Empires and Barbarians (63 page)

The ancient world had seen Mediterranean-based supraregional powers of several shapes and sizes, and in this sense the successor
states created there by longer-distance migrants such as Theoderic’s Ostrogoths were just a new variation on a long-established theme. But a brand-new phenomenon now emerged in the European landscape, and the existence of the Frankish superpower firmly reflected the five centuries of transformation effected in the north by the diplomatic, economic and other workings of the Roman state. Without the increased socioeconomic and political development that its existence stimulated in the inner and outer peripheries east of the Rhine and north of the Danube, these lands could never have provided the basis for a truly imperial power. By sponsoring the emergence of the new Frankish-dominated northerly power block, therefore, these earlier transformations set the developing pattern of European history off on a new trajectory in the second half of the first millennium. And from the sixth century onwards, the new superpower was itself to become a major factor in the further development of the European landscape.

That said, the path of Empire north of the Alps in the second half of the millennium did not run so smoothly as it had for its Mediterranean counterpart in the first. Roman emperors had come and gone, and a few peripheral territories had been lost in the third century. The Empire’s modes of government, likewise, were transformed over time. But this was largely a process of organic, internal evolution, at least up to the third century. Essentially, the Roman Empire remained the same state ruling over broadly the same territories for the best part of five hundred years.
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The same was not remotely true of imperial western Europe in the second half of the millennium. Merovingian greatness peaked in the sixth century, and by the second half of the seventh, much of the real power had fallen into the hands of regionally dominant blocks of local landowning elites, in Neustria, Austrasia and Burgundy (
Map 13
). This in turn allowed peripheral areas to reassert their independence. The Thuringians seem to have been independent from the revolt of Radulf in 639, the Saxons and Bavarians soon after 650. Even the long-subdued Alamanni reasserted their independence by the early eighth century.
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Later Merovingian political fragmentation was followed by a dramatic resurgence of Empire in the same century at the hands of a second Frankish dynasty, the Carolingians. The new dynasty originally came to prominence as Merovingian loyalists with lands between Cologne and Metz, more or less modern Belgium, where the Merovingians too had first burst on to the historical stage. Those who study
the first millennium
AD
have a distinct advantage when it comes to the age-old game of Name Five Famous Belgians. There is no need to tell the Carolingian story in any detail here, but in the late seventh century the first really prominent member of the dynasty, Pippin, made himself dominant in northern Francia, over both Austrasia and Neustria, after the battle of Tertry in 687. Ruling at first through a Merovingian frontman, in the next generation Pippin’s son Charles Martel successfully reunited to this northern Frankish heartland all the old territories of Gaul controlled by the Merovingians at their height. By 733 he was moving his supporters into Burgundy to establish his control in the south-east. After a lengthy struggle, Aquitaine in the south-west was conquered in 735. Charles Martel also campaigned east of the Rhine, forcing the Frisians, and notably the Saxons in 738, to start paying him tribute again.
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Imperial momentum had been established, and his sons and grandsons did more than maintain it. First, they ditched the Merovingians. After securing his own position, Charles’s son, another Pippin, made the final leap to royal lightspeed, deposing the last Merovingian, Childeric III, and having himself crowned king in 752. Now royal, the Carolingians quickly expanded the area under their control, the second half of the century being consumed in an orgy of conquest, initially under Pippin, but more particularly under his son and heir Charles, better known as Charlemagne: ‘Charles the Great’ (
Karolus Magnus
, 768–814). East of the Rhine, direct Frankish rule was asserted for the first time over peoples who had been periodically subordinate to the Merovingians, but often autonomous and sometimes entirely independent. By 780, self-assertive ducal lines in Alamannia, Thuringia and Bavaria had all been extinguished, and further north, Frisia had been subdued. Saxony, too, was eventually conquered outright, for the first time, but only in the early ninth century after two decades of punishing campaigning that had included forced baptisms, population transfers and wholesale massacres. On the back of these successes, Charlemagne directed his attentions further afield. The independent kingdom of the Lombards was crushed in the mid-770s, and in campaigns that culminated in 796 he destroyed the central European Empire of the Avars. The plunder taken on this expedition became proverbial.
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Charlemagne’s conquests thus united Gaul, the territory between the Rhine and the Elbe, northern Italy and much of the Middle Danube region, together with parts of northern Spain, into one vast imperial
state (
Map 13
). The Merovingians had at times exercised influence over large parts of this territory, but not everywhere in the form of direct rule, and their domination had never extended into Italy or the Middle Danube. Consonant with this, Charlemagne was much less shy in asserting that he had created an empire. From about 790 onwards, a consistent thread appeared in the writings of his team of resident royal intellectuals, extolling his success and his piety and declaring that both showed him to be a (or even ‘the’) true Christian emperor. There is not the slightest doubt, therefore, that Charlemagne’s imperial coronation on Christmas Day 800 in St Peter’s basilica in Rome happened not by accident but by design. Three hundred and twenty-four years after the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, full-blown Empire in the west was reborn.
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For all its grandeur and the lasting importance of some of its cultural legacies, however, the Carolingian Empire proved no more stable than its Merovingian predecessor. By the later ninth century there were still Carolingian kings, but their effective power was confined to a limited block of territory around Paris. Elsewhere in west Francia, authority had devolved once again to a constellation of local princes who each exercised within his own domain the kinds of powers (over justice, the minting of coins, ecclesiastical appointments and so forth) that Charlemagne had previously wielded over the entire Empire. Sometimes these rights had been formally granted, sometimes merely usurped. As one contemporary chronicler, Regino of Prüm, put it in a charming phrase, after the death of Charlemagne’s grandson Charles the Bald in 871, each area had made a prince ‘out of its own bowels’. In the west, the Carolingian Empire had come and gone within a century of Charlemagne’s coronation.
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In east Francia, beyond the Rhine, greater unity prevailed, providing – eventually – the third Frankish imperial moment of the second half of the millennium. Here, another of Charlemagne’s grandsons, Louis the German, enjoyed an unusually long reign, providing a greater heritage of political cohesion for the constituent duchies of east Francia – originally Saxony, Thuringia, Franconia, Suabia and Bavaria, to which Louis added Lotharingia and Alsace (
Map 14
). East Francia’s cohesive tendency survived the extinction of Louis’s line at the turn of the tenth century, and the region was brought to still tighter unity first by Conrad (King of east Francia during 911–18), originally Duke of Franconia; and then by Henry, son of Otto son of Liudolf, the Duke
of Saxony from 912, then King of the east Franks from 919 until his death in 936. Within three years of his accession, Henry had forced the Suabians and Bavarians to recognize him as King of the east Franks. He then provided effective war leadership against the pagan Magyar nomads, who had moved into the Middle Danube region from the western steppe around the year 900. They rapidly made themselves public enemy number one, raiding far and wide across northern Italy and southern France and defeating no fewer than three major east Frankish armies between 907 and 910. On the basis of a carefully crafted programme of military reforms in the late 920s, Henry was able finally to defeat them at the battle of Riade (in northern Thuringia) in 933. This victory secured Henry’s position as king, but it was his son Otto I who took the dynasty’s authority to a new level.

Not that this was easy. It took Otto until 950 finally to subdue different combinations of rebellious dukes and familial rivals. He also effectively continued another of his father’s key policies: expansion in the east. Otto then launched a powerful expedition into Italy in 951, taking control of most of its northern and central regions. This demonstrated that he was now the most powerful ruler of Latin Christendom, a status he confirmed by inflicting a crushing defeat on the still pagan Magyars at the battle of the Lech in 955. This gave him an irresistible combination of overt power and ideological legitimacy, since it was clearly God who had allowed him to defeat the pagans where so many other Christian rulers had failed. So armed, Otto was able to browbeat the papacy into another imperial coronation. A second Italian expedition was mounted in 961, after which he was crowned Emperor in 962. The third Empire of the second half of the first millennium had come into being. Although based ultimately on Otto’s inherited position in Saxony, the Ottonian Empire was a distinctly sub-Carolingian entity, a reasonably direct descendant of the east Frankish kingdom of the ninth century.
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A succession of Frankish empires based firmly in northern Europe thus dominated large parts of western and west-central Europe between about 500 and 1000. They were never as stable as their Roman predecessor, the exercise of imperial power being punctuated by two periods of considerable political chaos, c.650–720 and c.850–920. This was because all three were based on a weaker type of state structure. In the Roman Empire, much day-to-day control was in the hands of local communities, but the the central authorities
had always retained some key levers of power. They had the right systematically to tax the largest sector of the economy – agriculture – in order to generate substantial annual revenues. These were used to support a large professional army, a governmental machine and state legal structures (both laws themselves and the courts), which were the font of legitimacy in the Roman world. For all its limitations, and there were many, the Roman Empire thus operated a relatively big state structure in pre-modern terms. The three Frankish Empires of the second half of the millennium differed considerably in detail from one another, but none taxed agricultural production systematically to maintain large professional armies. They all drew the bulk of their armed might from the militarized landowners in the localities under their control. Sometimes this support could just be extorted, but usually it had to be attracted via reward. And since these later rulers were not renewing their revenues annually through large-scale taxation, this meant that wealth tended to flow outwards from the imperial centre to the more local landowning elites.

As has been well observed, the three Frankish imperial moments of the later first millennium all occurred when circumstances favoured expansionary, predatory warfare. Profits from this activity allowed the imperial dynasts, whether Merovingians, Carolingians or Ottonians, to reward their militarized landowning supporters without having to impoverish themselves. But when expansion stopped, political fragmentation quickly returned, as rewards flowed outwards again from a now fixed body of resources.
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As we shall see, this particular aspect of later first-millennium imperialism would play an important role in the further transformation of barbarian Europe, as well as providing much of the explanation for the rather stop–start character of Frankish imperialism. Even so, for most of the second half of the period, the view from outside would have identified a predominant western European power whose influence encompassed large parts of the continent. And it is, of course, precisely the view from outside – that of the barbarians in the rest of Europe – that will concern us in the chapters that follow. Before we can properly examine how the rest of European society responded to the stimulus provided by this entirely new north European imperial power, and the patterns of expansion inherent to it, we must take account of two further major reconfigurations of the ancient world order.

The first unfolded more or less simultaneously with the rise of the first of the Frankish imperial dynasties: the Merovingians. Their Empire, as we have just seen, stretched from the Atlantic to the Elbe, and comparing this area with prevailing patterns of development across the European landscape as they stood in the sixth century, it quickly becomes apparent that its extent east of the River Rhine coincided closely with those parts of the old Roman periphery – inner and outer – that had maintained a considerable continuity in their long-standing Germanic-type material cultures and associated levels of socio-political organization during the period of Roman collapse. This is a point of critical importance that is easily lost because it concerns areas of Europe whose history finds little or no coverage in the surviving historical sources. Its importance emerges immediately, even from a quick overview of the archaeological evidence.

In the late Roman era, the largely Germanic-dominated inner and outer peripheries of the Roman Empire comprised huge swathes of territory running broadly north-west to south-east across the map of Europe. Its breadth in the north was approximately 1,000 kilometres, from the east bank of the Rhine to just beyond the Vistula. In the south, it was broader – more like 1,300 kilometres from the Iron Gates of the Danube to the west bank of the River Don (
Map 15
). Societies within this block of territory had relatively dense and increasing populations, relatively developed agricultures, relations of some kind with the Roman Empire, and material cultures that characteristically included substantial amounts of carefully crafted metalwork and pottery. By the sixth century, culture collapse had engulfed most of the area. In Ukraine and southern Poland, this occurred when the Cernjachov and southern Przeworsk systems disintegrated, not long after 400
AD
. In middle Poland, collapse can be dated to c.500, and in Pomerania by the Baltic to c.500–25. In the Elbe–Saale region, complete collapse came right at the end of the sixth century; between the Elbe and the Oder, there is no sign of any Germanic continuity into the seventh. To the south of this zone, in Bohemia and Moravia, a thinning-out of Germanic-type remains is once more observable in the fifth and sixth centuries, followed by the total disappearance of such material between the mid-sixth and early seventh. By c.700,
characteristic styles of traditional Germanic material culture were thus confined entirely to areas west of the Elbe (
Map 15
).
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