For anyone dealing with medieval royal diplomatics, confirmation charters are a very common thing. Whenever a new ruler was appointed, one of his first acts was to renew charters that had once been given by his predecessors and which were now presented to him for confirmation. While through its renewal a document achieved new legal…
In the Carolingian period, general oaths of fidelity like those sworn under Charlemagne, Louis the Pious or Charles the Bald created a direct personal bond between the adult male free population and the Carolingian ruler and his family. This has always been taken as indicating a comparatively high degree of statehood, as the oaths had…
‘Charles’s stirrups hang down from Conrad’s saddle’. For the first ruler of the Salian dynasty, Conrad II (1024‒1039), to whom this proverb refers, Carolingian traditions mattered a great deal: Conrad reportedly visited Aachen soon after his election to take possession of Charlemagne’s throne and to emphasise his family’s Frankish roots. But the author of this…
In most accounts of modern German historiography, the period of the Ottonian and Salian rulers is featured as a period of national origins. The perspective adopted by the HERA project, however, is different. Since it focuses on the uses of the past, it allows us to look at this period from a different perspective. The…
