upon him. The lion rushed with tremendous fury on the bull, seized him by the neck and cast him to the ground. Then the king said to those who stood round him: ‘now drag the lion off the bull, or kill the one on top of the other.’ They looked down on one another, with a chill in their hearts, and could hardly utter these words amid their gasps: ‘Lord, there is no man under heaven, who dare attempt it.’ Then Pippin rose confidently from his throne, drew his sword, and at one blow cut through the neck of the lion and severed the head of the bull from his shoulders. Then he put his sword back in its sheath and said: ‘Well, do you think I am fit to be your lord? Have you not heard what little David did to the giant Goliath, or what tiny Alexander did to his nobles?’ They fell to the ground, as though a thunderbolt had struck them, and cried ‘who but a madman would deny your right to rule over all mankind?’

(Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, Two Lives of Charlemagne, edited and translated by David Ganz, Penguin Classics, 2008, p 106)

Not quite the same but it will have to do. A lion and a stag from an eighth century Lombard-Carolingian tomb I saw in Bologna. Photographed by yours truly

Of course, by Notker’s day, the reign of Pippin the Short was beyond anyone’s living memory, and Notker tells many legends and picturesque, moralising stories in his Deeds of Charlemagne. Any historian who wants to use Notker as a source for Carolingian politics has to do so with extreme care. Yet the fact that Notker chose to tell this anecdote does seem to show, that even after the Carolingians had continuously ruled as kings of the Franks for 135 years and seemed unshakeable (though that was going to change in just a few years), people could remember that there was a time when the position of the Carolingian dynasty had been a lot more unstable and their right to rule the Franks was not taken for granted. And while this incident with the bull and the lion probably never happened, it does nonetheless convey a broader truth – that new and innovative rituals, symbols and charismatic displays were absolutely essential to the establishment and maintenance of Carolingian rule. It was their creativity and dynamism that kept the Carolingians in power for so long, which left many significant and enduring legacies for later periods in the history of European royalty.

 

Carolingian government in action: The Edict of Pitres (864)

  I am back!!! After almost two months of inactivity (54 days to be precise), the longest in the history of this blog, I am now active again. Those of you who have been actively following may have been wondering what happened to Charles Martel part four - he'll be with you very soon, I promise. But I thought I'd give you an explanation as to what has been going on in the time in between. From 3 May to 17 June I have been on a long-anticipated journey round Europe to see some of the best late antique and early medieval stuff out there, as well as things from other historical periods. A kind of Grand Tour for the twenty-first century, if you will, but orientated completely towards my personal interests rather than a canonical selection of cities and Classical sites (mostly in France and Italy) believed to be essential to the education of any young gentleman. In the course of those 46 days I travelled a minimum of 4849.1 km by train (excluding day trips to outlying places) and walked 610.9 km (13.2 km a day on average) through five Continental European countries - France, Germany, Czech Republic, Austria and Italy. That number could be increased to seven if you include changing trains in Luxembourg and Switzerland. Basically covered a good whack of Charlemagne's Empire, and with all that near-constant travelling, one got some sense of what it must have been like to have been like to have been a highly itinerant ruler like Otto the Great, Conrad II or Frederick Barbarossa - above all, how exhausting it must have been. 

As you might suspect, the many great and wonderful things I saw on my travels will be the subject of many a blog post. But for the moment, in order to prepare you for the first blog post, I am going to do one on the Edict of Pitres, arguably one of the most important documents in early medieval history, as it gives us unparalleled insights into how an early medieval government was at least supposed to have worked. 

Who, what, where, when and Why?

 The Edict of Pitres was issued on 25 June. It was issued by the king of West Francia, Charles the Bald (823 - 877), at the royal villa of Pitres on the Seine, in what is now the French region of Normandy but was then called Neustria. The Edict was a legislative act issued following a royal assembly, which leading churchmen and landed aristocrats from throughout the kingdom had attended, where all kinds of consultation and discussion concerning the Edict's provisions had taken place before hand. As for the why, we need to take a step back and look at Charles the Bald's reign before that.

The Road to Pitres

Charles the Bald's reign up until this point had been quite a bumpy ride. He had won his kingdom through an extremely bloody and brutal three-year civil war, in which he and his brother, Louis the German, fought against their other brother, Lothar, and their nephew, Pepin II of Aquitaine, following the death of their father, Emperor Louis the Pious (r.814 - 840). I have covered this and the treaty of Verdun that followed in a previous post (see hyperlink above). 

No sooner had Charles secured his kingdom, he found himself faced with revolts from prominent nobles from the western regions of his kingdom, like Lambert of Nantes, who were still loyal to Lothar and his cause for a unified Frankish Empire. These threats were however eliminated fairly quickly. But in order to make sure that he political community as a whole in West Francia stayed loyal to him, Charles had to accept various constraints and limitations on his royal authority in a legislative act called the Capitulary of Coulaines - a kind of forerunner to Magna Carta. For the next five years, Aquitaine (the entire southern half of his kingdom) had tried to secede and become its own independent kingdom ruled by Charles' nephews. By 848 the nobles in Aquitaine and the Spanish March (Catalonia) had come to realise that all the advantages of having a local king were offset by said local king being a total car crash. Yet it was only in 864, a few months prior to the issuing of the edict, that Pepin II was finally pacified once and for all. Worse was to come in 858 when the West Frankish nobles, highly dissatisfied with Charles' rule, offered the crown to his brother, Louis the German. Charles was unable to raise an army to resist Louis and hid himself away in Burgundy. Only by rallying the support of the West Frankish bishops, led by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims (806 - 882), combined with desertions in Louis' army was Charles able to keep his throne. In 862, Charles had even faced-down a short-lived rebellion of magnates from the northern and western regions of his kingdom led by his own 16-year-old son, Louis the Stammerer.

But by the summer of 864, the situation had changed and Charles was now in a much stronger position politically, with his royal authority unchallenged. Therefore, Charles needed to make a statement that would proclaim his might as a ruler and the newfound confidence in his kingship. He also had some pressing concerns. Viking attacks down the riverine waterways of the Frankish kingdoms had been escalating. Trade with the east via Russia was becoming less profitable for the Scandinavians, as the Abbasid Caliphate was starting to politically fragment (a classic “centre can no longer hold” type situation) and its silver mines in the Middle East were drying up. Meanwhile, Britain and Mainland Europe still made rich pickings – we’re only three years off from the Great Heathen Army landing in Northumbria. Charles therefore needed to ramp up the Frankish state structures to prepare them for the worst to come. What was to happen at Pitres was going to be the defining moment of Charles the Bald’s kingship, a chance to put the last two decades behind him.

Charles the Bald appears enthroned in the Vivian Bible (846), BNF Lat 1 folio 423r

Charles the Bald's political style

Any royal assembly was a chance for a king to give charismatic displays of his royal authority. For example, we know that Carolingian Frankish kings wore their crowns at royal assemblies, as would the West Saxon kings of England from the tenth century onwards in emulation of Frankish practice. Processions, litanies and other ritual elements could be expected to happen, and its beyond reasonable doubt that these were quite theatrical occasions, even if no set of stage directions survives for a Carolingian assembly. Assemblies were also an opportunity for the king’s subjects who didn’t have the privilege of regularly attending on him at court to get close to their ruler – impress him with gifts, give him news of what was going on in their corner of the kingdom, petition him to give them favours or redress any grievances. Furthermore, they allowed members of the political community to socialise with each other – hunting and feasting would almost always be on the agenda in organising these assemblies. And most importantly, they were a forum for a king to receive formal advice from his subjects on matters of state and build consensus in support of his policies. Royal assemblies, which happened annually, were thus the key mechanism for kings to get anything done on a kingdom-wide level, and they were what held the kingdom together as a single unified entity in the absence of large, administrative bureaucracies like the Western Roman Empire had had western European monarchs from the twelfth century onwards would do.

Despite the importance of the event, we don’t know the actual proceedings of the assembly at Pitres. Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims was an eyewitness, yet in the Annals of Saint Bertin, which he authored, he only tells us what was accomplished there. Annual tribute was received from the Bretons, who had from 845 to 851 successfully fought to free themselves from direct Frankish rule and had become a tribute-paying client state. New fortifications were to be built on the Seine to defend against Viking attacks. Finally, “with the advice of his faithful men and following the custom of his predecessors and forefathers, he [Charles] drew up capitula to the number of thirty-seven, and he gave orders for them to be observed as laws throughout his realm.” That this is an allusion to the Edict of Pitres, there can be no doubt.

Hincmar’s statement highlights one of multiple purposes of the Edict – as royal-image making/ public relations/ propaganda (whatever you wanna call it). As Janet Nelson has demonstrated, Imperial Roman legislation in the form of the Theodosian Code of 438 and the Novels of Emperor Valentinian III (r.425 – 455) is cited, sometimes verbatim, as being the inspiration behind thirty-three of the provisions of the Edict. The number of chapters of the edict (37), mentioned by Hincmar, was very deliberately chosen, as the Novels of Valentinian III were 36 in number. None of this would have been lost on the Edict’s audience. Roman law in one form or another was still the legal system in the southern half of Charles’ kingdom (Aquitaine and the Spanish March). And churchmen from the northern half of the kingdom like Hincmar had extensively studied the Theodosian Code even though where they lived the Law of the Salian Franks, which had its roots in ancient Germanic custom, held sway. Charles himself appears to have claimed to have studied Roman law as a boy in a letter he sent to Pope Hadrian II in 870. And more than thirty years ago, Freculf of Lisieux had written for the instruction of the young Charles of how Theodosius I, “a man necessary for restoring the state” had “corrected many laws, added to them and issued them in his own name. Whatever laws he saw in the city to be pernicious and redundant in terms of ancient custom, he authorised them to be removed; and he saw to it that whatever laws were necessary to help the state were added.” The Edict also cites in various places earlier legislative directives (capitularies) from Charles’ father, Emperor Louis the Pious, and his grandfather, Charlemagne. And as Charles would have been aware, his grandfather had all the law codes of the different peoples living within his Empire written down, and had tried to reconcile the differences between the two legal systems operating in the heartlands of his empire (the Law of the Salian Franks and the Law of the Ripaurian Franks) but in the end had only added a few chapters to them to bring them somewhat up-to-date. Despite the fact that Charles the Bald, unlike his two elder brothers, had never met his grandfather, he was held up as a role model for him from boyhood and Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne was prescribed as a text for him to study in the schoolroom. Thus, through the Edict, Charles was very consciously casting himself in the mould of the Christian Roman emperors, especially Theodosius I (r.379 – 395) and Theodosius II (r.408 – 450), and of his immediate predecessors, who had always been held up to him as exemplary rulers.

What is the edict actually all about?

Even more interesting is what the Chapters of the Edict themselves entail. The Edict has been described by the great Anglo-Saxon historian Patrick Wormald as being the greatest single legislative act issued by a north European king before Edward I. Janet Nelson, whose biography of Charles the Bald is still the definitive work on the Carolingian monarch despite it being over thirty-years-old, describes the Edict as the most remarkable piece of public legislation between Justinian’s Novels (sixth century) and the twelfth century. And such assessments by modern academics really do bear out. The scope of the edict is huge in terms of all the different areas of government policy-making it covers, and the provisions it makes are incredibly ambitious.

The structure of the edict goes:'

The structure of the edict goes:

·         Preamble

·         Chapters 1 – 7: provisions concerning public order and the keeping of the peace.

·         Chapters 8 – 24: provisions concerning the reform of the coinage.

·         Chapters 25 – 27: provisions concerning the defence of the realm and the reform of conscription and military service.

·         Chapters 28 – 31: provisions concerning the regulation of the rural economy – taxation, rent, labour services, the land market and peasant migration.

·         Chapters 32 – 34: provisions concerning specific issues that were brought up in the royal assembly at Pitres.

·         Chapters 35 – 36: provisions concerning the communication and enforcement of the Edict in the localities.

·         Chapter 37: provision concerning the royal lodge by the Seine and final exhortation for the king’s subjects to defend the realm against the Viking threat. 

A short(ish) chapter-by-chapter paraphrase of the provisions of the edict now follows:

1.       Counts and other lay men may not appropriate church property for themselves – it’s the job of bishops and abbots to police the counts on this while the counts police other lay men; for offenders a policy of two strikes and then you’re out applies.

2.       Anyone who assaults widows, orphans, priests, monks and nuns, and any landowner who tries to evict a priest, charge rent on a holiday or on church properties granted exemption from it or refuses to pay rent on lands held from churches, will be thoroughly investigated by the counts and other royal officials and will have harsh justice served to them according to legislation issued in the reigns of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. Likewise, bishops can prescribe penance or excommunication to lawbreakers.

3.       All free men in the kingdom are obliged by sacred oath to maintain the public peace, and it’s the job of bishops, counts and other royal officials in the localities to police them and bring offenders to the king’s attention.

4.       The vassals of the king and queen shall be treated with all due respect by the counts, just as they would expect not to be mistreated by the king and his entourage.

5.       Counts must ensure that royal estates and monastic lands under royal protection that lie within their administrative districts are treated as inviolate. They also must respect the king’s choices of estate managers and guarantee their safety.

6.       Free men living in lands ravaged by the Vikings, who have thus turned to banditry to make up for their loss of homes, farmland, slaves and moveable wealth, shall be summoned to the public law courts by a local count. If they refuse then whatever remains of their property in their home county shall be seized by the state and they shall be outlawed.

7.       Men who operate as bandits outside their administrative district from which they hail shall be reported by the count responsible for the county in which they are operating to the count responsible for their home county. They shall then work together to track down and arrest the criminals in question.

8.       Unadulterated denarii (silver coins) of the correct weight from any mint are legal tender in every part of the kingdom until St Martin’s Day (11 November). All towns and villages across the kingdom, even if they are ecclesiastical properties that are legally immune from the normal jurisdiction of the king’s officials, will have local residents appointed as judges. Together they will work with the counts, other royal officers and major landowners in the area to ensure that good denarii are not rejected in financial transactions, and that denarii that are of incorrect weight/ are not of pure silver are prohibited.

9.       These ordinary free men chosen as local judges for the coinage, must swear an oath that they will perform the duties that the role entails to the best of their knowledge and abilities, and in good faith. Any man they know to have refused an adulterated denarius of correct weight, they must bring to the attention of the count and other officers of the state in the localities. If they fail to do this and are convicted, they will be punished as a perjurer under secular law and will also be prescribed an appropriate penance under ecclesiastical law.

10.   After St Martin’s Day (11 November 864), only the new, reformed silver coinage will be accepted. Anyone who tries trading with an old denarius will have the coins will have it confiscated from him by the count and his subordinate officials.

11.   Coins of the new, reformed type will look like this: on one side they will have the king’s name written in a circle and the monogram of the Carolingian dynasty in the middle; on the other side, they will have the name of the place where the coin was minted written in the circle and in the middle the symbol of the cross.

12.   Coins may only be minted at ten sites in the kingdom, all under the tight supervision of the king’s officials – Quentovic, Compiegne, Rouen, Paris, Rheims, Sens, Orleans, Chalon-sur-Saone, Melle and Narbonne.

13.   In each of these ten royally-approved sites for mints, the locals shall choose an honest and reliable moneyer. Moneyers shall swear an oath to do their duty to the best of their knowledge and ability and in good faith. If a moneyer is believed to have minted adulterated or underweight denarii, or to have engaged in fraudulent practices in the weighing or purifying of the silver, he will be subjected to trial by ordeal. If thereby found guilty, he will have one of his hands amputated and will be prescribed the penance appropriate for blasphemers and robbers of the poor by the local bishop. Those living in Aquitaine will be sentenced according to Roman law.

14.   On 1 July, every count from each of the ten districts allowed to have mints will come to the town of Senlis with his viscount, two substantial landowners/ slave masters from the region and the resident moneyer. There, they will be given five pounds of pure silver from the royal treasury so that they can begin minting coins. And on the Saturday before the beginning of Lent the next year, they shall bring five pounds of denarii to the king’s officers at Senlis.

15.   All men in the kingdom will be able to have their old denarii exchanged for the new coinage after 1 July, having been informed that after 11 November only the new coinage will be legal tender. Any man who rejects an unadulterated denarius of the new coinage of the new coinage after 1 July will have to pay a fine of sixty solidi (720 denarii or three pounds of silver), and any slave/ serf who rejects it will be given sixty lashes with a birch. The local bishop and the officers of the state will ensure that the punishment is not excessive. Any landlord or slave master who doesn’t let his slaves or serfs be punished for the aforementioned offence will be obliged to pay a fine of sixty solidi.

16.   After 1 July, if any man discovers a denarius of the new coinage that has been adulterated, he must perform a citizen’s arrest on the man who offered it to him during trading and interrogate him as to who he got it from, and this shall then pass from hand to hand until the original moneyer has been traced. As before, any moneyer who mints underweight or adulterated coinage will in Aquitaine be punished according to Roman law, and in the northern half of the kingdom and Burgundy will be punished by having his hand amputated. Anyone caught accepting an underweight or unadulterated denarius will pay a fine of sixty solidi if he is a free man, or given sixty lashes with a birch if he is a slave or a serf.

17.   Counts and other officers of the state will ensure that no one in their administrative districts tries forging coins or setting up their own private mints. Anyone caught doing this will have his hand amputated.

18.   If a forger flees to a royal estate, he will be searched for and arrested by the officers of the state. If he hides in lands belonging to churches or magnates that are protected by a legal immunity, the landowner is obliged to hand him over to the officers of the state for punishment as they would do for robbers and murderers. Any landowner who harbours a forger shall be fined 15 solidi if he refuses to hand him over at the first request, 30 solidi at the second, and full compensation for all the damages (600 solidi) combined with the count and his men coming over and forcing him to hand over the fugitive at the third. Any landowner who resists the count coming to arrest the forger will be fined 600 solidi.

19.   To facilitate the reform and regulation of the coinage as outlined above, every count shall be obliged to make a survey of all the markets in his county. They must be able to report back to the king’s court which markets in their county were created in the time of Charlemagne, which were created in the time of Louis the Pious with his authorisation, which were created in the time of Louis the Pious without his authorisation and which came into being during the reign of the present monarch. They must also find out which markets have moved location since they were created, and by whose authority this has taken place. Every count shall bring the surveys to the next annual assembly, and the king and his advisers shall determine which markets are useful and can remain and which ones are superfluous and shall be abolished. And no markets may be held on Sundays.

20.   Counts and other officers of the state must ensure that fixed weights and measures are used in all transactions, so that landlords may not claim more than they are rightfully entitled to by custom from their tenants in rent, and traders may not sell their customers short. Anyone found guilty of this will have the goods they measured dishonestly confiscated and be fined sixty solidi if they are a free man, and given sixty lashes with a birch if they are a serf or a slave, and they will receive appropriate penalties from the bishops as well. But if any counts or other officers of state unjustly confiscate goods from free men, serfs or slaves on the false pretence that they had used dishonest measurements, they shall be punished for miscarriage of justice in the same way as any official who abuses their powers. Anyone responsible for ensuring that correct weights and measures are used who fails in this duty will be punished as a perjurer.

21.   The fine for the rejection of good denarii has been remitted for the last three years. Now, it will be retroactively reinstated and those who took advantage of that must now make good, to ensure that no one will ever again refuse good denarii. Any landlord who tries to rack up rents/ any merchant who tries to rack up prices in order to fork up the money for the fine will be made to pay compensation to the poor people they have exploited this way and will be punished by the officers of the state, so no one will be tempted to exploit the poor in this way again.

22.   Unfree peasants who have been flogged for refusing good denarii should not be forced to pay fines, and if they have been fined in the past, they’ll be given due compensation. Any free man who owns allodial lands or benefices (lands granted by the crown for life) in multiple counties, but cannot fork out enough to pay the fine then the officers of the state may exercise discretion as to what is a fair punishment that will not just unjustly burden him – the aim is encouraging law-abiding behaviour for the common good, not the state’s representatives enriching themselves. Likewise, the officers of the state can be lenient in giving out fines to people who have broken the law unintentionally/ out of ignorance.

23.   Gold and silver alloys are banned. And after St Remigius’ Day (1 October) no one may sell gold and silver except for purification – jewellery is included in this ban. Anyone caught selling alloys or gold and silver jewellery will be immediately arrested and brought before the king’s representatives if they don’t own property or slaves in the county. And if they do, they will be summoned to the law courts. If found guilty, they will be punished accordingly. However, if any officers of the state arrest people carrying away their alloys or gold and silver jewellery to the smith for purification, the officers will be investigated and punished. Any smith caught making gold and silver alloys or jewellery after 1 October will be punished according to Roman law if he lives in Aquitaine, or if he lives in other parts of the kingdom, he will have his hand amputated.

24.   The price of a pound of refined gold is fixed at twelve pounds of pure silver in the new denarii. A pound of gold that has been refined but not enough to make gilt shall be fixed at ten pounds of silver. Any counts and officers of the state must, on pain of being stripped of their offices, ensure that these prices stay fixed. Any man who tries to fraudulently get round this decree will be forced to pay a fine of sixty solidi if is a free man, or will be given sixty lashes if he is an unfree man.

25.   From 1 July, any man caught trying to sell weapons and armour to the Vikings will be executed for treason against the state and betrayal of the Christian faith, without any hope of royal pardon or redemption.

26.   Any free man who owns a horse, or has the means to support one, is obliged to serve in the royal armies. Counts and other officers of the state are thus forbidden from confiscating a free man’s horses without clear justification, since it will prevent him from performing the military service he owes to the state. Any count or other type of royal official caught doing will receive the punishment befitting all government officials who engage in arbitrary and oppressive behaviour in the localities.

27.   The counts must make surveys of how many free men in each county can serve as soldiers in the royal army on their account, how many could serve if a neighbour helped provide them with supplies and equipment, how many could serve if two neighbours were ready to help them out and how many could serve if four neighbours were ready to help them out. The counts should then report back to the royal court how large a squadron of soldiers their county can send to royal army. The remainder, consisting of free men to poor to serve in the royal army even if they clubbed together, should be obliged to build new fortifications, bridges and swamp crossings and perform guard duty in public fortresses and on the border if they live in frontier regions, as it is their duty to defend the patria. Anyone who deserts from the royal army, or fails to show up for muster, shall be fined.

28.   Any free landholder who owes the king poll tax or rent is forbidden to commend themselves to the church or any other lord, lest the state loses what it is rightfully owed. The counts will enforce this. And if the church or any other lord does take such people on, they will be fined. Any free man is allowed to sell or gift his property to whoever he pleases, so long as the state still receives what it is owed by way of rent or tax.

29.   Peasants who live on royal or ecclesiastical estates, who already willingly perform cartage and manual labour on them as is laid out in the polyptychs (estate surveys and records of rents and services owed compiled in the time of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious), must now be willing to cart marl without any argument, even though this is admittedly a recent innovation rather than an ancient custom.

30.   Peasants are now forbidden from selling their hereditary lands on the land market, as it is leading to landlords losing rents and estates becoming fragmented. Counts, other officers of state and priests will be tasked with enforcing this. Any subsequent sale of peasant land that takes place will be revoked, and rents shall be levied on each hereditary holding after the lands belonging to it have been restored in proportion to the quantity and quality of its fields and vineyards.

31.   Each count must make a survey of rural migrants living in his county. Rural migrants who have lived in their new county of residence since the time of Charlemagne or Louis the Pious are permitted to stay. Those who have fled to live in a new county because of recent Viking raids must be sent back by the counts, the bishops and their agents, but they must not blackmail them into doing so. People who have migrated to other regions for seasonal wage labour in the vineyards can continue to do so, so long as they return to the home regions to sow, plough and harvest their landlord’s crops within the allotted times. Any marriages migrants make outside their home region will be dissolved. Runaway slaves will be returned to their masters, and any child of a runaway slave will inherit his mother’s status.

32.   Two counts who share a border must not convene their county courts on the same day, because free landholders who have lands and interests in both counties cannot attend both meetings. They must stay in constant communication – if one count holds the county court on a Monday, the other should hold it on a Thursday, and to make it fair they must alternate each year between who gets to hold their court first.

33.   Anyone who witnesses an oath shall swear his oath 42 days thereafter, unless Lent falls in between, in which case he must wait until eight days after Easter Sunday. Anyone who fails to heed this decree will be fined sixty solidi.

34.   The counts have asked for advice on how to deal with peasants who have sold themselves into slavery/ serfdom because they are doubly burdened by the poll tax and rent to their landlords in times of famine. After further consultation with the bishops and other members of the Christian faithful, and having looked through the Salic law, capitularies, the Bible and the works of the Church Fathers, the king has decreed that throughout the kingdom men should still be allowed to sell themselves into slavery/ serfdom when they are desperate. However, their masters are obliged to care for them and cannot sell them to anyone else. Nor can they claim ownership of any children that the man in question has had with a free woman.

35.   Royal agents will be sent into every county to make sure that all the provisions of the Edict, and all previous capitularies, are being implemented by the counts. And if any counts are found to be negligent or unwilling to implement the royal will in the localities, they will lose their offices and be replaced by more reliable candidates.

3 All archbishops, and the counts of the cities where their metropolitan sees are based, shall receive copies of the Edict of Pitres and previous capitularies from the royal chancery. They will then have them transcribed, so that all the bishops, counts, abbots and royal vassals in their provinces may have a copy of the Edict of Pitres which they can then have read out publicly in all the county courts across the kingdom. And lists will be drawn up by the archbishops and counts of all who have received a copy, which will then be given to the chancellor, so that no one can claim ignorance in disregarding the Edict’s provisions.

3 Following an incident last year, no one may reside in the royal lodge by the Seine without permission and the guards will ensure that the culprit does not escape without due punishment. All the king’s subjects must be prepared to defend the realm and the Holy Church against the Vikings whenever the need arises for them to do so.

A silver denarius of Charles the Bald minted at Quentovic following the reform of the coinage enacted by the Edict of Pitres

What the mounted militias mentioned in the Edict of Pitres would have looked like: cavalry depicted in the Golden Psalter of St Gall, St Gallen Stiftsbibliothek, Cod Sang 22 p140

Some analysis of mine

The first thing that is so remarkable about the Edict is the sheer range of different areas of government its provisions entail. Basically, you have all the basic functions of a state covered in the provisions here – justice, law enforcement and the maintenance of public order, national defence and military organisation and the collection of government revenues; they’re all there! But not only that, as the Edict attempts to regulate various aspects of economic and social life, as well as thoroughgoing reform of the state-backed currency. The Edict itself very frequently uses the Latin term res publica (normally translated as state, sometimes as commonwealth). It justifies many of its provisions in terms of the benefit of the state (res publica), as distinct from that of either the king as a person or the political community, and regularly appeals to the public good as well, though who that public was varied a lot. The Carolingians clearly saw themselves as something more than just holy warlords with an imperial Roman gloss, and they saw the kingdoms they presided over as something more than just their private property or a network of personal followers (the semi-mythical personenverbandstaat of German historiography). It is also clear from the edict that the Carolingians had a bureaucracy (however skeletal) with defined public duties and mechanisms for holding them to account over failure to perform those duties and abusing their public authority. A monopoly on violence was undoubtedly out of the reach of the Carolingian state – as is explicit from the provisions of the Edict, the Carolingians had no standing army or professional police forces, and had to rely on the close co-operation of local landowners for the maintenance of law and order. And the Edict does also show the importance of the church and appeals to authority to the successful operation of the Carolingian government. But if those last two criteria disqualify Carolingian West Francia, or indeed all other early medieval kingdoms, from being states then very few polities in the whole of human history have been states. Away with the naysayers! In my not even vaguely Weberian view, the West Frankish polity under the Carolingians was a state by any reasonable definition. How powerful and efficient it was is up for debate, but a state it was nonetheless.

Some of the policies outlined in the Edict, like the first seven provisions dealing with law and order (which in some places echo the Edict of Paris issued in 614 by the Merovingian king Chlothar II), are very basic and one really does wonder about their effectiveness. At the same time, they reflect the best methods then available. And while it would be wrong to say that later medieval governments didn’t make improvements on that front, no quantum leaps were made until long after the conventional endpoint of the Middle Ages. Indeed, the system of law enforcement in Georgian England (but not in eighteenth century France, where professional police forces had been introduced) barely differed in its fundamentals from that described in the Edict of Pitres – a small number of unpaid officials working together with local landowners and the wider community.

By contrast, when it comes to the coinage reform, the intricacy and sophistication of the mechanisms put in place for implementing it is phenomenal for an early medieval government. Indeed, reform of the coinage was where the edict was most successful in its impact, setting standards that would remain in place even after the decline of royal power in West Francia in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, up until the thirteenth century. Likewise the reform of the military provides a fairly robust plan for conscripting the yeomanry and other types of modest freeholders into the royal armies – the only alternative to having to rely on the private retinues of landed aristocrats, given that the Carolingian state did not have the resources to maintain a regular army, and one which gives the state direct access to military manpower. The provisions for reforming the military, along with others like the provisions on markets and rural migration, show the extensive use of written surveys and inquiries by the Carolingian state – the Domesday Book of 1086 had a long heritage, and I would argue that the Edict of Pitres and the legacy of Carolingian government more generally is part of it. In addition, provisions attempting to curb peasant migration and rural land markets demonstrate that an economically and socially interventionist state was not a novelty in the fourteenth century, the sixteenth century or the nineteenth century. Furthermore, all the considerations given towards the communication of the Edict down to the localities and the mechanisms for enforcing it/ holding the officers of the state to account show that this wasn’t just the Carolingian court having big ideas that had no real potential to actually change things on the ground. This goes in the face of the more pessimistic interpretations of the Carolingian reforms, based around the work of Francois Louis Ganshof, Louis Halphen, Heinrich Fichtenau and John Michael Wallace-Hadrill, that dominated the scholarly landscape from the 1940s to the 1980s. Finally, the fact that all of this was introduced in the wake of the Viking threat, invites comparison between Charles the Bald’s administrative reforms and those that Alfred the Great and his successors introduced in Wessex/ England in the struggle against the Scandinavians. After all, lets not forget that Judith, the second wife of Aethelwulf of Wessex and stepmother to Alfred the Great, was the daughter of Charles the Bald. So comparisons between Francia and Anglo-Saxon England are more than appropriate considering their contacts with each other.

The standards set by the Edict of Pitres really did endure for centuries. Here is a silver denarius of Count Fulk V of Anjou, the grandfather of Henry II, minted sometime between 1109 and 1129, when he left his county to become King of Jerusalem. The only difference between this coin and the coins of Charles the Bald post-864 is that the monogram in the middle of the obverse side is no longer recognisably that of the Carolingians (who had gone extinct by that point), and it definitely can't have been minted at one of the ten approved and centrally controlled royal mints mentioned in the Edict.

The most famous bit (among medievalists anyway) at the very end

In the appendix, one of the three provisions there reads (all credit must be given to Simon Coupland, whose translation of the Edict I have used and which you can read in full here  https://www.academia.edu/6680741/The_Edict_of_P%C3%AEtres_translation):

“And it is our wish and express command that if anyone has built castles (castella), fortifications or palisades at this time without our permission, such fortifications shall be demolished by the beginning of August, since those who live nearby have been suffering many difficulties and robberies as a result. And if anyone is unwilling to demolish them, then the counts in whose districts they have been built shall destroy them. And if anyone tries to stop them, they shall be sure to let us know at once. And if they neglect to implement this our command, they shall know that, as it is written in these chapters and in the capitularies of our predecessors, we shall look for counts who are willing and able to obey our orders, and appoint them in our districts.”

This is probably the most famous provision of the Edict, despite only being in the Appendix. It is one of the very earliest written sources to mention castles in France or anywhere else in Western Europe – ninth century Carolingian Frankish sources rarely ever speak of them, unlike tenth century ones where they’re much more common and twelfth century ones where they’re completely ubiquitous. It also appears, on the surface at least, that the Carolingians banned the construction of private fortifications and saw them as a nuisance to public order. The Edict of Pitres is thus undoubtedly part of the early history of the European castle. But what part of it? That is something to be explored in another post, so please stay tuned for more.

 

Images of Carolingian castles are extremely hard to come by (but not completely non-existent, as we'll see in a subsequent post), which may say something about the Edict's general effectiveness. This is pushing into what we'd normally consider to be post-Carolingian, but here's one of the earliest artistic depictions of castle-based warfare from the Leiden Maccabees, Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, Codex Per F 17 folio 24v.