the carolingian inheritance

The restoration and expansion of the Frankish empire in the eighth century were possible not least because the ruling Carolingians accepted the existence of the regnal structure of the Franco-Lombard core region of Europe and indeed took this on board as a permanent aspect of Carolingian tradition. The sources distinguish between three kinds of regna. In its first sense, regnum means the whole Carolingian empire; in its second sense it refers to a Frankish (or the Lombard-Italian) subkingdom; and in the third it denotes a political and regional entity with a name drawn from that of a people living there under a common law. The first two kinds of regna were invariably ruled by kings, whereas a regnum of the third type might be ruled by kings’ sons (with or without a royal title) or by princes without kingly rank. The Carolingian empire was thus a flexible polity built up of prefabricated parts, an organisational form which allowed an imperial extensiveness together with a governmental intensiveness in smaller regions.

The Carolingians had in general to associate their leading men with the government of the empire; the ‘imperial aristocracy’, to use Gerd Tellenbach’s term, were still more entitled to political participation in the regna of the third type. Representatives of the most successful aristocratic groupings emerged from the competition for closeness to the king, power and influence as the ‘second after the king’. Diplomata and other sources written in the royal entourage never call such magnates anything except comites or, in the late Carolingian era, marchiones. A secundus a rege of this kind might nevertheless acquire a princely position, even in the Carolingian period. Occasionally such a comital or margraval office-holder might even have to take on royal duties, if royal authority had failed or been withdrawn from an area for one reason or another.