Border pacts and frontier areas in Carolingian Italy
From Firenze University Press Book: Carolingian Frontiers: Italy and Beyond
Stefano Gasparri, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
- The legacy of the eighth century
Boundary pacts are an Italian peculiarity within the Carolingian world. They indicate the existence of a traditional and specific practice of agreements between different powers coexisting on the territory of the peninsula. It was the politically fragmented geography of early medieval Italy that forced to alternate between competition and collaboration. To try to interpret this situation, one must take a step back and go back at least as far as the eighth century, in the Lombard period. From the time of Liutprand to that of Aistulf, a series of significant acts can be enumerated: the first and second pacts with the Venetians;1 the famous donation of Sutri, which could also be considered a territorial agreement between the papacy and the Lombard kingdom; finally, the pact with the inhabitants of Comacchio, even though it had no frontier value. Moving on to the Carolingian period, and leaving aside the partly different case of the difficult attempts to identify the borders of the Roman Tuscia and Sabina with respect to the Lombard ones, we can add the other Venetian pacts and the southern ones. This list of boundary agreement proves that their history is much older than the Carolingian age, which in this field, as in many others, stands as a continuation of the earlier tradition of the Lombard kingdom, to the point that we are in doubt whether to call the pacts of this latter period Carolingian pacts or — rather — Italic pacts. In any way, in this essay I would like to outline their internal characteristics and try to identify, where it exists — as Geoffrey West has recently done — their common agenda.
- Arichis’ pacts for the Liburia
The most ancient pacts of the Carolingian age concern the Liburia, an area which corresponds more or less to today’s Terra del Lavoro, a land stretching between Naples, Caserta and Capua, known since antiquity for its fertility. According to Jean-Marie Martin’s convincing reconstruction, the pacts were issued on two occasions by Arichis II of Benevento: the first in 784, during a war against the Neapolitans, to whom the prince tried to impose a pact, which was refused by them as they were victorious on the field; and then the second, in a milder form, perhaps in 787, when the prince tried to protect one’s back through an agreement with the Neapolitans in the face of the threat of invasion by Charlemagne. This time the agreement was found and the result was a text — the Pactiones de Leburiae — that, although it consists of two distinct parts, for our purposes we can nevertheless consider a single text and consequently analyse it as a whole. The text, very incorrect and sometimes difficult to understand, was only handed down from the famous manuscript 4 of Cava dei Tirreni. The pact regulated the rights of the Lombards and Neapolitans over the lands of Liburia and those who worked it, who were mostly unfree peasants. Although the pact was the result of an agreement between two different and autonomous powers, its trend reminds the regulation of conflicts between private individuals, since it dealt precisely with the rights that the individual owners had over the land. One of the most interesting aspects of the pact is the name of tertiatores given to some of the workers of the lands of Liburia. In this definition there is a distant echo of the famous chapters of the Historia Langobardorum, where Paul the Deacon told the story of the Lombards’ settlement in Italy by the tertia, an echo that cannot be entirely ignored. Moreover, in the pact there is the recourse, in two cases, to the word hospitatica, which also refers back to those famous chapters9. We are faced with two words from the early days of the Lombard kingdom, authentic fossils, perhaps not just linguistic ones. As proof of its persistence, the term tertiatores reappears, as we shall see, in Sicard’s pact of 836. The tertiatores are also mentioned in the oldest private document of the duchy of Benevento, issued in Nola in March 703, where the widow Selberada sells half of two tertiatores to the monastery of the Sts Theodor and Sebastian, dependent on the Neapolitan Church, which already owned the other half. This is proof of the existence at the beginning of the eighth century, in a territory not distant from the Liburia, of the same mechanisms of Lombard-Neapolitan common management that would be regulated eighty years later by Arichis’ pacts for the Liburia. We can therefore legitimately backdate the start of this situation, although we are unable to say from when, whether from the early days of the establishment of the duchy — and this would be the most suggestive interpretation — or later. On the other hand, the text of the pacts refers to previous divisions, per scripta or per capitulare, of lands and serfs between Lombards and Neapolitans.
DOI: 10.36253/979–12–215–0416–3.15
Read Full Text: https://books.fupress.it/chapter/border-pacts-and-frontier-areas-in-carolingian-italy/15108
