Alboin, the Iron Crown, and the Lombards

The fall of the Roman Empire was by no means a pretty thing, and by the mid 6th Century, less than a century after Odovakar sent the last Emperor into exile, the Italian Peninsula, once the heart of the Empire, was completely war-torn.  Odovakar had been murdered in 493 by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, but the Byzantine Empire, the residual eastern half of the Roman Empire that was not dissolved with Odovakar’s dismissal of the Emperor, was not about to let the most densely populated region in Europe go so easily.  Repeated campaigns by the Byzantines ravaged the countryside even worse, but internal political machinations within the Byzantine Empire did not allow any permanent gains to be made.

It is upon this background that our story begins, when the Ostrogoths were permanently conquered by the rebounding Byzantine Empire, which appeared poised to re-take all of the former Roman Empire and more.  Mostly ignored at the time were the events happening in the Danube River valley.

An extremely busy map of the Mediterranean World in 565

So, One thing you’ll notice is that on the northern border of the Byzantine (here called Roman, because that’s basically what it was) are a few bigger kingdoms, namely the Lombards and Gepids.  You’ll see Lombard spelled a bunch of different ways if you research this for yourself, so don’t worry about all that, but the important part to remember here is that the Lombards are in an extremely unpleasant area of the world.  It’s cold, but it really doesn’t rain as much as you think it would, and for the farming techniques available at the time, most of it was unarable (unfarmable).  As a result, the Lombards were really looking for a place that was not where they were, which led them to fight with their neighbors, the Gepids, constantly.

In 552, the Lombards scored a big win on the Gepids.   Most of our history on this stuff comes from Paul the Deacon, who wrote down largely what he was told by Lombards several decades after it happened, but it seems like the Lombard prince Alboin, killed the son of the Gepid king in what was a complete rout.  External sources do confirm this, because the Byzantine Emperor Justinian intervened on the behalf of the Gepids, hoping to keep the Gepids and Lombards at each others’ throats so that they wouldn’t turn to the logical next target – the fabulously wealthy Byzantines.

Justinian’s plan seems to have worked at first.  Somewhere probably after 560, Alboin succeeded his father to the crown of the Lombards and waged a new war against the Gepids.  In 565, the Byzantines intervened once more, although they were by this point much weaker than they had been and were ruled by a new Emperor, Justin II.  Either way, the Gepids and Byzantines combined were more than enough to wipe out the Lombards.  Alboin, seeing no other option, formed an alliance with Bayan I, Khagan of the Avars, but it came at a price.  Bayan demanded that the Gepids’ lands belong to him at the conclusion of the war, plus half the war booty, much of the Lombards’ cattle, and a tenth of the Lombards’ lands.  By 568, the Gepid kingdom had been annihilated and subjugated by the Avar horde, and Alboin had slain the Gepid king, taking his daughter, Rosamund, as his new wife.

It didn’t take long for Alboin to realize that he had made a deal with the devil, and Bayan’s posturing made it clear that before long, he would turn on his old ally and take the Lombards’ lands.  Alboin determined that he and his people, as they had a century before, would have to migrate south, this time into Italy.  Somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000 Lombards around a third of whom would have been fighting fit warriors, made the trek from their homelands in Pannonia to the Italian Peninsula.  On Easter Sunday of 568, the Lombards departed, and they don’t show back up on the historical record for a year.

To this day, it is unclear as to whether the Byzantines even knew the Lombards were coming.  They were certainly unprepared, but then again, not many countries could be compared for 50-100,000 soldiers invading with an entire nation in tow.  No Germanic tribe had done this for almost a century, and the Lombards would be one of the last.  Paul the Deacon says that Alboin entered Italy “without any hindrance,” which would suggest that the Byzantines were entirely unaware of the impending crisis, and they were never able to put together a coherent response.

One of the major issues with Alboin’s invasion was that Alboin was an Arian Christian – one who believed that Jesus was not God but rather a special creation of God, neither god nor man, designed to atone for the sins of the world.  Arianism had been condemned at the 325 Council of Nicaea (in which Saint Nicholas punched Arius in the face, true story; that’s the same Saint Nicholas who is now your beloved Santa Claus), but the Arians had been much more aggressive missionaries than the orthodox Nicaean Christians had been.  Because of this, most of the invading Germanic tribes had, at least at first, converted to Arianism.  Through a complicated series of events that I have nowhere near enough time for, Arianism had more or less disappeared, particularly after the fall of the Ostrogothic Kingdom in 553.  Now, fifteen years later, another major Arian power was making its presence known.

The Byzantines viewed their struggle against the Lombards as a Holy War, and the influx of heretics into Italy would serve as a catalyst for Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) to lead a sort of evangelistic revival in the Church that would lead to the establishment of the institution we now call the Catholic Church.

Literally the first evidence of anybody resisting the Lombards is at Pavia…

Right there.  The Lombards had marched clear across Northern Italy and nobody had said a thing.  The issue that the Lombards ran into was that they weren’t used to siege warfare of any sort, and so when a walled city finally refused to surrender out of sheer terror, the Lombards just had to sit outside and wait.  This was not something they were good at, and so while Alboin sat there with the main army, his men scattered all around, raiding Burgundy to the Northwest and moving farther south and taking more land.

Alboin also apparently became an alcoholic at this time (although it’s possible that he had been for a while, the unfamiliar Byzantine liquor might have been too strong for him), and an initially ambitious and warlike king became apathetic and lazy.  Pavia fell in the spring of 572, after over two years of siege, and Alboin declared a new kingdom of the Lombards, allegedly forging for himself an Iron Crown (more on that later), but the title was, by this point, meaningless.  His men had already fought and lost to the Burgundians without his presence or permission.  They had conquered much of Southern Italy without his blessing as well.  Alboin was a figurehead, if even that.

Things came to a head in June of 572, as Alboin’s wife, Rosamund, plotted to murder him.  Mind you, we mentioned that Alboin had killed her father fourteen years before, and she probably didn’t just forget about that.  Now, a lot of people diverge on the story of Alboin’s murder.  Gregory of Tours, a generally solid source but not one who specialized in the Lombards, says that Rosamund had simply bode her time until the opportune moment, whereupon she decided to poison the Lombard king.

Paul the Deacon tells the story differently.  He says that Alboin had gotten drunk, as usual, and had been using Rosamund’s father’s skull as a drinking vessel.  This might sound like a fantastic tale, but this has been done a lot through history, even as late as the 13th Century among the Bulgars.  The Bulgars and Avars seem to have been pretty big fans of the whole skull-drinking thing, and it’s not unlikely that Alboin, seeing the ferocity and speed with which the Avars subdued their enemies, became something of an admirer of the practice.  One way or another, he began to taunt his wife and even forced her to drink from her own father’s skull, which rekindled Rosamund’s desire to see Alboin dead.

With no real succession plan in place, the assassination of Alboin led to a downward spiral among the Lombards that led to a ten-year period known as the Rule of the Dukes.  It would not be until 584, when a foolish invasion of Burgundy would result in a Frankish alliance against the Lombards, that the Lombards would, only out necessity, reunite under a single king.

“King of the Lombards” would never be a powerful title, as the Lombard dukes preferred to maintain their own rights in their own principalities, but the title became symbolically important, as the myth of the Iron Crown grew.  Later, when declaring their own position as “King of Italy,” the kings of the Germans would take an iron crown they claimed had been forged by Alboin himself, giving a certain ancient rite to their position.  Of course, few German kings were ever able to exercise practical control in Italy, but the myth was created by Alboin, who permanently broke Byzantine hegemony in the Italian Peninsula.

The Lombard territories at the death of Alboin in 572

How to Pick a King, Part 1

So our fun story for today and tomorrow comes from 14th Century Germany, which, I understand, is uncharted waters for even some avid history lovers.  To set the stage here, the Hohenstaufen Dynasty had just expired, for all intents and purposes, in 1250 – with the death of Frederick II, known in his time as Stupor Mundi.  Frederick had been able to cover up some fundamental fractures within his Empire, but after his death it became clear that the Holy Roman Empire was simply a church-endorsed method for the southern German lords in Swabia, Bavaria, and Austria to exert nominal authority on the North.

Before we go any further, I should probably explain what exactly the Holy Roman Empire is, and that will be pretty much the entirety of this blog post.  Tomorrow, we’ll get past the background and get into the actual story itself, but here, you can see my somewhat distilled explanation.

So, if you’re as avid a history fan as me, you’ve probably heard that there wasn’t such a thing as “Germany” until 1871 (or something similar), and while there’s some truth to this, there’s a reason why Hitler called his empire “Das Dritte Reich” (the Third Empire).  He viewed it as a succession from the Holy Roman Empire, which was dissolved by Napoleon in 1806, to the Prussian Empire, which became the modern state of Germany and was dissolved in 1919, to his own empire – starting in 1933.  This is not to cite Adolf Hitler as a historian of any merit but rather to demonstrate that, at least in modern times, the Holy Roman Empire has been understood as a predominantly Germany construct.

It is true that the Holy Roman Empire was not exclusively a German empire; there were Bohemians, Poles, Dutch, Danes, Italians, occasionally Occitans, briefly Arabs, and even a sizable Greek-speaking population for a time.  The first Holy Roman Emperor, was Charlemagne, who was crowned on Christmas Day 800 and was hailed as the resurrector of the Roman Empire in the West, and he spoke Old High German, so although the makeup of the Empire was large and varied, the vast majority of the emperors were German-speakers.

There is a fair argument to be made that in this moment, Charlemagne was the most powerful man not only in Europe but also in the entire world.  Unfortunately, his power was not to last.  He split his empire among his sons, creating the divide between France and Germany that survives to this day, and although most of the pieces were reunited under Karl the Fat for a few years, they split apart once more upon his death.  The line of East Frankia (which was primarily composed of non-Frankish Germans) died out with Ludwig the Child’s death in 911, leading to a succession crisis.

Here one of the odder moments in German history came about, and the records of the day say surprisingly little about the actual political machinations that led to the ascension of Konrad of Franconia.  By right of birth under the Salic Law (the four hundred year old law code written by Clovis, first King of the Franks), it should have passed to Karl the Simple, who was reigning in West Francia (which would become France), but, as his name would suggest, he was not deemed a fit ruler by the eastern Germanic lords.  Although Konrad’s reign was generally unsuccessful and fraught with conflict with the very dukes who had elected him, it marked a break from the line of Charlemagne in the East; moreover, it established the right of the German lords to elect their king, rather than simple father-to-sons succession.  It should be noted that this is hardly the first instance of this.  Some sort of election process was also employed by the Visigoths and Vandals, earlier Germanic tribes, as early as the 4th Century.  The Franks, however, used the gavellkind succession method, in which upon a monarch’s death, his kingdom would be divided among his sons, and when Charlemagne united and Christianized the Germanic peoples (except the Prussians and some other smaller groups), they imposed this system upon their new subjects.

Western Europe and the former empire of Charlemagne in 915

While in West Francia Charlemagne had become all but a saint, there was clearly some surviving resentment in the East.  This is reflected by the fact that they intentionally picked a king who was not a Caroliginian (meaning a descendant of Charlemagne, also spelled Karling).  The problem was that, embarrassingly, he was defeated by Charles the Simple in his war for Lorraine.  Repeat – Charles the Simple.  Moreover, from the East, a horde of Magyars under their king, Árpád was laying waste to the frontier, and Konrad was perceived as doing relatively little to stop them, particularly by Arnulf, Duke of Bavaria, who was most directly in their path.  Konrad died of his wounds from fighting Arnulf in 918, and the German lords convened again to select a new king.

This time, they chose Heinrich I (known commonly as “the Fowler”), the Duke of Saxony.  He seems to have been more closely vetted than Konrad, as he described his role as that of the “first among equals.”  He saw Germany as a confederacy of Stammesherzogtümer, which has no clean translation to English but “Tribal Duchies” suffices.  It is also sometimes rendered as “Stem Duchies,” but this is an incorrect translation of Stamm.  Ironically, by humbling his rhetoric from that of the imperial Caroliginians, he wielded more power than anyone since Charlemagne’s son Ludwig, then a hundred years deceased.  The Tribal Dukes simply wanted to be told that they had the power.  The reality of crown authority was relatively unimportant, as long as the veneer was of independence.  Sound familiar?

Seal of Heinrich the Fowler

Heinrich proved the perfect man for the job.  Although Arnulf of Bavaria still did not want to accept Saxon suzerainty with continued threats from the Magyars, Heinrich forced him to submit.  Oddly, Heinrich’s closest ally was Konrad’s brother and successor as Duke of Franconia, Eberhard.  Together, the pair of them made gains in Lorraine, taking advantage of civil war in France to secure much of what had been lost to the Caroliginians after the death of Ludwig the Child.  Heinrich would eventually fight the Magyars to a stalemate in 933 and defeated the Bohemians so badly that they would not cause the crown any trouble for almost a century.  Heinrich was so popular, that even after his death in 936, the Tribal Dukes agreed to elect his son, Otto, the new King of the Germans.

Building on his father’s successes, Otto did much to create an identity of the “German people;” however, unlike his father, Otto demanded respect from his vassals.  He crushed rebellions by both Bavaria and Franconia, killing Eberhard.  This was how German crown authority was to operate for the next six centuries.  The king was as powerful as he could make himself and as far as his nobles respected him, but the office itself came with little loyalty from one’s subjects.  This contrasts sharply with France, where the cult of Charlemagne continued, even after his descendants were ousted from the throne by Hughes Capet (Otto’s grandson through his daughter, fun fact).  Compared to many other medieval monarchies, France did not suffer the same internal strife, due to the reverence with which its aristocratic institutions were treated.

One of the simplest ways for a monarch to gain credibility was to establish oneself as King of Italy.  Historians debate whether the tradition of crowning oneself with the Iron Crown existed at this time, but claims of the crown’s usage date back to the 9th Century.  Thirty-four monarchs became powerful enough to claim the crown, and Otto was among the first to be able to extend his power south of the Alps.  The highest sign of a king’s power, however, was being crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope.  The office was, at times, left empty – even for decades.  This was the case in Otto’s time, when it had been left vacant for thirty-four years, since the death of Berengar, Charlemagne’s great-grandson, but what made it so difficult to become Holy Roman Emperor?

Simply put, the German Kings could not trust the men who elected them to continue their support in their absence, and to march an army down to Rome in order to be anointed Emperor by the Pope was quite an investment of both time and money.  As far as the electors were concerned, if they had put the king on the throne, they had all the right to take him right back off.  Only a king who was powerful to make the dukes fear him even in his absence could take the risk of travelling all the way to Rome to receive an almost entirely symbolic honor.  Otto did so, however, in 962, establishing the practice for generations to come, lasting into the 16th Century with Maximilian I.

Empire of Otto I (the Great)

The notion of a German nation, however, did not truly arise until the 11th Century during the Investiture Controversy (a story for another time).  Like I mentioned, Heinrich the Fowler was simply head of a confederacy, Otto styled himself after Charlemagne, who took his authority from God and the Pope.  The notion that the German-speaking peoples should be united did not come about until the days of Heinrich IV, who feuded constantly with the Papacy.  The Pope then referred to a rex Teutonicum (roughly, King of the Germans), refusing to refer to Heinrich as Holy Roman Emperor (he had already been crowned).  Heinrich responded by calling himself rex Romanorum (King of the Romans), which essentially removed any meaning from the title of Holy Roman Emperor, save the “Holy” part, which relegated the Pope’s authority to that of the religious.  It seems like petty semantics, and it is, but it is important to understand that around a century after Otto’s death, the Germanic tribes had been united for so long that it was plausible to call them a united kingdom.

By 1152, the process of electing kings had become more or less institutionalized by the “College of Electors.”  Although membership was initially somewhat fluid, it clearly included the “Four Nations of Germany” which evolved from the Stammesherzogtümer – Franconia, Swabia, Saxony, and Bavaria – among others.  By 1250, the membership had crystallized into a panel of seven rulers:

1. The Archbishop of Mainz
2. The Archbishop of Trier
3. The Archbishop of Cologne
4. The King of Bohemia (House of Přemyslid, later House of Luxembourg)
5. The Pfalzgraf of the Rhine (House of Wittelsbach)
6. The Duke of Saxony (House of Wettin)
7. The Margrave of Brandenburg (House of Ascania, then House of Wittelsbach after extinction of Ascania)

The College of Electors would maintain roughly this composition, with powerful families attempting to install their relatives in the Archbishoprics so that they would be elected to the throne.

Eventually, the College of Electors became quite a seedy business, with massive bribes being paid out almost habitually.  Families such as the House of Wettin became almost legendarily wealthy because their choice could become extremely consequential in such a small voting pool, and so if a family believed that its candidate was especially viable, they would drop a fortune on the Electors.  Even foreigners would sometimes become candidates for the throne if they could offer to pay enough, and a few were even elected, such as Karl V (probably the best-known, Richard of Cornwall and Alfonso of Castile).  The dispute between Richard of Cornwall and Alfonso of Castile is where we will pick up our story tomorrow.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned,

Paul