Tag Archives: Rome

Seminary LXVII: don’t call it corruption, call it a cash-rich political system

Posted on 27 October 2010 | 5 comments

I am falling behind with blogging generally and with seminars particularly, though I’ve also started falling behind with going to the things so this may yet balance out. I am also in two minds about whether to blog the Oxford Medieval History seminars, as while they’re looking likely to continue being interesting, some of the people presenting are quite junior and at least one of the papers (mine) has been somewhat rapidly-prepared. I think I can safely get away however with talking about the first one of the term, because Chris Wickham has featured here before and knows this, and so when on the 11th October he attracted an audience of eighty people to hear him talk to the title, “The Financing of Roman Politics, 1050-1150”, he probably expected that fact to end up here.

Decorated initial showing Pope Gregory VII excommunicating King Henry IV of Germany

Decorated initial showing Pope Gregory VII excommunicating King Henry IV of Germany

The tenth- and eleventh-century papal court is famous for two things, really, isn’t it? Gregorian reform and at the other extreme, corruption on a massive scale. Chris was talking about the latter, and trying to take a non-judgmental look at the systems that were operating that left this impression on our sources. Certainly, as he admitted and found many examples to prove, money was vital to political campaigning in Rome and deployed in huge amounts, while candidates for papal office or other high dignity who ran out of money also ran out of backing very quickly. This is clear in the sources and deplored by many across Europe, perhaps most noticeably John of Salisbury, who said as much in a letter to a pope, indeed, Hadrian IV, a fellow Englishman. Hadrian refused to take offence but preferred to point out how much good the money could achieve when correctly directed. It’s tempting just to stop the judgement there, but Chris, as an economic historian, wanted to know how this all actually worked. What he came up with for us was a picture of a medieval economy where, unusually, very little land was in play. The popes were big landowners in Rome and thereabouts but they weren’t big on an international scale; much of what they claimed was also sometimes claimed by the Empire and a great deal of it (as I’d heard from Chris before) was tied up in fairly binding leases to the nobility. On the other hand, their cash income was huge, from pilgrim gifts especially but also the rents from those leases, various other ground-rents in the city, international token payments from far-off monasteries that mounted up all together… This means that money was the primary available form of patronage. None of our sources have a problem with gifts of land in exchange for support, after all, so what’s the problem with cash? Well, it gets spent. Land is permanent, and can’t really be used up, which makes obligations pertaining to it long-term things, but not so with money. This means that people don’t stay bought; also, people don’t stay wealthy, whereas a lot of land keeps you that way rather better. That’s not available in this game, and so the players at the top of the table rotate a lot more. The result is something that our sources feel is corrupt, and which even the participants sometimes did, but which is explicable in its own terms at least, and when there are strong morals in play in our sources of course it’s very necessary to carry out this kind of enquiry.

Interior of St Peter's, Rome

Interior of St Peter's, Rome; must have cost a bit...

Mark Whittow raised in questions an obvious parallel to the court of Constantinople, which also ran on money a great deal and about which Liutprand of Cremona has similar things to say, though only on the embassy when he couldn’t persuade the emperor to include him in the handouts… Other interesting questions were raised about the exchange rate of money for favours—plenty of rulers offer precious goods for support as well, in various places (not least Heorot!) but these are often worth more than what they eventually buy, for the sources at least, a complication that is yet to be explored. It also seemed to Chris that this money did not, except in, well, exceptional cases, serve to recreate this kind of politics at a lower level; there was a super-rich threshold that the popes were, and would-be popes had to be, above, and below that one was too vulnerable to the actions of the super-rich to amass the same sort of patronage clout on a smaller scale. That sounded as if it could also use some testing, to me, but the big system view still makes a lot more sense to me at least than writing the whole thing off as corruption; even if that’s what it was, it was also a working system that needs to be understood as such, and that’s what Chris gave us.

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Posted in Byzantium, Institutions, Italy

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Seminary LXIV: when in Ravenna do as the Romans do

Posted on 10 May 2010 | 1 comment

The last of last term’s seminar reports, and probably the last substantive post before I try and fly the Atlantic with only a commercial airliner to help me, ‘is presented herewith, I mean thusly‘. The occasion was Andrea Augenti, presenting at the last Institute of Historical Research Earlier Middle Ages Seminar of the term with the title, “Rome and Ravenna from late Antiquity to the Early Middle ages: an archæological perspective”. He first set out something of a stand against political archæology, something to which Rome has frequently fallen victim. (I don’t just mean the way they recently found Romulus’s grave here, or whatever it was, or the kind of anti-medieval Classicism discussed by Charlotte Roueché at Ephesus (I do know that’s not in Rome, but the same agendas have been at work) but rather more substantial things: did you know, for example, that Mussolini had one of the of the seven hills of Rome cut through to link his government buildings to the old Imperial Fora? The further we get from World War II the harder it gets to believe that Mussolini was actually real.)

Archaeological map of the Ravenna area

Archaeological map of the Ravenna area

With this much clear, Dr Augenti proceeded by comparing Rome and its sibling capital Ravenna, on three scores: palaces, churches and houses. There are some obvious ways in which any comparison is unfair, of course: yes, both cities were capitals of Italy at one or other point, but this doesn’t alter the fact that Rome is far larger, 1200ha to Ravenna’s 166ha if you’re comparing the area within walls. It’s not so bad if you remember, as we were urged to, that Ravenna at its peak should also include the port of Classe and the populated suburban area that linked that to the actual city, giving it an area of more like 350ha, but the two aren’t really at the same level however you cut it. Despite that, they show some definite parallel trends in evolution.

Reconstruction of the Forum of Nerva as constructed (in the reign of Nerva)

Reconstruction of the Forum of Nerva as constructed (in the reign of Nerva)

On the score of palaces, for example, similar things happened in both cities after the Ostrogothic takeover: while a number of palaces and public buildings in particular locations—in Rome, the Palatine—remained operational, a number of others were converted to other uses: some became necropoloi, some were broken into private housing or just left to fall into ruin. The Forum of Nerva above, famously because it’s been dug fairly recently, was filled in with fairly large-scale town-houses in wood, with garden plots and a road for their owners to reach them on. This is much harder to get reconstruction images of… Similarly, in Ravenna, the most important buildings continue as royal residences, but others are effectively given up to private use or disuse.

The current state of the Forum of Nerva, partly reconstructed

The current state of the Forum of Nerva, partly reconstructed (but to when?)

As for churches, here again there is parity in quality while Rome continued to have the edge in quantity, naturally enough. Both cities saw a spread of church-building after the toleration of Christianity, unsurprisingly, and in the fifth and sixth centuries also, perhaps because of the existence of two Christian sects running in parallel for much of that time. Then that all stopped, and there was very little building of churches until the tenth century, which is as we know when it was at generally. But there is a big difference: the churches from the fifth and sixth centuries are huge temple-like affairs, but from the tenth they are tiny private Eigenkirchen.* Much changed about monumentality and the expression of piety in this time. This change is, however, one that Rome and Ravenna shared.

Third-century stele of Valeria Maria, from San Vitale di Ravenna

Third-century stele of Valeria Maria, from San Vitale di Ravenna, now in the Mueso Arcivescovile

The big difference arises in housing, although not straight away. Both cities experienced a long period at the beginning of the early Middle Ages in which rebuilding or adapting was far more common than building anew. In Rome, new construction began again in the seventh century, but Ravenna had by that time been hit by Lombards and was no longer a capital of any kind; it was instead resuming its previous existence as a middling entrepôt and bishopric, rejoining the urban ‘main sequence‘ while Rome continued as a supergiant. This was the point at which Ravenna dislimned once more into three settlements. It’s not however that there was no building at all going on here. Indeed, that may not even be the case in several other cities which seem to fit this pattern, because eighth-century contexts at Ravenna carefully excavated have thrown up a particular kind of domestic building, a sort of rectangular house with a central partition running most of the way across it, like a capital E with the right-hand side closed over (in some font where the middle limb doesn’t reach the far side, which I now realise isn’t what I’m composing this in). These crop up a lot, but have not been dated this early before; so the digging at Ravenna may explain a lot and cause a few periods of apparent stagnation in other cities’ archæological records to fill up. Nonetheless, they’re scrappy, basic, and wooden, and in both Rome and Ravenna found in the harbour districts overlying previously industrial facilities. Change, again.

The mosaic of Emperor Justinian I and Empress Theodora in San Vitale di Ravenna

The mosaic of Emperor Justinian I and Empress Theodora in San Vitale di Ravenna, in which a city under threat from the Lombards makes a statement about its loyalties

As you can probably tell even from this dry write-up, this was a paper full of information and not without humour, but all humour was put aside for the conclusion, in which Dr Augenti took to task perspectives in which the changes visible in the archæogical records of these two cities are viewed as decline. It’s probably easiest just to copy my notes here:

Decline prob. irreversible…. But whose decline anyway? This is just a similarity index for our own times, isn’t it? Better? For whom? why don’t they build grand if that’s so great? Times change, priorities change; best to keep all past as a foreign land. They build what they need, and we need to understand, inc. the bits that ‘decline’ as well as ‘progress’.

Dr Augenti apologised for his poor English, which was quite unnecessary as he was perfectly understandable, but if any proof of that were needed it would have been found in the current of heartfelt agreement that murmured around the room in response to this speech. The Earlier Middle Ages Seminar, by long tradition, does not applaud at the end of papers; occasionally visitors who don’t know this start clapping anyway. This time it was the regulars. This man speaks the truth, or so at least many of us felt. It was a good paper to close a term’s program with.

* The description of the large sixth century churches led to one particularly good sidetrack. Apparently Ravenna has a number of enthusiastic amateur archæologists, but the crown among these goes to a man who sets out to locate sites armed only with his copy of Agnellus of Ravenna’s Liber pontificalis and a metal dowsing rod. Dr Augenti was understandably sceptical when this man claimed to have found an unlocated church which would have been the largest in Ravenna in Agnellus’s time, and therefore somewhat astonished when that was exactly what the ground-penetrating radar revealed. It has now been dug, although it was badly ploughed up, and the dowser’s convictions amply borne out. I’m not sure if we need more or less of that sort of outcome…

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Posted in archaeology, Institutions, Italy, Romans

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Ferdinand Gregorovius: the man on the spot, still?

Posted on 22 November 2009 | 5 comments

A conversation with its originator revealed that I had at least slightly misunderstood the intended slant of the lecture for which I was running through stuff on the early medieval papacy a little while ago, which is just as well given how much I managed to find. I assume that the situation is better in non-English languages, not least Italian I suppose, but really, for the tenth and early eleventh century one does struggle a bit. I mean, there’s no separate coverage of the Papacy in the 900-1024 volume of the New Cambridge Medieval History; it’s subsumed into Rosamond McKitterick’s chapter on the Church, but the papacy is also a state, you know?1 There’s Ullmann’s Short History of the Papacy of course, but it is, well, short, basically institutional and far from recent.2 I was at something of a loss and so a learned colleague offered me a strange kind of rescue in the form of a loan of the relevant volumes of Gregorovius’s City of Rome.3

Volumes III and IV.1 of Gregorovius's History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages

Volumes III and IV.1 of Gregorovius's History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages

Now, you will see that though this is longer it is not newer. I didn’t even know it existed in translation, I knew of it merely by repute as the pavement on which subsequent histories have been based. And it is, in translation at least, an easy and entertaining as well as, for the standards of its time, highly erudite, read. (There are a few ambiguous points that make me suspect that in the German it is probably even clearer, as they seem like problems caused by the loss of the ability to inflect.) But oh lor’, it is of its time. Every successful king is brave and chivalrous (yes yes I know we barely have knights yet, maybe this was the translator’s choice), every losing one craven and malign, every woman who features is either meek and pious (if religious and ineffective) or beautiful, cruel, headstrong and ungovernable (if politically active, though all of those except the beauty were, to be fair, probably entry-level requirements for anyone in Roman politics in this era). There are no in-betweens and everything is straight out of a time of heroes and villains in a struggle between civilisation and barbarism. And of course, sometimes there was some truth in that, but with passages like:

Italy [after the death of King Berengar] sank into chaotic anarchy. Throughout the country we see nothing but smoking cities, upon whose ruins the savage Hungarians hold their wild Bacchanalia, the inhabitants flying for refuge to the mountains. We see kings, vassals and bishops struggling for the blood-stained shreds of power, and beautiful laughing women who, like Furies, seem to head the wild procession. Contemporary chronicles or records of immediately succeeding times are so confused as to present but a labyrinth to the student…

you will readily see what I mean.4 This is Old History Writ Large (very large, in fact, the full set is eight volumes in translation, and some of those volumes are in separate parts), and criticism of the sources, rather than of their subjects, is largely lacking. Gregorovius did insert a fair few footnotes where he dealt with conflicting readings of sources by scholars, or with conflicts between the sources themselves, but they never touch the whole “why is the author saying that anyway?” question we try and get through to our students so much: the closest he comes is a short reflection on whether or not Liutprand of Cremona can be trusted for anything.5 It’s that whole paradigm of ‘reliability’, which is a character judgement and not a judgement of information available to the writer or of his motives, about which I could write a whole separate post.

So, why on earth am I bothering? Well, partly because it is to hand and, however dated, fun. But also because as he says, the sources for this period are a labyrinth. And the big virtue of this old book is that Gregorovius sorted them out. At the end of this you feel like you have a chronology, and a grasp on what actually happened. Now, half of what he reports may be made up, because his method was basically to slot things into a chronology like a jigsaw until everything that was known and found `reliable’ was slotted in somewhere. But it’s from there that critique can start. So I see why this has been the foundation of later work. But I think we could really use building a bit more round these parts, by now.

1. Rosamond McKitterick, “The Church” in Timothy Reuter (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History vol. III: c. 900-c. 1024 (Cambridge 1999), pp. 130-162; look in vain for any help in Guiseppe Sergi, “The Kingdom of Italy”, ibid. pp. 346-371, though on what it does cover it is a masterpiece of concision and analysis. The previous volume, which was some years prior, did cover the Papacy separately (Thomas F. X. Noble, “The Papacy in the Eight and Ninth Centuries” in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History vol. II: c. 700-c. 900 (Cambridge 1995), pp. 563-586) and I don’t know how they felt that didn’t need doing again, but then, the contents of that volume are one of the very few areas where the late Professor Reuter’s judgement has been called into question.

2. Walter Ullmann, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages (London 1972, repr. 2003 with introduction by George Garnett).

3. Ferdinand Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter vom V. bis zum XVI. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart 1854-74, repr. Berlin 1889-1903), 4 vols, rev. edn. (München 1978-88); transl. Annie Hamilton as History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (London 1894-1902), 8 vols in 14, repr. with introduction by David Chambers (New York 2003), 8 vols in 13. Citations here from the original translation, but the new reprint retains the pagination.

4. Gregorovius, History of the City of Rome, III pp. 273-274.

5. Ibid., III p. 249 n. 1; he’s agin’ him. Cf. III p. 250 n. 1: “The Invectiva in Romam relates that John [tenth Pope of that name] usurped the bishopric of Bologna, and reviles him as a Lucifer. The Invective is a production of John’s time, and its words in spite of being inspired by party hate, are not without weight.” Which of course makes it OK! But, in fairness, this is only in a footnote.

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Seminary XLVIII: plus ça change, plus c’est la Rome chose

Posted on 22 May 2009 | 4 comments

The penultimate (I almost typed punultimate, but I’m afraid I probably have more than one left) gathering in this year’s Cambridge Late Antique Network Seminars took place on the 12th May, and Chris Wickham drove direct from giving one paper in Oxford to give us a different one in Cambridge, in the course of things proving that Cambridge’s tidal one-way system is a form of gatekeeping the University would never have stooped as low as. Anyway, your humble correspondent may have had too little sleep and too much tea so I’ll try and stick to the reportage. The title of the paper was “Social Change (and Complexity) in Early Medieval Rome, 700-1000”.

The paper was divided into three parts, and the first of those went on ceremonial. The focus was on the elaborate adventus ceremonies that Rome mounted for incoming emperors, something which needed doing fairly rarely, and so was always exceptional, but nonetheless had a background going back to the late Empire, and which had been progressively updated to incorporate new social orders like the ex-Byzantine militia (whoever they actually were) in the old hierarchy.1 Rome was in this respect open to change as long as it could package it firstly as antique and secondly as unique; nowhere else went to the same level of elaboration over these things except perhaps Constantinople, one of the few cities bigger than Rome in any of the Empire, let alone the West where it was unrivalled. (This was really the only part of the paper which really went back to 700; most of the focus was on the tenth century, which was of course fine with me.)

Ruins in the Foro di Nerva, Rome

Ruins in the Foro di Nerva, Rome

This led to questions of how such a city supported itself, which are unusually complex because inside, say, 20 miles of the centre, there was no visible peasant landholding. This doesn’t preclude agriculture, of which there obviously was some even within the old city walls, but it must have been tenant farming because all, to an incredible degree of exclusion, of the land visible in the tenth-century charters was Church-owned and had been as far back as can be seen in the record. This doesn’t mean it was full of churchmen because almost all of it was leased out to aristocrats, including for example the Foro di Nerva above, on which in the ninth century private housing was built. Other previously-public spaces developed workshops, housing, gardens, and so on, apparently built for profit, but the land remained the church’s, and there was apparently no guarantee of heredity when the time came for the leases to be renewed, though since most of these leases were made for three lives, a certain amount of future planning was possible. Nonetheless, when laymen give land to the Church in these records, it is land that they had leased; land that they owned was all much further away. Yet they lived in Rome, and leased land to do so, land on which they tried to turn a profit but which they did not own. The rents were tiny, so what the Church got from this was something that Chris had yet to resolve; one assumes, protection and a clientèle but I got the impression that Chris would have preferred an economic rationale, and as he observed, since these arrangements last for generations and are often seen at renewal, they must have been economically viable because otherwise all the leasing churches would have gone bankrupt.

Anyway, Chris’s general point was that there is a lot of change in Rome, especially in the tenth century, a lot of it at the high political level but also a growing change in the development of the economy, artisanal titles becoming more and more visible in charters as the year 1000 approaches, various sorts of associations of clerics and laymen joining the existing ones (often seen through the ceremonial by which they articulated their links to the old and current orders). Despite this, the social structure of the city, most of all focussed on the pope but below him mediated through dozens of links between Church and churches and aristocrats of various grades, with a pre-eminent family (the Theophylacti, family of the Patrician Alberic) not diminishing that variety, stayed more or less the same. The long-term nature of the lease situation and its apparent inherent stability left the aristocrats, who were getting profit from the lands and the social capital of a Roman presence, and the churches who were getting, well, we don’t really know but they kept doing it so there must have been a reason, with no reason to alter things. In the end, Chris suggested, it was Henry IV and Gregory VII who spoiled this equilibrium by really really messing with the ability to maintain this lay-ecclesiastical property-sharing; reform undid Rome’s social networks.

Pope Gregory VII depicted deposing King Henry IV of the Germans, 1054 (unknown source)

Pope Gregory VII depicted deposing King Henry IV of the Germans, 1054 (unknown source)

That bit sounds a bit glib, but I’m fine with the implication that the tenth century is pretty stable. I’ve seen a few of the relevant charters, however, and the impression I got is that it’s not just the economy that’s elaborating.2 Or maybe it is, but landholders are transacting more, or being recorded more, scribes who used to only be seen working for the pope are seen doing private jobs, this is when at least one of the texts of the papal formulary and general order of practice known as the Liber Diurnus is probably created, and in general Rome is taking part in a much wider economic phenomenon visible all around the Western Mediterranean in which at least, after some hard centuries, the economy is beginning to kick out a genuine surplus.3 An awful lot of the change that’s supposed to happen around 1000 firstly comes from this new availability of surplus, and therefore the resources with which to do things differently, and secondly, is largely seen (because of the nature of our sources) in terms of elaboration and increased preservation of documents. That last makes it hard to tell what’s new and what was already there but just invisible, but as Chris said, in the few places where documents go back further than this period, they don’t show the same concerns and, although formulas changing can obscure or reveal a lot, they also represent a change in social practice that has made the old ones less useful. This is an old argument associated indelibly with the name Barthélemy, though it should as I’ve argued be associated instead with its resolution by Bedos-Rezak, and I won’t do it again here. But it did seem to me that Rome was here partaking of a wider pattern from which its indubitable distinctiveness shouldn’t be allowed to separate it. The wind was blowing on Rome and on, I don’t know, Aigüatèbia de Conflent alike.

The building used as the Senate House in medieval Rome, next to the Temple of Vespasian, from Wikimedia Commons

The building used as the Senate House in medieval Rome, next to the Temple of Vespasian, from Wikimedia Commons

The other thing that I wanted to remark on was the behaviour of the `aristocrats’. For Chris’s purposes anyone not farming their own food is an aristocrat, and I thought that in a society as stratified as Rome that didn’t break things down enough. Some of these guys, the Theophylacti for example, were really important people who could make most of the city follow their bidding (no-one can make all of Rome follow their bidding, not since Octavian if then), and some were just struggling people we’d call knights anywhere else, and to imply that they’re all supported by the same system and that that doesn’t change, while acknowledging that they are also changing the face of Rome’s public spaces and embroiled, as we can tell from Liutprand of Cremona, in all kinds of power politics, seems like a disjunction to me. These are people involved in political change and economic agency, and I felt that the link between the fierce competition and change at that level, and the apparent stasis of the social structure, needed exploration. But then, we know so little about what these people did. It’s always amazed me how little work there is on Alberic. A guy starts calling himself Prince of Rome and ruling the city alongside the pope! Apparently no-one can oust him. He can almost ignore the kings! And yet somehow Pierre Toubert seems to be the only person who’s thought him worth writing about in the last century (and I confess, I haven’t read that writing).4 Am I missing something or is that badly out of synch with what people would find interesting anywhere else? So it’s easy to understand why such a story is not yet told, and the story that Chris was telling at system level was equally new to me and equally fascinating, but I did feel that there were these two halves to the story which will only make sense together, and now I’m hoping someone will do the other one.

1. Much of what Chris was saying will, I expect, emerge in his own work in the not-too-distant future, but two references of resort were Pierre Toubert’s Les structures du Latium médiéval : Le Latium méridional et la Sabine du IXe siècle à la fin du XIIe siècle (Rome 1973) and Roberto Meneghini & Riccardo Santangeli Valenzani, Roma nell’Altomedioevo: topografia e urbanistica della città dal V al X secolo (Roma 2004).

2. The Roman charters with which I’m familiar are mainly edited in L. Allodi & G. Levi (edd.), Il Regesto Sublacense del Secolo XI, Bibliotheca della Reale Società Romana di Storia Patria (Roma 1885) & L. M. Hartmann (ed.), Ecclesiae S. Mariae in Via Lata Tabularium. Partem vetustoriem quae complectitur chartas inde ab anno 921 usque ad a. 1045 (Wien 1895), both of which give a giddying impression of social complexity.

3. The Liber Diurnus is something of a controversy; its function, date and importance are all long disputed. The two most recent contributions to the debate I’ve seen are Hans Hubert Anton, “Der Liber Diurnus in angeblichen und verfälschten Papstprivilegien des früheren Mittelalters” in Fälschungen im Mittelalter. Internationaler Kongreß der Monumenta Germaniae Historica, München, 16.-19. September 1986, Teil III: diplomatische Fälschungen (I), Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Schriften) XXXIII.3 (Hannover 1988), pp. 115-142, and Hans-Henning Kortüm, Zur papstliche Urkundensprache im frühen Mittelalter: die päpstlichen Privilegien 896-1046, Beiträge zur Geschichte und Quellenkunde des Mittelalters 17 (Sigmaringen 1995), pp. 312-318, but I’m sure there’s more since I was up with this stuff. As for the economy, I don’t think the tenth-century growth is widely enough appreciated. It’s somewhat dwarfed by the economic take-off of the eleventh and twelfth centuries but this take-off run unleashes an awful lot of social development and change. The only decent comparative treatment I know arises in a conference volume, La Croissance agricole du haut moyen âge : chronologie, modalités, géographie. Dixième Journées Internationales d’Histoire, 9, 10, 11, Septembre 1988, Flaran Vol. 10 (Auch 1990).

4. Toubert, Latium, and idem, “Une révision : le principat d’Albéric de Rome (932-954)” in idem, Études sur l’Italie médiévale (IXe-XIVe s.), Collected Studies 46 (London: Variorum 1976), V.

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Feudal Transformations XI: Chris Wickham takes still another (at)tack

Posted on 1 December 2008 | 5 comments

The last time I could get into London for a short while was Monday 17th November, and I dithered over it but eventually went because the occasion was the Institute of Historical Research‘s Creighton Lecture, which Jinty Nelson told the attendees was, they liked to think, the most important lecture in history in the UK, and more to the point, speaking was Chris Wickham, to the topic, “The Culture of the Public: assembly politics and the ‘feudal revolution'”. Conrad Leyser had the week before asked rhetorically if anyone still thought the feudal transformation was an interesting topic, and I realise this sits ill with my posting record but I half wanted to agree with him that it isn’t. The trouble is that although it has become somewhat tedious even to me, we still haven’t solved it. Something does happen to Europe in the centuries either side of 1000, and we don’t seem to be able to agree on how much, what, or what importance it has. Yet, as I’ve argued, there must be an effect of the collapse of such a superstructure as the Carolingian Empire. What is it, and why is it so hard to pin down? The answer to the latter question of course lies in local diversity, but the former we haven’t yet got.

The Great Hall in King's College London, arrayed for another occasion

The Great Hall in King's College London, arrayed for another occasion

Once having settled in a rather under-populated Great Hall at King’s College London (the IHR doesn’t have enough space for this large a gathering, though it might have been able to cope with the numbers who actually turned up), I was not a little pleased to find Chris saying very similar things, but he has a new way into it, or at least perhaps a more profitable one than my various attempts have so far been. Observing that something that changes that almost all parties agree upon is the state of balance between public and private authority, he was looking at the main forum for expression of such things, the assembly. Referencing a particularly lucid article of Timothy Reuter’s, which explains the whole idea of assembly politics in the Middle Ages in a way that we’re very happy to point students at but mostly have to disagree with from our own material (reminds me of GCSE), Chris started from his recent work on Rome to ask in more detail what changes in assembly politics over this period and whether it helps us explain anything.1

Ruins of the Roman forum as they stand today

Ruins of the Roman forum as they stand today

His key points were, roughly, that the ideal of an assembly of free men giving you as ruler legitimacy in your actions is always important, and that throughout the Middle Ages someone doing something can add legitimacy to their action by arranging that it happens in public before witnesses.2 Despite this, large-scale public assemblies stop.3 Local courts remain roughly the same, but the top stratum of the social stratification is lost. (You see the similarity to my earlier pitch.) The new assemblies of, for example, counts and their followers, don’t have the same function of placing actions in public, because they are closed; the ‘public’ are disenfranchised and it doesn’t seem to matter, although in Rome at least some of the ‘closed’ gatherings get so big that they arguably include most of the political actors, and for Italy generally the commune is just such an organisation, of all those with power if not the whole public. They don’t do public judgements, but there are other ways of involving a (more restricted) public; they do political debate, the rather more repressive old Roman Empire had used processions and spectacles for the same kind of public access to the powerful, and of course bishops continue to use such tactics throughout the Middle Ages when they need to take some action onto a higher level, the best examples being the councils behind the Peace of God. So there are many ways to deploy a public gathering in the pursuit of the reinforcement, or indeed the destabilisation, of power.

A depiction of the Council of Clermont from the <em>Livre des Passages d'Outre-mer</em> of <i>c. </i>1490, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, here found on answers.com

A depiction of the Council of Clermont from the Livre des Passages d'Outre-mer of c. 1490, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, here found on answers.com

His conclusion was however that the most effective assemblies are regular ones. An assembly that someone knows is going to happen gives them stability. They can bring the case then, so they don’t need to ravage your lands now; they will be able to protest, albeit in a stage-managed fashion, so violent action now is both less legitimate and less necessary. On the other hand, ad hoc assemblies show weakness, and are often disrupted or produce unexpected results (“Dieu le veult! Dieu le veult!“) With observations like this, and more work on how assemblies are used both by their organisers and participants, we might have another wedge with which to open up this topic over which we continue unwillingly to trip.

1. Timothy Reuter, “Assembly Politics in Western Europe from the Eighth Century to the Twelfth” in Peter Linehan & Janet Nelson (edd.), The Medieval World (London 2000), pp. 432-450; Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, 400-1200 (London forthcoming).

2. As often happens, it seems, I am already reading about this somewhere else, in an article that I’ll come back to next post, Isabel Alfonso, “Judicial Rhetoric and Political Legitimation in Medieval León-Castile”, transl. Carolina Carl in Alfonso, Hugh Kennedy & Julio Escalona (edd.), Building Legitimacy: political discourses and forms of legitimation in medieval societies, The Medieval Mediterranean: peoples, economies and cultures, 400-1500, 53 (Leiden 2004), pp. 51-87.

3. Chris here referenced a book I now apparently have to read which I only recently discovered, Thomas Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government (Princeton 2008).

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Recent finds in soil and sea, from the heart of the Empire and well beyond its borders

Posted on 4 November 2008 | 3 comments

Since my own work this brief ‘holiday’ has so far been mostly revising stuff I wrote long ago, rather than finding out new stuff, I’m sticking to observations culled from the Internet this post. I think almost all of them came from either News for Medievalists or the Heroic Age blog, so thanks to both those fine institutions for these links that I went and followed.

In the first place, of interest to no-one but me most likely, I have discovered a Catalan archaeology blog, ArqueoCat, which has duly been blogrolled, though nothing there has been posted since I did this. Its focus seems to be mainly prehistoric, and of course it’s written in Catalan (there is a translator for webpages offered by the Catalan government but its results are, er, erratic) but I have hopes for it and I also have the relevant language skills. If you have those, I’ve also just happened across a Catalan blog dealing in medieval romances and chivalry, Eixa altra Edat Mitjana, whose author is apparently reading this, so hullo! I warn the general readership, it is about as work-safe as Got Medieval, and phrases like “butt–trumpet” may be necessary. As we’ve observed before, the Middle Ages weren’t a particularly clean-minded era.

For those of you reading mainly in English, I had Kirsten Ataoguz’s Early Medieval Art blog down in the resources section, but discovered I was never checking it, and have therefore put it with the other blogs where it probably rightfully belongs, and have simultaneously discovered, I think through someone’s notice at the Unlocked Wordhoard (how do people expect Prof. Nokes actually to read all those darn blogs? I lose too much time on the ones I follow already) Medieval Ecclesiastical Art, which is a bit late for me academia-wise but has the signal advantage of telling me about places I might actually visit, because I in turn have the signal advantage of being in Europe of course, though some of our political parties here might prefer to think otherwise.

That kind of leads us to archaeology, and recently the hot archaeology appears to be in Rome where they are claiming to have found the underground retreat where the Emperor Caligula was murdered. I am pretty dubious about this. I mean, even I have fallen prey to the whole let’s-associate-a-written-source-with-our-recent-find syndrome, it’s natural enough, but in the case I blogged about here, the source was rather more solid than Suetonius’s Vita Cæsarum and the archaeology rather clearer. This new case could be all wrong: let’s remember that the Roman digs are being led by someone who was trying to tell us he’d found genuine evidence for Romulus and Remus only a few years ago. Their level of interpretation comes across too much, in English-language media at least, as “it looks so close it must be true! what do you mean, dating evidence?” and I worry. There’s some further reports that I haven’t seen (no YouTube at work, no inclination to switch off the Black Sabbath at home—after all, heavy metal’s a legitimate subject of scholarly inquiry now) here on News for Medievalists, which I guess are covering the same stuff. However, that’s all Classical so I don’t have to worry more than I choose to. Much more interesting to me, and not sensational for them so rather less likely to be over-/misreported, is this story that they’ve found evidence for ‘Dark Age’ habitation apparently in the Classical catacombs, people living among the ancient dead. A certain amount of sensationalism has crept in with a claim that these people “must” have been runaway slaves or persecuted Christians living in hiding, but I wonder (and I’m not the first). The Roman catacombs elsewhere in the city, and some of those in Milan, have turned up much more complicated scenarios than this, including anti-Christian graffiti, so I hope more investigation goes on here as it would be a window into a period of Rome about which I don’t think we know as much as we’d like.

The site of the tomb complex uncovered in Rome (follow link for credits)

Then from the other end of Empire, I discover that Martin Carver isn’t the only one with a Pictish-period monastery in Scotland to play with, although Inchmarnock, where digging has recently been concluded, is on the opposite coast to Portmahomack, where meanwhile the digging and finds continue, which must be almost irritating for them now that they have the Visitors’ Centre up and running and have to rearrange the display every time something new that’s old comes up. Inchmarnock isn’t quite so productive a site, or so Pictish but, as has been said here before the Picts were on Skye, though we only see them as they Gaelicise, so the dating could be crucial for such a definition. Unfortunately for the Pictish nation enthusiasts, what’s come up so far is mainly slates, and those used for writing in Ogham, which makes an Irish connection most likely. But writing on slates is always interesting anyway, my first really popular post here was about that very phenomenon, and the parallel intrigues me especially as the report suggests that the slates suggest people learning Ogham, which would be inordinately important for the literacy scholars, some of whom, of course, taught me to pay attention to this stuff. If writing was being taught, I suppose it is likely that what they’re finding is from a monastery, and we know that there was eventually one there. All the same, it’s not as conclusive as Portmahomack’s all-male cemetery, but I see that this hasn’t stopped the dig leader writing a book about it which I guess I shall now have to read, some day in my mythical free time.

Well outside the Empire in one direction, because I already mentioned Inuit cultures here once I now feel they’re sort of part of the remit even though I know nothing about them. Partly it’s because it’s useful to keep a vague notion of what else is going on where in the world during the Middle Ages just so that one doesn’t get too fixed to a European idea of progress and development. So, late Antique Alaska: we have new evidence. Constantine was founding a new Rome and these people really didn’t care, but we know more about them than we did a few weeks ago.

"A bird bone... grooved for snapping out thin blanks that would be ground down and eyed into sewing needles"

'A bird bone... grooved for snapping out thin blanks that would be ground down and eyed into sewing needles'

And lastly, and maybe most importantly of all I find this story about a sunken Arab dhow, from its cargo datable to after 826 A. D., that has been found, still mostly preserved on the seafloor with a fabulous cargo. The important thing is not so much the cargo, however, as the location, which is off Sumatra. Then the cargo becomes important, because it’s basically gold treasure and really really fine Tang dynasty pottery of the highest grades, as well as 40,000 china bowls—which are now the oldest known actual ‘china’ in the world—packed in beansprouts… Who knows what this stuff was doing on one badly-lost dhow, which seems to have come to grief on the reefs of the Gaspar Strait, but it illustrates really high-value commercial links between (probably) Iraq, via Basra and on into the cAbbasid Caliphate, and Tang dynasty China, well before we have much evidence of such contact. Also, bulk long-distance trade too: even Chris Wickham would have trouble writing off 40,000 bowls as marginal luxury traffic… So I hope for much more on this in future months.

If that isn’t enough to keep you clicking, and in some cases boggling at how little some Romance languages can change over six hundred years, well, I don’t know what would be but I look forward to seeing it…

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Two seminars too late: opposite ends of dispute settlement

Posted on 26 March 2008 | 8 comments

It’s just struck me that I’m badly behind with seminar reporting. In fact I managed to jam the Catalonia trip between two seminars that had important similarities: they were by people for whose work I have lots of respect, they were both working on dispute settlement, and they were both studying a period later than I usually consider interesting. There the similarities more or less ended…

On 4 March Professor Chris Wickham was addressing a joint gathering of the Institute of Historical Research‘s Earlier Middle Ages seminar and the London Society for Medieval Studies, and he was talking to the title, “Getting justice in twelfth-century Rome”. To me this was worth it mainly for the stories of years-long lawsuits, flagrant disregard of the results, corrupt judges and obdurate defendants that most medieval dispute studies can bring up; the actual conclusions didn’t seem terribly transportable as the story was mainly that Rome was very unusual. The particular oddity that was being looked at here was the way that a dispute in Rome might be taken either to the Pope, or, after about 1150, to the Senate. Neither seems to have been very good at settling things, taking a very long time to produce verdicts that then couldn’t be enforced, and which might be appealed from one court to the other. It’s difficult to prove a judicial verdict is ever enforced, of course, but here we have a much higher incidence of preserved returns to court, for a new sentence after one had proved ineffective, than we get from elsewhere, and that must at least mean that such records were likely to be needed in the medium-term, which in turn speaks for an inconclusive system. What didn’t really become apparent was why the Romans persisted in using the system, although there was of course the possibility opened that mostly they were not and we were seeing only cases that people couldn’t resolve any other way, which might in turn explain why so few were settled… But there are circles here, though Chris’s work will no doubt slowly square them.

The Pope depicted as Antichrist in a 1521 woodcut by Lucas Cranach

Then soon after I got back, 19 March, there was Professor Stephen White, talking to the Earlier Middle Ages seminar to the title, “A Paranoid Style in Medieval Political Culture? The Taste for Legal Melodrama in 12th- and early 13th-century France and England”. I know Professor White’s work primarily through having reviewed a volume of his collected papers, and that gave me an impression of a very hard-nosed attitude to dispute records leavened by an interest in the actual characters in the disputes, which I can generally get behind. So I was slightly surprised to find I was listening to a paper about twelfth- and thirteenth-century romances, in which Professor White has found a pattern of disputing that he thinks tells us about political culture in those areas, especially under the Angevins. The pattern was basically that someone is falsely accused by a traitor, who takes in the corrupt and febrile king (often Arthur or Charlemagne) and is only thwarted by sane old counsellors insisting that the matter be taken to trial by combat, in which the wronged hero wins so that the balance between corruption and honour is, often briefly, restored. These stories do seem to have been popular, or at least, there seem to have been a lot of stories with these moments in, but disagreements from the floor centered on the variation between the stories in which they appeared, how important the dispute was to the rest of the story, how much extra diversity could be found in the pattern when you started to look, and of course, whether literary evidence like this really connects to the world. To the last, Professor White suggested that in the conflicts that rolled up the Angevin Empire before Philip Augustus, actually things that put tests of loyalty and misfortune from faulty rulers at the centre of their themes might have found an unsually sympathetic audience, but I still personally left thinking that little had been proved except that there are a lot more medieval romances than anyone can be bothered to read except when looking for particular motives. But is gutting literature for use as a context-less data-bank ever really sound history? It wasn’t as brute as that, but it was questionable, I thought, whether this could ever really tell us much about what people did, or even about the stories.

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Seminary XIX: Rosamond McKitterick looks at the Liber Pontificalis

Posted on 25 February 2008 | Leave a comment

There is a certain speed one has to get up to with Professor McKitterick’s papers, at which one can take in a full manuscript description in about five seconds. Without this one can get hopelessly lost as the details of stemmas and contents ravel inextricably before you. Or at least, this is how it happens to me, and I’ve been listening to Professor McKitterick a long time now. But this time, at the Institute of Historical Research‘s now-legendary Earlier Middle Ages Seminar on 13 February, where she was speaking to the title “The Liber Pontificalis in its Early Medieval Historiographical Context”, there were only three or four manuscripts gone into in detail and after about ten minutes of floundering I caught up and was able to follow the string of intriguing and subtle points.

Miniature from a late manuscript of the Liber Pontificalis

The Liber Pontificalis, for those unfamiliar, is a collection of papal biographies that runs from Peter up to the mid-ninth century. It is believed, so Professor McKitterick told us, to have been written in two big bursts, a first draft circa 530, an update probably in the 570s, and then a new set of lives added in the seventh century after which it was sporadically updated life by life. The paper showed that there was at least some reason to believe the `second draft’, the 570s version, circulated independently, and the later versions are not widely known.

Her basic points were that, firstly, there is all kinds of stuff going on in Italy at the time, the Ostrogothic wars, Justinian’s attempted reconquest, and so the repeated agenda of the popes proving how superior they were to the patriarchs of the East in theological argument has all kinds of agendas to it; and secondly, that even in Italy there is a ferment of historical writing at the time, all dealing with this idea of how to cope with the fact that Rome, which previous centuries of Christianity had managed to appropriate into their intellectual world view as centre of a new, holy Roman Empire (not that one! but think ‘Eternal City’ -> ‘City of God’ in good Eusebian tradition) was no longer centre of the world, but only centre of the West, and that rather shakily what with the Lombards. So what you get is a debate over the popes versus the emperors, and Professor McKitterick was urging us to see the LP, not as an official history, at least not when it was composed even if it later became one, but as a contribution to that debate, using secular serial biographies like Suetonius and the Historia Augusta as a model for a new set of ruler-histories replacing the emperors with the popes. And she emphasised that this was going on at the same time as a long-term programme of replacing Roman Imperial monuments with new Christian building, starting new processions governed by the liturgy, and thus remapping how people link up the city in their minds, and so on. In short, there’s an awful lot of change going on in Rome, and the popes are a big part of it, but not everyone view the changes the same way and the Liber Pontificalis is only one of the voices shouting about it, merely the best-preserved. (Though one irony that came out of the paper is that none of the surviving manuscripts seem to come from Rome itself.)

Professor McKitterick’s work is these days mostly on intellectual history, in a way, and she and I cross paths little except in wondering how people went about getting charters written. How much the average Roman man in the street cared about all this, when he could still be running round whipping the local maidens in the Lupercalia as the LP records with distaste, is a good question perhaps. But her work, by making the most of a huge volume of basically intellectual source material, opens up a vastly rich world of thinkers who were not stuck in ivory towers, but walking those same streets, thinking about what went on there, and then writing stuff from which we can sometimes get back at their world.

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