7
The Family Deployed, ‘… all Saxony subjugated’
I. CHARLES AND HILDEGARD AND THEIR CHILDREN: WORMS AND ROME, 781
In 780 Charles decided the futures of his four surviving sons (little Lothar having died). ‘He left Pippin and [Young] Charles at Worms’ may not sound like a major decision. Neither the ArF nor the ArF reviser mentioned it; indeed the only writer to do so was the well-informed contemporary author of the Mosel Annals whose wording indicated that Pippin the first-born was regarded, still, as the special and senior son of Charles, recognized as such by the aulici at Worms, the major royal residence at this point in the reign.1 Born (probably) in 769, Pippin was of age, or very nearly so. To be a first-born son, a primogenitus, was, as Cathwulf had emphasized, a status strongly approved in Scripture.2 Young Charles, born in 773, was not yet of age. Charles had already made plans, along with Hildegard, which involved the other two sons and the family journey to Rome. The paired decisions concerning the two sons left at Worms and the two taken to Rome were tantamount to – though not referred to as such in the historiography – a division-project.3 Provisional as such projects were, they offered road-maps for the future, and a ‘spread bet’ in case of disaster.
Charles and Hildegard had decided to bring with them to Rome four of their children: Rotrud (aged six), Carloman (four), Louis (three) and Berta (one).4 The priorities of Charles and Hildegard as they travelled across the Alps to Rome ‘for the purpose of prayer’ at St Peter’s shrine were the futures of Carloman and Louis. Charles came to Italy this time not with squadrons of battle-hardened Frankish warriors but with a small army of servants and nursemaids equipped with push-chairs.5 And Hildegard was pregnant again. They arrived at Pavia to celebrate Christmas; and for Charles this surely recalled the events of 773–4, the siege of the Lombard capital and his rushed visit to Rome to meet the pope. Seven years on, priorities were different for both Charles and Hadrian.
Hadrian had had to wait much longer than he could have expected (he had started to wait in late 774) to see Charles revisit Rome.6 Perhaps – and these are only guesses – Charles put his recent contacts, Duke Hildeprand of Spoleto and Abbot Anselm of Nonantula, to work in providing hospitality for the royal family en route from Pavia to Rome in the spring of 781. It was not until 15 April that Charles and Hildegard arrived at Rome (by then the queen was near to giving birth to her eighth child, Gisela, named for the baby’s aunt, Charles’s sister).7 In 778, Hadrian had been repeating his territorial claims of 774, and excoriating assorted ‘abominables’ who seemed hell-bent on thwarting him: Beneventans, Neapolitans, Greeks, the patrician of Sicily.8 By 781, Hadrian’s sights were more limited (he was claiming no more than particular bits of land in a region near Rome), and his tones were more measured. He was also in charge of the liturgical arrangements required to effect the baptism of Carloman, and the anointings and coronations of Carloman and Louis as kings of Italy and Aquitaine respectively.9 These rituals established spiritual ties of compaternity and commaternity with the boys’ parents. Bonds of spiritual kinship with the Carolingian royal family had been constructed by Stephen II and Paul. Now Hadrian seized the chance to create similar bonds with Charles and Hildegard, and to repeat references to them in his letters. From 781 to early 783, which was as long as Hildegard lived, Hadrian wrote of her as ‘most excellent daughter and spiritual commater (co-mother)’, as well as addressing Charles as compater, co-father.10 These were symbolic relationships, without implications for potential allegations of incest or, indeed, for political alliance. They were important for Hadrian, as they had been for several previous eighth-century popes. But it’s possible to exaggerate an importance which varied with often misty circumstances.11
Clear-cut, by contrast, was the (re-)creation of two regna, kingdoms: for Carloman, that of the Lombards (soon to be called the kingdom of Italy); and that of the Aquitanians for Louis. Italy has been considered much the more important regnum. It was much more fully documented than Aquitaine and had the distinctive contours of a kingdom; for centuries, the Lombards had had well-known borders, and had been ruled by kings who gave laws and appointed officials to police them. Aquitaine was different, for it had been ruled not by kings but by warrior-dukes. Fortunately for Louis, his Aquitanian regnum was written up by the Astronomer as chapters 3–33 of the Life of Louis, on the basis of the memories of a fellow-Aquitanian, Ademar, which gave an insider’s account of the region’s government, life and culture.12
The baptism of Carloman had been long deferred: the baby boy born in 777 was now four years old, and the rite of baptism, both in canon law and in what is known of actual practice, was normally given to infants.13 Why the delay in Carloman’s case? It looks as if Hadrian was determined to perform this baptism in person, and so replicate with Charles the spiritual relationship of compaternitas, co-fatherhood, that Charles’s father had had with popes Stephen II and Paul. Another reason for the delay was that Charles had had to take on such heavy commitments elsewhere between 778 and 781 that Hadrian’s pressing invitations to Rome fell on deaf ears. Hadrian could only wait, determined that he and no other should baptize the third of Charles’s sons who was now to rule Italy. Reviving in this new generation the compaternity bond between the dynasty and the papacy meant much to both Charles and Hadrian; and when Archbishop Thomas of Milan baptized baby Gisela in May, as the royal family were en route back to Francia, imitation was the sincerest form of flattery.14
The exceptional feature of the 781 plan was that Carloman’s name should be changed to Pippin. There is a historians’ consensus-view that Hadrian chose the new name because it evoked that of Charles’s father, grantor in 754 of the Donation of Quierzy whereby Pope Stephen II had received an extensive ‘patrimony’, a res publica, in Italy. Two Frankish campaigns in the mid-750s had failed to force successive Lombard kings, Aistulf and Desiderius, to recognize the papacy’s rights over these territories.15 From 774, when the Donation of Quierzy was confirmed, Pippin was a name for the pope to cherish. In the years just after the Frankish takeover of the Lombard kingdom, Hadrian was still fighting these old battles against Lombard claims. At stake for the papacy in the name-change of Carloman, then, was the perpetuation of the spiritual bond. More than compaternity was (re-)created: Hadrian conferred the magic of legitimacy on this highly irregular situation.16 For ordinary mortals, what was significant in Carloman’s name-change was that there were now two (half- ) brothers with the same name, two Pippins.
Why Charles and Hildegard had chosen the name ‘Carloman’ for their third son in 777 is not an easy question to answer. Though the name itself was well-established in the dynasty, the circumstances of the ‘retirement’ to a monastery of Charles’s uncle Carloman in summer 747 (only months before Charles’s own birth on 4 April 748) remained (and remain) unclear. The name had been overclouded (to borrow an apt word from the ArF reviser in another context) during the fraternal conflicts between Charles and his brother Carloman during the years 768–71, and thrown into even darker shadow after Carloman’s death which, within a little over two years, left utterly obscure the fates of Carloman’s sons. It is a striking fact that no other Carolingian king gave his son the name Carloman until some sixty years later, and even then, it would only be given to a boy far down the birth-order of a set of siblings or destined for a career in the church. Had the name carried shades of ill-omen for Charles? Had its re-use in 777 evoked feelings of regret, even guilt? Perhaps Hadrian hatched the renaming plan with Charles with the aim of making Carloman ‘reborn’ in the font of baptism and to give him a new ‘clean’ name. The contemporary and close-to-court authors of the Mosel Annals and the Lorsch Annals entered the same words under 781: ‘King Charles went to Rome and his son was baptized there, the son who had been named Carloman but whom Pope Hadrian, after changing the name, called Pippin.’17
Hildegard approved the plan together with Charles. She too saw matters from her own personal standpoint. The future of Pippin the first-born was not her concern: after all, she was his stepmother, not his mother. She wanted to have her son become king of the Lombards, and to have him re-christened, as it were, with the name that resonated most loudly in the dynasty into which she had married. She as well as Charles was an interested party in the name-change: this becomes clear in the light of a piece of contemporary evidence, the dedicatory poem for an evangelistary – a book of Gospel readings – written by a scribe called Godescalc and now kept in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Charles and Hildegard commissioned it ‘in the fourteenth year of his reign’, that is, 781. The poem opens:
Charles pious king of the Franks along with his excellent wife Hildegard
ordered this exceptional work to be written.
The lord king of kings, glory of the heavens, Christ,
watches over their lives with his salvation-bringing name.
And near the end, the poem describes the baptismal renaming:
The co-father lifted from the blessed waters the white-clad child
reborn in the font and washed by holy baptism,
sprung from the famed line of Charles the prince,
the child Carloman, whose name was now changed to Pippin.
An accompanying picture shows an eight-columned structure around a fountain of life within a paradisal scene, and art historians have interpreted this as evoking Cathwulf’s columns supporting a just king and a just realm.18
A foil to Godescalc’s poem is a set of Laudes regiae, liturgical acclamations sung in honour and in the presence of rulers in the Latin West and in this form, though related to other types of acclamations for the arrivals of potentates, or for triumphal processions. It is a distinctively Carolingian genre.19 This set, now preserved in Montpellier, is among the earliest sets to survive, dated to between 783 and 792. It begins thus:
Karolo excellentissimo et a Deo coronato
magno et pacifico rege Francorum et Langobardorum
ac patricio Romanorum, vita et victoria!
Salvator mundi, tu lo iuva!
Sancte Iohannis, tu lo iuva!
Exaudi Christe!
(To Charles the most excellent and crowned by God,
great and pacific king of the Franks and the Lombards
and patricius of the Romans, life and victory!20
Saviour of the world, help him!
St John, help him!
Hear O Christ!)
The second verse is:
Pipino et Karolo
nobilissimis eius filiis, vita!
Exaudi Christe!
(To Pippin and Charles
his most noble sons, life!
Hear O Christ!)
The third:
Pipino rege Longobardorum, vita!
Sancti Mauricii, tu lo iuva!
Exaudi Christe!
(To Pippin king of the Lombards, life!
St Maurice, help him!
Hear O Christ!)21
Carloman’s name-change at first looks highly problematic, given that Charles’s first-born Pippin was still very much alive. There are precedents or parallels for a prince’s name being changed, but no case of a name-change resulting in two half-brothers having the same name at the same time.22 Perhaps, though, not everyone at the time saw this as a problem at all. In the Laudes just cited, the two Pippins are hailed in consecutive verses, differentiated in ways perfectly clear to contemporaries. Whoever composed, chanted or heard these Laudes evidently saw no incongruity in offering them for two different Pippins, one after the other.
The decisions about the two kingdoms, Italy and Aquitaine, were put into immediate effect. Louis was taken to Orléans, where he made a ritual crossing of the Loire into his kingdom in some kind of portable chair, and his subsequent royal itinerary was between the four palaces of Aquitaine (of which Chasseneuil in Poitou was the chief residence). Pippin entered his Lombard kingdom and resided at Pavia. Each child-king was provided with baiuli, functionaries who acted as regents and tutorial advisers.23 As each of the boys came of age, a fully fledged court and palace coalesced around him.
II. TASSILO MEETS CHARLES AT WORMS, 781
Tassilo, duke of Bavaria, born in 741, and Charles, born in 748, were first-cousins. There is a backstory to Tassilo’s life which in this book has not yet been taken into account, though it has important implications for the way the ArF should be understood. So far, I have drawn extensively on the ArF without exploring the purpose of its author (or authors), their intended audience, or who commissioned them and when. It is high time to look more closely into why the historian who set out in the 1980s to review these questions, Matthias Becher, ended up with a new interpretation, published in 1993. Running through these annals, Becher realized, was a series of episodes, of which the first, in 757, represented Tassilo as publicly subordinating himself to his uncle King Pippin at Compiègne in an event that could well have been witnessed by the nine-year-old Charles.24 What can be seen now – though for well over a century of modern scholarship it was not seen – as the simple method of comparing the ArF (and their dependent accounts, the revised ArF and the AMP) with the independent accounts in contemporary minor annals (the Ann. Mos., Ann. Lauriss. and Ann. Petav.), reveals that oath-swearings and a commendation ‘in vasatico’ (into a vassal-relationship) were inserted into the ArF’s story of 757 at a significantly later moment – soon after Charles deprived Tassilo of his dukedom and imprisoned him in a monastery in 788.25 In other words, it was only once Tassilo had been deposed and Charles had annexed Bavaria that the king commissioned a justificatory account of these events for the consumption of a wide and largely Frankish public.
The ongoing story of relations between Tassilo and Charles up to and including 781 was not one of Tassilo’s increasing subordination to Charles. The two cousins ruled in a curious unsynchronized counterpoint to each other. It used to be thought that they were almost the same age, until, in a stunning piece of detective work published in 1973, the late K. F. Werner made a strong case for Charles’s having been born in 747; and in 1992 Becher fine-tuned the argument by showing that Charles was born in 748.26 Rather than being of more or less the same age, Tassilo was seven years older than Charles. When Tassilo’s father, Duke Odilo, died in 748 and the mayor of the palace Pippin helped install young Tassilo in his father’s place, Charles was a babe-in-arms; and when Tassilo came of age, Charles had only recently lost his first milk-tooth.
In the 760s, there is rich documentary material from Bavaria for Tassilo’s founding and giving to monasteries and dealing justice in disputes over their property.27 Not until the 770s would the same be true of Charles. Tassilo had married, probably in 763, Liutperga, a daughter of King Desiderius, and soon after Pippin’s death in September 768, Tassilo went to Rome to forge a friendship with Pope Stephen III.28 Charles married another daughter of Desiderius in 770: Charles and Tassilo may well have become brothers-in-law after Queen Bertrada, en route for Rome, had diplomatically attended the Council of Dingolfing where she witnessed decrees being laid down ‘thanks to the action of the lord Tassilo, the princeps’, and the Bavarian bishops and abbots signalled their solidarity by making a formal prayer-brotherhood nineteen-strong.29 At Neuchingen in 772, a council issued more decrees, this time (mostly) De popularibus legibus (‘concerning secular laws’), ‘with the help of the princeps, lord Tassilo’, and again, Tassilo entitled himself princeps and dominus. Charles gave or confirmed many gifts to churches in the early 770s; but he did not summon councils. For most of 771, Charles and Tassilo were still brothers-in-law: only late that year did Charles repudiate his Lombard wife, thereby risking a serious falling-out with Tassilo. The duke chose discretion over valour, and steered clear of vengeance. But contemporaries within Charles’s own family, notably his cousin Adalhard, who withdrew from the court to the monastery of Corbie, made plain their disapproval of Charles’s action.30
The relationship between the former brothers-in-law now became more obviously competitive. In 772, the year when Charles first campaigned in Saxony and destroyed the Irminsul, Tassilo sent his son Theodo to Desiderius and thence to Rome to be baptized at Whitsun by Hadrian, who thus made Tassilo his compater.31 That same year, annal-writers at Salzburg and Regensburg registered Tassilo’s victory against the Carinthians on his south-eastern border.32 When Charles, in 773, was considering negotiations with Desiderius for the transfer into his own custody of his nephews, the Lombard king’s protégés, Hadrian, steeled by Charles, refused to consecrate them as kings.33
Duke Tassilo, his wife the Duchess Liutperga and their son Duke Theodo, out of special devotion for the salvation of their souls, sent a magnificent embassy … to Rome with very large gifts. King Charles would let only two of the envoys past, Bishop Alim of Säben and Abbot Atto of Mondsee … Tassilo was displeased and felt insulted that his cousin King Charles had refused to let his men through and was seized by great bitterness towards him. Charles, for his part, was anxious about Tassilo, who, he thought, was becoming too powerful. Tassilo was certainly at one with the Saxons, Wends and Huns, all of whom had long been sworn and mortal enemies of King Charles and all the kings in Francia.34
Charles and Tassilo competed to attract praise and advice from courtier-clerics in the 770s: Tassilo from an Irish scholar, Clement, probably in 772, Charles from the Anglo-Saxon Cathwulf in 775.35 After Charles had captured Pavia, deposed Desiderius and become king of the Lombards in 774, both Tassilo and Charles devoted themselves to expanding their territories, and to conflict-management on and beyond their borders, in careers that ran in parallel. In the hindsight knowledge of 787–8, Stuart Airlie asked, ‘What made Tassilo so dangerous?’36 It could also be worth asking if and when Tassilo was dangerous. Tassilo and Charles seem to have treated each other in the 770s and early 780s warily. ‘In a sense’, to quote Airlie again, ‘Tassilo was Charlemagne’s “significant other”.’ Perhaps the onset of Charles’s perception of Tassilo as an insidious threat should be dated to 773, and Airlie’s ‘in a sense’ should be left ambiguous.
In 781, before Charles left Rome, he and his new compater Hadrian had thought up plans to bring Tassilo, also a compater of Hadrian, and Charles on to terms of respect for each other. The ArF and the revised ArF both reported Charles’s return to Francia after April, adding that the pope sent two bishops, Formosus and Damasus, as envoys, as well as Charles’s own envoys, Riculf and Eberhard, to Tassilo to remind him of the promises and oaths he had made to Pippin ‘long before’ (that is, in 757). Tassilo replied that he would be willing, if – a significant ‘if’ – Charles first sent him hostages, to meet the king. Charles agreed to this, and Tassilo appeared at Worms and took receipt of the hostages handed over by Charles.
The lord king did not refuse this, and Tassilo duke of the Bavarians, presenting himself to the king at the city of Worms, there renewed the oaths and handed over 12 chosen hostages as pledges that he would in all respects observe with regard to the said king Charles and his faithful men whatever promises he had made to Pippin under oath.37
In a separate clause, hostages were brought by Bishop Sindpert (of Regensburg) from Bavaria and duly handed over at Quierzy. (Charles, perhaps not coincidentally, given that place’s connection with his father, wintered at Quierzy in 781–2.38)
One point about the 781 meeting deserves special attention in light of Becher’s advice to compare the ArF and their dependent accounts with other annal-sets. Only the ArF and the dependent accounts asserted that in 781 Tassilo renewed to Charles the oaths given to Pippin in 757. The independent accounts – the Mosel Annals, Lorsch Annals and the Annales Petaviani – though they mentioned Tassilo, said nothing about any such renewal of oaths. Here, then, is another link in the ArF’s chain of argument leading to the submission of Tassilo at the Lechfeld (the river Lech was the boundary between Alemannia and Bavaria) in 787 and Tassilo’s trial and fall in 788 at Ingelheim. The independent contemporary accounts, which present a much more independent Tassilo, are those to be preferred. In these, before Tassilo presented himself at Worms, he asked to receive hostages from Charles – and secured Charles’s willingness to hand them over. This is the one and only time, so far as the records go, that Charles gave hostages as well as receiving them. Independent accounts emphasize an exchange of gifts. Such exchanges were not always what they seemed, and never equal. According to the Petau Annals, ‘Tassilo presented great gifts to the lord king’. Supporting this account of the gift-giving at Worms is the testimony of Tassilo’s chancellor Creontius (Crantz in German): ‘The duke came to his cousin king Charles at Worms, and gave him great gifts of goods and money: in return the king gave him [Tassilo] even more.’39
An important insight into such exchanges is that they were competitive, and there was therefore ‘a need to outbid’. But evaluating gifts was not then (any more than it is now) an easy matter, and outbidding may be inappropriate in certain contexts.40 Creontius added: ‘Charles received Duke Tassilo very honourably and treated him with great honour and respect. They concluded an eternal peace with each other.’ The best assessment of the 781 meeting is that both parties gained much and hoped to gain more.
A further gift-arrangement made in 781, this time in Rome, was not directly to do with Tassilo, but belonged in the much wider network of inter-familial dynastic exchanges in which the daughters of rulers were involved. Of the daughters of Desiderius, two were still very active in pursuing the interests of their husbands, their offspring, and the peoples ruled by their husbands and offspring. One of these women was Liutperga, Tassilo’s wife; the other was Adelperga, wife of Duke Arichis of Benevento.41 Their brother Prince Adelchis, exiled in Constantinople, was ever-hopeful of a return to Italy. Charles had become increasingly au fait with Italian politics, and his own communications network had expanded to include Byzantium. Charles’s father, in 767, had seriously considered arranging a marriage between his daughter Gisela to the son of Emperor Constantine V, the future Leo IV (775–80). It had come to nothing, however, and Leo too was now dead.
In 781, Leo’s widow, the Dowager Empress Eirene, took the initiative in asking for Charles’s daughter Rotrud as a bride for her son, the young Emperor Constantine VI (780–97). An embassy was sent to Rome, the hub of high politics, diplomacy and gossip, at a time when Eirene knew that Charles and the family – including Rotrud – would be there. The embassy included high palace officials and a scholar, Elissaeus; and ‘after an agreement was reached and a betrothal was concluded, the officials left Elissaeus behind to teach Rotrud the language and literature of the Greeks and to instruct her in Roman imperial ways.’42
This interesting information comes from the Chronicle of Theophanes.43 The only western contemporary to record this agreement was the author of the Mosel Annals, who, after reporting the anointings of Pippin and Louis, added: ‘And the king’s daughter Rotrud was there betrothed to the Emperor Constantine.’44 From the ArF and ArF reviser, both writing after the idea of Rotrud’s Byzantine marriage had faded and died, there was not a word on the subject. During the years from 781 to 787, it’s a good guess that Rotrud’s thoughts often turned to far-away Constantinople as well as to Rome. Charles and his eldest daughter (and perhaps, too, her aunt Gisela, wishing a better fortune for her niece than she herself had had) were seriously committed to the marriage-plan until 787.45 Only with hindsight does the marriage look chimerical, and all that Greek learning seem sadly in vain.
III. THE ASSEMBLY AT LIPPSPRINGE: SAXONS, NORTHMEN AND AVARS
The annalistic record for the 780s needs a brief, but necessary, comment, because these were the years when there began ‘a flurry of annal-making … somehow officially sponsored’. The argument of Roger Collins that this ‘unprecedented spate’ was ‘encouraged’ by Charles and his advisers at court is, in my view, compelling.46 Perhaps the start of the ‘flurry’ could be dated a little earlier than ‘the late 780s’ and its end seen as overlapping with ‘an attempt to promote a single “authorised” and centrally produced record in the form of the Royal Frankish Annals (that is, the ArF)’. In what follows, a distinction will be maintained between what Becher calls the ‘independent’ annals, and what Collins calls the ‘authorized’ (or quasi-official) record.
The annal for 782 in both sets of records started with Charles’s summoning a Spring assembly (or ‘Mayfield’) at Lippspringe, ‘the place where the river Lippe rises’. After that, the two annal-groups diverged. The ‘independent’ annals continued with a remarkable piece of information: ‘he established over it [Saxony] Saxon counts of the most noble birth.’47 Another version of this event gives: ‘Charles held a great assembly with the Saxons again, at Lippspringe, and appointed noble Franks and Saxons as counts over them.’48 It might be that Charles was no longer overly concerned about Widukind and thought (wrongly, as it turned out) that matters in Saxony had been settled: perhaps the envoys of the Danish king Sigifrid had come to the Lippspringe assembly to negotiate with Charles a way of co-opting Widukind into the service of the Frankish regime, as many of the Saxon primores had already been.49 It would be easy to imagine that assembly as an event where – though all the practicalities would remain to be worked out over time – counties were assigned and the names of the new counts publicly read out. German historians write of a ‘county-structure’ imposed by Charles, on the model of similar structures elsewhere in the realm.
The business of politics moved on with even greater momentum than usual, as is evident from the following charter trail from July to September: on 4 July Charles was at Düren, where he granted the church at Fritzlar to Archbishop Lull; on 25 July, he was at Lippspringe, where he confirmed remission of dues to the bishop of Trier in haribergo publico ubi Lippe confluit, ‘in the public army camp where the Lippe flows out’.50 Only three days later, on 28 July, he was at Hersfeld, 150km to the south-east, granting lands to the monastery recently founded by Archbishop Lull, and also confirming the estate at Schornsheim to Leoba, abbess of Tauberbischofsheim for ‘so long as she lived’ (she died two months later). Leoba, forty years older than Hildegard, had enjoyed a ‘longstanding friendship’ (antiqua familiaritas) with her, and Charles’s grant may have been intended as a favour to the queen as well.51 Charles was back in Francia at Herstal in August (he may have returned in July already), where on 18 August he settled a dispute between the monastery of Farfa (a group of monks had come bearing charters to make their case) and Duke Hildeprand of Spoleto (who did not come in person), in Farfa’s favour.52 Charles was staying at the palace of Gondreville on the Mosel south of Trier when, on 26 September, he granted an immunity to Bishop Geminianus of Modena.53 Gondreville is some 100km south of Thionville where Charles and his family would winter in 782–3.
The ‘authorized’ annals foreshortened the sequence of events by implying that Charles’s return to Francia followed soon after the Lippspringe assembly, and that his next decision was the sending of an army, composed jointly of Franks and Saxons, to fight ‘a few Slavs’.54 The charter evidence shows a longer chronology: it was only at the end of September or early October that news of Widukind’s return from Nordmannia (the land of the Northmen, or Denmark) to foment another serious Saxon revolt and cause a Frankish military disaster, prompted Charles’s swift return to Saxony. It looks as if Charles had banked on Widukind’s remaining in Nordmannia, and so had inferred that the time was not yet ripe for ‘turning’ him.
There is a little more to be got from the independent annals. In comparing those with the authorized ones, historians have encountered problems. For one thing, the ArF and the ArF’s reviser offered – uniquely – accounts that were quite distinct yet somehow connected, each drawing on different sources of information or invention. Further, the reviser was a master of narrative, offering lessons at once political, military and moral: this too was a unique feature in the near century’s-worth of authorized annals. The ArF account, relatively succinct at twenty-three lines in the Latin text, depicted an army consisting of Franks and Saxons led by Charles’s senior officers (missi), Adalgis, Gailo and Worad, who had orders to attack ‘a few Slavs’, suddenly ‘hearing en route that [other] Saxons had rebelled, combined to form a joint scara and rushed upon the Saxons without informing the lord king Charles of what they were doing’.
Was this statement intended to imply that had Charles been in a position to intervene, disaster could have been avoided? If so, was it therefore meant to be taken as a criticism of the missi? In a blatant distortion, the ArF author presented the outcome as a victory:
The Franks fought bravely, killed many Saxons, and emerged as victors. And two of those missi, Adalgis and Gailo, fell there. Charles, hearing this, advanced there with as many Franks as he could quickly muster and arrived where the river Aller flows into the Weser. Then all the Saxons once again assembled and subjected themselves to the lord king. They handed over all the malefactors who had most determinedly settled on rebellion (rebellium maxime terminaverunt), 4,500 of them, to be put to death. This was done – except for Widukind who escaped by flight to Nordmannia. When all this had been done, the lord king went back to Francia.55
The ArF reviser’s account, at fifty-six lines, is much longer and more complicated, asking rather a lot of its readers and hearers, then and now. It deserves to be presented in full:
Charles summoned three of his officers (ministri) to his presence: Adalgis the treasurer, Gailo the constable, and Worad count of the palace, and ordered them to act as fast as possible taking with them East Franks and Saxons to repress the boldness of the stubbornly disobedient Slavs. After they had crossed Saxony to carry out their orders, these men heard that Saxons acting on Widukind’s advice were preparing to make war on the Franks. They abandoned the route by which they had been intending to advance against the Slavs, and quickly marched with East Frankish troops towards the place where they had heard Saxons had gathered.
They were joined in Saxony by Count Theoderic, the king’s kinsman (propinquus regis), with as many troops as he had been able to gather in a hurry in the Rhineland on hearing of the Saxons’ rebellion. He advised the hastening officers (legati) that scouts should first ascertain as fast as possible where the Saxons were and what they were planning, and then, if the nature of the terrain allowed, he [Theoderic] and they [the legati] should make a joint attack on them. They thought his advice was praiseworthy, and they advanced together as far as the Süntel Hill, as it is called, on whose northern flank lay the Saxon camp. After Theoderic had pitched camp there, they crossed the Weser, as agreed with him, so that they could bypass the hill more easily, and they made their own camp on the river-bank.
But they were afraid, when they discussed matters among themselves, that if they had Theoderic with them in the same fight, the fame of victory would be transferred to his name (veriti sunt ne ad nomen Theoderici victoriae fama transiret); and they therefore decided to engage the Saxons without him, and, acting not as if they were taking on an enemy drawn up in battle-line against them, but as if they were pursuing a fleeing foe to seize booty, each man seized his weapons and charged with as much speed as he could muster, as fast as his horse could carry him, onto the place where the Saxons were standing in their battle-array in front of their camp. Just as this charge went badly, so the ensuing battle went badly: for in the engagement they were surrounded by the Saxons and killed almost to a man. Those who managed to escape fled, even so, not to their own camp but to Theoderic’s, across the Hill. The loss to the Franks was greater than numbers alone, however, for two of the officers (legati), Adalgis and Gailo, four counts and as many as twenty other distinguished and noble men were killed, as well as the others who were in their followings and who chose to die at their sides rather than outlive them.56
Count Theoderic himself (or someone in his following) has been suggested as the teller of the tale.57 Its lessons could certainly be read as a familiar part of the moral repertoire of faithful followers: one group of the king’s men should not compete for glory to each other’s destruction; men should follow their lord even unto death, in which they would find posthumous glory and a memory in song and story – the three aulici and their men at Roncesvaux come to mind; and the king would avenge the deaths of his faithful officers and comrades.
The rest of this story became one of crime and exemplary punishment. The ArF account can be abbreviated, thus: when Charles had learned of the fate of his missi and their men, he advanced to where the Aller flows into the Weser; and all the Saxons assembled and subjected themselves to Charles, and handed over to be executed all the evil-doers – except Widukind, who escaped to Nordmannia – who were responsible for the rebellion, 4,500 in all. The reviser’s account follows this, repeating the number 4,500, but putting great emphasis on the Saxons as perpetrators of a crime (scelus, and a few lines further on, tantum facinus) which had had to be avenged and for which the penalty was beheading.
A few further comments are à propos. One is that older generations of scholars, persuaded by a Marxist analysis of class war, blamed the nobility for selling-out the peasant rebels.58 Another is that beheading was the normal penalty (laesa majestas) for treason in late Roman law and for heresy (breach of the Faith) in the laws of Christian emperors.59 A third is that the figure of 4,500 is suspiciously large, and its tidiness increases suspicion. It could well have resulted from a scribe mistakenly (or through deliberate inflation) adding a zero.60 The basic story can be retained, however, and it’s reinforced by the information by the author of the Petau Annals: ‘Then with a great army (exercitus) the Frankish army-detachments (hostes) went into Saxony and the Franks slew a multitude of the men of the Saxons and led many Saxons captive into Francia.’61
IV. THE CAPITULATIO DE PARTIBUS SAXONIAE
The Capitulary about the regions of Saxony is one of the most puzzling texts that scholars of Charles’s reign have to come to grips with. It survives in a single manuscript written in c.825 at Mainz.62 Most twentieth-century historians have inclined to date it to 782, and a fairly recent fresh appraisal adds strength to the argument.63 The Lippspringe assembly has been considered the context in which the Capitulatio was issued, on the grounds that what was then put in place was a ‘structure of countships’.64 Counts in Saxony, whether Saxons or Franks, were a new phenomenon without a tradition originating in late antiquity. Counts in Saxony, unlike those in Francia, were appointed by the king to a ministerium, an office, held from the king directly, rather than rooted in a locality or inherited lands. Saxon counts had more restricted powers in their counties (pagus or comitatus) than Frankish counts in theirs. A royal official (missus) in Saxony had the role of king’s representative and agent implementing royal decisions, rather than a local judge.65
While the count featured as an important figure in the Capitulatio’s cc. 24, 28–31 and 34, no count appeared anywhere in the remaining capitula. By contrast, cc. 3–14 are largely concerned with the application of the death penalty for pagan acts and especially heinous crimes, and cc. 15–23 with ecclesiastical matters such as fines, penalties and burial practices. This arrangement of the material has struck some historians as indicating that the Capitulatio ought not to be treated as a single text but as a compilation of two, or three, separate texts.66 This strikes me as plausible, but unprovable. For now, the Capitulatio, whether a single text or a compilation from older sources including the Old Testament and a slightly earlier text, the Indiculus superstitionum et paganiarum (‘The list of superstitions and pagan practices’), is best dated to 782.67
Was it the Capitulatio’s promulgation at the Lippspringe assembly that provoked the Saxon revolt and its bloody consequences? It is certainly possible to stick with the scholarly consensus on this cause-and-effect answer. But an alternative question, still apparently unasked, is: did Charles and his advisers put together and issue the Capitulatio as a response to the revolt and the loss of his men, as described by the ArF reviser three decades after the event, probably on the basis of oral testimony? The Capitulatio could still be dated to 782, but, in view of the charter chronology, near the very end of the year, and issued at Verden as a prerequisite to the legal process of inquiry, condemnation and the exaction of death-penalties.68 Charles and his advisers were driven less by practical considerations than by ideology. The Capitulatio was a deeply ideological text: here ‘the rhetoric of paganism is used to contrast an assortment of practices and affiliations with the Frankish behaviour Charlemagne’s court wished to promote’.69 Vengeance was indeed the Lord’s, but not only the Lord’s: it was also Charles’s vengeance for the deaths of Adalgis and Gailo, four counts, and so many other ‘men of distinction and nobility’. Their deeds became part of a collective Frankish memory, recalled and commemorated long before they were recorded by the ArF reviser near the end of Charles’s reign.70 Collective Saxon commemoration may have existed too, focused on a place, Verden, and a shocking event; but only very much later did it surface in denunciation of Charles as ‘the Saxon-slayer’.71 Historians and archaeologists nowadays tend to agree that the Capitulatio, with its ‘savage penalties’ for cremating the dead, was aimed, ‘less at Christianising Saxons’, than at ‘suppressing Saxon identity’ by assimilating Saxons – especially elite Saxons – to ‘the Frankish majority’. In fact, Saxon pagan practices of cremation and mound burial had long been in decline.72
After Verden, Charles made for a favourite residence in which he and Hildegard and their children could overwinter and begin a return to normality by spending Christmas 782 and Easter 783 at Thionville in the Mosel valley. Looking back to 783, the ArF reviser ventured a rare lyrical evocation of that year’s ‘mild and smiling spring’.
V. CHARLES AND AN EXEMPLARY JUDGMENT
Judgments made at large assemblies (placita) and involving high-status parties, lay or ecclesiastical, had long formed a special category of document in the Frankish kingdom: they were decisions on legal disputes made, usually, in one of the king’s palaces by the king and a panel of counts and faithful men, and recorded by a notary of the count of the palace.73 Only ten judgments of Charles survive, very unevenly distributed through the reign. In them – even more clearly than in charters because they are inherently adversarial – can be traced ‘the imposition, challenge and final acceptance of a new relationship between central and local power under Charlemagne’.74 The dispute (contentio) between the cathedral church of St Peter’s, Trier, and the sons of Lambert was heard at the palace of Thionville on the Mosel in late 782.
Our missus Wicbert together with the scabini [local judgment-finders assisting at the courts of counts and missi] and witnesses of the Mosel region came and reported to us about [the monastery of] Mettlach, because it was a thing of our property. Our grandfather the Mayor of the palace Charles [Martel] beneficed Milo [bishop of Trier] with Mettlach, and then our father King Pippin beneficed Milo with it and then Bishop Hartham [of Trier]. They said that Bishop Leodonius, father of Milo and Wido, had given it by documents to the church of Trier which is built within the walls of the city of Trier; and Milo, Leodonius’s successor, had sent abbots to it from Trier, as Pippin had beneficed Milo’s successor … Then there was a dispute between the missus Wicbert and the sons of Lambert, Wido, Hrodold and Warin. The representatives of St Peter’s and the scabini said that Lambert had seized Mettlach by force (per forcia) with the power of King Pippin in a wicked way (malo ordine) and despoiled Bishop Hartham of it. Wido and his brothers said that their father Lambert had left it to them as lawful hereditary property (legitimo alode). And this was how they judged, that the possession of the property was in law and justice on the side of us and of St Peter’s because Bishop Milo and Bishop Hartham had always had that monastery by the benefice of the Mayor Charles and of King Pippin. But Warin and his brothers contradicted this, saying that the possession was theirs because their father Lambert had left them possessed of it as lawfully inherited property. For this reason, there was a great dispute (magna contentio).
Then we with our faithful men joined with all the scabini of the duchy of the Mosel who unanimously judged that [because] Wido and his brothers had never had any documents to vindicate their father’s claims to the monastery against King Pippin, our lawful possession must be on the side of St Peter’s. But since Wido and his brothers could produce no witnesses nor scabini [to attest] lawful possession, the judgment was handed down to them that they must restore in our presence with a solemn promise [what was owed] to the said monastery and to our side in the dispute over St Peter’s, Trier.
This they did, and in person they made over through their missus the possession of the monastery to the side of St Peter’s, Trier whose bishop is Archbishop Weomad, as has been judged by us and by our faithful men, and as we have been seen to have adjudged to St Peter’s, by us and our faithful men Bishops Angelramn, Peter and Borno, counts Erhard [and 10 named others] and our other faithful men the scabini Thetfrido [and 43 named others] and the Count of the Palace Worad and as many other faithful men as possible who were there present. Archbishop Weomad will receive a written order (preceptum) and a vindicated judgment (iudicium vindicatum) concerning the monastery of Mettlach and the property and people (homines) pertaining to it and belonging to the side of the Trier people (Treverenses). And this we have done …75
Like many abbeys, Mettlach was the foundation of an aristocratic family, with, in this case, close associations to the bishopric of Trier. The bishops were chosen from the founder’s dynasty, and the descendants of the founder did the choosing. Lorsch was a similar and slightly earlier case: it had passed from the founding family via the family’s gift to Bishop Chrodegang of Metz, and a judgment made in Chrodegang’s favour by Charles in late March 772, to a near-simultaneous de facto takeover by Charles himself when he granted Lorsch his mundeburdium vel defensio (‘protection and defence’) later in 772 or early 773.76 Matthew Innes, having deftly noted the Lorsch parallel, summarized the outcome of the Thionville judgment as imposed by the ruler and accepted by locals.77
Charles Martel and King Pippin had granted out Mettlach in benefice to successive bishops of Trier, ‘out of Trier cathedral property’ apparently.78 When Trier tried to recover Mettlach, the sons of Lambert refused, and Charles’s judgment went in Trier’s favour. But, at the same time, Charles himself claimed Mettlach. His use of churches as benefices led to lordship (dominium) ‘more focused and “proprietary” than general royal authority’.79 The Church’s military service to Charles had its roots in attitudes like these. His letter of summons to Fulrad, lay-abbot of St-Quentin, shows exactly how much was expected.80 The lay-abbacies of people such as Alcuin and Angilbert were the – highly selective – grants of a king who, like his father, wanted orderly reform and faithful service at the same time.81 Such abbacies were run by laymen with primarily military obligations to the king – hence modern historians’ terms lay-abbot and lay-abbacy – and a dual arrangement developed whereby an ecclesiastical abbot managed the liturgical side while the military abbot operated alongside him: a practical solution combining orderly reform and faithful war-service.
It’s appropriate to end this section by returning to the magna contentio. The record of the Trier judgment is so detailed that a modern reader is able not just to follow the process and the outcome, but to visualize the assembly as if he/she were there along with the king, the three archbishops, the eleven counts with the count of the palace and, last but not least, the forty-four boni homines, men of the region of Trier, each with his shiny new title of scabinus denoting an office and a duty sworn to by an oath, and bursting his buttons with pride. It was this sense of personal enlistment that signalled a new regime: a practice of empire, an engagement in trust, and a presence culture shaped, instrumentalized and lived out by Charles.82
VI. LAYING WASTE AND MOPPING UP
The executions at Verden did not end the Saxon wars. As Charles began to prepare for a new campaign, he got news of ‘a general defection of them’ (omnimoda eorum defectio) – meaning, Saxons. If the Capitulatio, in whatever form, had quickly become known in the region where resistance had been concentrated in the previous decade, it could have been calculated to arouse new extremes of hostility, not near Verden or in Angraria, but in Westphalia and the Süntel hills, and in the Weissgau between the rivers Weser and Werre.
Charles first attacked ‘with a few Franks’ some Saxons ‘arrayed in battle-formation’ at Detmold on the Werre: ‘he manfully (viriliter) fell upon them and they as usual turned tail.’ While waiting for more troops to join him from Francia, Charles got news that Saxons were assembling on the river Hase. Charles was, according to the ArF reviser, commotus, a term which, as used by Suetonius in two of his Lives of the Caesars, meant ‘enraged’.83
In a second battle, ‘An infinite multitude of [Saxons] were cut down, spoils were seized, and great numbers of captives were carried off.’ And Charles’s forces ‘put them to flight as far as the Elbe’ before returning to Francia.84 Einhard claimed that these were the only two cases in which the king in person led his armies into battles in Saxony, and both these occurred within a single month.85 These triumphs of personal leadership clearly impressed Einhard. (In fact, Einhard underrated Charles’s capabilities as a war-leader, for he had personally led troops into battle at Lübbecke in 775, and again at Bocholt in 779, after which he had ‘conquered all the Westphalians’). There is no mention of Widukind here, but his old supporters in that region could well have been involved in increasingly desperate resistance. The only sources to provide evidence of Charles’s movements for late 783, or for the whole of 784, 785 and early 786, are the ArF and the revised ArF. From a period of thirty months, not a single charter survives. This was emphatically not business as usual.
In 784, the areas Charles first targeted were likewise in Westphalia. Severe flooding in that region, however, soon made Charles look in other directions. For the first time, he deputed major military responsibility that year to his son Young Charles, who remained in Westphalia engaged in mopping-up operations. Charles himself went eastwards into Thuringia and its northern borderlands with Eastphalia, making an encircling move to Steinfurt, thence to Schöningen, and finally traversing Thuringia again in a south-westerly move back to Westphalia. Father and son, both successful, returned to Worms at the end of the campaigning season. The Franks were becoming accustomed to winter-warfare. Charles decided on a short sharp mid-winter campaign in Westphalia, in the Weissgau and on the river Emmer, where he celebrated Christmas at the villa of Lügde, and then attacked Rehme, near Vlotho, on the Weser.
Then, severe flooding again caused a further change of plan: Charles based himself at the Eresburg on the river Diemel. This was the Franks’ first great Saxon fort, constructed in 772, retaken by Saxons in 773, recovered and restored by Charles in 775, briefly evacuated by its Frankish garrison in 776 while Charles was absent in Italy, and then, on his return, rebuilt once more by ‘Charles and the Franks’. Now in 785, he stayed at the Eresburg from Christmas through to June ‘because of the very severe flooding’. He bade his wife and sons and daughters to join him there, rebuilt the fort and also built a church, and, while waiting for the weather to improve, celebrated Easter there.86 The intensification of fighting in the preceding year had discouraged normal political transactions.
The flooding and persistent rain made living conditions hard for everyone. For the Westphalians, they became intolerable, and the outcome inevitable:
Charles resided at the Eresburg and the Franks in the area round about, in huts. Then mobilizing the army from their tents, he came to Dersia [Hesse], and burned that region, and crossed the Weser and that same year destroyed the barriers and the defence-works of the Saxons. And then, with God’s help, he acquired (adquisivit) the Saxons.87
For the Franks, morale was constantly being boosted by Charles himself:
He sent out scarae on numerous occasions while he was staying there, and also campaigned in person. He despoiled rebel Saxons, captured their forts, made his way into their fortified places, and cleared the roads, while he awaited the arrival of suitable weather.88
The ArF reviser laid on the message with a trowel:
Charles had his wife and children summoned and brought to him. Leaving an adequate garrison of loyal and steadfast soldiers with them in the fort, he himself went out with a swift-moving force to devastate the districts of the Saxons and plunder their estates, and he paid back the Saxons with an unquiet winter as he and the war-leaders he sent out went everywhere throwing all into confusion with killings and burnings. By ravaging throughout the whole winter in this way, he inflicted a huge disaster on nearly all the regions of the Saxons.89
In 785, after he had held his assembly at Paderborn, Charles was able ‘to march about Saxony, going wherever he wished on open roads, meeting no opposition’.90 Saxons looking out over their ravaged landscape saw a different tranquillity – that of death and destruction. Later in life, when Charles became acquainted with Augustine’s City of God, he would begin to understand the perils, but also the potential, of an ‘ordered tranquillity’ – ‘peace of a kind’.91
VII. QUEENS DEAD AND ALIVE
From Verden, Charles had returned to Francia in time to join Hildegard at Thionville for Christmas in 782, staying through to Easter (23 March) 783. They must have recalled a previous winter there a decade before, when the pope’s envoy had arrived with an urgent request. Hildegard had been pregnant then, with the child who would be named after his father and great-grandfather, and who had by then reached the age of ten.92 Hildegard was pregnant again. The baby was born in late April, but the birth was difficult or she suffered complications post partum. On 30 April she died at Thionville, aged twenty-five. The recording in the ArF of the date of the queen’s death attested the impression her life made on contemporaries. On 1 May, Charles granted an estate near Metz to St-Arnulf’s, ‘for the soul of our most beloved wife, Hildegard the queen’. The wording was conventional enough; more unusual were the arrangements for perpetual lights at her tomb day and night, daily masses, psalmody and prayers, and the insistence that future abbots and custodians must never relinquish control of the property granted for this purpose.93 A similar grant of royal properties belonging to the royal residence at Florence to the church of San Miniato, for lights and prayers for Hildegard’s soul, probably belonged to Christmas 786 which Charles celebrated at Florence.94 The baby, named for her own mother, outlived her by only forty days. At Charles’s court in (probably) 784, Paul the Deacon wrote epitaphs for them both, commissioned by Charles. The genre dictated conventionality, but the baby’s epitaph conveyed a father’s anguish, while in Hildegard’s the poet singled out her ‘candour of soul and inner beauty’ (simplicitas animae, interiorque decor) as rather more than merely conventional traits associated with her piety.95
Evidence for a queen’s experience in the form of letters and court poetry becomes available only for the years after Hildegard’s life ended. Her personality could be considered inaccessible. Yet in her case, one source may offer an alternative route: Notker the Stammerer’s Gesta Karoli, the earlier part of which was written at St-Gall in 885–6. So far I have made very little use of Notker’s work. There are connections, however, between Notker himself and Hildegard. Both were Alemans. At Notker’s monastery, an oral tradition in the form of stories gathered around Hildegard and her family, and Notker set a few of these down in the Gesta Karoli.96 One such story is worth presenting here. It concerns ‘a bishop’ (in fact, the archbishop of Mainz) who was a particular object of Notker’s dislike:
When the most warlike Charles was away on campaign … this bishop was left to take care of the most renowned Hildegard. When he began to be so over-excited by working closely with the queen, and so insolent that he became bold enough to ask her if he could borrow the golden sceptre of the incomparable Charles (who had ordered it to be made for his own ceremonial use) – so that he himself could carry it on feast-days instead of his episcopal staff. With a clever bit of deceit, Hildegard said she would not dare to give it to anyone but she would faithfully pass on the bishop’s request to the king. When Charles came home, she laughingly told him about the ‘mad’ bishop’s request. The king, highly amused, agreed to do what Hildegard had asked, and said he would do even more. When almost everyone of any importance from the whole of Europe had gathered in an assembly, Charles announced the bishop’s request, adding that he himself hadn’t been consulted! The bishop left in confusion.97
This typical Notker joke might just (though I’m not sure I’d bet on it) record a real-life episode, which not only denounces episcopal greed and ambition but preserves a memory of the royal couple’s relationship.98
Little over two months after Hildegard’s death, Charles’s mother, Bertrada, died on 12 July. Again, her impact on contemporaries explains the record of her death in the ArF. Einhard, who could never have known Bertrada, wrote that, apart from the falling-out over Charles’s repudiation of his Lombard bride, ‘Bertrada lived with her son and grew old in high honour. She had lived long enough to see 3 grandsons and 3 granddaughters in her son’s house.’ Einhard omitted to say that Charles’s daughter Berta had been named for her grandmother, nor did he mention Bertrada’s episodic presence in the environs of the monastery of St-Denis, although he knew that she had been buried at St-Denis ‘with great honour’, beside her husband.99 The two queens, the consort and the dowager, had in common more than closeness to Charles. As wives, they shared much of the ritual patterning of their respective husbands’ lives, and accompanied them in their public acts. The two queens’ experiences also differed in two important respects: Hildegard not only lived with but travelled with her husband when possible, whereas the record seldom indicates that in Bertrada’s case; and, connected with that difference, was another, namely Hildegard’s exceptional performance bearing children (nine babies in eleven years of marriage). In contrast, Bertrada gave birth to four babies in twenty-four years of marriage, followed by fifteen active years of widowhood and grandmotherhood. What Pauline Stafford called ‘the inexorable unfolding of the female lifecycle’ is something anyone interested in early medieval dynastic and family politics has to confront, and often lament.100
Within roughly six months of Hildegard’s death, Charles had married again. The bride was Fastrada, daughter of Count Radolf, an East Frank whose family connections in the Rhineland, notably with Archbishop Riculf of Mainz, can be traced in charters. Some historians of nineteenth- and twentieth-century vintage (and it goes without saying that these are all men) have taken a very critical view of Charles’s too-swift remarriage, as resulting from his pathologically uncontrollable sexual desires. Einhard twice (in succeeding sentences) framed Fastrada as responsible for the two revolts of Charles’s reign, in 786 and 792, because of her ‘cruelty’, which contrasted so starkly, Einhard thought, with the gentle nature and kindness of Charles. Not so long ago, Johannes Fried nailed Fastrada as ‘young, beautiful, and cruel – vampiric traits’ (indeed!)101 Other historians have pointed out that Charles had come to value greatly the duties performed by Hildegard as consort: a king needed a queen as much as a man needed a wife.102
There is something to be said here for a middle way. Charles had repudiated two wives one after the other after only one son had been born to the first wife. Fathering nine children within eleven years on his third wife may have pushed the limits of normality, even for the richest and most powerful man. Einhard presents details about Charles’s wives, and then his mistresses, giving a sequential chronology of relationships that could have run concurrently. The manliness of early medieval warrior-elites included a lusty sexual appetite. Churchmen preached monogamy. Contradictory pulls, and tensions, were unavoidable, as the authors of advice-books for aristocratic men acknowledged.103 Historians nowadays (often women) tend to a practical and practicable via media: Charles’s strong sex-drive was exceptional enough to be remembered in a horrified monk’s nightmare years after his death;104 yet Charles also manifested concern and affection for both Hildegard and Fastrada.105 That concern persisted after their deaths. In two charters, both issued in 787 and in Italy, Charles arranged for prayers to be said for ‘us, our queens, and our children’.106 The plural queens were the dead Hildegard and the living Fastrada. The formula may sound soullessly, even heartlessly functional, but it represented a moment of bridging and continuity.
Gender compounds the paradoxes in the otherness of the early medieval past. The nature of the sources makes it almost impossibly hard to capture how high-born women experienced lives that were at once private and public, yet the female lifecycle inexorably unfolded for women of all ranks (did Bertrada share with the women of her household the signs of her pregnancy in 747?), and female religious shared with laywomen the experience of menstruation and menopause (did the antiqua familiaritas between the old nun Leoba and the young but childbirth-worn Hildegard include conversations about bodily as well as spiritual things?)107 Fastrada’s eleven-year stint as queen will occupy sections of the next two chapters, and she gets a small but memorable part in the next section, below.
VIII. ATTIGNY, 785
In this final section of the chapter, I want to recapitulate the story of the Saxon wars so far, and then consider how and why it looked as if some kind of closure had been achieved. The wars had begun as classic border-disputes, pitting a stronger, more organized state against its more fragmented neighbours in occasional demonstrations of power by cross-border ravaging and the seizing of booty.108 It was only in Charles’s reign that a pattern of conflict became recognizable. Raids and battles were followed by the extracting of oaths of fidelity, conversions and mass baptisms, the explicit opposing of Christians to pagans, and frequent allegations of perfidy and rebellion. These came to form the main theme in the narrative of the ArF. Westphalia was the core area of conflict, though longer-distance raids further north and east became more frequent. Charles summoned his assembly to Paderborn for the first time in 777 and staged a performance of power in front of Franks and Saxons (except for Widukind), and envoys from Spain; he staged similar performances in 780 when he held his assembly at Lippspringe and marched north-east as far as the Elbe, and in 782, when again the assembly was at Lippspringe, with Saxons (except for Widukind), Franks, Danes and Avars constituting the audience and counts were appointed in Saxony. An unusually clear charter-trail makes it possible to see where Charles was, whom he favoured, and to whom he did justice in the months from July (‘in the army-camp’) to September 782. Rebellion followed, resulting in serious Frankish casualties; and late in that same year, Charles staged a spectacular event at Verden on the Elbe, combining a legal trial, at which an unbelievably large number of Saxons were condemned for treason and beheaded, with old-fashioned vengeance for the Frankish dead. In the following two years, 783 and 784, Westphalia was so ruthlessly ravaged and plundered that resistance there collapsed and Charles could travel ‘on empty roads, wherever he wanted’.
Floods are memorable events, as anyone who has experienced one knows all too well. It was severe flooding that, according to the ArF author, impelled Charles to leave Rehme in waterlogged Westphalia and move to the Eresburg, ‘where he bade his wife, the lady queen Fastrada to come with his sons and daughters to join him … for the whole winter’. Fastrada had stepped into Hildegard’s combined role of queen and carer-of-the-family, but with the difference that she was the children’s stepmother. Not all of them were in a position to answer their father’s bidding: Rotrud might have stayed at Worms to mourn her mother and continue her Greek studies; Pippin king of Italy and Louis king of Aquitaine were residing at Pavia and (probably) Chasseneuil, respectively, with their new households. At the Eresburg, a 120-metre-high Iron Age hillfort strongly fortified by Charles and supplied with a church, louring steeply, over the river Diemel and its wintry rain-soaked landscape, the children present would have been Pippin the first-born, Young Charles, Berta and Gisela: two big boys, two little girls. Fastrada may well have already been pregnant, for the first time. The cycle was unfolding again. Einhard’s chapter 19 reports that
as soon as they were old enough, [Charles] had his sons taught to ride in Frankish fashion, to use arms, and to hunt. He made his daughters learn to spin and to weave wool, to use the distaff and the spindle, and acquire every womanly accomplishment rather than fritter away their time in sheer idleness.
It takes a bit of imagination to see the family at the Eresburg. Two historians have recently done just that in imagining speculation about the sex of Fastrada’s unborn child.109
By the time Charles held his summer assembly in 785, he had complete freedom of manoeuvre in the Westphalian heartland of Saxony. Everyone knew it – including Widukind, who had seen the writing on the wall for rebels. It was Charles who took the initiative, making the move in Widukind’s direction: he travelled from Paderborn to the Bardengau in the area near the mouth of the Elbe in north-east Saxony. From this point, the ArF reviser has a fuller story:110
Once there, he learned that Widukind and Abbio were in the region of the Saxons which lay across the Elbe [impossible to say when they had moved from Nordmannia] and he began to urge them, through Saxons in the first instance, not to hesitate but to put perfidy behind them and come over to fidelity to him (ad suam fidem). Conscious of their crimes, they were doubtful about committing themselves to fidelity to the king. But at length, after receiving from him the promise of impunity that they wanted, and obtaining from him the hostages for their safety that they had asked to be given, they came with Amalwin, one of his aulici whom the king had sent to escort the hostages to them, to appear in his presence at the villa of Attigny, and there were baptized …
The ArF author adds: ‘… with their followers. And then all Saxony was subjugated.’111 With this firm claim, the ArF author shows that his text was written before 795, when another Saxon revolt broke out. In hindsight, it can be said that a decade of peace in Saxony ensued.
That Charles made the first overtures to Widukind was profoundly significant, as was the fact that he had sent hostages, as he had previously done for Tassilo in 781. Charles recognized the moment as a tipping-point, and he was prepared to seize a great opportunity. Most significant of all, though, were the baptisms of Widukind and Abbio, and the additional fact, known, as so often, from minor annals (Ann. Mos.; Ann. Lauriss.) that Charles raised them from the font, that is, became their godfather.112 The spiritual relationship, like that of compaternity, could mean a great deal – or it could mean little. In this case, there is no evidence in the sources either way. But for once, absence is good evidence: the disappearance from the record of both Widukind and Abbio indicates that they stayed in Westphalia, making good their losses, and remaining faithful to Charles.113 The genuineness of the Saxons’ submission was affirmed by Charles in a letter to Hadrian late in 785, and hailed enthusiastically by the pope himself early in 786. Charles had announced that praises should be sung for a month and a day in thanks to God, and at Charles’s request, Hadrian had
sent forth orders into all our lands, those lying under the dominion of your spiritual mother the Holy Roman Church that under God’s protection litanies are to be celebrated in those regions, as by us also on the 23 and the 26 and the 28 June which are, first the Eve of St John the Baptist, then the birthday of SS John and Paul, and also the Eve of St Peter the Apostle. And may your Royal Power likewise send word throughout all his territories and to those regions across the sea where the Christian people (populus) is to be found, for the performance of litanies for three days in this fashion. It is because Christian peoples (gentes) live so far away from your royal dominion that we have provided for the deferment of the litanies … We have also decreed the singing of praises to the Redeemer of the world that those peoples brought to the Christian Faith through your royal solicitude may, through your support, abide in it for all time.114
Some Saxons did rebel again, it’s true, but not in Westphalia. In the final phase of the Saxon wars, the scene would shift to the far north and east of Saxony. For contemporaries, and still, for the author of the ArF, peace had broken out at last in Saxony.
