The Making of Charlemagne's Europe (768-814)
Lead Research Organisation:
King's College London
Department Name: History
Abstract
The reign of Charlemagne (768-814) saw the incorporation of most continental Western regions into the Frankish empire, resulting in the establishment of new forms of rule and a new kind of political culture, with far-reaching implications for later European history. 'The Making of Charlemagne's Europe' project is intended to document this change not simply from the perspective of central Frankish authority and the rarefied realm of high politics, but on the ground and in the localities, in an effort to grasp its practical and material impact.
The only way to achieve this is to look to the only type of source capable of conveying information at both ends of the scale, from the royal to the local: documents known as charters. Some of these, termed diplomas by modern scholars, were issued by rulers, but the vast majority, termed private charters, were issued by non-royal persons, including some churchmen, but more often laypeople. Whereas narrative sources, such as annals, hardly ever mention anyone outside the immediate entourage of the king, charters allow access, often of a very direct and personal kind, to broader sections of the population from regional elites to local peasant landowners.
Land transactions were crucial in forming and maintaining relationships between institutions, families and individuals, and therefore belong in the social and political realm as much as in that of economic history. The predominance of monastic archives gives a distinctly ecclesiastical slant to the surviving record, but this makes it no less illuminating: monasteries, far from being withdrawn from politics, were the front-line representatives of Carolingian power as well as some of its main beneficiaries, and temporary grants from church and monastic lands were an important way of rewarding followers and sustaining secular rule.
Charlemagne's reign corresponds to an exceptional peak in the documentary record, with some 4,500 surviving documents - more than for any other early medieval reign. Though their distribution is patchy, charters have been preserved from all the main regions of Charlemagne's empire. Bringing them together will allow genuine cross-regional comparison, something which has never been done before in a systematic way. This will give the project the combination of a high level of precision in local detail and a bird's eye view of the whole empire required to answer some of the most important questions related to Charlemagne's empire: above all, what made it an empire after the initial stage of conquest? What impact did it have on the ground?
The project will seek to answer these questions through the creation of a database extracting information from all surviving documentary sources from the reign of Charlemagne, in a fully relational, searchable format. This will make this material comparable in a way that simply reproducing the Latin text would not. It will not only facilitate the exploration of personal and political networks for particular individuals, but also bring to light more complex patterns through the development of mapping and statistical tools, to allow questioning on more structural lines (to answer questions such as, for example: were there regional differences in the types or the extent of property transacted by women?). We will therefore be able to test and evaluate the issue of regional difference with far greater rigour than has so far been possible.
Beyond serving our own research objectives, the database will also constitute a lasting resource open to many different avenues of questioning. It will be accessible, online and for free, to anyone interested, whether academics, graduate or undergraduate students, A-level pupils or members of the public. As well as answering crucial questions on the nature of empire-building in the early middle ages, it will be a genuinely democratic resource, presenting in immediately usable form an extraordinarily rich and rewarding type of material.
The only way to achieve this is to look to the only type of source capable of conveying information at both ends of the scale, from the royal to the local: documents known as charters. Some of these, termed diplomas by modern scholars, were issued by rulers, but the vast majority, termed private charters, were issued by non-royal persons, including some churchmen, but more often laypeople. Whereas narrative sources, such as annals, hardly ever mention anyone outside the immediate entourage of the king, charters allow access, often of a very direct and personal kind, to broader sections of the population from regional elites to local peasant landowners.
Land transactions were crucial in forming and maintaining relationships between institutions, families and individuals, and therefore belong in the social and political realm as much as in that of economic history. The predominance of monastic archives gives a distinctly ecclesiastical slant to the surviving record, but this makes it no less illuminating: monasteries, far from being withdrawn from politics, were the front-line representatives of Carolingian power as well as some of its main beneficiaries, and temporary grants from church and monastic lands were an important way of rewarding followers and sustaining secular rule.
Charlemagne's reign corresponds to an exceptional peak in the documentary record, with some 4,500 surviving documents - more than for any other early medieval reign. Though their distribution is patchy, charters have been preserved from all the main regions of Charlemagne's empire. Bringing them together will allow genuine cross-regional comparison, something which has never been done before in a systematic way. This will give the project the combination of a high level of precision in local detail and a bird's eye view of the whole empire required to answer some of the most important questions related to Charlemagne's empire: above all, what made it an empire after the initial stage of conquest? What impact did it have on the ground?
The project will seek to answer these questions through the creation of a database extracting information from all surviving documentary sources from the reign of Charlemagne, in a fully relational, searchable format. This will make this material comparable in a way that simply reproducing the Latin text would not. It will not only facilitate the exploration of personal and political networks for particular individuals, but also bring to light more complex patterns through the development of mapping and statistical tools, to allow questioning on more structural lines (to answer questions such as, for example: were there regional differences in the types or the extent of property transacted by women?). We will therefore be able to test and evaluate the issue of regional difference with far greater rigour than has so far been possible.
Beyond serving our own research objectives, the database will also constitute a lasting resource open to many different avenues of questioning. It will be accessible, online and for free, to anyone interested, whether academics, graduate or undergraduate students, A-level pupils or members of the public. As well as answering crucial questions on the nature of empire-building in the early middle ages, it will be a genuinely democratic resource, presenting in immediately usable form an extraordinarily rich and rewarding type of material.
Planned Impact
The constituencies which will potentially benefit from the project include: teachers and students (taught graduates, undergraduates, A-level); PhD students; libraries; museums; media (broadcast and web); publishers (books, history magazines); and the general public. Charlemagne stands at the heart of a remarkable convergence of interests from academics and the wider public. No other medieval ruler has been the subject of as many biographies, both academic and popular: the last decade alone gave us ten books dedicated to his reign. He is even part of the school curriculum (OCR, A2 module 2587). Charters and documents might seem like a challenging source, but recent projects funded by the AHRC, such as the Fine Rolls project, show that this does not preclude engagement beyond academia. A notable trend of public engagement with history is the desire to connect, beyond the wider political and military narrative, with the life experiences of ordinary people and their fates. Charters offer a particularly fruitful way of linking the two: while illuminating the empire-building for which Charlemagne is so well known, they also document 'ordinary' people far better than any other source. The project will link these two strands of engagement with history in the following ways:
- Feeding into commemorative literature, exhibitions and broadcasts. Public interest in Charlemagne is certain to grow with the imminent 1200th anniversary of his death in 2014, when the project is set to be completed. The launch of the project would coincide with events in Britain and in other European countries (books, museum exhibitions, magazine articles and television programmes). The project includes a Knowledge Transfer Advisory Group which will work to ensure the project shares in this heightened level of exposure and contributes positively and appropriately to media and exhibition content. We will use our existing links with the British Museum and the British Library to achieve this, and will also target magazines such as BBC History and History Today.
- Creating a genuinely free and democratic resource for all. The resource will be accessible online and for free. Every effort will be made to ensure it is easy to use. All entries will be in English, and where translation would be impossible or misleading, as in the case of technical terminology, Latin words will be linked to a glossary. Apart from the glossary, the project will include other supporting materials intended for non-specialists: a methodological introduction, explaining how to use this data and what sorts of question it can answer; a general introduction to the reign of Charlemagne and its major developments (the empire-wide context for the regional and local developments traceable in the charters); and, where known, short biographies of key people. The aim throughout will be for maximum transparency and ease of access. Users will be encouraged to submit their own short studies or biographies for 'feature of the month' entries, which have proved so successful in engaging the public in the case of the Fine Rolls project. The resource will be useful to prospective PhD students, by giving them a much more coherent basis on which to formulate research topics; to libraries, by offering them a simple resource capable of bringing together bibliographies and original materials for the benefit of their users, and (in European countries) a guide to their own materials; and to museum curators, by offering them a rich geographical context for displayed artwork, manuscripts and artefacts.
- Contributing pedagogic resources. We will use the expertise of the KTAG to ensure that resources for teaching are relevant and pitched correctly. The success of published sourcebooks and translations of full texts linked with the reign of Charlemagne shows a genuine demand for improved accessibility. The project would
- Feeding into commemorative literature, exhibitions and broadcasts. Public interest in Charlemagne is certain to grow with the imminent 1200th anniversary of his death in 2014, when the project is set to be completed. The launch of the project would coincide with events in Britain and in other European countries (books, museum exhibitions, magazine articles and television programmes). The project includes a Knowledge Transfer Advisory Group which will work to ensure the project shares in this heightened level of exposure and contributes positively and appropriately to media and exhibition content. We will use our existing links with the British Museum and the British Library to achieve this, and will also target magazines such as BBC History and History Today.
- Creating a genuinely free and democratic resource for all. The resource will be accessible online and for free. Every effort will be made to ensure it is easy to use. All entries will be in English, and where translation would be impossible or misleading, as in the case of technical terminology, Latin words will be linked to a glossary. Apart from the glossary, the project will include other supporting materials intended for non-specialists: a methodological introduction, explaining how to use this data and what sorts of question it can answer; a general introduction to the reign of Charlemagne and its major developments (the empire-wide context for the regional and local developments traceable in the charters); and, where known, short biographies of key people. The aim throughout will be for maximum transparency and ease of access. Users will be encouraged to submit their own short studies or biographies for 'feature of the month' entries, which have proved so successful in engaging the public in the case of the Fine Rolls project. The resource will be useful to prospective PhD students, by giving them a much more coherent basis on which to formulate research topics; to libraries, by offering them a simple resource capable of bringing together bibliographies and original materials for the benefit of their users, and (in European countries) a guide to their own materials; and to museum curators, by offering them a rich geographical context for displayed artwork, manuscripts and artefacts.
- Contributing pedagogic resources. We will use the expertise of the KTAG to ensure that resources for teaching are relevant and pitched correctly. The success of published sourcebooks and translations of full texts linked with the reign of Charlemagne shows a genuine demand for improved accessibility. The project would
Publications
Bradley J
(2019)
Exploring a Model for the Semantics of Medieval Legal Charters
in International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing
Title | concert: A Requiem Mass for Charlemagne |
Description | This concert took place at the end of the half-day conference on 'Charlemagne: The First 1200 Years' (28 January 2014). The King's College London choir learned requiem music from the age of Charlemagne and performed it for the public in the College Chapel. |
Type Of Art | Performance (Music, Dance, Drama, etc) |
Year Produced | 2014 |
Impact | The performance was recorded and put up on the web. It is the only example of performed ninth-century music available freely on the internet. |
URL | http://charlemagneseurope.ac.uk/concert-a-requiem-mass-for-charlemagne/ |
Description | The Making of Charlemagne's Europe project results in a website and freely searchable database, offering a single, unified framework for the extraction of prosopographical and socio-economic data found in early medieval legal documents. This was applied to legal documents surviving from the reign of Charlemagne (25 September 768 to 28 January 814 AD), a time of significant change in European geopolitics with profound implications for patterns of property transfer. The project offers a common framework capable of extracting and comparing the data contained within legal documents, while still, at the same time, allowing users to identify and control for the most significant distortions typically affecting this material (such as modes of transmission, e.g. via an original or a later copy). This makes an important contribution to a structured data approach to medieval charter materials. |
Exploitation Route | The database is intended for further use by students and historians of the Carolingian empire as a way of testing initial hypotheses against the shape of the surviving material. This use can apply to many different types of historical research (political, social, economic or cultural). The form of the database itself, and its ability to absorb materials from extremely varied legal traditions, means that it is open to being exploited ready-made for other medieval charters projects. The framework of the database is available for free for any researcher wishing to use it for their own purposes. For instance, more data is currently being input by researchers at the University of Padua, who got funding from the Italian government to continue entering data into its Italian section. |
Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) Education |
URL | http://www.charlemagneseurope.ac.uk/ |
Description | The database has been used in classrooms as a way of teaching students about Europe in the age of Charlemagne as well as to demonstrate the potential of digital humanities tools. For instance, the project has been used as a case study and as the basis for two sample lesson plans on the American Historical Association blog on digital pedagogy ("rethinking modern assumptions about property values", https://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/teaching-resources-for-historians/teaching-with-dighist/rethinking-modern-assumptions-about-property-value-with-mapping-charlemagnes-europe and "exploring charters", https://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/teaching-resources-for-historians/teaching-with-dighist/exploring-connections-between-charters-with-mapping-charlemagnes-europe). It has also been used as a resource in individual schools internationally (e.g. Canberra Girls Grammar School). The AHA digital history blog describes it as "a gold mine for teachers looking to introduce students to the Early Middle Ages" (http://blog.historians.org/2017/02/using-charters-to-teach-medieval-history/). The usability of the database in classrooms at school and undergraduate level is a result of significant efforts to make the contents accessible to non-specialists, by using English throughout (while allowing cross-referencing with Latin terms), and also by including extensive guidance materials (e.g. "Early Medieval Charters: A Guide for Students"). |
First Year Of Impact | 2016 |
Sector | Education |
Impact Types | Cultural |
Title | Charlemagne database |
Description | This uses a single, unified database framework for the extraction of prosopographical and socio-economic data found in early medieval legal documents and applies it to legal documents surviving from the reign of Charlemagne (25 September 768 to 28 January 814 AD). |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2015 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
Impact | Taken up by University of Padua to analyse data from Carolingian Italian archival materials. |
URL | http://www.charlemagneseurope.ac.uk/browse/ |
Description | University of Padua |
Organisation | University of Padova |
Country | Italy |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | The University of Padua is using the database framework devised as part of our project in order to enter more data drawn from archival materials from Carolingian Italy. |
Collaborator Contribution | The University of Padua has agreed to share the data they are entering with us, so that users of our database will be able to benefit from it. |
Impact | The collaboration has contributed further information to the database on the project website. |
Start Year | 2017 |
Description | 'Charlemagne's Web: Building an Early Medieval Charter Database', talk at Bucks Historical Association |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
Results and Impact | This was an invited talk by Dr Rachel Stone to the Buckinghamshire Historical Association branch. The database was presented and sparked questions and discussion from the audience afterwards. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
URL | http://buckshistoricalassociation.org.uk/talks/ |
Description | Digital Humanities conference |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Presentation entitled 'Exploring a model for the semantics of medieval legal charters' delivered at digital humanities conference 'A digital perspective on ancient and fictional worlds' by Dr John Bradley, Co-I on the project. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
URL | https://www.infoclio.ch/sites/default/files/standard_page/Dupont2.pdf |
Description | Fathers and Sons conference |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | Presentation "Fathers and sons in a charter database: statistics and stories" delivered at session "Fathers and Families in Early Medieval Charters" at the Leeds International Medieval Congress 2015, exploiting materials from the project database. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
URL | https://www.slideshare.net/KarolusMagnus/fathers-and-sons-in-a-charter-database-statistics-and-stori... |
Description | Medieval Studies in the Digital Age seminar at the University of Leeds |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | Invited presentation at the Medieval Studies in the Digital Age seminar at the University of Leeds, entitled 'Bits of charters: putting Carolingian charters into a database', focusing on our creation of data structures for the database, especially for place names and on the use of faceted browsing. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
URL | https://www.slideshare.net/KarolusMagnus/bits-of-charters |
Description | Unknown unknowns: using "The Making of Charlemagne's Europe" database for social history research |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | This was a paper presented at the Leeds International Medieval Congress in 2017 by Dr Rachel Stone. The talk sparked questions and discussions afterwards and raised the profile of the project before an international audience. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
URL | https://imc.leeds.ac.uk/dbsql02/AQueryServlet?*id=30&*formId=30&*context=IMC&chosenPaperId=NA&sessio... |
Description | conference and concert (Charlemagne: the first 1200 years) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
Results and Impact | We held a half-day conference open to the public on the day of the 1200th anniversary of Charlemagne's death (28 January 2014). This featured talks by Jinty Nelson (KCL), Michael Wood (MayaVision), Gareth Williams (British Museum) and Leslie Webster (British Museum). The conference was followed by a public concert featuring music associated with the requiem mass from the ninth century, performed by members of the King's College London choir. The aim was to raise interest in Charlemagne and his cultural setting, and discuss what sort of role he plays in imagining a common past for Europe. Around 160 people attended, including about 35 A-level pupils. The talks were followed by a general discussion on Charlemagne's importance, and many questions from academics who attended, the general public and school pupils. We also used this as an occasion to publicise the upcoming database of Charlemagne's charters which will constitute the chief research output of the project. Some of the papers, discussion and the concert have now been put up on the project website. The school teachers who attended said that they would use the materials discussed during the conference in their teaching, and that they would be interested in using the database with their pupils as well. The conference also generated interest among the general public who attended. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
URL | http://www.charlemagneseurope.ac.uk/charlemagne-the-first-1200-years/ |
Description | conference panel (Kalamazoo International Congress on Medieval Studies 2014) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
Results and Impact | The panel ('New Approaches to Carolingian Charters') was intended to raise awareness of our project among a US audience. A member of the project team (Dr Rachel Stone) organised the panel, and invited two scholars to bring their own ideas about how to use a database of this kind for their own research, and the problems and possibilities involved. The talk generated a lot of interest in the project. Several people expressed in interest in finding out more about the database and to use it for their own research once it was made public. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
URL | http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1051&context=medieval_cong_archive |
Description | conference paper (Freiburg 2013) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
Results and Impact | A member of the project team, Dr Sören Kaschke, presented the project at a conference in Freiburg on personal names ('Personen und Namen in der Datenbank'). The aim was to see how far our database could be optimised to include the interests of philologists with a particular expertise in personal naming during the early middle ages. There were many questions, and the overall reception was very positive. Philologists present said they would use our database to help with their research. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |
URL | http://www.qucosa.de/fileadmin/data/qucosa/documents/15085/13_Patzold_FINAL-WEB.pdf |
Description | conference paper (Leeds International Medieval Colloquium 2013) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
Results and Impact | The talk, given by Dr Rachel Stone, a member of the project team, discussed the problems and possibilities associated with using charter databases as a resource for network analysis. The talk generated many questions. The discussion sparked off a collaboration with Dr Joan Vilaseca, who is currently working on social network analysis of Catalan charters. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |
URL | https://imc.leeds.ac.uk/dbsql02/AQueryServlet?*id=30&*formId=30&*context=IMC&chosenPaperId=NA&sessio... |
Description | conference paper (Leeds International Medieval Congress 2014) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
Results and Impact | A member of the project team, Dr Sören Kaschke, presented the project as part of a session exploring the value of charter databases for early medieval history. The talk generated a lively discussion and many questions. Several members of the audience volunteered to help test out the database. The other participant in the session also said that our talk had suggested to him new possibilities for how to approach database-building. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
URL | https://imc.leeds.ac.uk/dbsql02/AQueryServlet?*id=30&*formId=30&*context=IMC&chosenPaperId=NA&sessio... |
Description | conference paper (Lincoln 2014) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
Results and Impact | Dr Rachel Stone, a member of the project team, gave a presentation on priests based on the information already contained in our database. The talk stimulated discussion and questions afterwards. Historians working on priests' families declared their intention to use our database for their own research purposes. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
URL | https://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/media/universityoflincoln/adminimages/events/Middle,Ages,Final,Progra... |
Description | conference paper (Tübingen 2014) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
Results and Impact | This paper was delivered at a conference on "Namen und Geschichte in der Zeit der Einnamigkeit (ca. 400-1100)" (Tübingen). The talk sparked questions and discussion afterwards. Names specialists expressed great interest in our database's ability to plot personal naming practices geographically, and said they would use it for their own research. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
URL | http://www.onomastikblog.de/ankuendigungen/namen_und_geschichte_in_der_zeit_der_einnamigkeit_ca_400_... |
Description | round table (Leeds International Medieval Congress 2013) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
Results and Impact | We presented our database project as part of a round table organised in collaboration with 'Nomen et Gens' (another database project based in Tübingen, Germany). The talk sparked a lot of questions and discussion, especially in relation to methodology. Many people volunteered to try out a beta version of the database once the user interface became more developed. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |
URL | https://imc.leeds.ac.uk/dbsql02/AQueryServlet?*id=30&*formId=30&*context=IMC&chosenPaperId=NA&sessio... |
Description | round table (Leeds International Medieval Congress 2014) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
Results and Impact | The round table included a demonstration of the working version of the user interface. The talk attracted many questions and expressions of interest. Several people commented that our demonstration would help them in devising charter databases of their own. Two postgraduate students volunteered to help out and input data, and we also got a further invitation to come and give a talk at a digital humanities seminar (to be held in Leeds, February 2015). |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
URL | https://imc.leeds.ac.uk/dbsql02/AQueryServlet?*id=30&*formId=30&*context=IMC&chosenPaperId=NA&sessio... |