18

The Tenth-century Successor States

Gerbert of Aurillac, arguably the leading intellectual of the tenth-century West, had a remarkable career. He was born around 940 to, as it seems, a non-noble family, and educated in his home-town monastery of Saint-Géraud at Aurillac, a regional pilgrimage centre but isolated in the mountains of south-central France. Around 967 he was talent-spotted by Count Borrell of Barcelona, and trained in Catalonia for some years; he accompanied Borrell to Rome around 970 and moved on to the entourage of Pope John XIII and the emperor Otto I (936-73) as a teacher, of mathematics, astronomy, logic and rhetoric - basic elements in the central medieval curriculum. In this role he moved to Reims in 972, and was for two decades both a renowned teacher and the private secretary to Archbishop Adalbero. The only break here was in 982-4, when he impressed the emperor Otto II (973-83) with his philosophical and debating skills, according to his pupil the historian Richer, our source for most of this, and was made abbot of Bobbio in Italy; at Bobbio, however, Gerbert offended vested interests, and he had to flee back to Reims at Otto II’s death. From then on, as his letters, surviving as a collection for the years 983-97, show, he was an active political dealer, both on behalf of his patron Adalbero and independently. He operated in support of the infant Otto III (983-1002) and his mother the queen-regent Theophanu in East Francia and Italy, and also Duke Hugh Capet of West Francia, the main rival to the West Frankish king Lothar (954-86). Adalbero and, secondarily, Gerbert facilitated Hugh Capet’s non-hereditary succession as king of West Francia (987- 96). After Adalbero’s death in 989, Gerbert might have expected the archbishopric, but Hugh chose Arnulf, King Lothar’s illegitimate son, largely to undermine support for Lothar’s brother Charles, duke of Lower Lotharingia (d. 991), who was fighting for the throne. This was a miscalculation; Arnulf almost at once handed Reims to Charles. When he captured Charles and Arnulf in 990, Hugh deposed the latter for treachery in a synod at Saint-Basle-de-Verzy, organized by Gerbert, who now succeeded him as archbishop (991-7). But Hugh had not consulted Pope John XV, who objected to the deposition. The West Frankish bishops argued that it was canonical, but pressure built up on Gerbert, and after Hugh’s death he left Reims for Saxony and the court of Otto III. Here he became the still-young emperor’s tutor in 997, and was promoted away from Reims: to the archbishopric of Ravenna, and then, in 999, to the papacy itself. He died in 1003 as Pope Silvester II.

Gerbert’s career had serious setbacks, but the favour of the great always set him right again. If one reads his letters, they show an assured dealer, playing a complex political game for himself and Adalbero, and, later, for himself alone. It is true that he was consistent, in his support of the Ottonian king/emperors (even though he was in West Francia at the time) and also, increasingly, of Hugh Capet. All the same, he sailed so close to the wind in his dealings that one constantly might expect, if one did not know how his career would end, that he would come unstuck: a man with no social background, entirely reliant on patronage, playing high politics in a period of switchback political shifts, and made an archbishop in dubious circumstances - such a situation destroyed Ebbo of Reims in the 830s, as we saw in Chapter 17, and Gerbert was incredibly lucky not to fall too. What saved him was his scholarship: Gerbert was always welcome as a court intellectual. He wrote letters asking for manuscripts (particularly of mathematical works, and of Cicero) as systematically as Lupus of Ferrières had done a hundred and fifty years before. His skills ensured that he could and did travel with ease across every part of the old Carolingian empire. Gerbert is an illustration that many aspects of the ninth-century political and intellectual practice described in the last chapter had by no means gone away a century later.

But there are differences. One was in the fate of the Carolingian programme. Even second-level intellectuals like Lupus had been able to lecture kings on their moral duties in the ninth century; but, when Otto III wrote to invite Gerbert to be his tutor, Gerbert replied, not with moral advice, but with an enthusiastic evocation of the mathematics he could teach him. (The Saxon historian Thietmar bishop of Merseburg, d. 1018, remembered him for the astronomical clock he built for Otto at Magdeburg.) None of his letters admonish the great; they give information, make practical suggestions, ask for favours. The Ottonians, although in many ways as ambitious as the Carolingians (Thietmar compared Otto to Charlemagne), did not inherit their moralized politics, except to an extent with Henry II after 1002; they barely even issued any laws. The rhetorical frame of ruling had changed. And so had its scale. Among non-royal political operators, Adalbero and Gerbert were by now rare in their interest in more than one kingdom (Reims was near a boundary, and Adalbero had close kin in Lotharingia). Historians certainly were not interested; Flodoard and Richer, the tenth-century West Frankish historians, recount almost nothing of East Francia or Italy, and in the East the Saxon historians Widukind and Thietmar similarly only chronicle East Frankish affairs, adding Italy, somewhat perfunctorily, when Otto I conquered it in 962. The only exception was Liutprand of Cremona (d. 972), the historian of Italy, who paid attention to East (but not West) Frankish politics because he was writing for Otto I, in exile in Frankfurt.

The future countries of Italy, France and Germany were diverging, then. This was not complete, as Gerbert shows. Otto I, too, as we shall see, not only took over Italy, but was a player in West Frankish politics as well, without it seeming inappropriate. And the separate concepts ‘France’ and ‘Germany’ did not yet exist; nor even, except occasionally, did ‘West’ and ‘East’ Francia, the terminology historians currently use; both were normally just Francia, or Francia et Saxonia in the case of the eastern kingdom, to reflect the Saxon origins and political base of the Ottonians. (‘France’ is of course simply the French for Francia; by contrast in the German lands, the Frankish heartland was only one region among the old ethnic territories of Saxony, Alemannia, Bavaria, and so a new inclusive name eventually appeared, the regnum Teutonicum, though not until the eleventh century.) But the lack of interest of the historians reflects a slow cultural separation. For Flodoard and Richer, Francia was ‘really’ (northern) France; the East Franks wereTransrhenenses, from over the Rhine, or else the inhabitants of Germania , the old Roman geographical term. For Widukind, similarly, West Francia was Gallia, proto-French the Gallica lingua, and Francia was seen as ‘really’ being in the East. When Thietmar says that ‘rule by foreigners is the greatest punishment’, he certainly would have included the West Franks. The political history of these three regions will have to be discussed separately as a result. But the procedures of political practice had not diverged very greatly, all the same, and in the last section of the chapter I shall discuss these for all the post-Carolingian regions, seen as a whole.

East Francia was easily the most powerful of the successor states. This was not because of its infrastructure. It was heavily forested, particularly in the centre and south, and its communications were dependent on rivers: for centuries, the only practicable north-south route, except for single and expert travellers, was the Rhine corridor in the far west of the kingdom, which was also the main ex-Roman region, with roads and East Francia’s major cities, Cologne and Mainz. Saxony and Bavaria were a month’s travel apart, and had little to do with each other; rulers based in one tended to leave the other alone. But the regional political system created by Louis the German largely survived the troubles of the decades around 900, and could still be used by the Ottonians, and indeed for another century or more on from them.

Arnulf of Carinthia (887-99), who seized power from his uncle Charles the Fat, ruled from Bavaria. He was clearly the senior ruler of his time in all the Carolingian lands; he was the lord of Rudolf I king of Burgundy (888-912) and Berengar I of Italy (888-924), and had perhaps even been offered the throne of West Francia in 888. In 894-6 he took Italy briefly and made himself emperor. But he had a stroke in 896 and soon died; and his young son and successor Louis the Child (900-911), the last eastern Carolingian, never made much impression. The years 896-911 saw a power-vacuum in the eastern kingdom. It was filled by new regional rulers, called dukes: of Bavaria (in particular the ‘Liutpolding’ Arnulf, duke 907-37), of Alemannia (now increasingly called Swabia: in particular Burchard I, d. 911), of Saxony (in particular the ‘Liudolfing’ Otto, d. 912), of Lotharingia (at least after 903, under the ‘Conradine’ Gebhard, d. 910), and even of the East Frankish heartland, which seems to have crystallized as a duchy under Gebhard’s nephew Conrad around 906. Bavaria and Swabia had been Carolingian kingdoms with their own local political structures (and an autonomous political past), and it is relatively easy to see, particularly in Bavaria, how it was possible for a local ruler to move from being a duke in Bavaria to being duke of the region; Arnulf ran Bavarian-wide assemblies and armies, appointed his own bishops, and even briefly called himself king, in 918. Saxony was harder, for it had never been a unified autonomous region, and Duke Otto’s father and brother Liudolf (d. 866) and Brun (d. 880) had, although each were called dux, only a frontier command; but that command involved successful wars against Sclavenians or Slavs and a military machine, and Otto by his death had come to be more or less in full control of Saxony, which he passed on to his son Henry. Lotharingia and the Frankish heartland took longer still, for these were core Carolingian territories and still contained the largest concentrations of royal lands, around Aachen and Mainz respectively; but it is a sign of the power of the duchy as a political concept that they too had more or less hegemonic dukes by Louis the Child’s death. The Frank Conrad, ruler of the most ‘royal’ duchy, was a natural successor to Louis, as Conrad I (911-18), but he failed to gain the respect from his ducal ex-peers that he hoped for, in particular Henry of Saxony and Arnulf of Bavaria; he also lost Lotharingia to the West Frankish king Charles the Simple (898-923). When he died, the magnates of Francia et Saxonia chose Henry of Saxony as the new king (Henry I, 919-36), possibly even at Conrad’s suggestion, and certainly with the agreement of Conrad’s brother and heir, Eberhard duke of the Franks (d. 939). The Swabians and Bavarians were, however, absent.

East Francia at this point could have been easily divided into (at least) three, as it had been in 876; the two southern duchies had their own traditions, after all, and a Saxon king was far away - and was also not Frankish, so not obviously more ‘royal’ than a Swabian or a Bavarian. Henry proceeded with care; he was probably not anointed king, so as not to claim too much authority, and he established pacts of ‘friendship’, implicitly of quasi-equality, with the other dukes. They were prepared to make them, however, and Henry also established momentum by retaking Lotharingia in the 920s. Saxon armies were, furthermore, active against Slavs, and above all against the Magyars or Hungarians, a semi-nomadic people who had overthrown Moravian power in the decade after 894 and established themselves in what is now Hungary. The latter were very effective raiders across much of central Europe and Italy in the early tenth century, and Henry achieved considerable status (not least in Bavaria, on the front line of their attacks) by defeating them in 933 and quietening them for two decades. Henry’s supremacy was also, like Arnulf’s, recognized in Burgundy (though not Italy). When he was succeeded by his son Otto I in 936, Otto could choreograph an election and coronation in Aachen itself, with a very formal anointing by the archbishop of Mainz, and a banquet in which all four dukes, plus the king’s deputy (a rege secundus) in his home duchy of Saxony, served him dinner, the clearest sign of subjection.

Otto when he inherited the throne had brothers, for the first time in the eastern kingdom since the 870s (and the last until 1190); Henry had excluded them from succession, in a deliberate departure from Carolingian norms. In 939-41 two of them, Thankmar and Henry, revolted, fortunately (for Otto) not at the same time, and found considerable support both from other dukes and from inside Saxony itself; only Hermann of Swabia (926-48), a Conradine put in by Henry I, was consistently loyal to the king. But Otto won the wars, and was able to remove dukes everywhere; in the Frankish heartland, he abolished the title after Eberhard’s death in battle against him and Hermann, and ruled it directly himself. Otto consistently chose his dukes from now on. They were almost all from the ducal families that had already emerged, which did not give him a wide range of choice; the Ottonians, unlike the Carolingians, could not create a new Reichsaristokratie on any scale. But often Otto chose his own relatives, his now-reconciled brother Henry in Bavaria (947-55), his son Liudolf in Swabia (948-53), his youngest brother Brun, archbishop of Cologne, in Lotharingia (954-65), before going back to more local families.

Liudolf revolted in 953-4 as well. But his revolt, although widely supported, was subverted by the last great Hungarian invasion, which Otto destroyed on the Lechfeld outside Augsburg, on the Swabian border, in 955. After that, Otto’s hegemony was unquestioned. It extended to West Francia, as already shown by the synod of Ingelheim in 948, in which King Louis IV (936-54) brought his grievances against Duke Hugh the Great (d. 956) to Otto’s own assembly, to be judged by the East Frankish king and the papal legate. Otto was also able to extend himself to Italy, first in 951-2, when his overlordship was recognized by Berengar II (950-62), then in 961-2, when he annexed the Italian kingdom and was crowned emperor. Otto was strong enough to spend most of the rest of his reign in Italy, and was, in the last two decades of his life, by far the most powerful ruler of the tenth century - Thietmar was not wrong to make the Charlemagne comparison. Otto’s political structure was strong enough to survive the relatively lacklustre reign of his son Otto II (973-83), who was unsuccessful in his wider forays, outside Paris in 978, and, most disastrously, when he was defeated by the Arabs in 982 in the far south of Italy, near Crotone; and the long royal minority of the three-year-old Otto III (983-1002). The younger Ottos, however, had Otto II’s mother Adelaide (d. 999) and wife Theophanu (d. 991) to look after them: tough queens-regent in the Merovingian mould, and themselves proof of the now-established centrality of the Liudolfing/Ottonian family as East Frankish kings. At Otto III’s death without children the magnates of the eastern kingdom hesitated between Hermann II of Swabia and Ekkehard, marquis of the Saxon march of Meissen, but without much difficulty in the end they plumped for Henry IV of Bavaria (Henry II, 1002-24), who was Otto I’s brother’s grandson and Otto III’s male-line heir. There was no doubt at any of these royal accessions that East Francia was a single political system, which by now included Italy as well.

How this system actually worked is more of a problem. The Merovingian and Carolingian assumption that assemblies were the key moments of political aggregation was certainly maintained, and indeed heavily stressed: the new Saxon royal centres of Magdeburg and Quedlinburg attracted aristocrats and bishops from all over the kingdom at the big Easter feasts. Royal diplomas show that the legitimacy of royal grants of land and rights were important throughout the kingdom, too. But Ottonian local control was more mediated than it had been under their predecessors. The king/emperors chose the dukes, but the dukes of the two southern duchies controlled all the ex-royal land of Swabia and Bavaria; indeed, Otto I’s son Liudolf when he succeeded Hermann in Swabia had to be married to Hermann’s daughter Ida, in order to succeed, ‘with the duchy, to all his property’, as Widukind put it, implying that if Hermann had had sons, Liudolf might have been a duke with little land. Inside duchies, assemblies, army-muster and justice were all under ducal control; there had never been many royal missi in Carolingian East Francia, and the court chaplains the Ottonians sometimes sent out were very ad-hoc representatives. Kings chose bishops too, often from the court chaplains; an episcopal presence in the royal entourage was important, and they could also carry royal interest back into their duchies. But they, too, tended to be from local families, except for the key archbishops of Cologne and Mainz. The best the kings could do was to undermine ducal power, sometimes by dividing duchies (Carinthia was carved off from Bavaria in 976, Lotharingia was split into Upper and Lower from the late 950s) and, often, by encouraging the autonomous interests of both bishops and other local magnates, especially through grants of judicial immunity. In the end, the default Ottonian political practice in the outlying duchies, and also in Italy, was simply to divide and rule. This, plus assembly ceremonial and frequent royal presence - for the Ottonians moved around a lot, far more than the Carolingians had, and could be found in most places except Bavaria - was a large part of Ottonian government, outside Saxony at least.

All the same, the Ottonians had major strengths, too: in their royal land, in the still-surviving Carolingian heartland regions around Aachen and Mainz-Frankfurt, to which they added their own family heartland in the south of Saxony, between Hildesheim and Merseburg; in their powers of patronage, to benefices, duchies, bishoprics, which, as with the Carolingians, kept their courts essential locations for the distribution of political power; in the silver-mines providentially discovered in their Saxon heartland around Goslar about 970, which funded the kings for two centuries; and, above all, in their large army. The core of the latter was Saxon, and it was honed on the eastern marches, which under Henry I and Otto I had become tightly organized military territories aimed at eastward aggression. The Slavs of the Elbe-Oder lands (roughly the East Germany of 1945-90) were largely subjected, and they and their eastern neighbours paid tribute; the Saxon aristocracy gained massively from this, which helped the loyalty of most of them, but the king/ emperor kept control of the whole process. (Dukes of Saxony developed again in the tenth century, once the Liudolfings/Ottonians had become kings, but they were essentially based in the eastern marches, and did not yet displace direct royal power.) The core Saxon army was supplemented by units from everywhere else in the East Frankish kingdom when the Ottonians fought elsewhere, drawn largely from church lands, as is seen in the Indiculus Loricatorum, a rare administrative document from the tenth century, an army-list for the reinforcements called for by Otto II in southern Italy in 981. The Ottonians never lost control of army-service from the whole kingdom. Even the great Slav revolt of 983, after Otto’s Italian defeat, which drove the Saxons out of much of the land beyond the Elbe and held off their advance for a century, did not break the Ottonian grip on the army and on the Saxon frontier. All this made possible Ottonian supremacy, despite the relative simplicity of the political structures in much of their realm, and it showed no sign of slipping in 1000.

The kingdom of Italy, the Italian peninsula stretching down to Rome, was the opposite to East Francia, an institutionally coherent polity whose kings were weak. It still had its capital at Pavia, the location of the royal court and an increasingly active centre of judicial expertise. Italian court-case records are elaborate and relatively homogeneous until late in the eleventh century, and appeals to Pavia were normal. Most such court records are of county-based judicial assemblies, which were thrice-yearly public meetings headed by counts or royal missi (who continued to exist in Italy, though the office was by now a local one), usually held inside Italy’s strong network of cities: this had parallels with the assembly politics of East Francia, but was much more localized, much more regular, and also explicitly judicial; such assemblies were full of semi-expert lay iudices, judges, who were generally literate, as well as lay notaries. Italian revenues from tolls and royal lands were also more systematic and larger-scale than in Germany, away from the Saxon frontier at least, particularly in the royal heartlands of what are now called Lombardy and Emilia, around the capital. Italy was worth conquering in 962, in the same way as it had been in 773-4.

This institutional coherence coincided with a much more regionalized politics. The aristocracy of the eighth-century Lombard kingdom had been local, and modest in its wealth. The Carolingians introduced Franks from the great northern aristocratic families, who owned more widely, such as the ‘Widonids’ in the southern duchy of Spoleto and the ‘Suppon ids’ (kin to Louis II’s queen Angilberga), as we saw in Chapter 16. But these families failed in the early tenth century, or else localized themselves, or else both, as with the ‘Bonifacian’ counts of Lucca, a family from Bavaria first documented in Italy in 812, who became entirely regionally focused, as marquises of Tuscany for the period 846 to 931, after which they were overthrown and died out. After an early Carolingian period in which incomers monopolized almost all secular offices, Lombard families re-emerged in the later ninth century and onwards, who might gain lands and offices on a substantial scale, as with the Aldobrandeschi in southern Tuscany, protégés of Lothar I and Louis II, or the Canossa in eastern Emilia, protégés of Hugh and Otto I (see Chapter 21); but these, too, usually had major interests only in three or four contiguous counties, and most of the aristocratic players of the tenth century had interests in only one. Italy outside the royal heartland was divided into duchies or marches as was East Francia: Friuli in the north-east, Spoleto in the south, Tuscany in the centre, Ivrea and then Turin in the north-west (the first two of these had Lombard antecedents, the others were Carolingian or post-Carolingian). These had semi-autonomous political structures and armies, as did their analogues north of the Alps. But the particular point about Italy was that the solidity of the majority of counties, usually coterminous with the local bishopric and centred on a city where most local political players lived, meant that secular and ecclesiastical aristocracies could very easily focus on single city-territories as their major points of reference, bypassing even the marches. In the tenth century, not only Friuli and Tuscany, but their constituent elements, such as Verona, Padua, or Pisa - and, in the royal heartland, Parma, Bergamo, Milan - began to have their separate histories. They were institutionally connected to Pavia, but city-focused identities and political rivalries mattered rather more. These localized territories were more coherent than in most of East Francia, and were for the most part less dominated by single families than in West Francia. They therefore absorbed more of the political interests of local powers, and kings and even marquises intervened in them very largely from the outside. Beyond the city network, only Tuscany survived as a fully coherent regional territory into the eleventh century.

This was the backdrop for the political shifts of the tenth century. Berengar marquis of Friuli was the first to make himself king after Charles the Fat was overthrown; he faced no less than five rivals in his thirty-five-year reign, Guy and Lambert of Spoleto (889-95; 891-8), Arnulf from the north, as we have seen, and later Louis III king of Provence (900-905), and Rudolf II king of Burgundy (922-6). Berengar I survived the early deaths of the first three and blinded the fourth; between 905 and 922 he enjoyed the widest and most uncontested power of any king of his time. But he was not actually very popular outside his own power-base in north-east Italy (all his rivals except Arnulf were actively supported in the north-west; Tuscany usually remained neutral); nor was he a great military leader (he lost battles to the Hungarians, and, later, to Rudolf of Burgundy). He initiated in the 900s a trend to local structures of defence, concentrated on cities, or else on privately owned fortifications, to which he often gave judicial immunities. Guy and Louis III, and then Berengar, also granted comital rights inside the walls of cities to bishops, thus breaking up comital jurisdiction further. This should be seen as Berengar exercising a well-structured and largely successful political protagonism, to reward support both inside and outside his heartland; but it also strengthened the trends to localization already referred to. There is little sign under Berengar I of either a Carolingian programmatic politics or the ceremonial royal assemblies of the Carolingian and Ottonian systems north of the Alps. Even the verse panegyric on Berengar from around 915 (an atypical but not unique text; both Charlemagne and Otto I had them) makes no reference to such initiatives. Berengar ended badly, when his Hungarian mercenaries stirred up a new revolt and Rudolf’s invasion, the Hungarians then sacked Pavia, and in 924 Berengar was, unusually for the period, murdered.

The Italian magnates were still looking for an effective ruler, and in 925 they tried Hugh, count of Arles, who ruled energetically for two decades, 926-47. Hugh, who had no local power-base, operated from the royal heartland around Pavia, and sought systematically to control the marches by choosing their rulers. In this respect he operated in almost exactly the same way as his younger contemporary Otto I: he moved established families around (more than Otto did, in fact), and appointed his own kin, as with his brother Boso and illegitimate son Hubert, successive marquises of Tuscany (931-69). He also relied greatly on a network of bishops, whether his relatives or from more local families, who had considerable powers (as with his son Boso, bishop of Piacenza, who was also arch-chancellor in Pavia). Again, we lack much evidence for a more public, assembly-based politics (except in the field of law), although this might be expected to have been normal at least in Pavia. Our main narrative source for Hugh, Liutprand of Cremona, systematically disregarded the standard markers of royal legitimacy when he discussed the Italian kings, faithful protégé as he was of Otto I, but clear signs of royal ceremony, or political aggregation around Hugh, are absent in our other evidence as well. We gain the sense that Hugh remained an outsider to the local political preoccupations of the Italians, and he fell too, in the end, when the exiled Berengar marquis of Ivrea invaded with an East Frankish army in 945 and Hugh found himself with no supporters. Berengar II ruled under the hegemony of Otto I after 951, and was easily removed in 962.

A political system which has both wealth and institutional coherence, but whose rulers are relatively marginal politically and have little military support, is both attractive and easy to conquer, as Rudolf, Hugh, Berengar II and Otto I found in turn. It is arguable, though, that Ottonian rule by now suited Italy best. Otto I and Otto III spent some time in Italy, nine and five years respectively, but kings were present in the kingdom itself for less than a third of the period 962-1000, and in the eleventh century the figure dropped precipitously. The Ottonians promoted episcopal immunities where counts were strong, and appointed and endowed counts where bishops were strong: an ad-hoc procedure aimed at reducing local power-bases, as beyond the Alps. They did not do much else; they imported no new families. The strength of their armies, when they were present in the country, made explicit opposition rare, although Otto III had considerable trouble in Rome, which he tried to make his political base in 998-1001, in a romantic and largely rhetorical attempt at a renovatio of the Roman empire. But most of the time they were absent, and the local politics of the Italian bishops and urban aristocracies could continue with little external interference, linked together essentially by the Pavia-focused network of judicial assemblies and also by the regular seeking of diplomas granting lands and rights from the king/emperors beyond the Alps. This was a pattern which would persist until the civil wars of the 1080s-1090s forced Italian city communities to think about ruling themselves; on the other hand, the coherence of city territories was, after 1000, itself eroded by the crystallization of even smaller lordships with autonomous political rights (see below, Chapter 21).

Otto I and III intervened directly in Roman politics, and all three Ottos also sought to intervene south of Rome. The independent principality of Benevento had held Charlemagne off, but in 849, after a ten-year civil war, it divided into two, Benevento and Salerno, and Capua split off from Salerno by the 860s. These three principalities then variously combined, fought each other, and fought the small ex-Byzantine city-states in the same area, Naples, Amalfi and Gaeta, for two centuries. They were not very internally coherent as polities, and already in the mid-tenth century they were dividing into smaller lordships, with the exception of Salerno. They were also militarily weak: Louis II had already sought to dominate them in the 860s-870s, though he failed; the Byzantines had also, more definitively, annexed the southern portions of Salerno and, in particular, of Benevento in the 880s-890s. The southern principalities thus looked like possible new conquests to the Ottonians, and, if they did not become so, it was only because they were so far away from the main Ottonian power-bases, and because Otto II’s 982 defeat was so traumatic.

Conversely, however, inside southern Italy, the independent principality under its own ruling dynasty was the unchallenged political model. This is doubtless why Rome, under four generations of the Theophylact family (c. 904-63), moved in the direction of the dynastic pattern as well. It was one strong enough even to tolerate an independent female ruler, Marozia senatrix et patricia (c. 925-32), one of a small handful in the tenth century (the others, discussed later, were in Mercia and Rus); her son Alberic (932-54), who overthrew her, called himself princeps, prince, in clear imitation of the princes just to the south. These rulers chose their bishops - that is, the popes - just as the princes of Capua-Benevento and Salerno did, and also just as the Ottonians did in the north. Alberic drew back from the pattern, however, when he was not only succeeded by his son Octavian (954-63/4), but persuaded the Roman aristocracy to elect the latter pope, which they did, as John XII, in 956. Rome’s traditions and papal-orientated bureaucracy made an episcopal leader more appropriate in the long term than a princely leader. But this brought renewed instability, after John’s overthrow by Otto I, as rival families supported rival pontiffs across the rest of the century. Otto I and III only exacerbated this in their own high-handed, violent and temporary interventions. But although the king/emperors could and did give up on the south of Italy, they could not give up on Rome, where they needed to be crowned emperor. Otto III tried to solve Roman faction-fighting by choosing non-Italian popes (including Gerbert), for the first time since the mid-eighth century. This failed, but it would be imitated by Henry III in the 1040s, with unpredictable future effects.

West Francia was easily the least successful of the post-Carolingian kingdoms. Even the shadowy kingdom of Burgundy in the Rhone valley managed an essential durability (except in the south, ravaged by Arabs) and also dynastic continuity, between 888 and its absorption into the East Frankish kingdom/empire in 1032. West Francia, however, combined the personalized kingship of the Ottonian East with the political instability of early tenth-century Italy - a fatal mixture. Already by the 940s the kings of the West had hardly any authority, and for the next hundred and fifty years they hardly gained any more.

In 888 the ‘Robertine’ Odo of Paris took the throne of West Francia (888-98). The only surviving western Carolingian, Charles the Simple, was a child, and an adult was needed to confront the Vikings. In 889 Odo held substantial assemblies, and counts and bishops from as far south as Barcelona and Nîmes came to them; but his non-Carolingian blood did not help his authority south of the Loire, in Aquitaine and elsewhere, and by 893 lack of success against the Vikings allowed Archbishop Fulk of Reims (d. 900) to get away with setting Charles as king against him. Civil war followed; Odo and Charles made peace in 897, and Charles was recognized as Odo’s heir, in return for Odo’s brother Robert being recognized as in sole control of the family counties and monasteries between the Seine and the Loire and around Paris. When Charles succeeded as king (898-923), he was thus cut out of a large section of the traditional royal lands in the Paris region. The counts of Vermandois, Heribert I (d. c. 905) and his son Heribert II (d. 943) - themselves distant Carolingians, for the former was grandson of Bernard of Italy - had occupied most of the royal properties in the Oise valley north of Paris, too; Charles was left with Laon to the north-east as a political base, extending to Reims whenever he could. It is not surprising that he spent the 910s trying to make good his control of Lotharingia, for the royal properties around Aachen would have increased his wealth and political influence dramatically. But he did not have the full support of the West Frankish aristocracy for this enterprise, and they also seem to have resented his Lotharingian advisers. In 920 ‘almost all the counts of [West] Francia’ revolted, as Flodoard of Reims put it, and in 922 they made Robert king against him. Robert was killed in battle the next year, but the Franks would not take Charles back, and chose instead Rudolf duke of Burgundy, Robert’s brother-in-law (923-36). Charles was captured by Heribert II of Vermandois, and died in prison in 929.

Charles was not an entirely useless king. His Lotharingian adventure was at least a sensible strategy, even if a desperate one. He also had the vision to deal with the Vikings of the Seine by recognizing them and settling their leader Rollo as count of Rouen in 911. The Vikings (Nortmanni in Latin) of the Seine more or less respected their side of the deal, and held off future attacks; they settled down and soon began to behave in ways analogous to other Frankish magnates, and ‘Normandy’, though prone to civil war, remained fairly firmly in the hands of its count/duke. But Charles had several insurmountable problems. One was that he had very little land in West Francia as a whole; in the two decades preceding 898 the counts and dukes of both the north and the south had occupied most of it for their own purposes, except in the Paris heartland region, which Robert and Heribert divided with him. The second was that he and his successors had no power to choose counts and dukes, unlike the kings of East Francia and Italy; no tenth-century West Frankish king had any significant effect on the succession of a major county or duchy, unless its ruler died without heirs. This power had been lost only recently, for Charles the Fat exercised it in the 880s, but it had now gone, with the consequence that the territorial chequerboard of West Frankish politics was strategically uncontrollable except by war; only some of the bishops and abbots of the north, notably the major regional power of Reims, could usually be chosen by the king. The third was that the magnates of West Francia were themselves regionalized; already in 898 Robert, Heribert I, Baldwin II count of Flanders, Fulk of Reims, Richard the Justiciar duke of Burgundy, William the Pious duke of eastern Aquitaine and Odo count of Toulouse had interests that were restricted to the counties they controlled and their immediate neighbours, and not to the kingdom as a whole. This was quite like the East Frankish or Italian situation, and it was Charles the Simple’s task to establish the political centrality of his assemblies, as Henry of Saxony would do. But he had not the landed resources to do it, and his attempts to create them were unsupported.

King Rudolf in 923 at least had a new landed base, in the duchy of Burgundy, and was strong there. But he also largely remained there; Flodoard’s Annals describe him as having to be ‘summoned’ to the West Frankish heartland, not that far away, by Heribert of Vermandois or Robert’s son Hugh the Great (d. 956), when he was needed to fight wars. At his death in 936, Hugh recalled Charles’s son Louis IV from exile in England to rule. Louis had effectively no land or power at all, and strove constantly, but without success, to establish himself independently of Hugh, who had become ‘duke of the [West] Franks’ in 936. Hugh even imprisoned him in 945-6, an action which brought Otto I more firmly onto the scene, and resulted in Louis’s appearance at Ingelheim in 948 to seek Otto’s judgement against Hugh. (Hugh was excommunicated for it later in the year, but paid no notice, although he did make peace with Louis in 950.) Louis died in 954, leaving a thirteen-year-old son, Lothar (954-86), as king; Lothar’s mother Gerberga was regent for several years. But Hugh’s death in 956 gave the king respite, as his own eldest son Hugh Capet was only eleven. Gerberga and Hugh Capet’s mother Hadwig were sisters; they were also sisters of Otto I, whose authority in the West was at its height in these years; it was exercised through their brother Brun of Cologne, who is often found in West Francia in the next decade, and who orchestrated the confirmation of the title of duke on Hugh Capet in 960. Lothar as he grew up fell out not only with Hugh Capet but with Otto I and Otto II, fighting a war with the latter in 978-80, like that of sixty years earlier, in an attempt to regain Lotharingia. But his greater protagonism was based on no greater strength on the ground. When his son Louis V died young in 987, Archbishop Adalbero of Reims argued successfully for Hugh Capet’s succession, as we have seen. The running sore of Carolin gian-Robertine rivalry was ended when Charles of Lotharingia was captured in 990, and male-line ‘Capetians’ then ruled West Francia/ France without any significant break until 1792, a record unsurpassed, as far as I know, in all history, except in Japan.

This was not the end of royal trouble, all the same. Adalbero (or Gerbert) could already in 985 write a brief ‘secret and anonymous letter’, probably to the archbishop’s Lotharingian kin, saying that ‘Lothar is king of Francia in name only; Hugh not in name, it is true, but in deed and fact’; this was 751 all over again, on the surface. But time had not stopped for the Robertines either. Hugh the Great’s power-base was in a block of around twenty counties stretching from Paris to Orléans and west to Angers: a substantial area of land by tenth-century West Frankish standards. But during Hugh Capet’s minority the formerly subordinate counts of the western half of this block, notably those of Angers and Blois, gained effective independence, and began to operate their own local and regional politics; Fulk Nerra of Anjou (that is, the territory of Angers; 987-1040) was famously insubordinate to Hugh Capet’s son Robert II (996-1031), and Odo II of Blois (995-1037) also took over Champagne around 1021, thus hemming the Robertine/Capetian heartland in from both sides at once. The already small geographical scale of the political and military operations described in Flodoard’s Annals in the 920s became, if possible, smaller still in the eleventh century. Royal traditions such as assembly and army-muster had even less force after 1000 than before. West Francia north of the Loire, an area much the size of Saxony, was by 1025 the terrain of six or seven effectively independent ‘principalities’, Brittany, Anjou, Normandy, Blois-Champagne, Flanders, with the kings in the middle and the archbishops of Reims on the edge. South of the Loire there were more again.

The Merovingian-Carolingian system of counties was stronger in West Francia than in the East, and there were no strong traditions of ethnic difference, except in Brittany, which was finally absorbed into Frankish politics in the fragmented tenth century, and, by now, Normandy. The eastern model of the ethnic duchy had less force here. Each political unit that was larger than a single county, as all the small principalities north of the Loire were, was thus created, painstakingly, territory by territory, and could risk falling back into its constituent parts again, as the Robertine lands were doing by 987. In the south, too, the ‘Guilhelmid’ counts of the Auvergne (see Chapter 21) had accumulated a string of counties in eastern Aquitaine and called themselves ‘dukes of the Aquitainians’ by 900, but the west of Aquitaine, notably the counts of Poitiers, did not recognize their authority, and there was no real reason why they should; when in 927 the Auvergne dukes died out, the counts of Poitiers took the title, but could only exercise power in the Auvergne if they took it militarily, and so on. Actually, the Poitiers dukes were quite successful in this, and William IV (963-93) and William V (993- 1030) exercised, at times, wider authority than anyone north of the Loire by now. The regional church councils which preached against aristocratic violence and in favour of the ‘Peace of God’ in the last half of the century in Aquitaine were partly taken over by William V after 994 and turned, in effect, back into Carolingian-style large-scale assemblies, the only ones still in existence in West Francia by the end of the tenth century. But the core of William’s power and land was still Poitou, and elsewhere he had to gain the fidelity of counts and other local lords, by force or persuasion or ceremony. This was a fidelity that had constantly to be reinforced, as we can see in a surviving agreement of around 1025 between William and Hugh of Lusignan (a powerful lord in Poitou itself) which discusses in great detail the tense, prickly, and armed stand-offs between the two sides before settlement was reached. This was so everywhere. The counts of Flanders, the count/ dukes of Normandy, the counts of Anjou, the counts of Toulouse, the counts of Barcelona, all ruling collections of counties, some of them quite large, did manage to establish real and lasting hegemonies over the different powers in their principalities. Others, however, were at best intermittent overlords. And after 1000 or so there was a further involution in much of West Francia, when counties themselves began to break up into smaller lordships, each with their own localized political, military and judicial powers: all the political system of Charlemagne’s huge empire reduced to the scale of a few villages. This process, the so-called ‘feudal revolution’, will be looked at again later.

The late twentieth-century hegemony of French history-writing over the central Middle Ages, which begin for these purposes around 1000 or a little before, has made the West Frankish experience seem the typical post-Carolingian development. As should be clear to readers of this chapter, it was not. Still less, as we shall see, was the ‘feudal revolution’ typical, for it only affected parts of West Francia itself. Everywhere, it is true, power was highly local, built up of lands, rights, armies and oaths of fidelity; and in Italy, too, and even in some of East Francia, it was more local in 1000 than 900. But in most places aristocratic status and identity was still tied up with being close to kings, or at least major regional powers such as the duke of Bavaria, the marquis of Tuscany or the count of Flanders. Even in Italy, although identities could be closely tied to city-territories, the institutional force of the kingdom remained, as an inheritance from the Lombard and Carolingian periods. And elements of a common political practice, also inherited from the Carolingians and only partly modified after 900, existed throughout the post-Carolingian lands, even in the West. Let us end this chapter by looking at how some of them worked.

The tenth century gave less space to Carolingian-style political theology. There was some: Abbo of Fleury (d. 1004), in particular, could praise Carolingian legislation to Hugh Capet and Robert II; but he seems fairly isolated in his commitment. (The West Frankish kings around 1000 were also not the most suitable recipients of such ideas; but Abbo was also patronized in England, which was different, as we shall see in the next chapter.) Conversely, it would be wrong to conclude from this absence that the tenth century had moved away from the world of writing. The educational traditions of the ninth century had continued in Carolingian centres such as St. Gallen, Corvey and Reims, and indeed extended geographically, to remoter locations such as Gerbert’s Aurillac, and to the new south-east Saxon royal heartland, in Quedlinburg, Gandersheim, Magdeburg. Some of the literary results were striking: the rhymed prose of the Lotharingian Rather, bishop of Verona (d. 974), the heavy use of Sallust in the Saxon historian Widukind of Corvey (d. after 973), the knowledge (and pretentious use) of Greek in the Italian Liutprand bishop of Cremona (d. 972), and the Virgilian poetry and - most unusual of all - Terence-influenced play-writing of the Saxon Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim (d. 975). Hrotsvitha and her patron (Otto I’s niece) Abbess Gerberga show that the women of the Saxon aristocracy could be formidably educated. And all the people named in this paragraph, although undoubtedly trained in ecclesiastical milieux, had close court connections, usually but not only with the Ottonians.

Translators are certainly more commonly referred to in tenth- than in ninth-century sources, even for kings and dukes. Otto I is sometimes thought not to have known Latin, for example, because Liutprand had to translate for him in Rome in 963. But it is more likely that Otto was simply avoiding giving away that he did not have full control of public rhetoric in Latin, as well as making the political point that he, the new ruler of Rome, was a Saxon-speaker. Hrotsvitha thought it worthwhile dedicating her verse Gesta Ottonis to him (and to his son Otto II, who was certainly educated), and it would be odd if he had patronized so many literary figures he could not understand at all. Furthermore, writing (in Latin) was as regular a means of political communication in the tenth century, alongside spoken messages, as it had been in the ninth and earlier, even outside Italy with its widespread lay literacy. Gerbert’s letter collection (probably a working collection, even if he subsequently edited it for publication) shows how dense a political correspondence could be in the 980s. Gerbert and the people he wrote for, Adalbero, Hugh Capet, Lothar’s wife Queen Emma, sent terse and practical messages to each other and to other significant political players, very frequently - as when Hugh, now king, writes in December 988 to the empress Theophanu about her health, promises peace, and proposes a diplomatic meeting in the next month, all in eight lines. It is likely enough that most aristocrats were no longer fully literate, and they certainly did not match the literary commitment common in the ninth century. All the same, this was not an ‘oral’ culture, as some more romantic historians have described it, except in so far as all cultures, including our own, are essentially oral. And, whether with writing or without it, some aspects of tenth-century government could be (by early medieval western standards) tightly organized and monitored. Berengar of Ivrea’s poll tax to pay off the Hungarians in 947 is one example. Another, perhaps more striking, is Otto III’s decision in 997 to defend an important Saxon border castle, the Arneburg, with four-week garrisons headed by important local aristocrats, who had to hand over to each other in relays; when a handover slipped up and the Slavs sacked the castle, the emperor demanded an accounting. Meissen was similarly garrisoned in the next decade. This represents systematic government, at least in Saxony, and it was experienced by the lay aristocracy too, not just their ecclesiastical brothers and sisters.

Side by side with this daily communication, tenth-century polities maintained the large-scale public arena of political action of the Carolingian world. Assemblies were probably smaller in West Francia, whether for political or judicial purposes; indeed, judicial assemblies died out in much of the western kingdom by 1000 or so. The 987 assembly of magnates who elected Hugh Capet was called a curia by Richer, a ‘court’, a rather more restricted word than placitum, the large judicial assembly surviving in Italy, or than theuniversalis populi conventus, the ‘meeting of the whole people’, referred to often by Widukind for the East Frankish lands. Even in West Francia, though, the peace councils of William V of Aquitaine and others could sometimes revive the image of wider public participation; and elsewhere all the members of local or kingdom-wide political communities could meet together and become the audience for political acts, which had power simply because of the size of the audience.

These acts could be very elaborate. Otto I’s coronation, already referred to, was one, potent with images of Carolingian legitimacy and supremacy. There was a stateliness about many of them, a rule boundedness, which has been influentially characterized by Gerd Althoff in his phrase Spielregeln, ‘the rules of the game’, rules which everyone in the community knew, and which held off open disagreement in public. This was all the more necessary because the single court hierarchy of the Carolingian world had, in reality, gone; there were by now far more players, whose relative position could no longer be established from above. Equality between kings was carefully choreographed, as when Otto I and Louis IV in 948 sat down at the synod of Ingelheim at the same moment, or as when kings met at the boundaries of kingdoms: Charles the Simple, for example, met Henry I in 921, each watched by their fideles, in a boat on the Rhine, to which they had each come in their own separate boats. In a parallel case, Rudolf of West Francia met Duke William II of Aquitaine at the River Loire in 924, when Rudolf was threatening war to get William’s submission to him as king. Messengers crossed by day to negotiate, then William crossed at night, got off his horse, and met the still-mounted king on foot, from whom he received the kiss of peace; this was the crucial element that began the submission process, involving a symbolic river-crossing and a posture of inferiority, but taking place in the dark, so less publicly visible (the negotiations must have largely been about that). Subjects regularly greeted their lords kneeling, or even prostrate on the ground (as also did kings, when kneeling or prostrating themselves before altars): particularly when asking for favours, but even in normal greeting, as with the story by Rodulf Glaber (d. 1047) of the unfaithful Heribert II of Vermandois receiving Charles the Simple’s kiss of peace while prostrate in 923. And when kings (or even, later, counts) came to cities there were regular adventus rituals of greeting, in a tradition surviving from the Roman empire and continuing to the modern period. Rome had by far the most elaborate ones, which signalled Rome’s own status, but all cities had their own, as when the cives fortiores, leading citizens, of Pavia came out to greet King Hugh ‘by custom’ in about 930, according to Liutprand, or when Louis IV was formally received at his accession in 936 at Laon and nearby cities, according to Richer. All of these latter accounts are literary reconstructions, but the imagery was a recognizable and a strong one. Rituals could also be used to humiliate. Prostration was particularly commonly used by people confessing crimes and seeking pardon; and kings could demand very specific public humiliations, like the dogs which the leading supporters of Duke Eberhard of the Franks had to carry publicly into Magdeburg in 937 after a minor revolt. This had Carolingian antecedents (under Louis II of Italy it would have been saddles), but as a sign of royal right, and of the subjection and penitence of the guilty, it must have had quite an effect.

The point about elaborate systems of rules, conversely, is that they can be subverted to make points. Sometimes this is the work of the writer, as when Dudo of Saint-Quentin (d. c. 1020), the Norman chronicler, supposes that in 911 Rollo of Normandy’s follower, when kissing Charles the Simple’s foot to represent the formal submission of Rollo’s Vikings, pulled the foot up into the air to kiss it: Dudo here simply wants to convey Viking/Norman egalitarianism and disrespect. More complex was Duke Hermann Billung of Saxony’s decision in 968 to call an assembly in Otto I’s city of Magdeburg, where he was received by the archbishop, dined in the emperor’s place, and slept in his bed; or when Marquis Ekkehard of Meissen in 1002, who was seeking the throne after Otto III’s death, came to the electoral assembly at Werla, and, when he realized he had lost, commandeered a feast that had been laid on in the palace for Otto III’s sisters, and ate it himself with his allies. We rely on Thietmar of Merseburg for these stories, and he had his own agendas, inevitably, but his close relatives were anxious witnesses in each case. Hermann and Ekkehard were certainly making points: about the fact that the Ottonians were potentially replaceable (in Ekkehard’s case, certainly), and also (in Hermann’s case, more ambiguously) the critical comment that Otto I had been too long away in Italy, and the claim that the duke of Saxony himself had, or should have, considerable formal power. Watchers knew that these sorts of points were being made; Ekkehard was killed for it, and the archbishop of Magdeburg (though not, interestingly, Hermann) was heavily fined by an angry Otto I. As with the Carolingians, once again, public acts always had audiences, who needed to be persuaded of arguments, and who could be convinced by creative reworkings of the rituals they were familiar with. This in turn generated new rituals and public procedures, like the Peace of God councils: I have described these in terms of Carolingian antecedents, but they were also seen as collective religious responses and counters to aristocratic violence, organized locally (as was the violence), rather than necessarily as the product of traditional political hierarchies. As the tenth century moved into the eleventh, the readings of public acts by local political actors could change quite a lot, at least in the West Frankish lands.

Rome was still one element of legitimization. It was still a pilgrimage centre and the location for imperial coronation, and most major political players found themselves there at one time or another. Popes, too, maintained some of their late Carolingian authority, at least in the field of law. Both John XV and Gregory V demanded the reversal of Arnulf of Reims’s deposition in 991, and got their way in the end (his enemy Gerbert himself, as Pope Silvester II, reconfirmed him in office in 999). Earlier, Agapitus II had at least initially demanded the same when Arnulf’s predecessor Hugh was deposed in 947; although he was persuaded to reverse his position in 949, his opinions mattered, and his agreement needed to be obtained. Not many bishops were actually deposed in this period, but they were politically important in every kingdom, and they answered to Rome in certain limited respects. Tenth-century popes were not usually protagonists; they were mostly in rather weak positions inside the city of Rome, and, rather than act, they reacted to requests, usually along the lines the powerful wanted. But if they were to make decisions on their own, against the interests of the powerful - as over Arnulf of Reims, who had no significant support among the laity - it was hard to force them to change their minds, and the powerful might have to back down. The Latin church thus maintained the skeleton ‘international’ values and procedures that had begun in the Carolingian period.

One respect in which political practice changed was that it became more dynastic. This was a recognizable Carolingian inheritance, too; the Carolingians themselves had a strong dynastic consciousness, and the families of the Reichsaristokratie were also conscious of their rights of inheritance to land, which included an expectation that sons would succeed fathers in office at least somewhere, as we saw in Chapter 16. In the tenth century, however, nine of the great Carolingian aristocratic families gained the royal title, at least for a time, and others doubtless thought they might join them; and many others gained practical autonomy in a duchy, march, or accumulation of counties, which they could expect to pass to their heirs in a regular way. They appropriated some of the public rituals described above; they also appropriated a much more direct sense of hereditary entitlement than aristocrats had had in the ninth century. The West Frankish kings could not intervene in ducal or comital succession at all, as noted earlier, and even the Ottonians did so only with some care, or in response to revolt - or else when magnates died without sons, when they could manipulate marriage alliances. As a result, it was possible for the first time to suppose that dukes or counts might inherit as children; and this was also true of kings (Otto III in the East, Lothar in the West), as it had not been in the ninth century. Queen-mothers reappeared as important and recognized political forces, as we have seen, and a less contested force than were some of the powerful queens of the century before. Women were sometimes powerful even when kings were adults: Otto III used his aunt Matilda of Quedlinburg (d. 999) as a regent in the north when he went to Italy in 998. And, interestingly, we begin to find quite a few active duchess-mothers and marquise-mothers as well: powerful dealers for their deceased husband’s families, like Bertha (d. 926), regent of Tuscany for her son Guy after 915, or Hadwig, widow of Hugh the Great, politically active in 956-60, or her daughter Beatrice, who ran Upper Lotharingia for a decade after her husband’s death in 978. It is interesting how little hostility is expressed towards these ruling women in most of our sources, even though our writers are full of patriarchal clichés about female fragility. The one exception is Liutprand of Cremona, a selective misogynist, who frequently explained female power as the result of sexual licence; but his targets were essentially Italian, and this can be linked to his desire to delegitimize all aspects of Italian independence. It may be that the weakening of the heavily moralized politics of the Carolingian period left female power less exposed to suspicion and censure, outside the work of Liutprand.

A more dynastic set of political assumptions also meant a politics more rooted in the control of specific lands. Aristocrats still needed Königsnähe, ‘closeness to kings’, to keep their power and wealth and to gain more, except, increasingly, in West Francia, but they looked to the royal court from a clearly defined regional base by now, which would not shift geographically except in very rare cases, and which would, if it grew, result only in a greater domination of their own region. The effects this would have on aristocratic identity, and on the structures of local domination itself, we shall look at in more detail in Chapter 21, which deals with the aristocracy. It had an effect on wider-scale politics as well, however. Regional interests had led to the eclipse of the relevance of the West Frankish kings, as we have seen. They also contributed to the readiness of Italian magnates to cope with absentee kingship, and to focus instead on much more localized rivalries. Even in East Francia, the Ottonians had to deal with five separate political networks, Bavarian, Swabian, Frankish, Saxon and (crystallizing more slowly) Lotharingian, with their own identities and loyalties and (relative) lack of interest in their neighbours. Thietmar tells us little about Italy or West Francia, but actually not much about Bavaria and Swabia either, much less than about the most immediate Saxon rivals to the east, such as the Poles. If Otto I had been in Bavaria in the 960s and not Italy, Hermann Billung might well still have staged his critical ceremony in Magdeburg. One long-term result of this localization of identity was that, everywhere, it was not quite as entirely essential as in the past to go to kings, or to dukes or marquises or counts, to gain social status and legitimacy as an aristocrat. At a pinch, one might claim it oneself. In East Francia there was still no contest: significant players needed offices and Königsnähe or its ducal equivalent, and so would they for another century and more. But it would be just possible to imagine the choice by now, even in East Francia. In the West there were already some people in the tenth century who were beginning to go it alone, and there were many more in the eleventh. The parameters of political power itself would change when they did.

The tenth century has had a problem of double vision in the eyes of historians: should it be seen as a post-Carolingian century, prolonging ninth-century political structures and values (although, in the eyes of some, not so effectively), or as a prelude to the often quite different politics and polemics of the centuries after 1000 or 1050? A book which stops in 1000, as this does, is probably inevitably going to pay more attention to the first of these, and I have done so here. But the tenth century does indeed seem to me more ‘Carolingian’ than does the eleventh, including in the fragmented world of West Francia: even a small western principality like Anjou or Catalonia was still using many Carolingian public procedures in the late tenth century, and Tuscany or Saxony, or the Ottonian kingdom/empire as a whole, was using nearly all of them. I do not want to argue here for a simple and unchanging stability, and indeed the last couple of pages have argued the opposite. But the political parameters of the tenth-century world, including its violence, and a fair measure of cynicism and opportunism, seem to me - if one has to choose - to look backwards rather than forwards. Above all, the tenth-century emphasis on the public world of assemblies and large-scale collective rituals would lessen in the future. It was already beginning to disappear in the last decades of the tenth century in West Francia; in Italy it would continue for another century, but disappear quite fast around 1100; in East Francia it would persist for rather longer at the level of the kingdom, but would fade much faster in some of the localities. Assembly politics slowly turned into the politics of royal and princely courts, groups selected by rulers rather than being representatives (however much in practice aristocratic ones) of political communities. A sense of belonging, of loyalty, and of hierarchy would become more personalized as these changes took place, and the lord- dependant relationship would come into the foreground more, gaining as it did a more elaborate ceremonial and etiquette. These are markers of the central Middle Ages, not the early Middle Ages; and they were hardly more than at their beginning in 1000.

One result of that change is that the eleventh century, at least in West Francia but to an extent also in Italy, seldom looked back much to the tenth. History-writing in Italy after 1000 is very localized, and pays little attention to the politics of the kingdom at all; the tenth century only gets remembered in tiny vignettes, such as Hugh’s lustfulness, or Otto I’s saving of his second wife Adelaide from Berengar II. Rodulf Glaber in West Francia, writing only a generation after Richer, is at least interested in the kings of his own time, but before the 990s has almost no information, and it is again expressed in isolated stories, Heribert II’s capture of Charles the Simple, or Lothar’s war against Otto II, or the Arab capture of Abbot Maiolus of Cluny in 972; his highly detailed account of his own times needs no back history to explain matters, and maybe it would not have explained them, to his eyes. This reordering of historical consciousness marks the failure, in the west and the south of the Frankish lands, of the Carolingian political world and its traditional methods of legitimization: too much of the past did not mean anything any more. Only Charlemagne survived, as an increasingly mythic and dehistoricized figure, flanked in some areas of West Francia by Pippin III and Clovis: safe symbols of the distant past, legitimizing the present but not explaining it. The tenth century was thus eclipsed; some of its major players still cannot easily be understood. But this would not have been in anyone’s mind in 1000, when, to a Gerbert or a Thietmar, the world, even if dangerous and unpredictable, was carrying on just fine.