Renegotiating Power and Identity in Earlier Merovingian Gaul: A Material Cultural Approach

[This is the keynote paper I gave to the 12 or so people who had stayed to the end of the recent conference on 'Renegotiating Power' held at Christ Church University, Canterbury.  Thanks to the organisers, especially Charlotte Liebelt, for the invitation, Leonie Hicks for chairing, and the audience for insteresting questions and discussion afterwards.  Thanks also to Rob Heffron (Sheffield) for some helpful information about gendered space in Christian basilicas.

The argument looks first at the ways of ordering space via architectural cues, at the breakdown of the distinctive settlements of the social elite - villas - and of the basilica used as a secular political space and at the replacement of both to some extent by the hall.  Then it examines the ways in which costume symbolised identity and in so doing was employed in creating political space - or the space of the political. Throughout, emphasis is placed upon the possibilities for miscommunication and thus renegotiation that inhere in all communication.]

Introduction

This paper comes out of work I have been doing under the general heading of a project I started (ahem) nine years ago on The Transformations of the Year 600, which I am hoping that I might actually finish within the next couple of years.  One of those areas concerns what became of public space in the sense of the spaces of the political.  Another concerns why high-status sites are curiously absent in this period, or at least are, in the current state of our knowledge, not very archaeologically visible.  That does beg a number of questions to which I will return.  Finally, linking all of this, how political communities change in the period I am looking at, between c.560 and c.650.  I will talk principally about Gaul/France but I will bring in some other areas of western Europe here and there.  I am going to talk about the production of space, whether of politics or of the political (in the distinction made in French thought since the 1950s, between la politique (politics) and le politique (the political)).

Spatial Shifts

The key starting point for my analysis is the sociological studies of Pierre Bourdieu and, in his early work, Anthony Giddens, which, though very different, come together around the idea that social structure is not some extrinsic set of laws that governs social behaviour but is perpetually constituted and reconstituted by social interaction itself.  It is useful to think of it as a cumulative memory bank, an archive if you prefer, of those ways of interacting that people approve, and those of which they disapprove.  Every social interchange between people of particular categories – gender, age, social rank, ethnicity, etc. – has, by adding to that archive, the capacity or potential to renegotiate the limits of the acceptable. In this perspective, change is inevitable; the chance of social structures continually and exactly reproducing themselves over time are pretty thin.

There are nonetheless strategies that attempt to put the brakes on the renegotiation of social identities, or to keep the interplay of social categories within particular limits.  An important one is the use of space.  Space sets the tone for the exchange.  It sets up cues about how one deals with the particular people or classes of people that one might be expected to encounter.  Most of us are familiar with the awkwardness involved in meeting someone in an unexpected location or setting.  Location sets up a range of expectations, a script.  It literally sets the scene.  Obvious, though in many respects this is, it is actually fundamental to rethinking some points about the interplay of identities.

In the Roman world, different types of space were quite clearly delineated.  To give a couple of political examples we could cite, first, the reception rooms of villas.  The approaches to villas, as with later castles, were carefully devised to present a particular view of the house, passing along which, through gateways and into ornately-decorated reception rooms, set the tone, or the stage, for the encounter with the estate’s dominus.  Whether the visitor was a guest of more or less equal or superior status to the villa-owner, or a tenant or client coming to pay rent or beg a favour, the expectations of behaviour were clearly set up, framed and limits set upon the range of acceptable outcomes.

Equally, the public spaces of the classical city functioned in similar ways, whether we are talking of the for a, the civil basilicas, the baths.  Again, in many well-studied cities, urban planning made use of the possibilities of vistas and lines of approach.  These are cues; they establish the expectations of how to speak and how to behave: of bodily posture.  Bourdieu said that a component of the habitus was repeated, learned, bodily dispositions and uses of space.  This seems quite a good illustration of the concept.  What I want to add, though, and it is something to which I will return throughout this paper, is the possibility of slippage and miscommunication – the mis-cue – that inheres within visual cues precisely because they function ‘textually’ in the sense that I will outline later.

From Villa to Hall

The fairly traditional classical forms of space had undergone or were undergoing profound change by the middle of the sixth century.  By that time, the villa pattern across western Europe had disappeared or was in its final throes.  Wherever one looks in the former western provinces, there is no new class of settlement that replaces the villa as a separate elite residence and focus for display and consumption – no class of settlement that creates social space and distance in the same way.  Across western Europe, from the mid-sixth century onwards, the settlements we know about are much less clearly distinguished – whether hilltop sites in southern Gaul, Spain and Italy, the communal-looking remodelling of villa-sites in Spain, the villages of Italy, new settlements in Spain, or the rural settlements of northern Gaul and England.  It may be that some more obviously elite settlements were coming into existence in Anglo-Saxon England around 600 but such sites are generally not archaeologically visible in Gaul until the middle of the seventh century.

One common feature of settlements is the hall.  Clearly there are all sorts of spatial, hierarchical cues in the hall but they are of an importantly different variety from those of the villa and there is a key theme of commensality as the nexus of social interchange.  This needs more work and I would be glad of any thoughts or recommendations but it seems to me that there are some very important differences, in terms of the experience of space, between Roman public assembly or reception spaces and the halls of the post-imperial period.  One might start from the location of the entrances and the perception of spatial hierarchy as a subject entered the space.  At least when used as a reception chamber, one entered the space from the opposite end of the building’s long axis from the seat of the dominus.  One entered facing the lord and furthest from him (or her), behind an audience facing away from you.  The experience of space was one of approaching as close to the focus at the front as one felt one was worthy.  The main entrances of post-imperial halls, by contrast, were on the long sides of the building.  It might be that some of these opened on to a corridor and that the main reception hall was thereafter entered, analogously to the basilica, opposite the lord’s seat at the far end of the room.  Where this was not the case, though, one entered from the side, some way between the lord and those seated furthest from him, and one entered in the gaze of most of the people present.  The decision of where one should or could sit, whether to move towards or away from the Lord’s seat, was thus made and enacted in front of an audience.  This was all the more true, given how one imagines the benches were laid out, if one entered opposite the Lord, though the movement would concern how far towards him one moved.  The arrangement of the tables means, however, that the lord’s seat was not the sole possible visual focus of the space.  Another key shift, alluded to earlier in the references to benches and tables, is to the seating of the community.  Other than in the senate, the Roman political community stood, with the exception of the dominus (whether Emperor or local lord) who remained seated.  This is but one instance of the shifts in the political gaze that occurred between the disintegration of the western Roman Empire and the early seventh century.  Add to this the different sensory and emotional architecture of basilica, on the one hand, and the hall, on the other, and I think one can gain an impression of a real shift in the experience of enclosed political space between the fifth and the seventh centuries.

How this shift might have come about is an intriguing problem and very difficult to answer. Most of the arguments usually proffered stumble on the same block.  A move away from the old villa-focused uses of social space to the kind of hall just described has been variously ascribed to ‘Germanic’ influence, a rejection of Romanitas, or the militarization of society.  All of these have something to be said for them, even the allusion to ‘Germanic’ influence – and I don’t often say that! – but they all run into trouble in dealing with the fact that the highest rank of the Roman population of early Merovingian northern Gaul were the ‘dining friends of the king’ (the Convivia Regis) whereas the Frankish equivalent were the members of the Trustis Regis – the Antrustiones – the senior members of the royal bodyguard.  So, the group defined, in a sense, by its involvement in commensality is defined by its Romanness and in opposition to ‘Germanic’, barbarian, military identity.  One could of course object that this was a different form of dining culture from that of the hall and the ‘mead-benches’ but it is difficult to see the continuation of the context for the old sort of Roman dining in the Gaul where that law was drafted. 

Clearly halls are important in the settlement architecture of Germania Magna.  Architecturally it seems very likely, at least in some areas, that at least part of the influence came from there, but the simple ethnic ascription won’t suffice.  The phenomenon is too ubiquitous and the origins of the Germani who eventually settled in the different parts of the former Empire too diverse.  More to the point, the aisled hall had plenty of antecedents in the Roman world, from various forms of settlement.  One was the typical ‘cross-hall’ of the principia found at the centre of every Roman fortress.  Roman military buildings had, however, undergone considerable change in the later imperial period and are famously less well-known or understood, and more diverse, than their precursors.  Halls are nevertheless known from forts – perhaps most famously in Britain from Birdoswald on Hadrian’s Wall.

The search for origins, though, probably misses the point.  The type of social interaction for which the hall set the scene is probably itself symptomatic of the socio-economic changes that brought about the demise of the old villas.  I would like to suggest that the kind of relationship between lord and follower implicit in the feasting hall is crucially different from that signified in the audience chamber or the basilica.  The provision of food in the format of the shared meal is indicative of a very different form of reciprocity from that of the old aristocrat-client or landlord-tenant relationship.  A clientship of sorts is produced of course but a closer, personal bond, in a smaller, more face-to-face arena.  That shift in relationship between an aristocrat and a follower seems to me to be central to the demise of the old Roman country house and its hierarchical spaces. 

The gradual disintegration of the Western Roman Empire undermined much of the local and regional security that kept local aristocrats in their position.  This happened early and quickly in the north-west; the process was slower elsewhere.  The top tiers of the Roman aristocracy lost access to lands overseas and the revenues from them and had to focus their efforts on a particular diocese: Gaul, Spain, Italy, Africa, or the East.  Even within these regions political change, fragmentation and uncertainty probably led to the loss of outlying estates and a concentration upon lands in only one or two neighbouring civitates.  The importance of the civitas as the centre of political identity and allegiance in Gregory of Tours’ Gaul is well-known. 

As well as the reduction in wealth, however, the restriction of effectively-managed estates to much smaller geographical zones meant the reduction of the social distance between the upper and lower tiers of the aristocracy and a new, more evenly-matched competition for local and regional authority and status.  In this context the need to acquire local support increased and it is not difficult to see the cost of doing so decreasing the amount of wealth available for the upkeep of villas of the old style.  At the same time, however, the spaces delineated in that old architecture would become less useful in the creation and maintenance of local power.  Previous explanations for the demise of the villa, including my own, have invoked too simple a cause-and-effect model, whether the cause be economic contraction, an abandonment of traditional Romanitas or the militarization of the provincial aristocracy.  The argument I am proposing here envisages economic constraint, for the simple reason that I cannot see why the Roman country house would not have been maintained by the aristocracy had it the economic wherewithal to do so.  It does not imply a necessary decrease in the productivity of the land; what is at stake here is the control of surplus, not the capacity to produce surplus in the first place.  But the model I advance also accounts (or attempts to account) for the precise architectural or structural changes involved.

The end of the civic basilica as a political space

There might be a further reason for the changes away from traditional Roman reception areas.  Now, as Derrida argued over 50 years ago, all communication works according to the same general principles as written text.  In order to convey information, each sign – each grapheme in his term – must be capable of iterability: repetition in a context where one or both of the parties to the communication, transmitter or receiver, are not present.  Once any sort of signifying grapheme is understood to convey a particular signified, then it is capable or reproduction outside its original context.  Indeed, one of Derrida’s key points is that there can never really be an original context; the capacity for iterability that separates sign from context was always already present.  This applies to everything, including buildings.  A type of building, once recognised as such, acts as a sign, a combination of signified and signifier.  This applies even to the ‘unique’.  Once a structure is recognised as a particular building it acquires a meaning, a signified content, and that signifier can be employed outside its original context.  Take the Eiffel Tower: a unique building but capable of endless repetition in new contexts, as in Las Vegas or on a key ring.  Indeed, it occurs to me that many of the best-known buildings of Las Vegas stand as an architectural illustration of Derrida’s concept of iterability. 

The concept is equally well-illustrated by the basilica.  At some point in classical antiquity a particular form of building was understood as meaning an assembly hall.  Within its semantic range was the audience chamber, in which the emperor, his representative, his statue, occupied the focal point within the apse at the far end of the central nave.  When Christianity, permitted to build its own structures and now the favoured, then official, eventually exclusive religion of the Empire, built churches it did so, as is well known, on the basilical plan.  The ‘sign’ of the basilica was essentially repeated in a different context.  If you like, the semantic range of the sign widened further.  Could a stranger tell which was a civil basilica and which a church?  Location would be a clue: Christian basilicas tended generally to be located on the edges of towns; the civil ones in the old municipal centre. I am not suggesting that late antique westerners habitually bumbled in and out basilical structures at random, taking a wild guess at whether it was a church or an audience chamber.  Nonetheless it is interesting to think how the iteration of the basilical form might have created a space in which power and identity were renegotiated.

Basilicas had always had a range of functions; what interests me is the wholesale reproduction of the hierarchical spatial organisation of the civic basilica.  The space occupied by the emperor, his image or his representative becomes occupied by the altar and the officiating priest.  This means quite a reshuffling of the usual hierarchical arrangements.  In the palace/audience chamber the emperor or secular leader occupies the key space and nearness to or distance from him – or occasionally her – was determined by secular worldly status.  Those at the front would be the highest-ranking and clergy would be expected to respect that hierarchy.  If one moved next door to the cathedral the bishop would occupy the centre of the space and secular officials, even emperors and kings, would take their place relative to that.  From one building to another, who was or was not permitted entry was dependent upon different people, and different considerations.  It is very likely that there were significant readjustments in the gendering of space between the civic and religious basilicas.  Women were allowed into churches but how many women rubbed shoulders with the men in the main aisles of civic basilicas?  Doubtless there were innumerable local variations, not least dependent upon architecture, such as the presence or absence of galleries. 

This must, given the similarities in spatial layout, have given rise to myriad interactions and renegotiations, infractions and reactions.  You can get a sense of some of these from sermons of Caesarius of Arles.  Caesarius berates his flock for conducting business in church and general chatter, quite apart from trying to leave the building before he could give his sermon!  Caesarius says a lot about posture and comportment.  Don’t lie down as though you’re in bed, he says; sitting is fine if you are old or infirm.  Stand or prostrate yourself to pray; bow your head or genuflect to the Host.  Matters went beyond that though.  One of Caesarius’ repeated themes was self-control and concentration.  Keep your mind on God and on prayer; don’t be distracted by other thoughts.  Idle speech and impure thought offered a way in for the demonic.

How do these ideas and instructions contrast with the usual bodily dispositions?  What were the restrictions on talk and posture in the civil basilica?  Could you lie down at the back if you were tired?  As mentioned, though, a dominus, local or imperial, sat when he granted an audience, and his petitioners, counsellors and the rest stood.  In church all stood or bowed, regardless of worldly status.  What did it cost a lord to bend the knee or prostrate himself with everyone else and was it a price freely granted?  At the highest levels, perhaps not.  There are some pretty fraught confrontations in churches between bishops and emperors, empresses and kings.  One of the more interesting is that between bishop Nicetius of Trier and King Theudebert I of the Austrasian Franks, related by Gregory of Tours in his Life of the Fathers.  This showdown concerns Theudebert’s entrance into church with a number of his senior aristocrats or leudes, whom Nicetius had excommunicated.  Nicetius declared that he would not continue mass until these men had left his cathedral; the king refused to send them away.  Who was in charge in this space?  In other cases the palace is the location for the confrontation, as in the Life of Saint Martin, where Emperor Maximus is compelled to stand to receive the holy man, or in Gregory’s account, again in the Life of the Fathers, where King Chilperic of the Burgundians feels his throne tremble as if there was an earthquake when the fearsome abbot Lupicinus enters the palace.  Whether this forced him to stand up is not specified but it seems reasonable.  One interesting point about that story, though, is that Chilperic is described as being seated at table with his courtiers.

An intriguing reverse example can be found in Book VII of Gregory’s Histories.  Gregory tells us that in 585 in Paris – he does not say where but probably one of the Cathedral basilicas on the Ile de la Cité – the deacon asked the congregation to be quiet to that the mass could take place.  Apart from providing a glimpse into the realities of a Merovingian church, this is actually a part of the Gallican liturgy.  It precedes the address by the bishop.  Yet it was not Bishop Ragnemod who spoke next but King Guntramn of Burgundy.  Guntramn essentially made a plea for loyalty to the Parisians, at this point effectively under siege by an Austrasia army.  This was not the only time that Guntramn played the part of a bishop in Gregory’s Histories and in the Edict that he issued in conjunction with the Council of Mâcon that same year he espouses, a decade or so before Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, the idea that kingship is a ministry.

So, in a church the bishop takes the space usually occupied by the king but, in a church, sometimes a king might speak in the place of the bishop.  Below that level there were countless other shifts in disposition and in the relative positioning of people of differing status and gender.  The verses composed by Venantius Fortunatus for the basilica of Saint Martin in Tours are designed to impose upon the visitor the sense that one ought to approach no nearer the front than one was worthy but, on the other hand, the surviving wall mosaics at the back of the nave at Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna suggest that the decorations in the secular and religious buildings might not always have been very different.  In buildings that were organised, in terms of spatial hierarchy, pretty much identically, where were the semiotic cues?  Who was in charge of this space, ultimately?  Who controlled the terms of the discourse? 

There are yet more points to add into this mix.  One is that, as has become increasingly clear to me over the past decade or so, the fifth century was really characterised by the Christianisation of political discourse.  One of the many ways in which this is shown is in the building of churches.  This continued into the sixth century, when in some parts of southern Europe especially churches were built on villa sites.  One of the upshots of this was surely that secular rulers and leaders legitimised their position through public appearance and devotion in church; that this in turn became a new means of demonstrating leadership in the community, in a sort of spiritual commensality.  I suspect nonetheless that this might have been a further factor that made the traditional secular basilica, as an architectural form, a contested space, an arena for the renegotiation of power.

Furthermore, the authority that a secular lord positioned in front of the apse at the end of a basilica was, as mentioned earlier, largely sanctioned and bolstered, symbolically, by the fact that he occupied the place of the emperor, as his agent or representative.  After the western wars of Justinian (533-65) this symbolic support was cut away.  Justinian based his wars of reconquest upon the idea that the western Empire had been conquered by barbarians and thus was no longer a part of the Roman Empire.  This was news to the occupants of the western provinces who, while clearly aware that the pars occidentalis currently had no emperor, certainly did not feel that the Empire itself had come to an end.  Most of the rulers of those regions thought that they held an official title as an imperial official, legitimising their rule over Roman citizens.  Indeed, even their title of king was essentially one adopted to facilitate relationships with the Emperor and to legitimise power in his eyes.  The imperial declaration that the western provinces were not part of the Empire cut the traditional ways in which power was legitimised from underneath western rulers and, in turn, their officials and commanders.  It is possible that this sort of cultural shift played a part in the end of the villas

I would like to argue that if one put all of these factors together one might be able to see why the basilical form drops out of the repertoire of secular political spaces, even though it is clear that at least some aristocrats continued to have the wherewithal to build them.  In the eighth century, the Carolingians seem to have brought them back, but that would be a different story. 

Making space. The Materiality of identity

Public space had become quite different by 600 AD.  The clearly demarcated political arenas had atrophied.  Aristocrats and others, men and women, were more likely to rub shoulders in a far less structured fashion in all kinds of spaces, whether settlements, churches, religious processions.  How could one attempt to restrict the free renegotiation of status and power in this setting, without the old architectural or spatial cues?  I want to discuss some ways in which identity was materialised and, in so doing, produced a particular space, or distance; created a spatial structure for social interaction.

To do this I want to think about the ways in which the subject is presented/presents itself.  By way of a metaphor, it might be worth considering someone coming into one of the halls I discussed earlier, coming in, like Bede’s sparrow, from the dark into the warmth and glow of the fire.  In one of his early works, Time and the Other, Emmanuel Levinas first introduced his concept of the ‘il y a’, the ‘there is’: the notion that there is always something and someone ‘out there’; the ineffable sense of shared existence.  Levinas uses the metaphor of sleeplessness, lying awake in the dark, sensing that other shapeless existence, but sitting alone in a fire-lit hall, looking at the door, might provisionally serve almost as well. Levinas discusses the sense of solitude, of being ultimately alone in your own being, but within that shared existence.  The moment of presentation, for which Levinas used the term hypostasis – let us envisage it as the moment where someone steps into the light from the darkness outside, before which we only sensed their presence – is the instance where that solitude is made material.  It is a moment at the extremes where a being touches being in general.  At that moment though, that solitude becomes dispersed into various categories which are shared with others, identities.  One might want to think this phenomenon with Jean-Luc Nancy’s discussion of community.  He describes what he calls, using his own neologism, as comparution, translated by the equally neologistic ‘compearance’, a shared appearance with others, appearance together.  This is a simultaneous appearance and withdrawal in Nancy’s view: the appearance of someone or some category/identity that is familiar, simultaneous with a withdrawal: the interiority, the secret thoughts of the subject.  In Nancy’s thought, it is a hesitation on this moment that keeps community, in his terms, ‘unworked’, ‘désoeuvrée’.

If we, like Nancy, pause at this moment, how is the subject to be comprehended in social interaction?  How is the subject identified ascribed an identity, categorised?  How does the subject present itself to its audience, to those in whose gaze it finds itself, to those amongst whom it finds itself thrown?  As noted, we are thinking of a moment and a circumstance where spatial cues are of no help.  This is where the archaeology of earlier Merovingian Gaul is of interest.  By the end of the first quarter of the sixth century, across Gaul north of the river Loire, whole communities had adopted the custom of burying its dead with grave-goods.  Increasingly, the study of these goods and other aspects of the burial ritual has shown – in Gaul and its northern neighbouring regions – the correlation between particular types of grave-goods and the age and gender of the deceased.  One of the great unknowables, of course, is the degree of correlation between the association of particular classes of people with types of costume and artefacts in death, and the relationships between such objects and costumes and those particular categories of people in life.  In the Merovingian context at least, there is sufficient evidence to support the hypothesis that funerary costume at least bore a reasonable relationship to formal dress.  Indeed, one might go further and suggest that the very degree to which Merovingian people lived their lives in the gaze of the community suggests that even ‘everyday’ costume may have born some sort of relationship to the formal and stylised construction of social categories in death.  If one ran the risk of meeting people in fairly random or unstructured settings then one needed some other way of keeping interactions within an acceptable set of parameters. 

If we are thinking about the renegotiation of power, we need to think more deeply about what identity is, what we mean by it, how it functions in social interaction.  Identity is a word that is ubiquitous in medieval studies – in paper-, book-, article-, chapter- and conference-titles – but there is hardly any serious theorisation of what identity is at all, even in the area of ethnicity.  Generally, what is discussed under the heading is the issue of groups, identifiers and labels, or it acts as some sort of vague ontological place-holder.

My earliest discussions of this topic (1995/1997) were based around the contingent, active interplay of different identities and the stressing of links and barriers in social relations or encounters between different people.  Much of this model was sociological in its inspiration and formulation and was concerned with how people achieve aims vis-à-vis other people.  It was concerned with power and principally a theory of status, value, worth and social roles.  The model worked according to the idea that identity was a stable entity that could be communicated more or less unproblematically.  It implied that identities were not only things that you had but also things that you were in a straightforward way. It envisaged a sort of free choice in the deployment of identity.  You picked an identity and invoked the power that went with to achieve your aims.  This now seems hopelessly naïve

However, all identities are categories: means of organising the world. As such, they are constructed as signs or groups of signs. Even where they are based upon differences that are, or might be, naturally-occurring or visible regardless (hair-, skin- or eye-colour for example; differences in genitalia; physiological stages of ageing), the choice to use them as categories, their precise definition, the way in which they are employed and therefore the ways in which the people of the categories so created experience their lives, depend upon their position in a contingent system of signs. As such they function textually (in the Derridean sense), within chains of presence and absence, similarity and difference. Because no concept can be understood separately from those signifying chains, or comprehended apart from its relationship with other signs, there is always something of the ‘different’ within the ‘same’ and that is very important to remember. To be Derridian about it, the first time anyone said ‘I am a Goth’ to someone else (and was understood), the term ‘Goth’ already had an iterable place in a signifying chain. Logically, if not temporally, the identity must be prior to its instantiation. It already related to an ideal, which was never coextensive with that which instantiated it, and to its constitutive outside (all the things which, ideally, it was not).

Identities function in the imaginary as well as the symbolic registers. That is to say that there remained (as with all signifiers) a notion of the ideal member of the category. Normally that was structured by some of the aspects which helped define the category (social and ritual mores, etc.) to create concepts of the ideal member of a sub-group within it (young woman, male elder, monk, king etc.). This has important implications. Social identities are constituted in citation and in performance. Even more crucially, identity is itself a motion towards an ideal. The ideal can never be attained, because it never had a pure, originary existence. It’s a motion of desire: what do I want to be, but also, crucially, what do they want me to be? As Lacan famously said, a fool who thinks he is a king is no crazier than a king who thinks he’s a king.  (He might better have said that a fool who thinks he is a president is no crazier than a president who thinks he’s a president.)  In any interaction there are at least two sets of signifieds in play: both parties’ ideals of what their status and identity and that of the other person means.  These might, of course, not coincide.  The performative citation of an identity is always, to some extent, a risk, a wager.  That is one of the most important things I want to stress.

Those ideals, moreover, are always themselves changing in the course of social practice. They can never be entirely recreated. It is thus critically mistaken to talk of the maintenance of a Gothic or Frankish identity by a particular group, whether the guardians of the Traditionskern or an equally mythical group of Gothic Königsfreie; no such thing had ever existed that was capable of maintenance in the first place.  It was always already in a state of renegotiation and reinvention.

I must underline the textual and discursive elements that are central to identity, and the inescapable fluidity that that implies. I also want to link identity to speech, subject and authority.  To deploy, perform or cite an identity is to give an account of yourself – to borrow a phrase from a recent book by Judith Butler – but it’s also, as I said, a wager on recognition: of the identity-ideal, the signifier, and of the right to speak/act from that subject-position.  It is in the element of risk or wager that I differ from Butler.  That links identity to subject-position, and indeed to subjectification.  One of the most important ways in which an identity or subject position was made manifest in late antiquity was through costume, broadly defined (including the artefacts carried with it, buckled on to belts and so on).  It conveyed information about the person sporting it, and the social category to which they belonged.  The repeated patterns of association within the sixth-century Merovingian cemetery record suggests that costume was capable of transmitting fairly precise information, about adolescent boys, young women, old men and so on.  As such it provided cues as to how one might expect such a person to behave, how one might judge their speech, how one would be expected to behave towards them.  This provided the cues that could create social space or distance. 

We can read some of this from Merovingian written sources such as the laws, which penalise touching of women’s bodies.  These parts of the body are generally those highlighted by Merovingian jewellery.  The laws’ system of wergilds also set out various levels of legal protection or esteem for particular people: women of child-bearing age; young boys; Franks; royal officers, and so on: all categories that seem to have been visible from the costume of the person in question. 

As we have seen, to be capable of communicating any sort of information, any concept must be capable of iteration, that is able to refer not simply and exclusively to that specific instance but to others too.  This implies the ever-present chance of misunderstanding or miscommunication in the interplay of identities.  This is a key support of Judith Butler’s work on, for example, performative gender identity and drag.  We can see iterability illustrated with the figure of Zercon the Moor, the “jester” at Attila’s court whose “act”, so to speak, involved dressing up (or being dressed up) as a warrior.  Because Zercon was a dwarf, the Huns, for once living up to their stereotype, found this incongruity hugely entertaining.

An example a little closer to Butler’s might be found in the Poitevin who appears in Gregory of Tours’ account of the tribunal that ended the Nuns’ Revolt at Poitiers.  In Gregory’s description, this was a man who in Gregory’s report of the exchange dressed as a woman because he was ‘were incapable of manly work’.  This is a complex text to read in terms of that person’s identity, and how the semiotics of their practice worked is difficult to disentangle.  This difficulty is only magnified by another iteration of feminine costume.  Several late antique texts notionally about pagan behaviour refer to and condemn the practice of dressing up as an old woman on the Kalends of January (a harsh law, as I have always thought, if you actually were an old woman…  Iterability again).  This alone gives us a range of different possible ways of reading feminine costume: different signifieds.  There is always, thanks to iterability, the potential for slippage from one to another; of miscommunication.  This is the space of deconstruction: in our terms, a space of constant renegotiation: the remaking of the bases of power.

The relationship of costume to person is worth more consideration as it will lead us further into thinking about the practice of negotiation.  You might have noticed that I have avoided the term individual in my paper.  I have done so for many reasons but not the least of these is that the subject is the meeting place of a number of categories or identifications: gender, age, family, ethnicity, religion, and so on: an assemblage if you prefer.  In that sense the category expressed in costume rarely conveys more than one or two, considered to be the most important at a particular moment.

At this point it is important to think about the social body.  Jeffrey Jerome Cohen importantly talked about how the construction of identity blurred the edge of the human body: hybridised it with the objects – and animals – that conveyed the image of the identified category.  This was part of Cohen’s ongoing post-humanist project and a very important contribution.  I want to push back a very little against this, however, partly because I find quite problematic some of the political implications of post-humanism and related approaches that stress the agency of objects, and partly because I don’t find the reading entirely satisfactory.

To be brief, I want to uncouple the elements of desire and queering, in Cohen’s account, which I find more interesting, from the probably lesser element of the hybridisation and blurring of the body.  I am not sure that costume and the accessories intrinsic to the signification, embodiment and the very inhabitation of an identity really do blur the boundaries of the body in the way envisaged.  Leaving aside the slippages of communication that have been my theme and which, I think are inherent in Cohen’s examples, I would rather read the assemblage from the outside in, as layers of social skin.  Does one really ever get beyond layers of social skin, back to an entirely pre-social human body?  Again, in my view, there is an absent centre.

The final point that this too brief consideration leads me to is how one could get out of the situations where a miscue, misfire or miscommunication had occurred.  One way out here can be thought in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of lines of flight.  (I can’t as yet claim to have read that much of or be very well versed in DeleuzoGuattarian thought.) Social actors, as I have said, can be seen as assemblages.  Even if elaborate costumes or layers of social skin aim to convey one identity, thought to be most important, those layers can still be peeled back to reveal others.  Laying aside the weaponry that might have conveyed Frankishness or a particular age-grade, could strip that persona back to a layer of general masculinity, for instance, that expressed a shared identity; buckling on such items could remake distance. The sheer multiplicity of identities that converge in the social actor make this sort of thing possible.  The other ‘line of flight’ is humour, which plays on the very possibilities for miscommunication that inhere in interaction.

Conclusion

In the early Merovingian world, the space of the political was up for grabs.  Old architectural cues broke down, were renegotiated; new, different ones were tried.  A greater relative investment in costume, the social skin, was one response to this.  Wherever we look, we can see, in my reading, the interaction of decentred subjects, fraught with potential miscues, miscommunications, and scrambles to remake or reconfigure social space: social structure was a chaotic, constantly reordered, teleologically re-read archive of precedent.  ‘Negotiating power’ is thus, in a way, a tautology.  Power does not, and cannot, exist other than in its constant negotiation.

Awkward Identities in Merovingian Trier

[While I was at the Austrasia conference, a number of people mentioned the problem of knowing why Metz was chosen as the capital, or chief urban royal residence, of that realm.  As part of my on-going, irregular attempt to put all my unpublished 'back-catalogue' on-line I present this paper from 2001, in which I attempt to answer that question by looking at why Trier was not established as the capital, given its imperial past.  The argument is essentially that the very Romanness and imperial pretensions of Trier made it very difficult for the Merovingians to inscribe their political identity over that.  More to the point, the bishops of Trier had a tradition of standing up to secular power, most stridently visible, perhaps, in the career of the long-live St Nicetius.  After the Justinianic wars (this is one of the earliest, tentative steps towards the argument I have been espousing more recently) it was easier for the Merovingians, and other post-imperial rulers, to choose lesser Roman towns that had the trappings of a royal capital but without too heavy baggage from an imperial past.  It was originally the last in a series of seminars on towns held at the Institute of Classical Studies and notionally co-organised by me and Richard Alston (in fact Richard did about 80% of the organisation), so the specific references here and there to other scholars works is to their papers in the series.  Naturally it is pretty much viva voce and lacks any apparatus, but I hope you might find it of interest.]

The reasons for this paper are several.  On the one hand I thought it would be as well for me to get away from talking about Metz – indeed when they heard I was speaking in this series, more than one person commented ‘I suppose you’ll be talking about Metz then’.  Well, how better to avoid this unfortunate pigeon-holing than by getting completely away from that city, writing about another city and its region entirely?  And where better than Trier, which is a good seventy-five kilometres away from Metz, as the crow flies, significantly more if you go via the Mosel?   

Now rather old plan of Trier by Kurt Böhner

More seriously, Trier features prominently in the secondary literature, often as a sort of paradigmatic north-east Gaulish city, largely as a result of the fact that it has been so often, so thoroughly and so well worked over by very prominent Romanists and medievalists, historians, numismatists, epigraphers and archaeologists: Edith Wightman, Eugen Ewig, Kurt Böhner, Nancy Gauthier, H.H. Anton and so on.  And this in turn is largely because Trier is very well served with evidence of diverse kinds.  Yet when I was writing my doctoral thesis on Metz I noticed that Trier was different from Metz; at the time, and when I wrote the book based upon the thesis, I thought this was because Metz was unusual (which it is), but what has struck me increasingly since then is just how profoundly different and unusual – indeed just plain weird – Trier itself is, far more so than Metz.  This individuality, and it seems to be a conscious individuality, would seem to be a theme running throughout late antique and early medieval Trier: The city is, obviously, important in the Late Roman period, and its distinctiveness remains very clear in the Merovingian period, as I shall argue, but it doesn’t stop there; in the Carolingian period, the Trierer aristocracy is very self-consciously independent, and by the end of the first millennium this area is at the heart of a new regional identity, that of Lotharingia, the Middle Kingdom.  For this reason Matthew Innes and I decided that the Triererland would make a good project upon which we could test out our ideas about Merovingian and Carolingian society and politics, nicely situated between, but different from, the regions of Metz and Mainz upon which we have worked individually.  Thus what I am going to say today represents very much, not even work in progress, but some initial ideas, formulations and questions. 

Something else, which has intrigued me for a long time, ever since my Metz work, has been why the Merovingian kings of Austrasia settled upon Metz as their principal urban seat.  After all, why not Trier, the former imperial capital, just down the Mosel?  Then it has become apparent to me that this is only part of a wider phenomenon: post-Roman kings did not choose leading Roman political centres as the capitals of their kingdoms.  The Visigoths in Spain chose Toledo, not the more important cities of Cordoba, or Mérida, or Tarragona, or Barcelona.  The Lombards in Italy could not, obviously, use Rome or Ravenna, but nor did they make much use of Milan.  Instead Pavia became their royal centre.  And the Merovingians eschewed Trier, Rheims, Arles or Lyons, in favour of Paris and Metz, neither of which (it may come as a surprise to Parisiens) was very significant at all in the Roman period. Now this seems to be true mainly for the later phase of post-Roman kingdoms.  The Ostrogoths in Italy used Ravenna, and the Vandals made their base in Carthage.  Kingdoms of the sixth century, however, as stated, seem to have steered clear of the major Roman political centres.  Given the general quest by early medieval kings for that modern commodity, Romanitas, this seems all the more surprising, but the case of the Merovingians and Trier may permit a way into exploring this problem.  And the distinctiveness of the Triererland turns out not to be unrelated to this issue.  Alas, this does mean talking somewhat about Metz.  It is difficult to talk about why one town was not adopted as a capital without some discussion of the neighbouring city which was chosen. 

Finally, I must state at the outset that I was inspired, and put on to the track towards much of what I am about to say today, by examining the PhD thesis of Mark Handley, on the early medieval inscriptions of Gaul, Spain and Britain.  What I am going to say regarding inscriptions is derived from his work, and I’d like to make that debt clear from the outset. 

Trier, in many ways, needs no introduction but some reminder of the background will still be useful.  Situated on the right bank of the Mosel, it was one of the great cities of Roman Gaul.  For today’s purposes it is worth noting at the outset that the Treveri were always a rather unusual group within Roman Gaul.  They were one of the very few northern civitates to produce senators, and in the third century the prosperity of the region’s aristocracy seems to be manifest in the large, and much debated, monuments which they erected, such as the famous Igelsaüle.   

Trier was at the heart of the late Roman Empire.  From the late third century and the period of the Gallic emperors through to 388 and the suppression of the usurper Magnus Maximus Trier was frequently the capital of the western Empire.  Indeed its use as a capital can be argued to have been a key factor in the continuing survival of the western Empire.  As a result of imperial presence, the city was endowed with several splendid monuments: the Kaiserthermen, built by Constantine, and the famous Aula Palatina.  Here we see the Aula Palatina, built, according to a coin of Severus found in a wall, some time shortly after 305.  In some ways I think the Aula Palatina stands as a metaphor of the late Roman Empire and its historiography.  Seen here it seems, especially alongside the rather twee baroque Archbishop Elector’s palace, like a huge imposing monolith, a building to sum up the A.H.M. Jones image of the late Roman state.  However, just as subsequent generations have been less impressed by the efficiency of the late Roman Empire or taken in by its rhetoric, it is as well to remember that originally, the interior of the Aula Palatina was covered with frescoes and mosaics, and the outside was plastered, whitewashed, painted with false joinery, and appointed with all sorts of, to use the technical term, twiddly bits, making it look much less of a monster.  Even more of the time, I imagine, it looked a bit shabby and run down.  This was part of a huge palatine complex at Trier, including a circus, refurbishment to the amphitheatre and the construction of a large double-cathedral.  The provision of imperial ceremonial and spectacle was clearly very important; the association of palace and the other elements is reminiscent of the slightly later new imperial capital at Constantinople.  Other building associated with the imperial presence took place under Valentinian I and Gratian, involving riverside warehouses and modifications to the other major structures, with the imperial baths possibly being used as a palatine barracks. 

The imperial presence was a decisive factor, just as Hugh Kennedy showed that the difference between the fates of Scythopolis and Gerasa was related to the presence of imperial government and its money.  Other northern Gallic towns, as was mentioned last week, are, in the late Empire characteristically much reduced with small walled administrative redoubts at their core.  Very little, if any, new public building was done and the extent to which the areas outside the walled circuits were still occupied is still debated and, though it was doubtless more common than was once supposed, we should remember that the walls usually enclosed areas of 20 Ha or less.  At Paris the defended areas were the Île de la Cité and the left bank’s forum.  The centrality of imperial patronage is also, as it happened, graphically demonstrated at Metz, the next city on Trier’s lifeline to the south.  Here there is an unusually large walled circuit, possibly the largest late Roman circuit in the north, given that Trier’s enormous walled circuit was built early in the Roman period, and may well have been more a curse than a blessing; it would be difficult to defend it all.  Metz also has fourth-century public building, this civic basilica at St-Pierre-aux-Nonnains being constructed probably in the reign of Valentinian I and clearly modelled upon the Trier basilica.  It may well be the last such piece of new civic building in the western Roman Empire north of the Alps at least.   

This continued prosperity was carried over into the rural areas of the region.  The Treveri, like the Mediomatrici to their south, survived the crises of the late third century pretty well.  Overall, about half of the villas known in the region continue to be occupied through the fourth century, although there are regional variations, with the west of the civitas suffering worse than the areas immediately around Trier itself.  Fourth-century occupation is particularly well attested in the lower Eiffel.  More to the point, perhaps, some of the late Roman villas of the Trier region are very impressive affairs.  There is the palatial, possibly imperial villa at Konz, the three-storey and defensible, if not fortified, villa at Pfalzel, Welschbillig, Nennig and Echternach.  Imperial ownership has been suggested for Konz and possibly Pfalzel.  Welschbillig appears to be the focus for the huge estate surrounded by the Langmauer.  Since this earthwork was constructed by troops (primani), an imperial connection of some sort seems likely, though it could also (if perhaps with less likelihood) have been access to imperial patronage by a leading palatine aristocrat which produced this source of labour.  Again, this repays comparison with neighbouring regions, and may very well have a bearing on later developments.  The well-known changes in ideology which so affected Roman towns after the third century, and which were revisited by John Haldon in the first paper in this series, may have been less important here.  The local aristocracy may have otherwise been as unwilling as another to invest in their city – the impressive private monuments are an index of that change from private money going on public monumental munificence to private houses – but they were just as keen to acquire imperial patronage, and the heart of the distribution of that patronage was at their city.  The vici in the region also survive the third-century crisis fairly well.

After the suppression of Maximus, no legitimate emperor ever returned to Trier.  The fifth century is an obscure period.  The Roman infrastructure of the region survives better than in other areas, which is probably related to the wealth and power of the aristocracy.  In the late fifth century, Trier was ruled by a Count, Arbogast, who received a letter from Sidonius Apollinaris praising his Roman-ness, and a praise poem from the bishop of Toul.  This apparently independent Roman rule is important for our purposes. 

This part of the world was incorporated into the Merovingian realms at some point before 511, though we have no way of knowing when: the old methods of trying to map Frankish conquest by plotting the distribution of certain types of grave, or even artefact, although still employed in some quarters, are unacceptable.  For one thing, these burial styles cannot be equated with the Franks; for another the one chronological fixed point in these archaeological attempts at political history, the burial of king Childeric in Tournai in 481/2 has been shown (by me) to be nothing of the sort.  Childeric could have died five years before, or ten years after, this date.  When Clovis died in 511, however, the Moselle valley was under Frankish control.  His eldest son, Theuderic ruled the area.  Indeed, Theuderic may have been ruling the region even before his father’s death.  In the seventh century, Fredegar said that Theuderic had Metz as his capital, but he appears to have been projecting the situation of his own day back to the 511 division.  Merovingian kings never developed the idea of a permanent capital as their Lombard and Visigothic contemporaries did, but a principal urban base seems to have been chosen. As far as we can tell, Theuderic’s was Trier.  This is the town in which he is mentioned as ruling by Gregory of Tours in the Vita Patrum. 

Theuderic’s son and successor Theudebert, rex magnus francorum is associated with Trier as well, but he also appears to have had some connection with Verdun.  When he died, there was rioting in Trier and the stoning to death of his tax-collector, Parthenius, but the implication of Gregory’s account, which is puzzling, interesting and amusing in equal measure, is that the king was not there when he died, even if some of the administrative machinery may have been.  Theudebert’s son and successor, Theudebald held court at Metz.  With the death of Theudebald, the conveniently alliteratively-named first Austrasian dynasty came to an end, and the kingdom passed to his great uncle, Chlothar I.  Chlothar too had some connection with Trier, but as king, by this stage, of most of Gaul, he spent most time elsewhere and is mostly associated with Soissons.  When, by that time king of the whole regnum francorum, he died in 561, in the eventual division of the kingdom between his four sons, Austrasia fell to Sigibert, and Sigibert moved his court to Rheims.  By 566, however, he was holding church councils and celebrating his marriage to Brunhild at Metz, and Metz remained the principal Austrasian royal urban residence for as long as we have information on the subject. 

Thus, although the Austrasian kings flirted with the idea of establishing themselves in the old Imperial capital, their association with the city was brief and, as we’ll see, unhappy; they appear to have toyed with various other capitals, including, briefly, the other principal northern city of Roman Gaul, Rheims, but within fifty years or so had definitively settled upon Metz, and equally definitively abandoned Trier.  So pronounced was this shift that by the end of the Merovingian period Trier even lost its Metropolitan status, and the bishops of Metz briefly became archbishops.  So what had gone wrong?  Why did the Frankish kings give up on Trier?

The principal reasons are episcopal and ideological; more particularly they are Nicetius of Trier, or Nicetius of the Treveri as Gregory of Tours calls him in his Vita Patrum, which is possibly significant, as we shall see.  Nicetius, possibly of Aquitanian origin, was appointed bishop of Trier by Theuderic in about 525, and remained bishop for the next forty years or so.  When Nicetius became bishop he felt a weight settling upon his neck, which he realized was the burden of episcopal dignity.  However he may have been weighed down by the responsibilities of his office, Nicetius was never unduly burdened by doubts about his own importance.  According to Gregory, or his informant Aredius of Limoges, Nicetius’ former assistant, even before he was bishop Nicetius used to berate King Theuderic for his sinful behaviour.  In Gregory’s Life of the bishop, this was allegedly why Theuderic made him bishop.  This is rather odd, not just because it seems to be asking for trouble, but also because Theuderic usually comes across as a nasty piece of work in Gregory’s writing.  By contrast his son Theudebert is usually given a glowing write up by the bishop of Tours but in the Life of Nicetius he is the bishop’s most sinful royal adversary.  This is revealed most clearly by the showdown in the cathedral described in Gregory’s Life of the Fathers, where Nicetius excommunicated the king and his fellow debauchees.  The king refused to leave the church whereupon a possessed man proclaimed that the king was indeed a sinner and too proud, whereas the bishop was a holy and humble man, and God would decide this in due course.  After this display, the king, unsurprisingly, stalked out of the church and Nicetius healed the possessed man, although he could nowhere be found afterwards.  Many people, says Gregory, said this showed that he had been sent by the Lord.  We might wonder, perhaps too rationally, if it wasn’t just that the king’s men found him first... 

This, is possibly a good place to revisit Mark Humphreys’ theme of the provision of spectacle.  We assume that the Merovingian kings had set up in the former imperial palace.  As we have seen, this was a complex which included amphitheatre and circus but also the bishop’s cathedral.  The two were close neighbours and thus in competition for control of this vital component of the city.  What, if any, spectacles were put on in the former amphitheatre, which may have been turned into a form of stronghold in this period, or the circus, is unknown.  Childebert II staged bear-baiting in Metz, presumably in the small amphitheatre there; another Merovingian king allegedly restored the circuses at Paris and Soissons because he wanted to present spectacles to the people; Theudebert himself is said by Procopius to have staged horse races in the circus at Arles.  Whatever these games were, they appear to have been trumped by great religious spectacles, especially those which involved the dramatic humbling of  the king and miraculous healings – even if any rash ‘volunteers from the audience’ may have found themselves sleeping with the fishes shortly afterwards.  In terms of the competition of impresarios, there can be little doubt about who won here. 

And maybe it wasn’t just the bishop but the community which he had won over who presented the problems.  Theudebert had been betrothed to a Lombard princess called Wisigard but instead ran off with a Roman noblewoman from the south called Deuteria.  The Merovingians’ irregular marital practices do not generally appear to have alarmed people, other than a very small number of bold, and possibly over-self-confident, clerics.  Yet, according to Gregory, Theudebert eventually put aside Deuteria and made good his promise to Wisigard, because ‘the Franks’ thought this was, in Lewis Thorpe’s translation, a ‘scandalous situation’.  I have suggested elsewhere that this outrage may have stemmed from a resentment of the fact that the Merovingians studiously avoided intermarriage with their Frankish aristocrats.  More significantly for us, perhaps, is the fact that the next time that Gregory mentions ‘the Franks’ in the context of the reign of Theudebert, it is as the mob at Trier who stone to death Parthenius the tax collector – who must, Simon Loseby was telling me last week, have been aged about eighty at the time: he’s a grandson of the emperor Avitus.  The Franks hated Parthenius because he had taxed them during Theudebert’s reign.  Gregory hated him partly because he was a member of Avitus’ family, of whom he had no great opinion, but also, rather charmingly, because he was a great glutton and used to ‘fart in public without any consideration for those present’.  Some would say that stoning him to death was going a little far...  Some, and in this case I would include myself, would say that it was a bit churlish to kill Parthenius because of the king’s almost certainly entirely legal – if possibly more rigorous than expected – taxation policy.   

Either way, Theudebert cannot have felt that Trier, its bishop and its locals, was a welcoming place.  This was unfortunate because Theudebert was one of those Merovingians with real pretensions to Romanitas.  He minted solidi with his own image on them, much to the disgust of Procopius, sent letters to Justinian which styled himself in such a way as to compete with the Emperor in titles, and indeed to deny the Emperor his assumption of various titles, not least francicus!  There seems to be a real competitive dialogue between the two in this correspondence. He sent an embassy to Constantinople including examples of all the peoples over whom he claimed overlordship.  The Angiloi present caused merriment by falling off their horses: the awkwardness of being an Englishman in New Rome.  Theudebert led an army in the Italian wars with some success, taking advantage of both the Ostrogoths and the Byzantines: he adopted the not untypically Frankish policy of getting round the fact that he had made an alliance with both the Goths and the East Romans as King of the Franks, by initially dispatching an army of subject Burgundians and Alamans!  In Arles, as mentioned, he put on a display of horse racing in the circus, which was probably as close as he could get to an imperial display in the last capital of the Gallic prefecture.  How galling, then, if you’ll excuse the pun, that he could never make Trier his own.  Small wonder, perhaps, that he decided to move to Verdun, a small town – indeed only a civitas capital since Diocletian’s reforms – with no such grandiose pretensions. 

Not much of a surprise either that his son Theudebald who, by all account, would not have seen eye-to-eye with the morally rigorous bishop of Trier, set up shop in Metz.  Theudebald, however, reigned only a few years, whereupon the north-east passed to the formidable Chlothar I.  Even an old savage like Chlothar could not expect an easy ride from Nicetius, however.  Nicetius continued to denounce Chlothar and excommunicate him, even as the king responded by threats, eventually carried out, to send the bishop into exile.  Again there is a comment in Gregory’s Histories which possibly fleshes out the account in the Vita Patrum.  When he took over Theudebald’s kingdom – the Kingdom of Francia, as Gregory calls it, interestingly – Chlothar also took over Theudebald’s widow, Vuldetrada (who, incidentally, was the sister of the Wisigard who had been married to Theudebald’s father Theudebert: such are the labyrinthine Merovingian marital politics).  Says Gregory (or rather Lewis Thorpe) in another marvellous, if unintentionally hilarious, phrase, ‘he began to have intercourse with Vuldetrada but he stopped when the bishops complained.’  Again I think we can detect Nicetius’ role here.  As Nicetius was leaving for exile, accompanied by a sole deacon, whom we might suppose was Aredius of Limoges, messengers arrived from Chlothar’s son Sigibert saying that Chlothar had died, just as Nicetius had predicted.  Sigibert invited the bishop, by these letters, to return to his see.  Sigibert, however, made his capital at Rheims and then Metz, as we have seen.  He was astute enough to court Nicetius’ favour, but far too astute to want him as a near neighbour. 

Nicetius’ ex cathedra fulminations against the kings were not the whole story, either.  He also declared that he had had a vision in which he saw a great and many-windowed tower with God at the summit.  Through one of the windows, an angel read out from a book and declared the names of the Kings of the Franks and how long they would reign, the nature and length of their life.  Nicetius did not keep this to himself for, as Gregory says, ‘And for each king it happened just as Nicetius declared in his revelation.’  Romanists, especially late Romanists, amongst you will appreciate that this was a startlingly dangerous dream to own up to having had, let alone to keep harping on about in public.  Yet Nicetius does not appear to have been bothered by this. 

Nicetius, it must be said, took a maximalist interpretation of his pastoral responsibilities.  In 564 he wrote to Chlodosind, queen of the Lombards and daughter of his recently deceased adversary Chlothar, to enjoin her to convert her pagan husband, Alboin.  This letter gives us an interesting alternative account of Clovis’ conversion from that given by Gregory.  Nicetius also saw no problem in writing to the Emperor Justinian, accusing him of falling into the Eutychian and Nestorian heresies.  This letter is interesting largely for the fact that it shows that Nicetius had got completely the wrong end of the stick, doubtless confirming Byzantinist views of the uncouth West.  None of this, however, would prevent someone as grand as the metropolitan bishop of Belgica Prima from writing a hectoring, if ill-informed, tract to the mere ruler of the Roman Empire.  Justinian’s response is unrecorded.  What chance did a mere rex francorum have?  I think now we begin to understand the exasperation of Theudebert and Chlothar. 

Nicetius also worked as an impresario of cult.  Mark Handley has shown quite clearly how the church and the cult of SS Maximinus and Paulinus were promoted in the sixth century by Nicetius, although he also makes the interesting point that the bishop may have been building upon an existing local veneration of these saints.  Handley makes a persuasive case that the relics of Paulinus were translated to Trier before 550, during Nicetius’ long episcopate.  He also makes clear that the church and cemetery of St-Maximinus took over from that of St Eucharius as the post popular choice of burial place.  Epigraphic evidence from this cemetery underlines the growing popularity of the cults of Maximinus and Paulinus in the sixth century.  This cemetery was, as Handley demonstrates, growing in popularity by the fifth century but I think its dominance can be put down to Nicetius, who is associated with the church of Maximinus in several miracles, and in the end chose to be buried there.  The growth in popularity of the northern cemetery may be down to the fact that it was closer to the cathedral, and to the fact that occupation appears to have been concentrated in the northern part of the walled zone.  Nicetius was thus adapting to his environment. Nicetius used the cult of Maximinus in a struggle with one of his deacons.  Given that his own cult became popular too, this only strengthened the importance of this site.  We shall return shortly to consider why Nicetius should have chosen to favour Maximinus and Paulinus instead of the first bishop of Trier, Eucharius, who appears to have been venerated by some at least of Nicetius’ predecessors.  For now, the power of Nicetius over his flock is what should be stressed. 

Thus far I have dwelt upon Nicetius’ spiritual and high political activities, but it is worth drawing attention to other aspects of his work, which equally spelt difficulty for any competitors for authority in the Triererland.  In a poem addressed to Nicetius, Venantius Fortunatus dwells at length about Nicetius’ ‘castellum’ on the Mosel.  This place, called Mediolanum, is ringed by walls with thirty towers and sits overlooking the Mosel on a dominant crag.  The bishop has organized mills to grind flour, to feed his flock, and has planted vines to ensure wine.  Quite where this castellum was is not entirely clear.  If Ross Samson is right, however, rather than being a newly constructed private fortification, it was the site of a Roman castellum or burgus.  This seems to be the more common way of reading this passage and, though there is no decisive evidence, it seems plausible enough.  If so, then we see the bishop’s famed humilitas at work again.  A Roman castellum would, presumably, have been public land and thus have passed to the king.  Nicetius appears to have taken over this land and used it to his own purposes, especially providing bread and wine for the locals.  Again, this is precisely the sort of thing which, as Richard said in his paper, might undercut other attempts to create links of patronage and dependence.

The burdens of episcopal office could be considerable, as Nicetius said.  However, there was no automatic reason why a bishop should feel duty bound to be such a thorn in the side of his kings.  The Merovingian Church seems to have generally adopted a somewhat flexible approach to the demands of its rulers.  In this, as well as drawing upon traditions of having to work with possibly pagan Frankish rulers in the fifth century, after 507 it took up the baton from the Visigothic Gallic church, which had found similar theological elasticity (or, in Gregory of Tours term, ‘flattery’) to encompass close working relationships with Arian kings.  Nor, as we shall see, was it a foregone conclusion that bishops who took a more ideologically rigorous line would win out.  Theuderic wanted a saintly cleric as bishop for his capital, and apparently imported other southern Gallic clergy to staff the Trierer churches.  However, I think he expected that the bishop would be beholden to him for this, and become a yes man, or perhaps, to borrow a joke first cracked I think by Paul Kershaw a ‘yes minister’.  What was it that made Nicetius so awkward?   

Here we must return to why Nicetius chose to promote the cults of Maximinus and Paulinus, fourth-century bishops of Trier. Both had been outspoken critics of Arianism, and thus of emperors.  Gregory of Tours says that Maximinus was a powerful bishop in the reign of Constans, information possibly derived from his Trier sources.  He was a vocal supporter of the anti-Arian party.  Paulinus died in exile.  As Handley says, it seems to have been Nicetius who brought his relics back for burial in Trier, though whether it was his ill-judged letter to Justinian which facilitated this is perhaps less likely.  When he (if it was he) acquired or invented relics of Paulinus it is important to note that, unlike Kate Cooper’s Roman cult impresarios, Nicetius ‘discovered’ not a martyr, but a local bishop who had been exiled for his firm stance against worldly rulers.  Furthermore, Nicetius had an attachment to the cult of St Martin, another saint who, by the late sixth century had acquired anti-Arian credentials.  In his letter to Chlodosind, he says that it was because of miracles at the church of St Martin in Tours that Clovis was converted.  As he will have known from the highly influential Life of Martin by Sulpicius Severus, Martin was an outspoken critic of backsliding Emperors, not fearing to tackle Magnus Maximus.  And where did Martin do this, other than at Trier?  For a naturally zealous prelate like Nicetius, these traditions, in the physical environment, however run down, of the old imperial capital and palace, could indeed settle heavily upon your neck.

Nicetius was not just a problem whilst he was alive.  After his death some time in the mid 560s, his cult rapidly became very popular.  Gregory tells us, in the Glory of the Confessors of the many miracles which took place at his tomb.  These included the freeing of prisoners from their chains, so even from beyond the grave, Nicetius could present difficulties for the agents of secular law and order.  Nicetius’ cult, obviously, was promoted by his successors, and they inherited the burden of tradition, obviously even heavier for Nicetius’ sterling efforts during his forty-year episcopate.  His successor Magneric, though he does not appear to have been a particularly politically effective figure, outside Trier at any rate, nevertheless also intervened in royal efforts to control the church.  When Theodore of Marseille – an unfortunate, though, it has to be said, politically inept prelate – was brought north on one of his periodic trials, Magneric intervened on his behalf, praying for his release and putting about stories which claimed how demons had pronounced this bishop to be a holy man: the resonance with the story of Nicetius’ clash with Theudebert is fairly clear.  He also tried to save the life of Guntramn Boso but with less success.  His opponent, Childebert II, despite or because of his tender years, being only 18 or 19 at the time, had a more robust approach to dealing with difficult bishops than his relatives.  He ordered his troops to set fire to Guntramn’s house, and if Magneric didn’t come out, well, then he could go up in smoke too.  The church where Magneric prayed for the release of Theodore was the Church of Maximinus, so he too was continuing to promote this cult, now of course strengthened by having Nicetius’ remains interred there.

Difficult though the episcopal tradition at Trier was for Merovingian kings to deal with, it still is not the whole story.  Bryan Ward Perkins discussed the problems which might arise from attempting to impose a new ideology upon the built remains of a previous one, to which one was opposed.  I think Bella Sandwell’s discussion of Antioch demonstrated clearly why temples might not have been such a huge problem as Bryan supposed.  In Trier the Altbachtal cult site appears to have simply been allowed to fall down, and have private houses built all over it by the Merovingian period.  In the west, buildings associated with spectacle appear to have been more problematic, as I mentioned after Bryan’s paper and as Mark Humphreys’ paper showed much more lucidly.  In the Trier context, the diatribe of the ex-pat Treverus Salvian against his former compatriots and their hankering after circuses in the dark days of the fifth century takes on particular importance.  Here, the fact that the circus and amphitheatre lay next to the cathedral was probably a boon to Nicetius, but not to his royal rivals, as we have seen.  Yet the problem of the existing built environment did not only arise where one wished to impose a new and antagonistic ideology.  It could arise when one wanted to adopt but adapt the old ideology.  As many commentators have shown, and is increasingly the standard view, Merovingian royal ideology was very Roman, but the very fact that Trier had been the Roman capital itself made difficulties.  In his poems composed during various visits to the north-east, Venantius Fortunatus described Trier as ‘noble capital of a noble people’ and ‘the noble capital of ancient times.’  In, or perhaps amidst, an environment so clearly and so obviously imperial, how could post-Roman kings inscribe their own political identity?

Then I wonder if there was not a general case of what we might term, again using technical historical vocabulary, the post-Justinianic jitters?  Patrick Amory has demonstrated clearly the very real political importance of the new Constantinopolitan ideology about the ‘lost west’ and the need for reconquest from the 520s onwards.  These ideas were translated into bloody reality in the middle decades of the century, with the expulsion of the Vandals from Carthage and of the Ostrogoths from Italy.  Indeed mention of the Ostrogoths and the well-known buildings of Ravenna might bring up very clearly the problem of imposing new ideologies on old ones.  All this may well have made post-Roman kings, who were no less keen on Romanitas than their predecessors, somewhat less easy about inhabiting the ideological centres of the Roman Empire.  After all, that Empire had just waged dreadful war against such interlopers.  All this might help us understand why the Anglo-Saxon kings seem later to have had less of a problem with using York.  As we saw last week, there was – or seems to have been – a significant break between York’s existence as a Roman city and its reuse by the Romanising kings of Northumbria.

The jitters can be seen as late as the 580s, long after the Empire had ceased to have any real ability to interfere militarily in the west, during the Byzantine-backed revolts of Hermenegild and Gundovald.  This may well be why after the middle of the sixth century ‘barbarian’ kings stopped living in major Roman centres.  The case of the embattled Lombards, perpetually at war with the Empire is particularly unsurprising; the Visigoths, who now adopted Toledo had also been on the receiving end of Justinian’s ideology.  To this one might add that the bishops of Milan obviously had their own highly significant model of forthright intervention against secular rulers: Ambrose himself.  Roger Collins has demonstrated the problems which the Visigoths had in dealing with the bishops of Mérida.  The Visigoths also had recent problematic confrontations with Roman aristocratic groups.

All this was particularly acute for the Lombards and Visigoths, both of whom had to contend with imperially controlled territories providing rival political foci and, especially in Italy, rather more convincing claims to Roman identity.  Yet it was clearly a problem for the Franks too.  Here we return to the Treveri themselves. The priest confounded by St Maximinus in a miracle during the reign of Theudebert was called Arbogast.  It does not seem unlikely that the dynasty descended from the fourth-century usurper and fifth-century count was still present in the city and proclaiming its identity.  Arbogast’s opponent was just ‘a Frank’, another intriguing reference to ‘Franks’ in Trier in Theudebert’s reign.  More usually, however, the Treveri took a particularly Roman identity.  It is interesting to note that Gregory calls Nicetius ‘Bishop of the Treveri’ and not Bishop of Trier.  I think it does suggest his link with a particular, Romanising community.  The wealth of the Trierer aristocracy was noted at the beginning of my paper.  It is possibly demonstrated by the continuing frequent use of Roman names throughout the Merovingian period on Trier epitaphs.  It is also shown by those epitaphs themselves.  If one plots the distribution of Merovingian epitaphs in northern Gaul we have a few here, a few there, as many as twenty or so in Metz, but, at the latest count, over 800 in Trier.  Mark Handley says that this is over a third of the entire corpus of Gallic late antique inscriptions.  This was a community which proclaimed an adherence to Roman traditions in death and I would argue one which proclaims a greater confidence in status and identity.  This was going to be the competing communities part of this project, because I wanted to compare this tradition with the burial of grave-goods in the rural areas of the civitas.  There are interesting comparisons and contrasts between these forms of competitive memorialisation.  As is clear though, I don’t have time to go into this.

The comparative power of the Treveri aristocracy might also be shown by the comparatively better rate of survival of villas and other sites into the fifth century.  Largely the evidence is not very good and still only seems to go as far as the mid century, but this is still better than the areas all around – here we’re still talking about the Mosel valley rather than the peripheral regions of the civitas.  And the evidence of continued occupation at Trier itself, though hardly deafening, is better than that for certain other Gallic towns I could mention, or any British town.  Most interestingly of all is the reference in the Vita Germani Grandivallensis to the fact that Germanus came from a family of ‘senators’.  This reference to senators is, as far as I am aware, unique in Merovingian northern Gaul, and note, again, his Roman name.  Not quite as interesting, but still fairly interesting, is the Vita Gaugerici with its statement that Gaugeric came from a family of ‘Romans’ of middling status in the civitas of Trier.  Here, however, his parents gave him a Germanic name.  Another point is the survival of Roman place-names in the region and the fact, long known, that the area of Trier was a bastion of Romance language, another index of self-conscious, socio-culturally powerful Roman identity in the post-Roman world.

I wonder if the repeated reference to ‘Franks’ in Trier in Gregory’s works is suggestive.  Gregory’s sources for Trier were almost entirely to do with Nicetius, probably almost entirely Aredius of Limoges.  Nicetius probably, and Aredius certainly, were Aquitanian Romans, like the Arvernian Gregory himself.  Nicetius and Aredius possibly felt some common identity with the Roman Treveri.  Given the Roman names and collective identity of the Treveri, it may be that the stories about ‘Franks’ which made it back to Gregory were stories about ‘outsiders’.  After all, the Frank in the miracle involving the deacon Arbogast is at the end of the story simply called ‘barbarus’.

The Trierer aristocracy appears to have remained powerful and comparatively wealthy throughout the Merovingian period.  The power of the Merovingian realm was largely based upon the importance of royal patronage and office.  The Treveri do not appear to have felt they needed this, and yet were sufficiently self-assured to feel they belonged at the centre of power.  Possibly the best way to combat this and bring them to heel was to adopt the solution which bound the even more powerful and confident southern Gallic Roman aristocracies into the Merovingian polity: to remove them from the centres of politics.

With all this in mind it is perhaps easy to see why the ‘King of the Franks’ may not have felt at ease in Trier, especially after Justinian’s wars.  Thus he moved to Metz.  Brief study of Metz sheds extra light on the problem, not least because it highlights its complexities.  Metz was a large city and a prosperous one as we’ve seen, central within Austrasia and more easily defended than Trier.  It did not, furthermore, have Trier’s Roman ideological baggage.  It did have, like Toledo, the merit of absolute blandness.  This allowed the kings to proclaim their Romanitas but to inscribe their own political identity on the town.  Now, interestingly, they seem to have tried to recreate a royal complex very similar to that at Trier.  It had a centre for spectacle in the small amphitheatre, probably like that at Trier, incorporated into the walls.  It had a large basilical building, which was probably the centre of the palace complex, and it had the cathedral of St Stephen in close proximity.  But bishops weren’t a problem at Metz.  There were no awkward local saints or traditions of episcopal antagonism.  What’s more, the Merovingians, practically as soon as they moved to Metz, simply installed trusted former palatine officials as bishops.  Practically every bishop of Metz that we know anything at all about has a close link with the royal court.  The most problematic bishop, Arnulf does not appear to have been popular with the locals and seems to have been driven out.  His cult did not take off until his descendants, the Carolingians, gained political control, and it took them a while to bring Metz to heel.  The difficulties of bishops were still revealed, however.  Although the evidence is almost non-existent, it seems that Charles Martel, when he gained control of Metz, had to put up with a bishop, Sigibald, who had been a member of the opposing faction, and was clearly venerated in the region.  Sigibald inconveniently remained bishop for the rest of Charles’ period of rule.  When he died Charles’ successors quickly installed one of their followers, Chrodegang, who assiduously refounded Sigibald’s monastic foundations.

The Messin aristocracy was also less wealthy than that in neighbouring regions.  The king and the bishop would appear to have retained tight control of the lands of the Plateau Lorrain throughout the Merovingian region, and the region remained socially and politically dependent upon Metz and the patronage dispensed there.  This was much more like it.

So, post-Roman kings liked to act the Roman Emperor but they didn’t want any latter day Ambroses on their doorsteps stealing the show.  Merovingian kings liked to take role of Roman ruler; they were not keen on the supporting cast playing the part of the citizens of the res publica with too much gusto.