Charlemagne's Practice of Empire

"Davis is a woman with a mission. What she wants to explain to us is how Charlemagne managed to rule the empire he built. She tries to fight the idea of the lone genius who was ‘reviving the Empire’. But that still leaves open the question of how exactly he did it. She asks whether he had a plan—and suggests he didn’t. She paints a really practical Charlemagne, who had no big overarching plan, but who was a very good improviser except when he wasn’t—and things went horribly wrong. He sometimes lost battles. Sometimes people were unfaithful at unfortunate moments. She really thinks about how you run a really big kingdom or empire without modern structures of governance. If you really only have a bunch of faithful people to work with, but these people are only as faithful as they want to be and feel safe to be, you need to reward them enough and keep them happy. How does this work in practice? And then what do you do if one of your key people decides not to be faithful? And how do you manage things as your empire gets bigger and bigger? Can you still rule a place of that size, or are there limits? Like Janet Nelson, she has taken every shred of evidence. She confines herself mainly to contemporary sources, to be as close to the events as possible, to reconstruct how he did it. It’s a wonderful book because she is a very rigorous scholar and she is not afraid to say that, although we used to think Charlemagne was a man with a plan and a vision, it turns out that he was just improvising as we all do in parts of our lives. The term she comes up with for this form of governance is ‘an empire of practice’. There’s a lot of experimentation and some experiments go wrong. Then he comes up with a new way of dealing with problems. And that sounds like a very refreshingly realistic Charlemagne to me. Over hundreds of years, Charlemagne has been painted as larger than life, but here we see somebody you can relate to. You see it through the rules and regulations, in a very practical way. If the king has decided that people cannot work on Sundays because that is what God wants—then what? You’ve decided in Aachen, along with your faithful men, that it’s a good idea that nobody should work on Sunday. But there are ten million little settlements in that empire. How are you going to organize that? That’s the type of thing Davis thinks about. And the answer is delegated responsibility. There are people in every region with whom you work directly and they have their own people and so on down the ladder. But there’s always a weak link. The way to deal with that is always to have more than one person doing the same job. So, if one link in the chain breaks, you have alternatives. I wouldn’t call this society fully feudal yet—and, in any case, that’s not a concept that is really current anymore. But delegated responsibility works with face-to-face contacts. You would appoint people you trusted and those people would, in turn, do the same thing. In that sense, it resembles the model that we used to think of as feudal, but it isn’t as strictly organised. One thing he did very cleverly, and it is something that the Carolingians continued to do after him, was try to prevent families from digging themselves in to a specific region. If you have a talented military leader who has his home base in, say, northern Italy, you might send him to eastern France. Then, after a while, when he’s done his stuff there, maybe he’ll get a new job in southern Germany. Charlemagne tried to prevent ‘territorialisation’. This is before every knight builds his own castle. This highest layer of faithful men is very mobile. They get rewarded in a super-clever way. If you are a successful count, you get part of the booty of war, but if there’s land to be divided, you get a little bit in Belgium and a little bit in southern France and a few vineyards in Bavaria and maybe the rights to a toll on a river, so you can’t lump things together. And you have to keep travelling around and managing your very dispersed goods and property. That was a good way to keep people both happy and on their toes. Yes. It’s bits of Belgium , bits of the southern Netherlands , bits of France . It expands to the east, more or less to the Hungarian border. He expands into the Italian peninsula, down to Rome, but he clashes with the Dukes of Benevento, so southern Italy is one step too far. That was the natural maximum size, apparently, that you could manage at the time, with the road system that there was and the people that there were. Yes. Frisia was contested. I think most Frisians at the time would have denied that they were part of the Carolingian Empire, but Utrecht, where I am now, was solidly Carolingian. You shouldn’t imagine a border like a line on a piece of paper. It’s like a grey zone where influence slowly peters out. He tried, but he failed. That’s the famous battle that ended up as the Chanson de Roland—Roncesvalles. That went horribly wrong. There was Islamic rule in Spain and resistance was too strong. Like southern Italy, it was a step too far. Southern Italy still had a very strong Byzantine influence and two of the local dukes—of Benevento and Spoleto—did not like the Carolingians at all. There is a wonderful story in a border monastery on the edge of the area of Charlemagne’s influence, where it encountered the Beneventians. Charlemagne sent an abbot. The story, from a bit later in the 9th century, goes that there was a man in this monastery who had said officially that he would rather pray for a dog than for Charlemagne. So his popularity in that area was not uncontested. Davis’s book is a very clever and sophisticated study of how Charlemagne did what he did, with all these mechanisms explained in a very convincing way."