Pippin's usurpation of the kingship of the Franks in 751 has rarely seemed quite "the most momentous act of the entire Middle Ages," as the ecclesiastical historian Gerhard Ficker judged it in 1912. Often, in fact, it has not even been described as a usurpation, and it is perhaps only in the last few years, as historians have more keenly questioned sources that portray the Carolingians' rise as somehow natural (if not divinely ordained), that the event has really attracted the kind of attention that this book exemplifies.
The book assembles papers given at a conference in 2002. That its timing was slightly unfortunate becomes evident from Rudolf Schieffer's introductory paper. Taking Ficker's dictum as his cue, he first summarizes assessments of 751 from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1970s, before reviewing the work of the last twenty-five years. This latter has had two principal concerns. One--certainly dominant, though not quite "as good as exclusively" (8-9), as Schieffer himself in fact shows--is the issue of the rituals that Pippin underwent (whether in 751 or in 754) to be made king: is it justifiable to call any such rite an "anointing," and where do these events stand in the history of king-making rites? In this regard, the relationship with the book under review here of Josef Semmler's publication of the following year, Der Dynastiewechsel von 751 und die fränkische Königssalbung (Düsseldorf, 2003), is confusing on several levels. Quite apart from the likelihood of muddle when searching for one or other by their titles in library catalogues, it is nowhere really made explicit the extent to which contributors to this volume took account of Semmler's views, although Schieffer implies (11) that some of his work was available earlier than 2003. The issue is most relevant for the contributions of Arnold Angenendt and Michael Richter, and I will deal with the substance of the argument when reviewing those articles. But in any case, discussions of the way in which Pippin was made king are to some extent undermined by the second theme of recent historiography: that is, a new scepticism towards the sources themselves. The last few years have seen pointed questions directed both at the narrative sources on which accounts have traditionally relied, and at the relationships depicted in them (for instance, the insinuation of St Boniface into Pippin's consecration by the Annales regni Francorum, which gave the event the imprimatur of missionary approval).
The plain fact is that we lack truly contemporary narrative sources for the events of 751, free from the demonstrable influence of the ultimate success of Pippin and his son. Of course, both Einhard's Vita Karoli and the Annales regni Francorum (ARF) were written with the benefit of considerable hindsight, and we are still coming to appreciate the influence of their context on their accounts of events like the Dynastiewechsel. The ARF's report of an embassy from Francia to Pope Zacharias has often been thought to find corroboration in what has been widely regarded as the earliest account, the Continuations to the Chronicle of Fredegar. But Rosamond McKitterick has shown that there is no reason why this should be accepted. She makes a good case for seeing the Continuations as a whole as having been written at least a generation distant from 751 (that is, 768x786).[1] The case for a late date for the other narrative source, the so-called Clausula de unctione Pippini regis, is even stronger. Although Schieffer notes these points, and the partial support they receive from Semmler's recent book, neither he nor any of the other contributors to the volume seem to have had time to think through their implications. While Schieffer apart, McKitterick's work is referenced by a number of contributors (Schieffer, Collins [87], Airlie (111, n. 8), Goetz (322, n.7)), its message is only properly absorbed by Reimitz (see below), while Olaf Schneider argues against her late dating of the Continuations (see 246, n. 10 and 251, n. 31) because he thinks this would make its "numerous contradictions" with the Annales regni Francorum less explicable. But there may still have been some twenty years between the Continuations' composition and the annals', and given the conditions of the time--the number and geographical spread of different writers and scriptoria, and the difficulty of communication--this would surely give ample scope for contradictions to arise. He also defends the contemporaneity of the Clausula, though without satisfactorily explaining its anachronistic dating clause, which gives regnal years to Charles and Carloman before 768.
The work of McKitterick, Semmler and others raises questions over the extent to which we can ever recapture the events of 751. That Pippin was made king at that time seems clear--he was certainly king by 1 March 752 (DD Kar. 1, no. 1). But how he was made king increasingly looks irrecoverable. Discussions like Schieffer's of the meaning of consecratio in the Fredegar Continuation account carry much less relevance if that text was written later and under its own very different influences.
The papers in this volume therefore need to be seen as contributions to an on-going and lively discussion not only about the origins of Carolingian power, but about its influence over our sources, and ourselves.
How fraught this discussion can sometimes be is evident from the first two substantive papers. In the first, Ian Wood examines different "palace coups" under the Merovingians, in order to highlight what was unusual about Pippin's usurpation, especially in comparison with his family's earlier attempt, the so-called "Grimoald coup." The latter, Wood concludes, took place in a world in which "consensus politics" focused around a relatively loosely conceived Merovingian family; Pippin's act signalled a new era, in which legitimacy within the royal family was more tightly defined. Yet Wood is himself then one of the targets of the next paper, in which Theo Kölzer pointedly attempts to unpick recent, more positive, re-evaluations of the later Merovingians. For Kölzer, these kings were every bit as fainéant as earlier historians made them; but he argues that we should distinguish them from their period, which was, perhaps, rather brighter than in its traditional depiction. Coming from one who produced the recent magisterial edition of the Merovingians' diplomas, this judgement has to carry some weight, but I remain unconvinced by his attempts to explain away the signs of continued vitality in the office of king that we find in the placita of, most obviously, Childebert III.
Ulrich Nonn looks again at the much-discussed and contradictory reports of relations between Charles Martel's sons between 737 and 742, and especially at the partition of the kingdom reported by later sources to have been agreed between Carloman and Pippin in 742, after their father's death and their defeat and imprisonment of their stepbrother Grifo. While Schüssler had proposed an elaborate reconstruction of a division of the Frankish heartland between northern (Carloman's) and southern (Pippin's) portions, Nonn gives reasons not only to doubt received interpretations but even to question the fact of such a division at that point, in a case that would have been even stronger had it taken into account Paul Fouracre's detailed treatment of the evidence for Charles's final years. [2]
Roger Collins re-examines the narrative for the period of Pippin's mayoralty (741-51), hitherto based on the scant and, as he shows, problematic testimony of the Continuations of the Chronicle of Fredegar and the Annales regni Francorum. Convincing additions to their information come from his ingenious rehabilitation of the later Annales Mettenses Priores--recently generally dismissed for its overtly polemical tone, but for these years including material from a lost source. Despite this new witness, he can find nothing that covers the events of the crucial years of 749 and 750, in which the Dynastiewechsel must have been prepared. This is true too of the other sources to which we need to turn for ecclesiastical affairs, ignored with remarkable and surprising consistency by the annalists. Only two are really useful: the Boniface correspondence and the acts of the councils of the 740s. In both Pippin appears alongside his brother Carloman presiding over attempts to reform the structure of the Frankish church, by creating new metropolitan sees and encouraging more regular episcopal synods. But his role seems very passive, and the stalling of these initiatives after 747 may be due, as Collins suggests, to Pippin's declining interest in them after he had acquired control over Carloman's part of the kingdom. One letter (Tangl ed., Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, no. 77) does reveal, however, that Pippin had established direct and independent contact with the papacy by 746, but this only concerned the transmission of some unspecified capitula, and need not be seen as the precursor to communication of real ideological weight, especially if we treat the report of an "embassy" to the papacy c.750, to seek approval for the usurpation, with the caution which, as we have noted above, has recently been urged.
Jinty Nelson continues her studies of Carolingian royal women with an article on the role of Pippin's wife Bertrada, reviewing ten pieces of evidence for her life up to 754. She examines why Pippin married relatively late (he was about 26), and why he married Bertrada, regarding as a red herring the notion that she had some kind of kinship with the Merovingian royal line. Bertrada's crucial contribution to Pippin's usurpation was the bearing of a son, Charlemagne. This meant that after his brother Carloman retired to a monastery, Pippin could abandon his commitment to Carloman's son, Drogo, and make a bid for kingship on behalf of his own blood line. Nelson does not here treat (though she has elsewhere) Bertrada's other great contribution to Carolingian politics, when in 770 she arranged for Charlemagne's marriage to a Lombard princess, the repudiation of whom led directly to the Frankish conquest of the Lombard kingdom.
Stuart Airlie investigates what he calls "a system that worked to make the aristocracy into a Carolingian aristocracy in a Carolingian landscape" (115), at the centre of which was the internal dynamic of the Carolingian family itself--and specifically of the sons of Charles Martel--which possessed, according to our sources, a magnetic power of attraction on other aristocrats. Supporters of Grifo may have been opposing Pippin, but they were also playing the same game as him, one with Carolingian rules.
Dieter Geuenich argues that the encounter with the Alemans was crucial to the growth in power of successive generations of Carolingians. He might have extended the point by noting the centrality of the Alemans to the wars Pippin and Carloman had to fight on their father's death, wars which for the Alemans ended with the apparently catastrophic battle at Cannstatt in 746.
Walter Pohl notes that we possess no Lombard source about the conflict with the papacy. One hint of the Lombard stance, however, comes in the prologue of Aistulf's laws, in which the king claims that the Roman people had been assigned to him by God. Aistulf was therefore in direct competition with the other claimant to rulership of the Romans, the pope. It was this stance that led ultimately to the fall of the Lombard kingdom.
In a chronologically broader essay than most in this volume, Yitzhak Hen examines the Christianisation of early medieval western kingship. One consequence was the employment of Christian liturgy as an ideological medium. Just as much as the Carolingians, "the later Merovingians...used the patronage of liturgy as a political machinery of royal propaganda" (174). This very usefully sets what has often been termed Pippin's Kirchenpolitik in a wider context that makes it look far less exceptional or original than is often thought.
Arnold Angenendt's concern is the question of whether an act of anointing accompanied Pippin's elevation to the kingship, and if so, what form it took. In the book noted above, Josef Semmler argues that whatever ceremony took place in 751--as we have seen, the subject of a laconic report by the Continuations of Fredegar and an even less reliable one by the Annales regni Francorum (which implicates Boniface in the rite)--it did not amount to a new and, for the Franks, original ritual, a royal anointing, as is often claimed. Angenendt pointedly rejects this, and draws direct comparisons with baptismal rituals to elucidate the different acts of anointing/consecration that took place in 751 and (by the pope) in 754. Yet to convince fully his argument would have to tackle the doubts raised, and noted above, over the reliability of the Continuations' report. On the same theme, Michael Richter takes issue with Michael Enright's book of 1985, Iona, Tara and Soissons. The Origin of the Royal Anointing Ritual (Berlin and New York, 1985), stressing that references in Irish sources cannot be proven to refer to the custom of royal anointing, and that therefore any anointing that Pippin underwent had no insular precedent.
More forensic when it comes to key sources is Michael McCormick's piece, which looks at an event from the last years of Pippin's life: the legation that he sent to the caliph, and the Muslim embassy that accompanied its return. He suggests that our main source for this--once again a Continuator of the Chronicle of Fredegar--was writing with an eye on the still-living Bertrada, which would give a terminus ante quem for its composition of 783--not far different from the terminal date of 786 suggested by McKitterick. Detailed dissection of the Continuation's Latin allows McCormick to expose its "strange brew of insightful but flawed information" (240). He shows how it omits report of Pippin's embassies to Byzantium, perhaps because the marriage that they sought to arrange, between Pippin's daughter and Leo IV, were inimical to the interests of the Continuator's patron. He also demonstrates how to overcome the Continuator's "relaxed" syntax in order to interpret accurately his report of the caliph's embassy. The suggestion that Pippin was engaging in negotiations with Baghdad in order to prevent alliance between his Aquitainian enemy and the caliph's Umayyad opponents in Spain seems eminently plausible. In all, McCormick skilfully identifies Pippin's last years as ones in which he took Frankish kingship onto a new diplomatic level, conversing on more or less equal terms with the Byzantine emperors and Muslim caliph.
As already mentioned, Olaf Schneider's survey of the eighth-century source material for Pippin's elevation argues for the reliability of the Clausula de unctione Pippini. But it suffers from not having had the chance to take on board work on this text, and on the Continuations of Fredegar, that must have been going on simultaneously with his own.
The challenge of recontextualizing primary sources is taken up by Helmut Reimitz. His article examines manuscripts central to the transmission of the Annales regni Francorum, a text of which no complete copy survives that is not linked together with other texts. He compares three historical compendia and successfully shows "how very similar texts on the history of the Franks could, at different times and in different contexts, be used as resources to define and to legitimate political and social roles in the Frankish regna of the Carolingian age" (312).
Finally, Hans-Werner Goetz surveys how the details of 751 appeared in later sources, up to Gottfried of Viterbo and including royal charters. He finds that although memory of the events was seldom rekindled in the Ottonian and early Salian periods, there is an increase in reports from the middle of the eleventh century, and it is often mentioned in later medieval texts.
The most successful of these papers are those which might be said to skirt around the main issue--looking at Pippin's earlier years and precursors, and his external relations, or the broader social and political context. A number of the studies of the Dynastiewechsel itself do, however, add to the growing body of work on the problems of the sources. They point in particular to the need for a complete re-assessment of the influential Continuations of the Chronicle of Fredegar, and hold out the prospect of a reshaping of the narrative of these crucial years.
1. R. McKitterick, "The illusion of royal power in the Carolingian annals," English Historical Review 115 (2000), 1-20, revised, and reprinted in her History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge, 2004), 133-155.
2. P. Fouracre, The Age of Charles Martel (London: Longman, 2000), 155-167.