DOI: 10.1111/hic3.12622 ARTICLE Political culture and ducal authority in Aquitaine, 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 duke, William the Pious, in the early tenth century, to the Poitevin dukes of the mid-eleventh century. The post- Carolingian duchy of Aquitaine, 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 France 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 Normandy, Burgundy 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 princes 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 Loire and north of the Mediterranean coastal areas. It splits easily into roughly four quarters: Berry and the Auvergne and their margins in the north-east, Poitou and its environs in the north-west, the March of Toulouse in the south-east and Gascony 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 Charles the Bald (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 870s, 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 880s 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- 910s (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 prince, exercise any power’ (Bernard & Bruel, 1876, 179).