The study of migration is a classic topic in early medieval historiography.1 In his book, Paul Predatsch examines the question from a new point of view. Against all nationalism and ethnocentrism, instead of looking at large groups (ethnic, national, political), he chooses to deal with the point of view of the actors, i.e. the individual migrants, using the tools provided by the modern sociology of migration. Dealing with migration, of course, also means dealing with ethnicity.
The author begins with an analysis of German historiography on early medieval migrations, starting with the appearance of the concept of Völkerwanderung after 1750, in the works of Johann Gottfried Herder, and continuing up to the time of the two world wars. During this period, migrations were interpreted as a change of place and not of culture, because peoples would be tought to be immutable. In addition, the move was perceived to have been an element of weakening of Germany (the reference is to the defeat of 1918). Predatsch underlines the instrumental use of archaeology in the first decades of the 20th-century, which was based on Gustav Kossinna's thesis2 that archaeological cultures correspond to historically identifiable peoples.
After the end of the Second World War, innovations came, on the one hand, from anthropology, with the studies of Edmund Leach and Fredrik Barth, who argued that identity was a situational construct, the result of rational choices3, and from the New Archaeology, which demolished Kossinna's theories; and on the other hand, from Reinhard Wenskus's book of 19624, which denied that there were objective, biological criteria of belonging to a people, and constructed the theory of ethnogenesis. This posited that the early medieval gentes were held together by the belief in a common descent transmitted by the Traditionskern, a dynamic and elitist nucleus around which, over the centuries, the different barbarian peoples were formed. The author rightly points out that Wenskus stops halfway between tradition and novelty, due to the elitist nature of his theses and the lack of consideration of the role of the Romans in the late antique and early medieval ethnic processes. These limitations have been overcome in recent decades, thanks above all to the so-called Vienna School - whose most prominent figure is Walter Pohl5 - which has definitively affirmed the subjective, situational character of ethnicity. However, even the most recent historiography deals only with large ethnic and political groups. The real actors of migration remain in the shadows.
Predatsch deals with the migration of the peoples from North of the Alps into Carolingian Italy after the Frankish conquest in 774 and concentrates his analysis on the territory of Lucca, the Lucchesia, because only in such a small area can the social analysis of migration be deepened. He first gives a picture of the whole of Italy between 774 and 800, where he shows convincingly that in Edward Hlawitschka's important book on the migrants from beyond the Alps (774–962) there are too many identifications as migrants of people of whom nothing is really known.6 The real migrants in this period are very few, they are only members of the elite (counts, bishops, officials) and they do not take root in the country, but maintain family relations, properties and religious foundations North of the Alps: they are diaspora-migrants, or even return migrants. The migrants increase, with the appearance in the sources of simple freeholders of foreign origin, only during the 9th-century. Predatsch's correct conclusion is that there was no entire replacement of the Lombard ruling class, nor even a policy of Frankisierung of Italy by means of a massive migration from the North. However, there were certainly more peoples from North of the Alps than those indicated as such in the sources, and, in order to identify them, one must pay close attention to all the elements, present in the sources, which revealed a person's ties to the territories North of the Alps.
Lucca’s archive has an extraordinary number of 8th and 9th-centuries documents. Within them, documents issued for ecclesiastical bodies are the majority. There is therefore a distortion in the transmission of documents, in Lucca as elsewhere, whose representativeness Predatsch evaluates with statistical methods. The documentation is analysed by dividing it between the various episcopates, since the bishops, much more so than the counts, were at the centre of local society. From this analysis emerges the formation of an economic system involving landed property, ecclesiastical institutions and the episcopate, in a pattern which – although Predatsch does not say so – can be traced back to the socio-economic model which Ian Wood has called „Temple Society“.7
The first episcopates of the 8th-century, those of Talesperian and Walprand, show the presence of exclusively local networks linked to the two bishops. Most of the concessions to religious bodies involved the retention of control by the donors. The situation changes with Peredeus and John: the cathedral becomes the centre of control of the land and donations of the whole of Lucchesia, which are addressed directly or indirectly to it. The production of documents increases greatly, and most of the notaries are ecclesiastics: the legal practice is controlled by the Church of Lucca. Networks are formed between landowners, who donate with reservation of usufruct, and the church of Lucca, which receives the goods; the usufruct usually lasts for a few generations, after which the bishop rents the properties, establishing new links with other landowners. There is a close cooperation between the local landowners and the bishop, who is a central actor from a legal (he presides over the pleas) and economic point of view. There are hardly any migrants in this period.
In the 9th-century, donations to the churches become more marginal. In these donations the relationship with the bishop is less strong, often there is only the consecration, or there is no reference to a fee to be paid to the bishop in exchange for the usufruct of the donated properties. The legal practice changes, corresponding to the decrease in the number of ecclesiastical notaries. At the end of the 9th-century, the control of land ownership through cooperation between bishop and landowners almost disappears. The cathedral loses its centrality in social and economic relations.
During the 9th-century, the first northern migrants appear. They were landowners, vassals, public officials; their number increased a great deal in the middle of the century, when count Boniface of Lucca was active and the bishops were Berengar and Ambrose (they all were from the North of the Alps). However, Predatsch states that the changes in the 9th-century, with the decrease in the number of documents reporting the transfer of properties to churches and monasteries, are not due to their arrival and the establishment of new legal traditions, but to changes in local social relations.
The last part of the book includes a complex analysis, carried out with the methods of historical semantics, of the name Francus, examining its occurrence in different groups of sources and its co-occurrence with a series of keywords. A micro-corpus (the Annales regni Francorum in both versions) and two large corpora, Latinise and Historical Semantics Corpus Management, are examined. Despite the diversity of the latter (the former analyses historiographical texts, the latter those of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica and Patrologia Latina), and their difference from the limited sample of the Annales, the results are the same: the name Francus in the 8th- and 9th-centuries had a socio-political value, rather than an ethnic one, because it indicated above all the political community, dominated by the king, the king himself, the elite, the officials and the army.
In the general conclusions, Predatsch states again that migrations did not influence the evolution of Italian society. For contemporaries, it was irrelevant whether a person was Frankish or from another region north of the Alps. This result goes against the idea of the early Middle Ages which is widespread in historiography and leads us to consider more carefully the categorisations present within the society of that period, which were based more on social and functional rather on ethnic distinctions.
There is some imbalance between the different parts of the book. The explanation of statistical methods on the one hand, and of historical semantics on the other, are certainly necessary, but could perhaps have been shorter to give more space to the analysis of historical sources.
I agree with the general conclusions of the book, but they are only partly original. The idea of an elimination of the Lombard ruling class by the Franks, which was dominant at the time of Hlawitschka's book, has long since been abandoned8, but this book is important because it provides precise elements to support the new interpretations. Moreover, the analysis of Lucca's society through the archival documentation is very accurate and precise, and will be very useful for all those who will study early medieval Lucca. The idea that social evolution was not determined by the arrival of migrants is also undoubtedly correct. Perhaps, in the end, those who appear too little in the book are precisely the migrants, who should have been the main object of it, and whose role appears quite marginal. They are mainly present in the two appendices of the book, both very well done and very useful for future studies: the prosopography of officials (774–800) and the list of migrants (774–874) in Carolingian Italy. The latter reworks the list made by Hlawitschka in his book according to the new criteria of social history, which allow us to identify the different characteristics of the various types of migrants.
Notes:
1 Le migrazioni nell’alto medioevo, Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di Studi sull’Alto medioevo (Spoleto, 5–11 aprile 2018), LXVI, Spoleto 2019.
2 Gustav Kossinna, Die deutsche Vorgeschichte – eine hervorragend nationale Wissenschaft, Würburg 1912.
3 Edmund Leach, Political Systems of Higland Burma, London 1954; Fredrik Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. The Social Organization of Culture Difference, London 1969.
4 Reinhard Wenskus, Stammesbildung und Verfassung. Das Werden der frümittelalterlichen Gentes, Köln 1961.
5 Walter Pohl, Ethnicity, Theory, and Tradition. A Response, in A. Gilllett (ed.), On Barbarian Identity. Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages, Turnhout 2002, pp. 221–239.
6 Eduard Hlawischka, Franken, Alemannen, Bayern und Burgunder in Oberitalien (774–962). Zum Verständnis der fränkischen Königsherrschaft in Italien, Freiburg im Breisgau 1960.
7 Ian Wood, The Christian Economy in the Early Medieval West. Towards a Temple Society, Binghamton 2022.
8 Clemens Gantner / Walter Pohl (eds.), After Charlemagne. Carolingian Italy and its Rulers, Cambridge 2021.