Exhibit category type 7 rank over status society.
The Source:
Patrick Wormald, ‘Kings and Kingship’ in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume 1 c.500–c.700, edited by Paul Fouracre, Cambridge University Press 2005
KINGS AND KINGSHIP
INTRODUCTION: A WORLD OF KINGS
Throughout the first millennium AD, much of the known world was ruled by monarchies. A good part of it has been for most of the second. In the first millennium BC, a number of the most self-confident societies were not. The records of the Jewish, Greek and Roman cultures that underpin European civilisation are laden with suspicion of individualistic authority.
Nothing can be less readily assumed than that kings or emperors are the natural order of things.
Discussion of early medieval monarchy ought … to begin with a glance at the anti-monarchical traditions … in the early Middle Ages. … Sixth- and seventh-century Europeans [knew] of the fall of the kings of Rome. Isidore of Seville [c.560–636, Spanish archbishop], in the period’s most influential epitome of kingship, derived rex from regere, in the sense not only of ‘ruling’ but also of ‘doing right’ (recte facere) and ‘putting right’ (corrigere). ‘Hence the ancient proverb’, he wrote, ‘you will be king if you do right; if you do not, you will not’.
For when the Romans could not tolerate the proud domination of kings, they organised annual governments and a pair of consuls; for the marks of kingship were not benevolence in counsel but pride in dominance. The lesson of ancient wisdom was that kingship was an admirable method of rule in ideal circumstances. However, it was subject to the most absolute of corruptions and especially if exercised absolutely.
These paradigms are a reminder that some societies at the same sort of stage of development as the early medieval West have opted against monarchy. Yet in 700 AD a governmental gazetteer of what had once been the Roman Empire would consist almost wholly of monarchs. …
IMPERIAL RULE
The main reason why almost the whole of the area covered by this chapter was a mosaic of monarchies in the year 700 is transparent. Over the previous seven centuries, it had all been affected directly or indirectly by experience of Rome.
The Roman Empire was in fact an autocratic monarchy, whatever the constitutional niceties.
The story of post-Roman kingship thus begins with ‘New Rome’ on the Bosphorus. When writing to the senate, Roman emperors used a formula which pithily expresses their relationship with the state: ‘If you are well, it is well. I and the army are well’.
The primary, perhaps always the fundamental, sense of imperator was ‘commander-in-chief’. It was command of the army that made Rome once again a monarchy, against its basic principles.Triumphs for emperors–and none but emperors–in full military rig highlighted their image as bringers of victory. Coins whose obverses almost always carried an imperial portrait had reverses which, in at least one issue for nearly every emperor, harked on military themes: victory itself; avenging Mars; a captive or otherwise humiliated barbarian; a loyal soldiery attending its commander’s speech or receiving his bounty.
Yet it is possible to over-stress the military essence of imperial rule. Emperors were pre-eminently members of a cultivated upper class. The Roman military aristocracy had a thick civilian patina from its earliest recorded days. The acceptable face of imperial rule was perforce civil even as its sinews were military. Emperors were rarely if ever in the front line. For two centuries after the 390s, they ceased to go on campaign altogether, while offering their subjects the doubtful reassurance of an enhanced martial image on their coins; both developments may be attributed to the deterioration of the real military situation. Generalship seldom led directly to the throne between 306 and 602. Only in the Western Empire’s last two decades did commanders make and unmake emperors at will: a process that reached a logical d ́enouement when barbarian soldiers opted for rule by a barbarian king.
So it was that Justinian [Byzantine emperor 527–65], self-styled victor over so many barbarians, was rarely seen outside his palace complex. And when the emperor Maurice was minded to take the field in 590, he was successively discouraged by senatorial advice … It took the post-610 revival of the Persian threat, in a more explicit form than had been known … to induce an emperor to revive the role of Alexander and to better effect than had been managed by almost a millennium of imitators. …
… Byzantine emperors often led armies on campaign but rarely in battle. Too military an image was a solecism that could be as lethal as enemy action. One of the few emperors who died sword in hand was the last.
Emperors were generals by definition. Most Romans, like most Roman historians, probably saw their ruler as above all a military man. But it is as judge that he appears in the many thousand transactions of emperor and subject recorded by subjects themselves on inscriptions or papyrus, or else in the great codes of Theodosius II and Justinian. The words with which Justinian [Byzantine emperor 527–65] launched his Institutes would ring down the centuries: ‘Imperial Majesty should not only be distinguished by arms but also armed by laws . . . so that the Roman emperor . . . should appear as devout in justice as triumphant over defeated enemies’.
We tend to think of the Roman Empire as a galvanic force imposing its will on a huge swathe of humanity until finally overwhelmed by forces beyond even its control. But emperors in a legal role were more often passive than active parties. The main influence on the development of imperial jurisdiction was the expectation that imperial power evoked in Hellenistic cities whose political culture predisposed them to seek monarchical patronage. Emperors were from the outset deluged by petitions, legal grievances prominent amongst them. The urge that promoted an ‘appeal to Caesar’ predictably made the most of the reply (‘rescript’), regardless of its formal status; and the fact that most rescripts owe their survival to incorporation in Justinian’s code shows that they certainly came to be seen as law.
Constantine’s reign [Roman emperor 306–37] appears to mark a change because the Theodosian Code (438) took its starting point from 311, and was meant to include only laws with ‘sacred generality’. Yet what had really changed was not the pressure of petitions but the tone of response. Under Constantine the ‘Quaestor of the Sacred Palace’ became the imperial spokesman. To judge from the job-description given by Cassiodorus, who held it under the Ostrogoths (506–512), legal expertise was relevant, but rhetorical technique more so. Petitions to the emperor had always needed to be couched in the stylised rhetoric that was an educated Greco-Roman’s hallmark. The skills, which had earlier won the emperor’s favour, now took control of his pronouncements.
The tendency of later emperors to meet specific grievances with general fulminations, that were then collected into huge codes in their name, made them look more and more like makers of law.
Such was the context of the supreme legislative achievement of this or any age, Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis. Even here, the all-encompassing imperial initiative is in part illusory. … Justinian’s temple to the ‘public reason of the Romans’ (in Gibbon’s phrase) can thus be seen as a crucial stage in the recasting of imperial rule … it is a monument to the human intellect of measureless importance, the artificiality of the Corpus Iuris in its own time is exposed by its lack of immediate resonance. Justinian’s successors down to Heraclius issued few laws. Heraclius [Byzantine emperor from 610 to 641] seemingly made none, except when trying to crystallise doctrinal orthodoxy.
Leo III’s Ecloga (741) [Byzantine emperor 717–41] has a pertinent prologue: ‘knowing that the laws enacted by previous emperors have been written in many books and . . . that the sense is difficult . . . we considered that the decisions . . . should be repeated more lucidly’. The eighteen succinct Greek chapters that follow are perhaps the nearest to a real ‘Digest’ of law for routine use that any early medieval ruler managed. In addition, in twice citing ‘the wise Solomon’, the prologue chose a model who would have more influence on western royal law-makers in the coming centuries than any Roman.
One of the nostrums of Roman history is that an ‘imperator’, with his austere if informal ‘senatorial’ style, made way for a ‘basileus’, a title that had once symbolised the difference between Greek freedom and enslavement to a Persian autocrat. Much discussion has attended the formal adoption of this title by Heraclius in 629. Greek speakers had in fact been using the word of emperors for centuries. Its ‘official’ appearance (if that is what happened in 629) merely set a seal on the Hellenistic influences to which Roman rule had so long been exposed. The educated easterners who pressed hardest on an emperor’s business came eventually to dictate his patterns of behaviour.
This sea-change is most vividly reflected in the new significance of the palace. The word derives from the fact that the first imperial headquarters was an admittedly unusually opulent private house on the Palatine. No one could mistake Constantinople’s sacred palace for an aristocratic residence. Already by the fifth century it covered quarter of a million square metres. For imperial rule, the late Roman rebirth of a ‘palace culture’, such as had not been seen west of the Levant since Mycenae, meant two things above all.
… it both symptomised and facilitated the emergence of a bureaucracy. The total staff actually present under the palace roofs may have run to four figures, as against an attendance on early emperors of under two hundred. This burgeoning government machine was what gave educated provincials their new access to the levers of power. To emperors it brought a more systematic approach to the raising of revenue and the keeping of archives than was ever possible on the Palatine.
… the rise of the palace entailed the elaboration of the court ritual …
… in evidence too are the elaborate diplomatic protocols which would before long be ridiculed and resented in the West. … But the most illuminating aspect of court ceremonial was perhaps that centring on the Hippodrome, an extension of the palace complex. It had always been in the circus or amphitheatre that emperors staged their dialogue with the Roman people. At Constantinople, however, the circus factions of the Blues and Greens were no longer mouthpieces of public opinion; their role was ever more tightly circumscribed by the orchestration of imperial acclamations. It is typical that a Book of Ceremonies provides most of the evidence of what went on at the races.
An obsession with ceremony was one of the few brickbats that Procopius [c.500–c.562, Byzantine historian] did not throw at Justinian, preferring to stress his lack of dignity. But few of his images are as unforgettable as that of an emperor pacing the corridors of his own labyrinth by night, scorning sleep and snatching odd bites off the imperial table as he passed. One way towards a more sympathetic view of Justinian [Byzantine emperor 527–65] is to appreciate that in the professionalism that so enraged Procopius lay the way ahead. Palace officers after the 630s had little time for history, panegyric or even invective, which is why this is Byzantium’s Dark Age.
The East Roman aristocracy was no longer an elite for whom service to the state was a function of its culture, but a service elite proper, its literary culture less a qualification than an option, and its education dedicated to the very survival of the world it knew.
… Byzantine emperors were the first to act on the principle espoused by European monarchs until the Enlightenment: rulers answer to God for their people’s observance of the Faith.
It is reasonable to see the emperor’s prominence in church affairs as one more aspect of the acceptability of the imperial destiny to those with a background in Hellenistic notions. Emperors seemed to give a spiritual lead. … Emperors chaired sixth- and seventh-century ecumenical councils, which got under way with chanting of the imperial laudes.
Justinian II’s [Byzantine emperor twice between 685 and 711] personal initiative … set about the detailed ordering of a Christian society in ways that foreshadow Carolingian approaches. …What embroiled emperors in ecclesiastical dispute was their duty as much to preserve peace as to formulate orthodoxy. …
Imperial apostleship was articulated in quite another way by care for the poor. There is a difference between the provision for fellow-citizens that pagan emperors channelled through recognised corporations with some of the status of trade unions, and the targeting of the destitute as a religious duty …
Procopius’ account [c.500–c.562, Byzantine historian] of the hospices for the incurably ill and xenodochia for the merely itinerant built by Justinian in the capital and elsewhere is circumstantial. It is revealing that the stuff of panegyric… should now extend to foundations like these. ..
The Empire’s traumatic seventh-century experience of loss, recovery and loss again lent imperial religious leadership new urgency. … When Justinian II relegated his own image to the reverse of his coins, and replaced it on the obverse with that of Christ, the ideal of Byzantium as a new Holy Society reached an apogee. Emperors would soon seek to enforce God’s Law against idolatry. …
MGH: Omissions
[from page 582 Damascus — omitted]
[from page 583 The Balkans — omitted]
[from page 585 The Celts — omitted except for below..]
… The rest of this chapter will show that sub-Roman monarchy in the West derives substantially from the Roman imperial model. The question is whether it does so exclusively. Did anything in their own traditions anticipate the experience of kingship among Europe’s post-Roman masters? …
[pages 585 & 590 — secular filids paragraph and Celts/Irish concluding paragraph]
… the chief determinant of the texts on Irish secular culture is that they were produced and preserved by men who made a fetish of the past. The filid were in recognisable line of descent from the druids of pre-Roman Gaul and Britain. The label ‘druid’ had been dropped along with the priestly functions of paganism. But filid was the same sort of privileged class, membership of which came partly by birth and partly from exhaustive training in its own schools. Their speciality too was recording of all varieties of tradition, from genealogy and saga, through praise of rulers (and their rebuke in satire or curses which filid prestige had a way of bringing to fruition), to the preserving and expounding of law … Much that we know about the theory of early Irish kingship, and quite a lot about the practice, was transmitted by men with a professional archaising bias. …
… There is no reason to doubt that Irish kings had less dominant roles in the societies they ruled than their counterparts. Nor can it be doubted that this relative reticence was linked with the ascendancy of learned orders. Kings in Ireland had less power than elsewhere; lawyers, poets and prophets had more. But it was not that the strength of the professions caused the weakness of kings. Rather, the degree to which Irish kingship remained small-scale gave the professions their scope. Whether their tradition could have retained its hold had kings commanded the sort of resources they did in the rest of the West is a quite different question. By the High Middle Ages, Irish, Welsh and Scots had constructed quite elaborate structures of ruler power. There is no longer any question about a hierarchy of officials, nor of the taxation and services they could enforce. The moral here is important. Traditional Celtic learning was no more proof against escalating royal power than against the appeal of Christianity. The problem that remains is how far such developments were already under way in the period when law-tracts and sagas were first committed to writing. The likelihood is that, if they were in train by 700, the evidence would have hidden this from us. …
[RETURN NOW MAIN TEXT FINAL SECTIONS]
BARBARIAN KINGSHIP: GERMANS
For the purposes of this chapter, ‘Germanic’ kings are defined as those whose own names and/or that of the people they professed to rule derived from languages philologists call Germanic. This section thus covers the kings who governed the one-time dioceses of Italy, Spain, Gaul and Britannia in the post-Roman era.
The definition is somewhat hesitant because many modern scholars are far from sure that either societies or their rulers are helpfully described as ‘Germanic’.
The conundrum has a twofold root. In the first place, a cardinal fact of early German history is that we never meet persons or classes whose position approaches that of Celtic filid. The Germanic past had no guarantors. Almost all we know of the Germans’ history before, during and after the era of the invasions comes from pens which, whether or not wielded by those of Roman origin, were steeped in Roman values.
Secondly, the Germans were affected by Rome long before the invasions, in ways and to extents which those Celts who withstood Roman conquest were not. Well-known ‘barbarian’ royal mannerisms such as the giving of gold rings or military gear to followers, or fixing an enemy’s head on a stake, were anticipated by victorious emperors. Yet to say that is clearly not to say enough. Those mannerisms became firmly embedded in a barbarian idiom. The Roman legacy was so thoroughly mediatised that scholars have barely recognised it, and contemporaries could never have done. Germanic rex and Byzantine basileus may have a common ancestry, but they are no more the same animal than gorilla and chimpanzee. So it is still necessary to explore the accessible past of ‘Germanic’ kingship: and, whether or not this is meaningfully called ‘Germanic’, it remains convenient to do so – without inverted commas.
Proto-kings
… Germanic kingship was already ancient before the barbarian invasions, but each also implies that its powers and responsibilities were then very different from what they became.
… the terminology of early Germanic kingship was not only diverse but also fluid… [The] word which had the greatest future in this respect, though conspicuously absent from Ulfila’s ‘wordhoard’ [was] kuningaz. It was well enough established in West Germanic to be borrowed by Finnish and Slavonic; the distinctly underpowered chieftaincy represented by Slavonic knez may be the clue … There is no reason why a word meaning merely ‘member of a kin’ should come to designate anything special, unless the ‘kin’ represented were the ‘tribe’ or people: that is, a ruler so described was a focus and symbol of ethnic identity. If that were its basic meaning, we might very well expect it to acquire new significance in an age of new ethnic formations.
The other evidence on early Germanic kingship is of course that of Roman writers, and their lessons are ultimately the same as that of vocabulary. That Tacitus should have thought that Germans had kings when Caesar did not is best explained if they were generally too marginal to attract Caesar’s notice. Tacitus’ famous formula, ‘reges ex nobilitate, duces ex virtute sumunt’ (literally translated ‘they take kings for their high-birth, war-leaders for their courage’), appears to mean that kings were not war-leaders, nor, apparently, did they have much influence in the judicial or religious spheres.
Yet Caesar and Tacitus both knew of figures altogether more formidable t… Moreover both writers say enough about early Germanic society to suggest what worked the transformation. Each implies that a chieftain might attract followings of warriors in return for hospitality, and a share of the loot in treasure and particularly weapons that their service had secured. Hence, whatever the notional position of kings, the initiative in the conditions of more widespread warfare from the late second century onwards lay with anyone offering the prospect of the glory and plunder that was war’s reward.
A dux ex virtute appointed in an emergency might thus acquire the permanence of a rex for himself and his family; a rex might indeed achieve the role of a dux. Warband activity would meanwhile fracture tribal structures into a flotsam which new leadership could reconstitute as new peoples. This would in turn explain the emergence of a royal terminology whose point is precisely that a ruler embodies his people’s entity.
Such a model does make sense of some of the evidence from late antiquity and even the time when Germanic kings already controlled much of the West. Ammianus Marcellinus is one of a set of fourth-century authors who call Athanaric, ruler of the Goths, iudex, not rex. Athanaric was certainly a war-leader and a member of a dynasty. He was also, if the Roman label has any meaning, responsible for law, and perhaps in a sense for religion. However, he was not what Goths gave Romans to understand …by ‘king’.
Procopius [c.500–c.562, Byzantine historian] has a remarkable story about the Heruli [an early Germanic people possibly originating in Scandinavia]. They decided to dispense with their rhex whom they anyway treated with little respect. Second thoughts persuaded them that they were badly off ‘without ruler or general’, so they sent a deputation all the way to ‘Thule’ (apparently Scandinavia) to find a replacement among those with ‘royal blood’, of whom there turned out to be a handsome number. Like any good ancient historian, Procopius was an afficionado of the tall tale where barbarians were concerned. But this story may serve to confirm that royal nobilitas was something Germans took seriously, even if not quite sure why. Finally, Bede [673–735, English theologian and historian] says that the eighth-century Old Saxons ‘have no rex but only a number of satraps . . . and when . . . war is about to break out, they cast lots . . . and all . . . obey the one on whom the lot falls for the duration of the war’.
This is like the system among Germans of the first centuries BC and AD, which was yet compatible with reges distinguished by nobilitas. It is a fair guess that, like Caesar, Bede just could not recognise kings who did not square with his own experience. His ‘satraps’ were quite probably what other sources called regales; and his temporary Saxon duces were what could develop into the sort of rex he did understand.
How much of this model of emerging Germanic kingship is really valid can never be known. Monarchy would be recast all over again on Roman soil. What seems safe to say is that kingship was hardly less native to Germans than to Celts.
That, in the last resort, must be why it was kingship, not emperorship, that was the West’s central political institution for the next millennium and more.
Kings in power
In working the transformation of rex into rex/dux, Roman example as well as Roman money and Roman policy was surely decisive. It was in battle that barbarians most often met an emperor. As time went on they were also likely to be found in the ranks of his army. Imperial victory, humbled barbarians, generosity to troops, were constant iconographical motifs, sounded not only by dozens of triumphal arches all over the provinces, but also by coins and medals circulating beyond as well as within the Empire’s borders.
For that vast majority on either side of the frontier whose experience of emperors remained exclusively pictorial, the image of ruler as generalissimo must have been almost subliminal. A strong case can be made that the Anglo-Saxon potentate honoured at Sutton Hoo [English medieval burial site] was meant to represent a Roman emperor, from gorgeous parade-ground armour to rod of consular office. Yet Sutton Hoo gives notice that however necessary is Roman example in explaining the styles assumed by post-Roman rulers, it is not in itself sufficient. Two similar military artefacts make the point. In the helmet-plate showing the Lombard King Agilulf enthroned between winged victories and suppliants emerging from towered cities, there is much beyond crude workmanship to announce a post-Roman world. Agilulf has flowing hair and beard and carries a sword, as emperors are rarely if ever seen to do. Yet this is still a Roman victory ritual. …Whatever its Roman roots, the warrior ethic had been thoroughly assimilated.
Sutton Hoo Mound One [medieval English burial site]… is demonstrably a warlord’s monument, testimony to a more specifically military power than that of emperors. However, it is not demonstrably a king’s monument. Sutton Hoo could be the cemetery of a dynasty of duces on its way to what would later be recognised as regalitas. …
… One reason why late Roman emperors were decreasingly military in style and record was probably the resolutely civilian timbre of upper-class life. The elite of the sub-Roman West looked more unambiguously for leadership in battle.
… a word for king used in Germanic languages by the sixth century was in Anglo-Saxon form dryhten, meaning ‘warband-leader’. Its use is not confined to the literature of war. Its semantic core contributes to the formation of a term for the king’s picked followers, antrustiones, in Frankish law-codes. …
… battlefield experience is what says most about the war- leadership of Germanic rulers and its attendant risks. Of eight Northumbrian kings down to 685, only Oswiu died in his bed. The East Anglians had four kings killed in battle. …
It is no surprise that those who erected Sutton Hoo Mound One should believe in a king’s effect on a battle regardless of his will to participate. … Military leadership increasingly passed to mayors of the palace, whose warrior record finally bore fruit in the decision that those who held real power should also be called kings.
Early Germanic kings were no more makers of law than their Irish equivalents. Royal law-giving in the sub-Roman West arose, as in the early Roman Empire, from subjects’ expectations.
… Barbarian kings were being kitted out to take on the legal role of emperors and praetorian prefects. That they should go on to issue codes like their major legislative model, the Theodosian Code (438), was the next logical step. [It was said] that under King Euric the Goths began to have ‘institutes of law in writing, for before they were governed by tradition and custom alone’. … Cassiodorus’ [5th century Roman scholar] formula for a comes Gothorum distinguished suits between Goths, ‘terminated according to our edicts’, from those of Goth and Roman, ‘decided by fair reason in association with a Roman juris-consult’, and those of Romans, ‘whose decision rests with Roman examiners’. Goths came under the remit of ‘civilised’ written law. Romans were by and large left to their own legal devices. But Cassiodorus’ whole output shows that this was far from a bipartite legal regime.
The new kingdoms were governed by the king’s written pronouncements as necessary, by written Roman or unwritten barbarian custom as otherwise appropriate. The crucial point is that Germanic kings replaced emperors as makers of new law.
The main statement of Visigothic law was issued … in the mid-seventh century. This was the purest post-Roman manifestation of Roman legislative priorities. Arranged in twelve books like the Twelve Tables, it was meant to supplant all previous legislation. It did. This most Romanised of early medieval law books was, logically enough, the only one to abolish Roman law, but Roman inspiration was no longer all that was at work. Councils of the whole Spanish church at Toledo published [an equivalent code Reccesuinth/Ervig] … Law is ‘the soul of the whole body politic’. As that body’s head, the king is source of its guiding principles, but head and body follow the one programme. In their close association of church and king, Visigothic law-makers … anticipated Charlemagne.
The Lombard Edict of Rothari was issued at much the same time as the Visigothic Code. In contrast to Visigothic legislation, it explicitly claims to state ‘the ancient law of the Lombards’. There is quite enough in it that can hardly be Roman, notably laws about feud… codifying Lombard law for Lombards … committing to writing what the ‘leading judges’ and ‘most happy army’ … should already have known. It is hard to resist the conclusion that [Rothari’s] code is first and foremost a symbol of his people’s new place in a civilised world. At the same time, there is much that is ‘civilised’ about it. Marks of Roman influence shared with the Visigoths are scale and comprehensiveness. It is authenticated and dated, as Roman law should be. For all its ‘barbarism’, it is conceivable only in terms of the extensive survival of Roman legal culture in Italy. The best proof of this is that it would ultimately be cited in court proceedings more often than any post-Roman laws bar the Visigothic.
Something comparable, but in important ways distinct, happened in northern Europe. Lex Salica, the primary law of the Franks [ascribed to Clovis] … [That] royal sponsors are … lacking … confirms that Germanic political culture was initially … hesitant … about royal law-giving. Kings as explicit legislators are one more symptom of Romanisation. … Anglo-Saxon kings after Æthelberht were increasingly preoccupied with the concerns of the church and with law and order as such. The Frankish Childebert II and Ine of Wessex punished Sunday work. The former even forbade taking of revenge. Frankish kings made subject peoples ‘civilised’ by giving them written law.
As kings came to seem wardens of social peace, earlier kings were retrospectively credited with a legislative role they perhaps could not claim at first. Romanisation never went so far in northern as in southern Europe. References to ‘lex’ in law suits often have no basis in written law, since by no means all law had been written down. Yet Germanic kings became law-makers under the sort of pressure from their new subjects that Hellenistic cities had exerted on Roman emperors. Even where written law remained more an object of aspiration than an accomplished fact, there was intensification of the idea, perhaps already residual in Germanic as in Celtic society, that kings stood for justice. It was an idea that would achieve enhanced intensity under the Carolingians.
Early medieval western kings inherited what was, by the standards of the time when Germans first became familiar with Rome, a massive palace mechanism. Among the themes of their rule was its scaling down until it again resembled what had been at Augustus’ disposal. The charters whereby Merovingian and Lombard kings gave judgement represent them formulaically as ‘residing at their palace’ amidst an array of court personnel.
… A western king’s home in this era and for long afterwards was his ‘hall’. Anglo-Saxon historians have become familiar with … the technology with and for which warriors fought and died [and] the environment where they sang and drank and had their being … the early medieval royal lifestyle.
The Visigoth Leovigild (568–586) was said … to have been ‘first to sit openly in royal garb upon a throne’, when ‘before . . . both costume and seat were the same for people and king alike’. This probably involved wearing a crown … He was certainly the first Visigothic king to issue gold coins in his own name and image, and in evident imitation of Byzantine models. When a Frankish king did this, Procopius thought it a blatant trespass on an imperial preserve. A fascinating and near-ubiquitous echo is of Hippodrome ritual … [of] succession in the Milan theatre … the amphitheatres at Soissons and Paris, and … staged chariot-races at Arles. It has been shown that the street-plan of Canterbury was modified so that all roads led to the theatre. …
In the end, though, so much aping of Byzantine styles does no more than offset the irreducible East–West contrast.
Sub-Roman government of course had officials; and not only in Germanic-speaking England but also in Francia, Italy and Spain some of these officials had Germanic titles.
The point is that the apparatus of government was now quite different, in spirit as much as size. Cassiodorus’ Variae show that Theoderic’s regime made a systematic attempt to prolong late Roman palace government, in the interests of the senatorial class that had found a new elixir from participating in it. [Some] still had palaces to accommodate it.
But most post-Roman governments, like that of early emperors, were regularly on the move, and mobility is not conducive to heavy government machinery.
The roll-call of Visigothic, Lombard or Frankish officialdom is attenuated almost beyond recognition. There is a bleak discrepancy between the luxuriant lists of office-holders in the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire and those of its successor states.
For all the Roman relics in the Frankish government system, the impression that lingers is of a barely differentiated personnel.
A ‘provost of the sacred bedchamber’ was replaced by a ‘mayor of the palace’: no eunuch, but an aristocrat of military background and increasingly military function.
Society was returning to the days when a ruler’s chief assistant was his second-in-command.
A significant twist was also affecting the terminology of service. The future great title of ‘seneschal’ is a Germanic word whose suffix (as in ‘marshal’) has menial connotations. Young nobles served apprenticeships in the king’s entourage, specifically at table or in his stable, before moving (it may be) to more responsible posts in local government. Attendance in the privacy of a ruler’s bedroom had made way for servicing his wholly public feasts and hunts.
However else it is described, post-Roman government cannot be called bureaucratic. Hence, kings were no longer equipped to tax as emperors had, and were beholden to an aristocracy whose idea of patronage was not office but land.
A crucial difference between post-Roman regimes that foundered like the Ostrogothic, and those that ultimately flourished, above all the Frankish, was not that the one was heretically Arian and the other orthodox, but something crystallised by the religious difference: the maintenance of a gulf between barbarian and Roman in the name of the basic late antique divorce of military and civilian.
The kingdoms that prospered were those that integrated their elite. The price of integration was the ascendancy of military values that had little use for governmental hierarchies and that made the hospitality of a lord’s hall the fulcrum of upper-class solidarity.
As rulers who with few exceptions absorbed Christianity as part of the imperial legacy, … The western scene was complicated by ideological cross-currents. The Latin church learned from Augustine, its one great theoretician, to look more askance than easterners at secular power’s spiritual role. Germanic kings joined the church when emperors were Arian, and several dynasties stayed that way for much longer. In Augustine’s North Africa, Vandal kings evoked memories of a Diocletianic persecutor, not a thirteenth apostle. None the less, kings furnished the post-Roman West with its best-known martyrs. The cult of the Burgundian king Sigismund, killed in 523 by the Franks, looks like the kind of devotion that clustered around the victims of medieval politics until the days of Simon de Montfort and beyond. …
… Spaniards were ahead of all Westerners in seeing that the Old Testament offered the best ideological underpinning for an integration of Christian principles with martial priorities. Their kings were the first to be anointed when inaugurated, perhaps already in 631, certainly by 672 … [Spain] ‘out of line’ with the rest of Europe in its precocious development of the crusading ideal.
… Clovis II [633–657) King of the Franks] was said to have scandalised his monks by stripping silver from the apse of the church so as to benefit the poor. A paradox of late Roman rule thus recurred in the sub-Roman West: kings whose power increasingly distanced them from the run of their people … were brought closer in principle to their least privileged subjects.
CONCLUSION: DOLITTLE KINGSHIP
… the pre-750 period’s best-remembered legacy was not the formidable force Germanic kingship had become, but the notion of a ‘shadow-king’, a roi fain ́eant, kingship in decline. …
The author of the Liber Historiae Francorum, writing in the 720s, gloried in past Frankish triumphs. He was not hostile to Carolingian military achievement, nor was he contemptuous of the position the Merovingians by then occupied. So far as he was concerned, at least one recent king, Childebert III [king of the Franks 694–711], had done a good job. The job was to ‘do justice’, which apparently meant to mediate in the feuds of his greater nobles without excess commitment to any one faction, and to dispense what was left of his patronage to its most deserving (i.e. already privileged) recipients. There is not the least hint that kingship in this style was set upon the path to its own destruction.
… Old Saxon contemporaries … The fierce resistance they put up to Charlemagne’s campaign of Christian conquest is partly explained by attachment to a system where rulers took ‘kingly power’ temporarily and by casting lots. Even Bede [c.673–735, English theologian and historian], another contemporary, who deplored the dissipation of his native Northumbria’s royal resources … had learned … that the summum bonum was not the rule in this world. He could not withhold his admiration for strong kings …
In 700, European kingship was still hedged about with the ambiguities bequeathed by its Hebrew and Roman models, and perhaps by abiding barbarian traditions, both Celtic and Germanic.
… [kingly] office embodied the ‘Ghost of the old Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the ruins thereof’ (in Hobbes’ classic phrase). …
The western European future did now lie with kings who … were God’s agents on earth.
[until a 1000 year spell was broken and secular type 8 was ushered in sans mystique]
[END of Chapter 21]
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