The Mastery of Space

Charlemagne maintained a political system that accommodated diversity and a plurality of political and religious centers across the huge extent of his territories. Despite becoming a favored residence toward the end of Charlemagne’s life, Aachen never functioned as a capital, nor did any other royal palace under Charlemagne’s successors, for the empire remained polycentric.^[1287] He developed aspects of the ad­ministration already in the process of formation under his father Pippin III, as well as making many innovations of his own.

Assemblies were obviously a means for the king to be informed about the affairs of the kingdom, but they were also occasions to hear and decide upon legal disputes, receive ambassadors, to determine new economic and administrative arrangements, and to decide how ecclesiastical concerns were to be addressed. At Frankfurt in 794, for example, among a host of matters small and great, the assembly stated its posi­tion on iconoclasm, the doctrine known as Adoptionism, the double procession of the Holy Spirit expressed in the phrase filioque which the Franks added to the Nicene/Chalcedonian Creed; heard Tassilo of Bavaria’s final renunciation of all of his and his family’s rights and properties; regulated the prices, weights, and meas­ures to be used across the entire realm; announced the reform of the coinage to be used “in every city and every market, bearing the imprint of our name, of silver and full weight”; pronounced on the administration of justice, especially in the bishops’ courts; forbade secular plots and coniurationes or conspiracies; settled a dispute about the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the archbishoprics of Arles and Vienne; discussed discipline in monasteries and the fate of orphaned girls; proscribed the creation of popular saints; and announced that papal permission had been granted for Angilram, archbishop of Sens, and Hildebold, archbishop of Cologne, to be ab­sent from their sees in order to serve the king permanently in his palace.

The impact of Charlemagne's own travel to these assemblies, as well as that of the secular and ecclesiastical magnates and their entourages who attended, can be understood in symbolic as well as practical terms. Their processional traversing of the realm to the meeting places decided upon each year provided a visible confir­mation to all those living within the empire of the ruler and his leading men going about official business. Royal estates and residences, monastic guest houses, epis­copal residences, and nobles' houses, as well as inns and tents, accommodated all these people on the move.

Institutionalized itinerant kingship only became a central element of the ruling method and administrative system of the Ottonian kings and German emperors, in that the king's presence was essential for the carrying out of royal business.^[1293] Charlemagne's officials, on the other hand, conducted royal business on his behalf in his absence. It is this system which provided the overall structure of Carolingian government, even if later rulers relied more on their personal presence to en­force their authority than Charlemagne had ever seemed to need to do. The cre­ation of this vast realm, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean and North Sea to the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas and encompassing many of the greatest river sys­tems in Europe, including the Rhine, upper reaches of the Danube, the Weser, and the Elbe, incorporated many new peoples and posed challenges for order and con­trol quite apart from those of cohesion, identity, and a sense of belonging. Such order and control depended far more on an extended administrative network, local officials, peripatetic royal agents, and an insistence on the maintenance of justice than on force and military presence.^[1294]

Nevertheless, the role of the army in the maintenance of the early medieval empire needs to be considered in the light of the absence of a standing army or­ganized by the state.

One major difficulty with most modern discussions of Carolingian and Ottonian warfare is their tendency to pick pieces of information across a wide chronological and geographical range and apply that information elsewhere in time and space as if it were equally valid. A very precise chronological analysis of information which takes the political and social context into account, and is capable of differentiating phases in the army, as Bachrach has done for the reigns of the Carolingian mayors before 768, as well as the early years of Charlemagne’s reign from 768 to 777, is essen­tial.^[1297] This is not just about the end of expansion after 804, nor are the assumptions about the army itself just those of scale. The social and specialized composition of military contingents, military methods, strategies, technical resources, recruitment, and deployment are all disputed, with varying interpretations of the same scattered shreds of ambiguous evidence.^[1298] That is, campaigns are seen either as more likely to have been a series of small-scale skirmishes, guerilla attacks and raids, or major expeditions with large fighting forces.

It is a commonplace that the most detail we have about Carolingian military or­ganization is in a handful of Charlemagne’s capitularies from the first decade of the ninth century about the mobilization of the army. These instructions are to be seen in a defensive rather than aggressive context, designed to protect the homeland should there be any invaders. The memorandum of 807, moreover, could be read as implying specific provision for that year in the light of the Danish king Godofrid’s aggressive tactics on the north of the kingdom. The capitulary of808, however, with its summary of what the emperor’s missi (agents) ought to have for mobilizing the army, certainly does look as if its intentions were longer term.^[1299] The letter sent to Abbot Fulrad of St. Denis concerning the arms, tools, and other military equip­ment his homines were to bring to an assembly to be convened on the River Bode in Saxony in 806 does at least provide a shopping list of military necessities that is likely to have been required over many decades. Each horseman was to carry shield and spear, long sword and short sword, bows, quivers, and arrows. Carts were to contain axes, stone-cutting tools, augers, adzes, trenching tools, iron spades, “and the rest of the implements which an army needs.”^[1300] Archaeological evidence corroborates these items, not least the expertly crafted Frankish long swords found in consider­able abundance in Westphalia.^[1301]

One capitulary in 808 even specifies the way in which exemption from military service could be purchased. The army tax, or haribannus, formerly understood as a fine for non-performance of military service, appears to have been a customary levy to support the army from some individuals from whom military service was not expected, rather than a fine.

Information about fighting and soldiers, as distinct from recruitment and main­tenance, is culled from the contemporary narrative sources. From these it emerges that arms training for the elites certainly appears to have been customary, and members of the elite might be called upon to fight. The army was conceivably a career, but there are few indications that a warrior would make war his sole occupa­tion, nor that military leadership was the sole criterion for effective rule. Fighting, because of the sheer skills and training involved for swordsmen, spear throwers, and archers at least, was certainly a specialized occupation, and it is assumed that military training was conducted in aristocratic households. Freemen of all ranks may well have been trained to fight at various levels and with particular weapons, but how universal this is simply cannot be ascertained.

The impression created by the scattered evidence for the period of Charlemagne’s reign, therefore, is that military organization was geared toward the supply of small well-equipped contingents, and that the responsibility for organizing this mili­tary retinue/equipage/was the local landowner’s. A recurrent acknowledgment in the Frankish annals is the recruitment of the men of the many regions of the Carolingian realm into the Frankish army, culminating in the conforming of Saxon military organization to Carolingian regulations.^[1304]

The evidence is sufficiently ambiguous for estimates even of the size of Carolingian and Ottonian armies to have ranged between several hundreds to mas­sive gatherings of more than 20,000, and for the numbers of the enemies ranged against them to be equally problematic.^[1305] The military levies as reinforcements in the famous Indiculus loricatorum [Index of Armored Contingents] demanded by Otto II to support his army in Italy in 980/981 gives us one notion of the num­bers involved, either as original contingents or as further reinforcements, not as the basic provision for a precise expedition, with no guarantee that this was normal or recurrent. From the archbishop of Mainz and the bishops of Worms and Speyer 100, 40, and 20 men, respectively, were demanded. The abbot of Lorsch was to send 50 men, and three counts, Megingoz, Heribert, and his brother, were asked for 30 men each. If these magnates had not so far been asked to supply troops, this may indicate an average level of support. But here the 1,500 soldiers led by Heriveus, archbishop of Reims in 919, give an alternative sense of scale, into the thousands.^[1306]

The reality on the ground, even with small forces, required investment in organi­zation, physical resources, and manpower, whether for aggression or defense. The sheer expense of putting men in the field, as well as dread of the consequences of their loss, may be one reason why the sources after ca. 800 so often record recur­rent gatherings together and displays of military strength rather than active engage­ment. Bishop Prudentius of Troyes, for example, reports that force was indeed used in 841, but only after discussion and persuasion had failed.^[1307] Even in the contempo­rary accounts of the defensive strategies against Viking and Magyar raids in the last few decades of the ninth century and the early tenth century, recourse to fighting was only one of a range of options pursued. Further, there is a strong ideology of peacemaking and the virtues of a peaceful king.^[1308]

There is also a remarkable paucity of archaeological evidence for fortifications across the entire territory. Some evidence for defensive fortifications is extant in northwest Francia and the lower Rhine in the later ninth century, and there are some scattered references to fortified bridges and fortification of towns in relation to Viking attacks. Very little material corroboration of these, apart from the bridge at Pitres on the Seine, has been unearthed so far. Excavated remnants of boundary walls, ditches, and defensive structures, as well as their dating and ascertainable periods of occupation, have yielded a variety of princely residences, linear terri­torial defenses, defended town walls, and rural settlements, as well as occasional refuge-sites for people and livestock in time of war or in a region subject to inter­mittent hostile raids.

Difficulties of identification have been exacerbated by the possibility of changing functions over time and the difference between private and public or state defense. From the archaeological evidence alone it is not possible to determine how many defensive structures were controlled by local magnates rather than the ruler. Some refuge sites, such as Unterregenbach in Kreis Schwabisch Hall, were effectively hill forts or circular enclosures and appear to have been created in the eighth or ninth century as protection against raiding. In the Ardennes, some prehistoric and Roman sites were reused from time to time in the early Middle Ages, presumably as refuges. In the coastal areas of Holland some large circular ditched and banked enclosures have been discovered, and the Frankish annals report that Charlemagne ordered the building of fortified guard posts along the coast of the Low Countries in specific response to Godofrid’s threats in 808. There appears to be general agree­ment that defensive structures and the repair of old Roman fortifications are rare before the end of the ninth century, and the few known from before that, such as the Danevirke at the base of the Jutland Peninsula, are right on the peripheries of the Carolingian Empire. The evidence from the later tenth century, in both Denmark and Ottonian Saxony, on the other hand, is rather more substantial. A number of “rectangular, banked and ditched enclosures in western Saxony and smaller cir­cular enclosures and ditch and palisades east of the Weser,” as well as ring forts, have been identified.^[1309] Definite evidence of castle structures in masonry further west are similarly few and far between and date from the tenth and eleventh centuries.^[1310]

As a further indication of the maintenance of peace within the Carolingian Empire, the Carolingians constructed large palace complexes without major defen­sive structures. These palaces, built with rich materials and expert workmanship at Aachen, Compiegne, Frankfurt, Ingelheim, Nijmegen, Paderborn, Regensburg, Worms, and elsewhere, were distributed right across the empire and functioned as both occasional residences for the ruler himself as he traveled within his realm, as well as, most probably, bases for the local royal lay or ecclesiastical royal officials. The Ottonians added palaces as Halberstadt, Hildesheim, and Magdeburg, among others, but used family monasteries as royal resting places as well. These palaces included spaces for ceremonial display as well as religious worship and living quar­ters. Aachen was built on the site of a Roman bath complex and incorporated an aula, residential buildings, and a glorious chapel ornamented with marble columns, mosaics, elaborate bronze screens, and monumental bronze doors. Zurich palace was built within an older Roman fortification, and the Roman defensive walls were demolished in the tenth century. A Regia domus was constructed at the abbey St. Denis in Paris for Charlemagne by Abbot Fardulf. Quierzy and Samoussy were equipped with assembly hall and chapel. At Ingelheim there was a 90-meter-wide semicircular building, an aula regia, and wide frontal towers in a Roman style. Nijmegen has not been excavated, but Paderborn was excavated in 2004, where a two-story building with aula and church with rich murals were discovered, which possibly served as the bishops' residence. Paderborn's hall chapel and royal residen­tial quarters were initially defended by earth and timber fortifications destroyed in 778, then replaced with a substantial stone wall.^[1311] Most of these palaces were unfortified. Recent work has suggested that Aachen might have had some kind of moat, though the date is still uncertain. The palaces at Thionville and Herstal, both on the River Moselle, had walls on their landward side, which may or may not merit the description of defensive or protective as opposed to demarcations of space and display.^[1312] Palaces close to the large forests, that were such an important resource for hunters of game, may have had creatures from the natural world, other than armed men, they wanted to keep out of their living quarters.

These palaces were built and decorated with deliberate evocations of the impe­rial past, not least spolia from Roman buildings. Aachen chapel, for example, is usu­ally understood to have been inspired by the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna. The royal aula at Ingelheim was decorated with a series of ruler portraits from Ninus of the Assyrians, Phalaris of Sicily, and Cyrus of the Persians to the Roman emperors Augustus, Constantine, and Theodosius, as well as the Frankish rulers Charles Martel, Pippin III, and Charlemagne themselves.^[1313]