The Heroic Age

A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe

Issue 17 (2017)

The Heroic Age

A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe

Founded 1998   |   ISSN 1526-1867

Issue 17 (2017)

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Carolingian Formation of a Persecuting Society

James B. Williams

University of Indianapolis

©2018 by James B. Williams. All intellectual property rights reserved. This edition copyright © 2018 by The Heroic Age. Permissions granted for educational and personal purposes only.

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Abstract: R. I. Moore in The Formation of a Persecuting Society argued that Europe formed a persecuting society in the twelfth century. In this article, the author argues that those origins belong in the ninth century when both the Carolingian rulers and church began to target and regulate the same marginalized groups utilized in Moore's thesis—heretics, Jews, lepers, homosexuals, and loose women.

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§1. Robert Ian Moore's publication of The Formation of a Persecuting Society, almost three decades ago, challenged historians to view medieval Europe from the perspective of oppressed and marginalized groups of individuals deemed detrimental to society at large. Since then, Moore's approach to describing Europe's formation into a persecuting society has spawned an industry of appropriation as many sought to take Moore's principles and critique them or re-apply them to new contexts (2007, 172–96). His work meets the actual definition of a paradigm shift in historical thinking, though it is a term I am reluctant to use for its frequent misappropriation today. Moore's theory on the formation of Europe as a persecuting society rests on two critical points. The first is that Europeans of the twelfth century began the process of creating a persecuting society by labeling, harassing, controlling, and sometimes killing vulnerable individuals deemed "enemies," specifically aggregated into identifiable groups of heretics, Jews, lepers, male homosexuals, and female prostitutes. The second point, extending from the first, is that the persecution of these "enemies" could only take shape in a context where the state, often with the assistance of the church, could construct the bureaucratic apparatus necessary to target and regulate them.

§2. Though many scholars have taken this paradigm shift forward in time from the twelfth century to explore its implications in Europe, the same effort has not been applied as vigorously to the past. Was the twelfth century the origin point for the time when Europe began to form a persecuting society, or can it be pushed back further? After examining the Carolingian period, it is clear that ample evidence exists from the ninth century to make the argument for looking to the time of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious in particular as the proper origin point for the formation of a persecuting society in Europe. Indeed, in each of the main categories Moore explored: heretics, Jews, lepers, male homosexuals, and loose women, it is possible to find Carolingian rulers and their surrounding elites acting in concert to target and regulate these vilified groups, and in the process, augment the power of the nascent state and empire that was being formed.

Persecuting Heresy (and Paganism)

§3. Even though twelfth-century Europe is in many ways the apex of religious persecution of heretics in the Middle Ages (with such groups as the Cathars and Waldensians), the Carolingian period may rightfully be regarded as an important waypoint to that summit of persecution. Charlemagne, as the father of Europe and first emperor since the fall of the Roman Empire, re-engineered Carolingian society to confront two particular enemies of his new Christian state, Felician heretics and pagan apostates (McKitterick 2008, 292–380). Felicians, or Adoptionists, were a heretical group that emerged as a threat to Carolingian hegemony during the reign of Charlemagne (Cavadini 1993, 1–9; Heil 1965, 95–155). Under the leadership of Felix the bishop of Urgel and Elipandus the Archbishop of Toledo, the adherents to "Felicianism"—so-named by Carolingian church clerics—numbered in the tens of thousands, mostly occupying areas of southern France and northern Spain, according to a letter of Alcuin of York's (Alcuin Epistola 208). How so many followers of Felicianism emerged so rapidly is somewhat perplexing, but it becomes more understandable if we come to view the labeling of the heresy as an expression of state power. The Carolingian regime was seeking to assert its cultural dominance over an area of its empire that had remained in the orbit of Visigothic culture and influence for centuries. In cruder words, the Carolingians deliberately picked a fight with Visigothic bishops in order to manufacture a heresy that could then be suppressed.

§4. The evidence for this deliberate creation of a controversy can be found by scrutinizing the details of the heresy. Archbishop Elipandus, in response to some wayward clergy in the former Visigothic realm, articulated a vision of Christ as someone who was adoptive in his humanity. Here Elipandus derived his understanding of "adoptive" from the process of self-emptying described in Philippians 2:6–7, which says, "Who [Jesus Christ], though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness." This Christological perspective sparked immediate protests from the Carolingian church leaders at the time, who felt that such "adoptive" language smacked of the many heresies of the past, particularly Nestorianism. As John Cavadini has noted in his work on Felicianism, there is a fundamental misinterpretation on the part of Carolingian leaders because Elipandus's writings never violated the language or the intent of the Council of Chalcedon that declared Nestorianism a heresy (Cavadini 1993, 24–44). In this sense, the Carolinigian court deliberately manufactured a theological dispute with Elipandus, although the target of their cultural bullying was not Elipandus in a distant Toledo but rather Felix of Urgel who dwelled in the Spanish March, the borderland between the Visigothic world and the Frankish world.

§5. Felix as bishop of Urgel in the provinces of Gothia may have lived under the domain of the Carolingian rulers, but his cultural and ethnic heritage and apparently his ecclesiastical loyalty remained with the Visigothic Church. Felix thus supported Elipandus's description of Christ as "adoptive." In a show of their supremacy, Carolingian leaders dragged him up to the church Council of Frankfurt in 794 to judge him and his statements. Alcuin of York personally took the lead in eviscerating Felix's perspective, and to no one's surprise, the council of Frankish bishops declared Felix's beliefs a heresy. Afterwards, Felix was escorted to Rome to beg forgiveness of the pope and recant his sins. There, he was supposed to remain, but he did not. Somehow, Felix escaped from Rome, reinstalled himself in Urgel as its bishop, and resumed his preaching about the adoptive Son of God. Such a brazen act coupled with such clear support among the Goths of Urgel indicates the scale of this emerging cultural war launched by the Carolingians. Eventually, Felix's opponents once again detained him and brought him before a council to be condemned in 799 after another series of debates. Upon this second condemnation, Felix spent the rest of his life imprisoned in Lyons under the careful eye of its bishop, Agobard. With the heretical leader safely secured, Charlemagne launched a preaching campaign led by Benedict of Aniane to stamp out Felicianism and bring those heretics into the fold of the church. Their success in winning converts is unknown, although Carolingian leaders would continue to write treatises against Felicianism and design buildings such as those at Saint-Riquier and works of art to counter Felician beliefs for the next several decades (Lewis 1980, 71–93; Rabe 1995, 111–37).

§6. If we examine the historical context of Felicianism through the lens of Moore's theory, it is possible to see both how heretics were persecuted and how the instruments of the Carolingian proto-state suppressed them. Although the theological dispute between the Felicians and the Carolingians converged over a minor difference in the interpretation of the word "adoptive," Carolingian authors strongly promoted the idea that Felicians polluted what was an otherwise healthy body of Christ. In his Three Books against Felicianism, Paulinus of Aquileia asked, "Numquidnam infelicissimi Arii sociorumque eius non extetit pestilens paer diabolus qui adulterino conplexu virulentum semen perfidiae in vulvam depravate mentis eorum coitu effudit pestifero" (Paulinus of Aquileia Contra Felicem Libri Tres 1.3). In short, he wondered how these Felician friends of the heretic Arius could share an adulterous embrace with Satan in a destructive sexual union, who was perversely shooting his poisonous semen of faithlessness into the vulva of their minds. Here Paulinus separates the Felicians from other Christians because of the pollution they have received from Satan's semen and at the same time identifies them as a threat to the faithful, a dynamic mirrored in Moore's description of "purity and danger" in the twelfth century, a necessary element of his articulation of a persecuting society (Moore 2007, 94–116).

§7. Unlike those twelfth-century heretics, Carolingian rulers did not round up Felicians and burn them at the stake, but such mercy on their part does not mask the means by which they employed governmental power to instigate the heresy and then silence it. It was Charlemagne himself who initiated these conflicts with Felix. Charlemagne convened and oversaw both of the church councils where Felix of Urgel was condemned, ensured the imprisonment of Felix in Lyons, and endorsed the preaching campaign designed to convert the Felician heretics to the Carolingian definition of orthodoxy. These acts of suppression served to both augment Charles's power as a Christian king and to strengthen the apparatus of the state itself to dictate the "right belief" of its peoples, especially as he was seeking to exert his authority over the newly created Spanish March (Chandler 2013).

§8. The mercy Charlemagne exercised against the Felicians was not universal, and if the definition of "heresy" is broadened in this period to include any threats to the established Christian order, then paganism emerges as a parallel example. Charlemagne's war came from a long-standing Carolingian feud with the pagan Saxons that preceded his reign, and yet his campaigns to subjugate them under the Carolingian yolk elevated the affair to a much bloodier affair, with nearly annual warfare lasting over thirty years (McKitterick 2008, 103–6). Unlike the case of the wars against the Avars or Lombards, Charlemagne demonstrated a keen willingness to use his authority as king to destroy the Saxons and their paganism. Carolingian conquerors forcibly converted the Saxons to Christianity, in what one scholar has questionably called "Charlemagne's Jihad" (Hen 2006, 33), though it is also clear that the process of real Christianization took generations to take root, especially in the Saxon ecclesiastical structure (Carroll 1999, 219–46). This slow process of Christianization was not a result of idleness on Charlemagne's part. To ensure Saxon observance of Christian practice, Charlemagne issued new laws such as the ones at Paderborn where he declared a series of offenses as punishable by death, including the consumption of meat during the time of Lent and the cremation of the dead, both distinctly pagan practices (Capitulatio de Partibus Saxoniae 4, 7). These new laws were not mere threats. Just a few months after the meeting at Paderborn, Charlemagne resolved to use the might of the state to prevent apostasy by his newly conquered subjects when he executed 4,500 rebellious apostates on the banks of the Aller River (Annales Regni Francorum 782).

§9. Such a brutal massacre can be interpreted today as an atrocity of warfare, but there remains a strong religious and cultural component to Charlemagne's extinction of Saxon life that fits well with the idea of a persecuting society. For our Carolingian thinkers, Charlemagne's acts to suppress paganism were much like his acts to suppress heretics; both ensured the health of the Christian body in the face of impure threats. Einhard in his Life of Charlemagne notes that the conflict between the Saxons and Franks only came to an end when the pagans accepted Charlemagne's conditions "to cast aside the cult of demons and let go of the ceremonies of their forefathers" (Vita Karoli Magni 7). Likewise, the poet of The Paderborn Epic, composed in Charlemagne's lifetime, endorsed Charlemagne's forced conversion and suppression of the Saxons by whatever means necessary. He writes:

What the contrary mind and perverse soul refuse to do with persuasion,
Let them leap to accomplish when compelled by fear,
What wretched rebels at first did not do with their own accord,
They eagerly rush to accomplish, with fright goading them.
The one who in savage fashion for a long time refused to be pious,
That impious one, is made pious when coerced by holy fear (Karolus Magnus et Leo Papa; Garrison 1994, 133).

The Paderborn poet succinctly summarizes Moore's sentiments on a persecuting society. Not only are the pagans a threat because of their "perverse soul" but also the use of the power of the state to coerce them into obedience is legitimate. In fact, such repression merits a song of great praise.

Persecuting Jews

§10. Let us then turn to look at another main pillar of Moore's argument, the case of the Jews. In the twelfth century, it is easy to trace the process by which heretics came to be persecuted and how it was applied in a similar manner to Jews, i.e. identifying them as a pollution to society, targeting them as a threat to Christian society, and suppressing them with state power (Moore 2007, 26–42). While the Carolingian period exhibits fewer and less extreme episodes of Antisemitism than the twelfth century, it is still possible to observe the cycle of persecution beginning to take hold and a commensurate rise in state power (Langmuir 1990, 304; Stow 1992, 34–35).

§11. There can be little doubt that, at least in the minds of bishops from the city of Lyons, Jews polluted society and posed an inordinate threat to Carolingian society. Agobard, not without irony that same bishop of Lyons who imprisoned the heretic Felix of Urgel, wrote several anti-Jewish works during his ecclesiastical tenure out of which Jews came to be associated with pollution. Agobard's objections centered around his perception that Jews operated with too much freedom in the Carolingian world, which encouraged them to act brazenly. For instance, Agobard objected to Jews' successful attempts to block Christian missionary work among their slaves (Agobard De Baptismo Mancipiorum Iudaeorum; Contra Praeceptum Impium de Baptism Iudaicorum Mancipiorum). He also protested the selling of meats by Jewish merchants, which the Jews apparently labeled "Christian beasts" because they were unfit for Jewish consumption (Agobard De Insolentia Iudaeorum 3). Yet, in his appeals to Emperor Louis the Pious to intervene and correct the Jews, Agobard chose invective language against the Jews that singled them out as a pollution to Christian society. Agobard referred to the Jews as children of the devil, instruments of the devil, the worthless seed, and the polluted children. Most significantly, Agobard explicitly labeled the Jews as "Antichrists," equating them with the greatest possible threat to Christian society (Agobard De Cavendo Convictu et Societate Iudaica; De Iudaicis Superstitionibus et Erroribus 1, 17, 19). As a result, Agobard encouraged others, for instance his friend Nibridius Bishop of Narbonne, to avoid any contact with Jews, saying "But who shares a common table with the Antichrist and claims to keep his faith in Christ" (Agobard De Iudaicis Superstitionibus et Erroribus 19)?

§12. Agobard's successor, Amulo of Lyons, would continue this same line of accusation against Jews as polluters of Christian society. He twice referred to Jewish temples as "the synagogues of Satan" (Amulo Epistola seu Liber contra Iudaeos 7 and 9). Like Agobard, Amulo saw this pollution tangibly occurring in the food consumed by Christians, in this case of Jewish wine, which "is intentionally polluted by them in many ways" and sold to Christians. Amulo notes with particular horror that some of this polluted wine was even used in the celebration of the mass (Amulo 41). Both Agobard and Amulo establish a framework whereby the Jews are not just a pollution to Christian society but a clear and present danger to its safety.

§13. It is perhaps unsurprising to find that Agobard's and Amulo's framework for the Jews of Lyons manifested elsewhere in the Carolingian world with more aggressive scapegoating of Jews. For instance, Prudentius of Troyes in the Annals of Saint-Bertin blamed the Jews of Bordeaux for betraying the city and allowing it to fall to the Danes in 848. On the other side of the Carolingian realm, Prudentius also imputed the Jews for selling out the city of Barcelona to Arab invaders in 852 (Annales Bertiani 848 and 852). These offenses against society struck at both the temporal and spiritual health of the Christian body, but in 877, Hincmar of Rheims took these accusations against Jews to a new level when he wrote of the death of the emperor Charles the Bald in the Annals of Saint-Bertin. He claimed that Charles fell prey to a fever, and so called upon his doctor Zedechias, "whom he loved and trusted all too much." Zedechias had him drink a powder to help him overcome the fever, but in truth, Hincmar claims, this powder was nothing more than a poison, hastening the king's death (Annales Bertiani 877). We do not know what became of Zedechias or if Hincmar's accusation triggered any violence against Jews, but in these accusations, it is clear that Jews have become the scapegoats of political tragedy, not unlike they will be in successive centuries of European history.

§14. As disturbing as these accusations against Jews may be, they do not of themselves constitute persecution. Only when the power of the state acts on such accusations to suppress the Jews can it truly be considered persecution. In the case of our Carolingian rulers, it is possible to observe some suppression of Jews through both capitularies and church councils, a tradition started by their predecessors the Merovingians. In fact, as the Carolingian period progresses, the capitularies and canons that target Jews become increasingly hostile. For instance, one of the earliest restrictions came at the capitulary of Nijmegen in 806 when Charlemagne instructed bishops not to sell ecclesiastical items to Jewish merchants, who had apparently taken to boasting that they could buy anything off of a Carolingian churchman (Capitulare Missorum Niumagae Datum 4). It is debatable who is really targeted in this legislation, as the rebuke seems primarily aimed at bishops in the empire, rather than Jews, but treatment of Jews progressively worsened. Later a capitulary issued from Aachen demanded that Jews supply four to eight witnesses in disputed property claims at court, while Christians only had to supply three. The undue burden of providing additional witnesses returns to the theme of the deceitful Jew scattered throughout the writings referenced above. Jews were also forbidden to employ Christian labor on Sundays (Capitulare Missorum Aquisgranense Alterum 13).

§15. These restrictions in the capitularies found reinforcement through conciliar legislation, though Carolingian rulers also sought ways to bridge the divide with the community of Jews they sought to exclude. At the Council of Meaux-Paris in 845, led in part by Hincmar of Rheims, Jews were banned from positions of authority and restricted from possessing Christian slaves (an edict which had been a part of previous church councils but clearly not enforced) (Concilium Meaux-Paris 73–75). The assembled at the Council of Pavia in 850 prohibited Jews from serving as tax collectors or judges, which again raises the specter of their untrustworthiness, here in the case of royal funds and judgments (Concilium Pavia 24). Thus restrictions on Jews increased over time. Interestingly, as with the case of the Felician heresy, Carolingian rulers deliberately sought to make Christian society whole by bringing Jews into the fold. In an anonymous letter to Emperor Louis the Pious by one of his bishops, the author thanks Louis for sponsoring his missionary work to convert Jews to Christianity. Apparently, this bishop identified Jewish youth as the most susceptible targets for conversion and had won many of them over. Some of the Jewish parents of the town had even taken to sending their children away to friends and relatives in other cities in order to avoid these conversion attempts (Ex Epistola Episcopi ad Imperatorem de Baptizatis Hebraeis). Although limited in their violence, Carolingian rulers used the trappings of royal power, with the assistance of the church, to treat Jews within their own territory as subjects of a different, devious sort.

§17. Fascinatingly, an early example of the segregation of lepers emerges from the origin story of the Carolingians themselves. Arnulf, bishop of Metz, for whom the Carolignians or Arnulfings are named, retired in 629 from his work as bishop to care for lepers around the monastery of Remiremont. It is unclear exactly how authorities established a boundary for this group of lepers, but Arnulf subjugated himself to their needs by washing them and cooking for them in some kind of leprosarium or leper house (Vita Arnulfi 21). The hagiographers of such descriptions, whether of Arnulf or others, employed these stories to elevate their saint's sanctity. After all, what could be more Christ-like than stooping from a bishop's seat to wash the feet of lepers? And yet, the story has credibility in the sense that there is a parallel example, which has affirmation in both its description of treating lepers and more importantly of constructing space for them. Abbot Othmar, founder of the illustrious monastery of St. Gall in 720, established a leper hospital building outside the complex of St. Gall so that the monks could tend to those in need there. Of course, Abbot Othmar was at the forefront of this service, washing with his own hands their "festering wounds" from the heads of the lepers to their feet (Walafrid Strabo Vita Otmari Abbatis Sangallensis 2). The primary motivation for these churchmen was to express their piety through what was perceived as a perilous act of servitude. And yet, their actions also reveal the further development of the process by which lepers began to be ostracized in proscribed areas (Miller and Nesbitt 2014, 121–25).

§18. One Carolingian intellectual further augmented the perception of lepers as outsiders, and even enemies, by describing their disease as punishment from God and tying it to heresy. In his Exposition on Matthew, Hrabanus Maurus expounds upon Matthew chapter eight where Jesus, who has finished delivering the famous Sermon on the Mount, descends from the Mount and encounters a leper who seeks healing from Christ if he is willing (Hrabanus Maurus Expositio in Matthaeum 3.8.3). Christ states his willingness, saying "Volo, mundare," or "I am willing, be clean." He then miraculously touches and cures the leper. Hrabanus Maurus parses this very short encounter into parallels with Christianity's history of heresy. In identifying Christ's willingness with "Volo," Hrabanus Maurus indicates this foreshadows a refutation of Photinus of Sirmium, a heretic famous in the West for adoptionist monarchianism or denying Christ's association with God until after he left the womb. Next comes the "be clean" command, which Hrabanus ascribes to a foreshadowing of "Arrius" or Arius, the infamous heretic of the Arian controversy that articulated the Son's distinction from the Father (and therefore subordination to the Father). Finally, Christ's action of healing the leper occurs, according to Hrabanus, out of a refutation of Manichaeus, whose dualist heresy viewed aspects of the material world and body as inherently evil. Each of Jesus's actions is thus parceled out by Hrabanus Maurus in order to illustrate how the Son of God's speech and actions counters the philosophies of each of these three prominent heretics. Moreover, Christ's actions form their own Trinitarian defense with the three points of refutation. Regardless of the nuances of Hrabanus' theological meanderings, what stands out from his interpretation of Matthew is the clear association between these heretics and the leper. Just as the theologies are cleansed by Jesus, so is the physical affliction of the leper. Thus Hrabanus connects one outcast enemy of society, the heretic, with another, the leper, and in doing situates himself and Carolingian thought well within the western tradition on leprosy (Miller and Nesbitt 2014, 102).

§19. While Hrabanus's exposition of Matthew established a sinful association with heresy, the church and the Carolingian proto-state took action through conciliar legislation and capitularies to further segregate lepers. Leprosy provided one of the few means by which divorce could legitimately take place in the early medieval world, with conciliar legislation by the bishops of Gaul reinforcing this notion under the leadership of King Pippin at the Council of Compiègne (Pippini Regis Capitulare Compendiense 19). The sequestering of lepers found greater momentum under Pippin's son, Charlemagne, who in 789 issued an edict whereby lepers should be separated in society, "so that they would not mix themselves together with other people" (De leprosis, ut se non intermisceant alio populo) (Capitulare Generale 20). It is difficult to know the degree to which this law was implemented, and the lack of details about how to prevent the mixing leave much to the imagination. It may very well be a promotion of the continued construction of leprosariums like at St. Gall or perhaps the basis for local officials to implement their own measures of exclusion as they saw fit. Nevertheless, these two snippets of legislation reinforce Moore's own observations of the twelfth century that both church and state moved in concert to segregate the leper from society because of his or her danger (either medically or by association of sin). Interestingly, these Carolingian episodes also contrast with R. I. Moore, who detected no evidence of lepers from the Lombards in the seventh century till the eleventh, writing "apart from those two incidents the legislation of Rothari inaugurated a silence in the western sources which lasted almost unbroken until the eleventh century" (2007, 46). Meager though these leprosy references in Carolingian sources may be, they nevertheless indicate important precursors to the leprosy epidemic of the twelfth century, particularly in demonstrating how the state could be used to control aspects of society by defining marriage and community.

Persecuting Homosexuals

§20. Any discussion of medieval homosexuality in the Middle Ages often, of necessity, begins with the historian John Boswell and his well-known thesis that the Christian tradition was not nearly as hostile to homosexuality as had been widely perceived (1980, 333–54). For the Carolingian period, Boswell found that tolerance of homosexuality was the norm (1980, 198), but subsequent work has since challenged this notion. James Brundage argued that both ecclesiastical and secular law from the period of the sixth to eleventh centuries increasingly held all of society to monastic ideals of purity where it concerned sexuality, including a crackdown on homosexual behavior, most prominently in Irish penitentials (1987, 124–75). More recently, Rachel Stone in her examination of Carolingian masculinity noted how "homosexual behavior and bestiality were grave concerns to Carolingian reformers, but only rarely urgent ones" (2012, 298). She notes how Carolingian reformers consistently condemned homosexuality as an unnatural act, and yet they acted in a way to remove and hide the scandal of homosexuality rather than expose it. In this sense, the Carolingians practiced their own form of persecution, with a focus on labeling homosexual acts and using the power of the state to prevent such acts of perceived immorality.

§21. Both state and church acted together in terms of using institutional legislation in an effort to criminalize and control same-sex male activity. In his 789 Admonitio Generalis, Charlemagne sought to correct a wide variety of shortcomings he had observed taking place in monasteries across his kingdoms, among those shortcomings was the issue of "unnatural" sexual activity. Charlemagne decreed that men who sinned with animals or other men must face a harsh and strict penance for their infractions according to the Council of Ancyra, and he tasked bishops and priests "to cut out this evil from custom" (In concilio Acyronense inventum est in eos qui cum quadrupedibus vel masculis contra naturam peccant: dura et districta penitentia. Qua propter episcopi et prebyteri, quibus iudicium penitentiae iniunctum est, conentur omnimodis hoc malum a conseutudine prohibere vel abscidere) (Admonitio Generalis 49). Interestingly, the canon from the Council of Ancyra on bestiality, to which Charlemagne refers here, included a penance of 15 to 25 years of prostration in prayer, depending on the age at which the offense was committed (Council of Ancyra 16).

§22. This salvo against male homosexuality proved insufficient to defeat the specter of homosexual activity because Charlemagne returned to this "evil" in his 802 general capitulary for the missi dominici, who were Charlemagne's secular and clerical representatives tasked with enforcing his commands. In addressing the proper behavior of monks in monasteries across his empire, Charlemagne spent a great deal more time dwelling on the question of sodomy. Rumor had apparently reached Charlemagne that many in the monasteries were "sodomites," and in response, the Emperor made it clear he would not tolerate such behavior in his domain, much less in the spiritual persons meant to uphold virtues of chastity and moral purity. Although he did not levy a specific penalty, his parting shot was remarkably blunt, saying "if any such report shall have come to our ears in the future, we shall inflict such a penalty, not only on the guilty but also on those who have consented to such deeds, that no Christian who shall have heard of it will ever dare in the future to perpetrate such acts" (Certe si amplius quid tale ad aures nostras pervenerit, non solum in eos, sed etiam et in ceteris, qui in talia consentient, talem ultionem facimus, ut nullus christianus qui hoc audierit, nullatenus tale quid perpetrare amplius presumserit) (Capitulare Missorum Generale 17). This wording of a vague yet ominous threat resulting in a penalty that would strike fear in all reinforced the notion that homosexuality was an affront that required special treatment. Throughout most of the capitulary for the missi in 802, Charlemagne issued general "dos" and "don'ts" for various groups in his kingdom (do obey and honor your bishops, don't neglect a muster of the emperor), while never specifying any real consequence for failing to act in the prescribed manner. On only a few occasions throughout his list of forty capitularies did Charlemagne bother to add heft to his command with a threat of future severe and unspecified consequences; it is not surprising that one of the other such instances occurred with the crime of incest, which Charlemagne indicated must receive a severe enough punishment contrary to a practice of letting the person off lightly so that others would fear to do it (Incestuosum scelus omnino prohibemus. Si quis nefanda autem fornicatione contaminatus fuerit, nullatenus sine districtione gravi relaxetur, sed taliter ex hoc coripiantur, ut caeteri metum habeant talia perpetrandi, ut auferetur penitus et inmunditia populo christiano, et ut reus ex hoc per poenitentia ammittat pleniter, sicut ei ab episcopo suo disponatur) (Capitulare Missorum Generale 33). Both incest and homosexuality presumably marked for Charlemagne dangerous issues of purity where avoidance may have been the social norm, unlike other crimes including patricide, fratricide, theft, insults to the king, etc., that did not require extraordinary threats because everyone understood them to be wrong and worthy of recrimination.

§23. Charlemagne's actions against homosexuality through royal edict found reinforcement in conciliar legislation in 829 under his son Louis the Pious. In the preceding years, Louis the Pious had witnessed a flurry of failures in military campaigns in the Spanish March and elsewhere, in political unity with the dismissal of powerful magnates Matfrid and Hugh, and in ecclesiastical disagreements about the proper relationship between property, church, and state. The emperor and church leaders therefore convened the Council of Paris in 829 to tackle the important question of how the Carolingian world had offended God and what atonements needed to be made for the sins that had led to God's wrath (De Jong 2009, 148–84). Unnatural "pollutions" such as sex amongst men and sex with animals surfaced as two of the more powerful examples of the sins lurking in the Carolingian realm necessitating correction. One section of the Council of Paris begins by examining how these particular vices provoke God's temper more than any other, supplying vague references to divine retribution like Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19) and the sins of the Canaanites (Levit. 18). What follows for the churchmen is the logical extension of these Old Testament examples, to punish such vices with execution for this "wicked" infraction. They state, "Also in the law the Lord judges the author of this wicked deed and disgrace to be punished by death, and the apostle affirms the deservedness of death" (In lege quoque Dominus auctorem huius sceleris et turpitudinis morte puniri iubet, et apostolus dignum morte adstruit) (Concilium Parisiense Anno 829 34). Even though later in the passage there is some modulation of this extremism with a call to get these "wicked" people into confession and penance immediately, the call for death remains severe. The rush to remove these vices traces back to those very same Old Testament stories; for instance, in the case of Sodom and Gommorah, God laid waste to all inhabitants of the cities, including women and children. In the minds of the Carolingian elite, the threat of death was not just a sword that dangled over the sinners but over all of society who shared communal responsibility for the climate that bred such a "heinous and detestable sin."

§24. A second passage dealing with homosexuality in the Council of Paris coming specifically from the bishops returned to many of the same themes, but it also complemented the first section, completing the rationale established earlier. If God sought to punish societies because of the pollution of homosexuality, as He had in Soddom and Gomorrah, then was there evidence that he was punishing the Carolignian Empire for the existence of this particular vice? The bishops point to contemporary events to show that God's wrath was already upon them. People in the Carolingian Empire in 829 were starving, and pestilence had been whipped up because of the actions of these wicked violators of divine law, whom the church leaders had failed to remove from the rest of society (De diversorum malorum patratoribus. Sunt sane diversorum malorum patratores, quos et lex divina improbat et condempnat, pro quorum etiam diversis sceleribus et flagitiis populus fame et pestilentia flagellatur et ecclesiae status infirmatur et regnum periclitatur) (Concilium Parisiense Anno 829 69). The language used here was dire. The church was enfeebled, and the kingdom was endangered because of the vice of homosexuality, which had been identified as the gravest of the wicked deeds that had brought God's divine punishment. Thus, the impetus for extinguishing homosexual behavior was not just drawn from Biblical justifications but from an imminent and profound threat to contemporary society, an attitude that fits well with Mayke De Jong's characterization of the penitential state that emerged under Louis the Pious and the political elite surrounding him who jockeyed for the loftiest perch on the moral high ground (2009, 4–5).

§25. In sum of the case of homosexuality, Carolingian patterns of persecution mirror those of the twelfth century. Homosexuals were identified, labeled, and deemed not just unfit but inherently dangerous to the survival of society. We unfortunately do not know to what degree Charlemagne's legislation concerning homosexuality nor the church canons from the Council of Paris impacted Carolingian society, an all too common problem in assessing the Carolingian period. Did bishops interrogate abbots about the state of homosexuality and bestiality in their cloisters? Did nobles take this message as missi dominici and apply it to their households? The sources here are silent, which in a way raises another tantalizing question. Is the legal sphere the only realm where such a matter can safely be discussed? Is the homosexual sin seen as so "heinous," its pollution so toxic, that no one else would dare give it the power of posterity by putting it to writing? There is some hint that this could be the case, for one of the only non–legal condemnations of homosexuality occurs in the Visio Wetti of 824, in which Wetti, a monk of Richenau, experienced a vision quest amongst the dead in the afterlife. Guiding Wetti along this journey was an angel, who repeatedly warned him that God viewed sexual sins "against nature" as the sins most offensive to God. As Paul Edward Dutton has established, dream literature provided the one safe space in the Carolingian world for criticism otherwise forbidden in regular society (1994, 1–4). The idea that homosexuality might constitute an otherwise unspeakable sin might also explain why Carolingian political discourse did not employ accusations of homosexuality to discredit rivals (Stone 2012, 296). Regardless of the degree to which homosexuals were silently pursued and rooted out as Charlemagne and the canons prescribe, it is possible to see an important development here. What the Carolingian church and state established was a joint obligation to intervene in and exercise power over society, particularly through the drafting of law, in order to regulate its members to conform to their notions of acceptable sexual behavior.

§27. Attempts to regulate harlotry became the primary concern of Louis the Pious rather than his father. Charlemagne himself tolerated a great deal of promiscuous sexual activity in his household and his court. He kept concubines and, more famously, permitted sexual promiscuity among his daughters so long as they did not marry and thereby create rivals that could threaten the male Arnulfing family line (McKitterick 2008, 88–96). This tolerance abruptly gave way to intolerance upon Charlemagne's death and the accession of his only remaining male heir, Louis. Upon his arrival in Aachen, Louis's first order of business, according to the Astronomer, was the reading and execution of Charlemagne's will. The second order of business was the purging of women from the royal palace. Here, the Astronomer proved delicate in his accounting, noting that the gathering of women at the palace was "extremely large" and that Louis permitted only a very few whom he deemed essential and "suitable" to royal service to remain (Vita Hludovici imperatoris 23; Noble 2009, 248). Everyone, most especially his promiscuous sisters, vacated, withdrawing to any properties they had received from Charlemagne. In short, the party at Aachen, and any sexually promiscuous activities connected to it, came to a crashing halt. This conclusion is what the Astronomer would have his audience surmise, but it is clear from other sources that such activities did not cease.

§28. In 820, Louis the Pious turned to the legal toolbox and the hammer it could provide to extirpate the problem of harlotry at the royal palace, just a few years after his initial purge detailed by the Astronomer. In a capitulary on the discipline of the royal palace, Louis the Pious opened his commands with nothing short of a full-scale investigation by palace officials for the presence of any "harlot" hiding among the many people and servants there. If such a person was found, he or she was to be detained and the abettor to be closely watched (Capitulare de Disciplina Palatii Aquisgranensis 1). The second command of Louis expanded this investigation further afield to surrounding villas around Aachen and to stewards of other royal properties throughout the kingdom. In a statement that reveals a profound lack of trust in his many subordinates and also the perceived prevalence of harlotry, Louis suggested a similar ransacking through the dwellings of bishops, abbots, and vassals, when those esteemed individuals were absent, to ascertain if harlots were hiding there (Capitulare de Disciplina Palatii Aquisgranensis 2). And what should become of such loose women caught in this sting? They were to be collared and brought all the way to the marketplace for a public flogging. In the event such transportation proved infeasible, a beating on the spot would have to suffice (Capitulare de Disciplina Palatii Aquisgranensis 3). It should also be noted that this kingdom-wide operation also detailed what should be done with criminals (thieves, murders, etc.) found to be hiding in any of these subordinates' dwellings, thus associating an act of harlotry with criminality. Though a detailed justification is not provided for Louis's actions, the root concern seems self-evident; Louis the Pious sought to cleanse his own household and those of all his vassals from the pollutant of harlots.

§29. Following Louis the Pious's lead, the church turned, for the first time in centuries, to a concern about harlots and their corrosion of Christian society. For instance, early medieval penitential texts were a natural place for addressing concerns about the sin of prostitution, but it was only in the mid-ninth century under St. Hubert's penitential that penances first came to be offered for sex with prostitutes (Payer 1984, 117). A bit more light can be shed on the matter from the moralist Jonas of Orléans, a Carolingian bishop at the court of Louis the Pious, who wrote a mirror for the Count of Orléans. Among other things, Jonas addressed the problem of extramarital sex for a Carolingian nobleman, particularly through adulterers, concubines, or harlots. He drew upon passages from Augustine, Bede, Jerome, Lactantius, and Ambrose in order to demonstrate the pollution of such sexual trysts and the damaging impact it had on the household. In his conclusion, Jonas of Orléans admonished Carolingian noblemen not to succumb to sex with such women (De Institutione Laicali Libri Tres 2.4). Jonas was not extreme in his treatment of prostitutes, remaining grounded in the texts of the ancient fathers, but the fact that he chose to include this section in his mirror for noblemen indicates that it had become a greater concern in the Carolingian period for the leaders of the church to manage. In this sense, Dhuoda echoed Jonas's concerns in her book of instruction for her young son William, who was serving as a hostage at the court of Louis the Pious. She offered to William the same warning against associating with harlots and the dangers they posed (Liber Manualis 4.6).

§30. From the current understanding of historians, prostitution did not register much concern in the early Middle Ages, but in more closely examining the Carolingian period, that viewpoint merits reconsideration. The church was becoming increasingly aware of this problem as evidenced by the creation of penances for sex with prostitutes and recommendations for avoidance of them by noblemen; Dhouda's example even demonstrates how lay Carolingian nobility absorbed these concerns. For the Carolingian proto-state, the actions of Louis the Pious revealed the ugliest side of persecution. Using his political power, he dispatched state officials to identify harlots specifically, hunt them stealthily, shame them publicly, and abuse them physically. Such an outburst of violence from persecution is much more akin to episodes commonly found in the later Middle Ages.

Conclusion

§31. Heretics, Jews, lepers, male homosexuals, and loose women—all of the main categories addressed by Moore as groups targeted for persecution by European states and the church in The Formation of a Persecuting Society find precedence in the Carolingian period. The attempts at persecution under the Carolingians may appear more as flashpoints than as a sustained program of persecution when analyzing one of these groups in isolation. Indeed, counter-examples can be found for many of these cases to dispute the characterization of Carolingian society as being wholly against any one of them. And yet, when taken together the harmony between these five categories is astounding. In each case, there is intellectual support from the church to aid in the classifying of marginalized groups, oftentimes with the ascription of pollution to their presence in society so as to justify their exclusion. More importantly, in each case, Carolingian rulers employed the power of their nascent state to suppress these groups in some way, at times even advocating the use of violence against them. Robert Ian Moore makes the case that the transformation of European society into a persecuting one began gradually in the eleventh and twelfth century until it became "habitual" (2007, 4). In looking through the evidence presented here, that gradual process began in actuality two centuries earlier when these habits first became formed.

§32. This conclusion may seem striking, as it goes against the grain of a Carolingian Renaissance that many imagine led to the progression of a greater western civilization or at least a greater Middle Ages. Was it not the Carolingian age that supposedly pulled Europe out of the Dark Ages? In many cases, this argument still bears out, but what cannot be ignored is that the Carolingian rulers and the church looked to establish a particularly Christian order, to form a European identity, and to empower the rule of their state. They were successful, if only temporarily, in doing so, but one of the great points of Moore, drawing inadvertently from the tradition of Michel Foucault, is that such accretion of power often has its consequences, born of society and wielded by a dominant political elite at the expense of others who fail to conform to it. In this sense, the repressive side of Carolingian society fits quite well with the narrative of a progressive Carolingian renovatio or renewal. A newly forged Carolingian empire had to marginalize common enemies of society to foster a sense of unity that was otherwise absent in a sea of diverse peoples, languages, and customs.

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Published 10-Jan-2018