The Frankish Kingdoms Under the Carolingians 751-987

Rosamond Mckitterick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317872474
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

An exciting examination of the entire history of the Carolingian 'dynasty' in western Europe. The author shows the whole period to be one of immense political, religious. cultural and intellectual dynamism; not only did it lay the foundations of the governmental and administrative institutions of Europe and the organisation of the Church, but it also securely established the intellectual and cultural traditions which were to dominate western Christendom for centuries to come.

Chapter One
The Sources

The sources extant for the two and a half centuries during which the Carolingians ruled as kings over the Franks are of great richness and diversity. Not only are there the narrative sources, annals, chronicles, biographies and saints' lives, the histories of abbeys and of bishoprics; there are also many letters, both official and unofficial, poems, theological and didactic treatises, and all the legal sources, charters, conciliar decrees, royal legislation and the Germanic law codes. All these, with a few exceptions, are written in Latin; the vernacular languages were only beginning to be written down in the late eighth and the ninth centuries, and most of what vernacular source material survives is religious in content. Excellent surveys have been made of the types of both Carolingian and medieval source material, such as those of Wattenbach and Levison, Monod, Molinier or Van Caenegem, which describe the principal editions of printed material.¹ Most of the sources have been printed in one form or another, though in many cases the only editions available are those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and are inadequate by modern standards. There remains, however, unstudied and unedited manuscript material to be explored. Coins,² archaeological remains and manuscripts also provide important insights into the history and culture of the Carolingian period. It is often purely fortuitous that much that has survived has done so. The Codex Epistolaris Carolinus for example, a vitally important collection of papal letters addressed to the first Carolingian rulers, Charles Martel, Pippin III and Charlemagne, survives in one manuscript in Vienna, a late ninth-century copy of the collection Charlemagne ordered to be made of these letters in 791. This copy seems at one time to have been in the possession of Willebert, archbishop of Cologne from 870 to 889, and may even have been made for him, but nothing more is known of the manuscript until it turned up in 1554 and was acquired by Caspar Niedbruck for the Imperial Library in Vienna.³

The greater proportion of the extant Carolingian material dates from the first three-quarters of the ninth century. The comparative paucity of sources for the eighth and tenth centuries, however, need not necessarily reflect a decline in political and cultural life; the problems of survival from such an early period make it unwise to infer too much from a lack of evidence or type of evidence. Much of the evidence on which the following chapters are based will be discussed in its proper context; a consideration of all the legal sources, for example, will be included in the chapter on Carolingian government and administration. It is useful, however, to gain not only a general familiarity with the types of evidence available for the different stages of Carolingian rule in the Frankish kingdoms, but also an awareness of the difficulties of dealing with some of this evidence. To take but one instance, what kind of narrative sources are there for the Carolingian period, and why and for whom were they written?

Of the narrative sources the annals are the most essential. Annals first appeared as short notes of an event or events in a year. The year 715 in the Annales Sancti Amandi, probably the earliest of the Frankish annals, is the year 'when the Saxons devastated the land of the Chatuariori' (the region between the Rhine and the Meuse rivers) and 720 the year in which 'Charles waged war against the Saxons'.⁴ At first these notes were written between the lines or in the margins of the Easter tables. These tables, of which probably every monastery possessed a copy, were drawn up on the basis of the astronomical calculations to determine the date of Easter made in Rome in the sixth century by the Scythian monk Dionysius Exiguus. He adopted the old Alexandrian method of calculating Easter in relation to the first full moon after the vernal equinox, and formed a cycle of 532 years from 28 cycles of 19 years. All these years were carefully tabulated in the Easter tables, usually at first with a cycle of nineteen years to each page. The earliest tables included columns for the year of the Incarnation, the Indiction, the Epacts, concurrents and lunar cycles as well as the dates of Easter and days of the moon. Their purpose was solely to fix the day of Easter and no room was left for notes, which was why they had to be crammed between the lines and in the margins. The Stuttgart manuscript of the Annals of Weingarten is typical of such an arrangement.

After a while the notices of events became more important and other parts of the table less essential, so that tables were drawn up containing only the year of the Incarnation on the left and the date of Easter on the right, with the space in between left blank for the insertion of notes. Gradually the nineteen-year cycle to a page arrangement was modified, years without notes were omitted, and the notes themselves became much fuller and more detailed and in time developed into a form of historical writing in their own right. The notes had no historical pretensions however, but were simply a memorandum, either contemporary or near contemporary, of events. Entries continued to be random in the earlier Frankish annals; notices concerning famine, the death of an abbot, the new campaigns of a king and an eclipse of the sun follow one another in rapid succession.

Annals appeared on the Continent for the first time in the eight century, and although the manuscripts containing the earliest are from the Rhine— Meuse region where the Carolingian family was strongest, there is no necessary connection between the appearance in time or place of these early compilations and that of the annal as a form of historical writing. Because the Roman method of calculating Easter devised by Dionysius Exiguus was accepted by the Synod of Whitby in 664 and Bede subsequently wrote De temporibus and De temporum ratione which both made clear to the clergy the principles underlying the calculation of the date of Easter and did much to introduce the practice of dating events by the year of the Incarnation, and because Bede's two works and the Easter tables were probably brought to the Continent by the Anglo-Saxon missionaries, the beginning of annal making has also been ascribed to them. How much influence, if any, Anglo-Saxon or even Irish annal writing had on the Frankish, cannot be determined. Certainly Easter tables with annal entries and Bede's De temporum ratione are often juxtaposed in the manuscripts, as in the ninth-century Valenciennes BM 343 (though the entries in this case date from the middle of the tenth century). Nevertheless, the habit of making annal entries need not have been introduced by the Anglo-Saxons. The early annal entries are so terse, based so exclusively upon events impinging upon the life of the abbey, that they may have been no more than natural reactions (like the commemoration of the death of an abbot or the recording of some items of news received from a passing traveller) to events of local importance.

Frankish annals may be divided into two main groups, the minor or little annals which were the more primitive form, and the major annals, displaying a more sophisticated form of historical writing. The most representative of these are the Royal Frankish Annals and their successors. The little annals for the most part cover a good deal of the eighth century and the early years of the ninth, and a very few were continued down to the tenth century. They can be divided into four main groups according to their probable place of origin: those from the region of Cologne and Trier (for example Annales Sancti Amandi 687, 703-810, Annales Tiliani, 708-867, and Annales Laubacenses 708-926), those possibly from Metz (for example Annales Mosellani 703-98 and Annales Petaviani 708-99), those for the Murbach region, Alsace and Swabia (for example Annales Guelferbytani 74 1—805 and Annales Nazariani 708—90), and annals from the Salzburg and Bavarian areas (for example Annales Salisburgenses and Annales Invavenses). None of the original manuscripts of these annals is extant; most have come down to us in later copies, and some, as in the case of the earliest of them, the Annales Sancti Amandi, in the seventeenth-century edition made of them.⁵

Moreover, we cannot be sure when the annals were written and by whom. In other words, there is no obvious way of telling how near in time the annals are to the events they describe. A further problem is the close resemblance of the many collections of annal entries (Monod listed forty-one of varying importance in 1898) to each other. The same incidents are recorded in similar language each year. Monod and most historians after him have attributed this to their method of composition. It is suggested that Easter tables containing annal is tic material circulated between abbeys and churches to provide information and to be copied and that numerous 'copying mistakes', such as misspelling, the use of a different tense or person of a verb and the insertion of adjectives or alternative words are to be explained by this manner of composition. An image is thus evoked of zealous and historically minded monks travelling between their monasteries carrying annals with them to copy. The notion is unsatisfactory. The identity of annal entries in two collections from different monasteries would clearly suggest communication between the two, but even then one monastery may have copied from another's collection at a much later date. The similarity of an account of any event, however, is not enough to suggest constant copying, though it does not rule out oral communication of contemporary news, Writers of annals with the same education, the same limited, miserable, vocabulary, governed moreover by conventions of expression, living in the same region and recording the same event for any one year, are bound to sound very similar. Hoffman's reminder that the annalists' limited command of Latin and their use of stock phrases make it dangerous to seek their identity should warn us too against assuming too readily that similarities between sets of annals proves their affiliation.⁶ Resemblances between the minor annals have also made some scholars ask whether they are dependent on one another or on a third 'lost work'.⁷ In recent years the 'lost work' theory has lost favour as being too contrived a solution. The uncertainty concerning the annals' value as historical evidence would increase if the possibility of unknown sources had to be taken into account.

The minor annals' chief value as an historical source is that although they were probably not written year by year they are generally either very close in time or contemporary with the events they describe. The years 785-798 of the Annales Mosellani, which run from 703 to 798, are a contemporary report. So too the famous Lorsch Annals, not from Lorsch but written in Alemannia, are not only contemporary with the years they describe, 794-803, but also survive in the original manuscript, now in Vienna. In this manuscript each year is entered by a different hand, so that there is neither one scribe nor necessarily one author. The Lorsch Annals are of great interest because of the independent account they give of the coronation of Charlemagne in 800.⁸ Sometimes too annals may provide insight into events or even just the outlook of a particular region, as is the case with the Chronicon Moissiacense compiled in Aquitaine. As a group, the importance of the minor annals is diminished by the fact that the compilers of the Royal Frankish Annals and other annal compilations made in the ninth century drew on them for details concerning the eighth century to such an extent that there are only a few instances where the evidence of the minor annals is at variance with the information contained in the Royal Frankish Annals. These too acted as a source for compilers. The Annales Mettenses Priores for example, which cover the years 678—830, draw on various minor annals up to the year 802, the account for 803-5 is the author's own, later interpolated, and from then until 829 he depends on the Royal Frankish Annals.⁹

The Royal Frankish Annals, or Annales regni Francorum, are the most important single narrative source for Carolingian history. Originally called the Annales Laurissenses maiores, their name was changed when von Ranke drew attention to their 'official' nature and the Carolingian point of view they express. The annals run from 741 to 829 and are then continued separately in the west and east Frankish kingdoms from 830. The western continuation, the Annals of St Bertin, is continued to 882 and the eastern, the Annals of Fulda, to 887 with a further addition taking it to 901. The entries are far more detailed than those of the minor annals but are still organized on a yearly basis. That the Royal Frankish Annals drew on earlier 'minor' annal entries for its own notes as far as 788 or so, and that from that date to 793 the entries represent a first-hand account is now generally accepted. The eminent French scholar Louis Halphen, however, wished to reverse the relationship and suggested that the minor annals were simply later abbreviations of the Royal Frankish Annals, a suggestion which also put the date from which the annals could be considered as a contemporary account back to 768, but this view has not received much support.¹⁰ It is possible that more than one hand worked on the section between 788 and 793, and that between 793 and 807 is also not a unified record by one single author, although the Latin has a definite style. In the next section, from 808 to 829, there seems to be a change of author at 820, and the entries for the following nine years are thought to be by Hilduin, abbot of St Denis, who became archchaplain at the court of Louis the Pious at Aachen, and left in disgrace in 830 because of his opposition to Louis' second wife Judith. Malbos suggested that Helisachar, archchancellor to Louis, collaborated with Hilduin on this section, on the grounds that the arguments in favour of Hilduin's authorship would also fit Helisachar.¹¹ No agreement has been reached about the authorship of this or the earlier sections. During the reign of Louis the Pious a revised version of the entries from 741 to 812 was made; the Latin style was improved and the account was augmented from other now lost or unknown sources which do not appear in other annals and which included some details about the less happy moments of Charlemagne's reign. The entries for the years 741, 746, 747, 753, 755, 769, 775, 778, 783, 786, 790, 793 and 799 are either completely or largely altered, and most editors indicate the contribution of the reviser in their texts. The revision was once attributed to Einhard but is now attributed to no one with any certainty, although its author was probably someone from the court circle of Charlemagne.

The manuscript tradition of the Royal Prankish Annals is rather complicated. There are five different groups of manuscripts containing the text, numbe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Genealogical Tables
• List of Maps
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Dedication
• Chapter 1 The Sources
• Chapter 2 From major domus to rex francorum: The Emergence of the Carolingians
• Chapter 3 Conquest and Consolidation: Pippin III and Charlemagne
• Chapter 4 The Means of Ruling
• Chapter 5 Louis the Pious and the Christian Empire
• Chapter 6 The Foundations of the Carolingian Renaissance
• Chapter 7 Charles the Bald and the Defence of Carolingian Kingship
• Chapter 8 Scholarship, Book production and Libraries: The Flowering of the Carolingian Renaissance
• Chapter 9 Normandy, Brittany and Flanders
• Chapter 10 Odo and the Emergence of the Robertians
• Chapter 11 Learning and Monasticism in the Tenth Century
• Chapter 12 The Last Carolingians
• Bibliography of Principal Sources
• A Note on Further Reading
• Genealogical Tables
• Maps
• Index of Manuscripts
• General Index