Places of Love and Honour: Cities and Almost-Cities in the Carolingian World

Abstract

The Carolingians have long been characterised as uninterested in cities, ruling over their empire while travelling between rural palaces. The limits of this perspective have been observed by others, but many of the centres of Carolingian power, such as Charlemagne’s Aachen or Charles the Bald’s Compiègne, were debatably urban; spaces that were seemingly both cities and not cities at the same time. This chapter examines this ambiguity through the lens of ancient ideas of the city as civitas, a community of people bound together by shared ideals. This concept was well-known in the Frankish world and frequently applied to cities. The concept of a civitas could also be used for non-urban institutions, such as monasteries. Investigation of contemporary descriptions of palaces such as Aachen and Compiègne reveal that they too were understood in terms similar or identical to the civitas. In this way, even if such foundations were questionably urban, ancient ideas of the city were adapted to be used by those who lived in them.

1 Introduction

That Charlemagne’s initial conquest of Saxony was not entirely complete by the year 778 is suggested by an incident which took place while he was on his ill-fated Roncesvalles campaign in the Iberian Peninsula.¹ In this year an army of rebellious Saxons crossed the Rhine, sacking towns and burning to the ground a settlement that had been built by the Franks two years earlier in 776 on the river Lippe. A number of Frankish annals refer to the foundation of this settlement, but they differ on its exact nature. Some call it a castellum or fort.² The Royal Frankish Annals, which is the most extensive and closest to Charlemagne’s court, calls it a castrum (castle).³ The Annals of Moselle, by contrast, reports that in 776 Charlemagne ‘built a city on the river Lippe, called Karlesburg’.⁴ The Annals of Petau agree, stating that ‘the Franks built in the country of the Saxons a city called Urbs Karoli (City of Charles)’.⁵ The Annales Maximiniani refers to it as the ‘urbs Karoli et Francorum (the city of Charles and the Franks)’.⁶

This sounds like a much more involved project than putting up a fort. Charlemagne had apparently established a city in these freshly conquered lands, upon which he had bestowed his own name, identifying himself and his reputation with this new foundation. Despite referring to it as a nameless stronghold, the Royal Frankish Annals hints at its importance by telling us that in 776 the Saxons came there ‘with wives and children, a countless number, and were baptised and gave as many hostages as the Lord King demanded’.⁷ This implies that this was intended to be a space of power, where the Saxon people were bound to Charlemagne.

This political significance probably explains events in 778, when, according to the Annals of Petau, the rebellious Saxons came ‘and burned with fire the city that the Franks had built on the river Lippe’.⁸ In doing so they targeted the most visible manifestation of Frankish power and a project that Charlemagne had placed his own name on. The embarrassing nature of the destruction of the city is the likely reason why references to it are so scarce. Having provided a highly misleading description of Charlemagne’s misadventure in Spain, the writer of the Royal Frankish Annals thought it best to similarly downplay the humiliation of the Saxon rebellion by downgrading the city to a castle and not mentioning that it was subsequently set alight.⁹

The strange case of Charles City sets up two important themes. The first is the slipperiness of settlement categories. Charlemagne’s foundation on the Lippe could be categorised as either fort or city depending on the needs of the writer. On the one hand this suggests the ambiguity of the settlements under discussion and the potential for multiple readings of the same place. On the other, that it apparently mattered a great deal whether the presumably tiny collection of buildings the Saxons levelled was a city or a fort indicates the importance of the words used.

The second theme is the impact of ancient and particularly late antique ideas of cities for the Carolingians. In founding a new city with his name on it, Charlemagne was participating in a tradition of Roman rulership that stretched back to Romulus.¹⁰ Constantinople and a whole range of cities named after Justinian attest that this was a habit familiar to Christian Roman emperors.¹¹ The successor kingdoms of the western Mediterranean had their own equivalents, with Theodoricopolis, Hunericopolis and Reccopolis showing that kings of the Ostrogoths, Vandals and Visigoths could all aspire to be eponymous city-founders.¹²

It is important to place Charlemagne within this urban genealogy, because the Carolingian empire is normally seen as a break in the continuity of the idea of the Roman city, in contrast to the more urban-minded Merovingians.¹³ This was embodied by Pirenne who observed that ‘It is quite characteristic, and quite illuminating, that the palaces (palatia) of the Carolingian princes were not located in the towns’.¹⁴ In his view the cities were saved by the bishops, who lived in the old Roman civitates, presiding over shrunken populations. Viewing Charlemagne as a city-founder helps rectify the misleading impression given by Pirenne.¹⁵ Even in Pirenne’s day it was accepted that cities continued to matter in an economic and political sense in Italy. North of the Alps, the work of scholars such as Adriaan Verhulst have served to challenge the idea that the cities of the Carolingian period were economic vacuums, offering compelling evidence for serious commercial activity and population growth.¹⁶ Indeed, Charlemagne’s family had a long history developing urban centres, from Liège under Pippin II to Laon under the last Carolingians in West Francia.¹⁷

Nowhere is the idea of Charlemagne as city-founder more fully expressed than in the poem Karolus Magnus et Leo Papa, written in about 800, where the anonymous writer celebrates Charlemagne as the lord ‘of the city where a second Rome/flowers anew, its mighty mass rising up to the great heights, /the lofty cupolas on its walls touching the sky’.¹⁸ The city whose buildings are being erected under the Frankish king’s watchful eyes is probably Aachen, although some have suggested Paderborn.¹⁹ Textually, it is a description of Carthage, being heavily indebted to Virgil’s depiction of the founding of Carthage in the Aeneid (1.418–440).²⁰ But spiritually, as the poet explicitly tells us, this city is clearly Rome come again.

Despite this grandly classical picture of city founding, there are things that make one uneasy about too readily describing the Carolingian realm as an empire of cities. Charlemagne’s city on the Lippe was not rebuilt, but was replaced by Paderborn, which may or may not have been on the same site, but was also not a city, being universally described as a palace.²¹ Charlemagne’s second Rome at Aachen was only debatably a city, being inconsistently referred to as such in our surviving sources. Einhard’s account of his transfer of the relics of Saints Marcellinus and Petrus from Rome to his new foundation of Seligenstadt in 829 is a case in point.²² Within a space of two chapters he calls Aachen both a civitas and a vicus (village), while also being happy to use the word palatium (palace) to refer to the whole settlement.²³ Unlike Paderborn, Aachen did not have a bishop until the nineteenth century. This did not prevent it from being a royal seat. Charlemagne called it his palatium publicum.²⁴ In the first decade of the ninth century, the poet Modoin named Aachen the caput orbis and New Rome, but he avoided specifically labelling it a city.²⁵ In the 840s, Nithard described it as ‘the palace at Aachen…the sedes (capital) of Francia’.²⁶ This placed Aachen within the hierarchy of the many rural palaces favoured by Carolingian rulers rather than as an urban centre.²⁷

2 The City and the Civitas

This ambiguity makes the importance of cities for the Carolingians unclear. A place like Aachen was both a city and not a city at the same time. One answer to this riddle comes from examining carefully the words used in our sources and the significance they had for their authors. Considering what contemporaries meant when they discussed different types of settlements offers a much clearer sense of how cities were understood and what role they played. Among the large number of words used by people in the Carolingian world when they talked about settlements was civitas, a word with a wide range of potential meanings. What follows will examine the way civitas was employed in the Carolingian world, the meaning it had for writers in the period, and the types of places the word was applied to. In doing so this chapter will seek to answer the question of whether, even if it was not a city, Aachen was instead a civitas.

First, and most obviously, the civitas could be a physical urban centre. Although the Carolingian empire is normally understood as an assemblage of kingdoms, people moving through it relied upon an itinerary of civitates. Charts such as the Carolingian ancestor of the Peutinger Map arranged routes through a network of cities.²⁸ Such a journey can be observed in Theodulf’s tour of the cities of Southern Gaul in his capacity as judge,²⁹ which started in Lyons and progressed to Aix-en-Provence via Vienne, Nîmes, Narbonne and Marseilles, among others.³⁰ In each place he described the local people of the area gathering in their city to bring questions to him or attempt to bribe him. These were places dominated by local inhabitants who had a strong sense of themselves as citizens. Theodulf alluded to a rivalry between the citizens of Arles and Narbonne as to which is the greatest (he sided with Narbonne on this matter).³¹ A similar view of the world could be applied beyond the borders of the Carolingian world. Civitates featured prominently in the catalogue assembled by the anonymous Bavarian Geographer of the peoples north and east of the Danube.³²

The physical civitas could also refer to the lands around the city which fed it and gathered within its walls for commerce and justice. The civitas was both a point in a network and a territory that bound the neighbouring countryside to an urban core. This is reflected by the way Charlemagne’s descendants traded territories as civitates. In 859, Lothar II gave his older brother, Louis II ‘the civitates of Geneva, Lausanne and Sion, along with the bishoprics, monasteries and counties’.³³ After Lothar’s death, his kingdom was divided between his uncles in 870, who broke it down into civitates, so that Louis the German took ‘Cologne, Trier, Utrecht, Strasbourg, Basel and Metz’, while Charles the Bald received ‘Lyons, Besançon, Vienne, Liège, Toul, Verdun, Cambrai, Viviers, [and] Uzès’.³⁴ Theodulf assembled the congregation of Orléans and the people in the country connected to it to perform Mass together.³⁵

The urban cores within the civitates of the Carolingian realms were not dead relics, but commercial and economic centres. Walls and churches were repaired and plots of land bought and sold, often by the Carolingians themselves.³⁶ A nervous Alcuin had to appease a furious Charlemagne when the men of Tours attacked a party from Orléans who had come to retrieve a criminal. Alcuin explained the fracas by writing that it was thought some insult was intended to St Martin.³⁷ The support of the same St Martin was offered in an anonymous panegyric celebrating the adventus of Louis the Pious into Tours.³⁸ Local elites gathered in cities in times of peace, but also for war.³⁹ A poet based in Orléans, possibly Theodulf or Jonas, celebrated ‘The faithful nobles [who] guard the city/by enduring the wars of the enemy’.⁴⁰

The vibrancy of the physical civitas mattered for the way writers in the Carolingian understood and used the term. Walls and towers would make appearances in many less material discussions of the civitas. But scholars and rulers were also guided by the legacy of ancient and late antique concepts of the civitas. Looming large over all Carolingian ideas of the civitas was the figure of Augustine. In his De civitate Dei, the Bishop of Hippo responded to a classical tradition embodied by Cicero, who defined the civitas as a community of people gathered around a shared sense of justice.⁴¹ Augustine agreed that the civitas was defined by the ideas that unified their members, asking ‘what is a city but a group of men united by a specific bond of peace?’⁴² He famously emphasised the importance of love as the key classifying concept of a civitas, distinguishing between:

the two civitates [that] were created by two kinds of love: the earthly was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the heavenly by the love of God carried as far as contempt for self.⁴³

Augustine thus emphasised the civitas as a community of citizens rather than a fixed place, unified and recognisable by the ideas they held which organised their lives.⁴⁴ Augustine was hugely influential for the Carolingians.⁴⁵ In his biography of Charlemagne, Einhard tells us that the Frankish ruler ‘was fond of the books of Saint Augustine, particularly the one called the City of God’.⁴⁶ The chronicler Frechulf of Lisieux quoted Augustine on precisely this point in the universal history he dedicated to the West Frankish king Charles the Bald.⁴⁷

Also casting a shadow on the subject was the ubiquitous Isidore of Seville. In addition to agreeing with Augustine that ‘a civitas is a multitude of people united by a bond of community’ he emphasised that ‘urbs is the name for the actual buildings, while civitas is not the stones, but the inhabitants’.⁴⁸ His Etymologies were widely employed across the Carolingian world, including in the encyclopaedia assembled by Hrabanus Maurus, who copied Isidore exactly on this point.⁴⁹ The Carolingian scholars mentioned here were not isolated figures, but influential men who had access to Carolingian rulers. What they suggest is an understanding of the word civitas to mean a community of people living together under a shared law or love.

3 The Non-urban civitas

The previous section showed that the civitas as urban centre was still a useful concept in Carolingian Europe. But it has also demonstrated that writers in the period inherited a whole range of understandings about the civitas from the classical and late antique Christian worlds. As a consequence, Carolingian writers defined the civitas as a community of people bound together by a shared love. While this concept was most obviously applicable to a city, it could also be applied to non-urban settings. A key example is provided by the Abbey of Corvey, about thirty miles east of Paderborn, established at its current site in 822, and founded by the brothers Adalhard and Wala, cousins of Charlemagne.⁵⁰ Heavily patronised by Carolingian rulers, the most spectacular part of its surviving ninth-century architecture is the Westwerk, erected between 873 and 885, which acted as the main gate, although the towers are later Gothic. On that gate, which resembles the entrance to a city, and probably predates the Westwerk itself, is an inscription that reads ‘You, lord, surround this civitas and your angels guard its walls’.⁵¹ The text is taken from an antiphon that circulated in the ninth century. Kristina Krüger has examined this inscription and argued that the use of civitas here implies a broader understanding of the monastery community, to include the lands and people that supported it beyond the walls.⁵² But it also hints at the idea of a monastery as a community of people united by a common purpose, making it a civitas.

This identification of the monastery as civitas or polis had a history that stretched all the way back to Anthony in the Egyptian desert.⁵³ Corvey is a particularly interesting example because of the existence of a discussion of its founding in a funeral oration for Wala, one of the fraternal founders and a controversial abbot of Corvey, written by Paschasius Radbertus in the 850s.⁵⁴ One of the interlocutors in Paschasius’ dialogue, Severus, describes the founding in terms drawn from De civitate Dei, comparing it to that of Rome and contrasting two cities:

Rome was founded by two brothers [as was Corvey] in a manner different from the new one in our name. The former was built carnally on the earth, the other spiritually so that it might expand in heaven.⁵⁵

This seems to be a veiled criticism that Corvey, this Rome in the wilderness, was not living up to the expectations of its founders, but rather acting in a corrupt manner. Certainly, the response of Paschasius ’ subtly named mouthpiece, Paschasius, suggests that this was to be interpreted critically, as he chides Severus for being overly severe.

Severus’ critique indicates that Corvey can be judged by how successfully it performs as a good civitas. Paschasius responded to this by asserting that Corvey is not the city ‘built on earth through bloodshed’.⁵⁶ Instead it is the city Ezekiel saw in his vision of the heavenly Jerusalem:

For it had the same measurements atop the same foundations, the same length and width, the same number of gates and windows, and no other room for expansion… two extraordinary men [Wala and Adalhard] laid the foundations for this civitas, together with its towers and ramparts, among the peoples of the north.⁵⁷

As with Corvey’s grand gate, we can observe slippage between the civitas as community and as physical environment in Paschasius’ towers and ramparts. Nonetheless, in asserting that Corvey was not Rome, but the heavenly Jerusalem, Paschasius accepted the terms on which Severus sought to measure the monastery.⁵⁸ What was important about Corvey was that it bound together a community of people with the shared love of God. This is a civitas but not an urban centre.

This case of a non-urban civitas shows that it was possible to disentangle a civic community from urban infrastructure. Nor was it just monasteries that could be a civitas. Another revealing example appears in a letter written by a monk based in Corvey’s motherhouse, Corbie, named Ratramnus, to a missionary active in Scandinavia called Rimbert, advising him on what to do about reports he had received of cynocephali (dog-headed people) living nearby.⁵⁹ The monk observed of the dog-headed people that ‘they follow some laws of society, to which their dwelling in villages bears witness’ which meant that they were rational.⁶⁰ Ratramnus linked this to the nature of the settlements they lived in:

Now since a civitas is said to be a collection of human beings living equally under the same law and those cynocephali are said to live together in certain common dwellings in villages, the definition of a civitas is believed to agree with that.⁶¹

These civitates did not need to be urban and Ratramnus consistently described these settlements as villages. A civitas was therefore a place where rational people lived together under a common law. In placing emphasis on rationality and justice, Ratramnus was working within a long tradition. Both were associated with civic life in classical sources.⁶² Cicero perceived justice as both the glue that bound the city together and the fundamental purpose for the city existing.⁶³ Augustine had defined a human being as ‘a rational and mortal animal.’⁶⁴ One of the ways that rationality manifested itself was being able to live together in a city.

The distinction between Corvey as a community dedicated to the love of God and the pagan cynocephali as one bound by a shared rational justice speaks to the difficulties in perfectly reconciling Cicero and Augustine, even by those who were inspired by both. As these two examples suggest, non-urban institutions such as monasteries or villages might be considered to be a civitas so long as they proved to be united by a common sense of purpose.

4 The Palace as civitas

This discussion of the many possible uses of the word civitas has taken us through the cities, scriptoria, monasteries and villages of the Carolingian (and cynocephalic) world. It now allows us to return to the problem with which we began, the ambiguous royal capitals that may or may not be cities. These settlements hover somewhere between a city and a palace. The examples of Corvey and the cynocephali suggest that this question can be usefully examined by considering the idea of a palace as civitas.

An incident in the long reign of Charles the Bald offers a valuable starting point here. Charles’ rule over the kingdom of the West Franks was not always unchallenged and in the year 858 he was invaded by his older brother, Louis the German, while Charles was busy besieging a viking army elsewhere.⁶⁵ Charles was saved in this moment of crisis by the refusal of large numbers of the West Frankish elite to recognise Louis, most notably the bishops. Louis summoned the bishops of the provinces of Rheims and Rouen to a meeting at Rheims, but instead they gathered at Attigny. There they sent a defiant letter to Louis, written by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims.⁶⁶ Having failed to garner sufficient support, Louis left West Francia. Of particular interest is the section of the letter where Hincmar condemns Louis for the atrocities his men have committed, all the more damning as they were against Christian Franks occupied fighting pagan vikings. Hincmar called upon Louis to:

prohibit, restrain and calm these things, because your palace ought to be sacred, not sacrilegious. For the palace of the king is so called on account of the rational people residing there, and not on account of walls or bricks that are incapable of feeling.⁶⁷

Hincmar thus declared that a palace is a community of people, defined by their rationality, not by the physical space, bound by a shared sense of the divine. This is remarkably similar to Isidore’s description of a civitas, which Hincmar had access to at the scriptorium at Rheims.⁶⁸ Hincmar was familiar with Isidore as an authority, and had recently been drawing upon the forged Decretals associated with him for his Collectio de ecclesiis et capellis in 857 or 858.⁶⁹ In the letter to Louis, Hincmar was not talking about a civitas, but he used precisely those terms associated with a civitas when it came to describing the nature of a true palace.

Hincmar’s letter to Louis also echoes ideas about law and rationality that we encountered with Ratramnus’ discussion of the cynocephali. These characteristics which defined the palace also defined the civitas.

The palace was a subject that Hincmar wrote about elsewhere. In 882 he produced an updated version of the De ordine palatii, which was originally written for Charlemagne by Adalhard, one of the founders of Corvey.⁷⁰ It is hard to tell what is Hincmar and what is Adalhard, but it can be assumed that Hincmar endorsed all of it.⁷¹ Here again, the archbishop emphasises the importance of rationality, stating that kings must choose palace officials who are ‘as noble by heart as by body, faithful, rational, discrete and sober’.⁷² This would ensure a palace built around those values. This was particularly important for the Count of the Palace, whose job it was to hear legal trials that had reached the palace ‘according to justice and reason’.⁷³

The idea of a palace as a place of common purpose appears elsewhere. In his encyclopaedia, De Rerum Natura, compiled in the 840s and dedicated to Louis the German, Hrabanus Maurus wrote ‘We speak of a single palace, when it is bounded by many wings and open spaces’.⁷⁴ He was quoting here Cassiodorus’ commentary on Psalm 148, which repeatedly refers to ‘heavens’.⁷⁵ The sixth-century exegete explained this pluralisation in the psalm by comparing heaven to a palace, ‘so we can perhaps speak of parts of heaven as heavens, since its constituent parts and its folds are demonstrably one’, just as a palace could be described as one despite the variety of the pieces that made it.⁷⁶ Hrabanus copied this commentary completely. The palace was therefore a space where unity emerged from multiplicity. Although Cassiodorus and Hrabanus were here thinking of physical structures, the same idea could be applied to the palace as a community of people, as we shall see.

In the second half of the reign of Charles the Bald, the most important palace where some of these ideas might have been applied was Compiègne.⁷⁷ Compiègne took an increasingly central role from the late 860s, hosting assemblies and celebrating major feasts there such as Christmas and Easter.⁷⁸ Charles launched a major building campaign there. That he saw Compiègne as his Aachen is suggested by his statement on the founding of a monastery there in 876:

Because our grandfather [Charlemagne], to whom divine providence granted the monarchy of this whole empire, established a chapel in honour of the Virgin in the palace of Aachen, we therefore, wanting to imitate the pattern set by him…have built and completed within the territory under our sway, the palace of Compiègne, a new monastery, to which we have given the name ‘royal’ in honour of the glorious mother of God and ever virgin Mary.⁷⁹

Compiègne resembled Aachen in a number of ways. It was a royal centre with a collection of monumental infrastructure based around a hall and a church, intimately connected in life and in memory with one particular ruler. Charles was associated with Compiègne after his death, as later annalists placed events of his reign in Compiègne despite evidence that they had happened elsewhere.⁸⁰

Later sources from the tenth century name Compiègne ‘Carlopolis’, and it may have been called that in the time of Charles.⁸¹ A letter from Pope Hadrian II in 871 observed that Charles had done so much work on Tours, that he could name it ‘Karolidonum’, just as in ancient times it had been called ‘Cesarodunum’ after the emperors, so the idea of naming a place after a monarch who had done a lot of building work there was clearly familiar to Charles.⁸² This implies that the palace of Compiègne was also perceived as becoming city-like through the development of physical architecture such as the chapel to the Virgin. But emotional and communal ties were also essential for defining its status.

In the Capitulary of Quierzy of 877, Charles called upon the West Frankish elite to finish the fortress he had started building at Compiègne. Charles was going on campaign in Italy and this was part of a series of fortifications designed to fend off vikings while he was away. While the other measures are fairly pragmatic, this one is described in terms of emotional bonds, ‘That the fortress of Compiègne, begun by us, should be perfected for our love, and your honour, as a testimony of your love towards our Kindness’.⁸³ Compiègne was portrayed as a place where Charles and his people labour together out of a shared love between monarch and subjects, where Charles ruled with kindness, and his followers earned honour through their service. It was a fortress rather than a city, but it was also a space where a community defined by love came together, fusing the ideas associated with a civitas with the concept of a palace.

This did not begin with Charles the Bald, even if it saw some of its clearest manifestation during his reign. As we have seen, Compiègne was intended as a response to Aachen, and the ideas discussed by Hincmar in his issuing of the Ordinances of the Palace probably originated in the time of Charlemagne. It has long been recognised that Charlemagne and Louis the Pious were trying to create a particular environment in Aachen. It has been described as a ‘courtly society’ in the sense of Norbert Elias; a place of education and discipline; a sacred community; a select society in and of itself and yet also a model for the rest of the empire.⁸⁴ In his biography of Charlemagne, Einhard presents Aachen as a model of sociability.⁸⁵ Notker the Stammerer would later depict Aachen as a sort of Panopticon under Charlemagne’s watchful eye, its members being carefully managed and corrected as needed.⁸⁶ The idea of a civic society, or civitas, offers a lens through which these multiple Aachens can be understood.

Aachen as a place where people are united by a shared love appears in a number of places. Round the interior of the rotunda of the chapel in Aachen that Charles the Bald sought to emulate in Compiègne, runs the inscription, inspired by 1 Peter 2 and reportedly composed by Alcuin:

When the living stones are fastened together in peace,

And in even number all come together,

The work of the Lord who has built this whole hall shines,

And the pious labour of mortal men is crowned with success.⁸⁷

The living stones here stand for the people quarried from across Europe and brought together to Aachen. The living community is fundamentally tied here to the physical building.

Something similar can be observed by returning to Karolus Magnus et Leo Papa. The poem celebrated the physical structures being built, particularly the high walls. But the longest passages focus on the nameless people constructing the nameless city called Rome. Workers are carving and moving stone, digging baths, building the church, raising the stones to elevate the walls, making tools and warehouses:

there is an uproar, a hubbub rises in the great city;

the busy throng comes and goes, scattered throughout the city,

enthusiastically gathering material to build lofty Rome.⁸⁸

This is a depiction of a community of people working seamlessly and enthusiastically together under Charlemagne’s direction to make a new city. Clearly the physical structures matter, but it is the vision and the human participation that makes it work. Much of the language is taken from the Aeneid, but the fact that it was chosen, taken and then rearranged says something about what our anonymous poet wanted to convey. The language of the poem may be that of urbs, but the community it describes is that of a civitas.

The language of the physical city is not without significance here. Writers and rulers were comfortable with the non-urban civitas. But they were also intimately familiar with the living cities that were also called civitas. Despite Isidore’s best efforts to separate the two concepts, slippage took place.⁸⁹ Spaces like Corvey or Aachen, which were civitates by virtue of their united communities, were then reimagined in urban terms. Both cases show how the language of construction, of walls and towers, was then pressed into service to explain the unity and purpose of a community of people. In this way, a non-urban civitas could acquire connotations of the city, even if that was far from an accurate description of the physical armature of the settlement in question.

5 Conclusion

It seems clear that in 776 Charlemagne wanted to found a city on the river Lippe, before trying to downplay the significance of the project after it went up in flames in 778. The unfortunate city was undoubtedly a physical settlement, intended to be impressive and probably in possession of churches and walls, even if the latter were sadly lacking when the Saxon rebels arrived. But this chapter has argued that Charlemagne and his advisers also thought about cities as civitates, communities of people united by their love and their honour. This was possible not just because of the glamour of Antiquity, but also because the Carolingian empire was filled both with cities that acted like civitates, such as Tours and Orléans, and with non-urban institutions such as monasteries that nonetheless embraced the concept of civitas. Under this definition of a civitas, the ambiguities that surround places like Aachen and Compiègne begin to make more sense. These palace centres were understood in the same terms as the civitas, as permanent communities bound by their shared love and honour. One consequence of this is that definitions of palaces might come to resemble that of the civitas, as we saw in the case of Hincmar. Another is that even a fairly rural palace centre might be referred to and thought of in terms that resemble a city because of slippage between the multiple concepts of the civitas.

In order to understand the Carolingian city, we need to do so by thinking about it in terms of the words they used and the meanings they attached to them, while accepting that these could be ambiguous and prone to change and really important all at the same time. Following this approach, it becomes evident that people in the Carolingian world took ancient ideas of the city, mediated by late Antiquity and by the example of still vibrant urban communities in their own times, and applied them to their much less urbanised landscape, even if that meant using them for settlement types that may not strike us as strictly speaking urban. In doing so, they identified a quality that struck them as a defining characteristic of a city, that of a community with shared goals and values, which continued to matter in the Carolingian world. Much like Charlemagne contemplating the burned ruins of his city on the Lippe and deciding that a rebranding was in order, the Franks as a whole adapted to changing conditions, making use of the ancient past in a new context.