An Empire of Memory (36 page)

magne’s countrymen as Carolingians, God’s Chosen people, it appears that we

instead have Franks, loved by God since the time of the Salic law, and Franks, God’s

blessed people . . . , because of their wonderful ruler Charlemagne’.3 This can be

seen throughout contemporary sources. The Annales regni Francorum’s entry for

783 twice records that Charles and his Franks advanced into Saxony, where ‘with

the help of God the Franks had the victory’. In 799, a Saxon leader ‘delivered his

land, his people, and himself to the Franks[,] and the whole province of Brittany

was subjugated by the Franks’.4 As Janet Nelson has noted, Charlemagne himself

was rarely singled out. The Saxons swore oaths to Charles but also to his sons and

all the Frankish people, while contemporary laudes praised the whole Frankish

army.5 Charlemagne may have been the prime mover of many ninth-century

sources but he represented a larger collectivity. The ruler guarded the cultus divinus

but because he modeled his actions on rulers from the Old Testament, filtered

through the actions of earlier Christian emperors, Frankish rulers after the Mer-

ovingians had to enlist the entire gens in order to ensure God’s support for their

actions. In effect, this intellectually created the king’s subjects as a populus christia-

nus, united in prayer and collective responsibility.6 The Franks were the actors.

3 Mary Garrison, ‘Divine Election for Nations: A Difficult Rhetoric for Medieval Scholars?’, in Lars

Boje Mortensen (ed.), The Making of Christian Myths in the Periphery of Latin Christendom (c.1000–

1300) (Copenhagen, 2006), 275–314, quotation at 306–7; and idem, ‘The Franks as the New Israel?

Education for an Identity from Pippin to Charlemagne’, in Uses of the Past, 114–61. This seems to

dovetail with Richard Sullivan’s observation that the Carolingian Age has been ‘imagined’ by modern

historians as something distinct in itself. See Richard E. Sullivan, ‘The Carolingian Age: Reflections on its Place in the History of the Middle Ages’, Speculum, 64 (1989), 279.

4 Annales regni Francorum, ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SRG (Hanover, 1895), 6: 64, 108. English tr. The

Royal Frankish Annals, in Carolingian Chronicles, tr. Bernhard Walter Scholz (Ann Arbor, 1970), 61, 78.

5 Janet L. Nelson, ‘Kingship and Empire’, in J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval

Political Thought, c.350–c.1450 (Cambridge, 1988), 215.

6 On the attempt to change this model during the reign of Louis the Pious, see Mayke de Jong, The

Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious, 814–40 (Cambridge, 2009),

116–22, 154–7.

The Franks Return to the Holy Land

131

They had the victory in warfare. They (admittedly, not too often) suffered the

defeat. Peoples bent their knees to the Franks’ collective power.

And then, as we have seen in previous chapters, the conquered were subsumed.

They too became Franks. This was not necessarily a difficult transition. In the early

Middle Ages the word gens should best be thought of as a political unit that

corresponded to a particular geographical area. Membership in the gens was flexible

and open, not necessarily tied to ethnicity and, as such, a layered form of identity.

In the case of the Franks, ascription to the gens had everything to do with ideology.

When speaking of oneself and how one related to a specific place, one could be

a Norman, Bavarian, or Provençal but when speaking of a larger, greater, more

Christian, and unified collectivity, one was a Frank.7 Being a Frank meant

being Christian and being subject to the Frankish ruler’s imperium. Being a

Frank during and after Charlemagne’s reign was not an exclusive category but

rather a supplementary one, an identity to be deployed in certain situations. By the

time of the ARF ’s last early ninth-century redactor, writing just after Charle-

magne’s death in 814, where once there were Lombards, Bavarians, Saxons, etc.,

now there was only one united Francia, ruled by a glorious king––a new chosen

people, a populus christianus, occupying a special place in God’s favor that extended

both backwards and forwards to the ends of sacred history.8

Even after the political and territorial fragmentation of the 840s, this ideological

unity remained. Hincmar of Reims (d. 882) spoke of a united regnum Francorum

(he thought he just lived in one part of it). Emperor Louis II of Italy (855–75)

argued that the Franks remained one in ‘flesh, blood, and spirit’ into his own time.

Both Ado of Vienne (d. 875) and Regino of Prüm (d. 915) wrote their universal

chronicles as narratives of Frankish history, with special attention given to their

7 Hans-Werner Goetz, ‘Gens: Terminology and Perception of the “Germanic” Peoples from Late

Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages’, in Richard Corradini, Max Diesenberger, and Helmut Reimitz

(eds.), The Construction of Communities in the Early Middle Ages: Texts, Resources and Artefacts (Leiden, 2003), 39–64; Ronnie Ellenblum, ‘Were there Borders and Borderlines in the Middle Ages? The

Example of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem’, in David Abulafia and Nora Berend (eds.), Medieval

Frontiers: Concepts and Practices (Burlington, Vt., 2002), 106–9; Helmut Reimitz, ‘Omnes Franci:

Identifications and Identities of the Early Medieval Franks’, in Ildar H. Garipzanov, Patrick J. Geary, and Przemyslaw Urbanczyk (eds.), Franks, Northmen, and Slavs: Identities and State Formation in Early

Medieval Europe (Turnhout, 2008), 57; and Janet L. Nelson, ‘Frankish Identity in Charlemagne’s

Empire,’ ibid. 71–5, 83. As we have seen, signifiers for groups of people were related to geography but not coextensive with that geography. Much of the difficulty in appreciating this understanding, I think, to do with the spell 19th- and 20th-cent. nationalistic historiography still casts on us. See the discussion of these problems in Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2002), esp. 16–38; and Courtney M. Booker, Past Convictions: The Penance of Louis the Pious and the

Decline of the Carolingians (Philadelphia, 2009), 15–126.

8 See Margaret Lugge, ‘Gallia’ und ‘Francia’ im Mittelalter: Untersuchungen über den Zusammenhang

zwischen geographish-historischer Terminologie und politischen Denken vom 6–15. Jahrhundert (Bonn,

1960), 38–9; Lutz E. v 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), 42–5; Natalia Lozovsky, ‘Roman Geography and Ethnography in the Carolingian

Empire’, Speculum, 81 (2006), 332, 364; also Rosamond McKitterick, Charlemagne: The Formation of

a European Identity (Cambridge, 2008), 30–1, 271–4, 371–2; idem, Perceptions of the Past in the Early

Middle Ages (Notre Dame, Ind., 2006), 91–4; and Chapter 4, above.

132

The Franks Recreate Empire

localities’ place in that history.9 For instance, in his entry for 880, Regino lamented

how the Franks had gradually lost imperium after Charlemagne’s death because they

were no longer able to keep hold of the diverse peoples who once comprised the

Frankish kingdom.10 Notker the Stammerer (d. 912) wrote that Charlemagne had

inaugurated a new Golden Age, a Frankish world empire that encompassed and

subsumed all peoples. This was an empire that lived on in the minds of the late

ninth century. For instance, Notker thought he was both an Alamann and a Frank.

This latter identity was particularly important to him, writing that men from across

Europe ‘all prided themselves on being paid a great compliment if they earned the

right to be called Franks’.11 The memory of Frankish imperium lived on in the

contemporary Bella Parisiacae urbis of Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where

Abbo claimed that a Frank could be anyone, anywhere, who was ruled by a

descendant of Charlemagne. This did not efface their more local identity though.

Andreas of Bergamo, writing around 877, considered himself to be ‘[a] man of

Bergamo, a Lombard, and a Frank. . . . These categories were not mutually exclu-

sive.’ The contemporary Saxon Poet displayed similar sentiments, writing the

Saxons into Frankish history by way of their conversion under Charlemagne.

They didn’t, however, stop being Saxons too.12

But overt claims of Frankishness tended to fade in the tenth century, perhaps

because of the changing political landscape. In West Francia, the Capetians and

texts sympathetic to them tried to carve out an identity for themselves as new reges

Francorum who still held a special kind of imperium. This seems to have been

acknowledged throughout West Francia. Although areas like Aquitaine, Nor-

mandy, and Flanders were increasingly considered separate regna in this period,

people from these regions thought that ‘there was a kingdom of the Franks, it could

have only one king, and everyone knew it’.13 At least implicitly, the men of these

regions still felt themselves to be subject to that king. At least implicitly, they still

thought of themselves as Franks.

In East Francia and Italy, the Ottonians and their boosters clung to the Franks

through an imagined continuity of rulership stemming from Charlemagne. We saw

this at work in Chapter 1. Just to take the example of the Ottonians, Bishop

9 Nelson, ‘Kingship and Empire’, 233; Steven Fanning, ‘Imperial Diplomacy between Francia and

Byzantium: The Letter of Louis II to Basil I in 871’, Cithara, 34 (1994), 4, 9; and the comments in

Goetz, ‘Gens: Terminology and Perception’, 60; and McKitterick, Perceptions of the Past, 29–30.

10 Regino of Prüm, Chronicon, ed. Friedrich Kurze, MGH SRG (Hanover, 1890), 50: 116–17.

11 Notker the Stammerer, Gesta Karoli Magni imperatoris, ed. H. F. Haefele, MGH SRG NS (Berlin,

1959), 12: 13. On Notker and his lineage, see Matthew Innes, ‘Memory, Orality and Literacy in an

Early Medieval Society’, Past and Present, 158 (1998), 11–12, 31. On Notker’s imperial ideas, see

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), 70–80; Simon Maclean, Kingship and Politics in the Late Ninth Century: Charles the Fat and the End of

the Carolingian Empire (Cambridge, 2003), 223–4; and the discussion in Chapter 1, above.

12 MacLean, Kingship and Politics, 60–3; Peter Godman, Poets and Emperors: Frankish Politics and

Carolingian Poetry (Oxford, 1987), 183; and McKitterick, Charlemagne, 22.

13 Geoffrey Koziol, ‘Political Culture’, in Marcus Bull (ed.), France in the Central Middle Ages, 900–1200

(Oxford, 2003), 44. See also, Joachim Ehlers, ‘Karolingische Tradition und frühes Nationalbewusstsein in Frankreich’, Francia, 4 (1976), 213; and Nelson, ‘Kingship and Empire’, 76.

The Franks Return to the Holy Land

133

Thietmar of Merseburg’s Chronicon claimed in several places that Otto I was

directly in the line of Charlemagne. And as I have shown elsewhere, Emperor

Otto III was obsessed with Charlemagne and his connection to both Rome and

Aachen, even descending into his tomb on Pentecost in the year 1000.14 But the

memory of Charlemagne’s Golden Age could be a double-edged sword, a site of

contestation, contrasting (instead of comparing) the current rulers of the eastern

Franks with an idealized past. In the tenth century, Benedict of Monte Soratte

elevated Charlemagne as an ideal while lambasting the Ottonians as sowers of

discord. Lambert of Hersfeld would unfavorably contrast Henry IV (1056–1105)

with Charlemagne.15 These critiques were made because they could have real bite.

This contestation represents something important, something beyond simple

critique. This contestation was a struggle over inheritance. In a certain sense,

everyone thought they were connected to the legacy of a Frankish Golden Age.

At ‘centers’ of power, at the Ottonian court for example, a connection to the Franks

lived on in the memory of Charlemagne as predecessor. But in places removed from

(or in conflict with) these royal/imperial centers––places like central Italy, Alaman-

nia, Aquitaine, and Normandy––Frankish identity survived too. For these latter

peoples and groups, the Charlemagne legend was primarily about a moment of

consensus between ruler and polity and the consequently elevated status of the

Frankish people as a whole. Throughout the tenth and eleventh centuries, disparate

places, scattered across the Franks’ ninth-century empire, shared a common politi-

cal culture, one ultimately derived from a common Carolingian experience; one

that sustained and was sustained by a particular understanding of their Frankish

past.16 Charlemagne seems to have just been there, hovering in the backs of people’s

minds, functioning much like he had in ninth-century sources––still that arche-

type, standing in as a personification of larger ideas about a Frankish Golden Age.17

For instance, one early eleventh-century Historia from West Francia barely

mentioned the Carolingian rulers but still notes that the ascension of Hugh

Capet (987–96) marked ‘the end of Charlemagne’s kingdom’. In East Francia, at

14 Karl Hauck, ‘Die Ottonen und Aachen, 876–936’, in KdG iv. 41–3, 53; 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