Early Piast Rule as a "Post-Carolingian" Phenomenon?
I'd like to call your attention to a piece of punctuation. The titles of the two papers at this
conference that concern East Central Europe both end with a question mark. Lisa
Wolverton's title is a straightforward question. Mine is an expression of doubt—about
whether the social or political order presided by the dynasty of the dukes, intermittently
kings, later called the Piasts was, to any degree, "post-Carolingian"; and, as a corollary,
what is meant by Carolingian or post-Carolingian, and how do we track down whatever
that is.
The project of situating Poland, over its formative period between the mid-tenth and
the later twelfth centuries, in the "Carolingian," or "post-Carolingian," world, presents
two enormous—almost (?) insurmountable—challenges. One is state of the evidence, of
which we have, in writing, quite literally next to none. There is archaeological evidence,
but it is quite difficult to interpret, and is today in a state of a rather bizarre
reassessment… The second obstacle is the utter absence of any actual presence, either
directly of, or plainly related to, the Carolingian empire or its successor kingdoms, in the
territories that subsequently comprised Poland. To begin with the obvious: we are
geographically and chronologically far, far away from any actual Carolingian network—
dynastic, territorial or political, ecclesiastical, economic, or other—cultural, social,
material/architectural… Nor is the future or very early Poland one of those polities which
interacted with the world ruled by the Carolingians: places situated nearer to, or
overlapping with, the empire's "marches," such as Moravia, Bohemia, the Polabian Slavs,
or bits and pieces of the Danube region.
These (almost?) insurmountable challenges are complicated by two other
considerations, different from the "Polish Question." One is a certain fluidity of the
meaning of Carolingian (and its derivative, signalled by the prefix post-) among
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medievalists today. This issue is well identified, and constructively embraced, by Marios
Costambeys, Matthew Innes, and Simon MacLean in their superb recent synthesis of "the
Carolingian world," where they seek to understand that "world," "on"—and these are
their own words—"its own terms," rather than as a long transitional phase from one kind
of high-level order to another. That goal, thus stated, logically implies some doubt about
the current utility of Carolingian and post-Carolingian as stable analytical categories.
That doubt, too, is signalled by a question mark placed at the end of a title. "Was there a
Carolingian economy?" the authors ask, at the last section of the relevant chapter. I am
struck by the absence of a conclusive answer to the question; and thus, by an implication
that, at least on this, the economic and the social, dimension of reality, the adjective of
Carolingian, understood as a benchmark or a comparative standard, may require further
thought.
The other complication is raised by Chris Wickham's massive treatment of early postRoman Europe, Framing the Early Middle Ages—an extraordinarily full study of what I
like to call comparable phenomena, extended over a significant time and space, regarding
several, enormously varied regions comprising the circum-Mediterranean world. The
study works as a lovely roster of highly specific similarities and differences. I'd like to
say something about those differences. They are—at least many of them—permanent.
They need not—and, as a default proposition, they do not—lead to convergence through
diffusion, one-sided or mutual... Wickham gives us an image of, and an explanation for, a
great, permanent, irreducible diversity.
Hence a few pertinent implications. Wickham's book ends in 800—on the cusp of the
"Carolingian" period, and so, in one sense, "too early" for us: in this conference in
general, let alone for those of us who study Poland. But this is an illusion. Nothing about
the book, its method, analysis, or glimpses into the medieval future, says or implies that
that diversity somehow ended in 800; or that regions of Europe situated fully outside of
the Mediterranean world—east of Denmark, Wickham's least "Mediterranean," but
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included, polity—may not be understood in similar terms. The implication—left, I think,
as an intriguing question—is that that balance, between similarity and irreducible,
permanent difference, was, or at least may have been, a permanent legacy of the world
Wickham has reconstructed up to 800—later, and elsewhere.
Back to Poland. Because direct presence of, or contact with, the actual Carolingians
are implausible, these multiple challenges confront us with two potential resolutions. We
can look for impact, or for resemblance. A search for impact entails observation, of traits,
or characteristics, that can meaningfully be specified as "Carolingian," or "postCarolingian"; and, their placement in a chronological and spatial succession, from the
"Carolingian," or "Frankish," "core," outward to, and "through," royal and ducal courts,
ecclesiastical communities, significant individuals, networks, social groups, central
places or towns—a process that might be called mediated diffusion. Regarding Poland,
that process is sometimes schematically imagined as a domino effect—Franks ➞
Ottonians ➞ Moravians ➞ Czechs ➞ Poles—in which the key piece is the successor
empire to the Carolingian: the Eastern Frankish kingdom, Germany, the Empire, the
Reich…
The most specific—that is, the least poorly documented—area, or vector, of impact
through these venues is a specific set of attributes pertinent to the highest office, ducal or
royal, including: succession; other dynastic phenomena, such as seniority, marriage, or
women; rituals related to the assumption and exercise of office; relationships between
rulers and the sacred, and between rulers and the clergy; and the relevant ideology. This
particular, most fruitful venue into our subject is best exemplified by the work of
Zbigniew Dalewski.
A search for resemblance entails the observation of such traits or characteristics, but as
a comparative exercise, without explicit emphasis on their imitation, transmission,
diffusion or the like… This approach involves a somewhat allusive, or impressionistic,
identification of specific bits and pieces of early Poland's high-level order that resonate
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with what we know from, or about, its "Carolingian" counterpart. Examples include:
Poland's "administrative" framework, above all the comites, and the designation, with the
word comes ("companion"), of the highest agent of the ruler's power; that agent's base in
a "town" or "city" subject to the ruler; the earliest documented landed estates; coinage,
specifically the use of the denarius, a small silver penny, and of its higher units for
expression of value, the solidus ("shilling") and the mark; and, political etymology: the
presumed derivation of the Western Slavic word for king—król in Polish—from the
presumed vernacular name Charles—in Polish, Karol.
Right here, I would like to consider an entirely different subject: estates, the villae, in
the language of Carolingian documents, but, regardless of their name—and, of the time
and place in the earlier Middle Ages—meant here bundles of material resources,
consisting of people, the environment, and its useable goods, and of nodes, processes, and
revenues of exchange, possessed, exploited, and (to a degree) shaped or modified by a
small, highly privileged population—the lords, who, to return Wickham, included two
generic protagonists: the ruler and the aristocracy.
Specifically regarding Poland, we run into yet another complication posed by the
evidence: the relative invisibility in the written sources of anything that can be called an
"aristocracy" until at the earliest the twelfth century. To be sure, right from even the
earliest bits of evidence, we do have glimpses of people other than the ruler in positions
of high(est) power—people who were, for example, in a position to affect succession to
ducal or royal office. In that sense, we can be sure that some such population existed, but
we know very, very little—I would say, nothing, zip—about that population in depth,
including the ways in which it supported itself economically; that is, the nature, and the
base, of its resources… So, by a kind of gigantic empirical default, in Poland's earliest
history, our attention is necessarily, irreducibly, focused on the ruler—in a wide range of
roles, including lordship, that is to say: as the sole visible, or apparent, or at least
empirically accessible, possessor of estates.
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This tilt in the evidence may explain why Polish historians have adopted a highly
specific model of the political and economic framework of very early medieval Poland.
That model hinges—absolutely turns—on material resources, available to the ruler in his
capacity of lord, accessed by him directly—without mediation by intermediate lords or
other agents—and including, at their core, the mass of the rural population. That
population comprised a whole network of estates. The crux of the model concerns the
creation, use, and logical purpose of those estates. This is explained by the ruler's
extraordinary degree and type of power. In what might be called a primeval act of power,
he was the creator of the resources comprising these estates—what we might call the dux
auctor. In particular, he created the labor force. He subjected part of the rural population
to specialized, high-intensity obligations, resulting in the emergence, in the midst of that
population, of workshops—village-based complexes of specialized production—
purposefully geared to the ruler's needs. The network of such localities sufficed to furnish
the ducal court with the resources it needed, for warfare, and other roles.
The basis, or reason, for this construction is a historiographically generated
conundrum: namely, just what enabled, around the mid-tenth century, the emergence of
an early-medieval polity that was powerful enough, at least over a stretch of several
decades, to challenge militarily the Empire, the Rus', or the Czech Kingdom, and that was
worthy of attention from Ibrahim Ibn-Ya'qub, Thietmar of Merseburg, or Bruno of
Querfurt… The model serves as a logical "answer" to that conundrum. Generated in its
broad contours as long ago as 1964, by Karol Modzelewski, it has enjoyed an astonishing
longevity, despite an enormous degree of subsequent reconsideration. It is now
undergoing a strong revival, back toward its original formulation—ironically, largely on
the basis of archaeological evidence.
I've always seen two major flaws with the model. First, it posits a political order that
is, right on its face, exceedingly unusual—anomalous—and so doubly difficult to place in
a meaningfully comparative perspective. In light of Wickham's work, two anomalies
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strike me as especially pronounced, and conceptually unfixable. First, the logical
disregard for the presence, and significance, of an aristocracy—to Wickham, an
absolutely essential element of the existence, and effective power, of any earlier medieval
polity—one that, almost by definition, rests on the possession and use of estates. The
second anomaly is the model's apparently axiomatic denial of exchange (across its range
of meanings), as a factor in the formation, work, and structure of those rural estates, or of
the bundles of resources comprising them—above all, the intensively specialized
components, the rural populations grouped and engaged in nodes of non-agricultural
production. To Wickham, a ubiquitous, almost logically necessary, corollary of intensive
economic specialization within a rural labor force is the simultaneous existence of
exchange—again, let me add, across its range of meanings.
Second—at the risk of sounding really dull—the model is extremely difficult to
demonstrate with evidence. This is because, at the time to which the model pertains, there
is none. Now, evidence of ducal interaction with lucrative resources certainly does arise
in the course of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. This may seem "late" for our
purposes, but there is no reason to think that, at the time when we can actually discern
them, such interactions were new. However, because it is "late," historians have always
processed this evidence as a marker of a decline—of that primeval, centrally imposed,
duke-created order—and not on its own terms.
When it is considered on its own terms, the interaction between the Piast ruler and
estates in that (later) period is certainly important, and visible, but it reflects patterns that
are different from the model I've just presented—patterns that are complicated and
eclectic. They do not add up to that, or to any one, simple model. And, they are entirely
compatible with various agents, or dynamics, behind the creation, maintenance, and
disposal of resources and estates. Such agents certainly included the ruler, but they may
have included other actors. The dynamics certainly included impersonal economic
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phenomena, such as the market, and other types, or aspects, of exchange. So let me
propose a lightly alternative model.
The Piast duke, as glimpsed through the evidence, performed (simultaneously) several
economic roles. I present them here in no specific order or importance, or any kind of
developmental sequence; I emphasize simultaneity. One role was creation of a record, by
means of a list: of personal names, place-names, and other designations for people and
groups; of units of arable and other spaces; of nodes of specialized production and
exchange, especially markets and taverns; and of environmental phenomena: animals,
fish, forest, park, water, and minerals. Another role was a more detailed reflection upon
those itemized components. Here, the lists "balloon" into short narrations, or close
descriptions of how a component worked, or was expected to work, as a source of
revenue. The third role was permissive, or enabling, or protective, whereby the ruler
promised the recipient, and significant others, specified access to resources.
The promise could be made in general terms, and apply to the estate in its entirety, or
it could be quite detailed, and "balloon" into one of those fuller, more textured economic
or demographic reflections. An example of this role is the charter of liberty extended in
1212 by Duke Henry the Bearded, over a market space possessed by the Cistercian
women's convent in Trzebnica: "[T]he market of Lubiąż shall be exempt from every
Polish exaction," so that "the moneyer shall not levy the pomot from anyone, and shall
have no right there, other than to carry out an exchange of coin[age], by selling salt and
exchanging pennies during [no more than] three markets," over a specified amount of
time. In this case, ducal intervention in the economy consisted in a withdrawal, by the
duke and his agents, from the following range of underlying economic phenomena: a
social demand for market activity; the use of coin; and the use of salt as a medium of
exchange in recoinages.
The fourth role was the identification by the duke of some specific area of demand,
and some equally specific source for the satisfaction of that demand. The demanded
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goods included, variously: cattle, meat, wax, tallow, mead, fish, salt, coin, wheels,
pottery, wooden vessels, and grain. The sources for procuring such commodities—that is,
for satisfying such demand—included: taverns, market spaces, pre-existing horse or cattle
herds, butcher stalls, apiaries, bodies of water, mineral deposits, forest, meadow, park,
and arable land; and people. The duke associated, in a kind of one-to-one
correspondence, one or more components and flows of revenue, goods, or labor, with one
or more specific areas of demand, which that component, or those components, was or
were meant to satisfy.
Finally, the ruler sometimes actively reshaped, modified, or more thoroughly, in a
meaningful sense of that word, "created," "organized," or "reorganized," resources. This
role is perhaps best illustrated by another example. In a diploma for the Trzebnica nuns
issued in 1202 or 1203, Duke Henry recalled:
[T]hat my grandfather transferred the market which had once existed in
Trzebnica to Cerekwica, for the use[s] of the Wrocław [cathedral]. But
because, as a result, the [new convent] is hardly able to have a market nearby
for its usual needs..., I have established a market in Trzebnica, without any
diminution of the revenue of the market of Cerekwica. But since the populace
[plebs] [wishing to attend any one market] is divided by many markets [in]to
single [persons], I expect that, because of the very close proximity [of the two
markets to one another], the market of Trzebnica will be a source of harm to
the market of the canons [of the chapter]. In order to avoid this, and forever to
secure for the canons the fullness of their revenues, I have allayed the
[canons'] fear of loss, by [a subsidy of] 7 silver marks, accruing from toll,
annually.
The duke here reported a sequence of his own, and his father's, interventions,
anticipating, modifying, and responding to, specific economic phenomena: market
spaces; demand, by the possessors of those market spaces, and by the broader, open-
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ended population, the plebs; and coin, assigned from yet another source of revenue, In
order to offset the anticipated complications arising from the above mix.
Ducal documents contemporary with these two proliferate with such provisions,
falling somewhere within the above typology of ducal intervention, and reflecting a wide
range of economic phenomena and processes, with which the ruler interacted and which
he affected. And that, to me, is the alternative model. And now, the crunch. Where, uhm,
does all this get us in terms of the "Carolingian" or "post-Carolingian" problematic?
Apart from some very, very specific elements of rulership, we cannot meaningfully
discern influence or impact. So, regarding that approach to our subject, I reluctantly give
up… What we can do is observe resemblance: a close comparison of meaningfully
comparable phenomena. One such phenomenon is the economy, and the ruler's
engagement with it: a resemblance between the Piast ducal "policy" toward the earliest
estates in Poland, and the interactions by the Carolingian kings with the varied economic
realities, as reflected by Charlemagne's capitulary De Villis.
Another meaningfully comparable phenomenon is big systemic transition. The early
Polish documents, of which I've noted two in this paper, mark a moment in a long-term
process of standardization, and intensification, of peasant status, peasant subjection to the
aristocracy, obligations, above all, rent; and, of the range of interactions between the
Piast rulers and all of it. Likewise, the decades on either side of 800 were a time when the
Frankish peasantry, and the estates that framed rural resources, underwent a series of
transitions of the same general kind. By which, I do not mean similar, in process,
outcome, or detail, but—in the sense in which I like to use that word—comparable.