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.

Not what the textbooks usually mean by ‘manuscript illustration’

Thankyou all those who have encouraged me to keep going with the blog! Plans remain afoot, but for now you can certainly have this little gem (not a lettuce) which apparently I stashed for future writing up in May 2021. It speaks to some of the blog’s oldest themes, to wit protochronism, micro-histories in administrative documents and, not least, medieval sex, and I owe it to the sharp observation of Rebecca Darley, who had she known she was going to be doing the blogging thing herself after a while might well have kept it; so thankyou Rebecca, but it’s mine now!

Cover of Lucy Blue, Fred Hocker and Anton Englert (edd.), Connected by the Sea: Proceedings of Tenth International Symposium on Boat and Ship Archaeology, Roskilde 2003 (Oxford 2006)

Right, so, we’re out of my usual territory now, because of Rebecca reading her way through the proceedings a Festkonferenz held at the Viking Ship Museum (as it then was) at Roskilde, no less, for archæologist of boats and ports, the late Seán MacGrail.¹ Obviously not everything in the resulting volume is in either of our areas of interest, but it is nice all the same to read what you own and find out what others are interested in, and thus she came across Professor David Hinton, who gave Professor MacGrail a paper on tax returns from East Anglian shipowners as of 1344. That is apparently the first point at which we have that sort of record, as part of a series of occasional taxes on people’s movable property to pay for the Hundred Years War called lay subsidies.² The 1344 returns go down, in some places, to individual shipowners, their named ships and it’s all very interesting, but midway through dealing with King’s Lynn Professor Hinton, who is at this point chasing a distinction between the texts seem to make sizes of ship, jumps to a fifteenth-century overseas tax record from the town, in which one of the smaller vessels, batelli, is recorded.³ And this is where the blogpost suddenly comes from:

"… overseas customs lists include a 15th-century account of a vessel in a creek, its forfeited cargo interesting for its mixture of wool and rabbit-skins, hardware, jet and glass beads, harp strings, lewd calendars and such-like, said to have been ‘in magno batello vocato kele‘…"

Professor Hinton is in many ways a better man than I, as is clear from the fact that he really is in this only for the boat-related philology and does nothing further with any element of that heterogenous cargo. Whereas I, and perhaps you, immediately reacted with: "lewd calendars?!"

So, perhaps these are well-known to scholars of high medieval England, but a long time ago in the history of this blog, and indeed others now long gone like The Naked Philologist and Got Medieval, we had quite the discussion about medieval pornography, largely because we kept getting searches for "medieval sex pictures" and the like.⁴ As I recall, the tentative conclusion was that there really wasn’t any, or at least none that survives or is referred to. Carl Pyrdum of Got Medieval, who had invented the rod for his own back that was Google Penance, where you try and post what people actually came to your blog looking for rather than what they found, eventually found one manuscript illumination of Lancelot and Guinevere in bed together where as well as their heads you can see, like, two naked upper chests, and that was about it. But we obviously just weren’t looking low enough (in society, I mean).

That image is actually pretty easy to find, being in Le Livre de Lancelot du Lac, British Library Additional MS 10293, fo. 312v. Unfortunately, because the British Library’s digitised manuscripts are still unavailable after the cyber-attack there last October, this Alamy clip is the best currently out there. I reproduce it anyway, however, since the real image is public domain.

But the news that in fifteenth-century England there was actually enough of a market for the saucy calendar that you could ship them in, albeit in a ship whose crew were trying, apparently badly, to smuggle their cargo in rather than pay duty, raises all kinds of questions. Where were these calendars actually being made? Amsterdam leaps to mind but for completely anachronistic reasons – unless they’re not! and so on. Also, are we talking just a count of days to the month, each with perhaps a seasonally-disattired woodcut, a list of festivals and dates? All the actual medieval calendars I know of are roughly page-per-month of almanackish text, saying what there is about the month that is notable, including feast days and so on, and they’re overall much more like books. In some cases they have marginal illustration, however, and the marginalia are presumably where, in this case and if you’ll forgive the phrase, the action was.

I know this isn’t very lewd, but we’ve already sailed quite close enough to the wind there thankyou, plus which, as I say, I’m not sure we have any of that sort of calendar. Instead, here are some labourers working at the top of February in London, British Library, Labourers clearing land, in a calendar illustration for February in London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B V/1, f. 3v

So the "classic" pin-up calendar on the wall of a King’s Lynn chandler is probably not what we have here. But what did we? Professor Hinton is probably right that it’s not the important thing to focus on here – apart from anything else, it leaves cruelly ignored the question of what market there was in Lynn for black-market harp-strings… – but I can’t help but wonder, and then feel slightly prurient for doing so. Still. Anyone know more? If not, I hope at least this is some good old 2012-style entertainment for you all!

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1. Lucy Blue, Fred Hocker and Anton Englert (edd.), Connected by the Sea: Proceedings of Tenth International Symposium on Boat and Ship Archaeology, Roskilde 2003 (Oxford 2006).

2. David Hinton, "Ships and Subsidies" in Blue, Hocker and Englert, Connected by the Sea, pp. 205-209.

3. Hinton, "Ships and Subsidies", p. 206.

4. The Naked Philologist clearly won that round by observing, of a search for "naked medieval people", "How are you going to tell? They’re naked."

Seminar CLXXXII: John of Nikiû on persecution

I promised something more substantial and so here it is, a note about a paper of late May 2021 that is, I think, still interesting stuff. Two levels of background you need: first, that what with our seminar series at the University of Leeds being forced online like everything else we did in that time of pandemic, the then-Director of the Institute of Medieval Studies, Dr Alaric Hall, took the chance to broaden our reach a bit, both in terms of nationality of speakers and of topics of discussion, which is how on 25th May we were hearing from Dr Felege-Selam Solomon Yirga, then and now at the University of Tennessee, with the title, “The Chronicle of John of Nikiu”. Second, John of Nikiû—who?

There are basically no images of either John of Nikiû or of anything of his era left from his old city, so the fact that Dr Yirga has given a paper or two about him now means that he himself is the main response to image searches for John. So I thought, why not. Here is Dr Yirga at Dumbarton Oaks ahead of giving a different paper about John there the year before.

OK, you have possibly just heard of Bishop John of Nikiû if you studied the era of Islamic conquests for more than a week but otherwise chances are poor. Nikiû is in Egypt, and a history that John wrote, a universal history in good Church tradition (though which Church? coming to that) running from Adam to the arrival of Islam in Egypt, is one of the earliest sources we have for that latter event. Unfortunately, it also exists only in quite a late Ge’ez version of an Arabic translation of what was probably originally a Coptic text based on Greek sources, and we don’t have all of it.¹ Phew. But better than nothing, am I right?

Now, Dr Yirga did his Ph. D. on John and his chronicle and so is better equipped to answer that question than most, and the way he chose to go about it was to say, let’s stop for a moment trying to work out what John was doing in his text about the events for which he is the immediate primary source, and see what he does with older events where we have some outside idea what happened and can thus work out his agenda. And that proves to be interesting, if not very conclusive.

There are several busts and statues supposedly of Diocletian, which show at least three clearly different men, so as is my wont, I’m going for an inarguably contemporary, if stereotypical, image of him, in the form of this billon nummus struck at Heraclea in 295-296 CE, which is in the University of Leeds Brotherton Library, Thackray Collection, olim CC/TH/ROM/IMP/812

The episode that Dr Yirga took for examination was the persecution of Christians under the Roman Emperor Diocletian, the only Roman emperor ever, I think, to retire and die peacefully at home.² (Tetricus I might also count, but I digress.³) Naturally you would not expect Diocletian’s persecution to receive a neutral press in Christian sources written after the eventual victory of their religion in the empire, and indeed it usually does not, because apart from anything else it has historically been an excellent period in which to situate the careers of martyrs whose lives need, um, filling out for lack of information.⁴ But John went somewhere else with it. Firstly, he made Diocletian himself Egyptian; secondly, he originated the persecution in a rebellion against Diocletian in Alexandria, making the anti-Christian measures part of how Diocletian suppressed this rising in his homeland; then thirdly he gave him this Nebuchadnezzar-like divine madness and illness which sent him off to the West as a hated exile, from which he returned when cured but never to rule again. (Actually he just went on and off with the persecutions until his retirement and in most other respects is regarded as one of Rome’s great reformers and generally a success.⁴) Now, some of this has at least some connection, either to history as we currently reckon it or at least to sources John had: thus, though Diocletian was from the Balkans by birth, I believe, he did face a rebellion in Egypt in 284 by one Domitius Alexander (though there was nothing Christian about it as far as we know, but John’s spin is coming here partly from older chronicler John Malalas); and of course, from a point of view in Egypt he did head off to the West and stop ruling as a result, even if the causation John put in there was all his own.⁵ But mostly, not.

So where did this leave the search for agenda? This was where most of the questions went, because the answer seems to be: to understand this bit you have to know the rest of the text as well. An awful lot of its agenda elsewhere appears to be to defend Christian Orthdoxy as it was mostly seen from Coptic Alexandria (that is, the Maiophysite persuasion of Christianity) against the deviant creed of the wider Empire (what is usually called Chalcedonian Christianity, including modern Catholicism and Orthodoxy both). How either Diocletian or the Islamic conquests fitted into that for our chronicler thus became slowly less clear. Matters were complicated here by one of the other people who does, Philip Booth, turning up in the virtual audience and giving a short spontaneous response, which suggested apart from anything else that the whole thing might really be an older Greek chronicle given only a gloss and translation by John of Nikiû. Dr Yirga thought that the work was all John’s and his sources’, but that this gave him a very complex identity, whose general position was roughly to reject Chalcedon but really want the Empire back, and thus try to make Egypt, and Alexandrian Christianity, central to its history where possible. And I could buy that, though I’d need to, you know, read it to be sure. And this has definitely pushed John’s Chronicle up my reading list, just because overall it sounds considerably odder than I’d expected!

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1. You can read it as John, Bishop of Nikiu, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, translated from Zotenberg’s Ethiopic Text, trans. R. H. Charles (London 1913), on the Internet Archive here.

2. There are many works on Diocletian and his colleagues, because one of the things he did was recruit trusted co-emperors, another thing of which he seems to have been uniquely capable until Constantine I succeeded one of them. Of those I’ve seen I’d recommend Roger Rees, Diocletian and the Tetrarchy, Debates and Documents in Ancient History (Edinburgh 2004), on JSTOR here, over most of the others.

3. There isn’t actually much on the Gallic Empire as a phenomenon, oddly, so you might have to start with John F. Drinkwater, The Gallic Empire: separatism and continuity in the northwestern provinces of the Roman Empire AD 260-74, Historia 52 (Stuttgart 1987).

4. For the normal representation of Diocletian in Christian sources, see Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum, trans. J. L. Creed, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford 1984). Nonetheless he has the reputation as a grand reformer with a true vision for the empire who may have saved it, if not from either of almost-caste-like restrictions on social mobility or hyper-inflation. See as samples of the new panegyric Stephen Williams, Diocletian and the Roman Recovery (London 1985); Bill Leadbetter, Galerius and the Will of Diocletian (London 2009); Alan Bowman, “Diocletian and the First Tetrarchy, A. D. 284-305” and Elio Lo Cascio, “The New State of Diocletian and Constantine: From the Tetrarchy to the Reunification of the Empire”, both in Alan Bowman, Averil Cameron & Peter Garnsey (eds), The Crisis of Empire, AD 193-337, The Cambridge Ancient History 12, 2nd edn. (Cambridge 2005), pp. 67–89 and 170–183; and as an answer to one of my sidewipes there, A. J. Boudewijn Sirks, “Did the Late Roman Government Try to Tie People to Their Profession or Status?” in Tyche – Contributions to Ancient History, Papyrology and Epigraphy Vol. 8 (Vienna 1993), pp. 159–175.

5. Malalas can be found (if you’re lucky) in John Malalas, The Chronicle of John Malalas: a Translation, transl. Elizabeth Jeffreys, Michael Jeffreys & Roger Scott, Byzantina Australiensia 4 (Melbourne 1986).

Jo Johnson’s New Domesday

When I promised you a post this weekend it hadn’t, I admit, fully dawned on me that that would be the New Year’s weekend. But I was ready, ready to give you a report on an interesting paper about Bishop John of Nikiu and the chronicle he wrote that is one of our earliest sources for the Islamic conquest of Egypt… and then I left the notes at home, so now that will have to be next week’s. Instead, let’s inaugurate 2024 by having a go at an erstwhile minister of government!

So, I stubbed this to write in May 2021 when Jo Johnson, brother of our lately-demitted Prime Minister whom one of my foreign friends calls Bojo the Clown, had just been promoted to the House of Lords after his second brief stint as Universities Minister. Lord Johnson of Marylebone, as he had thus become, was then back in the press for taking some strong lines in his speeches to the effect that academic links with China were bending academics’ and universities’ politics, as part of the Conservative party’s more general (and bemusing) preoccupation with limits on free speech on British university campuses. One of these got reported in an article in Times Higher Education that I read, but what caught me was not, sadly for Lord Johnson, his actual point but this quote from the article:¹

“Lord Johnson called for a ‘Domesday Book‘ of research links with China to give ‘early warning’ of fields where ‘dependencies’ on China are emerging.”

And, as the kids used to say, I was like, huh.

The manuscript of Greater Domesday

Now, at one level it’s nice to see that someone’s default reference for a tool of use or an exercise of effective power is medieval rather than ancient or Victorian (or Churchillian). But is this a good one? It would be fairly easy to say, “well, that depends on what you think Domesday Book was for, doesn’t it?” It has been seen as a tax register, as a record of military service, as the final say on any issues of disputed land tenure (whence its name, from “Doom” as in judgement), (famously) as an ownership claim placed upon the entire country by William the Conqueror which put him at the top of all land tenure in it, and more recently (and compellingly) as a way of making almost all landed communities in the country gather to swear in solemn circumstances to the state of play on the ground at royal command.² And it is probably quite important to realise that, whatever the actual inquest process of assembling that information was intended to do, the actual “Book”, which is (currently) actually four books plus related documents, representing at least three different levels of the recording process, none of them complete – and with no sign that London or Winchester were ever included at all – may well not actually reflect it terribly well.³

But of one thing we can be reasonably sure, which is that it was not an early warning system of any kind. I mean, I guess it might have been possible to comb through it looking for potential flashpoints of tension and then seek to avert them; but given the number of disputes that are recorded in it which we’ve no sign were ever addressed, I don’t think anyone has ever thought Domesday did in fact serve that purpose.⁴ And I guess therefore that Lord Johnson of Marylebone meant to invoke by his reference to it some kind of totally complete record which omitted nothing. But Domesday probably wasn’t ever that either (although Marylebone, as it happens, was included).

Domesday Book entry for the land of Barking Abbey at Marylebone, Middlesex, image from the Open Domesday project, linked through

But I’m not sure there’s any early warning to be derived even from that. Domesday was not a future-looking record; indeed, it covers so much that it must perforce have been becoming out of date even as it was written up. So my sad conclusion is that Lord Johnson, at least by 2021, didn’t really know what Domesday Book had been or was, or possibly even is. And perhaps that shouldn’t really be expected given that it must have been nearly thirty years since someone had taught him about it, even though he did get First Class Honours on a History degree which could have covered it, as I know because a mere seventeen years later I was teaching Domesday Book on that same course, with at least one person who must have taught his Lordship. I still think they might be a bit disappointed…

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1. John Morgan, “Jo Johnson: self-censorship on China ‘biggest free speech issue’” in Times Higher Education (THE) (12 May 2021).

2. I remember well a seminar at the Institute of Historical Research n which John Gillingham said by way of preamble to a question that since retirement, one of the few luxuries he’d permitted himself was to stop keeping up with the scholarship on Domesday Book. I feel similarly about having left behind teaching England in 2015, and I’m conscious that the most recent references I have for any of this are a decade old. Plus which, it’s New Year’s Eve guys! So permit me just two references, David Roffe and Katherine S. B. Keats-Rohan (edd.), Domesday Now: new approaches to the inquest and the book (Woodbridge 2016) and Stephen Baxter, "How and Why Was Domesday Made?", English Historical Review Vol. 135 (Oxford 2020), pp. 1085–1131, DOI: 10.1093/ehr/ceaa310, and an assurance that between them you could gather at least where the debates stood quite recently. For much much more see David Roffe’s website…

3. Here see David Roffe, Domesday: the inquest and the Book (Oxford 2000), and the review by Stephen Baxter in Reviews in History (30th September 2001), online here, with Roffe’s response here.

4. Here I think I’d look at Robin Fleming, Domesday Book and the Law: society and legal custom in early medieval England (Cambridge 2003), but I’m conscious that Stephen Baxter thinks or thought that there was much about Fleming’s work on Domesday Book (including a book I think is great, her Kings and Lords in Conquest England (Cambridge 1991)) that stood in need of revision, and I don’t know if Baxter, “How and Why”, deals with that or if you’d be better looking in Stephen Baxter, The Earls of Mercia: lordship and power in late Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford 2007).

Seminar CLXXXI: avoiding colonisation with medievalism

First I should apologise for a late post; last weekend was very full of family business and I didn’t have a post even started before Sunday night, and then once I had, I realised I’d written the text for a post ahead of the one I’d meant. So that should speed things up this weekend, but what I meant to report first on was this online seminar, which actually fits well with the last post even though the timing was mostly a coincidence. On 28th April 2021 the Centre for Law and Social Justice at the University of Leeds and the Leeds Law School at Leeds Beckett University jointly played virtual host to Tanya DePass and B. Dave Walters for a presentation entitled "Into the Motherlands: creating just and resilient communities". This turns out to have been part of a kind of tour of the Internet that Ms DePass, at least, was doing at that point to boost the attention then being paid to Into the Mother Lands, which the publicity for this paper explained as, "a tabletop role playing game set within a world unmarred by legacies of colonial violence". This sounded unusually geeky for my place of work; I was right then embroiled in this decolonisation initiative and also vaguely interested in gamifying my research for a funding bid that in the end failed. Also, I’ve played a game or two in my past, and we were in the middle of lockdown still and it sometimes seemed like a licence to go to anything at all, since it still didn’t mean leaving the house. So I attended, and it was fascinating.

DePass and Walters had, you see, been trying to write a different world. They had gathered a group of likeminded creators and built themselves a scenario and ruleset in collaboration. Once they had what they wanted, they got a group of people together and turned their playtesting into a TV stream. When they had enough people interested from that, they put together a Kickstarter to turn the thing into a real published game, and this was the phase in which I met the project in this paper. The aim with which DePass and Walters had set out, you see, was to try and capture the fun of rôle-playing games without carrying on board the worse tropes of the fantasy genre about gender and, especially, race. The pair, who did the paper more or less as a duologue, had some very sharp things to say about how those lines usually play out down pale=good or intellectual or magical and dark=bad or physical or monstrous.¹ Into the Mother Lands tries to get round that by three means: firstly, it has no limits on the characteristics of the various species that inhabit the world where it’s set, Musalia. Secondly, all the creative work is done by people of colour (the term used in the seminar); and thirdly, all the humans in the game are themselves people of colour who have never known colonialism. As my notes have it, in what is presumably a paraphrase rather than a quote, "framing a world like this lets us carry over the idea that a better world can exist" (Walters), "and avoid the narrative of murder achievements" (DePass). And as aims go that seems fair enough to me.

The Internet Movie Database masthead for the Into the Motherlands</cite< TV stream

The creators apparently found it very hard to get their key concept off the ground in development, however. A lot of the issues were with gameplay and the conflict and tension necessary to drive plots, which now had to be created some other way. The thing that caught the interest of this listening medievalist, though, was the scenario they’d had to imagine in order that this phenomenon, always-free black humans, could be conceptualised in this game, because their answer was medievalism, and there, you see, comes the relevance to the blog. Have you ever heard of Mūsā I, Emperor of Mali?

Mansa Mūsā I depicted in the so-called Catalan Atlas by Abraham Cresques, Paris, Bibliothèque national de France, MS Esp. 30, fo. 6, public domain claimed by Wikimedia Commons. The Atlas was made in 1375 CE and he died around 1337, so this is something like contemporary renown.

I had, very dimly, maybe once heard of Mansa Musa, as he is more usually known, but I couldn’t have told you a thing about him at this point. More people probably ought to have heard of him, though. He ruled Mali in the fourteenth century and may have been the wealthiest man the world has ever known. He is most famous for going on hajj to Mecca and distributing so much gold on his journey, particularly during a three-month stay in Cairo, that it caused hyper-inflation and kept the price of gold down for a full decade. There is much much more that could be said about him, too, including that he established something like non-Egyptian Africa’s first university.² However, here we actually need to focus on his predecessor and brother, Mansa Abū Bakr. Mansa Abū Bakr was interested less in the East and more in what might lie in the West, and equipped an Atlantic expedition to find out, which never returned. Undeterred, he therefore kitted out a more serious one and abdicated to lead it himself, setting up Mūsā in his place. And then off Abū Bakr sailed and what happened to him, no-one knows.³ There were some exciting theories in the 1970s about how this might mean Africans got to the Americas before Europeans did (Vikings not included, of course). I spent a while looking for where these had got to after this seminar, having tripped over them while trying to get more about Mansa Mūsā for the bibliographic mill, and it seems they died on the vine, or more specifically, that they dropped out of academic discourse and into popular discourse while the scholars still interested in this idea preferred to try to leave Africa out of it and focus on Asia instead.⁴ But DePass and Walters were, less seriously, working in that earlier tradition, because their answer to the question, how do we get a world where free black humans play on equal terms with the other inhabitants? was, in the end: what if Abū Bakr’s expedition was lost because it passed through a wormhole and ended up on a different planet? And thus was Into the Mother Lands given its back-story, and it may not be great history; but the point is, that’s how far out and how far backwards one has to think to unseat the present race dynamic between the ex-or-still-colonial nations and their erstwhile subjects. This struck me quite hard.

Now, shortly after they’d explained this, I had to run off for a meeting with, as it happened, Adam Kosto. I didn’t, therefore, get to hear the discussion, much less contribute to it, though I’m not sure I would have dared. What I also didn’t do, I have to say, is subscribe to the project’s Kickstarter or (because it was funded in 90 minutes) actually get or play the game, though that may not in fact have been possible because the publisher they had in mind part-folded shortly afterwards. (They now have a new one and the game is probably coming out next year.) I didn’t even watch the stream, I’m afraid, but I did keep thinking with it. I also searched up a lot of literature about Mūsā I and precolonial Afro-American contact, as we see in n. 4 below. But mainly what I keep thinking is twofold: on the one hand, how alarming it is that it should even be plausible that to envisage a world in which black is not generally the victim of white, you have to think back six hundred years; but, on the other hand, that this means the world really really does need medievalists. It’s possible it doesn’t need exactly the ones it’s got, but we can work on that, and it would be lovely to think we could have anywhere near as much fun as Tanya DePass and B. Dave Walters seemed to be doing their part of it back in April 2021.

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1. Starting reading on this would be Paul B. Sturtevant, "Race: The Original Sin of the Fantasy Genre", Race, Racism and the Middle Ages 36 in The Public Medievalist (5 December 2017), online here, which makes it clear it’s not just Dungeons and Dragons.

2. The main primary source for the Cairo story appears to be the Masālik alabṣar fī Mamālik al-amsār of the Mamlūk administrator Ibn Faḍl al-‘Umarī, available as Ibn Faḍl Allāh Šihāb al-Din Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā b. Faḍl Allāh al-‘Umarī, Masālik alabṣar fī Mamālik al-amsār, ed. & transl. Ayman Fu’ad Sayyid, Textes arabes et études islamiques 23 (Le Caire 1958), of which parts are translated into English in Aḥmad ibn Yaḥyá Ibn Faḍl Allâh al-ʿUmarī, Egypt and Syria in the early Mamluk period: an extract from Ibn Faḍl Allāh al-’Umarī’s Masālik al-Abṣār fī Mamālik al-Amṣār, transl. D. S. Richards (Abingdon 2017), but I don’t right now have access to either of these so can’t say where in Fu’ad’s version it occurs or if it does in Richards’s. For Mūsā I more generally, see J. E. G. Sutton, "The African Lords of the Intercontinental Gold Trade Before the Black Death: al-Hasan bin Sulaiman of Kilwa and Mansa Musa of Mali" in Antiquaries Journal Vol. 77 (Cambridge 1997), pp. 221–242, DOI: 10.1017/S000358150007520X. There must be something else but that’s what I know about. I mean, there’s always D. T. Niane, "Mali and the second Mandingo expansion" in Niane (ed.), Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, UNESCO General History of Africa 4 (London 1984), pp. 117–171 & M. Ly-Tall, "The decline of the Mali empire", ibid., pp. 172–186, the whole volume online here…

3. This is also from al-‘Umarī, which I find from Jean Devisse, "Africa in inter-continental relations" in Niane, Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, pp. 635–672 at pp. 664-666, the only pages in the whole chapter that deal with Africans looking out rather than other people looking in, and dismissing it as economically insignificant (though, interestingly, prepared to believe that they might have made it to South America, p. 666). However, Devisse used some other translation of al-‘Umarī, so I can’t give you a uniform cite. I can give you the English version of it he quotes (pp. 664-665), though, and that goes like this, in the voice of Mūsā I himself speaking of his predecessor:

"He [Mansa Abū Bakr] did not believe that the ocean was impossible to cross. He wished to reach the other side and was passionately interested in doing so. He fitted out 200 vessels and filled them with men and as many again with gold, water and food supplies for several years. He then said to those in charge of embarkation, ‘do not return until you have reached the other side of the ocean or if you have exhausted your food or water’. They sailed away. Time passed. After a long time, none of them had returned. Finally one vessel, only one, returned. We asked its master what he had seen and heard: ‘We sailed on and on for a long time until a river with a violent current appeared in the middle of the sea. I was in the last vessel. The others sailed on and when they reached that spot they were unable to return and disappeared. We did not know what had happened to them. For my part, I came back from that place without entering the stream.’ The sultan rejected his explanation. He then ordered 2000 vessels to be fitted out, 1000 for himself and his men and 1000 for food and water. He then appointed me his deputy, embarked with his companions and sailed away. That was the last we saw of them, him and his companions."

So make of that what you will!

4. This is now kind of a zombie debate, which isn’t to say it’s been resolved. However, in each of its phases it’s primarily been driven by a single scholar at a time. In the 1960s and 1970s that was one M. D. W. Jeffreys, who may have started this work with "Pre-Colombian Negroes in America" in Scientia: Rivista di Scienza Vol. 88 (Bologna 1953), pp. 202–218, online here, but then got the idea that maize could be attested in Europe prior to Columbus, necessitating some pre-Columbian contact; he did several articles on that but I think Jeffreys, "Maize and the Mande Myth" in Current Anthropology Vol. 12 (Chicago IL 1971), pp 291–320, on JSTOR here, completes them all. His work was already provoking reaction by then, as witness Raymond Mauny, "Hypothèses concernant les relations précolombiennes entre l’Afrique et l’Amérique" in Anuario de Estudios Atlánticos Vol. 1 (Gran Canaria 1971), pp 369–389, online here, A. R. Willcox, "Pre-Columbian Intercourse between the Old World and the New: Considered from Africa" in South African Archaeological Bulletin Vol. 30 (Wits 1975), pp. 19–22, on JSTOR here; and Almose A. Thompson, "Pre-columbian black presence in the western hemisphere" in Negro History Bulletin Vol. 38 (Washington DC 1975), pp. 452–456, on JSTOR here. Then things seem to have gone quiet again until a guy called Carl L. Johnannessen revived the maize question. Initially he was doing that from some quite thin art-historical evidence (and, importantly for us, steering the question away from Africa): witness Carl L. Johannessen and Anne Z. Parker, "Maize ears sculptured in 12th and 13th century A.D. India as indicators of pre-columbian diffusion" in Economic Botany Vol. 43 (New York City NY 1989), pp. 164–180, on JSTOR here, and this understandably met some pushback: you can read it through the collection of counter-evidence amassed by a supporter, J. Huston McCulloch, in "Maize in Pre-Columbian India", in Some Archaeological Outliers: Adventures in Underground Archaeology (Columbus OH 2006), online here, but you can find it done most thoroughly in Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, Gabriel Haslip-Viera and Warren Barbour, "They Were NOT Here before Columbus: Afrocentric Hyperdiffusionism in the 1990s" in Ethnohistory Vol. 45 (1997), pp 199–234, on Academia.edu here, with a host of related papers showing up there I can’t index now – but note that one of their concerns is that attempts to assign particular archæological and technological phenomena to African influence can only work by removing it from the Native American record, which is a point. The wave they’re trying to stem there must be as much or more Jeffreys’ fault, as his work became accessible on JSTOR and suchlike, I assume, as anything that’s happened since. None of this deterred Johannessen, however, who subsequently went big and added 69 other species of plant and 8 of various sorts of creature to the list of things he wants to explain by pre-Columbian contact, in John L. Sorenson and Carl L. Johannessen, Scientific Evidence for Pre-Columbian Transoceanic Voyages, Sino-Platonic Papers 133 (Philadelphia PA 2004), online here. A fairly recent review of the situation might be Richard V. Francaviglia, "’Far Beyond the Western Sea of the Arabs…’: Reinterpreting Claims about Pre-Columbian Muslims in the Americas" in Terrae Incognitae Vol. 46 (Abingdon 2014), pp. 103–138, DOI: 10.1179/0082288414Z.00000000033. But I bet you could find another one which disagreed entirely…

Seminar CLXXX: rehabilitating the Carolingian priest

The first time I blogged about one of Steffen Patzold’s papers, he later told me, it came as rather a shock to him when one of his students pointed it out to him. The episode threw me into a temporary tiz about whether I should in fact be writing up these semi-public events, whether it was like tweeting a conference paper (then a hot controversy) and so on, and although I decided in the end to carry on on the same basis, still, now that I find myself wanting to write up another of Steffen’s papers I still pause. I hope that two things will keep him happy with this post; firstly, that this happened two and a half years ago so is kind of old news; and second, that it’s a highly enthusiastic write-up! But then, so was it last time…

Cover of Steffen Patzold, Presbyter: Moral, Mobilität und die Kirchenorganisation im Karolingerreich, Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 68 (Stuttgart 2020)

Those who don’t know Steffen except through my occasional outbreaks of praise for his work here, however, may get some idea of it from the fact that in 2008 he published a book entitled Episcopus which, just like that, became the definitive study of the evolution of the bishop’s office through the early Middle Ages, and then in 2020 followed it up with another called Presbyter doing the same for priests (with three other books in between just to keep busy).¹ If Presbyter hasn’t yet had quite the impact that Episcopus had that may only be because, firstly, it’s still quite new and there was this pandemic in between; secondly, in this field there’s some strong competition for attention; and thirdly, obviously, there were lots more priests than bishops in the early medieval world and dealing with them as a phenomenon is consequently more complex.² As part of that, Steffen has been deeply involved in a long-running project on local priests in the Carolingian world that I’ve been watching closely, which must keep bringing those complexities to his attention.³ Nonetheless, he is still capable of drawing big conclusions in the best traditions, rather than the worst, of institutional history, and this was what he was doing when on 24th March 2021 he spoke, virtually, to the Earlier Middle Ages seminar of the Institute of Historical Research. This was the first paper where I’d actually managed to navigate the IHR’s virtual ticketing system, mainly by mailing to beg for the link which for me never arrives, and it was well worth it.

I had to cast around for a while for search terms for a Carolingian Eigenkirche (and on what that is see below), before it suddenly struck me that this, Saints Marcellinus and Peter in Seligenstadt, is one, albeit a big one: it was founded by a layman, who from whose letters we know controlled the appointment, and that there is almost no sign of episcopal control – but because that layman was Einhard and everybody loves Einhard it isn’t usually counted against him! But as we shall see, maybe counting things like this against people was a later concern anyway. Image by Jörg Braukmann, licensed under CC BY SA 4.0 via Structurae

So having introduced Steffen himself I have to introduce his topic. His title was "Beyond Eigenkirchen: local priests and their churches in the Carolingian world". So what’s an Eigenkirche, you may justly ask? Well, it is a term coined by one Ulrich Stutz, who in 1895 published a book called Geschichte des kirchlichen Benefizialwesens (roughly, History of Church property in benefice, which could itself demand an explanation, so maybe just let me carry on).⁴ It set up a clear and persuasive theory of a long struggle by the Latin Christian Church to get itself clear of ownership by laymen, patrons who built churches but then expected to control them, their appointments and their revenues entirely. For Stutz that situation came from the adaptation of "Germanic" expectations about property and enduring rights in it to the clear separation of Church and state beginning in the Gospels, a situation that the Frankish super-king and then emperor Charlemagne tried to reform, but which his son Louis the Pious made worse again by letting lords keep tithes as an encouragement to build more churches. This was where the great outburst of concern about such issues in the eleventh century which we tend to know as the Gregorian Reform after Pope Gregory VII, one of its loudest voices, came from. Stutz’s book has been tremendously influential; it went into its fourth edition in 1995, a full century after its publication, something we could all wish for but few indeed hope for, even though it was technically never completed, and the essential narrative survives even in more recent work on the subject.⁵ And as Steffen delicately but definitively argued, it’s basically wrong.

Portrait of Ulrich Stutz, from the Universitätsbibliothek of the Humboldt Universität Berlin. He does sort of look like someone’s just told him we were about to undermine his life’s work, doesn’t he? Sorry, Professor…

OK, big claim. On what does it rest? Well, firstly on the erosion of many of the accepted historical premises of the age in which Stutz wrote: that there was an ancestral "Germanic" set of expectations about property, a continual opposition of Church and state or at least Church and nobility even though the two groups were basically the same families, or that Louis the Pious was a weak ruler dominated by priests.⁶ But also, and this was Steffen’s main front of attack, on an equation between lord’s chaplains, what Stutz called because Carolingian legislation also calls "house-priests", whom Charlemagne, Louis and their churchmen regarded as dangerously free from oversight by bishops, often dangerously dependent on their lords (slaves given orders and that sort of thing) and certainly dangerously unqualified, and the more widespread and ordinary parish priest, or at least the local priest doing the ministry to the general population. For Stutz, since almost all churches were owned by lords and the priests their creatures, there was no meaningful difference. But since churches were built by many agencies, including the Church itself, but also their own future congregations, and in these places the bishops got to make appointments – we have very numerous records of bishops’ appointments of priests, so they must have worked somewhere – actually there were quite a lot of people doing that kind of work who were not running lords’ private churches, and these were the people on whom Steffen focused to make his case.

Some of these local priests were pretty major players in their own right and "local" is perhaps understating their importance, which was hardly one of being powerless flunkies. One guy called Erlebald, operating around the monastery of Lorsch, organised many donations there by a variety of people but also made some of his own, including numerous serfs and quite a lot of treasure. It’s hard to believe he was funnelling revenue to anyone else much, and maybe that was indeed a problem for his bishop, but not because he was under some lord’s thumb instead.⁷ However, these were the people on the ground for the Carolingian efforts to improve popular worship and belief, and we have lots of stuff written for and about them in the expectation of both their cooperation and effectiveness.⁸ Furthermore, there were lots of them: Julia Barrow asked for some numbers in questions and Steffen said that when the number of baptismal churches in some Carolingian dioceses was assessed numbers ranged from 50 to 230, each of which would have had several priests, each of whom would then have been set up as heads of new parishes, so, hundreds of priests in a diocese, thousands across the empire. As this implies, Steffen had argued that these reform efforts meant the Carolingians radically changing Church structures, breaking up big territories belonging to mother-churches with baptismal rights, which provided clergy to smaller less-privileged chapels (Italian pievi were mentioned, but I thought straight away of early English minsters⁹), and changing them into smaller structures centred on single churches with full rights over more limited areas (under the supervision of bishops, of course), the sort of thing we might call "parishes".

Not an Eigenkirche but somewhere from where churches and priests were regulated and instructed, Saint-Germigny-des-Prés, built by Bishop Theodulf of Orléans, whose statutes for his priests we have. Image « Germigny des Pres » by user:Cancre — own work, licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.

So at the end of this we had not just what looked like a death-blow to a century-old shibboleth of early European Church history and a rehabilitation of the genuine effectiveness of Carolingian efforts to expand and improve, maybe even "correct" but maybe not "reform" the Church, but a plausible argument for the origins of the European parish. It’s not a bad evening’s work! Naturally, there were questions. Ed Roberts asked if house-priests could become "local" priests, to which the answer was that they certainly tried and some presumably did; Peter Heather wondered where the 11th-century boom in church-building came from if it wasn’t lords hungry for tithes, and Steffen pointed out some other ways to get rich off Church patronage as well as the way people could also set up their own; Erik Niblaeus wondered how monasteries fit, as lords or as tools of the reform effort, and Steffen said that structurally they were lords but worried the régime less as their priests tended to be better qualified; and I asked if an impression I had that mother-churches remained the first step in frontier-zones, with parish fragmentation following only later (thinking of my work on Manresa), which Steffen thought unlikely.¹⁰ I may have to show he’s wrong (or that Catalonia’s weird, one of the two). But he doesn’t make it easy!

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1. Steffen Patzold, Episcopus: Wissen über Bischöfe im Frankreich des späten 8. bis frühen 10. Jahrhunderts, Mittelalter-Forschungen 25 (Ostfildern 2008); then Patzold, Presbyter: Moral, Mobilität und die Kirchenorganisation im Karolingerreich, Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 68 (Stuttgart 2020); between times, Patzold, Das Lehnswesen, Beck’sche Reihe 2745 (München 2012); Patzold, Ich und Karl der Grosse: das Leben des Höflings Einhard (Stuttgart 2013); and Patzold, Gefälschtes Recht aus dem Frühmittelalter: Untersuchungen zur Herstellung und Überlieferung der pseudoisidorischen Dekretalen, Schriften der Philosophisch-historischen Klasse der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften 55 (Heidelberg 2015).

2. I think here mainly of Julia Barrow, The Clergy in the Medieval World: Secular Clerics, their Families and Careers in North-Western Europe, c.800–c.1200 (Cambridge 2015).

3. I’ve probably missed some here, but the project has produced at least Steffen Patzold & Carine van Rhijn (edd.), Men in the Middle: Local Priests in Early Medieval Europe, Ergänzungsband der Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde 93 (Berlin 2016) and Francesca Tinti and Carine van Rhijn with Bernhard Zeller, Charles West, Marco Stofella, Nicolas Schroeder, Steffen Patzold, Thomas Kohl, Wendy Davies and Miriam Czock, "Shepherds, uncles, owners, scribes: Priests as neighbours in early medieval local societies" in Zeller, West, Tinti, Stofella, Schroeder, van Rhijn, Patzold, Kohl, Davies & Czock, Neighbours and Strangers: local societies in early medieval Europe (Manchester 2020), pp. 120–149.

4. Ulrich Stutz, Geschichte des kirchlichen Benefizialwesens: von seinen Anfängen bis auf die Zeit Alexanders III. (Berlin 1895), 1 vol., online here. The title page says this is the "Ersten Band, erste häfte", but there seem to have been no more parts. The treatment is thematic rather than chronological, so what is argued is at least complete in itself. There is also Ulrich Stutz, Die Eigenkirche als Element des mittelalterlich-germanischen Kirchenrechts, Libelli 28 (Darmstadt 1955), non vidi, which given its date is I guess the key part on that subject extracted from the earlier work.

5. Stutz, Geschichte des kirchlichen Benefizialwesens: von seinen Anfängen bis auf die Zeit Alexanders III., ed. Hans Erich Feine, 4th edn (Aalen 1995), though as far as I can see all the new editions are just reprints with an extra essay at the beginning. Still, is four editions over a century even the top score to beat? We might instance Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, Una ciudad de la España cristiana hace mil años: estampas de la vida en León, 21st edn (Madrid 2014), originally published in 1928, parts of which you can find translated as Claudio Sánchez Albornoz [sic], "Daily Life in the Spanish Reconquest: Scenes from Tenth-Century León", transl. Simon Doubleday, in The American Association of Research Historians of Medieval Spain Library (Toronto 1999), online here, but I don’t know which edition Simon translated! According to Steffen, meanwhile, the obvious new work to replace Stutz, Susan Wood, The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West (Oxford 2006), doesn’t change the picture on this score very much. I should obviously know, but…

6. See here especially Mayke de Jong, "Ecclesia and the Early Medieval Polity" in Stuart Airlie, Walter Pohl & Helmut Reimitz (edd.), Staat im frühen Mittelalter, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 11 (Wien 2006), pp. 113–132 and Mayke de Jong, "The State of the Church: ecclesia and early medieval state formation" in Walter Pohl & Veronika Wieser (edd.), Der frühmittelalterliche Staat – europäische Perspektiven, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 16 (Wien 2009), pp. 241–254. A broader introduction can be found in Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes & Simon MacLean, The Carolingian World, Cambridge Medieval Textbooks (Cambridge 2011), pp. 80-153.

7. For the abbey of Lorsch see Matthew Innes, "Kings, Monks and Patrons: political identities and the Abbey of Lorsch" in Régine Le Jan (ed.), La royauté et les élites dans l’Europe carolingienne (début IX^e siècle aux environs de 920) (Villeneuve de l’Ascq 1998), pp. 301–324, though right now I can’t so whether it mentions Erlebald or not I can’t tell you. He is mentioned in passing as a relative and associate of Abbot Baugolf of Fulda in Innes, State and Society in the Early Middle Ages: the Middle Rhine Valley, 400-1000, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 4th Series 47 (Cambridge 2000), p. 190.

8. We know this not least from the volumes of statutes they left behind which are now printed in Peter Brommer, Rudolf Pokorny & Martina Stratmann (edd.), Capitula episcoporum, Monumenta Germaniae historica (capitula episcoporum) 1-4 (Hannover 1984-2005), 4 vols, online from here.

9. On pievi why not see Rachel Stone, "Exploring Minor Clerics in Early Medieval Tuscany" in Reti Medievali Rivista Vol. 18 (Firenze 2017), pp. 67–97, online here? As for minsters, see John Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford 2005), pp. 79-134, 246-367 and to be honest much of the rest of the book too, or for short, John Blair, "Minster Churches in the Landscape" in Della Hooke (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Settlements (Oxford 1988), pp. 35–58.

10. But not just Manresa, or that wouldn’t be a great example since it’s so late; I think we also see it at the definitely-Carolingian Sant Pere de Rodes. See Jonathan Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880-1010: pathways of power, Studies in History, New Series (Woodbridge 2010), pp. 93-97, and for proof of contemporaneity of at least the settlement with Louis the Pious, Imma Ollich, Montserrat Rocafiguera, Albert Pratdesaba, Maria Ocaña, Oriol Amblàs, Maria Àngel Pujols & David Serrat, "Roda Ciutat: el nucli fortificat de l’Esquerda sobre el Ter i el seu territori" in Ausa Vol. 28 (Vic 2017), pp. 23–40, online here.

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…

Seminars CLXXVII-CLXXIX: animals in Byzantium, Christians under Islam, Byzantines in Israel

As promised, this week I want to do a bit more old-style seminar reporting. I’m not getting out to seminars the way I once did, and wasn’t even in early 2021, our current point in my backlog, but sometimes if you’re in the right place the seminars come to you, and sometimes Leeds is that place…

Heidelberg Universitätsbibliothek Cod. Pal. Grace. 18 fol. 96v, showing "Isaac" Tzetzes offering his Scholia in Lycophronis to Christ, this misnamed 13th-century depiction being the only one there is of our next subject

In the first instance that was slightly less surprising because the speaker was Dr Maroula Perisanidi, who had been working for us for some time by this point and was shortly to become an established member of our staff! But with that still in the future, on 26th January 2021 she was presenting to the Institute for Medieval Studies Research Seminar with the title, “Animals and Masculinities in the Letters of John Tzetzes”. I had not heard of this particular twelfth-century scholar before, but Maroula made him out as a very sympathetic character for an 21st-century western audience: he thought competitive warlike masculinity was silly (as do many of us who feel we would be bad at it, I guess, but that doesn’t always stop us responding to challenges…) and that real intellectual endeavour was a non-competitive and largely inward pursuit; and he was almost always short of cash or support.¹ Furthermore, and Maroula’s key point, his letters are full of the love of animals: he hated hunting; he kept pets and mourned them when they died (and pointed to significant warleaders who had done likewise as proof that this was a perfectly masculine thing to do); and he argued that animals were better than people in lots of ways, not limited to but definitely including their superior senses. I did notice that in Maroula’s instances Tzetzes seemed most ready to liken himself to the phoenix, the lion, the kite, etc., rather than the mouse, louse or rabbit, but that doesn’t make his positions any less striking. Questions were naturally raised about whether he was weird, and to that Maroula reckoned that rejecting hunting was quite common but that in the rest of it he might be more unusual. Emilia Jamroziak reminded us of the trope in saints’ lives (and before, with Androcles and that) of the animals which help the worthy, but Maroula thought Tzetzes gave the animals their own agency in making his points; it was their normal animal life he used, not their narratively-necessary bits of interaction with humans. There was lots left to work out, and I guess that is still going on, but as what we might call "serious entertainment" this was a winner of a paper.²

Exterior of one church which certainly was rebuilt under Islam, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/jlascar/ – http://www.flickr.com/photos/jlascar/10350972756/in/set-72157636698118263/, licensed under CC BY 2.0 via https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30052661

The next paper I want to record was one that it’s possible I caused. At least, back in the days of physical meetings and the Institute for Medieval Studies Public Lectures, which went away during the high pandemic for obvious reasons and never came back, I put on one of the feedback sheets they used to hang out something to the effect of, “What about Janina Safran?” No-one subsequently mentioned this to me, but when I later learned that on 23rd February 2021 Professor Janina Safran was in fact presenting to the same seminar, with the title, "Reading Fatwas into History: ‘Let Every Religious Community Have its House of Worship’", I couldn’t help but wonder. In any case, Professor Safran, whose work on divisions and interactions between religious and social groups in Islamically-ruled communities has been quite important over the last few years, was doing some more of that, and her specific questions were about Christians and Jews being allowed to rebuild churches or synagogues, respectively, or indeed build new ones, where Islam ruled.³ It’s all too easy now to look this up and find someone citing that rather difficult pseudo-document, the Covenant of ‘Umar, as proof that this just wasn’t and isn’t allowed.⁴ But as Professor Safran quickly showed, there has never been agreement across Islam about this issue (or about what the Covenant of ‘Umar is, for that matter), and even if there had been, the mass displacement of communities from the collapsing Muslim states in the Iberian Peninsula to Africa and vice versa in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries (CE) would have brought the issue to a head as existing community resources were swamped or abandoned in each case.⁵ Professor Safran had found a range of Islamic scholars each with a different opinion: about the only thing they all agreed on was that bell-ringing was not allowed, but for some there was neither building nor repair allowed because Christians were a treacherous fifth column (apparently the opinion of Ibn Rushd, even though modernity loves to love him), for some repair but not expansion (al-Burzulī), for some necessary expansion but not new building (Ibn al-Hajj, Professor Safran’s main source for the paper) and for some even new building was allowed if no Muslims were there to see it (and likewise the only places bells were OK were where there were no Muslims to hear). And of course, all of this was coming before jurists because the thing was happening anyway and people were consulting them over whether it was legal, or we’d not have the fatwas (rulings); but that also means people weren’t sure. Since each specific pact with a Christian community was individually negotiated at conquest, as long as they had surrendered, there was even the question of whether general legal rules could or could not overrule particular concessions, and most agreed that they could not. We lost Professor Safran to internet patchiness before we got to the conclusion, but recovered her for questions and had by then already accumulated quite a rich picture of the bitty, cumulative and sometimes contradictory way in which Islamic law developed and develops. People who get worried about the iron force of sharīʿa might take some comfort from medieval illustrations like these of how it actually got and gets worked out in practice.

Mosaic floor in the 3rd-century synagogue at Kibbutz Ein Gedi, image from the Madain Project and linked through to them

Lastly, not a medieval paper at all but one which turned that way suddenly in questions, on 24th February 2021 another Leeds colleague, Dr Nir Arielli, was presenting to the School of History Research Seminar with the title, “Life Next to the Dying Dead Sea: a social-environmental micro-history of Kibbutz en-Gedi”. This, I attended largely because some months before Nir and I had warmly agreed that there needed to be more work on land use in the School of History and thus I felt that, when he was then doing that, I should probably support. The land use in question, however, is at great risk because of the way that the Dead Sea has shrunk over the last few decades, largely if not entirely because of extraction for industry from the River Jordan by many countries.⁶ The pictures were dramatic and worrying, but the hook for this medievalist listener came from the fact that, among its other work on the site, the Kibbutz has found and attempted to frame itself as the revival of a Roman-period Jewish village. This rang bells for me because of the work of Dan Reynolds about the historicization to political purposes of Roman- and Byzantine-period use of lands in these areas, but I restricted myself to asking how long the Roman settlement had lasted and what was known about it by the Kibbutz community.⁷ Even that was quite interesting: the site had a synagogue, with a mosaic floor that you see above which very handily identifies itself, a Cave of Letters connected with the Second Jewish Revolt whose records include the court cases of a a litigious second-century woman called Arbatta, among the other victims of the Roman suppression of the rebellion, and other remains that indicate the place was occupied until the seventh century. I don’t know what happened then and all likely answers would probably be bad at the moment, but it was certainly easy enough to understand why the modern community had built themselves a museum for this stuff and interesting that the past was so literally central to the place and its settlers’ identity. There were lots of other more relevant questions as well, of course, but I felt as if I’d got the medieval to show itself in my modernist colleagues’ work for a moment and therefore went away well satisfied as well as more educated. Which, I suppose, is ideal for a day in a university environment!

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1. If one is in need of an introduction to Tzetzes, other than the man’s own X feed already linked of course, one might try Enrico Emanuele Prodi, "Introduction: A Buffalo’s-Eye View" in Prodi (ed.), Τζετζικλι Ερεϒνλι, Εικασμος: Quaderni bolognesi di filologia classica, Studi online 4 (Bologna 2022), pp. ix–xxxv, online here, but I admit I haven’t so can’t be sure what you’d get.

2. If you can’t wait till this emerges, you could sate yourself meanwhile with Maroula Perisanidi, "Byzantine Parades of Infamy through an Animal Lens" in History Workshop Journal Vol. 90 (Abingdon 2020), pp. 1–24, DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbaa019; and the phrase "serious entertainments" is famous to me because of Nancy F. Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago IL 1977).

3. Professor Safran was known to me when I scrawled that request for work such as Janina M. Safran, "Identity and Differentiation in Ninth-Century al-Andalus" in Speculum Vol. 76 (Cambridge MA 2001), pp. 573–598, DOI: 10.2307/2903880; Safran, "The politics of book burning in al-Andalus" in Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies Vol. 6 (Abingdon 2014), pp. 148–168, DOI: 10.1080/17546559.2014.925134; and Safran, Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia (Ithaca NY 2015).

4. See for example David J. Wasserstein, "ISIS, Christianity, and the Pact of Umar" in Yale University Press Blog 16 August 2017, online here.

5. Further doubts about the application of the Pact can be found in Norman Daniel, "Spanish Christian Sources of Information about Islam (ninth-thirteenth centuries)" in al-Qanṭara Vol. 15 (Madrid 1994), pp. 365–384, which includes apart from anything else a demonstration that there is no evidence for the Pact being known in al-Andalus.

6. See for more Nir Arielli, "Land, water and the changing Dead Sea environment: A microhistory of Kibbutz Ein Gedi" in Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture Vol. 40 (Abingdon 2022), pp. 235–256, DOI: 10.1080/13531042.2022.2186311.

7. Daniel Reynolds, "Conclusion: Post-Colonial Reflections and the Challenge of Global Byzantium" in Leslie Brubaker, Rebecca Darley and Daniel Reynolds (edd.), Global Byzantium: Papers from the Fiftieth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Publications of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies 24 (London 2022), pp. 372–409, DOI: 10.4324/9780429291012-20 at pp. 376-391.

From the Sources XIX: Charles the Bald does not admit blame

Would you like another source to ponder? Oh good. I have, in the course of my teaching at the University of Leeds, done quite a lot of scratch translation of sources here and there, as have I here of course; but at Leeds I run a Special Subject, an archaic but effective Cambridge pattern of module which involves deep immersion in the primary evidence for a subject, and my students, of course, don’t have Latin, or Arabic, of if by some chance they do they don’t have the medieval versions of either. They don’t usually have any European languages other than English either, and everything crucial to the teaching has to be accessible to everyone, so no translations that aren’t in English can help. One way or another, I’ve piled up a lot, but still the time often comes, especially when dissertations loom, that a student finds something else that would be really handy if they could read it… And sometimes, if it’s short, I’m able to help. And that’s how in February 2021 I found myself in the back of volume II of the Catalunya Carolíngia translating the Capitulary of the Synod of Attigny, a meeting in 874 whose record describes…¹ Well, I’ve written about it before here, but never given it in full, so I thought I would let you read and see and I saw one new point I could get out of it to make it worth your while. The post title mainly refers to the third heading, but it’s all interesting as an example of early medieval religious government.

In the Year of the Incarnation of the Lord 874, the lord King Charles issued these capitula, which follow, at Attigny on the Kalends of July.

1. The bishop of Barcelona pleads that Tirs, priest of Córdoba, setting up a congregation around himself in a church between the walls of the selfsame city, is usurping almost two parts of the tithe of the selfsame city and, without any licence, presumes to celebrate masses and baptism in the selfsame city, and extends communion to those who are summoned by the bishop to the mother church even for the solemnities of Easter and the Nativity of the Lord and, despising the bishop, renounce him. Whereof the sacred Council of Nicæa says:
   

   "Whatever priests or deacons, or any others enrolled among the clergy, recklessly and dangerously and not having the fear of God before their eyes or regarding the rule of the Churches, shall separate from the Church, these ought not by any means to be received in another church, but every constraint should be imposed upon them so that they return to their own parishes. If they do not so, it is necessary to deprive them of communion."

   This is decreed of Tirs, who has irregularly separated from his own city. Further of him and of other contemptibles the Council of Antioch says:

   "If any priest or deacon, despising his own bishop, sequester himself from his Church and, gathering people around him, set up an altar and should neither acquire episcopal consent nor wish to consent to or obey the bishop though summoned to once and again, let this man be damned in every way, and let him find no other remedy, since he is not fit to receive the dignity. If he persist in disturbing and soliciting the Church, let him be suppressed like a rebel by external powers."

   This the canons of the African province also decree. But this chapter of the Antiochene council has established quite enough of a position. Of basilicas and tithes, moreover, the holy canons decree:

   "That all basilicas, which have been built in various places or are daily being built, shall according to the first rule of the canons be in the power of their bishop, in whose territory they are located."

   And the holy Gelasius in his decretals, says:

   "From the renders and just as much from the offerings of the faithful, just as the authority of the Church proportionally deems, and just as is reasonably decreed, it is suitable to make four portions: of which one should be the bishop’s, another the clergy’s, another the poor’s, and the fourth applied to buildings. Of these, just as the priests shall receive the whole of the noted quantity for the ministry of the Church, thus the clergy may insolvently add nothing to their expenses beyond their assigned sum. That indeed which is attributed to the ecclesiastical buildings, let be truly assigned to this work for the aforementioned manifest installation of the places of the saints; since it is evil, if the sacred altars lie destitute, for the chief-priest to convert this designated income into his own wealth. Let the selfsame portion assigned to the poor, by whatever divine means may be shown, have been dispensed, however, no less according to what is written: ‘so that they may see your good works and glorify your Father, who is in Heaven, it must be preached with present witness and the criers of good report not be silent.’"

   And indeed these things about the renders and offerings of the faithful are specially decreed of those which belong to the bishops of the churches in those regions where resources are not abundant, but which subsist as much from the tithes of the faithful as from offerings. As for the other rural parishes, how much the bishops in the regions of Septimania and Galicia ought to exact from their priests is demonstrated by the second canon of the Council of Braga and the fourth of the Council of Toledo. Of those moreover who retain the priest Tirs in the church of the city of Barcelona against the authority and the will of the bishop of Barcelona, the capitulary of the Augusti lord Charles and lord Louis decree as follows:

   "Of those, who without episcopal consent install priests in churches or eject them from them and do not care to be admonished by the bishop or by any missus Dominicus, that they shall suffer our bann, or endure some other punishment."

   Since indeed it is lengthy to bring those persons to the presence of the king and dangerous to remove them further from the March, the lord king will command his marquis that he should distrain and punish them. About the tithes indeed, which ought to be in the power and disposition of the bishop, which they have stolen from the mother church and by their pleasure give to another, the same capitulary says:

   "Whoever shall steal the tithe from a church to which it ought justly to be given, and presumptuously or on account of gifts or friendship or whatever other reason shall have given it to another church, let him be distrained by the count or by our missus so that he restore the same quantity of tithe as is required by law."

   And also:

   "Of those who have already neglected for many years to give ninths and tithes, either in part or in whole, we wish that they be constrained by our missi so that they answer according to the previous capitulum for the ninth and tithe of each year according to the law and also for our bann; and let this be made clear to them, that whoever should repeat this negligence, in which they ought to pay these ninths and tithes, let him know that he will lose his benefice."

2. About this, which [the bishop] pleads, that through the insolence of the priest, by his ministry [the bishop’s] castle of Terrassa has been subjected to the power of the faction of Baio, the ruling of the aforesaid Council of Antioch is to be followed in the case of the insolence of a priest. Against the faction of Baio, moreover, is to be followed the canon of the council of Carthage, which says:
   

   "It is seen everywhere that defenders have been demanded by the emperors, on account of the affliction of the poor, by whose sufferings the Church is fatigued without intermission, so that the defenders may be delegated to them by the provision of the bishops against the powers of the wealthy."

   The above-placed capitulum from the capitulary of the Augusti is also to be followed:

   "Of those, who without episcopal consent install priests in churches or eject them from them."

3. As for this, which [the bishop] pleads, that a certain Goth, Madeix, has by fraud and cunning has obtained by precept the noble and ancient church of Saint Stephen, where with the worship of God put aside the base conversation of rustics now occurs, and similarly the Goth Requesèn has by fraud and cunning obtained the field of Saint Eulalie by precept, let the royal order command these things to be diligently and truthfully investigated by our faithful missi, and let the selfsame inquest be made to be brought to our notice under seal through the guard of faithful men. And if it be found that the aforesaid church of Saint Stephen and the field of Saint Eulalie were obtained by the aforesaid Goths through precepts, let the selfsame precept be sealed according to the law and brought before the royal presence along with the selfsame inquest, for a public judgement of who there has been who has lied in their entreaties, so that what they have sought may not profit them and they may lose the selfsame benefice there in the documents which was transferred by the rescripts, and the Church of Barcelona may receive by royal magnificence that which is its own.

Lots of things to notice here, but let’s start with the fact that though this document is printed as a capitulary of the synod, I would say that it’s vanishingly unlikely that the sole business of a major synod of Charles the Bald’s kingdom was complaints raised by the bishop of Barcelona (who, by the way, though not named here, was probably at this time the mysterious Frodoí of whom we have talked here before). This is pretty obviously just the record which the bishop of Barcelona took home with him of the bits which mattered to him (although going further than that is hard, because the text is only known from a printing of 1623 that didn’t name its source). The issue of what counts or doesn’t as a capitulary or as Carolingian law is raised good and high by this text.²

Next, we see that whoever they were the bishop of Barcelona’s status was much challenged at this time! But lots of the challenges have back-stories that this document isn’t interested in discussing. Who Tirs was we have no idea, though it’s interesting that he came from Córdoba at a point when Charles the Bald was also interested in acquiring relics of the fairly recent and much-disputed Christian martyrs of that city; channels were maybe more open than usual to clergy moving zones at this point.³ But still: to waltz in and appropriate more than half of a city’s tithes, presumably by the will of its congregation? That suggests bigger things than charismatic authority; that suggests major problems with the standing of the actual bishop, perhaps even a disputed election. This document has thus been part of the case that Frodoí, who it may or may not have been complaining to the king here, was the king’s outsider candidate pursuing an unpopular agenda, perhaps the replacement of the local Mozarabic liturgy with the Carolingian-preferred Roman one, and meeting opposition, which, in the full version of this thesis, he would then try and master by "luckily" finding the relics of Saint Eulalie in Santa Maria del Mar, thus proving his divine backing.⁴ Well, maybe. But the apparent link between Tirs and Baio suggests a further dimension.

Panoramic view of the three churches of Egara at Terrassa, “Egara. Conjunt episcopal” by Oliver-Bonjoch – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.

The key element here is Terrassa. The three palaeochristian churches of Terrassa, though very close to Barcelona, had under the Visigothic kings been the site of their own bishopric. That seems to have been inactive by the time of the Carolingian conquest, so the Carolingians combined its territory into Barcelona.⁵ That Tirs was in a position to put someone in Terrassa who could then keep the Carolingian bishop of Barcelona out has always suggested, to me, that what Tirs was actually doing was attempting a revival of the bishopric of Terrassa. At which rate, the "two thirds" of the bishopric the Carolingian bishop was complaining about losing to him might just be the old see, freshly split back off at least for now. All this wouldn’t necessarily make Tirs and Baio honest actors; but it does mean that they, too, could probably have found Church council legislation in support of what they had done.

Then on that subject, aren’t the sources of authority in play interesting? We have an ecumenical council (I Nicæa), provincial ones from Asia (I Antioch) Africa (IV Carthage), Gaul (I Orléans) and Hispania (IV Braga and VII Toledo), as if all were now in the inheritance that the Carolingian Church could draw on – but also, had they been there to plead their case, lending legitimacy to the Visigothic Church arrangements which Tirs and Baio may have been trying to revive – and then a Carolingian capitulary, cited as law whether or not this capitulary in which we have the cite counts as law. But it’s also misattributed: it’s the one we call the Capitulary of Worms, and it wasn’t issued by Charles and Louis, i. e. Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, Charles the Bald’s daddy and granddad, but by Louis the Pious and Lothar I, i. e. daddy and Charles’s sometimes-wicked half-brother.⁶ Charles was 1 at the time, so you could see why he might not remember; but were the available texts bad, was the memory of Lothar and the year 830 awkward, or was it just that Lothar I didn’t clearly have authority over the March so that it seemed better to attribute the ruling to the two kings who conquered it? But to me it’s also the idea that here secular law and Church law are equivalently valid, and as if to match that, not only was the bishop of Barcelona clearly hoping for the king, not the synod, to sort the matter out, but one of the synodal judgements cited, I Antioch 5, even requires "external authority" to get involved. So here we have a Church and a state which do recognise each other as external to themselves, but still assume the other’s unquestioning support.

This isn’t the right charter – it won’t surprise you, perhaps, to know that Madeix and Requesèn’s charters don’t survive⁷ – but it gives you some idea of what these things usually look like as we have them. It is a 12th-century copy of a precept of Charles the Bald for the monastery of Sant Medir, now in the Arxiu Comarcal de la Selva

But then there’s cap. 3, which is no-one’s problem but the king’s. There’s no canon law to cite here, no Church councils that bear on the issue, because the only authority in question is Charles’s, through these precepts that the two Goths Madeix and Requesèn may have got from him. Here, of course, Charles was in a difficult position. In the early years of his reign he had handed out concessions of land to willing followers as only a man embroiled in a civil war of uncertain outcome with no other reliable access to information about the areas in question might – “I own that? Sure, have it, not like I’m seeing anything from it. How many troops did you bring again?” – but, although there is disagreement about this, I have argued elsewhere that pretty soon Charles had switched his policy with such Hispani begging land grants to handing over his rights and therefore their immunity from certain dues and duties to the local Church.⁸ At least, in most areas, but not, apparently, in Barcelona proper, where there seems to have been enough of a core group of people who could still be called Goths that they were worth maintaining as some species of royal following. That policy had here come back to bite Charles: he had given grants to lands to which, perhaps because they had belonged to Terrassa, it was possible that the cathedral of Barcelona had a claim. Furthermore, although it’s not clear from this document, he had done this quite some time ago, because when his son ratified Barcelona’s possession of these lands in 878, it was explained that, “formerly a Goth by the name of Requesèn took these lands from the power of Bishop Joan and held them without right”.⁹ Bishop Joan is only attested up to 858, and Bishop Adaulf between then and Frodoí turning up in 862, so Frodoí had in this respect walked into a situation that was at least four years and two bishops old when he became bishop himself and was at least sixteen years old by the time he felt able to get the king to address it. This, along with the non-standard coinage Frodoí may also have issued, makes me think that he was not Charles’s chosen agent of reform in the area, but rather someone with a weak power base who was only able to cultivate the kings quite late on. It makes one wonder how long Tirs had been at Terrassa: was he in fact a fugitive from the martyr movement? No way to know, but…

In any case, in 874 this mostly worked. In principle, as we see from the rest of the document, Charles would back up his bishop to the fullest extent; but where it meant going back on his own word, however hasty, it was better to hold a local inquest, "for a public judgement of who there has been who has lied in their entreaties". Because one thing had to be for sure: the blame would lie on the March, either with the Goths or, alarmingly for him perhaps with two-thirds of his congregation currently voting differently, with the bishop. The one place blame was not going to lie was with the king who had issued the precepts!

It’s easy to say that the rulers of this era moved in a different world to our politicians, in which they were apart from anything else primarily responsible in the eyes of all to God, and to the actual people, if at all, only through some quite selective and not very powerful organisations of the social élite who relied on the king too much for position ever really to hamper him. It’s equally or more easy, I guess, to go the other way instead and just assume that these rulers were just like ours, with their eyes only on the immediate prize and any talk of God just a cynical way to smooth out opposition to their own will. It’s certainly possible to read this document in either direction, according to your preference: was Charles mobilising Church authority to keep his man in power? Maybe, at least up to the point where his man called Charles’s own authority into question! And I suppose that the alternative perspective, in which Charles was here the prisoner of Church demands until they came down simply to property, could be seen equally cynically by the fashionable device of seeing the Church as an organisation whose goals were primarily political and financial, with any actual religious motive invisible behind their peculation; this is, after all, roughly how we see our own politicians now so why should anyone claiming power be different?¹⁰ It’s possible, indeed probably preferable, to see the medieval Church as a massive state-endorsed charity whose holdings amounted to substantial policy influence but whose goals remained ultimately religious; but it might fairly be said that the bishop of Barcelona here did not "surface" that priority in this plea to the king.¹¹ All the same, it seems clear to me that at the end of this rather difficult interaction, Frodoí (if it was he) may have got most of what he wanted but the real winner was still Charles the Bald, and that’s politicianning however you see it, I reckon.

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1. You can find it in Ramon de Abadal i de Vinyals (ed.), Catalunya carolíngia volum II: Els diplomes carolingis a Catalunya, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica 2-3 (Barcelona 1926-1952), 2 vols, Ap. VII. Abadal helpfully identified all the conciliar and legal references it makes, which I’ve hyperlinked rather than footnote as that seems more directly useful.

2. Abadal gave as ultimate source (ibid. vol. II p. 430), “Sirmond, Capitula Caroli Cavli et successorum, Paris, 1623, que el tragué d’un còdex desconegut.” For the difficulties of the genre see these days Christina Pössel, "Authors and recipients of Carolingian capitularies, 779–829" in Richard Corradini, Rob Meens, Pössel and Philip Shaw (edd.), Texts and Identities in the Early Middle Ages, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 12 (Wien 2006), pp. 253–274, or Shigeto Kikuchi, "Carolingian capitularies as texts: significance of texts in the goverment of the Frankish kingdom especially under Charlemagne" in Osamu Kano (ed.), Configuration du texte en histoire. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference Hermeneutic Study and Education of Textual Configuration, Global CEO Program International Conference Series 12 (Nagoya 2012), pp. 67–80, for my copy of which I must thank the author.

3. See, among other things, Ann Christys, "St-Germain des-Prés, St Vincent and the Martyrs of Cordoba" in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 7 (Oxford 1998), pp. 199–216, DOI: 10.1111/1468-0254.00025.

4. For this thesis, see Joan-F. Cabestany i Fort, "El culte de Santa Eulàlia a la Catedral de Barcelona (S. IX-X)" in Lambard: estudis d’art medieval Vol. 9 (Barcelona 1996), pp. 159–165, online here.

5. Manuel Riu, "L’església catalana al segle X" in Frederic Udina i Martorell (ed.), Symposium Internacional sobre els Orígens de Catalunya (segles VIII-XI) (Barcelona 1991), 2 vols, vol. I pp. 161–189, online here, pp. 161-164, is safe enough on this. For where it’s not, see Jonathan Jarrett, "Archbishop Ató of Osona: False Metropolitans on the Marca Hispanica" in Archiv für Diplomatik Vol. 56 (München 2010), pp. 1–42.

6. If the messy history of the Carolingian royal family at this point in history is new to you, the very short version would be: Charles was the youngest son, by a different mother, of Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious, ruler like his father of most Western Europe, who had enough trouble settling his succession arrangements to the satisfaction of his three adult sons by his first marriage already when Charles came along, and the result when Louis died in 840 was three years of war and thirty years of mistrust and occasional coup attempts thereafter. The longer version is best got through Janet Nelson, Charles the Bald (London 1992).

7. Though this didn’t stop Abadal indexing them as documents we know once existed, as Catalunya Carolíngia II Particulars XXII & XXIII. He dated them to before 858, for reasons we’ll go on to discuss, but they would probably fit best of all among the many documents Charles issued for Catalonia in 844, for which see n. 8 below.

8. As just said above, Charles’s maximum generosity to Catalonia was while he was besieging his ertswhile marquis Bernard of Septimania in Toulouse during 844. Because the king’s location was both in reach and the same for long enough for news to get out, he seems to have been regularly beset with Marchers asking for charters; in the two months he was there he issued thirteen that we know of, and four more are known, including these two, which could also date to this period; see Jordi Rubió i Lois, "Índexs" in Abadal, Catalunya Carolíngia II vol. II, pp. 507-586 at pp. 511-513. All are of course edited in the same volumes, so I won’t give further references here. For my arguments about his policy, see Jonathan Jarrett, "Settling the Kings’ Lands: aprisio in Catalonia in perspective" in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 18 (Oxford 2010), pp. 320–342, DOI: 10.1111/j.1471-8847.2010.00301.x at pp. 329-330.

9. Abadal, Catalunya Carolíngia II, Barcelona: Església catedral de la Santa Creu II, cit. under ibid. Particulars XXII but not Particulars XXIII.

10. I meet this expectation from students a lot: a question about religious versus secular motives is always likely to confuse them since, having never experienced it themselves except as a vague part of the English state and education system, they mostly can’t conceive of religion except as a tool of secular power through indoctrination. However, it can’t be said that they don’t have academic company, as Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge 1983) and Robert B. Ekelund, Robert D. Tollison, Gary M. Anderson, Robert F. Hébert and Audrey B. Davidson, Sacred Trust: The Medieval Church as an Economic Firm (Oxford 1996) will always be there to remind us.

11. Of course the two aspects crossed; but you can’t understand the economic one without belief as a factor. See Ian Wood, "Entrusting Western Europe to the Church, 400–750" in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th Series Vol. 23 (Cambridge 2013), pp. 37–73, DOI: 10.1017/S0080440113000030 and indeed behind that David Herlihy, "Church Property on the European Continent, 701-1200" in Speculum Vol. 36 (Cambridge MA 1961), pp. 81–105, DOI: 10.2307/2849846.

Seminars CLXXIV-CLXXVI: Crusaders, Cistercians and more at Leeds

Hullo again! Firstly, I should apologise for the unexpected skip week, which I can best explain as backwash from the end of the industrial action at Leeds; everything is now back at full power in our educational machine and I disappeared briefly back into the gears… But, on taking stock of where I was in my blog backlog, it turned out that for a while it was almost all papers I’d heard in Leeds at the end of 2020 or early 2021. And it’s worth remembering that there are reasons to be an academic in the UK system, for all the trouble it’s in, and that if you’re a medievalist Leeds’s name is still famous for some of those reasons. So I thought I’d showcase four of those papers here, and maybe do some more slightly later on.

So we start on 17th November 2020, when our then-resident Teaching Fellow Dr James Doherty, who is now helping to run things at Birmingham, spoke to the Institute of Medieval Studies Seminar with the title, “Count Hugh of Troyes and his Charters”. Jamie has for a long time been working on people who went on crusade when there wasn’t one of the big, numbered, crusades happening, of which there were many – he works on a project with a database you can look at – but Hugh doesn’t quite fit the profile, because he was to begin with a person who stayed home when others went, including two of his brothers, who died on crusade in 1100 and 1102. Now, if you’ve heard of Hugh at all it’s probably either because you’re Charles West (or one of his readers) or for bad reasons that Jamie should get to tell people about himself; but he was big news in his day: by various channels of inheritance he ended up running much of the future Champagne; he married a daughter of the King of France in 1095 and then lost her in an annulment in 1104; he donated Clairvaux to the Cistercian Order, ensuring that Bernard of Clairvaux would have somewhere to be of; he survived an assassination attempt in 1102; and he finally joined the Templar Order.¹ And this, you know, is all notable.

Impression of the seal of Count Hugh I of Troyes, image from Anne François Arnaud, Voyage archéologique et pittoresque dans le département de l'Aube et dans l'ancien diocèse de Troyes, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The failed marriage, however, presumably coming on the back of his loss of his brothers, seems at first to have been some kind of turning point for Hugh: he went east himself for three years in 1104, went again in 1114-1116 and then lastly, as a Templar, in 1124-1127 and possibly until his death in 1130. Some of that has been studied, but Jamie was looking at the bits of his life where he stayed home to find out what he did there. And part of the answer is that, at least for the First Crusade, he was working for Pope Urban II, settling cases to do with the properties of those who had gone on Crusades, trying to get donations completed that crusaders had made and not finished before they went, and also representing Urban’s candidature for the papacy in an area whose bishops largely did not recognise it (because people, and especially students, tend to forget that the pope who called the First Crusade was in France because he couldn’t get into Rome because of the rival, more successful, pope who was there already). Therefore, argued Jamie, instead of envisaging a dramatic change of heart from a man who had hitherto resisted the call to go east, we might see his departure in 1104 as a man who was finally free to follow his heart in a matter where he was already committed. And that seemed fair enough to me, although I did wonder whether he was also trying to make up for his brothers’ failure somehow. The documents, sadly, don’t give us that kind of perspective, but Jamie showed us that they do add something.

Jumping chronology slightly so as to stay on a theme, on 14th January 2021 the Northern Network for the Study of the Crusades met at Leeds, and I made it to that too, not least because the second speaker was someone who had taken part in my Rethinking the Medieval Frontier project a while before and I wanted to show solidarity. That was Professor Nicholas Paul, who was up second, but preceding him was Louis Pulford, speaking to the title “‘I can give no better or more authentic account of this’: the sources and intellectual context of Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay’s Historia Albigense“. For those not familiar with that text, of whom I was one, Mr Pulford described it as a Cistercian preaching history of the Albigensian Crusade, which was directed not against Muslims but against the kind-of-Christian Cathar sect of southern France, the text being written very soon after 1219.² Peter was nephew of the abbot of the place where he was a monk, but both were crusaders, having been on the disastrous 4th Crusade until its attack on Croatian Zara, and the abbot had also been in Cathar territory as a counter-preacher, with Peter sometimes there too, so this is a sort of religious soldier’s narrative. The text has been dismissed as being basically calqued from much older theology, however, and so is not reckoned much use as an account of the Cathars, and so Mr Pulford wanted to do a proper analysis on it to see just what texts it used and where it didn’t. There turn out to be lots, from the Bible through to Peter’s own day, including several papal letters (recorded as such), and Mr Pulford thought that the mass of this material, including some stuff from quite high up the command chain of the Crusade, might actually imply a role as official historian of it. I think I’d want a writer to say that if it was true – and why would you hide it? – so I asked and it turns out that it is dedicated to Pope Innocent III, but does not name him as sponsor. So my personal jury remains out on that, but at least this was a set of reasons to think that Peter was doing something quite specific with his text, and that its purpose might be worth divining as a source of understanding of the politics around the crusade in itself.

The ruins of Byblos Castle, in modern Lebanon, a possible setting for crusader performance! Image by Heretiq – Own work, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

After that, Professor Paul spoke to the title, “Setting the Stage: aristocratic performance and the Eastern theatre of crusading conflict”. I thought I’d heard this paper before but actually this was a revamped version with little left of the one he’d done for us. In it, he framed crusading, which we now appreciate was dangerous, very very expensive and in general not a surefire way to advance as a Christian aristocrat in the Middle Ages, as the ultimate performance of chivalry in a world where that was a competitive sport. At home you had tournaments, which were also good stages, but this was the real deal. It was also, however, a kind of Grand Tour avant la lettre, which might include visiting Constantinople, usually as a pilgrim, and of course the Holy Land itself. One would come back having seen the hearts of the Christian world and briefly, perhaps, added one way or another to the blood flowing through them. This much was cool, but not perhaps hard to see; but Professor Paul’s next step was one I recognise now from pilgrimage study, in which he argued that romances and stories of crusading became scripts for the would-be performers to follow, and that those who moved out there, knowing from such texts what they thought they should find there, were trying to perform those scripts, even in things as material as castle-building, making them sites of hospitality and giving them gardens which made it possible for them to be the fantastic eastern sites the romances had already told them of. Apparently Hildebrand of St-Omer, otherwise unknown to me, even reports that this was being done competitively with the Muslims, trying to out-east the Easterners.³ By the end of this I wanted to read Professor Paul’s book…⁴

View eastwards from the west end of the north aisle of the church of my local Cistercian ex-establishment, Kirkstall Abbey, a building whose purpose was pretty clearly not just estate management. The photograph is mine.

But in between all this crusading stuff, another theme you may not have spotted there popped up again, that being Cistercians! I admit that this is actually a pretty strained link, but only because when our local Cistercians expert, Professor Emilia Jamroziak, spoke to the School of History Research Seminar on 25th November 2020, with the title, “The Theory of Modernisation and the Historiography of Medieval Monasticism”, you can tell she was working a much broader theme than just one monastic order studied more for their land-use or their angriest writer than for much else.⁵ She started by pointing out that monasticism is a subject whose history is usually written pretty much directly from its own institutional memory, which is of course selective, but usually written about monasteries’ connections to the wider world.⁶ Emilia was here instead looking at how the history that is written about these institutions come from the other side of a medieval/modern divide effectively set up by the Enlightenment (or, I might say, even earlier), preventing it being seen as a ‘rational’ response to the world whereas, of course, it did make sense to the people who did it (as they fairly clearly tell us). This tends to bring the Cistercians and their famous land management out on top as looking most ‘rational’ and ‘future-minded’, when actually the future on which all these places were focused was in fact the big eternity. Even the more recent historiography has tended to start valuing monasteries as innovators or precursors of phenomena which would later become significant, like eye-glasses, book production, and so on, which is all still basically an industrialised capitalist perspective that ignores the actual religion in these religious institutions. As Emilia said in questions, this kind of thinking lets modern Protestants engage with this Catholic movement without having to engage with its spirituality, which they consider suspect. Or else, monasteries get seen as tools of Europeanisation, bringing the periphery of the North and East onto the master narrative’s progressive track for their own teleological passages towards the Enlightenment and the current world order.

I’m putting my own spin on this, for sure, but you would be able to tell even more clearly from my notes that Emilia was quite ready to tear all this down and wants a history of monasticism at least to be told in its own terms to see what that looks like. There were lots of questions, including one person asking whether we shouldn’t therefore let monks do the history-writing themselves, to which Emilia suggested that monks wouldn’t want her doing it but that an outside perspective might still be desirable. Graham Loud suggested that another problem is that our sources are most vocal when things were going wrong, making normally-functioning monasticism much harder to see than you’d expect. But most of the questions focused around the idea of a ‘linear narrative’ which Emilia wanted us to abandon. By this she meant the progress narrative of modernisation, I’m pretty sure, but the phrasing led to various people asking if non-linear narratives are possible – Bill Flynn, liturgist until recently also at Leeds, suggested that monasteries themselves tend to see the narrative running backwards, from the age of perfection to them, and I unwittingly invoked the idea of cyclical establishment, corruption and reform that gave rise to the Cistercians themselves, which offered Emilia another pattern to suggest. As far as I can see from my desk at home, Emilia is still working on the new narrative that will answer these objections, and I should really just ask her about it, though conversations on my corridor these days tend to revolve around teaching and exhaustion and get no further. But I do rather want to see it.

The corridor is along the top of this, the Parkinson Building, University of Leeds, home of the IMS. Photo by Tim Green from Bradford [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Anyway, this all gives you some idea of the kind of things which go on in the Institute for Medieval Studies when it’s not the International Medieval Congress; and there is, as I say, more where this came from! I only wish I had then been and now was contributing more to it myself…

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1. For Jamie’s take, see James Doherty, “Count Hugh of Troyes and the Prestige of Jerusalem” in History Vol. 102 (Oxford 2017), pp. 874–888, DOI: 10.1111/1468-229X.12521. For Charles’s, see Charles West, “Count Hugh of Troyes and the Territorial Principality in Early Twelfth-Century Western Europe” in English Historical Review Vol. 127 (Oxford 2012), pp. 523–548, DOI: 10.1093/ehr/ces080.

2. It has for some time been available in English as Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, The History of the Albigensian Crusade: Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay’s Historia Albigensis, trans. W. A. Sibly and M. D. Sibly (Woodbridge 2002).

3. I can’t find any real trace of this person (bar this), but Professor Paul cited an article which must, I think, have been Uri Zvi Shachar, “Enshrined Fortification: A Trialogue on the Rise and Fall of Safed” in Medieval History Journal Vol. 23 (Cham 2020), pp. 265–290, DOI: 10.1177/0971945819895898. That said, the details don’t match perfectly and the only Latin source I can see in Schachar’s citation is Laura Minervini (ed.), Cronaca del Templare di Tiro (1243-1314): La caduta degli Stati crociati nel racconto di un testimone oculare (Napoli 2000), and I can’t find much out about that either. But that’s as far as I think it’s probably sensible to chase this particular hare…

4. It is Nicholas L. Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages (Ithaca NY 2012).

5. Although if you are interested in Cistercians, obviously we at Leeds recommend Emilia Jamroziak, The Cistercian Order in Medieval Europe, 1090-1500 (London 2013), and Jamroziak, “East-Central European Monasticism: Between East and West?” in Alison I. Beach and Isabelle Cochelin (edd.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin World (Cambridge 2019), 2 vols, vol. II pp. 882–900, is also important more generally, as is lots more of Emilia’s work.

6. I have to admit guilt here: this is exactly what Jonathan Jarrett, “Power over Past and Future: Abbess Emma and the nunnery of Sant Joan de les Abadesses” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 12 (Oxford 2003), pp 229–258, DOI: 10.1111/j.0963-9462.2004.00128.x, does, though in my defence Jarrett, “Nuns, Signatures, and Literacy in late-Carolingian Catalonia” in Traditio Vol. 74 (Cambridge 2019), pp. 125–152, DOI: 10.1017/tdo.2019.7, is more like what Emilia suggests, so in this sense I have developed.