The Carolingian (back-up) plan for world domination

It’s a long time now since I did my doctorate. Nonetheless, I recognise a huge debt in my work even now to that of my supervisor, Matthew Innes—I am prone to saying that Rosamond McKitterick gave me my study area, Matthew gave me questions to ask about it and Wendy Davies gave me the techniques to answer them (though Wendy never taught me as such), but actually Matthew gave me quite a few of the answers too—and when I come across more of his work it’s always good news. This happened again a few months ago, as I slowly worked my way through a chunky volume from Vienna on the early medieval state in which he features.¹ In this chapter, he does nothing less than propose a general characteristic of Carolingian conquest, and I think it’s great and plausible but that it doesn’t work for Catalonia. From this follow some wider musings, as you may imagine.

This post involves talking about Alemannia, and it’s really difficult to find a map that shows that. It’s more or less the little segment of this one marked "536" just above Italy.

Matthew starts his chapter with the tightest summary yet of his idea of how early medieval polities operated, one of the things that I have adopted wholeheartedly from him, that for distant rulers to get anything done in the regions they controlled they had to establish relationships with local agents who could do those things from a direct landed power-base, and make sure that they would do so by means of negotiation and incentives.² Looking specifically at Alemannia, roughly modern far south-western Germany and part of the modern Switzerland, through the lens of Notker’s Gesta Karoli, a text that takes some careful reading to be used as a source for politics but one that Matthew knows very well, he argues that what Carolingian take-over looked like is a moment of weakness in a region’s autonomous government, a Carolingian intervention by force majeure involving expropriation on a substantial scale by the Carolingians’ initial agents, and then the development of a structure of government and judicial process dividing power between more people, including the locals, during which a lot of the property that was initially expropriated dribbles slowly back into local hands via gifts, court cases, benefices and so forth.³ In other word, it worked because they toppled local government, stole a lot of stuff and then offered people a way to get their stuff back that endorsed the Carolingian position at the top. As Jinty Nelson once memorably said, “They weren’t nice people, you know.”

This is not really Sankt Gallen as Notker would have recognised it, but it’s still quite impressive. By Hansueli Krapf (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

I find this very persuasive. It certainly seems to work for Alemannia (where Matthew is mostly following Michael Borgolte here), it probably works for Italy, I think also Bavaria and, in an extreme kind of way, probably also for Saxony, though it might be less property and more recognition as free people.⁴ It doesn’t, however, seem to me to work for Catalonia, which raises the question of why not.⁵ In the first place, a crucial difference: parts of what is now Catalonia first came under Carolingian government, as you may recall, because the men of Girona opted to side with the Franks in 785.⁶ Cerdanya and Urgell seem to have done something similar and were under Carolingian rule by 793, when a Muslim army came to punish them for it, and after that the extent of control was slowly pushed out by military means until 809, when the hope of further gains seems to have been dropped by King Louis the Pious of Aquitaine (as he then was).⁷ But the initial secession is represented by the Frankish sources as self-determined, and there’s little enough to make any case against that with.

Here’s another handy map, this one of the whole Marca Hispanica as the Carolingians established it. By Modifications author: Tonipares (Adapted and translated from [1]) [Copyrighted free use or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

I have tried looking for such things, I should say, but I have pretty much failed. The ‘Goths’ here, like the ones of Narbonne, got to keep their own law; there are only two cases known to me where Frankish royal officials intervened in judicial process. For a while, at least, local counts remained in charge too, though quite possibly feathering their own nests from so doing. The administration does seem to have had a shake-up, but things like the writing of documents, for example, were still done by local standards afterwards. Even learned culture seems to have remained primarily Visigothic at first, though here I think there may be room for a different reading of the evidence.⁸ The Carolingians didn’t even impose the Roman rite over the Hispanic liturgy until probably much later. The two biggest changes were the abrogation of two of the area’s bishoprics, both probably inactive, and the establishment of those misunderstood semi-independent migrants, the Hispani, hither and yon with consequent complications for what was probably otherwise a mechanism for military service that would also have seemed like a severe change and which the counts were well-placed to exploit to their advantage.⁹ It seems as if an awful lot of the strong-arm measures required elsewhere were not necessary here. Why not?

A depiction of the armies of Israel from the tenth-century Bíblia de Ripoll. This is used much too often as an illustration of tenth-century warfare but I don’t have a better one so I shall be just as bad…

Well, the reprisal attack of 793 shows one good reason: those living in this area must have seen the need of protection in a fairly real way. Bavaria and Saxony’s far frontiers were largely within their capacity to manage, though Denmark might explain Saxony’s rapid assimilation in the same way as al-Andalus could here. Italy is a bit more complex, because its southern duchies remained a kind of barrier between the bit the Carolingians ruled and the notional enemy, and in any case that enemy could be any one of several. All the same, there was a job for government to do in Catalonia, and also there wasn’t much central control there anyway; while Barcelona and Girona themselves usually shared a Muslim ruling family as far as we can tell, those rulers’ position vis-à-vis cities further south and west was continually variable, and how far those centres’ power reached into the Pyrenees may legitimately be doubted.¹⁰

The walls that helped turn Charlemagne back… Roman walls at Saragossa. By own work (Own work) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC BY 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons.

But the other factor, which brings me perhaps closer again to Matthew’s argument, is that I think the Carolingians had tried the strategy he describes in the 770s and it had failed. The local agents would have been the al-‘Arabi family of Barcelona, but also no doubt some new Frankish brooms to keep them in order, and they would have ridden into local power on the back of the local leaders’ wish to separate from the Emirate; the establishment of Frankish defences would have meant a supporting allotment of land, and it could all have unrolled much as it had in Bavaria (taking that story from Duke Odilo, rather than just Tassilo), except of course that the local leaders changed their mind, formed ranks and had big old Roman cities to do this from.¹¹ Result, Roncesvalles, more or less. So after that something else had to be done instead, and what they came up with was accommodation first, strong-arming second. But I think that Matthew might be right that the other way round had, till then, been the way that worked for the Carolingians.

---

1. M. Innes, “Property, Politics and the Problem of the Carolingian State” in Walter Pohl & Veronika Wieser (edd.), Der frühmittelalterliche Staat – europäische Perspektiven, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 16 (Wien 2009), pp. 299-313.

2. A formulation worked out in M. Innes, State and Society in the Early Middle Ages: the middle Rhine valley 400-1000, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 4th Series 47 (Cambridge 2000), followed by me in J. Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880-1010: pathways of power (Woodbridge 2010), and now stated almost equally tightly in Jarrett, “Engaging Élites: Counts, Capital and Frontier Communities in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries, in Catalonia and Elsewhere” in Networks and Neighbours Vol. 2 (forthcoming), pp. 211-261, which is a pupil’s work in many ways.

3. M. Innes, “Memory, orality and literacy in an early medieval society” in Past and Present no. 158 (Oxford 1998), pp. 3-36, doi: 10.1093/past/158.1.3.

4. M. Borgolte, Geschichte der Grafschaften Alemanniens in fränkischer Zeit (Sigmaringen 1984); Elina Screen, “Lothar I in Italy, 834-40: Charters and Authority” in J. Jarrett & A. S. McKinley (edd.), Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Charters, International Medieval Research 19 (Turnhout 2013), pp. 231-252, doi: 10.1484/M.IMR-EB.1.101685; Stuart Airlie, “Narratives of Triumph and Rituals of Submission: Charlemagne’s mastery of Bavaria” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th Series Vol. 9 (Cambridge 1999), pp. 93-119, doi: 10.2307/3679394 and Warren C. Brown, Unjust Seizure: conflict, interest and authority in an early medieval society, Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past 2 (Ithaca 2001), for Bavaria; there isn’t really a good study for Saxony that I know of, perhaps because anyone who does it has to face up to the ugly fact that intermittent genocide actually worked out pretty well for Charlemagne for creating loyalty to his family…

5. It would probably work for Ramon Martí, given his “Conquistas y capitulaciones campesinas” in Jordi Camps (ed.), Cataluña en la época carolingia: arte y cultura antes del románico (siglos IX y X) (Barcelona 1999), pp. 59-63, transl. as “Peasant victories and defeats”, ibid. pp. 448-451, but as you may remember I can’t find it in me to agree there.

6. Chronicon Moissiacense, printed in Georg Heinrich Pertz (ed.)., Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptorum Tomus I (Hannover 1829), pp. 280-313, s. a. 785: “Eodem anno Gerundenses homines Gerundam civitatem Carlo regi tradiderunt.”

7. Josep María Salrach i Marés, El procés de formació nacional de Catalunya (segles VIII-IX), Llibres a l’Abast 136-137 (Barcelona 1978), 2 vols is still the best guide here.

8. I’m finishing this post away from my library, so this is harder to substantiate than I’d like, but… judicial intervention in Santiago Sobrequés i Vidal, Sebastià Riera i Viader & Manuel Rovira i Solà, (edd.) Catalunya Carolíngia V: els comtats de Girona, Besalú, Empúries i Peralada, ed. Ramon Ordeig i Mata, Memòries de la secció històrico-arqueològica 61 (Barcelona 2003), 2 vols, doc. no. 7 and there is another case in Pierre Ponsich (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia VI: els comtats de Rosselló, Conflent, Vallespir i Fenollet, ed. Ordeig, Memòries LXX (Barcelona 2006) but I don’t have that reference handy, sorry; the counts and their origins are discussed in Salrach, Formació, I pp. 39-46; the changes in documentary practice are studied in Jonathan Jarrett, “Comparing the Earliest Documentary Culture in Carolingian Catalonia” in Jarrett & McKinley, Problems and Possibilities, pp. 89-126, doi: 10.1484/M.IMR-EB.1.101679; and on learned culture, see Michel Zimmermann, Écire et lire en Catalogne (IX^e-XIII^e siècle), Bibliothèque de la Casa de Velázquez 23 (Madrid 2003), 2 vols, II pp. 619-831.

9. On the Church reorganisation see e. g. Manuel Riu i Riu, “La organización eclesiástica” in José María Jover Zamora (ed.), Historia de España Menéndez Pidal, tomo VII: la España cristiana de los siglos VIII al XI, volumen II. Los nucleos pirenaicos (718-1035): Navarra, Aragón, Cataluña, ed. Riu (Madrid 1999), pp. 613-648. On military service, wait for my article on the subject, but meanwhile compare Cullen J. Chandler, “Between court and counts: Carolingian Catalonia and the aprisio grant, 778-897″ in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 11 No. 1 (Oxford 2002) pp. 19-44, doi: 10.1111/1468-0254.00099 and Jonathan Jarrett, “Settling the Kings’ Lands: aprisio in Catalonia in perspective”, ibid. 18 (2010), pp. 320-342, doi: 10.1111/j.1471-8847.2010.00301.x.

10. Here again Ramón Martí would disagree: see his “Palaus o almúnies fiscals a Catalunya i al-Andalus” in Hélène Débax (ed.), Les sociétés méridionales à l’âge féodal (l’Espagne, Italie et sud de France X^e-XIII^e s.) : hommage à Pierre Bonnassie, Méridiennes 8 (Toulouse 1999), pp. 63-69, for an argument for a much more thoroughly-spread Muslim presence; cf. e. g. Eduardo Manzano Moreno, “Christian-Muslim Frontier in al-Andalus: idea and reality” in Dionisius Agius & Richard Hitchcock (edd.), Arab Influence upon Medieval Europe (Reading, IL. 1994), pp. 83-96.

11. For now the best resort here is the work of Philippe Sénac, for example his “Charlemagne et al-Andalus (768 – 814)” in idem (ed.), Aquitaine—Espagne (VIII^e – XIII^e siècle), Civilisation médiévale 12 (Poitiers 2001), pp. 1-18, but look for new thoughts from Samuel Ottewill-Soulsby, currently doing his doctorate at Cambridge.

Seminar CCV: tracking the head of John the Baptist

I proffer my usual apologies for the intermittent service here at the moment. I had hoped that the holidays would give time for blog catch-up but I am between even more places than usual this Christmas and have also been contriving to get about 1,500 words a day of book written and an article finished off and ready to submit, and I’m loath to mess with the magic… Nonetheless, tonight I have some time and so I can tell you about going to the Earlier Middle Ages Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research on 14th May 2014 to hear Dr Georges Kazan speak to the title, “The Head of St John the Baptist: Byzantium and the Circulation of Relics in the Early Middle Ages”.

View from the west of the church of Sv. Ioan Prodrom, Sveti Ivan, Bulgaria. Photograph by Kazimir Popkonstnatinov

This was an unusual paper, not least because the speaker confessed himself out of his area of expertise almost immediately and then turned out to know an awful lot. Dr Kazan’s expertise is archæological, and specifically he knows a lot about reliquary types and designs, especially in the Byzantine world. But reliquaries are what they are only because they contain things connected with saints, and that gets you into the world of hagiography, that most tricky and unreliable of genres. Plucking up his courage after getting involved in the Bulgarian find of relics that were immediately hailed as John the Baptist’s at Sveti Ivan near Sozopol in 2010, as reported sceptically here indeed, Dr Kazan had tried using the texts to tell him what relics of St John the Baptist were around in the early Middle Ages and where, and had been pretty exhaustive in breadth about it.

Supposed relic of the skull of St John the Baptist in the Topkapi Palace, Istanbul

The first thing that surprised me about this catalogue is that it was surprisingly unambitious till about 800. Despite John’s fame, his head was not claimed by anyone until the end of the fourth century, although then there were two, in Alexandria and in Constantinople. Other places claimed to have unspecified relics of his and it is possible to guess that these might in fact have been coming from Constantinople, not least because the Sveti Ivan relics were in a reliquary of a type that was exported from there in some numbers. In about 800 a third head came to light, however, and by 814 a fourth one (claimed to be the same one) was in Rome, and after that it begins to get silly: there are, to Dr Kazan’s knowledge, thirty-six claimed heads of John the Baptist currently preserved in whole or in part, and a hundred and thirty-seven relics of him in general, with sixty-seven other cases now lost. All this is exactly why I was sceptical about the Sozopol claim, though I didn’t know the numbers. Interestingly, however, that has been radio-carboned and DNA-tested and comes out (at least the human bones in the casket, which were accompanied by lots more including animal bones 500 years older) as bone from a Middle Eastern male alive in the first century A. D., so at the very least it was a suitably-old body the makers piled in there…

Not that there was very much of him… The relics as discovered, in the sarcophagus. Photograph by Kazimir Popkonstnatinov.

That was the second thing that surprised me, and the third was that, with excruciating effort, it was more or less possible for Dr Kazan to construct a story that more or less reconciled all the different snippets of hagiography up till 800.¹ In that construction, that of the chronicler Rufinus of Aquileia, the body of St John was first reported at Sebaste in Palestine, when with that of the prophet Elisha it was attacked by pagans during Emperor Julian’s persecutions in 361. It was gathered up and brought to Jerusalem for safety, then to Alexandria, then back to Jerusalem in 362, by which time the body had been divided; it was then established in a martyrium in Alexandria (again!) in 395. On the other hand, in the Ecclesiastical History of Sozomen, monks who had found the head in the mid-fourth century were reported to be venerating it in Cilicia during the reign of the Emperor Valens; Valens ordered them brought to Constantinople but the mules pulling the cart would go no further than Cosilaos, where a new cult was set up and whence Emperor Theodosius I removed the relics in 391, taking them to Constantinople where they were established in a church at the Hebdomon.² The thing that makes this all just about possible is the first story’s insistence that there were two bodies at Sebaste and that they were burnt and broken up; after that, how to know which head was which? Both groups could have believed they had the right one. Of course, then there come the heads of 800, one supposedly located in the ruins of Herod the Great’s palace by yet more monks and stolen off to Emesa by parties unknown, who sealed it into an urn that became the property of an Arian healer, who hid it in a cave when his quackery was revealed and he was run out of the town. The cave got used by hermits, who eventually turned up the urn in 453, and passed it on to a monastery back in Emesa in 753. This was the head that was claimed to be at Rome in 800 but was unfortunately also still attested at Emesa in 814, so by then things have got silly but before 800 the details we have that are not fantastic are not in themselves clearly contradictory.

Supposed relic of part of the head of John the Baptist in the Residenz, Münich. By LarryB55 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Of course, the fact that that is possible does not mean that any of it is true, and the fantastic details do present a problem or two here, ones that may be more apparent to the textual scholar than the archæologist. In the first place, the deposition of the bodies at Sebaste is hard to take in Rufinus’s terms because we have very little sign otherwise of persecution under Julian, rather than just cutting funding. In the second place, of course, it is completely unclear how many of these details could possibly have been known by the people who would have to have hold the story; in the case of the Emesa head most of that is frankly impossible (and this Dr Kazan freely acknowledged). To do any more one would need to know a lot more about the manuscript situation of each of the texts (Rufinus, at least, not being preserved in any version earlier than the seventh century, surely affecting what his redactors knew to be ‘true’ about such matters, and you already know what I think about Sozomen’s critical faculty) but Dr Kazan had not gone any further than the nineteenth-century editions, so there that matter had to rest. At this rate, to accept any of the details as any more than a fortunate stab in the dark by an inventive hagiographer is pretty much unjustifiable, so the body part maths doesn’t really get us very far, and what we are left with is more or less where Dr Kazan had started, the Sozopol sarcophagus and its siblings.

The reliquary with its lid on. Photograph by Kazimir Popkonstnatinov.

By Dr Kazan’s account, pressed from him in questions by Charlotte Roueché, Alan Thacker and Caroline Goodson, these kinds of reliquaries were made in Asia Minor half-finished and finished wherever they were needed, but the best finishing was done in Constantinople. They often contained metal caskets, although both the stone shells and the caskets are found separately. They were not necessarily reliquaries, but were almost always put to funerary purposes and so make sense for that use. It would seem that Constantinople had quite the trade in these things going on, so that by the fifteenth century relics with a Constantinopolitan provenance were considered automatically suspect. Nonetheless, it was and had been for a long time one of the kinds of status Constantinople had to offer people. The trouble was, I think these were things that Dr Kazan had known already before starting research for this paper. It was delivered sincerely and contained a great deal of interesting information, but very little of it was information on which a historian could put any weight, and sadly that is a state of the record which further finds are unlikely to fix.³

---

1. Happily for me given the state of my notes, Dr Kazan seems to have had most of these references worked up for a conference he organised in the Sozopol finds in Oxford in 2011, which I completely missed but whose papers are now online. I get most of the textual references following from Dr Kazan’s own “The Head of St John the Baptist—the early evidence”, and the site details and a number of the images in this post from Rossina Kostova, Kazimir Popkonstantinov and Tom Higham, “Relics of the Baptist: Scientific research planned for the finds excavated in Sozopol, Bulgaria in 2010 (Radiocarbon Dating, DNA testing)”.

2. Rufinus of Aquileia, Historia Ecclesiastica, ed. Theodor Mommsen in Eusebius, Werke, ed. Eduard Schwartz (Leipzig 1903-1909), II: Die Kirchengeschichte – die lateinische Übersetzung des Rufinus, II.28; an earlier translation is here. Other later historians also report this, and are listed in Kazan, “John the Baptist”, p. 2, but all seem to be working from Rufinus. Sozomen, who worked explicitly to correct Rufinus, is edited in Sozomène, Histoire ecclésiastique, ed. J. Bidez, trans. André-Jean Festugière & rev. Bernard Grillet (Paris 1983-96), and in older English online here, VII.21.

3. Kostova, Popkonstantinov & Higham, “Relics of the Baptist”, cites as publication of the excavation K. Popkonstantinov et al., ‘Srednovekoven manastir “Sv. Ioan Prodrom” na ostrov ”Sv. Ivan”, Sozopol’ in Arheologičeski otkritija i razkopki za 2009 godina (Sofia 2010), pp. 595-599.

Can Open Access be done right?

Shortly before I wrote my last post about open access, I was given a copy of a very recent British Academy publication about open-access journals, and you may even remember that I cited it there.¹ I had, however, only looked at it briefly then and planned at that stage to write a sequel post using it to look at ways in which open access, which you will hopefully remember I don’t think has yet been developed as a working idea, might be. This is that post, but I can’t promise much by way of optimism…

The front cover

The book had an explicit brief from the British Academy, which was to evaluate how far any UK government or quasi-NGO policy on open access as a requirement for funding needed to vary across disciplines and what effect it would have on the UK academy to impose it (or, in the case of Research Councils UK, continue imposing the current one). All of this was more or less intended to settle some of the questions raised by a previous British Academy volume, and this one was explicitly focused on the situation in the UK. Though occasionally it looks across the Atlantic to the place where the results of the Research Assessment Exercise 2008 told the authors UK academics mostly publish when they don’t in the UK, and indeed compares [edit: the publication system] to the old Soviet Union on one occasion (note the third author), the conclusions and the dataset it presents on which those conclusions [edit: rest] only really apply in the country where I write.² There is an issue there which I’ll come on to but it’s an understandable restriction, and maybe it shows the way evaluations could go elsewhere.³

The other limit of the debate is that one of the main questions is taken as already settled out of court, that being the question of what type of open access we are debating. The last time I wrote about this I was cross about what has come to be called ‘gold’ open access, in which the publisher compensates for their loss of a product to sell by charging the author to publish with them, a charge (APC, article processing charge) that is usually thought will be supplied by the research’s supporting funding. At that point various voices were saying that for humanities research, often done without grants and equally often with very small ones, this was pernicious and would hit poorer institutions and younger students disproportionately. This is a position that the British Academy apparently took to be obvious and of which Research Councils UK has since come to be persuaded, and the result is that that is accepted as a model that only works for the sciences and perhaps only medicine (a position that the figures presented here justify) and that what we are actually studying here is ‘green’ open access, and exactly how to implement it.⁴ Obviously elsewhere that debate is not so finished, but this again may be something that this work could transmit to such fora.

The way that ‘green’ open access works, or is supposed to work, is that rather than charge the author, the publisher accepts that after a while it will put the work online for free, but it will not do this straight away, so that people who need the information as soon as possible will continue to buy the journal. They may also, when it finally goes online, only put the author’s submitted version online, which will not reflect subsequent changes or, obviously, correct page numbers, so it effectively can’t be cited. (Again, medicine has less of a problem with citing pre-prints, and I suspect that we will see more and more of this in the humanities, but for now it’s part of what gives journal publishers any hope and it has to be said (and is in this book, with figures) that basically almost no-one in the humanities actually puts up pre-print versions on the web anyway, Academia.edu or even personal web-pages not withstanding.⁵ Even I don’t, because how could you cite it? And so on.)

So with that accepted or assumed, the question becomes how long should the embargo period before the article is released to the world be? This is where the book is doing most of its work. In the first place, they show by an analysis of usage half-lives (a complex formula, given its own appendix, which tells you the median age of the content that made up half a journal’s downloads over a given period, and makes a reasonable index of comparison) that in general, the humanities do happily use content that’s older than medicine, but that actually, so does physics and most of the other sciences; medicine is just out by itself in its need to have the most immediate content straight away (and even there, the half-life figure was about six months on average).⁶ As they say several times, “the boundary does not lie between STEM (science, technology and medicine) and HSS (humanities and social sciences); rather, it lies between HSS plus Physical Sciences on one side and Medicine on the other”.⁷ The actual embargo periods being proposed as compulsory for humanities research funded by RCUK seem reasonable to them in the light of this, however, and so that ends there, and they go on to what is perhaps a more interesting set of questions about academic publishing more widely.

This is the point where I think there might actually be the sign of a set of answers emerging, at least for the time being, and it’s interesting. In the first place, they establish by means of a just-about-significant survey (Edit: 12% response rate! What can you do, though?) that librarians, who it is who actually buy journals, don’t pay any real attention to embargo periods when doing so and thus argue that publishers have nothing to fear from reducing them; and then they go on a two-chapter excursus about how journal publishing can and should be paid for, and this is one of my big questions about all such initiatives as you know so it made me read avidly.⁸ They don’t really have an answer, but what they show, by the same kind of back-of-the-envelope maths that I was using to disprove the possibility of crowdfunded higher education, is that it must be paid for, that only the smallest of journals can be run with no staff and no print costs and that as soon as one attracts any kind of following it needs an organisation that more or less amounts to a publisher. And since publishers need at the very least to pay for themselves, money has to come into the system somewhere, and whence is more or less an ethical debate depending on whom you think benefits most: the author, the academy or the world? And we might like to think it was the last, really, but the chances of any new tax revenue being put aside to fund open-access publication, as the authors here say, does seem fairly small.⁹ So we’re stuck in the middle with publishers and the only thing that matters, until that be solved, is how much libraries can afford to pay for journals and what publishers will charge for them. So I like this, obviously, because it more or less justifies my stance that even when the current academic labour of publication is uncosted, we can’t do this for free and have to answer the money question. What that means, in effect, is that whatever one’s ethical stance on open access may be, it is more or less irrelevant until we can come up with a better solution for academic publication than the current one, and that is a bigger problem than even three such sharp writers as these could be expected to solve in a 106-page volume, but it really needs solving.

I will permit myself just one of the various logos the open access movement has scattered across the Internet because I like the double signification of this one, it goes well with the post…

There are also some other important qualifications about coverage and inclusion here. Firstly and most obviously, this whole argument can only apply where publication is online. For the sciences that’s a no-brainer but looking over my own CV, of twenty-six outputs and seven reviews I could count over my career thus far, although six are virtual exhibitions and thus not only basically unimportant for research evaluations but self-evidently online, five of the reviews but only ten of the remaining twenty outputs are online automatically, seven of them behind paywalls, and three more are online because I put them there myself, not having signed any copyright away. My book is partly visible in Google Preview. The rest, ironically including quite a lot of the work about putting things on the Internet, is only available in hard copy, so remains very definitely closed. This is an issue the authors are aware of, substantially expressed as an awareness that electronic publication of actual books has a long way to go before it’s anywhere near general and that for most parts of the humanities, and especially the creative arts, that’s where most or much work goes.¹⁰ On the one hand this means that the figures and answers the authors come up with here are truer for psychology than any other HSS subject and affect, say, history, relatively little, but on the other hand means that if the less affected disciplines were suddenly required to make most or all of their research open access their publication plans would have to radically alter and would probably become partly impossible.

The other problem, and one to which the authors are alive in some ways, is that this really is an Anglophone and indeed UK problem. They emphasise that whatever the successes of the open access movement in the USA in creating impressive logos and impassioned stances (I editorialise somewhat), very few US publishers are paying any attention to it. They see this as a sign that what RCUK was proposing could seriously hurt UK academics’ ability to publish abroad.¹¹ I have tended to see it the other way, however, because of naturally looking at Europe. When I started my doctoral work basically no Catalan journal was online; now, almost all of them are, for free, open access. A goodly part of the French academic journal scene is also online via the Persée portal and there are German and Spanish equivalents too. Now it is certainly true that these are sometimes funded by the major state research organisations, because they publish most of the relevant journals; the fact still exists that the relevant state thought it worthwhile to fund that. In Catalonia, in fact, it isn’t even the state, but eighty-nine separate academic or learned institutions from museums and universities through to the Generalitat, which is funding it, but with the Generalitat one among many institutions contributing to it actually getting done. In these countries, someone did put aside tax revenue to present, organise and preserve academic research. Why we can’t, or won’t, do that, and why the justification of it is so much less obvious in the Anglophone world, not just to funders but to practitioners with our platitudinous explanations of the inherent worth of our subjects of study, is also quite an important research question, I’d say, even if not one I expect to see the British Academy funding however the results were published.

---

1. Rebecca Darley, Daniel Reynolds & Chris Wickham, Open Access Journals in Humanities and Social Science: a British Academy research project (London 2014), and it is of course, as you’d expect, online free and open-access, here.

2. The previous volume was Nigel Vincent & Chris Wickham (edd.), Debating Open Access (London 2013); comparison to the USSR Darley, Reynolds & Wickham, Open Access Journals, p. 85.

3. It should be remembered, though, that a great deal of the starter data here came from the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise 2008, without which the book probably couldn’t have been written, and certainly, without that or an equivalent, any country trying this will need to do much much more data collection. Of course, even that data was six years out of date by the time this book was published, and this is a fast-moving field, but since the Research Excellence Framework was only then being completed and has only just been counted, what could they do?

4. Darley, Reynolds & Wickham, Open Access Journals, pp. 16-20.

5. Ibid., pp. 71-74.

6. Ibid., pp. 49-66.

7. Ibid., pp. 8, 61 & 92.

8. Ibid., pp. 67-87.

9. Ibid., p. 84: “a frankly unlikely scenario”.

10. Ibid., pp. 24-32.

11. Ibid., pp. 33-35 & 36-48.

Seminar CCIV: continuing to work out the Staffordshire Hoard

There seems to be little question that being in Birmingham has put me in a place where I can reach a much wider range of medievalist activity than my previous employments allowed, and by way of proof of this, on 13th May of this same year I was at the University of Leicester hearing Chris Fern give us the latest news on a certain famous find under the title of “The Staffordshire Hoard: the current state of knowledge”. Not many people would be better placed to, since Dr Fern (of whom we have heard here before) was then producing the object catalogue, meaning that he had perhaps a better view than anyone else of what the whole assemblage was like (at least, until they had got it all onto one table two months previously). For me, there were three particular areas where this lecture told me something new, and those were the silver items, the links between items, and the problem of parallelling any of the stuff, so that’s how I’ll divide the post.

Fragments of silver foil during conservation at Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery

When the Hoard first came to light, one of the questions I quickly developed was “what is the silver stuff?” The news was always clear that that there was about three kilos of gold and one and a half of silver but it seemed that the gold was all we saw. This turned out to be not least because the silver was in much smaller parts than the gold, and thus harder to separate from the mud, but also because both those factors made it much harder to identify. In fact, it turns out very largely to be bits of 12 friezes that might all be from a single helmet, and the difficulty in working that out will be clearer if I say that amounts to more than 700 fragments. This is not actually a job I would want, I have to admit…

A silver strip in the process of reassembly by Rachel Altpeter at Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery

However, the Hoard team had been doing this, and not just with the silver. Of the total of circa 3,800 fragments they could at this point join up more than 600, not a lot but enough to show patterns. For example, they had 41 pairs of hilt collars to go at the top and bottom of sword grips, but a total of 85 pommels for those swords, as well as enough hilt-plates to allow for 4 each per sword, and much of this groups into two basic styles albeit with great and ingenious variations, one being gold, garnets and cloisonée glass and the other, later, involving much more filigree work and fewer gems or glass bits. On the other hand there are also some odd things that won’t group, the crosses and the wire serpents for example but also the three sword-rings that seem to have been casts, meant to look like really old Scandinavian swords but not actually being made the same way.

A close-up of a hilt collar with fine filigree work, and when I say fine, I mean, the wires are less than a millemetre thick each!

This, along with the fact that we don’t know and probably can’t know who it was that stripped all this stuff violently off the objects it had once adorned, who it was who gathered it together and then who it was who buried it, and whether any of these people were the same or around at the same time, makes dating the Hoard qua hoard very difficult still. (One interesting point that only makes that more complex is that apparently though many of the fragments show signs of wear, this is typically at the extremities, not the parts that were handled, suggesting that these splendid weapons were perhaps worn more than drawn. This opens up the possibility that they might have been kept for a long time, and be heirlooms whose antique look was important in an age where normal weapons would have looked different.) We have a lot of stuff here that Dr Fern thought was best paralleled from East Anglia, which is something that happens a lot because basically our biggest single source of early Anglo-Saxon art parallels is the assemblage from the Sutton Hoo ship burial, and that was so varied and so is this that parallels are to be expected, but there are a lot; on the other hand some of the material, especially the older-looking stuff and the silver, is more Scandinavian and at the other end of the period range Dr Fern suggested that some of the material, which is best paralleled from the Scottish site of Mote of Mark, might indicate British workmanship under Northumbrian influence and by that point, really, anything is possible except that there will be an easy explanation. So there is still a lot to do, but in some ways it seems that the range of things we can actually hope to resolve is closing down, and the parts of the Hoard that are destined to remain enigmas are, paradoxically, becoming more clearly obscure as our knowledge of it increases.

---

Presumably a full publication of the Hoard is now relatively close but until that time, apart from the project website from which I have linked almost all my pictures in this post, the basic starting point is Kevin Leahy & Roger Bland, The Staffordshire Hoard (London 2009), which was quite limited in what it could then say. For the other two sites I’ve mentioned there’s a wealth of material on the Sutton Hoo ship burial but the easiest way in is perhaps now Gareth Williams, Treasures from Sutton Hoo (London 2011), in the same series. Then lastly there’s Lloyd Laing & David Longley, The Mote of Mark: a Dark Age hillfort in South-West Scotland (Oxford 2006).

Quick! To the palace!

Sometimes I have big learned-looking points I want to make on this blog, and then at other times I just want to jump and down and tell you about something fascinating I’ve found. This is one of those latter times, a document I encountered in the Catalunya Carolíngia most of whose details I never seem to have noticed before, even though it’s very unusual. It also supports the point I’ve felt towards before about the different ways of running the county of Barcelona that Count-Marquis Ramon Borrell thereof (992-1018) was already developing as he picked up bits of its rule during the lifetime of his father Borrell II (945-993), but mainly it’s one of those cases where the regular form of the documents is stretched to fit something quite unusual and one is left wondering what on earth they were trying to accomplish and how odd it was or wasn’t.

Espona de Saderra, probably not involved in today’s documentary excitement but as close as I can get copyright-free

We are in the year 996 here and the protagonist is one Gombau. He had come to a deal with a priest called Donadéu and was selling him some stuff.¹ The transaction related to an estate in the Vall de Saderra, but the first complication is the nature of what they were actually transacting over, which is best set out in their own terms:

“By this scripture of my sale I sell to you in your and your heirs’ alod, that was your grandfather’s Asner’s and your father’s Galí’s, my selfsame census such as I have there that my lord Ramon, Count and Marquis, sold me, such census as you and your heirs were accustomed to answer for thence and it came to me by my purchase from my above-written lord…”

Census, in the terms of this period, is really any kind of rent or levy taken by a lord from the owner of a property over which he or she is lord, but here I think we are dealing with something that we could respectably call tax, a revenue belonging to the public official personified by the count, and it was for sale. Now, this is not quite new, you may be thinking if you really follow along here: didn’t we, after all, have a few complicated arrangements with two-way sales that effectively bestowed the tax revenue on the landholder? And yes, we did, but there are two differences here: firstly, here they were just straight out selling the revenue (for a ‘best charger’) and secondly the count had previously disposed of it, in a document we don’t have, to someone other than the landholders, which is how come Gombau had it to sell it on to them. The last time I looked at this I observed that, circa 990 at least, the counts of Barcelona could not or would not simply sell tax revenue, but had to come up with elaborate ways round it; a mere six years later we see that there was no longer such a problem with it, which means that it was probably very new.

So all of that is interesting to me, and teeters dangerously close to what we could carelessly call ‘feudalism’.² But digging deeper we discover that actually it is even more like feudalism, because having sorted out the price Gombau made further specifications and they look very much like someone borrowing ideas:

On this account I thus hand into your power the aforesaid census for your own so that from this same day in future neither you nor any of your successors shall answer any more for any census thence to any count, nor to any vicar, nor to any man, unless your heirs so much to you. And let this above-written alod thus be free without any impediment and without any disturbance, but so much on account of the great attentiveness which I shall make to you and of the benevolence and honour and governance of the above-written alod I shall thus have patrocinium over you, I and one son of mine without any ill intent.

This is a very funny definition of ‘freedom’ that’s developing here, isn’t it? The priest Donadéu was already holding an alod, but while this has been understood as land free of lordship the difference between it not being free of lordship and a private person taking the tax revenue might be hard to spot.³ It was enough to be worth a good warhorse, apparently, but the ongoing cost was that Gombau, giving up that direct and quantifiable form of dominance, picked up a much vaguer but more subjecting one, the old Roman idea of patrocinium, a word I’ve seen in no other Catalan charter. Later documents like this, in so far as there are any like this, would just use the word dominatio, but we can see that they were here feeling out something for which they didn’t have words, because the bits that I’ve put into bold here are all coming from outside the sale formulae: the first bit is riffing off Carolingian royal immunities, by which public officials were excluded from a given territory, and the final clause is coming out of the vernacular, or at least would in later documents such as those we’ve seen here before be reflected in the vernacular, “sin engany” for what is here in Latin, “sine malo ingenio”.⁴ They didn’t have the formulae ready for what they were doing here, which is essentially a very early homage arrangement.

Time therefore for the obligatory picture of an act of homage from the Liber Feudorum Maior, which for all that it was a twelfth-century compilation does contain documents from this far back. From Wikimedia Commons.

So what was going on here is at some level a delegation or even a privatisation of public authority, but at another level this is immensely personal. The last time I looked at these concessions, when they were still fiddly, I suggested that the claim to census might itself be fairly new, irregularly enforced and brought out mainly, as I then put it, as kind of “a protection racket, in which the counts picked somebody whose tax liability they were willing to enforce in order to bind them closer into the structure of personal obligations created by these kinds of deals.” By the 1050s, as we’ve seen, those kind of personal obligations were most of how power was being constructed in these areas, in a hierarchy much like the supposed feudal pyramid except far less tidy.⁵ Here, in 996, we see it already happening, but within the old structures of power that gave the scribe the words he used, words whose use suggests this was new.

What made this worth wording carefully, however, was presumably a lurking sense that in some way this was public revenue. I say this not just because of the repeated invocation of the count, but because of the detail that was actually the first one I noticed when I read this document during my Ph. D. (and clearly subsequently forgot), which is the signature clause by the scribe: he explains himself as he, “who wrote this sale in the See of Vic, and it was confirmed in Barcelona, in the selfsame palace of Count Ramon, in the street, by the order of the above-written Gombau”.

The erstwhile comital palace of Barcelona, fourteenth-century as it stands but with one or two tenth- and eleventh-century bits in it… It’s in that courtyard, even though it wasn’t then there, that I imagine this scenario happening. “Plaça del Rei 2074102277” by Carquinyol from Badalona, Catalunya, upload by Herrick – Barcelona – Plaça del Rei. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

When I first saw this I was mainly interested in the palace, because it was then the earliest mention of it of which I knew (though as you have seen here there is one text that makes it clear that Borrell also had a palace, presumably the same one). But it’s weirder than just that, isn’t it? Gombau didn’t get this deal confirmed in the palace, but outside it, in the street, “in platea”. Neither did the count witness it, though a judge did and he only one of seven clerics who make up the witness list, including Gombau’s brother. Again, there is for me the sense here that there wasn’t a procedure for this, that this was not a common or perhaps entirely legitimate operation, and it needed a kind of public sanction that brought it to the centre of comital government, rather than the solemnity of Vic cathedral, but then didn’t actually involve that governor but a raft of clerics instead.

There are plenty of questions that arise: did all these sales of tax revenue involve the kind of recognition of patronage that Gombau here got made explicit, but which a count might not need to have because of already having it? Is the reason this arrangement was so undefined and fudged from bits precisely that everyone was clear that this was in some sense acting like the count, and therefore conscious that public power had a particular sphere still that private persons shouldn’t really have? Or is it instead more important that the count himself had disposed of these rights to Gombau in the first place (and that Borrell, evidently, had not)? Without being able to work out more of what was actually happening here (and why Vic cathedral wound up with the charter) I can’t answer these questions, but I ask them feverishly anyway, believe me I do.

---

1. The document survives in the original and is printed in Eduard Junyent i Subirà; (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Vic (segles IX-X), ed. Ramon Ordeig i Mata (Vic 1980-1996), 5 fascs, doc. no. 594, where I first met it without apparently reading it properly, and in Ordeig (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia IV: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica 53 (Barcelona 1999), 3 vols, doc. no. 1712, where I apparently still had to read it three times before noticcing all of the things mentioned here. Given that and the weight I place on words here it seems worth giving a text myself:

“In Dei nomine. Ego Gondebaldus vinditor sum tibi Donadeo presbitero, emptore. Per hanc scriptura vindicionis mee vindo tibi in ipsum tuum alode et de eredes, qui fuit de Asenario avio tuo et de Galindone patre tuo, ipsum meum censum qualem ibidem abeo que mihi vendidit senior meus Raimundus comes et marchio, talem censum qual tu et eres tui exinde solvere solebas et advenit mihi per mea empcione de suprascripto seniori meo, et est hec omnia in comitatu Ossona, in kastrum Torilione, in valle Sedero vel in eius termines. Qui afrontat hec omnia: de orientis in ipsa Guardia, et de meridie in ipso pugo ultra flumine Tecer que dicunt Cergoso, et de occiduo in ipso grado de Seder, et de circii in ipsa gugularia de Boscatello. Quantum in istas afrontaciones includunt sic vindo tibi suprascriptum censum ab integrum, qualem senior meus suprascriptus comes ibi abuit et mihi vendidit, totum vindo tibi ab integre propter tuum kavallum obtimum, quod tu mihi donasti in precio et mihi placuit et manibus meis recepii, et est manifestum. Propetera sic trado in tua potestate suprascriptum censum ad tuum proprium ut de isto die in antea neque tu neque ullus de succesoribus tuis iam amplius exinde nullum censum persolvatis ad nullum comitem, neque ad ullum vicarium, neque ad ullum ominem, nisi tantum eredes tuis ad te. Et sic fiat liber suprascriptus alodes sine ullo inpedimento et sine ulla inquietudine, set tantum propter magnam diligenciam quod ego faciam ad te et bonitatem et onorem et gubernacionem de suprascripto alode sic abeam super te patrocinium ego et unus filius meus sine malo ingenio. Quod si ego Gondebaldus qui recepit de te Donadeo presbitero suprascripto precio aut filius meus qui de te aut successores tuos de suprascripto censo aliquid inquietaverit, non hoc vale vindicare set componat tibi omnem suprascriptum alode in duplo cum sua melioracione, et in antea ista scriptura vindicione firma permaneat modo vel omnique tempore.
“Facta ista scriptura vindicione XVIII kalendas februarii, anno VIII regnante Ugo rege.
“Sig+num Gondebaldo, qui ista vindicione fecit et firmavi et firmare rogavi. Dacho sacer et iudex sub SSS. S+ Sentelle presbiter. S+ Holiba levita SSS. S+ Agigane sacer. Erigane sacer de Terraca. Sentelle presbiter de Barchonina. Oliba levita, frater Gondebaldo.
“Francus sacer, qui ista vindicione scripsit in sede Vico et fuit firma in Barchinona, in ipso palacio de Raimundo comite, in platea, per iussione de suprascripto Gondebaldo, et sub SSS. die et anno quod supra.”

The bold bits are autograph signatures.

2. At this point I cite Susan Renyolds, Fiefs and Vassals: the medieval evidence reinterpreted (Oxford 1994), and duly note that what we have here includes neither a fief nor a vassal and that probably I should find a better word, if only anyone would recognise by it what I meant any more readily.

3. See Gaspar Feliu, “La pagesia catalana abans de la feudalització” in Anuario de Estudios Medievales Vol. 26 (Barcelona 1994), pp. 19-41, for a powerful argument that alodial property was never free in the way that historians of the period have often imagined.

4. On these documents see of course Adam J. Kosto, Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: power, order and the written word, 1000-1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 4th Series 51 (Cambridge 2001).

5. Ibid. but also Pierre Bonnassie, “Les conventions féodales dans la Catalogne du XIe siècle” in Annales du Midi Vol. 80 (Toulouse 1968), pp. 529-550, repr. in Structures sociales de l’Aquitaine, du Languedoc et de l’Espagne au premier âge f&eacuute;odal : Colloque International de Toulouse, Mars 1968 (Paris 1969), pp. 187-219, transl. Jean Birrell as “Feudal Conventions in Eleventh-Century Catalonia” in Bonnassie, From Slavery to Feudalism in South-Western Europe, transl. J. Birrell (Cambridge 1991), pp. 170-194, for the case before, and Michel Zimmermann, “Aux origines de Catalogne féodale : les serments non datés du règne de Ramon Berenguer Ier” in Jaume Portella i Comas (ed.), La Formació i expansió del feudalisme català : actes del col·loqui organitzat pel Col·legi Universitari de Girona (8-11 de gener de 1985). Homenatge a Santiago Sobrequés i Vidal, Estudi General 5-6 (Girona 1986), pp. 109-151, with English summary p. 557, French online here, for important nuance.

Seminar CCIII: working on and out the North Italian landscape

It’s seminar report time again, and this time it was back down to London for the Earlier Middle Ages Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research where, on 7th May 2014, Professor Ross Balzaretti was presenting with the title, “Early Medieval Charters and Landscapes: Genoa and Milan compared“. This is of course meat and drink to me as if there’s anywhere that has nearly as many charters left from the early Middle Ages as does Catalonia it’s Italy and the Mediterranean climate and mountainous landscapes the areas share made a lot of what Ross was saying seem comfortingly familiar.¹ Insofar as Ross was out to make converts, therefore, he was not preaching to me, but I can at least join in with the hymns.

A Ligurian landscape of the sort that Ross has written about, this one being terraces at at Corniglia, man-made and nature overlaid and intercutting

The basic contention of the paper was that we can use charters as sources for landscape use and economic activity in a north Italian context, which is just as well as we don’t have a lot else left with which to do it given how intensely those landscapes have mostly been worked since the Middle Ages.² The argument against such use of charter evidence has usually been that the documents are so formulaic that their detail can’t be trusted, to which the counter is that they vary a very great deal, and Ross was able by his comparison to show that the formulae, if that’s what they are, vary so much between Milan and Genoa that even if they’re formulae they must reflect considerable local differences in what formulae apply, so that in fact the level of choice would have to be such that it’s simpler to assume that what is making the variation is the actual landscapes concerned.³

Olive-groves at Castello Rosso, near Genoa

As to that variation, it is quite marked. Genoese charters make much more of trees and Milanese ones more of fields for cereals. Both were producing in a specialised fashion, implying a market presumably dominated by the big towns whose hinterlands we were hearing about, but in Genoa the specialist product was olive oil and Milan it was much less focused (though that may be not least that at this point Milan was rather bigger). But the specialisation was also partly geographic: there are more mentions of terracing around Genoa not just because the charter scribess round there liked that formula but because the land requires it, being much more sloped than around Milan. Around Genoa the work to make the land yield food is very evident in terms of work contracted or expected and boundaries revealing it already done. Milan looks more domestic, as if less co-dependence was necessary to make a living here. And so on.

There is now an agricultural park outside Milan, apparently, which lets me show you the other kind of landscape in play here as well

All of this rang very familiar with me because of the similar, if lesser, variations I’d been seeing between the lands owned by San Salvatore di Brescia in the Santa Giulia polyptych, so much discussed a little while ago. Here as there, of course, another way to see the variation is as between people, making different decisions about how to make their living, and charters do have that advantage that the polyptych does not, that you can usually put names to these individuals. But that doesn’t mean at all that I thought Ross’s focus on the landscape was misplaced; the countryside these people worked was the silent partner in all their actions, and the charters let you get at something of that too.

Settling the sins of your father: when counts lost in court

Work pressure continues to damage my great resolve to reduce backlog here, but here is a thought I first had in June of this year when dealing with Josep María Salrach’s Justícia i poder (it was a very fruitful read for me), that perhaps addresses that question of why we sometimes see the counts of Barcelona of the tenth century lose court cases in documents that they then preserved, which we lately debated, and which has just come up again in the work I am just about managing to do.¹

Cover of Josep María Salrach’s Justícia i poder en Catalunya abans de l’any mil (Vic 2013)

You see, of late I have trying to get a decent detailed chronology of the reign of Count-Marquis Borrell II of Barcelona, Girona, Osona and Urgell (945/947-993) worked out. This is something you would think I had but apparently not quite enough; some interesting things are occurring to me just by realising that, oh, those two things happen sequentially, and so forth. But it has also reminded me of the details of two things that happened when he died: firstly, a number of people made bequests or donations for his soul, usually of lands or properties that they had originally got from him.² Then, after a while, we start to hear about the opposite, people who lost land or property to him. The first of these is Bishop Sal·la of Urgell, in a curious case I discussed here long long ago, but after a few years more follow, indicating that Borrell was not always scrupulous about how he obtained property that he felt he needed. There are six of these cases all told, where despite land having been given somewhere it wound up back in the count’s hands.³ In three of these cases people had gone to law against Borrell for the properties and their right been admitted but somehow the counts never quite handed it back. Once Borrell was dead, these things could be pursued, although one of these cases comes up in 1021, so it took a long while all to work out.⁴ I feel this nuances Salrach’s point about the counts needing to lose some cases to make it clear to people that that could happen; losing might not cost them very much given that they were their own enforcement…

The ruins of the castle after which Castellfollit del Boix, location of the property Borrell had grabbed back, is named. By Elmoianes (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0-es], via Wikimedia Commons.

What interests me is the way that Borrell’s heirs handled these cases, however. This is quite different between his two sons, Ramon who succeeded him in Barcelona, Girona and Osona and Ermengol who did so in Urgell. Ramon Borrell is another of Salrach’s rulers who didn’t mind correcting himself, as we’ve seen, but he was also very happy to correct his father: we’ve seen before the case where Sant Benet de Bages took Ajó, widow of the judge Guifré, Vicar of la Néspola, to court for land that had been given to Sant Benet at its endowment (Sant Benet being a foundation of Ajó’s daddy, which also complicates things). Borrell had grabbed the land back and bestowed it upon Guifré by charter, and though Ajó had that charter Ramon Borrell’s court decided that Sant Benet’s title was better and awarded the land to the monastery.⁵ Last time I discussed this it was because that didn’t work, and a second hearing let her have it for life under rent to the monastery, but that hearing did not take place before a count.⁶ Ramon was happy to admit that his father had done wrong. Ermengol was also happy to do this but for a different reason: the two cases of this in his charters both involve fairly substantial payments by the unlucky defendant for their rights: in 1007, for example, Ermengol’s fidelis Sunyer gave him five denarii and a horse so that Ermengol would remit to him an alod in Solsona for part of which Sunyer had already taken Borrell to court and won, for all the good it apparently did him.⁷ Ermengol, who is also the best-documented recipient of a payment for simony I know, seems mainly to have offered justice at a price. Two years later, indeed, Ermengol made his will and there gave back to Santa Maria d’Urgell the villa of Tuixén which Borrell had bequeathed to the cathedral in his will, so the two brothers obviously learnt different things from their father’s examples…⁸

The selfsame villa of Tuixént, as it is now spelt. By Jordi Picart (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons

What all this makes me think of is the efforts that Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious, the second Holy Roman Emperor, made to demonstrate that his succession in 814 meant a change of régime: most of Charlemagbne’s courtiers were chased out, all Louis’s sisters put into nunneries and some of his male relatives tonsured too, and (we are told, though it was obviously not wholly true) all of Charlemagne’s charters called in and replaced. There was also a set of judicial enquiries set in train to clear up hanging cases like those we just looked at where justice had not in fact been done.⁹ One of the Catalan counts in fact did the charter replacement too, or so we are told, and again the survival makes this look unlikely but the fact that it was said is impressive.¹⁰ I guess that there was some important political capital to be made when a long-lived ruler died in reaching out to the people who had become his enemies and whom he had excluded from access to central power; by calling Daddy’s decisions into question you could tell those people that the situation was up for renegotiation and hope to bring them on board without necessarily having to go quite as far as did Louis in getting rid of the old guard.

Mind you, there were worse places to wind up than where two of Louis’s cousins did, the abbey of Corbie, here delightfully represented by a maquette of the modern church as in 1810 inside the modern church as of this century. By Paulparis2010 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons

This model is quite easy to find once you start looking, and I suspect it explains quite a few of Salrach’s cases where the counts let themselves be seen to lose; it was not they who lost, but the grip of their father. And if you think back to the Vallformosa case we discussed a few posts ago and have such trouble explaining, you’ll notice that the same thing is going on there: Borrell was pursuing rights that his father had claimed, exactly thirty years after his father had died when it cannot, legally, have had a chance of working out because of the legal limit on unpursued claims in the local law. Was the point to show that his father’s claims were not always just? I think, in this case, probably not, because Borrell had been willing to outright say as much when it must have counted a good deal more, just after his succession; but the tools he was using could be put to that purpose, and his sons were good learners.¹¹ There is stuff I still have to work out here but I do think that dealing with succession to the successful, and perhaps still more to the unsuccessful (which is arguably more how Borrell was seen, after the sack of Barcelona in 985¹²) is part of what was going on with these cases of comital defeat.

---

1. J. M. Salrach, Justícia i poder en Catalunya abans de l’any mil, Referències 55 (Vic 2013), pp. 109-118.

2. For example, Argemir and Major giving land they had from him at Castelltallat to Sant Benet de Bages in 995 (Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia IV: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica LIII (Barcelona 1999), 3 vols, doc. no. 1705, or no less than Count Bernat Tallaferro of Besalú and his wife Tota giving with the church of Santa Maria de Merlès, built on land he got from Borrell, to Santa Maria de Ripoll in 997 (Petrus de Marca, Marca Hispanica sive Limes Hispanicus, hoc est geographica & historica descriptio cataloniae, ruscinonis, & circumiacentium populorum, ed. Étienne Baluze (Paris 1688; repr. Barcelona 1972, 1989), ap. CXLV.

3. In order, Cebrià Baraut (ed.), “Els documents, dels anys 981-1010, de l’Arxiu Capitular de la Seu d’Urgell” in Urgellia: anuari d’estudis hist&orave;rics dels antics comtats de Cerdanya, Urgell i Pallars, d’Andorra i la Vall d’Aran Vol. 3 (Montserrat 1980), pp. 7-166, doc. no. 239; Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. nos 1840 & 1864; Baraut, “Documents, dels anys 981-1010”, doc. no. 286; Baraut (ed.), “Diplomatari del monestir de Sant Sadurní de Tavèrnoles (segles IX-XIII)” in Urgellia Vol. 12 (1995), pp. 7-414, doc. no. 35; José Rius Serra (ed.), Cartulario de «Sant Cugat» del Vallés Vol. II (Barcelona 1946), doc. no. 454; Gaspar Feliu & Salrach (edd.), Els Pergamins de l’Arxiu Comtal de Barcelona de Ramon Borrell a Ramon Berenguer I, Diplomataris 18-20 (Barcelona 1999), 3 vols, doc. no. 154.

4. The law cases are Baraut, “Tavèrnoles”, no. 35, Rius, Sant Cugat doc. no. 454 and Feliu & Salrach, Pergamins, doc. no. 154, the last being the 1021 one.

5. Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. no. 1840.

6. Ibid. doc. no. 1864.

7. Baraut, “Tavèrnoles”, doc. no. 35.

8. Baraut, “Documents”, doc. no. 300. Even then, Ermengol I still forgot to actually get the bequest carried out and Bishop Ermengol (no relation) had to take Ermengol I’s son Ermengol II (obviously more related) to court for it in Baraut (ed.), “Els documents, dels anys 1010-1035, de l’Arxiu Capitular de la Seu d’Urgell” in Urgellia Vol. 4 (Montserrat 1981), pp. 7-186, doc. no. 528. Nor was that the first time the comital family had grabbed back Tuixén just after it had been given away; I’m not quite sure why they kept letting it go…

9. Recorded in Thegan, Gesta Hludowici imperatoris, ed. E. Tremp in idem (ed.), Thegan, Die Taten Kaiser Ludwigs (Gesta Hludowici imperatoris). Astronomus, Das Leben Kaiser Ludwigs (Vita Hludowici imperatoris), Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Scriptores rerum germanicum in usum scholarum separatim editi) LXIV (Hannover 1995), online here, last modified 8 November 2004 as of 30 May 2008, pp. 167-277 with commentary pp. 1-52, cap. X.

10. Santiago Sobrequés i Vidal, S. Riera i Viader & Manuel Rovira i Solà (edd.), Catalunya Carolíngia V: els comtats de Girona, Besalú, Empúries i Peralada, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica LXI (Barcelona 2005), ed. Ramon Ordeig i Mata, 2 vols, doc. no. 288.

11. That more extreme case is the appointment of a replacement for his father Sunyer’s nominee as abbess of Sant Joan de Ripoll, recounted in Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. no. 645.

12. Gaspar Feliu, La Presa de Barcelona per Almansor: història i mitificació. Discurs de recepció de Gaspar Feliu i Montfort com a membre numerari de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica, llegit el dia 12 de desembre de 2007 (Barcelona 2007), online here, last modified 15 September 2008 as of 3 November 2008.