The Hungarian riders were one of the gentes whose own history was interwoven with the history of the Latin West from the first Empire through the Empire’s demise to the rise of a new Empire. Thus they had a considerable effect on these three western periods. The Annals of Saint-Bertin are the first source to…
As I noted in my earlier blog post on Ratherius of Verona’s use of the concept of ‘patria’, I am working on identity construction in the long tenth century. At the start of the project I limited my research to the works by Ratherius, but over the past year I branched out to also include…
In the long tenth century various horizontal and vertical bonds as well as social and political boundaries were changed due to the fragmentation of the Carolingian empire which produced a variety of power relationships. These offered multiple possibilities of adherence to social entities which their contemporaries could align themselves with, or be assigned to. New…
Although often dismissed as a dark “age of iron”, the tenth century has also been paraded as the period that laid the foundations for the birth of later nation states. After being spawned by the destruction of the Carolingian imperial centre, so goes this narrative, the territorial units of West and East Francia would eventually…
