Matthew Innes
State And Society In The Early Middle Ages
Cambridge University Press
pages 336
The middle Rhine valley was a region whose geopolitical profile
underwent a series of dramatic changes between the late Roman period
and the high middle ages, changes which affected the relationship of
the region to the political centre. In this Roman frontier province
political power was transformed by the Imperial infrastructure, which
led to the foundation of fortified settlements as the central points of
local society, an influx of men and resources in the army, and, in the
fourth century, the physical proximity of the Emperor. Eventually, in
the fifth century, the middle Rhine found itself cut off from the
redistributive system of the Roman army and administration. A new power
structure, which expressed itself in the idiom of a ‘frontier culture’
which had developed through the interaction of barbarian elites and the
Roman military, had emerged by the sixth century. The change from Roman
to post-Roman, the atrophy of institutionalised forms of power and the
emergence of militarised rule which tapped the agrarian surplus
directly, was far more abrupt here than elsewhere in Gaul. By 600,
rulers began once again to be involved in the region directly; rulers
based, as they had been in the fourth century, in northern Gaul, but
increasingly interested in exploitation of the ‘wild east’, the
provinces beyond the Rhine, and happy to stay at Worms and Mainz. In
the second half of the eighth century, the final consolidation of
Frankish royal power in the east placed the Rhine at the heart of
Empire, a development consummated by the construction of magnificent
palace complexes at Ingelheim and Frankfurt. The symbolic significance
of these centres, and the geopolitical centrality of the region, meant
that the middle Rhine remained a royal heartland to the end of the
early medieval period and beyond.