Some very early Europeans

I promised you Mozarabic philology this post, and you can decide for yourselves whether this qualifies. It is probably a fairly small set of people who are familiar with the text known variously as the Mozarabic Chronicle or the Chronicle of 754. If you aren’t, it is a Latin chronicle written probably in Córdoba and probably in 754, that is 43 years after Islamic armies arrived in the Iberian Peninsula and began taking most of it over, and 30 years or so since they had settled their government on that same city. It is our earliest detailed, and arguably (Roger Collins has argued it is) our most trustworthy narrative of those processes and the events in the Visigothic Kingdom which enabled them, and it’s pretty interesting.¹ I would have said I was one of the people who were familiar with it, at least in the English translation by Kenneth Baxter Wolf, because I set it for my Special Subject at Leeds every year that runs so I’ve read it quite a few times by now.²

You see, I own my own copy and everything

And yet, the third time that Special Subject ran, in late 2020, I found this, which I would swear I never saw before, in the account of the victory of the Frankish warleader Charles Martel over the Andalusī raiding army of the governor of Córdoba, `Abd al-Raḥmān ibn ‘Abd Allāh al-Ghafīqī, at the well-known and oft-misrepresented Battle of Tours:³

“While Abd ar-Rahman was pursuing Eudes [the Duke of Aquitaine], he decided to despoil Tours by destroying its palaces and burning its churches. There he confronted the consul of Austrasia by thee name of Charles, a man who, having proved himself to be a warrior from his youth and an expert in things military, had been summoned by Eudes. After each side had tormented the other with raids for almost seven days, they finally prepared their battle lines and fought fiercely. The northern peoples remained as immobile as a wall, holding together like a glacier in the cold regions. In the blink of an eye, they annihilated the Arabs with the sword. The people of Austrasia, greater in number of soldiers and formidably armed, killed the king, Abd ar-Rahman, when they found him, striking him on the chest. But suddenly, within sight of the countless tents of the Arabs, the Franks despicably sheathed their swords, postponing the fight until the next day since night had fallen during the battle. Rising from their own camp at dawn, the Europeans saw the tents and canopies of the Arabs all arranged just as they had appeared the day before. Not knowing that they were empty and thinking that inside them there were Saracen forces ready for battle, they sent officers to reconnoitre and discovered that all of the Ishmaelite troops had left… Worried that the Saracens might attenpt to ambush them, the Europeans were slow to react and thus they searched in vain all around. Deciding against pursuing the Saracens, they took the spoils—which they divided fairly among themselves—back to their own country and were overjoyed.

So the Franks are doughty and even honourable warriors but our chronicler does wish they’d been a bit quicker on the uptake and wiped out the rest of the Muslim army too, it would seem. But it’s what the chronicler calls them that interests me.⁴ The chapter opens with `Abd al-Raḥmān invading the lands of the Franks, and Frankish territory is where he meets and defeats Eudes. But Charles Martel and his men are Austrasians, not Franks, at least until they’re suddenly “Europeans”. So where did that come from?

Well, the first question here has to be, what does the actual Latin say? This is Wolf’s translation, not what our chronicler wrote, so we need to get as close to that as possible before we start deducing things from his word choice. And Wolf doesn’t make that easy, since he doesn’t tell you what text he translated from, but thankfully there’s a really thorough study of the transmission of the text by Cardelle de Hartmann so that no-one ever needed to ask questions like this again.⁵ And what that tells me is that while I should be using the edition in the Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum, not so easy in small-town small-hours West Yorkshire, I can get away with the one in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, so let’s go.⁶ Our keywords for this chapter are Frank, Austrasian, northern and European, and according to Theodor Mommsen these are the Latin equivalents actually used in the text:

English by Wolf	Latin by Mommsen	Commentary
“lands of the Franks”	terra Francorum	No surprises there…
“Frankish territory”	not actually present, just Wolf making the English flow better by using a term twice the Latin only has once	Fine. It’s not easy to translate.
“consul of Austrasia”	consulem Franciae interioris Austrie	Y’see, I’d give that as “of inner Francia or Austrasia” myself; but maybe there was a word limit.
“northern peoples”	gentes septentrionales	Well OK, no complaints there!
“Austrasians”	gens austrio	Again, no argument here.
“Europeans”	Europenses, both times	Well, there’s a thing.

Now, I do not claim great expertise in the development of a language of Europe and it may be that this is well known. But from the quick looks at admittedly old stuff I’ve just carried out, it seems that there has been much more interest in the idea of Europe, usually as a geographical space into which the Franks liked to imagine their dominion was bound to expand, than in the identity of “European”.⁷ Lacking secondary work that answered this question, I decided just to throw the term ‘Europenses’ at the Digital MGH, and that gives only three results, one of which is these ones, one of which is an index in a later volume picking that up, and the third of which is a footnote to a different account of the Battle of Tours calling account to this one. I did try ‘Europeani’ as well, and that gets zero hits. So by that rapid measure, the author of the Chronicle of 754 is the only person ever to use the noun ‘European’ in medieval Latin, at least from the places where Germanic languages have been spoke (i. e. basically everywhere but France or the British Isles). It’s probably not entirely true; but it’s at least close to true. So that’s a thing just by itself.

Given that possible importance, it seems worth trying to figure out what he wants it to mean, since it really can’t have meant what we mean by it. What we would expect it to be is an opposite to “Arabs”, and I’m sure it is, but it’s not a straightforward one, because the text has these others in play as well. I think the simplest way to read this need for this odd term is that whatever account of the battle our chronicler had – which, I think you will probably agree, doesn’t make a lot of sense as a tactical account, given that defeat seems to happen and not happen several times over, and therefore may have been badly edited into this text – had a bit in where it said that the defeated Eudes, with the Franks, and Charles Martel, with the Austrasians, combined forces, and for some reason, maybe just because the word franci was already in play, the chronicler then couldn’t deploy it unambiguously. So instead we get this word implying people from a bigger space than either portion of Francia and therefore including both. I think that would have been understood, and it doesn’t have to mean a political idea of “Europe” or anything; it’s just a space with Franks of various kinds in it. I’m less clear whether our chronicler thinks they themself are in this space, given that it’s a term you apply to “northern peoples” and there isn’t so very much of Europe south of Córdoba. But two other questions remain unanswered too: one, have I understood this right? and two, if I have, surely someone else must have noticed this too. Right?

---

1. For Roger Collins’s views, and a decent introduction to this text, see Roger Collins, The Arab Conquest of Spain 710–797 (Oxford 1989), pp. 23-32.

2. “The Chronicle of 754”, transl. Kenneth Baxter Wolf, in Wolf (ed.), Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain, Translated Texts for Historians 9, 2nd edn (Liverpool 2011), pp. 111–160.

3. Ibid., cap. 80 (pp. 145-146).

4. The first go at this post referred to the chronicler as ‘he’ throughout, and because of realising that I’d done the thing that is lamented in Janet L. Nelson, “Gender and Genre in Women Historians of the Early Middle Ages” in Jean-Philippe Genet (ed.), L’historiographie en Europe (Paris 1991), pp. 149–163, and assumed an anonymous author must be a bloke, I then went through and hopefully fixed that. We don’t know, and there were literate women too.

5. Carmen Cardelle De Hartmann, “The textual transmission of the Mozarabic Chronicle of 754” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 8 (Oxford 1999), pp. 13–29, DOI: 10.1111/1468-0254.00037.

6. So, not Juan Gil (ed.), Corpus scriptorum Mvzarabicorum (Madrid 1973), 2 vols, vol. I pp. 15-54, but Theodor Mommsen (ed.), Chronica Minora saec. IV. V. VI. VII 2, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Auctores Antiquissimi) 11 (Berlin 1894), pp. 323-369, and specifically pp. 362-363.

7. I started by looking in D. A. Bullough, “Europae Pater: Charlemagne and his achievement in the light of recent scholarship” in English Historical Review Vol. 85 (Oxford 1970), pp. 59–105, DOI: 10.1093/ehr/LXXXV.334.59, and then remembered why in general one shouldn’t; Karl Leyser, “Concepts of Europe in the Early and High Middle Ages” in Leyser, Communications and Power in medieval Europe: the Carolingian and Ottonian centuries, ed. Timothy Reuter (London 1994), pp. 1–18, is much more use. There’s also Amancio Isla Frez, “Los orígenes de la idea de Europa y Carlomagno” in Ángel Vaca Lorenzo (ed.), Europa: proyecciones y percepciones históricas, Acta Salmanticensia, Estudios históricos y geográficos 101 (Salamanca 1997), pp. 17–30, on Academia.edu here, who doesn’t catch this but might show that the idea of Europe as political unit did have legs in the Carolingian era. I feel as if there must be newer and more obvious things on this theme. Any recommendations?

Pictish Pandemic Roadtrip, Part III

This gallery contains 19 photos.

I thought I might be boring people with the pictures of random Scottish stones, but they couldn’t have sunk with as little trace as the intermediate post, so, let’s get back to Scotland in August 2020. On day 3, waking … Continue reading →

From the Sources XVII: more Pavians destroying important people’s houses

Rather than just drown you in pictures of symbol stones for the next few weeks, it seems wise to intersperse some other material, so let’s jump forward a bit to the month after I was back from that trip when I was reading something really old and Italian for details of early medieval military service.¹ It wasn’t much use but one of his sources, a charter of King Berengar I of Italy to Bishop Adalbert of Bergamo, reminded me of something. You would have to go back a long way on this blog to remember me writing about the destruction of the royal palace in Pavia in the period of Conrad I of Germany’s reign before he could get down to claim Italy as well; that is a thing that happened in 1037, and it caused Conrad more or less to invent the theory of the king’s two bodies.² However, turns out it wasn’t a completely new thing for Pavians to do. Check this out:³

“In the name of the Lord God Eternal, King Berengar. We wish it to be known to all the faithful of God’s Holy Church that the venerable Adalbert, chief-priest of the holy see of Bergamo, has proclaimed to our care that his Church had manses and a solar in the city of Pavia in the place which is called Farmanya, and that when an attack of the Hungarians was imminent, in order to fortify the selfsame city, firstly the houses were destroyed by the citizens and then the wall of the city was built upon his Church’s land and his own, just as it is now seen to be built, and therefore he was describing himself as being without an episcopal house in the aforesaid city.

Wikimedia Commons tells me that this is actually a part of the Roman, and then early medieval, city wall of Pavia, which was later incorporated into the monastery of Santa Agata; but since it has Roman fabric, I guess it can’t be the bit that they built in this charter. Still, it’s a wall that was there at the time, that’s good enough, right? Image by FabioRomanoni – opera propria, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

“And since we found this to be so, desiring to console all the oppressed and especially the churches and priests of Christ, we decided it worthwhile that in the same place which is called Farmanya upon the wall of the selfsame city both he and his successors should have licence from us and power to construct a building and a road there which is laid from west to east, so that it is close enough to the aforesaid wall, but not next to it, as far as the postern, and on the southern side the boundary should be set between his land and the land of Saints Peter and Thecla, since we have directed that to the provision of Bishop John of Pavia. Let moreover the wall on which which we have conceded the right of building his and his church’s property extend for twelve legitimate perches.

“If therefore anyone should attempt to infringe or violate this our authority and concession of a precept, let him know that he must compound for it with fifty pounds of gold, half to our chamber and half to the aforesaid bishop Adalbert and his successors.

“So that it may be more truly believed and diligently observed, confirming it with our own hand we have ordered it to be signed with our seal below.
*** Sign of the lord [seal] Berengar the most serene king. ***
*** John the chancellor, in place of Ardingus, bishop and archchancellor, have recognised and subscribed. *** [Signum]

“Given on the Kalends of September, in the year of the Incarnation of Our Lord 915, in the 28th year, indeed, of the lord and most serene king Berengar, in the 4th Indiction. Done at the estate of Coriano. Happily in Christ’s name, Amen.”

As usual with these things, the text sort of stands by itself, but there’s still some things I’d like to pull out of it.

1. Firstly, it’s hard to call this kind of destruction mob violence; they built a wall over the destruction, so they must have been coordinated somehow. Either the bishop of Bergamo was complicit in the destruction of his own house, therefore, or whoever was in charge in Pavia was happy to evict him.
2. It’s not exactly clear when that destruction happened, either, and therefore how long Bishop Adalbert had had to stay with friends when he visited Pavia. Hungarians raided Italy in 899, defeating King Berengar, and in 904, when he paid them to fight for him instead. They didn’t come south of the Alps again till 920, but they got close in 911. I can’t tell from what I have to hand whether Pavia was really threatened at any of those times, but if we assume that you don’t go demolishing bishops’ houses without clear and present danger, then it seems likely that this situation had been hanging awaiting repair for at least 11 years, perhaps because it had taken Berengar that long to admit that anything that happened in 904-5 wasn’t completely splendid.⁴
3. We can also deduce something about Berengar’s régime from the fact that no-one was summoned or punished for this… At least, no mention is made of it, or specifically of anyone but the bishop paying for the work on his land which Berengar had taken so long to give.
4. On the other hand, enough was still functional about the royal capital, even in the lamented absence of a king, that the bishop of Bergamo, 90 km from Pavia, still needed a pad there, suggesting he frequently had to be present. That might be Church rather than royal government but it’s still a system with central attraction, not what one might expect from some histories of tenth-century Italy.⁵
5. Also, while there is no specific military obligation stated, neither is it excluded and you’d assume, probably, that someone holding property next to a city wall had some obligation to help man it. If so, this charter may have got the bishop somewhere for a new house; but it also made him or his retinue part of the defence of a city not his own.

The other thing that strikes me about this is the division of the section of the wall between two bishops, Adalbert and Archbishop John of Pavia. The place that immediately reminded me of was Saxon London, which when restored by Alfred the Great (or perhaps better, reassigned by him) involved neighbour bishops, not on the wall (though we don’t know it didn’t) but on the river, with Worcester and Canterbury being given neighbouring plots at Queenhithe to develop in 886.⁶ Of course, those concessions were meant to build up an economy, not a defensive system, though it could reasonably be supposed that those plots were subject to the famous trinodas necessitas (‘three-part duty’) of fortress, road and bridge maintenance, in so much as, as far as I remember, the grants don’t mention exemptions from it.⁷ But in any case, we’ve already seen in an earlier post that the cathedral clergy in Pavia were quite deeply concerned with trade as well, so it is very tempting to see the Queenhithe grants in London and this one in Pavia as two sides of the same coin struck by kings trying to re-establish beleaguered capitals. Of course, there are lots of differences in terms of threat, damage and authority contexts, and it could equally be that Alfred and Berengar adopted divergent policies for their troubled cities. But at least one can imagine both cards in a late-ninth or early-tenth-century king’s hand.

You’d have to say it worked at Queenhithe, on present evidence, though it might be quite a while since the dock was used for anything much. Image by Pymouss – own work, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Now, the scholar who put this all before me didn’t care about any of this; he was interested in the place-name Farmanya, which he was considering as part of a search for an obscure category of soldiers among the Lombards, a couple of centuries before, called faramanni. He decided that that wasn’t what lay behind the place-name here, which he had rather have read as deriving from Foro Magno, the ‘great forum’.⁸ But he gave the document in full in his appendix anyway, and I’d not have read it any time soon otherwise, so I have to thank him for that; it almost made the reading of his 152-page conference paper worthwhile… Almost. But hey, doing so got me a blog post, and so it got you that too. Here you are!

---

1. Ottorino Bertolini, "Ordinamenti militari e strutture sociali dei Longobardi in Italia" in Ordinamenti militari in Occidente nell’alto medioevo, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 15 (Spoleto 1968), 2 vols, vol. I, pp. 429–629, of which mass pp. 581–607 are a separate "Appendici dei testi" and pp. 609–629 are the discussion.

2. Hagen Keller, "Das Edictum de beneficiis Konrads II, und die Entwicklung des Lehnswesens in der ersten Hälfte des 11. Jahrhunderts" in Il Feudalesimo nell’alto Medioevo, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 47 (Spoleto 2000), 2 vols, vol. I, pp. 227–261; more distantly, I refer of course to Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, 2nd edn (Princeton NJ 1985), on JSTOR here.

3. Bertolini, “Ordinamenti militari”, Appendici dei testi, pp. 603-604, more deliberately printed in Luigi Schiaparelli (ed.), I diplomi di Berengario I, Fonti per la storia d’Italia, 35 (Roma 1903), doc. no. C (pp. 262-264).

4. Kornél Bakay, “Hungary” in Timothy Reuter (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History volume III: c. 900–c. 1024 (Cambridge 1999), pp. 536–552 at pp. 539 & 541-543.

5. Such as that old classic Ferdinand Gregorovius, History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages, transl. Annie Hamilton (London 1894-1902). We might now refer to Chris Wickham, Medieval Rome: stability and crisis of a city, 900-1150 (Oxford 2015) instead.

6. I am here running off Tony Dyson, "Two Saxon Landgrants for Queenhithe" in Joanna Bird, Hugh Chapman and John Clark (edd.), Collectanea Londiniensia: Studies in London archaeology and history presented to Ralph Merrifield, London and Middlesex Archaeological Society Special Papers 2 (London 1978), pp. 200–215, online here and Dyson, "King Alfred and the Restoration of London" in The London Journal Vol. 15 (London 1990), pp. 99–110; I should now cite Rory Naismith, Citadel of the Saxons: the Rise of Early London (London 2018) too but sorry, I haven’t yet had time to look it out.

7. I don’t actually have a reference to the primary source charters here, bothersomely, because I had to go back to my undergraduate dissertation for these data and apparently I only cited Dyson, as in n. 6 above; but damn, it’s not bad work for a 21-year-old despite that failing.

8. Bertolini, "Ordinamenti militari", pp. 511-512, then defended in discussion wth Guido Mor pp. 626-629.

Pictish Pandemic Roadtrip, Part II

This gallery contains 29 photos.

I explained two posts ago how it was that in August 2020 I was on the road in Scotland looking for Pictish stuff with a very indulgent medievalist partner; this post takes you through the third day on the road. … Continue reading →

Does ChatGPT think the Academy got hacked?

Today I am not at the International Medieval Congress, but as mentioned on what was supposed to be a holiday but is actually looking after ill cats. It’s OK. It also gives me time to put together a lighter-weight distraction blogpost in order to make up somewhat for the lack of blogging you have recently endured from me. So here we are. You may remember that part of the reason for that lack was that I got myself into a sunk costs problem over writing a long-distance review of a book called Hacking the Academy, which was a lot of work. Given how much work it was, it was tempting to find a way of outsourcing that work, and since we are in the middle of what might most gently be called a phase of adjustment to the academic implications of ChatGPT and large language model software, I couldn’t help wondering what the so-called AI would make of the task…

Advertisement banner image for GPT-4 from Matt G. Southern, OpenAI Releases GPT-4: Now Available In ChatGPT & Bing, Search Engine Journal, 14th March 2023, linked through

This was really my first brush with the beast in its lair, and I drew the line at signing up for an account. The career blackmail possibilities of their user data must be tremendous, and I saw no need to add to them, so all they have on me is an IP address. Well, and this post. But without an account all you can use is the online chatbot here, so I did. And these are the results.

Screenshot of interaction with the OpenAI ChatGPT chatbot, reading as follows:

AI: Hi? How can I help you?
You: What do you think of the 2013 book Hacking the Academy?
AI: As an AI assistant, I don’t have personal opinions, but I can tell you that "Hacking the Academy" is a collaborative volume that explores the potential of digital media to transform academic institutions. The book includes a collection of essays by scholars and educators who offer innovative ideas and strategies for using technology to improve research, teaching, and institutional practices. If you are interested in this topic, I can provide you with more details or recommend related materials.
You: Do people think that the 2013 book Hacking the Academy still has value?
AI: Yes, many people still find value in “Hacking the Academy” even though it was published in 2013. The book’s focus on the potential of digital media and technology to transform academic institutions is still relevant and important. Additionally, some of the essays in the book offer insights that have only become more relevant over time, such as the challenges of academic labor and the need for greater diversity and equality in higher education. Overall, “Hacking the Academy” remains a thought-provoking and valuable resource for anyone interested in the intersection of technology and academia.
You: Thankyou!
Error while calling OpenAI: rate limit reached for default-gpt-3.5-turbo in organization org2MYfTx8Pgtl3C8H3nS3EjVU2 on tokens per min. Limit: 90000 / min. Current: 89789 / min. Contact us through our help center at help.openai.com if you continue to have issues.

I have far fewer issues than I expected, in fact, though it is ironic that what looks to be an unconnected system error arose at the point of purely social exchange. The repetition is noticeable between the two answers but so might it have been in a human’s answer. This also isn’t really a full test of the thing’s possibilities, I do realise; the second answer is really the outline of a fuller review which would, in the hands of clever users, have expanded on the second and third sentences until you had full paragraphs for each point written by the robot. 1,000 words would have been pretty easy to get like this. But there’s also nothing really wrong with the substantive bits of what it told me. It found information on the Internet and made as reasonable a summary of it as anyone could. Obviously I could make it work harder, but the fact that it’s capable of doing what we want but not acting as we do is still fascinating. (We should also note that that error message suggests that chatbot is still running on GTP 3.5, rather than the more capable GPT 4.0, so if I’d dared the account I might have got my post much more easily.) I’m sure I’ll be dealing with this stuff more in future, but still: in a very simple and direct way it’s going to be difficult to make friends with it…

Pictish Pandemic Roadtrip, Part I

This gallery contains 21 photos.

I always have to start my posts with excuses these days… After all, firstly I was on strike, and somehow still had no time to write; then we managed to win an end to the strike but were still on … Continue reading →