My Burgundy Your Burgundy History, culture and nature

February 20, 2011

Some snippets of local Burgundian medieval history

Filed under: History — admin @ 5:43 pm

I’ve been reading Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 and was pleased to find that Burgundy features quite prominently.

We have Theodoric the Ostrogoth giving the Burgundian monarch Gundobad a water-clock in about 506, which Wickham says, was designed to show the superiority of Italian/Roman technology. (p. 218)

Wickham talks about the centrality of kings in the Merovingian political system, the place of aristocrats and bishops defined by court politics. That he says that local politics could have place, the bishops in particular who threw themselves too heartily into central government politics could be unpopular. “When Leudegar of Autun was finally destroyed by Ebroin in 676-8 it is clear he got little support Autun itself.” (p. 127)

Autun also features earlier, in the late 460s, as Sidonius Apollinarus tells a friend, the bishops of Lyon and Autun had to choose a new compatriot in Chalon-sur-Saone. “there were three candidates, unnamed, one claiming office because his family was old, one who had built up support in the city by feeding the people, and one who promised church land to supporters. The bishops instead chose the holy cleric John, who had slowly moved up the church heirarchy, thus confounding the local factions.” (p. 50)

Getting into Carolingian times, Autun was in the early 860s held by Count Bernard “Hairy-paws” (i.e. foxy, d. 886) of the Guilhelmid family, which had got tangled up in civil wars in earlier decades, not to its benefit. In 864 “for unclear reasons, he tried to assassinate either Robert the Strong or Charles the Bald himself; he lost most of his honores at once, and Autun two years later.” But he was able to recover, return to court, and start accumulating lands again – his son called himself duke of Aquitaine. (p. 511)

After the Carolingian empire broke up (887-8) into five kingdoms, the first Burgundian king was Rudolph. from Queen Judith’s family. “What destroyed Carolingian power was simply genealogy. There had always been too many Carolingians…. as late as 870 there were eight legitimate adult male Carolingians, all kings or ambitious to become kings. In 885, however, there was only one… Charles ‘the Fat’ … reunited the whole empire in 884 for the first time since 840…Charles was ill, and had only an illegitimate son.” (p. 402)

And we have the Macon famous as “one of the nest-documented areas of tenth- and eleventh-century Europe, thanks to the thousands of charters of the monastery of Cluny, and thanks also to Georges Duby’s epoch-making regional study of 1953”. What Wickham sees is “the pulverization of the structures of the county, and the takeover of all the public traditions of the state by private landholding families”. (p. 515) So he follows one family the Uxelles lords, who by the second quarter of the eleventh century had descended to having rights of over only around 100 square kilometres, “by no means all of it directly controlled by the family.”

Those are mere fragments, but one of the things I find fascinating about this area is that you can often be walking on the ground where these events happened, or even between the walls that held them…

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