On this day in history 3: following in your grandfather's footsteps

 And so we're back again with another Carolingian imperial coronation, one which followed almost exactly 75 years after the one we looked at last time and one which was very much meant to replicate it. And this post concerns probably my favourite Carolingian monarch of them all, Charles the Bald. 

On this day in 875, King Charles the Bald of West Francia was crowned Western Roman Emperor at Rome by Pope John VIII, having been crowned King of Italy and received the imperial regalia at the Italian capital, Pavia. On 12th August 875, Charles' nephew, Louis II, the king of Italy and the Western Roman Emperor, had died aged 50. His only child was a daughter, Ermengard. With the death of Louis II, the branch of the Carolingian family descended from Charles' elder brother, Lothar I (795 - 855), became extinct. This was a crucial step in the "great-thinning out" (as I call it) of the Carolingian dynasty. In 862, there had been five Carolingian monarchs (six if we include the usurper Pippin II in Aquitaine), each with the potential to start their own royal line in their respective kingdoms - there's also a seventh branch of the Carolingian family, the counts of Vermandois (descended from Charlemagne's middle son, Pippin of Italy) but we don't talk about them. By 875, it had already narrowed down to two - the West Frankish branch descended from Charles the Bald and the East Frankish branch descended from Charles' middle brother, King Louis the German of East Francia. By 911, there would be just the one branch, Charles the Bald's branch, which would continue to rule in West Francia, with some interruptions, all the way up to its termination in 987 - again, the Vermandois branch survived into the eleventh century and indeed beyond (they're also the female-line ancestors of William the Conqueror and all English monarchs since 1066, not to mention a huge chunk of the British aristocracy), but for the last time no one talks about them!

Now, like when King Lothar II of Lotharingia died, also childless (save for an illegitimate son, Hugh of Alsace) in 869, Louis II's uncles immediately pounced and tried to get first dibs on his kingdom and the imperial title. Charles managed to win the race and so he was crowned King of Italy and Western Roman Emperor on this day in 875.

In a way, this was the fulfilment of Charles' lifelong ambition. Though Charles, unlike his three elder brothers, had never personally known his grandfather, the Emperor Charlemagne (d. 814), he did grow up with him as a role model. In 829, when Charles was eight, one of his father's court poets and leading advisers, Walahfrid Strabo, wrote in his poem "Concerning the vision of Tetricus":

Happy the line that continues with such a grandson: grant Christ that he will follow in deeds whom he follows in name, in deed, in character, nature, life, virtue and triumphs, in peace, faith, piety, intellect, speech and dignity. In doctrine, judgement, result and in loyal offspring.

Janet Nelson has suggested in her 1992 biography of Charles the Bald, still the definitive work on the Carolingian monarch 30 years on, that Einhard's "Life of Charlemagne" was used as a mirror for princes in the 830s to provide the teenaged Charles with an education in political theory. Certainly, Charles had read Einhard's "Life of Charlemagne", as he quoted directly from it in a letter that he himself composed for Pope John VIII, shortly before his death in 877 at the age of 56. And all throughout his life, his courtiers were always trying to measure him up to Einhard's portrayal of Charlemagne as neo-Roman Emperor in the mould of Augustus Caesar, Vespasian and Titus.

This can also be nicely illustrated by comparing Charles to his middle brother, Louis the German (806 - 876). While the East Frankish king issued no legislation and kept his administration simple, he excelled in diplomacy and warfare, especially on his long eastern frontier with the Slavic realms extending all the way from the Baltic to the Adriatic. He was also very good at managing his sons, extended family and aristocracy, and never faced serious challenges to his rule from any of them in his 33 year long reign in East Francia. He also ruled much of his realm with a very light touch - he rarely set foot in the roadless, densely forested and still semi-pagan and tribal region of Saxony, but when he did in 852 he held public judicial assemblies (placita in the Latin sources) and his subjects eagerly petitioned him for dispute resolution and favours. Charles the Bald, on the other hand, was the opposite - the first twenty years of his reign in West Francia saw him experience revolts from both his sons, his extended family (his nephew Pippin II) and his aristocrats, and he wasn't all that militarily successful against the Vikings and Bretons and his East Frankish relatives. But Charles had a near-boundless vision. His legislation testifies to it - the Edict of Pitres in 864, which I've talked about here before, was the most lengthy and ambitious single piece of legislation any Western European ruler ever issued between the fifth and the thirteenth centuries. The Carolingian project of governmental reform and centralisation probably peaked under him - the coinage was very successfully reformed and put under tighter control, the foundations for a new system of national taxation (the first Francia had known since the old Roman tax system decayed in the seventh century), military service was extended to most of the free male population and missi continued to investigate the localities to ensure public justice was running smoothly and enquire into corruption and abuses with more vigour than ever. Royal assemblies, probably the most important institution of Carolingian government, were also at their grandest in his reign - Charles the Bald and his main adviser, Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims (806 - 882) were absolutely obsessed with ritual. Charles was also a real intellectual, who had extensively studied law, theology and Roman history since childhood, and during his reign the Carolingian project of expanding education and literacy and the influence of intellectuals at court continued to thrive.

The image below, from the Psalter of Charles the Bald, produced c.869 by an artist in Charles' Palace School, nicely illustrates how this had always been Charles' great ambition. It shows Charles enthroned and dressed in an ankle-length tunic and chlamys like a contemporary Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor. He has a crown on his head (a symbol of kingship since Biblical Israel) and he carries the orb and sceptre, symbols of rulership that seem to have developed under the Carolingians in the late eighth and ninth centuries, symbolising his authority over the world granted to him by God. He also sits underneath a canopy in the classical Roman architectural style. The inscription in Latin, written in the square capitals used for monumental inscriptions in ancient Rome (as the Carolingians would have known very well), reads:

When Charles the Great presides with his crown on, he is similar in honour to Josiah and the equal of Theodosius.

Ca. 869 AD. BnF, Manuscrits, Latin 1152 fol. 3v, École du Palais de Charles le Chauve, Wikipedia Commons

Thus Charles the Bald is consciously being compared to three of his personal heroes here - the seventh century BC Old Testament King Josiah of Judah, a great reformer of Judaism who compiled the books of the Torah together; the Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius I or II, the former being the one who made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire and the latter being the one who codified Roman law into the Theodosian Code which Charles the Bald cites regularly in the Edict of Pitres; and the third being his grandfather Charlemagne.

Indeed, at the month-long Synod of Ponthion in June 876, Charles the Bald would come dressed in the traditional Frankish costume of knee length tunic, cloak and leggings at the start, but by the end was dressed exactly how he is in that image - in the East Roman imperial costume and with a crown. His wife, Queen Richildis, was then given her coronation as Empress. This was done to make it real to the West Franks that Charles was now Emperor. The image below, from the San Paolo Bible, nicely illustrates how he would have appeared.

By Benedictine workshop, probably in the Reims region. - Bible of San Paolo fuori le Mura, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7590481. I would translate the inscription if it wasn't too damn faded. But its a masterpiece of Carolingian art all the same, especially rich in its use of colour and decorative patterns.

Finally, Charles also had a splendid throne made for his coronation. It survives in the Vatican museum, and is richly decorated with carved ivories. Below you can see the throne itself, and individual panels from it. They depict episodes from the labours of Hercules, including Hercules wrestling the Nemean lion and cleaning out the stable of Diomedes. This is demonstrative of how Charles and his court absolutely adored classical literature and mythology, and how Charles saw parallels between his own triumphs and tribulations as king and emperor and those of the greatest of the Greek heroes. But it may also be a warning, perhaps even influenced by Theodulf's poem we looked at earlier this year, against the dangers of pride and trusting too much in your own abilities rather than in God to give you success, which Hercules exemplified. Indeed, Charles himself was guilty of this on many occasions, as his attempt to reunify the entire Carolingian Empire by conquering East Francia ended disastrously at the battle of Andernach on 8 October 876. His imperial glory was also fleeting too, as he enjoyed it for only two years before his death in 877. 

Photo credit: Helen Gittos https://twitter.com/Helen_Gittos/status/1398695600854536193/photo/1

Bibliography:

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

Janet Nelson, Charles the Bald, Longman (1992)

Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 - 1000, Penguin (2009)

From the sources 6: why write an autobiography in the twelfth century?

 

Meet Guibert de Nogent (1053 – 1125), the abbot of a monastery in Picardy, northern France. Guibert’s seventy years of life coincided with some pretty tumultuous and exciting events – the Norman Conquest of England, the ideological struggle between the German emperors and the popes that is somewhat misleadingly called the Investiture Controversy (the right to invest bishops was part of it, but far from the whole story), the First Crusade, the explosion of new monastic movements like the Carthusians and Cistercians, a campaign across the whole of Catholic Christendom to reform clerical morality and the emergence of urban self-government in the West for the first time since classical antiquity.

A self-portrait of Guibert de Nogent from his Tropologies of the Prophets shows Guibert (in his black Benedictine robes) offering his book up to Christ enthroned, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Lat 2502, folio 1

 Guibert had opinions on all of these things going on in the world, despite never leaving his corner of northeast-France save for one brief trip to Burgundy, as is attested in his writings, even if some of them are written from a quite parochial angle. He wrote a treatise on saints and relics, a history of the First Crusade called The Deeds of God through the Franks and an autobiography called the Monodies, which includes within it a history of his abbey of Nogent-sous-Coucy and an account of the bloody uprising of the citizens of Laon against their bishop in 1112 which resulted in a short-lived urban republic called the Laon commune. Guibert is quite a household name among crusades historians, but arguably he’s most significant as the author of the Monodies, written between 1108 and 1115. Guibert called them the Monodies (Latin: Monodiae) because that term meant a song sung by one person. As Isidore of Seville (560 – 636) explained in his early seventh century encyclopaedia Etymologies:

Original Latin: Cum autem unus canit, Graece monodia, Latine sincinnium dicitur; cum vero duo canunt, bicinium appellatur: cum multi, chorus.

My translation: When one person sings, while in Greek it is said to be a monodia, in Latin it is said to be a sincinnium; indeed, when two people sing, they call it bicinium, and when many people sing, they call it a chorus.

The Monodies were the first complete autobiography to have been written in the West since St Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions (c.400). Indeed, it is the shadow of St Augustine that lurks behind Guibert de Nogent’s work. Like St Augustine, who was hugely influential, Guibert believed that the human mind and soul were locked in a constant struggle against their own pride and the various corrupting forces present in the material world and this is the central theme that runs throughout his autobiography. He also believed that demons could assist in leading humans down the path of pride, temptation and corruption, and this will essentially be the focus of this series. And like Augustine in the Confessions, Guibert’s story is that of a boy who starts out with promise, goes down the path of sin in adolescence but later relents thanks to God’s boundless compassion and patience – indeed, both deliberately echo the story of the Prodigal Son in the Gospel of Luke.

St Augustine of Hippo (354 - 431): Guibert de Nogent's personal hero and inspiration

One could also say that Guibert was to some degree writing in an established genre of religious writing, one which revolved around using “experiences (experimenta)” as “examples (exempla)” to teach good or bad morals. Many monks had written works in this vein, which could get quite intimate and personal, such as Otloh of St Emmeram (1010 – 1072) in his letter to his friend, William of Hirsau. Indeed, beyond Guibert’s youth, his autobiography essentially reads like a collection of anecdotes with moral lessons, in many of which Guibert himself is just a side-character.

Nonetheless, while this is a carefully curated autobiography, Guibert de Nogent as a teenager had been taught by Anslem of Bec, the great theologian and future archbishop of Canterbury, and had fully internalised his trademark saying “If I look within myself, I cannot bear myself; if I do not look within myself, I do not know myself.” Also, if this was all just a moralistic exercise, or a story of faith and devotion to God being tested, why did Guibert focus on himself? Surely, he could have just focused on Bible stories for his experimenta, as Otloh had done, or the lives of the saints in providing instruction on how to live a good life and avoid evil, as these were more than sufficient for that purpose. There’s little doubt that Guibert saw himself as a unique somebody with distinctly personal challenges to overcome as well as ones that spoke to the experiences of your regular medieval monk. But note that he did not see himself as a unique somebody in a positive, celebratory way. This was a man who never learned to be happy with himself, and while a moderate amount of self-deprecation was de rigueur for a medieval monk or cleric (there’s plenty of that in the writings of Guibert’s mentor, St Anselm of Canterbury) Guibert takes it to excessive levels in the Monodies. Yet despite his crippling insecurities and anxieties was able to accomplish all that could have been expected of him and more in life and was not driven to depression and suicide.

Now, to get a sense of the general tone of the text, lets see first how Guibert begins his autobiography:

I confess to your majesty, O God, the innumerable times I have strayed from your paths, and the innumerable times you inspired me to return to you. I confess the iniquity of my childhood and my youth, still boiling within me as an adult. I confess my deep-seated penchant for depravity, which has not ceased in spite of my declining strength. Lord, every time I recall my persistence in self-defilement and remember how you have always given me the means of regretting it, I can only marvel at your infinite patience. It truly defies the imagination. If repentance and the urge to pray never occur without the outpouring of your spirit, how do you manage to fill the hearts of sinners so liberally and grant so many graces to those who have turned from you and who even provoked you?

Now, in a sense, Guibert is following St Augustine’s Confessions, by giving a meditation on the nature of God and his relationships with humans. His theological training from St Anselm of Canterbury is also much in evidence here – two of St Anselm’s great specialisms were in ontology (the study of the nature of God as a cosmic being) and moral theology or, in GCSE RS/ A Level Philosophy terms, “the problem of evil” (why does God allow bad things to happen in the natural world and humans to sin). But even if a lot of the language, very eloquent nonetheless, is quite generic, Guibert unlike Augustine in the first five chapters of the Confessions, makes it explicit that this isn’t about God and man generally, its about God and him. Right from the start, Guibert is making it clear that this is about him as a unique somebody, and a uniquely wretched and sinful somebody, who God with his infinite power and goodness somehow manages to redeem. To while Guibert is undoubtedly taking his lead from one of the greatest of the Church Fathers of ancient Christianity, and one of the most prominent Catholic theologians of his own day, he is from the start writing something original.

Later on in the first chapter, Guibert says:

O good God, when I come back to you after my binges of inner drunkenness, I don’t turn back from knowledge of myself, even though I don’t otherwise make any progress either. If I am blind in knowing myself, how could I possibly have any spark of knowledge for you? If, as Jeremiah says, “I am the man who has seen affliction” [Lamentations 3:1], it follows that I must look very carefully for the things that compensate for that poverty. To put that differently, if I don’t know what is good, how am I to know what is bad, let alone hateful? Unless I know what beauty is I can never loathe what is ugly. It follows from this that I try to know you insofar as I can know myself; and enjoying the knowledge of you does not mean that I lack self-knowledge. It is a good thing, then, and singularly beneficial for my soul, that confessions of this sort allow my persistent search for your light to dispel the darkness of my reason. With steady lighting my reason will no longer be in the dark about itself.

This beautifully written passage neatly expresses Guibert’s purpose in writing the book – to try and understand himself in order to be able to understand God. Right from the outset this is a deeply religious exercise, but Guibert doesn’t want a generic understanding of what God is like and what he does? He wants to understand him through his own personal experiences.

In the second chapter, Guibert goes on to think about the gifts God has given him in life. This is echoing St Augustine, who in Confessions 9.6 says:

Original Latin: Munera tua tibi confiteor, domine deus meus, creator omnium et multum potens formare nostra deformia.

My translation (bit ropey, but here goes): I demonstrate many of your gifts to me to you, my lord God, creator of all and with much power to shape our many deformities.

Here, Guibert remarks that all the things we have materially in life are gifts from God and thus we shouldn’t boast of them because whatever they might do for us in this world, they’ll do nothing for us in the next:

The more fleeting they are, the more their very transitoriness makes them suspect. If one can find no other argument to despise them, it is enough to point out that one’s genealogy, or physical appearance, are not of one’s choosing.

Some things can sometimes be acquired through effort: wealth, for example, or talent … But the truth of my assertion here is only relative. If the light, which “enlightens the way for every man coming into the world” [John 1.9] fails to enlighten reason – and if Christ, the key to all science, fails to open the doors of right doctrine – then, surely, teachers are fighting a losing battle against clogged ears. Any person, then, is unwise to lay claim to anything except sin. But let me drop this and get on with my subject.

Guibert then goes on name the first and foremost of those gifts God has given him, namely his mother “who is beautiful yet chaste and modest and filled with the fear of the Lord”, which nicely summarises Guibert’s view of what womanhood should be (he most certainly wasn’t alone in it!). Guibert’s mother is a very important recurring character in the Monodies, as we’ll see, and it is she who plays the most important role, after God of course, in steering him down the right path and away from sin and ruin. It becomes quite clear from the Monodies that Guibert was very close to his mother (even after he become a cloistered novice monk, she lived as a hermit in the monastery grounds and he would visit her), and that she had a very important influence on his personality, both positive and negative. It was no doubt his recollections of his mother that led to Guibert identifying a lot with St Augustine, who also had a mother (Monica) who was devout and modest, whom he was very fond of and who did a lot to try and steer him down the right path, in Augustine’s case towards Christianity (Augustine’s father was a pagan and in youth Augustine became firstly a Manichaean and then a Neoplatonist sceptic).  

Guibert uses his mother to illustrate the points he’s just made earlier:

Mentioning her beauty alone would have been profane and foolish if I didn’t add (to show the vanity of the word “beauty), that the severity of her look was sure proof of her chastity. For poverty-ridden people, who have no choice about their food, fasting is really a form of torture and is therefore less praiseworthy; whereas if rich people abstain from food, their merit is derived from its abundance. So it is with beauty, which is all the more praiseworthy if it resists flattery while knowing itself to be desirable.

Sallust was able to consider beauty praiseworthy independent of moral considerations. Otherwise, he would have never said about Aurelia Orestilla that “good men never praised anything in her except her beauty. Sallust seems to have meant that Aurelia’s beauty, considered in isolation, could still be praised by good people, while admitting how corrupt she was in everything else. Speaking for Sallust, I think he might as well have said that Aurelia deserved to be praised for a natural God-given gift, defiled though she was by the other impurities that made up her being. Likewise, a statue can be praised for the harmony of its parts, no matter what material it is made of. Saint Paul may call an idol “unreal” from the point of view of faith, and indeed nothing is more profane than an idol, but one can still admire the harmony of its limbs …

… If everything that has been designed in the eternal plan of God is good, every particular instance of beauty in the temporal order is, one might say, a mirror of that eternal beauty. It is created things that make the eternal things of God intelligible,” [Romans 1:20] says Saint Paul …

In his book entitled On Christian Doctrine (If I am not mistaken) Saint Augustine wrote something like this: “a person with a beautiful body and a corrupt soul is to be more pitied than one whose body is also ugly.” If therefore we lament beauty that is blemished, it is unquestionably a good thing when beauty, though depraved, is improved through perseverance in goodness.

Thank you God, for instilling virtue in my mother’s beauty. The seriousness of her whole bearing was enough to show her contempt for all vanity. A sober look, measured words, modest facial expressions hardly lend encouragement to the gaze of would-be suitors. O God of power, you know what fame your name had inspired in her from earliest years, and how she rebelled against every form of allurement. Incidentally, one rarely, if ever, finds comparable self-control among women of her social rank, or a comparable reluctance to denigrate those who lack self-control. Whenever anyone, whether from within our outside her household, began this sort of gossip, she would turn away and go, looking as irritated as if she were the one being attacked. What compels me to relate these facts, O God of truth, is not a private affection, even for my mother, but the facts themselves, which are far more eloquent than my words could ever be. Besides, the rest of my family are fierce, brutish warriors and murderers. They have no idea of God and would surely live far from your sight unless you were willing to show them your boundless mercy as you so often do.

"Fierce and brutish warriors and murderers" with "no idea of God": knights torment the Roman philosopher and statesman Boethius in this highly imaginative eleventh century manuscript of the Consolations of Philosophy from France, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Latin 6401

There’s so much to talk about here. The first is Guibert’s methods of argumentation. He always starts from his own personal reflections on human character, which he seems to have a keen awareness of, or on God and then elaborates on them with references to revered authorities – a standard method of argumentation throughout Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, given how much tradition and ancient wisdom was valued in premodern thought. Most of the intellectual authorities Guibert cites are the Biblical, or else St Augustine, though notably he does cite the first century BC Roman historian Sallust, specifically his discussion of Aurelia Orestilla, the wife of the wicked Catiline, the Roman aristocrat who attempted to overthrow the Republic in 63 BC, in his On the Conspiracy of Catiline. We might assume, based on our preconceived modern stereotypes, that a devout medieval monk would be hysterically opposed to pagan literature, but as I’ve written before such stereotypes are largely unwarranted. Instead, the pagan Romans were regarded by most medieval intellectuals as the best guide to skilled rhetoric and fine writing, and as deeply insightful if sometimes flawed guides to the natural world, the human condition and history. Sallust himself was a standard classroom text in medieval monasteries and cathedral schools, and so many medieval historians roughly contemporary to Guibert including William of Poitiers, Bruno of Merseburg, Orderic Vitalis, William of Malmsbury and Henry of Huntingdon were intimately familiar with both his Catilinarian Conspiracy and his Jugurthine War. In citing Sallust, Guibert was both showing that the ancients had made the similar observations on human character to him, despite their differing religious worldviews, as well as also demonstrating that he was a well-educated man.

We can also see that Guibert wasn’t dogmatic in how he chose to follow authorities. While he agrees with Saint Paul that idols, by which he means physical objects that are worshipped by people presuming them to be living, physical manifestations of deities, are bad, he also says that they can nonetheless be pleasing to look at from an aesthetic standpoint. This also reflects part of his personality – as I’ll show you in a future post, Guibert did have something of a proto-archaeological interest in pagan antiquities, and even excavated a more than one thousand-year-old holy-site in the grounds of his monastery.

The final lines concerning his mother in this chapter really give us a sense of why Guibert wrote the Monodies. These “facts” about his life do more than any abstract theological reasoning or fine rhetoric could do to illustrate his arguments, by showing how it all works out in the here and now.

Guibert also has a very negative attitude towards his own family background and social class. As we’ll see, both his parents came from the lowest echelons of the Northern French warrior aristocracy – his mother was a minor noblewoman and his father a knight who owned his own castle. While undoubtedly this background helped Guibert get to where he was, as abbot of Nogent, Guibert sees it as nothing praiseworthy and disdains what he sees as the highly secular, materialistic and violent culture of this social group. Guibert was not alone here. St Bernard of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian abbot and the most influential religious leader of the twelfth century, was full of denunciations of the vanity, vainglory, lustfulness and violence of nobles and knights – in 1115, a year after Guibert finished the Monodies, Bernard condemned the new craze for mock battles among young knights that were coming to be known as tournaments. And Guibert’s contemporaries, Orderic Vitalis and Abbot Suger, wrote invective-laden narratives about borderline psychopathic feudal lords who habitually terrorised churches and kidnapped and tortured merchants, men like Robert de Belleme and Thomas de Marle (who also appears in Guibert’s Monodies). At the same time, Guibert is a helpful reminder that churchmen and warrior aristocrats weren’t from two different worlds – a lot of the time, they were brothers, uncles, nephews and cousins! And the First Crusade gave Guibert a flicker of optimism for the warrior elite, while his contemporary St Bernard of Clairvaux tried to spiritually reform them and channel their martial energies to higher causes by setting up the Knights Templar with Hugh de Payens between 1118 and 1127.

Finally, Guibert gives us such a brilliant insight into the ascetic mindset, which can be really hard to grasp in twenty-first century Britain where the idea of going off to live in a monastery, giving up all personal property, abstaining from sex and living a life of prayer, hard work, study, contemplation and fasting to get closer to a divine being seems very alien and transgressive to most people. Particularly revealing is that paragraph about poor people fasting as opposed to rich people fasting, the latter deserving more praise than the former for doing so. A recurring theme throughout many medieval hagiographies is the wealth, noble pedigree and physical attractiveness of the saints (male and female) that are their subject matter being stressed – the point being that they could enjoy political power, luxurious living and sexual pleasure, yet they chose to spurn it all to pursue a higher cause. Perhaps then the closest analogues to medieval ascetic saints and monks today would be certain members of the environmental movement, like Greta Thunberg.

Hercules and the Carolingians: corruption and classicism in the poetry of Theodulf of Orleans

 

A rather naturalistic depiction of Hercules from the Leiden Aratea (c.816 - 840), a Carolingian copy of an astronomical treatise by the Roman general (and father of Caligula) Germanicus Julius Caesar (15 BC - 19 AD), which is basically a Latin translation of the Phaenomena, a poem about the constellations by the 3rd century BC Greek poet Aratus. This manuscript was likely commissioned for and owned by the Emperor Louis the Pious himself. The Aratea is essentially a picture book, with the beautiful images of the constellations  captioned by the relevant verses of the poem written in Rustic Capitals (see the right hand folio in the image), the deluxe handwriting of the ancient Romans which the Carolingians liked to use for Classical texts. For the Bible and religious works they used Carolingian miniscule, which forms the basis of the handwriting we use today.

Hi everyone! Since its world poetry day, lets return to our old friend Theodulf of Orleans. Now, as you may remember from the post I did about him two months ago, as well as being a poet, courtier and bishop extraordinaire, he was a royal missus dominicus? But what the hell is a missus dominicus when it's at home? you might ask. 

The role of the missus dominicus in Carolingian government can be described as something of a hybrid of circuit judge and superintendent. Their job was basically to hear cases that the local courts (placita/ malla publica) were unable to deliver a fair verdict on, ensure that provincial governors (counts, dukes and margraves) and their teams subordinate officials were behaving themselves and generally ensure that everything was running smoothly and that the king's policies were actually being implemented in the localities. Typically, in each provincial circuit, the missi dominci would consist of one cleric (a bishop or an abbot) and a lay nobleman, both of whom would not be landowners/ provincial office holders in their own circuits so as to prevent conflicts of interest. They start appearing as ad hoc commissions under Charlemagne the late 780s, but their work had become more regularised by the end of the eighth century. They thus came to provide an important link between centre and locality - by 800, Charlemagne's Empire stretched from the Elbe to Catalonia and from the North Sea to Tuscany, so there was only so much work a peripatetic imperial court or even Charlemagne's sons being set up as regional sub-kings (Louis in Aquitaine and Pepin in Italy) could do.

A modern artist's impression of a pair Missi Dominici going on tour in the provinces

Theodulf of Orleans was indeed one of these missi dominici and as you might have gathered from the previous post, as a highly learned and energetic individual who commanded a lot of local power and respect (in the Loire valley area) and an enthusiastic supporter of Carolingian reform, he was the perfect fit for the job. Yet as we'll see in the poem, what he experienced in his activities, or at least claimed to have, as a royal missus he found sobering and darkened his outlook on the operation of the law and justice in the provinces and what is work as an agent of Carolingian reform could achieve. But, as we'll also see, there's a lot more to poem that kindles the historian's interest than that.

Theodulf and the antique vase

Too often I see that our judges relinquish the law to those 
Who bribe them with gold, fine food and delicious drink.
Often I am keen to prevent those who wish to accept bribes
But there are many wishing to take, few willing to say no.

Great crowds in gathering after gathering sought us out,
Every age and every sex was represented there:
Small ones, old and young ones, fathers, unmarried women and men,
Elders, youths, old women, husbands, wives, and children.
Why do I hold back? These people immediately offered us gifts,
Thinking that if they gave, they would receive what they wanted in return.
They tried hard to smash our resistance with this assault,
So that our will would collapse before the intense pressure.
One of them promises me gems and a crystal
If I can get for him the lands belonging to another.
Another showed me a huge number of golden coins,
Some of which bore Arabic lettering,
Some, these silver, bearing Latin inscriptions;
All to help him obtain estates, fields, and houses. 
In a hushed voice yet another whispered to my assistant, 
That he should carry the following message to me:
"I possess a vase decorated with ancient figures.
Its metal is pure and it is heavy to hold.
On its sides are engraved the crimes of Cacus:
The skulls of men stuck on stakes and rotting flesh,
His rocks chained down and evidence of rapine and theft,
The fields coloured with the blood of men and cattle. 
There Hercules in fury smashed the bones of Vulcan's son,
Who spits out his father's flame from his beastly jaw,
As Hercules knees him in the stomach and kicks his abdomen,
Shattering with his club the beast's smouldering face and throat.
There you can see the bulls emerging from the cave,
Afraid they might be dragged back again.
On the inner mouth of the vase, on a thin band,
Can be seen a series of small figures:
The Tirinthian infant [Hercules himself] slaying the two snakes,
And his ten labours shown in their proper sequence.
The outer surface of the vase, however, is well-worn from handling,
And a scene that once existed there is rubbed down. 
There Alceus, the river Calydon, and the centaur Nessus,
Fight over the beauty of Deianira.
The poisonous robe laced with the blood of Nessus is depicted,
Along with the frightening fate of the wretched Lichas.
As well Antaeus is seen losing life in the arms of the powerful Hercules,
For he is prevented from touching the ground as he needed to.
This vase I shall bring to you my lord - for he was calling me his lord -
If he heeds my requests.
There are a great many people - mothers, fathers,
Children and youths of both sexes -
Whom my father and mother left behind as free,
And from that fact they remain free.
If I could falsify their records, the lord would own the ancient vase,
I would own those people and you would soon receive gifts."
Another said, "I own a rug dyed in a variety of colours,
Which I believe a wild Arab sent.
On it a young calf can be seen following its mother and a heifer trailing a bull.
The colours of the calf and heifer are alike, while those of the cow and the bull are the same.
You can see the beauty of the piece, and the artistic use of colour.
And how a small circle is artistically joined to larger ones.
I am involved in a dispute with another man over some nice cows,
On behalf of which I am ready to give suitable gifts:
A calf for the calves, a bull for the bulls,
One cow for the cows, and one ox for the oxen.
Another man promises to give me some beautiful cups,
If I grant that he need not hand over what another demands ... 

Oh this foul plague [of bribery] which is found everywhere,
Oh this crime, this madness, this too savage habit.
Which lays claim to and evilly captures the whole world,
There is no one who does not give and no one who does not take bribes.

(Translation sourced from Paul Edward Dutton, Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader, University of Toronto Press, 2009, pp 100 - 102)

This highly intelligently crafted poem, rich and vivid in its imagery and full of emotion deserves much by way of literary analysis, but that is not what is going to be done here - while I very much prefer this kind of stuff to charters, I'm a historian not a literary scholar. 

Theodulf gives us much insight into the kind of corrupt practices that the missi were confronted with in the localities in the time of Charlemagne. The man who tries to bribe Theodulf with the gold and silver coins, and the one mentioned in the previous two lines who tries to bribe him with the precious stones, seem to be trying to obtain a title deed to estates in the rightful possession of others that they have obtained illegally. The man who offers him the beautiful Arab rug depicting the four cows is trying to get Theodulf to give him a favourable judgement in a dispute he has with another free landed proprietor over the ownership of some cattle. And the man who tries to bribe Theodulf with the antique vase is hoping that Theodulf will forge some documents so that the erstwhile unfree men and women his parents manumitted will become slaves again. 

Theodulf himself is completely horrified by these corrupt practices, which are very well attested in other Carolingian sources, and feels deep sympathy for those victimised by them. What Theodulf is describing is fairly quotidian, and are certainly far from being one of the worst examples of corruption encountered by a royal missus. A generation later, Wala (d.836), serving as a missus for Emperor Louis the Pious in Italy in the 820s, encountered an elaborate cover-up of the expropriation and murder of an aristocratic widow in which people at all levels of Italian society were implicated. Its precisely because of stuff like this that historians' assessments of the Carolingian reforms have been so mixed in the last hundred years - see Chris Wickham, "The Inheritance of Rome", pp 390 - 392 for a very even-handed view of the debate. On the one hand, we a high-minded and dynamic royal government that is clearly able to make its presence felt in the localities. On the other hand, we have pervasive corruption at all levels of society that requires the skeletal Carolingian state bureaucracy to bite off more than it can chew. future posts I'll hope to cover more about the Carolingian reforms - the evidence, when looked at as a whole, certainly permits a far more optimistic view of them, which is what historians have increasingly swung towards in the last 30 years, than does Theodulf's poem by itself.

Other significant details include the importance of written documents over memory and orality hinted at by the need to forge documents in order for the litigants to get favourable verdicts. Theodulf was of course a Missus Dominicus in Aquitaine and the Midi, where the Gallo-Roman legacy remained very strong and with it a very strong tradition of written law and archival and notarial culture among the law - written wills never disappeared here like they did in Gaul north of the Loire following the Frankish takeover at the end of the fifth century. Another thing that's interesting is the references to coinage, the gold coins being described as having Arabic lettering and the silver ones bearing Latin inscriptions. The golden coins are clearly gold mancuses imported from nearby Muslim al-Andalus, some of which made their way as far north as the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia (see below).

A Gold dinar with Arabic writing, bearing the name of King Offa of Mercia (757 - 796) 

Meanwhile, the Franks, since the failure of the sub-imperial gold coinage in the late seventh century and the currency reforms of Pepin the Short (r.741 - 768) only minted in silver (see below).

A silver denier of Charlemagne with a cross on the obverse and the Carolingian monogram on the inverse

Gold coinage in eighth and ninth century Trans-Pyrenean Europe was thus a real prestige item that could only be acquired by contacts with the Muslim world, as Carolingian Aquitaine and indeed Anglo-Saxon Mercia both clearly had - there, here's your nice little dose of fashionable global history for you.

What I found most interesting about it, however, were the Classical elements, specifically the antique vase. Traditionally, scholars following the lead of Julius Schlosser in 1892 presumed that Theodulf was providing a straightforward description of an ancient Roman vase which has since been lost. However,  Lawrence Nees in "Theodulf's mythical silver Hercules vase, Poetica Vanitas, and the Augustinian Critique of the Roman Heritage", Dumbarton Oaks Papers Volume 41 (1987), pp 443 - 451 argues against this. He points out that, for starters, Theodulf in the poem isn't actually describing an object that he can see with his own eyes. Rather he is describing an object that the slave master trying to sweet talk Theodulf's servant has described to him, and because Theodulf did not accept the bribe after the servant relayed the information on to him he never saw the object himself. He also demonstrates well that the descriptions of Hercules' encounters with Cacus and Nessus are not drawn from any extant Roman artwork but straight from Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses, and that what Theodulf was doing here fitted squarely into the poetic exercise of ecphrasis - describing an object or place (real or imagined) and extrapolating deeper meaning from it.

While I find Nees' arguments broadly convincing, I do think its overwhelmingly likely that Theodulf did have some interest in ancient Roman material culture. This is especially clear from the highly archaeological manner in which he describes it, such as mentioning how certain of its features are worn and erased by centuries of use, which strongly suggest that Theodulf had seen and handled a good few Roman antiquities in his time. And even if he had no real interest in them except as imaginary poetic devices, we know that other people in the Carolingian era did have an appreciation for them as physical objects which they used in their daily lives. See for example the "Cup of the Ptolemies" (see below), crafted from onyx in Alexandria sometime in the first century AD, which ended up in the possession of Charlemagne and his grandson Charles the Bald.

Concerning the broader meaning of this part of the poem, Nees argues that Theodulf's take on the labours of Hercules is far from celebratory. He points to how for all that the description of Cacus lair matches the one contained in Virgil's Aeneid, while the Roman poet portrays Hercules as a civiliser clearing the site in which the glorious city of Rome will one day flourish of a troublesome monster, Theodulf's Hercules comes across more like a thug driven by rage and a desire for violence. I think Nees goes a bit too far in claiming that Theodulf, like St Augustine before him, tries to cast a sympathetic light on Cacus - its clear from Theodulf's description that he thinks Cacus had been an absolute menace in the countryside of Latium, stealing cattle and terrorising innocent humans. And in describing Deianira, Theodulf emphasises how Hercules fights with Nessus out of lust for her beauty. And after the poisoned robe kills Hercules, there is of course no suggestion of his Apotheosis. Nees thus argues that Theodulf is using Hercules, a heroic figure yet one nonetheless, by his estimation anyway, driven by pride, lust and brutish impulses, as metaphor by which to attack pagan Roman culture as fundamentally inadequate, lacking as it did the higher truths of Christian revelation which would otherwise make people cast aside its flawed notions of heroism and virtue. He argues, fairly convincingly, that Theodulf was following in the tradition of St Augustine, who in his "City of God" (430) his extensive knowledge of pagan Roman literature and histories to turn the pagans own stories and symbols against them, which is what, as Nees sees it, Theodulf is doing with Hercules' exploits as recounted in Virgil and Ovid. 

Here it is interesting to note that Theodulf most likely wrote this poem in 799, in the build-up to Charlemagne's coronation as Roman Emperor in the West on Christmas Day 800. Charlemagne had just rescued Pope Leo III from the Roman mob, and talks must have already begun about him whether or not the pope should repay him by granting him the imperial title - contrary to what Einhard in The Life of Charlemagne claims, the coronation in Old St Peter's Basilica was almost certainly not a surprise to the emperor. Perhaps he might have seen his royal master taking up the mantle of the Caesars as another poisoned cloak, and in writing this poem was trying to weigh in against Charlemagne's other advisors, such as Alcuin, who were more positive about the idea of Roman imperial revival. This is incredibly speculative on my part, but perhaps Theodulf, in placing this in a longer excursus on judicial corruption, was trying to give a warning to Charlemagne. That being that he should not lose sight of the fact that, first and foremost, he is a Christian king with a duty to uphold justice and good morals among his subjects and to eradicate corruption and oppression of the poor by the powerful. Taking up the glamorous yet tainted mantle of Roman Emperor, synonymous with the celebration of power and might (represented in the poem by Hercules), makes him potentially risk losing sight of that, and from there all kinds of trouble begins.

Theodulf may be a figure very mentally remote from us in certain respects. If Lawrence Nees is right to see him as a thinker in the Augustinian tradition, which would later be a huge influence on mainstream Protestant Christianity in both its Lutheran and Calvinist forms, then Theodulf obviously believed that people could not be truly moral without being blessed with the divine revelations of Yahweh (in the Old Testament/ Jesus Christ (in the New Testament). As Martin Luther, probably one the greatest and most famous Augustinians (in both the narrow and the broad sense) who ever lived, and John Calvin would argue 700 years after Theodulf, Socrates and Cicero were not exemplary figures (contra Erasmus) and would be burning for all eternity in the fires of Hell. Why? Because, as Augustine had argued back in the early fifth century, they, unlike Moses or St Paul,  did not have God's revelation and grace and therefore could not be moral or be saved. Theodulf would have probably agreed, and I doubt that he, like Dante Alighieri (1265 - 1321), would have had Virgil guide him through Hell and Purgatory, let alone, like Peter Abelard (1079 - 1142), imagine the pagan poets and philosophers being taken up to Heaven, along with the Old Testament Prophets, by Christ in the Harrowing of Hell. Except among extreme Protestants in places like the US Bible Belt, this way of thinking would come across as profoundly disturbing to most Christians, let alone most people generally, today. It seems self-evident to most of us that people in all times, place and cultures are capable of being good and virtuous, and the idea that people can rightly to be condemned to eternal punishment and alienation from God simply for not knowing about him, indeed not being able to know about him, seems revolting to us. More than a generation after Theodulf, the heretic Gottschalk of Orbais (808 - 867) would anticipate the Protestant theologians of the sixteenth century in taking Augustinianism to its extreme. According to Gottschalk, not only are all non-Christians damned, but so are all but a small chosen group of Christians (God's elect), who have been destined to go to Heaven before they were even born on account of God being all-powerful and all-knowing. A brilliant book on this whole subject area is John Marenbon's "Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz" (2015) in which the author explores how medieval and early modern Christian thinkers grappled with the three thorny questions of whether pagans could provide valuable intellectual and moral wisdom to Christians, whether they could be virtuous and whether they could be saved without conversion, both in relation to Graeco-Roman antiquity and more contemporary encounters with Scandinavians, Mongols, Native Americans and Chinese. The story he tells is an incredibly erudite and complex one, and certainly not one of linear progression from medieval bigotry to early modern open-mindedness.

Yet at the same time, there are many ways in which Theodulf isn't actually that mentally removed from us secular liberal humanists in the twenty-first century at all. This is a man who, as is evident from the poem, believes in the rule of law and an honest and equitable judicial system, and despises official corruption and the oppression of the poor and vulnerable by the rich and powerful. Indeed he points to the invaluable contribution medieval Christianity made to shaping our western liberal values and how, while we like to see them (with some justification) as having their ultimate roots in Classical Greece and Rome, the pagan ancient world perhaps wasn't as amenable to them as we think and its contribution to them has been overstated. This is very much the argument pursued in Larry Siedentop's "Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism" (2016), one of the books I read in the summer before I applied to university, and more recently in Tom Holland's "Dominion" (2019) - Tom Holland is the creme de la creme of popular historians and I'm a huge fan of his "The Rest is History" podcast which he co-hosts with Dominic Sandbrook. See here the debate between Tom Holland and A.C Grayling on the subject of Christianity's contribution to Western values - its great good fun to watch, and in my opinion it was Tom Holland who carried home the day. 

Indeed, late antique and early medieval history whom we expect to be completely removed from us mentally, but we actually find quite a lot of common ground with. John Chrysostom (347 - 407), one of the Church Fathers, denounced wife beaters, corrupt politicians and people who didn't show compassion for the poor. Caesarius of Arles (470 - 542) rejected the double standard, denouncing male promiscuity, drunkenness and loose morals. Jonas of Orleans (760 - 843) and Hincmar of Rheims (806 - 882) are all about denouncing corruption in church and state and aristocrats oppressing their social inferiors. Agobard of Lyons (779 - 840) even went so far as to attack the institution of slavery. This is a huge contrast to a lot of modern Christian moralists, who focus only on attacking women and the poor and neglecting the abuses committed by rich and powerful men, above all, the 45th President of the United States. There's no doubt that any early medieval Christian would have harboured beliefs we'd now consider highly distasteful, though frankly nothing one wouldn't also find in earlier or later periods. But that shouldn't conceal some aspects of their thought that are quite genuinely admirable and arguably formative to the moral universe in which we live in today.

I will return in future posts to the importance of the Carolingian age in shaping our ideas about power, accountability and good government. But as Theodulf is also demonstrative of, is its importance to shaping how we approach the past. For all that Theodulf might have been downbeat about the pagan ancient world, he was deeply fascinated by it and had studied its literature so extensively. And he clearly saw the Greek myths as invaluable cultural artefacts that imparted necessary moral lessons, even if the lessons he extrapolated from them weren't entirely the same as those that the Classical Roman poets and their readers would have done, and as many modern writers are now doing, especially in the recent trend towards feminist retellings of the Greek myths and explorations of their "subversive power." Yet he approached it nonetheless as a culture separated in time and in many other ways removed from his own. As Anthony Kaldellis points out in relation to how Theodulf's contemporaries in the East Roman world approached the same issues in "Byzantium Unbound" (2019) Chapter 3, this sense of critical distance from the classical culture is in fact precisely what is needed for classical studies to emerge. If you treat it as a living culture that you yourself continue to inhabit, its not classical studies, its just literary studies. Theodulf combines fascination with and serious stud of the literature and beliefs of the ancient world with an all too keen awareness that this is not his own culture, but rather one of a bygone age, that needs to be approached with care. Indeed, and here I'm deliberately being provocative and controversial, it might even be fair to say that he was one of the first ever Western European classicists, as opposed to participants in a living classical culture (as Desiderius of Cahors more than a a century and half before arguably still was, being the last participant in a continuous tradition of letter writing as an art going back to Cicero and Seneca). All in all, Theodulf is a reminder that for all that the Carolingians, and early medieval more generally, feel mentally remote from us, they played a critical role in shaping Western Civilisation and the world we live in today.

Getting acquainted with Adhemar of Chabannes, in which I also discover an eleventh century monk's take on the Trojan war

Yesterday, I started on a project I'd been resolved to do for a good few months now. After I translated, as part of my undergraduate thesis, the "Carmen ad Robertum Regem (Poem to King Robert the Pious)" by Bishop Adalbero of Laon (c.940 - 1031) - at once, one of the most satisfying and most frustrating things I've ever done in my life so far - I felt I had a mission to help make French history between the late ninth and mid-eleventh centuries more accessible by translating important sources that have never been translated into English before. I don't want to oversell my abilities as a medieval Latinist - despite both my parents being classicists, I never took a GCSE (14 - 16) or A level (16 - 18) in Latin, though I think I've just about compensated for that by subsequently going on a Latin course at UCL and doing medieval Latin as a component of my masters' degree. Instead, I simply figured that someone's got to do it, so it might as well be me. And I figured who could not be better to start off with than Adhemar of Chabannes. After all, a quick look on the website of the brilliant After Empire Project showed that there's no existing English translation of Adhemar's Historia Francorum. That someone hadn't already gotten onto this decades before me sincerely surprised me. He's pretty much the only vaguely contemporary narrative history we have that covers the history of Aquitaine (roughly a quarter of the French kingdom at that time) from 930 to 1028 in any significant level of detail. And he covers a lot of things that historians working on post-Carolingian/ post-millennial France (and western Europe more generally) are interested in, such as the four highly interlinked issues of church reform, the emergence of popular religious enthusiasm, the Peace of God movement and the first significant reappearances of heresy in the West since the sixth century. Robert Moore, whose (now classic) interpretative synthesis the "First European Revolution, c.970 - 1215" (2000) has become a staple on undergraduate reading lists for papers covering Western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, regularly uses Adhemar to support his arguments on all these issues in chapter 3 of the book. A quick glance at Adhemar's wikipedia page shows that he has had two scholarly monographs in book-form written about him in the last thirty years. And he's even made it into the creme de la creme of popular history - both Tom Holland's (no, not Spiderman) "Millennium" (2009) and Robert Moore's own dramatically titled (with fairly obvious political allusions) "The War on Heresy" (2012). So by the standards of any eleventh century French author, Adhemar of Chabannes is not obscure, so the fact he hasn't merited an English translation of his works is somewhat puzzling, given that English translations of medieval Latin primary sources generally are in high demand in universities for fairly obvious reasons (the decline of the study of classical languages in UK secondary schools). But those of you who haven't spent much time in eleventh century France may be wondering - who the hell is this guy anyway?

A bit of a colourful chap 

(Above) a drawing done in Adhemar's own hand 

For a medieval chronicler who lived a thousand years ago, we actually know a fair amount about Adhemar of Chabannes. He was born in 988, a year after the death of the last Carolingian king of West Francia and the accession of Hugh Capet (whose direct, male-line descendants would rule France for the next eight centuries), at the village of Chabannes in central-south-western France to what seems to have been a well-to-do family. He received his education as a novice monk at the Abbey of Saint-Martial de Limoges, where he was taught by his uncle Roger of Chabannes, who served as the abbey's music director from 1010 to 1025. Adhemar had a pretty interesting career after that. No doubt influenced by his uncle, he became a musical pioneer and, according to music historian James Grier, he made significant steps towards the development of modern musical literacy by developing a form of notation that used accurate heighting to present relative pitch information - while it still required the reader to already know the melody, the result was transformative (see James Grier "The Musical World of a Medieval Monk: Adhemar of Chabannes in Eleventh Century Aquitaine", Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp 325 - 326). Indeed you can see it in practice in Adhemar's own autograph hand from one of the hymns he composed ( see below, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, lat 909 fol. 151r-154r). He also wrote the Historia Francorum - a history of the Franks from their earliest origins to 1028 - which I am, of course, translating.

Adhemar's career also had a somewhat darker side to it. He embraced the developing tale that St Martial, the first Christian bishop of Limoges who initiated the conversion of Aquitaine, was actually born almost three centuries earlier, making him one of Jesus' original apostles. Knowing that the documentation for this was scanty at best, Adhemar decided to add to the evidence for Martial's "apostolicity" by forging a hagiography (saintly biography) of Martial, which he tried to present as having been written by Aurelian, the priest converted by the saint who succeeded him as bishop. He also composed an apostolic mass for Saint Martial, which the Bishop of Limoges and the Abbot of Saint-Martial had performed on 3 August 1029. However, a monk from Lombardy called Benedict of Chiusa sensed that something was amiss, and denounced the "Life of Martial" as a provincial forgery and the new liturgy as offensive to God. Adhemar's response was to splash-out even more on the forgeries, fabricating a church council of 1031 and a papal letter. This was a massive success - though doubted elsewhere, Martial's apostolicity became well-established in Aquitaine and it was only in 1920s that the Life of St Martial, the church council of 1031 and the papal letter were definitively proved to be forgeries by the Benedictine monk and historian Louis Saltet. At some other occasion, I will discuss the business of medieval forgery at greater length - its fascinating and crucially important for medievalists, especially those working (like I do) on the eighth to twelfth centuries, to understand. Perhaps to clear his conscience, Adhemar of Chabannes went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1034, where he died.

Adhemar the ancient historian

Adhemar begins his History of the Franks with, perhaps surprisingly for some, the Trojan war. Below is my translation of the first chapter (all faults with it are my own)

The beginning of the Frankish kingdom or rather the origin of that people, came forth from war. Indeed, it was in Asia, stronghold of the Trojans. There, there was a city that was called Troy, where Aeneas ruled. The Trojans were a brave and strong race of warriors, and they renewed wars excessively – restlessly exhorting themselves through their struggles, they went around conquering the lands that encircled them. However, the kings of the Greeks roused themselves to action and fought against Aeneas with an army, losing a great many men against him. Thither many of the Trojan people fell to the ground, and so Aeneas fled and hid himself away in the city of Troy. The Greeks fought against that city for ten years. Indeed, when the city had fallen, the tyrant Aeneas fled to Italy to contract peoples for fighting. Others also from amongst the princes, namely Priam and Antenor, boarded onto ships with the twelve thousand soldiers that were left of the Trojan army and departed from Troy, and they came all the way to the banks of the river Don. Having entered into the sea of Azov, they sailed and came through to the ends of Pannonia, adjoining the sea of Azov, and began to build a city. According to their memorial, they called it Sicambria, and they lived there for many years and greatly multiplied in population.

Adhemar's rather brief account of the siege of Troy obviously bears little relation to Homer's version of the events. The Iliad and the Odyssey were almost completely inaccessible to scholars in the Latin west until very late in the Middle Ages. Medieval scholars plenty about the Trojan war but they got their knowledge of it from works written in Latin like Virgil's Aeneid, the 1070-line "Ilias Latina" by the first century AD Roman senator Publius Baebius Italicus and the (pseudo)history purported to be written by at the time of the war itself by Dares Phrygius, a Trojan priest of Hephaestus (I must read Frederic Clark's brand new monograph on it someday). But Adhemar doesn't seem to be directly engaging with those authorities. Instead, as Adhemar's modern editor Jules Chavanon has pointed out, Adhemar looked to more recent sources than those to research his material early chapters of his histories, namely the seventh century chronicle of Fredegar and its continuation and the Liber Historiae Francorum, written in 727 by an anonymous layman (see Adhemar de Chabannes, "Chronique", edited by Jules Chavanon, Collection de textes pour servir a la etude et la enseignement de l'histoire, Paris, 1897, p xii). These sources also gave a similar account of the Trojan origins of the Franks. When exactly this legend of Trojan origins developed for the Franks developed is unknown, but it was certainly widespread under the later Merovingian kings in the seventh and early eighth centuries. The attractions it would have had at the time are fairly straightforward - it gave the Franks a venerable history and lineage, and as those who are familiar with Virgil will instantly deduce, it established their kinship with the Romans and by extension will have given them legitimate claims to a share in their former territories and their glorious legacy. Such legends were promoted as official history by the French monarchy and were still widely believed in the early modern period. Dissenting voices were not welcome - in 1714, the learned Nicolas Freret was arrested and imprisoned in the Bastille for claiming that the Franks were in fact Germans (see George Huppert, "The Trojan Franks and their Critics", Studies in the Renaissance Volume 12, 1965, p 227). Only with the French revolution of 1789 - 1794, when it became politically convenient to argue instead that the French royal family and aristocracy were the descendants of Germanic invaders who had imposed their alien and barbaric ways on civilised Gallo-Romans (the ancestors of the French people), was the myth of Trojan origins definitively abandoned.