Exhibit category type 7 medieval rank over status society. Type 7 is at ‘research stage’.
The Source:
Janet L. Nelson, ‘Kingship and royal government’ in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume II c. 700—c. 900, edited by Rosamond McKitterick*, Cambridge University Press 1995
*longtime loyal subscriber to Social Science Files.
INTRODUCTION
… [In the early eighth century] the vast wealth on which Roman emperors had gorged was a thing of the past: eighth- and ninth-century kings had to make do with smaller slices of diminished cakes. Yet … the resources available to kings, in moveables as well as land, were increasing, and competition, inside and outside realms, produced a new momentum. The reorientation of the west brought into view societies around the northern periphery of the Roman empire which, though remote from its centre, had felt the impact of the empire's existence: Scandinavians, Irish and Anglo-Saxons would all respond to the creation of a new concentration of power in the west.
In Constantinople, emperors saw themselves as Rome's direct heirs. Severe economic and military problems helped concentrate minds, and resources. The institutions and the ideology of the late Roman state survived in attenuated form. In the west, the two successor states [Lombard and Frankish] which at first seemed to have inherited the largest concentrations of Roman state power had undergone profound change by the early eighth century. …
… In the eighth century, the Frankish empire, under Carolingian leadership, expanded to absorb neighbouring peoples. In the ninth century, as Frankish expansion halted, the surrounding world of exterae gentes was ravaged, plundered, exploited when possible; otherwise converted, traded and treated with, recruited and borrowed from. …
THE BASES OF POWER
… The kingdoms of the eighth and ninth centuries depended on the location, and quality, of the lands and central places controlled by the king. … In the Frankish realm, royal lands, often called by the old Roman term fisc [dict. public treasury of Rome], derived in part from the fifth-century take-over of Roman civitates and imperial estates. When the Carolingian dynasty replaced the Merovingians in 751, they took over old fisclands and added their own family lands, augmented through astute marriages, in the valleys of the Meuse and Moselle, and in the Rhineland. …
… in every kingdom a core of royal lands apparently remained intact over long periods. This was sometimes the outcome of kings' successful efforts to secure the succession of a single heir …
… The [ex-Roman] estates’ careful management was geared to the perpetuation of royal power: to maintaining the stock of horses for the war-band, and to providing the wherewithal to equip men. It was geared, still more fundamentally, to the sustenance of the royal household — for kings regularly stayed throughout winter (and often much of the summer too, when not campaigning on or beyond the borders) in the heartlands of the realm. The notion of royal itineracy, helpful as it is, can be overplayed. Kings made prolonged stays at a few places. Sometimes a single central place emerged. …
… The largest constellations of royal lands were organised around such residences, or palaces. Kings jealously guarded their forest rights to ensure meat supplies for winter. Though no written constitution declared the demesne [land attached to the ‘palace’ or residence] inalienable [untransferable], it was the prerequisite for the kingdom's survival. … Members of the royal family might have a life-interest in particular estates: queens, for instance, might be given particular estates as dowerlands which reverted to the fisc at the holder's death.
The fisc [i.e. royal land] was not a fixed quantum. The king received lands by gift or inheritance or acquisition. Treason, and disloyal service, were punished by the confiscation [play on words, possible origin, taking away] of estates. The royal lands also supplied (as a ninth-century king put it) 'the wherewithal to reward followers ': estates confiscated from the faithless could be regranted to the faithful. Grants were quite often made in areas outside the heartlands where they were, in any case, difficult to manage. Conquest could mean the acquisition of a defeated dynasty's fisc, for instance when the Carolingians acquired Lombardy, or Bavaria — regions excentric vis-a-vis former heartlands. These brought new resource bases for ruling an extended realm. The empire of Charlemagne was 'amplified' to some 1,200,000 sq km in extent.
Distance increased the difficulties of control. Though rivers provided access routes to areas far inland and Roman roads and even staging posts survived in some regions, the preservation of fisc lands in outlying parts of the realm was always problematic, and unless military concerns were likely to bring the king back could be a thankless task.
As power radiated out from palaces and heartlands, it inevitably became less regular, and less intensive, nearer the periphery. But power less direct was nonetheless real.
The paradox of early medieval states was that their stability depended on chronic instability, as kings made constant efforts to expand their territory and the range of their raiding and tribute-taking, inevitably at their neighbours' expense.
… Expansion provided kings with the wherewithal to maintain the loyalty of aristocrats and of potential competitors within the royal family. …
… Charlemagne had to intervene to prevent the misappropriation of royal estates by local magnates. …
[CONTROL OF CHURCH]
… [Thanks] to generations of pious royal and aristocratic benefaction, the secularisation, that is, lay reappropriation, of church lands was well under way in the eighth century. The very establishment of Carolingian power used to be credited to a 'feudal revolution' whereby church lands were seized by Charles Martel to be granted to his vassal-cavalrymen. It is now clear that Mattel did nothing new in appropriating church lands, nor did he exploit the church particularly vigorously. … What Mattel did was to 'crush the tyrants' that is, the bishops who had been building up ecclesiastical principalities at Auxerre and Orleans, for instance. Martel was driven less by reforming zeal than by the need to remove political rivals in strategically key areas and to put ecclesiastical resources at the disposal of men who would fight for him.
Martel set his heirs on the way to a royal destiny. His son Pippin, king from 751, picked up threads left by powerful Merovingians. He continued Mattel's strategy of controlling key churches, expropriating … lands … for instance, and installing noble supporters thereon. He also extended that strategy, in a complex quidpro quo of patronage and exploitation, into a truly realm-wide Einstaatung — incorporation into the state — of the Frankish church. Pippin, after all, had been consecrated king by the bishops of Gaul. He personally appointed bishops and abbots to major establishments (a century later, this was rightly claimed as Frankish royal custom); summoned their attendance at councils and assemblies, which reinforced their corporate involvement in royal designs; required the military service of the men, often kin and/or clients of bishops and abbots, endowed with grants of ecclesiastical lands; and obtained the prayers of senior churchmen for himself, his family, his regime. The map of Carolingian resources thus needs to include major churches along with palaces and royal estates.
… Since such churches were firmly under royal protection, and hence still open to royal influence and intervention, this was a form of devolution, not disengagement. Thus, while the Carolingians' relations with favoured churches had a strong flavour of private interest, their church policy, overall and in detail, deployed and built public authority.
In theory church lands were the property of saints 'forever', but in practice this did not exclude their continuing availability to meet royal demands. These demands grew heavier as needs increased and alternative sources of reward diminished. Louis the Pious listed monasteries owing gifts, military service and prayers — in some cases all three. Sometimes a king's exploitation was barefaced … Royal generosity could be explicitly conditional … granted lands on condition … Royal access to church resources was fully institutionalised. … The armies of ninth-century Carolingians included … troops … organised for campaign by bishops, abbots and abbesses. The loyalty, perhaps too the efficiency, of those ecclesiastical dignitaries was generally more reliable than that of secular office-holders. This system [reliance on church resources] clearly played an important part in the expansion of the Carolingian empire. …
… In any event, [in the ninth century] patronage in the form of land-grants was a positive instrument of royal government: political crisis can be documented by a fall in numbers of grants, the defusing of crisis by a marked rise as the ruler rewarded supporters. Moreover, a managerial rationale is sometimes suggested by the nature and location of lands conceded: those furthest from the heartlands were hardest to run; and relatively recent acquisitions (for instance, through confiscation) made prudent concessions to the rivals of the disgraced.
But the critical point … is simply this: that the political geography of the Carolingian empire must include the ecclesiastical alongside the secular. The great majority of extant Carolingian charters are grants to churches, and so, given the system just described, can hardly be categorised as losses to the state.
[CONTROL OF LAND & WEALTH]
Kings depended not only on their lands, but on moveable wealth. In 793 Charlemagne rewarded non-defectors after a serious rebellion by giving out 'gold and silver and precious cloths’. How had Charlemagne acquired these items? In his reign, plunder and tribute were major forms of royal income and royal reward/inducement. …
… Charlemagne's empire … reached its utmost ('natural'?) limits by about 806 and ceased to expand. Charlemagne's treasure-hoard was dispersed at his death in 814. There were to be serious dynastic disputes in the ninth century. Yet the Carolingian state did not implode. Partly through (not despite) divisions, its rulers found homoeostatic [stabilising] mechanisms of their own. External attack came: the successor states of the ninth century did not succumb. The first part of the explanation lies in readjustment of the bases of power.
Internal redistribution of wealth was an alternative to external expansion. The preservation of a single Carolingian regnum after 840, with brothers, uncles and nephews all retaining stakes in their patrimony, in spite of division and (in 855) further division, allowed expansion as between Carolingian kingdoms through the working of inheritance. …
The Carolingian empire's … process of dissolution was also one of resolution and reformation. Kings could put increasing pressure on ecclesiastical resources …
… Further, income from fisclands could be increased through more vigorous management, that is, extracting from peasants heavier labour services, and increased dues in kind and especially in cash. …
… The aristocracy too grew richer in the eighth and ninth centuries by participation in the spoils of war, and also by more aggressive landlordship which imposed … heavier burdens on the peasantry…
Did growing aristocratic wealth necessarily mean diminishing royal resources? True, the elites of the Carolingian world took a very much bigger slice of the available cake than their predecessors in the Roman empire had of theirs, because the Carolingian state did not tax its elites as the Roman state had done. (The cake as a whole was very much smaller than the Roman one: what matters here are the relative sizes of slices as between state and elites.)
Carolingian rulers did however impose a regular levy on aristocratic wealth through institutionalised 'annual gifts'. Horses as well as gold and silver were always welcome to kings. There were other less regular levies too: rulers since the sixth century had assigned a high office for a price.
In the case of ecclesiastical offices this was called simony [buying or selling of ecclesiastical privileges, pardons or benefices]. Complaints in the reign of Charles the Bald [b. 823-d. 877] suggest that his prices were high.
Powerful Carolingians may also have been able to limit the size of the cut taken by an office-holder from the fines and gifts (munera) which together constituted the profits of justice. This was a form of power-sharing in which the king could contrive to retain the lion's share. But it was possible for both the aristocracy's and the king's shares to grow, if the total cake was expanding, that is, if there were increased proceeds from expanding economic activity and, at the same time, from increasingly active royal government.
… the coinage reforms of Pippin and Charlemagne … are among the surest signs both of newly active internal and external markets offering kings and others possibilities for profit, and of revived royal authority in Francia … Coinage oiled the wheels of trade; and tolls contributed substantially to royal income. …
… Archaeologists have been able to show … the material evidence of the revival of an economy of exchanges. Written sources record more merchants, and more markets. Kings played some part in stimulating these changes, as protectors of merchants and patrons of emporia. More significant still, kings benefited from them, in terms of consumption and exaction.
Charlemagne's prohibition of Sunday markets suggests the stimulus given to more local commercial transactions involving peasants. Charles the Bald's 864 legislation envisages peasants as among regular coin-users; and anecdotal evidence in hagiography confirms that peasants got their coins through selling in local markets. There were potential benefits for kings here too, as landlords, and as controllers of markets within their realms. …
The renovatio moneta of 864 in the West Frankish kingdom entailed the calling-in of all coins, many of them very debased, their demonetisation (the old coins would no longer be accepted as currency) and their replacement by a distinctive new issue of purer coin — a substantial revaluation in fact. Those who brought in old pennies to mints would receive many fewer new pennies. The charge thus imposed on coin-users seems to have amounted in the Carolingian period to some 10%, shared between the king and those who managed each mint, namely the moneyers and the local count or viscount. Renovatio meant taxation on all who held and used money: profits flowed from every mint to the royal treasury. The purity of the reformed coins, their standardised dies, the hoard evidence for the disappearance from currency of the old money, all prove Charles' success in carrying out this ambitious plan.
In 866, he [king and emperor Charles the Bald] the was able to impose realm-wide direct taxation, calculated on land-units, to pay off tributes owed to … war-bands. …
… Charles the Bald was also able (in 864) to attempt to prohibit unlicensed markets, and so if not to limit, at least to check, and insist on payment from, other beneficiaries of market activity. In the more monetised parts of western Europe, that is, west of the Rhine and in England, kings had problems less because they were poor (if they were poor compared with Roman emperors, they were not so poor compared with seventh- or tenth-century kings), than because they had to share so much social power with other potentes, inside as well as outside the royal family. When Charles the Bald tried to increase the aristocracy's contribution to taxation in 877, he was confronted by rebellion. His 864 legislation implies that local aristocrats, counts no doubt in the lead, were already vigorously exploiting market control. …
… Charles the Bald's [successors] were unable to increase internal or external income. Thus the fiscality of royal government, as of landlordship, in this period was precarious as well as limited. …
THE SOCIOLOGY OF POWER
… The obligations of kinship played through institutions, dynastic power through structures of office-holding, in complex and contradictory ways. Kinship was crucial to the political workings of all kingdoms, whatever the level of economic activity, whatever the administrative arrangements.
While an elective element in royal succession was common, inheritance within a more or less restricted family or kindred was the norm. Changes of dynasty were masked by the construction of fictive genealogical ties. In Francia, the frequent creation of child-rulers in this period implies both the overriding importance of dynasticism, and (paradoxically) a firmly institutionalised regnal authority able to weather periods of temporary royal incapacity, because aristocrats could so actively participate in royal government. Kinship itself, imposing the most fundamental of social obligations, and acting as the template for a variety of political relationships, contained another paradox. … The closest nexus of loving relationships, maintained by the most sacred of social duties, was also the site of tension and often ferocious conflict. Charlemagne forbade his sons 'to kill, blind, mutilate their nephews, or force them to be tonsured against their will’. …
… In ruling families, women occupied centrally important positions: as individuals they could strengthen, yet also imperil, dynastic security, could be powerful, yet vulnerable in a patriarchal world. …
… Carolingians, unlike some Merovingians, took their wives from the aristocracy; and royal fathers normally selected, and sometimes dowered, their sons' wives. Marriage with a local heiress could give a king's son a grip on his sub-kingdom. … The activities of queens were more than a matter of personal or familial influence, however: they reflected the centrality of the court in the political system and the institutionalised powers of kingship, hence the extent to which the Carolingian realm functioned as a state. In order to do his job, a king needed a queen. She played a key role in running his household, dispensing annual payments to the milites; and she could have a household, and household officers, of her own. …
… Queenship began to take its place alongside kingship as the subject of political thought. At the same time, the queen's role reflected the special loyalty expected of close kin. A king shared his parent's kin with his brothers: a king's wife's kin were his own. When kinsmen on mother's or father's side threatened rivalry or defection, in-laws promised an individual king firmer support… The marriages of daughters, on the other hand, threatened to bring too many in-laws with claims on shares of the patrimony.
Charlemagne kept his daughters unmarried: their influence at court during his last years became a scandal that was never permitted to recur. Nearly all the daughters of the ninth-century Carolingians were placed in convents. It was a safer way to narrow the circle of in-laws claiming familial resources and influence at court. But a royal descent line could become too narrow: in the later ninth century the Carolingians themselves were faced with no threat more severe than 'the sterility of their wives’. It may be true that the Carolingians overrated the binding-power of marriage-alliances: it is hard to think, though, of any better strategy available to them. …
Kingship was an exceptionally scarce resource, and sub-kingdoms were limited. Kings' sons 'surplus to requirement' had therefore to be shed. … Few kings escaped the problem of rebellion by a close kinsman … Conflict between dynastic branches, or rival dynasties, could leave a kingdom vulnerable to rivals and external aggressors. ….
… At the palace, kinship with the king defined a group of men with presumptive claims to political influence. An aspiring youth was encouraged by his mother to cultivate 'the king's parentes and propinqui, both by paternal descent and by marriage’. Stray hints in the sources suggest there were many of them. Some were more equal than others. …
… A king's court teemed with the sons of the nobility sent there by their parents to learn social, political and military skills, to shine among their commilitones, to grow up with the benefit of Konigsndhe [presumably this means something like ‘understanding of kingship]. The idea of selecting even non-noble boys to join the court may have appealed to kings as a way of keeping nobles on their toes… From this material a young king could shape his own entourage, or a mature king the next generation of fideles. The queen too played an important part, as pay-mistress, as well as surrogate mother, to the youths of the household. Gift-giving cemented the king's authority … Alongside the young laymen were young clerics, equally ambitious. … Most bishops came from this milieu. …
… Kings thus had access to social levels below the great aristocracy. … In the Frankish realm, the difference between free and slave was important in differentiating those who could be called on for military service from those who could not. Among the free, kings could use utilitas [meaning unclear in this context] where they found it.
Whatever his birth, a man with a mission from the king, and armed with royal protection, had authority vested in him.
The gulf between potentes and pauperes was wide, but nowhere was there simply a two-class society. There were squirearchies, and there were prosperous free peasants. Kings and magnates alike depended on the deference and political support of their social inferiors, and so shared a vested interest in maintaining a hierarchical order.
Elites in Francia feared coniurationes, sworn associations formed by lesser folk to provide a kind of social security, for instance against fire or shipwreck. Such horizontal groupings could seem to the powerful like threats to social control.
Hierarchy mattered more than ethnicity. …
… For any king, the worst danger was noble coniuratio, conspiracy against himself. Protecting pauperes was good, but promoting lordship was better. That was the basis of a king's entente with the aristocracy. … oaths must be kept … Obligations to lords overrode even the bonds of kinship… Kingship and lordship went together, and reinforced each other.
The next section of this (15th) chapter — THE LOGISTICS OF POWER — is long and relevant to our proposed type 7 thesis. It will follow shortly.
Please send comments or corrections to me directly at mgs.heller@gmail.com
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