Aristocratic networks. Elites and social dynamics in Italy in the age of Lothar I
This volume collects the proceedings of a conference held at the Department of Humanities of the University of Trento from 13 to 15 October 2022 as
part of the initiatives of the PRIN 2017 project Ruling in hard times. Patterns
of power and practices of government in the making of Carolingian Italy.
This was a project structured in four units that operated at the Universities of
Trento, Padua, Venice Ca’ Foscari and the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa.
Each of them developed lines of research on some specific aspects, that were
the basis of five conferences, the proceedings of which are published in the
series in which this volume is also included: the “memory” of the Gothic kingdom in Carolingian Italy; the role of the bishops and the texts related to them
in the networks of which they were part; the political and social dynamics
that characterised the border areas; the elites of the kingdom and their networks between centre and periphery; Lothar I and his actions as a ruler .
The study of the elites of Carolingian Italy and their networks has been
the main focus of the activities of the Trento unit, but given its central importance, it has also involved many members of the other units. We wanted to
involve them in the conference, the proceedings of which we are now publishing, together with those who, although not part of our research project, have
been in close dialogue with it since its inception. Among the latter, we can
count François Bougard, to whom we entrusted a difficult task, which he carried out in the keynote speech he gave at the opening of the 2022 Conference
in Trento, and which has now been revised in the opening essay of this volume. This task is summarised in a question that is simple in its formulation,
but complex in its answer: what did it mean to be aristocratic in Carolingian
Italy at the time of Lothar I?
With this question, which is in fact the basis of all the essays collected in
this volume, we wanted first of all to put a time limit on the research presented at the conference, choosing a historical phase of Carolingian rule in Italy
that has not been studied in depth, even in recent research, which has concentrated above all on the age of Charlemagne or on the second half of the ninth
century. One of the reasons for this historiographical “misfortune” of Lothar
I’s reign is certainly its complexity and political and institutional ambiguity,
which stem from the very difficulty of defining Lothar’s role in Italy. In fact, he
was associated with the imperial title by his father Louis the Pious, but he is
never defined in the sources as rex Italiae or rex Langobardorum, unlike his
predecessors and successors. “Sovereign” at the head of a regnum without rex and co-emperor, always
in a situation of subordination or conflict with his father, Lothar was never
permanently present in Italy, where he made his debut in 822 under the tutelage of Wala, Charlemagne’s influential cousin. Wala had previously been at
the side of King Bernard, whose deposition and death after the “revolt” of 817
had allowed Lothar to assume the political leadership of the former regnum
Langobardorum, after having been king of Bavaria (rex Baioariae) for a few
years. The political ambiguity of Lothar I’s role in Italy was also due to his intermittent presence, which – before his father’s death – was marked by five
phases, all of them of short duration, except for the last, which ended in 840
with the death of Louis the Pious and the re-emergence of the conflict with
his brothers (822-823; 824-825; 829-830; 831-833; 834-840). It is precisely
the intermittent nature of his presence which has, in the past, led to the idea
that he was a kind of “foreign body” in the political dynamics of the kingdom,
whose ruling class would have been made up of “transalpine immigrants”,
with minimal involvement of the local elites. Lothar’s long absences from Italy and the lack of effective central control in Italy were also seen as the cause
of a deterioration in the social situation on the peninsula. In this context, the
great secular and ecclesiastical aristocracies would have taken advantage of
the lack of central power to strengthen their position at the local level, enriching themselves at the expense of the royal fisc and weakening the “middle
class” of free men7
.
But was it really so? Based on an analysis of the lexicon of sources and
some case studies, the essays collected here have attempted to reconstruct
the forms of political and social prominence and the networks that linked – or
opposed – those who, at different levels, exercised forms of power and control
over people and territories. These networks could be based on kinship, on
different kinds of loyalty, including vassalage, on the exchange of goods and
property, on shared lifestyles, and on royal Königsnähe. Depending on their
nature, these networks could extend from the centre of the kingdom – Pavia
or the main royal courts (curtes) – to the periphery, or they could be local.
These, too, could be of various types, depending on the “pivot” around which
they revolved: bishops, abbots or abbesses, counts, major or minor public officials, simple landowners.