The Carolingian reforms presented themselves, at least superficially, as about centralization.Footnote 1 From the late eighth century onwards, Frankish kings and churchmen sought to bring conformity and unity wherever there was error and diversity. For these reformers, the deviances of paganism, heresy and immorality – not to mention ecclesiastical incompetence – all needed to submit to correction from the centre.Footnote 2 Indeed, the term correctio has often been used as a scholarly shorthand for the drive to improve Christian life and thought in the light of standards set by the court.Footnote 3 Just as the Frankish kingdoms had military frontiers, so did Christian orthodoxy and morality have boundaries that included and excluded. At the same time, however, conformity did not equate to the unilateral and top-down process that might be assumed.Footnote 4 In Rutger Kramer’s words, ‘the Frankish Church thrived on diversity and had the ability to accommodate many different varieties of the same core message’.Footnote 5 Those at the centre allowed for greater variety of expression than a cursory reading of their ideals might suggest. Conformity did not mean uniformity. Carolingian rulers and their advisers even valued debate and the expression of alternative viewpoints (drawing heavily on Roman models of rhetoric).Footnote 6 As this article will explore, such open-mindedness extended to what lessons could be learned from those living on the distant peripheries of the Frankish kingdoms.
The early medieval periphery has attracted considerable recent attention in two ways.Footnote 7 The first has been the political, military and diplomatic management of geographical frontiers and the extent to which, for example, the Carolingians successfully incorporated them into their realms.Footnote 8 The second has been how the geographical margins and their inhabitants spurred reflections about identity and community at the centre.Footnote 9 Through ‘strategies of distinction’ and perceptions of moral and cultural difference, ‘group identity could be strengthened by emphasis of what did not belong’.Footnote 10 The elision of an early medieval ethnic identity with a sense of moral rectitude depended partly on the vilification of those ‘strange peoples’ (exterae gentes) beyond the frontiers.Footnote 11 A combined moral and political centre – centred upon royal courts and associated ecclesiastical networks – made sense if those who were geographically distant were also morally beyond the pale.
Carolingian thinkers, however, did not necessarily envisage the boundaries of Christianity and the military frontiers of the empire as coextensive. As various scholars have stressed, the Franks did not think that they – as an ethnic group – had a monopoly on ‘good Christianity’.Footnote 12 Theodulf of Orléans, writing in the early 790s, wrote that ‘almost the entire world is filled with Christ’s people’.Footnote 13 By definition, Christian identity had permeable edges, capable of including ethnic variations and those at or beyond geographical frontiers. This article explores how, perhaps surprisingly, the geographical periphery furnished some Carolingian authors with positive moral counsel and exemplars. Those at the geographical margins exemplified views and behaviours that conformed precisely to the moral ideals which these authors wished to press upon their readers. The geographically peripheral, yet morally conformist, could admonish those at the centre who deviated from the core message of contemporary reform. This strategy of admonition, which echoed the ‘valorisation of the barbarians’ by Roman historians such as Tacitus, found particular expression in Frankish annals.Footnote 14
Structured according to the years of the Incarnation, annals had emerged in the late eighth century.Footnote 15 As with all early medieval histories, they did not simply describe their world and its events (mimetically), but sought to show their readers how to navigate them (prescriptively).Footnote 16 Frankish annalists became increasingly prescriptive as the ninth century wore on, especially as moral rhetoric intensified during the reign of Louis the Pious (814–40).Footnote 17 Part of this was the depiction of moral ‘otherness’ against or through which valid norms could be taught. This article looks at four annalists from the 840s to the 890s, who contributed to the so-called Annals of St Bertin and Annals of Fulda. Each of these annalists were, broadly speaking, close to the courtly centres of the Carolingian kingdoms. The Annals of St Bertin were written first by courtiers of Louis the Pious, followed by Prudentius, bishop of Troyes, and then finally by Hincmar, adviser to Charles the Bald (r. 840–77).Footnote 18 The Annals of Fulda, meanwhile, were written at one of the foremost monasteries of the East Frankish kingdom with excellent links to the court of Louis the German (r. 840–76).Footnote 19 These authors enjoyed proximity to royal power but also – as part of the upper echelons of the Frankish church – helped to generate the normative centre against which moral non-conformity was measured.
The article considers these annalists because they all depicted marginal groups who endorsed – by word or deed – Carolingian moral norms, as part of a wider didactic strategy to conform their own audiences to that imagined moral centre. These episodes are complex, and the groups involved were marginal to different extents. Some were simply far from wherever the annalist wrote, others were physically beyond Carolingian territory. They were all, however, proximate to the annalists’ own communities and in correspondence with them (unlike, for example, the twelfth-century legend of Prester John, a Christian king in the distant Orient). Their inclusion reveals something important about the kind of unity and conformity desired by Carolingian reformers. They aimed not at a chauvinistic uniformity but made space for ethnic and geographical diversity under a broader Christian fellowship. Despite the apparent self-confidence of Frankish churchmen, they proved open to lessons on correctio from ‘strange peoples’.
English and Greek Counsel
The first case study concerns the closing year of the reign of Louis the Pious. Louis’ reign had been characterized by dynastic infighting and an intensifying moral discourse, centred upon the need for counsel and admonition.Footnote 20 The Annals of St Bertin, which would eventually provide a narrative from the year 830 to 882, began as an anonymous effort by those close to the emperor to continue a set of annals associated with the imperial court.Footnote 21 In the early 840s, these annals came to be written by Prudentius, bishop of Troyes, until his death in 861.Footnote 22 Based on various thematic consistencies, however, Prudentius may have been involved in its writing at the palace as part of a wider team.Footnote 23 Intriguingly, Prudentius was himself from the margins: one of several Iberians who had made a career in the Frankish church.Footnote 24
The lengthy entry for 839 recounts various catastrophes and dynastic struggles that plagued the emperor. Among these, a deacon from the palace named Bodo had converted to Judaism, taken the name Eleazar, and fled to Spain.Footnote 25 This is an excellent example of, firstly, ‘otherness’ being used negatively as a warning and, secondly, ideological marginality being paralleled by a movement to the geographical periphery. Bodo begins in close proximity to the emperor and represented the best of a Christian education: ‘imbued in the Christian religion from almost the very cradle by the instruction [eruditionibus] of the palace clergy’.Footnote 26 The author even noted his ethnic identity from within the Frankish kingdoms as an ‘Aleman by birth’.Footnote 27 He ends beyond salvation and on the far side of the Pyrenees, in Zaragoza, ‘along with some Jews’.Footnote 28 The author also stressed the contrast in behaviour. As a Christian, he had learned and studied and went on pilgrimage; as a Jew, he changed his hair, took up arms and married. Significantly, Bodo was ‘seduced by the enemy of the human race’ despite all his learning.Footnote 29 The annalist warned that even those closest to the centre – those who had received the best education – could slip away to the ideological (and in this case geographical) margins.
Moreover, the account has a strongly affective dimension. Bodo’s apostasy was to be ‘most tearfully bemoaned by all sons of the Catholic Church’.Footnote 30 It was ‘grievous for the Emperor and Empress and indeed for all those redeemed through the grace of the Christian faith’.Footnote 31 The interplay between centre and margins mattered and reinforced the contrast in the emotions of the reader, who was encouraged to sympathize with the imperial family. Throughout, the author defined Christianity clearly, both with reference to salvation (redeemed by grace) and as belonging to the visible church (as children thereof). Bodo’s ideological marginalization, therefore, served to clarify the identity of the centre. This is a typical example of how vilification served to emphasize a group’s identity by way of contrast. Importantly, however, the author did not elide Christianity with either the Franks or the Carolingian empire, a move which seems intended to set up what follows.
The entry continued with more constructive moral counsel, also from beyond the frontiers. Æthelwulf, king of Wessex, sent envoys to the emperor warning him ‘to devote even more careful attention and concern to the salvation of the souls of those subject to him’.Footnote 32 Æthelwulf’s envoy also passed on a letter which contained a striking vision of impending judgement, a letter which the annalist inserted into their narrative.Footnote 33 This vision was given to ‘a certain religious priest … while seized out of his body’.Footnote 34 A guide showed the priest a heavenly world where children wrote out books in letters of black ink and blood, representing the ‘various sins of Christian men’ and ‘sins and crimes of Christians’, specifically the breaking of the Sabbath.Footnote 35 The letter warned the emperor that ‘unless the saints cried out to God so incessantly with tears, there would already have been an end to so many evil [Christians]’,Footnote 36 and that ‘if Christian men do not quickly do penance … the greatest danger will intolerably come quickly upon them’.Footnote 37 Specifically, a dense fog would cover the land for three days, followed by pagan men laying waste to Christian lands. This all but named the Vikings – who had already begun raiding both Frankish and English shores – as the agents of judgement.
Neither the English nor their kings had featured in Frankish annals up to this point. Indeed, Charlemagne had expressed little interest in diplomacy with those north of the Channel.Footnote 38 Here, however, a West Saxon king offered fulsome counsel to the emperor, quoted at length by a source close to the court. Although the letter (which shows no signs of fabrication) originated in a different context, its content and tone overlapped significantly with the moral discourse of Louis’ reign, chiefly the concerns around sin and divine judgement through military defeat. This discourse had included admonitory visions, a general concern over sin and divine judgement, and a specific concern about the Sabbath.Footnote 39 In fact, the vision of the demon Wiggo (found in Einhard’s On the Translation of Marcellinus and Peter) had urged obedience on this specific point.Footnote 40 Visions, in themselves, have a marginal quality. They feature marginal figures, whether human ascetics or spiritual agents, and come from beyond normal life. This vision, however, took place within the context of diplomatic communication between royal centres across the very tangible physical boundary of the English Channel. Crucially, the vision elided Frankish and English territory into ‘the lands of the Christians’, equally vulnerable to sin and sharing a common pagan threat. This further developed the construction of a Christian identity begun in the Bodo episode, which had also transcended identification of Christians with particular ethnic groups. The marginal, in this case positively, helped to create an inclusive Christian identity: one that had been called into question by Bodo’s apostasy.
The very next passage also described diplomacy, this time from the Greeks, on the opposite border to that of the English. Named envoys arrived from Constantinople to express friendship and affection between the two emperors.Footnote 41 They also congratulated Louis on recent victories won ‘from heaven’.Footnote 42 They encouraged him to ‘give thanks to the Giver of all victories’.Footnote 43 In a very different way to the letter from Æthelwulf, this also paralleled aspects of Carolingian moral discourse: the need to ascribe victories to God.Footnote 44 Indeed, the annalist would do so at the very end of the entry, when a Saxon army sent by Louis defeated the Sorbs while ‘supported by heavenly help’.Footnote 45 This replicated the language of ‘heaven’ used by the Greek envoys and put their advice into practice, by recognizing what God had done. This added to the sense of a Christian identity that included other Christian kingdoms and rulers, this time defined not by shared sinfulness, but by their recognition of heaven’s mercies. Significantly, this attribution of military victories to divine agency had fallen out of favour with Frankish annalists during Louis’ reign.Footnote 46 It may be that the Greeks’ counsel provided implicit justification for restoring what the author regarded as an important part of his role.
Louis, therefore, received advice from two fellow Christian rulers, from opposite borders of his empire. Their advice complemented one another very precisely, especially on this latter point of recognizing and talking about divine agency. The English, through an epistemologically murky vision, implied and inferred the possibility of divine judgement and the dangers of sin. Divine agency, however, remained very implicit, appearing only as the recipient of saintly intercession in the English vision. Agency instead lay with the sins of the Christians. The Greeks, by contrast, openly attested the agency of God in the emperor’s recent military successes, which was to be celebrated. Both passages, importantly, articulated the response expected from Louis and (by extension) the reader. In the former, Louis needed to look to the salvation of his people, specifically through the observance of the Sabbath. In the latter, Louis needed to recognize and give thanks for what God had done. The annalist did not want to risk their readers taking divine favour for granted, but nor did they want them to think that God only came in judgement. By using voices from the periphery, the annalist could offer variegated yet coherent advice to the centre. This involved both a sense of Christian identity, which (although shaken by Bodo) remained secure and founded upon a shared recognition of the problems of sin and the mercy of divine agency.
Prudentius of Troyes explicitly took up these themes as he continued the annals, by repeatedly depicting divine activity beyond the borders of the Frankish kingdoms. As an Iberian among the Franks, he had every reason to encourage an ethnically inclusive understanding of Christian identity. Specifically, he ascribed the military successes of other Christian societies to God. The Beneventans, for example, defeated the Saracens ‘with God’s help’ in 843.Footnote 47 The Irish and English both defeated the Northmen ‘by the help of our Lord Jesus Christ’.Footnote 48 This created a sense of a coherent Christian world of which the Frankish kingdoms formed only a part. What gave this urgency was the constant fear of non-Christian aggression – whether Scandinavian, Slavic or Saracen – shared across the Christian world. In the entry for 845, the year in which the Northmen first attacked Paris (less than 100 miles from Troyes), Prudentius made this explicit. He asserted that ‘the equity of divine goodness, offended so greatly by our sins, wore down the Christians’ lands and kingdoms’.Footnote 49 What Prudentius offered his community was a reminder that all remained within God’s power. As they read the annals, however, they would have first encountered those ideas in the messages of foreign kings from beyond Frankish borders, yet who participated in the same Christian identity under God’s care.
Bulgar Devotion
In 861, the Annals of St Bertin passed into the hands of Hincmar, archbishop of Reims – a key royal adviser and major figure in Frankish politics – who continued them until his death in 882.Footnote 50 Although he despised Prudentius (on doctrinal grounds), he shared his interest in how Christians from the geographical margins could provide models for those at the centre. This centre included Hincmar’s own clergy at Reims, but also the court of Charles the Bald (840–77). In his entry for 866, Hincmar drew their attention east, to the Bulgars, whose king oversaw the conversion of his people ‘with God inspiring him, and with the signs and afflictions on the people of the kingdom warning him’.Footnote 51 However, the king’s ‘leading men, being troubled, incited the people against him’.Footnote 52 Whereas the entry for 839 had provided counsel, the episode provides a positive example of robust Christian leadership in the face of catastrophe.
The king – now named Boris-Michael – found himself surrounded in his palace by ‘however many there were in the ten counties’.Footnote 53 When he counter-attacked, Hincmar stressed the sheer impossibility of the odds: ‘he set out against all that multitude with only 48 men’.Footnote 54 Boris-Michael, however, did so ‘having invoked Christ’s name’ and his few men, ‘fervent towards Christian devotion, remained with him’.Footnote 55 There are several exemplary actions here. Firstly, Boris-Michael stood firm for Christ’s name despite the odds and did so by praying. Secondly, his faithful men remained loyal despite the pressure of their peers, and as a result of their own devotion. Loyalty (or fides) had a dual meaning for the Franks, capturing both faith in God and loyalty to the king.Footnote 56 Whereas earlier annals had looked at how other groups had simultaneously become Christian and become loyal to Carolingian kings, Hincmar conveyed that sense in an entirely foreign context. Boris-Michael’s men were good Christians and loyal warriors, regardless of their relationship to the Franks. Hincmar, therefore, presented a royal household – new to the faith, remote from the West Frankish kingdom – functioning exactly as a Christian political society ought to.
What happened next vindicated their devotion. The king’s warband saw ‘seven clerics and each held a burning candle in his hand, and thus preceded the king and his men’.Footnote 57 The rebels, however, saw ‘a great flaming villa was falling upon them, and the horses of the king’s men … advanced upright and struck them with their fore-hooves’.Footnote 58 It is worth noting again the importance of the visionary, which furthered the sense of distance from the everyday experience of Hincmar’s readers, while simultaneously validating the moral norms which governed it. The rebels tried to flee in terror but found themselves rooted to the ground. Boris-Michael, tempering justice with mercy like a good Christian king, killed fifty-two of the leading men but released the remainder unharmed. From start to finish, the king and his men acted in ways which would have gladdened the heart of any Carolingian palace chaplain.
Hincmar, however, did not leave the Bulgars on the margins, but related their experience to the geographical and political centres of Christian Europe. Firstly, Boris-Michael asked the Carolingian kings for help setting up ecclesiastical life in his kingdom. Louis the German sent bishops and priests, while Charles the Bald sent liturgical vessels, vestments and books, funded by his bishops (that is, Hincmar and his colleagues). This tied Hincmar to events among the distant Bulgars. They were not merely a helpful allegory for Christian kingship, but part of the same ecclesiastical structures as the Franks. Secondly, Boris-Michael sent his son and some leading men to Rome. To St Peter (by name), he also sent gifts and ‘the arms with which he had being clothed when in Christ’s name he triumphed over his adversaries’.Footnote 59 The importance of gift-giving has repeatedly been stressed in scholarship, and victorious generals sometimes sent captured trophies to their kings.Footnote 60 For Boris-Michael to send his trophies to the pope made a comparable, but actually more powerful, statement about hierarchy and submission to the church. That Hincmar repeated the phrase ‘in Christ’s name’ to describe the armour furthered the sense of a Christian victory. As a gift to Rome, however, it pulled the reader’s perspective out to encompass Christianity understood universally and centred upon Rome. Hincmar thus established – as the earlier Annals of St Bertin had done – a clear overarching sense of Christian identity and showed the reader what it meant to live correctly within it, just as the entry for 839 had done.
As in the previous case study, this passage picked up themes in the entry for the year (and indeed Hincmar’s annals) as a whole. In the West Frankish kingdom, there had been repeated clashes within the aristocracy and between members of the Carolingian family in recent years.Footnote 61 The divided loyalty of Boris-Michael’s men may have resonated with this. At the same time, Hincmar’s relationship with Charles the Bald had become strained in 865, because of a dispute over the appointment of Wulfhad to the see of Bourges.Footnote 62 Boris-Michael allowed Hincmar to present an ideal of Christian kingship which was dependent on and obedient to the church. Such resonances are, of course, merely suggestive. Stronger literary links, however, appear in the contrast between Boris-Michael’s success and the defeat of West Frankish forces at Brissarthe by the Northmen in the same entry. The Frankish commanders – Robert the Strong and Ranulf of Poitou – were important members of the West Frankish aristocracy and had featured prominently in Hincmar’s narrative. Hincmar pointedly wrote that they would have defeated the Vikings ‘if God had been with them’.Footnote 63 Instead, their forces were defeated, Robert was killed, and Ranulf died of his wounds because, ‘refusing to be corrected [castigare]’, they ‘deserved to experience vengeance’.Footnote 64 (Their sin was to hold lay abbacies.Footnote 65)
The episodes of Boris-Michael and Robert and Ranulf thus complement one another, showing positive and negative examples of Christian militarism. Importantly, Hincmar stopped short of ascribing Boris-Michael’s victory explicitly to God. Hincmar rarely did this anyway, but the explicit denial of divine help to Robert and Ranulf brought this into sharper relief. In both cases, victory or defeat hinged on the spiritual and devotional attitudes of Boris-Michael and his men (positively) and Robert and Ranulf (negatively). Whereas other Carolingian historians – including Prudentius – had explicitly ascribed Christian victories to God, Hincmar may have felt that this downplayed the spiritual responsibilities of the Christian soldier. What is remarkable is that he explored this lesson by inverting the centre and the margins. The central and courtly figures of Robert and Ranulf failed, whereas the king of a distant land, a new Christian, succeeded. The foreign king thus behaved in a manner that fulfilled the highest ideals of Carolingian correctio.
Before moving on, it is worth interrogating briefly the role of Rome itself. The see of St Peter was central as an authority in Hincmar’s annals (both in the Bulgar episode and elsewhere) and in Carolingian Christianity. As a city, however, Rome was a geographically marginal location and remote from the experience of West Frankish audiences. As Jan Clauß has noted, respect for Rome’s apostolic authority did not preclude Frankish suspicion of the city itself with its infighting and conspiracies.Footnote 66 It is, therefore, significant that, like Boris-Michael, Pope Nicholas provided Hincmar with another example of Christian leadership in the face of the catastrophe, ironically when the (Carolingian) Emperor Louis II threatened Rome in 864. Nicholas proclaimed a fast so that God ‘might give the Emperor a good mind’ towards ‘the authority of the apostolic see’.Footnote 67 Louis II arrived to find ‘the clergy and people of Rome’ carrying out Nicholas’s instructions by ‘celebrating their fast with crosses and litanies’.Footnote 68 His men attacked the worshippers and smashed their crosses, and then desecrated the Holy Cross in St Peter’s itself. Pope Nicholas, learning of Louis’ plan to imprison him, secretly escaped across the Tiber, ‘where he stayed for two days and nights without food or drink’.Footnote 69 The passage is chiastic: the prayers of the Romans and Nicholas frame the iconoclasm by Louis’ men. In the end, Louis II fell ill and one of his iconoclastic soldiers died, and Rome was saved.
The episodes are implicitly connected by Louis II’s appearance in the entry for 866, demanding the Bulgar trophies from Pope Nicholas. No doubt Louis sought to contest Nicholas’s centrality in a broader Christian world, but the pope ‘made excuses’.Footnote 70 Like the Bulgar episode, the events in Rome in 864 also involved the marginal and the central. Papal authority represented the centre of Hincmar’s religious world, yet Rome lay beyond the geographical scope of his readers’ experience, in distant Italy. They are threatened, meanwhile, not by pagans (as with Boris-Michael’s opponents) but by a Carolingian ruler, who ought to have conformed to Christian norms. Nicholas himself was forced to the edge of the city, alone, to escape Louis’ fury. Only there, in prayer and fasting, did deliverance eventually come. Hincmar’s emphasis, as among the Bulgars, was on prayerful submission to God in the face of wickedness. This shared focus – and the importance of Rome to both narratives – shows how Hincmar used geographical marginality to convey Christian norms. In both cases, the marginality destabilized expectations. Even the pope might seem marginalized or distant to the experience of those in Reims. Even a recently converted king proved a better Christian than the Carolingians. Hincmar’s point in both episodes is that what mattered was steadfast humility before God in the face of adversity, in a way which built upon themes already present in the Annals of St Bertin.
Frisians and Northmen
The Annals of Fulda represented an alternative annalistic tradition originating in the East Frankish kingdom. This began in the 830s at the monastery of Fulda, which enjoyed close connections to the court of Louis the German (r. 840–76). Its various authors often explored moral questions facing those involved in contemporary politics and warfare. One of these annals’ lengthiest episodes concerned a conflict on the north-west margins of Louis’ kingdom, in northern Frisia. Even after their conquest in the eighth century, Frankish historians still referred to the Frisiones as a distinct ethnic group, as in this entry.Footnote 71 It had only recently joined Louis’ kingdom, as part of the Treaty of Meerssen (870). The annalist thus specified the region, but added that it was still part of ‘Louis’ kingdom’.Footnote 72 The region and its inhabitants, therefore, were peripheral to the annalist’s audience without being as remote as the English, Greeks or Bulgars considered so far. A Viking leader, called Rudolf, attacked the region, demanding tribute.Footnote 73 The Frisians replied, as loyal subjects, ‘that they were not bound to pay tribute to anyone except to King Louis and his sons’.Footnote 74 This emphasized at the outset that these remote Frisians shared the same political identity as the monks at Fulda (unlike the purely religious solidarity of previous cases studies).
As with the Bulgars, the annalist used the Frisians to set forth how to respond correctly to a pagan onslaught. Rudolf swore to kill the men, enslave the women and children, and seize their treasure. In response, ‘invoking the Lord, who had very often rescued them from their enemies’, the loyal Frisians joined battle, killing Rudolf and eight hundred Northmen.Footnote 75 The Frisians here remembered God’s help to them in the past and depended on Him in the present. This was something Carolingian rulers had done earlier in the Annals of Fulda (Charles Martel in 726 against the Saracens; Charles the Fat in 869 against the Moravians).Footnote 76 Conversely, in 849, a Frankish army – sent by Louis the German – had been defeated by the Bohemians precisely because they had not feared God.Footnote 77 Fulda numbered East Frankish generals among its patrons, and its abbots sometimes commanded the king’s armies. As a result, they cared about a correct attitude to military operations and the need to depend on God. The annalist, as Hincmar had done, located such positive exemplars of this among those on the distant periphery of their kingdom. The Frisians’ invocation of God is vindicated, as it had been for Carolingian princes. The Viking survivors were cut off from their ships and took shelter, while ‘the Frisians’ besieged them and took stock.
Only at this point does the annalist mention the Frisians’ commander: ‘A Northmen, who had become a Christian and for a long time lived with these Frisians, had led their attack’.Footnote 78 Strikingly, this anonymous captain was himself marginal to the group he commands. Indeed, ethnically, he had more in common with the enemy. Yet his faith and long-term loyalty to the Frisians had clearly allayed any suspicions about divided loyalty. In his address to his men, his ethnic marginality contrasted with his moral conformity as he exemplified contemporary norms of humility and gratitude to God. As I have argued elsewhere, this speech (as recorded) fulfils Cicero’s criteria for persuasive rhetoric, albeit from a Christian perspective.Footnote 79 The oration argues, firstly, that ‘we few have prevailed against many enemies, not regarding our own strength, but God’s grace’.Footnote 80 Behind this statement lies an allusion to 1 Maccabees 3: 18–19, which contrasted numerical superiority in battle with dependence on God. Other Carolingian historians (including the current annalist) used these verses to describe military successes, albeit usually Frankish ones.Footnote 81 It also featured in contemporary texts on kingship, such as Sedulius Scottus’ On Christian Leaders, written for Charles the Bald in 869.Footnote 82 Hincmar himself had used the same verse to warn Charles the Bald not to trust (or conversely to fear) military strength.Footnote 83 This is not to suggest that the annalist knew these West Frankish texts, but he certainly held similar convictions. Sedulius wrote, for example, that a leader ‘ought to establish their whole confidence not in themselves nor the strength of their men but in the power and grace of the Most High’.Footnote 84 That this annalist presented an ex-Viking as espousing the same moral views as such palace advisers is remarkable.
This statement about divine agency, however, informed his second piece of advice: the Frisians should not recklessly try to improve on what they had already accomplished. Instead, they should take hostages and oaths from the Vikings, and let them go rather than risk defeat.Footnote 85 This was a sensitive issue for those fighting the Northmen. Should battle be joined against the odds, risking defeat and (by extension) giving the invaders freedom to raid? Or was negotiation and caution acceptable if it mitigated that impact? As Rachel Stone has argued, these were moral issues, relating to courage and cowardice.Footnote 86 It directly affected the discharge of the aristocracy’s obligations to protect the Christian people from attack. Later on, different authors of the Annals of Fulda would condemn two different commanders for attacking Viking warbands ‘rashly’ (incaute).Footnote 87 The Frisians’ anonymous leader contrasted the possibilities open to his men. Although exhausted, they could keep fighting their enemies who had been pushed to desperation. Or they could negotiate a return of treasure and the Vikings’ exit with little risk, which seemed the ‘more sensible’ (consultius) option. As Mayke de Jong and Irene van Renswourde have argued, such debates and methods of persuasion pervaded the high politics of the Carolingian court.Footnote 88 Here, such strategies appear on the lips of an outsider to those on the margins. Above all, the narrative shows the wisdom of such counsel: the others agree, the Vikings hand over hostages and treasure, make oaths and leave ‘with great confusion and loss of men’.Footnote 89 This is perhaps the most successful encounter with the Northmen in any set of annals for some decades. They are defeated in battle, their leader killed, and they leave with nothing. And yet that honour goes to an anonymous leader and a group distinct from the annalist’s own people, although part of his kingdom.
As with the examples from the Annals of St Bertin, the episode derived even greater force from its position within the overall entry for 873, which it concluded. This began with a starkly different tone and troubling moral warning. In January, the annalist recounted, King Louis held an assembly at Frankfurt with men from all over the kingdom to discuss ‘the state of the realm’ (statu regni). The entry began in the political heart of the kingdom, with the king, his sons and his leading men. Yet here, of all places, the demonic burst in and possessed Charles the Fat, Louis’ youngest son, who thrashed around while those around wept with fear.Footnote 90 As the Fulda annalist explained, Charles had himself been deceived and ensnared by Satan, just as he had conspired to deceive his father. There are parallels with the episode of Bodo-Eleazar, involving both the courtly, the demonic and the affective response of those involved. Louis then addressed another son, Louis the Younger, who had conspired with Charles, in direct speech. There is ‘nothing … hidden which will not be revealed’ (Matthew 10: 26) and advised him to ‘confess … do penance, and pray humbly to God’.Footnote 91 The episode captured the familiar themes of loyalty and humility, and the need for practical submission to God, unfolding at the centre of the East Frankish kingdom.
Three interrelated aspects connected this to the later episode in Frisia. Firstly, divine agency conditioned the course and outcome of both episodes very explicitly. The annalist announced that Charles’s possession unfolded ‘with the Lord doing it’.Footnote 92 He had conspired against the king ‘chosen and ordained by God’.Footnote 93 He was possessed so as to ‘learn’ (disceret) that there is ‘no counsel against God’.Footnote 94 In an important sense, Charles here parallels Rudolf’s attack on Frisia, ‘ignorant of the revenge that would pursue him from heaven’.Footnote 95 Moreover, where Charles failed to submit to God and suffered, the Frisians invoked God and triumphed. Secondly, both episodes highlight the knowledge (or ignorance) of spiritual realities. Rudolf was ignorant, Charles needed to learn, Louis the Younger needed to ‘see’ (videsne) where conspiracy leads, and what has been hidden was now revealed. Even the heroic Frisians needed persuading by their commander not to presume God’s continued grace.
Finally, and closely related to this, both episodes involve communication. It was unusual for annalists to include direct speeches, yet this entry contained two, both urging their listeners to take counsel. Charles’s possession means that he is unable to communicate properly. ‘Shouting, now quietly, now in a loud voice, he threatened with open mouth to bite those holding him’.Footnote 96 While counsel leads to correction, the demonic obscures knowledge and hinders communication. What is so striking, however, is the contrast in good counsel at either end of the episode. On the one hand, the East Frankish king must warn his son about conspiracy and the demonic and to undertake penance. On the other, an anonymous ex-Viking urges the simple recognition of God’s help, humbly sought and graciously provided. Both were touchstones of Carolingian ideals, but their juxtaposition at the centre and periphery here threw them into stark relief. The periphery put the centre to shame.
The Bulgars Return
In the closing decades of the ninth century, what was ‘central’ to Frankish society began to change. The monopoly of the Carolingian dynasty over royal power gave way to an increasingly fragmented political landscape ruled by competing dynasties.Footnote 97 The very nature of the periphery thus altered dramatically. Nonetheless, in some quarters, including the later Annals of Fulda, the relevance of marginal communities to the normative function of historiography persisted. By the 890s, one version of these annals had come to be written in Bavaria, with possible links to the court of Arnulf of Carinthia (887–99).Footnote 98 The Bulgars, so distant from Hincmar in Reims, now served as valued Christian allies just across the frontier. What made their example perhaps more pressing was that in 896, Arnulf had suffered a stroke, and the annalist now lacked a clear Christian king to provide coherence to his narrative. In the elderly Boris-Michael, the Bavarian annalist found one who could at least provide moral instruction, in a manner which echoed the entry for 873.
In 896, the Bulgars found themselves bested by Hungarian invasions (backed by the Byzantines). ‘Miserable and uncertain’, they ran ‘to the feet of their old king, Michael, who had first converted them to the truth of the Christian religion’.Footnote 99 They specifically sought his ‘advice’ (consulere), highlighting once again the importance of counsel. The king told his men to ‘seek help from God’, which they duly did.Footnote 100 More intriguingly, he enjoined penance ‘for the injury inflicted upon Christians’.Footnote 101 This pointed to the perennial ninth-century issue of Christian kingdoms fighting one another instead of their pagan enemies. East Frankish texts in the 890s, such as the acts of the Council of Tribur (895), strongly emphasized the primacy of a unifying Christian identity.Footnote 102 Indeed, the Bavarian annalist has to be adamant that Arnulf’s campaigns in Italy were against ‘bad Christians’ to avoid compromising this.Footnote 103 Boris-Michael’s counsel here both illustrated the fragility of Christian identity while illustrating the religious solidarity between the Bulgars and the eastern Franks.
The Bulgars nonetheless followed Boris-Michael’s advice and ‘by God’s mercy, victory … fell to the Christians’ against the ‘gentile [Hungarians]’.Footnote 104 The Bulgars thus prove to be morally instructive neighbours for the annals’ Bavarian readers. This echoed the entry for 873 in various ways: it was located in a proximate region among a neighbouring yet distinct ethnic group, who took counsel and triumphed over their pagan enemies through divine agency. What distinguished the Bavarian annalist from his 870s predecessors was that he elsewhere used ‘Christian’ to denote East Frankish or Bavarian armies (including against the Hungarians). In this entry, and those for 891 and 900, armies identified by their ethnic group set out to fight (East Franks and Alemans in 891, and Bavarians in 900). On joining battle, however, the annalist switched to calling them ‘Christians’, all helped by God. He thus showed how disparate ethnic groups – some marginal and some central – could all be contained in the same Christian identity against pagan threats. This was a new development in Carolingian historiography and showed how, as the Carolingian hegemony fragmented, the importance of a shared Christian self-consciousness became more pressing. At the same time, this approach shared elements already apparent in the Annals of St Bertin in the 830s and 840s. As the Carolingian world changed, established constructions of Christian identity and its relationship to moral conformity continued to provide traction on contemporary issues.
Conclusion
Space forbids the discussion of many further lines of inquiry: the Iberian and Mediterranean frontiers, and the distant margins of Christianity in the Holy Land, for example, or the appearance of margins in other Frankish historians. Before suggesting why annalists used marginal characters in the ways discussed, two further observations are necessary. Firstly, the prescriptive and idealized nature of these narratives should not preclude their basis in reality. Evidence abounds not only of cultural and religious conflict across the Carolingian frontier, but also of accommodation and cultural exchange between centres and peripheries.Footnote 105 Although such exchanges were certainly complex and fluid, they also gave rise to important and lasting affinities between the Franks and their various neighbours. The Normans are simply the most famous example of ‘strange peoples’ who – like the anonymous hero of the Annals of Fulda – entered a Frankish cultural world. Such exchange and accommodation sustained the annalists’ evident curiosity about what those distant from themselves got up to and what this might teach their audiences.
Secondly, although based on the reception of rumours and reports from afar, the annalists seem to have integrated these episodes into their narratives with considerable ingenuity. It often remains unclear how far early medieval historians – especially annalists – intended to juxtapose seemingly random episodes to achieve a greater narrative impact.Footnote 106 Some combinations hint at deeper arguments, others may simply reflect the order that information reached the author. The examples considered here could, theoretically, have stood alone and still made valuable moral arguments to their readers. Nonetheless, their thematic coherence with other episodes within a single entry is suggestive of wider authorial planning in these particular cases. At the very least, such events gained relevance because they spoke to concerns already embedded within the narrative. More generously, they reinforce the sense that annalists – just as much as biographers or epic poets – knew how to assemble their material with both literary and didactic skill.
The consistent thread running through these episodes, and examples of accommodation more broadly, was Christianity. This gave the Franks and their converted (or converting) neighbours a shared vocabulary and a vision of community which they could share without abandoning their own particular identities. This made marginal communities didactically valuable, and related to two further developments. Firstly, Carolingian ideas about ethnicity were changing. As Helmut Reimitz has demonstrated, Charlemagne’s reign had seen an attempt to create a single Frankish identity into which the king’s subjects could be elided.Footnote 107 As Charlemagne conquered more regions, that Frankish identity proved too narrow to gain traction among such a diversely-peopled empire. By c.800, Frankish historians began searching for alternative, broader visions of community, in which different ethnicities could coexist rather than being invalidated.Footnote 108 Christianity, and especially the concept of the ecclesia as discussed by Mayke de Jong, provided coherence and unity across ethnic diversity (as it had done in the New Testament) and allowed for individuals and communities to operate with several layers of identity.Footnote 109 The examples considered in this article were the next step. If other ethnic identities were valid because they shared their Christian faith with the Franks, then strangers from the periphery could provide valuable moral advice and counsel. It is worth pointing out how remarkable this is. These examples demonstrate a potent de-centring of the Franks within their own social imagination.
This would have been unlikely, however, without a second important condition which made strangers, if anything, better than those at the centre. As van Renswourde has shown, late antique Christianity had a long tradition of the outspoken outsider – the prophet and the ascetic – speaking truth to power. In Merovingian culture, holy men were often marginal to the royal court and yet had enormous rhetorical and persuasive authority precisely because they operated in a liminal world, out in the wilderness but close to God.Footnote 110 Under the Carolingians, that inspired and ascetic dimension of monasticism became more routinized and institutionalized, and the court became far less indulgent of marginal voices.Footnote 111 Outspoken bishops could easily find themselves cold-shouldered by the courtly establishment and so had to find other ways to counsel and persuade that followed a new set of rules.Footnote 112 Carolingian historians, however, did not want their audience to become complacent; they did not want their very centrality to blind them to the need for humility. This, after all, was the key message behind each of the episodes considered above.
Geographical strangers, therefore, provided perfect foils. There was a literal distance between them and the authors who used them to criticize and counsel. There was a great difference between saying how the current bishop, abbot or king should rule – with all the controversy that entailed – and pointing to how sensibly a distant Christian leader seemed to be leading their people. These distant characters had no direct stake in the political life of the texts’ audiences. They were safe to listen to and admire. Criticism of colleagues or patrons could remain implicit. Discussions about what it meant to lead well as a Christian could be abstracted by making them geographically remote. At the same time, however, the shared Christian identity and military experiences of these peripheral Christians overlapped sufficiently with the audiences of these texts to prove instructive. They fought the same enemies and battled the same temptations, and thus had something valuable to say. Marginal Christians provided yet another way for the Frankish church to debate and negotiate its way towards wiser and stronger pastoral leadership.Footnote 113 Their distance made them excellent if implicit critics of Frankish arrogance. Their shared Christianity made them worthy exemplars to follow. By their very marginality, they sustained the moral core of the Carolingian correctio.
