The Historians' Sketchpad

In the year 756 ʿAbd al-Rahman ibn Muʿawiya entered the city of Córdoba and declared himself to be the new emir. It would take him thirty years of fighting to make it reality, but historians tend to mark this moment as the beginning of Umayyad rule in al-Andalus. This was in opposition to the ʿAbbasids who had overthrown the dynasty in the central Caliphate in 750. The caliphs of Baghdad may not have controlled Muslim Spain, but by 768 at the latest they had a reasonable grip on the province of Ifriqiya (roughly Tunisia, Libya and eastern Algeria).

In hindsight this all looks inevitable, but had you asked an intelligent observer in about 750 which family was most likely to dominate the Islamic west, the answer would probably have been neither the Umayyads nor the ʿAbbasids, but an alternative line, known to modern historians as the Fihrids. In Ifriqiya, ʿAbd al-Rahman ibn Habib (henceforth Ibn Habib) overthrew the centrally appointed governor in 744. Across the sea his close relative*, Yusuf al-Fihri took power in al-Andalus in 747. The stage looked set for the Fihrids to rule the Maghreb. Instead by 757 their power had been shattered.

This post is primarily intended as a post-mortem, examining what went wrong for the Fihrids and why. But I also think it gives us an opportunity to slightly rethink our periodisation of early Islamic history, as well as the patterns of power that would prevail in the Maghreb. The eighth century is still a time when most modern histories of the Islamic world are still focussed on the story of the Caliphate as a whole. A struggle between the Umayyads and the ʿAbbasids for the Maghreb works neatly as a natural coda to the revolution of 750. As local warlords using their support among elites to seize office and establish their own dynasty, the Fihrids don’t fit this. They feel historiographically premature. Their regimes have the flavour of a later period, when the textbooks start dividing their chapters geographically as well as chronologically. But this is precisely what makes them so interesting.

The Fihrids were members of the Quraysh, the Arab tribe that had dominated Mecca. Other members of the Quraysh included the Prophet Muhammad and the Umayyad family. Several branches of the Fihrid family had travelled west as part of the Arab conquest of the Maghreb. The most celebrated of these was ʿUqba ibn Nafiʿ, who founded Kairouan, the first capital of Ifriqiya, and who led the first Muslim army to reach the Atlantic in 683. His death in a Berber ambush on his way back only burnished his legend. Ibn Habib was ʿUqba’s great-grandson. Their prominent role in the conquest meant that the Fihrids acquired large estates, making them extremely wealthy. This combined with the prestige of their ancestry allowed the Fihrids to emerge as the natural spokesmen for Arab settlers in the Maghreb.

This was reinforced by the habit the Arabs of the west seem to have had of turning to the Fihrids in moments of crisis. Yusuf was appointed governor of Narbonne immediately after the Battle of Tours, where he seems to have done a good job stabilising the northern frontier. South of the Pyrenees, Charles Martel’s victory prompted the Arabs there to make a Fihrid from another branch, Ibn Qatan, governor. Although he was fired after two years for corruption, when the Berber revolt spread to al-Andalus in 741, Ibn Qatan was put back in charge.

The generations after ʿUqba were generally loyal to the Umayyad caliphate. Many of them took part in the conquest of Spain in 711 and, as in the case of Ibn Qatan, a number of governors of al-Andalus were members of the family. Ibn Habib’s father, the unsurprisingly named Habib, commanded the armies of Ifriqiya in Souss in 739 and in Sicily in 740. The turning point, as with so many things, was the Berber Revolt in 740. This not only shook Umayyad power in the west, it also undermined Damascus in the eyes of the Fihrids. Both Ibn Habib’s father and uncle died in defeats at the hands of the Berbers. Worst still, the elite Syrian army sent to crush the Berbers were perceived to be looking down on the longer established Arab settlers. Ibn Habib watched the Syrian second-in-command treat his father with disrespect in person.

The uprising of 740 was also an existential challenge to the position of Fihrids and their constituents, which was built on the assumption that as Arabs of prestigious lineage they were superior to Berbers, even if they were Muslim. There may have been an element of anxiety among the Arab settlers that the central government might be willing to accept some Berber demands. This would have encouraged the Fihrids, particularly in North Africa, to take their opportunities to seize power to secure their position.

Fihrid dominance ultimately didn’t last long, but we shouldn’t assume that brevity was preordained. After all, an independent dynasty taking over al-Andalus and Ifriqiya is exactly what happened in 756 and 800 with the Umayyads and Aghlabids respectively. I’ve talked before about the emergence of successful polities built around strongmen in the ninth-century Caliphate in the wake of the Anarchy in Samarra, such as the Tulunids in Egypt, the Saffarids in Khurasan and the Samanids in Transoxiana.

I’m not going to overstate the solidity of the Fihrid regimes, but I suspect they’re victims of bad luck as much as anything else. They were also interestingly distinct from each other and faced dissimilar challenges. Ibn Habib’s setup seems to have depended very strongly on the support of his family, particularly his brothers Ilyas in Tripoli and Amran in Tunis. Power was very much concentrated in the hands of Arab settlers. The biggest threat were revolutionary Berber forces operating in large numbers in the provincial hinterlands. These were not united and followed slightly different strains of Kharijite thought, but they represented a continuation of the earlier Berber revolt of 740. We also have hints of various Arab plots in Kairouan, many of them led by Umayyad refugees such as the future ʿAbd al-Rahman I. By 752 however Ibn Habib appeared reasonably secure. A big Kharijite push on Tripoli had been defeated, and the governor had even started ordering raids on Sicily with an eye to a full invasion.

Yusuf’s al-Andalus looked very different. The Berber revolt there had devolved into a particularly murderous free for all, exacerbated by another round of civil war from 744 which nearly brought down the entire province. Among the key ‘stakeholders’ were Berbers, the remains of the Syrian army sent to quell said Berbers, and the longer established Arab settlers. None of these were unified interest groups and the Arab settlers in particular seem to have collapsed into multiple factions. Unlike in Ifriqiya, a regime built on just one of these groups was a non-starter.  Yusuf’s pedigree and long career in al-Andalus gave him sway with the Arabs. He was able to call upon at least some Berber support. But the key relationship that underpinned his power was his alliance with the Syrian general al-Sumayl, who could bring a critical mass of the recently arrived veterans with him. So important was al-Sumayl that he was suspected of being the power behind Yusuf’s throne.

(There’s an interesting hint that Yusuf might also have been popular with some Christians. The great Fihrid stronghold in al-Andalus was Toledo, a city whose Christian population remained unusually influential in local governance. Some Iberian Christian sources put him at the start of lists of Umayyad emirs as the first Arab king of al-Andalus).

Ultimately what brought both Ibn Habib and Yusuf down was internal dissension in the face of external pressure. In 755 Ibn Habib was stabbed to death by his brother Ilyas, allegedly for executing his Umayyad brother-in-law on suspicion of treason. Ilyas then proclaimed himself governor in the name of the ʿAbbasid caliph al-Mansur. What followed was a very busy year featuring many broken promises which apparently culminated in Ibn Habib’s son, inevitably named Habib, slaying Ilyas in single combat. We don’t necessarily have to believe all of the details here, but civil war among the Fihrids proved fatal. Multiple groups of Kharijite Berbers took this turmoil as an opportunity to strike. Habib died in battle in 757 trying to fend them off, effectively ending Fihrid power in the area. Kairouan experienced an exciting reign of terror as one group of Kharijites began executing people for being insufficiently pious until another, more lenient force pushed them out and established a Berber caliphate that was crushed by ʿAbbasid troops in 761.

Ibn Habib got a bit unfortunate in his fraternal relations. Yusuf was arguably even more snakebit. In 755/6 his attention was firmly fixed on Zaragoza in the northeast of al-Andalus, where al-Sumayl was besieged by forces endorsed by al-Mansur. Although he successfully rescued his general and crushed the rebels, Yusuf then managed to lose a lot of soldiers failing to conquer Pamplona. Even worse, ʿAbd al-Rahman was able to use these northern distractions to cross over from North Africa. He raised an army initially among disgruntled Arabs in the vicinity of modern Granada, and from Syrians based in Seville. With this force the Umayyad was able to beat Yusuf in a battle outside Córdoba in 756 and take the city.

Fihrid al-Andalus died hard. Yusuf raised another army and was defeated in the field in 757. Toledo held out until 764 under Yusuf’s cousin. In 777, a member of the Fihrids raised a revolt in the northeast, supported by al-Mansur, although he was quickly defeated. In the same year one of Yusuf’s sons was part of the embassy that travelled to Paderborn, inviting Charlemagne to invade Spain in his ill-fated Roncesvalles campaign. The last gasp came in 785, when two of Yusuf’s sons raised Toledo in revolt, only to be crushed.

It’s tempting to find structural reasons for Yusuf’s downfall. His failure to manage all the factions gave ʿAbd al-Rahman an opening to build an army. He perhaps paid too much attention to places like Zaragoza and Pamplona in the north when he should have been concentrating on the all-important Guadalquivir river valley. I’m not sure I buy that. It’s worth noting that ʿAbd al-Rahman would eventually have to turn on his original supporters in order to stabilise al-Andalus. It’s also not like Yusuf knew ʿAbd al-Rahman was coming. Even the Umayyads would fight for Zaragoza if they didn’t anticipate a threat to their core territory in the south.

One advantage that ʿAbd al-Rahman had that Yusuf didn’t was his ancestry. It wasn’t just that the magic Umayyad name was one of the few that could compete with the descendants of ʿUqba. ʿAbd al-Rahman’s mother was Berber, which may have given him more credibility with those in al-Andalus. I think at the end of the day though, ʿAbd al-Rahman won the battles and Yusuf didn’t. Had they gone the other way, the Falcon of the Quraysh would be an interesting but obscure footnote, while we might be talking about the celebrated Fihrids of al-Andalus.

Something that I think is striking is that both regimes had to at least think about the danger posed by Caliph al-Mansur. ʿAbbasid troops only arrived in Ifriqiya in 761 but Ilyas seems to have had the caliph’s support for his assassination. Yusuf was actively crushing an ʿAbbasid backed revolt when ʿAbd al-Rahman crossed. This is a way the Fihrids genuinely are unusual for being so early. No other caliph seems to have been much interested in al-Andalus and by 800 Harun al-Rashid was willing to give up on Ifriqiya as well. That said, I don’t think ʿAbbasid pressure really explains the collapse of either branch of the Fihrids. It’s also not like later dynasties such as the Tulunids and Saffarids didn’t sometimes have to worry about Baghdad.

A more important takeaway to me is that both Fihrid polities seem to anticipate future developments. Fihrid North Africa looks an awful lot like that of the Aghlabids, particularly in its anti-Berber hostility and acquisitive attitude towards Sicily. The Fatimids weren’t Kharijites, but ‘messianic leader commanding a Berber army that sweeps through the cities of Ifriqiya’ works as a description of both 757-8 and 902-909. Yusuf’s al-Andalus, built around a slightly rickety coalition of different interests, with near constant rebellions almost everywhere, may appear more unfamiliar, but I think that is in large part because we underestimate just how shaky the early Umayyad emirate was. ʿAbd al-Rahman and his successors had to fight continuously for their position until the middle of the tenth century.

The Fihrids are interesting as a reminder of the contingency of history. While both Ibn Habib and Yusuf had problems, there is a very plausible universe where their regimes survived their deaths. At the same time, at the risk of seeming unimaginative, I suspect that the big picture doesn’t actually look that different. Fihrid al-Andalus probably closely resembles its Umayyad counterpart. The only meaningful change I can think of is that being longer established in the Maghreb, the Fihrids might have been less inclined to look to Syria for their cultural cues, but at most that would have been a difference in degree than of kind.

With regards to North Africa, it’s not clear to me how Fihrid interest in Sicily a couple of generations before the Aghlabids started conquering the island in 829 would change the picture in the central Mediterranean. My hunch is probably not much. I also think it’s likely that eventually something like the Fatimids would eventually overwhelm them. The interesting difference would come if the silver boom that took place in the 770s also happened in our alternative timeline. If, rather than mostly heading towards Baghdad, that silver had gone to a Fihrid ruler in Kairouan that might slightly change the setup, although even then I’m not sure how much. This possibly indicates that there were only so many ways Arab dynasties in the early medieval Islamic west could construct polities. The interesting comparison would probably be with the independent Berber confederations to the west, such as the Barghawata, the Midrarids in Sijilmasa, and eventually the Idrisids.

Perhaps the best reason to remember the Fihrids is as a means of recognising how early the Muslim world became polycentric. The struggle between al-Mansur and ʿAbd al-Rahman helps obscure it, but from the end of the Berber Revolt at the very latest, Islamic history can no longer be told as a story about the Caliphate as a whole. Instead the very many pieces that emerged from this eighth century crisis need to be understood on their terms and in their own light.

* Exactly how closely related is a good question. Yusuf might have been Ibn Habib’s son. The nasab or chain of patronymics does work. I do get a little nervous about this because (1) this isn’t something our earliest sources spell out; (2) you’d expect more interaction between father and son than we see; (3) the Fihrids are not exactly imaginative with names; and (4) the chronology to make it work gets very tight and requires a lot of people to do things while very young or very old**. I’ve seen scholars suggest that they might be cousins instead which does alleviate some of these worries.

** Yusuf first appears in the sources as governor of Narbonne in the 730s. That means the latest he could have been born is about 710 (even that’s a bit young). His supposed grandfather was commanding armies and fighting on the battlefield in 741, so I’m reluctant to push his birth to much before 680. That’s not impossible but it does require a couple of generations of young fathers. I worry a little bit that while both Ibn Habib’s father and grandfather participated in the conquest of Spain in 711, there’s no record of him taking part in it, despite him apparently being old enough to father Yusuf.

Those of you who have been following the blog for a few years might remember about eighteen months ago, when I posted something saying that the general understanding of the succession crisis after the death of Duke Henry of Burgundy in 1002 was wrong. Since then, I have written these thoughts up into an article, and it’s now out in print! I have to say, writing this piece felt excellent – at various points sitting and typing, I genuinely felt like I was flying. The thing is that, whereas often medieval history can involve putting together a jigsaw with lots of puzzle pieces missing, here there’s a pretty good source base all pointing in one direction, and that made it easy and satisfying to write up. Plus, the case study points towards some larger points about succession crises and rebellion in France around 1000. And now you can read about it!

The article is available online and, thanks to the generosity of Nottingham’s university library, Open Access. It can be found at the end of this finely crafted hyperlink, and the full reference is:

Fraser McNair, ‘Rethinking Rebellion in Early Capetian Burgundy’, French History 40 (2026), pp. 1-15.

The gritty details: A pretty straightforward process, all things being equal. Having noticed the issue while blogging at the end of 2024, I wrote up a first draft pretty quickly and sent it to some colleagues to read over. Their comments were positive, but there was a wait of a month whilst I chased up a false lead from the cartulary of Bèze. (This involved having to ask a friend in Tübingen to get hold of a three-volume French PhD thesis, only for it to then turn out that an argument about dating, which would have been useful if it were true, was a circular argument.) It was submitted in February 2025, and with a pleasing speed was accepted by mid-March. The peer reviews only wanted minor changes, but my monograph editor wanted a big tranche in before the 2025 IMC, so I wasn’t able to submit the changes until the middle of July, which then got accepted by September. It was at this point I realised I’d actually sent it to the wrong journal – I had actually meant it to go to French Historical Studies, which published the excellent Koziol article on the Burgundian civil war back in 2014. Given that French History is an excellent journal and the whole editorial process was extremely smooth, this was a happy error on my part! (Although I imagine the editorial team did raise some eyebrows about why my cover letter kept referring to a piece they hadn’t actually published…) Anyway, once the revisions and copy-editing were accepted, the article came out almost immediately in a pre-print edition, so if you’ve seen it floating around the internet, that’s what it was. At that juncture, it was just a question of waiting for the allotted issue to emerge, which it has now done!

As a general rule, if what an official diplomatic document is saying is at all interesting, something has gone horribly wrong. The paperwork that people can actually check is supposed to be sufficiently soporific that it could double as an anaesthetic. The good stuff is shared behind closed doors, or conveyed through inference and juxtaposition. The early medieval world could be a little more direct, but when encountering the smooth formulae of a royal chancery, it can still be hard to read past the bland phrases. Context is often our friend here, and it’s with this in mind that I want to introduce our subject today, which is a letter sent by Pope Nicholas I (r. 858-867) to King Horic II of the Danes in 864. On its own it’s a perfectly fine missive, distinguished by being our earliest surviving piece of papal correspondence with a Scandinavian monarch. But the spectacularly convoluted context is what makes it really interesting. But first, the letter itself:

Nicolas I, Epistolae, no. 27, MGH Epp. 6, ed. E. Perels (Berlin, 1925), 293-4.

Nicholas, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Horic, King of the Danes.

We have given many thanks to Almighty God at the arrival of our brother and fellow bishop Salomon [I of Constance], who was sent by our son, the glorious King Louis. He presented your gifts and greatly delighted us by reporting your faith, which, by the surpassing mercy of God, you are already recognised as possessing even before receiving the grace of baptism.

And so, lifting our eyes to Him who alone is true, singular, and almighty, we ceaselessly and humbly pray His clemency for your salvation, that He ‘who commanded the light to shine out of darkness,’ [2 Cor 4:6] and, out of His enabling grace, by the illumination of His Holy Spirit dispelled the fog of ignorance and unbelief from the hearts of those who would believe in His name, He who has already deigned, in His accustomed mercy, to show in you the work of His compassion, may also open your eyes to the Truth which ought to be recognised, drive away the darkness of ignorance from your heart, remove your heart’s hard shell, and reveal to you the light of true faith and religion. May He draw you to His knowledge and lead you to the saving fountain, to the eternal kingdom, and to everlasting life.

There, joy exists without sorrow, satiety without disgust, continual health, unfailing life, peace without end, and the highest security and eternal glory remain. There God will be seen as He is, and all the righteous will reign with Him. Their kingdom is not confined by boundaries, nor disturbed by wars, nor ended by limits, nor brought to an end by any conclusion.

Recognising this, we who hold the faith of Christ and are called Christians believe in Him who has promised us such a life and kingdom. We serve and worship Him far more for that life than for this one, which is entirely miserable and full of dangers, where there is constant sorrow, satisfaction mixed with pain, brief health, mortal life, strife, uncertain security, and quickly fading glory. As it is written: ‘The life of man upon earth is a warfare, and his days are like the days of a hireling’ [Job 7:1]. Here, indeed, the kingdom is short-lived, shaken by constant wars, and soon taken from the hand of its possessor, if not by human power, then by the condition of death.

Therefore, cease to worship idols and stop serving devils. ‘For’, as the Psalmist says, ‘all the gods of the Gentiles are devils: but the Lord made the heavens’ [Ps. 95:5]. Thus, He, who made all things and was not made, is the Creator, not created, and must be worshipped. For your idols, made by human hands, are deaf, mute, and blind; consider, I ask you, what kind of salvation they can offer you, since they cannot even help themselves, being entirely without sense.

Therefore worship God; adore Him; render singular service to Him alone, He who is almighty, all-sustaining, indescribable, immense, infinite, simple, unchangeable, uncircumscribed, immortal, wholly good, wholly merciful, wholly sacred. He can aid you in this world and grant you blessedness in the next. If you worship and love Him perfectly, He will give you after death a life that does not end and grant you a kingdom that knows no decline and never experiences any diminution.

May God Almighty, the enlightener of all, illuminate your heart and graciously lead you to the knowledge of Himself.

As you can see, it’s a relatively straightforward text. Nicholas thanks Horic for sending him gifts before urging the Danish king to abandon his old gods, which are devils that cannot save him, and adopt Christianity. Where it gets interesting is the stuff around it. This letter was preserved as part of a collection of documents gathered by Anskar, archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, shortly before his death in 865, all of which relate to his mission to convert the Danes and Swedes. A copy of this dossier was allegedly distributed throughout East Francia but the only version that survived was in Hamburg, with some slightly later documents from the tenth century. This manuscript is now lost, but not before Philipp Caesar was able to print a copy in 1642.

Anskar didn’t assemble this portfolio for merely antiquarian reasons. Most of the documents are charters or privileges demonstrating that his ongoing mission to evangelise the north had the backing of Louis the Pious (r. 814-840) and of the Popes in Rome. Nicholas’s letter fit this remit nicely, showing the pontiff supporting efforts to convert a Scandinavian king with whom Anskar had close dealings. Almost all of the claims Anskar and his followers made were at least slightly controversial and almost all the documents collected have been improved or fabricated in some way. One of the few exceptions is the letter to Horic II, which even the most sceptical scholars have been content to accept as genuine, which is helpful.

Let’s begin at the (geographical) top. It’s hard to say why Horic was sending letters to the pope, but the best guess is that it has something to do with the shakiness of his regime. He came to the throne as a small boy in 854 after his predecessor, Horic I, died in the midst of a terrible civil war. The following year he had to fend off an attack from relatives of his and in 857 he was forced to give part of his kingdom away. While he seems to have got that land back [Ed.: Although I have argued he didn’t here], Horic probably didn’t feel particularly safe. Despite Nicholas’ optimism, there’s no hint that he ever converted, but the Danish king might have patronised Christians in order to get some much-needed goodwill from his neighbours to the south, permitting Anskar to set up a church in the town of Ribe and repair another one in Hedeby. Communicating with Pope Nicholas may have been another way of securing his position, elevating himself above his numerous rivals by acting as a king and receiving letters and gifts from afar.

If that seems a little desperate, this is our last reference to Horic in the sources. We don’t know what happened to him but by 873 there were other kings ruling in his place. Given how much emphasis Nicholas puts on the instability of mortal kingdoms, I wonder if he might have been aware that Horic’s throne was at risk of collapsing under him. While the transitory nature of this world is something of a running theme in Christian writing, it would be very intriguing if Bishop Salomon was transmitting information about Danish politics which probably came from Anskar.

Why the pope would be interested in converting a pagan king might seem self-evident, particularly one like Nicholas, who also sent letters to Khan Boris I of the Bulgars as he became a Christian. But there’s a bit more to this than meets the eye, which requires some backstory. Louis the Pious had been a keen supporter of Christian missions to Scandinavia. After the emperor’s death, none of his sons were quite as enthusiastic. The funds that had supported Anskar and company dried up. Louis the German (r. 840-876) did however have a use for Anskar. After the division of the empire in 843, Louis ruled Saxony, but the very important bishops of the region answered to the archbishop of Cologne, which lay in the realm of his brother Lothar I (r. 840-855). Under the guise of his purpose to evangelise the north, Anskar could be usefully positioned as not under the authority of Cologne. Louis didn’t care about the mission but he did want bishops who couldn’t be controlled by his brother. Thus, when Anskar’s first bishopric of Hamburg went up in flames after a viking raid in 845, he was appointed to the safer see of Bremen in 847.

By the 860s, Louis started seeing new possibilities. Cologne was now controlled by his nephew Lothar II (r. 855-869), who was having notorious marital difficulties. In 860 he discarded his wife Teutberga and in 862 he married his lover Waldrada (I am simplifying so so much right now). Pope Nicholas was dubious about all of this and rejected its legality in a synod he held in Rome in 863. Archbishop Gunther of Cologne had been an essential part in these happenings, so Nicholas excommunicated and deposed him. The whole mess also estranged the pope from Lothar’s older brother, Emperor Louis II (r. 855-875), who marched on Rome in 864 and wrecked the city in his fury. Nicholas didn’t budge. It was in the midst of this controversy that Louis the German sent Bishop Salomon of Constance to meet the pope in 864, bearing with him the presents from Horic.

Nicholas was initially suspicious but quickly realised he and the East Frankish king had several interests in common. First, they both had reasons to want to undermine the archbishop of Cologne. Second, they were both worried about the spread of Byzantine religious interests. The previous year had been a busy year for papal excommunications. Nicholas had excommunicated Patriarch Photios of Constantinople because of the dubious manner in which his predecessor had been deposed. In the same year, the celebrated Cyril (of alphabet fame) and Methodios had arrived among the Moravians, Louis the German was concerned about the influence of these Byzantine monks on his most powerful immediate neighbours. To counterbalance the Moravians, he had allied with the Bulgars, but while Khan Boris had converted to Christianity in 864, he was baptised by a Byzantine embassy, with the emperor in Constantinople becoming his godfather. Louis wanted Nicholas’ blessing to wage war on the Moravians. Coordinating rolling back Byzantine influence was thus also a shared objective for the two parties.

Anskar and Horic supported both of these common interests. The bishop of Bremen’s mission and his success at communicating with the Danes, proved by Horic’s gifts, made it easy to justify elevating him in opposition to Gunther in Cologne. Thus on 31 May 864, Pope Nicholas approved the union of the sees of Hamburg and Bremen, elevating it to an archdiocese independent of Cologne, with responsibility for Scandinavia. The northern mission also served to present Louis the German as a champion of the spread of Christendom, sealing the alliance between king and pope. This was particularly important at a moment when it looked like eastern Europe was about to be lost to Constantinople. As it happened, Boris would turn to Rome in 866 and subsequent Moravian rulers would make a point of reaching out to Nicholas’ successors, but that wasn’t obvious in 864.

It would be interesting to know how much of this Horic understood. It’s tempting to assume that this meant nothing to him but that might be a mistake. After all, Anskar’s people were active in his kingdom and would have been able to fill him in on at least some of the Frankish angle. Nor was eastern Europe entirely unreachable. The eastern empire was in contact with the Rus’ by 839. The year 860 had seen Constantinople besieged by the Rus’. While these men were mostly originally Swedes rather than Danes, it seems possible that at least some news of Byzantine affairs was reaching Horic that way.

Many of the letters that come down to us from the ninth century arrive as isolated missives, placed in a bottle on an unknown tropical island and committed to the ocean of the centuries. If we only had Pope Nicholas’ letter to Horic it would still be a precious document. Nothing that survives the vagaries and disasters of more than a millennium is to be treated lightly. But here, because through good fortune, we get to glimpse the much bigger, much more complicated story surrounding the letter, one which connected Roman pontiff and Scandinavian king to a bigger world and a deeper history.

…Scholars and professional researchers, on the other hand, have to actually make a considerable effort to remain so ignorant.

David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York, 2021), p. 147.

Of the many sins of scholars, pedantry and defensiveness are among the most common. The first needs little in the way of explanation. Accuracy is a requirement not a virtue for academics and that attracts and breeds a certain cast of mind. In the case of the second bad habit, researchers are used to having to argue for the value of their subject and their work to an indifferent audience and can be overly aggressive in doing so, insisting that their area of study is indispensable in any situation. But seeing an interloper venturing into their sanctum without the reverence they feel it deserves raises hackles.

I try, not always successfully, to repress these instincts. They are unhelpful traits, which threaten to stifle good faith attempts at interdisciplinarity. They also work against efforts to look at the larger picture of the human past. Any ‘big’ history is by nature going to venture well past the specialisms of the people conducting it, which means that nuances will be missed and mistakes made. Yet whether we like it or not, both academics and the wider public go about their day with grand narratives of human history in the background of their minds, if only to somehow navigate the long course between The Flintstones and The Jetsons. Not trying to do big history today simply means that those narratives will be based on desperately out of date material (like mid-twentieth century Hanna-Barbera cartoons).

The best attempts at big history are also intriguingly provocative, inspiring new connections and approaches in a range of different fields. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by Davids Graeber and Wengrow, is most certainly that. Published in 2021, it seeks to revolutionise our understanding of the development of human society. In particular, they argue that far from being locked into one inevitable path of civilisation, which unites agriculture, urbanism, global connectivity, social complexity and inequality as part of the same inseparable package, humans actually had considerable choice and control over what they did and how they did it. Farming could be adopted piecemeal, neolithic people could routinely travel vast distances, cities and archival practices could be developed without needing resource inequality or violence.

In support of this thesis, Graeber and Wengrow draw upon their expertise as anthropologist and archaeologist respectively. One of the great joys of their book is how wide-ranging it is. Anyone reading it will encounter something fascinating and new. Highlights for me included the discussion of cities in neolithic Ukraine, power dynamics among the Nuer of South Sudan and the unexpectedly Calvinist Native Americans of northern California. There are worlds to be explored in this book.

Provocative can, however, also mean bad. Despite its many virtues, The Dawn of Everything is bad on ancient and medieval Europe. Some of this is small stuff. Alaric the Goth is repeatedly presented as a barbarian antithetical to Rome and everything it stood for, rather than as a man who was raised in the empire, served in its military, and who took up arms against it in part because he wanted to rise within it. On multiple occasions the book repeats the claim that modern office employees work longer hours than medieval peasants. (For a particularly good breakdown of why this isn’t the case, I recommend Bret Devereaux’s wonderful series on peasant life). This sort of thing is irritating but not a big deal given that neither David is pretending to be a specialist on late antiquity, nor is their book primarily about it.

But some of the mistakes are bigger problems for the overall thrust of the argument, particularly when it comes to the early chapters. While I suspect that the other parts of the book are better, being closer to the authors’ areas of study, it is alarming when the bit that seems weakest is that which is about things I actually know about (Gell-Mann Amnesia is not your friend). This matters because The Dawn of Everything has sold extremely well by academic book standards. The copy I have been reading was one of three available in my small, local library. It has been translated into many different languages and been favourably reviewed in newspapers around the world.

While these are good reasons to muscle past my initial reluctance to pedantically pile in, there is another, much less good one, which is that the authors of The Dawn of Everything are very quick to assume that people who disagree with them are incompetent and lazy. While I’m sure both Davids were lovely people in real life (sadly David Graeber died before the book could come out), what emerges from the pages of their work is an often startling contempt for scholars in other fields. That’s not in itself a reason to disagree with a book. Academic writing can be correct even if it’s unpleasant. But it does reduce my instinct to be charitable over mistakes given that the authors seem disinclined to grant the same charity in return.

(Incidentally, if the name David Graeber sounds familiar, he also wrote Bullshit Jobs in 2018. It’s an interesting coincidence that the man who thinks large numbers of jobs in sectors of which he has no personal experience are worthless is also extremely critical of scholars who work in different fields to him.)

In the first chapter of The Dawn of Everything we are told that our familiar narratives of the birth of civilisation are the product of the Enlightenment, in particular Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s vision of the state of nature and the first appearance of inequality, laid out in his Discourse on the Origins of Social Inequality (1755). Rousseau and his contemporaries were inspired by conversations with Native Americans, particularly the Wendat leader Kandiaronk, recorded by Europeans. These unprecedented critiques challenged Enlightenment figures to defend the naturalness of European civilisation. It was in this context that people first began seriously to think about how inequality began and where our standard model of simple primitives slowly trading their egalitarian communities for social complexity comes from.

Graeber and Wengrow believe that the opinions attributed to Kandiaronk are real and not the product of literary artifice written for political reasons. (Their treatment of historians who are worried that this might be the case is not kind). Perhaps they’re right, but their argument ignores the long tradition in European writing of using the perspective of an outside ‘barbarian’ to comment on civilisation and its ills. I won’t hammer this point because David Bell has already talked about it in detail here, but any educated individual in the eighteenth century would have had the opportunity to read someone like Tacitus (‘they make a waste and call it peace’) and seen how the most damning indictments of the Roman empire, although written by Romans, were placed in the mouths of ‘uncivilised’ Britons or Germans. The idea of the noble savage, superior to civilisation, who could see through its veneer to plumb the corruption that lay within, did not begin with Kandiaronk.

We won’t linger here too long, but I think it speaks to some of the recurring weaknesses of The Dawn of Everything. There’s a blind spot about the role of literary culture in shaping ideas and perception. Rousseau and company are depicted as inventing their narrative of the human past ex novo rather than being part of a conversation that stretched back to classical antiquity. Later writers looked back to that ancient world and comprehended their present in light of their reading of the past.

A case in point is Graeber and Wengrow’s discussion of Tlaxcala, which I enjoyed, but underplays the extent to which writers like Cortés and particularly Peter Martyr d’Anghiera depended upon analogies to Switzerland and republican Rome in their understanding of the city. It still says something about Tlaxcala that those were the comparisons that came to mind, but it means we need to think through the implications carefully, particularly when Tlaxcala became a vital talking point in imperial Spanish debates about whether Native Americans were human or not. (I discuss this problem in this chapter here).

This Rousseauian reading also flattens a European culture that consisted of many different strands, turning it into an incurious monolith until stung into action by an outside perspective. In particular, Europeans long before the eighteenth century were deeply exercised by the question of inequality and where it came from. Graeber and Wengrow are aware of classical traditions of the birth of inequality, but argue that they were so varied that it’s hard to connect them with modern ideas. However, the Middle Ages were also filled by people looking back to early humanity to ask questions about the origins of civilisation and how it should be organised, sometimes with explosive consequences, which formed an important context for later ideas.

Medieval Europe had good reason to be interested in the roots of inequality. Any Christian society has to find ways of reckoning with the words of the Bible. Jesus had preached a creed of giving away worldly goods to the needy. The famous injunction that ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God’ (Mark 10:25) had considerable force. So too did the words of Paul, ‘here is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3:28). If all were equal in the eyes of God, and the poor and humble were cherished by the Lord, then the origin of worldly inequality was a question of considerable importance. Was it divinely ordained or a sinful betrayal of the command of heaven?

The medieval west had also inherited a large number of ideas about primitive humanity from the Greco-Roman past.  While many of these told positive stories about how early humans had acquired fire, learned to build shelter, and formed cooperative societies, others were much more negative, depicting a lost Golden Age before the corrupting influence of civilisation. One of the features of these legends was that this was an age of equality, when all shared the bounty of the earth. These ideas were widespread in the classical world, appearing in the writings of Cicero, Ovid, Tacitus and Lucretius (who Rousseau would later draw upon particularly heavily), among others.

This rhymed nicely with Jewish and Christian ideas of a fall from a primeval Eden. Already in antiquity there were people who sought to fuse Greco-Roman myth with the Bible. Thus the Jewish writer Josephus attributed much of this corruption to Cain, claiming that whereas early humans had lived peaceful unconstrained lives, the son of Adam taught them to desire more and to acquire it through violence towards their neighbours, drawing up boundaries and claiming the earth as their property (Antiquities, 1.2.60-62). These themes spread into early Christian thought, so that the idea that humans had originally lived simply and without property until greed and sin broke this equality became a commonplace.

Among my favourites is the fourth-century writer Lactantius, who argued in his Divine Institutes (5.14–20) that all civilisations were unjust because they were unequal and ‘where people are not all equal, there is no fairness: the inequality excludes justice of itself.’ Among the most influential commentators was Ambrose of Milan, who attributed inequality to human greed, writing in his De Officiis that:

God commanded that all things be generated so that nourishment would be common to all and the earth therefore would be a common possession of all. (1.28.132)

This tradition culminated in the words of Pope Gregory the Great that ‘by nature all of us are equal’ (Moralia in Job 21.22).

This intellectual background did not prevent medieval Europe from being an extremely hierarchical society, with enormous differences in wealth and legal status, where social rank was fiercely policed. Gregory himself was quick to urge his readers to obey the laws of the land. But it did mean that inequality had to be justified. When we encounter something like Adalbero of Laon’s division of society into Three Orders, or John of Salisbury’s description of the Body Politic (Policraticus, books 5 and 6), or Thomas Aquinas’ exposition on the Great Chain of Being (Summa Theologica, 1.108.a.4), we are reading an argument in support of inequality in a world where the basic assumption was that humans had been created equal and where the blessings of subsequent hierarchy were contested.

One of the striking things about medieval ideas of primitive equality is quite how widespread they are. Chroniclers such as Frechulf of Lisieux and Otto of Freising took their cue from Josephus in their depiction of tyrannical rulers upending a communal past. This model also played a strong role in the development of monasticism. The influential early monk and theologian John Cassian condemned the powerful who ‘base their lives on plunder rather than live from the sweat of craftsmanship and labour’ (Collationes patrum, 8.21). For him, the monastic life offered a route back to the primeval simplicity that had existed before some people began monopolising what God had given to all in common. Anxieties about property and inequality played out through monastic orders such as the Franciscans, whose holy poverty could appear downright subversive to the powers-that-be, defensive of their place in society.

These concepts also appeared in other fields, such as philosophy. The cornerstone of early medieval Latin philosophy was On the Consolation of Philosophy, readers of which would encounter Boethius’ poetic mourning for a lost Golden Age of equality (metre 5). Much later, students at the universities of the thirteenth century had to wrestle with the competing ideas of equality discussed by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics. These questions also showed up in law. Near the opening of Justinian’s Institutes appears the statement that ‘by the law of Nature all men from the beginning were born free’ (1.1.sec 4), with a similar line appearing in the Digest. Gratian’s Decretum notes that under natural law all property is held in common for the use of all. Both Justinian and Gratian then start sketching out laws for a highly unequal society. But every law student would learn that human society had begun equal.

Nor were such notions confined to intellectual circles. The thirteenth-century Old French Roman de la Rose, popular across the courts of Europe and otherwise distinguished by an almost impressive level of misogyny, observes that:

Naked and impotent are all, / High-born and peasant, great and small. / That human nature is throughout / The whole world equal, none can doubt. (c. 98, lines 19411-14)

Lower down the social ladder, and more unsettling for church authorities, were the reports of heretic movements that held all property in common. Determining what was fact and what the fevered imagination of churchmen is difficult, but the idea that early humans had lived egalitarian lives and that inequality was an unnatural and unholy imposition seems to have been circulating in parts of medieval Europe.

The potential political consequences of such a concept were most famously explored by the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381. When the rebels gathered at Blackheath in southeast London, they were given a sermon by the radical priest John Ball. In the version recorded by Thomas Walsingham in his Historia Anglicana, Ball asked:

When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men.

This question of political philosophy would soon be ended by Richard II’s soldiers, with Ball hanged, drawn and quartered. But the episode suggests that ordinary peasants had views about societal inequality, in which human society had been equal and had become less so not by nature but by political choice.

Returning to The Dawn of Everything, this medieval habit of thinking about the history of inequality challenges the notion that the writers of the Enlightenment were doing something entirely new in response to critiques from overseas. Writing as someone who has a bit of a soft spot for Enlightenment writers, Europe had a long tradition of considering the development of unequal societies, drawn from Christian and classical ideas, which pervaded theology, history, law and philosophy. This allows us to place Rousseau and his contemporaries in context. They may well have been innovators, but they emerged from a culture that had long wrestled with ideas of inequality.

Does any of this matter? Most of the book has nothing to do with medieval Europe. In the last chapters of The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow explore the institutions of the Iroquois Confederacy, which were built around ideals of egalitarian deliberation. They suggest that these in turn emerged from a revolution against hierarchical elites in Cahokia beginning in the late fourteenth century. Many of the American Founding Fathers such as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were fascinated by the Confederacy and drew upon their example for inspiration.

But the long history of the late antique and medieval past also left their mark on the revolutionaries of 1776. When Jefferson wrote in the United States Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal’, he probably didn’t know that he was quoting Gregory the Great. But the reason that he wanted to put down those words (despite the many enslaved people working on his estates who might look askance at him for doing so), was because he was the product of a long culture of writing and debate that reached back to the sixth-century pope and beyond. When, two decades earlier, Rousseau wrote his account of the birth of inequality and humanity before civilisation, he was doing so in a Europe that was open to the wider world like never before, but also as the heir to a culture that had been wrestling with these problems for thousands of years.

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I have been thinking about the politics of the Caliphate in the late ninth century, with a particular focus on relations between the ʿAbbasids in Baghdad and the various military dynasties that had taken power in outlying provinces, including the Saffarids in Khurasan and the Samanids in Transoxiana. What may not have come through is why I got interested in this subject.

The Book of Gifts and Rarities is a source I’ve been working with for some years. But in 2023 I noticed something new to me. In the late ninth and early tenth centuries, various dynasts on the northern edge of the Islamic world, including the Saffarids and Samanids, sent an extraordinary number of falcons to the ʿAbbasid caliphs in Baghdad. These birds were not just numerous, but unusually large and in striking colours, including white. Ornithology isn’t my strong suit but that didn’t sound to me like any sort of raptor found in the Caliphate. Rather, they put me in mind of gyrfalcons, a decidedly arctic bird. I began thinking about how such an unusual animal might start arriving in the Islamic world in large numbers in the ninth century, and the image of a Scandinavian not wearing a horned helmet came into mind.

It was at this point that I had my first stroke of luck. Unsure what to do with this, I turned to my friend Caitlin Ellis, expert in all things viking-related and just about to start as Associate Professor at the University of Oslo. Not only was Caitlin interested in the idea, but she volunteered to write an article together with me. Her knowledge of matters Scandinavian vastly outstrips mine so she was able to handle the northern end of the research, while I focused on the Caliphate. What I didn’t realise is that she also knows a lot about birds, which proved to be immensely useful. The resulting article is as much her work as it is mine and would not have been nearly as good without her, if it existed at all.

My second stroke of luck was when I was granted funding to spend three months at the Uppsala Research Centre for the World in the Viking Age (WiVA) from November 2024 to January 2025. I’ve written about my time in Uppsala before, but this what gave me the time to work on my end of the article. I’m extremely grateful to everyone at the WiVA team, who were wonderful. They held an entire day to discuss the falcons project, bringing in experts from across Scandinavia to offer advice.

They also funded the Open Access for the final article, ‘The caliph and the falcons: a ninth-century history from Iceland to Iraq’, out now with Early Medieval Europe. Coincidentally, this is a journal I’ve had the chance to work quite a lot with recently, as I’ve been hosting their new homonymous podcast which you should absolutely check out. I’m really pleased with how the article came out. In it, Caitlin and I argue that the gyrfalcons did indeed come from Scandinavia and that their appearance in Baghdad is a consequence of the Norse settlement of Iceland, the growing connections between the Baltic and the Islamic world with the rise of the Rus’, and the complex politics of the Caliphate of the period.  

I particularly enjoyed writing this because it allowed me to address two things that have always annoyed me about the way we think about the vikings and the caliphate. The first is that there’s a relatively small canon of Arabic writing about the Rus’ that everyone always uses for these conversations, with Ibn Fadlan naturally at the fore. By using the Book of Gifts and Rarities, I want to encourage scholars to think about other possibilities in the copious available sources from the ʿAbbasid world. The other frustration is that I think historians have a bit of a bad habit of treating the Caliphate as a black box in which vikings go in with furs and slaves (and falcons!) and come out with silver. This article gave me a chance to talk about how interaction with the Rus’ might play into the politics and culture of the Caliphate.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to decide what the next exotic animal that I need to get obsessed with is…

Empires transform the populations they rule, binding them into a changed order with new patterns of power and ways of thinking, connecting them to a wider world. One of the things that makes that of the Carolingians so interesting is the extent to which that transformation was mandated from the centre. Charlemagne and his successors were not content to simply extract taxes from their subjects and otherwise let them get on with their lives. The rulers of the Franks wanted the souls of the empire. This meant not simply conversion to Christianity, but the correct knowledge and practice of the faith, aided by an army of parish priests, led by a network of engaged and committed bishops. The Carolingians did not just expect lay elites to serve in their wars, but to engage intellectually and spiritually with an ambitious programme of cultural and religious reform. This demanded a lot of those leading families, who were caught between old ways and the new world being made by the Carolingians.

One place we can get a glimpse of what that might have felt like is this letter written by an anonymous Saxon noble to Louis the Pious shortly after he became emperor in 814. The author begs Louis for aid in restoring his family’s property to him, his mother and his sister, in doing so telling us a fascinating story about a family caught in the crosshairs of history.

Epistolae Variorum, no. 2, MGH Epistolae 5, ed. E. Dümmler (Berlin, 1899), 300-1

Here begins a petitioning letter.

To your most pious ears, most merciful and glorious emperor, I shall endeavour to present this not with the boldness of presumption, but because of my great necessity; that is, how our paternal inheritance was first taken away from me, a sinner, and my sister, and how it is still withheld even now.

And therefore, most pious emperor and most merciful protector of all the needy, we are greatly in need of your protection, so that through your mercy and charity I may be able to attain that same inheritance; for in no other way can it be restored to us except through your most zealous and ever-benevolent clemency in doing justice.

With these things thus put, my lord, however poorly, may your excellence deign to hear the appeal of our misery.

For we had, most serene emperor, a father named Richart and a paternal uncle named Richolf, both Saxons, and their inheritance lay in Saxony. But while they were in the service of your father, the lord Emperor Charles of happy memory, their kinsmen and fellow countrymen, raised into fury on account of their Christianity, rose up against them and swiftly looted everything they had in the houses they themselves had built with their own labour, because they learned that they wished to continue in the Christian faith and were in no way willing to renounce it.

Later it happened that the lord emperor sent my uncle Richolf on a mission beyond the Elbe, together with those that follow, that is Count Rorih, Count Gottschalk, Count Had, and Garih; and all of them were there killed together for the support of Christianity. When this was heard, my father Richart set out to report it to the lord Emperor Charles. And while he was travelling, my mother herself was seized by those same men who had earlier killed the aforesaid envoys, and they left her placed in the custody of guarantors; moreover, they took off with them by loot everything else that was found there, whether in goods or in any other things whatsoever.

When this became known to my father, he came over secretly and, as if by stealth, took her away; and he fled with her into the country called Marstheim, to her maternal inheritance. And thus he remained there until, by command of the lord emperor, a deportation from Saxony had been carried out and Saxons were brought out and settled in various lands; and at that time my father and mother were also brought away with them. After they had been brought out, and while they were staying in various places during that deportation, separated from their own land, my father was taken from this world when his final day came; and my mother remained alone, and I and my sister as well. And even now, by God’s mercy, the three of us survive. Yet we have not attained our paternal inheritance.

Therefore, most pious emperor, you who never cease to mercifully provide a sure refuge for all the poor and indeed for all the needy for the love of God, may you also, for us who have been stripped of our paternal inheritance, give aid out of your charity in response to this our petition, however inadequate it may be; and may you deign to have this matter investigated by your loyal men, to determine whether it ought justly to belong to us or not, according as your most holy excellence shall have decreed. For many witnesses from those very districts can be produced concerning this matter, who know it well and will be able to reveal the truth of it faithfully, O most merciful and serene emperor.

The big reason I love this letter is that it’s just such a cinematic story, featuring fraught allegiances, murder, kidnap and rescue. This ought to be a grand historical novel subsequently adapted into a movie (allowing me to relive my frustration that Paul Eddington was never cast as Louis the Pious in anything). But in addition to being a great read, the letter offers us a fascinating window into a whole range of subjects.

This petition is preserved in a small collection of letters made in Mainz in the middle of the ninth century, which now makes up the first part of Codex Vindobonensis 751 in the Austrian National Library. The fact that it was preserved is a hint that someone thought it was potentially useful as a model. Appeals to the emperor were a key part of how the Frankish realm functioned. The Carolingians had a limited infrastructure on the ground, so petitions for justice were a standard way to draw imperial attention to problems, with an eye to getting them to send an agent to take a closer look at what was going on. This obviously favoured the well-connected and literate, but humbler appellants also crowded the streets of Aachen. It was a slow process, but one that could pay off for those petitioning, as we’ve seen in the case of the Spanish March.

It’s worth stating right at the top that this is a piece of writing that is intended to persuade Louis the Pious to investigate the situation. Our anonymous author was therefore presenting everything in as sympathetic a light as he possibly could, stressing his family’s devotion to Christianity and loyalty and past service to the Carolingians. That said, there’s nothing inherently implausible about the story he tells.

Charlemagne’s efforts to conquer the pagan Saxons had begun in 772. After some initial easy victories setbacks began and the overall conflict dragged on until 804. It was an unpleasant affair even by the standards of early medieval warfare, with the Franks massacring large numbers of Saxons in the process. As Saxon resistance continued, the Franks grew increasingly frustrated, escalating the violence and bad-feeling. Charlemagne’s dealings with the Saxons were complicated by the fact that they were not a unified people but divided into several groups. Matters of religion added to the tensions. Christianisation was at the heart of Charlemagne’s project for Saxony. Pagan holy sites were targeted and destroyed. Mass baptisms took place at swordpoint. Non-Christian worship was banned, with ferocious punishments issued for anyone found not complying.

Many Saxons swore their allegiance in 777, while others continued to oppose Charlemagne. The author of the letter implies that his family were longstanding supporters who chose to adopt Christianity, whether out of conviction or convenience. In 782, Charlemagne began appointing leading Saxons to official positions and it’s possible that our author’s family was one of those that benefitted. By 785 it looked like the Carolingians had won, only for a new wave of resistance to break out in 792. The narrative of the petition implies that his family were caught up in the midst of this uprising, which pitted Saxon against Saxon. It may have been then that Richart and Richolf’s houses were looted, or at some point in the bitter years that followed. The image we get is of kin divided and neighbours set against each other, as individual Saxons were forced to choose their allegiance.

We can actually say a bit more about the fatal mission that Uncle Richolf took part in, because it shows up in both versions of the Royal Frankish Annals. In 798 Charlemagne sent a team to talk to the northernmost group of Saxons, known as the Nordliudi, who lived on the far side of the Elbe. Things went badly and most of the Carolingian agents were killed, except for some who were taken prisoner. Among the dead was the unlucky Gottschalk, who was on his way back from a diplomatic mission to King Sigfrid of the Danes when he got caught up in the uprising.

The annals imply that Charlemagne’s men here were all Franks, but the letter indicates that Saxons were also acting on his orders. That the same rebels were able to seize the writer’s mother suggests that his family lived in the area and might have counted as Nordliudi themselves. This would indicate that Charlemagne was using trusted local men to act for him. The anonymous Saxon presents Richolf’s death as a holy martyrdom at the hands of the unbeliever. This was language designed to win over Louis the Pious. It might also reflect how he genuinely thought about his uncle’s death. The family had made a choice in its allegiance, but it might be overly hasty to assume that it was entirely out of political calculation.

(Quick sidenote, but this whole affair reminds us how much diplomacy was going on that wasn’t normally recorded. There’s a good chance we would never have heard about this embassy if Gottschalk hadn’t been killed on his way home. I’m also intrigued by the name Rorih, which is similar to Rorik, a name popular among the Danish royal family. Was he perhaps a relative of Sigfrid travelling back to Charlemagne as an ambassador who was killed by annoyed Nordliudi? There might be interesting implications here for Saxo-Danish relations.)

At this point in the story, Richart travelled to Charlemagne to report what had happened. This left his family vulnerable and his wife, our author’s mother, was kidnapped by the rebellious Nordliudi. Hostage-taking had been a theme of the Saxon Wars, with Charlemagne routinely demanding them as a condition of peace. The men who took Richart’s wife may have been thinking along those lines, before she was snuck out by Richart and they fled to her people in Marstheim. I don’t know where that is but later events suggest that wasn’t that far away, speaking to the deep divisions within Saxon society.

The next big event in this tale of woe came when our narrator and his family were migrated out of their home on Charlemagne’s orders. From 794 the Carolingian had been forcibly shifting large numbers of Saxons. This happened several times in subsequent years, but the last and biggest took place in 804. In that year Charlemagne deported all the Saxons on the other side of the Elbe, moving them closer to the centre of his territory, where they would be easier to control, and giving their land to his clients, the Abodrites. I suspect that this is when our Saxon family was displaced from Marstheim and came to spend several miserable sounding years wandering.

Is the story true? One obvious place for scepticism is Richart’s daring rescue. An alternative reading might be that the author’s father cut a deal, leading to his wife’s release and allowing them to live a quiet life not a million miles from home. Or possibly Richart had supported the rebellion, unlike Richolf, and stories of kidnapping were a later invention intended to excuse his failure to make himself useful to Charlemagne in a time of crisis. If there were doubts about Richart that might explain why his family got scooped up in 804 and weren’t offered the support such a lineage might expect from the emperor.

I don’t think we can know for certain, anymore than we can know whether the petition was successful. But the context was at least favourable. In 811 and 813 Charlemagne acceded to petitions by Saxon men to have their claim to lands they had been forced to leave. In 819, Louis the Pious confirmed the claim of three Saxon men to properties that had been erroneously confiscated because it was believed they were rebels. This was the same year he married Judith, whose mother was an elite Saxon. Indeed, following his coming to the throne, Louis seems to have been in the mood for a general reassessment. In 815 he restored the right of Saxons to inherit property from their fathers that had been lost due to treason. The emperor also seems to have supported Saxons reclaiming lands across the Elbe. This might explain why Richart’s children waited this point before petitioning the emperor. Circumstances were never going to be more propitious than this.

 Carolingian justice was an imperfect system. But Charlemagne and Louis the Pious seem to have been fairly active on behalf of lesser elites, protecting them against greater magnates. This was one of the key strengths of the empire. If you obeyed the Carolingians and did what they asked, you could normally count on being protected. This was vitally important in Saxony, where secular nobles protected the northern frontier, enforced the law, acted as diplomats and agents, and supported the spread of Christianity. No better demonstration of this can be asked for than the Stellinga revolt of 841-5, when a Saxon revolt against Louis the German was crushed by the local aristocracy.

Leading Saxons continued to embrace the imperial project after the Carolingians had vanished from their lands. A little over a century after our petition was written, in 919 a Saxon, Henry I, was elected king of East Francia. A little under fifty years after that, his son, Otto I, would be crowned emperor in 961. The Saxons had gone from pagans resisting incorporation into the Frankish world to the mightiest champions of Christendom and the bearers of empire. I think the letter we have been looking at here, and the political and social edges to its family drama, help us to understand how that process took place.

In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, foe of the blog Edward Gibbon (d. 1794) began discussing Charlemagne by observing that ‘The appellation of great has been often bestowed, and sometimes deserved.’ It’s safe to say that the English historian’s perspective of the emperor was decidedly mixed. Reminding the reader of his mastery of the underhanded compliment, Gibbon wrote that the Carolingian’s ‘real merit is doubtless enhanced by the barbarism of the nation and the times from which he emerged.’ In what followed he took aim at the Frankish ruler’s chastity, his military prowess, and his prudence.

Most damning in his eyes however were Charlemagne’s wars against the Saxons (772-804). For Gibbon, the emperor’s:

treatment of the vanquished Saxons was an abuse of the right of conquest; his laws were not less sanguinary than his arms, and in the discussion of his motives, whatever is subtracted from bigotry must be imputed to temper.

According to the English historian, not only was the conquest of the Saxons an affair of brutal fanaticism. It was also counterproductive:

The subjugation of Germany withdrew the veil which had so long concealed the continent or islands of Scandinavia from the knowledge of Europe, and awakened the torpid courage of their barbarous natives. The fiercest of the Saxon idolaters escaped from the Christian tyrant to their brethren of the North; the Ocean and Mediterranean were covered with their piratical fleets; and Charlemagne beheld with a sigh the destructive progress of the Normans, who, in less than seventy years, precipitated the fall of his race and monarchy.

Gibbon was here reflecting on the irony of empire, in which the quest for security through dominance sows the seeds of later collapse. But the idea that Charlemagne’s conquest of the Saxons would ultimately prompt the beginning of the Viking Age would have a long career.

As a hypothesis it joins an extensive list. The causes of the Viking Age in the west have been debated for decades. The long catalogue of reasons adduced include: the construction of more seaworthy ships; bad weather in Scandinavia forcing people off the land; the emergence of strong Scandinavian kingdoms causing a political crisis; good weather in Scandinavia causing an unsustainable population boom; trade networks in the west encouraging the emergence of rich targets elsewhere in Europe; polygyny at home forcing young men to look for women overseas; the collapse of weak Scandinavian kingdoms causing a political crisis; trade networks in the east prompting a silver frenzy; and (an oldie but a goodie) the wrath of God.

Gibbon’s argument, that viking raiding began in Western Europe as a response to Charlemagne’s conquest of the Saxons, is one of the more insidious ideas floating around. It’s a difficult one to respond to because very few scholars spell it out. When the concept is introduced in an academic work its normally confined to a single sentence, often without a footnote, before moving on to what the writer in question actually wants to talk about. It’s a notion that nearly every early medieval historian is familiar with but that anyone likely to think about it for any amount of time dismisses without comment. As a result, it tends to circulate online or among non-specialists writing for a popular audience. Most prominently recently, this argument was at the heart of Robert Ferguson’s popular history book, The Hammer and the Cross: A New History of the Vikings (2009), which remains a ubiquitous sight in museum bookshops.

The strong version of the case goes something as follows. Because of its brutality, and the way it targeted pagan worship, Charlemagne’s conquest and conversion of the Saxons sent shockwaves across northern Europe. The peoples of Scandinavia were horrified at the fate of their neighbours to the south and alarmed at the possibility that they would be next. Seeking to avenge the Saxons and ward off the Franks, they began launching raids overseas, specially targeting Christian institutions such as monasteries in reprisal for the onslaught against paganism in Germany.

There’s something quite superficially pleasing about this line of thought. The Saxon hypothesis provides a clear explanation for the timing of the coming of the vikings that seems rational but is just unintuitive enough to make the reader feel clever. Charlemagne’s conquest of the Saxons was indeed a war of aggression. Pagan sites of worship were deliberately destroyed, including the sacred Irminsul in 772. The Saxons were forced to become Christian upon pain of severe punishment. Resistance was responded to with violence, and the massacre at Verden in 782 is only the most notorious atrocity committed by the Franks during the war. (Compulsory link to Christopher Lee’s heavy metal track on the event is compulsory.)

Charlemagne’s final deed in the struggle was an act of ethnic cleansing in 804, as the most northerly Saxons were forced to leave their homes at swordpoint and resettle south of the Elbe where they could be more easily controlled. The Danes at least were certainly aware of the conquest taking place on their southern border. The Saxon leader Widukind repeatedly received shelter from their king, Sigfrid. The Danish ruler was also in contact with Charlemagne during the war, with multiple embassies going between the two monarchs.

Further, the Saxon hypothesis is emotionally satisfying. A lot of people have a soft spot for vikings as heroic adventurers which becomes awkward when you have to start thinking about the whole ‘plundering and killing the innocent’ end of the business. Having them be plucky underdogs using their wits in self-defence against an unsympathetic superpower allows you to root for them again. Pagans valiantly protecting their faith and indigenous way of life in the face of the inexorable and often coercive spread of Christianity and western European culture also has strong modern resonances.

There are nonetheless a number of problems with the theory. The first is that it’s hard to find much evidence of Scandinavian-Saxon solidarity. Sigfrid may have sheltered Widukind in exile from the Franks but he didn’t support him in his struggle. We don’t know a huge amount for certain about pre-Christian religion in either Saxony or Scandinavia. Assuming that because they were Germanic pagans they worshipped in the same way or identified with each other is to accept the Carolingian framing of them as an undifferentiated pack of barbarian heathens rather than as complex societies with their own interests and relationships.

There are also hints that relations between the Saxons and Danes weren’t always friendly before the coming of the Franks. The creation of the great set of earthwork fortifications known as the Danevirke (discussed by my editor here), begun in late antiquity and repaired in the early eighth century, guarding the north-south route into Jutland, suggests that not all was happiness and light on the southern border of the Danes. After the conquest, leading Saxons, including men who were adults before the start of the wars, enthusiastically raided Danish territory and killed their northern neighbours. This sometimes happened without orders from the Carolingians.

Further, if the people of Scandinavia were supposed to be thirsting to avenge the Saxons, nobody appears to have told the kings of the Danes. Sigfrid maintained good relations with Charlemagne. King Godfrid did end up at war with the Franks, but the first signs of serious trouble with him began in 808, four years after the end of the Saxon conquest. Even then, the fighting started out as a Danish dispute with the Abodrites who were clients of the Carolingians. Godfrid went out of his way to avoid conflict with Charlemagne until 810, when he launched a raid on Frisia. Whether this was what prompted his murder that year by one of his retainers is uncertain but his successor was so eager to make peace with the Franks he arranged a placeholder agreement before winter started before a proper treaty could be negotiated the following year.

Frankish territory did start getting raided by vikings in the 790s. The years running up to 800 saw Scandinavian pirates becoming a growing problem in the English Channel and North Sea, to the point that Charlemagne began organising fleets and fortifications to fend them off. In 799 Alcuin wrote about raiders attacking islands off Aquitaine. But it’s not obvious that the marauders were particularly targeting the Carolingian empire. Most of our recorded viking activity for these years is in Britain and Ireland, including the famous attack on Lindisfarne in 793. As a strategy for striking back against the Carolingian conquest of Saxony ‘wait several decades until Saxon resistance is on the point of being crushed, then get in our ships and raid monasteries in the north of England’ leaves something to be desired.

Nor does the thought that the vikings may simply have lumped all Christians together in their quest for vengeance seem likely. At the very least, they would not have done so accidentally. Scandinavians were not an unknown sight in Britain and Ireland before the 790s. In a letter to King Æthelred of Northumbria in 793, Alcuin of York chastised him for imitating ‘the pagan way of cutting hair and beards’, suggesting considerable familiarity with their grooming habits pre-dating the attack on Lindisfarne. The vikings would have known that they were not raiding the same kingdoms that had conquered Saxony. That doesn’t rule out a general campaign against Christians in general, but it does make it seem less likely.

This prior contact also undermines the idea that the conquest of Saxony opened up Scandinavia to the wider world, thus enabling raids. Trading settlements were founded throughout northern Europe in the eighth century, including Ribe (Denmark, c.700), Reric (near Wismar in modern Germany, c.735), and Birka (Sweden, c.753). These emporia were frequented by foreign merchants, particularly although not exclusively Frisians. Goods from the farthest extent of Norway were exchanged for those from the Rhineland and the Isles. Scandinavia was not particularly isolated before the coming of the vikings. Indeed, existing contact and trade networks were a prerequisite for the Viking Age to happen. Pirates needed shipping routes to follow and targets to strike at.

I do think there is a more defensible weak version of the Saxon hypothesis that goes something like this. The conquest of the Saxons by the Franks undermined the stability of the Danish polity by placing the Carolingians right on their border. Under pressure from their powerful neighbours, the kingdom repeatedly collapsed into civil war. The losers in these conflicts went a-viking to build up their strength for the next round of fighting, while the weakened kings at home struggled to control pirate chiefs operating out of their territory.

This seems more plausible to me. The slow collapse of the Danish kingdom over the ninth century does appear to have helped escalate viking raids. Fraser has pointed out elsewhere quite how many viking kings can be linked to the Danish royal line. The glimpse we get of the tensions between King Horic I and Ragnar from the Saxon Count Cobbo shows how these dynamics could play out. The Carolingians did put pressure on the Danish kingdom. Louis the Pious’ support for Harald Klak against the sons of Godfrid almost certainly prolonged the civil war of the 810s and 820s. The arrival of Christian missionaries with Frankish backing could have contributed to tension, as Danish kings permitted them to preach and establish churches in part to appease their mighty patron south of the border.

Even here though I’m unhappy with attributing too much of this to Charlemagne’s wars in Saxony. First, the Saxons are only relevant insofar as their conquest made the Franks and Danes share a border. The cruelty and Christianisation of those decades become incidental to the argument. If living next to the Franks could be uncomfortable sometimes, well there’s a Byzantine proverb for that. Second, we shouldn’t overstate the importance of the Carolingians for the Danish civil wars. The Franks may not have helped stop them, but they didn’t start them, and the resulting turmoil says as much about structural weaknesses within the kingdom as it does about foreign interference. The timing isn’t particularly convincing either. The struggle for power within Denmark really kicked off in about 814/5, two decades after the first viking raids in the west.

Thirdly, many of the earliest vikings probably hailed from western Norway. The statement that the men who killed a royal official at Portland in 789 were from Hordaland (the area around modern Bergen) only appears in later versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. But our earliest examples of viking ships in Scandinavia proper, dating from the last decades of the eighth century, were buried in Rogaland just to the south, close to the perfect pirate’s nest of Avaldsnes. It’s hard to connect developments here to those across the sea in Denmark. An entry in the Royal Frankish Annals for 813 indicates that the kings of the Danes had power in the Vestfold (‘Westarfolda’) in eastern Norway, which was ‘the extreme northwest of their kingdom.’ If that’s true, then the western coast was beyond Danish control. Even the Vestfold seems to have been slightly challenging for the kings to hold onto as the annal entry in question is about how the region had risen up against them and had to be suppressed. I don’t want to put too much weight on the geographical location in the text as the writer seems to be under the impression that it was somewhere in Britain and it’s possible that the ‘Vestfold’ label refers to a different or larger area than the later region. But it’s a weirdly specific bit of information with a recognisable name which suggests that its ultimate source was somebody who knew something about Scandinavia. Southeastern Norway has traditionally been more heavily influenced by Denmark than other areas because of its easy access across the Skagerrak strait, something that still shows up in local dialect. The sudden emergence in the region of the commercial site at Kaupang in about 800, which resembles the one founded by the Danish king Godfrid at Hedeby in 808, is suggestive. I don’t know of anything similar in western Norway. It’s also intriguing that the account of the voyage of Ohthere contained within the Old English Orosius presents Kaupang (probably) as the place between Norway and Denmark in the 890s, although this is almost a century later and doesn’t necessarily reflect political divisions. The weight of this makes me think that western Norway was beyond the direct reach of the Danish kingdom when the first viking raids took place.

I’m also troubled by how focused on western Europe this conversation becomes. There are strong hints that something interesting was happening in the Baltic in the eighth century. Two Scandinavian ships found buried near Salme on the Estonian island of Saaremaa in 2008 and 2010 were dated to between 700 and 750. The people buried in the ships seem to have been high status and heavily armed. Whether this is evidence of a viking-style raid is uncertain, but the finds indicate that tooled-up Scandinavians rocking up on foreign shores pre-dated Charlemagne’s wars. Both Birka in Sweden and Staraja Ladoga in Russia were founded by 753. The two settlements would flourish as trading posts connected to the Byzantine and Islamic worlds via the Dnieper and Volga rivers, helping to bring vast quantities of silver to northern Europe by the ninth century. None of this activity required any involvement from the Carolingians.

If the viking tide that threatened the Carolingian empire was indeed the consequence of Charlemagne’s original Saxon sin it would pleasingly marry the pious sermons of the ninth century with the eloquent histories of the eighteenth. (The ordinary people subject to violence and robbery at the hands of the marauders would no doubt appreciate the elegant irony.) But the timing and nature of the first attacks strongly argues against the Saxon wars as the reason for the onset of the Viking Age. Early medieval Scandinavia was connected to a wider European world long before the coming of the vikings. Their interests stretched far beyond the lands of the Franks, taking them to Britain and Ireland and across the Baltic. People in the north were well aware of Charlemagne’s conquest of the Saxons. But when they set their beautiful, terrifying ships upon the cold waters of the sea, they were almost certainly not motivated by events in Germany.

Spoilers for the first three Foundation books below. And the Pirenne thesis, I guess.

Exactly when and how Isaac Asimov (c.1920-1992) encountered Henri Pirenne (1862-1935) is unknown. That the American science fiction writer was familiar with the Belgian medieval historian’s famous thesis is clear. One clue appears in Asimov’s 1968 book, The Dark Ages, part of a series of popular history books he penned for children. Pirenne isn’t mentioned by name in the volume, it not being that sort of book, but in his chapter on the Arab Conquests, Asimov writes:

The Mediterranean Sea became what it has been ever since, a division between two cultures that were usually at bitter enmity with one another. Trade decayed and the cities on the southern coast of western Europe, which had managed to survive so far, now began to deteriorate.

As we have seen elsewhere, Pirenne had controversially but powerfully argued that the end of the Roman world did not come with the last emperor in the west in the fifth century. ‘Barbarian’ kings might rule in the west, but the fundamental economic system of the empire, built around cities made wealthy by Mediterranean trade, continued unhindered. The Franks, Goths and other migrating peoples were awed by Roman culture and wanted to be part of it, adopting Latin, converting to Christianity and looking to the emperor in Constantinople for leadership.

For Pirenne the great caesura came in the seventh century, in the wake of the Arab conquests, which broke the unity of the Mediterranean, destroying its commercial networks and thus the economy upon which the cities of the Roman world depended. Possessed of their own faith, written in their own language, which had brought them such victories, the new conquerors felt none of the cultural cringe of their Germanic predecessors. They thus remained fundamentally unromanised.

As a consequence of the disruption in the Mediterranean, new trading systems emerged in the North Sea, which for the first time became a place of wealth and power. Commercial entrepots appeared in the modern Low Countries. This development elevated a northern dynasty, the Carolingians, whose powerbase was away from the Roman Mediterranean core. From this came Pirenne’s famous quote that ‘Charlemagne, without Muhammad, would be inconceivable.’ In the long run, the trading centres of the eighth century were to be the ancestor of the great Flemish mercantile cities of the later Middle Ages, a key engine in the emergence of capitalism and industrialisation. That this placed Pirenne’s native Belgium at the centre of world history did not cause him any loss of sleep.

Returning to Asimov, we can see at least some of Pirenne’s ideas in the quote from The Dark Ages, including the Arab conquests as a disruptive force that destroyed the Mediterranean economy by dividing it, leading to the decay of its cities. But there is another, earlier and more obvious hint that Asimov had heard of Pirenne. It shows up in a short story first published in the leading science fiction magazine Astounding in May 1942. It is now known as ‘The Encyclopedists’, but when it came out it was called ‘Foundation.’ Taking inspiration from the end of the Roman empire, among the story’s characters is an individual named Lewis Pirenne.

Given the subject matter of the story and the rarity of the surname, it seems unlikely that this is a coincidence. But determining exactly how Asimov became familiar with Pirenne is difficult. Growing up in Brooklyn, he had been a voracious and omnivorous reader from an early age. But the Belgian historian was entirely absent from his favourite books concerning the end of the Roman empire, which were Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and The Beauty of the Purple (1924) by William Stearns Davis, a novel set during the siege of Constantinople in 717. Pirenne’s book, Mahomet et Charlemagne, posthumously published in 1937, had been translated into English in 1939 and sold reasonably well in the United States, but Asimov makes no reference to ever having read it. One possible source of transmission is Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History (1934-1961), often seen as an inspiration for the Foundation series, and the early volumes of which contain references to Pirenne. However, Asimov claimed that he first encountered Toynbee in 1944 and to have been unimpressed by what he read. 

In the absence of an obvious route of transmission (and I very much invite readers to make their own suggestions), we must simply raise our hands and accept that somehow Asimov stumbled upon the Pirenne thesis through some process of osmosis. But the use of the name Pirenne is interesting. Asimov liked making little nods with his choice of character names. The energetic general seeking to restore the Galactic Empire for a paranoid emperor in Foundation and Empire is called Bel Riose in an echo of Belisarius. Centuries later in Second Foundation, the last emperors, ridiculous figures devoid of real power, are named Dagobert, recalling the decline of the Merovingians. But as far as I can tell Lewis Pirenne is the only character named after a modern historian. Why that might be is something that intrigues me and that I’d like to think a bit about here.

I, Pirenne

The idea for Foundation came to Asimov in August 1941, when he was about 21 (being born in provincial Russia shortly after the adoption of a new calendar in the midst of a civil war is not particularly conducive to knowing exactly how old you are). A PhD student in chemistry at Columbia, by this point he had been publishing short stories for three years. Although his earnings from writing were not enough to support him, he was beginning to build a reputation as his work started appearing in the same magazines as Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. Inspired by a recent rereading of Gibbon, he decided he wanted to write his own version in space, pitching the idea to the editor of Astounding, John W. Campbell. Campbell was enthusiastic about the concept and between May 1942 and January 1950 Asimov published eight short stories in Astounding charting the decay of the Galactic Empire.

At the heart of the stories was Hari Seldon, the genius whose mastery of the science of psychohistory allowed him to understand the patterns of civilisation and predict the collapse of the Empire and an ensuing dark age that would last for millennia. Seeking to ameliorate this, Seldon establishes the Foundation on a planet at the farthest edge of the known universe. Made up of the most brilliant minds, this Foundation will shorten the dark age and provide the nucleus for a second Galactic Empire. (We can immediately tell that this is total fiction because when Hari Seldon tells people he’s a psychohistorian the authorities give him his own planet, but when I do it, they nod and check me for sharp objects.)

The Foundation stories were gathered as a trilogy of books with a new introductory story in 1951-1953, but sales were slow. They really took off when reissued by Doubleday in the 1960s. The entire series is estimated to have sold a total of 20 million copies. Having opted to study chemistry rather than history in order to make money, Asimov would always be amused that he accrued his fortune from his misspent childhood reading history books in Brooklyn Public Library. The wealth came with critical acclaim and in 1966 the Foundation trilogy was voted the greatest All-Time Series at the Hugo Awards hosted by Worldcon, beating The Lord of the Rings. Despite pressure to write more Foundation stories, Asimov had become bored with the setting and only returned to it in the 1980s. There is currently a TV adaptation of the series on Apple which I’m told is very good but haven’t seen.

The original trilogy can still be read with pleasure and interest. It is afflicted with many of the ailments of classic SF. Foundation has a cast of about thirty people sharing at most five distinct personalities. Asimov only intermittently remembers the existence of women and a lot of the time when he does you sort of wish he hadn’t (although he leans more to patronising than creepy). The first few stories, in which a crisis comes to threaten Foundation, only for it to be averted exactly as Hari Seldon predicted centuries earlier do get a little repetitive. No love could ever be more ardent and faithful than that of Asimov for the word ‘sardonic’. And yet Asimov is a genuinely good writer who keeps the plot moving quickly and is imaginative enough that there’s always something interesting happening. He had a real gift for making philosophical conversations readable. In the second half of the trilogy he realised the format was getting stale and shook it up in unexpected and exciting ways.

The middle of the twentieth century was a good time to be trying to think about patterns and laws of history, whether it be Marxist class analysis or Toynbee’s Challenge-and-Response model. The idea that science might one day understand the human psyche so intimately as to be able to predict the future fit nicely in a world where psychoanalysis continued to go from strength to strength. But Asimov probably didn’t take the concept of psychohistory too seriously, with much of the details hashed out in conversation with the keen Campbell. Instead, he used it to play with ideas of free will and historical determinism. The personalities of the main characters matter, but those personalities are the product of material circumstance, predictable and measurable by the all-seeing Hari Seldon.

We also shouldn’t overstate how fully planned Asimov’s vision for Foundation was in 1941. After his initial meeting with Campbell, the editor encouraged him to draw up a timeline and map out the chronology of his stories. Asimov very quickly became overwhelmed by this task, and opted to just start writing instead. As a consequence, there was a fair amount of organic evolution over the subsequent years.

Where might Henri Pirenne fit into this? At least at first glance the use of his name seems to be a mocking joke. In ‘The Encyclopedists’, Lewis Pirenne is an inflexible scholar, convinced that the Galactic emperor remains capable of protecting the vulnerable Foundation even as the empire wanes and predatory neighbouring kingdoms eye its technology hungrily. As the Galactic Empire encompassed the entire known universe, these kingdoms are not ruled by outsiders but by the descendants of renegade governors and pirates. Yet the vaguely Germanic nature of their names, (‘Lepold’ and ‘Wiese’), evokes the barbarian warlords of fifth-century Europe. Asimov could be interpreted as jabbing at the Belgian historian here for insisting on continuity and being unable to recognise the decline of Roman power and the changing political environment of the ‘barbarian’ kings.

Yet as the stories progress a more complicated picture emerges. Over the second and third stories we watch the Foundation managing to become indispensable to the neighbouring kingdoms through a mixture of technology, culture and religion. While this has natural echoes of the monasteries of Europe serving as repositories for classical culture and sources of political legitimacy, it also has a flavour of Pirenne about it, stressing the continuing importance of Roman culture and Christianity in the late antique west, winning over new regimes and encouraging continuity.

The next stage of the development and advance of the Foundation comes with the rise of merchants, who bring a pragmatic, entrepreneurial spirit to its government while spreading its influence across the stars. There are a number of influences at play here, from the American West to the experience of Asimov’s parents, who arrived in New York from Russia penniless in 1923 and flourished running a series of shops. But again, Pirenne’s North Sea entrepots, with their canny traders bringing in goods from wide networks, forging a new world in a backwater, offer an interesting point of comparison.

One fascinating potential likeness is presented by the Mule. In the second half of Foundation and Empire, the Foundation is faced by an unprecedented challenge in the form of the Mule, a man whose unique mutations give him the power to change history in ways that Hari Seldon was unable to predict, threatening to undo the psychohistorian’s project. The Mule is a conqueror uninterested in resurrecting the old Galactic empire, which he sees as fundamentally corrupt. Instead he sweeps across planets, creating a new order in his wake. It’s tempting to ask if the Mule is Asimov’s take on Pirenne’s Muhammad, a singular figure reshaping history away from the old empire.

Intriguing as this possibility is, it’s probably not right. There’s nothing particularly religious about the Mule’s campaign as befits an analogy for a Prophet. Nor is there any grand vision as such. Instead I think the Mule is probably Asimov’s way of solving the biggest problem with the first few stories, which is that the omniscience of Hari Seldon makes each crisis feel anticlimactic. Throwing in a curveball like the Mule was a natural response to this. Also, Asimov may himself have been getting a little bored with the concept of Foundation by the end of 1945 when the Mule first appeared in Astounding and needed something to make things more interesting for him. Delayed by Asimov’s time in the army, the next Foundation story wasn’t published until January 1948, and shows at least as much the influence of tales from the Second World War as late antiquity. Campbell had to bully him into publishing the final story of the original trilogy two years later.

The Foundation Thesis

Looking for Henri Pirenne in Foundation is an exercise in supposition. Asimov’s major influences were elsewhere and it’s unclear how much exposure he had to Pirenne, or what he took from his ideas. He was writing a series of stories not a history, even an imagined one, and not even Gibbon could get in the way of his narrative. Yet the themes that the Belgian historian addressed are there, in the fertile mulch made from the things that Asimov had been reading as a child, forming the soil out of which Foundation grew. Asimov had some idea of who Henri Pirenne was, or he wouldn’t have used his name. But Pirenne’s ideas mixed with the other things the American writer had read to shape his vision of what the fall and rise of empire might look like.

In doing so, Asimov helped expand Pirenne’s legacy. Henri Pirenne has been a vastly important scholar. His name is familiar to nearly anyone who has ever studied early medieval history. But vastly more people have read that of the character of Lewis Pirenne without ever knowing of his real namesake. Just as the young Asimov in Brooklyn Public Library had his worldview shaped by the books he found, the Foundation series was a formative influence on a generation of SF readers and writers. In doing so he spread hints and echoes of Pirenne and his thesis far beyond what the historian could have ever imagined. 

It could be a dangerous thing to be Jewish in Christian Western Europe in the Middle Ages. In addition to being a religious minority, Jews were believed to have orchestrated the execution of Jesus Christ. Accusations that they ritually murdered children, or were responsible for the spread of disease, or that they were conspiring with outside enemies, were all too common. As a result, so too was violence against Jews, with the massacres conducted in the Rhineland by members of the First Crusade in 1096, or at York in 1190 being only the most extreme manifestation of a wider hostility. Even when tolerated, Jews were often legally confined to certain professions, such as money-lending, or forced to wear particular clothes to identify themselves. They were often prohibited from founding synagogues. Jews were also regularly driven from their homes. Edward I expelled them from England and Wales in 1290, while the Capetians expelled the Jews from France four times between 1182 and 1394.

But there were places where Jews had more protection and the Carolingian empire was one of them. This grant by Louis the Pious to a Jewish merchant from Zaragoza named Abraham offers us a small glimpse of what that looked like:

Formulae Imperiales, MGH Formulae, ed. K. Zeumer (Hanover, 1886), no. 52, p. 325.

Let it be known to all bishops, abbots, counts, vicars, hundredmen and other ministers of Ours that the Hebrew named Abraham, residing in the city of Zaragoza, came into Our presence and commended himself into Our hands, and We received him and keep him under the words of Our protection.

Therefore We have ordered this Our present authority to be made for him, through which We decree and command that neither you nor your underlings or successors presume at any time to trouble the aforesaid Jew on any illicit pretext whatsoever, nor to generate calumnies against him, nor to take away or diminish anything from his own goods or his business; and that you shall not exact tolls (teloneum) or requisition horses (paravederat) or lodging (mansionaticum) or exact pulveraticum or traffic tax (cespitaticum) or harbour dues (portaticum) or business dues (salutaticum) or trabaticum. Rather, let him be permitted to live in peace under Our protection and defence, and to serve the part of Our palace faithfully without any unlawful opposition from anyone

Let him also be permitted to live according to his own law, and to hire Christian men to do his work, except on Sundays and feast days.

And if a Christian should have suit or quarrel against him, let him bring three suitable Christian witnesses and three Hebrews similarly suitable as witnesses on his behalf, and with them vindicate his cause. And if he has a suit or quarrel against a Christian, let him summon suitable Christian witnesses in witness on his side, and with them prove his case against him. But if any of them, Christian or Jew, should wish to conceal the truth, let the count of that city, through a true and just inquiry, cause each one to speak the truth according to his own law.

Let him also be permitted to buy foreign slaves, and to sell them nowhere except within our empire.

But if any cases should arise or begin against him or his men, who are seen to rely on his legal protection, which cannot be settled within the [local] country without great and unjust expense, let them be suspended and kept until they come before Our presence, so that there they may receive a definitive sentence in accordance with the law. And so that this authority may be more truly believed and more diligently preserved by everyone, We have ordered it to be subscribed according to Our custom and sealed with Our bull.

The Carolingian empire was very far from a paradise for Jews. In an earlier post we discussed the rabid, conspiratorial antisemitism of Bishop Agobard of Lyon. The capture of Bordeaux by the vikings in 848 and the fall of Barcelona to the Umayyads in 852 were both ascribed to Jewish traitors by Prudentius of Troyes. Hincmar of Rheims blamed the death of Charles the Bald on his Jewish doctor. Louis the Pious seems to have seen the Jewish quarter in Aachen as a source of undesirable behaviour, sending his men there to drive out prostitutes from the neighbourhood.  If these demonstrate anti-Jewish prejudice, they also speak to the presence of Jews throughout the empire, often in positions at the centre of power. Agobard famously got nowhere in his campaign against the Jews, being blocked by Louis the Pious and his chief advisers, torpedoing what had once been a reasonably promising career in the process.

Louis employed Jews in his service and protected them and intellectuals such as Amalarius and Hrabanus Maurus consulted with learned Jews on Biblical history and interpretation. During Louis’ reign, Agobard made reference to an Everard who was the magister iudaeorum, which could be translated as ‘master of the Jews’. Whether he himself was Jewish and what exactly his role was is unclear, but it suggests some sort of official responsible for regulating Jewish life and possibly for acting on their behalf. Agobard also accused Louis of allowing Jews to build new synagogues, something forbidden under Roman law.

The grant translated above allows us to discuss some of these ideas. One thing that’s worth noting is that although it concerns a specific person, Abraham of Zaragoza, the text itself is a model intended to be reused. It was preserved in BnF MS Latin 2718, a manuscript written in about 830 in Tours, as part of a collection of similar documents from Louis the Pious’ chancery. (For a useful discussion of the manuscript see here). Whoever preserved it did so anticipating that it could be used for other analogous situations, indicating that Abraham was far from unusual. Indeed, in the same manuscript we can find Louis making very similar statements about the Jewish community of Lyons, including reference to a Rabbi Domatus. This was not an isolated act of patronage.

The thing that most interested me about this document when I first encountered it was Abraham’s place of origin. Despite Charlemagne’s best efforts to conquer it in 778, Zaragoza was part of al-Andalus, ruled by the Umayyads of Córdoba. It was the largest and most important city on the northeast frontier and a natural place for travellers to pass through. Part of what could have recommended Abraham to Louis was those connections with one of the Carolingians’ most powerful and dangerous neighbours. He might have been able to pass information to the emperor. In 822 Louis the Pious ordered a raid over the border and by 830 he was planning to support a revolt in Mérida by attacking Zaragoza.

A connection between Louis and Iberian Jews is also suggested by a charter of 839, in which he granted land to a Jewish family on the road between Barcelona and Girona. This continued into the next generation. Charles the Bald employed a Jew named Judas or Judacot as his agent in the Spanish March, using him as a messenger to Barcelona in 876. The horizons of Jews in the Carolingian world could stretch even further, as demonstrated by Isaac, who brought the elephant Abu al-ʿAbbas from Harun al-Rashid to Charlemagne (an incident that I’m sure would make a great subject for a book).

Abraham was a merchant, which might explain how he came to have an interest in the Franks despite being from Zaragoza. Not all Jews were involved in trade, and only a tiny minority were involved in international commerce. Merchants were probably the type of Jew most likely for the elite Christians writing our sources to encounter and therefore loom large in the historical record. Nor were all merchants Jewish, with Frisians and Italians also widely represented. Nonetheless there does seem to have been an association between Jews and mercantile affairs, possibly due to restrictions on other types of jobs they could carry out. Writing in the ninth century, Ibn Khurradadhbih commented on the network of Radhanite Jews that shipped goods from Francia to the Caliphate and then beyond to India.

Slave-trading was a big business in early medieval Europe and this was Abraham of Zaragoza’s line of work. Slavery was common in the Carolingian empire. The desperate could sell themselves or their family members into bondage, while criminals and debtors could also end up enslaved. The biggest source of commercial slaves came from outside the Frankish world, particularly from eastern Europe, where raiders acquired large numbers of captives for international markets. The biggest market for these slaves was in the Islamic world, both in the Maghreb and further east. As they were mostly pagan Slavs, the fate of these people was less likely to raise ethical qualms among Christians. The Carolingians frequently interfered to prevent Christians from being sold to non-Christians, particularly in Italy, as in the case of the pact between Emperor Lothar I and the Venetians in 840 alluded to here.

Many writers even had their doubts about the selling of pagans to non-Christians, believing that this deprived them of a chance to convert to the true faith and achieve salvation. In the reign of Charlemagne, Cathwulf and Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel both criticised the practice. So did the Council of Meaux-Paris in 845/846. This might explain why in his grant Louis the Pious forbade Abraham to sell slaves beyond the borders of the empire to make sure they stayed in the Christian world. That these objections would also apply to Jews owning slaves is probably the reason why the emperor made it clear that Abraham could purchase and sell slaves. Elsewhere he banned the converting of slaves belonging to Jews to Christianity. For their part, Jews were forbidden from proselytising, including converting their own slaves. Conversion to Judaism in general was forbidden, as demonstrated by the memorable incident when Deacon Bodo of the palace chapel in Aachen had to flee to the safety of Córdoba after changing both his faith and his name in 838.

How large the role of Jews in the slave trade was is a debated question. Chain gangs driven by Jews across Francia feature heavily in the tracts of Agobard of Lyons, but his antisemitism makes him a questionable witness. Frisians, Venetians and vikings played a large part in the commerce in people. That said, Jews show up often enough in the sources slave trade to suggest that they were reasonably common in the business, probably reflecting their wider participation in commerce. The inquiry into tolls at Raffelstetten from 903×906, translated here by friend of the blog, Jonathan Jarrett, declares that ‘merchants, that is, Jews and other traders, wherever they should come from in this same country or other countries, [should] pay the just toll as much for slaves as for other goods.’ While it’s clear that the author expects non-Jewish slave traders, it is interesting that he explicitly names them first. (Note that Jonathan interprets this passage differently to me).

One of the other things this text reveals is the bewildering array of taxes that a subject of Louis’ empire could face. I’ve done my best to identify them, but many defied me and others are educated guesses. Some such as mansionaticum, whereby imperial agents could demand lodging, were probably applicable to a wide section of society. Many of the others, like portaticum or harbour dues, seem more focused on mercantile activity. The Carolingians looked to extract their share from the commerce that ran through their lands. As a list it helps explain why so many merchants and institutions were concerned to get privileges exempting themselves, or pretended to be pilgrims rather than traders. It is interesting to compare this to the Raffelstetten inquest which offers more of a sense of how these taxes worked in practice on the Bavarian frontier in the early tenth century.  Similar relief from taxation was offered to Christian merchants upon occasion, so Abraham does not seem to have been given special treatment here because of his faith.

Among the fascinating details of the grant is the discussion of law. Jews were not only entitled to but expected to be able to represent themselves and bear witness in court. Louis shows concern to make sure that representatives of both the Jewish and Christian communities were present in cross-denominational legal disputes. That the litigants were required to call upon multiple witnesses of a different faith might suggest a reasonable amount of mixing across confessional lines.

The reference to Abraham being allowed ‘to live according to his own law’ is interesting. This could be a way of saying he should be allowed to practice his beliefs. In the context of the passage there might be a legal reading. Elsewhere I’ve discussed instances of people being allowed to use different laws depending on their nationality. But if Abraham wasn’t under Salian Frankish law, what law did he follow? It was unlikely to be Gothic law. Under Visigothic legislation, Jews were legally counted as Romans, so that would be the most probable alternative legal category. 

Jewish life in the Frankish world was far from straightforward. They were a minority within a Christian empire not normally tolerant of religious difference. Agobard was the loudest but far from the only hater of Jews. Yet, as Louis makes clear at the end of the grant, the might of the Carolingian dynasty was wielded as much for the protection of Jews as for their oppression. That support created a relatively safe harbour for the Jewish people of the empire. But it was also important for the Frankish kingdoms as a whole. Jewish merchants connected the Franks to the wider world; Jewish scholars connected them to their past and to their past. It was an uneasy, unequal relationship, but the safety it provided was very real.

Some articles are not written from the most noble of motives. When dealing with the accession of the Capetians, there are a few old chestnuts which, simply, get on my nerves. I have already complained about one of them on this blog, which is when historians seriously take the speech which the historian Richer of Saint-Remi gives Archbishop Adalbero of Rheims about why Hugh Capet should be king, despite every argument Adalbero gives being diametrically opposed to his own political practice. Another one is a statement from the end of the reign of King Lothar, found in the letters of Gerbert of Aurillac, that it is Hugh Capet, not Lothar, who really rules the kingdom. You will find this one quoted all over the place, even though it’s not just polemic, it’s bad polemic that didn’t convince its hearers.

Anyway, last summer I was on holiday in France and read a recent book on the Capetians which went through all of these chestnuts at a bracing pace. So, on the train ride home, I got out my laptop and wrote up a little piece explaining why these particular snippets should not be taken at face value and requesting that people stop doing so, and sent it off to Reading Medieval Studies. The aim, quite bluntly, was to have something on the matter I can cite myself when the topic comes up in passing down the line. That’s not to say this isn’t a valuable work of scholarship in its own small way – as we wait for the last Carolingians to get a full historical reassessment, anything which contributes to kicking out some of the more rotten planks from the old structure is worthwhile, and I’m particularly pround of the bit on Gerbert’s letters in that regard.

The article is not yet online – apparently Reading Medieval Studies only digitises its issues after a year. Nonetheless, in addition to the physical copy (which costs £20 if you’d like to support the journal yourself), they have also kindly sent me a PDF of the article which you can email me about if this tickles your fancy. The full citation is:

Fraser McNair, ‘The Accession of Hugh Capet: Two Studies in Politics and Texts’, Reading Medieval Studies 51 (2025), pp. 109-23.

The gritty details: Remarkably un-gritty, especially compared to last time. As I say, I wrote this up more-or-less in one go on a long train ride in summer 2024, albeit both of the case studies had been floating around in older draft files and blog posts for a bit. However, I wasn’t satisfied with the conclusion of the first draft, so the comments from the beta readers were especially useful in pushing it over the finish line, and I’d like to extend particular thanks to Jason Glenn, whose suggestions were the key needed to unlock a finished version. I submitted it in October 2024. The next I heard was August of this year. It turned out that the reviewers had accepted it without any revisions, so they sent me some tweaks for SPAG which I sent back same day. After that, the article went straight through production and I got my copy last week. Thanks to the staff at RMS for making it such a smooth process!