Today on the blog, the arrival of The Carolingian South, published by Manchester University Press, edited by myself and the inimitable Graeme Ward, and featuring a wonderful collection of contributions, including one from The Historian’s Sketchpad’s very own Fraser McNair. This is something I’ve been working on for a while, so I’m absolutely delighted that it’s now out in the world!
We tend to think of the Carolingian empire as a northern European phenomenon. This is of course partly due to the efforts of friend of the blog Henri Pirenne, who argued that the rise of the dynasty was predicated on the collapse of Mediterranean trade and prosperity. Drawing their power from lands unaffected by this disruption and from the growing commerce of the North Sea, the Carolingians were able to fill the power vacuum and establish a new geography of empire. Modern scholars tend to be cautious about such an interpretation. But when thinking about how the empire worked and what the Carolingian project meant, we generally focus our attention on the region between the Seine and the Rhine. Insofar as the lands we’ve called ‘the Carolingian South’ (defined as south of the Loire and the Alps) feature in this, it’s as conquered territory that Carolingian stuff happens to.
The Carolingian South is intended to offer a slightly different perspective. It argues that people in the diverse lands of the South engaged with the Carolingian project and made it their own, transforming it in the process. We pay particular attention to the world of the Goths, both in the Iberian Peninsula and on the other side of the Pyrenees, but Italy and southern France also feature strongly in the volume. Other chapters venture beyond the edges of Frankish power, to Dalmatia, Benevento, Córdoba and Jerusalem, to take a glimpse at the shadow cast by the Carolingians on the world outside. The contributors to this book did not march in lock-step and many of the chapters disagree with each other. Those points of disharmony are some of my favourite parts of the volume. The soil where tectonic plates meet is among the most fertile.
The reason this book exists is that in early 2022 Graeme and I were both at Tübingen as part of ‘Migration and Mobility in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages’ Centre for Advanced Studies. I was finishing writing The Emperor and the Elephant, where I argue that the Carolingians had to keep one eye firmly fixed on al-Andalus at all times. Graeme was rethinking the old concept of ‘Visigothic refugees’ at the courts of the Franks. That meant that both of us were interested in reassessing the importance of the southern end of the Carolingian world. With the benevolent encouragement of Professor Steffen Patzold, we decided to team up and, on the 11th and 12th October 2022, we held a conference entitled ‘The Carolingian South: Power, Culture and Movement’ in a splendid room up in the castle.
The event was not without incident. On the day I had to ambush Fraser outside the gate to said castle to beg him to fill a gap in the programme. Despite being given less than two hours’ notice, he heroically rose to the occasion, giving a paper that was as excellent as it was spontaneous. The conference as a whole was a great success, and Graeme and I were convinced that the shared themes that had emerged from those two days would make the basis for an excellent book. As is often the way, not everyone who participated was able to contribute owing to prior commitments. Graeme and I also had to recruit new contributors as we realised with hindsight some of the gaps in our coverage. We approached Manchester University Press because of their expertise in the early medieval world and Carolingian history in particular and they have been extremely good.
To talk briefly about my own contribution to the volume, entitled ‘“All the kings who reign in Francia are called Charles”: The Carolingians in the eyes of al-Andalus’, this was partially unfinished business from The Emperor and the Elephant. My monograph was focussed on the diplomatic relationship between the Umayyads and the Carolingians, but I had become increasingly convinced that there was more to say about how the rulers of Córdoba perceived and remembered the kings of the Franks. The Carolingian South offered me the perfect opportunity to do so, showing the Carolingians both as dread rivals but also as respected opponents, who were the only dynasty in the west that could be thought of as peers to the Umayyads. I think it works well with the rest of the volume, particularly the chapters by Shane Čavlović, Rosamond McKitterick and Giulia Zornetta, which view the Carolingians from the vantage points of Dalmatia, Rome and Benevento respectively. Although I didn’t intend it as such, reading back over it, I believe it also works as a short introduction to Carolingian-Umayyad relations, and might serve as such on undergrad reading lists.
I’m very excited to see The Carolingian South outin the world. I’m also extremely grateful to our contributors, who were uniformly wonderful, and to Graeme, for being unfailingly steady, insightful and on the ball. The book would have been impossible without him.
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