Lawcourt proceedings in the Lombard kingdom before and after the Frankish conquest

The Frankish conquest of the Lombard kingdom in 774 is considered a basic event and even a turning point in the early medieval history of Italy. Lombard institutions are believed to have disappeared in favour of Frankish rules and customs. This article seeks to refute this view by demonstrating that there is a very great deal of continuity between the two periods for one of the most important judicial institutions, the trial. It will be shown that the different phases of court procedure remain nearly unaltered after the acquisition of Northern Italy by the Franks and that even the most striking difference between the Frankish and the Lombard trial, namely the distinction between judges and scabini, was not introduced in this part of the Carolingian Empire before 827. Even after that date the Frankish distinction was only applied in some trials, while the Lombard procedure remained the more common.     

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.     

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.     

The bishoprics of Saxony in the first century after Christianization

The eighth and ninth centuries witnessed the foundation of many new bishoprics in the territories on the fringes of the Carolingian Empire. Saxony was one such region. This article seeks to understand the political status of these new bishoprics during the first century of their existence, from their foundation to the end of Carolingian rule in east Francia (805–911). The religious history of the Saxon province, and the Carolingians' lack of interest in this region after its forcible conversion, had a significant effect on the status of its bishoprics during the ninth and early tenth centuries. This study assesses the evidence for both the land-holdings of this new episcopal church and the activities of its bishops, and concludes by arguing for the distinctive position of the Saxon bishoprics within the Frankish and east Frankish churches of this period.     

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.     

Music, Print and Presentation in Saxony During the Seventeenth Century

At the start of the seventeenth century composers such as MichaelPraetorius, Johann Hermann Schein and Heinrich Schütz sawmuch of their music into print; at the end of the century, however,musicians such as Johann Kuhnau or Nikolaus Adam Strungk enteredprint comparatively little, if at all. This article uses thedecline in music printing as a way to understand the changingrole of music and musicians in society. At the start of thecentury, the intensity of music printing testified to the Lutheranmarket for music, but also to the efforts of composers to promoteand present themselves in print. After the Thirty Years' War,however, the market for printed music collapsed, as many courtsand cities began to expect virtuoso performances and a constantsupply of new compositions.     

The story of Comanche: horsepower,heroism and the conquest of the American West

Marked by the Census Bureau’s closure of the frontier; the symbolic end of American Indian resistance at Wounded Knee and powerful articulations on the ‘winning of the West’ from Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill Cody, the early 1890s was a critical moment in the history of the American West. It also saw the death of one of the region’s most famous cavalry horses, Comanche, who succumbed to colic in 1891 aged twenty-nine. Famously billed as ‘the only living thing to survive the Battle of the Little Bighorn’, this article uses Comanche as a locus around which to examine the history of warhorses in the military culture of the American West, and, more broadly, to point towards a growing scholarship on war and the environment that emphasises the usefulness of such themes as spatiality and inter-species exchange in embellishing our understanding of the experience, impact and cultural memory of war. Not only does Comanche’s lifespan (c.1862–1891) usefully coincide with the federal government’s final conquest of the West but his equine biography serves as valuable testament to the use of horses in the US military as both practical and symbolic agents of American expansionism.     

The Byzantine conquest of Crete (961 AD), Prokopios' Vandal War,and the Continuator of the Chronicle of Symeon

Abstract

Historians reconstruct the Byzantine conquest of Crete in 960?961 based largely on the History of Leo the Deacon and two variants of the continuation of the Chronicle of Symeon the Logothete. However, the account in the continuation is modelled closely, in narrative structure, imagery, vocabulary and ideology, on Prokopios' account of the conquest of North Africa by Belisarios in 533?534. This challenges our knowledge of the campaign but sheds interesting new light on the sophisticated use of classical texts that Byzantine ‘chroniclers’ could make.