Gerd Althoff

Althoff's pioneering research on the importance in medieval government of political and social groupings, and of the links between them, has as its starting point the work of Gerd Tellenbach and his "Freiburg working circle" students at Freiburg i.B.[45][46] During the 1950s Tellenbach recognised significant patterns in the groupings into which the lists of names in Confraternity/Memorial Books were arranged. Using various different "memorial sources", such as confraternity books, necrologies and registries of deaths/burials, important sources for the histories of nobility families and family research could be derived for the then badly under-researched (even in Germany) period between the eighth and tenth centuries.[47] This intensive prosopographical "names research" acquired its own momentum and developed into a major project in "Mediävistics". The work was taken forward, in particular by Karl Schmid and Joachim Wollasch, both of whom were students of Tellenbach. Gerd Althoff was a student of Karl Schmid.[46] During 1981/82, as part of the "Groups creation and groups consciousness in the Middle Ages" research project, Althoff worked with Schmid in a close study of the listings of names entered in the "Gedenkbuch" (loosely, "memorialisation book") from Reichenau Monastery, which they compared with those from the monasteries at St.Gallen and Fulda as well as that from the Convent at Remiremont (Lorraine). They were struck by the way in which members of leading families had increasingly asserted their importance by entering the names of their relations and friends, with accompanying entreaties that the monks and nuns should pray for the immortal souls of those departed, in "Gedenkbücher" at each of several different religious houses. The researchers determined that the family associations and mergers implicit in the Gedenkbücher listings were part of a more general pattern behaviour designed peacefully to create and enhance cohesion within leading families, and to engender mutual support between them. They were struck by the way in which the quantity of such entries in the Reichenau Gedenkbuch increased steadily between 825 and 936, and then fell off abruptly after the death in 936 of King Henry I. Exactly the same pattern was identified at St.Gallen, Fulda and Remiremont. By drilling down into the family connections of the individuals listed, Althoff established a clear association between the intensification of Gedenkbuch entries and the alliances that King Henry established with the leading families involved. This was clearly reflected in the king's efforts to consolidate his royal lordship through Amicitia (friendship) alliances entered into with the dukes during the tenth century. Henry's son and successor, Otto I, abandoned the mutual family alliances ("pacta mutua") with the leading families: this led to conflicts. These insights are chronicled in considerable depth in Althoff's various substantial publications, starting in 1985, on Henry I and Otto I.[48] Althoff's shared insights on the importance of friendship alliances and oaths of mutual support have significantly enhanced understanding and have become widely accepted among scholars researching Henry I and his Ottonian successors.[49][50]

In a contribution published in 1983 Althoff focused on a monk called "Widukind" who is identified as "Dominator Widukind" in the Confraternity book ("Verbrüderungsbuch") of Reichenau Abbey. Althoff, in his essay, identifies "Dominator Widukind" as no less a man than Duke Widukind, baptised, according to the Reichenau records, in 785. Widukind was an (originally "pagan") leader who between 777 and 785 waged war against Charlemagne. Those wars had ended with the Carolingian annexation of Saxon territory and the triumphant conversion of the Saxons to Christianity. According to Althoff, his research confirmed that those wars also ended with Duke Widukind banished to the island monastery at Reichenau and, following baptism, obliged to spend the rest of his life as a monk.[51] Althoff's conclusions on this matter remain contentious among medievalists.[52]

Althoff also worked on a major project to publish transcribed so-called "Memorial sources". Together with Joachim Wollasch he published a compilation of monastic necrologies from Merseburg, Magdeburg and Lüneburg.[53] Combining the work undertaken for this project and the work undertaken for his habilitation dissertation,[11] using information from the Saxon necrologies from the Billung and Ottonian monastic records from Lüneburg and Merseburg, he was able to identify kinship connections and friendship alliances created and sustained during the period between noble and royal families.[47] The networks he identified included 3 popes, 190 bishops and archbishops, 92 abbots and abbesses. 51 kings and queens, 47 dukes and other members of ducal families along with 182 counts and countesses.[11][54] The usefulness of Althoff's work on so-called memorialised traditions was questioned by Johannes Fried and simply rejected by Hartmut Hoffmann. Althoff and Wollasch responded to the criticisms from these medievalist colleagues with their own robust reply.[55][56]

In 1990 Althoff published the results of his researches into the formation of social groupings and the characteristics of the resulting group consciousness during the tenth century.[57][58] A follow-up followed in 1992.[59] He was able to show that extended kinship networking and with friendship-based political alliances (amicitiae) between leading families were more important than equivalent ties to the rules. Obligations to the king took second place. The alliances between the families were further strengthened through "Coniurationes" (oaths of mutual obligation).[58] These insights left the earlier historiography of the period, represented by historians associated with National Socialism such as Otto Brunner and Theodor Mayer, of a state held together by personal loyalty and allegiance to a kingly ruler, looking anachronistic and badly outdated.[60][61] Althoff was also able to identify an association between a surge in additions to the monastic "Gedenkbücher" of the time of Henry I with measures that had become necessary to repulse a new wave of Magyar attacks.[59][62] Earlier generations of medievalists had often portrayed King Henry as temperamentally distanced from the church, but nevertheless invoking religious and spiritual backing in his defensive strategy against the Magyars. But Althoff was also able to show that the increase in "Gedenkbuch" registrations during the period was not restricted to Saxony and Franconia. His insights are therefore highly significant for research into the power structure and human networks across the entire empire during its post-Carolingian formative period in the tenth century.[63] Revelations from the new more intense research into the "memorial sources" preserved in the monasteries brought a whole new appreciation and detailed understanding of the connections between the nobility, the church and the king. These were insights that had not been accessible to early generations of more "constitutionally focused" historians. They provided important context for existing Ottonian historiography, while also creating a range of new questions that can be applied to all the contemporaneous and subsequent sources. An entire re-working and re-evaluation of the Ottonian tradition has thereby come to the fore.[64]

Since as far back as 1980 Althoff's interest in networking among the movers and shakers of tenth century Germany had been wide-reaching.[65] In his 1982 study, "Zur Frage nach der Organisation sächsischer coniurationes in der Ottonenzeit", he shewed how key participants in Duke Lindolf's insurrection of 953/954 were members of the senior nobility, with their own close connections to the family of the king himself. These noble brothers in arms were organised into a form of fraternity or guild, and shared together in a ceremony commemorating the dead ("... ein gemeinsames Totengedenken") and ritual feasting ("convivia") as the launching point of their armed insurrection.[66] These insights were decisive for subsequent research on how conflicts were structured, the concomitant use of violence and the submission rituals that conventionally ensued.[5][67] Studies of banquets as a ritualised way of cementing peace and of the different approaches taken to political consultation followed, with continuing interrogation in the Ottonian context of "Feast and treaty" ("Fest und Bundnis") and the character in a medieval political context of Gratia" (loosely, "Huld" / "grace") or "satisfactio" (loosely, "Genugtuung" / "full satisfaction"). Further excursions by medievalists into group behaviour among leading families continued to be unleashed by conflict research.[68][69]

Traditional research on the period had concentrated extensively on the king's courts. Viewed through this perspective, conflict was resolved primarily through court rulings. In 1927 the influential legal historian Heinrich Mitteis published work summarizing his research on medieval political trials [lower-alpha 3] conducted before the kings' courts between approximately 900 and 1300.[70] By the 1970s, especially among American medievalists, an appreciation had developed that conflicts during the Medieval period could only be adequately evaluated if they were addressed also through the prisms of the social-sciences and in their cultural contexts, and not solely on the basis of intensive study of Medieval court records. Conflicts resulted from shifts between and within social networks and needed to be understood in societal and cultural terms. Cultural elements in this instance included in the first instance rituals, gestures and ceremonies. Excessive reliance placed only on written records, accepted at face value and only in their own terms, was also questioned.[71]

Since the 1980s Gerd Althoff has taken a lead in the German speaking world in research on Medieval conflict management and conflict resolution. He has followed the increasingly mainstream Anglo-American insight that accords an important role to conflicts that were managed and resolved without reference to the kings' courts, and he has accepted that rituals, gestures and ceremonies all play an important role. He has also developed his ideas in the context of Medieval statehood as more broadly understood.[72] Althoff and Keller highlighted the impossibility of trying to describe the tenth-century Ottonian state through the elements and categories characteristic of the twentieth-century state, since in most respects the tenth century managed without using written documents, without "state institutions", without agreed and regulated competences and responsibilities and – most importantly – without the ruler enjoying anything close to a monopoly on violence.[73] Even more obviously than in the earlier Carolingian period, the king's power and authority in the tenth century was based on his own personality, because consensus derived from his meetings and other, mostly public, interactions with the leading members of the leading families. For leadership and resolution of conflict a succession of public spectacles and events, combined with symbolic messaging and ritualised chains of communications were often effective.[14] From this central importance of personal connection and symbolic forms of communication, Althoff derived his thesis of "Ottonian kingship without the state", which he pointedly contrasted with the previous century's "Carolingian statehood".[74] Althoff set out to answer the question of how "kingship" could function in an age without fixed written norms.[75] He comes back to the firm conclusion that conflict management cannot be explained in terms of modern thinking, involving state institutions and written laws. Instead, "unwritten rules of the game" emerged in the tenth and eleventh centuries, which were hardly less binding on the parties involved than the body of written laws on which the modern state is based.[76] An important starting point for sharing his insights on conflict in the medieval period was the lecture "Royal Rule and Conflict Behaviour in the Tenth and Eleventh centuries" which Althoff delivered at the 1988 "German Historians' Day" conference at Bamberg (of which he was himself one of the organisers). The lectures delivered at the conference were published in Frühmittelalterliche Studien during 1989.[77]

Althoff investigated the operation of royal rule in the absence of state institutions, studying the actions of kings and nobles in conflict situations. Where the parties to the conflict were the king and his leading nobles, both the cause(s) of the conflict and the way(s) in which it was progressed and resolved were explored and discerned. Such conflicts revealed both the possibilities and the limits of Medieval kingship.[77] There was, according to Althoff, a very clear distinction to be drawn with Anglo-American historiography of France, Iceland or England in the Middle Ages, in respect of which it is not unreasonable to investigate conflict through court records, and the Ottonian-Salian "state" which could be studied more usefully through what he termed "historiographical texts". These provided "for the centuries under research, the most abundant and the most detailed information about ritual actions".[78] From these sources, Althoff was able to discern a model for conflict resolution: one of the parties to the conflict declared himself willing to submit to the will of the other, following the intervention of mediators. This took place in a public ritual known as a Deditio.[78] The individual performing the Deditio was required to demonstrate his self-humiliation by removing his shoes, donning a penitential robe or copiously weeping, before throwing himself at the feet of the king, begging that the king do with him as he would. The king would then raise the supplicant from the ground and show forgiveness with a kiss or a hug. Following a brief symbolic term of imprisonment the supplicant would then have his previous obligations and offices restored to him. This enabled the king to display magnanimity.[79] Nothing about this ritual was spontaneous. The matter(s) under dispute had been fully discussed and explained and clearly agreed, in confidence, by the mediators. The "Deditio" was simply the carefully staged outcome of those negotiations.[80][81] The mediators were in most cases the most influential men in the kingdom at the time, and were not bound by the king's instructions. Their involvement therefore served as an important constraint on the arbitrary exercise of royal power during the early and high Middle Ages. Their purpose was to show the conflicting parties a way forward by proposing solutions that could be acceptable to both sides.[7] Where the king violated an agreement previously entered into, it was not unusual for the mediators to intervene on behalf of the wronged party. Althoff identified the removal to a monastery of the oath-breaker Tassilo of Bavaria, by virtue of the so-called "Ingelheim judgment" of 788, as an early example of the process in operation.[67][82] By the time of Louis the Pious there was a "fully identified [Deditio] ritual" in evidence.[79] As a rule, the Deditio could not be arbitrarily repeated. If a party, having once found leniency and forgiveness in the process, subsequently reopened a conflict, he should expect harsh punishment.[83] Althoff also shared his conclusion that access to the Deditio ritual was a privilege reserved for the high nobility.[84] On this point he faced criticism from the medievalist Jean-Marie Moeglin, who welcomed and shared Althoff's emphasis on the significance in the structure of medieval society of "unwritten laws", but felt that Althoff had excessively downplayed the importance of traditional German constitutionalist historiography in respect of the Ottonian period. With specific reference to Althoff's conclusions on the significance of Deditio, Moeglin insisted that, far from being a privilege reserved for the nobility the "submission ritual" extended across the entire social spectrum.[85]

During the tenth century the king's enemies from the leading families, sometimes including his own family members, could often hope for a significant level of forbearance. Althoff went on to present several studies on conflict management and resolution during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.[86][87] Althoff's research has led him to conclude that the political structure of the Ottonian-Salian period in "Germania" was strikingly different both from the order established by the Carolingians and their heirs in West Francia and from that of the Staufer rulers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The relatively harsh methods of punishment associated with the Carolingians, such as blinding, other physical mutilation or admission to a monastery, largely disappeared from the (German) empire. He has been able to detect the first breaks with this set of "rules of the conflict management game" back to the practices of Henry II. Henry II was not inclined to display the same leniency towards his enemies as his Ottonian precursors.[88][89] Althoff attributes the major escalation of conflict under the later Salians, Henry IV and Henry V, to a "break with the old customs of conflict settlement". He bases this on his observation that "the king was himself trying to break away from the rules that constrained his ability to punish opponents".[90] Subsequently, under the Staufer rulers, the guiding principle of leniency on the art of the kings was no longer to the fore, and the preferred measure for the effectiveness of government became the "rigor iusticiae" (the "forcefulness of the justice system").[78][91]

Having started out by establishing the medieval "rules of the game for conflict management" with reference to conflicts between the king and leading members of the nobility, Althoff went on to research and recognize similar instances arising in disputes between members of the nobility, those between a king and a pope, and those between rulers of the increasingly dynamic city-states beyond the Alps, in Northern Italy. From this further work he inferred that the "rules" he had identified were actually more generally applicable as rules of conflict management.[58][92] In view of the frequency with which conflicts in the tenth century were amicably settled through the agreed intervention of mediators, Althoff insists that the notion of the Middle Ages as one of "gun-toting feud-happy" conflict is only one part of what was in reality a much broader and more nuanced approach to conflict management and resolution.[93][94]

Since the 1980s Althoff has been working on the importance of ritual for orderly rule in the Middle Ages. For him, "rites, rituals and other rules of the game, which taken together constitute medieval statehood", bound the empire together.[58][95] At the same time, in London, Anglo-Saxon research on the political importance of rituals and signs was being undertaken by Althoff's near-contemporary Janet Nelson, a former doctoral student of the respected Cambridge Medievalist scholar, Walter Ullmann.[96][97] Althoff organised conferences on communication, ritual and expressions of overlordship. He teamed up with Ernst Schubert to head up a three-day workshop meeting of the :Konstanz Working Circle for Medieval History during 22–25 March 1994, held on Reichenau, on the theme of "The expression of overlordship in Ottonian Saxony".[98] Medievalists and art historians presented their research results in respect of the Ottonian heartlands in Saxony and of the forms and functions used to communicate overlordship during the Ottonian period[98] In October 1996 and again in March 1997 further workshop meetings of the :Konstanz Working Circle were dedicated to the "form and function of public communication in the Middle Ages", generating and sharing further insights into the political systems of those times.[99] By this time Althoff's approach was becoming increasingly mainstream. His research findings were no longer viewed by colleagues as mere anecdotal adornments to the more traditionally revered gleanings from a small number of surviving court documents, but as important evidential statements in their own right about the functioning of Medieval kingship.[99][100] This approach to research into historical rituals ties in with the increasingly widespread acceptance, during recent decades, of Cultural anthropology as an important element in the historian's tool-kit.[97][101]

In 2003 Althoff bundled up a couple of decades of research into the centrality of rituals in the Ottonian quasi-state in a single volume, entitled appropriately "Die Macht der Rituale. Symbolik und Herrschaft im Mittelalter". By "rituals", the author explains in a footnote on page 13, he means "the chains of actions, symbols and indeed words ..., that are tied to an overall behavioural pattern, and through repetition achieve a reinforcing power of recognition".[lower-alpha 4][67][78][102] Althoff's book nevertheless restricted itself to the East and West Frankish kingdoms.[103] Althoff was, in addition, very clear just how "preliminary and in need of elaboration" his results remained.[67][78] He saw his own published research as an "interim balance sheet ... in a long-term effort adequately to understand and describe the operation and structures of medieval overlordship".[103]

The extent to which he dealt with the earlier Middle Ages remained limited. For the Merovingian period he imputes relatively little significance to the place of "ritual". He writes of "modest beginnings ... to the curtailment of the king's power ... still very little circumscribed by ritual procedures and processes".[78] Althoff picks out the meeting between the pope and King Pepin at Ponthion in 754 as a milestone, not simply in terms of its obvious political consequences for the enduring power relationship centred on the papacy and what became the Holy Roman empire, but also in terms of "the development of Frankish ritual culture".[78][104] In the ninth and tenth centuries which followed he identified a growing "need for ritual procedures".[105] The led, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, to a "broadening of ritual behaviour patterns".[67][78] The tenth and eleventh centuries were indeed the principal focus of the book. Althoff observed wryly that the ritual of royal self-humiliation introduced by Henry IV came to a "somewhat abrupt end" with the so-called "walk to" Canossa.[78][106] Althoff attached decisive importance to the events in Canossa: "... the effect of the events in Canossa was enduring. Not the least of its consequences was undoubtedly a reconfiguration of ritual behaviour patterns".[78][104] The king's voluntary self-subordination could indeed be presented at a symbolic illustration of subordination to the pope. But due to the numerous subsequent accusations that the king had failed to stand by his agreements, ritual statements were seen to lose their power to bind the parties.[78] Althoff's book was critically reviewed in Historische Zeitschrift by Hanna Vollrath, who complained that the author was purporting to "explain general shifts from one specific ritual event".[104]

Althoff's extensive research into the medieval "rules of the political game" and rituals found their way repeatedly into his 1996 biography of Otto III. The king himself was consigned firmly to a supporting role. Althoff expressed his scepticism over whether it could or would ever be possible to capture in a book the individual personality of any medieval ruler. Instead, he wrote that he wanted to use the biography format as a vehicle for a "source-oriented description of the framework and constraints surrounding medieval kingship, using the example of Otto III".[83][107][108] Althoff's idiosyncratic approach to biography attracted criticism from a number of academic commentators who found its underlying premise unpersuasive.[109] Michael Borgolte was critical that in "tying up Ottonian kingship in customs and rituals", Althoff had lost sight of the personality of Otto III, identified in its titles as the subject of the book.[110] Franz-Reiner Erkens had similar criticisms.[109]

More criticism of Althoff's researches on the centrality of medieval rituals came from Philippe Buc (then Professor at Stanford). Buc found it inappropriate to use twentieth century theories derived from Social science and Anthropology as prisms through which to view early medieval source narratives. For Buc, medieval rituals were deliberate constructs, the realities of which were unknowable and unprovable. He called for a proper (and greater) account to be taken of the contextual connection between sources and their authors' intentions. The newly developed (and increasingly accepted) concept of "medieval ritual" was excessively dependent on a superficial understanding of early medieval sources.[111][112] In a later review of Gerd Althoff, Die Macht der Rituale (Darmstadt, 2004), Buc underscored despite differences Althoff's pathbreaking work.[113]

Another recurring focus of Althoff's work is the source-value of Ottonian historiography. Like Johannes Fried at Frankfurt, he used Ottonian historiography as an opportunity to assess the distorting impact of oral transmission on the written historiographical records dating from (in this instance) the tenth century.[114] According to Fried, those distortions were so powerful that the events on which the resulting written sources were based were "never identical with the actual events".[115] Widukind of Corvey's Res gestae Saxonicae, widely seen as among the most important contemporary historical sources on the Ottonian period, was condemned by Fried as "saturated with errors".[115] Althoff came to a completely different set of conclusions on Widukind's dependability. He insisted that there were particularly good reasons to place trust in the Res gestae Saxonicae, on account of its dedication to Matilda, the teenage daughter of Otto the Great who in 967/968, when the work was completed, was the only member of the imperial family north of the Alps. In this context Althoff inferred a clear didactic motive on the part of Widukind: "... to make the emperor's young daughter politically capable".[116] From what was written, Matilda could see which men she was going to be dealing with, how the histories of the leading families had shaped current relationships, and what conflicts each had fought with the Ottonians. That this was a core purpose of the Res gestae Saxonicae was also apparent, according to Althoff, from the simple weighting of the book. Rather than giving equal weight to all the significant "deeds of the Saxons", the entire Italian policy was confined to a single chapter, while the missionary policy to the east and the complex negotiations after 955 that led, in 968, to the establishment of the Archbishopric of Magdeburg received no mention. From this selective approach, Althoff concluded, "the key witness [Widukind] is trustworthy".[116][117]

Building his argument, Althoff contends that in tenth century Ottonian historiography the liberty to change the "accepted version of truth" was severely restricted in respect of any issues in which the self-defined "good and great" had an interest. Changes made at the discretion of the chronicler were not possible. It was certainly the case, however, that the "accepted version of truth" might contain whitewashing and emphases that were incorporated to satisfy the expectations of the "good and great".[118] Althoff asked about the problems that had triggered the creation of a piece of historiographocal work, and from his conclusions on that point he inferred "a connection between actual concerns at the time when the work was produced and the resulting motives and objectives of the author(s)".[119] It was, he pointed out, often crisis situations that prompted religious communities to produce hagiographies and historiographies.[120] Numerous anecdotes, dreams and visions, frequently included in tenth century historiography, carry an argumentative kernel of criticism against the powerful.[121] Althoff demonstrated that in the historical writings produced at the great monetaries of Quedlinburg and Gandersheim, open criticism of the rulers appeared in instances where rulers had not properly look after the interests of the religious.[122] He was also able to adduce the results of new research findings, such as those drawn from various types of "memorial sources" and "conflict research".[123]