Herstory: Beyond Baby-Making - The Role of Carolingian Queens

By Kim Rendfeld

Although seldom mentioned in annals, queens in Carolingian era (eighth and ninth century Francia) had a much more important role than a casual 21st-century observer might think.

If the king did not already have heirs, the queen’s primary role was to produce healthy sons to inherit the realm, and some kings tried to divorce wives unable to bear children. My main characters’ inability to conceive becomes a point of contention in my first novel, The Cross and the Dragon. (Paradoxically, a Carolingian king would not want too many sons born in wedlock because each one of them would expect kingdom when his father died, and the realm would not pass to the next generation intact.)

Yet a queen’s responsibilities went beyond baby-making, and if the question of heirs was already settled, she could have tremendous influence.

The ninth-century treatise The Government of the Palace says the queen’s role is “to release the king from all domestic and palace cares, leaving him free to turn his mind to the state of his realm.”

This does not mean the queen is relegated to the role of housewife. In the Middle Ages, the personal and political were intertwined. The queen was the guardian of the treasury, and she controlled access to her husband. The courtier and scholar Alcuin wrote to the queen to find out where Charlemagne was spending the winter.

When houseguests were foreign dignitaries, royal hospitality was key to international relations. Hospitality was more than just showing good manners. Frankish royalty would want their guests to report to their own rulers that the palace was beautiful and sturdy, the baths were hot, the table was laden, the host well dressed, and the guards and servants well cared for. All signs of power, important to project even to one’s own allies whose support could shift.

Of course, this time period was hardly ideal for women. Girls as young as 12 or 13 were considered marriageable and their families chose their husbands. Among aristocrats, marriage was most often for political reasons. Canon law gave women the right to consent to a marriage at age 15 or 16, but that could be beaten or starved out of them.

However, the reason for Women’s History Month and for posts like these is that too often women are portrayed only as victims and not as full human beings who could influence events around them and contribute to their societies. Carolingian queens certainly did both.

Illustrations are from Costumes of All Nations (1882).

Sources

Women at the Court of Charlemagne, Janet Nelson

Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne, Pierre Riché (translated by Jo Ann McNamara)

**An Excerpt from The Ashes of Heaven's Pillar**

"What are the furs the girl is holding?" Hildegard asked.

"Rabbit, my queen."

"Child, bring them to me. Oh, she holds them up without being asked. She is a good servant, Ragenard, and will fetch a good price should you want to sell her."

Sunwynn stood rigid and trembling. Leova swayed and steadied herself. She turned and fixed her gazed on Ragenard's face. For a moment, they locked eyes.

"Thank you, my lady queen," he said, "the girl is a good servant, and if you run your hand over the rabbit furs she is holding, you will find they are of the finest quality."

Fury rose from Leova's gorge, causing her hands to shake under the furs. Her child could be lost to her because of a Frank's whim!

Stroking the rabbit furs, Hildegard gazed at her husband across the room, smiled, and nodded as if to herself. "I want the rabbit furs, some leather, and the bolts of linen and wool. I'll pay two hundred dernier."

"My lady queen, they are worth more than that. Let the linen flow between your fingers; feel the fine texture of the wool. They are worth two hundred fifty dernier."

"I must be a good wife and spend my husband's treasure wisely. Two hundred twenty-five."

"You are a good wife and a good queen. Two hundred twenty-five it is." He bowed.

Relief washed through Leova. She barely noticed the clerk scribbling on the wax tablet. Sunwynn would stay with her—for now.

 Kim Rendfeld is the author of two novels set in 8th century Francia: The Cross and the Dragon, a tale of love set amid wars and blood feuds, and The Ashes of Heaven’s Pillar, about a peasant going to great lengths to protect her children. Her work in progress, Queen of the Darkest Hour, features Fastrada, Charlemagne’s influential fourth wife. Connect with Kim on her website (kimrendfeld.com), her blog (kimrendfeld.wordpress.com), Facebook (facebook.com/authorkimrendfeld), and Twitter (@kimrendfeld).

Dark Ages Slavery and the Battle for Souls

By Kim Rendfeld

Bishops in Carolingian Francia disliked the slave trade, but not for the reasons you might think.

When Carolingian kings conquered a pagan land, it was an opportunity for Christian missionaries to spread the faith. That chance, along with many souls, was lost if war captives were shipped off to Muslim Spain, Egypt, or other parts of Africa or they became the property of Jews.

Bishop Agobard of Lyon was irked to find out that Emperor Louis the Pious required slaves owned by Jews to have their master's permission before being baptized. In On the Insolence of Jews (as anti-Semitic as it sounds), Agobard rails against allowing Jews to own Christians at all because the Christians might pick up the Jews' bad habits of observing the Sabbath on Saturday, working on Sunday, and eating the wrong food at the wrong times during Lent.

Bishops who assembled at Meaux in 845 objected to Christian and Jewish traders driving Slav war captives to be sold to Muslims. They thought it better to redeem the captives and baptize them than to allow them to fill the ranks of the infidels.

Costumes of slaves or serfs from the sixth
to the twelfth century

In the mid-eighth century, King Pepin forbade the sale of Christian and pagan slaves. Perhaps realizing sales couldn't be stopped completely, Pepin's son Charles (Charlemagne) tried to regulate the practice, requiring the presence of a count or bishop and prohibiting sales beyond the frontiers.

Before Pepin became king, a male slave might have been worth slightly over half the price of a horse, the most expensive livestock. In the later years of Charles's reign, the enslaved man might be about the same price as a horse.

Not only does this show inflation and why the slave trade became more attractive; it shows what slaves were worth compared to other possessions, more than most livestock and most garments.

A slave owned by an aristocrat might physically be better off than a peasant. In a time when having enough food to last through winter was not guaranteed, a servant in a noble household was more likely to have food and clothing. Nor was the servant subject to conscription in the army.

But slaves were vulnerable to abuse. A maid could not refuse her lord's unwanted advances. If the master needed funds for a horse and armor, he could sell slaves and break up families.

In other words, slave were commodities in the eyes of traders and their customers, and war captives were inventory. Churchmen, however flawed their motives by 21st century standards, did see war captives as humans with souls worth saving.

Sources

Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne by Pierre Riché, translated by Jo Ann McNamara

Agobard of Lyon: On the Insolence of the Jews to Louis the Pious (via Medieval Sourcebook) 

Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce AD 300-900 by Michael McCormick

Kim Rendfeld's second novel, The Ashes of Heaven's Pillar, features a pagan Saxon family sold into slavery. It will be rereleased in November and is available for preorder on Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes. It will available on Amazon in the coming weeks. Her first novel, The Cross and the Dragon, will be rereleased on August 3, in print and ebook. The ebook is available for preorder at Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Barnes and Noble.

The Intellectuals: The Start of the Carolingian Renaissance

By Kim Rendfeld

In 780, Frankish King Charles might have been thinking about his realm’s long-term future and wanted to give his empire an intellectual foundation, one to associate Francia with ancient Rome and rival the Byzantines.

At that time, the man we today call Charlemagne had ruled for 12 years and had conquered Aquitaine and Lombardy. Although he was still warring with Saxon tribes, he had gained significant territory. The father of six (with No. 7 on the way) was 32, no longer a young man by medieval standards.

He and his queen, Hildegard, who was from a long-established, powerful family, started a journey to Rome, perhaps with empire-building on their minds, judging by what happened in Rome the following spring.

But first the royal family needed to spend the winter in Pavia. There, Charles might have met Paul the Deacon, a Lombard who wrote Historia Romana and other works and had taught in the overthrown court of Pavia, and Peter of Pisa, a deacon and poet who would later teach the king Latin grammar.

A public domain image from 1830 of Alcuin
presenting a manuscript to Charlemagne

When the Frankish royals resumed their journey in warmer weather, Charles met Alcuin in Parma. Alcuin, a Saxon from Britain, already earned a reputation as master of the cathedral school at York, and Charles invited him to lead the Palace School in Francia. Alcuin agreed, after he got permission from his superior upon his return to York.

In Rome, the pope anointed Charles and Hildegard's three- and four-year-old sons as subkings, and their six-year-old daughter was betrothed to the child emperor of Byzantium. The Frankish king and the pope apparently discussed Charles's uneasy relations with his cousin the duke of Bavaria, resulting in high-level diplomatic talks later.

After Easter, Charles and Hildegard returned to Francia in the company of intelligent men: Peter of Pisa; Paul the Deacon; Paulinus of Aquileia, who would later write about theology and play a role in converting the conquered Avars in the 790s, and Fardulf, a poet who in the 790s exposed a plot to overthrow Charles and was rewarded with the abbey of Saint-Denis.

Charles’s intellectuals would come and go in fulfilling their other roles, and his circle of scholars would expand to include other nationalities such as Theodulf, a Visigoth from Hispania and leading satirist, poet, author, and bishop of Orléans, and Dungal from Ireland. The circle had a few Franks such as Angilbert, Charles's trusted aide, diplomat, poet, lay abbot of Saint-Riquier who would transform the place into a center for learning, and later almost-husband (technically a Friedelmann) of Charles's daughter Bertha.

These thinkers and writers were sometimes rivals who were not above teasing and sniping at each other in their poetry. But thanks to them and others, Francia produced more literary work than before.

Charles's own education level in the 780s is unclear, but it was higher than most of his illiterate countrymen's. Likely, his mother taught him his first lessons, and she hired a churchman to tutor him as he got older. By the end of his life, he could read but not write. He could converse in Latin in addition to his native Frankish and understood Greek better than he could speak it. He enjoyed the liberal arts ranging from literature to math to music and astronomy, studied philosophy, and had his sons and his daughters educated.

He never stopped learning, and in old age, he tried his hand at writing. He didn't need that skill. He had clerks for that as did the rest of the nobility. But this hunger for knowledge might been another reason he recruited intellectuals.

Sources

Einhard’s The Life of Charlemagne translated by Evelyn Scherabon Firchow and Edwin H. Zeydel

Carolingian Chronicles, which includes the Royal Frankish Annals and Nithard’s Histories translated by Bernard Walter Scholz with Barbara Rogers

Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne by Pierre Riché, translated by Jo Ann McNamara

Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, edited with an introduction by Peter Godman

Kim Rendfeld's third novel, Queen of the Darkest Hour, about Charlemagne's fourth wife, Fastrada, includes the early days of the Palace School. She is also the author of The Cross and the Dragon and The Ashes of Heaven's Pillar. Connect with Kim on Facebook (facebook.com/authorkimrendfeld), Twitter (@kimrendfeld) her blog (kimrendfeld.wordpress.com) or her website (kimrendfeld.com).