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Home , Aquitaine, Burgundy, Duchy of Aquitaine, Duke of Aquitaine, Hugh the Great

DOI: 10.1111/hic3.12622

ARTICLE

Political culture and ducal authority in , c. 900–1040

Fraser McNair

University of Leeds Abstract Correspondence The development of ducal authority in tenth-century Aqui- Fraser McNair, School of History, University taine was a major change in the region's political culture. of Leeds, Woodhouse, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK. Email: [email protected] The emergence of a regional, aristocratic polity was a shift from the Carolingian past, and historians have proffered Funding information Leverhulme Trust, Grant/Award Number: several explanations for it. This article examines several ECF-2017-693 models for the development of principalities: as the expres- sions, however compromised, of ethnic separatism; as the evolved forms of ninth-century administrative structures; and as aristocratic power constellations no different from any other. It traces the history of Aquitaine from the first , William the Pious, in the early tenth century, to the Poitevin of the mid-eleventh century. The post- Carolingian , it is argued, is best under- stood not as an ethnic or an institutional formative, but as the distinctive expression of a changing regional political culture.

1 | INTRODUCTION

The emergence of discrete, regional, non-royal political units (known, by an historian's term of art, as ‘principalities’) in what is now over the course of the late ninth through early eleventh centuries is an historical puzzle. Prob- ably the most profound is how we are to characterise these polities: a break, an evolution or just the nobility's power essentially unchanged but dressed up in flashy new titles? Historians have up to the present struggled to characterise the emergence, out of a Carolingian world where aristocratic polities were conspicuous by their absence of regional political units such as , and, of course, Aquitaine.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2020 The Author. History Compass published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

History Compass. 2020;18:e12622. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hic3 1of10 https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12622 2of10 MCNAIR

There are basically three main models of regional polities, which we might for convenience label the ethnic, the juridical and the revisionist. To simplify and abbreviate: under the ‘ethnic’ hypothesis, associated above all with Jan Dhondt's learned and very influential 1948 monograph Études sur la naissance des principautés territoriales en France, regional magnates, enriched by vast tracts of land extorted from Carolingian kings who needed their support, allied with ethnic groups chafing under the Frankish yoke in order to legitimise themselves and attempt to shut out royal power from the regions entirely (Dhondt, 2018). Such an approach was challenged by the historians who formulated what I have termed the ‘juridical’ hypothesis, above all Karl-Ferdinand Werner and, in his footsteps, Olivier Guillot (Guillot, 1991). For Werner, the first exercised duly delegated royal authority within the defined boundaries of pre-existent Carolingian sub-kingdoms (regna, singular regnum). However, the disturbances of the late ninth and early tenth centuries allowed this first generation of regional rulers to make these grants of authority hereditary, so that the kings could not claim them back (Werner, 1979). More recently, historians have become increasingly scepti- cal of both these approaches. Carolingian ‘administrative’ structures now appear rather less stable than Werner believed; equally, ethnic groups do not appear as driving forces of change (Becher, 1996; Innes, 2000). On the other hand, historians such as MacLean have argued that Carolingian kings remained effective and able to command mag- nates' loyalties up until at least the very late ninth century (MacLean, 2003). Moreover, a new wave of studies, such as those of Charles West and Florian Mazel, have questioned whether or not ‘principalities’ are a category corresponding to any historical reality: Mazel has argued that principalities were not really distinct from any other aristocratic power constellation (Mazel, 2018; West, 2012). In what follows, we will use the example of Aquitaine to explore this debate. Aquitaine plays an important role in arguments over the nature of principalities, not least because the history of late- and post-Carolingian Aquitaine has so many interesting facets. This is in a sense not a surprise. Aquitaine was a big region, containing more-or-less everything south of the and north of the Mediterranean coastal areas. It splits easily into roughly four quarters: Berry and the and their margins in the north-east, and its environs in the north-west, the March of in the south-east and in the south-west. For our purposes, we will be looking at the two northern quarters, because it was these regions which were the heartlands of Aquitanian ducal power. Compared to other regions, the dramatic features of Aquitanian history throw the questions posed by historians of principalities into sharp relief. How does the history of ducal Aquitaine, with all its variety, reinforce or challenge the historiographical models outlined above?

2 | GUILLELMID AQUITAINE

During the reign of (r. 840–877), Aquitaine was a fractious region (Martindale, 1997). Charles attempted to assert his power there, but faced consistent overt resistance until 859 and concealed opposition until 864 (Trumbore-Jones, 2006, 89–90). Over the , though, links between the most important Aquitanian magnates and the West Frankish court grew closer. By the late 870s, the single most important figure in Aquitaine was Bernard Plantevelue (‘Hairy-Paws’, † c. 885), a member of the powerful Guillelmid family, who accumulated the lands and offices (honores) of his rivals over the course of the 870s and to create a vast conglomerate of honores stretching across the region (MacLean, 2003, 69–70). After the deposition of the last Carolingian emperor in 888, Bernard's son William the Pious (r. c. 885–918) became the most important magnate in Aquitaine. Indeed, William the Pious was the first of the great regional mag- nates to assume the title of dux, usually if somewhat anachronistically translated into English as ‘duke’, after that year's succession crisis (Brunterc'h, 1997). Guillot argued that the assumption of the title of dux was based on negoti- ations held in 893 between William (along with other regional supremos) and King Odo in the context of a West Frankish civil war (Guillot, 1991, 65–70). This is possible; but given that our evidence shows that the ducal title was not used by William until 898 (William is named in at least one charter every year between 893 and 898, but never as duke) but had been used by his father Bernard in 873, it is probably better to see the evolution of aristocratic MCNAIR 3of10

authority as a slower process (Kienast, 1968, 164–175). In any case, William was clearly a man of great authority: his charters aped the styles of royal diplomas, and he was referred to as exercising principalis potestas, which Werner saw as meaning sovereign authority (Werner, 1979, 248). He was clearly one of the most powerful men of his time, but the nature of his power is mysterious. For Dhondt, William's duchy represented the Aquitanians having finally, although only partially, thrown off the Frankish yoke (Dhondt, 2018, 194–197). However, the presence of Aquitanian ‘nationalism’ as any kind of particular force in this period seems dubious. Historians of the Carolingian kingdom of Aquitaine have emphasised that Aquita- nian kings were not regional or ethnic separatists attempting to forge an independent realm, but insiders trying to increase their share of the pie within a fundamentally Carolingian framework, and so too with Aquitanian dukes (Collins, 1990). In the early tenth century, neither narrative sources such as Odo of Cluny's Life of St Gerald of Aurillac nor documentary sources such as the charters of the Aquitanian abbeys of Brioude or Déols give any hint that Wil- liam was considered the ‘natural lord’ of all Aquitanians by virtue of their ethnicity (Brunterc'h, 1997, 77–78)—that is, even people who saw themselves as Aquitanians did not see William as their ruler because of that. Christian Lauranson-Rosaz, a more recent historian of tenth-century Aquitaine, although he sees Guillelmid power as increas- ingly ‘southernised’, conceives of this less as an ethnic phenomenon than as the re-emergence of local autonomy in a region where Carolingian power was never very strong (Lauranson-Rosaz, 1987). For Olivier Guillot, Aquitaine under William the Pious was ‘juridically the very model of a principality’ (Guillot, 1991, 73). Yet this too seems to have little accord with the evidence. If our sources do not picture lower- level aristocrats as owing William loyalty because of his headship of any kind of ethnic community, neither do they allow us to infer that he was automatically entitled to loyalty because of his institutional role, whether comital or vice-regal. The evidence is exiguous, but there are strong hints, developed by Jean-Pierre Brunterc'h, that William's position in his central Aquitanian heartlands of Berry and Auvergne appears to have been under threat in the mid- (Brunterc'h, 1997, 102–103). Werner's picture of an Aquitaine whose borders were static because it was in some sense an official creation therefore does not measure up to the evidence. The very term principalis potestas, which only appears once, in a 913 notice of a judicial assembly at Ennezat, pretty clearly does not refer to any kind of subroyal legal jurisdiction. The charter says that William did not ‘inflict any force nor, although he was a , exercise any power’ (Bernard & Bruel, 1876, 179). This is not a juridical maxim from the notice's author, but instead implies that William could, if he wanted, exercise untrammelled force in his own interests, and no-one else could realistically stop him. Indeed, for several decades, William's rule was fundamentally the same as any mighty noble. His titles piled up, like any late-Carolingian aristocrat trying to express the idea that he was a big, powerful man: William was duke, and count, and abbot (and so on …). Older historians debated the constitutional significance of these titles, especially that of dux; but it now seems fairly certain that at this point, these were imprecise signifiers of a general sense of impor- tance (Helmerichs, 1997). William even experimented with court ties, using titles like ‘count of the palace’ to express his authority (Kienast, 1961). In 910, though, an important new step was taken: in an act issued for the of Saint-Julien in Brioude, he was entitled ‘duke of the Aquitanians’ (dux Aquitanorum; Kienast, 1968, 169). The issues this title presents cut to the heart of the problem of principalities. In practice, ‘princely’ authority may have stood, as did others, on pillars of military might and ties of loyalty and kinship. However, William's authority was presented as though it stood on more as well. This is the paradox historians have been wrestling with. William the Pious made claims to rule framed not only in terms of personal ties but also in terms of an abstraction (‘Aquitanians’); yet our evidence from the ruled makes almost no acknowledgement of this. Indeed, all our sources in the voice of the ruled referring to William's rule over them talk about personal connections, of fidelity or of friend- ship rather than in terms of ethnic ties. Why, then, dukes in Aquitaine became dukes of the Aquitanians is a question of paramount importance, and more research is needed to resolve it. A crucial question in that research will be the relationship of ducal and royal authority. If dux Aquitanorum has distinct overtones of rex Aquitanorum, it may yet be significant that it emerged around 910. William's problems in that decade may have been owed not least to royal power. For instance, there are tantalising hints of King Charles 4of10 MCNAIR

the Simple (r. 898–923) appointing abbots to the abbey of Saint-Sulpice in (Brunterc'h, 1997, 77). Famously, the reign of preserves essentially no narrative sources except at its very beginning and very end (Dunbabin, 2000b, 374). It is entirely possible that the fact that we are completely dependent on the documentary sources for Charles the Simple's reign badly skews our ideas of William the Pious'. The development of William's authority in terms of an abstract community, in short, may well have been part of a polemical dialogue with royal authority rather than the result of any kind of smooth or organic growth of aristocratic power. Nonetheless, when our narrative sources resume in the and with the Annals of the Rheims chronicler (and the Life of St Gerald by William's old ward Odo of Cluny), we do indeed get a sense that the picture has changed. For one thing, both Flodoard—an outsider—and Odo—an insider of sorts, even if one who apparently did not identify as Aquitanian himself—were quite happy to label William the Pious and his nephew and successor William the Younger (r. 918–926) as rulers ‘of the Aquitanians’ (Kienast, 1968; Sitwell, 1958). Clearly, the concept that Guillelmid authority was over something more than a personal following had been successfully propagated at least to an extent.

3 | INTERREGNUM

William the Younger was followed in short order by his brother and successor Acfred (r. 926–927), who perished as the new king, Ralph of Burgundy (r. 923–936), was in the midst of tearing apart his duchy (Koziol, 2012, 283–287). The decades between the death of Acfred in 927 and the claiming of the ducal title by the counts of in the were a crucial, although mostly passed-over, period for the history of tenth-century Aquitaine. Between 927 and 936, there was no at all. In 936, however, Count Raymond Pons of Toulouse appeared at Brioude to witness the foundation of a priory at Chanteuges calling himself princeps and dux Aquitanorum (Brunterc'h, 2001, 227). Some historiography, particularly some older Francophone material, worked this up into a running battle between the counts of Toulouse and Poitiers for the title. Such a conflict is entirely phantasmic. Raymond's claim to the ducal title was probably related to the succession of King Louis IV (r. 936–954) and the assumption of the title dux Francorum by his leading magnate which took place in the same year (Dunbabin, 2000b, 383). Raymond probably continued to claim the title until his death at some point in the , at which point the title once again fell into abeyance. This is not surprising. As other historians have pointed out, acquiring a ducal title was a matter of politics and prestige rather than one of administration and law; and absent any political need to claim to be duke of Aquitaine, the title simply did not exist. (Goetz, 1977). If there was no ‘duchy’ of Aquitaine per se, however, the political units within the sphere of influence of the Guil- lelmid duchy continued to evolve. In Auvergne, the absence of one leading layman has caused some historians to describe the region as dissolving into a welter of minor lordships. However, as Anne-Hélène Brunterc'h noticed, the mid-tenth century did in fact see one dominant personage emerge as the leading figure in central Aquitaine, Bishop Stephen II of Clermont (Brunterc'h, 2004). It is important not to be fooled by his clerical status: nothing about regional political authority meant that it was of necessity an inherently lay phenomenon. Nonetheless, Stephen, who came from the family of the viscounts of Clermont and also had the resources of the bishopric of Clermont and the important abbeys of Conques and Figeac behind him, was in fact the ruler of the Auvergne and was treated as such by both Auvergnat nobles and outsiders up to and including the king. Stephen's relations with King Louis were good—he met the king on the river Loire on several occasions and received a number of royal diplomas. Internal Aquitanian politics in the and early 960s, though, were no less fractious than they had been in Charles the Bald's time. William Towhead (Latin Caput Stupe, referring to his pale hair), (r. 934–c. 963), made an attempt to assert dominion over the Auvergne, but this was very short lived. By the late 950s, the nobles of the region had fallen into internal conflict (Lauranson-Rosaz, 1992, 108–109). The main response to this came not from William (who may in fact have been behind it), but from Stephen. The bishop was able to overcome this internal dissent, and his authority appears to have been secure until his death sometime in the . MCNAIR 5of10

The events of the 950s and 960s, however, had one major repercussion. From the late 950s, the counts of Poi- tiers slowly took up the ducal title. Poitou and its environs had been for a long time somewhat separate from the rest of Aquitaine. It had been a loyal stronghold of Charles the Bald, and its closeness to the king persisted into the tenth century (Nelson, 1992, 143–144). In the 940s, Count William Towhead had sworn allegiance to Louis IV and pro- vided him with troops (Dunbabin, 2000b, 383). In 955, however, Louis' son King Lothar (r. 954–986) and Hugh the Great attacked Poitiers, although to no long-term strategic effect it is true (McKitterick, 1983, 322–323). Strikingly, it is also at this time that William Towhead began attacking Stephen of Clermont, and it is also at this time that the counts of Poitiers began making attempts to claim a greater status and a wider remit for their authority. The development of these claims was far from straightforward. Whereas William the Pious had jumped in at the deep end as dux Aquitanorum, the Poitevin counts developed their titles over a decade of complicated competition amongst the great magnates of the West Frankish kingdom in the late 950s and early 960s (Guillot, 1991, 106–110). Charters of the late 950s refer to William Towhead as ‘count of Poitiers and and the Auvergne and in addi- tion count of the palace of Aquitaine’ and ‘count of the whole duchy of Aquitaine’, both interesting insofar as they reveal a conception of Aquitaine more as a political community than a simple geographical expression. It was not, however, until the mid-960s when William's son William Fierabras (‘Iron-Arm’; r. c. 963–995) began to be consis- tently (if not universally) entitled as duke of Aquitaine (Kienast, 1968, 188–199). The significance of these self- declared titles are, again, that they illustrate how difficult it is to categorise principalities. The Poitevin court was clearly grasping towards a kind of authority more than the sum of the counties the Williams held; yet this grasping was largely improvised and hesitant. Comital authority was not being poured into a well-defined or clearly under- stood mould.

4 | AQUITAINE UNDER THE POITEVIN DUKES

Nonetheless, by the mid-eleventh century, contemporaries at least believed that there was a duchy of Aquitaine, based in Poitou, complete with rulers and even borders, even if these were unspecified (Guillot, 1972, I:359). Was this duchy more than a phantom or was it an eleventh-century League of Nations, failing to inspire bonds of collec- tive solidarity? The dukes of Aquitaine were undoubtedly powerful lords, but was it only personal ties, akin to those of any ruler, which supported their authority? Discussions of loyalty from this region, of which there are a surprising number, would seem to show that how- ever important the Poitevin dukes were, the lesser nobles of the region did not feel bound to them by any sense of collective solidarity (Bisson, 1994). Take the complaints of Hugh of Lusignan, a powerful Poitevin lord whose gripes against Duke William the Great (r. c. 995–1030) are recorded in a document known as the ‘Conventum of Hugh the Chiliarch’. Hugh—so the text purports—found William to be a bad lord, refusing to give him castles and advantageous marriages to which Hugh felt he was entitled; Hugh therefore fell into rebellion against him. George Beech has noted the general absence of anything like ‘public power’ in the text—all the ties of authority we see are personal (Beech, 1998). This might be dismissed insofar as the Conventum is a justification, and probably a deliberately ten- dentious one, for rebellion (De Vasselot, 2015; White, 2004). However, a famous letter of Bishop Fulbert of Chartres to (once again) William the Great is a separate question. Fulbert, William's friend, wrote to outline, at William's request, the duties owed by vassals to lords. Yet again, however, he is talking about personal ties. These ties are not necessarily, as White has pointed out, all that different from those of the Carolingian period; but they too show little indication of ducal authority basing itself on anything other than individual loyalties (White, 2004). Yet, as in William the Pious' day, the dukes of Aquitaine kept claiming to be more than simply the biggest boss around. William the Great's father William Fierabras called himself ‘the prince of all the Aquitanians’ and ‘duke of the whole monarchy [a word here simply meaning “sole rule”] of the Aquitanians’ (Kienast, 1968, 193, 196). This could of course be empty verbiage, but that seems unlikely: the post-Carolingian world had plenty of ways to describe power- ful lords without resorting to grand, abstract claims. That the counts of Poitiers claimed to be dukes of Aquitaine, 6of10 MCNAIR

and that they did so consistently, does suggest they were finding an audience (Prell, 2012, 62–65). This is doubly so in light of the fact that they were not the first family to hold the title: rather than creating an image for their own authority ex novo, they drew on what by now was historic precedent for what the region's leader was called.1 There is, in fact, evidence to suggest that they were. The historian Ademar of Chabannes, who may have been writing a panegyric of the dukes but was doing so off his own bat, presented William as the rightful ruler of all Aquitaine (, 1995). The work of Ademar is a source as rich as it is problematic—Ademar's viewpoint was very idiosyn- cratic, and he made up large tracts of material to back it up. Discussing Ademar could easily double the length of this article, but it seems useful to note that the analysis which follows is overwhelmingly based on material found outside his work. A series of letters from the church of Limoges also presents ducal authority over them in terms of collective solidarity: ‘all Aquitaine is yours’, wrote the canons to Duke William VII (r. 1039–1058; Trumbore-Jones, 2009, 77). It appears, then, as though a claim to headship of a political community was indeed a component of the board upon which the games of personal loyalty were played. The case of Hugh of Lusignan, though, raises an important point. Ducal claims to authority were frequently con- tested. How powerful actually were the dukes? A French-language tradition sees William the Great (as his name sug- gests) as one of the most powerful rulers of his time, one next to whom even the king cut a sorry figure (Treffort, 2000). This has been challenged on a variety of fronts. Bernard Bachrach has argued that historians' posi- tive impressions of William stem largely from the praise of Ademar of Chabannes and that William's reign actually saw a decrease in Aquitanian power, as he was forced to give up rights, property and influence to the kings, the dukes of Gascony, the counts of , the counts of Angoulême and a class of local lords who were growing in power and fractiousness (Bachrach, 1979). More broadly, André Debord has argued for a ‘castellan revolution’ in Poi- tou, as a forest of castles sprung up from out of the dirt, leading to the dismemberment of public power by over- mighty local chiefs (Debord, 1992). This gloomy picture—of an Aquitaine fractured, violent and beset with small-scale warfare from newly uncontrollable castellans—finds allies amongst historians of the Peace of God movement. Lauranson-Rosaz argued that the middle of the tenth century saw the collapse of lay power and its replacement with lordly violence (Lauranson-Rosaz, 1992). To this, the Aquitanian episcopate responded by calling councils and issuing legislation and spiritual threats, thus beginning what is known as the Peace of God movement. Lauranson-Rosaz is far from alone in interpreting the Peace of God as a reaction to political fragmentation and growing violence, but it is striking that many Carolingianists are sceptical of this kind of interpretation (Nelson, 1994). We have seen that there was no shortage of disorder and unrest in Aquitaine right back to the mid- ninth century—were social conditions so different by the 950s as to demand new solutions? One key observation, rarely made, is that using the term ‘Peace of God’, derived from documents of the early-to-mid eleventh century, to describe evens of the late tenth century and the decade or two after 1,000 runs the danger of lumping dissimilar things in together based on perceived similarity to later developments. For sure, by the later and afterwards, historians are entirely justified in labelling the ‘Peace’ movement as a singular, coherent phenomenon, but in the later part of the tenth, this is rather less obvious (Goetz, 1992). Take, for instance, the 989 Council of Charroux, held under the auspices of Archbishop Gunbald of and (probably) William Fierabras (Head, 1999). The language of this council's canons can be directly paralleled from Carolingian texts, and the word ‘peace’ does not appear once (Magnou-Nortier, 1992). Declaring that Charroux represents the same phenomenon as, say, the 993 Council of Saint-Paulien seems distinctly dubious. Here too, more research is needed: we need more studies of individual coun- cils in their political contexts, more studies of the Aquitanian background and more studies of aspects as basic as the manuscript transmission of the texts describing these councils (many of the earliest texts survive only in Early Mod- ern copies). As matters currently stand, then, the jury must remain out on the social impact of the so-called ‘Peace of God’. What about the impact on high politics? An important feature of Aquitanian councils—and in a lot of cases, we have no idea whether they were legislative or not—was the presiding role of the duke. Many historians have made the point that the presence of the bishops of Limoges at these councils is a significant tell. The see of Limoges fell under the jurisdiction of the archbishops of Bourges, but most of the other bishops present came from the MCNAIR 7of10

ecclesiastical province of Bordeaux. That is, Aquitanian church councils tended to reflect not church organisation, but the sphere of influence of the dukes (Trumbore-Jones, 2009, 92–95). In this regard, it is important that the dukes of Aquitaine began to start holding councils at precisely the point when that sphere of influence started expanding. Under William Towhead, and for most of the reign of William Fierabras, the ducal entourage consisted almost entirely of people from Poitou. After 989, though, documentary evi- dence indicates that the ducal entourage began to encompass a much wider area: the counts of Angoulême, the vis- counts of Limoges and a number of Aquitanian bishops who had not, apparently, previously been closely connected to the ducal court (Trumbore-Jones, 2009, 93; Head, 1999, 671–672). Some of these figures had had prior associa- tions with the counts of Poitiers, but in the decades around 1,000, their presence became much more consistent. Even more, William the Great was able to draw into his sphere of influence men from further afield, such as the lords of Châteauroux, the most powerful figures in Berry; and the counts of Gévaudan (Dunbabin, 2000a, 175). Conse- quently, although William the Great's military accomplishments were pretty minimal, to argue that his reign saw a substantial diminution of ducal power is not reflected by the charter evidence. The question remains, though, what drew these people to the dukes? One answer must be the increased ducal influence over the Church in Aquitaine (Callahan, 1977). By sponsoring councils of whatever sort, and through other means such as patronising relic translations, the dukes made a convincing case for their headship of an Aquitanian political community (Koziol, 2018, 60). At the ceremonies surrounding the discovery of the head of John the Baptist at Angély in 1016, the duke presided over a ceremony gathering relics from all over Aquitaine, including those of St Peter and St Eparchius from Angoulême, St Martial and St Stephen from Limoges and St Leonard from Noblat in the ; present were the West Frankish king Robert the Pious (r. 996–1032) and King Sancho of Navarre, as well as a selection of counts and bishops (Landes, 1995, 47). Gatherings such as this forged an Aquitanian episcopate: let- ters from the bishops of Poitiers and Limoges indicate that they saw themselves as part of an Aquitanian political network headed by the duke (Treffort, 2000; Trumbore-Jones, 2009). In short, it appears as though patronage of the Church was a significant factor in generating a genuine sense of collective loyalty. When Martin the Monk sat down in around 1100 to write the story of the foundation of the abbey of Montierneuf in Poitiers, he began with the tale of the Aquitanian realm. He described how the inheritance of Aqui- taine passed from William the Pious to the Poitevin family, until the Aquitanian realm (regnum) was taken up by the abbey's founder, Duke Guy Geoffrey (r. 1058–1086; Carpentier & Pon, 2008). In taking Aquitaine as a political entity for granted, Martin was no eccentric. By his time, the Poitevin dukes had managed to construct a duchy which did not merely exist, but which was a politically salient quantity.

5 | CONCLUSION

To return to the question we asked at the very beginning, after almost 200 years of Aquitanian history, what kind of a beast was the principality of Aquitaine? In the first instance, any visible sense of ethnic cohesion as a driving force of political behaviour is conspicuous by its absence. This was perhaps to be expected: older views of the Carolingian and post-Carolingian principality as a Stammesherzogtum or tribal duchy, being the outcome of a national yearning for self-rule have given way to a better sense of the constructed nature of ethnicity (Goetz, 2000). There is little evi- dence that Aquitanians themselves based loyalty to ducal authority on a sense of ethnic fellow-feeling—indeed, dur- ing the time of William the Pious, virtually, the only magnate explicitly described as an Aquitanian is also explicitly described as not being William's dependent (Sitwell, 1958). Equally, ducal power did not obviously rest on principalis potestas. The dukes may have mimetically taken on some attributes of kingship—as in the Poitevin dukes' summoning of councils—but this was imitative of a royal mode in political culture, not the direct deployment of regalian prerogatives. For Fulbert of Chartres and the scribe behind the complaint of Hugh of Lusignan, as we have seen, ducal lordship was an important facet of their power. The dukes of Aquitaine were certainly mighty seigneurs. We have 8of10 MCNAIR

seen continuities in this over 200 years—ties of friendship and personal fidelity were consistently important. How- ever, the dukes were not just lord-dukes. They were also the first amongst the Aquitanians—that is, they could appeal to a more abstract basis for allegiance. Ducal Aquitaine was a construct made up from bundles of rights and personal loyalties, but it was more than that as well—it was also a construct of a regional political culture. Such dis- tinctive collective solidarities did make principalities distinct from other kinds of aristocratic power-constellation. There was nothing natural about this. We have seen it slowly develop over time, from the first attempts under Wil- liam the Pious to more consistent evidence for collective solidarity in the eleventh century. Even in the eleventh cen- tury, ducal claims for allegiance were not automatic. They had to be made to work for them; but we have seen that there is evidence both that the dukes did use these strategies and that they meant something. The history of Aqui- taine in this period, thus, is both significant in its own right and points the way towards a new understanding of the development of principalities as being fundamentally about changes not in institutional structures of whatever sort, but in changes in the conceptualisation and understanding of legitimate authority: that is, in political culture.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to thank James Doherty and Amanda Williams for their useful comments on earlier drafts of this article. The research on which this article rests was generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust through grant number ECF- 2017-693.

ORCID Fraser McNair https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4297-0107

ENDNOTE 1 I would like to thank Dr. James Doherty for this point.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Fraser McNair is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the School of History at the University AQ5 of Leeds.

How to cite this article: McNair F. Political culture and ducal authority in Aquitaine, c. 900–1040. History Compass. 2020;18:e12622. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12622