Stuart Airlie - Power and Its Problems in Carolingian Europe

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VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES

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Stuart Airlie

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First published 2012 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge
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This edition 2012 by Stuart Airlie

Stuart Airlie has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Airlie, Stuart.
Power and its problems in Carolingian Europe.

(Variorum collected studies series ; CS 1010)
1. Carolingians History. 2. Europe, Western History.
3. Power (Social sciences) Europe History.
I. Title II. Series
944014dc23

ISBN 978-1-4094-4600-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012932939

ISBN 9781409446002 (hbk)

VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES CS1010

Bonifatius - Leben und Nachwirken. Die Gestaltung des Christlichen Europa im Frhmittelalter, eds F.J. Feiten, J. Jarnut, and L.E. von Padberg. Mainz: Gesellschaft fr Mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte, 2007

Der Dynastiewechsel von 751. Vorgeschichte, Legitimations Strategien und Erinnerung, eds M. Becher and J. Jarnut. Mnster: Scriptorium, 2004

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 9, 1999

Charlemagne. Empire and Society, ed. J. Story. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005

Staat im frhen Mittelalter, eds S. Airlie, W. Pohl and H. Reimitz. Vienna: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2006, pp. 93111

Charlemagnes Heir. New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious (814840), eds P. Godman and R. Collins. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990

Courts and Regions in Medieval Europe, eds S. Rees Jones, R. Marks and A.J. Minnis. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2000, pp. 120

La royaut et les lites dans LEurope carolingienne, ed. R. Le Jan. Lille: Centre dHistoire de lEurope du Nord-Ouest, 1998

Lay Intellectuals in the Carolingian World, eds P. Wormald and J.L. Nelson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007

Past and Present 161, 1998

Nobles and Nobility in Medieval Europe, ed. A.J. Duggan. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2000, pp. 2441

Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West, eds E.M. Tyler and R. Balzaretti. Turnhout: Brepols, 2006

The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 43, 1992

This volume contains xviii + 308 pages

These papers have been written over a period of some fifteen years and more. Naturally, my views have changed and, I hope, deepened over that time, not least due to the impact of work by other scholars. Nonetheless, there is consistency of concerns and argument here and the papers have been selected and arranged to form a book, something more than the sum of its parts. My focus is on power and authority in the Carolingian world, from the origins of Carolingian royal authority in the mid-eighth century to the disintegration of that dynastic hegemony at the end of the ninth. This is not a story of an upward struggle to rise to a relaxing plateau of achievement and then a slip down a sloping fall. The Carolingian dynasty could not relax once it gained the royal throne in 751; it had to maintain its seized power in a cloak of legitimate authority and it had to do this continually.

Such struggles for political power and authority are of course only one feature of the Carolingian era, as that era itself is only one part of the history of the early medieval west. And the Carolingian period can no longer dominate early medieval historiography as a master-narrative of a successful formation of a distinctively (western) European identity. The figure of Charlemagne as father of Europe may not resonate now as it did after the great exhibition held at Aachen in 1965 under the auspices of the Council of Europe. Europe is bigger now, much less sure of its direction, and so starting-points as well as destinations are too problematic and various for a made in Francia label to cover them. While 1999 saw valiant efforts made to remind Europeans (including those in the British Isles) of Charlemagnes impact with great exhibitions in Paderborn, Brescia, Barcelona, Split and, on a smaller scale, York, the Council of Europes exhibition of 20002002 was on Europes Centre around 1000 and was to be displayed in Budapest, Cracow, Berlin, Mannheim, Prague and Bratislava. Such work tends to revel in the variety of early medieval cultures, of which the Carolingian realm is only one, and if I were writing these papers now, I would myself doubtless try to incorporate more comparison across space and time, and to draw more on studies of material culture.

The point about such comparisons, however, is not to point out parallels between Carolingian culture and others, or to spot continuities across time, but to render more clearly what is distinctive about the Carolingian era itself. More work, as they say, is needed here. Even the chronological span of this period is a bit fuzzier than it could be. While the start of Carolingian royalty is relatively clear-cut with the 751 coronation of the first Carolingian king Pippin, confusingly known as Pippin III, the end is historiographically less secure. The last Carolingian king was Louis V, whose death in 987 marked the end of one royal dynasty and the start of another, the Capetians. Yet the valuable recent survey,