An Empire of Memory (28 page)

Padberg, ‘Zur Spannung von Gentilismus und christlichem Universalitätsideal im Reich Karls des

Grossen’, in Franz-Reiner Erkens (ed.), Karl der Grosse und das Erbe der Kulturen (Berlin, 2001),

36–53; Mayke de Jong, ‘Charlemagne’s Church’, in Joanna Story (ed.), Charlemagne: Empire and

Society (Manchester, 2005), 103–35; Matthew Innes, ‘“Immune from Heresy”: Defining the

Boundaries of Carolingian Christianity’, in Paul Fouracre and David Ganz (eds.), Frankland: The

Franks and the World of the Early Middle Ages (Manchester, 2008), 101–25; and now de Jong,

Penitential State. On Bede’s influence over the Franks, see Ch. 3 n. 47.

16 On the Carolingian building program and Rome, see Charles B. McClendon, The Origins of

Medieval Architecture: Building in Europe, A.D. 600–900 (New Haven, Conn., 2005), 106–27. On

Charlemagne and Louis’s relationship with Rome, see Thomas F. X. Noble, The Republic of St. Peter:

The Birth of the Papal State, 680–825 (Philadelphia, 1984), 287–301; Janet L. Nelson, ‘Translating

Images of Authority: The Christian Roman Emperors in the Carolingian World’, in The Frankish

World, 750–900 (London, 1996), 89–98; and Janet L. Nelson, ‘Kingship and Empire’, in J. H. Burns

(ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c.350–c.1450 (Cambridge, 1988), 232. On

the Franks’ conception of their place in history, see the trenchant comments in McKitterick,

Charlemagne, 326–30, 370–7. On the matrix of relics, space, and time, see the excellent R. A.

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peoples rather quickly came to think of themselves as Franks and these Franks were

the new chosen people, possessors of their own particular empire. The Franks were

the Church; they were the Christians. It was probably not coincidence that Alcuin

kept calling Charlemagne ‘David’ and not ‘Augustus’ and, drawing from Gregory

the Great, spoke of the Franks holding the christianitas regnum. Charlemagne was

thought to have led a united populus christianus against all God’s enemies.17

The Frankish regnum was intellectualized to be comprised of one all-embracing

gens, defined not by ethnicity but rather by common adherence to an ideal, by

submission to a new, universal Frankish imperium. Indeed, the places Charlemagne

cared about were varied. As seen in Chapter 1, Charlemagne’s circle intellectually

constructed a special role for the Franks in watching over the Christians living in

the Holy Land. The Franks also tried to make their presence felt in Iberia and

Constantinople by taking great interest in quelling the heresy of Adoptionism and

refuting the Second Council of Nicaea’s stance on images, respectively. The early

thirteenth-century Peutinger map was almost certainly modeled on a ninth-century

original. The map geographically represented the extent of the Franks’ vision of

empire––the entire world touched by Christianity, the world evangelized by the

apostles and subsequent missionaries, from Britain to Sri Lanka.18 The empire

under the Carolingians was never tied geographically to any one place (including

Rome) but rather linked intellectually to both ‘Franks’ and its contemporary

synonym ‘Christians’.

Court ideology spread outwards. By the end of his reign, the Frankish royal

agenda under Charlemagne had ‘like dye in cloth . . . , taken, or become absorbed,

in human material collectively. Charlemagne’s government would persist as an

empire of the mind.’19 Or, perhaps better, it would persist as an ‘empire of

Markus, ‘How on Earth Could Places Become Holy? Origins of the Christian Idea of Holy Places’,

Journal of Early Christian Studies, 2 (1994), 257–71.

17 Mary Garrison, ‘The Franks as the New Israel? Education for an Identity from Pippin to

Charlemagne’, in Uses of the Past, 114–61; Bullough, ‘Empire and Emperordom’, 386; and Mary

Alberi, ‘The Evolution of Alcuin’s Concept of the Imperium Christianum’, in Joyce Hill and Mary

Swan (eds.), The Community, the Family and the Saint: Patterns of Power in Early Medieval Europe

(Turnhout, 1998), 3–17. Alberi suggests that this understanding of the populus christianus would

downplay the significance of the different gentes under Charlemagne and hence the importance of

‘Frankishness’. I don’t agree. As I have mentioned in Chs. 1 and 2 above and will discuss in more depth in Ch. 5 below, this smoothing of differences seems to have elided the populus christianus with the

Frankish gens in particular and highlighted its importance.

18 On the Adoptionism controversy, see John C. Cavadini, The Last Christology of the West:

Adoptionism in Spain and Gaul, 785–820 (Philadelphia, 1993); and the brief summary in

Rosamond McKitterick, Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity (Cambridge, 2008),

311–15. On Carolingian sources and the Holy Land, see Ch. 1, above. On the Peutinger Map, see

Emily Albu, ‘Imperial Geography and the Medieval Peutinger Map’, Imago Mundi, 57 (2005), 136–

49; and idem, ‘Rethinking the Peutinger Map’, in Richard J. A. Talbert and Richard W. Unger (eds.),

Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Fresh Perspectives, New Methods (Leiden, 2008), 111–19.

19 Janet L. Nelson, ‘Charlemagne and Empire’, in Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick

(eds.), The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: New Directions in Early Medieval Studies (Burlington,

Vt., 2008), 232. Warren Brown elsewhere suggested that scribes in Bavaria, at least, picked up on court ideologies. See Warren Brown, ‘The Idea of Empire in Carolingian Bavaria’, in Björn Weiler and

Simon Maclean (eds.), Representations of Power in Medieval Germany, 800–1500 (Turnhout, 2006),

37–55.

The Franks’ Imagined Empire

103

memory’. Charlemagne’s ninth-century successors remembered well their duty to

shepherd the populus christianus. In a new study of the reign of Louis the Pious

(814–40), Mayke de Jong has convincingly, though obliquely, shown the central

importance of this intellectual legacy by showing how Frankish court elites argued

over the proper relationship between the ruler and the populus christianus. In the

period 827–34 Louis and some of his advisers bumped up against a group of old

hands from Charlemagne’s reign, notably Einhard and Wala. In the end, the old

system––a more collective conceptualization of responsibility to God––won out

and the health of the whole populus christianus remained of paramount concern for

the Frankish ruler.20 Two of Charles the Bald’s diplomas for the abbey of Montier-

en-Der share this idea, referring to his gifts for the abbey as benefiting the whole

populus christianus. Charles’s brothers, Louis the German (840–76) and Lothar I

(840–55), also dreamt on the meaning of empire as defined by their father and

grandfather, looking for ways to lay claim to the symbols that defined them, such as

Aachen and the imperial title.21 This continued into the next generation as well. In

871 Emperor Louis II (855–75) implied his superiority to his Byzantine counter-

part by informing him that the Franks remained united in ‘flesh, blood, and spirit’

and he rightfully held the title of Roman emperor because of the Franks’ constant

orthodoxy. In this context, Notker the Stammerer’s imperial ideas, and his likely

hope that they would be absorbed by Charles the Fat (emperor 881–8) via the Gesta

Karoli Magni, seem rather standard. Notker conceived of the empire––begun by

Charlemagne and passed to Charles the Fat––as universal and Christian, anchored

in sacred history, but with the Franks at its core and straddling Byzantium, Africa,

and the rest of the known world.22

The first Ottonians (through Otto II, 967–83) tended to de-emphasize both the

empire’s essential Frankishness and its pan-Christian character. Their definition of

empire generally became more about establishing the title within a quasi-feudal

20 De Jong, Penitential State, esp. chs. 4–6. On Louis’s reign generally, see esp. Karl Ferdinand

Werner, ‘Hludovicus Augustus: Gouverner l’empire chrétien.––Idées et réalités’, in Peter Godman and

Roger Collins (eds.), Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious (814–40)

(Oxford, 1990), 3–123; Thomas F. X. Noble, ‘The Monastic Ideal as a Model for Empire: The Case of

Louis the Pious’, Revue Bénédictine, 86 (1976), 235–50; and Eric J. Goldberg, Struggle for Empire:

Kingship and Conflict under Louis the German, 817–76 (Ithaca, NY, 2006), 29–31.

21 The Cartulary of Montier-en-Der, 666–1129, ed. Constance Brittain Bouchard (Toronto, 2004),

nos. 14, 16. On Louis and Lothar, see Eric J. Goldberg, Struggle for Empire: Kingship and Conflict under Louis the German, 817–76 (Ithaca, NY, 2006); and Elina Screen, ‘The Importance of the Emperor:

Lothar I and the Frankish Civil War, 840–3’, Early Medieval Europe, 12 (2003), 25–51; respectively.

22 Steven Fanning, ‘Imperial Diplomacy between Francia and Byzantium: The Letter of Louis II to

Basil I in 871’, Cithara, 34 (1994), 3–17; and De Jong, ‘Charlemagne’s Church’, 114–15. On Notker

and Charles the Fat, see Theodor Siegrist, Herrscherbild und Weltsicht bei Notker Balbulus:

Untersuchungen zu den Gesta Karoli (Zürich, 1963), 112–14; Hans-Werner Goetz, Strukturen der

spätkarolinischen Epoche im Spiegel der Vorstellungen eines Zeitgenössischen Mönchs: Eine Interpretation der ‘Gesta Karoli’ Notkers von Sankt Gallen (Bonn, 1981), 76–80; and Simon Maclean, Kingship and

Politics in the Late Ninth Century: Charles the Fat and the End of the Carolingian Empire (Cambridge,

2003), 154, 223–4. See also the battle for Aachen in the late 970s, analyzed well in Theo Riches, ‘The Carolingian Capture of Aachen in 978 and its Historiographical Footprint’, in Paul Fouracre and

David Ganz (eds.), Frankland: The Franks and the World of the Early Middle Ages (Manchester, 2008),

191–208.

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The Franks Recreate Empire

Figure 4.1. Eleventh-Century Ottonian Ivory Water Vessel, Aachen Cathedral Treasury.

# Domkapitel Aachen (photo by Ann Münchow).

hierarchy (an emperor above a king, as a king was above a count). Theirs was a

different dynasty, utilizing different symbols of authority than their Carolingian

predecessors. Territorial boundaries became more important, if perhaps more

limiting, in understanding empire.23 Otto III, however, resurrected and re-engaged

with an earlier Carolingian imperial ideal and Henry II followed in that Otto’s

footsteps. Otto III and Henry II both envisioned either ‘a Christian Empire or

Imperial Christendom, under the sole control of the Emperor’.24 Ritual and

23 Robert Folz, The Concept of Empire in Western Europe from the Fifth to the Fourteenth Century, tr.

Sheila Ann Ogilvie (London, 1969), 27–32, 47–51; Timothy Reuter, ‘Regemque, quem in Francia pene

perdidit, in patria magnifice recepit: Ottonian Ruler Representation in Synchronic and Diachronic

Comparison’, in Janet L. Nelson (ed.), Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities (Cambridge, 2006),

136–42; and John W. Bernhardt, ‘Concepts and Practice of Empire in Ottonian Germany (950–

1024)’, in Björn Weiler and Simon Maclean (eds.), Representations of Power in Medieval Germany,

800–1500 (Turnhout, 2006), 142–54.

24 Folz, Concept of Empire, 64–6, quotation at 64; Helmut Beumann, Der deutsche König als

‘Romanorum Rex’ (Wiesbaden, 1981), 75–7; and now Matthew Gabriele, ‘Otto III, Charlemagne,

The Franks’ Imagined Empire

105

symbolism of universal authority mattered here. For example, at his coronation,

Otto III wore a cloak decorated with figures from Revelation and possessed another

garment called the orbis terraum, the latter based on the description of the mantle

worn by the High Priest of the Temple in Jerusalem. Henry II’s imperial mantle

was embroidered with stars, signifying his cosmic authority, while he carried a

golden globe, representing his worldly authority.25 An Ottonian ivory water vessel

(Figure 4.1), likely dating from the reign of Otto III, nicely synthesized Roman,

Carolingian, and Ottonian ideas of empire. Here, soldiers and bishops all inhabit a

city reminiscent of the heavenly Jerusalem, while the emperor, likened to Christ

and wielding universal power on earth akin to his in heaven, rules them all. The

entire iconographic program here represents the emperor’s imperium and how it

extended over all the faithful.26 What changed around the millennium, however,

was that Rome became progressively more important to this conception of imperial

authority. For example, Otto III attempted (unsuccessfully) to rule from Rome and