Fiscal resources and political competition on the periphery of the Carolingian empire: some Catalan examples (9th century)

From Firenze University Press Book: Carolingian Frontiers: Italy and Beyond

Igor Santos Salazar, University of Trento

In this article I analyse an area situated on the western periphery of the Carolingian world, in order to address important questions relating to the role played by fiscal assets (i.e. the material bases of public power, basically land) in the construction of governing strategies between kings, counts and local élites. My analysis will focus on the period ranging from the reign of Charlemagne to that of Charles II, and in the southern counties that Frankish annalists defined, for a very brief period, as the Spanish March. In so doing, I will consciously distance myself from some of the main historiographical issues that have characterised the last half-century of studies on Carolingian Catalonia (whose borders are very different when compared to those of the modern Spanish region): the debates on the ethnic identity of the Hispani, on the meanings of legal concepts such as aprisio and, above all, on the sterile, ideological and anachronistic efforts to discover the phantasmagorical roots and contours of the Catalan nation. Thanks to recent researches by authors such as Cullen J. Chandler and Jonathan Jarrett about the Hispani and the extensive legal use of aprisio — which is nothing more than a tool to identify land clearance in Catalan charters –, I can move forward and concentrate in these pages on the study of a dossier of public documents — diplomas and the judicial proceedings known as placita — in relation to recent developments in the study of public assets and the royal fisc, taking into account lands characterised by their belonging to the public fisc, over which social élites and publics officials were in dispute.

Land, courts and political peripheries: Carolingian conquest and governance

Once Gerona (785) had been conquered, Carolingian rule spread across the southern side of the Pyrenees slowly, until the fall of Barcelona (801), over a mosaic of authorities that were (and indeed are) difficult to characterise both for the Carolingian authors and for modern scholars. The areas under Frankish control are defined in ambiguous ways in the charters: labels such as territorio, pagus, valle, describe a landscape in which only Girona and Barcelona could be called civitates. Moreover, the references to comitati are consistent but intermittent, while mentions to the Spanish March appear only in narrative sources. In fact, the territory supposedly organised within the March is described with great ambiguity in the Carolingian normative sources. Furthermore, the complete set of written sources preserved for the period between the end of the eighth century and the first half of the ninth — mostly preserved as later copies from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries — shows a large group of public officials, mostly counts, acting within the geographical space of what has come to be called, with a useful anachronism, Carolingian Catalonia. From Roussillon to Barcelona, and from Ampurias to Urgell, there are about twelve men described as counts during the time between the Carolingian conquest and the age of Bernard of Septimania, to which at least another ten counts must be added for the time between Bernard’s execution (844) and the last years of Charles II’s government (from 870 onwards). The inclusion of the Iberian comitati and territories within the Carolingian political construct led to the imposing of a new brand of political and economic exploitation which can be seen in other European spaces controlled by the Frankish emperor, such as Northern-Central Italy and Dalmatia. In this sense, a diploma from Charlemagne dated to 812 and addressed to some counts (among them Bera and Gauselm, active in the areas of Barcelona, Conflent, Rossellò and Ampurias) — designed to respond to the complaints of forty-two Hispani who had denounced in Aachen the injustices perpetrated against them by public officials — is very interesting. The document, preserved as a copy in a twelfth-century Narbonne cartulary, is clear in highlighting the role of the counts and other public officials linked to them (such as the saiones), accused of illegally imposing censuses, and acting with force taking land and properties recognized as possession of the Hispani by the Carolingian authority, in which one can recognize land considered by the Carolingian rulers as part of the fisc. The document also shows that the resolution of the conflict fell to Archbishop John and the king of Aquitaine and son of Charlemagne, Louis, who had to impose order on social groups that had been under Carolingian rule for a relatively short time. This type of problem linked to the government of fiscal resources, which developed in Catalonia shortly after the Frankish conquest — although the diploma does not indicate the geographical areas in which the counts’ actions had taken place, the presence of Bera and Gauselm link the lands to Northern Iberia –, can also be seen on the eastern periphery of the empire, in Istria. In 804, in a place called Rižana, Charlemagne’s missi listened to the complaints of one hundred and seventy-two homines capitaneos — a term which can be understood to denote the elite of possessors of the Istrian territories, both rural and urban − denouncing the behaviour and illicit actions of the patriarch of Grado, Fortunatus, several bishops, and the highest Frankish authority in the area, the duke John9. All of them were accused of not maintaining the old Byzantine uses and customs after the conquest of Istria by the Frankish armies. Indeed, the patriarch of Grado is criticized for not having met the tax obligations owed to the public authority, and for replacing them with levies on the lay possessors of the area. Along with other charges, the homines gathered at the court also accused the Frankish duke of having appropriated the sums that should have served, or at least once served, for the financing of the public authority10. The example of the Hispani is very different from that of Istria, of course. However, in both documents it is possible to follow the imposition of the Carolingians’ political system, and the violence that came after through the arbitrary imposition of some charges by the public officials. Likewise, it is possible to follow the negotiation mechanisms (basically imperial justice) that were implemented to heal the social and political fractures that the actions of counts, duke and lesser agents such as the saiones, had provoked in these two peripheral regions of the empire. In addition, in both cases it is possible to see the centrality of public assets and resources (land, censuses…) as the main features of the conflict.

DOI: 10.36253/979–12–215–0416–3.19

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