Helmut Reimitz

it seems important to bring the diversity and concurrence of these early

historiographical experiments of Frankish identity more starkly into view,

especially when the question of the relationship of ethnic identity and state

formation is concerned. Such an examination of continuities and

discontinuities of narrative resources in the formation of social coherence

helping us to observe how blueprints for ethnic and national identity were

created, and which were successfully developed in the West in following

centuries.

Mittelalters, 9 (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2004), pp. 23–36.

See also Patrick J. Geary,

The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe

(Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2002).

68

Map 1: Charlemagne’s Empire.

3. F

RANKISH

I

DENTITY IN

C

HARLEMAGNE’S

E

MPIRE

Janet L. Nelson

arly medieval historians have every reason to talk about

gentes

. They

don’t, these days, talk about ‘race’, but about ethnicity, identity, and

nationality. One good reason for

not

talking about race is that, as far as I

can see, there was nothing like a modern idea of race, let alone racism, in the

early Middle Ages. Origin-myths are not to be confused with biological pseudo-

science.

1

True, there’s occasional evidence for stereotyped and highly pejorative

attitudes to other peoples (Notker on Slavs in the 880s; and Saxon historians on

Slavs in the Ottonian period)

2

but these attitudes certainly don’t predominate.

Popes had a style all their own: it was a pope who called the Lombards ‘a foully

E

1

Patrick J.

Geary,

The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe

(Princeton:

University of Princeton Press, 2002). Ten years ago, I briefly addressed the question of

Frankish identity in the Introduction to a collection of my papers,

The Frankish World 750-

900

(London: Hambledon, 1997), pp. xiii–xxxi; and more recently I considered the mutual

effects of historians’ writings and modern national conceptions of ethnic identity in

‘England and the Continent in the Ninth Century

II

: the Vikings and Others’,

Transactions

of the Royal Historical Society

, 6th series, 13 (2003), 1–28. Meanwhile the historiography

continues to grow. I single out particularly the work of Walter Pohl, especially his

‘Introduction’, and ‘Telling the Difference: Signs of Ethnic Identity’, in

Strategies of

Distinction

, pp. 1–15 and 17–69; and his overview in ‘Aux origines d’une Europe ethnique:

identités en transformation entre antiquité et moyen âge’,

Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales

,

60 (2005), 183–208. Some further references are given in the notes that follow.

2

Notker,

Gesta Karoli

, II: 12, ed. by H. F. Haefele, MGH SRG ns, 12 (Berlin:

Weidmann, 1959), p. 75 (tadpoles, worms), compare

I: 27, p. 38, trans. by Lewis Thorpe,

Two Lives of Charlemagne

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 157;

Thietmari

Merseburgensis episcopi chronicon

, III: 17, ed. by Robert Holtzmann, MGH SRG ns, 9

(Berlin: Weidmann, 1955), p. 119 (‘greedy dogs’), trans. by David Warner,

Ottonian

Germany: The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg

(Manchester: Manchester University

Press, 2001), p. 141.

Janet L. Nelson

stinking people’ (‘

foetentissima gens’

)

3

but I know of no comparable statement

from anyone else. Charlemagne noted that

populi

, peoples within his own

empire, intermarried to make alliances ‘

inter partes et regna [. . .] inter se soc-

iari ’.

4

He did so himself: one of his five successive wives was a Lombard; another

was an Alaman; and one of his mistresses was a Saxon.

5

Gentile difference

existed; racism did not. But the experience of writing this paper has taught me

that what gentile identity, specifically Frankish identity, meant to Charlemagne

and his contemporaries, is not so easy to pin down.

Modern historians risk another kind of intellectual pitfall, in casting early

medieval

gentes

as nations. In particular, French and German etiological, and

teleological, national consciousness continues to be projected back onto Charle-

magne, with curious results. M. Favier is disappointed to find Charlemagne

‘ignoring Paris’.

6

Herr Tischler is happy to find Charlemagne’s kingship

fundamentally ‘German’.

7

The eighth-century Franks inconsiderately sprawled

right across ‘national’ frontiers.

Charlemagne’s own thinking about frontiers, Frankish and other, can be seen

in the 806 Division project — or rather the four alternative scenarios for division:

number 1 might seem to respect Frankish identity for it assigns the whole of Fran-

cia — east and west —

to Charlemagne’s eldest son Charles; on the other hand, it

doesn’t respect other gentile identities; Pippin, the second son is assigned along

with Italy and Bavaria, ‘a part of Alamannia’ — a southwestern corner of Ale-

mannia was to be carved out to give Pippin access across the Alps to Noricum and

Chur; scenario 2 provided for the situation if Charles died before the other two,

3

Codex Carolinus

45, ed. by Wilhelm

Gundlach, i

n

Epistolae Merovingici et Karolini

Aevi

,

ed. by Wilhelm Gundlach and Er

nst Dümmler,

MGH Epistolae, 3 (Berlin:

Weidman, 1892),

p. 561, opposing to this, ‘vestra praeclara Francorum gens, quae super

omnes gentes enitet’. See

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.

by Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.

114–61, at pp. 144–45.

4

Capitularia regum Francorum

,

I

, no. 45, c. 12, ed. by Alfred Boretius, MGH Leges,

Sectio 2 (Hannover: Hahn, 1883), p. 129.

5

Einhardi

v

ita Karoli Magni

c. 18, ed. by G. H. Pertz, G. Waitz, and O. Holder-Egger,

MGH SRG, 25 (Hannover: Hahn 1911), pp. 22–23.

6

Jean Favier,

Charlemagne

(Paris: Fayard, 1999), p. 156.

7

Matthias Tischler,

Einharts Vita Karoli: Studien zur Entstehung, Überlieferung und

Rezeption

, MGH Schriften, 48, 2 vols (Hannover: Hahn, 2001),

I

, 223 with n. 471 (‘der

fränkisch Volkskönig’, ‘ein germanisch-patriarchalisch Familienvater’).

72

3. FRANKISH IDENTITY IN CHARLEMAGNE’S EMPIRE

then the two remaining brothers were to divide Charles’s share between them

‘just as I and my brother divided it [in 768]’. Scenario 3 provided for the

situation if Pippin had died — a partition of the Lombard kingdom, with Louis

getting Tuscany and northwest Italy as far as Provence, Charles the rest; the

partition if Louis died was set out in scenario 4 — Pippin was to get part of

Burgundy, Provence, and Septimania ‘as far as Spain’, Charles Aquitaine and

Gascony (map 1).

8

Whatever notions of gentile territory were in their heads,

those who devised this plan were prepared to drive a coach and horses through

them, cheerfully dividing regna and provinces which didn’t in any case coincide

with gentile territories. In light of scenario 2, we shouldn’t assume that scenario

1 reflected the Franks’ desire to preserve Francia’s unity. Look again at the

distribution of royal resources — and you will find that Charles’ share was a

lion’s share of those. This was a very different project from the

descriptio

and

divisio

realised at Verdun in 843, when equal shares were, so far as humanly

possible, the aim and outcome.

9

Our starting-point, then, must be that there is

nothing self-evident about early medieval gentile identities, and nothing to be

taken for granted about the collective agency of men of the same

regio

.

To explore Frankishness in Charlemagne’s empire, I will now look first at annals

— briefly, because Helmut Reimitz is dealing expertly with them. Then, second, I

want to ask Einhard a few questions. Third, I look at miscellaneous texts that evince

near-total silence on Frankish or any other ethnicity. If there’s a civilizing mission

here, it’s not a Frankish-inspired one. Finally I consider capitularies and legal

business as the locus par excellence of ethnic practice. I argue that ethnic identity in

this area was not — or not only — a situational construct

10

but an operational

8

Capitularia regum Francorum

,

I

, no. 45, c. 1–4, pp. 127–28. See Peter Classen, ‘Karl

der Große und der Thronfolge im Frankenreich’, in

Festschrift für H. Heimpel

, 3 vols

(Göttingen, 1972),

III

, 109–34 (with very interesting maps). The map in this volume does

not show these scenarios and is provided for a more general reader.

9

Nithard,

Historiarum Libri

IV

. 4–5, ed. by Ernest Müller, MGH SRG, 44 (Hannover:

Hahn, 1907), pp. 46–47, trans. by Bernhard W. Scholz,

Carolingian Chronicles

(Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), pp. 169–72;

Annales Bertiniani

, s.a. 842, 843,

ed. by Felix Grat and others (Paris: Klincksiek, 1964), pp. 43–45, and

The Annals of St-

Bertin: Ninth-Century Histories,

I

, trans. and annoted by Janet Nelson

(Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 1991), pp. 54 and 56. See Janet Nelson,

‘Le partage de

Verdun’, in

Media Francia

, ed. by H. Pettiau (forthcoming).

10

Patrick J.

Geary, ‘Ethnic Identity as a Situational Construct in the Early Middle Ages’,

Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien

, 113 (1983), 15–26: a path-breaking

paper.

73

Janet L. Nelson

tactic for the securing of rights not necessarily against Franks, but in negotiation

with them, and with neighbours of whatever ethnic group. Modern stereotypes of

imperialism are unhelpful here.

Annals

The notion that the

Annales regni Francorum

were a form of official

propaganda produced in the reign of Charlemagne isn’t a new one, though it’s

recently had a new lease of life.

11

Exponents of the propaganda argument ought

to ask themselves more insistently about audience. At whom were the annals

directed? A comparison helps: the

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

I always found just a

wee bit hard to swallow the notion that these annals were produced by King

Alfred in order ‘to indoctrinate the West Saxons with loyalty to himself and

enthusiasm for his cause’,

12

as if they went in for public readings of a text which

is so very unlike the stirring rhythms and themes of

Beowulf

. But at least the

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

was written in the vernacular Old English. Contrast the

Annales regni Francorum

: in 793, at Würzburg or Frankfurt, how many laymen

would have been able to understand, let alone be stirred to enthusiasm by, the

account of the canal-building? You all know the dénouement: they dug and dug,

‘sed in cassum. Nam propter iuges pluvias, et terram, quae palustris erat, nimio

humore naturaliter infectam, opus quod fiebat consistere non potuit; sed

quantum interdiu terrae a fossoribus fierat egestum, tantum noctibus humo

iterum in locum suum relabente subsidebat

’.

13

All right, there were successes:

11

Rosamond McKitterick,

History and Memory in the Carolingian World

(Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2004), chapter 4, pp. 84

–119 and chapter 6, pp. 133

–35 ; and

for a different view, Roger Collins, ‘The “Reviser” 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. by Alexander

Callander Murray (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 191–213, esp. p. 192.

12

R. H. C. Davis, ‘Alfred the Great: Propaganda and Truth’,

History

, 56 (1971), 169–

82 (p. 182).

13

Annales regni Francorum

, s.a. 793, p. 93. I have put this passage in

Latin so that

readers can try the effects of reading it aloud (and letting

naturaliter

resonate); but see

also the translation of P. D. King,

Charlemagne: Translated Sources

(Lambrigg: King,

1987), p. 125: ‘But it was to no avail, for because of constant rain and the ground, which

was swampy and in the nature of things thoroughly waterlogged, the work which was

done could not hold. However much soil the diggers excavated during the day, an

equivalent amount would slide down to replace it at night’. See Paolo Squatriti, ‘Digging

74

3. FRANKISH IDENTITY IN CHARLEMAGNE’S EMPIRE

the bringing home of the Avar treasure in 796 and its distribution by

Charlemagne ‘

in palatio suo, liberali manu’

.

14

But interestingly enough there is

no mention of the Franks in that passage. Now the idea of the Franks as a

Chosen People isn’t the same thing as Frankish identity but it’s surely closely

connected, as cause or effect or both. Mary Garrison has done an excellent job of

cutting this well-loved motif down to size — for instance by pointing out that

Josiah was invoked in the

Admonitio generalis

as a model for Charlemagne, not

Charlemagne as a new Josiah; and the Franks aren’t mentioned there at all.

15

What’s evoked by the liturgy, the poetry, the paraphernalia of the Aachen court,

is the notion of a Christian people — as often as not without any ethnic

signifier — which suggests that the people was multiethnic. Not even Alcuin’s

invocation of a

beata gens

and a

felix populus

includes any explicit reference to

the Franks. There, I would go further than Garrison in seeing the reference to a

Christian people of many peoples, rather than any actual single

gens

.

Einhard

He’s responsible, isn’t he, for our image of Charlemagne the Frank? Einhard

constructs Charlemagne in ethnic terms that are also profoundly gendered.

Suetonius offered him, ready-made, a model of

vir

tus in the public man and the

private man. The Frankish

gens

could be like the Roman

gens

, the group in

which and for which the public virtue of manliness was displayed. If the wars

and the family provided theatres for complementary demonstrations of this, the

description of Charlemagne’s person and dress showed masculine virtue

embodied. For whom was the show? Not for Charlemagne, certainly, for he had

died some fifteen years (probably) before Einhard wrote, though there were still

some about who were, like Einhard himself, survivors of Charlemagne’s court.

Einhard reached out, from his private

otium

at Seligenstadt, to the busy public

servants at Aachen, and to a younger generation of the elite. With what he

hoped would be a passport to continued influence, he addressed the Emperor

Louis, and leading clerics, but he also made a strong pitch for the attention of

laymen who were new men: students of Latin and Christian rhetoric in an age

Ditches in Early Medieval Europe’,

Past and

Present

,

176 (2002), 11–65 (pp. 11–6 and

49–51).

14

Annales regni Francorum,

s.a. 796, p. 98-99, trans. by King,

Charlemagne

,

p. 127.

15

Garrison, ‘The Franks as the New Israel?’, p. 147.

75

Janet L. Nelson

of new, defensive, warfare, men who had learned not only to walk the walk but

to talk the talk. Walter Pohl recently suggested that Einhard in stressing that

Charlemagne wore the garb of his Frankish forefathers (

vestitus patrius

) was

actually criticising ‘many Frankish aristocrats who did not wear it’.

16

It’s a

thought-provoking suggestion — but it assumes that there really was a

distinctive Frankish dress. The story about Saxons who snuck their way into a

Frankish camp in 775 along with Frankish foragers one summer-day at siesta-

time, then began to slaughter the snoozing Franks, doesn’t suggest that Franks

and Saxons looked different from each other, whether in terms of costume,

facial hair, or weapons.

17

An alternative reading to Pohl’s would be this, that the

‘Frankish’ qualities Einhard depicted in Charlemagne were not in fact specific

to the Franks: in the literary form of the

Vita Karoli

muscular Latin

Christianity was an ideal of manliness for the multi-ethnic elite of Louis le

Pieux’s empire. It had limits, of course: Einhard offset it against

peregrina

indumenta

, which were what they wore in Rome and I think we could add in

Constantinople. ‘Foreign clothes’ consisted above all in a long tunic, and a long

robe. Frankish clothes, first and foremost, consisted of pants, and a short tunic.

The punchline of Charlemagne’s best joke was to the effect that the eastern

emperor should have sent Charlemagne’s envoy back on his thousand mile

journey not with platitudes or pseudo-authoritative grants of provinces, but

with a good pair of breeches.

18

16

Walter

Pohl, ‘Franken und Sachsen: die Bedeutung ethnischer Prozesse im 7. und 8.

Jahrhundert’, in

799. Kunst und Kultur der Karolignerzeit: Karl der Gro

ße und Papst Leo

III in Paderborn, Beirtr

äge zum Katalog der Ausstellung Paderborn 1999

, ed. by Christoph

Stiegemann and Matthias Wemhoff (Mainz: von Zabern 1999), pp. 233–36 (p. 234).

17

Annales regni Francorum

,

s.a. 775, p. 43, trans. by King,

Charlemagne

,

p. 112.

18

This joke is retailed by Notker, but I venture to regard it as representative of

Frankish humour of the period of Charlemagne as well as the later ninth century,

Gesta

Karoli

, II: 5, pp. 52–53 (my translation): ‘In the midst of such concerns [war and man-

management], the great-hearted Emperor in no way omitted to send envoys bearing letters

and gifts to all kinds of kings of very distant places; and from these, in return, were sent the

honours of all these provinces. When from the midst of the Saxon war he sent envoys to

the king at Constantinople, the king asked [the envoys] whether the kingdom of his son

Charles was at peace or was it suffering incursions from neighbouring peoples? The chief

envoy replied that all was at peace except that a certain people called the Saxons were

disturbing the Franks’ frontiers with very frequent acts of brigandage. “Oh dear”, said that

man who was sluggish in idleness and was useless for any warlike action, “why does my son

struggle against enemies who are so few, have no reputation and totally lack manly

courage? You can have that people, together with everything that belongs to them!”

76

3. FRANKISH IDENTITY IN CHARLEMAGNE’S EMPIRE

According to Einhard Charlemagne’s ‘Frankish’ clothing in winter included

a kind of pullover or jerkin made of pelts,

ex pellibus

. Whoever interpolated the

phrase ‘lutrinis vel murinis’, ‘of otters and ermines’ in c. 23 (this is a variant that

Matthias Tischler has persuasively argued was not in Einhard’s original) may

have borrowed it from the late Roman historian Justin; but a capitulary of 808

fixed the prices of garments made from the pelts of martens and otters at 30

solidi

and of ‘better-quality ermines’ at 10

solidi

.

19

These were evidently items of

high-status exchange (Tim Reuter wrote of a ‘parallel circulation of goods’

alongside the ‘normal’ economy)

20

apparently operating in a particularly lively

way in border regions (

in marcha

). These were pre-eminently zones of ethnic

mixing. You bought your otterskin jerkin to show your status, and also that you

belonged to the

partes

of Charles. Did that make you feel a Frank? An honorary

Frank? For such men, Charlemagne’s jerkin could have made him an

emblematic figure of a frontier zone that Tim Reuter called the Wild East,

where Franks interacted with, and even shaded off into, assorted Others.

Miscellaneous texts

In making an empire, Charlemagne not only encountered many non-Franks but

roped them in. Encounters with Others are often thought to have led to sharper

definitions of one’s own identity. Charlemagne’s empire, less predictably,

promoted, and even constructed, other identities. It was not until two

generations after Charlemagne’s death that an East Frankish author defined an

emperor as one who ruled over plural

regna

.

21

Charlemagne ruled as a monarch

for precisely ten years: 771–81. Thereafter, having recreated autonomous

regna

When the envoy returned and reported this to the most warlike Charles, he laughed and

said: “That king would have done you a lot more of a good turn if he’d given you some

breeches for your long journey back!”’

19

Capitularia regum Francorum

,

I

, no. 52, c. 5, p. 140, compare Tischler,

Einharts Vita

Karoli

,

I

, 102–6.

20

Timothy Reuter, ‘Plunder and tribute in the Carolingian Empire’,

Transactions of

the Royal Historical Society

, 5th series, 35 (

1985), 75–94 (p. 85) (repr. in Timothy Reuter,

Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities

, ed. by Janet Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2006), pp. 231–50 (p. 240).

21

Annales Fuldenses

, s.a. 869, ed. by Friedrich Kurze, MGH SRG, 7 (Hannover: Hahn,

1891), p. 70 and

The

Annals of Fulda: Ninth-Century Histories,

II

, trans. and annotated by

Timothy Reuter

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 61.

77

Janet L. Nelson

for his sons Pippin and Louis in what had been Lombard Italy and in Aquitaine,

Charlemagne was a king of kings. Pippin and Louis were Franks, but their

mother was descended from the dukes of Alemannia, and Charlemagne ensured

that they ruled as, respectively, Lombard and Aquitanian kings.

22

It was

Charlemagne who in his son’s name perpetuated the Lombard tradition of

administrative law for Lombard consumption.

23

It was Charlemagne who

staged, in Saxony, a reception of Louis and the noble boys in his entourage all of

them dressed as little Gascons.

24

It was a charming charade, no more and no less.

Aquitanians and Gascons were distinct

gentes

, though ruled in a single

regnum

.

Louis went native, as Pippin did in Italy, because the natives had in their own

ways gone Frank. At these kings’ courts, and in their entourages, Franks and

natives rubbed shoulders. They fought Charlemagne’s wars, and together they

extended the frontiers of what Einhard called the

regnum Francorum

.

25

Charlemagne’s sons followed their father’s example. Thanks to Charlemagne’s

cousin Adalard, author

c

. 812 of the

De ordine palatii

, we have direct testimony

to the way Charlemagne brought the men of his far-flung regions together: ‘

ut

sicut hoc regnum Deo auctore ex pluribus regionibus constat, ex diversis etiam

eisdem regionibus [. . .] ministri eligerentur qualiter familiarius quaeque

regiones palatium adire possent, dum suae genealogiae vel regionis consortes in

palatio locum tenere cognoscerent’

.

26

Interestingly, in Adalard’s work, the word

22

On Louis’s regime in Aquitaine, see Philippe Depreux,

Prosopographie de l’entourage

de Louis le Pieux

(Sigmaringen: Thoerbecke, 1997), pp. 25–6 and 42–6; on Pippin’s in

Italy, see François Bougard, ‘Public power and authority’, in

Italy in the Earlier Middle

Ages

, ed. by Christina La Rocca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 34–58, esp.

pp. 49–51; see further C. Villa, ‘Cultura classica e tradizione Longobarde: tralatino e

volgare’, in

Paolo Diacono e l’origine dell’Europa medievale

, ed. by P. Chiesa (Udine:

Forum. 2000), pp. 575–600; Brigitte Kasten,

Königssöhne und Königsherrschaft:

Untersuchungen zur Teilhabe am Reich

, MGH Schriften, 44

(Hannover: Hahn, 1997), pp.

272–303; and Janet Nelson, ‘Charlemagne —

pater optimus

?’, in

Am Vorabend der

Kaiserkrönung. Das Epos ‘Karolus magnus und Leo papa’

, ed. by Peter Godman and others

(Berlin: Akademie, 2002), pp. 269–82.

23

Capitularia regum Francorum

,

I

, nos 90–103, pp. 190–212 (with some revised

datings from François Bougard,

La justice dans le royaume d’Italie de la fin du VIIIe siècle

au début du XIe siècle

(Rome:

École français de Rome,

1995) ).

24

Astronomus,

Vita Hludowici imperatoris

, c. 4, ed. by Ernst Tremp, MGH SRG, 64

(Hannover: Hahn, 1995), p. 294.

25

Einhard,

Vita Karoli

, c. 15, p. 17.

26

De ordine palatii

c. IV (cap. 18), ed. by Thomas Gross and Rudolf Schieffer, MGH

Fontes iuris germanici antiqui, 3 (Hannover: Hahn, 1980), p. 66, ll. 296–301. For the

78