17
Early in the morning in late January 828, Einhard met Hilduin of Saint-Denis sitting outside Louis the Pious’s bedchamber in Aachen, waiting for the emperor to get up. This was Hilduin’s job; as imperial arch-chaplain, he formally controlled access to Louis. But Einhard had come to see Hilduin. They chatted while looking out of the high window into the rest of the palace, perhaps the window which Notker in the 880s would claim that Charlemagne had built so that he could see what was going on everywhere (see above, Chapter 10). Einhard had a bone to pick with Hilduin, however.
Hilduin had in 826 initiated a fashion for buying relics from Rome, acquiring the body of St Sebastian for one of his monasteries, Saint-Médard at Soissons. In 827 Einhard had imitated him, with the help of a professional thief and dealer, the Roman deacon Deusdona, and had sent his own notary Ratleig to steal the bodies of Sts Marcellinus and Peter from their tomb on the Via Labicana outside Rome and bring them north. After Ratleig crossed the Alps, he no longer had to hide them, and in a public procession, in front of crowds of bystanders, he brought them to central Germany, where most of Einhard’s properties were. He took them to their destined church in Einhard’s planned retirement home of Michelstadt in the Odenwald forest; but the saints did not like it there, and demanded in dreams that they be transferred to Einhard’s other church at Seligenstadt near Frankfurt, which Einhard duly arranged. Healing miracles began when he did, and had continued without a break, often in great numbers, up to when Einhard wrote his account of these events in late 830. But Hilduin’s servant Hunus, who had gone to Rome with Ratleig, had stolen from him some of St Marcellinus; and when Einhard met Hilduin the rumour had already spread that Hilduin had both bodies at Saint-Médard. The rumour was almost worse than the fact, for Einhard’s reputation and that of his own relics; Einhard had to get them back. Hilduin admitted he had Marcellinus, rather grudgingly (one must note that Einhard was writing this account after Hilduin’s fall from power in October 830). The relics were brought from Soissons to Aachen, and Einhard received them in April 828. There, they certainly reversed the rumours, for, in a sense thanks to Hilduin, Einhard’s relics were now in the centre of the empire; they were (Einhard says) met by crowds, and Louis and Queen Judith themselves visited them and gave them gifts. Miracles began again, and continued after Einhard rejoined both sets of relics at Seligenstadt at the end of the year. Einhard made the most of it; Marcellinus took a long route home to his fellow saint. Soon after Easter, as Einhard happily records, his friend the palace librarian Gerward was staying outside town, and was told the palace news: ‘At present the courtiers are mostly talking about the signs and miracles happening in Einhard’s house by means of the saints . . .’ It must have been one of the high points of his life.
This account foregrounds the importance of the palace, the importance of public ritual, and the importance of intellectuals, in the Carolingian political world, for Einhard was the biographer of Charlemagne and had been a mainstay of court society for three decades by now, and Hilduin was no minor scholar: in 828 he had just painstakingly translated a Greek text, the works of St Dionysios (that is, St Denis), sent by the Byzantine emperor Michael II to Louis, into Latin. In this chapter we shall look at these three issues in turn, and then at some of their implications.
The royal or imperial palace, whether at Aachen or elsewhere, was the core political centre of the Carolingian lands, a whirl of activity - and noise, as Paschasius Radbert’s Life of Adalard of Corbie complains. Every political actor had to go there when called, which in Einhard’s case was often, just as every victim seeking royal justice had to come there, to be interrogated by the arch-chaplain or the count of the palace to see if the king needed to get involved. As usual with the Carolingians, this was a Merovingian tradition writ large, and also systematized. Hincmar’s (or Adalard’s) On the Organization of the Palace can list the palace officials, headed by the arch-chaplain (in charge of church affairs) and the arch-chancellor (in charge of the writing office), in order, down to the hunters and the falconer, and there are consistent indications that this was a real hierarchy - although it could always be modified, as when Bernard of Septimania, as chamberlain in 829-30 (in charge of the palace commissariat under the queen, and fourth-ranking official, according to Hincmar/Adalard) was seen as ‘second to the king’ after Louis. Notker, although he never went to court, could imagine that the palace hierarchy was preserved in dining etiquette, with Charlemagne served by dukes, dukes served by counts and aristocrats, and so on down through court scholars, and greater and lesser palace officials. The court certainly had an ever-changing etiquette of behaviour, which no aspiring politician could risk not knowing. And it had an organized, explicit, patronage network. Hincmar/Adalard even supposed - certainly over-schematically - that officials were deliberately appointed from different regions, so that everyone could use a kinsman or at least someone from their locality to facilitate access to the palace. Notker imagined that, at the death of a bishop, all aspiring applicants put their names forward through those closest to the emperor. Einhard, although never (it seems) a palace official in a formal sense, routinely acted as a patron, and he is seen in his letters requesting the kings, either directly or through current office-holders, to approve the appointment of an archbishop or an abbot, or the renewal of a benefice, or simply to hear an appeal. This was a competitive and often unscrupulous world of favours, structured by court procedures.
The palace was thus a worldly (and corrupt, and vicious) political hub. But it was also the moral centre of the empire, particularly once, after 780 or so, Charlemagne embraced the task of moral correctio. It was not chance that the senior Carolingian palace official handled church affairs: these were the court’s special concern. Louis the Pious was a priest even more than he was a king, at least in that he promoted religious learning, according to one of his biographers. Charlemagne instituted penitential fasting at court, as we saw at the start of the last chapter, which he extended to the entire empire in 805 to combat a famine; Louis did the same in 823 in the face of dangerous portents. The seventh-century Irish tract On the Twelve Abuses of the World circulated very widely in Carolingian Europe, and Abuse 9, ‘the unjust king’, argues that if kings were oppressive and unjust, and if they did not defend the church, then famine, invasion and ruin would follow. A succession of ninth-century writers composed treatises for kings on just rule, culminating in Hincmar’s On the Person and Ministry of the King, and most of them quoted Abuse 9, alongside, at great length, the Old Testament. They held that the king should start with controlling himself and his own behaviour, before he could properly govern others, through law and its enforcement. The whole empire was at risk if he did not. The king/emperor could appoint his bishops (this right was never contested in the Carolingian period), but they, conversely, were responsible for policing the moral world, and that included royal actions, both private and public. Bishops often took this role very seriously, particularly in the crisis years of 829-34 and the civil war period of 840-43, when the public good was obviously threatened.
The political and the moral roles of the palace did not have to be in contradiction. The secular and the spiritual could be seen to work in much the same way. Einhard regarded Sts Marcellinus and Peter as his spiritual patrons in just the same way as the emperors were his secular patrons, and his heartbreak over the death of his wife Imma in 836 was only worsened by the realization that his spiritual patrons had failed him, in not answering his prayers. Thus at moments of crisis the Carolingian world could lay itself open to moral panics. Given the high political profile of queens, the permanent ambiguity of female power and the new emphasis on personal morality, it is not surprising that many of these panics centred on queenly sexuality. Charlemagne’s daughters, who ran his palace in his last years, were accused of fornication in 814 (as was Charlemagne himself). Judith was accused of adultery with Bernard in 830, an accusation which recurs in every account of the period, favourable or hostile - it must have been a very high-profile charge - and which was theorized by Paschasius Radbert in the 850s as marking a total reversal of the right order of the world, a sign above all that Louis the Pious, who could not control his palace, was not fit to govern. Lothar II accused his wife Theutberga of sodomy and incest (see below); Charles the Fat his wife Richgard of adultery with, again, his principal counsellor, Bishop Liutward of Vercelli; Arnulf’s wife Uota was accused of adultery too. It would be wrong to see these accusations, doubtless all false except the first, as signs that the political role of queens was under threat: it was their high profile, not their weakness, that exposed them to criticism. The Merovingian tradition of powerful queen-mothers was less in evidence in the Carolingian period, for few rulers were children at their accession (there would be more of them in the late tenth century); but Carolingian queens were more prominent during their husbands’ lives than their Merovingian predecessors had been. Conversely, except when rulers themselves sought (perhaps unwisely) to use queenly impurity as an excuse for divorce, all these accusations had as their primary target, not the queen but the king/ emperor, whose capacities as a corrector of his people were thus cruelly exposed. Control, or the appearance of control, was necessary at all times.
Both harmony and tension were mediated by elaborate rituals, whether regular (as with the ceremonial associated with assemblies or Easter celebrations), or specific to the occasion. Einhard when he first brought his saints to Seligenstadt prepared ‘those things that ritual stipulates for the reception of saints’ bodies’, and then performed two masses. When he got St Marcellinus back from Hilduin, the latter organized a choir to chant an antiphon; Einhard’s party then proceeded, chanting, to his own chapel, which attracted a large crowd; when he joined the bodies again in Seligenstadt, he again prepared the process carefully. According to his own account, that is, and this is important: for ritual was always a means of self-presentation (Einhard wanted to make sure that no one could doubt the saints were his and that they were properly treated), and different observers could read different things into it. One of the most elaborate secular rituals that expressed kingliness and royal order was regular hunting; it recurs with almost obsessive frequency in the annals of Louis the Pious’s reign, for example, especially after major events, and it is significant that Louis is said by Einhard to have gone hunting just after he had seen the latter’s relics in 828. It is interesting, then, that the Annals of Saint-Bertin do not mention hunts in 830-34; it is not that Louis did not hunt then (one of his biographers explicitly says he did in 831 and 834), but rather that a ritual of order did not seem appropriate to the annalist in a period of crisis, even though Louis was presumably himself trying to present 831, for example, as business as usual. Louis’s two penances, in 822 and 833, were particularly prone to be read in different ways. In 822 at Attigny he performed a voluntary penance whose orchestration he controlled, to cauterize the wound caused by the death of Bernard of Italy; but did this really end the matter? In 833 Bernard’s death was as fresh as ever in the indictment proposed by Lothar’s bishops; it is as if Attigny had not occurred. Paschasius Radbert, for his part, in hisLife of Adalard, could not ignore Attigny, for it had brought Adalard back to court, but he contested how in control of the ritual Louis really was: ‘all contemplated his willingness and perceived his unwillingness.’ Louis had gone out on a limb in 822, probably with success at the time, but hindsight and hostility could see it as failure, and as leading directly to Louis’s deposition penance in 833. The latter, in an interesting reversal, was written up as voluntary by Louis’s enemies, but as forced and therefore invalid by his friends.
Every major event in the Carolingian period, whether involving ritual or not, was written up by writers to make political points of this type; they either upheld or subverted the correct order of the empire. This means that it is, often enough, impossible to enter in detail into what ‘really’ happened. But what is abundantly clear is that the ninth century was a period in which the ceremonial terrain - the public sphere, one could say (the Carolingians used the word publicus extensively) - was particularly wide and important. It was terrain which had to be claimed by every political actor, even though he (or she) could not fully control the perceptions of the audience of each ritual act, given that it was the audience who would ultimately determine whether the act worked properly or not. There always had to be a process of negotiation. This is why, for example, Charles the Bald at the 876 Ponthion synod, which was largely devoted to ecclesiastical court cases, ended the proceedings with an elaborate procedure intended to make real to the Franks the fact that he was now the emperor: he wore Byzantine costume and a crown, as we saw in the previous chapter, then papal legates went to fetch Queen Richildis with her own crown, and then the same legates performed the closing liturgy. Did this work? Hincmar, who wrote this up for the Annals of Saint-Bertin, was greatly hostile to most of the decisions of the synod, but he was clearly impressed by the ritual: he was himself the writer of elaborate coronation rituals, and he could understand the internal structure and the roots of this one. The Fulda annalist, anyway opposed to Charles, and also writing in East Francia, where much less was known about the Byzantine empire, dismissed Charles’s ‘Greek customs’ in two lines; but it was men like Hincmar who were Charles’s intended audience, not the Frankish East, and for them this ritual had a considerable success.
This large and moralized political arena was also populated by intellectuals, at least three generations of them after Charlemagne began to patronize them in the 780s. It is this group of (in nearly every case) men which really characterizes the Carolingian period as different from its predecessors; in other respects, the politico-cultural world of the sixth to early eighth centuries was still fully operative. The importance of intellectuals for the political practice of the ninth-century West was as great as or greater than it would ever be again in the Middle Ages, and the ninth century matched the French Revolution as a focus for collective intellectual political activity. This did not make political actors behave better, of course, but it greatly increased the range of the excuses and self-justifications for bad behaviour, which also mark out the period. To have had an education was, simply, enough for prominence. It is not that aristocrats did not sneer at the low-born, as with Louis the Pious’s biographer Thegan’s highly coloured hostility to Archbishop Ebbo of Reims for his servile birth (Thegan claims), or with Liutward of Vercelli, who was compared to the biblical villain Haman by one of the Fulda annalists; both ended their political careers in disgrace, too - Ebbo was one of the few people to face punishment for having supported Lothar in 833-4. Neither of these, all the same, was a major writer. Education and intelligence, however, linked Einhard and the poet and liturgist Walahfrid Strabo, whose backgrounds were relatively undistinguished, with genuine aristocrats such as Hraban Maur, Hincmar, or the theologian Gottschalk (d. c. 869: Walahfrid’s friend, but Hraban’s and Hincmar’s enemy), as well as, of course, incomers from England, Ireland or Spain, with no roots in the Frankish lands, from Alcuin and Theodulf at the start of the Carolingian period to the theologian John the Scot (d. c. 877) at the end.
Part of this sense of collectivity derived from being educated together, at Aachen itself or Tours or Corbie or St. Gallen or Fulda (where Einhard, Hraban, Walahfrid and Gottschalk had all been trained) or any of two dozen other active centres. Much of it, however, was because such writers had a communality of knowledge, of the Bible, canon law, Virgil, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Isidore, Bede, and the rest of the Latin church fathers: they knew what they were each talking about. And they could assume that their peers did too; as we have seen, aristocrats had to be literate to be able to operate politically in this period. Hincmar could write highly erudite texts for Charles the Bald and expect him to pick up the allusions; Charles sought books on his own behalf as well, as when Lupus abbot of Ferrières (d. 862), one of his most loyal scholars, sent him a sermon of Augustine against perjury. Aristocrats had libraries; Marquis Everard of Friuli’s 863-4 will had bibles, biblical commentaries, several law books (including, probably, one Lupus had collected for him), works by Vegetius, Augustine and Isidore, several saints’ lives, two or three histories, and more. Most of these books were not ninth-century texts, but they attest to the same interests that our ninth-century writers demonstrably had. There was a common intellectual community, which extended a long way beyond the writers of the period.
This community could sustain some quite elaborate theoretical interventions. Late in 828 Louis the Pious called four church councils for the following year, in Mainz, Paris, Lyon and Toulouse, to discuss the ‘anger of God’ - some unspecified natural disaster - and how he could be placated. According to Paschasius Radbert’s Epitaph of Arsenius (an often obscure biography, in dialogue form, of Wala), this involved specific requests for advice. Wala duly responded with a schedula, which he formally presented in one of the 829 councils: this seems to have criticized uncanonical episcopal elections and the lay control of church lands. Interestingly, Einhard presented a pamphlet of capitula to Louis at almost the same moment, and it is very likely to have been in response to the same generalized request for opinions. We do not have these, but we do have the summary of a similar pamphlet composed in Einhard’s circle around the same time, which denounces oppression and the full range of standard sins, in particular hatred and mistrust, a generic enough set of misdeeds it is true, and maybe less useful to Louis, but certainly heartfelt on Einhard’s part. In a bizarre framing, he attributes the second critique to the demon Wiggo, speaking through the mouth of a possessed girl, and thecapitula to none other than the archangel Gabriel, appearing in a dream (in the guise of St Marcellinus) to a blind man, recently cured at Seligenstadt. Louis’s decision to open up debate allowed criticism to come from some unusual sources.
We must not overstate the success of this sort of discursive initiative. Einhard remarks sorrowfully that ‘of the things that [Louis] was ordered or urged to do by this small book he took the trouble to fulfil very few’. The 829 council of Paris listed many things that the Frankish people and king could and should do as well, but what Louis actually did was appoint Bernard of Septimania as chamberlain, a cure worse than the disease to most observers. Wala (though not Einhard) went over to the other side, and, together with Paschasius, was in Lothar’s camp at the Field of Lies; but Louis’s temporary overthrow was not reassuring to Wala at all. Paschasius’ account portrays himself and Wala dumb-struck at the ease with which Louis’s army melted away: ‘they had flown completely around, like chickens under wing . . . without serious counsel and careful arrangement . . .’ and, worst of all, without listening to Wala’s advice! Aristocrats were not taking it seriously enough, that is to say; they were simply engaging in politics, without considering its moral implications. It would be a common moan of intellectuals at later times of political change as well. All the same, scholars elaborated both sides of the key ceremonies of 833-4: Agobard of Lyon drafted part of the core accusations against Louis in his forced penance of 833; after Louis’s restoration the emperor had his own version of the 833-4 crisis written down by his bishops and abbots, and formally read out at the Thionville assembly in 835; meanwhile, Hraban Maur in 834 had written a tract on the duties of sons, which Louis reprised in instructions sent to Lothar in Italy in 836. Whether or not magnates were governed above all by realpolitik, they felt a strong need to express their political choices in moralized terms, and writers sought to argue about them as a result. Nithard, Lupus and then Hincmar would do the same for Charles the Bald later as well.
Did the increasingly elaborate education of Carolingian élites aim to be inclusive, or exclusive? It is not wholly clear. The more complex the Latin used by the educated strata, the further it departed from the Romance spoken by the huge majority of the population of the western and southern parts of the empire; the earliest form of French came to be seen as a separate language for the first time by authors precisely in the Carolingian period. And a high percentage of the Carolingian élite spoke German; ninth-century texts for the first time regularly describe people as bilingual, including Charlemagne, Louis the Pious and Wala, which implies that plenty of people were not. (Einhard was most struck by the fact that the demon Wiggo spoke Latin, for the girl he possessed only spoke German.) It might be that the complex Latin of our texts was only a court and clerical language, a ‘mandarin’ language, pronounced in an increasingly un-French way because of the influence of the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin, and therefore deliberately closed to most people, including even most aristocrats. But at least among the aristocracy there is good evidence of a wider awareness of Latin than that. Lupus of Ferrières could be trained for several years at Fulda in the 830s without ever having to learn German; Latin was totally hegemonic in this large monastic school in the middle of Germany, which had lay students too. Everard’s books show what an aristocrat might read or at least listen to (many would read less today), and it is notable that he expected his daughters, who inherited some of them, to do so as well: Judith was given some Augustine, some Alcuin, and the Lombard law code. And Dhuoda, down in Uzès, clearly shows in her Handbook someone who has bought the whole Carolingian package: not only had she read the Bible, some church fathers and some Christian Latin literature, but she could manipulate it with sophistication. It may have been wasted on her son William (see below, Chapter 21), but its very survival implies that he kept her text by him. Dhuoda is seen as being from the high Reichsaristokratie because she was married in 824 to Bernard of Septimania, in Aachen, too; but, given the striking absence of her own kin among the lists of relatives she thought William should pray for, one might wonder about that. Either way, a dense literary education was available to a lay woman by 810 or so, only twenty-five years after Carolingian schooling started, which, given the patriarchal values of the period, must surely mean that it was normal for aristocratic men, and not necessarily just the top families either.
Conversely, this was, overall, overwhelmingly an élite affair. The Carolingians did sometimes contemplate general schooling, but they did not seriously develop it. Similarly, there were some efforts to translate the Bible into German (though certainly not into proto-French), but they did not get past Genesis and the Gospels, for the most part in poetic versions. Indeed, the wide peasant world was hardly in the field of vision of any Carolingian king or intellectual except for preaching (a genuine commitment, but one which only reached a minority), or else as a source of wonder at ignorance, as in Agobard of Lyon’s exasperated attack on local beliefs in weather magic. Too great a separation would be an exaggeration; Agobard also inveighed against the idiocy of widespread beliefs that a cattle plague had been caused by malign dust sent by Prince Grimoald IV of Benevento, but a chance remark of Paschasius Radbert shows that Corbie intellectuals had been panicked by that too. Similarly, Einhard’s descriptions of the miracles and visions of Sts Marcellinus and Peter and their popular reception show no break at all between his sensibilities and those of the peasants around Seligenstadt. Education did not separate people from the religious culture around them, which did not fundamentally change from the sixth century to the tenth (above, Chapter 8). But the imagery of correctio and the need for education was confined to the aristocracy and to clerics, the political actors. Local priests, growing in number in this period as more rural churches were founded, were the lowest down the social scale it even theoretically reached. There are some signs (for example, in the signatures to Italian documents) that these priests could at least write, and bishops certainly expected them to be basically educated, often in a cathedral school. But even the common assumption in church statutes that priests would know the Psalter was not necessarily true of the majority, and little detailed control of their daily activities and culture was in practice possible; most priests came from local élites, and their social networks were linked to their localities, not to the bishops who sought to command them. The Carolingian project reached local societies through the structures of public justice, not through those of moral reform.
The educated, political world was nonetheless dense and many levelled, even if it only included élites. The court of Charlemagne, at the start of the process, saw legislation, theology, biblical commentary and poetry written; under Louis and his sons, the genres of educated writing increased further, with works on liturgy, history and political theory as well. These were sought after. Hraban Maur, the great biblical commentator of the 820s-850s, dedicated his (rather daunting) books to queens and kings, including a commentary on the Book of Judith sent to Queen Judith in the key year of 834. The Carolingian world also copied enormous quantities of texts, usually patristic writings but also including pre-Christian Latin works (these were only a small proportion of Carolingian copying, but it is because of that proportion that most classical Latin literature survives). Scholars wrote to each other begging for texts to copy; a dozen of Lupus of Ferrières’s letters in the 830s-850s are requests for books, some very specific, like the letter to Pope Benedict III (855-8) asking for the commentary of Jerome on Jeremiah ‘starting with the seventh book and continuing to the end’ - for many texts were defective or corrupt, and intellectuals sought both to complete them and to find the best versions. They were helped by a technical advance, the fast and easy-to-read Caroline minuscule script, which won out over older cursive hands in the late eighth century and had become uniform across most of the empire by the early ninth. Libraries of laymen could reach fifty books, as was the case with Everard of Friuli, but the larger monastic libraries could have hundreds, many of them containing more than one work. This added to the sense of the communality of culture, for writers in the different parts of the empire could increasingly assume that they had the same texts to hand.
This was the essential context for the growing importance of theological debate. This is already visible in the 790s, for Carolingian political circles were then flustered by the discovery of Adoptionism, the first new western heresy for nearly four centuries, associated with two Spanish bishops, Elipand of Toledo and Felix of Urgell (it used the image of adoption of the Son by the Father to explain Christ’s humanity). They also reacted very negatively to the Byzantine repudiation of Iconoclasm at Nicaea in 787 (above, Chapter 11). Carolingian theologians did not have full access to the Byzantine debate, and did not understand its principles (Greek was relatively little known in Carolingian Francia), but the continuing status of Byzantine theology ensured attention to the issue, and Theodulf of Orléans, in the Libri Carolini, wrote a detailed condemnation of the veneration of religious images in 790-93. The synod of Frankfurt in 794 formally rejected both doctrines, and Alcuin wrote at length against Adoptionism in 800, to match the work of his rival Theodulf. These were, emphatically, not widespread disagreements; it would be surprising if there were more than a dozen Adoptionists in the Carolingian lands (outside the ex-Visigothic far south), or hardline Iconoclasts for that matter. But they mattered to the state, and also to theorists. Theodulf took the trouble to create an Iconoclast pictorial programme for the apse of his private chapel at Germigny-des-Pres near Orléans, which still survives (see Chapter 10), and Iconoclast theorists (mostly from Spain) argued into the 820s, with Bishop Claudius of Turin going so far as to attack pilgrimages, and the veneration of the cross and of relics, as idolatrous - this went too far, however, and seems to have brought him condemnation in his turn.
Carolingian thought never claimed to be novel; in fact, like most late Roman, Byzantine and central medieval thought, it was explicitly the opposite, the return to older authority, often cited at great length. But Charlemagne and Alcuin made it possible for a critical mass of intellectuals to accumulate in Aachen and argue, and this took theology and political thought off in new directions whether writers liked (or realized) it or not. The ‘virtual’ community of the great monastic and cathedral schools of the ninth century, all in communication with each other, continued that critical mass. And the importance of theory to the political élite kept debate in the public eye, doubtless encouraging it further. People made very individual choices sometimes, like the deacon Bodo, a court scholar, who in 839 converted to Judaism and fled to Spain, to the horror of Louis the Pious and his courtiers. And every so often writers went outside the bounds of debate, and were condemned at church councils, as Amalarius of Metz was at Quierzy in 839 for his views on the liturgy, or as Gottschalk was at Mainz in 848 and Quierzy in 849 for his views on predestination (a condemnation which, significantly, was referred to in the Annals both of Fulda and of Saint-Bertin). These deserve some attention.
Amalarius of Metz (d. 850), successively archbishop of Trier and Lyon, was the main liturgical expert of the early ninth century, and was intermittently patronized by both Charlemagne and Louis. Out of office in the 820s, he wrote the Liber Officialis, a detailed exegesis of the allegorical significance of every act of the liturgy, which he circulated widely and revised in response to queries, criticisms and new information from Rome, three times in the next decade or so. This brought him back to royal and episcopal attention, and when Agobard was expelled from Lyon in 835 for supporting Lothar, Amalarius was appointed to replace him. This good luck was also bad luck, for Lyon seems to have been solidly behind Agobard, and Florus of Lyon, the major scholar left in the city, already thought that Amalarius’ allegories were ridiculous insults to the intelligence. Allegory was only supposed to be applied to the Bible, the word of God, which liturgical practices were not; and some of Amalarius’ attempts at symbolic meanings were simply bizarre - indeed, maybe heretical. Both Agobard and Florus wrote tracts against Amalarius, savagely pointing out his errors. This was why he was called to Quierzy in 838, to answer this criticism and to justify his arguments by authority. Amalarius replied that ‘whatever I have written I have read deep within my own spirit’ - in other words, he had no authority. This was fatal; he was condemned for heresy and was himself expelled from Lyon, although his works continued to circulate widely (the liturgy did, after all, still need explication).
Gottschalk was a more serious scholar; he was trying to make sense of Augustine’s theology of predestination, which he certainly did through appeal to authority, but which he interpreted in a novel way: that humans could separately be predestined to salvation and damnation, and that Christ’s crucifixion only affected the former, not the latter. Even after his condemnations in 848-9, this split the intellectual world of the 840s and 850s. Florus, Ratramn of Corbie, Prudentius of Troyes and Lupus of Ferrières supported Gottschalk, at least to some extent; Hincmar and Hraban vehemently opposed him. So did John the Scot, though his tract on the subject was itself controversial. The debate spun out of control in the 850s, and at least five church councils came to different views on it, until Charles the Bald and Lothar II together put a stop to it in 860, with a rejection of some of Gottschalk’s key positions at the synod of Tusey. As with Amalarius, an apparently arcane disagreement became the stuff of high politics; Francia briefly became the eastern Roman empire of Nicaea and Chalcedon, when correct doctrine was crucial for the stability of the state.
The political resonance of Amalarius’ condemnation was a simple one: he was both beneficiary and victim of the aftershocks of 833-4. When he was dismissed from Lyon, indeed, Agobard was called back, and it is hard not to feel that Amalarius might have had a different experience at Quierzy if Louis the Pious had not wanted to reintegrate old opponents. But it is still significant that the public debate was entirely a theoretical one; Florus undoubtedly held his views sincerely (he had protested to the Thionville assembly against Amalarius’ initial appointment), and Amalarius’ chosen defence, once he was forced to give it, would have sunk him, no matter what the political context. ‘Practical’ politics and abstract theological debate could run along parallel lines, reinforcing each other, thanks to the intensity of the moral imperatives of correctio. The Gottschalk dispute is a different case, for it did not map straightforwardly onto other political rivalries. Here, however, the issue of predestination bit into the whole intellectual underpinning of the Carolingian reform project. Authority was not an issue here (both sides rooted their arguments in Augustine); but if Gottschalk’s hardline predestination was to prevail, which (unlike that of many of his supporters) ignored the need for faith and good works, that is, human action, to get into heaven, then much of the Carolingian project was pointless. This was one of Hincmar’s core concerns, and, although his extensive arguments were not always coherent, it was this, plus doubtless his personal influence with Charles the Bald, that won the day for him. The Carolingian project could not, he was in effect arguing, be allowed to be ruined by an intellectual argument devoid of social context. Of course, many disagreed with him; but all of them, including Gottschalk himself, would have seen the project as sacrosanct. Its moral purpose was at the root of their theological interests themselves, whatever the theological conclusions they each reached.
One essential element in the Carolingian politico-cultural world was Rome. Rome did not contribute much to the intellectual elaborations just discussed, but it had an authority that went back to the start of Carolingian kingship, and the king/emperors treated it with great care: most emperors were crowned in Rome, after all. For a start, the territory of Rome, the Patrimony of St Peter, was not formally incorporated into the empire. The Carolingians, and also local powers like the marquis of Spoleto, leant on Rome, but they never fully controlled it, and (despite attempts) seldom had much say in papal elections. Rome was, with 20,000-25,000 people, a huge and rich city by western standards, with its own political procedures, a set of rituals as elaborate as those of Aachen, an equally complex network of official hierarchies, and a dense factional politics which the Carolingians openly admitted they did not understand. They constantly sent representatives to try to work it out, but only too often, as the Royal Frankish Annals put it in 823, they ‘could not determine exactly what had happened’. The ever-changing succession of popes (there were twenty-one in the ninth century) meant that the factions had to be understood anew at each election. And tough popes, like Hadrian I (772-95), Paschal I (817-24), Leo IV (847-55), Nicholas I (858-67), John VIII (872-82), had unpredictable political positions, at least to Frankish eyes. Hadrian and his successor Leo III (795-816) were very close to Charlemagne, and keen to do what he asked in return for a free hand (and armed support when needed) in Rome and central Italy. This was a position shared by many of their successors; the presence of Gregory IV (827-44) at the Field of Lies may well have been his own choice, but he was part of Lothar’s entourage. By contrast, Paschal I seems to have executed two officials in 823 (the year of the Annals quote cited earlier) because they were supporters of Lothar; Paschal, a major church-builder, was locally controversial, but he was probably less controversial in seeking to undermine a Carolingian power that seemed, in those years at least, too close (above, Chapter 10). Lothar reasserted that power after Paschal’s death, but from then on, in practice, the Carolingians usually restricted themselves to intervening when factional struggles seemed too out of control.
The detail of papal authority vis-à-vis the Franks fluctuated. Over- all, the Carolingians did not care what the popes thought, any more than the Merovingians had done, as long as they maintained their legitimization of Carolingian power, which was not in doubt. Papal hostility to Iconoclasm, for example, had no effect whatsoever over the Alps. And the Franks could easily look down on Roman intrigue, given that they did not understand its complexity. (Admittedly, sometimes they were right, as in the gothic events of Christmas 896, when the corpse of Pope Formosus (891-6) was dug up by his enemy and successor Stephen VI and put on trial; but that horrified the Romans, too - Stephen did not survive another year. Normally, Roman violence to losers had its own stately logic.) But the intensity of the Carolingian theoretical debates of the second quarter of the ninth century, and the perpetual pacing of church politics through appeals to episcopal councils, gave the popes a new prominence as the final court of appeal in the Latin church. Nicholas I in particular found that his judgement was sought, for example over episcopal depositions, or in marriage cases (as we shall see in a moment), and also over theological issues - Gottschalk appealed to him after Tusey for example, though Nicholas died before he heard the case. In return, Nicholas, in his conflicts with the Byzantines over the legitimacy of Patriarch Photios and the conversion of Bulgaria (above, Chapter 13), which were international problems specific to Rome, given its continuing links with the eastern patriarchates, sought and obtained the support of Hincmar and other Frankish bishops, who even wrote treatises for him. Nicholas used the legal superiority of the papal office to considerable effect, in a Carolingian world attuned to such issues. His successors did not, however, at least not so effectively. John VIII sought to make emperors after the death of Louis II in 875 (he would have liked to persuade them to fight Arabs in the south of Italy), but choosing them, as opposed to crowning them, was out of his control. When the Carolingian project receded at the end of the century, the international standing of the papacy lost force again, even if the pope’s legal powers remained.
All these different trends converged in the great querelle over Lothar II’s divorce from Theutberga, in 857-69. This ought to have been simple. Lothar had married Theutberga, from the prominent aristocratic family of the ‘Bosonids’, in 855 but soon turned against her and sought in 857 to return to his former partner Waldrada, with whom he had had a son, Hugh. Marriage law was tightening up in the ninth century, however; Charlemagne could put away a wife, but Lothar had to have reasons. He came up with the claim that Theutberga had had anal sex with her brother Hubert, had become pregnant as a result (impossibly, of course; his supporters invoked witchcraft), and had aborted the foetus: incest, sodomy and infanticide all at once. Theutberga proved her innocence in an ordeal in 858, but Lothar staged a show trial at a council in Aachen in 860, where she was forced to confess her guilt and retire to a monastery. This was carefully ratified at a synod in 862, in which Waldrada was proclaimed queen; papal legates agreed at Metz the following year, where Theutberga confessed again; Lothar’s two senior archbishops, Gunther of Cologne and Theutgaud of Trier, then took the case to Rome for final ratification in 863. But Nicholas I refused to support them; in a coup de théâtre, he annulled the synod of Metz, demanded that Lothar take Theutberga back, and deposed the two archbishops themselves. Lothar never got his marriage dissolved, and died of fever in 869 in Italy, where he and his brother Louis II of Italy were trying to ‘persuade’ Nicholas’s perhaps more pliable successor Hadrian II (867-72) to change the judgement.
The malignly inventive humiliation Lothar and his advisers devised for Theutberga was so extreme that it is hard not to be pleased at its failure. That apart, however, the case had important implications. First, it involved realpolitik: if Lothar had no legitimate male heir, other Carolingians would take over Lotharingia, and indeed in 869-70 his uncles Charles the Bald and Louis the German did just that. Unsurprisingly, the latter supported Theutberga; Charles took her and her brother in, and Hincmar, as his major theorist, wrote a long tract in her favour, whereas Lotharingian bishops wrote tracts against her. But, once again, there were issues of principle: of the inviolability of marriage; of the finality of a successful ordeal (Hincmar and Nicholas thought the case should have stopped in 858); of the disaster for the body politic if a queen confessed such misdeeds (Lothar’s supporter Adventius bishop of Metz argued that Theutberga’s confession alone was enough to disbar her as queen); of the disaster for the body politic if a king was weak enough to get into this kind of marriage difficulty in the first place; and of the rights of the pope as supreme judge in the West. Except the last, these were all issues that had been explicit or implicit in Carolingian theorizing in recent decades, and, as in the 830s crisis, or as with Amalarius, it was the theoretical issues which were at the front of the debate. And this time, it was theory which won; Nicholas I had no axe to grind over who should succeed in Lotharingia, but his violent condemnation of Lothar (who, he correctly said, had misused two women, not one), his synod and his archbishops, could not, in the political environment of the 860s, be got around. No one in Francia had expected this; Nicholas was genuinely trying to exert a real authority over at least the sectors of Frankish politics which came into an ecclesiastical remit, and this, as we have seen, was a lot. Gunther of Cologne was outraged, and we have the text of his rejection of Nicholas’s ‘abusive sentence . . . delivered against us without justice or reason and against the canonical laws’. Hincmar had no sympathy with Gunther, but when Nicholas followed this up in 865 with disrespectful letters to Charles and Louis and also, in a separate case, reversed the deposition of a bishop of Soissons by senior Frankish prelates including Hincmar, the tone of his account changes substantially too. But the Frankish élite were too committed to correct legal procedure by now, so, when an obstinate pope stuck to legal decisions which the Franks themselves had asked for, they were stuck too. At least until the pope died, for Nicholas was unique in this period; Hadrian II totally failed to prevent Charles and Louis from taking over Lotharingia, and retreated over the appeal of another deposed bishop, Hincmar of Laon, in 871-2. But in the meantime a theoretical debate had caused the eclipse of a kingdom.
The three major political systems of the ninth century, Francia, Byzantium and the caliphate, all had an intellectualized politics in one form or another, and it is worth looking at them comparatively for a moment. The fact that they were roughly simultaneous seems to me to be chance; nothing links together the military success and sense of ecclesiastical mission of Charlemagne, the stabilization of the reduced Byzantine empire in the eighth century which allowed for the revival of writing in the capital by 800 or so, and the fiscal centralization which funded Baghdad and the enormous intellectual activity of the ‘Abbasid period. All the same, their contemporaneity at least makes it harder to see each of them as unique, as historians often do. Medieval governments characteristically saw themselves as legitimized by their superior religious moralism (governments still do); and strong governments, as all three of these were, could develop a considerable density of moral and intellectual initiatives. But they were by no means identical, for all that; their differences are, indeed, more interesting than their similarities.
In Byzantium, an educated ruling class steadily developed across the ninth and tenth centuries. This class was very largely a secular élite; Byzantine education, and some ninth-century institutional reform as well (notably in the field of law), were aimed at reviving Graeco-Roman traditions, which included the assumption that the men who ran the state should have a developed literary culture. But that culture had a strong religious element by now; and this in turn was linked to the religious importance of the emperor as the focus of Orthodoxy and as the centre-point of elaborate political rituals. We saw in Chapter 13 that the Byzantines did not have the political and moral urgency that can be seen in Carolingian correctio. That urgency perhaps in part came from the relatively recent roots of the Carolingian project. The Byzantines knew that they had a millennium of imperial power behind them, over half of it Christian, and that its revival ought to be enough, given Roman success in the past; but Frankish religious self-esteem was new in the late eighth century, and very much bound up with Charlemagne’s belief in his own uniqueness and Louis the Pious’s sense of his personal moral task. The Byzantine state was also, of course, more solid than the Frankish one, and education and literary culture could build up slowly over several centuries, unlike the three-generation history of the Carolingian experiment. If the Byzantines felt less need of urgency, given that they were, in their own minds, simply rediscovering their Roman past, they were not necessarily wrong in that.
The ‘Abbasids were, in a general way, as convinced of their central role in human religious salvation as either of the other two; but the way it worked in the caliphate was different. The religious centrality of the caliph himself was slipping after 750 (above, Chapter 14); only the mihna of 833-47, introduced by al-Ma’mun, sought to reinstate it, without success. The absence of a specialized priesthood in Islam meant that the interpreters of the Muslim religion, who effectively became its sole guardians by 850, were much more loosely defined as an educated class, the ‘ulam’. Education trained one for statecraft, in the ninth- century caliphate as in ninth-century Byzantium, in the increasingly elaborate traditions of adab, but it also, often simultaneously, trained one for religious authority. On the other hand, no formal hierarchy personified that authority in Islam; it was religious knowledge and philosophical rhetorical skill that established one as a religious leader, not one’s appointment as emperor, patriarch/pope, bishop or abbot. The result was a plurality of voices, which at its best was highly stimulating, but which seldom moved the state in any particular direction after 847. Indeed, the caliphs and other political leaders were largely cut out of moralized politics from then on, except in the Fatimid caliphate; as a result, although education, including religious education, was a core training both for a political career and for religious prominence, it did not produce the equivalent of the political intellectuals of the Carolingian court, simply because attendance on rulers, and involvement in their policies, was not so essential for moralists. There were certainly some politically powerful intellectuals in the Islamic world; one thinks of Nizam al-Mulk (d. 1092), vizir to the Seljuk Turks and an important theorist of government; men like him match Photios in Byzantium, and, of course, Alcuin and Hincmar in Francia. But political power was not part and parcel of being a Muslim intellectual; it was simply the most remunerative career path. Moral reform did not proceed through the state, as it did in Byzantium, given the emperor’s religious centrality, and as it did in the West. Arab political ceremonial - as elaborate as that of Constantinople - had less of a religious charge, and was less systematically written up than either in Byzantium or in Francia.
The solidity of the Byzantine and Arab political systems (in each case derived from a complex tax structure, absent in the West), reinforced in the Arab case by a steady separation between the caliphal and post-caliphal political system and the question of religious salvation, thus gave plenty of space to the idea that education was a passport to political prominence; but it did not produce the conclusion that a specifically religious education for the élite was essential for the survival of the state, or that the task of the state was in large part the salvation of the community of the realm. This marks the originality of the Carolingian project. The Carolingian state was, for over a hundred years, very successful indeed, and so confident of itself that the task of salvation seemed actually possible. The network of intellectuals that surrounded three generations of Carolingian rulers existed precisely for this purpose. So did the public space of political ritual, which, although simpler than in the East, was at least as charged with meaning, watched and analysed as in Byzantium, and at key moments (as in 833-4, to name only one obvious case) was perhaps even more so. All major political moments were theorized, moralized, in ninth-century Francia, often with competing interpretations. There was space in Francia for the pure political intellectual, men who were important in the state, heard in its councils just because of their knowledge and intelligence, even though they never had an administrative role in it, like Einhard or Lupus of Ferrières, in a way that was rare if not unknown in Byzantium or the Arab world; and there were, for a time, many more Hilduins or Hincmars, men who held official positions but who also had a political or moral programme, than there were Photioses or Nizam al-Mulks.
If one looks at the Carolingian reform programme from the standpoint of the early medieval West, it can sometimes seem stately: as the product of the most successful political regime in Latin Europe between 400 and 1200 (at the earliest), it does not seem surprising that it had as much self-confidence and as dense a cultural activity as it did. If one looks at that same programme from the standpoint of contemporary Constantinople or Baghdad, then it seems over-anxious, hyperactive, shallow in its roots, and - of course - temporary. Essentially, given the underlying structural weakness of all western medieval polities, this latter is true. (The over-anxiousness is also forgivable; it must have been hard to have God as attentive an audience to one’s every action as the Carolingians believed.) But it is still interesting, indeed striking, that the Carolingians achieved so much. In the moralization of Frankish politics, in the education of at least two generations of lay aristocrats, as also in the increasing systematization of government, the Carolingians had an effect: different from the Byzantines or the Arabs, but an effect all the same.
The Carolingian project receded in the 880s, even before the fall of Charles the Fat in 887. Hincmar, who died in 882, was the last political leader really to be committed to theory, just as Charles the Bald was probably the last king who really wanted to read it. The latter may be the crucial point. Tenth-century Frankish bishops presided over reform councils, but they were mostly local, and less connected to royal politics, except occasionally in late tenth-century Germany; education (and manuscript copying) continued in monasteries and cathedral schools, but it did not have an effect on political decisions after the 870s. The ecclesiastical world did not change so much, that is to say; but the political context changed substantially. The optimism and confidence of the Carolingian century, the sense that what Frankish politicians decided mattered to God, was what kept the reform project going; and the failure of the dynasty in the years 877-87, followed by a much less ideologized politics in the non-Carolingian successor states, pushed reform onto the local stage of episcopal pastoral activity.
Successful political systems could nonetheless return to parts of the Carolingian programme. The early eleventh century in Germany, and also the late tenth century in England, both saw partial revivals of moral reform imagery as part of high politics. The programme, that is to say, was there waiting to be used, even if the smaller polities of the future could not re-establish the critical mass of competitive writing which marks the middle decades of the ninth century; that would need a new environment, the towns and the money economy of the twelfth century, in order to return. And the political presupposition that kings and bishops were in partnership, with kings choosing bishops but bishops having the right to ‘correct’ kings, all in the aid of both effective and moral rule, and prosperity in both this world and the next, continued to be axiomatic in western politics, at least as an aspiration, until the late eleventh century at the earliest, and in many respects for a long time later. This presupposition was pushed centre stage by the Carolingians, and it had a long legacy.