Strategy is a not a word not often used in connection with early medieval warfare ,which is often seen as mere feud or the gathering of loot. This was strongly reinforced by the widespread attitude that military history was a fit subject only for military academies. Only recently has it been recognised that war in this period was the subject of thought, care and calculation. Moreover, early medieval sources are relatively scarce and often pose difficulties of interpretation. And armies had no continuous institutional life of the kind we associate with the formation of strategic ideas. Nor were kings able to impose a monopoly of violence on their followers, for early medieval states were fragile and highly dependent upon the accidents of individual ability. The armies which were gathered were not unitary, but assemblages of diverse elements whose political relation to the sovereign was problematic. But although writing about strategy poses challenges, it is evident that military commanders in this period were not mere bloodthirsty brutes. An army, even a small one, represented a huge financial and political investment whose raising could only be justified by some substantial purpose. But the nature of medieval strategy was conditioned by the political structures which created it. A world where dynastic continuity and political stability were closely intertwined, and where kings were rulers of peoples rather than territories, gave birth to a very different kind of strategic outlook from our own.

This chapter discusses two Middle English Charlemagne romances, The Siege of Milan and The Sultan of Babylon, to illuminate post-1291 anxieties about royal politics, Christian infighting, and God’s will and support. It brings these romances into conversation with two main bodies of literary and historical material. The first consists of writings that polemically engage with the question of whether English and French kings should prioritize domestic affairs or crusading activity. The second consists of poems, letters, and chronicles that, written by Christians following crusading defeats, feature wrathful rebukes of God and threats of conversion to Islam. I draw on this latter corpus to offer a new interpretation of the literary motif of the “afflicted Muslim” who vents his military frustration on his “gods,” arguing that such depictions should be understood as projections of Latin Christian anxieties about God’s lack of support to the crusading enterprise.

The third chapter delivers a reassessment of the cult of Charlemagne from his death in 814 to Frederick Barbarossa’s accession in 1152. The use of local Aquensian and regional Lotharingian material shows that the widely known developments of the memory of Charlemagne had a particular regional and unique local tendency. Sulovsky’s focus in this chapter is on the Karlsdekret, a forgery pretending to be Charlemagne’s foundation charter for the city and convent of Aachen. Where historians previously dated it to before about 1147, Sulovsky affirms that the forged seal of Charlemagne, the Karlssiegel, which dates to the late 1120s, must have been impressed on the original copy of the forgery. Thus, the forgery was an imitation of an imperial charter, and it was designed to impress Lothar III in 1127. This small find redates and reshapes all of what we know about the rise of the cult of Charlemagne in crusade-era Europe. Aachen had a particular stake in shaping the memory of its most famous patron, but it also wielded an influence over it as it contained his tomb.

In the fourth chapter, Sulovsky turns to the supposedly imperial saints’ cults of the 1160s: the Three Kings and Saint Charlemagne. The chapter demonstrates that the cult of the Magi was unconnected to the emperor. Rather, the agency of Rainald of Dassel in bringing the Magi to Cologne was related to his personal suffering from the Milanese while he was imperial legate in their city on the eve of Epiphany (= Three Kings’ Day). As this was liturgically already the vigils of Epiphany, and as Rainald was trapped in the imperial palace next to the saintly bodies before he barely escaped, he translated the Magi to honour his protectors. This debunks the Kulturkampf-inspired theory that the purpose of worshipping the holy kings who adored Christ long before the apostles were called would help achieve a sacral independence of the Empire from the Papacy. On the other hand, the cult of Saint Charlemagne is shown to have been accepted at the imperial court as a part of a plan to mend the Alexandrine schism by launching an Anglo-Franco-German crusade, which was thought of as an imitation of Charlemagne’s exploits in the east.

This chapter establishes the political and cultural context for what follows through an examination of the reign of Pope Leo III (795–816) and his alliance with the Franks, notably Charlemagne, whom he crowned as Roman emperor on 25 December 800. A primary focus is the political and other messages implicit or explicit in the construction and decoration of new reception spaces at the Lateran patriarchate and Saint Peter’s, aimed at reinforcing the new role of the papacy in temporal as well as spiritual matters, and the mosaic decorations for which Leo was responsible in the churches of Santa Susanna and Santi Nereo ed Achilleo. An analysis is provided of the exceptionally detailed list of papal gifts to Roman churches, known as the ‘Donation of 807’, and the chapter concludes with an analysis of the possible sources of papal wealth necessary to make such extravagant largesse possible.

This chapter introduces the formulas as a source genre and in particular the manuscript and formula collection that occupies the center of this study: Paris, BNF ms. lat. 2123 and the formulas from Flavigny. It also introduces the concepts “early medieval Europe” and “early medieval laity,” in order to frame the questions that shape the book. The chapter briefly describes how the category “lay” even came to exist; that is, how and when a category “clerical” distilled out of late and post-Roman Christian society and came by the Carolingian period to separate clergy and monks from laypeople. From there it moves into what we know about how lay people lived their lives in post-Roman and early medieval Frankish Europe, and what remains unknown that makes it worth writing a new book about. The chapter then sets the Flavigny formulas in the context of the other Carolingian formula collections, presenting it (and them) as a gateway into a different world. Finally, the chapter briefly outlines the steps we need to open the gate and to understand what we see on the other side, and the topics we will explore when we get there.

This chapter analyzes the earliest medieval evidence for the position of advocate. It argues that, rather than relying on top-down sources such as Frankish legal texts (capitularies) and the canons of Church councils, we need to focus on what named advocates are described as doing in eighth- and early ninth-century sources. Taking this approach, it demonstrates that advocates first emerged in the Frankish empire in the mid-eighth century and then proliferated rapidly under Charlemagne. Contrary to the standard argument that these Carolingian advocates were official, legal representatives for ecclesiastics at court, the chapter contends that – from the beginning – advocates were closely tied to the local territorial interests of monasteries and churches and frequently pushed the limits of their formal responsibilities.

Argues that the establishment of ecological harmony and creation of weedless landscapes were a political responsibility, as well as a justification for monarchical rule, in Carolingian times.

The three systems identified at the end of the previous chapter are all represented in the Carolingian and post-Carolingian period. The ‘inclusive’ system was renewed in the post-Carolingian period by the Decretum of Burchard. This left out a lot of the early papal jurisprudence studied in PJc.400. Secondly, produced over a century before Burchard’s Decretum and surviving in a multitude of manuscripts, there was the Pseudo-Isidorian corpus, consisting of conciliar canons and papal decretals, with boundaries closed against other genres of religious writings. It included all the papal material studied in PJc.400, but also material that would in a later period be classed as theology rather than canon law. More or less exclusive of such material, thirdly, were the Dacheriana, which included a non-trivial proportion of early papal jurisprudence, and the Dionysio-Hadriana, which was full of papal law. Charlemagne’s Admonitio generalis may be classified with them. It transmits only a modest amount of early papal jurisprudence, but this is attributed explicitly to the popes in question, and marked off, together with the conciliar canons, from the rest of his reform programme.

The reign of the caliph Harun al-Rashid is entwined with history and legend. This chapter disentangles the influences of the Arabian Nights and Orientalism on this caliph's biography, and explores his pursuit of a centralizing policy that culminated with the overthrow of the Barmakid ministers and the establishment of his base in Raqqa. The caliphate of al-Rashid evokes a wide range of themes dealing with international trade, Byzantine war, foreign embassies to Charlemagne, and a contentious plan for caliphal succession between his sons, al-Amin and al-Ma'mun.In spite of a civil war, the caliphate recovers under al-Ma'mun and goes on to experience an age of scientific englightenment sparked by the famous Greek to Arabic translation movement centered on classical texts. Al-Ma'mun's interest in philosophy, and his support for the rationalizing sect of the Mu'tazila, however, culminates with a backlash from traditionalist scholars and a standoff in the episode known as the Mihna.

The wedding of Francesco de’Medici and Giovanna of Austria was accompanied by processions and art that celebrated Florence’s history and its cultural and artistic achievements. Vincenzio Borghini and Giorgio Vasari worked with Duke Cosimo on the program. New paintings on Florentine history in the Palazzo Vecchio led Girolamo Mei to write a treatisethat challenged Borghini’s assessment of the city’s history, using evidence that included the writings of Annius of Viterbo. They exchanged letters that raised issues about the use of ruins and other non-textual evidence. Borghini went on to write Discorsi on Florence’s history and traditions that also explored methods of studying the past; he wrote on medieval coinage, on families and family crests, the nature of nobility, and more. Borghini argued that traditions and social practices develop and change like languages. Many typically Florentine customs, he suggested, developed in parallel with the formation of the city’s government in the thirteenth century.

Surveys political events in the second half of the eighth century as Rome, in the face of continued Lombard attacks, shifts its political ties from the emperor in Constantinople to the Franks, culminating with the coronation of the Frankish king Charlemagne as Roman ‘emperor’ in December 800