The Written Word in Carolingian-Style Fiscal Administration Under King Henry I, 919–936
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German History Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 399–423 The Written Word in Carolingian-Style Fiscal Administration under King Henry I, 919–936 David S. Bachrach Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/gh/article/28/4/399/688104 by guest on 01 October 2021 I. Introduction For more than a century, German-speaking scholars have worked diligently to portray the eastern portions of the Carolingian empire, forged by Charlemagne (768–814), as administratively backward as contrasted with the West. In very important ways, this scholarly effort was a manifestation of German hostility towards France arising from the Napoleonic wars and, looking even further back, from Louis XIV’s wars of conquest in the Rhineland. The Carolingian empire, built on Roman administrative and fiscal foundations, was seen as the precursor to France. German scholars, embarrassed by Germany’s failure to develop as a nation state along the lines of its more westerly competitors, sought refuge in the romantic-nationalist ideology of the free Germanic warrior, resistant to the ‘civilizing’ domination of Rome.1 This ideological justification for Germany’s special path (Sonderweg), although now long removed from its initial inspiration, still underlies much of contemporary scholarship regarding the government of early medieval Germany.2 The burden of this essay is to call into question this dichotomy between East and West, by showing the continuation of Carolingian-style written administration during the reign of the first Saxon king, Henry I. In her seminal and fundamentally revisionist study of the role that the written word played in the administration of the Carolingian empire as a whole under Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, and of the West Frankish Kingdom under Charles the Bald, Janet Nelson stresses that royal power depended on the accurate and systematic descriptio of the royal fisc. This included both those resources under direct royal control (dominium) and those that had been granted as benefices (beneficia).3 With regard to the West, Nelson disputes the rather pessimistic view of F.L. Ganshof that documents were rarely used by counts or comital subordinate officials (vicarii) to provide detailed reports to royal missi who were sent from the court.4 With specific regard to the requirement, set out in 1 For a detailed discussion of the development of German nationalism in the early modern period, see the valuable recent study by Caspar Hirschi, Wettkampf der Nationen: Konstruktionen einer deutschen Ehrgemeinschaft an der Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit (Göttingen, 2005); and the review by David S. Bachrach in Sixteenth Century Journal, 39 (2008), pp. 316–18. 2 Regarding the centrality of the Sonderweg model for studies of the German middle ages, particularly during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see Timothy Reuter, ‘The Medieval German Sonderweg?: The Empire and its Rulers in the High Middle Ages’, in Anne J. Duggan (ed.), Kings and Kingship in Medieval Europe (Exeter, 1993), pp. 179–211. 3 Janet L. Nelson, ‘Literacy in Carolingian Government’, in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 258–96, here p. 272–74. 4 Missi were officials who acted as an extension of the royal will at local level, executing royal commands and solving problems in the royal interest as they understood it. © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghq108 400 David S. Bachrach capitularies, that vicarii were to make detailed reports regarding the beneficia in their districts for transmission to the royal court, Nelson observes: ‘it is harder still to doubt that counts and vicarii often communicated with each other in writing’.5 By contrast, however, with her positive assessment of the successful use of the written word in the West to maintain up-to-date and detailed records regarding the status of fiscal resources, including those granted out as benefices, Nelson accepts the model of a very limited use of the written word for the Carolingian East, and its Ottonian successor state.6 Here, Nelson draws attention to Karl Leyser’s contention that Ottonian government operated with ‘a modest array of institutions’ and very little use of written Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/gh/article/28/4/399/688104 by guest on 01 October 2021 documents.7 Ironically, Leyser himself intended his study on Ottonian government to serve as a rather more positive portrayal of the use of the written word, and institutions that depended on the written word, than had hitherto been the norm in German historiography. The great nineteenth-century constitutional scholar, Georg Waitz, who had actively sought continuities between Carolingian and Ottonian governmental practices, was frustrated by the lack of normative, capitulary legislation for the tenth- century East that set out models of how a written administration should operate under the Saxon kings.8 Waitz did argue that there was some kind of central collection office for tax and toll revenues and that Otto I (936–973) probably did have information about the gross sums of money that were coming into the royal treasury.9 Nevertheless, it was Waitz’s pessimistic conclusions regarding continuity of Carolingian administrative practices, which focused largely on the lack of surviving capitularies, that dominated subsequent German-language scholarship. Indeed, Marc Bloch, working from a francophone perspective, critically observed in 1928 that scholars specializing in early and high medieval German history virtually 5 Ibid, p. 285. 6 Ibid, p. 294. 7 Nelson, ‘Literacy’, p. 294; and Karl Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony (London, 1979), p. 102 for the quotation, and Leyser, ‘Ottonian Government’, English Historical Review, 96 (1981), pp. 721– 53, repr. in Leyser, Medieval Germany and its Neighbours, 900–1250 (London, 1982), pp. 68–101. 8 Georg Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, vol. 6 (2nd edn, ed. G. Seeliger, Berlin, 1896), p. 323 ff. For Waitz’s observation concerning a lack of higher supervision over economic affairs, see Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, vol. 8 (2nd edn, Kiel, 1878), pp. 216–18. For further expressions of these same views, see Otto Brunner, ‘Moderner Verfassungsbegriff und mittelalterliche Verfassungsgeschichte’, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung (MIÖG), Ergänzungs-Band, 14 (1939), pp. 513–28, repr. in Hellmut Kämpf (ed.), Herrschaft und Staat im Mittelalter (‘Wege der Forschung’, 2, Darmstadt, 1956), pp. 1–19; Heinrich Mitteis, ‘Land und Herrschaft. Bemerkungen zu dem gleichnamigen Buch O. Brunners’, Historische Zeitschrift, 163 (1941), pp. 255–81, 471–89; Hagen Keller, ‘Grundlagen ottonischer Königsherrschaft’, in Karl Schmid (ed.), Reich und Kirche vor dem Investiturstreit: Vorträge beim wissenschaftlichen Kolloquium aus Anlaß des achtzigsten Geburtstag von Gerd Tellenbach (Sigmaringen, 1985), pp. 17–34; and Timothy Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages 800– 1056 (London, 1991), pp. 89 and 211. 9 Waitz, Verfassungsgeschichte, vol. 6 (2nd edn), p. 330. M. Stimming, Das deutsche Königsgut im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert, I. Teil: Die Salierzeit (Berlin, 1922), p. 28, notes Waitz’s observations and, in this context (p. 29), argues that it would have been impossible for King Henry III (1039–1056) to have made grants of one-ninth or other frac- tions of royal income without having a rather good idea of what the total sum of royal revenues was from particular royal estates of the fisc. This same observation has been made more recently by Neil Middleton, ‘Early Medieval Port Customs, Tolls and Controls on Foreign Trade’, Early Medieval Europe, 13 (2005), pp. 313–58 with regard to the distribution of income from royal tolls. The Written Word in Carolingian-Style Fiscal Administration under King Henry I, 919–936 401 ignored the question of administration, especially when contrasted with the concerted efforts of their French contemporaries to grapple with administrative problems.10 Bloch emphasized that There is almost always something disappointing about reading two histories one after the other—however excellent they may be—dealing on the one hand with the institutions of medieval France, and on the other with those of Germany during the same period. You seem to be looking on at a desultory dialogue in which neither of the speakers ever gives an answer exactly meeting the requirements of his partner. One of the two books points to the problem and solves it in a certain way. But when you turn to the second book you find most of the time that the problem is not even mentioned.11 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/gh/article/28/4/399/688104 by guest on 01 October 2021 In the present orthodox view, however, even Leyser’s modest and impressionistic effort to revise the tendency observed by Bloch in the German historiographical tradition has largely been rejected by German scholars over the past three decades. In a 1989 article in Frühmittelalterliche Studien, the prominent specialist in Ottonian history, Hagen Keller, states explicitly: Despite the continuity of the idea of empire and the model of Charlemagne, everything that was of par- ticular importance for high Carolingian imperial organization—centrality, office, law-giving and writing— was absent in its successor states. Indeed they simply came to an end.12 Writing a decade later, Gerd Althoff defends the provocative subtitle of Die Ottonen: Königsherrschaft