The empire of the Frankish king Charlemagne encompassing western and central continental Europe, but not Iberia and Scandinavia.
The dynastic roots of the Carolingian empire are found in the seizure of the throne by Charlemagne’s father, Pepin, in the 750s. The empire lasted into the tenth century after its division with the Treaty of Verdun in 842.
Earlier Frankish kings had established control of northern and central France, and Charlemagne’s grandfather Charles Martel had halted Muslim expansion across the Pyrenees in 732. Pepin involved the Franks in Lombard Italy, and Charlemagne pushed Frankish and Christian authority eastward into German and Avar territories as far as the Elbe River and the Hungarian plain. The pope crowned him emperor on Christmas Day 800. His only surviving son, Louis the Pious, ruled alone and with his three sons, who in turn divided the territory among themselves, one of them retaining the title emperor. The empire was ruled through territorial counts, dukes, and markgrafs with virtually no bureaucracy and a heavy reliance on members of the Catholic clergy for record keeping.
Land constituted the major factors of both production and wealth, creating a near-subsistence level economy for the vast majority of people in the empire. For the most part, either the nobility or the Catholic Church, especially large monasteries, controlled the land, which was worked by both free and enserfed peasants. The emperor and his entourage lived off of the produce of imperial estates, traveling among them to consume what was their due. The marginal agricultural surpluses and some craft items produced on estates were exchanged or sold locally, and local foodstuffs supported those who lived and worked in towns, which were either old Roman establishments or newer settlements that served the local agricultural or monastic communities. Frankish silver pennies (denarii) minted throughout the realm circulated in the Carolingian territories, as did Arabic dirhams and English coins, to lubricate local trade. In 744, Pepin ordered bishops to establish, maintain, and protect at least one regular market in each diocese, evidence that a local supply and demand did exist. Long-distance trade consisted largely of fine cloths, wine, salt, and luxury goods both foreign and domestic.
Charlemagne, the Frankish king who united western Europe in the eighth century and helped restart continent-wide trade after the Dark Ages, is shown being crowned king of Italy by Pope Adrian I in Milan in 774. The painting detail shown here dates from the early nineteenth century. (The Art Archive/Musée du Château de Versailles/Dagli Orti)
Regional and even international fairs and markets also operated throughout the Carolingian period, fueled by both local and long-distance supply and demand and fostered by the relative security that the Carolingian government could afford. From the seventh century, regular fairs were held at the royal monastery of Saint Denis near Paris on October 9 after the grape harvest. In February 775, a second fair was instituted there by Charlemagne. The scant records indicate that foreign merchants from England, Frisia, and elsewhere came to trade for wine, honey, and dyestuffs, among a broader range of goods. In Italy, Carolingians supported a long-running fair at Pavia, a major Lombard city at which three transalpine roads met. From there, northern goods would have found their way south to Rome, Bari, or Venice, while Italian and eastern Mediterranean goods would have moved north into Frankish cities or the imperial court. Trade at Lombard Piacenza was so brisk that officially recognized fair days were extended from one per year to five periods totaling forty-three days. Such specificity of place and time served several important purposes: sellers and buyers knew when and where to gather, local authorities could provide necessary protection and other services to the traders, taxes could be collected easily, and unproductive competition among these centers could be avoided.
Inside the empire, the authorities, both local and imperial, fostered the activities of merchants and benefited from them as well. The emperors, nobility, and high churchmen created the chief demand for long-distance trade goods and saw to it that port facilities, roads, and bridges were maintained. Imperial law mandated that the local count or bishop be present when gold and silver items, horses, and slaves were being sold or bartered. In 811, Charlemagne had the Roman lighthouse at Boulogne restored to use for the aid of coastal shipping. His Capitulary of Thionville exempted from tolls goods that merchants carried for their own use. In 828, Louis the Pious granted merchants the status of fideles, or imperial vassals, who were due special protection and exemptions from tolls and other charges. Essentially, all merchants were expected to provision the imperial court. As these negociatores or mercatores followed the old Roman roads in their various stages of disrepair and crossed or traveled up and down Europe’s rivers—the Loire, Meuse, Scheldt, Rhine, Po, Danube, and Seine—they met the collectors of local and imperial tolls and fees. By land they would be subject to the rotagium (wheel tax), pulveraticum (overland carriage toll), pontaticum (bridge toll), and portaticum (ferry crossing fee), and by water, the cespitaticum (mooring fee) and Mute (Rhine river tolls). In April 841, French king Charles the Bald requisitioned the service of twenty-eight merchant ships moored near Rouen in the Seine to ferry his troops to Paris. This instance not only indicates yet another way in which rulers benefited from commercial activity, but also informs us of the level of activity at this important Seine River port.
In the north, Quentovic and Duurstede served as the major ports for Scandinavian, English, and Baltic traffic. Where towns were few and far between, fortified trading stations (Latin: portus; Saxon: wik) facilitated exchanges along the eastern borders with the Slavs as well as provided military outposts. In the southeast, Venice was the major doorway for both Muslim and Byzantine goods, including fine cloth and spices. Much of this was paid for in Carolingian gold, which disappeared as currency as this trade dried up in the dynasty’s later years. Little is known of trade with Muslim-held Iberia or southern Italy, though its local importance is likely.
In the course of the ninth century, economic conditions, and apparently trade, deteriorated. The empire went from an offensive growing stance to one of defensive, protective stasis, and then division. Military assaults from shipborne Scandinavians (Vikings) and Arabs in the Mediterranean devastated coastal and river areas and closed ports, while aggressive and swiftly moving Magyars (Hungarians) knifed into central Europe and Italy, disrupting the movement of traffic and wrecking what urban life there was.
Joseph P. Byrne
See also: Middle Ages.
Hodges, Richard, and David Whitehouse. Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.