PAUL FREEDMAN: We're
going to talk today, now, about Carolingian decline. It's not just that
we're compressing lectures or in a hurry. The empire of Charlemagne
is an empire that does not last that long. So when we say that it has
certain flaws, like size, well, we already said that the
Roman Empire had this flaw. We've already said
that the Abbasid Caliphate has this flaw. But those empires are able to
manage with this weakness for quite some time. Part of the problem with
the Carolingian Empire is its size. Part of it, however, as you
will have read in the Fichtenau reading is its lack of
infrastructure and economic development. Infrastructure in a sense of
not just towns, roads, communications, but social
infrastructure, the lack of an idea of obeying the state or
obeying the ruler, and a tendency, therefore, to mix
private and public interest, and to the benefit
of the powerful. We'll talk more about that. There are also external
problems. The beginnings of the Viking invasion, which we
will be talking about after the break, occur before
Charlemagne's death in 814. Nevertheless, there's
no sense hastening the signs of decline. We always can see signs of
decline coming after. But Charlemagne's rule had been
so successful, so full of accomplishments, he was a ruler
such prestige, that even the difficult last ten years or
so of his reign can't quite eclipse that. In 801, there arrived an
elephant at the court of Charlemagne, a gift from the
caliph of Baghdad, Harun al-Rashid, the caliph who
figures in the Arabian Nights entertainments. This is a link between two very
powerful and very distant empires, the two of the three
that we've described as, in some sense, heirs to the Roman
classical empire and civilization. There was a tentative thought
of, perhaps, an alliance between Baghdad and Aachen,
the capital of Charlemagne's empire. At various times, there had
been negotiations between Constantinople and Aachen
discussing the possibility of an imperial marriage. The Carolingian ruler was
contemptuous of Byzantium because it was ruled by a woman,
the Empress Irene, a rather exceptional figure. But neither the alliance with
Byzantium, at least not at this point, and certainly not
the more far-fetched alliance with Baghdad came to anything. The elephant was certainly the
first one seen in Europe probably since Hannibal and
his invasion of Italy. And how he got there, what the
logistics of his transport were, how he got to Baghdad in
the first place-- it's not as if they have elephants
in the natural habitat of Iraq either. Nevertheless, here's this
elephant who lives for about ten years. One of the signs of things
starting to unravel in the Carolingian Empire, so some
historians say, is the death of Charlemagne's elephant, which
Einhard talks about, actually, in his biography; that
is, it is an event that's worth mentioning. But pets, they don't
last forever. As someone who lost his cat
within recent memory, you've just got to get over it. On the other hand, I can
get another cat. And Charlemagne, presumably-- well, not presumably. We know he didn't get
another elephant. The high watermark of
his reign seems to be the year 802. This is arbitrary, but this is
shown by the energy of his quarrel with the Byzantine
empress over his arrogating to himself the title of emperor. This is the first person in
the West claiming to be emperor, and the Byzantine
Empire doesn't like it. By 802, he is done with his two
campaigns; one in Spain, and the other in Saxony and
the regions of the Danube. He had pacified the
Saxons after a nearly twenty-year effort. And while he hadn't achieved his
ambitions in Spain, he had seized territory in
the northern part of what's now Catalonia. He attempted to address the
problem that I've just identified, namely the tendency
of powerful people to take over and rule localities
not as government servants, but as noble rulers. He, in order to combat that,
tried to get every free man in his realm to swear an oath to
him personally, that is to make sure that they understood
that their prime loyalty had to be to the emperor and not
to the count, duke, local ruler, bishop, whoever he was. And the instructions that he
gave to the men sent out to try and to administer this oath
show you some of his idea of rulership. We've talked about this already,
but since it's a fairly complex idea, it's
worth emphasizing. In the instructions, it says,
"Let each man keep himself in the sacred service of God,
following the divine commandment and observing
whatever promise he may have made fully, to the best of his
understanding and powers. For the lord emperor cannot
exercise his vigilance or powers of correction over every
man." So the notion that the emperor is supposed to
be responsible for people behaving themselves, is
responsible for not just what we would call political order,
or peace, but for the salvation of the people, for
the spiritual as well as political health of the realm,
is typically Carolingian, and, in a way, typically medieval. There's a sense of imperial
responsibility before God for the behavior of the emperor's
subjects. But already, a few years
later in 806, this idea has been weakened. In eighteen 806-- if you take a look at the first
map that I've given out, we have a partition in 806, an
agreement at a place called Thionville. I guess this is going to have
to be spelled out, since we don't have chalk. T-H-I-O-N-V-I-L-L-E. And it's
written on the first-- well, no it just says, proposed
partition. In 806, he came up with the
idea of dividing his realm among his three children. His son Charles would get the
north, his son Pepin would get Lombardy and Bavaria,
and his son Louis would have Aquitaine. In this document, there's no
mention of the imperial title, leading one to surmise that
maybe he thought this title was just his personal
accomplishment. Maybe he didn't really envisage
the reestablishment of the Roman Empire in any
kind of permanent way. Here, we just have a kind
of splitting up of land. Louis gets the southwest;
Charles gets the lion's share, the heartlands of the
Carolingian family, the parts of Germany that the Carolingians
controlled and northern France; and Pepin
gets Italy and the Alps. So here you have a contrast
between 802, this grandiose imperial idea of unity, 806,
just like the Merovingians, partitioning out the lands for
the successors of Charlemagne. Aachen is a long way from
being another Byzantium Constantinople or
another Baghdad. And in these capitularies, the
documents that are issued by the court of instructions to the
administrators, we do see, as Fichtenau emphasizes, a
sense of unease and of problems. Again and again,
the capitularies lament corruption, maladministration. They start to mention the
Vikings as more than just a minor, mosquito-bite-level
distraction. But most of all, they emphasize usurpation of royal authority. Usurpation meaning, again, that
the people, such as the counts or dukes or the nobles
who are supposed to be servants of the crown, supposed
to be his chief servants, are taking over for
themselves things like taxes, revenues, the right
of judgment, the right to punish people. And people are tending to look
at them as their rulers. The count of Flanders, the count
of Barcelona, the duke of Aquitaine, these are people
who are starting to think of themselves as potentially, at
least, rulers who might transmit their office
to their children. And it then is not an office,
it's a possession, if you have a right of inheritance. In other words, I could transmit
to my children my ten-year-old car, my silver
butter dish, all of my treasured possessions, but I
cannot transmit to them the professorship that I have. I
can't just say, well, my eldest son is going to be a
professor of medieval history at Yale, whether or not he has
any interest in doing that, because I don't own
the position. It's not my property. It is my office. We're so familiar with this that
we don't even think about what it would be like. Well, we actually do, because
there are some things that people do tend to start to own
that, originally, were not supposed to be that way. But in the medieval world, it
is a problem to dislodge people from property, because
most property is in land. All Yale has to do is stop
paying me, and I'm no longer benefiting from this office. On the other hand, if I had
a castle across campus and stored some boiling pitch and
some followers, naturally, some trusty drinking mates, and
had this a little moat and bailey establishment right
outside of Harkness, I could terrorize Yale and
extort from it. That picture is not
so far-fetched. Where the picture is really
not far-fetched is if you imagine Yale in ruins. People pasturing sheep on Cross
Campus and wondering "God, what were those
buildings, anyway? They're really huge. And all those funny little
blackboards, whatever they were for." And then using WLH
to build fortifications. Why build a new castle on the
lawn when you've got building materials that somebody
else left for you? So WLH 117, 116, 115 are
one person's fortress. And that auditorium at the other
end is somebody else's. And here I'm getting a little
bit ahead of myself, but this is what's going to happen once
the Carolingian Empire dissolves, essentially. When I say to people usurp or
arrogate or make hereditary their possessions,
I'm talking about something that sounds abstract. But if you think of it in terms
of what it means to defy people, basically,
you're talking about building castles. And this has to do with
the nature of warfare. This is all a subject for the
course that succeeds this one, but it has to do with the nature
of warfare, in the sense that, once you have that
castle, it's very hard to be dislodged from it. The advantage is with
the defense. Catapults, trebuchets, all these
interesting weapons, actually, both require an insane
amount of mobilization and organization and are not as
effective as artillery some centuries later is
going to be. So the problems of Charlemagne's
empire-- despite the invasions that will
be our subject for Monday after Thanksgiving-- the problems of Charlemagne's
empire are essentially internal, as was the case of the
Roman Empire, only moreso. These internal problems, what
I've called the lack of infrastructure, which means
political and economic infrastructure, make it very
difficult, effectively, to resist the Vikings. And there are other invaders
whom we'll have to mention as well, later on, the Hungarians
and invaders and raiders from North Africa. The empire was too large,
given the nature of communications and
the mechanisms available to impose order. The same thing that made it an
empire made it have some disadvantages: diversity of
population, ethnic loyalties. So you have revolts of
Aquitainians who are not Franks; of Bretons, people of
Britanny, who are not Franks; Bavarians; Visigoths. All of these people are not
necessarily overjoyed with Frankish rule, not necessarily
immune from the possibility of seizing on the weakness of
the Franks to rebel. These problems become more
manifest in the reign of Charlemagne's son, Louis
the Pious, who rules from 814 to 840. My hesitation in using the
word rules is that he is deposed once and forced to
undergo public penance twice. One of the problems of the
empire was obviated, however. When Charlemagne died in 814,
the succession was just to Louis because his brothers
had died. So the 806 deal, or
806 plan, was not implemented and became moot. Charlemagne was succeeded by one
sole ruler over the entire empire, Louis the Pious,
because Pepin and Charles had died. Louis is often seen as inept
but well-meaning. His sobriquet-- and a lot of the Carolingian
rulers now have less-flattering than Pious
Charles the Bald, well, that seems a little unfair. Charles the Simple, Charles the
Fat, Louis the Stammerer, Louis the Child. You get the idea. Not an imposing group
of rulers. But pious, shouldn't pious
be a complement? And indeed, it could be. And, as it happens, he's not
known as Louis the Pious in every language. So in German, he's referred to
as Louis the Pious, but in French, he's Louis the Debonair,
the Imposing. He is an imposing figure,
actually. He's not as weak as what I'm
going to say in the rest of the discussion about him is
going to make him look. He was a very effective
general. He did a lot of wars
in southern France. He was the effective
ruler of Aquitaine. He conquered Barcelona
for Charlemagne. He suffered from three
problems, however. One not at all of his own
making, the second certainly exacerbated by his vacillation,
and the third is just who he was. The first problem is
the invasions. The Viking invasions, in
particular, begin during his reign, first part of
the ninth century. So it's an external problem. On the other hand, the lack of
an effective response does have to do with flaws in the
nature of Carolingian rule, flaws in the nature of Louis'
rule, in particular. The second problem
is his sons. His sons fought against
each other and against their father. This is not something
that's new to us. We've seen this with
the Merovingians. But in order to maintain control
of sons who expect some kind of rulership and who
are jockeying for power with their siblings, Louis made it
worse, in part, because he had sons by two marriages and tried
to carve out another realm for his youngest son,
Charles the Bald, Charles the future the Bald. I don't know that he was called
Charles the Bald when he was fourteen. I actually don't know when
that title starts to come into effect. Not title, nickname. As we'll see, these civil wars
have greater significance than mere civil wars, because they're
at the origins of the breaking up of the empire into
entities that we can just about start to call France
and Germany. So we're at the kind of
crucible, or moment of creation, of the European order
that will exist for the next more than 1,000 years. Louis had very sophisticated
ideas about imperial rule. Perhaps even more sophisticated
than those of his father, because Louis was
quite a bit more educated than Charlemagne, quite literate,
one might almost say an intellectual as well as
an effective general. But he was less pragmatic, less
realistic, less flexible than his father. Even more than Charlemagne,
Louis believed that the emperor must answer before God
for the conduct of his population. Even more than Charlemagne, he
believed that he ruled over a sanctified state. In other words, he was not just
a political ruler, he was, in some sense, a religious
leader that the religious and the political were
not to be distinguished. If the state is a religious
entity, does it mean that the state rules over the Church? Or if it's a religious entity,
perhaps it means that the Church rules over the state? It can go either way. When Charlemagne was crowned
by the pope, he certainly indicated a conception
of rulership sanctified by the Church. He was not at all worried
about the pope dictating to him. He had rescued the pope
from the Roman mob. The pope was utterly
dependent on him. But that is not necessarily
the way things would be. And Louis had less to worry
about from the popes than from his own bishops. Taking his rulership as a sacred
trust seriously meant that, in 822, he appeared at
a place called Attigny. A-T-T-I-G-N-Y, Attigny. In the Church of Attigny,
covered with ashes and dressed in sack cloth, which the Bible
describes, and which, I guess, burlap would be the best modern
equivalent, so dressed in rags, literally, covered with
ashes to ask forgiveness for the way in which the
rebellion of his nephew, Bernard, had been suppressed. Not only were his son's
restless, but his nephew had rebelled, been captured,
been blinded, and died. The blinding-- maybe they knew how to do
it better in Byzantium-- was supposed to be a more humane
alternative, rendering him unfit to rule but
sparing his life. But, in the end, he died. Louis was full of remorse
for this and did a public act of penance. And we know from the experience
of all forms of leadership, including modern,
that there are ways of saying you're sorry and ways of not
saying you're sorry. The problem with a political
officer or ruler saying they are sorry is that it may
make them look weak. It may make them lose their
aura of leadership. The problem with them not saying
they're sorry, in the modern world, of course,
is also very great. And it's very tricky to
negotiate a line that preserves command but also
gives, at least, the impression of candor. Louis does not have
Charlemagne's instinctive charisma of leadership. The penance at Attigny resulted
in his loss of prestige and a great increase
in the power of the Church. So there had always been an
implicit danger of this once Frankish and Christian ideas
of rulership were merged. Charlemagne, as I've said,
had no problem with this, but Louis did. Already in 829, Pope Gregory
IV would claim, "is not the authority over souls, which
belongs to the pope, above the imperial rule, which is of this
world?" The implication here is that because the
spiritual is superior to the material, in moral terms. And
why is the spiritual superior to the material? This is a sort of Plato's
Republic kind of question. I'm just saying this-- Yes? STUDENT: It's morality over
the pressures of lust or something like that. PROFESSOR: And not
merely morality over the pleasures of lust. What's the
problem with the pleasures of lust, from the killjoy, Plato's Republic point of view? STUDENT: They end. PROFESSOR:
They end. Right. They end. They are mortal. They die. And so is all matter,
by definition. All matter fades. So which is superior, the
spiritual or the material? The spiritual doesn't die. The spiritual is immortal. That's what makes
it spiritual. That's what the Forms, or
reality, or the higher, the invisible, invisible-but-real. To put ourselves in the mindset
of 829, of course we have to admit that. You may not feel that. I'm not urging this upon
you as a world view. You may think that there is no
such thing as the spiritual. Or you may think that
the spiritual is as mortal as the material. But in 829, people would
agree, "Yeah, OK, the spiritual is superior to the
material, because it's immortal and the material
withers and dies." But does that mean that the spiritual has
got to rule the material? That's the question for the
ages, at least for the medieval ages. So Louis the Pious
and his sons. In 817, Louis issues an order,
map number B, to divvy up the realm in the event of his death,
an order called the ordinatio imperii, the ordering
of the empire. This, unlike Charlemagne's
division, really expresses an idea of imperial rule. Louis associates with himself
his eldest son, Lothar. And look at how big their
territory is. First of all, it's huge. It encompasses the Carolingian
ancestral lands. And basically, the other sons,
Louis the German, Bernard, and Pepin, are given a bunch
of adjunct lands. And in fact--I'm sorry. Bernard is not his son. It's his nephew. And this is what Bernard rebels
against-- the rebellion that will cause his blinding
and death-- is this, what he regarded as a
few crumbs from the table, rather than a full share. The real problem begins,
however, even after Attigny in 825 when Louis' second wife
gave birth to a son named Charles, thus complicating
the succession. His second wife, Judith, urged
him to fit Charles into the succession, and this enraged
the older sons from his first marriage. In a 829, a council
met at Paris. And while Charles was given a
share, the bishops of the realm also claimed a right
to judge the king by his performance. In 831, a rebellion, a second or
third rebellion, broke out. The sons of Louis the Pious,
although fighting against each other, allied. The Church regarded Louis,
now, as hopelessly ineffectual, incapable of
bringing order to the realm. And Louis was captured by his
sons, forced to abdicate both by the Church and by Lothar
and Louis, his older sons. Lothar was so arrogant, however,
that by 834 Louis had been restored. I won't go into the complexities
of this. Suffice it to say that the
hapless, or at least unlucky, Louis the Pious, when he died
in 840, provoked another war of succession among his sons. Keep in mind that, meanwhile,
the administration of the empire is dissolving, and the
Viking invasions are occupying ever more attention, ineffectual
attention, and plundering even more. After a series of battles and
campaigns, in 843, a third partition took place. But this one is really
important. This is the Treaty of Verdun,
V-E-R-D-U-N. And that's the third one on your map that
I have bold or, at least, felt-tipped lines showing
the division. And then, on page two of the
handout, on the upper part, is the division of Verdun. The Treaty of Verdun divided
the empire among the three sons of Louis the Pious,
three surviving sons. The western part went
to Charles the Bald. And you see that in
white, Neustria, Aquitaine, Spanish March. It is what can start to
be called France. The eastern part, which
is the darkest-- Saxony, eastern Austrasia,
Alemania, Bavaria-- went to Louis son, Louis,
also named Louis. Louis the German, as he's
known to historians. And he's known as Louis the
German in part because his sphere of influence was the
East, which we can start to call Germany. The eldest son, Lothar, got
the middle part, which stretches from what's now
the northern part of the Netherlands, Frisia, all the way
down to Rome, and even a little south of Rome, Spoleto. This is the most prestigious
and, in some ways, richest part of the Empire. It has Aachen, the imperial
capital, and it has Rome, the old imperial capital. It has the lands of the
Carolingians, most of them, in the region of Aachen, in the
region of the Low Countries, modern Belgium. What's the problem
with this realm? Or what's the obvious military,
political problems? Spence? STUDENT: The shape would be
exceedingly hard to defend. PROFESSOR: It
would be very hard to defend. It would be easy to cut
off and invade. And if we say that the western
part is France and we say that the eastern part is Germany,
using these terms anachronistically but not
inaccurately, what is the middle part? The middle part is all that part
of Europe that has been fought over. All of World War I
[correction: that] takes place on the
Western Front. Most of it takes place
in the northern part of realm of Lothar. The places where, like Belgium,
which this day, now, is bitterly divided between
French-speaking and Flemish-speaking. In other words, people who speak
a Germanic language, descended from some ancestral
Germanic language, and those who speak French, descended
from Latin. That line runs right
through Belgium. And the same ambiguity pursues
this whole realm of Lothar's down into Switzerland, a modern
polity-- well, modern, late medieval and modern-- where they speak four official
languages and are so unsure about which is the official one
that their stamps give the name of the country in Latin
and their airline gives its name in English. Their stamps call themselves
Helvetia. There has not been an entity
called that, really, in real life terms, since the
Roman Empire. But that's better than having
all four language on there. It's more convenient. So there's a linguistic
ambiguity, there's a cultural ambiguity, and there's a
political ambiguity. Because, of course, the
realm of Lothar didn't hold up very long. Its strategic flaw was very
quickly manifested. It was divided, but
never permanently. Part of this realm would be
called what in French is Lorraine but in German
is called Lothringen. Lothringen named after Lothar,
L-O-T-H-R-I-N-G-E-N. Alsace and Lorraine, these two
provinces, are now France. In 1870, they were
taken by Germany. After World War I, they were
taken back by France. Under Hitler, they became
annexed to Germany. After World War II, they're
back with France. A substantial proportion of the
population of Alsace still speaks German. And until about the seventy,
eighty years ago, a fairly significant proportion of
Lorraine did as well. The same kind of ambiguity as to
what are these territories. And in our world, they either
are neither France nor Germany-- hence, Belgium,
Netherlands, Switzerland-- or they've traded hands. It is not exactly accurate to
say that the political, military history of Europe
since 843 is simply the unwinding of the consequences
of the Treaty of Verdun. But it's not completely
inaccurate to say that either. That doesn't mean that events
like the Reformation or the second world war don't have
significance well beyond that. But just in terms of border
shifting and maps of Europe, the legacy of Verdun
is tremendous. If the legacy of Charlemagne
is, in some sense, the creation of a cultural realm
that can be referred to as Europe, the legacy of the sons
of Louis the Pious is the ambiguous division
of that realm. What this really means, then, in
ninth century terms-- since nobody said, wow, we're signing
the Treaty of Verdun. This is going to have
consequences for centuries-- the immediate consequences were
the decreasing relevance, the decreasing importance,
of the imperial title. When Lothar died and his eldest
son died soon after, Lothar's realm was divided
between Louis and Charles. Then, Italy was left to
a son of Lothar's called Louis the Second. He took on the imperial title. But under Charles the Bald, the
third and much youngest son of Louis the Pious,
for a little while the Empire was reunited. For a little while meaning,
basically, two years. When Charles died in 877,
the Empire would not be reestablished as unified
for almost a century. And when it was, it would really
consist of, basically, an enlarged Germany and a
portion of Italy, not France. And Charles, although he bore,
between 875 and 877, the grand title of emperor and was
unchallenged within his own family, his rulership was
already severely undermined by the intrigues of his nobles
and the Vikings. By the time of his death, many
of the counties that had originally been administrative
divisions of the Empire has become almost independent. So for example, Barcelona,
conquered by Louis the Pious, was now ruled after 868 by
a count who paid nominal allegiance to the ruler of the
western kingdom, but who was the founder of a dynasty. Up to 868, therefore, you have
counts of Barcelona who are appointed by the ruler. After 868, the ruler has very
little to do with it. It is a local ruler. And the count is no longer an
office holder but a ruler in his own right. Similar with Aquitaine. Similar with Bavaria. Similar with Poitou,
Toulouse, Flanders. The reason that the counts are
able to do this is the weakness of the central power,
not only because of the personality of the ruler, but
because of the inadequate nature of the administration. When Charles died, he was
succeeded by several rulers in the West: Louis the Stammerer,
Louis the Third, who had the good fortune of just being Louis
the Third; and Carloman In Germany, the ruler
was Charles the Fat. And he was elected is emperor
for, again, four years, but was pretty utterly
ineffectual. And not because he was
fat, I hasten to add. The Middle Ages did not share
our prejudices in this regard. So Louis the Fat, in the twelfth
century, was a very effective king. Fat or not, Charles, this
particular Charles was not an effective ruler. All of these rulers, as
I said, suffered the depredations of the Vikings. But once again, I want to
emphasize that the problems of this empire, or the problems
of these separate kingdoms, or, indeed, the problems of some
of the counties ruled by independent counts but affected
by the Vikings and other invaders, were internal. The Vikings were opportunistic
raiders, not the cause of the dissolution of authority. The dissolution of authority
didn't mean that the Carolingians come to an end. Because by this time, in the
late ninth century, they have some of the prestige that
the Merovingians had in their decline. In their veins flowed the
blood of Charlemagne. They were a sacred dynasty. They had a certain
kind of prestige. So for example, they would be
kings of France, with some minor interruption, until 987. In Germany, the family ends in
911, and a new series of dynasties comes into effect. In 987, a new dynasty comes into
rule of France called the Capetian dynasty,
C-A-P-E-T-I-A-N, which technically runs out in 1314,
fourteen but which is related to the French kings since. And indeed, when Louis the XVI
was guillotined by the French Revolution, he was referred to
in the court documents as "Louis Capet." In other words,
they gave him a kind of artificial last name and regard
him as descended from this ruler Hugh Capet,
C-A-P-E-T. Thus, a member of the Capetian, C-A-P-E-T-I-A-N,
dynasty. But the reality of France, and
even of Germany, in the 10th century would be as a series
of nearly independent principalities feuding,
only nominally controlled by the kings. The ruler, Hugh Capet, who
succeeded in 987, basically, he seems to have controlled
the road between Paris and Orleans. But in places that are now
public parks in Paris, like Vincennes, there were castles
not loyal to the king at all. So my little fantasy of a
fortified Cross Campus is not so far-fetched, at least not
so far-fetched in terms of what really happened in places
like Paris, and indeed in, for example, the city of Arles in
southern France, there's a wonderfully preserved Roman
stadium, Roman sports arena that was fortified. That is, one family had the
bleachers and fought against the people who had the boxes
behind home plate. Not a classical term, but behind
what might have been considered home plate,
anachronistically. And indeed, there are towers
built on top of this structure that were then demolished,
because they were medieval and not classical. But they made use of
these materials. So we have a society in which
the power of the ruler has literally dissolved. Not dissolved into water, but
certainly crumble into much smaller components. Those components being,
essentially, a castle, or a few castles, the territory
around it, the right to exploit the peasants
around it. Maybe you would have an
effective regional ruler, like the count of Barcelona or the
Count of Flanders, who would tie to himself these castellans,
the people who own or run the castle. But it is a society that
has become fragmented. It's not a barbarian society. These are not nomads. They're violent, but then again,
lots of societies run on violence. It's a controlled kind
of violence. They want to squeeze the
peasants, even occasionally, perhaps, plunder them. They don't want to have them go
away or exterminate them, because they don't have
any wealth otherwise. It is an exploitative society. But that, again, is not entirely
new or entirely unknown in other historical
periods and places. What it does bring up, however,
and which I'll try to address in our last class once
we've talked about the Vikings, is what's been
accomplished. Here we are, from 300 AD to the
year 1000, and we're still talking about invasions. And we're still talking about
polities falling apart because they're too large. We're still talking about the
lack of administrative control over powerful individuals. So I promise you that something
was accomplished. And I will try to describe
that next time. But you're forgiven for thinking
that that, perhaps, we have wandered around
and not come very far. Have a very good Thanksgiving,
and I'll see you soon.
