1.

Hugh of Lusignan - setting up the assignment

2. Charlemagne's moustache
3. Empire as heritage and a Carolingian Renaissance
1. The prof said that we need a bit more time getting our teeth into
Hugh of Lusignan.
The document is a fascinating one, from very early in the history of lay
paper. And it is both very illuminating and very puzzling.
W: Who made it? Well, Hugh, a baron, but he could not write so he
must have dictated or explained it to a man of the pen, probably a
cleric.
W: When? Well, some time between 1020 and 1025, and some time
not long, probably, after that agreement with Count William of
Aquitaine. How long? Not clear at all.
W: Where: well, where Hugh was, wherever that is. As to who else was
present, it is hard indeed to say.
W: What is this thing? What is a quaerimonium: the name sounds like a
statement of grievance; that is what the Latin suggests (see querelous,
a cognate word). But is it primarily a statement of grievance or a
record of an agreement. It ends as the latter, and one wonders which is
the more important. In any case, we have few models for a document
like this, as it is very old and early, and it dates from a time when most
agreements among laymen (as vs churches) were still oral. We have no
clear queremony genre out there to link to this or to show us models
for the rhetoric and logic.
W: What is it for? A good question. Presumably it aimed at use among
the barons, rather than just for Hugh's quiet satisfaction, reading over
his grievances in his room. More likely, it was to speak for Hugh in his
absence, if some literate champion were to read it aloud to an
assembly.
Now the setting. We are some 200 years after Charlemagne into a
world that is deeply feudal, and it is notable how there is no sign of a
higher power than the Count of Aquitaine. No sign of a king. And there
is nothing like Roman law, with its habits of contract.
So the prof set up an opposition: contract vs. sacrifice/

Contract, as in Roman law, is closed, not open, and generally narrow

band. Sacrifice, as in honour, and religion, and in feudal relations, is
the antithesis, with its broad band and open-ended reciprocity.
Contract says "this for that" and sacrifice says "for you I give this up!"
See Hugh's language with William: it is all one sacrifice after another.
Now sacrifice takes the stance -- "I give, I ask nothing." But sacrifice, in
love, or friendship, or devotion to a saint or god, in fact always expects
some sort of payback.
The prof noted that this whole theme would return when we looked at
the Reformation, where Protestants would argue that Catholic
indulgences were contract-laden, a charge that the Catholics would
rebut.
Now back to Hugh and William, who are almost like gangsters in some
mafia movie, heavy hitters with their bands of thugs.
Not a contract in sight, and lots and lots of threats and blandishments
and promises and profferings of hostages or castles, in sacrifice mode.
This language of sacrifice, so central to medieval and early modern
culture, will be with us all through the course, right down to 1600.
So for the hypothesis paper, watch carefully that final settlement, as
described (even if the description is Hughs own, and not exact, it is
interesting as an image of how these tough lords did business with one
another). Look at all those sacrificial gestures: the serf to do the
ordeal, for instance.
Note that an honor is a property that yields income, and so is a
benefice and a host is an army.
2. Charlemagnes mustache: prof Paul Dutton at Simon Fraser has a
book with that title. He argues that the image, as in Einhard, of the
Long-Haired Kings, explains that mustache. The Merovingians had their
charismatic uncut hair: hair everwhere, down to their toes, and that is
why in Gregory when you want to undo a rival you give him a haircut
and shut him up with monks, and if he grows his hair back, well, you
kill him. Of course. Magic hair. Now the Carolingians refused that hair,
as they were the new dynasty the Un-Merovingians, but that
mustache is a vestige, a reminder, a sign or token.
3. That takes us to the accidents of birth, and death: the Carolingians
were no more given to primogeniture or single heir than were the
Merovingians. They too divided properties and kingdoms among sons,
with the inevitable huge wrangles between brothers, and then between

cousins, and the no less inevitable break-up of political units. It was

only after ca 1000, two centuries later, that the landed powerful
families moved to a single-heir system, without which kingdoms could
never have arisen from the confusion of the feudal landscape we see
with Hugh and Count William.
With primogeniture comes the lineage and the family name and the
house (the House of Lusignan is in fact famous and very durable).
But I rush ahead.
What happened with Charlemagne is that, gradually, the high officers
called Mayors of the Palace, who ran the big economies of the kings,
grew stronger than the kings themselves. Charles Martel was Mayor,
and Peppin III, his son, finally brushed the last Merovingian king aside
and got himself a crown. Now, as Einhard says, Peppin had a brother,
Carloman, who mysteriously just decided to become a monk at Monte
Cassino, Benedicts famous house. He must have been pushed, but,
like his dad, Peppin ruled alone. Now he had two kids, Charles (Karl)
and another Carloman, and Peppin divided Francia, but, luckily for
everybody, within two years Carloman was dead, leaving only Charles
the Great (Charles le Magne) = Charlemagne, the head of the
Carolingian Empire. (Same word).
3. This is an interesting moment in European history. Charles the Great
inherits his kingdom from his father, but grows it in many directions.
[a] Down across the Pyrenees into the Spanish March.
The prof explained that a March is a frontier district where local
commanders have more authority. Charlemagne had many, and so did
later rulers.
(Le Marche in Italy are one of his, as is Austria Ostermark, against the
Avars).
And Charlemagne pushed down to Rome and then subdued the
Beneventan Lombards south of Rome but did not swallow them. And he
pushed east towards where Hungary is, in Pannonia on the Danube
bend. And he pushed north into the Saxons on the border of modern
Denmark and east against the ancestors of the Poles.
A great expanse of landscape.
And then, on Christmas in 800 he had himself crowned HRE Holy
Roman Emperor. As Lord Acton joked, neither Holy nor Roman nor
really an Empire, but very influential as a model. Really, mostly, it was

a feudal federation in Germany, but with vast prestige and a monarch

named Caesar (Kaiser), which is why the Second Reich of 1871-1918
took the name it took, and why Hitler, with an eye to 800-1806,
announced grandiosely that he was founding a Third Reich that
would last 1000 years.
A student remarked that this empire had its hiccups, its temporary
suspensions, as is true. But the memory was there, as was the rivalry
with the serious continuous emperors in Constantinople.
So how to make it work. Ancient Rome with good roads was less
viscous and more transparent than medieval Europe. News and
commands could travel across space and power could reach out.
Medieval governance collided with the problem of distance: you cannot
see or hear and you cannot grab or slam. Or it was hard. But
Charlemagne managed very well, given the conditions, with his
traveling missi with orders and talking points (power point points) in
their saddlebags, moving from city to city and monastery to church,
with capitularies full of orders. And people came to the centre for great
meetings, from which some of these capitularies stem. And the annual
campaign projected power to the edges: the army.
Now Charlemagne did all this with no taxation, just tolls and levies
from his villas of the sort we see in the Capitulary de villis. It was in
many ways a command economy, more than a market one, though
commerce did live on. And the capitulary on villas lets us see that, how
they requisitioned goods from lands under royal ownership. The
documents suggests almost complete self-sufficiency at one of these
operations: they hunt and farm and fish and make metal goods and
cloth (in that womens workshop we hear of.)
So how to make it all work: instead of paying cash for services, the
crown would settle its dukes (military) and counts (civil admin) and
churchmen on lands, their benefices. at the end of your office you let
it go. Until the chaos of the 840s, when land-holders just hung on and
passed the lands to their sons. That is how feudalism sprang up, as we
shall see.
[4]
So a Renaissance: a conscious rebirth. A very potent idea, invented not
in the Middle Ages or in the Renaissance either, but much later, and
applied to the self-conscious revival in Italy, and then in France,
England and elsewhere, of ancient motifs and images and themes. Now
that famous word, Renaissance, was later applied to other times and
places, and we now talk of a Carolingian Renaissance, with good
reason, as the culture around Charlemagne really did try for a revival

of lost arts, whether that king on horseback (equestrian statue) we see

in Rosenwein, the first ever since the fall of Rome, or the miniscule
lettering in the books, or the use of imperial purple on manuscripts,
evoking imperial purple. And Einhards Life of Charlemagne is a
deliberately classicizing work on the model of Suetoniuss Lives of the
Caesars, so much so that we would say he plagiarizes his descriptions
of his royal subject.
Note to the Capitulary on Education, which is not really a capitulary at
all, as it has no capita, none of those power-point headings we know
from the other capitularies. But its ambition is to make the monks pray
in good Latin, as God likes good grammar and presumably grammatical
prayers work a lot better than ones with bloopers. So the push for
literate prayer is part of that same cultural campaign so typical of the
Carolingian interlude.
Now a lot of the Carolingian effort came to little, as the kingdom broke
into pieces and much that it achieved just faded. But the memory was
powerful, and the political arrangements, although feudalized, did last
in some way, with the dukes and counts, although the centre
disappeared and, like William of Aquitaine, they carried on more or less
solo.