Transcultural Approaches to the Concept of Imperial Rule in the Middle Ages

Christian Scholl / Torben R. Gebhardt / Jan Clauß (eds.)

Transcultural Approaches to the Concept of Imperial Rule in the Middle Ages

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Scholl, Christian, 1981- editor of compilation. | Gebhardt, Torben R., editor of compilation. | Clauss, Jan, 1982- editor of compilation. Jan Clauss, 22/09/1982 (22 September 1982)

Title: Transcultural approaches to the concept of imperial rule in the Middle Ages / Christian Scholl, Torben R. Gebhardt, Jan Clauss (eds.).

Description: Frankfurt am Main ; New York : Peter Lang Edition, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016051006| ISBN 9783631662199 (print) | ISBN 9783653052329 (PDF) | ISBN 9783631706244 (ePub) | ISBN 9783631706251 (MOBI)

Subjects: LCSH: World politics--To 1900. | Middle Ages. | Imperialism--History--To 1500. | Kings and rulers, Medieval--History. | Emperors--History--To 1500. | Imperialism--Cross-cultural studies

Classification: LCC D131 .T73 2017 | DDC 321/.60940902--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016051006

The electronic version of this book is freely available due to funding by OGeSoMo, a BMBF-project to support and analyse open access book publications in the humanities and social sciences (BMBF: Federal Ministry of Education and Research). The project is led by the University Library of Duisburg-Essen. For more information see https://www.uni-due.de/ogesomo.

ISBN 978-3-631-66219-9 (Print) ∙ E-ISBN 978-3-653-05232-9 (E-Book)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-70624-4 (EPUB) ∙ E-ISBN 978-3-631-70625-1 (MOBI)

DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-05232-9

Open Access: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NoDerivatives 4.0 international license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0

©Christian Scholl / Torben R. Gebhardt / Jan Clauß, 2017

Peter Lang GmbH

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Peter Lang Edition ist ein Imprint der Peter Lang GmbH.

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About the author

Christian Scholl studied History and English Language and Literature in Trier and Dublin. He is a researcher at the Institute for Early Medieval Studies at the University of Münster.
Torben R. Gebhardt studied History and English Language and Literature in Bochum. From 2011 to 2015, he worked at the Department of History in Münster. From 2016 onwards, he has been working as a project coordinator at the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Duisburg-Essen.
Jan Clauß studied History and Catholic Theology in Bochum and Dublin. From 2011 to 2015, he worked at the Department of History in Münster. Today, he works as a teacher.

About the book

During the Middle Ages, rulers from different regions aspired to an idea of imperial hegemony. On the other hand, there were rulers who deliberately refused to be «emperors», although their reign showed characteristics of imperial rule. The contributions in this volume ask for the reasons why some rulers such as Charlemagne strove for imperial titles, whereas others voluntarily shrank from them. They also look at the characteristics of and rituals connected to imperial rule as well as to the way Medieval empires saw themselves. Thus, the authors in this volume adopt a transcultural perspective, covering Western, Eastern, Northern and Southern Europe, Byzantium and the Middle East. Furthermore, they go beyond the borders of Christianity by including various caliphates and Islamic «hegemonic» rulers like Saladin.

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Table of Contents

Christian Scholl, Torben R. Gebhardt, Jan Clauß (Münster)

Transcultural Approaches to the Concept of Imperial Rule in the Middle Ages: Introduction

Christian Scholl (Münster)

Imitatio Imperii? Elements of Imperial Rule in the Barbarian Successor States of the Roman West

Sebastian Kolditz (Heidelberg)

Barbarian Emperors? Aspects of the Byzantine Perception of the qaghan (chaganos) in the Earlier Middle Ages

Jan Clauß (Münster)

Imports and Embargos of Imperial Concepts in the Frankish Kingdom. The Promotion of Charlemagne’s Imperial Coronation in Carolingian Courtly Culture

Simon Groth (Frankfurt am Main)

How to Become Emperor – John VIII and the Role of the Papacy in the 9th Century

Jessika Nowak (Frankfurt am Main/Freiburg)

Imperial Aspirations in Provence and Burgundy

Torben R. Gebhardt (Münster)

From Bretwalda to Basileus: Imperial Concepts in Late Anglo-Saxon England?

Nadeem Khan (Münster)

The Caliphates between Imperial Rule and Imagined Suzerainty – A Case Study on Imperial Rituals during Saladin’s Rise to Power

Tobias Hoffmann (Münster)

Von verlorenen Hufeisen und brennenden Nüssen – Über Konflikte im Rahmen des „diplomatischen“ Zeremoniells des byzantinischen Kaiserhofes←5 | 6→

Roland Scheel (Göttingen)

Byzantium – Rome – Denmark – Iceland: Dealing with Imperial Concepts in the North

Stefan Burkhardt (Heidelberg)

Intoxication with Virtuality. French Princes and Aegean Titles

Grischa Vercamer (Berlin)

Imperiale Konzepte in der mittelalterlichen Historiographie
Polens vom 12. bis zum 15. Jahrhundert

List of Contributors

Index of Names and Places

←6 | 7→

Christian Scholl, Torben R. Gebhardt, Jan Clauß (Münster)

Transcultural Approaches to the Concept of Imperial Rule in the Middle Ages: Introduction

The last years have seen a growing interest in the thematic strand of “empire”: not least the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s has stimulated public debates about the role the United States as the single remaining super power were supposed to play in the world. These debates were intensified after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, which, according to the sociologist Michael Mann,¹ constituted the United States’ transition from a hegemonic power widely accepted and acting benevolently to a militarist world ruler ruthlessly claiming “imperial” leadership.²

In the years following George W. Bush’s war against Iraq, a number of monographs on “empire” and/or “imperial rulership” were published both by historians and political scientists. In Germany, for example, Herfried Münkler published a volume on Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States in 2005, which soon became a standard work on the topic.³ In the same year, Hans-Heinrich Nolte published a monograph on empires in early modern times.⁴ Besides these general studies, several comparative studies were published in recent years: after an article published by Susan Reynolds in 2006,⁵ the afore←7 | 8→mentioned Hans-Heinrich Nolte edited a comparative study focusing on empires from the 16th to the 20th centuries in 2008,6 before in 2012 Peter Fibiger Bang and Dariusz Kolodziejczyk published the excellent survey Universal Empire. A Comparative Approach to Imperial Culture and Representation in Eurasian History, dealing with empires from Assyrian times to the 18th century.⁷ Most recently, in 2014, Michael Gehler and Robert Rollinger edited two vast volumes on empires from antiquity to the present.⁸

It is especially the last-mentioned work that deals with empires – or political systems similar to empires – of the Middle Ages. The empires dealt with include the empires of the Umayyads, Fatimids, Ayyubids, Mamluks, Almoravids, Almohads, Mongols, Byzantines, Ottomans, Merovingians and Carolingians as well as the European territories of the high and late Middle Ages, empires in India, the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy.⁹ Münkler only refers to the empire of the Mongols,←8 | 9→ whereas the volume by Bang and Kolodziejczyk contains three articles on medieval empires.10

Apart from these articles and Münkler’s references to the Mongols, there are also several recent monographs dedicated to medieval empires or at least elements of imperial rule. Stefan Burkhardt, for example, analysed the Latin Empire of Constantinople as a Mediterranean Empire; Almut Höfert dealt with the imperial monotheism in the early and high Middle Ages, examining the aftermath of Roman imperial tradition not only in Western Europe, but also in Byzantium and the Islamic caliphate in the early and high Middle Ages.¹¹ This shows that in recent years, researchers have increasingly turned their attention to the Islamic world, too, thus going beyond a Eurocentric perspective. In addition to Hoefert’s survey and the contributions to the Islamic world in the above mentioned volumes, this becomes evident in Robert G. Hoyland’s latest publication of a monograph on the early Islamic empire.¹² Last but not least, the topic “empire” was discussed among medievalists on several conferences, among them the International Medieval Congress (IMC) in←9 | 10→ Leeds in 2014,13 a conference held at the University of Münster in 2015,¹⁴ and another at the University of Hamburg in 2016.¹⁵

There are numerous definitions about what constitutes an “empire”. We here follow the definition given by the aforementioned German historian Hans-Heinrich Nolte¹⁶ who defined an empire by seven characteristics: 1. a monarch at the top of the hierarchy, 2. a close cooperation between church and crown, 3./4. an elaborate bureaucracy based on and working with written records, 5. centrally raised taxes, 6. diverse provinces, 7. a low degree of political participation of the subjects.¹⁷ Other authors add further characteristics, for example regarding space and time. According to most definitions, an empire must cover a vast geographical area, although this criterion is difficult if not impossible to assess for seaborne empires.¹⁸ Besides, even if seaborne empires often were not that large, they gained their power from controlling important trade routes, which can be regarded as more important than pure seize.¹⁹

Researchers disagree, however, as far as the factor time is concerned: whereas Herfried Münkler holds the view that an empire must have lasted a certain amount of time and have gone through at least one circle of rise and fall,²⁰ others disregard this factor and count, for example, Napoleonic←10 | 11→ France, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany as empires.21 Especially for the European Middle Ages, a further criterion seems indispensable to us, videlicet the claim to be the only empire with one single emperor dominating the whole of the world. As a result of this claim, empires could not accept others as equals.²² Therefore, conflicts arose when two political systems within the same geographical area claimed to be empires, as with the Western and Eastern empires in the Middle Ages (Zweikaiserproblem).

In this volume, however, we not only deal with classic examples of medieval empires such as that of Charlemagne or the Byzantine empire, but we also cover other communities or “kingdoms”, among them the Barbarian successor states of the Roman West, Anglo-Saxon England, Denmark, Iceland, Poland, Burgundy and Provence and look at elements of imperial rule (for example imperial titles, claims etc.) which played a role in ruling these communities. The following central questions were given by the editors as common ground for all authors to work with: for which reasons and in which situations did some rulers, for example Charlemagne, aspire imperial titles such as “emperor” or “basileus”, whereas other sovereigns, whose rule showed certain characteristics of “imperial” rule such as that of Theodoric the Great, voluntarily shrank away from them? Related to this point is the question as to why some rulers like Charles I of Naples or James of Baux strove for “virtual” or titular titles like “Emperor of Constantinople”, although no immediate power was connected to them.

Concerning imperial terminology and related matters, it is necessary to point out that titular emperorship seldom came alone. Instead, it was semantically flanked; claims of emperorship were underlined by a more or less sophisticated cluster of titles and symbolic prerogatives. Although these ritual aspects are not part of the pragmatic criteria formulated by Hans-Heinrich Nolte above, several contributions will analyse them regarding their underlying traditions and ideological references. After all, these←11 | 12→ specific symbolic resources could not only help to transform royal into imperial power, they could also enable real and “would-be” emperors to furnish their sovereignty with a charismatic aura helping to stabilize their rule. We therefore ask where these titles and rituals arose from, if they originated from a society’s “own” cultural horizon or if they were transcultural borrowings, as was the “basileus”-title in Anglo-Saxon Britain?

Last but not least, we ask for the perception of imperial rule in the Middle Ages: whose rule was perceived by others as “imperial”? Was it necessary to carry an imperial title such as “emperor” or “basileus” to be←12 | 13→ recognized as superior or did it occur that rulers were regarded as such without holding these titles?

The concept of “transculturality” was originally developed by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz23 and taken up by the German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch in the 1990s.²⁴ According to this concept, “cultures” cannot be understood as monolithic blocks, as was the understanding in the past, but – following Homi Bhabha and Edward Said – as hybrids and processes which permanently interact with and borrow from each other.²⁵ The fact that←13 | 14→ “cultures” permanently borrow from each other also becomes apparent in the articles of this volume, for example borrowings of imperial titles or rituals from Byzantium or Ancient Rome by rulers from Latin Europe.

The article by Jan Clauß deals with cultural and political long-term processes in the Carolingian world prior to Charlemagne’s imperial coronation. Traditional Carolingian scholarship advocated the position that Charlemagne←14 | 15→ was taken by surprise when Leo III crowned him emperor, and therefore attributed the driving force of the restoration of emperorship in the West to the pope. Against this narrative of a passive Frankish king, Clauß’ paper gathers evidence which evinces that around the turn of the century Frankish scholars actively paved the way for Charlemagne’s imperial perception. The imperialisation of the regnum Francorum and Charlemagne involved political entities in and outside the Carolingian sphere of influence. Corresponding with actual power politics, the status of the papacy, the Byzantine emperor and the Abbasid caliph in Bagdad were denied or (argumentatively) ascribed to the Frankish king himself. For this purpose Frankish scholars made use of selective borrowings from imperial traditions. The paper accordingly outlines that Charlemagne’s imperial rise was above all a transcultural project, which implied a critical reflection on empires of the past and present.

In her article, Jessika Nowak looks at successful and failed imperial projects in post-Carolingian Provence and Burgundy. Nowak elucidates why the Provencal kings Hugh of Arles and Louis the Blind as well as the Burgundian Rudolph II pursued differing agendas towards the regnum Italiae and either strove for or declined the imperial crown. In order to do so, she identifies essential political and cultural factors which shaped the respective political options. Drawing predominantly on charters, but also on numismatic sources,←15 | 16→ Nowak shows that the ambition to become Roman emperor mainly depended on family networks, especially connections to the Carolingian dynasty, and territorial powerbases and alliances in Italy. The lack of these features caused Rudolph II to emphasise his Burgundian kingship even when he was ruling in Italy, and at the same time led to a rather modest concept of Burgundian kingship. Nowak’s contribution thus demonstrates that ‘not being Emperor’ could be a preferable option for medieval royal agents, as it had been the case with the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great.

Tobias Hoffmann investigates the Western perspective on the Byzantine court ceremonial, which intended to emphasize the emperors’ socio-economic pre-eminence and was therefore often arranged as a downright running the gauntlet for Western visitors. In the early and high Middle Ages,←16 | 17→ there were anecdotal reports on the experiences of Frankish, Norman and Scandinavian kings and their emissaries visiting Constantinople. Literary echoes of these official visits to the imperial court can be found in writings such as Wace’s “Roman de Rou”, the “Morkinskinna”-saga or Notker’s “Gesta Karoli Magni”, all written for a Western audience. Hoffmann demonstrates that these sources share the common feature of turning the tables in favour of the Western side; they aim at playing the Greeks at their own game, styling their respective protagonists as cunning diplomats who avoid compromising themselves and / or their lords, or who deliberately provoke scandals outshining Byzantine ostentation. It turns out that the allegedly trivial anecdotes on golden horseshoes and eating habits in fact were quite aware of the symbolism of courtly protocol and its political implications. Using the Byzantine court as an antagonistic background, the entertaining episodes thus mirror a transcultural rivalry between East and West.