Bad numbers by Karl-Ferdinand Werner

I’m not sure how true this is in this third decade of the twenty-first century, but if like me you were first learning about the Carolingian empire of Charlemagne and sons in the last decade of the previous one, you probably didn’t get far before you encountered the name Karl-Ferdinand Werner (1924-2008). Some of the really major studies of how that empire worked, administratively, came from his pen or typewriter, and he always seemed to be capable of understanding that the administration had to rely on and even create loyalty to operate, and so made affective response as much part of his thinking as procedures and law.¹ He was, in short, quite important in the field, had a very interesting career between Germany and France, and was respected in both, and this post is not intended to diminish his legacy in any substantial way. It is just meant to suggest that like sadly far too many historians, he was far safer with words than with numbers…

Portrait photograph of Karl-Ferdinand Werner

The evidence for this comes from a conference paper he gave at the annual Settimane di Studio held at Spoleto by the Centro Italiano di Studi sull’alto medioevo, in 1967. So he was a little bit younger than I am now, for whatever that may be worth, and surrounded by the great and good of the field of that time, and the theme of the year’s conference was matters military. The reason I was reading this, back in 2021, was because after you get more than a couple of works deep, almost everything there is on the vexed question of how much of the population went to war in the post-Roman kingdoms of Western Europe cites or even just rests on the papers presented at this nearly sixty-year-old conference, and Werner’s perhaps most among them.² So I was a bit surprised it was as free-flying as it is, since I had never read anything else by him that suggested he could jump so far from his evidence. And since I have a pedigree in calling account on bad numbers in history, and since this can’t go into my article on this whenever it finally comes out, I thought perhaps it would be entertainment for my erudite readership here.

What Werner really wanted to know is something that others have wanted to know since as well, and if David Bachrach is reading, well, thank goodness you did that work, Professor Bachrach, as certainly no-one should have let things rest where Werner did.³ The object of enquiry was the size of army that the Carolingians’ successors in Germany, the dynasty we call the Ottonians, could put into the field, and Werner wanted it to be big; his paper had been provoked by a work by a guy called Delbrück which wanted to minimise the war effort of which these sub-Roman kingdoms were capable, and to which Werner thought a response was needed.⁴ His starting point was a document from Salzburg called the Indiculus Loricatum, roughly ‘List of Armoured Men’, which does actually give some viable figures for an Ottonian call-out, probably in 981 (though Werner thought 983), and it’s a better source than we might hope to have.⁵ But it doesn’t quite deal with the situation Werner wanted, and so it had to be, well, stretched…

What it’s not

The problems Werner faced lie in what the Indiculus isn’t, some of which are obviously related to what it actually is. So, for example:

1. It seems to be a count of troops summoned to a campaign in Italy by Emperor Otto II, which means it’s not a call-out for the defence of Germany by Otto I, which would probably have been as close to a theoretical maximum as the numbers for service ever got. (One of the odd things about this paper is that it was in pursuit of that theoretical maximum despite occasionally admitting that that probably never happened).⁶
2. It is a count only of armoured cavalry, which means it is possibly not a count of all the soldiers going, which one might expect to have included infantry, though I’ll come back to that.⁷
3. It is a levy primarily from Saxony, which means it is obviously not the figures for the whole empire.⁸
4. It is clear that not even all the known Saxon nobles were called, so that it’s not even a full levy from Saxony.⁹

All of that, of course, means that the figure it gives, which by Werner’s mathematics was 2,112 cavalrymen – remember that number, now – is necessarily a lot smaller than the figure Werner was after would have been. (It doesn’t help that the actual total seems to be 1,972.)¹⁰ And so the struggle begins to multiply it up to the "right" figure. Now, you know how I feel about this probably, but in case not, let me just quote once more the words of the late, great, Ted Buttrey:

When we enter on these kinds of calculation, we can be confident of two things. First, the answer will be wrong. Whatever it is, it will be wrong, since it cannot be right—once you are guessing, the number of possible permutations is gigantic. Worse, where the errors lie, and how serious they are, cannot be determined…¹¹

And if we needed another example, this paper was it. Let me break it down, take it to the bridge and generally set the funk out (if I may)…

Multiplying up

How then shall we compare thee, o Indiculus, to a hypothetical full-scale imperial mobilisation? Let me count the ways.

1. Firstly, we adopt a method already used by the rather later, but also great, Ferdinand Lot, who took early modern administrative divisions in France and their populations to give something like accurate multipliers for the fragmentary French records he was using for a similar, more pessimistic, exercise.¹² Werner had some really quite good figures for known palaces, cities, fiscs and so on in Germany, and so some basis to repeat that, but…
2. … they weren’t comprehensive, so he imposed an additional percentage as a guess for how many might not be included. First arbitrary alteration of the data…¹³
3. The Indiculus figures also didn’t account for people who would not turn up, and neither did Lot’s.¹⁴ Firstly, obviously, we can’t know what that percentage in fact was, as this document only sets out what was expected, but it should make the real figure for turn-out lower than the Indiculus ones, you’d think; but Werner actually used this flaw as his excuse to go for the theoretical maximum hereafter.
4. Then, going back to his early medieval administrative divisions, of course Werner didn’t have population numbers for these places as Lot had had from his anachronistic but proportional ancien régime data. So Werner just guessed, I’m afraid.¹⁵ Second arbitrary alteration…
5. This had already got him to an empire-wide figure of 30,000 heavy cavalry that we can’t trust, but it was still only heavy cavalry, so he multiplied that by 3 to add the infantry. No basis for that multiplier was apparently thought necessary; just 3, you know, sounds about right.¹⁶ Third arbitrary alteration…
6. Now, the Italian campaign factor. Here he made several assumptions: that troops would have been left at home for defence (extremely likely, I’d say, but of course unquantifiable except by step 1 above and that not really), that the campaign really was that of 983, not 981, and that therefore troops already sent to Italy in 982 might still be there, for a further discount; and that the nobility who are not listed should actually be included, even though the author of the source obviously didn’t think so. All of those, of course, need numbers making up to patch the gaps…¹⁷ Arbitrary alterations four, five and six.
7. And lastly, because apparently none of this was enough, at around the twenty-five-page mark, the base number he got from the Indiculus in the first place, 2,112, suddenly becomes 4,000 for no obvious reason and without remark, which of course nearly doubles all his subsequent sums!¹⁸

But what if… ?

So just by way of illustration of where this gets us, we start with that actual early medieval figure of 2,112 people we could maybe even call knights, whom we know were expected to go to Italy, maybe in 983, on the emperor’s command, mainly from Saxony, and probably not all of whom did. By the time Werner had finished stretching this that expedition had become a force of 20,000 men, which as Carlrichard Brühl pointed out (and others have since repeated, mainly the late and also great Timothy Reuter), means that some of the armies we’re talking about exceeded the populations of most medieval cities.¹⁹ The potential error is therefore rather more than a full order of magnitude, but of course as Ted observed, we have no idea what it actually is. Werner could even have been right about all this, though I think the top end of the range is unlikely. But that is only to apply my own subjectivities in balance against his, and his basic assumption that the person responsible for the service would have brought people with him in support is probably fair. I am therefore temperamentally inclined to agree that the Indiculus isn’t a full picture, but…

Speaking of full picture, here is the actual thing, Bamberg Staatsbibliothek Msc. Patr. 107 fo. 1, manuscript of the Indiculus Loricatorum, which was written into the leading blank page of a codex otherwise full of theology, largely Augustine. Image from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek MDZ, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

But let’s, just for a moment, try the counter-case. A different highly-respected German historian of this period, Hubert Mordek, once wrote another of my favourite methodological quotes, „[M]an muss der Überlieferung immer die Chance geben, recht zu behalten“, which we might translate loosely as, “You always gotta allow for the possibility the sources are just right”.²⁰ And the source says, 2,112 mounted soldiers with mailcoats, almost all from Saxony. Not just that, either: Werner brought in numerous other sources from later or different German contexts to suggest that this was, indeed, roughly the sort of level at which kings in Germany could demand such service; another weird thing about this paper is that it itself gives you all the tools you need to dismantle it.²¹ So what if it is right? What if it was 983, there already was an army in the field in Italy, and Otto II felt it was necessary temporarily to weaken defence in Saxony and raise what could be raised from there to supplement the Italian force, with strictly mobile troops who could therefore get there soon enough to make a difference? What if therefore it was actually only cavalry and supporting grooms and so on that went, and from there and in that number because that was all they could safely levy? What if this was the operational maximum? It does still imply quite a large Ottonian army in total, what with a presumably-larger force in Italy with an infantry component and remaining defences in various places; but it doesn’t require us to think that an Ottonian Germany already at war could suddenly fling another 20,000 men at the problem. And I’m not saying that caution is right either. I’m just saying it’s a way way simpler conclusion than the one Werner reached which requires no messing with the numbers. And those, by and large, are the conclusions I prefer.

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1. I guess I think here especially of K. F. Werner, "Missus – Marchio – Comes: entre l'administration centrale et l'administration locale de l'empire carolingienne" in Werner Paravicini and Karl Ferdinand Werner (edd.), Histoire comparée de l'administration (IV^e–XVIII^e siècles) (München 1980), pp. 191–239, reprinted in Werner, Vom Frankenreich zur Entfaltung Deutschlands und Frankreichs: Ursprünge, Strukturen, Beziehungen. Ausgewählte Beiträge: Festgabe zu seinem sechzigsten Geburtstag (Sigmaringen 1984), pp. 121-161.

2. K. F. Werner, "Heeresorganisation und Kriegführung im deutschen Königreich des 10. und 11. Jahrhunderts" in Ordinamenti militari in Occidente nell'alto medioevo (Spoleto 1968), 2 vols, vol. II pp. 791–843 with discussion pp. 849–856.

3. Referring here of course to David S. Bachrach, Warfare in Tenth-Century Germany (Woodbridge 2012).

4. Werner, "Heeresorganisation und Kriegführung", p. 813, referring to the original publication of Hans Delbrück, Geschichte der Kriegskünst in Rahmen der politischen Geschichte, 2nd ed. (Berlin 1920), 4 vols, transl. Walter J. Renfroe Jr. as History of the Art of War (Lincoln NB 1975), 4 vols, vol. II in both editions, the German 1st ed. being in the Internet Archive here.

5. Printed as “Indiculus loricatorum Ottoni II. in Italiam mittendorum” in Ludovicus Weiland (ed.), Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum) I (Hannover 1893), pp. 632-633, online here, transl. W. North as “Indiculus Loricatorum (Index of Armored Contingents)”, Amazon Web Services, online here.

6. Werner, "Heeresorganisation und Kriegführung", pp. 823-824 and 817.

7. Ibid., pp. 820-821.

8. Ibid., pp. 831-832.

9. Ibid., pp. 806-808.

10. Ibid., pp. 817-819. The lower total I get by adding the figures given by North, “Indiculus Loricatum”. I probably should have added them myself from the manuscript, but come on guys, this is enough work already.

11. T. V. Buttrey, "Calculating Ancient Coin Production: Facts and Fantasies" in Numismatic Chronicle vol. 153 (London 1993), pp. 335–51, on JSTOR here, at p. 349.

12. Ferdinand Lot, L’art militaire et les armées au Moyen Âge en Europe et dans le Proche Orient (Paris 1946), 2 vols.

13. Werner, "Heeresorganisation und Kriegführung", pp. 817-820.

14. Ibid., p. 816.

15. Ibid., p. 820.

16. Ibid., pp. 820-821; he repeated this argument pp. 833-834 with a reference to an eleventh-century French call-out from Moyenmoutier where each knight was accompanied by a manus, a hand, of other troops, but that was somewhere else somewhen else and still doesn’t specify 3 as a multiplier.

17. Ibid., pp. 824-826 & 831-832.

18. Ibid., p. 829.

19. 20,000 men: ibid., p. 829; Brühl, in discussion p. 851; Reuter, in "Carolingian and Ottonian Warfare" in Maurice Keen (ed.), Medieval Warfare: a history (Oxford 1999), pp. 13–35.

20. Mordek, "Karolingische Kapitularien" in idem (ed.), Überlieferung und Geltung der normativer Texte des frühen und hohen Mittelalters (Sigmaringen 1986), pp. 25-50 at p. 30.

The dogheads explained?

So here is, as they say, a thing. You know I do frontiers, obviously, and you may also be aware that there are more essay volumes by medievalists or including medievalists on frontiers, in which there is usually no explicit comparison between cases except by the volume editors, than anyone should ever have to deal with.¹ Back in 2021 I was finally making my way through one of these that had been on my reading lists since early in my doctorate, Walter Pohl’s, Ian Wood’s and Helmut Reimitz’s The Transformation of Frontiers from Late Antiquity to the Carolingians.² I didn’t think as much of this volume as I might have hoped given the people involved, though there are a few thoughtful papers in there, but there was also one curiosity offered in passing in Ian Wood‘s own contribution that seemed like blog material.³

1700s icon of Saints Stephen and Christopher as priest and dog-headed soldier, Recklinghausen, Ikonenmuseum, Web Gallery of Art WGA23491, public domain claimed at linked site

You may be aware that there was a medieval, and indeed ancient, idea that somewhere out in the world, at the edges where the monstrous peoples live, were a race of men who had heads like dogs, the so-called Cynocephali. Unlike a lot of the so-called monstrous races, the Cynocephali got some Christian thought devoted to them because of a persistent idea that St Christopher might have been one of them, a proof that the power of the Gospel covered all the world and so on. As one of our occasional commentators, Sam Ottewill-Soulsby, knows very well since he’s written about it, this even got as far as imagining whole urban settlements of these Cynocephali, allowing Sam actually to publish a piece called "City of Dog", an achievement that perhaps even beats Rory Naismith’s "An Offa You Can’t Refuse" and other punning titles that editors with more taste might have vetoed.⁴ (My current other favourite of these is a piece about the eleventh-century anti-pope Clement III subtitled, "Ceci n’est pas un pape", but I digress…⁵) But where did this peculiar idea come from? Coming across an instance of it in his paper, Professor Wood offers a possible answer. He notes that Bruno of Querfurt, in recording the deeds of the missionary bishop Saint Adalbert, says that his mission to the (original) Prussians included him being jeered at by Cynocephali.⁶ Now, that’s odd, because usually the whole point of the monstrous races is that they exist beyond where you can reach, and even the civilised Cynocephali—Professor Wood follows this observation with a page and a half on the theological debate over the cultural frontier beyond which this questionably-human people might or might not live, concluding that the consensus was that they were sufficiently civilised that they must have souls and could go to Heaven—certainly don’t, Saint Christopher aside, live among normal identifiable accessible humans. You don’t just meet them among crowds of sceptical human pagans. People (other than maybe John Mandeville, professional fourteenth-century authorial fiction) don’t claim to have met monopods or similar. In this respect the dog-heads are unusual even among "monstrous" peoples. And yet, says Professor Wood, with my emphasis:⁷

"Bruno’s awareness of the cynocephali may not simply have been the product of an over-vivid imagination. Dog-headed beings are a recurrent feature of accounts of the southern Baltic, appearing in the eighth-century Æthicus Ister and, less exotically, in a letter of Ratramnus of Corbie to Rimbert of Hamburg-Bremen. Remarkably lifelike dogheaded masks from ninth-century Haithabu reveal that men did disguise themselves as cynocephali."

To which part of me responds, "Who says they were men, not women? We only got the masks!" but a more impulsive, less intellectual part goes, "I bet the Hedeby finds are online now, somehow." And so it transpires. This is a bit of a trip into the uncanny valley, I’m sorry, but, look at this:

Textile dog mask in the Wikinger Museum Haithabu; photo by Klaudia Karpińska, presumed covered by CC BY NC 4.0 license of site of origin (linked)

Now, there is definitely a chicken-and-egg problem here. Even in his passing discussion Professor Wood pushes talk of the cynocephali back to the beginning of the eighth century and even then placed in the more distant past, and in fact it goes back at least to the Romans since it’s in Pliny’s Natural History. One can argue that Adalbert, or even Bruno, might well have expected dogheaded persons even before they got to the Prussians, and so seen what they expected even if somebody did mask up to greet the foreigners. One might also reasonably observe that Hedeby was at the other end of the Baltic from where the Prussians hung out, and that assuming that basically everyone in what would by the nineteenth century be German-speaking lands somehow shared this obscure cultural tradition, even the non-Germanic-speaking Prussians, has some problems. But still, there is this mask: someone at some point in the ninth century in a place connected with Hedeby was probably wearing a dog-face, and this isn’t the only one that’s been found there, despite the vast odds against textile survival from medieval contexts.⁸

So obviously it could all be nothing; this could just be a tool for a party trick or something from some really early theatre, or whatever. Even if more solemn in purpose, which we can’t necessarily assume, it might be evidence for ceremonial practice in this one Danish town that would not necessarily prove anything about what people were doing in tenth-century Old Prussia, and the story from Bruno of Querfurt could just be a way of emphasising how far beyond the known his subject had dared to travel for the propagation of his faith and not meant to mean that Adalbert really did see dog-headed people. Perhaps it’s even that Bruno, knowing himself of such Scandinavian practices, hoped that others would not when he wrote this up as a reference to the older legends. But it could, all the same, be as Professor Wood suggests: a future martyr fooled by pagans in dress-up into thinking he’d really met the cynocephali. It’s still quite a step from there to the delicately-floated suggestion that such Baltic-area practices, necessarily for this argument much older than our first records of them, were in fact the seed of the idea that dog-headed people were among the "monstrous races".⁹ But one can’t blame someone for making a suggestion which, before, no-one had thought of. If I’d been assiduous enough to read Sam’s piece maybe I would also know whether anyone has taken this up or further! But until I have, this is as far as I can go. I hope it’s of interest!

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1. Oh, man, so many volumes. The ones I regularly cite are Robert Bartlett & Angus MacKay (edd.), Medieval Frontier Societies (Oxford 1989); Daniel Power and Naomi Standen (edd.), Frontiers in Question: Eurasian borderlands, 700 – 1700, Themes in Focus 6 (Basingstoke 1999); Walter Pohl, Ian Wood & Helmut Reimitz (edd.), The Transformation of Frontiers from Late Antiquity to the Carolingians, The Transformation of the Roman World 10 (Leiden 2001); David Abulafia and Nora Berend (edd.), Medieval Frontiers: concepts and practices (Aldershot 2002); and Florin Curta (ed.), Borders, Barriers, and Ethnogenesis: frontiers in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 12 (Turnhout 2005), just because they’re the ones I’ve read properly (and a couple of them are really good); and I’m currently adding Ulrike Matthies Green and Kirk E. Costion (edd.), Modeling cross-cultural interaction in ancient borderlands (Gainesville FL 2018), on JSTOR here, to that, which despite its title is substantially medieval or early modern in focus; but I should also be as aware of things like David Harry Miller, Jerome O. Steffen, William W. Savage & Stephen J. Thompson (edd.), The Frontier: Comparative Studies, 4 vols (Norman 1977), vols I & II, which have several medievalist pieces in; Wolfgang Haubrichs and Reinhard Schneider (edd.), Grenzen und Grenzregionen. Frontières et régions frontalières. Borders and border regions, Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Saarländische Landesgeschichte und Volksforschung 22 (Saarbrücken 1993), online here; Dionisius A. Agius & Ian Richard Netton (edd.), Across the Mediterranean Frontiers: trade, politics and religion, 650-1450. Selected Proceedings of the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, 10-13 July 1995, 8-11 July 1996, International Medieval Research 1 (Turnhout 1997); Walter Pohl & Helmut Reimitz (eds), Grenze und Differenz im frühen Mittelalter, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 1 (Wien 2000); Emilia Jamroziak and Karen Stöber (eds), Monasteries on the Borders of Medieval Europe: Conflict and Cultural Interaction, Medieval Church Studies 28 (Turnhout 2013), DOI: 10.1484/M.MCS-EB.6.09070802050003050405030506; A. Asa Eger (ed.), The Archaeology of Medieval Islamic Frontiers: from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea (Louisville CO 2019); and Kieran Gleave, Howard Williams and Pauline Clarke (edd.), Public archaeologies of frontiers and borderlands (Oxford 2020), to name but the ones I already have contents for. I’m less sure about Stanton W. Green and Stephen M. Perlman (edd.), The Archaeology of Frontiers and Boundaries, Studies in Archaeology (Orlando FL 1985); Anthony Goodman and Anthony Tuck (eds), War and Border Societies in the Middle Ages (London 1992); and Benita Sampedro and Simon R. Doubleday (edd.), Border Interrogations: Questioning Spanish Frontiers, Remapping Cultural History 8 (New York City NY 2008), whose contents lists do not draw me in so much – Goodman & Tuck is actually a sexily-titled set of studies of one particular Anglo-Scottish battle, for example; I guess their publisher decided deception was the only hope! – but they do help illustrate the size of the phenomenon. Once you start including non-medievalist stuff, it’s just incredible.

2. Pohl, Wood & Reimitz, Transformation of Frontiers.

3. Ian Wood, "Missionaries and the Christian Frontier", ibid. pp. 209–218.

4. Sam Ottewill-Soulsby, ‘City of Dog’ in Journal of Urban History Vol. 47 (Cham 2021), pp. 1130–1148; Rory Naismith, "An Offa You Can’t Refuse?: Eighth-Century Mercian Titulature on Coins and in Charters" in Quaestio Insularis: Selected Proceedings of the Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic Vol. 7 (Cambridge 2007), pp. 89–118.

5. Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri, "Popes through the Looking Glass, or «Ceci n’est pas un pape»", edd. Umberto Longo and Lila Yawn in Reti Medievali Rivista Vol. 13 (Firenze 2012), pp. 121–136, DOI: 10.6092/1593-2214/340.

6. Wood, "Missionaries", pp. 213-214.

7. Ibid. p. 214.

8. Wood cites (ibid. p. 214 n. 36) I. Hägg, Die Textilfunde aus dem Hafen von Haithabu, Berichte über die Ausgrabungen in Haithabu 20 (Neumünster 1984), pp. 69-72.

9. I take this, at least, to be the implication of the sentence, "The cynocephali were, therefore, not simply a product of the fevered imagination of missionaries: they were constructed by alien peoples." (Wood, "Missionaries", p. 214). That must mean that Professor Wood thinks, or thought in 1998, that the idea of being a dog-headed person originated among the pagans, mustn’t it? I’d ask him when next I see him, but it wouldn’t help…

I said ‘yes’ to too many things…

I can already see that my blogging plans for this week are going to fall by the wayside, so I thought I should at least offer an explanation. It’s basically the one of the title: at some point over the summer, perhaps emboldened by the union-mandated freedom from marking, I started thinking about things like Rethinking the Medieval Frontier again and getting in touch with colleagues elsewhere and so on. And this is always risky, because the likelihood is, as we have noted here, that doing that will get you asked to give a paper. In recent years I have been saying ‘no’ to such requests, yea even unto the International Medieval Congress itself, but I must have had some sequential moments of weakness or over-confidence and now somehow I am giving two papers next week. One is good to go, the other not so much, and so I must spend the remainder of the weekend on it, good old unpaid research… but even that is a step forward from where we have been.

Composed screen-shot indicating what is currently taking up my metaphorical screen

Still, I can at least tell you about the papers. First up is an online paper for the University of Leicester’s Medieval Research Centre, this Tuesday coming at 17:00, on Teams. My title is "Frontier? Who Says? (Early) Medieval Classifications and Exploitations of Frontier Spaces in Iberia and Elsewhere", and if that interests you there is a link to join it, as well as the rest of their interesting-looking programme, here.

Then, on Friday, at the good ol’ University of Leeds, there is a full-day workshop entitled The Myth of Barter: Perspectives from the Global Middle Ages, organised by our Affiliated Research Fellow Dr Nick Evans. Here there is no webpage to link to, since it’s a closed event (mainly to protect Nick’s catering budget!), but if you are desperate to come along and hear, among other things, me unwisely talking to the title, "Exchanging Goods in Post-Monetary Societies: Back to Barter?", then a mail to Nick might still be effective. Other speakers are Nick himself, Professor Caroline Goodson and Dr Robert Bracey. So that’s why I have to come up with something good… I’ll check back in with you about some other stuff which happened at Leeds already, once this too is in the past!

From the Sources XVIII: A lost letter from a Caliph

It’s been a while since we had one of my source translations, and there’ve been a lot of photos of Scottish castles in poor weather just lately, so by way of the now-legendary "something completely different", let’s do some source stuff for a change. My candidate today, however, is a bit of a mystery and that needs explaining first.

Anscari M. Mundó

So, in 1983 the immensely learned and influential Catalan palaeographer and liturgist, as well as sometime monk, Anscari Mundó, published a short paper about the handwriting used in early medieval documents from the Iberian Peninsula in a birthday volume for his colleague Manuel Cecilio Díaz.¹ He used quite a range of examples, all given in tiny photographs, but among them were two previously unpublished pieces from the Archivo de la Corona d’Aragón which Mundó thought were letters from the (secretariat of) the Umayyad caliph in Córdoba to the count of Barcelona. For Mundó’s immediate purposes they served as almost the only known example of Latin handwriting in the Muslim part of the Peninsula which survives, but he was not blind to the fact that such a piece of diplomatic correspondence might be quite a big deal, and in a note he explained that he would give no further details right now, because he was imminently going to publish these documents separately.² And fair enough, except that publication never came. Even at Mundó’s death in 2012, the documents remained unpublished and, more importantly, since he had given no archival reference, inaccessible to anyone else. My personal belief, having dealt with the Archivo a bit, is that he found them in some documents yet to be filed, and then they got filed while he was away and no-one could tell him where, or else the stack got moved or something like that. Anyway, I assume it wasn’t for want of trying that he never managed it.

Entrance to the Archivo de la Corona d’Aragón in 2011, easy enough to pass through but very hard to do anything inside…

So what was to be done? In 1990, Roger Collins, himself now publishing on literacy and writing in the Peninsula, expressed his frustration with Mundó’s apparent secrecy and somehow, with a really powerful magnifying glass or something, went over one of Mundó’s inch-and-a-bit facsimiles (the other was either not photographed or was even smaller, I don’t remember—long long time since I saw it!) to get all the text he could out of it. From this he concluded, firstly, that the document in the photograph had been addressed to two counts of Barcelona, which dated it pretty closely to the years 947 to 966 CE, when my man Count-Marquis Borrell II was ruling jointly with his brother Miró III, and secondly that since these men were addressed as "brothers", it was unlikely in the extreme that the document was in the voice of the caliph (who would have been either the somewhat terrifying ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III al-Naṣir (r. 912-961, caliph from 928) or his more severe son al-Hakam II (r. 961-976)), and it was more likely to have been sent by a Cordoban Christian dignitary of some kind.³ And there things rested until this happened.

Ignasi J. Baiges i Jardí and Pere Puig i Ustrell (edd.), Catalunya carolíngia Volum VII: el comtat de Barcelona, 3 vols, Memòries de la Secció Històrica-Arqueològica, 110.2 (Barcelona 2019), in its physical form on my desk, where it has spent sadly little time since I got it

The now-completed Catalunya Carolíngia project, without which I could never have done my PhD or therefore had my career, took a long time to get round to the archives covering Barcelona, but part of the reason for that was their exhaustive searching of them, including the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón. Still, I personally hadn’t dared expect that one of the things they’d come up with was this lost letter, and so I was very excited to find it was there, as no. 393 in Barcelona part 1.⁴ Mundó is finally absolved and Collins has his text! Except that it’s not that document. Remember that Mundó had found two? Well, this is the other one, and reading it proves Mundó right and Collins, if not wrong, at least not right about this. And of course, the editors maybe should have realised which one they were looking at. None of the text that Collins saw in that photograph, importantly including the salutation to plural counts as brothers, is in this text, which implies that that document is yet to be found. But what is is actually much more interesting, although, inevitably, the document is defective… I suspect it has only survived because of being binding or wrappings for something else. So here we go with what is left.⁵

… Córdoba. And the same man is my messenger and his name is ‘Abd Allāh ibn al-Qumis, who is called ‘count’, and he is out of all these messengers our private minister, which they will tell you [singular] and indicate to you from their mouths. But give them your ear and your attention to their speeches and apply yourself to understanding them. And place your trust in everything which they report to you, lord [Lenr]et. And once [you have], in the same hour send to me that old man Guitard Arnau without any companion. God, God considers you, so give you no order or pact or guidance or promise until he return to you… predominantly your case. You, moreover, will know for certain […]
… [and] if it is allowed to […] this case in the Christian faith and how it [should?] fall […] into the cursed Jewish faith. Nevertheless, consider and act sen[…] and then you will see the glory of your God in all your cases […]

And that’s all folks, not all he wrote, obviously, but all we have. And, as I say, it has no overlap at all with the text Collins pieced together and is definitely addressed to a single recipient, whose name could apparently be mangled as "Lenret", with the first four letters dubious. I don’t feel as if "Borrel" is too much of a stretch there, not least because whoever it is has to be contemporary with Guitard Arnau, who is probably Viscount Guitard of Barcelona (r. 974-985), because Guitard went to Córdoba as Borrell’s envoy in 974 and 976. That would tend to place this document in that bracket, and probably 975 since Guitard was already familiar to the writer, rather than the Borrell-and-Miró-based dating of 950-957 the editors have given it (thinking, I guess, without reading their own text, that they were dealing with the document to the brothers that Mundó, and Collins, who goes unacknowledged, had worked on).⁶ There are some problems there: Viscount Guitard is usually reckoned to be the son of Viscount Gombau, not Arnau, and would actually have been quite young at this point, and that makes me wonder if the Guitard who went to Córdoba, otherwise only attested (as ‘lord of the city of Barcelona’ and Borrell’s ‘vicar’) by the eleventh-century historian Ibn Hayyān, albeit with apparent access to the court records, was actually someone else, or if our dubious grip on Viscount Gombau is actually somehow mistaken.

However, all that is really down in the weeds. What was actually going on here? It’s hard to say, but it seems like the following are halfway safe deductions.

1. The person receiving this letter had sought an intervention from an authority in Córdoba who had a Christian count as one of his privy counsellors; it seems really difficult to imagine anyone other than the caliph in that position, so the letter really is from him, presumably via a secretary such as we know the ninth-century emirs used.⁷
2. The issue about which Borrell (let’s say it’s Borrell) had consulted was one which could potentially be judged by Jewish or by Christian authorities, and the caliph was apparently going to have to decide which. We can’t go any further but I’m reminded of the ninth-century exile convert to Judaism, Bodo who became Eleazar, and wonder if some similar religious switch was part of the problem.⁸
3. However, the issue was apparently one about which Borrell might have been able to take local action; we can see that because the caliph is keen to forbid him that possibility. If you submit to caliphal jurisdiction, you gotta submit.
4. The demand for Guitard to be sent is part of that strategy; not only can Borrell not act without caliphal approval here, he is also going to be told what to do by one of his subordinates, without anyone else knowing whether what Guitard advises is what the caliph ordered. Given the later persistent conflict between viscounts and counts of Barcelona, I see a divide-and-rule strategy here in which Borrell’s independence is compromised by the equivalent of having a British Resident in his palace, or a Communist political officer if you’d rather, someone who can countermand him from below in any case.

So there’s actually quite lot here of interest. In the first place we see a strong caliphal hand in diplomacy, although also that (unless it was in a lost bit of the text) there isn’t much actual sanction the caliph can deploy against Borrell short of actually sending an army, which might be excessive; this moment of weakness however affords a lever with which the caliph tries to fracture Borrell’s authority. In the second place, against the increasingly common complaint that despite the tenth-century caliphate’s famous or infamous reputation for interreligious tolerance, we only actually know of one prominent non-Muslim courtier at Córdoba for the whole tenth century, the uniquely qualified Hasdai ibn Shaprut, here is another, an Arabicised but presumably Christian count of Córdoba, one of the caliph’s key confidants.⁹ (As well as whoever wrote this letter, I suppose.) So that’s a bit of evidence for the convivencia supporters. And we see the caliph arbitrating between the Peoples of the Book as we would expect, and so on.¹⁰

I’ve used this before, obviously, but it is the only medieval illustration of Borrell II there is, in the Rotlle genealògic del Monestir de Poblet, c. 1400, image from Wikimedia Commons

But for me most important, I think this is the only information we have about what the several submissions to Córdoba which Borrell made over the course of his career actually involved, beyond sending very expensive gifts. In 940, just after raiding Saragossa, his father Sunyer had been made (by Hasdai, no less) to swear off a marriage alliance with Pamplona and any kind of Christian cooperation north of the caliphate’s borders, but what the later submissions cost Borrell has only ever been guesswork; it doesn’t seem to have been military service, tribute or anything like that.¹¹ And I think this letter supports that: it fits into a context where the default relationship was detachment, to the point where when an intervention was requested by the supposed subject, the price for it would have to be negotiated individually, under some vague shadow of threat that the caliph was actually not well-placed to carry out. And yet it doesn’t appear that Borrell’s position here was the strong one. I do wonder what was going on. But now, so can you, and of course I’d love to hear your guesses…

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1. Anscari M. Mundó Marcet, "Notas para la historia de la escritura visigótica en su período primitivo" in Bivium: homenaje a Manuel Cecilio Díaz y Díaz (Barcelona 1983), pp. 175–196.

2. Mundó, "Notas para la historia de la escritura visigótica", p. 187 & n. 6.

3. Roger Collins, “Literacy and the laity in early mediaeval Spain” in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), Uses of Literacy in Mediaeval Europe (Cambridge 1990), pp. 109-133 at pp. 112-113.

4. Ignasi J. Baiges i Jardí and Pere Puig i Ustrell (edd.), Catalunya carolíngia Volum VII: el comtat de Barcelona, Memòries de la Secció Històrica-Arqueològica 110 (Barcelona 2019), 3 vols, vol. I no. 393, with an online version here.

5. Usually I’d provide a Latin text here as well, but since there is now the CatCar database, at last, as cited above, I don’t have to. Phew!

6. Baiges & Puig, Catalunya carolíngia VII, vol. I p. 410. For Guitard see José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec, Quan els vescomtes de Barcelona eren: història, crònica i documents d’una familia catalana dels segles X, XI i XII, Textos y documents 39 (Barcelona 2006), online here, pp. 23-41.

7. We even have the somewhat sideways testimony of one of those secretaries, Samson of Córdoba, that he did such work, in "Samsonis apologeticum contra perfidos", ed. Joan Gil in I. Gil (ed.), Corpvs Scriptorvm Mvzarabicorvm, Manuales y Anejos de «Emerita» XXVIII (Madrid 1973), 2 vols, vol. II pp. 505-658 at II.Præf.9. Samson even mentions someone, Servandus, in the office of Count of Córdoba. Given that the rôle fairly clearly involved office within the Christian community, it seems overridingly likely that a Christian held it, despite the tenth-century incumbent’s name, but then, Samson had contemporaries who complained about Arabicization among the Christian community and we have a few Arabic Bibles; see Hanna E. Kassis, "The Arabicization and Islamization of the Christians of al-Andalus: evidence of their scriptures" in Ross Brann (ed.), Languages of Power in Islamic Spain, Department of Near Eastern Studies and the Program of Jewish Studies, Cornell University, 3 (Bethesda MD 1997), pp. 136–155. That would all matter less had arguments about the speed and extent of conversion not been hung on such changes of name… For critique, see Alwyn Harrison, "Behind the Curve: Bulliet and Conversion to Islam in al-Andalus Revisited" in al-Masāq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean Vol. 24 (Abingdon 2012), pp. 35–51, DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2012.655582; for a reply to criticisms like that by the originator of the arguments, see Richard W. Bulliet, "The Conversion Curve Revisited" in A. C. S. Peacock (ed.), Islamisation: Comparative Perspectives from History (Edinburgh 2017), pp. 1–11, on Academia.edu here.

8. On this intriguing story see Frank Riess, "From Aachen to Al-Andalus: the journey of Deacon Bodo (823–76)" in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 13 (Oxford 2005), pp. 131–157.

9. The best general statement of the case about Hasdai ibn Shaprut, by which I mean it contains all the usual claims but doesn’t go beyond them, is probably Jesús Peláez del Rosal, "Hasdai Ibn Shaprut in the Court of Abd ar-Rahman III", transl. Patricia A. Sneesby, in Peláez (ed.), The Jews in Cordoba (X-XII centuries), Studies in Hebrew Culture 1 (Córdoba 1987), pp. 61–77. Sadly, the case is usually made instead from Eliyahu Ashtor, The Jews of Moslem Spain, trans. Aaron Klein and Jenny Machlowitz Klein (Philadelphia PA 1973), 3 vols, which for all its manifold virtues, in its forty-odd pages on Hasdai goes mostly without evidence or citation. On its limits, see Danica Johnson, "A Reassessment of Scholarship: Hasdai ibn Shaprut", unpublished MA dissertation, University of Leeds, Leeds, 2021, but as Johnson and I found (and hope someday to publish), most of what can be relied upon in Ashtor came ultimately from Philoxène Luzzatto, Notice sur Abou-Iousouf Hasdaï Ibn-Schaprout, médecin juif du dixième siècle, ministre des khalifes omeyyades d’Espagne `Abd-al-Rahman III et Al-Hakem II, et promoteur de la littérature juive en Europe (Paris 1852), online here and almost the only person ever to write about Hasdai with primary citation. On Hasdai’s questionable representativeness see Jonathan P. Decter, "Before Caliphs and Kings: Jewish Courtiers in Medieval Iberia" in Jonathan Ray (ed.), The Jew in Medieval Iberia, 1100-1500 (Boston MA 2012), pp. 1–32, or less sweepingly David J. Wasserstein, "Jewish Élites in al-Andalus" in Daniel H. Frank (ed.), The Jews of Medieval Islam: Community, Society and Identity, Études sur le Judaïsme médiéval 16 (Leiden 1995), pp. 101–110.

10. On this see most recently David J. Wasserstein, "Christians, Jews and the Dhimma Status" in Maribel Fierro (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Muslim Iberia (Abingdon 2020), pp. 208–227.

11. The 940 treaty is recorded by Ibn Hayyān in an extract printed in English in Olivia Remie Constable (ed.), Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources, 1st edn (Philadelphia PA 1997), no. 13B; it is presumably also in the 2nd edn but I don’t have that available to check. There is a short discussion of it in Philippe Sénac, "Una expedició de la marina califal" in Josep Maria Salrach (ed.), La formació de la societat feudal, segles VI-XII, Història política, societat i cultura dels Països Catalans 2, 2nd edn (Barcelona 2001), pp. 326–327. On the diplomatic context more widely see Sénac, "Note sur les relations diplomatiques entre les comtes de Barcelone et le califat de Cordoue au X^e siècle" in Sénac (ed.), Histoire et archéologie des terres catalanes au moyen âge (Perpignan 1995), pp. 87–101, online here.

A possible revision of the history of the Islamic conquest of Iberia

I’m afraid that at the moment on A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe your choices are more or less Pictish sculpture or analysis of the earliest chronicle record of the Islamic conquest of Iberia. If the latter is more your thing than the former, today is a good day for you! This post goes back to the so-called Chronicle of 754 to pick up another thing I’m not sure anyone’s noticed and weave it into a slightly larger argument, which might make the basis of an article some day. If you get there before I do you have to cite this post as original inspiration!

Opening of the Chronicle of 754 in its oldest surving copy, Madrid, Biblioteca Universidad Complutense, Fondo histórico, MS 134 fo. 59v, image licensed under CC BY SA 4.0, source linked through

But before we can get going on the text criticism it’s probably necessary to give the background. For a pretty obvious and consequential event remarkably little is agreed about the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. You’d think we could at least start from “some Muslims invaded the Iberian Peninsula” but for some people even that’s not guaranteed, either because the mostly-Berber armies involved couldn’t yet have been believing Muslims given how recently their own lands had been conquered—which, to be honest, is most simply resolved just by assuming that the army was largely recruited from areas of North Africa which had been conquered longer ago—or because the whole thing never happened, that, in the words of an infamous and ridiculous but influential work of the 1970s, “The Arabs Never Invaded Spain”.¹ I’m going to take it as axiomatic that an army of some kind under Muslim command did spearhead a takeover of the bulk of the Iberian Peninsula, because I think that is the most obvious way to understand everything which the sources say and subsequent events, and that this happened in 711 CE, though that too has been disputed.² But after that, we’re into more even contention.

There are, more or less, two sides to the story as usually told. They are broadly a Christian Latin one and a Muslim Arabic one, and they’re not wholly incompatible, though the stories may have met some time in the 850s and exchanged parts, which complicates that kind of judgement.³ Setting that aside for now, the Christian story is roughly this:

1. After decades of contention between different ruling-class families, the year before the conquest the death of King Witiza (r. 703-710 CE) was followed by the contested election of one Roderic (r. 710-711 CE).
2. Attempting to secure his rule, Roderic was fighting someone in the north when news reached him that an army (of Arabs, “Ishmaelites”, “Chaldaeans” or any of the other racialised Biblical terms the Christian sources of the era tend to use for Muslims) from North Africa had invaded in the south, so he halted his immediate campaign and raced south rallying all the troops which would come to his call.
3. Battle was joined with the invaders, probably on the River Guadiana, and part of Roderic’s army, led by those who were less keen on his rule, perhaps sons of a recent king, deserted; Roderic was therefore defeated and (probably) killed on the field.⁴
4. The invaders then raced up the peninsula securing surrenders left right and centre and before long were in full command of the kingdom.

The Arabic story, which we first have only from the 870s CE or thereabouts, long long after it was all over, does not differ hugely from this, but fixes the narrative on particular personalities in some fairly obvious ways.⁵ In this version Roderic is an immoral and misguided king, who breaks several long-running taboos, most significantly by either seducing or raping the daughter of a Count Ilyān (Julian?), who is usually placed at Ceuta, the Visigoths’ (and indeed modern Spain’s) bridgehead on the North African coast. I don’t think it’s actually clearly attested that that’s where he ruled but it fits with what is supposed to have happened next, which is that Ilyān, enraged, reached out to the nearby Muslim governor Mūsā ibn Nuṣayr and offered to ferry his troops into the peninsula. Mūsā, proceeding with some caution, sent his freedman Tāriq ibn Ziyad with an expeditionary force to take up this offer, and it was Tāriq who met Roderic in battle and, somewhat unexpectedly, laid the peninsula open to conquest by defeating him. Anxious to catch up, Mūsā therefore brought his own army over tout de suite and the conquest then proceeded in parallel and mostly unopposed.

A bad man in trouble? As seen in Bernardo Blanco y Pérez, “El rey Don Rodrigo arengando a sus tropas en la batalla de Guadalete”, oil on canvas, 1871, Madrid, Museo del Prado, P003331, image public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The Arabic stories of this are perhaps most interested, however, in what happened next, which was according to them a sequence of reprisals: firstly Mūsā against Tāriq, for exceeding his instructions and (presumably) placing the situation of North Africa and Mūsā’s own command there in jeopardy; then the caliph (stories vary on which one, but either al-Walīd ibn ʿAbd al-Malik, r. 705-715 CE, or his brother and successor Sulaymān, r. 715-717 CE) against Mūsā, for more or less the same things (and this is also in the Chronicle of 754); and then Tāriq against Mūsā for false accusation, supported by the caliph.⁶ In most versions Mūsā winds up destitute, his sons wind up either dead (`Abd al-Azīz, left in charge of the peninsula and supposed to have married Roderic’s widow and started acting like the new king, so murdered by his men) or dispossessed (the others), and Tāriq disappears from the story forever immediately after the caliph’s judgement.

Romantic modern depiction of Mūsā ibn Nuṣayr whipping Tāriq ibn Ziyad for disobedience; this is on both Alamy and Bridgeman, so I’m pretty sure neither own it, but I can’t find where it’s originally from; my source linked, but not necessarily endorsed

So, as has been wisely pointed out by Denise Filios, the Arabic stories as we have them are not actually about the conquest per se, but are bases for legal judgements about proper responsibility of officers and division of spoils from conquest and so on, as well as what parties exactly were involved in those divisions, which were presumably relevant for later claims (such as those of the tenth-century jurist Ibn al-Qūtīya, who claimed to be descended from Witiza himself).⁷ To be fair, the Christian ones aren’t actually about the conquest so much as who was to blame for them: either the sons of Witiza (unlikely, as said in notes already), Roderic’s rivals, Roderic himself or either Egica or Witiza for bringing down God’s disfavour on the kingdom for forcing clerics to marry or whatever. But given that commonality, it’s possible to knit a story out of these skeins that goes, more or less: not everyone liked Roderic and so when the local Muslims came a-calling in an exploratory, plunder-seeking fashion, the disaffected got in touch and everything spiralled out of control, and the kingdom was so centralised that with its head removed it was unable to respond to the crisis; result, conquest. The bit with Count Julian is usually dismissed as romantic fiction, as is the idea of previous collusion between Muslims and renegade factions of the Visigoths; the factionalism itself is considered enough to explain the kingdom’s apparent fragility, though there is still a certain amount of Spanish heart-searching about what on earth had happened to the soul of this obviously strong, because proto-nationalistically peninsula-unifying, kingdom.⁸ But basically, we blame the Goths, as the sources do, for not being together enough to resist the Muslim onslaught. There has been a small amount of attention to notes in the Christian chronicles which suggest that North Africans had already been raiding the peninsula for a few years before the conquest, something one of the Arabic sources also suggests by having Mūsā send out a reconnaissance raid first, but nothing that changes the overall picture much.⁹ And so this is the story that, by and large, the current historiography tells, and is therefore the one I’m proposing to modify.

This modification involves taking note of two parts of the Chronicle of 754, which I introduced in the last-but-one post, together. In Wolf’s translation they go like this, with my emphasis and loaded words also given in the Latin of the MGH edition in square brackets.¹⁰

52. “In Justinian [II]’s time, in the era 749 [711 CE], in his fourth year as emperor and the ninety-second of the Arabs [Arabum], with Walid retaining the sceptre of the kingdom for the fifth year, Roderic rebelliously seized the kingdom of the Goths at the instigation of the senate [ortato senatu]. He ruled for only one year. Mustering his forces, he directed armies against the Arabs and the Moors sent by Musa, that is against Tariq ibn Ziyad and the others, who had long been raiding the province consigned to them [sibi provinciam creditam incursantibus] and simultaneously devastating many cities. In the fifth year of Justinian’s rule, the ninety-third of the Arabs, and the sixth of Walid, in the era 750 [712 CE], Roderic headed for the Transductine mountains to fight them and in that battle the entire army of the Goths, which had come with him fraudulently and in rivalry out of ambition for the kingship, fled and he was killed.”

And then…

64. “In Spain al-Hurr [the governor of al-Andalus] retained his rule over the patrician city of Cordoba, deploying garrisons of Saracens [Sarracenorum]. He restored to the Christians the small estates that had originally been confiscated for the sake of peace so as to bring in revenue to the public treasury. He punished the Moors, who had long been dwelling in Spain [Mauris dudum Spanias commeantibus], on account of the treasure they had hidden. He imprisoned them in sack cloth, infested with worms and lice, and weighed them down with chains. He tortured them as he interrogated them.”

As far as I can see, anyone who has considered the last passage has taken it to be a measure, however unpleasant, taken against members of the invading army who had held onto booty which they should have pooled for common division as was early Islamic custom.¹¹ But this seems odd to me just because of that “long time” for which these Berbers had apparently been living in “the Spains”. Firstly, this was somewhere between 718 and 720, so the invaders had been there a maximum of 9 years. More to the point, any Arabs present would have arrived at the same time, so what was the point in marking a difference? But when this is paired with the previous extract, it makes more sense if what both these two passages are actually referring to is Berbers already settled in the peninsula when the invasion came.

“Now,” as George Molyneaux used to say in his Oxford lectures, “if I’m right about this…,” then how would we explain that? I can think of two scenarios. The one of these that means messing least with the existing story is that the conquest had already begun earlier, and maybe that Tāriq’s initial expedition was some years before, achieved some limited success and that it was only when Roderic got things together to drive him out that battle royal ensued and Mūsā had to get involved. The Arabic sources would later have simplified the narrative by having it happen all at once. OK, but then why doesn’t 754, which clearly knows about this situation, mention the original invasion?

I’m laying such emphasis on this word dudum (“for a long time”) that I might as well demonstrate it’s there; here is Madrid, Biblioteca Universidad Complutense, Fondo histórico, MS 134 again, at fo. 64r, and the lines in question are the fourth and fifth of the left-hand column; image licensed under CC BY SA 4.0, source linked through

So, an easier solution logically if more difficult to mesh with the standard narrative, is that the Berbers were there by permission. This is, after all, the apparent sense of the first of these extracts: a province had been assigned to them. It was not their presence, but their predatory behaviour within that province, that brought Roderic down upon them, whereupon maybe their leaders, of whom Tāriq was apparently only one, called on Mūsā for help and (perhaps) he later punished the one who had been his client, Tāriq, for taking another lord. I would see this in the same terms as the settlement of some part of England by the Saxons in Gildas’s On the Ruin of Britain or, a century later, the Scandinavian Roric’s emplacement in Carolingian Frisia or indeed Rollo the Ganger in Normandy, in all cases something like setting a thief to catch a thief, because of existing raiding by the same groups as were now being recruited as defenders.¹² But still basically that, an enlistment of foreign troops as defence against a new coastal threat whose deeper affiliations proved more durable. Whether that leaves Roderic, or indeed Witiza or even Egica, his predecessor—after all, these Berbers had apparently been settled a long time in 720—as the Vortigern of this story, the king who recruited the foreigners whom he could not subsequently restrain, I wouldn’t like to guess, though if we’re to retain the idea of a client relationship between Mūsā and Tāriq then it is probably most easily Egica, since Mūsā was made governor of Qayrawān in 707 CE and I would find it easier to imagine his clients breaking away before he’d made good like that than after.¹³ Or, there could be something in the idea of an African agent as well and the hiring of troops actually brokered with Mūsā by Witiza or indeed Roderic, but that doesn’t leave very “long” for Tāriq and his men to settle. So, my basic proposal that makes sense of this chronicle record would be that Tāriq and some others were recruited, probably late in the reign of King Egica, as defence of the southern coast against raiding from North Africa (perhaps a factor since at least 680 CE, as we’ve seen), and, perhaps coming under pressure from Mūsā’s new régime in North Africa, took advantage of the civil war to run riot until King Roderic, badly in need of credibility, took it upon himself to bring them into line and, for whatever internal reasons, found himself fatally unable to.

I probably don’t teach this this year – though I might, as there’s almost no better way to find out whether an idea works than to try it out with suitably critical students – but I think I might already think it. I wonder how it strikes any of the interested parties reading, though?

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1. The former contention I originally got from the paper by Richard Hitchcock at the link given; he seems to have dialled back on it in Richard Hitchcock, Muslim Spain Reconsidered (Edinburgh 2014), pp. 18-19. The latter is better-known and better-contested: it begins with Ignacio Olagüe, Les Arabes n’ont jamais envahi l’Espagne (Paris 1969), to which cf. most famously Pierre Guichard, “Les Arabes ont bien envahi l’Espagne : les structures sociales de l’Espagne musulmane” in Annales : Économies, sociétés, civilisations Vol. 29 (Paris 1974), pp. 1483–1513, DOI: 10.3406/ahess.1974.293575, but now also, because of a renewal of the debate, Alejandro García Sanjuán, La conquista islámica de la península ibérica y la tergiversación del pasado: del catastrofismo al negacionismo (Madrid 2013), reviewed favourably by Eduardo Manzano, “De cómo los árabes realmente invadieron Hispania” in al-Qanṭara Vol. 35 (Madrid 2014), pp. 311–319, with those views put into popular form in Eduardo Manzano Moreno, “¿Realmente invadieron los árabes Hispania?” in El País (13 de febrero de 2014), online here as of 10th February 2021, but less favourably in Kenneth Baxter Wolf, “La conquista islámica: Negacionar el negacionismo” in Revista de Libros, 2a época (9th June 2014) online here as of 10th February 2021, translated as Wolf, “Negating Negationism” (2014), online here. García-Sanjuán replied to that in “La tergiversación del pasado y la función social del conocimiento histórico: Una réplica a Kenneth B. Wolf” in Revista de Libros (9th July 2014), online here. The main new enemy in these sallies, however, is Emilio González Ferrín, Historia general de Al Ándalus (Córdoba 2006), and the controversy has gone another round since then, with González Ferrín renewing his version in Cuando fuimos árabes (Córdoba 2017) and García-Sanjuán replying, including in English, to both him and Wolf in García Sanjuán, “La creciente difusión de un fraude historiográfico: la negación de la conquista musulmana de la península ibérica” in Vínculos de Historia Vol. 7 (Ciudad Real 2018), pp. 173–193, DOI: 10.18239/vdh_2018.07.10, and García-Sanjuán, “Denying the Islamic conquest of Iberia: A historiographical fraud”, edd. Hussein Fancy and García-Sanjuán in Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies Vol. 11 (Abingdon 2019), pp. 306–322, DOI: 10.1080/17546559.2019.1601753.

2. The dispute comes not least from the fact that the Chronicle of 754, our earliest source and very well-informed, nonetheless says it happened in 712; on this and the real chronology see Roger Collins, The Arab Conquest of Spain (Oxford 1989), pp. 28-31. The fact that so early a source thought that invasion by a foreign force was what had happened is, of course, a major plank in the case against Olgaüe et al..

3. Although this theory probably didn’t originate there, I know it from Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, “La crónica del moro Rasis y la Continuatio Hispana” in Anales de la Universidad de Madrid Vol. 3 (Madrid 1934), pp. 229–266, reprinted in Sánchez-Albornoz, Investigaciones sobre historiografía hispana medieval (siglos VIII al XII) (Buenos Aires 1967), pp. 267–302. Of course, it’s possible that there was some kind of shared peninsular understanding of what had happened which was reported on both sides of the border; but Sánchez-Albornoz thought the textual links were stronger than that.

4. The 9th-century chronicles of Asturias, which I get at through Yves Bonnaz (ed.), Chroniques asturiennes (fin IX^e siècle), avec édition critique, traduction et commentaire (Paris 1987), unite in blaming the sons of King Witiza and accusing Witiza himself of bringing down God’s judgement on the Visigoths by forcing clergy to marry so as to legitimise his own loose sexual morals (Bonnaz, Chroniques, Chronique d’Alphonse III cc. 2-4; English in “The Chronicle of Alfonso III”, transl. Kenneth Baxter Wolf in Wolf (ed.), Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain, Translated Texts for Historians 9, 2nd edn (Liverpool 2011), pp. 161-177, cap. 5). As Collins points out, however, given that Witiza was only born in the early 680s, in 711 his own children can scarcely have been political actors yet (Collins, Arab Conquest, pp. 144-145). On the other hand, early Asturias was concerned about clerical marriage, which was apparently banned by King Fruela in 718-19 (Bonnaz, Chroniques, Chronique d’Alphonse III cap. 9; “Chronicle of Alfonso III”, c. 16), and the Asturian traditions uniformly blame Witiza for expelling the kingdom’s founder-figure Pelayo from the Visigothic capital (Bonnaz, Chroniques, Chronique d’Albelda cap. 36 – there is no English translation of this published – and Chronique d’Alphonse III cap. 6.1, “Chronicle of Alfonso III” c. 8, with commentary at Collins, Arab Conquest, pp. 142-144. So, it’s possible there was a family animus at work here pinning all bad things on their rivals. By contrast, the Chronicle of 754 accuses one of the sons of King Egica of collaboration with the invaders (‘The Chronicle of 754’, trans. Kenneth Baxter Wolf, in Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers, pp. 111–160 at cap. 54, and thinks Witiza was a ray of sunshine who put everything right that his corrupt father Egica had done wrong (ibid. cap. 44), whereas the Chronicle of Alfonso III thinks Egica was the good one and Witiza the villain (Bonnaz, Chroniques, Chronique d’Alphonse III capp.  3-4; “Chronicle of Alfonso III”, cc. 4-5), so we seem to have a source from each side of the faction fighting but a century and a new border apart. I should note at this point – just in case things weren’t confused enough – that there are two variant versions of the Chronicle of Alfonso III, which Wolf’s translation unhelpfully synthesizes and which all four of the differing editions of reference capitulate differently… As for the doubt over Roderic’s death, the Chronicle of Alfonso III records that his grave was found in Viseu, in what’s now Portugal, in the writer’s own times (Bonnaz, Chroniques, Chronique d’Alphonse III, cap. 5.2; “Chronicle of Alfonso III”, c. 7. This looks likely to be an attempt at appropriation of a technical-sense pathetic legacy, however, as no other source ever picked up the claim.

5. This story is drawn largely from the respective works of Abū Marwān `Abd al-Malik ibn Ḥabīb al-Sulami (d. 853 CE in the Peninsula), Abu’l-Qāsim `Abd al-Raḥman ibn `Abdullah Ibn `Abd al-Ḥakam (d. 871 CE in Cairo) and the much later `Alī ʿIzz al-Dīn Ibn al-Athīr al-Jazarī (d. 1233 CE in Mosul). We know the work of Ibn Habib primarily though its citation by the other two, which I access through John Harris Jones (transl.), Ibn Abd-el-Hakem’s History of the Conquest of Spain, translated from the Arabic with a Historical Introduction (Göttingen 1858), online here as of 12th August 2023, and Ibn el-Athir, Annales du Maghreb et de l’Espagne, transl. Edmond Fagnan (Alger 1901) online here as of 23rd July 2016, respectively. Collins, Arab Conquest, summarises over pp. 25-26 & 31-35.

6. Jones, Ibn Abd-el-Hakem’s History, pp. 24-26 (though pp. 22-24 are also about misappropriation of treasure); Ibn el-Athir, Annales, pp. 48-50. The best guide on all of this is Denise Keyes Filios, “A good story well told: memory, identity, and the conquest of Iberia” in Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies Vol. 6 (Abingdon 2014), pp. 127–147, DOI: 10.1080/17546559.2014.932422.

7. Filios’s work ibid. and Denise Filios, “Legends of the Fall: Conde Julián in Medieval Arabic and Hispano-Latin Historiography” in Medieval Encounters Vol. 15 (Wien 2009), pp. 375–390, DOI: 10.1163/157006709X458918. Ibn al-Qūtīya can be read in Muḥammad ibn `Umar Ibn al-Qūṭīyah, Early Islamic Spain: the history of Ibn al-Qutiya, transl. David James (London 2011), online here; on him see Ann Christys, Christians in al-Andalus (711 – 1000), Culture and Civilization in the Middle East (Richmond 2002), pp. 158-183, Christys, “How the Royal House of Witiza Survived the Islamic Conquest of Spain” in Walter Pohl and Maximilian Diesenberger (edd.), Integration und Herrschaft: ethnische Identitäten und soziale Organisation im Frühmittelalter, Denkschriften der Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-historische Klasse 301 (Wien 2002), pp. 233–246 and Denise K. Filios, “Playing the Goth Card in Tenth-Century Córdoba: Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s Family Traditions” in La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Vol. 43 (Dallas TX 2015), pp. 57–84, DOI: 10.1353/cor.2015.0011.

8. For Count Julian see Filios, “Legends of the Fall”; for the nationalistic agonising see Pablo C. Díaz & María del R. Valverde, “The Theoretical Strength and Practical Weakness of the Visigothic Monarchy of Toledo” in Frans Theuws & Janet L. Nelson (edd.), Rituals of Power: From Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, The Transformation of the Roman World 8 (Leiden 2000), pp. 59‒93, and Javier Arce, “The Visigoths in Spain: old and new historical problems” in Walter Pohl and Veronika Wieser (edd.), Der frühmittelalterliche Staat – europäische Perspektiven, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 16 (Wien 2009), pp. 31–40 at pp. 31-34.

9. Bonnaz, Chroniques, Chronique d’Alphonse III cap. 1.3 (170 ships in the reign of Wamba (r. 672-680 CE)); “Chronicle of Alfonso III” c. 2 (270 ships). If the Chronicler of 754 knew about this, they gathered it in under “various misfortunes” during the reign (“Chronicle of 754” cap. 36. The Arabic source which mentions a test raid is Ibn el-Athīr, Annales, p. 42; the fact that this only turns up in such a late account doesn’t inspire confidence, especially since the detail is used to explain a place-name.

10. “Chronicle of 754” capp. 52 (pp. 131-132) & 64 (p. 137); Theodor Mommsen (ed.), Chronica Minora saec. IV. V. VI. VII 2, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Auctores Antiquissimi) 11 (Berlin 1894), online here, pp. 323-369 at pp. 352 & 356.

11. For example, Collins, Arab Conquest, pp. 46-48.

12. Gildas, The Ruin of Britain, and other documents, ed. Michael Winterbottom, Arthurian Period Sources 7 (London 1978), De Excidio c. 23; Simon Coupland, “From Poachers to Gamekeepers: Scandinavian warlords and Carolingian kings” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 7 (Oxford 1998), pp. 85–114, DOI: 10.1111/1468-0254.00019; Pierre Bauduin, “Chefs normandes et élites franques, fin IX^e-début X^e siècle” in idem (ed.), Les fondations scandinaves en Occident et les débuts du duché de Normandie (Caen 2005), pp. 181–194.

13. The date is from Ibn el-Athir, Annales, p. 33.

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?

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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?

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!

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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.

Did the Academy ever get hacked?

Over-promised and till now undelivered, this is the blogpost I have been putting in so much work on that it ate up my last three blogging days and you’ve had only apologies to read here for ages. Once I was halfway through the work for this, the sunk costs fallacy held me to the task – but it therefore behoved me to make it worth your while to read, and I’ve tried. It’s about a book which came out in 2013, an essay volume called Hacking the Academy, which, it proudly proclaimed, was "crowd-sourced in one week" (more on that below) and was a collection of essays forecasting, planning or just wishing for a complete revision of academic and university practices in the brave new light of the Internet as it was then developing (or, given print process speeds, as it was for the most part two to three years before).¹

Although at the time I never read the book in full, there are a few bits of it which I did catch and still cite now and then, some in approval and some not, and because of this in July 2020 it occurred to me that I ought to grab it into my citation library.² In doing so I was forced for the first time at least to skim the contents and it struck me with force how badly the thing seemed to have aged. That wasn’t unexpected, of course; it’s a book about the Internet, after all. Years and years ago, like, 2009 ago, I wrote a post about a conference paper I’d just then read from 1998, taking its author’s first tentative steps into what then passed for the scholarly Internet, and the main thing I found then was that almost all of what they wrote about had since gone.³ My first impression from reconfronting Hacking the Academy nine years on was not quite that, however, but that either the things it had to say were still true, and that this was a problem because obviously they hadn’t been hacked, or else they were failed anticipations or bad ideas in the first place. And at that point I stubbed a post to do another of those appraisals about this more recent piece of technical evangelism. But then, of course, I hadn’t done the background work… So if that sounds interesting then read on; if not, another post will be along soon with photos of tourism in it that might interest you instead.

The lost reputation of King Hugh of Italy

As so often, I have to beg your forgiveness for a gap in posting. Family has become a much larger part of my life this year than usual, is probably the shortest way to put it, and they keep getting my weekends. However, I do have something ready now, so here goes. Every now and then I am spurred to write a post here by something I’ve read, in which I think I have a new historical insight that, nonetheless, I don’t think I could get a publication out of, either because it’s too minor or because I could never get up to speed in the relevant subfield in time. That latter kind of thought is obviously vulnerable to me subsequently finding out that, if I had been up to speed, I’d have known someone had already had the idea; we’ve seen this happen here, and this time it has happened again but thankfully, during the draft stage so that I can still write it up coherently. On this occasion, the subject is a tenth-century king who too often gets forgotten about, Hugh of Italy, and it turns out I may still have something to add.

Portrait of King Hugh of Italy from the 12th-century cartulary of the monastery of Casauria, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Lat. 5411, fo. 270r, online here but on this occasion got from the public domain file on Wikimedia Commons

Hugh of Italy is not much known now. He began his career as son of the Count of Arles, in southern France, at the time when the Carolingian Empire was running into its final breakdown, and he wound up closely associated with one of the last and most troubled Carolingians, Louis the Blind, son of the usurper King Boso of Provence but nonetheless himself becoming King of Provence after his father in 887, King of Italy in 900 and Emperor in 901. Louis was kicked out of Italy in a coup there in 905, which is when he earned his unfortunate byname, and retired to Provence where Hugh now became his chief advisor and started an on-and-off war with King Rudolph II of Burgundy. Rudolph also got involved in Italy, in the end deposing and removing Emperor Berengar, who had chased out Louis the Blind, and Berengar’s supporters therefore asked Hugh to step in, so in 925 he became King of Italy like his boss had been; in 928, when Louis died, Hugh simply annexed Provence to Italy and ruled them both, and he lasted in this position, more or less, till 945, when he in his turn got kicked out of Italy by another man named Berengar. Still King of Provence, Hugh died not very long after this, in 947.¹

Despite the tangled way in which it all arose, in the terms of the time Hugh was a success as King of Italy. His rule really only encompassed the north of the peninsula, and he could not control Rome despite a tactical marriage there (largely because the relevant wife, the infamous Marozia, had a son by her first husband, Alberic I lord of Rome, himself an interesting figure, and that son, Alberic II, did not intend to let the city out of his grip despite his mother’s new interest). But on the other hand, Hugh fought and won (mostly) against the Hungarian raiding armies that plagued the era and the Muslim raiders who had set up in the wildest part of Provence at la Garde-Freinet; he managed that latter with Byzantine naval help, and in the end indeed a daughter of his married into the Byzantine imperial family and finished up briefly as empress.² I put some of this together for my article that touched on la Garde-Freinet and thought then that it seemed weird that someone so internationally successful should be such a small part of our historiography.³ Admittedly, he has the problem that he belongs to no current nation very clearly, so no-one wants him to be proud of; but still. He held a series of tricky situations together for decades with what was clearly considerable personal force and ability. So why is his reputation so scant?

Later tenth-century manuscript page of Liutprand’s Antapodosis, now Münich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 6338, image public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Well, when I was then writing it seemed obvious to me that the answer was Liudprand of Cremona. Everyone’s favourite gossipy tenth-century Italian chronicler, you see, owed Hugh a living, having first been employed at his court. As a result of this, he is usually considered to be one of Hugh’s fans, but I have never thought this to be so. Liudprand undermines Hugh by mocking his wives’ conniving manipulation of him, which I knew already from scholarship, but looking at la Garde-Freinet I realised that he also collapses time so that Hugh’s victory over the Muslims there is immediately made irrelevant by his concession of the frontier passes of the Alps to them to keep him safe from Berengar of Ivrea, which actually only happened later.⁴ Whether Liudprand owed him his start or not, therefore, Hugh was apparently safe to lampoon from where Liudprand eventually got, and what success of his comes through Liudprand’s account is, I think, simply because it was too well-known to be ignored; he had to go all Chaucer’s Knight on it instead.⁵ So I thought that we should probably try looking past Liudprand to see the real power that Hugh apparently wielded. And then I read something else which notes that at the Italian monastery of Farfa, a namesake but unrelated Abbot Hugh at the end of the tenth century remembered King Hugh as a force for the good in the monastery’s history, helping it recover its property by installing and supporting an effective abbot like the author. That’s a politicised record itself, obviously, but one in which Hugh featured as one of the good kings, not the bad ones who had helped Farfa lose the property in the first place.⁶ So I decided there was something to write here.

Now, as it turns out, better scholars of Italy than me had already spotted this, and in particular none other than Ross Balzaretti had already published an article in 2016 that I’d completely missed, saying that it’s not just Liudprand, but all Liudprand’s contacts, who participate in this running down of Hugh’s reputation.⁷ Ross thinks that this was not just to amuse King Otto I of the Germans, for whom by this time most of these people worked and who in one case had installed their boss, but because of Hugh’s pretty free-wheeling attitude to marriage and legitimacy of offspring. The Wikipedia entry I found when I first drafted this post in February 2020 was and still is revealing here: it lists eight children, only two of whom were legitimate, both by his second of four wives. Hugh probably wasn’t the model reform monarch, therefore, whatever Farfa thought of him, and he had also removed one of our important primary authors, Bishop Rather of Verona, from office for a while.⁸ So there were axes grinding for him. Liudprand, who seems to have been highly amused by all sexual misconduct, probably didn’t think better of anyone for it either, but mainly I think he just found Hugh laughable in safe retrospect; Liudprand wasn’t a very nice man.⁹ Anyway, Ross does all this better than I just have, including the setting of Hugh’s career in context, so you can read him if you need the details. But there is just one thing he doesn’t cover, and there I can help because it’s about the Iberian Peninsula and indeed also about la Garde-Freinet.

La Garde-Freinet, seen from the fort ruins on Massif des Maures, photo by Patrick Rouzet – Own work, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Y’see, it wasn’t just the Byzantines who paid attention to Hugh, but also the first Umayyad Caliph in Spain, ‘Abd al-Rahmān III al-Nāsir. Various European rulers seem to have assumed that he was in some way or another in charge of the Muslim raiders at la Garde-Freinet, whom even Muslim sources say had come from al-Andalus, and embassies were probably sent to him about this.¹⁰ The most famous of these was led by Abbot John of Gorze, who spent several years in Córdoba while everyone tried to stop him getting himself martyred by denouncing the Prophet Muhammad before the Caliph.¹¹ It’s not really clear that he was sent to negotiate about the raiders, rather than in fact to denounce Islam, but priorities seem to have changed as when he sent for instructions after a couple of years, that was one of the things that came back: “accomplish peace and friendship about the infestation of Saracen bandits”.¹² The source that tells us this, a biography of John written after his death, unfortunately doesn’t survive complete, so we don’t know if that was achieved once he and the caliph made friends, but we may suspect not. Why? Because the Muslim chronicler Ibn Hayyān, writing in the later eleventh century but with apparent access to Cordoban court records, recorded a different embassy from a different king that raised the same question, as a result of which instructions were sent to the qādi (more or less, director) at ‘Farahsinit’, pretty clearly Fraxinetum, the Latin for la Garde-Freinet, telling him to lay off the relevant king’s territory. And who was the relevant king? Why, Hugh of Italy of course.¹³

So at the end of this we have, for the first half of the tenth century, one man whose diplomatic web reached effectively from end to end of the Mediterranean, making rulers he’d never met do what he wanted for no very clear reason, making up for his own weakness by his ability to mobilise or demobilise the forces of others, and generally surviving at the precarious pinnacle of Italian and wider Meridional politics for twenty years and getting in the end to die in his bed, quite possibly with someone the Church thought he shouldn’t have been with. There are ways in which such a person could be considered the most important man in Europe just then, and I imagine Hugh did so see himself (which may be why Liudprand liked to take him down so much). If I ever write the book I’d like to about the tenth century, Hugh will have to get a decent bit of it. It makes you wonder what other people like this have got written out or down because their achievements didn’t turn into countries or monasteries…

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1. In English there really isn’t much about tenth-century Italy, as I’ve mentioned before, but I recently re-read Guiseppe Sergi, “The Kingdom of Italy” in Timothy Reuter (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History volume III: c. 900–c. 1024 (Cambridge 1999), pp. 346–371, and it’s better than I remembered and definitely enough to start with. I haven’t yet read Chris Wickham, Medieval Rome: stability and crisis of a city, 900-1150 (Oxford 2015), but you’d imagine it would help.

2. Here you’d definitely want Wickham, Medieval Rome, by the look of it pp. 20-28 & 204-212, but for la Garde-Freinet best of all is Kees Versteegh, “The Arab Presence in France and Switzerland in the 10th Century” in Arabica Vol. 37 (Leiden 1990), pp 359–388, and for the Byzantine marriage you’re best to go to the source, which is Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio, ed. Gyula Moravcsik & transl. R. J. H. Jenkins, Corpus fontium historiae Byzantinae 1, 2nd ed. (Washington DC 1967), cap. 26.

3. Jonathan Jarrett, “Nests of Pirates? ‘Islandness’ in the Balearic Islands and la-Garde-Freinet” in al-Masāq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean Vol. 31 (Abingdon 2019), pp. 196–222, DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2019.1600101, pp. 212-214.

4. The Works of Liudprand of Cremona: Antapodosis; Liber de Rebus Gestis Ottonis; Relatio de Legatione Constantinopolitana, transl. F. A. Wright (London 1930), online here, Antapodosis V.xvi-xvii, and see also V.xix. On interpreting Liudprand, an ever-live concern, see for example Jon N. Sutherland, Liudprand of Cremona, Bishop, Diplomat, Historian: Studies of the Man and His Age (Spoleto 1988), and, maybe best of all till recently, Karl Leyser, “Ends and Means in Liudprand of Cremona” in James Howard-Johnston (ed.), Byzantium and the West, c. 850‒c. 1200, Byzantinische Forschungen 13 (Amsterdam 1988), pp. 119–143, reprinted in Leyser, Communications and Power in Medieval Europe: The Carolingian and Ottonian Centuries, ed. Timothy Reuter (London 1994), pp. 125–142.

5. For those that don’t know, I refer here to a book by the late lamented member of Monty Python, Terry Jones, Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary, 4th edn (London 2017), originally published in 1980, in which he argued that the apparently-heroic and chivalric knight in the Canterbury Tales was actually being placed by Chaucer at every notorious defeat or disgrace in European warfare of the fourteenth century possible for one man to attend, as a send-up of the ideal of chivalry the knight purported to represent. This was widely embraced by literature scholars at the time, and widely rejected by scholars of medieval warfare as being a stretched reading of almost all the evidence, or so I have been told. Jones seems to have relished the fight and made his argument more specific with each edition. Still, I have been told this at school, thirty years ago, in the specific context of a history teacher telling us our English teacher was teaching us rubbish, and so it’s possible I don’t fairly reflect the current state of the discussion…

6. Jean-Marie Sansterre, “« Destructio » et « diminutio » d’une grande abbaye royale : la perception et la mémoire des crises à Farfa aux Xe et dans les premières décennies du XIe siècle” in François Bougard, Laurent Feller and Régine Le Jan (edd.), Les élites au haut moyen âge : crises et renouvellements, Haut Moyen Âge 1 (Turnhout 2006), pp. 469–485 at p. 475.

7. Ross Balzaretti, “Narratives of success and narratives of failure: representations of the career of King Hugh of Italy (c.885–948)” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 24 (Oxford 2016), pp. 185–208, DOI: 10.1111/emed.12140, on Academia.edu here.

8. Balzaretti, “Narratives”, pp. 190-197; on Rather of Verona see also Irene van Renswoude, “The sincerity of fiction: Rather and the quest for self-knowledge” in Richard Corradini, Matthew Gillis, Rosamond McKitterick and Irene van Renswoude (edd.), Ego Trouble: Authors and Their Identities in The Early Middle Ages, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 15 (Wien 2010), pp. 227–242, on Academia.edu here.

9. See here not least Ross Balzaretti, “Liutprand of Cremona’s Sense of Humour” in Guy Halsall (ed.), Humour, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge 2002), pp. 114–127, but also Philippe Buc, “Italian Hussies and German Matrons: Liutprand of Cremona on Dynastic Legitimacy” in Frühmittelalterliche Studien Vol. 29 (Sigmaringen 1995), pp. 207–225, or Antoni Grabowski, “From Castration to Misogyny: The Meaning of Liudprand of Cremona’s Humour” in Acta Poloniae Historica Vol. 112 (Warszawa 2015), pp. 243–268.

10. Argued most straightforwardly by Ann Christys, Christians in al-Andalus (711 – 1000) (Richmond 2002), pp. 108-110, on the supposed basis of Liudprand, Antapodosis, I.i-iii; but Liudprand never actually describes the embassy which his correspondent, Recemund by then Bishop of Elvira, was returning, there or elsewhere.

11. Christys, Christians in al-Andalus, pp. 109-113; for the Life, or the significant bit of it, in English (and indeed in Latin) see Colin Smith (ed./transl.), Christians and Moors in Spain, volume 1: 711 – 1150 (Warminster 1988), no. 14.

12. Frustratingly, Smith ellipses this bit out of his translation (ibid. cap. 130). I actually did my own translation before finding Smith’s, however, which is what I’m here quoting, and if you want the Latin you can find it in Georg Heinrich Pertz (ed.), “Vita Iohannis Abbatis Gorziensis auctore Iohanne Abbate S. Arnulfi” in Pertz & Georg Waitz (edd.), Monumenta Germaniae Historica… Scriptorum Tomus IV (Hannover 1841), online here, pp. 335‒377, where it is also cap. 130.

13. Jarrett, “Nests of Pirates?”, p. 214, based on Versteegh, “Arab Presence”, p. 363 & n. 15. He cites Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Muqtabis, ed. Pedro Chalmeta, Federico Corriente & M. Subh (Madrid 1979), p. 308.

Digital palaeography come of age? Not quite yet

@leedsucu picket lines have started for the day. Don't cross the picket line! #ucuRISING #UCUstrike pic.twitter.com/9NQkDHOoYG

— Dr Aisha Walker 🇪🇺 #BeTheUnion #EnoughIsEnough (@aishawalker) March 21, 2023

We are now firmly into 2020 in my blog blacklog, and that was, as you presumably remember, so very different a year that I amassed rather fewer stubs than usual and might even move through it mercifully quickly. For now, however, we’re in mid-February of that year, when an old friend who likes to scour the Internet for medievalist news, or as in this case even older, picked up on a recent study of digital methods for dating ancient texts and posed me the reflection which forms the title above: was this digital palæography finally coming of age?¹

Now, I am less concerned than some have reason to be about the possibility of my expertise and training being replaceable by automation, although with every attempt to automate marking or package teaching content in such a way that anyone can deliver it whether expert or not, we get a step closer.² Still, the actual doing of historical analysis, whether I am paid for that or not, will probably remain a thing beyond computerised automation until we somehow go full-on Hari Seldon, and the database categories you’d need for such an analysis will probably take a few more civilisations to work out, so I think I’m safe. But at the fringes of the historical endeavour, if I was picking a discipline for highest vulnerability to digitsation and automation, it might well be palæography. That’s not just because almost no institution wants to pay for there to be palæographers, despite the near endless potential they have for research contributions; it’s also because at its absolute basic simplest, the discipline of palæography is based on the ability to recognise consistent graphical patterns, that is, letter-forms, and graphical pattern recognition (rather than social pattern recognition à la Seldon) is a thing computers are good at.

Screenshot of the Digipal database interface showing the letter "eth" as written at Worcester Cathedral, borrowed from their website, linked through

Accordingly, it’s not surprising that almost since computing and the humanities first tentatively shook hands, people have been trying to get computers to recognise and date ancient and medieval scripts. The earliest reference I have on this goes back to 1994 and relates to Egyptian papyri, and that was little more than an expression of hope, but by 2006, when I myself was briefly professionally interested in image recognition, people were getting closer.³ Back then the academic work was ahead of Google Image Search, but that didn’t last long, and before long technology like theirs was getting into humanities computing labs and I was seeing papers about it.⁴ Now those papers are coming out and people are clearly making great progress, especially it seems with South Asian scripts, so the fact that the one my friend had pointed me to existed was not surprising to me.⁵ But whether because she hadn’t been looking for this sort of stuff already or because I am just more cynical, I wasn’t expecting as much from this article as my friend suggested was in it.

There are, I guess, at least three ways a scientific study on something from my periods of interest can disappoint. The most annoying is when even I can see that it’s scientifically faulty, because of minuscule sample size, unconsidered error margins, lack of reproducibility or whatever.⁶ Nearly as annoying is when the science appears to be good but the historical context is more or less derived from the 1950s textbooks which apparently sourced either the lead researchers’ own undergraduate study or the Wikipedia page on which they based their questions; that’s annoying because they could just have asked (and then ideally credited) a historian, and I myself would love to be asked, so you know, come on.⁷ But much the most common and least reproachable, but still annoying for the non-scientific reader, is the study which is actually out to test or validate a method, not to find out something historical, and which therefore stops at ‘we have therefore shown that this could work’ without actual results.⁸ And this is one of those, a study of how we might digitally date the many undated fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls which, nonetheless, does not actually date any of them, because what it is trying to do is make their systems match the dates humans have already assigned to such fragments.

Dead Sea Scroll of Genesis, Jerusalem, Israel Museum 4Q7, image by KetefHinnomFan – own work, licensed as CC0 via Wikimedia Commons, cropped

You might then ask why, if they in fact had a viable method demonstrated, they didn’t at least go so far as to show it in action. It might have been because they were attempting to avoid the risk of showing their historical ignorance, like those behind a new pottery dating method back in the day; but actually, it’s worse; they didn’t yet have a viable method.⁹ Instead, their conclusions section is full of fixes which might be applied to make the method work better: a new date calculation method which didn’t ideally require even intervals (which they didn’t have, because the palaeographical datings they were trying to match worked in historic periods, not mathematical ones), or a specialised Hebrew character recognition tool, for example.¹⁰ Their error margins were reckoned to be about 23 years either side of the central year in any given dating period; that would be better than the few radio-carbon dates that have come off the Scrolls, if it were accurate, but when one of the periods into which they are trying to date is only thirty years long – less, we might note, than the lifespan of most of the people writing in the appropriate style – you can see how that wasn’t enough.¹¹ It doesn’t quite end with ‘so, back to the drawing board’, but it’s very much, ‘don’t come in, we’re not ready yet’.

For me, however, this study does not fail because of the weakness of the computing techniques used. I’m quite prepared to believe that for the values they’ve set up, those techniques could be refined, and at least they eliminate several as being unhelpful for the endeavour. But the problem they don’t see is the human element, in two places: in the creation of their source matter and in the provision of their classifications. The latter of these, the fact that the datings they were trying to train their method to match were all subjective by-eye evaluations by human beings, be they never so learned, the authors at least wave at in the introduction, saying that one advantage of a digital palæographical method might be to reduce subjectivity before proposing one based entirely on subjectively derived datings.¹² But the fact that humans, individual ones many of whose working lives probably overlapped their period boundaries, actually made the things they’re trying to date, almost eludes them. They do admit that scribes demonstrably change their writing styles over time, before saying that they are after a method which captures period-level shift in script instead; but they don’t seem to see that the former factor is a component of the latter.¹³ This is partly just the problem of database categorisation: something must fall one side of a line or the other, it can’t be ‘sort of both’.¹⁴ But it’s also humans in action, muddling along, trying something different, going back to the old ways disappointed, maybe trying again later. Every one of those decisions and choices could throw a close palæographical dating way out. A good palæographer knows all this and tries, subjectively, to account for it with context and background knowledge. Remove that subjectivity, and every palæographical judgement would need to come with huge error bars which would be labelled, if there were space, ‘unless this is a weird one’. Long ago, a then-lawyer friend of mine angrily told me in a pub, “the trouble with you historians, Jon, is you forget that people are weird!” Probably a fair complaint; but I’m not the only one guilty… So in the end perhaps the human palæographer has not yet got to fear robotic replacement: the computers will certainly end up better able to match patterns than we can, but the task of working out what the patterns mean is going to remain gloriously and resistantly fuzzy.¹⁵

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1. Maruf A. Dhali, Camilo Nathan Jansen, Jan Willem de Wit & Lambert Schomaker, “Feature-extraction methods for historical manuscript dating based on writing style development”, edd. Francesca Fontanella, Francesco Colace, Mario Molinara, Alessandra Scotto di Freca & Filippo Stanco in Pattern Recognition Letters Vol. 131 (Amsterdam 2020), pp. 413–420, DOI: 10.1016/j.patrec.2020.01.027.

2. Cf. Innovating Pedagogy: Exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers by Agnes Kukulska-Holme, Carina Bossu, Tim Coughlan, Rebecca Ferguson, Elizabeth FitzGerald, Mark Gaved, Christothea Herotodou, Bart Rientes, Julia Sargent, Eileen Scanlon, Jinlian Tang, Qi Wang, Denise Whitelock & Shuai Zhang, Open University Innovation Report 9 (London 2021), online here, or Wayne Holmes & Ilkka Tuomi, “State of the art and practice in AI in education” in European Journal of Education Vol. 57 (Oxford 2022), pp. 542–570, DOI: 10.1111/ejed.12533, which both think otherwise.

3. The 1994 paper is Janet Johnson, “Computers, Graphics and Papyrology” in Adam Bülow-Jacobsen (ed.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Papyrologists, Copenhagen, 23-29 August, 1992 (Copenhagen 1994), pp. 618–620. By 2007 one could also count Ikram Moalla, Frank LeBourgeois, Hubert Emptoz and Adel M. Alimi, “Contribution to the Discrimination of the Medieval Manuscript Texts: Application in the Palaeography” in Horst Bunke and A. Lawrence Spitz (edd.), Document Analysis Systems VII: Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3872 (Berlin 2006), pp. 25–37, or M. Bulacu and L. Schomaker, “Automatic Handwriting Identification on Medieval Documents” in 14th International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing (ICIAP 2007) (New York City NY 2007), pp. 279–284, online here, one of the authors of which shows up again in the paper under discussion. I’m sure there was lots more. The team I was part of myself was concerned with coins (inevitably) and showed up with Martin Kampel, “Computer Aided Analysis of Ancient Coins” in Robert Sablatnig, James Hemsley, Paul Kammerer, Ernestine Zolda and Johann Stockinger (edd.), Digital Cultural Heritage – Essential for Tourism (Wien 2008), pp. 137–144, and eventually Jonathan Jarrett, Sebastian Zambanini, Reinhold Hüber-Mork and Achille Felicetti, “Coinage, Digitization and the World-Wide Web: numismatics and the COINS Project” in Brent Nelson and Melissa Terras (edd.), Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture (Tempe AZ 2012), pp. 459–489.

4. For example, Arianna Ciula, “The Palaeographical Method under the Light of a Digital Approach”, presented at the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, 8 July 2008, and Peter Stokes, “Computing for Anglo-Saxon Paleography, Manuscript Studies and Diplomatic”, presented at the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, 13 July 2011, both mentioned here in their seasons.

5. Ciula’s did, at least, as Arianna Ciula, “The Palaeographical Method Under the Light of a Digital Approach” in Malte Rehbein, Patrick Sahle & Torsten Schaßan (edd.), Kodikologie und Paläographie im digitalen Zeitalter. Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age (Norderstedt 2009), pp. 219–235; Stokes’s I haven’t seen, but he did mastermind DigiPal, so it’s not like he left the game. One could also see Florian Kleber, Robert Sablatnig, Melanie Gau and Heinz Miklas, “Ruling Estimation for Degraded Ancient Documents based on Text Line Extraction” and Maria C. Vill, Melanie Gau, Heinz Miklas and Robert Sablatnig, “Static Stroke Decomposition of Glagolitic Characters”, both in Sablatnig, Hemsley, Kammerer, Zolda & Stockinger, Digital Cultural Heritage, pp. pp 79–86 & 95–102, or Jinna Smit, “The Death of the Palaeographer? Experiences with the Groningen Intelligent Writer Identification System (GIWIS)” in Archiv für Diplomatik Vol. 57 (München 2011), pp. 413–425, as steps along the way, and Mike Kestemont, Vincent Christlein and Dominique Stutzmann, “Artificial Paleography: Computational Approaches to Identifying Script Types in Medieval Manuscripts” in Speculum Vol. 92 (Cambridge MA 2017), pp. S86–S109, for where we are now or were recently. Again, I could cite lots more. On South Asian scripts, see Shaveta Dargan and Munish Kumar, “Gender Classification and Writer Identification System based on Handwriting in Gurumukhi Script” in International Conference on Computing, Communication, and Intelligent Systems (ICCCIS 2021) (New York City NY 2021), Vol. I, pp. 388–393, online here, and S. Brindha and S. Bhuvaneswari, “Repossession and recognition system: transliteration of antique Tamil Brahmi typescript” in Current Science Vol. 120 (Bengaluru 2021), pp. 654–665.

6. Discussed here but harmless: Michael McCormick, Paul Edward Dutton and Paul A. Mayewski, “Volcanoes and the Climate Forcing of Carolingian Europe, A.D. 750-950” in Speculum Vol. 84 (Cambridge MA 2007), pp. 869–895. Nastier: Mario Slaus, Zeljko Tomicić, Ante Uglesić and Radomir Jurić, “Craniometric relationships among medieval Central European populations: implications for Croat migration and expansion” in Croatian Medical Journal Vol. 45 (Zagreb 2004), pp. 434–444, PMID: 15311416.

7. S. R. H. Jones, “Devaluation and the Balance of Payments in Eleventh-Century England: an exercise in Dark Age economics” in Economic History Review 2nd Series Vol. 44 (1994), pp. 594–607; for an example where they did ask a historian but then didn’t credit her, see Susan M. Adams, Elena Bosch, Patricia L. Balaresque, Stéphane J. Ballereau, Andrew C. Lee, Eduardo Arroyo, Ana M. López-Parra, Mercedes Aler, Marina S. Gisbert Grifo, Maria Brion, Angel Carracedo, João Lavinha, Begoña Martínez-Jarreta, Lluis Quintana-Murci, Antònia Picornell, Misericordia Ramon, Karl Skorecki, Doron M. Behar, Francesc Calafell and Mark A. Jobling, “The Genetic Legacy of Religious Diversity and Intolerance: Paternal Lineages of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula” in American Journal of Human Genetics Vol. 83 (Bethesda 2008), pp. 725-736, DOI: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2008.11.007, where Dolors Bramon is acknowledged p. 734.

8. For example Alice M. W. Hunt and Robert J. Speakman, “Portable XRF analysis of archaeological sediments and ceramics” in Journal of Archaeological Science Vol. 53 (Amsterdam 2015), pp. 626–638, which more or less says, ‘this is a silly thing to do but if you must, here’s how’; cf. Warren W. Esty, “Estimation of the Size of a Coinage: a Survey and Comparison of Methods” in Numismatic Chronicle Vol. 146 (London 1986), pp. 185–215, for another example from a different discipline.

9. My whipping boy this time is Moira A. Wilson, Margaret A. Carter, Christopher Hall, William D. Hoff, Ceren Ince, Shaun D. Savage, Bernard McKay & Ian M. Betts, “Dating fired-clay ceramics using long-term power law rehydroxylation kinetics” in Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences Vol. 465 (London 2009), pp. 2407–2415, DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2009.0117, on whose problems see my old Cliopatria post here.

10. Dhali & al., “Feature-extraction methods”, p. 419.

11. Ibid., p. 418 (error margins) & pp. 414-415 (periodization), with the problems it causes expressed p. 419.

12. Ibid., p. 413 and 413-414.

13. Ibid. p. 414. For more on the problem see Jesús Alturo and Tània Alaix, “Categories of Promoters and Categories of Writings: The Free Will of the Scribes, Cause of Formal Graphic Differences” in Barbara Shailor and Consuelo W. Dutschke (edd.), Scribes and the Presentation of Texts (from Antiquity to c. 1550), Bibliologia 65 (Turnhout 2021), pp. 123–149.

14. Cf. Jonathan A. Jarrett, “Poor tools to think with: the human space in digital diplomatics” in Antonella Ambrosio, Sébastien Barret and Georg Vogeler (edd.), Digital diplomatics: The computer as a tool for the diplomatist?, Beihefte der Archiv für Diplomatik 14, (Köln 2014), pp. 291–302.

15. It wasn’t deliberate, but it’s probably no coincidence that the position I thus finish with is similar to that in Smit, “Death of the Palaeographer?” and Arianna Ciula, “Digital palaeography: What is digital about it?” in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Vol. 32 Supplement 2 (Oxford 2017), pp. ii89–ii105, DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqx042.