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The question about the role of women within medieval societies associatively makes one think of witches who allegedly were up to mischief by using poison or all kinds of magic to inflict maliciously harm on other people. But this impression results too much from an uncritical reception of such propagandistic conceptions that arose from the later medieval and early modern witch-hunt ideology. This cliché of medieval witches neither does justice to the general situation nor can it be transferred to the entire Middle Ages, as a representative view into the Carolingian empire of the eighth and ninth centuries shows.

The Carolingian empire in western Europe (c. AD 700–900) has long been defined by its military expansion and Christian renewal. Carolingian historical narratives portrayed their victories as divine...

This article re-addresses the question of the so-called Lateran in Aachen, mentioned in a number of texts produced in the wake of the Carolingian reform movement during the first decades of the ninth century. Scholars have searched for this “Lateran” as a physical space in the palace complex commissioned by Charlemagne in the late eighth century. This contribution tries to demonstrate that this search is problematic; the concept could also have been used in a more metaphorical or conceptual sense: Councils taking place in a “Lateran” would reflect the self-perception of the people gathered there, placing themselves in a Roman imperial and explicitly Constantinian tradition rather than demonstrating an actual architectural invocation of the Constantinian buildings in Rome. While the Lateran in the Carolingian sources may have referred to a specific part of the palace, it need never have been an official name, and may have only been used by a limited group of people with grand ideas and an even greater proj...

The author uses contemporary Frankish sources and the results of archaeological research to illustrate the political currents of the first half of the ninth century that framed the development of the Croatian dukedom (kneževina). He proposes a new reading for a passage from the Annales regni Francorum referring to Borna, Croatian duke (knez) and Frankish vassal. This new reading allows the reinterpretation of the first stages of development of the dukedom in the sense that Duke Borna expanded his territory by making use of the fighting that followed the insurrection of his neighbour Ljudevit, Duke of Pannonia Inferior. The author also surveys the typology and characteristics of societies that developed along the limes of the Carolingian Empire, and places in this context the further development and internal processes of integration in the Croatian dukedom.

High status did not guarantee queens, abbesses, and other elite women, anymore than servile women, a place in the surviving texts from the Carolingian Empire.1 As others have emphasized in this volume already, traditional biography is only rarely a way to tell the stories of medieval women, even more so Carolingian women.2 This chapter will trace a picture of two women, Girlindis and Alpais, who lived in the western part of the Carolingian Empire in the ninth century and who fabricated textiles, a crucial activity of Frankish women of every status. Medievalists have only recently come to appreciate the importance of textiles in the early Middle Ages, and few have recognized the prominence of cloth in the Carolingian world, largely due to the paucity of textiles that survive from that time and place. Given the silence of our sources about both individual women and cloth fabrication, learning about Alpais and Girlindis as individuals proves impossible. Examination of a wide variety of sources, both material and textual, allows for a glimpse of their possible experiences even when they do not pertain directly to the women in question. Archaeology, for instance, helps to illuminate the life of Girlindis while examining family members aids in learning about Alpais.3 Previous inattention makes it all the more desirable to examine these two textile fabricators as well as a surviving piece one produced.

Introduction: fraternal rivalry, 840–843 The deposition of Louis the Pious in 833 was neither, we have seen, the definitive disaster of the emperor's own reign nor of the Carolingian empire writ large. Still, the Frankish political community was unmistakably shocked. The main protagonists harboured anxieties about what they had done: in a letter of 847, the emperor Lothar reflected almost disbelievingly on that time of conflict between him and his brothers as ‘the work of the Devil through his agents’. But even the traumas of the early 830s were eclipsed in the Frankish psyche by the three years of bloody civil war which followed the death of Louis the Pious in 840. Once again, his sons were at the heart of the matter. A loose alliance of Charles the Bald and Louis the German teamed up against Lothar and Pippin II of Aquitaine (the three kings’ nephew who was hoping to dislodge Charles from the south-west and claim the kingdom of his father Pippin I, who had died in 838). As their armies ceaselessly roamed the empire in a game of armed chess whose top prize was control of the Carolingian heartlands in the north, a long series of armed stand-offs and skirmishes peaked at the bloody battle of Fontenoy in June 841. (See Map 14 for places mentioned in this chapter.) A man called Engelbert, who fought on Lothar's side, later wrote a poem lamenting the extreme violence and horrifying implications of the battle: ‘No slaughter was ever worse on any field of war…This battle is not worthy of praise, not fit to be sung.’ Major pitched battles were rare in the early medieval period precisely because so much could hinge on their outcome; and recent history, even the dark days of the early 830s, provided few examples of noble Franks drawing swords in earnest against their comrades. The Franks were thus stunned by the loss of aristocratic life at Fontenoy. Four decades later in a work written for the emperor Charles the Fat, Notker of St Gallen recoiled from even mentioning the name of the battle, so horrified was he that Christian blood had been spilled by Louis the German, Charles's father. A few years before that, Pope John VIII had taunted the same Louis by reminding him of the ‘still-damp fields of Fontenoy that he soaked with human blood in his youth’. All four Carolingians survived the fighting and in this sense the battle was not decisive. However, victory for Charles and Louis gave them the edge and effectively undermined Lothar's prospects of winning the war as a whole. His forays into the western strongholds of Charles, and those of Louis in the east, became less and less convincing and he was forced to negotiate. The final seal was set on the truce in summer 843 by the famous Treaty of Verdun. This carefully planned division split the empire into three vertical strips, with Charles receiving the western portion, Lothar the middle, and Louis the eastern – Pippin II, like Pippin the Hunchback and Bernard of Italy before him, was airbrushed out of the family picture.

Models which stress economic and political factors in empire‐building are limited in their ability to explain the reproduction of these complex socio‐political phenomena; ideological and, more generally, social factors must be emphasized. The Carolingian Empire lacked a sophisticated and overarching administrative and military structure which would ensure elite integration. We argue that the production of a Christian ideological code of order and social organization was developed in an explicit attempt to effect the reproduction of the system. This ideological order was disseminated by the Church and was reflected in the material culture of the period: the churches, mortuary practices, palaces, monasteries, gospel books and mosaics were active elements in social integration. The archaeology, art history and architectural history of the eighth and ninth centuries are used to illustrate the attempts by the Carolingians to ensure social integration in the face of fragmentation.

Confessions seem to litter the Carolingian landscape. This chapter proposes that the imagery and arguments that accrued in the Carolingian discourse surrounding confession had considerable impact on both pastoral and legal concepts of moral authority in the medieval West. On one hand, it appears that in the Carolingian period, the individual conscience gained recognition as a sanctified agent of judgement. On the other hand, it seems that such a gain in moral autonomy was matched by new mechanisms for the investigation and prosecution of offenses that advanced the claims of the community over the individual. The confessional experience and the criminal court were invested with new potential for prosecution of intangible offenses, and also for new modes of pleading, as Carolingians selected their moments and modes of blushing before the judge. Keywords: blushing; Carolingian Empire; confession; judge; moral arbitration

Both the birth and the death dates of the medieval Empire are matters of unambiguous public record. From the day on which Pope Leo III (795–816) crowned Charlemagne (771–814), Christmas Day in the year 800, until 6 August 1806, when Napoleon’s actions caused Charlemagne’s final imperial successor, Francis II (1792–1806), to give up the imperial crown brought it to an end, there was a Roman Empire functioning in Western Europe.3 The specificity with which we know its beginning and its end, however, is misleading. To say that Francis II surrendered Charlemagne’s crown is to assume that his empire was the same as Charlemagne’s.4 Comparing maps showing the territorial extent of the two rulers’ domains would quickly disabuse the observer of the belief that Charlemagne and Francis II ruled the same domain. While Charles’s domains stretched south and west from their heartland along the Rhine, into Italy and Spain, Francis II’s empire was centered on the Austrian lands that formed the base from which the Habsburgs pushed south and east. To the extent that Charlemagne had a capital, it was Aachen, Aix-la-Chapelle, in the Rhineland, while Prague and then Vienna served the Habsburgs as capitals as they pushed into southeastern Europe.