For Some of the Gold in China

In November 2019, somehow, despite being in the middle of teaching and just before going on strike, that continuous impoverishing recreation we academics keep having to have, I managed to do something I probably now won’t do again for a long time, which was, go to China. For much of 2018 and 2019, as you’ll have been picking up, I had been making friends in Chinese academic circles, where I am known if at all as a specialist in Byzantine coinage, and as I have distantly mentioned because of its proceedings coming out, at about this point one of these friends got me and m’colleague Dr Rebecca Darley onto the bill of a conference at the National Museum of China, in Běijīng, called “Coinage and Empire: the Influence and Changes of Coins in the International Perspectives”. The timing wasn’t great; but it seemed like the sort of opportunity I shouldn’t turn down. Now, the world has changed, in oh so many ways and so on, but since this is where the backlog has reached and since I still did it, it should be recounted.*

Now, you may remember from my first conference trip to China that I was very impressed by the country and the academic provision, especially but not just of tea. Of course I was meant to be impressed; the relevant international centre of a high-ranking but provincial university was keen to make a good show to its foreign visitors, and I appreciated it. The National Museum of China did the whole conference thing equally grandly, and it was still pretty international (a speaker from Japan, one from Russia, one from France and three from the UK), but on this occasion I’m not sure we foreigners were the audience for the showing-off so much as some of the things being shown off, and the actual conference was much more of a Chinese affair than the previous one had been. This manifested itself in several ways. Firstly, we didn’t get an English-language programme; instead, Dr Helen Wang of the British Museum sent round a scratch translation of it to the other foreigners attending a few days before we departed, for which we were suitably grateful. Likewise, at the conference itself, there was not so much of the translated summaries after papers that had been managed on the previous occasion; instead, we were stationed next to one of those aforesaid friends each and they gave us sotto voce explanations of what was going on, which varied considerably in depth along with their own interest (“Oh, you don’t care about this, it’s Ming”, and so on). And lastly, the fashion of the day was to use slides simply to put up a text of one’s paper as one gave it, which in hànzì you can just about do as you talk because of how dense they are semantically. This all combined with the jetlag to mean that I had between a sketchy idea and no idea at all of what some of the papers were about. Some of the speakers, to whom I was extremely grateful, had used their slides to give a précis in English of their Chinese paper, but it wasn’t very many. So this account is what I could get out of all that, minus what sense I now can’t make of my notes and less the memory loss of three years plus. But there was still some interesting stuff being said. This is how it broke down, in translation anyway.

13th November 2019

The Reasons for the Formation of the Two Different Coinages in the East and the West, and the Impact on their Social, Economic and Financial Development

• Huang Xiquan, “Seeing Power Struggles over Land in Coins”, in Chinese, of which all I could parse was that he was at one point reading the characters off the early ‘spade’ money;
• He Ping, “King Jing of Zhou’s Casting of Large Coins and Chinese Coin-Issuing Principles and Systems”, in Chinese, of which all I got was that in 124 BC Chinese authorities (presumably the Han) took the new step of issuing a multiple coin for the first time and the economy crashed because of it;
• Georges Depeyrot, “The Question of Metal in Europe”, in English
• Wang Liyan, “Evolution of Gold in Ancient Chinese Monetary Systems and its Structure”, in Chinese
• Zhou Weirong, “Response”, in Chinese

So obviously the ones I could engage with here were the papers by Professor Depeyrot and Dr Wang. The former was a determined attempt to read all of European economic history until not far short of the present day as being determined by availability of bullion. It was entertaining, but my notes are covered in quarrelsome asterisks where he said, for example, that coinage paid to barbarians was often converted to jewellery leaving them short of money, that there was no silver available in Western Europe between the 7th and 13th centuries (which would have been news to the miners of Melle and Harz, I imagine!), that the Huns and Mongols supplied silver to the West instead, and that gold arrived in China from Japan rather than from the West meaning that we have no documentation of it. He also appeared to think that the United Kingdom still runs on a gold standard. For all these reasons, I couldn’t really accept the thesis as presented. I learnt more from Professor Wang, who informed us that although pretty much all Chinese coinage has pretty much always been base-metal, actually the Qin, Han, Tang, Song, Ming and Qing all made occasional use of gold currency units, varying from small ‘pots’ known as ‘horse-foot money’ and simple ingots and bars through gold cash to leaves. It was all special-purpose money, and I would love to have heard more about what those purposes were, but even gathering that this stuff existed was a start.

3 gold horse-hoof ingots on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, but excavated from the tomb of Marquis Haihun in Nanchang, Jiangxi, and lent by the Jiangxi Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology

I couldn’t gather what the title of the second session was, but this was it…

• Zhou Weirong, “The Influence of Silk Road Trade on China’s Currency Structure and System”, in Chinese, which pointed out the rather rarer instances of silver coinage or bullion units in Chinese monetary history, but out of which I got little else;
• Wang Yongsheng, “The Relationship between Kings and Currency, as seen in Xi Xia Coins”, in Chinese, where I got nothing; my notes aren’t even sure that this was actually the paper which got delivered;
• Zhou Xiang, “On Dachao Tongbao Coins”, in Chinese, and of which all I got was the way in which Mongol rule brought Islamic patterns of coinage, including die-struck silver ones with square frames like Ayyubid ones, to China for some purposes—and again, I wish I could say what purposes;
• Wang Jijie, “On 50-liang Silver Ingots of Tianqi Year 1 and Grain Taxes in the Ming Dynasty”, in Chinese and presumably, from the title, a quite closely-focused argument, but I’m afraid that all my notes record is that I was impressed by the ingots;
• Zhang Anhaq, “On the Prohibition of Coins in Shunzhi Year 3”, in very fast Chinese with no real help from visuals, so sorry, I know no more;
• He Ping, “Response”, in Chinese

Qing-Dynasty 50-liang silver ingot, image from LiveAuctioneers (linked through) so presumably now in private hands

The Track of Coin Exchanges among the Countries and the Influence of Chinese Currency on Other Country’s Currency

• Lan Rixu, “The Evolution and Characteristics of Silk Road Coins”, in Chinese, of which I have no notes;
• Yang Juping, “The Century’s Research on Lead Cakes with Foreign Inscriptions”, in Chinese
• Rebecca Darley, “A Third Way? Currency Production in India from Antiquity to the Middle Ages in a Global Context”, in English;
• Li Xiaojia & Lin Ying, “On Changes in the Crowns on Sasanian Coins”, in Chinese, explaining the fact that each Sasanian shah of Iran was denoted on his (or indeed her) coins by a different crown, and that sometimes there was even a kind of reign reset with a new crown for the reigning shah;
• Lin Ying, “Response”, in Chinese

Here, as you can tell, the papers I can say anything about are Professor Yang’s and Rebecca’s, I mean Dr Darley’s. Professor Yang was dealing with a certain peculiar type of round lead ingot stamped with characters identifying them as belonging to the Han Wudi Emperor, but also others which have been read as Bactrian, Parthian and several other languages by various Western scholars. Yang pointed out that Chinese scholars have always been pretty clear that they are Chinese as well, meaning roughly ’28 Mansions’ which has Zodiacal significance, and now there have been silver ones found with a different Chinese inscription as well, so whatever they are it probably started in China; thankyou very much. Even though I was following this largely from slides it was still an entertaining slam-dunk of a paper. Rebecca, meanwhile, was posing a third way of ancient peoples having ‘done’ coinage between the Western precious-metal and the East Asian fiat currency tax systems, in the form of the silver punch-mark coins of the South Asian Mauryan Empire of the 5th to 1st centuries BC. Their immense variation within broad characteristics – flat bits of metal, usually rectangular, marked with up to four punched symbols and a load of extra use marks, which carried on being used and imitated long after their initiating empire had collapsed – she argued were a non-state, socially-negotiated, ‘discursive’ coinage system which she likened to early English pennies or Viking arm-rings. This paper, sadly, wasn’t in the proceedings, but I hope it comes out eventually.

Punch-marked karshapana of Pushyamitra Sunga struck at Vidisha in 185–149 BCE, photo by Jean-Michael Moullec, licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Then there was a tea-break, and straight back to more of the same session!

• The first paper in this session wasn’t either of the two that had been on the translated programme I had, and all I can tell you about it is that it was about exhibiting money. I wasn’t paying as much attention as I could have, because the next paper was…
• Jonathan Jarrett, “‘He will ruin many from among the people’: market exchange in the Byzantine Empire and the reform of Emperor Anastasius I”, which you have heard about, so I won’t go on about here as well; then
• Cao Guangsheng, “Sogdian Coins and New Perspectives on the Exchange and Integration of East and West Cultures in the Han to Tang Period”, in Chinese, informing us that the Central Asian Sogdian peoples imitated pretty much every coinage that reached them in their own issues but that this included Chinese cash, which even wound up being cast with local mint-marks from other systems on them;
• Zhao Xiaoming, “Looking at the Differences between East and West Coinages to See Connections between Money and Economy”, in Chinese, between the which and mounting jetlag I got nothing from this, sorry;
• Guo Yunyan, “Gold Money-Like Plaques on the Silk Road”, distinguishing as Guo does three levels of use of Byzantine-style money on the Silk Routes, actual Byzantine coins, close imitations and one-sided foil ‘plaques’ or ‘bracteates’, the question this raises being whether they all counted as, or were being used as, coins, or something else?¹
• And then there was a further paper at the end not on the original program, and I got nothing from that either I’m afraid…

Gold bracteate imitation of a Byzantine solidus made in Central Asia during or after the fifth century CE, BactriaNumis Z-156956, now in private hands

By the next day I was doing a bit better, but my notes suggest that the problem was not just jetlag, alas, as there were still many papers I didn’t get much of.

Theme 4

• Li Xiuying, “On the Sasanian Coins in the Shouzhou Museum”, in Chinese, and overrunning, but they do indeed have some Sasanian and indeed Arab-Sasanian coins in that there museum;
• Li Shuhui, “On Cotton Money in the Western Regions”, in Chinese, of which I wish I could say I had got anything as it sounds interesting, but sadly I did not;
• Li Xiao, “History of Greek-Indian Relations – Focussing on the Bilingual Coins”, in Chinese but with helpful slides and more or less a history of Indo-Greek and Bactrian coins, on which I have scatty notes that probably don’t serve you better than a good work on the subject;²
• Li Xiaoping, “Questions Relating to Money in Foreign Trade during the Yuan Dynasty”, in Chinese, on which my notes, do with this what you can, read, “Lots of pay of goods and ingots but no help for banking”;
• Wang Xianguo, “China’s Early Silver Money and the Formation of the Silver Liang System”, in Chinese, on which I have nothing;
• Wang Yongsheng, “Response”

And finally!

5

• Li Qiang, “Eastward Journey of Byzantine Gold Coins – Textual and Archaeological Evidence”, in Chinese but with helpful slides and of course on a topic familiar to me;
• Qi Xiaoyan, “From China to Central Asia: Sogdian Imitations of Kaiyuan Tongbao Coins”, in Chinese, hitting roughly the same points as Cao Guangsheng the previous day, though my notes don’t suggest I had any memory of that… ;
• Huang Wei, “Foreign Trade in the Ming Dynasty and Silver Money”, in Chinese; “Oh, you don’t care about this, it’s Ming”…;
• Liu Zhentang, “Seeing Western Power in Ancient Coin Power”, in Chinese, and I have no idea, sorry;
• Shi Jilong, “Developments in Banknote Printing and Distribution”, in Chinese but actually as much about paper-making technology as anything else, interesting;
• Helen Wang, “Displaying Money of the World at the British Museum”, in English with a Chinese introduction, giving a very short history of the British Museum’s coin collections, saying what the display philosophy relating to coins now is (which is, they’re in all galleries) and explaining the development of the Money Gallery itself;³
• Tong Chunyan, “The Concept of the Exhibition ‘Money and Kingship: Influences and Changes from a World Perspective”, in Chinese, and I’m sorry, nothing;
• Huo Hiongwei, “Closing Remarks”, in Chinese.

I confess that by the time this finished, I was ready to stop the effort to show some kind of understanding of that which I really was not understanding. I do have quite thick notes on Li Qiang’s paper, however, which took a broader view of the imitation of Byzantine gold coins in areas eastwards of the Empire than had some others. It was actually quite a widespread phenomenon, covering India to Mongolia with at least something on most major landmasses between, imitating rulers from Theodosius II to Tiberius III so over four centuries with the end coming at different times in different areas. He had lots of broad detail about location, as well, making it clear where this was literally marginal behavior (certainly in China, along the northern frontiers or where the Great Wall is) or just occasional (like Mongolia, where almost all of the known specimens are out of one particular tomb). The interesting thing, however, is that while most of what people have found is gold, the Sogdian and Chinese texts both suggest there should have been much more silver and talk about that as if it was currency. In this respect the texts and the archaeology don’t agree and the non-genuine coins seem to have been more integrated into currency systems than the real ones, but Byzantium still obviously had a cachet that made its coins worth imitating or owning.

This paper, frustratingly, is not in the conference proceedings either, as far as I can tell, possibly because Qiang had already published a version of it a little while before; but then, if it had been there, it’s not as if I could read it!⁴ But for now, it’s not a bad place to wrap up the conference report.
Now, when proceedings were over and lunch was served, we began to go our separate ways but part of this experience was a tour around the National Museum itself, an eye-opening experience. My overall recollection is that repeatedly, I looked at something and thought, ‘oh, it’s a bit like that Western thing that probably does the same job’ and then found that the Chinese specimen was about half a millennium older; it was difficult not to leave with the impression that everything happened or developed in China first. Of course it’s a national museum, that is surely the point; but they did have the material with which to do it…

One side of a Yuan stele bearing the inscription of a treatise by Pan Di whose title translates as ‘Pronunciation and Meaning of the Stone Drums (shiguwen Yinxun)’, from 1339 CE. I just love that this is epigraphy about understanding epigraphy. Photograph by Rebecca Darley, as apparently I just plain forgot to take my camera on this trip!

The next day, we got taken to another museum by one of the archaeologists who had been present at the conference, who between his own efforts and those of an English-speaking student of his was able to give us a fascinating account of some of the Silk Road sites he had dug at, and where we were wistfully sure we would never be able to go, the kind of frontier cities Owen Lattimore had written about in a fargone time before…⁵

Reverse of the same stele, image again by Rebecca Darley.

The last thing we did, in the afternoon of that free day, was visit the Forbidden City. We wandered round it marvelling till chucking-out time, slowly finding our way and understanding bits of how an empire could be ruled from here and also how, if you never took your people outside its walls, it couldn’t, and how completely isolated the lives of the last Qing emperors must have been here. Of course, again, I am not blind to the fact that access to this space was opened up by a revolution whose basis included the alleged unfitness of this ancien régime to govern any more, and that the curation of the site has only that purpose; but it is therefore a pretty powerful thing that what was once actually a forbidden city is now a public space (subject to search, scan and a reasonably hefty admission price anyway). I now feel very lucky to have seen it, since I can’t imagine what circumstances would now take me back there – and I do wish I had some photographs – but it was a good and remarkably peaceful way to conclude a manic trip across the world and back to talk about coins.

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* It may not be fashionable to have friends in China any more, but on this score my guidance has been, since it happened to me, a conversation with a Russian colleague who had only just made it to a conference because of trouble over getting a visa. Embarrassed as I so often am by the Home Office’s obstacles to academic visitors to the country, I began apologising for Britain and he stopped me with a hand on my arm, and said, as I remember it: “Please. You understand that we Russians know that there is a difference between the government of a country and its people.” I still felt obliged to assure him I hadn’t voted for the lot in office, but his assurance has stayed with me as a model.

1. Guo’s work is more widely available in English than many a Chinese scholar’s, and you could consult whichever you can get of Guo Yunyan, “Bracteates with Byzantine coin patterns along the Silk Road” in Fabio Guidetti and Katherine Meinecke (edd.), A Globalised Visual Culture? Towards a Geography of Late Antique Art (Oxford 2020), pp. 341–356, or Guo Yunyan, “Classification of Byzantine Gold Coins and Imitations Found in China” in Sven Günther, Li Qiang, Lin Ying and Claudia Sode (edd.), From Constantinople to Chang’an: Byzantine Gold Coins in the World of Late Antiquity, Supplements to the Journal of Ancient Civilizations 8 (Changchun 2021), pp. 207–240, though her classification goes all the way back to Guo Yunyan, “A General Overview of Byzantine Coins & Their Imitations Found in China” in Eirene: Studia graeca et latina Vol. 41 (Praha 2005), pp. 87–116, whole issue online here.

2. This is not my area of expertise, but at the moment the most obvious Western starting point I know for these coinages is A. Cunningham, Coins of Alexander’s Successors in the East (Bactria, Ariana & India) (Chicago IL 1969), which I found online here.

3. The BM regarded the Money Gallery as a sufficiently big project that they published a volume about making it: see John Orna-Ornstein (ed.), Development and evaluation of the HSBC Money Gallery at the British Museum, British Museum Occasional Papers 140 (London 2001).

4. 李强, “拜占庭金币东方之旅” in 光明日报 (14 August 2017), p. 14.

5. Things like Owen Lattimore, “A Ruined Nestorian City in Inner Mongolia” in The Geographical Journal Vol. 84 (London 1934), pp. 481-497, DOI: 10.2307/1785929, reprinted in Owen Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928 – 1958 (London 1962), online here, pp. 221–240; but the most amazing of these I have found so far is actually M. Aurel Stein, Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan: Personal Narrative of a Journey of Archæological & Geographical Exploration in Chinese Turkestan (London 1903), online here.

Vikings in ninth-century Catalonia?

There is a tendency for this blog to become a series of photo posts when my backlog shrinks through each past summer, and I like to break those up with more academic contact even if it means jumping chronology a bit. So, though last post we were with me in Paris in July 2019, we’re now jumping ahead a couple of weeks to once I was back from holiday, at which point my absolute top priority was reading, carefully but speedily, a doctoral thesis in Catalan which I was due to examine at the very beginning of the next month.¹ I will talk about that separately, because it was excellent and the now-doctor who wrote it deserves his own post, but there were a couple of things in it that deserved their own commentary and made me stub blog posts to do that thing, and this is the first.

Cloister of Sainte-Marie d’Arles-sur-Tech, image by Jordi Domènech, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

I’ve mentioned here before that I find it hard to be less than ten years behind with Catalan historiography, and in recent years there has also developed the problem of extensive publication of primary material I also haven’t had time fully to work through yet. Consequently, it’s pretty easy to find stuff I don’t know about, and this reference was such a thing. The text in question is a letter to King Charles the Bald of the Western Franks (r. 840-877) from Abbot Hilperic of Sainte-Marie d’Arles-sur-Tech (remember that place-name of Arles), giving an account of his monastery’s early history by way of explaining how it came to be so short of resource as urgently to need the king’s help.² Hilperic starts with the founder abbot, naturally enough, and it quickly reaches a point at which I stopped and went, “What?” Here’s a scratch translation of some rather odd Latin.³

“For there came a faithful man of God from the regions of Hispania, Castellano by name, an abbot, who entering by a narrow path found in the waste a miraculous bathing-place, where he built a holy monastery, to which he called and directed a college of many monks worshipping the Highest King, who under the authority of your glorious grandfather Charles, conceded [the latter’s] precept to the same monastery.⁴ When he was dead, his successor Requesèn arrived, who also placed himself rejoicing into your hands.⁵ With him passing from the world, there succeeded a certain venerable man [called] Recimir, his brother, an abbot, who likewise once commended himself into [your] glorious hands.⁶ While he was alive, there was given to us, by the thickening [sic] of the Devil, a multitude of persecuting Northmen, who both staying there for three days and destroying the same monastery, and coming upon us suddenly, we knowing nothing of it, killed several of us. Considering these events of ours, that which had occurred first and foremost because of all our faults and abundant sins, having gathered into one council, we were converted back to the Lord. With us celebrating fasts and holding vigils, and beseeching the Lord Christ, there was revealed by the same Lord to one of our brothers the place there where bodies of the saints were resting, who were called the blessed martyr Quintinus, bishop Hilary, deacon Tibertius. With us gratefully looking forward to their arrival, suddenly our abbot died. With him passing on, there succeeded he who still now is seen to rule us according to the Rule of our Father Benedict, which is now instituted.”

And though there’s about as much again after that, it’s all upwards from there, including the fleeing of demons from the area and the subsequent discovery of twelve more saintly bodies, of whom the writer only bothers to name two (Abundus and Grisantus). I guess the point is made by then that this is a
holy community, albeit completely on its uppers. And this is held to have been what provoked Charles the Bald’s surviving precept to Hilperic, whose text we have.⁷

Now, it has straight away to be admitted that there is actually a plausible context into which this story could fit. You may already have noted that given where Vallespir actually is, more or less stretching north-west up the Tech valley from where Saint-Marie is there, any supposed Viking attack would have had either to have landed on the northern Atlantic coast of the Peninsula and then marched pretty much along the Pyrenees, or else made it through the Straits of Gibraltar and attacked from the eastern coast. That latter might sound pretty implausible but actually at least one group did it, and they were there over the course of 858 to 861, so within our window between the two charters and in the time of Abbot Hilperic of Santa Maria. (But Santa Maria of where? Ssh, we’re coming to that.) Admittedly, they are said in the main and contemporary Frankish source, the Annals of Saint-Bertin, written at the time by a bishop of Peninsular origin, Prudentius of Troyes, only to have raided the south coast of what is now France, and almost all the Arabic sources that also cover this, themselves distressingly late, to have come there from the Balearic Islands, and gone on to Italy; if they’d hit actually-Iberian targets once through the Straits I might have expected one source at least to mention it.⁸ Or perhaps I should say two sources, because one, the Mamlūk encyclopaedist Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad bin ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī, supposedly records that the same Vikings went as far as Pamplona, in the heart of the Basque country, and captured and ransomed its ‘Frankish lord’, García, for 90,000 dinars. The Moroccan polymath Ibn Khaldūn, likewise apparently, later repeated this story and reduced the ransom to 70,000 dinars, but I don’t think this is any reason to suppose an independent tradition given how rotten Ibn Khaldūn’s attention to detail was. One scholar who made this detail available to Westerners quite early on, Jón Stefánsson, for some reason decided that the Viking force could only have done this from the Atlantic coast; but if we add this attack on a Pyrenean monastery (and Prudentius does say they attacked monasteries on their way to the Camargue, if not that they were not nearby) then these could be considered to confirm each other.⁹ It’s a bit odd that Prudentius didn’t record the rather embarrassing capture of the ruler of the ex-Frankish client principality of Pamplona, but that’s at best an argument from silence.¹⁰ At the very least, we can easily see why a younger Xavier Costa, faced with a report of a Viking sack of a Catalan monastery which would have to have happened between 844 and 867, chose the date 858-860 at which to place it.

Unfortunately, this turns out to be one of those structures which collapses when you put weight on it. Costa is not the first person to note this document, and I am not the first person to have doubts about it, as indeed his citation reflects.¹¹ Here are some reasons to have doubts, then.

1. The preservation context for this document is lousy. We have no medieval text of it at all. Its earliest text comes from a 1591 study by a guy called Miquel Llot of the cult of Saints Abdon and Sennen, two Persian Christians supposedly killed in Roman games in the third century. Their bodies are claimed to have wound up in all of Soissons, Florence, Rome and Murcia, but also Santa Maria d’Arles, and I assume that Llot was delighted to find some source that might explain how a saint of roughly the right name was found in this area completely unconnected to their passion narrative. Of course, it isn’t the right name, but that is arguably not the document’s fault, rather than Llot’s, who saw in it the story he wanted to tell rather than the one it did. However, all we know about the document is what he says, and apparently he says he found it nailed to a pillar in the Church when he visited Arles.¹² It’s not all the detail we might wish, though I suppose we should be glad he gave us the text.

Now, you might justly say, well, that’s all well and good: the letter would have gone to Charles the Bald but maybe come back with the charter he issued, then been preserved as the house’s own sort of account of its history. In any case the bit about the Vikings isn’t actually critical to the narrative of finding the relics, so while we might justly wonder how it was that fifteen saintly bodies, including one of a bishop of Poitiers otherwise widely considered to be buried, y’know, at Poitiers, at Saint-Hilaire indeed, were just lying around nearby and how much work this monastery was having to do to justify its relic collection, that doesn’t actually speak against the idea of a Viking attack. To which I say, sure, and thankyou, imaginary reader, for being such an erudite critic; but I’m not finished.

2. There is no mention of such an attack in the most obvious place you would expect it, King Charles the Bald’s precept that is supposed to have been a response to this letter. Admittedly our text of this is not preserved quite as one would wish either; we first know of it from a fourteenth-century copy. But it’s pretty consistent with Charles’s other documents without plainly being a copy of any of them, so there’s some reason to believe in an actual document that people could still see in 1340, and while it does mention a mission from Abbot Hilperic and a plea of poverty, it mentions neither Vikings nor, more interestingly, any of these fifteen saints whose bodies had supposedly been found since Charles had last issued Arles a precept only as many years before.¹³ And again it’s an argument from silence but you’d think these events were remarkable enough to find some kind of mention; Charles being such a man as would join in a saint’s translation when he came across one even though it meant delaying fighting a civil war, I’d imagine him seeing the gain in associating himself quickly with this effective miracle.¹⁴ But he didn’t, which suggests to me that whatever Hilperic did tell him didn’t include this story.
3. On the other hand, there is a very well-studied phenomenon of monasteries in the south of France going to later kings and saying that their current state of deprivation goes back to the time of Viking attacks, and invoking Carolingian grants made to fix that whose terms had not been respected, which they then entreated the current king to repair. This has been studied most of all by Amy Remensnyder, and Costa does cite this work, but he doesn’t seem to have let it make him suspicious.¹⁵ But that’s my secret power: I’m always suspicious.

And you may say, OK, Jonathan, but there’s also the Pamplona raid, so it seems to be corroborated that there was a Viking force in the area. Isn’t it easier to say that there was a known raid to which the monastery attached their story of relic-finding, for all the reasons Remensnyder points out and which indeed you have echoed in your dealings with accounts of the sack of Barcelona, that invoking this known context of shared affliction might make the people the writers were addressing more sympathetic?¹⁶ Maybe this just actually happened, the Viking bit anyway. But I’m still not finished.

Let’s take a quick look into that Pamplona raid first. Stefánsson, who reports it to us, did not read Arabic; his sources, in so far as he gives them, were secondary work and especially and foremost the multi-volume work of Reinhard Dozy, “the chief source of this paper, since the Dutch professor prints, the Arabic text and a translation in French of the Arabic records quoted”.¹⁷ And if you go to the French edition of Dozy, which is easy enough to do, the 858-861 raid is not there, at all, with or without the bit about Pamplona.¹⁸ So what had happened? Well, I draw the line at tracking down all of Stefánsson’s unreferenced secondary sources for an afternoon’s blog post—it’s evening already!—but I can offer a guess.¹⁹ Another Arabic source that described the episode is the Book of the Incredible Histories of the Kings of al-Andalus and the Maghrib by the Marrakesh historian Ibn Idharī. He doesn’t mention a Viking attack on Pamplona – but he does follow the account immediately with a Muslim raid on the area the next year, in which García’s son Fortún was captured and ransomed.²⁰ It doesn’t give the ransom amount, so there is still some other source in the mix, which may even be al-Nuwayrī, at which I can’t get. But I bet that some combination of errors with these materials had combined the two stories in whatever Stefánsson was reading.

One of the forms of defence adopted by Sainte-Marie d’Arles in later centuries; as it turns out, we’re probably dealing with another one. Image by Baldiri – Treball propi, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

So for these reasons I think it is unlikely that there actually was a Viking attack on Pamplona in 861 which only two fourteenth-century Arabic sources record for us. Without that, there is rather less reason to believe in an 858-860 sack of a monastery that goes unmentioned in the monastic community’s own next royal charter. But you can then reasonably ask, why was the story worth making up for someone at some point before 1561? And there Remensnyder, as I say, offers an answer, of a trial of faith by fire for which the monks were spiritually, but sadly not economically, rewarded (your majesty). And there’s also these fourteen saints they apparently had in their church, from some quite unlikely places, who needed some kind of back-story. But there might also be more, because of this problem of whether we’re talking about Santa Maria de Vallespir or Santa Maria d’Arles. Costa picks this problem up and notes that while most of the historiography treats these as the same place, actually they must have been some distance from each other.²¹ Our story, indeed, seems to show knowledge of this in its rather odd narrative order, in which the monastery is apparently destroyed before the monks find out about the raid and get killed. If we’re actually dealing with two sites of the same community, that problem can be made to go away.

This isn’t the right charter, 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 King Charles the Bald for Sant Medir, now in the Arxiu Comarcal de la Selva

However, it may also have been a problem for the community. The precept issued by Charlemagne, to which our story refers, is lost, but it is referred to (and known from) a subsequent one that our story here doesn’t mention of Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious, which he gave to the first abbot, Castellano, in 820, and which we have in 17th-century copies made for Étienne Baluze.²² This is how we know that Castellano was Abbot of a Santa Maria at Vallespir. So where did Arles get into this? Well, the church there, of Sant Pere, is one of the properties confirmed to Castellano by Louis’s precept, ecclesiam Sancti Petri in Arulas. However, Charles the Bald’s subsequent charter, of 844, is to Abbot Hilperic at Santa Maria of Arles, which he goes on to say that Castellano built in Vallespir; the church of Arles is no longer mentioned, though otherwise the same properties are mentioned, including a church of Sant Quintí which may explain why his relics were among those the monks later claimed to have.²³ By the time of the 869 charter this was sorted out and Hilperic was Abbot of Arles, and the monastery he is said to rule wasn’t further located; but the natural way to read this would be that Hilperic, as Abbot of Arles, had jumped over the head of the abbot in Vallespir and claimed the whole community’s territories from the new, and very beleaguered, king. This might also explain why Charles is said, in our story, previously to have received the commendation of two other abbots in what, given he only succeeded in 840, must have been less than four years. That seems like a viciously rapid succession if only one house was involved; but if there was some dispute between two, we might see something like this repeated race north to the king to get approved, a race which Hilperic ultimately won by coming last. It also helps explain why Recimir, who succeeded his brother Requesèn as abbot, was apparently already an abbot, and maybe that in fact was the takeover. But after that, an abbot of Arles might need some kind of account that explained why he now claimed all these lands which his own royal precepts apparently awarded to Vallespir. What might a good explanation be? Maybe Vikings destroyed the other monastery! And then whatever sins any of either congregation might have committed you can tell were repented away, because then all these relics became apparent to us! And maybe this is the story we have.

This is not a finished suggestion, of course. I’m not sure when I think this story would date from, but it seems that it would have to be pretty close to the events, given that it seems to be reflected in royal charters almost straight away. But I could alternatively suggest that it was only once the local history of the house was no longer remembered that the transition from Vallespir to Arles needed explaining. Likewise, Occam’s Razor might suggest, with some kind of disaster apparently afflicting a monastery not that many miles away from a known site of Viking raiding, that that disaster being a Viking raid is actually the simplest answer. Of course, that reasoning might also have occurred to someone later. Either way, I don’t think Costa was wrong to pass over this in fairly simple fashion, especially given the available space he had to cover this unique occurrence that didn’t much contribute to his overall arguments. But isn’t it fun to see what you find when you turn over these stones?

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1. Xavier Costa Badia, “Paisatges monàstics: El monacat alt-medieval als comtats catalans (segles IX-X)” (unpublished doctoral thesis, Universitat de Barcelona, 2019).

2. Pere Ponsich (ed.), Catalunya carolíngia volum VI: Els comtats de Rosselló, Conflent, Vallespir i Fenollet, Memòries de la Secció Històrica-Arqueològica, 70, 2 vols (Barcelona 2006), doc. no. 61, discussed by Costa, ‘Paisatges monàstics’, pp. 249-251.

3. Ponsich, Catalunya carolíngia VI, doc. no. 61:

“… Quia veniens vir Dei fidelis ex pertibus Hispaniae, nomine Castellanus, abbas, qui ingressus per angustam semitam, invenit in eremo mirabilia balnea, ubi aedficiavit sancta coenobia, in quo vocavit atque advertit multorum monachorum collegia Regi superno famulantia; qui sub auctoritate avi vestri gloriosi Caroli, eius preceptum in eodem monasterio concessit. Defuncto eo, successor eius adfuit Ressendus abbas, qui et in manibus vestri se glorianter tradidit. Migrante illo a saeculo, successit quidam vir venerabilis Recimirus, frater eius, abbas, qui et ipse similiter in gloriosis manibus se hactenus commendavit. Illo vivente, data est nobis, crassante diabolo, multitudo persequentium Normanorum, qui et tridium ibi manentes, et idem coenobium destruentes, et subito super nos irruentes, nihil nobis percipientibus, occiderunt aliquos de nostris. Haec nobis considerantibus, eo quod pro supereminenti omni nostro delicto et abundanti peccato evenissent, collecti in uno concilio, conversi sumus ad Dominum. Ieiunia nobis celebrantibus et vigilias facientibus, atque Christo Domino deprecantibus, revelatum est ab eodem Domino uni de fratribus nostris, eo quod ibi corpora sanctorum requiescerent, qui et vocantur beatus Quintinus martyr, Hilarius episcopus, Tiburtius levita. Eorum adventum gratulanter expectantibus, subito obiit abbas noster. Illo migrante, successit is qui et modo secundum regulam patris nostri Benedicti nos regere videtur, qui et modo consistit….”

4. This document, which does not survive, is indexed and discussed as Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals, Catalunya carolíngia II: els preceptes carolingis a Catalunya, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològico 2 & 3, 2 vols (Barcelona 1926-1955, repr. in facsimile 2007), Arles I.

5. This one we have, and it is printed as Abadal, Catalunya carolíngia II, Arles III.

6. This one, however, does not survive, and neither does Charles the Bald mention it in his subsequent document (see n. 7 below).

7. Abadal, Catalunya carolíngia II, Arles IV.

8. The relevant sources are probably all collected in Ann Christys, Vikings in the South: Voyages to Iberia and the Mediterranean, Studies in Early Medieval History (London 2015), but I haven’t access to it to check; it may well be that everything I say here is pre-empted there. Without it, I’m using Jón Stefánsson, “The Vikings in Spain, from Arabic (Moorish) and Spanish Sources” in Saga Book of the Viking Club Vol. 6 (London 1908-1909), online here, pp. 31–46, where pp. 40-42 cover this voyage. Of course, his references can mostly be updated a bit, and in any case he doesn’t consider the Frankish sources, so you also need to know about Janet L. Nelson (transl.), The Annals of Saint-Bertin, Ninth-Century Sources 1 (Manchester 1991), and Janet L. Nelson, “The Annals of St. Bertin” in Margaret T. Gibson and Janet L. Nelson (edd.), Charles the Bald: Court and Kingdom. Papers based on a Colloquium held in London in April 1979, British Archaeological Reports (International Series) 101 (Oxford 1981), pp. 15–36, reprinted in Janet L. Nelson, Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe, History 42 (London 1986), pp. 173–194, and in Margaret T. Gibson and Janet L. Nelson (eds), Charles the Bald: court and kingdom, 2nd edn. (Aldershot 1990), pp. 23–40, on the author(s).

9. Stefánsson, “The Vikings in Spain”, p. 41, where also n. 1: “They could only get to Pampelona from the Bay of Biscay.”

10. Pamplona’s rulers had submitted to the Carolingians somewhere around the 790s, but were independent again by 820, and before long clients of the Emirs of Córdoba instead, at least as far as Córdoba were concerned; see Juan José Larrea and Jesús Lorenzo, “Barbarians of Dâr al-Islâm: The Upper March of al-Andalus and the Pyrenees in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries” in Guido Vannini and Michele Nucciotti (edd.), La Transgiordania nei secoli XII-XIII e le ‘frontiere’ del Mediterraneo medievale. Trans-Jordan in the 12th and 13th Centuries and the ‘Frontiers’ of the Medieval Mediterranean, British Archaeological Reports (International Series) 2386 (Oxford 2012), pp. 277–288.

11. Costa, “Paisatges monàstics”, p. 250 and n. 602, citing Aymat Catafau, “À propos des origines de l’abbaye Sainte-Marie d’Arles-sur-Tech”, Bulletin de l’Association Archéologique des Pyrénées Orientales Vol. 15 (Perpignan 2000), pp. 76-81, Catafau, “Cuixà, Arles de Tec i Sant Martí del Canigó: el paper de l’aristocràcia nordcatalana en les fundaciones monàstiques del segle VIII al segle XI” in Lluís To & Jordi Galofré (edd.), Monestirs i territori: 1200 anniversari de la fundació de Sant Esteve de Banyoles (Banyoles 2013), pp. 79-88, and Amy G. Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past: monastic foundation legends in medieval southern France (Ithaca NY 1995), pp. 42-84. I haven’t read either of the Catafau pieces, though I’m very honoured to be following in his sceptical footsteps if I am; to Remensnyder, meanwhile, we will come shortly.

12. Ponsich, Catalunya carolíngia VI, vol. I, p. 123, including reference to the four times it’s previously been edited.

13. See n. 7 above.

14. This story is from Nithard’s Histories, III.2, accessible as Bernard Scholz with Barbara Rogers (transl.), Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankish Annals and Nithard’s Histories (Ann Arbor MI 1970), pp. 129–174 and 199–211, online here, where see pp. 157-158.

15. See n. 11 above.

16. Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past, more or less passim; Jonathan Jarrett, “A Likely Story: Purpose in Narratives from Charters of the Early Medieval Pyrenees” in †Simon Barton and Robert Portass (edd.), Beyond the Reconquista: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711–1085). In Honour of Simon Barton (Leiden 2020), pp. 123–142 at pp. 127-128.

17. Stefánsson, “The Vikings in Spain”, p. 46.

18. Reinhard Dozy, Histoire des Musulmans d’Espagne jusqu’à la conquête de l’Andalousie par les Almoravides (711-1110), 4 vols (Leyde 1861); vol. II (online here). Admittedly, Stefánsson specifies the 3rd edn., which I can’t immediately access.

19. Stefánsson, “The Vikings in Spain”, p. 46, adds to his mention of Dozy the following: “Werlauff, Mooyer, Professor Steenstrup and Fabricius have written on this subject. The two last-named have used Dozy’s work and some of the Spanish Chronicles.” Working these out looked like more work than I wanted to do today, sorry.

20. I access this through Aben-Adharí de Marruecos, Historias de Al-Ándalus, transl. Francisco Fernández González (Granada 1860), online here, repr. as Ibn Idari, Historias de Al-Ándalus, transl. Francisco Fernández González (n. p. n d.), where see pp. 88-89.

21. Costa, “Paisatges monàstics”, p. 249 n. 599.

22. Abadal, Catalunya carolíngia II, Arles II.

23. See n. 6 above.

The conference before the storm: Leeds International Medieval Congress, 2019

Looking back on the last pre-Covid International Medieval Congress seems like a different world by now, even though we’ve but recently had the 2022 one, where, ironically or not, I caught my first dose of Covid. I guess that, because of that and because of the big push towards online hybrid participation that the pandemic gave us, it’s clear already that we’re never going back to quite the same experience of a campus full of medievalists meeting and interacting, but will now live with the sense, firstly, that that may be dangerous as well as desirable and that some people just aren’t going to be able to take part, and secondly that a lot of the action is in fact happening off-stage, in the ether.¹ So this was the end of an era, or the last stop before a change of trains, or some other metaphor. And, to be honest, because of that, before picking up my notes on it I would have said I remembered very little of what happened at the 2019 Congress, as opposed to any other year since the IMC moved to the Central campus. I didn’t organise anything myself, is all I would have told you this morning, and on inspection that is completely untrue: Rethinking the Medieval Frontier ran for a full day, with people speaking from two continents about places from the Canaries to Kashmir. So as it transpires, I was there (obviously) and was pretty busy (nearly as obviously) and learnt a good few things (thankfully), and it was actually an impressively international and intersectional gathering that had all kinds of promise for the future threaded through it, and it still seems worth writing a report on it. It’s just that the future took a different turn… Because these reports are always huge, however, and not necessarily of interest to all (certainly not throughout), I’ll do what has become my practice and give you the running order of my conference experience, and then put actual commentary below a cut and let you decide (the few of you reading on the actual site rather than in your e-mail, anyway) how much further you care to go.

Monday 1st July 2019

119. Materialities at Birkbeck, I: between mind and matter in medieval monetary policy

• Rebecca Darley, “Discourses on Absence, or Kalabhra and Vakataka Monetary Policy in Early Medieval Southern India”
• Chris Budleigh, “Surplus and Scarcity: the contested relationship between monetary supply and aristocratic land management in Comnenian Byzantium”
• Sidin Sunny, “The Lighter Dirham: power relationships in medieval Spanish society and tendencies in coin fineness and debasement.”

240. The Use and Construction of Place, Space, and Materiality in Late Antiquity

• Edward James, “Materiality and the Holy in Gregory of Tours”
• Guy Halsall, “Trace, Space, Place: the materiality of identity”
• Catherine-Rose Hailstone, “Place and Space: Gregory, Materiality, and the Fear of God”

334. Seas and Floods in the Islamic West

• Andrew Marsham, “Nile Flood Levels and Egyptian Revolts in the Early Medieval Period”
• Xavier Ballestín, “Ships, Seafarers, Sails and Bows: a source approach to marine networks and coastal settlement in the Western Mediterranean basin on the eve of the rabaḍ uprising in Córdoba, 202 AH/818 AD”
• Maribel Fierro, “Sea in the Life Narratives of Andalusi Scholars and Saints”

Tuesday 2nd July

530. Rethinking the Medieval Frontier 2018, I: Iberian Spaces

• Jonathan Jarrett, “Ends of Empire: Two Island Frontiers between Byzantium and Islam”
• Stacey Murrell, “Centering the Marginal: concubines on Castilian frontiers, c. 1050-1350
• Sandra Schieweck, “Iberian Border Regimes: the case of Castile and Navarre in the late Middle Ages”

630. Rethinking the Medieval Frontier, 2018, II: Administration and Control

• Luca Zavagno, “‘The Byzantine Liquid Frontiers’, or How to Administer Insular and Coastal Peripheral Spaces and Stop Worrying About It”
• Davor Salihović, “The Distribution of Bordering in Late Medieval Hungary”

730. Rethinking the Medieval Frontier 2018, III: between religions

• Roberta Denaro, “Far from the Corrupting City: building the frontier as a stage for martyrdom and asceticism, 8th-10th centuries”
• Turaç Hakalmaz, “‘Islandness’ of a Coastal Kingdom: the case of Cilician Armenia”
• Aniket Tathagata Chettry, “Exploring the Complexities of a Brahmanical Frontier in Bengal”

830. Rethinking the Medieval Frontier 2018, IV: dealing with power on the frontier

• Jakub Kabala, “Claiming Authority over the Edge of the World: Frontier Strategies in Salzburg, c. 870″
• Zeynep Aydoğan, “Conquest and Territoriality in the Late Medieval Anatolian Frontiers”
• Andreas Obenaus, “To Whom Might/Do They Belong? Claims to Newly-Discovered Atlantic Islands in the Late Medieval Period”

Wednesday 3rd July 2019

1048. Forging Memory: false documents and historical consciousness in the Middle Ages, I

• Graham Barrett, “Charters, Forgeries, and the Diplomatic of Salvation in Medieval Iberia”
• Daria Safranova, “Using and Detecting Forged Charters in Northern Iberia, c. 900-1100″
• Levi Roach, “True Lies: Leo of Vercelli, Arduin of Ivrea, and the Struggle for Piedmont”

1140. Byzantine Materialities, II: Ephemera and Iconoclasm

• Rachel Banes, “You Can’t Write That Here! Mapping Religious and Secular Graffiti in Asia Minor, c. 300-700 CE”
• Daniel K. Reynolds, “Images, Icons and Apologetic: Christian Iconoclasm in Early Islamic Palestine”
• Leslie Brubaker, “Dancing in the Streets: the ephemera of Byzantine processions”

1252. Transport, Traders, and Trade Routes in Early Medieval Europe

• Ewa Magdalena Charowska, “Dugout Builders: the trademark of the Sclaveni in the 6th and 7th Centuries”
• Daniel Melleno, “From Strangers to Neighbors: Franks and Vikings in the late 9th century”
• Thomas Freudenhammer, “Rafica: early medieval caravan trade between the West Frankish kingdom and al-Andalus”
• Victor Farías Zurita, “Response”

1340. Byzantine Materialities, IV: workshops, trade and manuscripts

• Shaun Tougher, “Macedonian Materialities: the Menologion of Basil II”
• Chris Wickham, “Materialities of Middle Byzantine Exchange in the Aegean”
• Flavia Vanni, “Men at work: stucco workshops on Mount Athos”

Thursday 4th July 2019

1509. Gold, Coins and Power in the Early Middle Ages

• Marco Cristini, “The War of the Coins: Numismatic Evidence for the Gothic War”
• Nicholas Rogers, “Angels and the King’s Evil: projections of royal authority”
• Vera Kemper, “‘All that glitters is not gold’: heroes and material wealth”

1652. The Monetary System and Currency in Eurasia in the Pre-Modern Era, II: money and its circulation in British Isles and Scandinavia

• Yuta Uchikawa, “Commerce and Coin Circulation around the Irish Sea in the 9th and 10th Centuries”
• Hiroko Yanagawa, “The Irish-Sea Imitations and their Circulation during the Middle Ages”
• Kenji Nishioka, “The Use of Money in Scotland during the 12th and 13th Centuries”
• Takahiro Narikawa, “Church and the Money Circulation in High Medieval Norway”

1738. Materialities and Religion in Medieval Armenia and Byzantium

• Katherine New, “The Representations of Material Objects in Medieval Culture: statue or doll in Byzantine mythography”
• Carmen Morais Puche, “Medieval Byzantine Coinage in Patrimonio Nacional: image, materiality and religions”

Seminars CCLIII-CCLVI: Friends and the Famous Speaking at Leeds

There is a lot of unpleasantness going on just now, he says in a classic understatement. I had most of a series of angry posts about the state of the English university done when Russia invaded Ukraine, something I’d barely seen coming and which is starting, as people break out the word ‘nuclear’, to sound a lot like the bad dreams of my Cold War childhood over again. Now it seems a bit selfish to complain about having secure if worsening employment while others are losing their homes and lives. The Ukraine conflict has also got some pretty deep and obvious medievalist resonances, but with fighting going on at this moment, I cannot look at that now. Instead I’m staying safe around the turn of 2018/2019, when because I was not on Action Short of Strike and being threatened with total pay deduction because of it, I was still going to seminars. I cannot get to many seminars down south any more, so it is always important when people come north (or in one of these cases, east), and in normal circumstances I try to be there whoever’s speaking. But for these four I was there because I knew or knew of the people and was glad to have them visiting us, and so they each get a short report despite this having happened three years ago plus, sorry.

Real Royal Protection for the Carolingian Church?

First up, then, and coming from least far was my sort-of-opposite number in Manchester, Dr Ingrid Rembold, who on 28th November 2018 was in Leeds to address our Medieval History Seminar with the title, “Widows, Orphans and the Church: protection and virtue signalling in the Carolingian world”. Here, Ingrid was looking at the three categories of society whom Carolingian Western Europe considered it a royal duty to protect, and asking why and what it actually got them. For the Church we mainly had monasteries to talk about, and she had some good critical things to say about the legal category of ‘royal’ monastery, which I have myself also always struggled to find expressed in the actual sources; and her general argument that these obligations (which the previous royal dynasty don’t seem to have felt anything like as keenly) mainly sprang from the Old Testament and the idea of the Church as the bride of Christ, temporarily ‘widowed’ by His absence from Earth, I thought was new and sounded right.¹

The Torhalle of Lorsch monastery, supposedly a ‘royal’ house but whatever that means, this is a building through which Carolingian kings almost certainly passed. Image by Kuebi – Armin Kübelbeck – self-made with 36 single shots (Lens: 1:1.8 85 mm; 1:5.6; 1/500s; ISO 100; manual focus and manual exposure) made by stitching with Hugin, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Where there was more disagreement, however, although mainly between me and Fraser McNair, then of this parish, was about what this protection meant and how it was delivered. Ingrid had quite early on argued that Carolingian local power was so reliant on the local powerful that its legislation of this kind could only be exhortatory, without real force except as those locals cared to enforce it, which for her presented the problem that monasteries sometimes sought royal protection against exactly those locals, which makes no sense if they were the ones who would have to deliver it. If, after all, they actually did behave differently because the king told them to, even if he couldn’t coerce them, that is arguably a more powerful king, not less, than if he had to send the boys round. And that does seem to have happened in Catalonia, I will admit, with royal grant after royal grant coming south from kings who could not appoint, remove or direct anyone there; but I have explained how I think that worked, and it’s not universal.² I just think there was more use of force available to the Carolingian state than Ingrid does, apparently. She fairly asked whether it counts as state power if a local person does it, too, and this was where Fraser and I disagreed. I think the Carolingians mostly could send someone else into a local area with legitimate power to act, if they needed to, because of the three-legged structure of counts, Church and vassals they maintained, whereas Fraser argued that their trick was to recruit the locals into the wider power ideology of ministerium, so that yes, it absolutely did count as state enforcement if a local man did it, as long as he was the right local man.³ I just think that, optimally at least, there were plural right local men, and maybe the lengthy conversations between myself and Joseph Brown in comments on my old posts at the moment are partly about what happened once there was only a singular one in many areas.

Middle-Age spread in the English village

Then, on 4th December, no less a celebrity than Professor Carenza Lewis visited to deliver one of the Institute for Medieval Studies’ open lectures, with the title, “Triumph and Disaster: new archaeological evidence for the turbulent development of rural settlement”. This was showcasing a then-new project of which she was leader, which was seeking to redress the fact that we have a pretty skewed and partial sample of medieval rural settlement in England from archæology, mostly either deserted sites or along a belt from Hampshire to Lincolnshire and then up the Eastern Pennines. To remedy this, her team had been digging dozens and dozens of test pits of a meter square or so in people’s gardens, which was excellent for public engagement as well as data, and what they had mainly discovered was change. Thinly-documented phenomena like the ‘Middle Saxon shuffle’ (a general but not well understood shift of early English villages) showed up well, but the starkest two phenomena were, most of all, desertion of sites after the Black Death, to levels like 40-45% of sites with a concomitant implication of moves into towns as well as, you know, ‘Death’; and, secondly, the long period of high medieval growth before it. Those, perhaps, were not surprises, but they are often assumed from a small sample, so anything that puts such generalisations on firmer footings is probably worthwhile. What was weird to me then and remains so now, however, is that the Roman period, when we suspect settlement in lowland Britain to have been at its densest really until quite recently, showed up very poorly. Professor Lewis didn’t offer an explanation for this, but it made me wonder whether the method was somehow missing an object signature that would be significant. Since Roman ceramics are usually both plentiful and easy to recognise, however, as are Roman coins, I can’t imagine what it would have been! The Saxon period is usually poorer in material remains…⁴

Making Manuscripts under the Conquistadors

Then, finally ticking over the clock in 2019 and bringing this blog close to only three years behind at last, on 28th January 2019 Dr Claudia Rogers, then of Leeds and as we’ve seen a valued teaching colleague, presented some of her work in a workshop for the Medieval Group under the title of “Encountering Pictorials: a a workshop on sixteenth-century Meso-American manuscripts”. I know that this is not medieval on the usual European clock, but in the first place we have the debate about whether that counts outside Europe – but of course it’s kind of patronising and colonial to assert that, outside Europe, other places were ‘medieval’ for longer, so that’s not my justification here. Instead, I’ll argue that these manuscripts are some of our windows on the pre-Columbian time before, which is medieval on the European clock at least, and also that they’re just really cool.

Page from a Matrícula de Tributos showing just some of the stuff which the Aztecs had previously claimed in tribute every 80 days from their dependencies, México City, Biblioteca Nacional de Antropologia, MS 35-52 fo 5r

They are, however, wickedly complex to interpret. They are mostly on bark-paper, and come in three broad categories, organising knowledge by place (being, roughly, figured maps of significant things, people or events), events (iconographic treatments of single themes in detail, as here the tributes paid at conquest) or, to me most intriguing, by time, these being calendrical, cyclical, year-by-year chronicles with one image only per year to sum up everything in it. Obviously, one of their primary topics is the ‘Qashtilteca’ (‘Castile-people war’), but their reactions to it and involvements with it are quite complicated, and implicated: one group who produced several of these texts, the Tlaxcalans, had been in rebellion against the Aztecs when the Spanish arrived, and gladly accepted help against their overlords from the conquistadores, who, however, then turned on and subjugated their erstwhile allies. Tlaxcalan artist-scribes thus had a lot to explain. Smaller themes of the conquest can be picked up as well; apparently dog attacks on people became a new theme of depiction, for example. And these texts were produced in a world where the Spaniards were the new élite, and some were glossed in Castilian so we know that they were sometimes being explained to the conquerors. Are they therefore colonial or indigenous, collaborative or critical? Complications also arise when you compare these texts with solely-written ones of the same period: they seem to focus on different things, including giving more prominent roles to women. Was that a genre convention, or was one mode of discourse closer to (someone’s) truth than the other? And so on. And then there’s the question of what gets assumed or put back in the restorations that are making these texts increasingly available. Basically, you have to have a 360° critique going on at all times when trying to do history with these. Claudia did not necessarily have answers to these questions then, but even explaining the complexity of her questions was quite a feat, to be honest…⁵

Exemption by Whatever Means

Lastly for this post, a mere two days later I was back in probably the same room, I don’t remember, to hear then-Dr Levi Roach present to the Medieval History Seminar with the title, “Forging Exemption: Fleury from Abbo to William (997-1072)”. This was a paper dealing with no less fiendish, but much more focused, questions of source critique, revolving around the French monastery of Saint-Bénoît de Fleury (a ‘royal’ monastery in theory, but as we shall see and as Ingrid had already told us, that didn’t necessarily mean much). At the very end of the tenth century, Fleury found itself caught between a new dynasty of kings and their client, Bishop Arnulf of Orléans, Fleury’s local diocesan bishop, both of which were a problem for them (for reasons my notes don’t actually record). As well as Fleury’s own rights, they were in contention over the much bigger issue of who should be the Archbishop of Reims, a long-running fracas I will let someone else try and explain instead of me. For all these reasons, the monks found they needed extra support, and Abbot Abbo (or, I suppose, Abbo Abbot) went to Rome to get it, at that stage not yet a normal thing to do. Pope John XV apparently charged too much, but Pope Gregory V was more amenable and Abbo allegedly came back with a document detailing lots of things bishops could not demand from them.⁶ The problem is, however, that it’s not confirmed, and there is a nest of associated forgeries for other monasteries, and Levi’s work for about half his paper was to disentangle those from whatever the source of the copy of this document we now have actually was. Those who know my work well will realise that this twitched several of my interests, because only a few years before, I have argued that a count of Barcelona also went to the pope, on this occasion John XIII, to get a privilege which was not in fact awarded, and came back with the unconfirmed documents they’d presumably tried to get him to sign and pretended they were legit; but no-one believed them.⁷ Both that and the resort to the pope only when the king couldn’t or wouldn’t provide therefore looked quite familiar to me.⁸ I did raise these questions with Levi, indeed, and he defended his position by saying that when Fleury’s privilege was challenged, which it was, it was challenged on the basis of being unprecedented – quite literally uncanonical – rather than on being faked. To which I say, OK, but that doesn’t actually tell us what was going on. I need to check in on Levi’s subsequent work and find out what he now thinks, I guess! Had I but world enough and time, and did it not look like labour for my bosses when I’m on strike…⁹

But there you are, four good papers and only a selection of what I attended in November 2018 to January 2019 as well. Some of us clearly do find time to do research, or did! And I’m glad that they then come to Leeds when they have.

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1. My picture of what the Carolingians did with monasteries probably relies principally on 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, online here, which I still think is excellent, as I do most of Matthew’s stuff, but may still take that category of ‘royal monastery’ somewhat for granted.

2. Jonathan Jarrett, “Caliph, King, or Grandfather: Strategies of Legitimization on the Spanish March in the Reign of Lothar III” in The Mediaeval Journal Vol. 1 no. 2 (Turnhout 2011), pp. 1–22, DOI: 10.1484/J.TMJ.1.102535.

3. The odd thing is that I think we are both here channelling Matthew again, in the form of Matthew 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), just apparently from different directions.

4. When reporting at this distance, it’s always wise to check if something has actually come out that would represent a more up to date presentation of the same research, and in this case it seems to have, as Carenza Lewis, “A Thousand Years of Change: New Perspectives on Rural Settlement Development from Test Pit Excavations in Eastern England” in Medieval Settlement Research Vol. 35 (Leicester 2020), pp. 26–46.

5. In Claudia’s case the subsequent publication is newer media, John Gallagher, Nandini Das and Claudia Rogers, “New Thinking: First Encounters”, MP3, BBC Radio 3, Arts & Ideas, 23rd October 2019, online here.

6. This must be Maurice Prou and Alexandre Vidier (edd.), Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, Documents publiés par la Société archéologique du Gâtinais 5-6 (Paris 1907-1912), 2 vols, online here and here, I, doc. no. LXXI.

7. Jonathan Jarrett, “Archbishop Ató of Osona: False Metropolitans on the Marca Hispanica” in Archiv für Diplomatik Vol. 56 (München 2010), pp. 1–42.

8. I can’t take any credit for noticing people from the Catalan counties heading for Rome like they’d used to head to the king; that observation goes back as far as Ramon d’Abadal, Com Catalunya s’obri al món mil anys enrera, Episodis de la història 3 (Barcelona 1960).

9. It’s at least easy enough to find out that is, because Levi has since been all over the web about a book he’s published, Levi Roach, Forgery and Memory at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton NJ 2021), DOI: 10.1515/9780691217871, where pp. 113-152 look very much like a version of this paper.

Scribal individuation around Manresa c. 1002

Some time around the end of December 2015, in the fond expectation of soon having time to advance my old project on scribes and Church structures around the Catalan city of Manresa in the tenth century, when most of those structures were still in formation, I spent a bit of time staring at my images of the relevant documents and I was freshly impressed by the efforts the scribes went to differentiate themselves from other writers. And so I stubbed a blog post to tell you all something about it, and now we’re here in the summer of 2019 and I find myself just getting to it. As you know, lots else has been going on, of which there should be more to report soon, and I can’t say I have any massive new findings to present here, but some of this stuff is just cool, and that’s always been a good enough reason for a blog post before. So, here, have a charter!

Montserrat, Arxiu Monàstic, Pergamins Sant Benet de Bages, primera sèrie, no. 57. Click through for bigger version.

This is from 1002, and so as far as I know has never been published.¹ I haven’t done a transcription of it, but it’s a sale by one Tudiscle to a deacon called Borrell (no relation, I’m pretty sure) of a set of homesteads he was once given by his ‘lady’ (domina), Eigo. I picked it because of the subscriptions before I read it that far, but as it happens, you also have some female lordship there; you’re welcome. This happens in the Iberian Peninsula here and there. But I am, really, interested in the signatures. They start on the sixteenth line with the quartered disc with dots in it, which is a very abstracted form of the word signum, ‘mark’, ‘sign’, with a cross in the middle. Half of the signatures are by the scribe, a priest called Guifré, in the same unusual right-tilted hand as the main text, and those three all have that same disc, the people concerned being the seller Tudiscle and two witnesses, Guilabert and what seems to be Bonuspars, with which I can’t do much, I admit. But the scribe didn’t use that disc for himself: this was his sign for other people. He himself uses the four-pointed star device which, lexically, is filling in for the word subscripsit, ‘signed beneath’, ‘subscribed’, but looks nothing like it. Happily, the other two autographs show you different takes on the same idea, with Uuadamirsus sac(e)r, apparently not a man to whom spelling his name (which we would modernise as Guadamir) came easily despite being a priest, being clearest: the idea that lies under that messy ruche is a set of two or three Ss looped together as an abbreviation of the Latin. The other signature, MiRone leuita, the deacon Miró, does it more graphically, and that process of abstraction is the one that goes via the four-lobed version of the apparently-plural scribe Athanagild whom we looked at here years ago to the pointed version we have here. They’re all doing the same thing, these three churchmen, but they apparently didn’t want to do it in the same way.

Montserrat, Arxiu Monàstic, Pergamins Sant Benet de Bages, primera sèrie, no. 58. Click through for a bigger version

There were apparently times when one differentiation wasn’t enough, even. Here you have another unpublished sale from the same year written by Ermemir (trust me, that is what the dribbled-down signature says) from another Ermemir and his wife Em (presumably for Emma? But there’s no abbreviation mark…) to Isarn, who is apparently plural; it is hard to resist the belief that scribe-Ermemir’s document-Latin wasn’t very precise, though one can forgive him given his nicely-drawn dagger as an initial I at the start.² But as well as his deliberately decorative signature, he uses a really clear SSS-type ruche, and then seems to have tried out another in the far right corner. It’s not a separate witness signature, I think, firstly because there’s no name even though there’s space and secondly because the signatures otherwise finish at the far left, but it does seem to be the same ink. It’s possible some other scribe did a training run on a spare charter, of course, but the one scribe who’s clearly here is the one who’s named…

Montserrat, Arxiu Monàstic, Pergamins Sant Benet de Bages, Segona sèrie, no. 903. Again, a larger version lines beneath.

And then there’s this one, which is from 1002 as well. Unlike the other two, even though the two modern editions of these documents both stop at 1000, this has been edited before, because it’s a big deal (in both literal and figurative senses).³ What you have here is the monks of Sant Benet de Bages telling a story, and as ever when people in this area tell a story in documents, it’s because something had gone wrong.⁴ Their erstwhile abbot, Sunifred, had died during a Muslim raid on the area (probably in 997), at which point a dispute apparently arose between the founders of the church, apparently about the succession. At the time, however, that being 999 by this time, Count Ramon Borrell of Barcelona, presumably the obvious arbitrator, was in Rome visiting the pope. So they sent word out there, and when the query reached him the pope pointed out to Ramon Borrell that, canonically, monks ought to get to choose their own abbot. This seems to have come as news to our count (who elsewhere entitled himself ‘inspector of bishops’, not that I suppose he tried that before the pope), and he didn’t know what to do, and so the document says that the pope went to the actual monastery and asked the monks what they wanted, and they all praised God and asked for one Ramio, and this document celebrates his election.⁵

Monastery of Sant Benet de Bages, from Wikimedia Commons; not the first time I’ve used this image and I’m sure it won’t be the last

Now, this is fishy as the hold of a homebound Atlantic trawler. Most obviously, even though he had once been in Catalonia, Pope Sylvester II (for it would have been he) didn’t pop in and visit Sant Benet de Bages in 999; someone would have noticed and recorded it and in fact his own letters lament that he doesn’t have time to visit his old school province.⁶ Secondly, the monastery’s foundation charter does in fact say that the founders’ family should provide the abbots, but actually beyond one young retainer of Count Borrell II’s I’ve not managed to trace any of them beyond 985, and they don’t seem ever to have provided an abbot to the place, so I don’t know who could have been disputing the abbacy.⁷ But there was once and may still be another parchment, which I don’t think I have a picture of, which gives a quite different version of this story, and that too was in the monastery when Jaime Villanueva came visiting in the 1800s.⁸ So something is probably wrong about this story, but at least we can see that this was the version that the monks quite literally signed up to because, look, there they are, all differentiated. So at least they all agreed, right? But actually no, it’s not as simple as that once you stop and take a good look at the signatures. Let me break it down as far as I’ve currently got:

1. Firstly, there is no scribal signature. The line at the bottom left in the main text hand actually translates as, “We all unanimously who proclaim and confirm this election and have asked for it to be confirmed,” and then a ruche.⁹ But I think the main text scribe is the priest Ansulphus, more or less dead centre among the signatures, because the first signature in textual terms is Adroarius, whose signature is mainly in the main text hand because, as it explains, he was too ill to write but dotted the cross at the end of his ‘signature’ instead, and it looks to me as if the same hand that wrote Ansulf’s name formed Adroer’s too, in a deliberately different font. So that’s your first writing stint.
2. However, after the first eight autographs—Baldemarus (with the hatched SSS device), Orucius (who abbreviates ‘monachus’ differently to everyone else and has the vertical monogram for presbiter, ‘priest’, that we’ve seen elsewhere), Teudalecus (with a waved SSS), Ermengaudus (with the repeated double knot ruche), Auduagrius (who is sort of sharing the ruche Ansulf gave Adroer), Argericus (who has got his double knot into a fortuitous gap in Adroer’s illness clause), Willelmus (whose knot lies on its side—because he liked it that way, or just to fit?) and Wifredus, with the cross-hatch—you have a new line of signatures, Vivencius, Ansolphus (another one?), Stefanus, Miro and Sendredus, all of whom seem to be written by the same hand and it’s not Ansulf’s, even though his own signature immediately follows theirs. And there is a second Sendre[d]us, signing autograph, too, on the bottom line in a very unpractised hand that misses out his second ‘d’. So is this a second batch of signing?
3. If so, it wasn’t the last. Two lines above that Sendred, observe the signature of Pontius the deacon. This is probably Ponç Bonfill Marc (son of the Wonder Judge!), because his hand also seems to have written the signatures of the count and his two retainers in the bottom right corner. And you see that at very bottom right there is a spare cross, and one more below Ponç’s name, as if further names were expected but never arrived? That makes it look as if they took it to court to get the comital confirmation once Ramon Borrell had come back from Rome. But you see also, where that spare cross hangs about below Ponç’s name, there is what looks like more script in the main hand’s ink? I think that’s exactly what that was. I think that when they took it to the court, there was no room to sign, so not only did Ponç unusually use the shortest version of his name, they actually scrubbed out some of the existing names to make more room. So, three separate signing occasions?
4. No, in fact, still more, because there’s also some sign of erasure beside Sendred’s big scrawl at the bottom too, so he didn’t sign with the rest of the monks either. At least four signing occasions, then. So how many of the monks were even at the first one? There’s not really any way to be sure. The main text names only Adroer, Todalec, Baldemar and Ermengol. Did everyone else get added in later? How much later? On how many occasions? How consensual an election was this? How many other names had been washed out by the time they’d finally got it confirmed?

Anyway, that wasn’t supposed to be the point of the post. The point is, of course, that where we have got autographs, though here there is certainly a preference for the double-knot ruche, nonetheless, no one autograph is made to look like another; every one is different. This is, by now, what I have come to expect, but every now and then someone reminds me that other places don’t necessarily do this.¹⁰ In a later era, this might be authentication, but it would take a fiendish local knowledge to be able to remember who used exactly what variant of a ruche, I think, and besides we’ve seen before that it’s not always quite the same even when it’s (notionally at least) the same scribe involved.¹¹ So I think it really is just a local sense that in a document like this every signature should be different, perhaps so that everyone could see that it genuinely was another hand, not the scribe’s. But then, why not vary the signatures when it actually is the scribe as well? Cheating? I don’t, yet, have my head round this. But I may get there yet, if I just look at a few more charters…

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1. It is Montserrat, Arxiu Monàstic, Pergamins Sant Benet de Bages, primera sèrie, no. 57, as the caption says.

2. Montserrat, Arxiu Monàstic, Pergamins Sant Benet de Bages, primera sèrie, no. 58.

3. Jaime Villanueva, Viage literario a las Iglesias de España, tomo VII: Viage á la Iglesia de Vique, año 1806 (Valencia 1821), online here, ap. XIII.

4. See some day soon Jonathan Jarrett, “A Likely Story: purpose in narratives from charters of the early medieval Pyrenees”, in †Simon Barton and Robert Portass (edd.), Beyond the Reconquista: Essays on the Politics, Society and Culture of Medieval Iberia (forthcoming), but till then (and as well), Jeffrey A. Bowman, “From Written Record to Historical Memory: Narrating the Past in Iberian Charters” in Robert A. Maxwell (ed.), Representing History, 900–1300: Art, Music, History (University Park PA 2010), pp. 173–180.

5. Ramon Borrell is “inspector episcopiis dante Deo nostræ ditioni pertinentibus” in Petrus de Marca, Marca Hispanica sive Limes Hispanicus, hoc est geographica & historica descriptio cataloniæ, ruscinonis, & circumiacentium populorum, ed. Étienne Baluze (Paris 1688; repr. Barcelona 1972, 1989), ap. CLXXII.

6. Gerbert’s letters are translated in Harriet Pratt Lattin (trans.), The Letters of Gerbert, with his Papal Privileges as Sylvester II, Records of Civilization: Sources and Studies 60 (New York City NY 1961), but I confess I didn’t go and check there this time and am just running on Emília Tarracó i Planas, “Formació cultural de Gerbert d’Orlhac a la Marca Hispànica” in Imma Ollich i Castanyer (ed.), Actes del Congrés internacional Gerbert d’Orlhac i el seu temps: Catalunya i Europa a la fi del 1r. mil·leni, Vic-Ripoll, 10-13 de novembre de 1999 (Vic 1999), pp. 635–636.

7. The foundation charter is printed as Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia IV: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica 53 (Barcelona 1999), doc. no. 1127; on the family, see Jonathan Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880-1010: pathways of power (Woodbridge 2010), pp. 144-151.

8. Villanueva, Viage literario VII, ap. XIV.

9. Nos om(ne)s unanimiter qui hanc electionem p(ro)-clamam(us) & firmam(us) & firmare rogauimus”, cf. ibid., ap. XIII.

10. All these issues and more are explored for French documents in the excellent Benoît-Michel Tock, Scribes, souscripteurs et témoins dans les actes privés en France (VII^e-début du XII^e siècle), ARTEM (Atelier de recherches sur les textes médiévaux 9 (Turnhout 2005), DOI: 10.1484/M.ARTEM-EB.5.105728.

11. For when it actually was done as authentication, see Alan Friedlander, “Signum mei apposui: notaries and their signs in medieval Languedoc” in Robert F. Berkhofer III, Alan Cooper & Adam Kosto (edd.), The Experience of Power in Medieval Europe, 950-1350: essays in honor of Thomas N. Bisson (Aldershot 2005), pp. 94-117.

An awful lot of numismatists in Sicily, II

So, after that bit of numismatic self-congratulation, let me take you back for the last time to September 2015 and the town of Taormina in Sicily, where I was then one of many gathered for the 15th International Numismatic Congress. You’ve seen some of the local antiquities, heard about the first two-and-a-half days of papers and visited a local castle, now it’s time to return to the thick of the academic fray. But first, a party!

Party in the coutryard of the Palazzo dei Duchi di Santo Stefano

Indeed, the first thing on our calendar after descending from Castelmola and eating was not an academic session but a party put on by the Medieval European Coinage project, to celebrate its resurgence into activity since the previous INC in the form of the publication of the series’ volume on the Iberian Peninsula and the near-completion of that on Northern Italy (which, much though I often doubted it, has in fact now also emerged, something I should probably announce separately too).¹ By now you may well not remember that I am a part of that project still, but I am, so I was there to share in the glory. There were speeches, there was a strictly limited quantity of free wine, but mainly there was a superb setting.

MEC authors Bill Day Jr and Martin Allen looking very relaxed by the Cambridge University Press stand inside the Palazzo

It was a good way to wrap up the day. The next day was the last day of papers, however, and with certain obligations among them, and so for once I was up and ready right at the beginning. Here’s how it all unrolled.

Imitation and officialdom in early Islamic Syria

I want to write today about something I want at some point to be working on. This has been in the plans since I was at the Barber Institute and first met the relevant coins, but at the moment I have too many other things to finish to give it the time it needs; I’ve done enough reading to teach it, which worked well, but not enough to write with assurance. So I’ll just set it up to think about and promise to return to it in more depth later. The subject is what happened to the organisation of government in the areas taken over by Islam in its rush of conquests in the mid- to late-seventh century.

A Coptic-language papyrus detailing renders to an Islamic governor of Egypt, ʿAmr Ibn al-ʿĀṣ, London, British Museum, Pap. BM 1079

In Egypt, at least, it is now fairly clear that the immediate difference the Islamic conquest of the 640s made was minimal. The very top level of government, the Byzantine imperial governors and their staffs, was sliced off and replaced by an Arab governor appointed from Damascus, and that often proved to be problematic, but the people who ruled in localities, usually officials called pagarchs, were often allowed to remain in office, raising taxes in more or less the same way (and quite possibly less, which may have meant they were keeping more) and just rendering them to officials from Fustat for transmission to Damascus rather than Alexandria for Constantinople.¹ We know this from Egypt because of the prolific, if localised, survival of the papyrus documentation of the administration that dealt with all this, but Egypt’s level of survival, especially for papyrus, is kind of unique. What can we use where there are no papyri? And the answer is, as so often, coins.

Copper fals of ‘Abd al-Malik, Commander of the Faithful, struck at Manbij between 680 and 696, Barber Institute of Fine Arts A-B36

The areas that Islam took over in the seventh century were coin-using ones. In the west, as seen from Medina, there was the Byzantine (or, as they saw it, Roman) Empire, with a tax system based on the gold solidus and made practical by voluminous copper-alloy small change that also fed market exchange and kept city economies running. This system had been in trouble over the previous thirty years because of the ‘last great war of Antiquity’, that between the Romans and Persians during which Persia had for a decent while occupied the Middle East and Upper Egypt, and in that time not only do we apparently find the Persians striking pseudo-Byzantine coinage to keep things running, we also have several of the smaller cities of the occupied zone apparently making their own emergency coin to keep things going; that that is what it is seems obvious by how very much it doesn’t look like the real stuff, as if they feared to be accused of forgery if and when regular government returned.²

Hastily-constructed composite image of a probable coin of the Persian occupation of Syria in the reign of the Emperor Phocas (602-610), Leeds University Library, Thackray Collection, uncatalogued

Meanwhile, in the relative east, the system of what had been the Persian Empire, based on a tax system working in silver drachms with only locally-issed copper-alloy small change, also seems to have continued almost unaltered. That is really interesting, not least because of the Zoroastrian and royal imagery of the coinage which was maintained with only the smallest Islamic additions, but it’s not where I want to go today because that system does actually seem to have continued pretty much as before, with provincial governors in the same provinces striking coin of the same sort at the same mints. Not so, however, in the west.

Arab-Sassanian drachm after Shah Yazdgerd III {Edit: struck at Jayy (Isfahan),and] islamized only by the addition of the words ‘Muhammad the prophet of God In the name of Allah’ in Arabic by the Shah’s left shoulder, image from I forget where alas. Thanks to Yngve Karlsson for corrections in comments below!

In the Roman zone, much of the coinage had previously come from Constantinople or its two satellite mints of Nicomedia and Cyzicus, all of which were now outside the political area. More local mints had been at Antioch (not conquered until 637) and Alexandria (which was taken in 641, reconquered in 645 and definitively fell to Islam in 646), with some coinage perhaps coming in from Cyprus (where Roman-Islamic power-sharing was agreed in 649).³ We know of emergency issues that are probably from Jerusalem and Cæsarea, but these are very scanty and since we can’t date them, we also can’t be sure they were still being issued.⁴ What this means is that the ex-Roman area of the new Islamic dominion at the point of takeover had no regular mints in it, and even the addition of Alexandria didn’t solve that because Egyptian coinage was struck at a different standard to the rest of the Empire’s.⁵

Copper-alloy follis of Emperors Heraclius and Heraclius Constantine struck at Nicomedia in 615-616, Stoa Image Gallery

Copper-alloy duodecanummi of the same rulers struck at Alexandria in 613-618, HJB Coins sale 16 August 2001, not to scale (in fact, none of these are to scale)

So, what did they do? The study I’ve learnt most from so far breaks it down into four phases, all of which can seem a bit surprising.⁶ In the first place, the captured provinces continued to ship in Byzantine coin; we know this because issues struck after the date of the conquest, for Emperor Constans II (642-664), turn up there still in considerable numbers. Quite how that was arranged, I would love to know… After a while, which we can’t date and could actually have started straight away, local versions of Byzantine coins started to be made, which we can mostly identify because the details start to be slightly wrong. At the extremities of that range they feature things that were never on the same coin together, or which didn’t turn up on coins at all but seem to belong to the general symbolic library.

“Er, Severos, usually that B goes below the M, and vertically? What? No, no, it doesn’t matter…” ‘Derivative’ Arab-Byzantine coin of uncertain mint and date (636×695 to be safe?), Leeds University Library, Thackray Collection, uncatalogued

Almost none of these coins identify their place of issue, though some of them carry Greek or, perhaps increasingly, Arabic, words meaning ‘good’ or ‘legitimate’ or the like. There is assumed by the numismatists a general progression from real-looking pseudo-Byzantine coins towards things that are essentially Arabicised variations on a vaguely Byzantine theme. If that’s right, then we get more and more Arabic, and among those coins emerge new mints, at Damascus, Tiberias (a. k. a. Tabariyya), Manbij, Scythopolis (Baisan), and many other places, none of which except perhaps Jerusalem and Cæsarea, neither of which stuck at it long, had ever struck coin under the empire [Edit: for nearly four centuries].

Forty-nummi coin of an unknown issuer at Heliopolis (Baalbek), signed in both Greek and Arabic, of uncertain date, Barber Institute of Fine Arts A-B19

But almost all of these coins seem also to be imitated quite widely, at varying standards that have made one scholar, Clive Foss, write of a spectrum ranging from official issues to things that could have been made by a local blacksmith.⁷ At the extreme ends of this there are coins overstruck on whole or partial old coins, but this is hard to be sure about because the actual empire did a lot of that too, by now. And running alongside all of this is a myriad of very very worn Roman and Byzantine bronze, as well as some of the new stuff, that was validated or otherwise updated with Islamic countermarks, about which we know hardly anything (though a selection of it is now on display at the Barber Institute, if you’re interested).⁸

A copper twenty-nummi probably struck by Emperor Anastasius (491-518) or Justin I (518-527), very worn and bearing an Islamic countermark, from the Mardin Hoard, Barber Institute of Fine Arts MH0123

Copper-alloy forty-nummi coin struck by an unknown issuer at Emesa (Hims) at an uncertain date, and later countermarked on both sides, Barber Institute of Fine Arts A-B15

And this whole situation lasts until the 690s or so, at which point Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik seems to have tried a number of ways of joining Arab-Byzantine and Arab-Sasanian coinages up then replaced them all with the more standard Islamic coinage of the Middle Ages that we recognise somewhat more easily.

Silver dirham of al-Walid struck at a mint I can’t identify between 713 and 715 AD Hisham struck at Wasit in 734/35, Barber Institute of Fine Arts A-B73

So, if you were one of my Empire and Aftermath students, at this point I would be asking you what this all means in terms of authority and government in the area. Usually coinage is a state monopoly; if everyone and his or her neighbour is making coins, who’s in charge? Isn’t it a problem for our picture of the early caliphate if there were ‘official’ mints like Damascus striking coin and then there was another mint, somewhere we can’t place, imitating them to the point where numismatists actually distinguish it as pseudo-Damascus? How can the ‘official’ coinages and the countermarked quarters of coins hundreds of years old have been part of any system together? What can the point have been of marking some things ‘good’ or ‘of legitimate weight’ when their weights vary by sometimes as much as 50%? Why was no-one stopping the imitation? Could they not do so? These are the kind of questions that understanding the coinage might help with, and I intend to try, with the help of some esteemed collaborators, but any understanding of it is going to have to include the imitations.

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1. This has been pretty much established by the work of Petra Sijpesteijn: see for example her “Landholding Patterns in Early Islamic Egypt” in Journal of Agrarian Change Vol. 9 (Oxford 2009), pp. 120-132, DOI: 10.1111/j.1471-0366.2009.00198.x.

2. I follow here Clive Foss, Arab-Byzantine Coins: an introduction, with a catalogue of the Dumbarton Oaks Collection, Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection Publications 1 (Washington DC 2008), pp. 1-17, with the Persian coinages described on pp. 9-12. For the phrase ‘the last great war of Antiquity’ I have to acknowledge James Howard-Johnston, “Al-Tabari on the Last Great War of Antiquity” in idem, East Rome, Sasanian Persia and the End of Antiquity: historical and historiographical studies, Variorum Collected Studies 848 (Aldershot: Ashgate 2006), VI.

3. On the coinage system as it had existed here, see for preference Philip Grierson, Byzantine Coins (London 1982), pp. 43-77. My dates for the conquests could be challenged; I follow Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: how the spread of Islam shaped the world we live in (London 2007).

4. Foss, Arab-Byzantine Coinage, pp. 14-19.

5. Ibid., pp. 87-98.

6. Ibid., pp. 18-57, on which most of the next two paragraphs rest. Important differences with Foss’s account can be found in Grierson, Byzantine Coins, pp. 144-149, and Stephen Album and Tony Goodwin, The Pre-Reform Coinage of the Early Islamic Period, Sylloge of Islamic Coins in the Ashmolean Museum 1 (Oxford 2002), pp. 77-112.

7. Foss, Arab-Byzantine Coinage, p. 26.

8. Nicholas M. Lowick, Simon Bendall and Philip D. Whitting, The Mardin Hoard: Islamic Countermarks on Byzantine Folles. Catalogue of an Exhibition of Coins from the “Mardin Hoard” of Byzantine Folles, Many with Islamic Countermarks, in the University of Birmingham, 1976 (London 1977).

Chasing a fake chronicler: ‘Eutrand’ of Toledo

OK, I’m back! Sorry, there were two conferences and there are still many deadlines, but so many people at Leeds were kind about the blog that I feel under even more compulsion than usual to combat its backlog. I hope to post pretty frequently for the next few months now, as my responsibilities are about to acquire a much more regular shape, which will itself be a post topic shortly. Meanwhile, here’s a post I’ve been wanting to write for a long time. It’s something of a historiographical detective story, and it doesn’t have an ending, because as you will see I had to decide somewhere along the line that it was too much of a sidetrack for me. But it has a clear beginning, and that is with a post of Joan Vilaseca’s in May 2012 at his Cathalaunia blog. For those not up to a bit of Catalan, the post was about the earliest date we could put on the presence the relics Saints Llucia and Martial at Sant Sadurní de Vic, and Joan had just discovered an apparently-unnoticed mention of this in the Chronicon of Liudprand of Cremona.

The frontage, which is all that remains, of Sant Sadurní de Vic, taken from the Carrer de Sant Sadurní by your humble author

You can imagine that this got my attention immediately. There is information about tenth-century Vic in the work of one of the most chatty chroniclers of the early Middle Ages? How had I missed it? So I clicked on the links Joan had helpfully provided and immediately found myself in a world of confusion, which is sadly reflected in the comments I left on that post. For a start, the seventeenth-century edition that Joan was using made the division between its texts very hard to spot.¹ (There is no contents page…) So I looked for the extract in the Chronicon, not realising there were other texts in the volume at all, and found myself in something that seemed pretty clearly to be a truncated version of Liudprand’s Antapadosis, and I’ve got that and this bit isn’t there.² Tracking the reference through the linked edition eventually clarified that the bit that Joan was using came from a text which the editor had called the Fragmenta.³ But there are, canonically, four works attributed to Liudprand: the Antapodosis, a scurrilous and gossipy account of tenth-century Italian and German history as Liudprand had lived through it notionally addressed to Bishop Recemund of Córdoba, whom Liudprand had met at the court of Emperor Otto I of the Germans, Liudprand’s second boss; the Historia Ottonis, a short but detailed account of Otto’s deposition of Pope John XII; the Relatio de Legatione Constantinopolitana, a bitter and vituperative attempt to excuse the failure of an embassy he’d led for Otto to the Emperor Nicephorus Phocas; and a recently-recognised homily on Easter. So what on earth was this?

Title page of the 1635 edition of Liudprand’s spuria that started this trouble, details visible or in notes below

It wants saying at this point that it is really perfectly fair for someone coming new to this stuff to take it for real. Joan had the best reason of all to take them seriously, to wit, that he was following up a citation from a book chapter by Manuel Riu i Riu, whose work was not the sort of place where one usually found forgeries cited.⁴ And after all, it’s just not normal to find a seventeenth-century book of 427 pages in Latin with all the special typefaces and so on and it actually be completely false. The thing looks serious. Even if the suspicion arose, though, you would have a hard time checking it. None of the standard editions or translations of Liudprand I knew so much as mention any dubious or pseudonymous writings, by which I mean the standard (and web-accessible) editions of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Wright’s famous translation or Squatriti’s new one that includes the homily.⁵ Even the brand-new edition by Chiesa, which I only got hold of later, only mentions them in passing once as “le opere spurie”, without further explanation, and in fact refers to the Chronicon once beforehand as if it might be a genuine work, just misattributed.⁶ I even spoke to two people in Oxford who’ve published on Liudprand, and they’d never heard of these texts. And web-searches only brought up the various seventeenth-century printings of these texts without contexts, and brought me back to where I’d started. So it seemed that there was really very little help to be had here beyond going back to the text and trying to figure it out.

Frontispiece of the 1640 Antwerp edition of our problem texts

I couldn’t get very far with the Google Books version; there are times when a physical edition is still just easier to page through, and those times are when you don’t know what you’re looking for. But where was I going to find a dodgy seventeenth-century edition of Liudprand of Cremona in actual paper? And the answer turned out to be: where I worked, because the Upper Library of the Queen’s College Oxford has quite a lot of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century antiquarian works they apparently bought in a rush with a bequest and among them was a slightly later Antwerp printing of the relevant text.⁷ Once I’d got the thing open before me, I first noted that this edition contained, as well as all the three ‘regular’ works, the Chronicon, a Historia de rebus suo tempore in Europa gestis, a De adversariis, a Liber de vitis romanorum pontificum and the Fragmenta, that is History of Events in Europe in His Time, On Enemies, Book of the Vices of the Roman Pontiffs and Fragments. It’s quite full. The extra ones do admittedly sound like things that Liudprand might have written, but it didn’t take very long with the Chronicon to be sure that that, at least, could not be his. For example: its second entry states that in AD 607 Muhammad began to preach ‘his error’ in Spain and was booted out by the Archbishop of Toledo; only in 619, therefore, did he translate the said error into ‘books in the Arabic language’. Charlemagne, already mentioned as a saint in the prolegomena, is recorded visiting Toledo in 781 (although the era date given corresponds to 771) in order to marry Galiana, the Christian daughter (converted, of course, by an archbishop of Toledo, a title that perhaps we should mention they did not yet use) of a King Galafrid of Toledo, Muslim despite his name. I guess that I don’t need to point out that Charlemagne never came further south into Spain than Saragossa. In 799, King Alfonso the Chaste of Asturias and Count Roland and a bunch of Frankish nobles all go on campaign together; Roland, of course, had died in 778 at Roncesvalles and probably never met Alfonso. The best one is earlier, sub anno 690 where it says that there are ten languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, and lists them as “Hispanica, Cantabrica, Græca, Latina, Arabica, Chaldæica, Huriano, Celtiberico, Galicano et Catalaunica”.⁸ It’s hard to know what’s wrongest here, but it’s all pretty crazy and not something anyone could have thought in the tenth century. In fact it’s hard to think of a time when someone could have thought it!

The Upper Library of the Queen’s College, Oxford

All this therefore raised the question of what the text is actually supposed to be, and that’s also fun. The text starts with a letter from Bishop ‘Tractemund of Elvira’, apparently meaning the real Liudprand’s real correspondent Recemund of Córdoba, telling Eutrand (as it spells him) that Tractemund has received the Antapodosis and the De rebus gestis, but he has very few other books in Elvira because the Muslims have destroyed so much and he gathers that at Eutrand’s new home in Fulda there may be a copy of the Chronicon of Maximus and Dexter. Luidprand (so spelt) then replies in a letter that follows in the edition, saying yes, as it happens they do have a copy of the Chronicon. Since it only went as far as 612, however, what he’s actually sending is his own supplement from 606 to 960, including lots of stuff about their mutual acquaintances in Spain, because, you see, these letters also make clear that Eutrand is supposed to have spent some considerable time as a subdeacon in Toledo, only going to Pavia to become a deacon later and then getting out to Germany sharply afterwards. It would be marvellous if any of it were true, but it can’t be: Liudprand’s career is well-enough documented that we can see there isn’t a gap that size in it, nor any suggestion of such a thing in the Antapadosis, written, you will remember, for a Spanish recipient. But the editor, one Jeronimo Román de la Higuera, spends some time justifying this, and in limited support, the person they get to introduce the volume says that Higuera and his colleague extracted the manuscript from Fulda’s library (something that the editors themselves do not mention, even when arguing for the authenticity of the text).⁹ But the notes, which are supplied by one Lorenzo Ramírez de Prado, are said to come from the Tamaio de Vargas edition, and it’s all extremely tangled.

It seems, however, that it is Higuera who was the problem. I did not know till I looked into this, but Higuera was one of the most notorious forgers of perhaps the entire early modern era. He is credited with so many faked texts, all more or less to the greater glory of his native Toledo, that some of his defenders (for as a prominent Jesuit he has had some) have attempted the rather weak argument that it seems impossible for one man to have forged so much, so it can’t all have been him at which rate is any of it?¹⁰ And there is something in this, because although several of the texts in the 1640 edition don’t occur in the 1635 one, the Adversaria first turning up in the younger printing, for example, the De Vitiis apparently first surfaces in an edition by itself in 1602.¹¹ And anyway, what about Tamaio? And the answer to that turns out to be that Higuera’s stuff was being banned in Spain as forgeries even in the 1630s, which is why none of this stuff was printed there, and Tamaio seems to have been more or less a conduit for Higuera in getting it out.¹² And what was it that got Higuera into trouble? Nothing other than the Chronicon omnimodae historiae of Flavius Lucius Dexter, first known from an edition by Francisco Bivar in Lyons in 1627 but apparently something in which Higuera was neck-deep anyway.¹³ So it does almost all keep going back to the one man.

Title page of the source edition of the Chronicon Dextri

Now, you will deduce from this that I eventually found some literature about this problem. In fact, the obvious thing that I should have done straight away but only thought of later was to look in the Patrologia Latina, because Migne seems to have been the last person before Chiesa to admit these texts existed. He printed the Chronicon, but he followed it with an absolutely stinging rebuttal of its authenticity by Nicolás Antonio Hispalensi from a text called the Bibliotheca Vetus Hispana, in which the author calls Higuera every kind of fraud and denounces his errors about various saints and historical figures, all of whom by some erudite confusion or in some cases, as with Charlemagne, by brass-faced error, wind up with an origin in or some connection to Toledo, in cataloguic style.¹⁴ And then, more solidly and thoroughly, there is an 1868 work by Jesús Godoy de Alcántara that sets it all into a history of seventeenth-century forgery and which is also now online, and since then some other useful bits have been written that I have eventually also found.¹⁵

All the same, it seems to me that there is still work to be done here. For a start, not all of this rubbish came directly out of Higuera’s head. Godoy identifies some sources here and there: the story of Charlemagne and Galafrid is a part of the Charlemagne legend, for example, and is a lot older than Higuera, however great it may have seemed for his purposes. But there’s a lot more that could be done, especially with the Notae that Tamaio provided to the Chronicon, which include a good few inscriptions and other texts he thought relevant entire. It would be nice at least to rule out the idea that he or Higuera had source texts that might in some cases have been from somewhere near the period they purported to recall. But what? One wants to sit down with as many of the texts as one can and slowly go through working out what the layers of accretion are, checking phrases in the Pat. Lat. to see where they’ve been lifted from and generally working out a bit more about what is clearly Higuera, what Tamaio and so on, and what is less obviously explained. And this was, of course, the point at which I shook myself, said to myself, “this is not your research. This is a dissertation topic for someone else” and dropped it. And so one reason for putting all this up here, I suppose, is in case anyone happens to want what looks like a fun thesis topic… But the main reason is that because this stuff answers to a web-search now and most of the limited scholarship is in Spanish and doesn’t, there’s every reason for someone encountering this stuff as it comes up with your search terms, not necessarily near any of the overtly crazy bits, to assume it’s genuine. So there really ought to be something out there and easy to search up saying that it’s not… Hopefully this will do!

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1. The edition Joan was using was Thomas Tamaio de Vargas (ed.), Luitprandi, sive Eutrandi e subdiacono toletano, & Ticinensi diacono episcopi cremonensis, Berengario II. Italiae Regi a Secretis, pro Othone I. Germ. Imp. ad Pont. M. & ad Imp. CP. legati Chronicon ad Tractemundum Illiberitanum in Hispania episcopum, a multis hactenus desideratum, nunc editam (Mantua 1635), online here.

2. I’m not quite sure how I did this, as I must have stumbled into the De rebus gestis discussed below, which is indeed nothing but a truncated version of the Antapodosis but is not printed in Tamaio, Chronicon, but in Jeronimo de la Higuera & Lorenzo Ramírez de Prado (edd.), Luitprandi Subdiaconi Toletani Ticinensis Diaconi tandem Cremonensis Episcopi Opera quae extant: Chronicon et aduersaria nunc primum in lucem exeunt (Antwerp 1640), which is online here.

3. This is printed in both the above editions, but it’s still not simple to cite: neither have contents pages, and they paginate each work separately. It occupies the last fifty pages bar index of the Tamaio edition. Tamaio introduces it with a title page saying that it is “Luitprando sive Eutrando hactenus attributa”, ‘until now attributed to Liudprand or Eutrand’, but by the actual text that caution has been forgotten and the reason to question the attribution is never given. The text itself is a strange bundle of 270 separate little items, some large and some no more than “In Hispania habuit Carolus Martellus multos amicos, ut apud Cantabros, & Astures.” (‘Charles Martel had lots of friends in Spain, just as he did among the Cantabrians, and the Asturians too.’ (no. 252)) Only about half are dated, and they’re arranged in seemingly indeterminate order, a few being related by theme but not all of those on one theme being gathered together. It’s a bewildering text, though the bit quoted suffices to show that it too knows more modern names than it should to be what Tamaio claimed.

4. M. Riu i Riu, “Consideraciones en torno del Cronicon Luitprandi” in Luisa D’Arienzo (ed.), Sardegna, Mediterraneo e Atlantico tra medioevo ed età moderna: studi storici in memoria di Alberto Boscolo (Roma 1993), 3 vols, II, pp. 23-29. Riu’s reference was Tamaio, Chronicon. He was a canny man but not always alert to forgery: there’s a few things in his “Diplomatari del monestir de Sant Llorenç de Morunys (971-1613)” in Urgellia Vol. 4 (Montserrat 1981), pp. 187-259, that I’m very reluctant to accept. This is such an obvious case once you read it, though, and here discussed in a memorial volume, that I’m inclined to wonder if he might have been perpetrating a joke that would have made the deceased friend or colleague laugh…

5. There are three MGH editions, Georg Heinrich Pertz (ed.), Monumenta Germaniae Historica inde ab anno Christi quingentesimo usque ad annum millesimum, Scriptorum Vol. III (Hannover 1839), pp. 264-363 (online here); Ernst Dümmler (ed.), Liudprandi episcopi cremonensis opera omnia, in usum scholarum ex Monumentis Germaniae Historicis recusa (Hannover 1877), which is now on sale all over the web in knock-off reprints from the PDF but also in the Internet Archive here, whence presumably the reprints’ source PDF; and Joseph Becker, Die Werke Liudprands von Cremona, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Scriptores rerum germanicum in usum scholarum separatim editi 41 (Hannover 1915), online here. The two translations here referred to are F. A. Wright (transl.), The Works of Liudprand of Cremona (New York City 1930) and Paolo Squatriti (transl.), The Complete Works of Liudprand of Cremona (Washington DC 2007). None of these mention any spuria where I can find it.

6. Paolo Chiesa (ed.), Liudprandi Cremonensis Opera Omnia, Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Medievalis 156 (Turnhout 1998), pp. xli & xxxviii & n. 31, where: “Il riferimento è al Chronicon ad Tractemundum di Eutrando, subdiacono di Toledo, confuso con Liutprando nell’editio princeps di quest’opera.” and a reference to the following mention.

7. None other than Higuera & Ramírez, Luitprandi Opera, in fact.

8. These cites, however, come from Tamaio, Chronicon, s. aa., simply because that was the link I opened first when finishing this post off.

9. Higuera & Ramírez, Luitprandi Opera, pp. xxviii-xxix (where they are more concerned to establish that it’s perfectly to be expected that this text would contain chunks of Pseudo-Turpin) & xlii-xlv (justifying Liudprand’s Spanish sojourn from Julian Perez’s Chronicon, printed as Iuliani Petri Archipresbyteri S. Iustae Chronicon cum eiusdem adversariis et De eremeteriis Hispaniae brevis descriptio atque ab eodem variorum carminum collectio, ex Bibliotheca olivarensi (Paris 1628), online here; there is no editor stated as such, but not only is the dedication by Lorenzo Ramírez de Prado, the copy digitised by Google is even signed by him in the flyleaves. That is, they justified their fabrications of a continuation of a false chronicle they’d already published by reference to another false chronicle that they had already published! It’s amazing. It’s only in Eric Puteano, “De Luidprandi… nova editione… Iudicium….”, in Higuera & Ramírez, Luidprandi Opera, pp. xxii-xxiv, where the claim about the manuscript is made. But cf. n. 14 below!

10. See Georges Cirot, “Documents sur le faussaire Higuera” in Bulletin hispanique Vol. 8 (Bordeaux 1906), pp. 87-95, online here; I owe this reference to Joan Vilaseca.

11. Luitprandi Ticinensis Diaconi Opusculum de vitis Romanorum Pontificium. Item Albonis Florianensis Abbatis Epitome de vitis eorundem ex Anastasii Bibliothecarij Historiae excerpta. Vtrumq: ex pervetustis Mss. Codd. membraneis descriptum, et nunc primum typis procusum (Mainz 1602), online here, pp. 1-118. Again, no editor is specified, although someone has written into the copy digitised by Google an attribution to one Jean Busée. It seems hard a priori to connect this to Higuera. The notice of this printing I got from Chiesa, Liudprandi Opera, p. xli.

12. See Jesús Godoy de Alcántara, Historia crítica de los falsos cronicones (Madrid 1868), online here, pp. 221-251.

13. Francisco Bivar (ed.), Fl. Lucii Dextri Barcinonensis, Viri Clarissimi, Orientalis Imperii Præfecti Prætorio, & D. Hieronymo amicissimi, Chronicon Omnimodæ Historiæ (Lyon 1627); see Godoy, Historia crítica, pp. 129-179.

14. Jean-Paul Migne (ed.), Ratherii Veronensis episcopi opera omnia, juxta editionem Veronensem, anno 1765, curantibus Petro et Hieronymo fratribus Balleriniis, presbyteribus Veronensis, datam, ad prelum revocata, accedunt Liutprandi Cremonensis necnon Folquini S. Bertino monacho, Gunzonis diaconis Novariensis, Richard abbati Floriacensis, Adalberti Metensis scholastici, Scripta vel Scriptorum fragmenta quae exstant, Patrologiae cursus completus series latina 136 (Paris 1853), cols 937-1180, in which cols 937B-966B reprint Nicolás Antonio Hispalensi, Bibliotheca Hispana Vetus, sive Hispani Scriptores qui ab Octaviani Augusto ævo ad annum Christi MD. floruerunt, ed. José Saenz de Aguirre (Roma 1693-1696), 2 vols, I, VI.16, and cols 965C-1133 reprint the Chronicon from Higuera & Ramírez, Luidprandi Opera, but attributing it by confusion to a non-existent Antwerp 1640 printing of Julius Reuber (ed.), Veterum scriptorum, qui caesarum et imperatorum germanicorum res per aliquot secula gestas, literis mandarunt, collectio (Frankfurt 1584), which actually contains the Antapodosis, and preceding it, cols 965C-968B, with a preface of Higuera’s which appears in neither edition! This also claims (col. 965C) that the text was “ex libro Gothico ex bibliotheca Fuldensi detracto, Wormatiamque allato” (cf. n. 9 above); Godoy, Historia crítica, pp. 200-202, notes that Higuera’s claims of a busy correspondence between Spain and Fulda were somewhat quashed by Fulda’s denying the existence of his purported manuscripts, so I suppose that’s what had happened here. Godoy then goes on in n. 1 to point out that there is actually evidence for early medieval travel between Fulda and Spain that Higuera didn’t know about, a smug feat he repeated many times in this work. Returning to Migne, Ratheri opera omnia, lastly cols 1133A-1180D reprint the Adversaria from Higuera & Ramírez, Luidprandi Opera.

15. Godoy, Historia crítica; Cirot, “Documents”; Antonio Yelo Templado, “El Cronicón del Pseudo-Dextro: proceso de redacción” in Anales de la Universidad de Murcia: Letras Vol. 43 (Murcia 1984-1985), pp. 103-121, online here; Mercedes García-Arenal & Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, The Orient in Spain: converted Muslims, the forged lead books of Granada, and the rise of Orientalism (Leiden 2009), pp. 195-224.