Ecclesia and the early medieval polity - austriaca.at

Mayk e de Jong

Ecclesia and the early medieval polity It is now well over two decades ago since Johannes Fried argued that the learned Carolingian elite had been incapable of a political discourse in abstract and transpersonal terms.1 In the ninth century the word regnum referred to the ruler’s activity as a leader of his people, not to any territorial notion. Two concepts, however, went some way towards denoting the entire polity: the royal household (domus regis) and the Church (ecclesia). Yet for all the symbolic value of courts and palaces, these never became the transpersonal institutions characteristic of a true state, for they owed their symbolic value to the physical presence of the ruler, his family and his courtiers. In the domain of the ecclesia higher levels of abstraction were supposedly achieved, but this powerful metaphor for the unity of the Christian empire proved useless in the face of eventual political fragmentation. Thus, the Carolingian polity remained suspended between Church and royal household, without ever finding the language which might have turned it into a more viable and long-lived state. Reading this at the time, I was puzzled by this singularly idealist line of reasoning. Why would ‘statehood’ be dependent on finding the correctly transpersonal concepts for it? Why, for that matter – to mention a similar discussion of those days – was Purgatory only born when the Paris intellectuals of the late twelfth century endowed it with the noun purgatorium?2 To those not brought up in the tradition of Verfassungsgeschichte, new or old, Hans-Werner Goetz’s counter-arguments, based on an extensive dossier concerning the semantic field of regnum, seem entirely convincing.3 Of course, regnum was a flexible concept referring to kingdoms and sub-kingdoms, used often in passing and without reflection or precise definition, for this was a household word. In no way was the identity and coherence of Carolingian regna dependent upon any particular ruler. A regnum needed a king, but it was a unit which existed independently of whoever happened to govern it. In other words, regnum embodied the beginning of a transpersonal concept one might well call a state. Kings came and went; regna remained. As far as Anglophone early medievalists concerned themselves with Fried’s thesis, scepticism also prevailed – understandably so, for in the course of the 1980s and 1990s, British historians made a strong case for the viability of early medieval states, partly in reaction to F.-L. Ganshof’s influential and pessimistic view of a Carolingian Empire: Charlemagne’s admirable attempt at building an effective government had remained an ad hoc and superficial operation, doomed to fail in a world lacking a viable economic infrastructure to support such institutions. Hence, “l’échec de Charlemagne”, and, even more so, the failure of subsequent Carolingian rulers.4 Ganshof’s anachronistic notion of what 1

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Johannes Fried, Der karolingische Herrschaftsverband im 9. Jahrhundert zwischen Kirche und Königshaus, in: Historische Zeitschrift 235 (1982) 1–43; see also id., Gens und regnum. Bemerkungen zur doppelten Theoriebindung des Historikers, in: Sozialer Wandel im Mittelalter. Wahrnehmungsformen, Erklärungsmuster, Regelungsmechanismen, ed. Jürgen Miethke/ Klaus Schreiner (Sigmaringen 1994) 73–104. Jaques Le Goff, La Naissance du Purgatoire (Paris 1981); for a sensible critique, see: Aaron Gurevich, Popular and scholarly medieval cultural traditions: notes in the margin of Jacques Le Goff’s book, in: Journal of Medieval History 9, 2 (1983) 71–90. Hans-Werner Goetz, Regnum. Zum politischen Denken der Karolingerzeit, in: Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Germanistische Abteilung 104 (1987) 110–189, and Goetz’ contribution to this volume. For a brief commentary on this controversy, and a justified plea for a comparative study ranging beyond Frankish sources, see Jörg Jarnut, Anmerkungen zum Staat des frühen Mittelalters: Die Kontroverse zwischen Johannes Fried und Hans-Werner Goetz, in: RGA Erg.Bd. 41 (Berlin/New York 2004), 504–509. This only came to my notice after I had finished this article. François L. Ganshof, L’échec de Charlemagne, in: Comptes rendus de l’Academie des inscriptions (1947) 248–254. Much of this critique has focussed on the role of literacy in government and society: id., The use of the written word in Charlemagne’s

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athat proper state should be, then and now, has been challenged in a spate of publications on literacy, dispute settlement, immunities, kingship, aristocracy and the consensus fidelium, which all stressed the effectiveness of a polity that “however ramshackle, still constituted a state”. As Janet L. Nelson (who coined this phrase) expressed it, on the one hand “the Frankish realm can be classed in Weber’s sense as a patrimonial regime in which power legitimised as divinely ordained was exercised as the ruler’s personal authority like a father over his household”, but on the other, “to deny the ninth century any idea of the state or of public office is to throw out the baby with the bathwater.”5 And Nelson continues: “Political thought is embodied not only in theories but in contemporaries’ ad hoc responses to political problems and to perceived discrepancies between ideals and realities”.6 Unlike Fried, who looked for clear definitions of Staatlichkeit, Nelson – like Goetz – is concerned with definitions of the polity which arose in the fracas of politics. The domus regis – one of the two concepts that, according to Fried, defined the unity of the Carolingian polity without ever achieving ‘transpersonality’ – has been the focus of much recent research, which reveals that Carolingian courts and palaces were more than the royal household on the move. A network of palatia and royal monasteries spanned the Carolingian empire, to the extent that even palaces hardly ever visited by kings basked in the glow of the major palatia like Aachen or Ingelheim, embodying and representing royal authority in peripheral regions.7 Such palaces had enduring royal connotations, and therefore a good claim to some ‘transpersonality’ in Fried’s sense of the word. Under Charlemagne and Louis, Aachen became the centre of the empire, and also its moral hub. Scandal and disorder in the royal household might affect the entire polity. When accusations of adultery were levelled at the Empress Judith in 830, “ripples like this spread out from the royal bed-chamber until waves of pollution threatened to engulf the kingdom”.8 Some palaces were more pollution-prone than others, and therefore also became crucial scenes of reconciliation and cleansing: Judith’s rehabilitation was not complete until she was readmitted to Aachen and its royal bedchamber. After 840, in a divided empire, Aachen continued to capture the imagination of rulers wishing to found their own ‘senior palace’, as Charles the Bald did in Compiègne.9 In other words, Fried’s contention that the domus regis was a vital parameter of Carolingian political identity has been amply confirmed, even if the opposition between a personal household and a transpersonal locus of royal authority turns out to be much less relevant than he assumed. But what happened to ecclesia, the concept around which, supposedly, the contours of abstract Carolingian thinking about statehood became best visible? Not much, it seems. In fact, in reactions to Fried’s ar-

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administration, in: id., The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy (New York 1971) 125–142; Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge 1989) 25–37; Janet L. Nelson, Literacy in Carolingian Government, in: The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge 1990) 258–296. See also, Schriftkultur und Reichsverwaltung unter den Karolingern, ed. Rudolf Schieffer (Abhandlungen der Nordrhein-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 97, Opladen 1996). For a recent assessment, see Matthew Innes, Charlemagne’s government, in: Charlemagne, Empire and Society, ed. Joanna Story (Manchester 2005) 71–89. Janet L. Nelson, Kingship and empire in the Carolingian world, in: Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge 1994) 59; cf. also Nelson’s other excellent introduction into Carolingian political thought: Janet L. Nelson, Kingship and empire, in: The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, ed. James H. Burns (Cambridge 1988) 211–251. Nelson, Kingship and empire in the Carolingian world 65. Stuart Airlie, The palace of memory: the Carolingian court as a political centre, in: Courts and Regions in Medieval Europe, ed. Sarah Rees Jones/Richard Marks/Alastair J. Minnis (York 2000) 1–20; cf. also Thomas Zotz, Le palais et les élites dans le royaume de Germanie, in: La royauté et les élites dans l’Europe carolingienne. Début du IXe siècle aux environs de 920, ed. Régine Le Jan (Lille 1998) 233–247. Airlie, The palace of memory 7; cf. also id., Private bodies and the body politic in the divorce case of Lothar II, in: Past and Present 161 (1998) 3–38; Michael E. Moore, La monarchie Carolingienne et les anciens modèles Irlandais, in: Annales: Histoire, Sciences sociales 51 (1996) 307–324; Rob Meens, Politics, mirrors of princes and the Bible: sins, kings and the wellbeing of the realm, in: Early Medieval Europe 7 (1998) 345–357; Mayke de Jong, Bride-shows revisited: praise, slander and exegesis in the reign of the Empress Judith, in: Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–900, ed. Leslie Brubaker/Julia M. H. Smith (Cambridge 2004) 571–618. Janet L. Nelson, Aachen as a place of power, in: Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Mayke de Jong/Frans Theuws/Carine van Rhijn (Leiden 2001) 233 f.

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ticle, his idea that Kirche had anything to do with Staatlichkeit has been quickly discarded, with the argument that the concepts of ecclesia and regnum were never equated or even consciously paired.10 Furthermore, Fried’s own contention that the ecclesia had been both too restricted and universal a notion to stop the fragmentation of the Carolingian empire was further built on by his critics. Either the ecclesia referred to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, a body of clerics with their own collective interests, or to a universal ecclesia that could at best be equated with imperium, not with Staat. As long as the undivided Carolingian empire existed, ecclesia might have been a useful way of conceptualizing the polity, but after 840 and the subsequent fragmentation of the imperium, ‘the Church’ became useless as a metaphor for political unity. It is this perhaps somewhat hasty conclusion that I shall comment upon in this article. Surely, if one uses modern conceptions of Staatlichkeit as a yardstick – not something Goetz indulges in – ecclesia is not a candidate for defining early medieval states. But even if the concepts of regnum and ecclesia were not ‘consciously related to each other’, as Goetz expressed it, does this mean that ecclesia was irrelevant to early medieval understandings of political cohesion and identity? Part of the problem, both in Fried’s treatment of the matter and Goetz’s rebuttal thereof, lies in modern notions of ‘the Church’ interfering with historical analysis. ECCLESIA – UNIVERSAL? Over the past two decades, the distance produced by Western European secularisation turned what used to be ‘church history’ into mainstream history, with historians of pre-modern periods leading the way. This is no coincidence, for they were the ones most confronted with the otherness of a Christianity they now defined as ‘religion’, be it popular or not. But this new anthropological approach to the distant religious past did not mean that nineteenth- and twentieth-century notions of what ‘the Church’ represented no longer had an impact. There are two basic connotations, one broad, the other restricted. On the one hand, ecclesia refers to the universal community of the faithful which transcends political boundaries; on the other, it denotes the clerical hierarchy with its institutions and its property. These two meanings of ecclesia have a long pedigree. The universal church which existed regardless of political structures was an ideal most elaborately expressed in Augustine’s De civitate Dei. Christ’s Incarnation had inaugurated ‘Christian times’ (tempora christiana), in which religious cults and secular polities no longer coincided. With the beginning of the Christian era, the Sixth Age, the true cultus divinus and true Christians had become detached from the earthly City, progressing to their ultimate salvation within political structures, but without being dependent on the latter.11 This powerful ideal had an enduring impact upon Western culture. It has been at the core of post-medieval arguments for the separation of Church and State, and it remains the cornerstone of modern Christian and secular identity, as becomes evident in present-day confrontations with fundamentalist Islam. The more restricted meaning of ‘the Church’ as the corporate body of the clergy, the exclusive mediators between God and mankind, also has a long history, but its more pre-

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Goetz, Regnum 184: “Ecclesia und regnum treten an keiner mir bekannten Stelle in der Geschichtsschreibung in einen bewußten Bezug zusammen. Der Kirchenbegriff umfaßt die gesamte christliche Gesellschaft, doch fehlt ihm der staatliche Zusammenhang und nach der politischen Aufspaltung des fränkischen Reichs in Teilreiche vor allem die Fähigkeit, sich der neuen politischen Landschaft anzupassen.” Cf. ibid. 183, with reference to Hans Hubert Anton, Fürstenspiegel und Herrscherethos in der Karolingerzeit (Bonn 1968) 404–414: the king has a function within the institutions called regnum and ecclesia. Cf., however, Astronomus, Vita Hludowici 62, ed. Ernst Tremp, MGH SS rer. Germ. in us. schol. 64 (Hannover 1995) 541: Ibidemque [Poitiers] moranti et que utilitas poscebat disponenti, nuntius illi advenit, dicens Hludouuicum filium suum assumptis quibusdam Saxonibus atque Toringis secum, Alamanniam invasisse. Que res maximum ei peperit incommodum; … Invictus tamen eius animus, dum turbari tali peste ecclesiam Dei populumque christianum vexari comperit, … Robert Markus, ‘Tempora Christiana’ revisited, in: Augustine and his Critics. Studies in Honour of Gerald Bonner, ed. Robert Dodaro/George Lawless (London/New York 2000) 201–213; Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom. Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000 (Oxford 22003) 72–92. For a comprehensive treatment of Augustinian thought in relation to a Carolingian historiographer, see Nikolaus Staubach, Christiana tempora. Augustin und das Ende der alten Geschichte in der Weltchronik Frechulfs von Lisieux, in: Frühmittelalterliche Studien 29 (1995) 167–206.

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cise articulation occurred in the late eleventh century during the so-called Gregorian Reform and the Investiture Conflict. It further developed from this period onwards, often in opposition to so-called heretical movements which contested the clergy’s claim to the sacred domain as its exclusive prerogative. These two images of the Church, the universal community of the faithful and the well-organised clerical body, still dominate the present-day imagination, even in those Western societies in which religious divisions and denominations apparently no longer guide public or private life. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, the expression ‘the Church’ continues to have powerful and controversial associations, and historians of the early Middle Ages are also still in thrall to them. They are in a peculiar position, for they study a period which least conforms with the two ideal types of ‘Church’ they are familiar with. One approach to early medieval Christianity has been to neglect these differences; after all, the early medieval semantic field did include the two meanings of ‘Church’ just mentioned, the universal Christian community and the institutional church, so specific and time-bound inflections tend to remain invisible. The other approach, which has prevailed, is to stress the otherness of early medieval Christianity, which supposedly deviated from ‘real Christianity’ by its far-reaching integration of religion and politics.12 A long Western tradition of perceiving the clerical and secular domains in terms of an antagonistic dualism between Church and State – with the one inevitably posing a threat to the autonomy of the other – has turned the religious authority of Byzantine emperors – and that of Charlemagne, to some extent – into an anomaly called “césaropapisme”,13 but this same intellectual heritage has yielded the concept of Augustinisme politique, that is, clerics who massively and illegitimately invaded the domain of secular power.14 Instead of keeping itself to its sacerdotal and pastoral functions, ‘the Church’ increasingly turned its religious authority into a political leadership based on the superiority of episopal auctoritas over royal potestas.15 Albeit in different directions, both caesaropapism and Augustinisme politique represent a transgression of what is seen as a legitimate boundary between the ecclesiastical and the secular domain. In German historiography this early medieval integration of religion and politics came to be called Germanisches Christentum and then, in the post-World War II period, more neutrally, Landeskirchen, that is, churches in the restricted sense of the word (organisations of clerics) which identified with kings and kingdoms, rather than with Rome, and therefore lost touch with the ideal of Christian universality embodied by the papacy. Arnold Angenendt attempted to situate this typically early medieval politische Religion (“die politische Gemeinschaft zugleich Glaubens- und Kultgemeinschaft”16) within a broader typology derived from Religionswissenschaft, which distinguished between so-called ‘archaic’ and ‘ethical’ religions. But since German Religionswissenschaft had emerged within the intellectual climate of nineteenth-century Christianity and its norms, this is to a large extent a circular operation. The idea that early medieval religious culture represented a deviation from an original and authentic Christianity remains in place, with universality and detachment from the state as the latter’s main distinguishing characteristics. According to this line of reasoning, in the early medieval West the universal populus christianus of the late Roman Empire 12 13

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Discussed in Mayke de Jong, Religion, in: The Early Middle Ages, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Oxford 2001) 131–164. Gilbert Dagron, Empereur et prêtre. Étude sur le “césaropapisme” byzantin (Paris 1996) esp. 290–322; see the incisive discussion of this ground-breaking study by Evelyne Patleagan, Byzance et la question du roi-prêtre in: Annales HSS 55 (2000) 871–878 and Alain Boureau, Des politiques tirées de l’Écriture. Byzance et l’Occident, in : ibid. 879–888. Boureau, Des politiques tirées de l’Écriture, built upon by Mayke de Jong, Sacrum palatium et ecclesia. Sur l’autorité religieuse sous les Carolingiens (790–840), in: Annales HSS 58 (2003), 1243–1269. The two classic statements: Henry-Xavier Arquillière, L’Augustinisme politique. Essai sur la formation des théories politiques du moyen âge (L’église et l’état au moyen-âge 2, Paris 21955); Étienne Delaruelle, En relisant le De institutione regia de Jonas d’Orléans, in: Mélanges d’histoire du Moyen Age, dédiés à la mémoire de Louis Halphen (Paris 1951) 185–192; the intellectual background and context of the concept of ‘Augustinisme politique’ is outlined in Boureau, Des politiques tirées de l’Écriture. Arnold Angenendt, Das Frühmittelalter. Die abendländische Christenheit von 400–900 (Stuttgart 32001) 40, citing W. Baetke; cf also id., Geschichte der Religiösität im Mittelalter (Darmstadt 1997) 1–20.


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was replaced by a multitude of Gentilkirchen,17 churches that derived their cohesion from a polity with a shared ethnic identity. Clerics were integrated into the Personenverbandsstaat, and the awareness of belonging to a universal Christendom gave way to loyalty to king and gens. Only the Carolingian cooperation with the papacy ensured that Europe did not fall back entirely into “alte Gentilstrukturen”.18 In other words, the Franco-papal alliance revived and ultimately saved ‘real Christianity’. This view presents some problems. First of all, its implied contrast between Romano-Christian civilisation on the one hand, and authentic Germanic cultures on the other has been undermined by recent research into the formation of early medieval peoples with, at least at the level of the elites, a shared sense of identity. In this long-term process of what has come to be called ‘ethnogenesis’, Roman classifications played a crucial role, providing the labels and categories around which future political identities could cluster.19 As has been pointed out, to a large extent the Germanic world with its multitude of neatly situated gentes was a Roman creation, based on centuries of interaction within and across the limes.20 The emergence of new medieval polities was sustained by texts – initially produced by indigenous Romans or Romanized barbarians – that stressed common origins and shared histories. Much of the best work on ethnogenesis deals with early medieval historiography and the ways in which a common past was invented, shared, used and also manipulated.21 Curiously, as a crucial ingredient of the formation of new political identities Christianity has not played much of a role in these discussions, possibly because of the implicit assumption that ‘the Church’ is either too restricted a domain – just the clergy – or too universal – the community of all the faithful – to be central to the early medieval formation of peoples and states. Whatever the case, the fact that the concept of Gentilismus remains well and alive precisely among church historians is no coincidence, for it is one way of expressing the otherness of early medieval ‘religion’ as opposed to real Christianity. Celebrated early medieval narratives on Christianization have reinforced this view, highlighting the sudden transition from a supposedly pristine paganism to a Christian God whose main attraction was that he gave victory in battle.22 The suddenness of these royal conversions and the otherness of this fierce God continue to conjure up images of ‘Germanity’ and Gentilismus, even if it is clear that Constantine was the main literary model for these narratives, that Clovis weighed his options carefully before con-

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Arnold Angenendt, Der eine Adam und die vielen Stammväter. Idee und Wirklichkeit der Origo gentis im Mittelalter, in: Herkunft und Ursprung: historische und mythische Formen der Legitimation, ed. Peter Wunderli (Sigmaringen 1994) 27–52, at 38 ff. Lutz von Padberg, Unus populus ex diversis gentibus. Gentilismus und Einheit im früheren Mittelalter, in: Der Umgang mit dem Fremden in der Vormoderne. Studien zur Akkulturation in bildungshistorischer Sicht, ed. Christoph Lüth/Rudolf W. Keck/Erhard Wiersing (Köln 1997) 155–193, at 184. Cf. Walter Pohl, Gentilismus, in: RGA 2. Aufl. 11 (Berlin/New York 1999) 91–101. For a summary of this research tradition, see Walter Pohl, Tradition, Ethnogenese und literarische Gestaltung: eine Zwischenbilanz, in: Ethnogenese und Überlieferung. Angewandte Methoden der Frühmittelalterforschung, ed. Karl Brunner/ Brigitte Merta (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, Wien/München 1994) 9–26; for more recent articles, refer to: id., Ethnicity, theory and tradition: a response, in: On Barbarian Identity – Critical Approaches to Ethnogenesis Theory, ed. Andrew Gillett (Turnhout 2002) 221–240; id., Aux origines d’une Europe ethnique: Identités en transformation entre antiquité et moyen âge, in: Annales HSS (1/2005) 183–208; id., Identität und Widerspruch. Gedanken zu einer Sinngeschichte des frühen Mittelalters, in: Auf der Suche nach den Ursprüngen. Von der Bedeutung des frühen Mittelalters, ed. id. (Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 9, Wien 2004) 23–36; id., Die Völkerwanderung. Eroberung und Integration (Stuttgart/Berlin/Köln 2002); Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton/New York 2002), German transl.: Europäische Völker im frühen Mittelalter. Zur Legende vom Werden der Nationen (Frankfurt 2002). Patrick J. Geary, Before France and Germany. The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (New York 1988) IV. For a recent example of this approach: The Construction of Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Texts, Resources and Artefacts, ed. Richard Corradini/Maximilian Diesenberger/Helmut Reimitz (The Transformation of the Roman World 12, Leiden/Boston 2003). For a comprehensive critique of early medieval narratives of conversion and mission, see Ian Wood, The Missionary Life. Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1500 (London 2001).

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version, exploring the merits of Arianism23 and that Bede carefully left the still existing remnants of the Romano-British church out of his history in order to create a Kent-oriented English identity.24 The way forward is to become more aware of the way in which present-day ideals of Christianity still inspire past versions thereof, and to negotiate one’s way through differences and similarities without going overboard in either direction. Rather than following the dichotomies created by early medieval authors, these should be made into central topics of research. Yes, there was a tension between the Roman inheritance, including a vast body of patristic texts, and early medieval interpretations and transformations thereof, but it is the interaction between different traditions that should be explored, along with early medieval conceptions of what ‘real Christianity’ was all about.25 Between c. 400 and c. 1100, the concept of a universal ecclesia superseding temporal polities never entirely disappeared, but it was a subcurrent within a world consisting of micro-Christendoms, as Peter Brown has called the Christian communities of the early medieval kingdoms.26 This concept bears some resemblance to Landeskirchen or Gentilkirchen, without the negative connotations of deviation from an ideal of universality. Such diverse Christian communities kept alive the memory of a joint early Christian past based in the Mediterranean and, above all, in Rome. As Brown puts it, a propos the transfer of books from the Mediterranean to the British Isles in the seventh century: “Christianity was a patchwork of adjacent, but separate, “micro-Christendoms”. No longer bathed, unconsciously, in an “ecumenical” atmosphere based upon regular inter-regional contacts, each Christian region fell back onto itself. Each needed to feel that it possessed, if in diminished form, the essence of an entire Christian culture. Often singularly ill-informed about their neighbours, or deeply distrustful of them, the leaders of each “micro-Christendom” fastened with fierce loyalty on those features that seemed to reflect in microcosm, in their own land, the imagined, all embracing macrocosm of a world-wide Christianity.”27

Brown then goes on to discuss encyclopedic works such as Isidore of Seville’s, which aimed to link the Visigothic kingdom with the Roman world in which Christianity had originated. The Rome of Northern imagination that attracted so many pilgrims, including Charlemagne, was the Rome in which the Apostles had lived and died – a world of a pristine and true Christianity represented by the martyrs and the patres. Brown evokes a universal Roman Christendom which lived on in the minds of early medieval elites, but within the confines of a polity consisting of kings and their peoples in alliance with ‘their’ God. This approach is more helpful than that of the inward-looking Landeskirchen or Gentilkirchen, for it highlights a pervasive tension within early medieval religious discourse between particularized religious communities that initially coincided with gentes, and the lingering idea that the ecclesia had once transcended such boundaries. Although the Carolingian empire may seem the very opposite of a micro-Christendom, this concept is also illuminating for the Carolingian polity in general and the celebrated Franco-Papal alliance in particular. Rather than saving the barbarian West from a definitive decline into Gentilismus, the Rome-orientedness of the Carolingians was rooted in a post-Roman Western tradition that had continued to cherish Rome as the centre and locus of a pristine Christian past. Apart from the obvious uses of the papacy for the legitimacy of the Carolingian dynasty,28 Rome was a treasure trove of sacred resources into which the new Frankish rulers tapped more effectively and systematically than their predecessors – not purely tactically, but also religiously. One may also wonder whether Rome as a papal seat with an increasingly universal appeal would have survived without 23

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Danuta Shanzer, Dating the Baptism of Clovis: the bishop of Vienne vs the bishop of Tours, in: Early Medieval Europe 7 (1998) 29–57. Nicholas Brooks, Canterbury, Rome and the construction of english identity, in: Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West. Essays in Honour of Donald Bullough, ed. Julia M. H. Smith (Leiden/Boston/Köln 2000) 197–220; Rob Meens, A Background to Augustine’s mission to Anglo-Saxon England, in: Anglo-Saxon England 23 (1994) 5–17. A point made early on by Robert Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge 1990) 13–16. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom 13–20, 355–379. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom 364. A recent and thought-provoking discussion of these issues is provided by Rosamond McKitterick, Paul the Deacon and the Franks, in: Early Medieval Europe 8 (1999) 319–339; Rosamond McKitterick, The illusion of royal power in the Royal Frankish Annals, in: English Historical Review 115 (2000) 1–20.


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the ‘great expectations’ of Northern rulers and peoples who held St Peter’s seat to be a fount of authoritative Christendom and were willing to ensure that these sacred resources remained intact.29 In other words, the Carolingian Christian empire did not so much represent a return to any ‘original’ Roman universality, politically or ecclesiastically, saving the West from Gentilismus, as a microChristendom gotten out of hand by its very territorial extension. The universality of the Carolingian ecclesia seems obvious, at first glance, particularly because of its vastness and its connection with Rome. Likewise, Carolingian reflections on the ecclesia appear very similar to modern conceptions of the universal Church – but they are not, and this is precisely what makes such texts so difficult to interpret. What we are dealing with, from the late eighth century onwards, is that the notion of ecclesia, including all its connotations of the eventual salvation of God’s people, was harnessed to the identity of the Carolingian polity, with the ruler’s responsibility for the salvation of its people as its defining factor. Thus, the Carolingian polity became a corpus Christi. This Fried clearly saw in 1982, but to him, such reflection on ecclesia did not qualify as abstract thinking on a proper state – which, after all, was an empire that became divided after 840. Yet also after 840 the notion of a universal Frankish world lingered, precisely in the sense of the universality of an ecclesia that encompassed a Frankish populus christianus as well as the peoples that had been incorporated into this polity. As Patrick Geary has rightly noted, the Roman concept of a populus as a people united by law, as opposed to the many gentes that derived their cohesion from descent, was taken up again in the Carolingian political discourse.30 But a point not made by Geary should be stressed here: this new use of populus occurred within a biblical frame of reference shaped by the notion of the populus Dei, or the populus christianus. The gentes were still there, around the new imperial borders, but now in their new guise as pagans that should be converted by Christian rulers. This opposition between populus and gens was a familiar one within the Roman empire and its Carolingian successor, but also in the Latin version of the Old Testament. It identified the Christian populus as ‘us’, the gentes as the outsiders, and, mutatis mutandis, turned the ecclesia in the sense of the Christian community into a viable definition for a polity consisting of regna but also transcending them, on both a religious and a political level. A telling example of this can be found in the Royal Frankish Annals, which justified Charlemagne’s campaign against the Avars in 791 by stressing the “all too many intolerable evils committed by the Avars against the Holy Church or the Christian people” (sancta ecclesia vel populum christianum).31 This passage does not figure in Goetz’s dossier of the uses of regnum, for this word was not used, and presumably sancta ecclesia vel populum christianum denotes ‘the Church’ in the extended sense of the word, a concept too universal to express transpersonal notions of statehood. Yet this passage shows that if Franks were pitted against their enemies, sancta ecclesia vel populus christianus could be one way of defining the identity of the Frankish polity. How much ‘universality’ did the author of the Royal Frankish Annals have in mind when he coined this expression? This sancta ecclesia was one way of speaking of the Frankish kingdom, which was no longer defined in ethnic terms as the kingdom of a specific gens, but as a ‘Christian people’ in the process of being guided to its salvation by its leaders. Sancta ecclesia vel populus christianus allowed for the integration of newly converted gentes into an expansive kingdom; once christianised, they became part of the ‘Christian people’ and a polity that could be thought of as a sancta ecclesia. One also meets this kind of thinking in some Carolingian biblical commentaries on Old Testament books produced in the 820s and thereafter. The pervasive appeal of Old Testament law and history is another aspect of the otherness of post-Roman Christianity that has often been stressed. However selectively such texts were used, Old Testament legal precepts embodied an authoritative norm. The 29

30 31

Further discussion in Mayke de Jong/Peter Erhart, Monachesimo tra i Longobardi e i Carolingi, in: Il futuro dei Longobardi. L’Italia e la costruzione dell’Europa di Carolo Magno. Saggi, ed. Carlo Bertelli/Gian Pietro Brogiolo (Milano 2000) 105–127. Geary, The Myth of Nations 59–53, 151–155. Annales regni Francorum a. 791 (ed. Friedrich Kurze, MGH SS rer. Germ. in us. schol. [6], Hannover 1895) 58: … propter nimiam malitiam et intollerabilem, quam fecerunt Avari contra sanctam ecclesiam vel populum christianum.

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observance of the Sunday is a case in point, and so are royal anointing, anti-incest legislation, child oblation and prescriptions for abstinence from food and sexuality.32 The historia of the ‘prior people’, Israel, was a sacred history which inspired early medieval historians when they wrote their own Books of Kings. Carolingian litterati such as Hraban Maur hailed the Old Testament as the vetus lex, the divine law that also derived its ultimate authority from the fact that it was the oldest law there was.33 Since the 1970s this Old Testament-orientedness in the early medieval western cultures has attracted a lot of attention. The idea that all the early medieval ‘micro-Christendoms’ in the West perceived themselves as so many ‘New Israels’ has recently attracted some justified criticism,34 but all the same, the Old Testament histories and their authoritative tales of kings past were a constant source of inspiration and trepidation for early medieval rulers and their learned courtiers. This of course holds true especially for Charlemagne and his successor Louis the Pious. The Admonitio generalis (789) in which Charles invoked King Josiah, the Old Testament ruler who had restored the cult of God, is so well-known that one tends to read clear across the sense of urgency of this document, and also across Charles’ humble hesitation (and temptation) to liken himself to this saintly predecessor: non ut me eius sanctitate aequiparbilem faciam…. Josiah was a sacred king, embedded in the authoritative past of Scripture, a past that could never simply be adopted by any Christian ruler just for the purposes of power politics. First, the cult of God needed to be restored, to God’s satisfaction.35 What did prevail in early medieval reflections on the polity was the idea that God’s favour depended on the way ‘His people’, led by their king, worshipped Him in the right way, that the welfare and salvation of the people depended on this, and that the king and his bishops were responsible for imposing the right worship on the entire regnum. However important and authoritative the vetus lex and the sacred history of the Old Testament may have been, such texts were embedded in a more encompassing sacra pagina that included both the New Testament (of course) and a venerable patristic tradition of biblical commentary. The recovery of this heritage was part of the goal of restoring and safeguarding the cult of God that Charlemagne and his successors set themselves. The crux of patristic exegesis had been that the Old Israel was the Synagogue which had been superseded by the victorious ecclesia, and that the ‘old truth’ and the ‘old Law’ could only be valuable if interpreted in terms of the New Testament, which alone contained the key to salvation. No self-respecting biblical scholar at the beginning of the ninth century, now disposing of an authoritative corpus of older exegetical texts, would therefore argue that his polity was ‘Israel’, let alone the ‘New Israel’. What they would argue was that to read Scripture literally was to fall into the error of the Jews, and that the history of the Jews [or veritas hebraica] only gained its real meaning if its spiritual significance was grasped: that every passage in the Old Testament signified and predicted the truth revealed in the Gospels and the texts associated with the Apostles. The Synagogue had been conquered by the Pauline ecclesia gentium and its valiant fighters, the praedicatores. This patristic scheme was elaborated

32

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Raymund Kottje, Studien zum Einfluß des alten Testamentes auf Recht und Liturgie des frühen Mittelalters (6. bis 8. Jahrhundert) (Bonn 1965; 21970); Johan Chydenius, Medieval Institutions and the Old Testament (Commentationes humanarum litterarum 37, 2, Helsinki/Helsingfors 1965); La Bibbia nell’alto Medioevo (Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo 10, Spoleto 1963); Early Medieval Europe 7, 3 (1998), special issue on “The power of the Word: the influence of the Bible on early medieval politics”; Rob Meens, Pollution in the early middle ages: the case of the food regulations in Penitentials, in: Early Medieval Europe 4 (1995) 3–19. Mayke de Jong, Old law and new-found power. Hrabanus Maurus and the Old Testament, in: Centres of Learning. Learning and Location in Pre-Modern Europe and the Near East, ed. Jan-Willem Drijvers/Alasdair A. McDonald (Leiden/New York/ Köln 1995) 161–174. Mary Garrison, The Franks as the New Israel? Education for an identity from Pippin to Charlemagne, in: The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Yitzhak Hen/Matthew Innes (Cambridge 2000) 144–161. Garrison argues that explicit definitions of the Franks or any other people as ‘the Elect’ were few and far between, and that the expression novus Israel was never used. She is right, for ‘new’ was not a positive qualification in this tradition-oriented world, but this does not detract from the overwhelming authority of the Old Testament past to the Franks reflecting on their present. Admonitio generalis (ed. Alfred Boretius, MGH Capitularia regum Francorum 1, 22, Hannover 1883) 54; with thanks to Stuart Airlie who made me rethink this passage.


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upon by Bede and brought to the Frankish court by Alcuin, whose pupil Hraban retained this basic structure in his countless commentaries written for rulers, bishops and abbots.36 Exegesis was a highly conservative genre, but in spite of this, those writing biblical commentary were members of specific societies and reflected, albeit obliquely, on their own political communities, which were reflected upon in terms of the ecclesia. When Bede wrote of the ecclesia gentium as a biblical ideal to be resurrected in the present, this concept took on a new meaning, i.e. those of the many gentes he was confronted with in a politically fragmented England which needed to be forged into a new unity.37 Likewise – but in a different context – Hraban Maur opposed the Old Testament Jews, the ‘prior people’ (prior populus), to the ecclesia gentium which had wrested the Sword of Judah from its predecessors. Like Bede’s, Hraban’s ecclesia was inspired by the political reality he lived in, but in Hraban’s case this political reality was a multi-ethnic empire. This lent a new meaning to the Pauline concept of the ecclesia gentium – a Christendom encompassing many gentes which derived their very identity from being ‘within the empire/ecclesia’.38 This perspective was only fully developed under Louis the Pious, but the basic elements thereof are already present in some of Charlemagne’s capitularies, including the Admonitio generalis. Charles, with reference to Josiah, presented himself as the ‘rector of the kingdom of the Franks and the devout defender and helper of the holy church’ (sancta ecclesia).39 In short, early medieval definitions of the polity within a biblical frame of reference revolved around the ecclesia and its meanings, rather than around the New Israel. But neither was exegesis a purely ‘ecclesiastical’ affair. Charlemagne, Louis the Pious and his sons (and a number of Carolingian queens) were all the recipients of exegetical works, and deemed experts at judging the ‘orthodoxy’ of such texts by the authors concerned. How these political leaders interpreted the biblical commentary written at their behest – and often, at their command – is often difficult to ascertain, but that they took a more lively interest in exegesis than in the historiography of contemporary affairs is clear. All this should make us wary of chucking out ecclesia as a concept irrelevant to early medieval understandings of political cohesion and identity. Obviously, one cannot expect regnum and ecclesia to be ‘consciously equated’, but neither should one assume that the two have no bearing upon each other whatsoever. What should also be kept in mind is that the weight of exegetical tradition and its fixed parameters did not make this genre impermeable to changing inflections and meanings. As Goetz has shown, regnum was a flexible expression in historiography and hagiography, a word used to denote a polity that was much more than a Personenverbandsstaat, if one knows where to look for the relevant semantic field. For ecclesia the same holds true, provided that historians decide to take biblical commentary seriously, as a genre which was as much part of Orientierungswissen and political practice as the narrative sources they tend to privilege. At first sight, annals and histories seem so much closer to the turmoil of events, the grist to the mill of political history; hence, Bede is famous for his Historia ecclesiastica, and rightly so. But the majority of Bede’s copious literary production consisted of exegetical and computistical work, so the question arises whether the historiographer should be detached from this other Bede, the biblical commentator, and whether these two activities – historiography and exegesis – were not two sides of the same coin: making sense of a 36

37 38

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For a more extensive discussion, see Mayke de Jong, The Emperor Lothar and his Bibliotheca Historiarum, in: Media Latinitas. A collection of essays to mark the retirement of L. J. Engels, ed. Renée I. A. Nip (Instrumenta Patristica 28, Turnhout 1996) 229–235; ead., The empire as ecclesia: Hrabanus Maurus and biblical historia for rulers, in: The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Yitzhak Hen/Matthew Innes (Cambridge 2000) 191–226; ead., Exegesis for an empress, in: Medieval Transformations. Texts, Power and Gifts in Context, ed. Esther Cohen/Mayke de Jong (Leiden/Boston/Köln 2001) 69–100. Georges Tugene, L’idée de la nation chez Bède le Vénérable (Paris 2001). De Jong, The empire as ecclesia, much inspired by Nikolaus Staubach, “Cultus divinus” und karolingische Reform, in: Frühmittelalterliche Studien 18 (1984) 546–581. Admonitio generalis, Prologus, ed. Boretius 54; on the religious nature of this capitulary and Charlemagne’s close involvement in its genesis, see Thomas M. Buck, Admonitio und Praedicatio. Zur religiös-pastoralen Dimension von Kapitularien und kapitulariennahen Texten (507–814) (Frankfurt am Main 1997). On the notion of the ‘rector’, see the late Donald Bullough, Alcuin, Achievement and Reputation. Being Part of the Ford Lectures delivered in Oxford in Hilary Term 1980 (Leiden 2004) 380–382.

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confusing present in terms of a Christian past which might be elucidated in different ways, but primarily for the benefit of those charged with the salvation of the Christian people: kings and bishops. ECCLESIA – RESTRICTED? Carolingian usage of ecclesia in the restricted sense of the word – the clergy – is as deceptive as its supposedly universal counterpart. The 780s and 790s were decades of intensive reflection on Charlemagne’s part about his responsibility for the salvation of the Christian people. This was a burden Charlemagne shared with his ecclesiastical and secular magnates. In the course of his reign, capitularies increasingly stressed the need to distinguish between these various “orders” (ordines) to make sure the boundaries between their respective spheres of competence would not become blurred. In 811 a rather impatient-sounding Charlemagne demanded that bishops, abbots and counts would meet at the palace in separate groups, to answer to fundamental questions such as ‘are we really Christians?’, but also to discuss complaints about counts having trespassed on episcopal territory, and vice versa.40 This was inevitable in a world in which secular magnates were charged with religious responsibility and churchmen wielded extensive secular power. From time to time, the boundaries between these overlapping competencies needed to be redrawn – but there was more at stake than a clear division of labour between the king’s fideles. In order to guarantee the correctness of the worship of God, successive synods and assemblies – mostly initiated by the ruler – insisted on ever stricter distinctions within the “ecclesiastical order” (ordo ecclesiasticus) that mediated between God and mankind. This pattern is already visible in the Admonitio generalis (789) which addressed the wider category of sacerdotes that included bishops and leading priests, but also bishops specifically; then monks and canons were singled out, as related but still separate entities, as well as nuns, and virgins dedicated to God but not leading a regular life in a religious community; and last but not least, the Admonitio was directed at ‘all’, that is, the populus Dei visited, corrected and admonished by its ruler. This differentiation between the various ‘orders’ is already visible in Pippin’s first capitularies after his accession to the throne. The synod of Ver (755) is all about a new king affirming his control of the sacred by creating clear hierarchical structures. The cooperation of bishops with wellestablished authority was crucial to this enterprise. Religious communities, male or female, were to ‘lead a regular life, according to their order’. If they refused to do so, episcopal discipline would eventually be backed up by a ‘public synod’ – that is, royal authority. Abbesses were forbidden to travel to the court unless the king invited them to do so; if they wished to bring him gifts, they should do so through messengers. Monks were not to go off to Rome or other places of pilgrimage without their abbot’s approval, or to change communities without that of their bishop. Nobody who had been tonsured or veiled should retain his or her property or live outside some structure of authority. This person entered a ‘regular’ monastery or put himself or herself sub manu episcopi, that is, became a member of an episcopally approved canonical community, male or female.41 This differentiation between ecclesiastical ordines became increasingly complex, however, in the reigns of Pippin’s son and grandson. By virtue of their sacerdotal function, ecclesiastici – churchmen – were a distinct category, but this did not turn Carolingian reform into something that can be labelled as merely ‘ecclesiastical’ in the 40

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Capitula tractanda cum comitibus episcopis et abbatibus (811) 1 and 5 (ed. Alfred Boretius, MGH Capitularia regum Francorum 1, Hannover 1883) 161. See Janet L. Nelson’s illuminating analysis of the two capitularies dating from 811, with references to older literature: The voice of Charlemagne, in: Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages. Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-Harting, ed. Richard Gameson/Henrietta Leyser (Oxford 2001) 76–88. Charlemagne’s urgent concern with religious unity during the last years of his reign has also been noticed by Johannes Fried, Elite und Ideologie oder die Nachfolgeordnung Karls des Großen vom Jahre 813, in: La royauté et les élites dans l’Europe carolingienne. Début du IXe siècle aux environs de 920, ed. Régine Le Jan (Lille 1998) 71–109, but is interpreted from the traditional perspective of a sharp discontinuity between the reigns of Charles and Louis. Concilium Vernense 5, 6, 10, 13 (ed. Alfred Boretius, MGH Capitularia regum Francorum 1, Hannover 1883) 34–36. The key words of this text are correctio, regulariter vivere, ordo, oboedientia.


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modern sense of the word.42 Carolingian legislation used the expression ecclesia in an all-embracing as well as in a restricted sense. The ecclesia was the Christian people (populus christianus) led by Charlemagne and united by a correct worship of God, but at the same time, this cult and the clergy ministering to it should remain a sacred domain, separate and uncontaminated by the stain of secularity. Monastic communities solved this problem by creating a claustrum which safeguarded their purity, so they could mediate effectively between God and mankind. In the case of the secular clergy, such distancing was less easily effectuated but equally urgent. Hence, a ‘rhetoric of separation’ existed that should not be taken too literally, for the involvement of clerics in political leadership was not only a reality of life, but also one of the principles on which the Carolingian state was based.43 Louis the Pious’s Admonitio ad omnes regni ordines (825) is the most forceful statement on the part of a Carolingian ruler as to how the ecclesiastical orders (bishops, abbots and abbesses) should be included, along with counts, in the emperor’s ‘ministry’ – that is, the obligations of his kingship. The respective ministries of the ordines who were his helpers (adiutores) were perceived as deriving from Louis’s supreme royal ministry and complementing it. This capitulary certainly addresses the issue of hierarchy, but it is also about the ideal mechanisms of shared responsibility. The royal office was paramount and embraced all others, but in order to fulfil their complementary roles, other offices needed to be clearly distinguished.44 A preoccupation with ‘canonical’ order and its precise ramifications was a persistent feature of Carolingian legislation. At first glance, this yields the impression of ‘the Church’ pervading ‘the state’ after 750, to the extent that clerics came to dominate the political scene. This was Pirenne’s view of the difference between Merovingian and Carolingian kingship: the latter dynasty primarily derived its legitimacy from a substantially increased ecclesiastical authority. Even if the notion of secular Merovingians versus ecclesiastically dominated Carolingians has been challenged,45 it has a long lease of life. As Roger Collins observed in 2000, “what is notable about the capitulary legislation of both Charles and his father Pippin III is that the contents embrace what might normally be regarded as separate secular and ecclesiastical spheres of legislation. In the Merovingian period the royal lawmaking that has survived, in the form of a series of late-sixth century capitularies as well as two basic Frankish law codes, is almost entirely secular in character.” Collins then goes on to explain that, unlike Visigothic councils, Merovingian synods did not combine political and ecclesiastical matters in their agenda; they were concerned with the disciplinary and doctrinal issues of ‘the Church’, and Frankish kings did not attend such gatherings. Canon and secular law remained separate, until the Carolingians came along, when “royal assemblies came to be the principal occasions on which regulations affecting the Frankish Church were formulated and given authority”.46

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For an excellent recent reassessment of Carolingian reform, see Philippe Depreux, Ambitions et limites des réformes culturelles à l’époque carolingienne, in: Revue historique 307, 3 (2002) 721–751. For a more detailed discussion of all this, see the contribution of Steffen Patzold in this volume. Admonitio ad omnes regni ordines a. 823–825 cc. 1–4 (ed. Alfred Boretius, MGH Capitularia regum Francorum 1, 150, Hannover 1883) 303. Cf. Olivier Guillot, Une ordinatio méconnue. Le Capitulaire de 823–825, in: Charlemagne’s Heir. New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious, ed. Peter Godman/Roger Collins (Oxford 1990) 451–486; Mayke de Jong, Power and humility in Carolingian society: the public penance of Louis the Pious, in: Early Medieval Europe 1 (1992), 29–52. Ian Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 482–751 (London 1994) 140 ff.; Janet L. Nelson, Kingship and royal government, in: The New Cambridge Medieval History 2, c. 700–c. 900, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge 1995) 422 f.; Philippe Depreux, L’expression statum est a domno rege et sancta synodo annonçant certaines dispositions du capitulaire de Francfort (794), in: Das Frankfurter Konzil von 794: Kristallisationspunkt karolingischer Kultur 1, ed. Rainer Berndt (Quellen und Abhandlungen zur mittelrheinischen Kirchengeschichte 80, Mainz 1997) 81–101; Maximilian Diesenberger, Hair, sacrality and symbolic capital in the Frankish kingdoms, in: The Construction of Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Texts, Resources, Artefacts, ed. Richard Corradini/Maximilian Diesenberger/Helmut Reimitz (The Transformation of the Roman World 12, Leiden/New York 2003) 173–212. Roger Collins, Charlemagne (London 2000) 104.

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SYNODS It is worth dwelling for a bit on this concept of an ‘ecclesiastical invasion’ of Carolingian royal assemblies, for this is connected with the idea that within this polity defined as an ecclesia, there was no room for an independent sphere of secular authority, and hence, for real Staatlichkeit.47 From Fried’s perspective in 1982, the notion of royal ministry (ministerium) was derived from the ‘personalism’ of contemporary aristocratic ethos, combined with the personal morality of the ruler. The Carolingian Christian king was God’s servant, not that of the ecclesia, populus or res publica.48 The blurring of boundaries between royal and episcopal authority impeded state formation, for religious conceptions of political identity – ecclesia – were either too restricted or too all-embracing to create distinct political entities. The underlying assumption is, in fact, that in order to be ‘real’, state formation should occur in the secular domain; if the Church intervenes heavily in the process, this is perceived of in terms of obstruction. Yet there is a lot to be said for turning this model upside down, for at the practical and ideological level of government, Frankish kings ruled together with bishops, to the extent that one might consider bishops the mainstays of the Frankish polity. As Steffen Patzold argues in this volume, ninth-century Frankish bishops were prominent among the ordines that shared the God-given ‘ministry’ of governing the people together with their ruler; contemporary comments are explicit and articulate on their right to command, derived from royal authority, and the people’s duty to obey. The origins of this pattern of the dual leadership of rulers and bishops should be looked for in Late Antiquity, from Constantine’s conversion onwards, but the question is whether this imperialepiscopal co-operation that emerged at the Council of Nicaea (325) survived the Migration period. Unsurprisingly, it did, as is shown by Merovingian synods stemming from a political order that was not quite as different from the ninth-century political order as Carolingian propaganda would have it.49 We nowadays tend to think of synods as purely episcopal gatherings – that is, the domain of the ecclesia in the narrow sense of the word, but a good case could be made for synods having functioned as a public stage where kings made decisions together with their fideles, much like the royal assemblies from which synodi are often so difficult to distinguish. When barbarian rulers established their authority in the post-Roman West, they made good use of an already extant structure of government, i.e. bishops who ruled local communities but who also attempted to establish a supra-local consensus by means of periodical synods. The extent to which the new Frankish kings and the indigenous Gallo-Roman bishops came to rely on each other becomes clear from the way in which the rulers inserted themselves into an already functional synodal system. From Clovis and the Synod of Orléans (511) onwards, the geography of synods and regna tended to coincide whenever this could be managed.50 At a later stage, concepts with a good claim to being ‘transpersonal’, such as the royal ministerium were derived from an ecclesiastical tradition of reflection on episcopal office. With regard to early medieval state formation, there is a lot to be said for taking ‘the Church’ into account, not only as an institutional framework upon which new polities could be built, but also as a body of tradition from which ancient concepts might be gleaned in order to sustain new ideas of political cohesion.

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Fried, Der karolingische Herrschaftsverband 42. Fried, Der karolingische Herrschaftsverband 31. For recent discussions of the anti-Merovingian propaganda in the Carolingian kingdoms, of which Einhard’s depiction of the Merovingians in his Vita Karoli (1–2) is a well known example, see Diesenberger, Hair, sacrality and symbolic capital 207 f.; McKitterick, Illusion of royal power; Ulrich Nonn, Beobachtungen zur Herrschaft der fränkischen Hausmeier, in: Von Sacerdotium und Regnum: geistliche und weltliche Gewalt im frühen und hohen Mittelalter; Festschrift für Egon Boshof zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Franz-Reiner Erkens (Passauer Historische Forschungen 12, Köln 2002) 27–46, 27 ff; Yitzhak Hen, The Annals of Metz and the Merovingian past, in: The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Yitzhak Hen/Matthew Innes (Cambridge 2000) 175–190. Concilium Aurelianense (511), Prologus (ed. Charles de Clercq, Concilia Galliae [511–695], CCSL 148 A, Turnhout 1963) 3–19, at 4: Domno suo catholice ecclesiae filio Chlotovecho gloriosissimo regi omnes sacerdotes, quos ad concilium venire iussistis. This synod embraced all the bishops of a united kingdom. Merovingian synods were often much more restricted, but they tended to follow the ‘command of the king’ and the geographical scope of the regnum in question.


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This is also the thrust of Aloys Suntrup’s “Studien zur politischen Theologie im frühmittelalterlichen Okzident” – not a work, at first sight, to be happily devoured by Anglophone historians intent on rethinking the relation between kings and bishops, for this is a study full of ‘young Germanic kingdoms’ harbouring a “bischöflich-synodal strukturierte Kirche”, which in turn yielded a “königlichlandeskirchliche Verfaßtheit”.51 Suntrup is a theologian who clings to a sufficient number of notions now discarded, including Germanisches Sakralkönigtum, to irritate mainstream early medieval historians, especially if their first language is not German. But it would be a pity if this book was disregarded, for Suntrup presents a patiently assembled dossier on synods, both Roman and post-Roman, which were by no means exclusively ecclesiastic. He concentrates on Merovingian Gaul and Visigothic Spain, within the ideological parameters of a ‘real Christianity’ in which synods should of course be königsdistanziert,52 but in spite of this, Suntrup amasses a wealth of evidence to the contrary, which leads him to the general conclusion that Merovingian synods were part of a “synergisch-binäre Struktur”,53 in which the Gelasian idea of the two ‘persons’ governing the polity, the ecclesiastical auctoritas and the secular potestas, were not perceived as antagonistic forces, as was the case from the late eleventh century onwards, but as co-operating entities governing the Christian people. This is an important point to make, for whenever Gelasius’ celebrated text surfaces in early medieval sources, as it did during the Council of Paris in 829, historians tend to feel the weight of later medieval interpretations of this text.54 Arnold Angenendt has rightly called this an “abendländische Schicksalsidee”,55 but was not this Gelasian text a fateful idea only with hindsight, detached from its actual context, which in its ultimate late medieval and modern guise should by no means serve as a model for the interpretation of earlier citations of this ‘fateful’ text? This is what Suntrup argues, almost despite himself, from the relative isolation of the German-language branch of canon law. Recent historical studies on the close co-operation between rulers and bishops in Visigothic Spain and Anglo-Saxon England could have supported his argument.56 That kings ruled together with bishops in seventh-century Spain and England is clear enough, by now, but this does not yet hold true for the supposedly secular Merovingian kingdoms. Let us therefore turn Collins’ image of ‘the Frankish Church’ invading secular assemblies in the Carolingian age upside down. From at least the early seventh century onwards, and probably earlier, Merovingian synodi became privileged occasions where kings transacted the business of their realm with their magnates. Such synods served as a theatre for public affirmations of a political unity which was also a religious one, and their agenda far exceeded the affairs of ‘the Church’ in any strict definition of the word. If anything, the process went the other way around: royal and ‘secular’ business entered upon an originally ‘ecclesiastical’ scene. We are talking of an early medieval kingdom in which bishops shared in government by definition – because they came from the upper echelons of Gaul’s landowning aristocracy, but also because they were heir to a long tradition of synodal organisation. All this formidable tradition and expertise went into the building of early medieval kingdoms.57 51

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Aloys Suntrup, Studien zur politischen Theologie im frühmittelalterlichen Okzident. Die Aussage konziliarer Texte des gallischen und iberischen Raumes (Spanische Forschungen der Görresgesellschaft 36, Münster 2001); see especially the introduction 1–11. Suntrup, Studien 99. Suntrup, Studien 76. Not so the late Donald Bullough, commenting on Alcuin’s use of this text: Alcuin, Achievement and Reputation 415–418. Arnold Angenendt, Geistliche und weltliche Gewalt im Mittelalter, in: Geistliche und weltliche Macht. Das Paderborner Treffen 799 und das Ringen um den Sinn von Geschichte, ed. Josef Meyer zu Schlochtern/Dieter Haltrup (Paderborner theologische Studien 27, Paderborn/München/Wien/Zürich 2000) 1–19, at 5. Catherine Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils, c. 650–c. 850 (London/New York 1995); Rachel L. Stocking, Bishops, Councils and Consensus in the Visigothic Kingdoms, 589–633 (Michigan 2000). Cf. Martin Heinzelmann, Bischof und Herrschaft im spätantiken Gallien: Die institutionellen Grundlagen, in: Herrschaft und Kirche. Beiträge zu Entstehung und Wirkungsweise episkopaler und monastischer Organisationsformen (Stuttgart 1988) 23–82; id., Bischofsherrschaft in Gallien: zur Kontinuität römischer Führungsschichten vom 4. bis zum 7. Jahrhundert; soziale, prosopographische und bildungsgeschichtliche Aspekte (Beihefte der Francia 5, München 1976); Georg Scheibelreiter, Der Bischof in merowingischer Zeit (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 27, Wien/ Köln 1983); Reinhold Kaiser, Bischofsherrschaft zwischen Königtum und Fürstenmacht: Studien zur bischöflichen Stadt-

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A year after becoming ruler of a huge and united kingdom, Chlothar II (d. 629) called a synod in Paris on October 10, 614 which was attended by bishops from Neustria, Austrasia, Burgundy and Aquitaine, as well as by Justus, bishop of Rochester, and Peter, abbot of Dover – 67 subscriptions in all. From this synod, a royal decree also ensued, dated October 18, 614 “for all the people united at the gathering of bishops during the synod of Paris”.58 It is assumed by Pontal, who follows De Clercq, that the bishops first met separately; then the king called a second gathering with his proceres to approve and amend the episcopal decisions.59 If there is any evidence for this, except for the fact that the synodal acta and the royal edict are separate documents, I have not been able to find it. As far as I can see, this synod was one and the same meeting in which prominent laymen also played a part. The bishops defined the agenda accordingly. It pertained to “what is utilis to the king and the salvation of the people, and what the ecclesiastical order should observe for its own benefit”.60 The royal decree of 614 has often been perceived as a sign of royal weakness; extensive concessions were supposedly given to the nobility. I will not go into this matter here, except by saying that I agree with Ian Wood on this: “What was at issue was not royal, aristocratic or ecclesiastical power, but the answerability of the personnel involved in its enforcement”.61 The synodal acta and the royal edict of 614 were confirmed in a gathering in an unknown place; the 15 canons of this meeting are preserved in a badly damaged eighth-century manuscript.62 Some have suggested that this meeting was identical with the assembly of Bonneuil (618), but Pontal disagrees: “Doch das ‘Konzil’ von Bonneuil war wohl eine rein politische Versammlung Chlothars, um sich die Großen von Burgund günstig zu stimmen … Diese Versammlung umfaßte Bischöfe und leudes.”63 Once having decided that a Konzil is a matter for bishops only, one does get oneself into a certain amount of trouble. Judging by the conciliar acts in question, Chlothar II was personally present in Paris, and he also dominated the deliberations in Clichy in 626/627 – or, more precisely, in the basilica of the Virgin situated in the atrium of St Denis, near the royal villa of Clichy. In the prologue to the conciliar acta, the bishops present, again in large numbers, rejoiced about the fact that he not only issued precepts which had been revealed to him by divine voices, but also anticipated what they, the bishops, had to say. Chlothar was like David, in that he governed his realm with divine providence and fulfilled a prophetic ministry.64 Flattery for a mighty king? Surely, but such flattery went a long way towards creating images of kingship which also stuck in the minds of kings. The canons of the synod of Clichy are of an ‘ecclesiastical’ nature, in that they deal mostly with the behaviour of clerics. But how ‘ecclesiastical’ was this issue in a world where kings ruled together with bishops? Also, how ‘ecclesiastical’ was the issue of incest, which loomed large in Clichy, as it had done in Paris? Another question: how to separate the ecclesiastical from the secular in a number of later Merovingian meetings, if one defines a synod as a meeting of bishops dealing with canon law? “Als gemischte Versammlungen von weltlichen Großen und Bischöfen können die meisten schwer als

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herrschaft im westfränkisch-französischen Reich im frühen und hohen Mittelalter (Pariser historische Studien 17, Bonn 1981); Bernhard Jussen, Über „Bischofsherrschaften“ und Prozeduren politisch-sozialer Umordnung in Gallien zwischen „Antike“ und „Mittelalter“, in: Historische Zeitschrift 260 (1995) 673–718; id., Liturgie und Legitimation, oder Wie die Galloromanen das römische Reich beendeten, in: Institutionen und Ereignis: Über historische Praktiken und Vorstellungen gesellschaftlichen Ordnens (Göttingen 1998) 75–136. Edictum Chlotharii II (ed. Charles de Clercq, Concilia Galliae [511–A. 695], CCSL 148 A, Turnhout 1963) 283–285, at 285: super omnem plebem in conventu episcoporum in sinodo Parisius adunata … . Odette Pontal, Die Synoden im Merowingerreich (Paderborn/München 1986) 182 f. De Clercq, La législation 61 ff. Concilium Parisiense a. 614, Prologus, (ed. Charles de Clercq, Concilia Galliae [511–A. 695], CCSL 148 A, Turnhout 1963) 274–285, at 275: quid quommodo principis, quid saluti populi utilius conpeteret vel quid ecclesiasticus ordo salubriter observaret. Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms 143; see also Stefan Esders, Römische Rechtstradition und merowingisches Königtum (Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 134, Göttingen 1997) 316 ff.; 340 ff. Concilium incerti loci post a. 614 (ed. Charles de Clercq, Concilia Galliae [511–A. 695], CCSL 148 A, Turnhout 1963) 286–289; Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Ms Phillips 1743, f. 300v (s. VIII). Pontal, Die Synoden 188. Concilium Clippiacense II (ed. Charles de Clercq, Concilia Galliae [511–A. 695], CCSL 148 A, Turnhout 1963) 290–298, at 291. NB this ‘council of Clichy’ met in the basilica of the Virgin, which was situated in the atrium of St Denis – and next to the royal villa of Clichy.


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Konzilien angesehen werden”.65 Well yes, but had not such meetings been mixed for rather a long time? From all this, a seventh-century Merovingian tradition emerges – of synods which were ‘mixed’ to the extent that they tend to look like royal assemblies. Their function and impact far exceeded a narrowly defined ecclesiastical sphere, also in the sense that issues which may seem purely ‘ecclesiastical’ to the modern beholder were in fact a matter of importance to the state. This tradition of royal synods was revived in the 740s by the mayors of the palace, Carloman and Pippin. Given his vociferous complaints about the Franks not having organised proper synods for 80 years, the Anglo-Saxon Boniface usually gets all the credit for this revival. I am not about to deny Boniface’s impact on the synods of 742–44, but perhaps there was more to it than the arrival of one influential and articulate Englishman.66 In the Frankish kingdoms, convening synods had been the business of kings, so once the new rulers had been sufficiently established, they reverted to this royal pattern. The decisions of these synods dealt primarily with the reform of the cult and the clergy; they have been preserved as precepts issued by the mayors of the palace. This combination has reinforced the impression of Frankish ‘church law’ suddenly invading royal assemblies, a domain which had remained a supposedly secular one while the Merovingians ruled. Still, if one keeps Chlothar’s synods in mind, this discontinuity pales into insignificance. Furthermore, one may wonder once more whether the purity of priests and a clearly delineated episcopal authority, the two issues which dominated the synods of the 740s, were matters quite as purely ecclesiastical as they appear to be at first sight. Carloman convened the so-called Concilium Germanicum (742) together with “bishops and magnates” (episcopi et optimates), calling for the “recuperation of the Law of God (lex dei) and the ecclesiastical order (aecclesiastica religio) which have fallen into ruin under past rulers of bygone days, and how the Christian people (populus Christianus) can reach salvation and will not perish because of false priests”.67 These were issues Boniface was deeply concerned with, but not exclusively so, and neither were they merely of an ecclesiastical nature. Such pronouncements also reflect the ambitions of a new ruler who saw himself as a guardian of the correct cult and the salvation of the Christian people, not unlike the Charlemagne in the Admonitio generalis who associated himself with Josiah, the Old Testament king who “strove to recall the kingdom which God had given him to the worship of the true God”. By then the correct cultus divinus had become a matter of the state. But should we give Alcuin all the credit for this,68 just as Boniface has been seen as the godfather of the reform synods of the 740s? Or are we dealing with an older tradition of synods which were gemischt by definition, serving as a forum for the unity of the regnum and the authority of the king who convened these gatherings? Little is known of what went on during his own synods before the 780s, for these gatherings yielded only a few royal capitularies. To complicate matters further, modern translations tend to turn all synods (synodi) into a royal assembly (or a Reichstag), unless ecclesiastical issues clearly dominated the agenda. For example, the synodus held in Frankfurt in 794 to which droves of bishops from Gaul, Ger-

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Pontal, Die Synoden 213. Paul Fouracre, The Age of Charles Martel (London et al. 2000) 131 ff., Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms 304 ff.; id., Missionary Life 57 ff.; cf. also Petra Kehl, Kult und Nachleben des heiligen Bonifatius im Mittelalter (754–1200) (Quellen und Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Abtei und der Diözese Fulda 26, Fulda 1993). Concilium Germanicum, Prologus (ed. Albert Werminghoff, MGH Concilia 2, 1, Hannover 1906) 2: …, quomodo lex Dei et aecclesiastica religio recuperetur, que in diebus preteritorum principum dissipata corruit, et qualiter populus Christianus ad salutem animae pervenire possit et per falsos sacerdotes deceptus non pereat. On Alcuin’s influence on the Admonitio generalis, see Wilfried Hartmann, Die karolingische Reform und die Bibel, in: Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum 18 (1986) 58–74; Friedrich-Carl Scheibe, Alcuin und die Admonitio generalis, Deutsches Archiv 14 (1958) 221–229. For an extensive discussion, see Buck, Admonitio et praedicatio 67–156; Buck (at 131) sees Alcuin’s hand primarly in the sermon at the end of the Admonitio and is sceptical about ascribing the entire text to him. In favour of Alcuin having had a strong hand in the composition of the Admonitio generalis: Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils, 160–75. The issue of authorship only comes up in the preface and least 25 per cent of the text, for otherwise, the Admonitio generalis was taken from the Dionysio-Hadriana. On de Admonitio generalis as the collaborative effort of sacerdotes et consiliarii nostri, see Donald Bullough’s posthumously published Alcuin, Achievement and Reputation 380.

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many and Italy flocked is called a ‘synod’ or council,69 but a whole series of synodi of the 770s and 780s mentioned in the Royal Frankish Annals are usually translated as royal assemblies, partly because these brief references do not include any reference to a predominant involvement of bishops.70 In his comprehensive survey of Carolingian synods Wilfried Hartmann struggled with a problem with which Odette Pontal also saw herself confronted. How to distinguish between ‘real’ synods and the ones that are just called synodi?71 Hartmann’s solution to the problem is one of terminology. The revised version of the Royal Frankish Annals, the so-called Annals of Einhard, eventually substituted all these early synodi by the expression conventus generalis populi. “Bei diesen Versammlungen, die vom Beginn der Regierungszeit Karls des Großen an in fast jedem Jahr getagt haben, handelt es sich also um allgemeine Reichstage, auf denen geistliche und weltliche Große zur Beratung des Königs zusammenkamen”.72 But this sensible assessment is not an answer to the question why such gatherings were called ‘synods’ in the older version of the Royal Frankish Annals, nor does it address the equally intriguing issue of the Revisor redefining such meetings as a conventus generalis populi. The problem cannot be solved as long as we think of synods as merely an ‘ecclesiastical’ phenomenon.73 There seems to be little reason to adhere to this distinction for any important gathering convened by Chlothar II, Carloman, Pippin or Charlemagne. Regardless whether it is called a synodus, placitum or conventus, such a meeting is likely to have had both bishops and lay magnates in attendance and an agenda featuring a mixture of issues which may seem ‘secular’ or ‘ecclesiastical’ in present-day eyes, but not from an early medieval perspective. This also holds true for the synodus magna held in Frankfurt in 794, to which bishops from Gaul, Germany, Italy, Aquitaine and England flocked. This supposedly was a ‘synod’ proper, within the framework of a larger conventus, for religious concerns dominated the agenda, including the heresy of Adoptianism – yet to the attendant ruler and his fideles preoccupied with defining the correct cultus divinus, combating heresy was both the bishops’ business and a ‘matter of state’.74 It seems as if the Revisor, who was probably active during the reign of Louis the Pious,75 adapted the older terminology to something he was familiar with: a new and possibly quite recent distinction between a synodus as a gathering of bishops and a conventus as a meeting which included all the ordines which governed the empire, just like the many faces of the ministry embodied by the emperor. The Royal Frankish Annals produced during Louis’s reign support this assessment, for in these sec69 70

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Annales regni Francorum a. 794, ed. Kurze 94. E.g.: Annales regni Francorum aa. 770, 771, 772, 777 (synodum publicum), 779, 782, 788; ed. Kurze 30, 31, 32, 48, 58, 80, translated as (royal) assembly by Paul D. King, Charlemagne. Translated Sources (Lambrigg 1987) and as ‘Reichstag’ in the German translation of Reinhold Rau (Quellen zur Karolingischen Reichsgeschichte 1, Ausgewählte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters 5, Darmstadt, repr. 1993). Wilfried Hartmann, Die Synoden der Karolingerzeit im Frankenreich und in Italien (Paderborn/München 1989) 97–99. Hartmann, Synoden 98. On assemblies, good work has recently appeared which needs to be connected with this tentative discussion of synods. Apart from the late Timothy Reuter’s seminal: Assembly politics in Western Europe from the eighth century until the twelfth, in: The Medieval World, ed. Peter Linehan/Janet L. Nelson (London 2001) 432–450, see now also: Stuart Airlie, Talking Heads: Assemblies in Early Medieval Europe, in: Political Assemblies in the Earlier Middle Ages, ed. Paul S. Barnwell/Marco Mostert (Studies in the Early Middle Ages 7, Turnhout 2004) 29–76, with a discussion of the difficulties of defining assemblies that is also addressed by Adam Kosto, Reasons for Assembly in Catalonia and Aragon, 900–1200, ibid. 133–149. We also eagerly await the publication of Christina Pössel’s dissertation on Carolingian assemblies. Annales regni Francorum a. 794, ed. Kurze 95: … quando et generalem populi sui conventum habuit, concilium episcoporum ex omnibus regni sui provinciis in eadem villa congregavit… . King, Charlemagne 88; Bernhard W. Scholz, Carolingian Chronicles (Ann Arbour 1970) 73; Rau, Quellen 63. On this gathering, see: Das Frankfurter Konzil von 794. Kristallisationspunkt karolingischer Kultur, 2 vols., ed. Rainer Berndt (Quellen und Abhandlungen zur mittelrheinischen Kirchengeschichte 80, Mainz 1997). On broad participation, including bishops from Britain, see Charlemagne/Alcuin’s letter to Elipandus (ed. Albert Werminghoff, MGH Concilia 2, 1, Hannover/Leipzig 1906) 159 f.: necnon et de Brittanniae partibus aliquos ecclesiasticae disciplinae viros convocavimus …. Roger Collins, The Revisor revisited. Another look at the alternative version of the Annales regni Francorum, in: After Rome’s Fall. Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History. Essays presented to Walter Goffart, ed. Alexander C. Murray (Toronto 1998) 191–213, at 198; Matthew Innes/Rosamond McKitterick, The writing of history, in: Carolingian Culture. Emulation and Innovation, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge 1994) 193–220, at 209.


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tions the synodus and the conventus become two different phenomena. All the same, the Revisor had a clear idea of what Charlemagne’s earlier synods had been like. These were gatherings held almost annually and with a scope and impact which merited the contemporary expression conventus generalis populi because all the powerful that mattered were present at this public forum dominated by the king. PARIS 829 The synod that gathered in Paris in the summer of 829 is well known in the history of political ideas, for the bishop who edited the conciliar acta, Jonas of Orléans, cited a short passage from the celebrated letter of Pope Gelasius to the Emperor Anastasius.76 In the late eleventh century this letter became one of the key texts supporting the superiority of pontifical authority over imperial potestas, which is why the synod of Paris has become the locus classicus of an emerging dualism of secular power and episcopal authority, both being supreme within their own sphere of competence but the bishops just a little more supreme than the ruler.77 This synod supposedly was the first concerted effort “to erect ecclesiastical government irrefrangibly as an integral political entity apart from secular institutions”.78 Yet the contention that the central aim of this gathering was the separation (‘Abgrenzung’) of regnum and sacerdotium is the result of an excessive concentration on what is in fact a garbled citation of Gelasius’s letter, with “two august empresses by whom the world is ruled”.79 It also means totally ignoring the rest of this long text and forgetting about the context within which it was drawn up. An anxious winter meeting in Aachen in 828–829 of Louis the Pious, his son and co-emperor Lothar, and the inner circle of their ecclesiastical and secular fideles yielded an imperial call for correction and self-examination. In the face of military defeat, famine and dangerous portents, the crucial question was, what have we done to offend God?80 The imperial letter exists in two versions. In the shorter one, the Emperor Louis called for a new three-day fast after the octave of Pentecost “to be observed by all with the utmost devotion”; in order to combat the enemies that upset the sancta ecclesia and infested “the realm committed to us by God”, all men with military duty had to prepare themselves for fighting. Furthermore, after consultation with the sacerdotes and other fideles it was decided that four synods had to meet in Mainz, Paris, Lyon and Toulouse in the spring of 829. The longer version of this letter outlining the measures decided upon during the winter assembly, issued by the Emperors Louis and Lothar jointly, contains an extensive digression about God’s wrath, the trials and tribulations that were inflicted upon God’s people and the reasons thereof. One of these was that “scandals caused by tyrants had occurred in this realm” (scandala per tyrannos in hoc regno exsurgunt ).81 76

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Jonas, De institutione regia (ed. Alain Dubreucq, Le métier du roi, Paris 1995) 175; Concilium Parisiense (829) (ed. Albert Werminghoff, MGH Concilia 2, 2, Hannover/Leipzig 1908) 649: Duae sunt, inquit [Gelasius], imperatrices augustae, quibus principaliter hic regitur mundus: auctoritas sacra pontificum et regalis potestas. In quibus tanto est gravius pondus sacerdotum, quanto etiam pro regibus hominum in divino sunt examine rationem reddituri. Dubreucq, Jonas d’Orléans. Le métier du roi 85–90: “Jonas va donc très loin dans la voie de l’affaiblissement du pouvoir royal. Le roi ne détient plus maintenant qu’un ministère, qui lui est confié par Dieu.” Cf. also Élisabeth Magnou-Nortier, La tentative de subversion de l’État sous Louis le Pieux et l’Œuvre des falsificateurs, in: Le Moyen Âge 105 (1999) 331–365 and 615–641; Monika Suchan, Kirchenpolitik des Königs oder Königspolitik der Kirche? Zum Verhältnis Ludwigs des Frommen und des Episkopates während der Herrschaftskrisen um 830, in: Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 111 (2000) 1–27. For a pertinent and inspiring critique of Magnou-Nortier’s efforts to turn the Carolingian ‘Church’ into the quintessential enemy of the ‘State’, see Gerhard Schmitz, Echte Quellen – falsche Quellen. Müssen zentrale Quellen aus der Zeit Ludwigs des Frommen neu bewertet werden?, in: Von Sacerdotium und Regnum. Geistliche und weltliche Gewalt im frühen und hohen Mittelalter. Festschrift für Egon Boshof zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Franz-Reiner Erkens/Hartmut Wolff (Köln/Weimar/Wien, 2002) 275–300. Alas, this excellent article only came to my attention long after my text was completed; the author’s views on the interdependence of the honor sanctae Dei ecclesiae and the status regni (p. 297) are similar to the ones expounded here. Karl F. Morrison, The Two Kingdoms. Ecclesiology in Carolingian political thought (Princeton 1964) 45. For ‘Abgrenzung’, see Egon Boshof, Ludwig der Fromme (Darmstadt 1996) 176. Hludowici et Hlotharii epistola generalis (ed. Albert Werminghoff, MGH Concilia 2, 2, Hannover 1908) 599–601. Hludowici et Hlotharii epistola generalis, ed. Werminghoff 4.

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For a variety of reasons, the acts of these synods are interesting documents – not as a statement of episcopal supremacy, for this they were not, but as an expression of a Carolingian polity being perceived as an ecclesia, with the bishops operating within this church/empire as ‘the Church’ in the more restricted sense of the word. The synod of Paris was convened in order to identify the sins of the leadership and the people in order to pacify an offended God. According to a time-honoured tradition of Carolingian correctio, the synod of Paris aimed to combat confusio, trying to restore order by clarifying and re-imposing distinctions between ordines. The ecclesiastical and royal sphere should therefore be distinguished more clearly, but these two ‘persons’, the sacerdotal and the royal, were part of an all-embracing ecclesia that was identical with the ‘Christian people’. Unlike the original letter of Gelasius and its later interpretations, in Paris the ruler and the bishops perceived themselves as being within the ecclesia and directly accountable to God. One may call this ‘dualism’, surely, but then of a mutual and complementary kind. Bishops and rulers are portrayed as responsible for each other’s well-being and salvation, with the ruler having a right to correct his bishops by virtue of his ministry. Rather than the hierocratic vision of episcopal leadership suggested by an anachronistic reading of Jonas’ citation of Gelasius’ letter, the acts of the synod of Paris reflect anxiety on the part of bishops faced with formidable imperial might, who tried to defend their rights against a ruler who had freely helped himself to ecclesiastical property in order to reward his followers. But more importantly, the complementary ‘ministries’ of the ruler and bishops, who had mutually invaded each other’s spheres of competence, should be disentangled and more clearly defined, for it was this disorder that was perceived as the root of all evils that had assailed the populus christianus.82 What was at stake in 828–829 was that both personae – royal and episcopal – publicly presented themselves as negligent of their God-given ministerium and as in need of (self)correction.83 To interpret this need for atonement in terms of ‘persons’ having committed individual sin, or of Personalismus and Rechtssubjektivität, is missing the point.84 These were office-holders who viewed collective and public penance as part of their strategy to restore order. Not only were the rulers to blame, as has been maintained,85 but also the bishops; in fact, the first and by far the largest section of the acts of Paris deals with the many ways in which the bishops themselves felt they had failed. It consists of a long litany of episcopal sins: simony, avarice, cupidity, vanity, lack of hospitality, using church property for their own glory, oppressing the faithful, leading less than chaste lives; in short, it was better to have no bishops at all than negligent ones. The second section is devoted to “kings and princes and, more in general, all the faithful”, as Jonas expressed it. It contains Pseudo-Cyprian’s De duodecim abusivis saeculi on the dangers of the ‘unjust king’,86 but this text pales into insignificance compared to the many other authoritative texts cited, particularly biblical ones: Scripture contained all that kings needed to know about fulfilling their ministry.87 Above all, the acts of the synod of Paris are a statement about the joint need of those the two ‘persons’ to identify their sins and do penance for the scandal they had caused in the sancta ecclesia. The expression scandalum refers to public and scandalous sins that were thought to disturb a divinely inspired social order and which should therefore be expiated by an equally public kind of penance. ‘Scandal’ of the kind that triggered divine retribution is often mentioned the acts of the synod of Paris, which is not surprising, given that the central issue on this meeting’s agenda was the question of how God had been offended. Still, given that this synod is so often perceived in terms of bishops imposing their superior authority on the ruler, it is worth 82 83

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Concilium Parisiense 93 [26], ed. Werminghoff 679. Outlined very well and in great detail by Hans Hubert Anton, Zum politischen Konzept karolingischer Synoden und zur karolingischen Brudergemeinschaft, in: Historisches Jahrbuch 99 (1979) 55–132. Fried, Der karolingische Herrschaftsverband 11–12, 31–32. Moore, La monarchie Carolingienne; Paul E. Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (Lincoln 1994) 99–100. For further comments, see De Jong, Sacrum palatium et ecclesia. Pseudo-Cyprian, De duodecim abusivis saeculi (ed. Siegmund Hellmann, Texte und Untersuchungen zur altchristlichen Literatur 34, Leipzig 1934) 32–60; cf. Hans H. Anton, Pseudo-Cyprian: de duodecim abusivis saeculi und sein Einfluß auf dem Kontinent, insbesondere auf die karolingischen Fürstenspiegel, in: Die Iren und Europa im frühen Mittelalter 2, ed. Heinz Löwe (Stuttgart 1982) 568–617. Concilium Parisiense 62–63 [8–9], ed. Werminghoff 659–661.


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pointing out that scandalum occurs most frequently in the ‘ecclesiastical’ section of this text, in which the bishops outlined their own manifold sins.88 Only towards the very end of a summary of their deliberations the bishops presented to their ruler, the ‘sacred palace’ surfaced as a potential source of scandalum. “It is suitable that your sacred house appears admirable/respectable and imitable, and that its good reputation spreads abundantly to others subjected to your government as well as to foreign nations”.89 The summary of this penitential/synodal activity of 829, addressed with an episcopal letter to Louis and Lothar, is interesting reading for anyone concerned with ninth-century conceptions of ecclesia. Now that God’s sword has pierced the empire entrusted to Louis and Lothar because of ‘our’ sin (the ruler’s and his bishops), the latter send concrete advice on how to pacify an irate God and how to do penance. If the emperors want pax et otium to return to their realm, they should first investigate and correct all that displeases God in their own ‘person’ and ‘ministry’, and consequently in all the other ordines that were part of their rule.90 Certainly, in this summing up there is stress on the imperial responsibility for all that went wrong, but there is no reason to assume that the emperors thought differently about this. In the final analysis, this episcopal summary proposes the diagnosis that pastores, principes and the people had all sinned, for which the synods of 829 had already prescribed suitable remedies. But when all was said and done, there remained one particular obstacle to be addressed: that of the principalis potestas intervening in ecclesiastical affairs, thinking it has divine authority, and that of bishops – from negligence, ignorance or cupidity – immersing themselves more than they should in secular affairs. Both should act differently, according to divine authority. All this should be cured, the bishops wrote – and some other time we will speak of the life of counts.91 The latter apparently mattered less when it came to provoking God’s wrath or atoning for it, but more importantly, this redrawing of boundaries in 829 should not be mistaken for bishops assuming supremacy over two emperors and thus weakening their power, or for ‘the Church’ pursuing either its restricted agenda or the unity of an ecclesia that by definition transcended political boundaries and was therefore too unwieldy to conceptualize political identity. This was an attempt at joint atonement on the part of those who had exercised their ‘ministry’ according to the duties of their ‘order’ in the face of God, and who felt they had failed miserably. EARLY MEDIEVAL STATES Early medieval states, in the minds and writings produced by those in charge of them, were built on the complementary duality of kings and bishops. This is not to say that the secular powerful were unimportant, but within visions of political order the bishops and other ecclesiastical office-holders took precedence. These were states defined by religion, that is, a cult of God shared by the elites in charge. One way of dealing with this phenomenon, in a rapidly secularizing Europe, has been to relegate all this to the attic of ephemeral ecclesiastical ideology obscuring political reality – as in, the Admonitio generalis has nothing to do with Charlemagne, for it was Alcuin who wrote it. Another approach to which I also subscribe, which is best represented by Janet L. Nelson’s ground-breaking work, perceives the upper echelon of early medieval states – the king, his bishops, counts and other high-ranking counsellors – as entirely capable of producing the shared vision projected in court-connected texts, however much some of those who shared such ideals may have differed on details. One 88 89

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Concilium Parisiense 16, 19, 25, 53; ed. Werminghoff 623, 625 f., 628 f., 645 ff. Concilium Parisiense 91 [24], ed. Werminghoff 678: Decet quippe, ut sacra domus vestra cunctis spectabilis appareat et imitabilis existat et fama suae opinionis sive alios imperii vestri subiectos sive exteras nationes habundantissime perfundat. Ubi igitur omnes dissensiones et discordias dirimende et omnis malitia imperiali auctoritate est comprimenda, necesse est ut quod maliis corrigere decernit in ea minime reperiatur. Concilium Parisiense, Epistola epsicoporum, ed. Werminghoff 667: ut primum quicquid in vobis, id est in persona et ministerio vestro, corrigendum inveniretur Domino auxiliante corrigeretis, deinde quaecumque in omnibus ordinibus imperii vestri Deo displicerent inquireretis… Concilium Parisiense 93 [26], ed. Werminghoff 679. I thank all the editors, but Helmut Reimitz in particular, for their helpful comments and support.

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Mayke de Jong

crucial pillar of the Carolingian view of political order was that bishops had precedence in the corridors of power, directly after the ruler. This was an inheritance of late antiquity, first of all in a very practical sense: bishops were formidable leaders of local communities, with which the new rulers had to co-operate, if they were to survive. For this reason, a synod convened and attended by a king could easily grow into public forum that far extended the strictly ecclesiastical domain. Yet this legacy from the past was not merely a matter of Realpolitik and making the most of powerful bishops. There was the persistent notion that rulers were responsible for the salvation of their people, while being sinners themselves. Powerful examples from the past helped to keep this idea alive, with varying intensity. There was the memory of the Emperor Constantine who had presided over the Council of Nicaea, commanding the bishops present to hand him their written confessions; there was the Emperor Theodosius, who had performed a public penance, urged by Ambrose; there was the penitent King David facing God’s wrath as voiced by the Prophet Nathan; and there was David the Lord’s anointed, who left a kingdom to his temple-building son Solomon, and Josiah, the king who restored the cult of God. All these images of kings and emperors past might function differently, depending on the context. In the ninth-century Carolingian empire, Theodosius’s penance could be taken as an example of glorious royal humility, or, alternatively, as an instance of bishops teaching their monarch a salutary lesson – or both of these at the same time. Modern historians should never ignore the tensions inherent in this system of ordines presided over by the ruler, for bishops at loggerheads with kings were part and parcel of early medieval politics. The king was responsible to God for the salvation of his people, but if he became a sinner, his salvation was the responsibility of the bishops. This duality full of potential tension (who gains the highest moral ground?) was characteristic of early medieval states, in which neither royal theocracy nor its episcopal counterpart prevailed. It was also the uneasy balance upon which future European states were built, after centuries of reflection on how to distinguish the ministry of kings from that of their bishops. This debate still shapes the Europe we presently live in, and it started in the early Middle Ages.