Frontiers as zones of public overinvestment: fortresses, ditches, and walls in the northern frontier of the Carolingian Empire

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

University of Florence
2 min readJan 27, 2025

Marco Franzoni, University of Verona

Frontier zones are usually studied in order to highlight the differences that distinguished the centre from the periphery, so as to be able to understand how central power manifested its control over these regions. From another point of view, focusing on border areas has allowed historians to observe the centre from a new, and different, perspective. Then, if it is true that an «Empire looks different from different angles», one of the most interesting ways to study a medieval state is through the lens of its peripheral regions. These are places of clashes and inclusion; zones where the political vision of the centre is usually imposed through a large variety of actions and investments. Therefore, border zones are the places where imperial rhetoric broke down, and led them to adapt to the local political and social situation. The purpose of this article is to focus on the different infrastructures that the Franks and their neighbours created during the course of the eighth-ninth centuries in Saxony and the region of the Elbe River. The building of new fortresses, as the coordination and limitation of commerce, were direct answers to the new threats and the new challenges that the Franks had to manage to consolidate their power over Saxony and the Saxons. The frontier zone was the stage where the ruler was committed to spreading his authority through investment in movable and non-movable wealth, manpower, political and religious capital. At the frontier zone of Saxony and the Elbe, the Franks built fortresses, churches, markets and centres of power to improve their control over these areas. These investments were made to bind a fragmented and disunited region in a web of political and economic interests and infrastructure of power, that were meant to erase the differences and to subject them to the central authority. In the Middle Ages, borderlands were places of “public over investments”, quoting Pierre Toubert’s sentence, where the efforts of the central authority became manifest through the building of infrastructures and the reorganization of the topographies of power. As Toubert wrote, the main functions of castles have been precisely to mark borders and border areas, to give them materiality, to master them, to protect them and, in short, to insert their presence in the long-term historical landscapes. With the construction of castles and other infrastructures, the Franks manifested their power over a region or a population; they were performing an «opération de prise de possession symbolique de l’espace», a procedure reflecting the symbolic takeover of possession of space.

DOI: 10.36253/979–12–215–0416–3.12

Read Full Text: https://books.fupress.it/chapter/frontiers-as-zones-of-public-overinvestment-fortresses-ditches-and-walls-in-the-northern-frontier-of/15105

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