Carolingian Chronicles

Carolingian Chronicles PDF Author: Bernhard Walter Scholz
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472061860
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
The most comprehensive contemporaneous record of the rise and fall of the Carolingian Empire

Carolingian Chronicles

Carolingian Chronicles PDF Author: Bernhard Walter Scholz
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472061860
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
The most comprehensive contemporaneous record of the rise and fall of the Carolingian Empire

Anvil of God

Anvil of God PDF Author: J. Boyce Gleason
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578902531
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
It is 741. After conquering a continent for the Merovingian kings, only one thing stands between Charles Martel and the throne - he's dying. Charles cobbles together a plan to divide the kingdom among his three sons, betroth his daughter to a Lombard prince, and keep the Church unified behind them through his friend Bishop Boniface. Despite his best efforts, the only thing to reign after Charles's death is chaos. His daughter has no intention of marrying anyone, let alone a Lombard prince. His two eldest sons question the rights of their younger pagan stepbrother, and the Church demands a steep price for their support. Son battles son, Christianity battles paganism, and Charles's daughter flees his court for an enemy's love. Based on a true story, Anvil of God is a whirlwind of love, honor, sacrifice, and betrayal that follows a bereaved family's relentless quest for power and destiny.

Wheel of the Fates

Wheel of the Fates PDF Author: J. Boyce Gleason
Publisher: Bowker Identifier Services
ISBN: 9780578880785
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
IT IS 742. The throne is empty; the pagan states are in rebellion; Charles Martel's widow and youngest son have been imprisoned, and trust between Carloman and Pippin-the two brothers who remain in power-has been shattered. Making matters worse, the Church is secretly conspiring to place a Merovingian on the throne and Charles's daughter Hiltrude has wed the leader of the rebellion-giving him the legitimacy of Charles's legacy.BASED ON A TRUE STORY, Wheel of the Fates picks up where the award-winning Anvil of God leaves off-chronicling the lives of Charles Martel's children as they vie for power in what's left of the kingdom...and their family.

Early Carolingian Warfare

Early Carolingian Warfare PDF Author: Bernard S. Bachrach
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812221443
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
Without the complex military machine that his forebears had built up over the course of the eighth century, it would have been impossible for Charlemagne to revive the Roman empire in the West. Early Carolingian Warfare is the first book-length study of how the Frankish dynasty, beginning with Pippin II, established its power and cultivated its military expertise in order to reestablish the regnum Francorum, a geographical area of the late Roman period that includes much of present-day France and western Germany. Bernard Bachrach has thoroughly examined contemporary sources, including court chronicles, military handbooks, and late Roman histories and manuals, to establish how the early Carolingians used their legacy of political and military techniques and strategies forged in imperial Rome to regain control in the West. Pippin II and his successors were not diverted by opportunities for financial enrichment in the short term through raids and campaigns outside of the regnum Francorum; they focused on conquest with sagacious sensibilities, preferring bloodless diplomatic solutions to unnecessarily destructive warfare, and disdained military glory for its own sake. But when they had to deploy their military forces, their operations were brutal and efficient. Their training was exceptionally well developed, and their techniques included hand-to-hand combat, regimented troop movements, fighting on horseback with specialized mounted soldiers, and the execution of lengthy sieges employing artillery. In order to sustain their long-term strategy, the early Carolingians relied on a late Roman model whereby soldiers were recruited from among the militarized population who were required by law to serve outside their immediate communities. The ability to mass and train large armies from among farmers and urban-dwellers gave the Carolingians the necessary power to lay siege to the old Roman fortress cities that dominated the military topography of the West. Bachrach includes fresh accounts of Charles Martel's defeat of the Muslims at Poitiers in 732, and Pippin's successful siege of Bourges in 762, demonstrating that in the matter of warfare there never was a western European Dark Age that ultimately was enlightened by some later Renaissance. The early Carolingians built upon surviving military institutions, adopted late antique technology, and effectively utilized their classical intellectual inheritance to prepare the way militarily for Charlemagne's empire.

History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, 550–850

History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, 550–850 PDF Author: Helmut Reimitz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316381021
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
This pioneering study explores early medieval Frankish identity as a window into the formation of a distinct Western conception of ethnicity. Focusing on the turbulent and varied history of Frankish identity in Merovingian and Carolingian historiography, it offers a new basis for comparing the history of collective and ethnic identity in the Christian West with other contexts, especially the Islamic and Byzantine worlds. The tremendous political success of the Frankish kingdoms provided the medieval West with fundamental political, religious and social structures, including a change from the Roman perspective on ethnicity as the quality of the 'Other' to the Carolingian perception that a variety of Christian peoples were chosen by God to reign over the former Roman provinces. Interpreting identity as an open-ended process, Helmut Reimitz explores the role of Frankish identity in the multiple efforts through which societies tried to find order in the rapidly changing post-Roman world.

Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World

Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World PDF Author: Valerie Garver
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801464951
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
Despite the wealth of scholarship in recent decades on medieval women, we still know much less about the experiences of women in the early Middle Ages than we do about those in later centuries. In Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World, Valerie L. Garver offers a fresh appraisal of the cultural and social history of eighth- and ninth-century women. Examining changes in women's lives and in the ways others perceived women during the early Middle Ages, she shows that lay and religious women, despite their legal and social constrictions, played integral roles in Carolingian society. Garver's innovative book employs an especially wide range of sources, both textual and material, which she uses to construct a more complex and nuanced impression of aristocratic women than we've seen before. She looks at the importance of female beauty and adornment; the family and the construction of identities and collective memory; education and moral exemplarity; wealth, hospitality and domestic management; textile work, and the lifecycle of elite Carolingian women. Her interdisciplinary approach makes deft use of canons of church councils, chronicles, charters, polyptychs, capitularies, letters, poetry, exegesis, liturgy, inventories, hagiography, memorial books, artworks, archaeological remains, and textiles. Ultimately, Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World underlines the centrality of the Carolingian era to the reshaping of antique ideas and the development of lasting social norms.

Engraved Gems of the Carolingian Empire

Engraved Gems of the Carolingian Empire PDF Author: Genevra Kornbluth
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271042886
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Medieval Europe offers a pageant of almost incredible richness: King Arthur and his round table, demons and cathedrals, Charlemagne and his paladins. The Carolingian culture of the late eighth to late tenth centuries (in what is now France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and northern Italy) offers more than its fair share of achievements. This heavily illustrated study examines one revealing legacy of Charlemagne's heirs and his people--the Carolingian gems of rock crystal, jet, and agate engraved with complex figural scenes, which have never before been studied as a group. These objects have been largely ignored in the scholarship of medieval art, partly because of the difficulty of access. Genevra Kornbluth assembles for the first time all twenty surviving gems, from small seal matrices to the forty-one-figure "Susanna crystal" in London, along with information about lost works. The unique features of each gem are made visible in over 200 detailed black-and-white photographs, often highly magnified and produced using new techniques developed to record transparent engraving. Kornbluth fully analyzes the techniques of manufacture, style, chronology, iconography, and patronage of each gem and examines their social functions, the organization and status of the artisans who created them, and relations between media. The gems are presented as evidence of the rich diversity of the Carolingian culture, rather than as reflections of an artistic program dictated by the imperial courts; they are also seen to be essentially new creations, drawing on earlier visual traditions but adapting their sources to address contemporary concerns.

Carolingian Portraits

Carolingian Portraits PDF Author: Eleanor Shipley Duckett
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472061570
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Recreates the 9th-century world of Charlemagne through portraits of outstanding figures of the age

Struggle for Empire

Struggle for Empire PDF Author: Eric Joseph Goldberg
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801438905
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
Struggle for Empire explores the contest for kingdoms and power among Charlemagne's descendants that shaped the formation of Europe through the reign of Charlemagne's grandson, Louis the German (826 876)."

In the Manner of the Franks

In the Manner of the Franks PDF Author: Eric J. Goldberg
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812252357
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Eric J. Goldberg traces the long history of early medieval hunting from the late Roman Empire to the death of the last Carolingian king, Louis V, in a hunting accident in 987. He focuses chiefly on elite men and the changing role that hunting played in articulating kingship, status, and manhood in the post-Roman world. While hunting was central to elite lifestyles throughout these centuries, the Carolingians significantly altered this aristocratic activity in the later eighth and ninth centuries by making it a key symbol of Frankish kingship and political identity. This new connection emerged under Charlemagne, reached its high point under his son and heir Louis the Pious, and continued under Louis's immediate successors. Indeed, the emphasis on hunting as a badge of royal power and Frankishness would prove to be among the Carolingians' most significant and lasting legacies. Goldberg draws on written sources such as chronicles, law codes, charters, hagiography, and poetry as well as artistic and archaeological evidence to explore the changing nature of early medieval hunting and its connections to politics and society. Featuring more than sixty illustrations of hunting imagery found in mosaics, stone sculpture, metalwork, and illuminated manuscripts, In the Manner of the Franks portrays a vibrant and dynamic culture that encompassed red deer and wild boar hunting, falconry, ritualized behavior, female spectatorship, and complex forms of specialized knowledge that united kings and nobles in a shared political culture, thus locating the origins of courtly hunting in the early Middle Ages.