‘Most illustrious king of kings’. Evidence for Ottonian kingship in the Otto III prayerbook (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 30111) (original) (raw)
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Exercise of royal power in early medieval Europe: the case of Otto the Great 936-73
Early Medieval Europe, 2009
Current scholarly orthodoxy holds that the German kingdom under the Ottonians (c.919-1024) did not possess an administration, much less an administrative system that relied heavily upon the 'written word'. It is the contention of this essay that the exercise of royal power under Otto the Great (936-73) relied intrinsically on a substantial royal administrative system that made very considerable use of documents, particularly for the storage of crucial information about royal resources. The focus of this study is on Otto I's use of this written information to exercise royal power in the context of confiscating and requisitioning property from both laymen and ecclesiastical institutions.
2018
German historians long assumed that the German Kingdom was created with Henry the Fowler's coronation in 919. The reigns of both Henry the Fowler, and his son Otto the Great, were studied and researched mainly through Widukind of Corvey's chronicle Res Gestae Saxonicae. There was one source on Ottonian times that was curiously absent from most of the serious research: Liudprand of Cremona's Antapodosis. The study of this chronicle leads to a reappraisal of the tenth century in Western Europe showing how mythology of the dynasty was constructed. By looking at the later reception (through later Middle Ages and then on 19th and 20th century historiography) the author showcases the longevity of Ottonian myths and the ideological expressions of the tenth century storytellers.
Roczniki Humanistyczne
The Polish version of the article was published in “Roczniki Humanistyczne,” vol. 64 (2016), issue 4. The article focuses on miniatures of an enthroned emperor. These are: the miniature showing Otto II from the Registrum Gregorii (Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 14), two miniatures from the so-called Gospels of Otto III (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 4453)—one showing Otto III and the other one showing the allegories of the provinces of the empire, two miniatures (Otto II and the provinces) contained in the Gospels bound in the code also containing works by Flavius Josephus (Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Class. 79) and the miniature with the figure of Otto III found in the Liuthar Gospels, also called the Aachener Evangeliars (Aachen, Domshatz). The pictures were studied by Percy Ernst Schramm, Piotr Skubiszewski, Henry Mayr-Harting, Wolfgang Christian Schneider, Ludger Körntgen, Hagen Keller and Eric Palazzo. Exaltation of the emperor has its precedents in the Carolingian art. ...
Annual for Medieval Studies at CEU, ed. by Gerhard Jaritz, Kyra Lyublyanovics, Judith A. Rasson, Zsuzsanna Reed, 2017
Ritual of penance in the Early Middle Ages was a powerful tool for ecclesiastical authorities to intervene in secular affairs, to correct king’s sins and bring the Empire back on its way to salvation. At the same time, a figure of a crying repentant king was often utilized in royal ceremonies, illustrating his humbleness and piety – the characteristics of a true Christian. In this article, I investigate another dimension of royal penance, namely representation and interpretation of this royal ritual in narrative sources of the Ottonian age (919-1024), which were until recently somehow neglected in respect to the royal penance. My main argument is that royal penance could be interpreted as a rhetorical literary construct which enabled authors to express not only the course of events on their own, but also to find an explanation of the past, or, in some cases, to create a “useful past”. These descriptions of penances performed by kings and emperors from the Ottonian dynasty corresponded to the contemporary needs of the individual or the whole community involved in the production of a text, especially when it concerned the status of the diocese, its history, and prestige. In chronicles and histories of Ottonian age, royal penance gained a new specific function such as legitimating king’s decision that followed the described repentance. For example, King Otto I made a rather controversial decision, from the standpoint of ecclesiastical law, to establish dioceses in Magdeburg and Merseburg, which later was followed by abundant disputes between ecclesiastical communities and the king. The most important narrator of these events, Thietmar, bishop of Merseburg, legitimated this dubious royal decision in his Chronicle by imagining Otto’s repentance at the battle of Lechfeld, where he made an invocation to form a new diocese. Similarly, other Ottonian historiographers gave the same kind of power to the ritual of the royal penance, so that it could act as a retrospective legal argument in disputes between royal wish and canon law.
William Diebold argued for the overwhelming influence of the Carolingian Codex aureus, BSB, Clm 14000, in artistic production in Regensburg around the year 1000. Diebold has stressed the misreadings of the model, as well as its creative continuation in the visual/textual Ottonian culture. In this paper, I have argued that not only visual but also liturgical traditions developed by Carolingians might have influenced the rich Regensburg iconography that expressed theological/political ideas in the early eleventh and twelfth centuries. The invocation of the king in the "Te igitur" provided the ruler with sacramental powers and equated him with the highest ecclesiastical hierarchy. Similar ideas were unfolded in Henry II’s symbolic portraiture in Clm 4456, as well as in the heavenly/earthly hierarchy with Salian rulers from the Kraków Gospel Book. Moreover, it seems that the "ad complendum" oration from one of the "missae pro rege", preserved in all of the sacramentaries of indisputably Regensburg provenance, might also have influenced the original iconography of Henry in Clm 4456, fol. 11r. If, as noted by Kantorowicz, the Ottonian and early Salian government could be labeled as liturgical kingship, this conception reached one of its peaks during this era in the monastery of St Emmeram.
Wangerin, Kingship and Justice in the Ottonian Empire (University of Michigan Press, 2019)
Royal Studies Journal, 2020
he world of the tenth century is, or ought to be, strange to us": thus Karl Leyser begins Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society (1979), his great analysis of the Ottonians. The Ottonian dynasty began with Henry I in AD 919, and continued under the next four emperors-the three Ottos and Henry II (d. 1024). They and their wives ruled the territory covered by present-day Germany as well as parts of the Netherlands, France, Italy, and Switzerland. Although lasting only just over one hundred years, the dynasty shaped medieval Europe. Like Leyser, Laura E. Wangerin challenges the reader to perceive that period as of its time, not of ours. The author queries much of early modern, nineteenth-and earlytwentieth-century German scholarship, which "set Germany on a special path toward its own modern state idiom" (4). While largely true, the author, however, may have forgotten Geoffrey Barraclough's Origins of Modern Germany (1946), which argued that in its early centuries Germany was an ordinary medieval kingdom. The Sonderweg ("special path") "is inherently teleological and assumes that the medieval mind appreciated modern governmental apparatuses as superior to their own state," a proposition that Wangerin questions (4). She is more enthusiastic about Ottonian studies of the 1970s and 1980s, whose authors address ritual behaviour and the relationship between kings and their nobles. Wangerin asserts that, contrary to common parlance, the Ottonians were shrewd rulers and administrators who used various, but not always traditional, tools to govern their vast empire. Ottonian governance contained both analogous and unique characteristics as compared with other dynasties. The iter was similar to some governing processes of the Merovingian, Carolingian, and Anglo-Saxon courts. The Ottonian court, however, was the most consistently and deliberately itinerant. Its rulers considered the "distributed" court its strength. The iter brought the Ottonian court to the important towns in the duchies and therefore to the leading men-the bishops, archbishops, margraves, counts and other nobles. The Königsnähe (the proximity to the king) won prestige, privileges, and offices. Ottonian rulership structures are often considered to be poorly documented and lacking in organized legal processes. Although the Ottonians did not write their laws in capitularies (decrees of the Carolingian rulers of West Francia), Wangerin argues convincingly that orders, decisions, and legal changes for feuding activities, trading, and dispute resolution of all the "T