Cambridge Medieval History

THE NEW CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY Volume III C. 900-c. I024 EDITED BY TIMOTHY REUTER ProfeuoraJ Medieval History Unit'ersily of Southampton ~CAMBRIDGE ~ UNIVERSITY PRESS ~T ~)C; ( <:; 4 CHAPTER 10 SAXONY AND THE ELBE SLAYS IN THE TENTH CENTURY GerdAlthoff SAXON POLITICS IN THE SHADOW OF OTTONIAN KINGSHIP Saxony after Carolingian incorporation The conquest and incorporation of Saxony into the Carolingian empire, which Charles the Great achieved after long and bitter struggles, had far-reaching consequences for the political and institutional organisation of the Saxons. The three Saxon 'armies' of the Ostfalians, Westfalians and Engrians, and the 'national' assembly of all castes - nobles, free men and freed men - ceased to contribute to the coherence of Saxon political life. From 785 all assemblies in Saxony were forbidden except for those summoned by a count or royal missus. It was the so-called comital organisation which henceforth determined the strUcture of lordship in Saxony; but no more fundamental Frankicisation of the ruling strata in Saxony took place. The Saxon nobility allied itself with the Franks, presumably by ties of marriage, and the Carolingian rulers did not replace it with Frankish magnates. A second characteristic of the Carolingian conquest was to have long-term consequences: Saxon territory did not become a core region of the Carolingian kings, even after the divisions of the empire among Louis the Pious' sons. Carolingian visits to Saxony remained excep- tional events. Already by the mid-ninth century we can observe nobles in eastern and western Saxony termed dux. Between Rhine and Weser in the west it is Ekbert, with his ducatus Westfolorunr,in the east it is the dux Liudolf, ancestor of the Ottonians and founder of the nunnery of Gandersheim. In Saxony, therefore, as in other parts of east Francia, we find that phenomenon known as the 'younger tribal duchy': an aristocratic lordship claiming exclusive pre- eminence within agens (a source of lengthy feuds in Franconia and Suabia), and consequently bound to clash with the king. In Saxony such conflicts are not recorded at first, and it is in any case doubtful whether the dux Liudolf already claimed a leadership within the whole Saxon territory. He seems rather to have confined himself to his own lordship in eastern Saxony, in the Harz mountains. 268 GERD ALTHOFF Liudolf's postnon was inherited by his son Brun, who fell against the Northmen in 880 while leading a Saxon army including the bishops of Hildesheim and Minden among others. Liudolfing predominance was apparently not affected by this, for Brun's brother Otto 'the Magnificent' simply took over his position. The influence exercised by the Liudolfings is seen not least in the way their women married east Frankish Carolingians: Liutgard married Louis the Younger and Oda Zwentibald. Multiple alliances with the royal familywere accompanied by marriage links with powerful noble families outside Saxony, for example with the Babenberger of eastern Franconia, but not apparently by marriages among the Saxon nobility itself. Several of Liudolf''s daughters remained unmarried as abbesses of Gandersheim, a very clear indi- cation of the Liudolfings' prominent position. Henry, son of Otto and later to become king, was the first to break with these marriage practices. He first married a widow from the Merseburg regions for her rich inheritance, and then fell in love 'because of her beauty and her wealth',! with the young Matilda, a descendant of the Saxon duke Widukind, whose lands lay mainly in western Saxony. Ecclesiastical protests against the first marriage made possible its dissolution and Henry's remarriage; linked with it was a thrust into western Saxony, which soon brought Henry into conflict with the Conradines. The Uudolfings' position was consolidated by Henry's successful conduct of his dispute with King Conrad I, who had at first tried to restrict his succession to his father after the latter's death in 912. Henry's rise is all the more remarkable when we consider that no other Saxon aristocratic group succeeded in continuously extending its position in this way:neither the descendants of the dux Ekbert nor those of the Saxon leaders Widukind and Hessi achieved such a continuity, though the reasons are not clear. However, one very forcible reservation must be made when considering Saxony in the late ninth and early tenth century: any judgements are made very difficult by the fact that many evaluations come from the later 'Ottonian' historiography, which bathes early Liudolfing history in a flood of transfigur- ing light. This is true not only of the works written in Gandersheim but also of Widukind of Corvey's Saxon History. It is thus ultimately unclear how the Franks and the Saxans came to elect the Saxon duke Henry as king in 9I9 following King Conrad's death. The Saxon dukedom in the tenth century Henry I's elevation to kingship at Fritzlar in 919 had a less-noticed conse- quence for the Saxon people: its duke was now king. Henry I is not known to 1 Thietmar, Chronicon.l. 9. SaxOtry and the EIbe Slavs in the tenth century have taken any steps to install a substitute as duke in Saxony, and nor do the Saxans themselves appear to have been active in this direction. This was the start of a development which had great significance for the tenth century. The king, frequently absent, was able to shape Saxon politics less continuously than would have been possible for a duke. He nevertheless refrained from establish- ing an 'office-like' dukedom there, by contrast with the position in the south German duchies. This had three characteristic consequences for Saxon history in this period: noble families forced their way into the resulting power vacuum; it became more difficult to reach an expression of political will at royal and popular assemblies, for a number of different forces had or claimed positions of rough equality; cooperative forms of association (coniurotiones) were wide- spread, which is probably also a result of the organisation of lordship within Saxony. The Ottonian rulers naturally could not avoid giving offices and tasks to Saxon nobles from which a pre-eminence within the people might have been derived. The best-known such example was the appointment of Hermann }3illungasprinceps militiac by Otto I in 936.2This had particularly important consequences because with time Hermann's position gradually broadened into that of a duke, a position which became heritable within his family.But Otto's decision is also of great interest because it lit the fuse for a whole series of conflicts. These show that even in the early tenth century Saxon nobles thought of themselves as having claims to particular offices and were not prepared to accept royal decisions they perceived as arbitrary. Otto I's choice was a - probably deliberate - breach of the internal ranking of the Billung familyand of the Saxon nobility as a whole, intended to demonstrate his right to make such decisions. Resistance articulated itself immediately: Hermann's older brother Wichmann left the royal army and allied himself with Otto's enemies, while an Ekkehard, 'son of Liudolf', tried by an act of hare-brained courage to show that he was a more appropriate choice for military leadership than Hermann. With eighteen companions he risked an attack on the enemy against royal orders, and perished with allhis comrades.' In the following period we can see hoW Otto I repeatedly entrusted hisprinceps militiac with representing him (pro- 'limbO) in Saxony when he went to Italy. These procurationes came to be quite ~~ngthy ones, for the emperor spent almost all his time in Italy after 961. It is here fore significant that the royal chancery refers to Hermann only as comes or ~tJ,.chio, while Widukind of Corvey terms him dux, though he also uses this er1ll for other Saxon nobles of the period, such as Margraves Gero and ~ietrich. In spite of this it is clear that Hermann's exalted position was also reflected in his titles. 2 Widukind, Res gu/ae Saxonkae 11, 4. 3 Ibid. 11, 4. GERD AL TROFF The independence with which he acted can be seen from two events from his second procuratio. Otto wrote to the duces Hermann and Dietrich, ordering them not to make peace with the Redarii; although the letter was read out at a popular assembly in Werla, the peace, already concluded, was kept, since the Saxons feared to divide their forces while threatened by a war with the Danes.4 Even more striking than this overriding of orders from a distant emperor determined by the military position was a reception which Hermann arranged for himself in Magdeburg in 97z. Here he usurped the reception ceremony reserved for the king, sat in his place and slept in his bed. He had, of course, assistance in this, notably from the archbishop of Magdeburg, Adalbert, whom Otto condemned to a hefty fine for his presumption.i It is not until the time of Bernard I, however, who had inherited all his father's rights in 973, that we learn that the position of the Billungs within Saxony had come to approach that of a duke. In the crisis period after the death of Otto Il, who had left only his three-year-old son Otto Ill, just crowned as eo-ruler in Aachen, to succeed him, decisions by the Saxon people were particularly necessary because Otto's nearest male relative and guardian, Henry the Quarrelsome, himself aspired to kingship and sought a decision in Saxony. He summoned a Saxon assembly for Palm Sunday 984, and suggested to it that he should be elected king.

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