Continuity and change in Norman Italy: the Campania during the eleventh and twelfth centuries

The Campania was a fertile area, with a growing population during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and was economically more advanced than most of the rest of southern Italy. This essay examines the impact of the Norman conquest of the south upon this region, with special reference to the settlement pattern and the aristocracy. It concludes that the role of incastellamento in changing the pattern of settlement was relatively limited, and the extensive incastellamento of the Montecassino lands (a product of Norman pressure upon the abbey) cannot be taken as typical. Furthermore, while the Norman conquest led to colonisation by French aristocrats, this did not entirely displace existing Lombard families, and widespread intermarriage led to a blurring of the distinction between Lombards and Normans. The impact of political crises during the twelfth century was also more limited than might be supposed, and continuity rather than change characterised the nobility of the Norman period.     

The history of marriage and the myth of Friedelehe

The idea that Friedelehe and Muntehe constituted two distinct forms of Germanic marriage was based upon an attempt to reconstruct common Germanic culture with scraps of evidence from widely different times and places. A thorough re-examination of the sources for the institutions that were posited, based on this now outmoded methodology, reveals no evidence that transfer of Munt, or guardianship, distinguished between two different types of marriage, except perhaps in Lombard Italy, under the influence of Roman law. The idea that marriage with a dos is a different institution from marriage without one is not attested until the Carolingian period.     

The fall of Merovingian Italy, 561–5

After the end of the Gothic War in the mid-sixth century, northern Italy remained divided between the Merovingian Franks and the eastern Roman Empire. In the 560s the Frankish territories were finally taken by imperial armies, but the end of Merovingian Italy is variably dated between 561 and 565. Drawing on the eastern evidence provided by the panegyrist Corippus, this article argues that there is a hitherto overlooked conflict between the Franks and the empire around the year 565, which finally brought an end to decades of Frankish rule in Italy. As this victory occurred under Justin II, an emperor with a poor military reputation today, this reconstruction of western events further bolsters the case that the successes trumpeted in his early propaganda were grounded in reality.     

Under the aegis of the saints. Hagiography and power in early Carolingian northern Italy

In the transition from the Lombard to the Carolingian period, hagiography came to play a fundamental role in the strategies of legitimation and representation of the episcopal churches of the regnum Langobardorum. This article gives an overview of the features, choices, tastes and models of sanctity characteristic of Italian hagiography, against the background of local contexts and political competition. It demonstrates that in the territories under Frankish rule, hagiography represented a chief instrument in the hands of the ecclesiastical elites to shape and use the past in light of the concerns of the present.     

Gianrinaldo Carli at the centre of the Milanese Enlightenment

Gianrinaldo Carli was a central figure in the origin of the Milanese Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century. Carli's political career as well as his works connected him both to the mid-century reforms by Pompeo Neri and to the times of Beccaria and the Verri brothers—the heyday of Lombard intellectual life in Europe. Not originally from Lombardy, but from the Venetian periphery, Carli became an erudite scholar of witchcraft and magic and an influential functionary of the Habsburg administration in Milan. He remains most famous for his works on money and his contributions to the journal Il Caffè. Most of his later political writings, which were widely circulated in Italy following the American Revolution, originated in debates with Pietro Verri over the nature of Natural Law, of the Social Contract, and the relationship between patriotism and cosmopolitanism. They illustrate key aspects of Lombard political culture of the 1780s: a culture that was critical of Rousseau, trustful of the reformist experience and supportive of Enlightened Absolutism. Within this context, Carli's works have traditionally been difficult to place.     

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.     

Slavs in Fredegar and Paul the Deacon: medieval gens or ‘scourge of God’?

This article presents a new interpretation of the accounts of Slavs given by two early medieval Latin narrative sources. The first section discusses Fredegar's Wendish account, while the second section considers Paul the Deacon's view of the Slavs in his Historia Langobardorum . The instrumental use of the Slavs in the domestic affairs of the Frankish and Lombard kingdoms constitutes the emphasis of the last section, in which the author compares Fredegar's and Paul the Deacon's historiographical perspectives.     

Kypros,Tourkia kai ellinismos

Gianrinaldo Carli was a central figure in the origin of the Milanese Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century. Carli's political career as well as his works connected him both to the mid-century reforms by Pompeo Neri and to the times of Beccaria and the Verri brothers—the heyday of Lombard intellectual life in Europe. Not originally from Lombardy, but from the Venetian periphery, Carli became an erudite scholar of witchcraft and magic and an influential functionary of the Habsburg administration in Milan. He remains most famous for his works on money and his contributions to the journal Il Caffè. Most of his later political writings, which were widely circulated in Italy following the American Revolution, originated in debates with Pietro Verri over the nature of Natural Law, of the Social Contract, and the relationship between patriotism and cosmopolitanism. They illustrate key aspects of Lombard political culture of the 1780s: a culture that was critical of Rousseau, trustful of the reformist experience and supportive of Enlightened Absolutism. Within this context, Carli's works have traditionally been difficult to place.     

Illustrations of Domestic Manners During the Reign of Edward I

Abstract

A small ivory head of a tonsured man, expertly carved in relief, was found in 1991 during excavations at the great eighth-eleventh century Lombard monastery at San Vincenzo al Volturno. The head was excavated with other fragments of carved ivory, antler and bone, in the vicinity of the collective workshop of the monastery, and was doubtless carved in this workshop. The head-type is a variant on an early Byzantine formula which was employed in Rome by the sixth century and subsequently, in the eighth century, was adopted by artists working for noble Lombard patrons in northern Italy. The painters responsible for decorating the churches and claustral buildings of San Vincenzo in the first half of the ninth century also used this type, and in details of its carving the new ivory head seems to show the direct influence of painted heads of early ninth-century date from the walls of the monastery. The relief was probably intended for the embellishment of a small casket or the cover of a book. The new head, besides being a significant addition to the tiny corpus of surviving carvings in ivory from early medieval Italy, shows the craftsmen in the monastery's workshop had at their disposal a material which was both rare and prestigious in the period.     

From Romanus to Graecus. The identity and perceptions of the Byzantines in the Frankish West

Estrangement between the Byzantine and Frankish worlds was a long-term process, perceptible in a gradual change in the designations used to refer to the respective other. The Franks came more often to label the Eastern Romans as ‘Greeks’, a term with increasingly pejorative connotations that was used to distinguish the Byzantines from the ancient Roman past, and thereby to reconnect Western identities with both ancient and papal Rome. This paper examines the Frankish terminology and analyses this gradual shift in order to assess what it tells us about Frankish perceptions and their relationship with the Byzantine world. This analysis helps not only in a reassessment of early medieval identity and the use of the notions included in these appellations, but also to understand how these designations might have been used to create a modified Frankish identity and alterity.     

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.     

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.     

Barbarian interest in the Excerpta Latina Barbari

Joseph Justus Scaliger dubbed the text of Parisinus Latinus 4884, the sole surviving witness to a Merovingian Latin translation of a now lost Greek world chronicle, the Excerpta Latina Barbari. The name was essentially a judgement on the linguistic abilities of the translator, but it is suggestive. What is there in the chronicle to appeal to the ‘barbarian’ inhabitants of Gaul? An answer to this question can offer some insight into the provenance of a neglected, but intriguing text. It will be proposed that the Greek original of the Excerpta was composed as a gift for the Austrasian king Theudebert I and was intended to elicit his aid in the war against the Ostrogothic rulers of Italy. The translation is another matter. It seems to have been undertaken about two centuries later in the context of the missionary push to the north and east from Frankish territory.     

William of Malmesbury's Carolingian sources

In his great history of England, the Gesta regum Anglorum, completed in 1125, William of Malmesbury included digressions on continental affairs. One of these, on the Merovingian and Carolingian monarchs, provides an interesting study of William's historical method. His Frankish sources are difficult to identify, but we are helped by the survival of the late twelfth-century English MS. Oxford, Bodleian Library Lat. class d.39. This book contains, inter alia, a collection of chronicles and short pieces on Frankish history. We attempt to show that it was copied from a MS. made by or for William, and that his own notes were recopied into its margins. Moreover, it seems probable that he himself compiled the collection of chronicles in it. This discovery enables us to identify most of William's Frankish materials, to draw important conclusions about his manipulation of them, and so advance our knowledge of twelfth-century historiography generally.     

Louis the Pious and the contours of empire

When the southern Iberian city of Mérida revolted against Umayyad control, the Carolingian emperor Louis the Pious (814–40) sought to gain recognition there of his own political authority, probably in early 830. Motivated by a desire to project Frankish power after Umayyad intervention in Catalonia, the move was also in keeping with larger patterns of Carolingian expansion in the Iberian frontier zone. The incident is further revealing of Louis the Pious's wider imperial ambitions in the 820s, which early medieval conceptions of space allowed to be expressed over surprisingly long distances, well beyond the frontiers of the Frankish kingdoms.     

‘Leger est aprendre mes fort est arendre’: wool,debt, and the dispersal of Pipewell Abbey (1280-1330)

The culturally syncretic character of medieval Southern Italy and Sicily was never so apparent as under Norman rule in the twelfth century. From the fusion of artistic styles in the Capella Palatina in Palermo to the organization of King Roger II’s Regno, the influence of Byzantine, Arab, Christian, Norman, and Lombard traditions is evident. This paper argues, however, that underlying these more obvious manifestations of cultural intersection was an enduring sense of ethnic identity. This self-conscious expression of identity is revealed through the articulation of ancestry and lineage in the eleventh- and twelfth-century charters of the aristocracy in the Principality of Salerno. The distinctions between conquerors and conquered, long considered irrelevant after decades of intermarriage, were remarkably durable throughout this period. Both Normans and Lombards employed genealogical memory as a strategy to enhance their status in the Principality: the Normans aimed to legitimize their present rule; the Lombards wished to recall their past dominance in the region. This paper suggests that the evidence for ancestral memory reveals both differences in self-perception and contemporary attitudes towards political change among the various religious and ethnic groups in the medieval Mezzogiorno. While the intersection of cultures in the South is unmistakable, this paper modifies previous theories to recognize the resistance to cultural absorption by both the new settlers and the indigenous peoples.     

A house divided: San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro in Pavia and the politics of Pope John XXII

In 1327, Pope John XXII issued a bull granting the Hermits of St Augustine shared possession of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro in Pavia, a church that had been controlled solely by the Canons Regular for over 100 years. The ostensible purpose of the bull was to ‘reunite’ the Hermits with their putative founder, St Augustine, whose relics had been brought to the church by the Lombard king Liutprand. This article traces the process by which the Hermits' long and mutually rewarding relationship with the papacy shaped the order's distinctive theological focus on papal supremacy, that, in part, explains John XXII's apparent generosity regarding San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro. I propose that this unprecedented bull was part of a carefully crafted policy of political action and retribution by the Pope in his battle with the Visconti and the Empire for temporal control of northern Italy. The role of the city of Pavia as the epicentre in the struggle between the papacy and the Empire is elucidated as is the overtly political acitivity of both religious orders at San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro, the Canons Regular allied with the Empire, the Hermits, with the papacy.