Economic incentives for the Frankish conquest of Saxony

Contrary to received scholarly wisdom, this article argues that the Frankish conquest of Saxony under Charlemagne in the late eighth and early ninth centuries was driven in no small part by the pursuit of material wealth. Specifically, most scholars have viewed pre‐conquest Saxony as too materially impoverished for economic incentives to have played a significant role in Frankish expansion into the lands between the Rhine and the Elbe. However, a thorough review of the written and archaeological evidence suggests that Saxony had much to offer its Carolingian conquerors in the form of plunder and tribute, land and mineral resources, revenue from royal and ecclesiastical renders and taxation, and access to and control of trade routes.     

Literacy and the law in Lombard government

This article examines the Lombard law code as evidence for literate practices in government and society in seventh- and eighth-century Italy. The effectiveness of the code as an instrument of government is testified by the charter evidence, in which the precepts of the code are implicitly acknowledged or cited directly. Although largely the result of a necessary appropriation of late Roman property law, Lombard legislation and notarial practice applied further literate methods to document, and hence to validate, a range of transactions. The use of written law was not merely limited to male landowners, but affected Italo-Lombard society more widely, as is revealed by the evidence for women's property rights and manumission. The charter evidence and references within the code itself suggest that various uses of writing for governmental administration extended beyond the royal and ducal levels into local society.     

Frankish military duty and the fate of Roman taxation

Frankish kings exacted unpaid military service from their subjects in both Merovingian and Carolingian times. The basis for this right has long been uncertain. A study of the term ‘manse’ as a Carolingian measure of assets brings to light the ostensibly hidden property on whose basis Franks went to war. This military duty reached back to the origins of the Frankish kingdom, when a large share of Roman taxes was awarded in individual allotments to soldiers obligated to serve, otherwise unpaid, when summoned, and heavily fined if they did not. Both demesne and tributary manses – contributory units – were the main part of state resources applied to military costs. They cannot be simply envisaged as components of an agricultural scheme (grand domaine). A tax‐like military obligation was one among several institutions actively surviving from the fifth century to the ninth, and it suggests that Frankish government was more law‐based and administrative than is often allowed.     

Disputes and courts in Lombard and Carolingian central Italy

This study examines the relationship between judicial courts and the societies in which they operated as revealed by the documents of the abbey of Farfa in the duchy of Spoleto. In a series of case studies it is shown that disputants and judges could draw on a wide range of norms that enabled them to manipulate the settlement process and to tailor it to their own social advantage. Unlike many studies of disputes in central and northern Italy of the early Middle Ages, here weight is given to those aspects of disputing that took place outside the court. It is an approach that casts fresh light on the transition from Lombard to Carolingian rule in central and northern Italy. It also challenges the binary line between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ in dispute settlement. This, in turn, has implications for how we view the so‐called ‘feudal transformation’ in which the public was supposedly eclipsed by the private. ¹ 1 The following abbreviations occur throughout: Manaresi =I placiti del regnum Italiae, ed. C. Manaresi, 3 vols (Rome, 1955–60), vol. I; CDL=Codice diplomatico longobardo, vols I and II, ed. L. Schiaparelli (Rome, 1929–33), vol. III, ed. C. Brühl (Rome, 1973), vol. IV/1, ed. C. Brühl (Rome, 1981), vol. V, ed. H. Zielinski (Rome, 1986), cited with document no.; ER = Edictus Rothari, LGrim. = Grimoaldi Leges, LLiut. = Liutprandi Leges, LRat. = Ratchisi Leges, LAist. = Ahistulfi Leges, all in Leges Langobardorum (643–866), ed. F. Beyerle, Die Gesetze der Langobarden, Germanenrechte. Neue Folge, Westgermanisches Recht, 2nd edn (Witzenhausen, 1963); RF= Gregory of Catino, Regestum Farfense, ed. I. Giorgi and U. Balzani, Il Regesto di Farfa, 5 vols (Rome, 1879–1914), cited with vol. and document no.; CF=Il Chronicon Farfense di Gregorio di Catino, ed. U. Balzani, 2 vols (Rome, 1903).
     

The image of the Frankish kings in the poetry of Venantius Fortunatus

The poetry of Venantius Fortunatus is a sadly neglected historical source for sixth-century Gaul. Amongst the literary material that has survived from that age, the works of Gregory of Tours loom large. Since Gregory provides us with the sole narrative history of Gaul for much of this century, we are forced to see Merovingian society through his eyes. Venantius wrote panegyric, and an age such as ours, which values sincerity of expression, finds little that is attractive in that genre. Despite this, Venantius' poetry affords us a vantage point from which to view the Frankish kings. It also provides important evidence for the nature of the cultural fusion of Germanic, Roman and Christian elements that was taking place in the Gaul of Gregory of Tours and King Chilperic. The poems written for the Merovingian monarchs suggest that Venantius sensed a Frankish hankering after the trappings of Roman imperial authority. He wrote, perhaps with didactic intent, to give full exposition to the traditional Roman conception of the just ruler, coupled with the more recent ideal of the orthodox Christian monarch that was still current in the Byzantine Empire. When Venantius Fortunatus journeyed to the courts of the barbarian kings, he brought with him his cultural baggage from Byzantine Ravenna.     

Changes in crop cultivation during the last five centuries before the Roman conquest: archaeobotanical investigation in the Clermont-Ferrand basin,Massif Central,France

For several decades, a growing number of protohistoric sites in Auvergne (Massif Central, France)—mostly excavated through preventive archaeology—have been subject to the collection of archaeobotanical analysis. This study presents the archaeobotanical results from ten La Tène sites dating from the last five centuries before the Roman conquest. In addition to providing an inventory of taxa, this paper concerns crops and crop cultivation methods. These results are interpreted in a wider context, dealing with crop husbandry, arable farming, storage and consumption practices. The sites are located in the Limagne plain within a 50-km radius around the city of Clermont-Ferrand. A total of 23,579 carpological remains were identified from 163 sediment samples totalizing a volume of 1096 l. Comparable to other sites in Gaul, the spectrum of cereals and pulses is restricted. Spelt (Triticum spelta), einkorn (Triticum monococcum) and foxtail millet (Setaria italica) are disappearing or becoming rare. A better control of agricultural techniques and increased yields is supposed during the ca. five centuries of the La Tène period. Mixed cultivation is hereby replaced by the sowing of monocrops. At the beginning of this period, farming systems are dominated by a polyculture of cereals and pulses. They become more specialized during the last two centuries before the Roman conquest; diversity of cereals and pulses is decreased.     

Crying on Lombard Street: fixing sovereign defaults in the 1890s

The wave of sovereign defaults in the 1890s was one of the worst ever remembered in the history of finance. From Argentina in 1890 to Brazil in 1898, countries in Latin America and Southern Europe defaulted on their external debt, inflicting investors with huge losses. However, this was the last cluster of defaults of the gold standard era. At the beginning of the 20th century and until the outbreak of World War I, defaults were less frequent despite the continuous increase in foreign government borrowing. The literature has provided several explanations on this apparent success all relative to improvements introduced in the market. This paper argues that the fall in the number of defaults is more related to a more favorable world macroeconomic environment and to an increased liquidity available in international financial markets than to an abrupt shift in the manner in which defaults were handled. I show that settlements were more correlated with the relative facility to re-access foreign capital markets than to changes in the financial architecture.     

Old kingdom community organization in the Western Egyptian Delta

Old Kingdom Egypt has traditionally been regarded as distinctive among early civilizations in such characteristics as its largely non‐urban settlement patterns, extreme centralization of wealth and power in elites, and massive stability in its administrative institutions. But these characterizations are based almost entirely on documentary sources. Few Old Kingdom sites except those associated with mortuary cults have been excavated. Excavations at Kom el‐Hisn, in the western Egyptian Delta, have produced evidence about the economic organization and functioning of a rural Old Kingdom settlement that can be related to various hypotheses about the nature of Old Kingdom economic institutions.     

The Capetian apanages and the nature of the French kingdom

The Capetian apanages have traditionally been studied from the perspective of the developing national monarchy. This approach is anachronistic; its premises are drawn from a later century, and even within the Capetian period it groups together with little differentiation the attitudes and intentions of five generations of kings.The context for the early Capetian apanages is the successional customs of the nobility, which the kings knew well from having seen them practised by their baronial neighbors. The determining concepts behind these measures were not those of the crown and the royal domain, but rather the societal ones by which, through the succession, the individual members of the family were ordered in relation to the family's lands.Only in the last quarter of the thirteenth and the first quarter of the fourteenth centuries did the kings and the Parlement impose the series of rulings which molded Capetian practice into a distinctively royal pattern. For most of the period under consideration, the territorial kingdom was treated as an aggregate of separable holdings, most of which were the private inheritance of the ruling family.     

The Capetian apanages and the nature of the French kingdom

The Capetian apanages have traditionally been studied from the perspective of the developing national monarchy. This approach is anachronistic; its premises are drawn from a later century, and even within the Capetian period it groups together with little differentiation the attitudes and intentions of five generations of kings.The context for the early Capetian apanages is the successional customs of the nobility, which the kings knew well from having seen them practised by their baronial neighbors. The determining concepts behind these measures were not those of the crown and the royal domain, but rather the societal ones by which, through the succession, the individual members of the family were ordered in relation to the family's lands.Only in the last quarter of the thirteenth and the first quarter of the fourteenth centuries did the kings and the Parlement impose the series of rulings which molded Capetian practice into a distinctively royal pattern. For most of the period under consideration, the territorial kingdom was treated as an aggregate of separable holdings, most of which were the private inheritance of the ruling family.     

二战前后德国历史研究中的民族主义

第二次世界大战结束以后,西方史学研究的理论和方法发生了根本性的转变。自50年代起,美国史学界率先开始的新史学运动倡导结构一功能主义的历史研究方法,主张用系列数据研究人类社会中的各种传统的——不仅政治、军事和宗教的,而且经济、社会及普通民众日常生活的——功能作用,以达到在“总体”上理解和叙述人类过去的全部经历的目的。由此,改变过去的以政治事件和伟大人物串连起历史的方法,     

The importance of the emperor: Lothar I and the Frankish civil war, 840–843

Lothar I's perspective on the Frankish civil war has not previously been explored. Close analysis of the distribution and wording of the most significant body of evidence produced by Lothar's circle, his charters, casts new light on the politics of the civil war. The imperial title and questions of legitimate inheritance emerge as factors of crucial importance, which shape not only Lothar's self-presentation in the charters, but also Nithard's influential account of the war, and negative portrayal of Lothar.     

第二次郑州会议前后的政治沟通探析

第二次郑州会议前后,为做好人民公社体制的调整工作,在与中央领导层达成共识的基础上,毛泽东对地方领导人进行了耐心细致地说服工作,同时要求将第二次郑州会议的精神一竿子捅到底。在中央与地方的信息传递与交流过程中,不仅在一定程度上发扬了民主,而且地方还对人民公社体制的弊端提出了若干建设性意见。在这次政治沟通中,虽然没有道出农民包产到户的心声,但它对于统一全党思想、整顿人民公社初期的混乱局面起到了积极作用。     

戊戌前後諸政事(上)

本文根據"張之洞檔案"中的若干機密文件,揭開戊戌前後諸政事的內幕:劉坤一查辦張之洞被彈劾案,容閎、李提摩太、劉鶚在戊戌前後的表現,張之洞與李鴻藻的關係,岳州自開通商口岸,張之洞與日本政界聯手驅逐康有爲出日本,獎勵廣東紳士"報效"逃亡西安的清廷以及廢黜"大阿哥"溥儁等事件。這些雖非重大的政事,但對戊戌前後的清朝政治起到了相當重要或非常微妙的作用。本文分上下篇刊出。     

Unity from disunity: law,rhetoric and power in the Visigothic kingdom

This paper explores the relationship between the ‘Church’ and the ‘State’ in the Visigothic kingdom of sixth- and seventh-century Spain. The authors examine the copious legal material from this period – both church council records and royal legislation – to see what it reveals about the significant degree of interpenetration of the two spheres. For example, the royal laws gave bishops an important role in the supervision of judges, while a church council could not be called without the permission of the king, who often attended along with his officials and set the agenda for the meetings. There has been significant debate on this issue over the past two centuries, and the authors' analysis will be situated accordingly. The extent to which the Visigothic evidence emerges out of late Roman practices and precedents or is independent of it will also be addressed.