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. 

A somewhat overrated but still very important event: The Treaty of Verdun (843)

As background to my series' on the last Carolingian kings (starting with the mini-series on Charles the Simple) and ton the Ottonians, I am going to make a post about a certain event that happened 1178 years ago (the exact date is not known, but it took place in the month of august) at a certain place in what is now the Lorraine region of eastern France. 

The Long backstory

On Christmas day 800, Charlemagne, king of the Franks and Lombards, was crowned Roman emperor in the West by Pope Leo III in St Peter's Basilica in Rome. This was literally the crowning glory to three decades of near constant political and military achievement, in which the Franks had acquired an empire comprising essentially the original six nations of the European Economic Community (the forerunner to the EU) - France, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, West Germany and Italy - plus a few other areas, namely modern day Switzerland, Austria and Catalonia. This made Charlemagne's empire the largest political unit Western Europe had known since the collapse of the old Western Roman Empire in the fifth century. In many ways this might have seemed to have ushered in an exciting new era. Charlemagne set to work at building an imperial capital at Aachen replete with an imperial palace, whose chapel (the only bit that survives today, see image below) was modelled on the architectural styles prevalent in the still surviving eastern half of the Roman Empire (what modern historians choose to call the Byzantine Empire) and was constructed with classical Roman columns brought over from Italy. In 802, he made all free men over the age of 12 in the realm swear an oath of loyalty directly to him - an unprecedented display of authority which must have required some very concerted administrative effort -and doubled down on an ambitious programme of governmental, ecclesiastical and moral reform. In the meantime, as part of his ideology of Roman imperial renewal, an ambitious revival of classical literature, art and education took place - what modern historians call the Carolingian Renaissance.

Still, not everything was looking great. This was about the point in time the Vikings were starting to make a nuisance of themselves, and Charlemagne's ambitious reform programme was all the more necessary (and some would say all the more futile) as complaints about corruption, maladministration and the oppression of the poor by the powerful were mounting. And then there was the problem of the succession. Charlemagne had three sons who survived to adulthood - Pepin, Louis and Charles the Younger. He also had four surviving daughters and half a dozen illegitimate children from various concubines. Succession to the Frankish kingdom was governed by the Salic law that had been followed by the dynasty that preceded the Carolingians, the Merovingians, which ruled that all close male relatives were eligible to inherit a portion of a dead man's lands, and the kingdom was no different in this respect. Charlemagne being emperor made this no different - his coronation, while undoubtedly an important event, did not mark the beginning of a new state and at a certain level Charlemagne may have seen the emperorship as essentially being his personal accolade. In 806, he drew up a plan for the division of the empire after his death. Pepin would rule as king over Italy and Bavaria. Louis' kingdom would consist of Aquitaine, Burgundy, Provence, Septimania and the Spanish March (the southern half of France plus Catalonia, basically). Charles the Younger would get what was left - that being essentially the entire northern half of the empire. Revealingly, no arrangements were made about who would inherit the imperial title. However, this plan never saw the light of day. When the great Frankish emperor finally breathed his last in 814, only one son was still alive, and that was Louis. Louis thus inherited an undivided empire - he had already been crowned king of the Franks and co-emperor by his ailing father the previous year. 

Louis (see the coin of him below, modelled on Roman imperial coinage), or Louis the Pious as he would later become known (Ludwig der Fromme in German), was an idealist and a visionary who wanted to take the Carolingian reform programme of administrative and moral correctio (correction) to unprecedented levels. Like many people at the time, he subscribed to an essentially Old Testament view of kingship that saw the prosperity and security of the realm as dependent on the moral well-being of its rulers and people. Closely aligned with this, he firmly believed that as emperor he was responsible for the spiritual salvation of his people as well as their material security. What prevented his grand designs for  going as smoothly as he might have hoped was the issue that had dogged the final third of his father's reign - and indeed, would dominate Carolingian politics for the rest of the ninth century - that of the succession. In 814, three of Louis' sons had already been fortunate enough to have made it past infancy - Lothar, Louis and Pepin. Unfortunately for Louis, he had to decide what to do with them. In 817 he drew up a document called the divisio imperii, which stipulated that Lothar was to get the imperial title and have most of the territories of the empire under his direct rule, while his brothers Pepin and Louis were to rule in Aquitaine and Bavaria respectively as subordinate kings (if they had sons they would inherit their kingdoms when they died, if they did not then they would revert to the emperor). But in 818, Louis' wife, the empress Ermengarde, died - the two of them had been quite close, and Ermengarde had closely advised Louis on many of his policies - and Louis reluctantly remarried, on the advice of his counsellors, to Judith, who gave him a son, Charles, in 821. This meant he had yet another son to provide for, as per ancient Frankish law and custom, and that meant chipping away at his other sons' inheritances, specifically that of Lothar, whose piece of the pie was by far the biggest as per the divisio imperii. Lothar and Pepin resented this between 830 and 839 Louis fought three civil wars against him - they were joined by their brother Louis for the third At some points things looked pretty dismal indeed for Louis - in 833 he was forced to perform a humiliating public penance and was technically deposed, but was fully re-instated as emperor the following year with widespread backing from the nobility. By 840, Louis was clearly on top and peace and order had been restored to the empire, but the stress of near-constant campaigning had taken a toll on his health and, after retreating to his summer hunting lodge near the palace of Ingelheim-am-Rhine, he died on 20 June 840, having forgiven his rebellious sons and confirmed Lothar as the new emperor. 

What happened next was all-out civil war. Here, it was Lothar and his nephew Pepin of Aquitaine (so many Pepins to keep track of, I know), the son of the previous Pepin, trying to keep the empire together, while Charles (known to posterity as Charles the Bald) and Louis (known to posterity as Louis the German) were trying to carve out kingdoms of their own. On 25 June 841, a battle was fought between the two sides at Fontenoy-en-Puisaye in eastern France. A great slaughter followed. Andreas Agnellus, the bishop of Ravenna, estimated that 40,000 men died on each side - battlefield casualty statistics from early medieval writers are always to be taken with a pinch of salt, if trusted at all, but this was undoubtedly not a skirmish between a couple of thousand highly trained warrior retainers on either side (which is what some historians have argued to be typical of Carolingian warfare) but a major set-piece battle that really pitted the Frankish people against each other, and carnage ensued. For those who fought there, it was psychologically scarring. We are fortunate enough to know this because the Carolingian empire did have a mostly literate lay aristocracy, and two lay aristocrats who fought at the battle of Fontenoy expressed themselves eloquently on the matter - the historian Nithard and the poet Angilbert. Here is Angilbert's poem "Lament for Fontenoy." While it does contain some Old Testament imagery (as was standard for Latin literature at that time), one can nonetheless see genuine trauma in Angilbert's beautifully crafted verses, as genuine as that of any of the WW1 poets. 

 Fontenoy they call its fountain, manor to the peasant known,

There the slaughter, there the ruin, of the blood of Frankish race;
Plains and forest shiver, shudder; horror wakes the silent marsh.

Neither dew nor shower nor rainfall yields its freshness to that field,
Where they fell, the strong men fighting, shrewdest in the battle's skill,
Father, mother, sister, brother, friends, the dead with tears have wept.

And this deed of crime accomplished, which I here in verse have told,
Angibert myself I witnessed, fighting with the other men,
I alone of all remaining, in the battle's foremost line.

On the side alike of Louis, on the side of Charles alike,
Lies the field in white enshrouded, in the vestments of the dead,
As it lies when birds in autumn settle white off the shore.

Woe unto that day of mourning! Never in the round of years
Be it numbered in men's annals! Be it banished from all mind,
Never gleam of sun shine on it, never dawn its dusk awake.

Night it was, a night most bitter, harder than we could endure,
When they fell, the brave men fighting, shrewdest in the battle's skill,
Father, mother, sister, brother, friends, the dead with tears have wept.

Now the wailing, the lamenting, now no longer will I tell;
Each, so far as in him lieth, let him stay his weeping now;
On their souls may He have mercy, let us pray the Lord of all.

Overleaf: A much later (and more romanticised) depiction of the Battle of Fontenoy from a manuscript (dating to c.1460) of the Grand Chroniques de France, painted by the great French early renaissance painter Jean Fouquet.

In the end, the battle did have a clear winner - the divisionist side of Charles the Bald and Louis the German. Lothar and the imperialists were utterly crippled, and not long afterwards the emperor was forced to abandon the imperial capital, Aachen. In 842 Charles the Bald and Louis the German sealed their alliance at Strasbourg with mutual oath-taking, in which each of them swore oaths to each other's troops in the vernacular - Charles swore the oath before Louis' troops in a very early dialect of Old High German, while Louis swore the oath before Charles' troops in "the Roman language." The texts of the oaths is preserved and thus is a goldmine for historical linguists. The "Roman language" which Louis swore the oath in had clearly evolved quite some way from the spoken Vulgar Latin (as opposed to the high, literary Latin of Cicero, Caesar, Virgil, Ovid and Livy) of Roman Gaul into something that could now be called a Romance language. Some scholars have argued that the language of the text can be seen as the earliest written form of Old French. However, some more conservative linguists argue that it can't quite be considered Old French - it does not have any distinguishing features that would identify it as a forerunner to any of the literary dialects, either the Langue D'Oil of the northern French chansons de geste (songs of deeds in war), or the Occitan of Southern French troubadour fin'amour (what modern scholars call courtly love) lyrics, that attain written form when French vernacular literature gets going in the twelfth century. Indeed, there's one theory that the scribe who wrote the text of the oaths deliberately wrote in a kind of Gallo-Romance Koine, deliberately designed to be mutually intelligible to all regional dialects, like the Koine Greek of the New Testament. Below is the Gallo-Romance text:

Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di en avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo, cist meon fradre Karlo, et in aiudha, et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradra salvar dift, in o quid il mi altresi fazet, et ab Ludher nul plaid nunquam prindrai, qui meon vol cist meon fradre Karle in damno sit.

English translation (not my own): "For the love of God and the Christian populace and our joint salvation, from this day onward, to the best of my knowledge and abilities granted by God, I shall protect my brother Charles by any means possible, as one ought to protect one's brother, insofar as he does the same for me, and I shall never willingly enter into a pact with Lothair against the interests of my brother Charles."

The Treaty of Verdun and beyond

Lothar's position was incredibly fragile and so he agreed to come to a settlement with Louis and Charles. At Verdun in August 843 they agreed to divide the Empire into three between them (see the map below), but with Lothar keeping the imperial title. As you can see below, Charles' kingdom roughly corresponds to modern day France but plus Flanders and Catalonia and minus Alsace, Lorraine, the Rhone valley and Provence. Louis the German's kingdom is essentially West Germany minus some territories on the left bank of the Rhine and including some bits of modern day Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia. Therefore, some have seen this moment as being the genesis of France and Germany. Lothar on the other hand got what remained in the middle. Some would say that Lothar's kingdom was doomed from the start, arguing that it was simply too unwieldy to govern in an age when information could only travel as fast as a horse's hooves and with the Alps forming a significant obstacle between the north and south of his kingdom, that it was too ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous (a roughly 60:40 split between Romance and Germanic peoples) and that it was too vulnerable to attack from either side (I am kind of guilty of this tendency myself, in a certain meme I made, one featuring my all-time favourite animal). But I don't think there's any good reason to see Lothar's kingdom as any less viable than West and East Francia. Size was a problem for them too, and they were all inhabited by various different peoples each with their own dialects, laws and customs. While the inhabitants of Charles' kingdom north of the Loire identified as Franks and were subject to the laws of the Salian Franks, the inhabitants south of the Loire identified as Burgundians, Gascons, Visigoths (in Septimania and the Spanish March) and even Romans (I suspect that many old senatorial families still lingered in the aristocracy of southern Gaul) and were subject to Roman law - the Theodosian Code of 438 in Aquitaine and the Visigothic Breviary of Alaric II in Septimania and Catalonia - and the laws of the Burgundians. East Francia was a land of even starker contrasts, with the recently converted Saxons in the north, who had been making sacrifices to Odin and Thor in a time still within living memory, and still lived in a rough, frontier society governed by tribal customs, versus the cultured Bavarians in the south who took pride in having once been a Roman province and having converted to Christianity earlier than all the other peoples of East Francia; and its administrative and communications infrastructure were the least developed of the three kingdoms. Meanwhile, Lothar's kingdom had the highly agriculturally and viticulturally productive Meuse, Moselle, Rhine, Rhone and Po river valleys, making it very wealthy, as well as so many different places of ideological prestige including the imperial capital of Aachen, the old Lombard capital at Pavia, many great cities and bishoprics that went back to Roman times like Cologne, Trier, Lyon, Vienne, Milan and Ravenna and the great Carolingian family monasteries of Prum and Stavelot-Malmedy. 

Above, all its crucial to remember that this was not an age of nationalism. The Carolingian nobility (what German historians call the Reichsaristokratie) continued to embrace a pan-Frankish identity and continued to own lands and act as patrons to monasteries in several different kingdoms - for example, Eberhard of Friuli (died 867), duke (military governor) of Friuli in the north east of the Italian kingdom, gave his lands in Italy and in the East Frankish kingdom to his eldest son Unruoch, his second eldest Berengar got his lands and monasteries in north western Lotharingia (modern day Wallonia region of Belgium) and his other two sons got his estates in northern West Francia. Church councils were still attended by bishops from across the Carolingian kingdoms, and flourishing intellectual networks drew in luminaries not only from all over the territories of the Frankish empire but also from the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Ireland and Christian Spain. And the kings themselves still kept to roughly the same royal ideology and carried on with the Carolingian reform project in their respective kingdoms.

What would do for Lothar's kingdom in the end was, yet again, dynastic problems. Lothar had three sons who survived to adulthood - Lothar II, Charles (so many Charles', I know, its confusing) and Louis (Louis was another name the Carolingians were hooked on calling their sons) - and when he died in 855 they proceeded to divide it between the three of them with the Treaty of Prum. Lothar II got the northern vertical strip from the North Sea down to the foothills of the Alps that soon became known for many a century to come as Lotharingia. Charles got the Rhone Valley and Provence. And Louis got Italy and the imperial title as Emperor Louis II. But biological good luck was not on their side. Charles died childless in 863 and his territories were shared between Lothar and Louis II. Lothar II quickly realised that his wife Queen Theutberga, whom he married in 855, was barren and so tried to divorce her and marry his concubine, Waldrada instead, but since the leading bishops of the ninth century were trying to assert ecclesiastical jurisidiction over marriage, and insisted on it as being sacramental and binding, Lothar had to fabricate an excuse in claiming that Theutberga had been engaging in incest with her brother, Hucbert. Hucbert offered to defend the reputation of him and his sister in trial by combat, and after Queen Theutberga was shown to be innocent in a trial by ordeal of boiling water (her hand healed rather than blistered a few days after being doused in boiling water) Lothar was forced to take her back. Lothar thus died without legitimate issue in 869 and his two uncles, Charles the Bald and Louis the German, briefly went to war with each other before signing the Treaty of Meerssen (see below), in which they divided Lotharingia between them.

Dynastic bad luck came next for Louis II in 875, who also died without male issue. Charles the Bald and Louis the German went to war again, this time over Italy, and by 880 it was annexed to the East Frankish kingdom. Dynastic bad luck then hit the West Frankish branch of the Carolingian family real hard - after Charles the Bald died in 877, his son Louis the Stammerer reigned for only two years and his two teenaged sons from his first marriage, Pepin (still more Pepins) and Carloman, ruled the kingdom jointly for three years and then with Carloman as sole ruler for two years. When Carloman died in 884, his only heir was his five year old half-brother, Charles the Simple. The West Frankish nobility didn't want a child king, especially since this the point in time at which the Viking invasions were at their most devastating, so they invited Charles the Fat, the youngest son of Louis the German who had already hoovered up East Francia and Italy by outlasting all his brothers, to become king of West Francia. For four years, the Carolingian Empire was reunited under a single emperor. But Charles the Fat was a uninspiring leader with too many talented subordinates, and he too had failed to procure a legitimate male heir. So when he died of a stroke in January 888 after facing a rebellion in East Francia from his illegitimate nephew, Arnulf of Carinthia, the empire broke up again, this time forever, with the aristocracies of West Franica, Burgundy, Provence and Italy all electing kings from amongst their own ranks.

Long-term legacy

In the very long term, the Treaty of Verdun would indeed be very significant. West Francia and East Francia would, in the long-run, despite all the territorial configuration and reconfiguration all the way through the ninth century and beyond, prove to be quite durable political units and would, no later than the thirteenth century, develop into the distinct and recognisable cultural entities of France and Germany. Meanwhile, the old Middle Kingdom of Lothar would become a battleground between the rulers of the two kingdoms bestride it. I won't go into the details of what happened in the tenth century, since I'll cover them in other posts. Suffice to say that from c.1000 - 1643 the border between France and Germany/ the Holy Roman Empire lay squarely at the river Meuse, with Verdun itself being a border fortress, but after the Thirty Years' War concluded in 1648 France, which was among the victorious powers, got given various towns and fortresses east of the Meuse. Louis XIV fought a series of wars to bring the French border to the left bank of the Rhine, and also to conquer the Hapsburg Netherlands (modern day Belgium), in which he managed some further territorial acquisitions, including Alsace and French Flanders (the area around Lille and Dunkirk). Successive French leaders thereafter tried to achieve the same result - Louis XV managed to annexe all of Lorraine by 1766, and over the course of the French Revolutionary Wars (1792 - 1802) the First French Republic managed to bring its borders all the way to the left bank of the Rhine. Indeed, the areas under direct rule from Paris in the reign of Emperor Napoleon I essentially corresponded to West Francia plus the kingdom of Lothar (see map below).

After Napoleon's defeat in 1815 the French border was again set where it is now. But in 1871, Alsace and Lorraine were lost to the newly unified German Empire. They would only be regained by France after WW1, a war whose Western front essentially encompassed the old kingdom of Lothar II and its borderlands with West Francia (see map below). 

France would again lose Alsace and Lorraine to Germany with Hitler's invasion in 1940, and it was only in 1945 that the border between France and Germany was finally set where it is now, with its security and that of the Low Countries being guaranteed by the formation of the European Economic Community soon after. The European Economic Community would of course develop into the European Union. Interestingly enough, the EU's headquarters are located in Brussels and Strasbourg, both of them located in the old middle kingdom of Lothar II, and the EU annually awards the Charlemagne prize to those who they think merit it for the promotion of a pan-European identity. So one might say the story of the rise and crisis of the Carolingian empire is a central foundation myth to the European Union and its ideals.

The life of Charles the Simple (879 - 929) part the first: early years and rise to power (879 - 898)

This series also began its life as facebook posts I did for a medieval history group. The West Frankish kingdom in the long tenth century (c.880 - 1030 lets say) is very close to my heart - indeed its the area I wrote my masters thesis on, and the Feudal revolution debate I've been obsessing over since I was a first year undergraduate, essentially hinges on the last decades of it. Yet its political history is little known and has received little attention from academic medievalists post-WW1 (the last time a biography of Charles the Simple was written was in 1899), though in the last couple of decades that has started to be rectified. Through this blog I want to show that the last Carolingians and early Capetians can be interesting, so we'll start at the beginning ...

Charles the Simple was born in 879, five months after the death of his father, King Louis II the Stammerer of West Francia. Louis was the son of King Charles the Bald (843 - 877), who had been given West Francia at the Treaty of Verdun in 843, when the Carolingian Empire was divided up by the sons of Emperor Louis the Pious (814 - 840) after a three year civil war. However, unlike Henry VI of England, Charles was lucky enough not to have the kingship thrust on him as an infant. He had two teenaged elder half-brothers, Louis III and Carloman. They had some promise in them. Louis won a great victory against the Vikings at Saucourt in 881, that would not long afterwards be immortalised in one of the oldest surviving epic poems in German, the Ludwigslied. By 884, however, both of them were deceased. The West Franks were not going to have a five year old boy rule over them, so they got in Charles the Fat (these Carolingian kings really do have great names don't they), the king of East Francia and Italy and the son of Louis the German (Charles the Simple's great uncle) to rule over them. Thus the Carolingian Empire was briefly reunified. However, Charles, who was widely held to be incompetent, was soon faced with deposition and rebellion at the hands of his nephew, Arnulf of Carinthia, who had the support of the German nobility, in East Francia in 887, and in January 888 he suffered a stroke and died.

This was the final undoing of the Carolingian Empire and a seismic moment for West Francia. For the first time since 751, when Charlemagne's father Pepin the Short overthrew the last king of the Merovingian dynasty, Childeric III, and was anointed king of the Franks, there was not a single adult male Carolingian candidate for the throne of the West Frankish realms. Arnulf was not gonna become king of West Francia, because his support base lay squarely in Germany and to a lesser extent Italy. There was the Carolingian cadet branch of the House of Vermandois, descended from Charlemagne's grandson Bernard of Italy, but for some reason they always stayed out of succession disputes - though that didn't stop them from throwing their weight around otherwise. The branch of the Carolingian dynasty ruling over the Middle Kingdom (Lotharingia), had died out in 869. The only Carolingian candidate for the throne was of course Charles the Simple, and he was only nine years old. Now could not be a worse time for a child king. The Vikings had laid siege to Paris only two years earlier, and their attacks were only intensifying, given that in the last two decades they had been losing ground in the British Isles thanks to the efforts of Alfred of Wessex and Rhodri Mawr of Gwynedd. As you might have guessed earlier, there was no principle of primogeniture under the Carolingians. And while there was a sort of dynastic principle - the anointing of kings had been monopolised by the Carolingians for almost 150 years - a non-Carolingian king was not inconceivable. So the nobles and bishops of the West Frankish kingdom, figuring they needed an energetic warrior on the throne, gathered together and elected Odo, count of Paris, who had led the defence of the city of Paris during the Viking siege whilst Charles was away in Italy, as their king. At the same time, non-Carolingian kings were coming to power in Transjurane Burgundy (basically modern day Switzerland and the Franche Comte region of France) and Italy, and a non-Carolingian dynasty, the Bosonids, already ruled in Provence. The annalist of Fulda complained about "kinglets" and another contemporary chronicler, Regino of Prum, claimed that kings were being spewed from the guts of the old empire.

Odo seemed like a good choice on so many accounts. He was one of the most powerful officers in the kingdom and and major landowner - he was ex officio count of Paris, Etampes, Orleans, Blois, Touraine and Anjou (and those were just his most important ones) and lay abbot - part of the Carolingians' programme of monastic reform, was to appoint lay men as abbots to take care of estate management, political representation and military organisation while the monks got on with prayer and study - of seven monasteries, including Saint-Denis and Saint Martin of Tours, two of the oldest and most prestigious in the kingdom. He had also, like many ninth century Frankish noblemen, received a good education in the liberal arts (certainly grammar, rhetoric and logic - which would have involved the study of lots of Classical Roman texts) at Saint-Denis. The one thing that could be held against him was his background. Odo's father, Robert the Strong, had been a prominent government official and military commander under Charles the Bald, but nothing is known of his ancestry before then, beyond the realm of pure speculation - the whole theory linking Robert the Strong to Count Robert of Worms in c.800 strikes me as being rooted in essentially circular reasoning. I suspect, Odo's ancestors prior to his father were not noble, in the sense they didn't belong to the circle of prominent families who frequented the royal court - the reichsaristokratie (imperial nobility) as they're referred to in German scholarship. To my knowledge, Noble status defined by law did not emerge in Western Europe until the thirteenth century, and the Carolingians seem to have had a relatively open aristocracy, created and defined through service to the king and the state as well as landownership. Blood was largely insignificant (though family connections were certainly of no small importance to political success). Thereby, snobbery wasn't going to be too much of a problem, but above all Odo was not a Carolingian and that was going to come back to bite him.

From what little detail we have of his reign, Odo was a fairly successful ruler to begin with. He called the kingdom-wide royal ban - summons for all the free men in the realm to partake in military service for the Frankish state - against the Vikings and won some victories against them in Neustria (Normandy and Anjou area) and Aquitaine. But soon he received a knife to the back from Archbishop Fulk of Rheims. Fulk had resisted Robert's election in 888 but had been forced to yield. As soon as Odo started experiencing setbacks against the Vikings in Aquitaine in 893, Fulk made his move and anointed the not yet fourteen year old boy Charles the Simple, who was in his care, as king of West Francia. For the next four years, Fulk and Charles constantly harassed Odo, not managing to depose him but making his life very difficult. In 897 they came to an agreement - Odo would continue to reign as king until his death, but Charles would succeed him as king and Odo's brother Robert would succeed him in his offices (countships and lay abbacies) and family estates. Odo died the next year, leaving the pathway to the throne for Charles the Simple unobstructed at last.

Occasional forays into global medieval history, chapter the first: black Africans in the European Middle Ages

This began its life as a facebook post I did last summer, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests following the killing of George Floyd on 25 May 2020. I thought I should include it here because its still very topical and so I thought it deserved viewing from more than just my friends on social media. At the same time, I don't want to oversell myself on this - I am by no means an expert on this particular area - most of the secondary literature on race and otherness in the Middle Ages (in this context essentially meaning the later medieval period/ post-1100), I must confess, I have not read and have only cursory familiarity - and this post was very much cobbled together from what bits and bobs I knew and had read around about the topic. 

Black Africans and the European Middle Ages

In the midst of the current discussions on institutional racism and inequality both in the US and over here, history seems more relevant than ever. Naturally, most of the discussion has focused on Early Modern (c.1500 - 1800) and Modern (post-1800) History - the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and its eventual abolition, the American Civil War and Reconstruction, the European colonisation of Africa, segregation in the USA, the Windrush generation and their enduring legacies in the present age. Attention has also been drawn to the contributions of black people to Western civilisation, with figures like Joseph Boulogne "The Chevalier de Saint Georges" (1745 - 1799), the great Afro-Caribbean French classical composer. and Katherine Johnson (1918 - 2020), the Afro-American mathematician responsible for getting Neil Armstrong on the moon, amongst others getting the recognition that they've always deserved but has often been denied to them.

As some of you already know, I am of course not a modern historian. The time period I work on, the European Middle Ages, may seem to many like it has very little relevance to all this. Many people today still see globalisation as something that began in the 1490s with the voyages of Christopher Columbus to the Americas and Vasco da Gama round the Horn of Africa to India, while viewing the Middle Ages as being largely a period of minimal connectivity with most cross-civilisational contacts being violent i.e. the Arab conquest of Spain, the Crusades, the Mongol invasions etc. That view is being revised, as now we're coming to appreciate just how economically and culturally connected the medieval world, especially in the Central Middle Ages (950 - 1350, my favourite bit) really was. The economic connections is not what I'll primarily concern myself with here, but they were definitely there. By the 13th and 14th centuries, West African ivory was being used in all manner of different forms of Western European craftsmanship such as medallion of the attack on the castle of love from early 14th century France (see first image), and French copper was being used to make bronze sculptures like this rather naturalistic one from the kingdom of Ife in modern-day Nigeria (see below). Medieval western Europeans were definitely well aware of the wealthy, powerful and hugely sophisticated states in Sub-Saharan Africa from whence their gold and ivory came. The Catalan World Atlas of c.1375, a remarkably detailed and geographically accurate map compiled by the Catalan Jewish geographer Abraham Cresques for King Charles V of France (reigned 1364 - 1380), depicts (also see below) south of the Sahara a resplendent African king who could possibly be identified with the famous Mansa Musa (1280 - 1337), emperor of Mali, who was so wealthy that when he went on pilgrimage to Mecca he caused an economic crisis in Egypt from the hyperinflation created by his generous charity to the poor there.

So goods made their way across continents, but what about people? Contrary to what you might think, the story of (black) African migration to Britain does not begin with Windrush or even with the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Rather, it begins in Roman Britain as Moorish (possibly black) legionaries were stationed on Hadrians' Wall in the reign of the African emperor Septimus Severus in the early 3rd century and the skeletons of men and women of black African descent have been found in London and York. Yet perhaps that's to be expected - Ancient Rome was, after all, a vast cosmopolitan empire stretching from the Pennines to the Euphrates and from the Danube to the Sahara.

What about after the Western Roman Empire abandoned Britain in the early 5th century? Well it seems that while Roman imperial authority disappeared from Britain at that time, and the Roman way of life largely evaporated not long afterwards, connections with the Mediterranean and the world beyond did not. Excavations at the Romano-British fortress of Tintagel in Cornwall (often thought to be the real-life Camelot of Arthurian legend) and the Anglo-Saxon burial site at Sutton Hoo in East Anglia, have shown that trade with places as far away as North Africa and the Middle East did continue into the "Dark Ages", if only on a reduced scale and to satisfy the demands for luxury goods of elites - Romano-British warlords, early Anglo-Saxon kings and their warrior retinues. As with regard to people, it seems that lowland Britain in the "Dark Ages" was more ethnically diverse than just Romano-Britons, Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians. If you read the Venerable Bede's (died 735) "Ecclesiastical History of England", our foremost source for the 7th and early 8th centuries, you may encounter Abbot Hadrian of Canterbury (died 709). According to Bede, Hadrian did much to improve the organisation of the early English church as well as well as establish a school of Ancient Greek at Canterbury - besides a few enclaves in Italy, Greek was rarely studied in the early medieval West, so this was a very rare contribution yet an invaluable one to furthering Christian learning in Anglo-Saxon England. Bede describes Hadrian as a man of "African race." Since Bede was likely referring to the Roman province of Africa, this means Hadrian probably came from modern-day Tunisia. Whether Abbot Hadrian was what we'd now describe as black (black and white were not ethnic groupings in the early medieval period, after all) is uncertain and he may have more likely been a Berber, yet that would have still made him what we'd now consider to be BAME/ POC.

Further evidence of black Africans in Anglo-Saxon England comes in the form of a skeleton found at Fairford in Gloucestershire dating from sometime between 896 and 1025, around the time of the struggle against the Vikings. Forensic anthropological analysis has shown that this skeleton was that of a woman from Sub-Saharan Africa. Sadly, we don't know enough to figure out her social status and how she go there. Given that the Vikings raided as far as Islamic Spain, where black Africans lived along with Muslim Arabs, Jews and Christian Spaniards, its possible that she might have been a slave - early Irish sources indicate that the Vikings brought back some African slaves to their capital at Dublin - but we shouldn't assume that either, since traders and diplomats from Islamic Spain and North Africa are known to have visited the British Isles in that period. Going into the Central Middle Ages, a skeleton has been found in the cemetery of a Franciscan Friary at Ipswich in Suffolk of a black man, dated somewhere between 1258 and 1300. It seems likely that he came there with Robert Tiptoft, the nobleman who had founded the friary, as Robert had been on the crusade of the French king, Louis IX (1214 - 1270), to Tunis in 1270 and is recorded has having brought back four "captive Saracens (Saracen is a term normally used to refer to Arabs, but it came to refer to any non-Christian people i.e. the pagan Lithuanians were referred to as "Saracens" by crusader knights in the 14th century Baltic)." At the same time, we can't be sure if that man was one of those Muslim captives - he may have been a Christian from Nubia (modern day Sudan), an area often allied quite closely with Western crusaders. And certainly he was quite well-respected, of high status and, by the time of his death, baptised given that he was given the honour of being buried in the friary precinct. A final example to give, from the close of the Middle Ages, would be that of John Blanke, a "blackamoor" trumpeter in the retinue of King Henry VII who then went on to serve his son Henry VIII and successfully petitioned him for his wages to be doubled, showing that his music was clearly very appreciated at the Tudor court (the fourth image is of John Blanke as depicted in the Westminster tournament roll).

So clearly there were black Africans in Medieval Britain and Europe, but what were medieval attitudes to race like? This is a complicated matter, not least because the Medieval Western sources give us very different impressions depending on their authorial, historical and cultural contexts. Its safe to say that medieval people didn't have the same racial conscience that we do (they certainly didn't see the world as being divided up into whites/ caucasians, blacks and East Asians) and that the modern scientific racism that was to emerge in the wake of European colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries didn't exist yet. At the same time, medieval Europeans weren't colour-blind (except for in the medical sense, no one is really) and as recent scholars, especially American ones, have been keen to point out, there are a sizeable number of works of (mainly post-1300) medieval art and literature in which black Africans are depicted as exotic and Orientalised others if not savage and monstrous ones. Its important to remember that despite what has been said earlier here, seeing a black person would not have been an everyday experience for most medieval Europeans save for those who lived on frontier zones with the Muslim world - Iberia, Sicily and the Crusader States. Black people would have, in many contexts, been associated with Islamic polities hostile to Western Christian powers - large contingents of the armies of the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt and the Almohad Caliphate in Spain, great rivals of Western crusaders, would have consisted of black slave troops. There was also an ancient association of the colour black with sin and the devil, going back to the Roman poet Paulinus of Nola in the early 5th century AD and the Epistle of Barnabas (written sometime between 70 and 132 AD).

But medieval European attitudes to black Africans were nowhere near all ones of exoticism and bigotry. Lets consider some examples here, from a topic very close to my heart. As some of you know, I've always loved knights, castles and chivalry. So lets consider some depictions of black African knights from the Holy Roman Empire under the Hohenstaufen dynasty, which ruled the Empire from 1152 to 1245. To give just a little bit of background, the Hohenstaufen emperors frequently clashed with the papacy for who should have (almost entirely theoretical) supreme authority in Christendom as well as the more practical issue of who had the right to appoint bishops in Germany, and also with rebellious German dukes and Italian city republics. The second Hohenstaufen Emperor, Henry VI (died 1197), married Constance, the heiress to the Norman kingdom of Sicily. Their son, Frederick II (1194 - 1250), spent most of time in Sicily and there he ruled over a cosmopolitan kingdom in which black Africans alongside Greeks, Arabs, Jews and of course Germans and Italo-Normans all held positions of honour at his court and were amongst his retinue. Since Frederick II wanted to promote the image of himself as the heir to the ancient Roman emperors (see image below for a coin of his, likely produced with West African gold since Frederick began minting gold coins, being the first Western European ruler since the 8th century to do so, after he sided a trade deal with the Sultanate of Tunis, a depot for West African gold, in 1231), the presence of black Africans in his empire symbolised how, like Augustus Caesar before him, he was bringing all of humanity together so that they might enjoy universal peace and prosperity (see below a fresco Frederick had commissioned at Verona in the 1240s depicting his various subjects who, apart from their headgear, dress alike). In the reign of Frederick II, a statue was erected at Magedburg Cathedral depicting St Maurice (also see below). This indicates that Frederick had no interest in portraying the black Africans in his empire as fundamentally other, but rather as his lawful subjects along with all other peoples, sharing a common humanity.

Towards the end of Frederick II's reign, a statue was commissioned for the cathedral at Magdeburg in Saxony. It depicts St Maurice, the patron Saint of the Holy Roman Empire since the reign of Otto I (936 - 973). St Maurice was a 3rd century AD Roman soldier and early Christian martyr from Egypt. Here he is depicted unambiguously as a black African man though in relatively naturalistic way and not as a derogatory character. Instead, he is presented as a heroic and admirable figure, clad and equipped as mid-13th century German knight.

This nicely ties in with the final example that we shall now look at, drawn from the works of one of the most celebrated poets of Hohenstaufen Germany, the knight Wolfram von Eschenbach (died 1230). He is famous for the epic poem, Parzifal, the story of King Arthur's grail-questing knight based on an earlier, late 12th century Old French version. Here he tells of how the father of Percival, Gamuret, a knight of Anjou (a region of North West France), ventures through the Middle East to Africa down to the kingdom of Zalamanke. Here he comes to the rescue of the black African queen Belkane, who is being besieged by the king of Scotland. Afterwards he is received at her court with honour and despite their racial and religious differences (Belkane is a pagan who appears to worship Juno and other Graeco-Roman gods) Gamuret falls in love with her, finding Belkane to be beautiful and as pure-hearted as any Christian woman, and so they engage in a passionate love affair which produces a child - Feirefis. Gamuret has to return to Anjou and there fathers with another woman his other son Percival.

Percival later meets his mixed-race brother Fierefis and they do battle. They are both impressed by each other's chivalry, reflected above all in their martial prowess and courtesy, and they soon realise that they both share a common heritage. Eventually, Fierefis is taken to King Arthur's court and the poem follows thus:

"And Feirefis sat by King Arthur, nor would either prince delay

To the question each asked the other courteous answer to make straightway –

Quoth King Arthur, ‘May God be praised, for He honoureth us I ween,

Since this day within our circle so gallant a guest is seen,

No knight hath Christendom welcomed to her shores from a heathen land

Whom, and he desired my service, I had served with such willing hand!

Quoth Feirefis to King Arthur, ‘Misfortune hath left my side,

Since the day that my goddess Juno, with fair winds and a favouring tide,

Led my sail to this Western kingdom! Methinks that thou nearest thee

In such wise as he should of whose valour many tales have been told to me;

If indeed thou art called King Arthur, then know that in many a land

Thy name is both known and honoured, and thy fame o’er all knights doth stand.’

(529-540)

…

And Arthur willed ere the morrow a banquet, rich and fair,

On the grassy plain before him they should without fail prepare,

That Feirefis they might welcome as befitting so brave a guest.

‘Now be ye in this task not slothful, but strive, as shall seem ye best,

Then henceforth he be one of our circle, of the Table Round, a knight.’

And they spake, they would win that favour, if so be in it should seem him right.

Then Feirefis, the rich hero, the brotherhood with them aware;

And they quaffed the cup of parting, and forth to their tents would fare.

And joy it came with the morning, if here I the truth may say,

And many were glad at the dawning of a sweet and a welcome day.

(653-662)"

All throughout the poem, Wolfram von Eschenbach plays those ancient tropes associating blackness with sinfulness and then subverts them to show that what matters is not the colour of your skin but the hue of your soul, which is determined by your own free-willed decisions. He also demonstrates, like the statue of St Maurice, that men of all races can belong to the order of chivalry and be held in honour and respect by all knights, even if they are not baptised Christians, as is clearly the case with Fierefis. Its worth mentioning that there were other non-white knights of the Round Table, such as the Moorish knight Sir Morien and the Arab knights Sir Safir, Sir Palomides and Sir Segwarides. The Arthurian legends have in many of their more modern re-iterations that we're more familiar with of course been whitewashed, but next time you here someone complaining about POC actors being cast in a movie or TV series about King Arthur as "political correctness gone mad", as indeed happened with the recent "Merlin" TV series which I'm sure many of us remember (I was a fan of that series), tell them that the original medieval Arthuriana (and indeed medieval Britain historically) was much more diverse than they think.

Here begins nothing ...

Hello and welcome. My name is Joseph Brown and I have just completed a Masters in Medieval History at the University of Oxford, where I achieved a Merit, having previously done an Undergraduate degree there in (mostly medieval) history in which I achieved a 2:1. I am highly passionate about medieval history, as has been the case pretty much from as early as I can remember, going back to my early childhood fascination with knights and castles (still think they're pretty awesome today in my personal opinion). My interests in medieval history are very broad, both in terms of time period and geographical area, but in terms of the content of this blog on Western and Central Europe in the period c.700 - 1200. This particular period really fascinates me in part on account of its formativeness in European history - over the course of this period most of the classic features of medieval society as we tend to envision it (including, surprise, surprise, knights and castles) took shape, around which many rich historiographical controversies to get one's teeth stuck in abound. But history isn't all about linear progress, and this period is also full of lots of intriguing dead-ends and might-have-beens. Above all, its full of all kinds of dramatic and exciting events to give life to it - the rise and fall of the Carolingians, the conversion of the Scandinavia and East Central Europe to Christianity, the Norman Conquest of England, the Investiture Controversy, the first three crusades and the Twelfth Century Renaissance to name just half a dozen. This is not a strict limitation - when I feel like it I might make posts about the late Roman and post-Roman periods or the Later Middle Ages too, as well as exploring some connections and comparisons here and there with other parts of the Old World/ Afro-Eurasia (whatever one's supposed to call it) in this period. Through this blog I hope to share my knowledge, theories and musings (and the odd incoherent ramble) on this period and give insights into what research/ translating of original texts I'm doing. I hope that someday I'll do a PhD, likely one building from my Masters thesis on political culture in tenth century West Francia as seen by the controversial chronicler Richer of Rheims (fl. 991 - 998), but this is very much a moot point right now. What I hope most to achieve is to make this fascinating period interesting and accessible, and this blog is I hope a small step towards that.