Exhibit category type 7 European medieval rank over status society. Type 7 is now at research stage 700-900, soon progressing to 1000-1300, 1300-1500, and then England.
The Source:
Stuart Airlie, ‘The Aristocracy’, in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume II c. 700—c. 900, edited by Rosamond McKitterick, Cambridge University Press 1995
THE barbarian west was dominated throughout the period 700—900 by an hereditary aristocracy, that is, by a ruling elite, membership of which depended on birth. … But early medieval western society was not dominated by closed castes exclusively based on birth or service. The ruling aristocracies were 'open', not monolithic, to the extent that royal patronage could promote lowly men; noble birth did not in itself guarantee a glittering career.
The essentials of the secular aristocratic way of life in the west remain fairly constant from 700 to 900 and indeed beyond: pride in ancestry, possession of landed wealth, leadership and participation in warfare and government, not forgetting conspicuous consumption and hunting.
But in this chapter we shall be studying the dynamics of the aristocracy, primarily in the Carolingian realms, by examining its relations with royal patrons and the workings of its family structures. …
The expansion of Carolingian rule offered great opportunities to the aristocracy … Was this aristocracy therefore a Carolingian creation?
An older … tradition stressed the importance of Carolingian patronage together with its restriction to a few favoured families from the Carolingians' own 'homeland' in Austrasia. …
… the early Carolingians were … dependent on ‘followers', their fellow-aristocrats. … political necessity …
The power of [some] Austrasian noble families … pre-dated the rise of the Carolingians and actually made it possible. Such figures created the new royal dynasty, rather than the reverse.
The Carolingians were therefore not entirely free agents; the aristocracy was too potent a force to be merely an instrument of their will. From the beginning the Carolingians had to work with members of the aristocracy from the whole Frankish world and not simply with an elite group of Austrasians.
… Connections between the Carolingians and the aristocracies of [other] regions which they incorporated into their empire were intimate [e.g. intermarriage] …
The tide of the empire's expansion did not obliterate native aristocracies. As a result, old rivalries between aristocratic families continued to be fought out using royal favour as a weapon. …
… The creation of the Carolingian empire offered opportunities to regional nobilities to act on a European stage. For this elite, however, local origins were less important as a form of identity than membership of a group that governed the empire, a truly imperial aristocracy, the Reichsaristokratie [original concept and research by Gerd Tellenbach (1939)] … an elite upper stratum of the nobility [forty-two families], distinguished by its exceptional riches and power and its holding of lands and offices scattered throughout the empire. This office-holding was a product of its closeness to the ruling Carolingian dynasty (Konigsndhe), a closeness which obviously benefited both partners. … Since this elite was relatively small its genealogical ramifications and the ups and downs of its members' careers could be worked out in detail …
… [using] data banks of some of the most rebarbative and austere early medieval sources, the Libri Memoriales … maintained by abbeys in which lists of names of those wishing to be remembered in prayer … These books survive from an area that stretches from Durham in England to Brescia in Italy … [so historians could] trace patterns of kinship and association among the aristocracy to an extent hitherto undreamed of.
… What emerged was a picture of the aristocratic kin group of the period up until the tenth century as large, extended and drawing its noble ancestry from both the paternal and maternal lines of descent and diffusing it among all members of the kin. In turn, these large kins and family structures became explanatory tools for understanding the politics of the period. If members of these large kin groups were aware of their interrelationship and acted upon this consciousness then the Carolingian empire could be seen as a great network of family relationships, and … kin consciousness…
… the concept of the Keichsaristokratie needs refining. It is important not to see it as a closed caste. … Men of high birth had obscure relatives and not all offices in royal government were held by men of the very highest birth … [e.g.] the Frankish world of the eighth and ninth centuries was more socially flexible than … the kingdom of Germany in the tenth. Uncovering the Keichsaristokratie is therefore a complex business … It was royal favour that enabled a man to rise above his fellows, though social values and political pressures meant that the king's choice was not entirely free; in no sense was the aristocracy a royal creation. The concept of the Keichsaristokratie, however, is worth preserving …
The motor that propelled fortunate members of the aristocracy across Europe was royal favour and patronage. … [gives examples in the time of Charles Martel and Charles the Bald] …
But more than royal favour, or its loss, was involved in the making and sustaining of the Keicbsaristokratie. Patterns of office-holding were under-pinned by family structures. Members of this aristocracy may have passed from one region of the empire to another because of royal command, but while the kings provided a framework and opportunities for such movement, it was the family connections of the aristocracy that made it possible. … [examples given]
[MOBILITY IN NOBILITY]
… This network of patronage and support is a crucial factor in explaining how the Reichsaristokratie worked. Great men … moved from one 'support group' to another and acted as channels of royal patronage for the members of the 'support groups'. The movements and activity of the members of the Reichsaristokratie were complemented, and made possible, by the existence of the humbler branches of the kin who safeguarded kin interests while the great men moved from honor to honor. …
… Such structures and the pattern of holding property across the empire appear to have been little disturbed by the empire's division in the Treaty of Verdun of 845. Although this meant that members of the aristocracy could now hold office in only one kingdom, they retained property and family interests in other kingdoms. … [examples given]
… The fact that the high aristocracy was so mobile owing to royal patronage and the infrastructure of clientage has important consequences for our understanding of family structure. There appears to have been no fixed point, no family seat, around which these aristocrats organised themselves. …[examples given]
… This lack of a central base … stands in stark contrast to aristocratic texts of a later date, such as the twelfth-century Historia Welforum, which lay stress on the possession of a fixed residence (habitatio certa) as a key element in a noble family's make-up. This absence of conceptual traces of a centre is paralleled by an absence of physical ones. It is difficult to find a fixed point of residence for aristocratic families of the early middle ages.
Great aristocrats of this period do not appear to group themselves around a residence such as a castle, as was to happen later. Their properties were too scattered, the theatre of their operations was too wide … Thus the aristocracy from, say, 1100 on was different in type from its Carolingian predecessor.
The appearance of castles functioning as fixed centres of lordship meant that families shrank and organised themselves around such centres, whence they derived their surnames, a name element quite foreign to the aristocracy of 700 to 900. Broadly speaking, a tighter, more patrilineally organised aristocracy, with a smaller pool of heirs, thus came into being in western Europe.
We must not be tempted, in looking at the 'streamlined' aristocratic family of the high middle ages, to think of the early medieval aristocratic family as vast and amorphous. We have seen that members of the Keichsaristokratie did indeed have links with their humbler kin, but these were links of patronage and clientship …
What then was the shape of the early medieval aristocratic family? The negative approach to this question will show that the aristocracy did not operate in terms of great clans, that is, homogeneous units composed of members with common interests. The positive approach will demonstrate and examine the essentially dynamic and fluid nature of the aristocratic family and explore the consequences of this for our understanding of the period. …
… Naming patterns alone are an insufficient basis for establishing affiliation. …
… families could split. … tensions between close relatives … at times of political crisis [examples given] … loyalty along lines of family identity alone are bound to fail … family structure was flexible … the family group [was] potentially wide … the Libri Memoriales may be positively misleading …
… On occasion … the role of women as powerful ancestors could be highlighted but this does not mean that all families looked continuously to female ancestors as the source of their status. The fact that they did so, however, when it was suitable means that we must not seek to discover a single, cast-iron structure for the noble family. Instead we must grasp how flexible family structure was for contemporaries.
[INHERITANCE]
Definitions of identity and status were made within families and could be fluid … the biological bonds were supplemented with cultural ones… These bonds were strengthened through the transmitting of property … [examples given]
It is in the area of inheritance that we can see claims and definitions at their sharpest. … [examples given] Entitlement to property is therefore a key factor in family identity … Abbo of Provence … in his will (739) designates as kin 'only those persons from whom he had inherited property’. …
… there is evidence to suggest … that the circle of heirs was a restricted one, or even 'determinedly patrilinear’. … [examples given]
… early medieval law-codes stressed that not all members of a family were equally entitled to inherit. A text such as the Edictum Chilperici from the late sixth century points to an agnatic pattern [descended from the same male ancestor]: the inheritance (referred to simply as land, terra) is to go to sons, or in their absence, daughters. The inheritance rights that counted were those of a privileged circle. … [examples given]
… The pattern revealed by the above evidence is one of a small circle of heirs; children, including daughters, are to be preferred to more distant kin. This tightly linear structure is visible over several generations [in texts] … [For example] Only one member of the family in each generation enjoys possession of [a] relic, which is seen as a key element in the family's patrimony. …
… A similar pattern emerges from a survey of who controlled the 'family monasteries' that so often acted as a focus for aristocratic wealth. The Saxon noble Count Waltbert and his wife Aldburg founded Wildeshausen in the 860s as an Eigenkirche [proprietary church] that was always to be controlled by a fittingly pious member of his line. What Waltbert intended by this is quite clear: his own descendants, and no distant relatives, were to control Wildeshausen; his son Wibert was to be rector, to be succeeded by his brother's son or, if this was impossible, by the son of his sister. This is what happened. …
[WOMEN OF THE NOBILITY]
… Frankish law-codes suggest that women were postponed, not excluded, as heirs; daughters could inherit property if there were no sons. But at the beginning of our period we do find cases of women inheriting property quite straightforwardly; such heirs do not have to be brotherless daughters or childless widows. … there is charter evidence showing that women were inheriting property alongside their brothers (and disposing of it with them) as early as the late seventh century.
Such evidence reveals that, to some extent, a bilateral system of inheritance existed. … Women had legitimate claims which the family group could be compelled to recognise. … Women could in fact outrank their husbands in terms of ancestry and in such cases children took their names from the maternal side of the family. The aura of nobility surrounded aristocratic women; in eighth-century Bavarian documents women are grouped together with men under such titles as praeclari homines … [thus] differentiation of noble status within a family was not exclusively dependent upon gender. The noble family was a complex organism; no one model suffices to describe it.
… High-ranking women in the Carolingian world were well educated themselves and passed on their education, which would include family traditions, to their offspring and indeed to a wider audience. Thus Dhuoda's Liber Manualis, in listing her son's ancestors and urging him to pray for them, reproduces in miniature the gigantic apparatus of the Libri Memoriales. …
… It should now be clear that the social and political history of the aristocracy can only be understood in dynamic terms. Nowhere is this more true than in office-holding.
The relationship of the nobility to the royal dynasty, differentiation within the nobility as a social group, competition between and within noble families, can all be seen …
[HONORES] [RANKS]
The offices that the aristocracy competed for so fiercely can generally be described as honores: the public offices and benefices which gave their holders prestige and political muscle. …Those men who gained an office such as a countship were aware that it was a ministerium [ministry] for which one had to show oneself to the king as a worthy candidate, but they also saw themselves as having a claim on such offices because their noble status entitled them to rule.
Kings’ extensive power of patronage was therefore subject to constraints, in the form of the claims of the aristocracy as a group and, more particularly, the claims of certain families to specific offices. This holds true throughout our period.
… As the grip of the Carolingians … tightened, so did that of noble families on comital office. The countship of Meaux passed from Helmgaudus to his son Gauzhelmus and to his son Helmgaudus in what looks like uninterrupted succession from 744 to 813, while the countship of Paris was dominated by the descendants of Count Gerard between 753 and 858.
The combination of hereditary claims and the royal granting of a ministerium is clearly expressed in an 814 charter of the Bavarian Count Orendil in which he refers to his sons as his potential successors, should one of them be worthy of obtaining the office (ministerium).
[In] the famous Capitulary of Quierzy of 877 … Charles the Bald recognised hereditary claims to counties and benefices …
This … does not mean that kings' powers of patronage were limited to the extent that succession to office was a foregone conclusion.
… the nobility's hunger for office and the importance of office-holding … gave kings their enormous political leverage.
… The behaviour of Charles the Bald in 868 shows the continuing importance of the royal will in the distributing oihonores in the second half of the ninth century [including in cases] where hereditary claims were perceived even as they were passed over …
[examples of hereditary honores taken away and redistributed among other men]
[Charles the Simple, king of West Francia 898–922]
Both Charles the Bald's success and Charles the Simple's problems stemmed from the fact that the distribution of honores was a matter of political skill and negotiation; there were always more claimants than rewards, a timeless political problem.
The great political crisis of the ninth century involved struggles between rival kings and their followers over honores; this was, for example Hincmar's view of the civil war ended by the Treaty of Verdun in 843:
'the magnates of the realm began to fight among themselves for honores, to see which of them might obtain the lion's share’.
The Treaty of Verdun [above] itself was concerned to ensure that each king received an adequate share of the empire's resources with which to reward his following. But the splitting up of those resources guaranteed that politics after 843 would be dominated by royal efforts to gain more of them and that members of the Keichsaristokratie would come under severe pressures of conflicting loyalties.
The importance of the holding of honores cannot be overestimated as a factor in explaining aristocratic political behaviour.
Kings deployed the threat of loss of honores or the offer of them as routine methods of gaining aristocratic loyalties. Loss of honores, which involved loss of royal favour, was not merely a loss of resources, but exposed one to the pent-up hostility of one's rivals … complainants … Honores were worth fighting and dying for.
Aristocrats who had 'invested' too heavily in a particular Carolingian as a patron found it hard to switch to a replacement if their patron faltered.
Thus, the death of Charlemagne's brother Carloman in 771 resulted in the flight of several of his supporters to the Lombard court; they knew that there would be no place for them under Charlemagne, who had his own office-hungry magnates to reward.
Similarly, the followers of Bernard of Italy in 817 rebelled with him against Louis the Pious' plans for the succession which threatened to exclude Bernard.
For such men the death or threatened downgrading of their Carolingian patron meant that the flow of favour dried up. There was no real security of tenure. … the pattern is clear. Amidst … upheaval the determination of magnates to hold their office was a constant. …
What made honores so important? This returns us to the subject of family structure. The eighth and ninth centuries were in general a time of partible inheritance, not of primogeniture. … In general … the widespread practice of partitioning inheritances threatened the fortunes of a family. Nor was it only the petty nobility that faced such threats. The fact that aristocratic estates were often scattered across a wide area and were more frequently split up than either royal or ecclesiastical estates again meant that a given family's power could fluctuate dangerously from generation to generation. … divisions of inheritance could be tense occasions, when frustrated expectations burst into conflict, sometimes resulting in fratricide.
The importance of office-holding is now clear.
Only the possession of honores provided 'security' by raising a man above the pressure on inheritance of property. …The possession of … honores was a more stable power base than family estates. As we have seen, however, honores in fact offered little security, given the rivalries within both the aristocracy and the royal house.
Insecurity and conflicts are therefore the hallmarks of the social and political history of the Carolingian aristocracy.
Its members strove to rise above their rivals and that included their own relatives. The possession of honores also meant that there was differentiation of status within families. … [examples given]
… we are not dealing with a gulf between distantly related members of extended kin groups, but [rather] one between brothers. … The importance of royal favour in enabling a man to rise above his fellows should by now be evident, as should the restricted nature of the circle touched by that favour.
Conflict within as well as between families should therefore come as no surprise. We have seen this happen in the civil wars of the 830s and 840s. The great magnates often rose either in isolation from their relatives or at their expense. … [examples given]
Access to an honor such as a countship meant access to the powers of lordship, to income (for example, profits of justice) and to lands. …
Marriage into the royal family brought political favour … [and] important fiscal lands … Access to such resources enabled counts to strengthen their hold over their own following by acting as channels through which royal favour could be directed further down the hierarchy. … [examples given] What the great magnates gained for themselves, they had to redistribute. They accumulated in order to spend.
Differentiation of status within family parallels, and helps explain, differentiation within the nobility as a social group.
Magnates did not always manage to put down deep roots … short tenure of office can [also] be observed: [lands] held … merely as a source of troops and money … no interest in making it a permanent power base. [examples given] … An important consequence of this pattern is that humbler members of the nobility, broadly defined, may have been able to secure themselves more firmly in localities. Counts came and went … Beneath the Sturm und Drang of high politics we may have here a 'dynasty' of the petty nobility. … [examples given] … we can detect a vicecomes and missus
… In Italy the families with a future in the post-Carolingian world were those of the second rank who had consolidated their status in confined regions, often by leasing estates from more prominent office-holders such as bishops. …
[SUPER-MAGNATES]
The ultimate evolution of the great magnates, the 'super-magnates' who rose to become kings themselves, remains to be considered. Of course there had always been distinctions among the nobility, but the men who rose to regal or quasi-regal status at the end of the ninth century were distinctive indeed. … [examples given]
… High birth and royal favour enabled them to outrank their peers and to monopolise certain offices. … [examples given] Such men did not threaten royal power; they were strong agents of a strong king. High administrative tasks and military commands were the traditional preserves of favoured aristocrats and these men carried out such tasks on a large scale at a time of Viking and Hungarian attacks. In West Francia such men … ran the 'provinces' of Charles the Bald's empire; in East Francia men such [as these] held the title of dux …
Such men profited from royal service. In no sense can they be described as 'anti-Carolingian'. They would fight to retain their status and this could involve defying an individual king; their resistance prevented Louis the Stammerer [King of West Francia 877–879] from redistributing honores as he wanted to on his accession in 877.
But it was crises in Carolingian kingship itself that triggered the rise of the great magnates to royal status; that status had not been the target of the dynasty's followers. The death of Louis the Stammerer in 879 saw [noblemen] bid for a crown, but it was the deposition and death of Charles the Fat, the last legitimate adult male Carolingian, in the winter of 887-8 that heralded the appearance of the new rulers.
The great men who had risen in Carolingian service now stepped in to fill the power vacuum. A contemporary identifies them: in Italy, Berengar, the son of Eberhard of Friuli, in Burgundy, Conrad, son of Rudolf, in Provence and Gaul, Louis, the son of Boso, and Wido, son of Lambert, in the northwest, Odo, son of Robert the Strong. These men were the privileged members of privileged families. They had benefited from the success, not the failure, of the Carolingians' partnership with the aristocracy; to that extent they were the Carolingians' natural heirs [and] do not represent a take-over by the aristocracy.
What does explain 888 is the all-too-successful integration of Carolingians and aristocrats. This is not to downplay the crisis of legitimacy. … the 'kinglets' were indeed distinguished by high ancestry and power, but none had the royal charisma that would enable him to dominate.
Nevertheless Carolingian favour had marked these men out and the structure of the Carolingian empire itself was the foundation of the new powers in both East and West Francia. The new dukedoms and kingdoms reflected the old duchies and sub-kingdoms, the administrative regions, of that empire. The new powers were formed in old moulds. The new potentates thus modelled themselves on their Carolingian predecessors. What else could they do? They failed to match their intensity of rule, in both east and west, as the history of the tenth century shows. But they bore a Carolingian stamp. …
Please send comments or corrections to me directly at mgs.heller@gmail.com
Social Science Files displays multidisciplinary writings on a great variety of topics relating to evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age