CHARLES THE BALD’s ‘EDICT OF PÎTRES’ (864): A TRANSLATION AND COMMENTARY A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Brian E. Hill IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS Adviser: Prof. Bernard S. Bachrach April 2013 © Brian E. Hill 2013 i To my parents, Diane and Tony ii Table of Contents Part I: Introduction.................................................................................................1 I. The capitulary and Carolingian legislation..........................................11 II. Usage as a source..................................................................................24 III. How capitularies were formulated....................................................32 IV. Historiography of ‘consensus’...........................................................45 V. Royal authority.......................................................................................53 VI. Questions of literacy............................................................................59 VII. The Edict of Pîtres.............................................................................65 VIII. The context of the Edict..................................................................69 IX. The Edict in scholarship.....................................................................76 X. Conclusion..............................................................................................82 Part II: Text and translation..................................................................................84 I. Introduction to the translation..............................................................85 II. Text and translation...............................................................................86 III. Glossary of terms...............................................................................157 Bibliography...........................................................................................................162 Appendix: References in the Edict.....................................................................177 Maps........................................................................................................................180 Part I: Introduction 2 “With the advice of his faithful men and following the custom of his predecessors and forefathers he drew up capitula to the number of thirty-seven, and he gave orders for them to be observed as laws (legalia) throughout his whole realm.”1 With this description of the Edict of Pîtres (864), the Annals of St.-Bertin, our most detailed narrative source for West Francia in the mid-ninth century, introduce a host of issues that run through the wider arena of Carolingian capitulary scholarship. Capitularies were royal decrees put forth by the king, with the support of an assembly of his nobles and clerics.2 Their scope encompassed anything within the umbrella of royal authority: coinage and economic issues, ecclesiastical matters, military planning and infrastructure, and royal inheritance, to name a few areas. The Edict of Pîtres itself is the most significant example of this type of document we have. Put forth by Charles the Bald, king of West Francia from AD 840 to 877, the document is a statement on royal authority and a snapshot of the problems facing the king at that time. Charles the Bald was the grandson of Charlemagne (d. 814) and son of Louis the Pious (d. 840). His realm, West Francia (Francia Occidentalis), was roughly equivalent to the territory of modern France. His father’s death saw the division of the Carolingian empire, and Charles’ reign was marked by constant struggle with his fellow Carolingians for the pieces. 1 From the English translation of the Annales Bertiniani, hereafter referred to as the AB. The Annals of St- Bertin: Ninth-Century Histories, vol. 1, trans. Janet L. Nelson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), year 864, pg. 118. For the Latin, see Annales Bertiniani, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SSRG (Hanover, 1883), 72: Capitula etiam ad triginta et septem consilio fidelium suorum more praedecessorum ac progenitorum suorum regum constituit et ut legalia per omnem regnum suum observari praecepit. Subsequent citations will be from Nelson’s English translation, unless stated otherwise. 2 The importance of support from assembly attendees is a matter of heavy contention among scholars, especially if the statement is applied across the entirety of the Carolingian dynasty. The present study focuses on the reign of Charles the Bald, and the importance of the assembly in creating capitularies is generally accepted for his kingship (the mid-ninth century). 3 Charles the Bald’s kingship emerged from years of civil war between him and his brother kings, the sons of Louis the Pious.3 The Treaty of Verdun (843) had left each with a third of the empire.4 Charles held the west, with Lothar in the Middle Kingdom (Francia Media) and Louis the German furthest east (Francia Orientalis).5 Verdun had left the once-united Carolingian empire with the precarious arrangement of three legitimate Carolingian kings. Charles and Louis made common cause against Lothar for much of the 840s. The 850s, however, saw a souring of relations between the two brothers, a situation made more unstable by Lothar’s death in 855. Louis’ invasion of Charles’ realm in 858 marked a low point in Charles’ reign. Though he only narrowly avoided losing everything, he consolidated his power throughout the 860s, and by 875, he was able to seize the title of emperor before Louis, his elder, could take it for himself. 3 See Nithard, Historiarum Libri IV, ed. P. Lauer, in Histoire des Fils de Louis le Pieux (Paris, 1926), our best source for the years of the civil war (840-843). For an English translation, see Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankish Annals and Nithard’s Histories, trans. Bernhard Walter Scholz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970). 4 The treaty divided the empire based on equal distribution of available resources, not land area. Verdun has received a great deal of scholarly attention, as historians long viewed it as the genesis of the modern states of Germany and France. See Theodor Mayer, ed., Der Vertrag von Verdun, 843 (Leipzig, 1943) for an example of this. On the treaty more generally, see Janet Nelson, Charles the Bald (London, 1992), 131-135; Eric Goldberg, Struggle for Empire: Kingship and Conflict under Louis the German, 817-876 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 113-116; F.L. Ganshof, “On the Genesis and Significance of the Treaty of Verdun (843),” in The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy, trans. Janet Sondheimer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 289- 302, originally published as “Zur Entstehungsgeschichte und Bedeutung des Vertrages von Verdun (843),” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters XII (1956): 313-30; and Peter Classen, “Die Verträge von Verdun und Coulaines, 843, als politische Grundlagen des westfränkischen Reiches,” Historische Zeitschrift (196): 1-35. 5 Lothar is the focus of much less scholarship than his younger brother, Louis the German (or his youngest brother Charles, for that matter), most likely as a result of the historical ‘orphaning’ of his kingdom, as opposed to the claims on Louis and Charles’ kingdoms by later Germany and France, respectively. For Lothar, see Elina Mart Screen, The reign of Lothar I (795-855), Emperor of the Franks, through the charter evidence, unpublished dissertation (Cambridge, 1999); and Elina Mart Screen, “The importance of the emperor: Lothar I and the Frankish civil war, 840-843,” Early Medieval Europe vol. 12 no. 1 (2003): 25-51. For Louis the German, see Goldberg, Struggle; Wilfried Hartmann, Ludwig der Deutsche (Darmstadt, 2002); Boris Bigott, Ludwig der Deutsche und die Reichskirche im Ostfränkischen Reich (826-876) (Husum, 2002); and Ernst Dümmler, Geschichte des Ostfränkischen Reichs, 2nd ed. Vols. 1 and 2 (Leipzig, 1887-1888). 4 Rivalry between the brothers was exacerbated by the new set of choices facing the Frankish nobility.6 The nobility often held estates that spanned the divisions between the kingdoms, and the loyalties of many were far from set. A closing opportunity in one Carolingian court could represent an opening in another. Their options are made clear by a wave of defections by West Frankish nobles to Louis with his 858 invasion. Louis was supposedly invited into West Francia by noblemen who had tired of Charles’ ‘tyranny’ and misrule.7 Legitimate, available royal replacements were a dangerous feature of ninth-century politics. Charles had another such replacement, ensconced in his own subkingdom (regnum) of Aquitaine, who threatened to undermine the support of his nobility: Pippin II.8 With the death of Pippin of Aquitaine, Charles’ brother, in 838, Louis the Pious had decided to 6 The concept of Frankish nobility in the Carolingian period was fluid and open, relative to the idea of the ‘nobility’ that would begin to crystalize in the High Middle Ages. For a discussion of the terminology of nobility in this period, see Timothy Reuter, “The medieval nobility in twentieth-century historiography,” in Companion to Historiography, ed. Michael Bentley (London, 1997), 178-181. On the subject of Frankish nobility under the Carolingians, see Stuart Airlie, “The aristocracy in the service of the state in the Carolingian period,” in Staat im frühen Mittelalter, ed. Stuart Airlie, Walter Pohl, and Helmut Reimitz (Vienna, 2006), 93-111; Janet Nelson, “Nobility in the ninth century,”