For generations, historians have argued that powerful families gradually turned the comital office into something they could pass down from father to son. David Bachrach takes a fresh look at the evidence and argues that Carolingian and Ottonian rulers retained far more control over these offices than historians have assumed.
By David Bachrach
Was the comital office hereditary? This question has played a central role in debates concerning the nature of royal government under both the east Carolingians and the Ottonians for almost a century and a half. The scholarship on this question has been almost unanimous in concluding that the comital office became increasingly hereditary over the course of the ninth century, and that by the tenth century a son had an explicit right to expect to inherit his father’s office. This supposed reality had the concomitant putative consequence that the king lost direct control over the people who were under the count’s jurisdiction as well as the erstwhile fiscal assets that were now held in permanent possession by the count’s family.
However, when one considers the basis on which the scholarly consensus rests, it is quickly clear that the evidence is very limited. Indeed, there is much more evidence to indicate that the traditional Carolingian system of royally appointed officials continued into the eleventh century.
The Case for Hereditary Office
The Carolingian family tree, showing generations of the dynasty from Arnulf of Metz through Charlemagne and his descendants. From Ekkehard of Aura’s Chronicon universale, 12th century. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Ms. lat. fol. 295, fol. 80v.
There are a small number of examples in which it is clear that a particular count was succeeded directly by his son in the same office (comitatus), meaning the same geographical district. There are somewhat more examples in which the sources explicitly state that another relative of a count, that is his brother, nephew, or cousin, succeeded him in his specific position. There are yet other examples in which the son or other close relative of a count became a count in an entirely different comitatus, sometimes quite distant.
Overall, however, the examples that explicitly discuss the relationships among counts are quite limited. In an effort to address this substantial lacuna in the sources and to justify the consensus that the comital office had become hereditary, scholars began to employ the tools of prosopography, sometimes called collective biography.
Beginning in the early part of the twentieth century, scholars interested in the social history of what they thought of as the nobility began developing methods for identifying the larger, and looser, familial relationships, including those of important men who held comital offices. Indeed, it was often on the basis of these prosopographical studies, that many scholars became convinced that they could show that specific comital offices and comital offices in general were monopolized by a small group of “families”. Notably, these familial connections were defined by relationships extending to the fifth, sixth, or even seventh degree.
There is, of course, an obvious challenge in demonstrating an affinity among third cousins whose connection is demonstrated by the use of a common name or even common naming element. This point was made many decades ago by Karl Leyser. Even more importantly, the model of a legal or even expected hereditary succession of sons to their fathers’ comital offices founders on the fact that there is no positive statement in any source during the entirety of the ninth, tenth, or early eleventh century from the East Frankish and Ottonian kingdom that attests to this expectation. The two most explicit statements dealing with this question, well known to specialists in early medieval German history, actually make the opposite point.
What the Medieval Sources Actually Say
A charter issued by Otto I for the monastery of St Maurice at Magdeburg on 23 April 961. Landesarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt, Rep. U 1, Tit. I, Nr. 14.
In the first of these cases, the Bavarian Count Orendil stated in a charter issued in 814 that he hoped that his sons might be worthy enough to be chosen by the king to hold comital office in the future. As is quite evident, Orendil assumed that only the ruler could decide whether a man could become a count. In the second case, Adalbert of Magdeburg, writing for the Ottonian royal court in the 960s, observed that when the Rhenish count Udo died in 949, it was only with the explicit permission of the German ruler Otto I that Udo was able to divide up the benefices associated with his office among his sons “as if they were hereditary property.” Clearly, the allodial assets of a family and the assets associated with an office were understood as distinct. The former naturally passed to the heir while the latter remained under the control of the crown.
A second problematic issue for the supposed hereditary nature of the comital office is that prosopographical modelling, even if its most extensive claims are accepted, cannot demonstrate that most counts were even related to other counts, much less that they were the sons of or close relatives of previous holders of a specific comital office. For example, in her exceptionally detailed prosopographical examination of the counts holding office in East Francia from the reign of Louis the German (840-876) to Charles the Fat (881-887), Sophie Glansdorf makes clear that we can find family connections for fewer than half of these men to any known count-producing family. Notably, this is a period for which we have many thousands of monastic charters that provide information about property transfers and family relationships. Perhaps even more importantly, only a tiny minority of the counts in this period can be shown to have succeeded to their fathers’ specific comitatus.
When we turn to the pragmatic questions associated with the supposed inherited nature of the comital office in East Francia and Ottonian Germany, the assumption that members of comital families succeeded in alienating royal fiscal property from the crown turns out to be false. Scores of surviving charters from both the East Carolingians and their Ottonian successors make clear that kings routinely recovered fiscal property that had been granted as beneficia to counts, and reassigned these assets in a number of ways, including granting them to new, unrelated counts, granting them to ecclesiastical institutions, and granting them as allods to other royal fideles. In addition to recovering fiscal lands, the royal government throughout the ninth, tenth, and early eleventh centuries, maintained close oversight of fiscal lands held by counts, requiring them to seek a special royal license before being permitted to alienate these lands from the fisc.
Moreover, it is clear that in many cases, the fiscal property granted to counts to serve as their beneficia was not located within that count’s area of jurisdiction. Rather, these assets were often located in another comitatus altogether. Consequently, the assumption that comital authority rested on the ability to draw upon local resources to overawe competition is not borne out.
Similarly, the assumption that counts were among the most important landowners, i.e. that they possessed large concentrations of allodial property, in the comitatus in which they exercised legal and other jurisdiction, cannot be substantiated on the basis of surviving documentation. Rather, it was far more often the case that counts, as was common for wealthy individuals, possessed property across a wide swathe of territory, much of which was under the jurisdiction of other counts.
In short, the count’s jurisdiction and authority was not based upon his personal wealth within his comitatus or his control over royal fiscal assets within it. His authority was based instead on his appointment by the ruler, and the delegation of royal authority that came with this appointment, which was supported by the fiscal resources, often located outside his comitatus, which allowed him to carry out his duties.
Why Comital Families Still Mattered
Count Vivien and the monks of Saint-Martin of Tours present a Bible to Charles the Bald, from the First Bible of Charles the Bald (Vivien Bible), 845–846. Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Latin 1, fol. 423r.
If the comital office was not hereditary, it is still necessary to explain why we can see members of some families holding comital office, even if this is not the majority of cases. The answer to this question is twofold. First, in the hierarchical society of the Carolingian Empire and the early medieval German kingdom, the members of wealthy, socially and politically connected families were more likely to have the relationships with the court that would lead to preferment in offices. Once one member of the family had performed well in a high office, these tendencies were strengthened.
Secondly, it was in the king’s interest to maintain stability in the exercise of governmental functions within the local districts of the realm. A successful count created local connections and goodwill among the important people in his comitatus that could be transferred to members of the count’s family, who were well known in the district and perhaps had already played a role in its government. The preference for the known commodity is hardly limited to early medieval Europe as the large number of political dynasties in the United States, for example, attests. Thus, the ruler had pragmatic reasons for favoring the appointment of a member of the family of a successful, in the managerial sense, official to replace him. This was not a legal obligation on the king’s part, and does not represent a hereditary principle, with the limited exception that both the king and people subject to the count’s jurisdiction understood the qualities that made a count successful to be hereditary.
David Bachrach is a Professor at the University of New Hampshire, where he researches medieval military history, particularly in England and Germany.
David S. Bachrach, “The Benefices of Counts and the Fate of the Comital Office in Carolingian East Francia and Ottonian Germany,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, germanistische Abteilung 136 (2019), 1-50.
Sophie Glansdorff, Comites in regno Hludowici regis constituti: Prosopographie des détenteurs d’offices séculiers en Francie orientale, de Louis le Germanique à Charles le Gros 826-887 (Ostfildern, 2011).
For generations, historians have argued that powerful families gradually turned the comital office into something they could pass down from father to son. David Bachrach takes a fresh look at the evidence and argues that Carolingian and Ottonian rulers retained far more control over these offices than historians have assumed.
By David Bachrach
Was the comital office hereditary? This question has played a central role in debates concerning the nature of royal government under both the east Carolingians and the Ottonians for almost a century and a half. The scholarship on this question has been almost unanimous in concluding that the comital office became increasingly hereditary over the course of the ninth century, and that by the tenth century a son had an explicit right to expect to inherit his father’s office. This supposed reality had the concomitant putative consequence that the king lost direct control over the people who were under the count’s jurisdiction as well as the erstwhile fiscal assets that were now held in permanent possession by the count’s family.
However, when one considers the basis on which the scholarly consensus rests, it is quickly clear that the evidence is very limited. Indeed, there is much more evidence to indicate that the traditional Carolingian system of royally appointed officials continued into the eleventh century.
The Case for Hereditary Office
There are a small number of examples in which it is clear that a particular count was succeeded directly by his son in the same office (comitatus), meaning the same geographical district. There are somewhat more examples in which the sources explicitly state that another relative of a count, that is his brother, nephew, or cousin, succeeded him in his specific position. There are yet other examples in which the son or other close relative of a count became a count in an entirely different comitatus, sometimes quite distant.
Overall, however, the examples that explicitly discuss the relationships among counts are quite limited. In an effort to address this substantial lacuna in the sources and to justify the consensus that the comital office had become hereditary, scholars began to employ the tools of prosopography, sometimes called collective biography.
Beginning in the early part of the twentieth century, scholars interested in the social history of what they thought of as the nobility began developing methods for identifying the larger, and looser, familial relationships, including those of important men who held comital offices. Indeed, it was often on the basis of these prosopographical studies, that many scholars became convinced that they could show that specific comital offices and comital offices in general were monopolized by a small group of “families”. Notably, these familial connections were defined by relationships extending to the fifth, sixth, or even seventh degree.
There is, of course, an obvious challenge in demonstrating an affinity among third cousins whose connection is demonstrated by the use of a common name or even common naming element. This point was made many decades ago by Karl Leyser. Even more importantly, the model of a legal or even expected hereditary succession of sons to their fathers’ comital offices founders on the fact that there is no positive statement in any source during the entirety of the ninth, tenth, or early eleventh century from the East Frankish and Ottonian kingdom that attests to this expectation. The two most explicit statements dealing with this question, well known to specialists in early medieval German history, actually make the opposite point.
What the Medieval Sources Actually Say
In the first of these cases, the Bavarian Count Orendil stated in a charter issued in 814 that he hoped that his sons might be worthy enough to be chosen by the king to hold comital office in the future. As is quite evident, Orendil assumed that only the ruler could decide whether a man could become a count. In the second case, Adalbert of Magdeburg, writing for the Ottonian royal court in the 960s, observed that when the Rhenish count Udo died in 949, it was only with the explicit permission of the German ruler Otto I that Udo was able to divide up the benefices associated with his office among his sons “as if they were hereditary property.” Clearly, the allodial assets of a family and the assets associated with an office were understood as distinct. The former naturally passed to the heir while the latter remained under the control of the crown.
A second problematic issue for the supposed hereditary nature of the comital office is that prosopographical modelling, even if its most extensive claims are accepted, cannot demonstrate that most counts were even related to other counts, much less that they were the sons of or close relatives of previous holders of a specific comital office. For example, in her exceptionally detailed prosopographical examination of the counts holding office in East Francia from the reign of Louis the German (840-876) to Charles the Fat (881-887), Sophie Glansdorf makes clear that we can find family connections for fewer than half of these men to any known count-producing family. Notably, this is a period for which we have many thousands of monastic charters that provide information about property transfers and family relationships. Perhaps even more importantly, only a tiny minority of the counts in this period can be shown to have succeeded to their fathers’ specific comitatus.
When we turn to the pragmatic questions associated with the supposed inherited nature of the comital office in East Francia and Ottonian Germany, the assumption that members of comital families succeeded in alienating royal fiscal property from the crown turns out to be false. Scores of surviving charters from both the East Carolingians and their Ottonian successors make clear that kings routinely recovered fiscal property that had been granted as beneficia to counts, and reassigned these assets in a number of ways, including granting them to new, unrelated counts, granting them to ecclesiastical institutions, and granting them as allods to other royal fideles. In addition to recovering fiscal lands, the royal government throughout the ninth, tenth, and early eleventh centuries, maintained close oversight of fiscal lands held by counts, requiring them to seek a special royal license before being permitted to alienate these lands from the fisc.
Moreover, it is clear that in many cases, the fiscal property granted to counts to serve as their beneficia was not located within that count’s area of jurisdiction. Rather, these assets were often located in another comitatus altogether. Consequently, the assumption that comital authority rested on the ability to draw upon local resources to overawe competition is not borne out.
Similarly, the assumption that counts were among the most important landowners, i.e. that they possessed large concentrations of allodial property, in the comitatus in which they exercised legal and other jurisdiction, cannot be substantiated on the basis of surviving documentation. Rather, it was far more often the case that counts, as was common for wealthy individuals, possessed property across a wide swathe of territory, much of which was under the jurisdiction of other counts.
In short, the count’s jurisdiction and authority was not based upon his personal wealth within his comitatus or his control over royal fiscal assets within it. His authority was based instead on his appointment by the ruler, and the delegation of royal authority that came with this appointment, which was supported by the fiscal resources, often located outside his comitatus, which allowed him to carry out his duties.
Why Comital Families Still Mattered
If the comital office was not hereditary, it is still necessary to explain why we can see members of some families holding comital office, even if this is not the majority of cases. The answer to this question is twofold. First, in the hierarchical society of the Carolingian Empire and the early medieval German kingdom, the members of wealthy, socially and politically connected families were more likely to have the relationships with the court that would lead to preferment in offices. Once one member of the family had performed well in a high office, these tendencies were strengthened.
Secondly, it was in the king’s interest to maintain stability in the exercise of governmental functions within the local districts of the realm. A successful count created local connections and goodwill among the important people in his comitatus that could be transferred to members of the count’s family, who were well known in the district and perhaps had already played a role in its government. The preference for the known commodity is hardly limited to early medieval Europe as the large number of political dynasties in the United States, for example, attests. Thus, the ruler had pragmatic reasons for favoring the appointment of a member of the family of a successful, in the managerial sense, official to replace him. This was not a legal obligation on the king’s part, and does not represent a hereditary principle, with the limited exception that both the king and people subject to the count’s jurisdiction understood the qualities that made a count successful to be hereditary.
David Bachrach is a Professor at the University of New Hampshire, where he researches medieval military history, particularly in England and Germany.
Click here to read more from David Bachrach
Further Readings:
David S. Bachrach, “The Benefices of Counts and the Fate of the Comital Office in Carolingian East Francia and Ottonian Germany,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, germanistische Abteilung 136 (2019), 1-50.
Sophie Glansdorff, Comites in regno Hludowici regis constituti: Prosopographie des détenteurs d’offices séculiers en Francie orientale, de Louis le Germanique à Charles le Gros 826-887 (Ostfildern, 2011).
Karl Leyser, “The German Aristocracy from the Ninth to the Early Twelfth Century. A Historical and Cultural Sketch,” Past and Present 41 (1968) 25-53.
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