How the East was Lost: Triumphal Rulership, and the Failure of Integration in Carolingian Central Europe

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Abstract: 

In 795 CE, Charlemagne's armies celebrated a triumphal victory over the Avars, and the conquest of their European steppe empire from the Black Sea to the middle Danube that they had ruled for more than two hundred years. This triumph over what Carolingian propaganda presented as a triumph over the ultimate enemies of Christendom paved the way for Charlemagne’s coranation as the first medieval emperor of what would become the Holy Roman Empire. However, the ambitious rhetoric and ideology of this war in the name of God made it more difficult to incorporate the newly conquered territories into the empire along the more pragmatic inclusion strategies that Frankish politics had developed over several centuries prior to Charlemagne's reign. These tried-and-tested strategies for incorporating culturally, legally and ethnically diverse territories were replaced by the politics of a new Christian empire. In this process, the Avars disappeared. They were unable to maintain their political identity under a Christian Frankish emperor. Following the loss of the Avars and the inability to establish an Avar province, Carolingian politics lost orientation in the diverse and complex middle grounds of Central Europe. Consequently, ruling over the Central European Middle Grounds became a significant challenge for Charlemagne’s successors throughout the ninth century. Neither the rulers nor their political or ecclesiastical elites managed to establish firmer control over the territories along the middle Danube. In 907, when a Hungarian army defeated a Frankish army in the region of modern day Bratislava, the Hungarians came to control the region as far west as the River Enns – the river that Charlemagne had crossed in triumph to begin his conquest of the Avar Empire. In my presentation I would like to discuss this complex history of various regime collisions in the ninth century that came to shape the social and political topography of the region along the middle Danube for many centuries to come, even until today.

About the Speaker: 

Helmut Reimitz is Shelby Cullom Davis ’30 Professor of European History, and was formerly Head of the Program of Medieval Studies, at Princeton University. His research explores the formation of some of the distinctive features of the West in late Antique and early medieval Europe. In many of his studies he uses the rich and manifold manuscript transmission, the écriture and réécriture of texts and manuscripts to explore the changes from the late ancient to the early medieval, and from the early medieval to the later medieval periods. At the moment he is focusing on the history of diversity in the late Antique and medieval West, the changes in historical thought and practice of writing history from the early to the high Middle Ages, and the transformation of the legal landscape from late Roman to the Carolingian period. 

About the Kann Lecture: 

Established in 1984, the Robert A. Kann Memorial Lecture is delivered each year by a internationally-renowned scholar of Central European history, and is open to the University community and the general public. An expanded version of each Kann Lecture appears in the Austrian History Yearbook.

This Kann Lecture is made possible by an endowment established in honor of the late Robert A. Kann. Born in Vienna, Kann practiced law before he and his wife, Marie, fled to the United States following the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938. Kann later earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and was a professor of history at Rutgers University until his retirement in 1976. 

In 1982, the University of Minnesota acquired Kann's personal library. Consisting of roughly 5,000 monographs, the Kann Collection is noted for its breadth, depth, and integrity as the product of a single collector. The Kann Collection also forms an integral part of the Special Collections and Rare Books Division at the University of Minnesota's Elmer L. Anderson Library, serving as a valuable resource for scholars of Austrian history. 

Co-Organizers: Centers for Austrian Studies and Premodern Studies